They’d ignored the tools and screws and other supplies geared to rebuilding; their interest lay in more destructive pursuits. Firearms, grenades, antipersonnel mines, they plucked them all with abandon, leaving nothing but vacant shelves labeled with the yellowing names of their plundered wares. In this effort, they’d been thorough, though their sights were narrower than they could’ve been. If they’d been more technically acute, they may have investigated the cargo bay more closely. They probably fumbled with the bigger vehicles in the hopes of getting them moving, but lacked the technical knowledge to do anything beyond press a few buttons.
Simon figured this was why they failed to note the significance of the roof-mounted mortars, and consequently overlooked the crate of incendiary rockets stashed amongst the spare tires and engine parts.
The rockets were the one thing Simon hadn’t quite dared to test. He had too few of them to spare and too little an understanding of their precise capabilities. This decision had seemed prudent at the time, but its downsides emerged with sickening clarity as the moment of his attack arrived. What if the rockets were duds? Far from inciting city-wide chaos, the entire fusillade would do little more than dent a few walls or maybe crack an unlucky bystander’s skull. And that’s assuming they fired at all—they could easily fizzle out and do nothing, or worse, explode inside the barrel. Simon imagined the flash of light, the shriek of buckling metal, the instant of incredulity and fear as the flames escaped their bondage and rendered his body into so much ash and tallow.
And what if they worked? A single twitch of his index finger would turn some segment of a quiet city into hell. So what if that city championed slavery and boasted rulers who found their seats by slitting throats and orphaning children? The bombs didn’t care who they burned. Simon had pulled a trigger once before to save his sister, but the target had been valid and the danger imminent. This was a different matter altogether. This wasn’t justice or self-defense; this was an act of war.
But he and Selena were at war, weren’t they? And they weren’t the ones who’d started it. But Juarez didn’t start it either.
Simon positioned the mortar with a few taps of a joystick. His finger caressed the trigger protruding from its tip. Pressure mounted on its spring ounce by sluggish ounce. He felt the first yield as the button descended into its housing, the play of muscle against metal in uneasy equilibrium. The spring was light, calibrated to a few pounds of pressure at most. A toddler could manage it.
Otis and Emily stood outside the vehicle. Emily dragged her foot along the ridge of the mesa, chipping stones loose from the dirt and sending them skittering down the cliff face. Otis stared at the squat adobe huts that described the city’s border, his body still and rigid. He seemed less a man than a man-shaped outcrop of artfully weathered stone. He turned his head to glance at the vehicle, spoiling the effect.
“It’s time, I think,” he said.
Simon nodded. He adjusted his grip on the joystick, made a few minor adjustments to the mortar. Gears whined, and hydraulics wheezed. He pictured the cannon perched above him, a hollow, black eye gazing into the city’s apocalyptic future. Sweat dampened the joystick’s rubberized grip. He rubbed his eyes, hiking his glasses onto his forehead, and slid from the seat. Otis cocked his head, curious and concerned. Simon set his glasses on the bridge of his nose and sniffed.
“I can’t do it.” The words came out as a sob, choked and damp with misery. His breath hitched, clambering up a windpipe slick with mucus.
Otis took the boy in his arms and patted his shoulder. “This is a hard thing you’re doing,” he said. “It’s not something that should be up to children. It’s not right.”
“But I need to!”
Otis shook his head. “You don’t need to do it. But it needs to be done.”
Simon blinked, for a moment not understanding. Otis stepped past and climbed into the vehicle’s cab. Far from a giant’s den, the front seat looked positively cramped when accommodating his lanky frame. He took the joystick with his right hand and squeezed the trigger. Phthuff! The missile was airborne before Simon even had a chance to panic. He watched the arc of its trajectory, his stomach lurching as if it were him being launched through the air.
The rocket landed with an orange flash. A crackling rumble followed. Smoke rose from the point of impact, dark clouds lit from below by the flaming wreckage. Otis stared, transfixed, at the carnage. He tweaked the joystick and fired again. This time he hit an enormous structure in the center of town. A sustained rumble echoed over the plains as the wall collapsed.
The shots came faster, their targets random at first, but soon concentrated on a crescent of land to the south. The streets here were wider, the buildings larger and built from a broader range of materials. Their grandeur meant nothing to the bombs, whose flames found if anything a heartier meal. Otis continued bombing the rubble, his lips folding into a snarl. A thin whine escaped from the back of his throat, swelling throughout the onslaught into a scream. He kept screaming and firing after the last rockets were spent and the mortar clicked drily overhead.
Emily climbed into the seat beside her father and pried his fingers from the joystick. When the last of them was free, she took his hand and clutched it in both her own. The screaming subsided. Otis closed his eyes. Tears leaked from their corners and down his chin, spreading like cracks in the mask of dust and dirt that the desert had made for him.
38: Forfeit
There were few veterans among New Canaan’s Seraphim. Generals and colonels hailed from Selena’s class, and the Templars occasionally held a paramilitary role, but actual blood-and-guts, on the ground fighting was a Salter affair. As such, Selena had never had much more than an abstract notion of war, apart from the bombastic and almost surely apocryphal stories of New Canaan’s righteous insurrection against the globalist non-believers in the wake of the Last War.
To her knowledge, she’d only met one true veteran in all her years in New Canaan. It had been at a soiree hosted by some under-Cardinal or other. The Seraphim delighted in such parties almost as much as Selena loathed them, but as she’d left childhood behind, her participation had gone from strongly encouraged to mandatory. Support for the regime was essential for long-term survival, and as double agents for the hated Republic of California, her parents had more to lose than most. Understanding this made the events no less palatable, but it did ensure her attendance, begrudging though it might have been.
The veteran was a shy boy no more than a few years her senior, his receding chin partially masked by a band of fuzzy brown stubble. His posture was unlike that of most Seraphim men, who sprawled with loose-limbed confidence over any surface on which they sat, stood, or leaned, asserting hegemony over their square yard of space. He sat in the corner of a red velvet divan with his knees pressed together and his hands in his lap, long fingers curled around a tall glass of amber liquid from which he drew occasional sips. He’d looked as miserable and out of place as she felt, and it was perhaps this quality—coupled with the knowledge that she needed to socialize with someone or else face her parents’ pointed disapproval—that led her to approach him.
“Can I sit?” she asked, motioning to the space beside him. His head swiveled toward her, nodded, and resumed its original position. The rest of him hadn’t moved an inch.
They sat in silence for a while, nursing their drinks and gazing off in separate directions. The venue was exempted from power rationing for the event by edict of the Diocese of Light and spent its privilege lavishly. Bands of color-shifting LEDs twined around support columns, and snatches of baroque music burbled from speakers in the corners. Selena was content to lounge in silence, but her parents had stressed how important it was to converse and not to look sulky. She fumbled for something to say and noticed a bronze medal pinned to the boy’s lapel, its face embossed with a lion’s head roaring in profile.
“Is that a Heart of Daniel?”
The boy tugged his shirt from his chest to
get a better look at the medal. He observed it with mild distaste, as if it were a small and unobtrusive stain he’d only just noticed. “Yeah.”
“Where’d you serve?”
“The Outer Baronies, mostly.”
“That’s where you got the medal?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess you were in a battle then, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Selena bit her lower lip. The boy’s discomfort was palpable. It figured the one person she wanted to talk to—a first at one of these events, she believed—was also the most tight-lipped. Normally, some under-Bishop’s whelp latched onto her and spent the evening fawning over his own meager and doubtless inflated accomplishments, all while worming his fingers over as much covered flesh as he could get away with. But now here she was, speaking with an honest-to-god veteran—a Heart of Daniel recipient, no less—and it was as if every word required deliberate extraction, a tooth pulled without anesthetic.
“What’s it like? Being in a battle, I mean.”
Selena cringed even as the words were leaving her lips. God, what a stupid question. She opened her mouth to apologize but stopped when she saw the look on the boy’s face. His eyes rose from their meandering at his feet and fixed on some unseen point in the distance. His hands unclasped and gestured as he spoke, etching patterns in the air.
“It’s pretty much just chaos. It’s loud, and you’re either scared or angry, usually both. But there are moments sometimes where everything seems totally still. The battle keeps going on all around you, but it seems far away, or like it’s happening behind glass. Then all of a sudden, the glass breaks and it all pours back in on you. But for those few moments, it’s actually sort of beautiful.”
They’d said little else to one another after that, though the boy’s words had stuck with Selena. She recalled them now, watching as pandemonium closed around the arena’s throat, choking it with smoke and fists and fire, while her patch of earth remained untouched. It was very much as the boy described. Not beautiful, exactly, but hypnotic.
Mary’s voice, hurled from the alcove, broke the spell: “C’mon, already! Let’s get out of here!”
They waded through a tide of fleeing bodies, going with the current where possible and fighting it where necessary. Melees erupted here and there, but most of the people around her seemed more interested in seeking shelter than combat. Fire smoldered in the guts of crumbled buildings, tentacles of smoke squiggling through the debris.
A packhorse bolted down the road, trailing an unmanned wagon. The wheel hit a rut, and the wagon toppled. Bushels of squash and cornmeal spilled onto the cobbles. The horse continued undaunted, dragging the wagon on its side until the wood splintered and the wheel broke off. An old woman whipped a kerchief from her head and began filling it with handfuls of cornmeal. Others followed, and soon scavengers blackened the street from boardwalk to boardwalk.
Selena recalled the sacking of Fallowfield, dead Shepherds and farmers piled in the road like driftwood on a dried-up riverbed. Is this sort of thing gonna keep happening wherever I go? Her entire trip was supposed to avert a war, but it seemed wherever she went, she ended up causing one. She reached reflexively for the data stick and remembered that Simon had it. Her fingers twitched in discomfort at its absence. It was a talisman of sorts, a reminder that the path she walked hadn’t been of her choosing, and that the blood on her hands wouldn’t wash clean if she strayed; it would drown her, and the world with it. She was only doing what had to be done.
Sure, but I bet Thorin and The Mayor would tell you the exact same thing.
They came to a strip of adobe storefronts running east-west. Beyond it, the city’s core loosened into wider residential streets, which gradually flowed away to a loose cluster of mud huts and scrubland. Somewhere north of those fields jutted a lone outcrop of granite that Emily had set as their meetup spot. It wasn’t far, maybe an hour by foot. The thought that she could leave Juarez behind so quickly was difficult to grasp. She looked back at the chaos she’d sown. She hoped whatever bloomed in its wake was better than the swamp that came before. But she couldn’t be sure. Her hand went once more to the small blank spot by her hip, felt the stick’s absence, and climbed instead to the bronze and amber pendant hanging around her neck. She ran her thumb along its edge, its texture alternating smooth and jagged.
They cut through a narrow gap between buildings. Selena traced her fingers along the wall’s pitted length, reading an illegible history in its bumps and creases. They reached a gap in the wall where a narrow tributary met their wider alley. Canvas and corrugated metal formed a patchwork awning and draped the gap in darkness. Selena let her hand drop to her hip.
A large and looming shape exploded from the darkness and slammed into Selena. She managed to raise her arms to her chest before the crushing weight bashed her into the opposite wall. Flakes of dried earth fluttered onto her hair, her shoulders. A sickle of teeth cut the darkness like a crescent moon on its back. Eyes like polished onyx gleamed overhead.
“Well now, here is some luck for Old Krell,” said Krell. “I no thought I’d see you back in my alleys, girl. Where your boyfriend? I guess he not so tough now that he a foot shorter, hein?”
Other men oozed through the crack and into the alley, thwarting Selena’s attempts to break free. Mary reached past the throng and clawed at Krell’s forearm.
“Cut it out, asshole. Let her go.”
Krell watched her scrabbling with amusement. Her nails left white trails on his forearm, even drew blood in a few places, but by his expression, you’d think he were being accosted by a newborn kitten. One of his men put a hand on her shoulder. She swatted it away, earning more cackles from the crowd, which parted just long enough to swallow her.
Playful shoves grew sharper, meant to bruise and block instead of taunt. Mary threw a few punches before a broad-shouldered man with crudely shorn stubble pinned her arms behind her back. She looked from one face to the next, her indignation softened with the first markings of fear.
“You’d better tell your goons to let me go, Krell. I don’t care what bullshit rumors are swirling around with your dirtbag friends, but Selena and I still got Todd’s marks. You guys mess with us, you’re gonna wake up one morning with your balls mashed to masa.”
Krell’s smile sharpened at the edges. He released Selena from his grip. Three men flowed in to take his place, quick as liquid from a poisoned cup. She wriggled for a moment but could find no foothold for escape. A rabbit punch to the cheek encouraged her to hold still.
Krell sauntered over to where Mary stood. He squared his stance before her, feet planted a shoulder’s-breadth apart and ran a finger down her face. It charted a slow, deliberate curve, extending the fringe of her brand along its implied trajectory: down her cheek, along her jaw, into the slight cleft of delicate skin between the tendons of her neck. There it paused, pressing a slight dimple into her skin. “I no think so, girl. I tell you already, her mark is forfeit. ¿Y tuyo?”
His hand dove to his belt and in a single smooth motion drew a knife and plunged it into Mary’s belly. The men loosened their grip, and she slid from their arms like a load of soggy sheets and struck the ground with a dull thwack.
“Mary!” Selena burst free of the arms that held her and rushed to her friend’s side. An elbow plunged into her belly, but she barely felt it. She crouched down next to Mary, cradling the wounded girl’s head in her hands. Mary’s mouth worked silent syllables into the air. Selena held her, urging her to speak, as if her words were a balm with which she could heal herself. But no words came. The hands that had held Selena resumed their grip, and this time she lacked the strength to break away.
Krell stooped to clean the blade on the hem of Mary’s shirt, sheathed it, and moved back to Selena, his steps resuming their slow swagger.
“Mouthy thing, hein? Never mind, pet. I no got the same treat for you. Al menos no todavía.”
The other men laughed at this s
upposed witticism. Selena tried to meet it with a withering smirk, but her face couldn’t force even the sourest smile. There was simply nothing left to offer.
39: A Trio of Refugees
Simon stared into the setting sun. Though dulled by the band of haze armoring the horizon, its rays remained sharp enough to sting. Simon blinked against the pain but held his vigil. In some half-thought-out way, it seemed as if hope hung high above him, its feathered appendages frail and flightless, and his continued glare was the only thing keeping it aloft. To drop his gaze was to acknowledge the path the sun had forged across the sky since Otis launched his barrage on the city, to accept a passage of time far longer than Selena should have needed.
“She should be here by now,” he said.
Emily looked to Otis, who shifted uncomfortably. It was the first thing any of them had said in the better part of an hour.
“Hard to say. It’s a good distance ‘tween us and the Iron Circle. Could be two hours on foot.”
Iron Circle Page 22