1 - VALE

Winter 27, Sector Annum 106, 08h45

Gregorian Calendar: January 16

 

 

My fingers press into the hare’s neck, and the animal whimpers and twitches, caught in the terror of death. I spare a moment to marvel at its silken fur, its taut, sinewy muscles, the delicate bones. I close my eyes and whisper my penitence.

“I’m sorry.”

With a wrench, I feel the sick crack as the spine breaks. I open my eyes. The whimpering stops, the hare’s breath cut short. The muscles twitch for a second, and then everything is still. I let out the breath that had ballooned inside my chest.

Crunching leaves and stomping feet sound behind me. Firestone. I haven’t the slightest idea how he survived out in the Wilds all those months before the Resistance found him—he sounds like a wild boar rampaging through the underbrush. The idea of him creeping stealthily through the trees, hunting, or hiding, is laughable. It was his traps and seemingly endless knowledge of edible plants that saved him, I guess. I thought I had a good handle on all that with my Sector “wilderness” training, but I’d probably get pretty hungry out here without him. He’s been teaching the rest of us how to set the traps and forage for winter plants since we got to the safe house.

“Got something?” he asks, his voice rough, his long black hair tangled and droopy against his forehead. He hasn’t slept much lately. None of us have.

“Big, fat rabbit.”

“Good. Mine was empty.”

“The student becomes the master,” I say, bowing deeply as I stand to face him.

“Master, yes. And don’t forget it.” He flashes a grin. “Your traps been getting better, true. Better than Soren’s, at least. For a pianist, his fingers don’t seem to work that well.”

I smile. It’s not often I’m favorably compared to Soren. Kind words, these days are as welcome as a soaking rain on parched ground.

“At least we’ll have something to eat with all that damned amaranth,” he says, glaring at the sky, which is awakening clear and so, so blue.

I free the hare from the trap as Firestone holds out the small game bag he’s stitched together. I drop the rabbit in, and he slings the bag over his shoulder. Without another word, we start down the deer path back towards our hideaway. Morning sunlight flits through the boughs overhead like golden butterflies as we weave through the forest back to where the others wait.

Outside the safe house, little more than an overgrown shed, Remy, Jahnu, and Kenzie are loading a few daypacks with bags of nuts, dried fruit, and smoked meat leftover from the Resistance base. Remy glances up when she hears us coming. Our eyes meet, and the familiar tremor ripples down my spine into my belly. I drop my eyes, but I can feel hers linger on me, watching our approach.

“Got something good in that bag?” Jahnu asks.

“Vale nabbed a lapin,” Firestone says, using the old French word. In Okaria, where most of us grew up, everyone speaks English, or something like it. But in the factory towns and Farms, like where Firestone is from, traces of the old language lingers. French Canadian words sneak into his speech every now and then. Bear will sometimes drop in whole sentences of the old French. He says it's comforting, that it reminds him of growing up.

“That’ll go with the special breakfast Eli’s preparing,” Kenzie says with a smile. “You’ll never guess what it is.”

“Strawberries with fresh creme and warm sourdough bread?” Firestone asks.

“Even better, if you could believe it,” Kenzie chuckles, her bright red curls bouncing as she nods for us to keep guessing.

“Potato fritters with maple syrup?” Jahnu says.

“Oh I know! Bacon and eggs, right?”

“So close!”

“Oh, right. It’s amaranth, isn’t it?” I say drily. We all already know the answer.

“How’d you guess?” she asks, the hint of a wry smile on her lips.

“For the twentieth day in a row. That’s some special amaranth,” Remy adds.

The door bursts open and Soren stalks out.

“You’re leaving in an hour,” he says, a sharp edge to his voice. “So if you want to eat,” he narrows his frigid blue eyes at me, “you should prep whatever’s in that bag sooner rather than later.”

Eli announced yesterday what we all knew: that no one is coming to meet us here. That we’ve been waiting, anxious and idle, for something to happen, for someone from the Resistance to show up, or somehow get in touch with us, and it’s time to face the fact that it’s been too long to continue clinging to that hope. If anyone from the Resistance were able to contact us, they would have. My guess is that even the teams that made it to their designated outposts have opted for continued radio silence. It’s safer that way. But with our food rations dwindling and foraged food hard to come by in the dead of winter, we had to do something. So Eli decided it was time to go exploring, and Soren was none too happy when he’d made the announcement.

“Vale, Kenzie, and Remy. We’re taking out the hover car tomorrow,” he’d said. “Going to try to—”

“Are you joking?” Soren interrupted, his voice rising. “You’re going to take Vale out there? You trust him?”

“I saw him shoot down Sector airships with my own eyes,” Eli responded. “You’re my second in command—”

“Then I should come.”

“No, you’re second in command which means you stay here. If we don’t make it back, you’re in charge.” Eli said, that dangerous, maddening calm in his eyes. Soren clamped his jaw shut and didn’t say another word until breakfast, when he viciously accused me of over-seasoning the amaranth.

I am fairly certain he’ll never get used to me being around, seasoned grains or not.

“Calm down, Soren,” Firestone says now, dragging the words out. “We’re all hungry. No need for hard words.”

Remy puts her hand on Soren’s shoulder, and his expression softens. A rush of anger runs through me as Soren reaches a hand up to take hers, and a rare smile graces her face as their eyes meet.

What right do you have to wish you were in his shoes? I ask, trying to quell my jealousy. None at all, Vale. But the feeling doesn’t go away. I pull out my knife and turn away, busying myself with gutting and skinning the rabbit.

Later, in the hovercar, I keep silent while Remy, Eli, and Kenzie rehash for the hundredth time what could have happened to Team Blue, the Resistance group that was supposed to meet us at our rendezvous point after Thermopylae was destroyed. We’re heading in the direction of Waterloo, the nearest Resistance base any of us know of. Remy’s in the seat next to me, ignoring me, as usual, while I fight the urge to reach out and touch her arm, trace my thumb down to where her pulse beats at the base of her wrist, twine my fingers with hers. I try to distract myself by counting off all the reasons I shouldn’t want to touch her, but it turns out there aren’t very many reasons so I sit on my hands and look out the window.

Eli’s driving, searching for a clear path through the woods. Sometimes it seems we’re not moving much faster than we would be if we were on foot, but whenever he finds an opening, he guns it like we’re going for the finish line in one of the Sector’s hover raceways. He’s gunning it now and I rest my head against the seatback and feel the wind on my face.

“There’s absolutely no way they got lost,” Kenzie says. “I’d bet my life on it. The Director drilled these escape routes and rendezvous points into our heads a thousand times. There’s no way they could have missed it.”

“Something else, then,” Remy says, the desperation I’ve become all too familiar with creeping into her voice. “Their hover car broke, maybe. All our equipment is old, maybe theirs broke down and they’ve tried to make contact, but can’t.”

“I get why they’d keep to radio silence, but someone should’ve been here or made contact by now. They would have kept going by foot even if their transports conked out,” Kenzie points out. “And there’s no way it would have taken a month, even on foot. We’re only two hundred kilometers outside the city.”

“We’ve got company,” Eli growls, as his wristband flashes cerulean. His drone detector. Drones, here? This far into the Wilds?

Like a cresting wave, a thousand moments seem to converge on one as a crackling ball of electricity erupts out of the sky and crashes into the front of our hover car. It feels like a large hand has plunged into my gut, gripped my intestines and squeezed, and in a split second my whole body is alert and I’m shouting.

I push open the door and leap out, grabbing Remy’s arm and pulling her out with me. I dive to the ground and roll onto my back, watching as the hover car loses control and the momentum propels it straight through a stand of saplings and into an outcropping as big as a house. The car crumples into itself, but Kenzie, her red hair flying around her, scrambles safely out of the passenger window. Eli’s still inside and, from the looks of it, not moving.

I slide easily into combat mode. The air is alive with electricity, sparkling with low-powered Bolt fire. Above the treetops, the sky hums with recon drones. About the size of crows and faster still, these are programmed for speed and detection, not battle. Equipped with high-res cameras and topographic mapping capabilities but limited firepower, we’ve got a good chance of taking them out, but not before they transmit about a thousand photos of us to their base center. We’ll have to move fast once we’ve disabled them, before a half-dozen airships show up loaded with Black Ops.

I pull my handheld Bolt from the holster at my hip and flip the ray setting from STUN to DISPERSE. I fire a few shots into the sky, hoping the low electricity will scramble the drones’ guidance systems. Kenzie’s got her weapon out, too, but Remy is scrambling to her feet, launching herself in the direction of the ruined hover car. I throw a hand out to try to grab her clothes, to hold her back, but she’s too fast. Eli’s the closest thing to family she has right now. I couldn’t stop her from getting to his side. She sprints through the clearing to the hover car and starts pounding on the windows and pulling on the door handle.

“Eli!” she cries. To my relief, I see he's moving. He starts pushing against the doors, shouting, but his voice is muted through the crushed metal. I watch helplessly as Remy takes a direct hit, her back arching with the bolt of electricity. She slows only a half-second before pulling again, attempting to dislodge the mangled door.

I tilt my gun skyward and focus on where the drones seem to be grouping together. My handheld doesn’t have much more power than the drones do, but Kenzie’s got her big double barrel out. She fires repeatedly, slapping the capacitor over and over again. I can tell by the lack of arcing electricity that she’s got her weapon switched to disperse as well. After about five of her shots, the drones quiet and start drifting apart, listing without energy or direction. Several drop out of the sky entirely, incapacitated.

Remy and Eli have together managed to wrench one of the doors open just enough for him to squeeze out, and the two of them half-dive, half-fall behind a tree for cover from the drones. But it doesn’t matter. They’ve stopped firing.

For several seconds, nothing moves except a few drones, drifting through the sky, empty of purpose.

“Thank the harvest,” Kenzie breathes. “I think they’re done.”

She’s right. As if by some invisible force, the ones still aloft float away from us, all in one direction, and in a few seconds the sky is clear again. Kenzie stands and heads over to where Eli and Remy are lying, and I follow suit.

“You guys okay?” she asks.

Eli nods, and Kenzie offers both him and Remy a hand. They stand. Remy’s shaking, still feeling the shock from the Bolt that hit her.

“Let’s see your back,” Kenzie says, reaching gently down to lift Remy’s shirt. Remy turns so Kenzie can see better, and she pulls the cloth up to reveal a blistering red-and-white streak along her lower back. Low-powered Bolts might not kill, but they cause nasty electrical burns.

“Fuckers,” Eli swears.

“It’s nothing,” Remy says, but her voice is tight with pain. I grit my teeth, feeling the burn as if it was my own.

“It’s definitely something,” Kenzie says, dropping Remy’s shirt back into place. “But it could be worse. Lucky I’ve got a basic med kit. We’ll clean you up.” She grabs her pack out of the car and rummages through it.

“Where’d the drones go?” Eli asks, looking at me for answers. Anything to do with the Sector, Eli always expects me to have the answers. Most of the time, I do. “I didn’t know they could move that fast,” he says.

“Recon drones are built for speed,” I respond. “They’re never deployed in battle. Or out of the Sector.”

“So what are they doing out here shooting at us?” Eli demands.

I shrug, wishing I had better answers. “My best guess is they’re being deployed from an airship that’s looking for us, looking for other Resistance outposts. I’m sure they’ve been patrolling a wide swath of the Wilds since the attack on your headquarters. Driving the hover car again might have alerted them to the presence of electrical activity in the area. Or they might have just happened upon us. Either way, now we have no transportation, and we need to get out of here before they come back with more than just recon capability.”

“If they’ve ID’d you,” Eli says, holding my gaze, “they’ll be back with enough troopsto tear down the whole forest to find you.

I nod. There’s no doubt in my mind that if my parents find out where I am, they’ll send half the Defense Forces to try to bring me back. And, since those were recon drones, there’s about a 100% chance they’ve identified me.

“No chance we can fix the hover car?” Remy asks. We all cast a look at the crumpled carcass.

“Wishful thinking. I think we’ll be walking back.” Kenzie says. As she opens the tin and starts to smear burn ointment across Remy’s back, she glances up at me. “That was smart, setting your Bolt to disperse. They would have been impossible to hit otherwise, and we’d all need more than burn cream.”

Remy turns to me, but this time, instead of the watchful, wary look I’ve grown used to, her face is open.

“It helped,” I say. But not enough.