Of course she would.
He hadn’t given her a reason to trust him. And he hadn’t wanted to give her a reason not to trust the General, breaking her heart in the process.
“She made her choice, Gal,” said Aaron.
It was the same thing the Augments had said when he ordered them to chase after her.
Instead, Grant and Luca huddled over Alex’s body. They bound him in some of the clothes they had stolen, wrapping him tightly against the elements. They didn’t speak, and he hesitated to interrupt them.
Sarrin sat curled in a corner, her face blank as she stared at the wall in front of her. Her mouth twitched subtly. Maybe she was seeing things there that he couldn’t. Maybe she had an Aaron.
He shook his head. Sure, she was cracked, but not as cracked as him.
He turned back to watch Luca and Grant. There was nowhere to dispose of the body in the middle of the city. They would have to leave it, and hope it decomposed quickly enough to be unrecognizable by the time the UECs found it.
Surveillance drones buzzed along the streets below. They would find him, sooner or later, that much was certain.
He closed his eyes, imagining the look of horror on Rayne’s face as they read his list of treasons and put him to death. Of course, they wouldn’t officially put him to death — the Speakers and the Gods didn’t believe in such atrocities. They’d send him out to the middle of nowhere and let the elements take care of him.
Ironic. That’s how he had hoped to die. He had just hoped it would be on his terms, after a long life on a peaceful planet.
Another dark thought crossed his mind: Would Rayne be alive long enough to see it? Would her father protect her, or would she die for treason before he did?
A soft groan sounded from the last corner of the roof. The one they were avoiding. “Galiant?”
Gal sighed, turning to the noise. Another complication. “Hello, Urubane.”
The warrior sat up slowly, assessing his wounds. He scowled, then ripped off the make-shift bandages that had been tied across his abdomen and thigh. He winced as he tugged on the splint that supported part of his broken leg.
“What are you doing?” said Gal.
Urubane shifted to stand, but he crumpled with a muffled shout.
Luca and Grant looked up from their work. Face set, she stood, brushing off her hands, and slowly made her way to them. She loomed over the Uruhu who lay crumpled on his side.
Urubane shifted himself towards the wall. He let out another involuntary squawk as he did.
Her face was dark, hard. “You have fractured ribs and internal organ damage. Keep moving like that if you want to bleed to death. I don’t mind.”
Urubane froze, only his eyes darting, chest rising rapidly with quick, shallow breaths.
Luca’s arms darted in, maneuvering him so he sat with his back against the wall. With a jerk, she reset the leg and reapplied the splint. She walked away in a huff.
The colour had gone from his face, and Urubane struggled to catch his breath, but he remained quiet, eyes trained on Luca until she was well on the opposite side of the roof. “You travel with these” — he waved his hand weakly, searching for the word — “abominations.”
Gal stared down at him. “Why did you come here?”
“We had to protect the village.”
“I told you, these kids aren’t going to tell anyone about your secret summer camp.”
“The Agada is dead,” spat Urubane.
Gal but back his cry, even though he'd seen Ruel fall, he hadn't believed she could be gone. “The kids didn’t do that. You left us locked in that cage with that gas everywhere. She came to help us.”
“She gave us a warning. The Uruhu will be no more if we stay the current course. We had to act.”
“By killing them?” Gal nodded towards the grey-wrapped lump.
“Yes,” Urubane’s eyes grew dark. “We kill to protect ourselves. But we failed.” His head fell back against the wall. “She is just as dangerous as they say.”
“Who?”
Urubane jutted his chin across the roof, to the broken girl staring into the corner.
“Sarrin?”
He nodded. “The others, no. But her.”
“What do you mean?”
“The abominations, they were made to destroy the Uruhu. They have not been able to do it yet. We are too strong, we move too fast. The forest is ours and protects us. They’ve sent their armies and machines, set great fires, sprayed their gas. But that girl, seeing her fight, she could it. She could kill us all. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Gal stared. He had seen her fight. Multiple times. “That’s spread.”
“Ridiculous? No. You know I’m right, Galiant. We are the last of our kind. We need to protect ourselves. You see why I have no choice but to kill them.” He reached down into his fur covering, and pulled out a pointed object. A sharp throwing weapon.
“No!” Gal jumped, putting his hand out in front of Urubane.
Urubane threw it anyway, and it passed far below Gal’s outstretched arm.
It curved across the roof, heading for her.
Grant grabbed it out of the air. He stared at Urubane, dark, cold warning in his eyes. Then he snapped the piece in two, and again, until it was fragments falling to the ground.
Urubane gulped. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t understand what?”
“Why they haven’t killed me, like they did the others.”
“Check again,” said Gal. “Your friends ran. They’re still out there somewhere. Your friends left you. It was Grant who brought you up from the street. Luca that tended your wounds. Even after you killed their friend. I thought you were different, I thought you lived a life apart from the Speakers, but you’re just as ruthless. We should have left you crumpled on the street for them to find.”
Urubane blanched.
“They’re not here to kill you. They’re kids. They were made. Not by choice. Like you, they just want to be left alone. They don’t need you hunting them too.” Gal spun in a huff.
As he walked away, Aaron came alongside him. “Nice speech, Johnny.”
“Shut up.”
* * *
The longer Sarrin stared at the grey con-plas wall, the more the streaks and dots in the mix, the minor imperfections, swirled and blended into an almost colourful pattern.
She remembered every terrible minute, every movement her body made, the power that surged through her muscles. And she had enjoyed it. Enjoyed throwing the target point to his death off the five story building. Relishing in the power of life and death.
And she remembered Grant yelling at her. Grant panicked. Grant shouting, “She won’t stop,” fear in his voice.
She squeezed her eyes tight against it — no one cried in Evangecore.
She remembered the sound as one became Omega — the end. She’d tried to restart Alex's heart, like she had Kieran, but it was no use. The energy had already left him, seeped out of the bleeding hole in his brain.
So when Urubane threw his weapon, aiming for her, she had waited perfectly still for the sap-sharpened stone to pierce her skull. The blow never came, Grant foolishly stopping it. Urubane was right though, she was a monster. She deserved to die. She was a villain, someone placed to ruin the lives of others.
Like Alex.
The colours swirled in front of her until she couldn’t stand their happy dancing anymore and wiped them out with an angry grunt.
Luca sat down beside her — Sarrin hadn’t even heard her coming.
Grant kneeled on the rooftop in front of her. “Hey, Sar. You okay?” He reached an arm out, hesitating. She watched it with curiosity, stuck inches above her shoulder, trepidation coming off him in waves. He was afraid. As he should be. Then he resolved it and pressed the hand down, squeezing her shoulder.
She flinched, nearly rolling across the ground to get away. She pulled her knees tight to her chest, wrapping her arms around them.
Luca dragged a finger across the layer of dirt that covered the roof, drawing an idle pattern. “I can’t believe he’s gone,” she said after a minute.
Grant nodded. “Another casualty of the war.”
“Don’t you think it’s funny,” said Luca, suddenly brushing out her doodle. “I know he’s gone. We bandaged up his body, scrubbed his blood. But I can’t help but think he’s going to be there, waiting for us in the bunks tonight when we’re finished. Patched up and a little worse for wear, sure, but there all the same. He’ll crack out a loose smile — a little faded from the morphines — and tell us all about his injuries with a joke.”
Grant nodded with a snort. “Hoepe told me once in the war that he’d seen Alex in his Infirmary enough that he knew him by name.”
“When was that?” asked Luca.
“After we’d run from the bombings on Corrant. Alex had gone back to save some kids. He ended up getting caught in the blast zone.”
“I remember that. He couldn’t get out in time. The kids ended up dead all the same, and he was in bad shape.”
“Yeah.”
They both picked at something unseen on the con-plas floor. “Do you ever think about it?” Luca said quietly.
Grant pressed his lips together. “I try not to.”
Luca leaned back against the wall. “I killed a girl, in the arena,” she said. “Actually killed her. She never came back.”
Grant said nothing.
“You lose yourself. It’s easy. They tell you fight, fight, fight. People get hurt and they come back. There aren’t consequences. You start to think, if I hurt them, then I won’t get hurt.” Luca took a shaky breath. “I let a girl go once, saw her and just turned and ran. They put me in isolation for three days, because I needed to know what it would be like to be alone if my weakness — my hesitation — cost the lives of all my friends.
“So you do it. You know. You think, I don’t want to get hurt. I’m going to kill this person because it’s what they want from me. And the consequences aren’t there. You’re numb to it, because people always come back, and they’re always ready to go back into the arena the next day.”
Sarrin threw her gaze down to the floor when Luca looked her way. She had a look of longing, of desperation, that Sarrin couldn’t bear.
Grant cleared his throat. “I’m quick. I’m good at fighting. And I don’t mind it. They put me in a simulator — old women, pleasant men, children, just a street or a cafe, somewhere normal, bright sunshine. Then they’d turn, all of them, and blast me with laz-rifles. I can’t walk down a street without thinking they’re all going to attack. Without thinking, I should rip their heads off before they do the same to me.”
“Oh,” escaped Luca’s lips.
“Yeah. It was helpful in the war, I guess, since we couldn’t trust anyone anyway. But to walk through these streets here,” he waved his hand in the air, letting the rest hang unsaid.
“It’s okay,” said Luca. “I think — I think we’re all a little cracked. I think it would be weird if we weren’t.”
Grant nodded, but he stared at his hands, refusing to look up.
“I had forgotten myself, “ said Luca, “just a violent machine in an arena until… until….”
Sarrin realized she was looking right at her, a strange mix of confusion and hope set deep in her eyes.
Luca smiled then — odd because her eyes looked like they were about to shed forbidden tears. “Until someone reminded me that there was hope out there. Until someone stood up to them. Someone showed me that we could still care about each other, instead of just killing each other in the arena.”
Sarrin gulped. Grant reached a hand out to her knee, posting it gently. She nearly yelped as she flinched away. Her heart beat so loudly she couldn’t hear Grant or Luca as they turned away, seemingly unfazed by her outburst, and continued their conversation. Slowly, she picked herself up. She darkness swirled inside of her, subconscious images from the stories they shared bombarding her, dredging up her own memories. “They kept me in the simulator for days,” she blurted out.
The two turned to face her, and Sarrin suddenly felt small in the silence. She picked at the faint suture lines on her hands. “They wanted to see how fast I could move. For how long. The holograms would burn me if they made contact.”
Grant gulped, but he didn’t turn away. “How long?”
She blinked, unsure if she should tell the rest. But it tumbled out anyway: “Once for seventy-seven hours, until I passed out from blood loss and exhaustion. Guiterriez left me on the floor to bleed to death, the same as I had left him. But I didn’t.” Twenty-seven -- the nickname she's earned by scaling the researchers observation tower in Evangecore's arena and killing twenty seven of them -- had given them all hope, but they had tried to destroy her in the years after. Were still trying to destroy her.
Suddenly, not knowing how or why, Sarrin began to talk. She told them about the simulations, the experiments. She told them about the nurse, and the surgeries. She told them about the game she played and the things she felt.
And slowly, somehow, as the words tumbled out, she felt lighter. From the very inside. Her soul felt like it was starting to breathe again. She looked up at Grant. “I miss Amelia,” she said. “They took her from me.”
“Oh, Sarrin,” he said. “We’ll get her back. We will.”
“And what if Halud is dead?”
He pressed his lips. “Then he’s in a better place.”
TWELVE
THE GENERAL DIDN’T RETURN UNTIL late in the evening, slipping in the door just before the final curfew alarm. He smiled wearily at Rayne. “Have you had supper?”
She rose from the couch and stood at attention, waiting for him to nod before she relaxed. “I was waiting for you.”
“I have beef,” he said, and went straight into the kitchen, pulling two meal containers from the vacuum storage.
She smiled. “You’ll never find that on a starship.”
“Never. This is two-year angus from the farms on Yarna.”
“Wow,” she hadn’t tasted such luxury in years, since her Academy graduation.
He set them in the warmer, then started to clear the table. He tucked the grey, decorative bowl that adorned the small dining table and placed it on a convenient empty shelf. He disappeared into the living room, returning with the diorama tucked under his arm and eased it into the back of a cabinet. From the same cabinet, he pulled out two plates.
Real, ceramic plates. And real, steel cutlery.
Wiping his hands down the legs of his uniform, he surveyed the set table, seemingly satisfied. “I’m glad you’re home,” he said.
The warmer dinged, signalling the beef had finished cooking, and he stepped around her to retrieve the meals.
She sat as he transferred the meal onto a plate and then set it in front of her.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” she said.
A concerned look passed over his face as he chewed the first bite of his dinner. He pointed to her plate with his fork. “Don’t let it get cold.”
She glanced at the steaming plate in front of her — a true delicacy — but wasn’t hungry. “I need to speak with the Speakers,” she said.
The general chewed, swallowing. “What about?”
Her heart raced, palms suddenly clammy. Gal’s empty protests rang in her head. But this was her father. If he was anything like the vision she had seen of him when they were on Cordelia — that is, if he was the man she knew — there was nothing to be worried about. “The Ishash’tor… we… we found an Augment, Sarrin. The Poet brought her aboard at Selousa. We didn’t know what she was, but then it became obvious.”
“Sarrin?” her dad choked, suddenly pale.
“I was terrified” — the words tumbled from her — “certain she would kill us all. But she didn’t. I think she was more scared than the rest of us.”
“Where is Sarrin now?”
She paused, another moment of uncertainty
hitting her as she recalled Gal and the roof. “Here.”
“Here?” He stood, dinner forgotten. “Where?”
“It’s okay, Daddy. They’re not like we think. Sarrin saved my life. Twice. She saved Kieran’s and Gal’s — she saved us all. We found more Augments too.”
“And they’re here? In the city?”
She found herself pushing back, leaning away as he leaned over the table. “N-no. Just a few.”
“Where?”
She hesitated.
“I want to help them, Rayne. I need to know where they are.”
“Gal had a building he knew, we climbed onto the roof. About three kilometres from here. In view of the Speaker’s tower.”
“I have to make a call.”
“What are you going to say? It’s only because of them that I made it back to you, alive. They're good, I know they are. We have to protect them. Surely, it is the Will of the Gods.”
He paused. “Rayne, my dear Raynie. I want to show you something.”
She followed him down the narrow hall, past the spare bedroom and latrine, past his own chambers, and into his office. His private office she had never been allowed into. She gulped quietly.
He sat at the monitor, quickly typing in a set of commands. “The Augments,” he said, “they’re very clever.”
She kneeled down next to him. “Yes, I know. I’ve seen some of their engineering repair work. The doctors too.” She rubbed the burn mark over her shoulder, now nothing more than a small, faded scar thanks to Hoepe’s handiwork.
“No, I mean devious. It may seem hard to believe, but we had them detained for a reason. This is all classified, but I’m showing you because I want you to understand.”
She frowned. “You knew they were still alive? Still being held?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes. I’m telling you this because you can’t tell the Speakers what you’ve told me. If they see you’ve sided with the Augments, then you will be considered just as dangerous as they are. Do you understand?”
She nodded, slowly, not certain that she did understand.
He pointed to the screen. A vid played, kids sitting in a circle, a cluster of mag-blocks in front of them, a complex castle being rapidly assembled.
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