by R H Nolan
“Actually, there’s a lot of stuff we didn’t know about them. We just assumed what they were and what they wanted, and it got us into a lot of trouble.”
Ayla took a step back. “You’re talking about the war.”
“Yeah,” Max said, then took a deep breath. “Turns out the whole thing could have been avoided if humans just took the time to try talking to them. The Qirinians, I mean.”
“They would have killed us, Max.” Ayla almost looked angry now, scowling at him from beneath a furrowed brow.
“No they wouldn’t have. They were trying not to be killed by some other aliens. They were looking for somewhere they could be safe. And I guess we were too scared to believe it was anything but an attack.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Max,” Ayla said. “Their technology completely wiped out the planet and most of the people on it. If they wanted a safe place to hide, why would they bring weapons with them that could do this?”
She gestured around the room, but Max knew she was talking about all of it—the Wastelands, the city fortresses, the mutants and dead earth and harsh struggle for survival. At least, he figured she referred to as much of it as she’d probably learned about in some Neo Angeles school.
“It wasn’t a weapon,” he told her, trying to stay calm so he could get her to understand.
“Nice try,” she said with a sarcastic tilt of her head. “I’m pretty sure the radiation that killed Earth is the biggest weapon we’ve ever seen.”
“That only happened because we crashed their ships,” Max snapped in his rising frustration. “The energy that powered those ships is what created the radiation, but it’s not used to destroy things, Ayla. It’s the complete opposite. It… it gave me this.”
He raised his hand before remembering that he’d already used the yellow energy for a lightwave. Then he shrugged and dropped his hand.
“That’s how I can do this. Qirinian technology. They’re not monsters. And I don’t think any scientist since the war has come anywhere close to tapping into what their technology can do.”
He was breathing heavily now, feeling a little embarrassed about such a passionate outburst. Before now, he hadn’t realized how strongly he felt about this.
Ayla studied him for a while, then her scowl softened a little.
“If that’s true, Max,” she said, biting her lip, “then that means we did this to ourselves.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I know. It’s pretty messed up to think about.”
Shaking her head, Ayla added, “And I don’t think anyone else will want to hear it. We’ve been calling the Bugs our enemy and blaming them for everything that’s happened. Nobody wants to be told all this was our fault in the first place.”
Max stepped away from her a little, acutely aware again of the fact that he was a Scavenger and she was a Dweller. They came from two completely different worlds within the same broken planet. She didn’t understand how that kind of hatred really affected those at whom it was aimed. Not like Max understood it.
“But it wasn’t all ‘our’ fault,” he said. “Not the entire human race’s. I mean, when it comes down to it, everything’s really just up to a few people in power, right? The generals and leaders when the war broke out. Even here, in these huge cities, it’s almost the same thing. There’s nothing wrong with Scavengers. Most of us, anyway. But if you live in the Wastelands, they hate you. If you step out of line, someone’s going to try to shoot you. Whoever’s in power here should really step out of their perfect little bubble and spend a day watching how the rest of us live.”
Max closed his eyes again and took a deep breath. Obviously, he was more than a little angry, and he hadn’t meant to go off on a tangent like that, especially in front of Ayla. But the connection he’d just made between the misunderstood Qirinians and the misunderstood Scavengers—the Peacewinds, his people, his family—had woken something inside him that was more than the daily burden of trying to stay alive.
“I’m sorry,” Ayla said softly.
“It’s not your fault.” He looked at her again. “What do you call the top person here, anyway? I mean, we have chiefs on the outside, but that’s not really a Dweller word, is it?”
“We have a governor.”
“Yeah? Well, it wouldn’t hurt the guy to leave this city and take a good look at how the rest of us are just left to fight or die out there, would it? You ever talk to him? I bet he thinks all Scavengers are just as dangerous and inhuman as the Bugs.”
As soon as he finished speaking, he realized he’d said something wrong. Ayla’s expression of open curiosity darkened into a frown, her lips pressed tightly together.
“What?” he asked.
“The governor of Neo Angeles is my uncle.”
Max coughed in surprised and raised his eyebrows. “Oh.”
He’d apparently stepped in it with that one.
“And yes,” she added, “I’ve talked to him quite a lot, seeing as he’s been the only family I’ve had since I was six.”
That morphed his embarrassment into a surprisingly strong empathy for her. Max studied her for a minute, then swallowed and said, “I’m sorry, Ayla.”
“It’s not your fault.” She gave a small, sad smile. “Do you have any family out there?”
“My mom and my brother. My dad died when I was ten, so it’s just the three of us trying to make it work.”
Actually, it felt like it was just Max trying to make it work, trying to keep his family from dying. They wouldn’t last a day in the Wastelands doing what he’d done every day for years.
Ayla nodded. “You’re not wrong.”
Max frowned. “About what?”
“The City Dwellers do need to stop pushing everything under the rug. The war, the Bugs, the Scavengers in the Wasteland. All of it. I always thought it felt so wrong that we’re in here and so many other people are still out there. I can’t even imagine what that’s like.”
“How does your uncle feel about it?” Max asked.
He could put aside their differences when they talked about having lost their parents, but now it felt like he had an actual person to blame for what his life had become. Right now, that person was the governor of Neo Angeles.
Apparently, he’d revealed how he felt with the critical way he’d asked the question.
Ayla shook her head and frowned at him. “Being a governor doesn’t just mean lounging around all day with a bunch of servants. My uncle works really hard for this city and everyone living here. He’s just trying to keep everyone safe.”
“Safe from Scavengers like me,” Max said.
It was a harsh statement, and he said it gently enough, but it was the truth.
“Maybe.” She stared at the floor, then took a deep breath and looked up at him. “But he has kept the city safe, Max. That doesn’t mean I agree with the way he does it. He’s my uncle, but he rules this place with an iron fist. I hate how the Scavengers are being treated. I hate being stuck here inside these walls and only ever feeling the sun for a few hours a day. I want to get out of here. See what life’s like in the rest of the world. Sometimes it feels like I’m suffocating in here. And I’m so bored.”
Max chuckled; he couldn’t help it.
A slow smile spread across her face. “What?”
“My dad tried to explain a saying to me once. About the grass always being greener on the other side. I had no idea what it meant until right now.”
Ayla laughed. “There is no grass on your side, Max.”
“I know.”
They grinned at each other for a bit, then he said, “If you’re really that bored, you might be interested in why I came back here. And I could definitely use your help.”
17
After he explained, Ayla took a long moment to think.
“Alright,” she finally said. “I’ll help you get this thing your Bug friend needs from the labs. You wouldn’t be able to get down there without clearance, anyway. Which I have.”
Ma
x wanted to remind her that he didn’t have clearance to enter the city, either, but he let her continue.
“But it won’t work with just the two of us,” she said.
Max glanced around the room. “I don’t see anyone else here.”
“Well, lucky for you, I was about to meet up with some friends before I rescued you from the guards.”
“Rescue’s a pretty strong word,” Max said playfully, though he was also being serious.
Ayla smiled. “It’s okay to be rescued sometimes, Max.”
He snorted. Until today, there hadn’t been anyone to rescue him for a long, long time.
“You helped me hide, I’ll give you that much,” he said with a grin, then looked around. “Where are we, anyway?”
Ayla looked over her shoulder at the mostly empty room. A bench had been built into the back wall, but even that looked like it hadn’t been used in years and should have had at least a thin cushion. A small panel was on the wall beside a door at the back of the room.
“I don’t know what it was meant to be, just where it leads.”
“And where’s that?”
“You’ll see.” Ayla punched a series of numbers into the panel, a green light blinked, then she pushed down on the door handle.
The next room was covered in control panels, monitors, and an outdated mishmash of system hardware brought in from who knew where. It looked exactly how Max had imagined the old Earth spaceships from his dad’s stories. After Zryk’s ship, it looked like Stone Age technology. Max wanted to look at it closer—
Until he saw the three other kids sitting in the glow of the monitors.
Ayla closed the door and stepped past Max. “Sorry I took so long.”
All three kids looked up from the devices and monitors they’d been working on, their smiles of greeting turning into complete surprise.
“Who are you?” one of the boys said. Even sitting down, he was clearly much larger than Max—muscular arms and shoulders, a thick neck, and just a little bit of extra weight around the middle.
“This is the guy I told you about,” Ayla said. “He actually came back.”
There was only one other girl besides Ayla. She gently set down a small device she’d been handling and took a few steps forward. Her dark brown eyes were wide with amusement and curiosity, standing out even against her olive skin and long black hair. Max hadn’t realized he’d been staring at her hands—both of them sleek, well-crafted robotic prosthetics—until she added, “Bet that took some balls.”
Max looked up to meet her gaze. “I’m Max,” he said, not really wanting to be ‘the guy Ayla told them about’ for too long.
He’d put a lot of faith in the fact that Ayla wouldn’t tell the guards or Neo Angeles’ security system about him sneaking into the garden, but it hadn’t even occurred to him that she might tell her friends.
“Nice armor,” the second boy said with a wide grin, his skin almost as dark as his short black hair.
“Uh, thanks.” Max couldn’t think of anything else to say, feeling like a complete outsider in a place where he really didn’t know who he could trust. Except for Ayla… he hoped.
“That’s Trox,” Ayla said, nodding at the kid who’d complimented the himirini. “Lyra.”
The girl with black hair waved briefly with a silver hand.
“And Herk.”
The huge kid in the chair folded his arms and nodded in greeting.
Max gave them all an awkward, closed-lipped smile, but it felt more like a wince. He was acutely aware that he was a Scavenger, and they were Dwellers.
“So what’s he doing here?” the huge kid Herk asked.
Ayla glanced at Max with a smile. “Kind of a long story.”
“Oh, bummer.” Trox lifted his hands to gesture at the gadgets all around them, then grinned. “Too bad we don’t have any extra time on our hands.”
“I’m down for a good story,” Lyra added.
“Max?”
When Max looked at Ayla again, he found her blue eyes shining, waiting for him to make the decision. She was giving him the opportunity to tell three complete strangers the story of how he got here, what he could do, and why he needed their help.
He froze, wondering why that seemed so difficult.
“We can’t do it on our own,” Ayla said, then added, “You can trust them. They’re my friends.”
Max nodded. “Okay. This is going to sound nuts, so just… wait ‘til I’m done before everybody starts asking questions.”
He gave them the whole story, more or less, starting with his escape from Neo Angeles and guards by skating down the city wall. Ayla had obviously already told them about how she and Max had met.
His tale was a basic outline—escaping from the city guards by hiding in the Earth ship; falling through it twice before the Sandwalkers got him; discovering the crashed Bug starship and the stasis chamber and waking Zryk from at least half a century of sleep.
When he described the energy chamber and his first experiences with his powers, Max couldn’t bring himself to tell them all what the Soul Points were and how they had to be obtained. Maybe he’d tell them later, if the right moment came up. But right now, he didn’t want to take any chances and make them any warier of him than they already were. He was still a Scavenger, after all, and they were Dwellers.
Trox grinned and ran his hands down his cheeks when Max relayed his fight against the Sandwalkers to get Zryk the energy core. Lyra folded her mechanical hands and listened with her head tilted. Herk didn’t move, but his eyes were wide with awe and disbelief.
Max looked at Ayla as little as possible while he spoke. He didn’t know the others at all, but he already felt a certain connection with Ayla. They were a lot alike in some ways, and he wanted the chance to find out more about her. If he looked at her and saw the fear and confusion that he expected in her eyes, those chances were probably shot—even though she’d done nothing but marvel at his abilities and what he’d done.
There was a bit of arguing about helping a Bug. The discussion followed the same path that his and Ayla’s fight had taken earlier.
“Let me get this straight: you want to help the things that nearly killed off our entire species?” Lyra scoffed.
Max repeated everything that he’d said to Ayla, and they finally they came around and accepted Max’s version of events, including the accidental bombardment of Earth with radiation when the Qirinian fleet crashlanded, which was caused by humans.
Or at least they seemed to accept his version.
“So the next thing I have to get is something Zryk called an emergent,” Max finished.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Herk asked.
“Another energy source, I guess. It’s about this long”—he lifted his hands to show them—“like a rod, maybe. And it has a bunch of markings on it. It’s in one of the lower-level labs.”
“Which one?” Trox asked.
“Hold on.”
Max accessed his implant, pulled up the newly synced maps, and flipped through the detailed schematics of Neo Angeles. It still baffled him that Zryk had created all this in the first place, but thank goodness he had.
Max scanned through the multiple levels of the city, counting as he went, until he came to the layout of the floor with the green flashing dot.
“It looks like the… fifth level underground. Northeast quarter of the city about halfway between the center and the wall. That’s about as detailed as I can get.”
“You were looking at a map, weren’t you?” Trox replied, and his mouth dropped open in awe.
“Uh…” Max’s eyes flickered to Lyra and then Herk. “Yeah. If I knew how to share it, I’d let you take a look.”
“Eh, we’ll figure it out,” the kid replied. “I’m smarter than everyone in this room combined.”
Herk snorted in his chair, arms still crossed. Lyra closed her eyes and shook her head, though she smiled.
“I wish I knew more about the layout of the labs
,” Ayla said.
“I’m pretty sure I know where it is,” Trox added. “Sounds like Bioengineering to me. My dad works in the Sub-Level Five labs.”
“I have clearance,” Ayla said, “and Trox has a decent excuse to be down there… that could work.”
“Yeah, but what about the rest of us?” Herk asked. “All this stuff Max just told us… how do we know it’s real?”
“You can’t make this stuff up, man,” Lyra said, lifting a flashing silver hand to gesture in Max’s direction.
“Maybe.” Herk scowled. “But what if none of it’s true? Then Max broke into the city for something else, and we have no idea what we’re actually helping him to do.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” Ayla interjected. “The fact that no one should have to break into any city? Herk, we’re already trying to change the system with what we have. This shouldn’t be an issue about whether or not we’re willing to help a Scavenger—”
“I didn’t say I have an issue with Scavengers.” Herk scowled at her. “You know I don’t agree with how things are run. But I do have an issue with being lied to. Max’s story is pretty awesome. Obviously. It’s just not very convincing, and I don’t want any of us getting dragged into something that’s just gonna get us into trouble.”
“I get that,” Max said, realizing that Herk wasn’t as much of a jerk as his hesitation might imply. He knew how dangerous it was in the Wastelands to believe anything anyone said, and that feeling was the same, no matter where someone lived. “It makes sense that you don’t trust me. Honestly, the only reason I trust you guys is because you’re Ayla’s friends.”
He caught Ayla’s surprised look out of the corner of his eye.
“Look, I live in the Wastelands, yeah. I spend all day every day trying to find maybe one meal, and that gets split between three people—me, my brother, and my mom. Since I met him, Zryk’s been helping me feed them. That’s not what I’m asking from you guys, but the more I help Zryk, the longer I keep my mom and my little brother alive and healthy. That’s really all I care about.”
Nobody said a thing. Herk stared at him without any animosity. Trox bowed his head and stared at his hands clasped in his lap. Lyra nodded slowly.