by F. T. Lukens
“Call it an unfortunate side effect of being captured and made a slave.”
Asher laughed again. “Snarky. Anyway, but then you smiled, so I figured out it was a personality thing. It suits you, by the way—smiling. You should do it more often.”
Ren blinked. “Thanks?”
“No problem. At least you’re more talkative than the last occupant of your cell.”
Ren remembered what the guard had warned him about the previous day. He swallowed. “What happened to them?”
Shrugging, Asher rubbed the back of his hand over his eyes. “She went out with the guards one day and didn’t come back.”
Ren bit his lip. “Did she unlock the cuffs too?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t talk much. She told me her name and that was about it. She cried a lot.”
“Probably another unfortunate side effect of being taken from your home.”
“Probably,” Asher agreed. “But I have you now, and you’re infinitely more fun. I see my hours of boredom being cut in half, at least.” Asher made a slashing motion with his hand; his grin was wide despite the heavy topic.
“Glad I can be a source of entertainment.” Body cushioned by the hay, Ren relaxed against the wall. “But don’t you get out at all?”
Asher shook his head. “No. Unlike you, I’m not allowed outside of these four walls. It can be quite dull.”
Ren furrowed his brow. He hadn’t seen Asher taken from the cell, but he’d only been here two days. If Asher wasn’t a soldier or a servant, what was his purpose? What was he doing here?
Asher sighed and flexed his grip on the iron separating them. “Go ahead and ask.”
“Who are you? I mean, what’s your purpose? Why keep you around?”
“My good looks, obviously,” Asher said with a wink. At Ren’s unimpressed expression, Asher wilted. He leaned heavily on the bars. “I’m a hostage. I’m insurance so off-planet authorities don’t interfere with the Baron’s plans. That’s my purpose.”
“What plans?” Ren stood, his bare feet flat on the cool stone. He walked closer to Asher, and with the small distance between them, Ren noticed how tired Asher looked; the shadows under his eyes were not a trick of the low light, and his skin was pale from being kept inside. The flippant attitude was an act, a defense mechanism, and Ren could see it in the slump of Asher’s posture and the tightness of his jaw. “What plans?” Ren said, again.
Asher looked away. “His plans to take over your entire planet.”
“He can’t do that,” Ren said. “Erden is divided into five fiefs. Each fief has its own ruler and they report to a distant lord I don’t even know the name of.”
Groaning, Asher banged his forehead on the bars. “Oh my stars, you really are a duster, aren’t you? You don’t even know the ruler of your own backward feudal system of government. No wonder your people are easy pickings for a power-mad despot. Don’t you even watch your planet’s communication bulletins?”
“Insulting me isn’t helping,” Ren said, stepping closer. “And no, my mother didn’t allow it. What does it matter? Our village took care of itself.”
“It matters because that lord was assassinated last year. That created a power vacuum and your beloved Baron is gobbling up every bit of land he can get his hands on in a bid for power.”
Ren’s stomach dropped to the floor. “That’s why he’s building an army.”
“No, he’s built an army. It’s spread all over four of the five fiefs. He needed this new batch of people as reinforcements. You and the people from your village are his cavalry.”
“How do you know all this? Who are you?”
Asher pushed away from the barrier. He turned and pulled down the collar of his shirt, revealing a thin thread of a necklace and flashing the patch of skin on his right shoulder blade. In the dim light, Ren could make out the dark tattoo on Asher’s pale skin: a stylistic bird with its wings outstretched and flames rising around its feet. Ren recognized it immediately from the patch of cloth his mother kept in a box Ren wasn’t supposed to know about. But Asher’s was different; a swath of scar tissue cut through the mark.
“Phoenix Corps,” Ren breathed.
“So you know it then?”
Ren stepped closer. He reached out to touch in a daze, and only stopped when he realized what he was doing. His fingers curled back in to his palm. “Yes.”
“The lord of your planet called us in.” Asher said, hitching his shirt up to cover the tattoo. He turned around and cleared his throat. “He knew the Baron was amassing power, stealing from the villages he was supposed to protect. My regiment landed and we all thought it was some stupid duster conflict that would take us a day to clear up. The Baron’s army waited for us and overwhelmed our handful of troops by sheer numbers. I was captured along with a few others. The only reason the Baron spared me is because my mother is a high-ranking elected official in the Drift Alliance. As long as I am alive, the Phoenix Corps will not interfere with the Baron’s plans.”
Now, as Asher paced the small length of his cell, it was Ren, drawn to Asher’s story, leaning on the bars. Asher provided answers to many of the questions that had plagued Ren. The previous captives were fighting a conflict across the fiefs for the Baron. The Baron was after power and land and wealth and was not above using untrained villagers to acquire them. And while Ren processed all of the new information, one fact stuck out and made him ache down to his bones.
“You’ve been here for over a year?” he asked quietly.
Asher stopped his pacing, gaze leveled at Ren. “Yes,” he said softly. “It’s been me and these four walls and occasionally a companion in the cell next to me.” He cast Ren an apologetic smile. “Sorry, it’s you for now.”
“Don’t apologize. How does your mother know you’re alive?” Ren’s throat went tight around the words. He thought of his mother and wondered if she grieved for him. If he could find a way to tell her he was alive, that he was fine and looking for a way to escape, he’d gladly do it.
“The guards take videos.” Asher rubbed his stubbled cheeks. “They even let me bathe and shave before them. I tell her I’m being treated well and I wave and they send it to her.”
“Have you tried to escape?” Ren pressed, fingers wrapped around the slats.
Asher, hands on his hips, stared at the floor. “I was injured badly when they brought me here. I never had a chance.”
“Your shoulder.”
Asher rubbed the joint and rolled it several times. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
Asher huffed a laugh. “Don’t be. Look, it’s like I said. The sooner you realize there’s nothing you can do, the better.”
Ren dropped his arms and pulled away. He crossed to his mattress and sat on it. Asher’s words sank like arrows into his body; his hopelessness hurt Ren in a way he didn’t think it could.
“I have to get out of here,” Ren whispered.
“And go where? He’s not going to stop, Ren. He’s going to keep going to your villages. He’s going to keep taking your food and your people. So even if you run home, he’s going to drag you right back.”
Ren curled up on the mattress. Asher was right. If what he said was true, then the Baron would continue to hunt them, and Liam was in danger. Ren had to get home to warn his family, and then they could run. Maybe they could find a way off-world.
“I’m sorry, Ren,” Asher said. When Ren didn’t respond, Asher sighed. “Get some rest. I’m sure the guards will come for you early. And hopefully, you’ll come back.”
Ren tucked his hands under his cheek and closed his eyes.
%
Time passed in a haze for Ren. His life took on a new routine. He woke up. He ate breakfast. He worked in the courtyard. He watched Jakob train to become a soldier against his will. He watched Sorcha scrub pots and pans and serve food. He fixed
tech and slowly learned the common ways in which the different objects broke. Prods tended to burn out. Stunners’ triggers malfunctioned often. Comms broke from being dropped on the stone and having their circuits jarred loose. He even fixed the personal holovid recorder of one of the guards, which earned him an extra piece of bread at dinner.
Each night, Ren was taken back to the cell.
And while Ren lay on his mattress, arms aching from the shackles, he listened to Asher tell stories of his time in the Phoenix Corps.
“I was sixteen when I ran away from Mykonos and joined the Corps. My mother was furious. She said I was too young, too stupid, too reckless. But my older sister was running her own ship and I was eager to start my own life. There wasn’t anything she could do. I signed my name on the form. Four years later,” he said, looking around the cell, “and here I am. Maybe I should have listened to her a little more.”
“The lament of most teenagers,” Ren said around a yawn. “I should’ve listened to my mom.”
Asher laughed.
Ren raised his head and smiled.
Asher had taken to sitting in the corner next to their shared wall. He rested his head on the slats with his knees pulled to his chest and his arms propped on his bent legs.
“All right,” he said, looking at Ren, “your turn.”
“My turn?”
“I’ve been talking for a week. It’s your turn to tell me a story.”
Ren flopped back on the mattress. He stared up at the ceiling, a grid of stone, just like the walls and the floor. He wondered how Asher hadn’t gone mad yet.
“I don’t have any stories.”
“Sure you do. Your village couldn’t have been so boring that you don’t have any stories.”
Ren crossed his arms behind his head. “Actually, it was.”
“I don’t believe it.”
Ren sighed. “I have a brother. Liam. My mother used to tell us these weird stories about women who could tell the future and about humans who became machines and broke the sky.”
“Tell me one of those,” Asher said, voice oddly quiet.
“I don’t tell it as well as my mother does.”
“Try. I’ll bite my tongue if you suck at it.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Oh, come on, you cog. Out with it.”
Ren laughed. He rolled to his side and peered at Asher in the dark. “What did you call me?”
“You heard me. Make with the story.”
“Fine,” Ren said. He took a breath.
“Back when this world was new, an old star exploded. The dust rocketed through space and most of it burned up in the atmosphere, but a few specks, a very few, floated down to the planet’s surface. These specks were inhaled by people, and they became hosts to the star’s power. Then the star hosts developed special abilities.”
“What kind of abilities?”
“I thought you were going to bite your tongue?”
Asher looked contrite. He pressed his lips together and gestured for Ren to continue.
“Anyway,” Ren said, “some of the star hosts developed the power to see into the future. The first seer, a woman named Cassandra, was so accurate she could predict death. But no one believed her. And when they finally did, it was always too late. Cassandra was driven mad by her own power and was locked away.” Ren stopped and smiled softly. “At this point, story time usually devolved into Liam and me asking questions about our own futures.”
“Do you believe it?”
“Believe what?”
“That there are star hosts. With powers? Who can tell the future?”
Ren shrugged. “It’s just a legend.”
“Legends usually have a little truth to them.”
Ren closed his eyes and remembered how he had told Liam the same thing. It seemed like only yesterday, but weeks had passed since Ren had last seen his brother, since Liam had declared Ren a dreamer in a duster’s body.
Ren missed him. He missed him so much it was as if a hole had opened up in his chest. Sometimes, he thought he saw Liam, but it was always a figment of his imagination, or some other unfortunate boy who had been captured along with them.
Hot tears gathered swiftly behind his eyes, and Ren angrily scrubbed them away.
“Hey, are you okay over there?”
“Yeah,” Ren said, voice thick. “Just thinking about home.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Ren said. “And I don’t know what to believe. For the longest time I thought if I could just get away, I could find out what truth really is out there. Maybe find something spectacular. But now, I’m miles away from my village, my family, and all I want to do is go home. I couldn’t care less about legends.” Ren picked a piece of hay from his mattress and rolled it between his fingers. “It must sound like duster nonsense to you.”
Asher shifted and turned so that his crossed legs pushed his knees against the grate. “It doesn’t. When I was gallivanting across the cluster, visiting drifts and backwater planets like yours, I missed my home too. It’s not duster nonsense.”
“Well,” Ren said, squirming around on the mattress, trying to get comfortable enough to sleep. “At least you’ll get to leave here when this is all over. I don’t know where I’ll be.”
“Right,” Asher replied. It came out solemn and tired. “I hope you get to go home, Ren. Until then, lay low. You were right not to draw attention to yourself.”
Ren yawned. “I’ll do my best. Now, let me sleep. Some of us have important work in the morning.”
Scoffing, Asher crawled to his own mattress and plopped down onto it. “Goodnight, you idiot duster.”
Ren closed his eyes. “Goodnight, you arrogant drifter.” And he went to sleep.
5
After two weeks of being led to and from the courtyard, Ren could almost navigate the twists and turns of the corridors. He followed Oz, counting the steps, noting the turns. His chains clanked, but Ren had become used to their sound and weight. After the last sharp right, Ren could see the glow of the dawn ahead.
Smiling to himself, Ren stepped into the courtyard and blinked against the sudden natural light. He took a deep breath, inhaling the brisk morning air. He moved toward his normal spot in the corner of the courtyard, but Oz gripped his shoulder and stopped him.
“Not today,” Oz said. “This way.”
Another guard joined them, and they brought Ren to a wrought iron door.
Every day thus far, Ren had been taken from his cell, and every evening had been brought back. But the fear of not returning weighed heavily on his mind. And though Asher hid everything behind a glib exterior and snarky commentary, Ren saw he was relieved, as well, when Ren walked back into the dungeon at night.
“Where are we going?” Ren asked. Fear welled up into his middle, sending his pulse racing.
“You’re needed elsewhere today,” Oz said.
“Am I coming back?”
Oz didn’t reply. Instead, he opened the door, punched in the code for the force field and pushed Ren through when he didn’t immediately follow the other guard.
It was a corridor, like those Ren had experienced in his walk to and from the courtyard, but this one was narrower; its ceiling was short and curved. Oz slouched to walk through, and they had to walk single file. Ren’s shoulders brushed both walls. The tunnel was dark, with no natural light and no tech lights apparent in the walls, but it was short. They stopped at another force field, and beyond it, instead of a door, was a circular grate.
Ducking through it, Ren emerged into a line of bushes. He turned to look over his shoulder and stopped short, amazed to see the sheer outer stone wall of the citadel. It was massive, reaching toward the sky, looming over the landscape.
It took a moment for the implication to hit him. He was outside. He was on the othe
r side of the wall.
Ren swallowed his panic. He wished he had said something to Asher that morning. He wished he’d talked to Sorcha the night before as she served food. He wished he’d sought out Jakob, even after their strained conversation weeks ago.
“An escape tunnel,” Ren said. “Why would a citadel need a hidden tunnel?”
“In case of a siege,” Oz replied. He spun Ren around and shoved him forward. “Now, keep walking. No more questions.”
Ren stumbled, but righted his body using the wall. They walked parallel to it for several yards, hidden behind greenery, until they stepped through a small break.
A floater waited for them, filled with supplies.
The guards ushered him in. Ren sat between them in the front, which was infinitely better than riding in the back among the cargo.
“Where are you taking me?” Ren asked. He set his shackled hands in his lap; the chain curled on the seat.
Oz gave him a blank look and the question went unanswered.
Oz drove the floater across the flat landscape. Ren hadn’t seen the land around the castle, other than the front approach, but now he made sure to catalog what he saw. Plains stretched for miles, though off toward the horizon, Ren could see rolling hills that grew into mountains. And in the distance, Ren saw a ship take off and shoot into the atmosphere. He tracked the white trail arcing through the blue sky before it burned away toward space.
Not for the first time, Ren wished he were aboard.
They rode for about an hour, following the curves of the road, until a building appeared in front of them. It was surrounded by a chained fence, and a cluster of smaller buildings sat nearby. Oz spoke into the comm on his wrist.
“Requesting entrance to compound, code: comet. Over.”
A voice crackled back. “Wait for confirmation. Over.”
There was a long silence until the voice came back over the comm. “Entrance granted. Gate opening in five. Out.”
Ren counted to five in his head, and on the mark, the gate slowly rolled open.