by S J Taylor
I screamed. I knew it as a fact, but it was like it was happening outside of me. I didn’t care. Back at Colony 41 I broke more than one bone during training. I know what pain is. I could fight through it.
Stumbling to my feet I tried to pull away but the Enforcer still had her grip on my limp arm and she twisted it and I screamed again and then she was lifting her stun pistol, aiming at my head.
This close, the shot would kill me. The Restored Society might want me alive but that didn’t mean the Enforcers wouldn’t defend themselves.
I couldn’t move. I was badly injured and unarmed and every option that ran rapid-quick through my mind ended in me being dead.
The shot that rang out next was from the rifle I’d dropped. It hit the Enforcer at an angle, in her side, behind the protective pads, and with an explosive convulsion she swayed and dropped down beside me, blood bubbling from her mouth.
Her hand convulsed as she died, and I ducked my head down under the discharge from her stun pistol. I felt it ruffle the individual strands of my hair.
The world came back to me. The pain in my shoulder was fierce. I could still think, still act, but that steely cold fled away on my next heartbeat.
I didn’t have time to think about it.
Holding my arm to my side I made myself stand up. “Jadran,” I said to him, “thanks, I really thought I was going to—”
I looked in the direction the rifle shot had come from. It wasn’t Jadran.
Laria stood there, shaking violently, the weapon already slipping from her hands. Her eyes were wide. Her bottom lip was trembling. I doubt she had ever fired a weapon before in her life. Not in a peaceful place like Refuge. It was even more certain that she’d never killed anyone.
She had now.
Past her, I saw Jadran. He was just putting down the last Enforcer from the group. He was doing some sort of around the back strike and follow through move that I’d never seen before. It was beautiful to watch. I memorized every line of it, and made the attack mine to use at a later time.
He turned to me. Our eyes met.
Something stirred in me that wasn’t the cold, wasn’t the calm. It was warmth and life and it made my blood rush faster.
I couldn’t let this happen… and I couldn’t make it stop.
Laria let out a whimpering, keening sound. Oh, right. Her.
I went to her, thanking her for saving my life, gently prying the gun from her with my one working hand. She blinked at me, not seeing me at all.
“Jadran, we have to go,” I told him. “They got off a message. This house will be swarmed any second.”
His expression told me that he knew why. The Enforcers were after me.
“Apparently,” he said, “I was wrong about you.”
In that moment his opinion of me mattered more than all the columns of Enforcers in all the Colonies in the whole world. “What do you mean?”
“I told you once that deadly is something you could never be.” He looked around us at the bodies of the four Enforcers. “Apparently, you can. Come on. Let’s go.”
I felt myself blushing. No time for that, I reminded myself.
Tucking the stun pistol into the waist of his pants Jadran picked up two of the Enforcers’ MARs and strapped them across his back. Then he picked up Laria around her waist like she didn’t weigh a thing and rushed toward the back of the house.
I already had the rifle in my hand and the bag with my few things in it over my shoulder and the machete at my hip, and with my left arm hanging limp and useless it was all I could do to carry all of that. This was everything we were going to be able to take with us.
In the back room of the house with my little sick cot and the shelves of stored goods, Jadran stopped and set Laria back on her feet with a few words of gentle encouragement.
“Jadran,” I said, “how is this going to help us? We can’t defend this position.”
He unshouldered one of the MARs and pointed it at the back wall. “We’re not going to try. The time for fighting is over, Era Rae. Now, is the time to run.”
Two shots from the MAR had the boards of the back wall blasted outward in broken splinters. Our escape route.
“We can’t just leave all of these people,” I said to him. I meant it. Everyone in this village was going to be killed, or sent to a Colony quarantine site and experimented on like they’d done to Saskia and Verne. I wasn’t sure which was worse.
Laria attached herself to Jadran’s side. She clung there, looking up desperately into his eyes. Everything she had ever believed was being wiped away by the Enforcers in a moment’s time. The security and prosperity of Refuge was gone. The life she knew, gone.
The only thing she had left was Jadran.
I ground my teeth together, and focused on the pain in my shoulder. It was easier.
He looked up at me as he took hold of Laria’s hand. “There is nothing we can do here,” he said, his voice thick with unspoken emotion. “Refuge is lost. We will be too, if we don’t leave now.”
From the front of the house I heard shouted commands. Voices distorted through helmet speakers. Jadran was right. There was no more time.
We had to go.
Now.
Era’s Journal, Entry # 3019
We followed Jadran through the woods that closed in around the backside of Refuge. It was a headlong flight into the dark. I banged my bad arm more than once. The pain of it nearly made me pass out, but I stayed with him. Him and Laria.
When he stopped us at the top of a rise I fell to my knees, panting and sweaty. I would need medical attention for my arm very soon if I expected to save it. That wasn’t the priority right now, though. Right now, the top of our list was escape. We couldn’t save the people of Refuge, but we could still try to save ourselves.
So stopping now seemed foolish. I couldn’t understand why he’d brought us here just to look back at the village behind us.
Until I saw it in flames.
We were still close enough to see what was happening. The two HoverHawks floated above the trees, spotlights shining down, highlighting the scenes below. People ran, only to be dropped by the Enforcers with a single shot or a carefully placed kick. Some were being lead off with their wrists strapped together behind their backs. I saw countless others laying on the ground, not moving.
Flames had erupted near the north side of the village, spreading across homes and buildings until the night was as bright as midday. The Enforcers were moving back, already withdrawing, taking their captives with them and not caring about the rest. Mostly women and children, but I saw a few men in there as well.
Where we stood, we had a perfect vantage point of the village square. An old man in a simple blue robe was dragged out into that space and put on his knees. In the light of the fires, they executed the Venerate. Third Marshall Amicus made the kill himself.
Laria broke down in tears in Jadran’s arms.
What would it feel like, I wonder, to be held like that? Sheltered in the arms of someone I loved, the way it was obvious that Laria loved Jadran.
I can’t help but wonder if he loves her, too.
I shouldn’t care, but I do.
We were on the run again, and my arm was busted up, and if ever there was a wrong time to think about finding love then it was this moment right here. With Refuge in flames behind us and hundreds of people dead or in the custody of the Enforcers and nothing but the dark of night ahead for me and Jadran and Laria… nothing could be less important than love.
And when Jadran’s eyes found mine, I turned away. My thoughts were my own. No one else’s.
Just mine.
Book Three – Broken City
Part I
Chapter 1 - The Caves
Era’s Journal, Entry #3028
We knew we were sheltered in the Colony. Kept safe from the disasters that had ravaged a once beautiful planet. Safe from the death, the disease, the terrors that arose after the nuclear Event. It didn’t matter that the nuclear
devices were focused and surgical. They destroyed everything they touched. Created horrors that no mind could have ever imagined. Things no one had ever seen before. We knew we were being sheltered from all of it.
We just didn’t realize how sheltered we were.
Hard to know what the world is really like, when the ones who burned it were the same ones writing the history books.
We only knew what they told us. Controlling information is something the Restored Society does really well, after all, but it’s more than that. They take the truth in a stranglehold, tight in their collective fist, and only let out the bits that suit them. History got a serious makeover after the Event. Truth became whatever the Society wanted it to be. I doubt even they know what’s real anymore. We all grew up knowing the Event was caused by three rogue nations who started a war that burned the world.
That was the lie they fed us. The truth was what I found out later.
The Restored Society set off the Event. They killed millions of people. They’re still killing people, in the name of order. Their goal was to remake the world in their image. They brought their faithful followers together into the Colonies before the Event, to start a New World Order, led by the First Marshalls and the faithful elite.
First Marshalls like Avin Blake, who murdered my best friend.
Although… murdered probably isn’t the right word. What First Marshall Blake did to Saskia was worse than murder. He and the Restored Society butchered her and experimented on her. They tried to make her into a mindless robot soldier. I’ll never forget the way she looked the last time I saw her. Her beautiful face, turned into a horrible mix of scars and stitches.
In the end, she refused to be what the Restored Society wanted. Instead of ending my life, she saved me.
I couldn’t do the same for her.
Now I keep searching for her everywhere I go. Every time I see an Enforcer in their gray battle uniform, I look for my friend’s long body or her confident way of walking or something that will let me know Saskia is still alive. Still herself.
Still there for me to save her.
I’m giving up hope. Saskia may already be dead. Even if she’s not, there might be nothing left of the woman I knew.
I’m giving up hope of ever finding Saskia.
As it is, I’m barely alive myself. I am badly injured, and on the run.
And… I’m scared.
What comes next?
Binding my broken arm to my side was the best we could do for now.
An unbearable day turned into a night that would not end. We went as far away from Refuge as we could before making a camp. The Restored Society had destroyed that village. Ground troops and advanced weapons and support vehicles, including HoverHawk air support. It was far too much firepower for such a simple operation. The people of Refuge hunted animals for food with bows and arrows and long knives. They were peaceful. They weren’t a threat to anyone.
The Restored Society didn’t care.
We barely escaped with our lives. Me, Jadran Rill, and his friend Laria.
Jadran Rill had been the real surprise in Refuge. I’d spent long days there recuperating from the injuries I’d gotten while escaping Colony 41. Long story. The point is, I was on my back and in no condition to go anywhere while the healers in Refuge sewed me up and gave me nasty tasting medicine until I got better. In all that time, I never imagined this soft-spoken, alluring man had once been a member of a Colony, too. Colony 16, lost and gone because a disease had swept through like wildfire.
The disease had a name. It was one of the only things the Restored Society feared.
Curiosity.
The people in Colony 16 had started to question what they were told. They began to seek the truth. The real truth, not the lies being spoon fed to them. There was no way the Restored Society could allow that. The truth would destroy everything they had built so far. So instead, they turned their own troops on the people in that Colony, just like they did in Refuge. Only in Colony 16, the resistance had been armed.
From what I could gather from the little that Jadran would say, very few people made it out of Colony 16 alive. Jadran had, and then he’d gone back to live in the struggling village where he’d been born. The place he’d turned his back on. The world had been crumbling before the Event, and Refuge had lived on the edge even then, and a young Jadran Rill had been attracted to the prosperity and safety the Colonies represented. So he left his old life behind, and gave himself to the Restored Society, like so many people had.
Until he woke up, like very few people ever did, and went back to Refuge. That’s where I found him. Or, he found me, I guess.
Anyway. The three of us had escaped the destruction of Refuge, with the Restored Society tight on our heels. Me, with my dislocated shoulder, and Jadran pulling Laria along by the hand like a frightened little girl.
Laria. What do I make of her? She and Jadran obviously have a connection. They grew up together, in their early years, before Jadran went to Colony 16. What did she feel, I wondered, when he came back to Refuge? It must have felt like he was coming back just for her. No wonder she acted like Jadran belonged to her.
I still wasn’t sure how he felt about her. Or me either, I suppose. There had been more than a few moments back in Refuge when he and I had shared… something. I kept trying not to let him get close but I found myself wanting to know where we might end up if I just let him into my life.
That wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t let it.
It wasn’t a good idea for me to get close to anyone. I knew that. Me and Saskia had been much more than friends, even if we never had the chance to know it, and look where that had gotten her. Jadran was handsome and smart and maybe ten years older than me—which didn’t seem like a whole lot since I was sixteen myself—but we both had secrets and a past full of shadows.
Like how I’m a clone. I still haven’t been able to tell him that secret. Not exactly something you just come out and say. Hi, I’m a clone. How’s your day going?
So there’s one more brick in the wall I keep putting up between me and, well, everybody.
All these thoughts bounced around in my head while I held my busted left arm to my side as we ran to the edges of the scraggly forest outside of Jadran’s village. We didn’t stop until we thought we were far enough away. By the time we did, I was sweating through my borrowed cotton shirt and pants, and my steel-toed boots were like lead weights on my feet. My usually dark hair was damp and black now, the short strands of it sticking across my cheeks and forehead.
I dropped my bag of supplies and the weapons I’d taken from the dead Enforcers, letting them clatter to the ground as I collapsed to my knees. The truth was I probably wouldn’t have made it much further anyway.
Laria lay down and curled into a ball on the hard, rocky ground and just like that she was asleep. She was tall and lean and blonde, and I had to admit she was a lot prettier than me. She had this heart shaped face and these blue-gray eyes the color of steel. In a lot of ways she reminded me of Saskia. She just didn’t have Saskia’s strength. I know that out here in the Outlands she wouldn’t last long without me and Jadran to help her. Still, she had saved my life in the last moments back in Refuge when she shot that Enforcer. Even if it probably had been by accident.
I guess I could cut her some slack after that.
“She will never be like us,” Jadran spoke softly to me as he put down his own stolen weapons. Two Magnetic Acoustic Resonators and a stun pistol, to go along with my ballistic pulse rifle and my machete and the things in the supply bag. We were hardly our own army.
I blinked up at him, remembering that he had spoken. Jadran was head and shoulders taller than me, all springy muscles in all the right places from honest work in the fields and gardens of Refuge. It was the kind of honest work the Restored Society would have frowned on. Under the hot sun, Jadran’s skin had become tanned to the color of warm caramel and his hands had become strong and supple. In the Colonies, food was
hydroponically grown or chemically created to be high in nutrients and sterile in flavor. Jadran’s way of doing things was an affront to the way of life the Society had crafted. In fact, everything Jadran and his people had done was against the rules of the Restored Society.
Which was why the Enforcers had destroyed the village and taken the survivors captive.
God pity the captives.
In the dark, I couldn’t see Jadran’s earthy brown eyes, but I could feel his gaze on me. His long black hair had come out of its tail again and hung loose now around his shoulders.
“Laria,” he explained. “The way that you and I are, is something she will never be.”
“I know,” I assured him. “I’m not judging her.”
He didn’t say anything to that. Instead he took hold of his right sleeve and ripped it from the seams at the shoulder, then did the same with the left side. “Let us take care of that arm of yours.”
I liked the way he talked. Everyone in Refuge had the same cadence to their words, a sort of deliberate slowness that made you believe they really meant what they said. I trusted this man like I’d trusted very few people in my life.
Trust wasn’t easy for me anymore.
So I sat, and let him tear his shirt into strips while I watched the distant red and orange glow against the horizon. Refuge. Or rather, what was left of it. Behind us, not much further through the thinning woods, would be the beginning of the real Outlands where the effects of the Event would really be seen and felt. It still surprised me how there was life and growth and even wildlife near the waters of the coast. Like there had been in Refuge.
Further inland there would be life of a different kind. None of it friendly.
“You’ll be cold now,” I said to Jadran, knowing that the new vest he’d just made for himself wasn’t going to give him much protection from the dropping temperatures.
“I’ll be fine.”
He didn’t say anything else as he came over behind me with the lengths of cloth. I braced myself for him to wrap the first one around me, knowing it would hurt, lifting my right arm up to get it out of the way.