The Gatherer Series, Book 1

by Colleen Winter

  “I need antibiotics. For my friend.”

  The woman frowned, half smiling in confusion.

  “Antibiotics won’t help us. You should know—”

  “It’s for an infection. Not the plague.”

  Referencing the plague in front of an audience made it hard and tangible, no longer just stories that Maria had told her, but a real horrible thing that she had created. She was light headed, the hours of paddling and not eating rushing into her in a wave of nausea and shame.

  The woman’s grip tightened and she moved one hand to Storm’s elbow. A chair was placed behind her and she was lowered into it. A glass of water was pressed into her hand along with a sharp-edged tablet. The crowd loomed around her.

  The woman nudged Storm’s hand upwards, encouraging her to take it.

  “What is this?”

  The woman was warm and welcoming, but that benevolence didn’t ring from the crowd. A definite undercurrent of hostility increased her desire to run.

  “It’s fast absorbing electrolytes and minerals. Your body will respond to it as soon as it hits your tongue.”

  It had similar ingredients to the concoctions she’d created. The tablet was so much more practical. The crowd was silent, though voices and whispers continued further back. She would need something to get her back to Maria. They couldn’t have been waiting for her with a poison pill when they hadn’t known she was coming.

  She touched the pill to her tongue. Sweet. Sour. She washed it down with the water, finishing the glass. Maria needed this more than her, and she looked around for the source to refill it. The pill was no miracle cure but she did feel a subtle lightening, her body’s systems running smoother.

  “Where is your friend?”

  Megan hung close to the woman’s side, gripping the woman’s hand in both of hers. She seemed shyer in the light, younger, less like the girl who had led her through the dark.

  “At the river.”

  A murmuring in the crowd as the woman frowned.

  “Where?”

  “The Pier.”

  A small group of people disappeared out the door. Storm followed and found herself struggling to keep up in a pack of quick footed, silent ghosts, floating unheard back through the alleys and empty warehouses. The air felt crisper and harder, as if the corners had gotten sharper, the walls more unyielding. Megan ran beside her, an easy, sure-footed gait of someone who had spent a lot of time running.

  Storm’s fear grew as they ran, the few mentions of ‘gangs’ and ‘trollers’ she had heard as they left repeating with the rhythm of her feet striking the ground. They reached the river downstream from the pier, the group staying tight against the abandoned buildings as they ran. One by one they dropped off, each taking up a position along the river. The pier looked as it had when she’d approached it, concrete sides rising out of the dirty water, the outline of the railing jutting above the top, and no boat tied to its base.

  She was out of breath, shaking and off balance when she reached the end of the dock, each rung of the ladder clearly visible. The inky restless water churned against the concrete wall as if it had swallowed the boat whole. She checked the opposite side of the pier and lifted her gaze to the dark recesses of the river that led deeper into the city. She had been stupid to leave her, thinking the darkness would provide protection. She leaned over the top of the ladder, hoping for a flash of chrome and the impossibility of a boat waiting in the shadows. The water looked as hard as ice, the black brittle kind that allowed no light to pass through.

  Megan stood next to her, her attention upriver as if she could see something Storm couldn’t. She saw only lifeless river banks and the water’s unyielding surface. Storm needed something she could chase or run after, something other than the silence of the empty river.

  The girl kicked a chip of concrete. It rattled across the pier and over the side, the plop where it hit the water absorbed into the wall. Storm felt the burning heat of Maria’s skin, saw the rifle clutched in her hand, and remembered her strength when she had carried Storm beneath the hydro line. She was too strong to just disappear.

  One of the runners came onto the pier, his steps truncated, reluctant to be exposed above the water. He was tall and lean, with wavy black hair that swept back from his forehead.

  “We can’t stay out here too long.”

  He took hold of Megan’s hand and drew her back to the bank.

  Lights flickered and headlights moved in the distance. The starless sky arched away from her.

  “Who took her?”

  Megan and the man had reached shore, moving back the way they had come. The air stirred, the beginning of a breeze delivering the smell of garbage, asphalt, and progress. Had they taken Maria upstream into the light? To a hospital that hummed with electricity. Storm had a sharp ache for the busy calmness of it: machines humming, surrounded by the comforts of power.

  “Storm!”

  Megan called from the entrance of the alley. With a final look at the spinning Ferris wheel, Storm jogged away from the pier, checking several times over her shoulder for the shape of a drifting boat or water lapping against a hull. She felt as she had when she had walked away from the lab the final time. Nothing the way it should be. She shouldn’t have left then, and she knew she shouldn’t be leaving now. She stopped at the entrance to the alley. Megan and the man neared its other end.

  The moon was a brilliant, clear cut disc in the sky, yet its light was not strong enough to show her where Maria had gone. It was darker closer to the buildings, the light in the distance brighter, mocking. She turned and stepped into the now empty alley.

  TWENTY ONE

  Storm wanted to push the faces away. Some trembled openly, their skin as thin as rice paper, others gazed curiously from bright eyes above cheeks that held colour. Most of the people in the warehouse had come to see her, shaking her hand or simply laying a fingertip on her arm to see if she was real.

  She had expected blame and accusations. Instead, the same reverence surrounded her as when she had left, but now for a different reason.

  Megan pushed through the crowd, her pink tutu ragged at the edges, and placed a warm bowl of soup in Storm’s hands. It smelled rich and heavenly, lentils, carrots, and celery floating on the surface. She sipped gratefully on the hot broth, wishing she could share it with Maria.

  Marty, the gray-haired woman who seemed to be in charge, had said there were plenty of antibiotics donated by the medical community. Drugs that could be racing through Maria’s blood right now, soothing the inflamed flesh, if Storm hadn’t left her.

  “Are you organizing a revolt?”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Why are you here?”

  It was the same as when she had been surrounded by reporters. Questions coming faster than she could answer, their persistence in getting an answer feeling personal. They made assumptions that made her into something she wasn’t and gave her intentions that were so much more pre-meditated than they actually were. Except this persistence wasn’t about getting a good story. It was about finding hope.

  It was too much after the silence. The loneliness. She was entirely unequipped to deal with this, and she longed for Maria to step in.

  Megan stood, putting her small body between Storm and the accusations, as she took the empty bowl from Storm’s hands.

  “Thank you.”

  The girl slipped into the crowd, her pink tutu the last thing visible between the bodies.

  “Did you destroy the Gatherer?”

  The question hung in the air, surrounded by the quiet. What felt like a thousand pair of eyes focussed on her. She had ignored the question since they had returned from the docks, her crude, effective method of compromising the Gatherer’s mechanism in Three Rocks having been embellished in the days since into a well-engineered terrorist act that was to be the first of many. T
he beginning of a revolt. Didn’t they understand that the Gatherer was what had happened last time she’d tried to save people?

  “How did you do it?”

  It was the tall dark-haired man, his near black eyes examining her every move. Was this the answer to getting rid of the Gatherer? Sending out an army of sick soldiers to nearly kill themselves trying to destroy a single device? There had to be a better way, yet she couldn’t see what it was.

  She let the soup’s warmth and energy seep into her veins, the warmth bringing a blanket of drowsiness with it. Maria would have stepped in by now, herded these people away so she could think.

  “It’s a matter of interrupting the process.”

  The crystal bowl was half art, half energy harvester, the real beauty of it in the structure of the crystals. An intricate web that had to be precisely laid out for it to gather the minute, reclusive energy.

  “Can you show us?”

  The room watched her, broken only by the hum of a distant propane heater.

  She wanted to say ‘No.’ The urge to protect her creation was as strong as when she had first laid out the network of crystals that would bring such power and energy to the world. Each crystal had to be laid precisely within the lattice and energized at a specific frequency. As intricate and simple as the mechanism for the first light bulb she had seen at the National Museum of American History, delivering the same unforeseeable change to the world.

  “You have to get inside the Gatherer to do it.”

  Feet shifted. People glanced at one another. All of them were aware of the risk that would entail and none of them willing to get that close to a Gatherer that was drawing energy into itself—the moth that is drawn to the light only to be destroyed.

  “I need to find Maria first.”

  “Did she help you?”

  The smell of burning wax was thick and close and a dull ache had formed behind Storm’s eyes. The flickering flames of candles and torches created patches of abandoned light in the cavernous space. Of course she had helped her. Without even being asked.

  “Yes.”

  Better that they thought Maria was critical to destroying the Gatherer.

  The black haired man had his head bent in conversation with a man about Storm’s age whose arms trembled, and a tired-looking woman with short cropped hair, her arms crossed tight over her chest.

  “Where have they taken her?”

  It didn’t feel as if she were in the same city where she had lived, the darkness and danger not part of the city she had known. Some of the crowd moved away, shaking their heads, her ignorance or her fear stripping away that moment of hope. Some walked quickly as if being chased, swallowed into the darkness between the candles.

  The two men and the woman had stayed, the woman’s arms still crossed tightly.

  “We don’t know.”

  “But you know who’s taken her.”

  The man shrugged, came forward and offered his hand.

  “I’m Romero. This is Trevor and Bev.”

  Romero’s hand enveloped Storm’s. Trevor’s and Bev’s were as emaciated and sharp as her own.

  “You aren’t sick.”

  He was out of place amidst the waifs that shifted and whispered in the shadows. She envied his easy movements, free of the fear of an invisible attacker.

  “Not all of us are.”

  The woman laughed, her arms gripping her sides, as if afraid of letting something out.

  “He and Marty are the only ones. Everyone else got here on their own, or was dumped.”

  The children had gone back to playing a slow, unenthusiastic game of Sorry! Most were younger than Megan, all of them casting occasional hopeful glances in her direction. It made her ill to see their thinness, the tension around their eyes that spoke of an understanding of pain. They were the same signs that had been in her team, if she had thought to look—Jana’s growing fatigue, Callan no longer able to pull an idea out of the air, Ari’s growing absence. The rawness of it was too much, her carefully packaged guilt torn open, each pair of eyes taking the shape of her team’s.

  “We heard that you had found a cure.”

  The thick smoky air caught in her lungs and she was coughing, the coughs doing nothing to dislodge the irritation at the back of her throat. Romero moved away and returned with a bottle of water, holding it beside her. His fingernails were trimmed, the back of his hand smooth, plump in comparison to the ridged tendons that streaked the backs of her hands. It took several gulps before her throat eased.

  “So you have found one.”

  Bev’s brow was drawn over dark pupils, their recesses a mix of anger and fear.

  Storm thought of her regime of diet and isolation that had helped her manage her illness, but not cure what she had created. She wanted to tell them she could fix it. Maybe, for an instant, see the same wonder as when she had unveiled the Gatherer.

  Bev turned away at Storm’s hesitation, her shoulders hunched from the force of her arms around her. Romero stopped her.

  “We already know this.”

  Bev’s pointed shoulder blades poked beneath her thin coat, the roots of her hair gray at the base of her neck.

  An accusation would be better. Something Storm could defend herself against. Except there was no defense. Nothing that could justify the suffering of these people. Free energy. Limitless amusements. Everything anyone needed at the flick of a switch.

  Bev’s shaking had gotten worse, her face distorted by suffering. Storm had to look away. Romero led Bev towards the completely dark area at the back of the warehouse. Megan rose from her place in the play area and followed, her steps so quiet it was as if she didn’t touch the ground at all. A bedraggled angel that floated among the sick.

  “Groups of teenagers come into the blackout area at night.”

  Trevor had wide bones of what must have once been formidable shoulders. His hair was long and shaggy, his beard overgrown in patches. He gestured to two plastic chairs near the entrance.

  “It’s a game for them. Hunting down the weak ones, like wolves.”

  His trembling was nearly constant and she clenched her fists against the sympathy tremors racing up her arms. She hadn’t shaken in months.

  “Or at least that’s how they see it.”

  He unrolled his sleeve over his hand, and rolled it up again, stroked his beard, and leaned over to pick up a torn scrap of paper off the concrete floor.

  “The police let them do that?”

  He folded the paper into a tiny, scrunched square and tossed it away from him.

  “They’re afraid to come in here. Worried they’ll catch something.”

  “Don’t they know it’s the Gatherer?”

  It was good to say it out loud. Accept it as common knowledge so that she could find a solution instead of being perpetually drawn into the pit of her own guilt. Actually take a breath of air.

  “We do. Out there, they aren’t so sure.”

  Storm was aware of the great churning of the city around them. Whirring, spinning, broadcasting, glowing, speeding around them in a great wheel of electricity. As bright and shiny as gold. It was so much easier to keep your eye on the light than on the darkness it created.

  “But they use the fence to keep you in.”

  The warehouse had settled into quiet as if the excitement of her arrival had exhausted the inhabitants. The empty quiet of the rafters lay over the low murmur of the sick. Several candles had been snuffed out and she and Trevor sat in an isolated pool of light. The trembling of Trevor’s hands made no noise at all.

  “They know what our weaknesses are. The debate is over what is causing it.”

  She remembered how effectively the field had stopped her, any passage through that strength of field enough to incapacitate if not kill her.

  “What do the teenagers do when they ca
tch someone?”

  Maria had had a rifle. She shouldn’t have been overpowered. Yet the space below the pier had been empty as if the boat had never been there at all.

  “Is she sick?”

  “She’s got an infection, the handle—”

  The task of having to explain how they had ended up in the cellar overwhelmed her. The bomb. Maria’s deterioration as they had fled up the river.

  “No. Sick like us.”

  She could still feel the boat beneath her, her body rising and falling with the lift and roll of the water, her exhaustion inseparable from its rhythm.

  “Not like us.”

  This place where they had arrived was beyond anything she had imagined. Had Maria known what she was delivering her to?

  She crossed to the door, her legs heavy like when she had been in the river, except this time it was Storm who would have to come to Maria. Her hand was on the handle when Trevor reached her.

  “You won’t find her.”

  His eyes were blue and clear despite his illness, his core not yet compromised. He looked back over his shoulder to the sleeping room and shook his head at someone she could not see. One of the corners on his lip had split.

  She tried to shake off the fatigue crashing towards her. She hadn’t been struck this hard since the first early days. She struggled to stay above it as she remembered Maria’s hand tight around the rifle, her unusual sense of panic.

  “I have to.”

  She turned the handle, but her dry skin slipped on the smooth metal and the latch did not release.

  Trevor slid a bolt into place, clicking a padlock shut. She would have fought against him, but there was no strength, no energy to do anything but gaze at the shining metal.

  “It’s too dangerous at night.”