The forest receded. Lenith saw light—natural light—as might a newborn for the first time. Exhaustion wrapped a warm blanket around her fears of the future. The last stretches of foliage dwindled.
The sibling suns shone over all. Once more, Lenith whispered a farewell.
A tightly knit, destroyed stretch of Korvilene started where the trees ended. It was an isolated place, much like the rest; where parents had raised children and adults found their dream homes. Exquisitely ornate houses leaned on each other. Gutted windows accented crumbling facades. Some had collapsed inward. Others were charred pillars.
Some neighborhoods out there, farthest from the cities, were left untouched like impenetrable dream districts. Lenith never enjoyed those places. Scavenging the cratered remains of an Esterite diplomat’s estate was justified, but having to bust the front door of a one-story home off its rails and pilfer someone’s moldy notebooks for clean pages felt violating. Sometimes, she had to erase the owner’s words to make room for her own. That hurt most of all.
She supposed the annual Downpour, roaming fires, or the depths of snow and ice might erase leftovers like these but it never did. The wreckage went on for blocks, at times it seemed endlessly so.
Broken roads formed grids leading to nowhere. Swarms of red-shelled filts tore apart spoiled flesh and organs that lined the roadside. Alone, filts were specks; together, they formed red clouds over any carrion still worth tasting. If left unchecked, the clouds grew large enough to hunt their own prey. A particular lore-tale went so far as to warn children of playing near them.
A man at the front of the chamber jerked forward against his collar. He screamed nonsensical incantations and bucked wildly. The hiss of the filts drove him over the edge. Of all the gibberish he hollered, only “Let me go” came through.
Arjel laughed and nudged the man’s arm, telling him “Stop the teasing” in the most playful of ways. Once the collar clicked four times, the man shut up altogether. His face turned blue. His body thrashed and stilled. The collar had tightened to the point of splitting skin.
A withered street corpse caught on the back left orb under Lenith’s seat. Its bones cracked and fractured. The pressure turned what remained of the man to dust. The bottom half of the body tore away on the breeze. The leftmost Fury jerked her cerbike out of its way.
Little skeletons were once the hardest to comprehend; born, breathed, and then wiped away. Nothing more to it. The potential for an entire, irreplaceable life, extinguished; not an old man’s; not her father’s. Permanent youth. Untarnished by the cruelty of man and time, like a dead star long gone but shining in the night sky.
The future died for such a small price.
Lenith sighed.
Arjel slammed a gauntleted fist to the wall. “Brace yourselves.”
Before he finished talking, Lenith slumped. A force too powerful to ignore had swept her mind, like if two large magnets fought over her brain rather than metal. The collar clicked, again, compelling her upright as nausea bashed her temples.
Iggy gagged and spit through the open hatch. The glob landed on cracked pavement, just as an orange field swallowed the hole made by the Collector.
Lenith knew this particle shield well from those precious times on Emeray Hill. Her brother always said it was a solid, orange wall. Lenith assumed the hatched gridding that sustained the wall served as a net.
Both were right; both were wrong.
The Furies perforated the field without slowing. All the same, as the rest of Collector 85 spewed bile, Arjel relaxed deeper into the bench. Lenith made note of this resistance. Lucky for her, she had already lost her stomach.
“S’pose we’re here,” Iggy said. His head hung in final defeat. A burdened frown darkened plump features.
A twinge of remorse bounced off Lenith’s throat and fluttered away. In the end, they had nothing left but each other.
The Furies sped around the Collector. The neutered howl of their cerbikes trailed off.
The street widened on this side of the particle shield. It was smoother, shinier, almost silver, and the friction orbs hummed a different tune against the texture.
No more rubble or bones. No more running.
Fortified stations protected the base of particulate conduction beams. Officers of an Ilius subset occupied the stations, monitoring several surveilling angles on monitors spread along the wall.
Arjel waved to the local officers as the Collector went on. The Ilius waved cheerfully in return. Their faceplates were clear, leaving their faces visible behind a plain helmet’s framing.
Noctam officers—with red stripes on the upper breast of their light, unarmored suits—walked along the street. Lenith had never seen them before. They were without helmets, wearing partially transparent visors that shielded their eyes and fed them information.
Lenith’s foot twitched. She wanted out. The collar squeezed her throat. How many clicks did she have left? Her gaze wandered to the man who clicked four times. His eyes were bulging. His face had turned dark blue.
The Collector’s orbs shifted and the goliath of a vehicle gracefully swung into a hard stop. From where she sat, Lenith saw the bases of the largest structures she had ever known.
Arjel crashed down the aisle and hopped out. His boots thumped the silver pavement. He turned to the lot of prisoners. Two Ilius officers joined him, holstering sidearms into their service belts.
Ilius were identified by their orange stripes and pronounced, squared faceplate frames. They wore ribbed, minimal armor that made their navy blue suits look more skeletal, elegant, and somehow less intimidating. Lenith had seen them once in all her life, when the Thaymen family squatted in a house too close to the orange glower of Sudbina’s particle shield for comfort. A patrol of Ilius had passed in the street one dreary dawning, searching for lives to destroy.
The collars popped free. Iggy collapsed forward. Arjel caught and pulled him down from the chamber first and let his cracked scalp slap the road.
Lenith’s collar had left a hot imprint against her neck. The left Ilius officer brought her down onto solid ground and back into the light. Her legs wobbled. They were dead asleep. She grasped at the air and somehow found her balance on burning muscles. The sunlight splashed over her. It caressed her worries. Iggy had regained his breath and joined her side. He said nothing. Too caught up thumbing a cut his collar made along his second chin.
To her right, cascading annexes connected to a central, black-domed rotunda. She had seen the shape so many times on Emeray Hill. How little her sight had prepared her for its immensity—this place which the Chimayri referred to as the Mass Core.
On the left, a collection of buildings that had always stayed somewhat eclipsed by the rotunda. Five structures linked together by raised bridges. All had the clear mark of Chimayri design. Rounded and stark, intimidatingly passive, built with the planning of an architect’s hands and the minimalist beauty of an artist’s mind.
The locals referred to these five structures as the Hub, casting a soft shadow over all below. This was the heart of the Chimayri, and Lenith had no way of escaping.
The city of Sudbina existed beyond the Hub. Lenith had seen it night and day on Emeray Hill, lit up and frightening. Standing under the Hub’s shade, surviving seemed impossible.
The rest of the prisoners filtered out of the Collector, except the suffocated man. His collar remained locked. Arjel jerked on it and asked Fandel to release the locks again, to no avail. Fandel the Ilius nudged his Enieyu cohort aside and pressed a finger to the man’s neck.
“He’s pretty much dead. See, though, he died happy. He’s got a straight-up. Bet the collar was twisting his knots the whole time.” Fandel said. “Cylios is gonna be raging over a broken collar. Oh well.”
He removed a device from his service belt and held its blade to the collar. The handle was no bigger than the officer’s thumb. Lenith had to squint to make out what it truly was. Fandel pressed a button under his thumb and the miniature saw ripped into the steel embrace. The blade screeched. Sparks flew. Wires split and metal debris sprayed. The heated smell of fibrous material fraying came out of the chamber.
Blood splattered Arjel’s helmet. The Ilius pulled the miniature saw away too late. Hot crimson flowed from the new, deep gouge in the man’s throat. It shimmered over his dirty shirt and darkened the longer it spewed.
“That’s unfortunate,” Arjel said. “Go fetch an Aqrilex to clean the mess. Make sure they’ve had their inoculation, too. I don’t need a lecribria outbreak. I’ll reduce the prisoner count before Dehkie can see it.”
“Kogin really fucked that limb, didn’t he?”
“They’re a parcel of cowards now. Too busy pretending to be peacemakers.”
“They’re probably catching insects at the park.”
The two shared a chuckle.
Fandel wiped the blood from his mini-saw and headed out.
Lenith averted her eyes as he passed. Everything was foreign. She tapped her toes against the shiny pavement. It was the only way to staunch the lingering desire to vomit, as if that would make anything better.
Iggy looked down to her with a blank face. His hands remained tied behind his back. A river of sweat matted the front of his shirt, as well as his armpits. He reeked of his own odor, smoke from the fire, and ash of the Red Meopa sticks he chugged often. It was a powerful, repellant stench—an amalgamation of the past day.
“They’re killing all of us,” Lenith said.
“Think so. Hard to dream it’s gonna end somehow else. Probably in a show. Gonna put us on a stage at their Podium and puppet us around, ya know? Teaches kids lessons. Reminds adults their lessons.”
A man from the group overheard and stepped in. “They wouldn’t do that. It teaches terror and distrust. The Chimayri want nothing of it.”
His face was sunken and yellow, accentuated by tufts of black hair bowing over balding spots. Lenith recognized him, remembered one of the Halibreds looking the same way. He smelled like a Halibred—a kind of artificial, flowery fragrance. It did not mingle too well with Iggy’s natural aroma. Lenith was not sure what she smelled like. Probably dirt.
The man floated his arm forward to inject himself into the conversation. He adorned the typical attire of the Halibred family: Dark and solemn clothes belonging more to a dying man than a living one.
“I knew a good, great friend who was captured once. They took him to Saatus but I imagine they follow similar procedure here. Those officers—”
He pointed to a group of Chimayri in visors and white half-masks covering from nose to mouth. Identified by blue stripes and markings on light gray suits, the gaggle exited a Hub structure of white panels and black windows. A sign near the sliding doors read ‘Medifac’ in bright red.
“—they’re Iscleption. They will take all the injured into the Medifac. Then our captors will take the rest of us into the Hub, divide us, and convince us to divulge all the information we know, then they’ll set us loose in the city.
“They’ll wait days, enneads, cycles for us to make a mistake and then swoop in to take us back or kill us in private so they can tell everyone ‘See? They can’t be trusted. We gave them a chance. Dangerous after all.’ You watch. Watch your step. Watch your words. Watch the people around you. They’ll be watching and you won’t know it.”
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