by S J Taylor
And we ran.
Part II
Chapter 3 - Rocks
Era’s Journal, Entry #3048
Funny how the truth always has a way of coming out. That’s the lesson the Restored Society was never able to learn.
I had tried so very hard to keep my secrets from Jadran. Everyone in Refuge, really, but Jadran especially. I guess when it came down to it I couldn’t care less what the rest of them thought of me. Jadran’s opinion… well. That mattered to me.
At the time, I didn’t know why. Even smart girls like me can be slow about some things.
Then, there I was in that alley, screaming at Laria to just shut up, and everything I had tried so hard to keep secret just came rushing out.
So now they knew I wasn’t like them. I wasn’t just another human being trying to stay alive in the post-apocalyptic world created by the Event. I wasn’t even human. Not entirely. Not completely. I was something created by the Restored Society. A genetically altered human. The Society’s shining accomplishment. A soldier who took orders without question and lived to serve the Society.
Whatever part of me is still human must be stronger than whatever parts the Society had put into me. Maybe the human spirit can’t be dominated by science.
Or, maybe I’m just a failure. An experiment gone wrong. Let’s face it. I haven’t been much good to anyone up to this point. Saskia is probably dead, after being butchered and experimented on. The Enforcers swept through Refuge like a gale force wind through dead leaves. I couldn’t save any of them, either. Now Jadran and Laria and me are running for our lives through a broken city, avoiding creatures who don’t have any doubts about who they are or what they want to do.
They want to kill us.
Sometimes I wish it was that simple for me.
It makes me wonder, though, about all the other friends in my class. First Marshall Avin Blake had told me that some of them had been genetically altered just like me. I still didn’t know which ones, but were they the same as me? Were they able to call on that deep calm and become cold, calculating machines that killed and hurt and acted without thinking?
Or were they failures, too, asking questions about who they really were, how they were made…
Why they had to kill.
Secrets had a way of coming out.
What other secrets was the Restored Society hiding, I wondered.
And what would happen when they came slipping out?
Up was safety.
Jadran seemed to know where we were going, and I was happy to let him lead. I was busy concentrating on keeping my feet moving and ignoring the dull aching pain that was still settled in my joints. It was going away, bit by bit, but whatever venom or poison the Children of the Event carried in their saliva was nasty stuff.
We ran along broken streets where cracks and heaves had created an obstacle course for our feet. Vehicles of weird shape and design were everywhere, some of them turned over on their sides, more than a few of them burned down to the metal frames. Most of the buildings we passed were broken wrecks, with walls that had crumbled and roofs that had collapsed. Everything had the look of being long abandoned.
I didn’t see any signs of life anywhere.
Other than the constant sounds of the Children, hunting for us.
I don’t know how long it was before Jadran turned us off the street toward a building that was still intact, sort of. It was another tall building, shorter than the ones I had seen before going down into the caves, with rows of narrow six-sided windows marching up the sides. The top of the building, a whole three rows of windows, had been broken off in one piece and heaved sideways. Now it hung over the edge of the structure like a box top that had been put back on the wrong way. There were words on the side of the cement stairs, out in front of the building, in some language I couldn’t read. “JEA Tower.” I almost asked Jadran what “jea” meant, but I decided I didn’t care. It didn’t really matter, either.
This was a place for us to hide. Who cared what it was called.
Two wide openings out front led under the building, where more of the strange vehicles I’d seen on the street stood silent and dead. It was dark in here, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom before I saw stairs at the far side of the cavernous space. That was where Jadran led us.
“Wait, Jadran,” I panted, stopping to stretch and catch my breath. I still hadn’t recovered from the attack in the tunnels. And that had been just a scratch. “What if there’s more of those creatures in here?”
“I doubt they can fit up these stairs,” he reasoned. “They’ve never hunted in these buildings.”
“They never went in the caves before, either,” I pointed out.
That made him hesitate on the first of the metal steps. He was right, I saw. The space leading up would be too tight for the things that had attacked us in the tunnels to squeeze through. Maybe. Jadran must have thought so too because in the next instant he was leading us up into an even darker space. I took it as a good sign.
I counted floors as we went up. One, two, three… We passed doors on the landings of the switchback stairs. Light filtered through little square windows in those doors, enough for me to see that the stairway was crumbling just like the rest of the building. Like the whole city. Falling down around us.
An image flashed in my mind. The three of us, buried under hundreds of tons of concrete and metal and glass as this “JEA Tower” place finally gave out.
I had to swallow before I could speak again.
“Jadran,” I whispered, afraid that talking any louder would bring the building down around our ears, “where are we going?”
“What’s the matter, Era Rae?” Laria teased. “Afraid?”
But I noticed she kept her voice down, too.
Two more flights up, Jadran unexpectedly heaved a shoulder against the access door and led us out into a long hallway of filtered sunlight and heavy dust. It smelled like damp filth. A muted groaning rumbled through the walls and vibrated in the floor under my feet. I reached out to grab the doorframe, holding on for dear life.
“It is all right, Era Rae.” Jadran stood in the middle of the hall, smiling at me. “The building settles. It doesn’t break.”
“We don’t have buildings this size in the Colony,” I said, feeling foolish.
Laria snickered. “Surely the Society taught you how to be higher than everyone around you?”
“Enough,” Jadran cut in gently. “We will rest here for a few hours. Then we will move on.”
“In the dark?” I asked, not liking that idea at all. “Out there? In this city?”
“Perhaps,” Laria suggested, “you would have liked it better if we left you in the tunnels.”
I glared at her, and then very purposefully stepped away from the doorway into the uncertainty of the hallway. How far above the ground were we up here? It didn’t seem right, for buildings to be this tall. Or for me to be in one. Definitely outside of my comfort zone.
By the smile on Laria’s face, she was enjoying how uncomfortable I was.
“Come on,” Jadran urged the two of us as he hiked the MARs up higher on his shoulders. “There’s a room down here. I use it sometimes, when I come to the city. We will be safe there.”
“When you come to the city?” I followed him, but questions began popping up in my mind. “Why would you come here at all? Where exactly are you taking us, anyway?”
He smiled over his shoulder. “We’re going to find the Freemen. Before the Enforcers do.”
Then he stopped, and I wasn’t sure why at first, until I realized that Laria had stayed back by the doorway to the stairs.
She glared at me, a fist on one hip, then turned away like I didn’t matter. She walked past me, up to Jadran, and handed him the bag with our equipment and stuff. “I will check the other floors for supplies. Food, maybe, or clothes.”
“I have been through most of this building,” Jadran told her. “There’s nothing left.”
He didn’t answer her. He didn’t kiss her back.
He didn’t stop her, either.
I felt like the whole building was moving under me. Like no matter where I stood, I couldn’t find solid ground.
Silly, I know. Maybe it was all in my head, but that was the way it made me feel to watch Laria smile after she kissed Jadran.
She walked by me again without a single glance, and then she was gone. I heard her footsteps walking away down the stairs as the door closed behind her.
Jadran cleared his throat. “We should—”
“Yes,” I cut him off before he could say anything else. “Let’s get to this room of yours. Then you can tell me the rest of your plan to find the Freemen.”
“I don’t need to search for them, Era Rae.” He seemed relieved that I changed the subject. “I always knew where they were.”
Well. That changed things a little. “Why don’t we just go there now?”
“Rest first.”
He brought us to the fourth door down on the right. It opened for him when he turned the handle and then he stepped aside so I could go in first.
The light was better in here, shining through three of the oddly shaped windows, reflecting in prisms off their broken glass. It made me queasy to know I wouldn’t even have that flimsy protection between me and a fall down to the street below. There were four long tables in the room, set end to end in two rows. Blankets were piled in a rumpled heap on the one end.
“You sleep here?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted, unshouldering the MARs and putting them in a corner. I followed his example, leaning the pulse rifle near the other weapons, although I kept the machete on my hip, for all the good it had done me so far.
The rest of the room was bare. The walls were a faded green color, the carpet a deep brown. Tiles in the ceiling had come loose and fallen halfway from their supports. “Regular home away from home, isn’t it?”
I was surprised to hear him laugh, because really it wasn’t that funny, but he did and it made me feel better to hear it. Hopping up on the edge of one of the tables I pointed to the bag of our supplies in Jadran’s hand. “How’s our food situation?”
With a serious expression, he took out a sealed jar and set it on the table next to me. In it, a bunch of roundish things floated in a thick, yellow liquid. “We don’t have much, but there is enough for now. Have you ever had a peach?”
I pictured our flavored meals back at the Colony. Had any of them ever had peaches? There had been an apple paste, and something that was supposed to be a fruit compote, but I don’t remember ever having peaches.
Of course, the way I understood it peaches grew on trees. This stuff in the jar looked more like what I was used to eating from the Colony than wild, fresh fruit.
He undid the wire handle to open the top of the jar, explaining the process of preserving fruit as he did. They had needed to make food last as long as they could in Refuge, because all they had was what they could grow. Preserves and jams and jellies, dried and salted meat. I listened to everything he said, amazed that life could be so complicated.
And so incredibly sweet and simple.
With two fingers, he fished out a preserved peach and handed it to me. I accepted the cold, wet piece of fruit from his hand, but I waited for him to bite into one of his own first before trying mine. It was sweet, and squishy, and the juice dribbled over my chin.
It was quite possibly the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.
Jadran reached up, and used his thumb to wipe away the sticky liquid from around my mouth. His eyes watched mine as he did.
Then he leaned in closer.
“Don’t,” I whispered.
He stopped, but he didn’t move away from me. “Why not?”
“Because you don’t know who I am.”
“Yes I do, Era Rae. I know who you are.”
“You can’t know that.” I felt myself trembling against his hand. “I don’t know who I am myself.”
“Of course I do,” he whispered back. “I know you, Era Rae. I know you better than you know yourself. You are smart, and cunning, and everything your training at the Academy on Colony 41 taught you to be. But that will never be all you are. You are… so much more. You are also brave, and kind, and fierce. That part of you did not come from the Colony. The Restored Society did not make Era Rae. She made herself.”
Somewhere in those words, I melted. Emotions came surging forward and it was suddenly all right to let go of them and bare my mixed up, messed up soul in front of this man.
Jadran Rill.
The man who made it all right to be me.
His mouth found mine, and I know I was crying, and I didn’t care, because the feel of his lips was everything that mattered. I let him hold me, and I clung to him, and we kissed there in that room, high up above the world and hidden away from anyone else. It wasn’t long before we were laying across one of the tables, me in his arms, his kisses finding my lips and my neck and the uninjured side of my face.
And a little spot behind my ear that made me shiver.
I let myself breathe him in. His scent was like sweat and heat and life. It was more than that, though. It was his essence. I felt like I could see into his soul, just like I had shown him mine. He filled my senses, and my lips found his again and then I tasted him on my tongue and I had never, ever, been that free with anyone.
There had been boys, back at the Colony, where we would recreate with each other to blow off the tensions from our training. The professors encouraged it, as long as it was consenting and as long as it was meaningless. This brief moment with Jadran Rill, where we didn’t speak and we didn’t do anything more than kiss and hold on tight to each other, was more intimate than anything I had ever experienced at Colony 41.
I was falling in love, here in the middle of the dead city of Jacksonville. I was finding what it meant to be alive.
The sun had gone down when I realized we weren’t doing anything but lying there on the table, wrapped in one of the old, rough woolen blankets. I was settled on Jadran’s broad chest with my hand tracing the line of the muscles along his side. His fingers kept combing through my hair. It felt nice. It wasn’t lost on me that at any moment Laria was going to come walking through that door and see us like this.
I won’t lie. A big part of me was looking forward to the expression on her face.
“You haven’t told me about the Freemen yet,” I said after a long moment of silence. I wanted nothing more than to lay there and be quiet and just enjoy his touch, but I knew we couldn’t stay much longer. The Enforcers couldn’t be far behind us anymore. “How do you know their base is out here?”
His hand moved to rubbing circles on my back. I don’t think I purred, exactly. “I know they are here,” he explained as he looked up at the ceiling, “because I have been to their camp before. A few of us in Refuge gave them support when we could. We would bring them supplies. Some who had special expertise, like me, would help repair their weapons and vehicles.”
I nodded. It made sense. Insurgent groups like the Freemen couldn’t exist without the aid of the general population. Civilians were a necessary part of any army. It was one of the reasons why Enforcers were taught that everyone was a target. Never leave anyone alive at your back, because they might be the one to stab you there.
It was one of the Enforcer mantras. I knew them all by heart.
My eyelids closed while he gently massaged between my shoulders, and up and down my spine. I felt safe and warm in his arms. It was making me sleepy. Should I sleep? Probably not. I should probably stay awake and make plans with Jadran to get to the Freemen outpost and warn them about the coming Enforcers. No, wait. They would know already. They were already fighting with the Enforcers when I washed up on the shores of Refuge. Fighting, and losing. They kne
w what they were up against.
So why was Jadran taking us there?
To be safe, my sleepy brain told me. He’s taking us there to keep us safe.
Another part of my brain remembered how the Enforcers had beaten the Freemen, easily driving them back. They had brought an overwhelming force that the Freemen couldn’t hope to stand against, no matter what kind of weapons they had.
So why, I asked myself again, was Jadran taking us there?
Just as sleep slipped over me, I found the answer. Jadran was bringing us to the Freemen to join their cause. His whole village was gone. He mistrusted the Restored Society to begin with. The Freemen were his only option.
I imagined that I saw the columns of Enforcers coming from the distance, marching in unison, weapons at the ready. HoverHawks flew support overhead. Armored vehicles with knobby tires growled as their engines revved and their gun turrets aimed ahead of the advancing Restored Society army.
The Freemen stood around me in a group, all with their pointy sticks and bows nocked back with flimsy arrows. Jadran stood at the front of the Freemen, yelling out a battle cry that was picked up by first one, then another, then more of the freedom fighters standing behind him. I looked at the scene in horror, knowing with absolute clarity what was about to happen.
We were all going to die.
I cried out to Jadran, screamed his name at the top of my voice, but no sound came out. I rushed forward, needing to get to him, to stop this, before everyone here was killed.
Before Jadran was killed.
He was always just out of my reach. I couldn’t get to him no matter how hard I tried. Every step left me right back where I started. The short distance was just too far for me.
When I looked down, I realized that my body wasn’t my body. I had been twisted into a nightmare of fleshy limbs and spikes with something that might have been wings rippling out from my back. I was grotesque. I had become the monster that the Restored Society had always intended for me to be. Deformed and misshapen and ugly.