Athel (20 page)

I almost
want to cry so happy I am to see him alive. Wes must be reading my mind,
because he keeps me down with one hand and cups my mouth with the other.

“Athel,” I
mumble through pursed lips.

My brother. My beautiful, brave brother is
here
!

Athel
flashes a spiteful glare at Tahari, his expression a mix of sadness and
disgust. “And I thought Uli was the traitor.”

“Uli
betrayed
us
,” Tahari replies. “He
prioritized his own agenda.”

“Over
yours?” Athel insists.

“He
should’ve listened. Like you. Like all of you.” His eyes scan Athel’s raised
hand. “Whatever you’re holding, drop it,” he shouts, pressing the flat side of
the knife deeper into Lukas’s skin.

Lukas
shudders. He looks like a frazzled kitten held by its scruff. I look away, the
sight too painful to bear. I watch my brother’s emotional struggle, as he
squeezes what I imagine to be the weapon that just destroyed Golow and yet he
can’t fire it.
 

A
calloused and wrinkled hand comes to rest on my brother’s shoulder. Aghad, the
rice farmer, limps forward, shoots his arms up in surrender, and sets his sad
eyes on Tahari.

“What have
you done?” he asks, his voice broken. “My leader, my guide, my… friend.”

Unscathed
by Aghad’s plea, Tahari tightens his grip on Lukas. “You can’t possibly
understand, Aghad. What does a rice farmer know about leadership and survival?”

Aghad
raises his chin and squints at the man he once considered his leader. “I know
about rice,” he says. “A humble, resilient plant that has fed our people for
thousands of years. But you… What kind of leader are you, Tahari? You were
ready to sacrifice the life of a child instead of your own? You’ve turned the
meek into traitors, the peaceful into fighters. The Mayakes have always taken
great pride in their leaders, selfless men ready to sacrifice their own lives
for the safety of their people. Had you asked me, I wouldn’t have hesitated to
give myself up. I’m old. My life is expendable. But giving up the lives of our
children instead? That is… despicable. I’m ashamed of you.”

Tahari
flashes a look of disdain. He points his chin to us—Athel, Wes, me.
Lukas, still cringing next to him. “These are not our children. They’re rebels,
not worthy to be called Mayakes. Stray cats who refuse to abide by our simple
rules. They’ll bring destruction to our race. For centuries we’ve relied on
traditions. We have strict rules that keep us safe. Bad branches need to be
pruned early before they outgrow the tree and take it down.”

“That’s
right,” Athel says, stepping around Aghad. “If you’ll let me do the honors.” He
raises his fist and then opens it, revealing a small, white square on his palm.

“What is
that?” Tahari says, his gaze jumping from Athel’s face to the white square.

“Your
death,” my brother replies, and with a flick of his thumb, the cable zaps out
again. It’s all a blur, and the next instant Lukas is down on his knees, covered
in blood, and Tahari on the ground, his chest sliced open by the lightning-fast
cable.

“Lukas!”
Athel shouts, running up to him.

Lukas
scrambles back to his feet, his hands raised above his head. “Not my blood,” he
screams. “I’m ok, not my blood!”

Aghad runs
over, pats my brother on the shoulder and then hugs Lukas.

I smile
and wriggle away from Wes, but pain catches up with me. As I take a step with
my injured leg, a jolt shoots up my thigh, making me yelp.

Athel
hears my scream and runs. “Dottie!”

 
“What happened to everyone else?” I ask
as the first sunrays of a new day shine down on us. What happened to Yuri and
his father?

It’s a trap
, he warned us. But then he
tried to kill Wes …

“They’re
all dead,” Lukas says, wiping Tahari’s blood off his face with the back of his
hand.

I wrap one
arm around Wes’s neck and the other around my brother’s, and together we hop
over to the clearing of tall grass where Hennessy and Yuri are lying.
Hennessy’s clothes are charred, his torso black and smoking as if a ball of
fire has pierced him through and through.

I hear a
groan and turn.

Yuri’s
lying a few feet away, blood pooling next to him. His lips are blue, his hands
twitching. I grind my teeth at the sight as a surge of loathing fills my chest.
I wrap my arms around my brother’s neck and hop closer.

Mixed
feelings mingle in my head. This is the guy who vandalized my glider out of
spite, the guy who’s bullied my brother and me since we were little, the guy
who… followed us in the dead of the night to warn us about a trap.

“He was
about to kill—” I start.

Wes cups
my mouth again. “Shh,” he hisses. “It’s not what you think.”

“What?”

Lukas
crouches next to Yuri and whispers something in his ear, his eyes soft in a way
I never would’ve expected. Aghad leans over and tears open the kid’s shirt,
revealing a hole as large as a fist right below his ribcage. Blood bubbles out
like a running well.

Yuri
blinks, his eyes fixed on the sky.

The sun is
out now, and long morning shadows fan between golden hues.

“After I
left you guys,” Wes whispers as Aghad examines the wound, “I bumped into
Hennessy and told him about the doors. He pretended to listen, then snuck up
behind me and deactivated me.”

“What
about you, Lukas?” I ask. “Did Hennessy deactivate you too?”

Lukas shakes
his head. “Tahari did. As soon as he heard the rumble he knew you’d opened the
door. I tried to run over but he stopped me and everything went black.”

“Yuri
brought us back,” Wes continues, “Lukas and me, while Hennessy and Tahari were
watching you duel with Golow. He awakened us, told us not to move, to pretend
we were still out.”

Even Athel
has a hard time believing it. “Is that true?” he says.

Wes nods.

“But I saw
him,” I protest. “He had his laser beam muzzles out. He was about to kill you,
Wes.”

Wes shakes
his head. “No. He had to pretend he was pointing them at me, but he was trying
to destroy Golow. His father stopped him. And then you got in the way. Yuri
jerked his fist and the beams ended up piercing Hennessy instead.” Wes swallows
and looks down. “He and Tahari got what they deserved. They’d been following
us. Hennessy put me out before I could come warn you guys… warn everyone else.”

“What
happened after Yuri shot his father?” Athel asks.

“Golow’s fangs
were about to snatch Akaela. Yuri threw himself between her and the bot and got
skewered in her place.” Wes lowers his head and looks down.

I frown,
thinking back to those moments. I remember a flash, probably Yuri’s laser beam
going off. He then struck me in the face to get me out of Golow’s way. That’s
when the robot’s fangs pierced him.

My whole
body goes numb. My head, my leg, my heart. I swallow dust, my throat completely
dry.

I
disentangle from Athel’s grasp, hop over to Yuri, and drop to my knees,
averting my eyes from his gruesome wound. Lukas shakes his head.

No nanobot
can fix this.

Words fail
me. This kid I once thought a monster, once loathed with all my heart, saved my
life. Tears roll down my cheeks.

“Yuri,” I
say, between sobs.

He blinks.
His faltering gaze rests on my face. “My parents,” he whispers. “They always
said… you guys were the traitors.” His voice is barely audible, so I lean
forward and press my ear to his cold, metal face. “Turns out… it was them.”

He lifts
the tip of his fingers. “Take these,” he whispers.

I know
he’s talking about the laser beams. Lukas understands too and nods.

“Give…
them … Cal,” he says, his voice fading. “He doesn’t… know.”

“Cal?” I
say.

He nods.

I put a
hand on his forehead. It feels hot under my skin. “We’ll take care of him.
Don’t worry.”

He nods
again. “I’m sorry. I wish—”

“Shh,” I
whisper. “I’m sorry too.”

Yuri
closes his eyes. A few shallow breaths escape his mouth and then a long final
sigh.

I’m sorry too
.

Chapter
Twenty-One

Athel

Day Number: 1,590

Event: We’ve unlocked the Underground
City

Number of Mayakes left: Unknown

Goal for today: Prepare for more deaths.

I barely made it in time. Without
Lilun’s gift, Dottie would be dead, squashed between the fangs of a huge, wolf-like
AI. It all happened thanks to Aghad. When he saw I wasn’t returning, he walked
all the way to the back of the line to get Tahari. Except Tahari wasn’t there.
That’s when he got suspicious. He looked in his bag and found that the box with
the three
chavis
was missing. When I
finally joined our group again, he and I went on a frantic search.

Good thing
Golow made a lot of noise and wasn’t hard to track down.

We stand
lost in the middle of the ruins with three bodies and the wreck of a huge robot
lying around us. The morning breeze reeks of burnt flesh and blood.

Everything
is silent.

Aghad is
in shock, this small man with old, knotty hands at a loss with his life. I
stare into his tired eyes and recognize the deepest of all wounds, the betrayal
of someone trusted.

The slash
in Dottie’s leg is bleeding profusely. We need to shake off the stupor death
has bestowed on us and get going. We need to get help, to gather the
people—

A whistle
interrupts my thoughts. Loud, ear-splitting. We hold our breaths and look up. A
blade of light mars the blue sky. It lasts only a fraction of a second, then
the ground shakes and a rattle of explosions follow. We fall to our hands and
knees.

“The
Tower!” Dottie screams.

“It’s
happening,” Aghad says. “The Gaijins are attacking the Tower.”

A new
missile whistles high in the air and then crashes in the forest closer to us.
Flames burst in the air.

“And the
forest, too!” Wes yells.

We need to
take action.
Now
.

I help
Dottie back to her feet. “Lukas,” I say. “You and Akaela should go down the
Foresight door. Take care of her leg—it’s bleeding too much.”

“But I
want to go with you!” Dottie protests.

“You’d be
slowing us down,” I scold her. “Look at the bright side: you two get to be the
first ones to step into the Underground City in over a hundred years.”

A shiver
runs down my spine.
Let’s hope there are
no more bloodthirsty AIs guarding the Underground City
. I swallow and keep
that one thought to myself.

We’ve run out of options
.

A new
explosion bursts in the distance.

Aghad,
Wes, and I split, each one of us with a different destination but one common
goal: find all of our people scattered in the forest and bring them to safety.
Wes is the fastest and will reach the group that headed out with the carriages
and horses. Aghad and I will look for the rest.

Aghad
squints his old eyes at us. “Kids. It’s been a long night. A night of discovery
and realizations.” He swallows. “A night of pain. What you fought here
shouldn’t discourage you. It should make you stronger.”

Dottie’s got
tears in her eyes. Leaning on Lukas, she hops forward and throws her arms
around Aghad’s neck. We all pile up in a group hug. A few tears roll, some
real, some virtual—mine. I’m crying too, although inside, because my
cyborg eyes don’t shed.

At last Aghad
pats his rough hands on our backs and we all break apart. “I want to see you
back here. Safe,” he adds. “All of you.”

Wes nods
and then he’s gone in a blur. I watch his silhouette grow smaller as plumes of
smoke rise above the forest.

“You too
stay safe, Aghad,” I say, and then run off.

*
 
*
 
*

Lilun is still at the bottom of
the ravine, struggling to get her rocket going. I point to the blasts bursting
across the sky and beg her to fly the darn thing, until I realize what the problem
is. There never was a capsule. The straps Lukas found inside the rocket are
supposed to buckle around her waist and chest, except she can’t buckle them
anymore with one hand and a rudimentary clamp. She swings them over her
shoulder and shows me how they should wrap around her belt.

The rocket
is stuck, its muzzle entangled in a mass of ivy and dead branches. She wouldn’t
let me touch it earlier, but now that the sky is exploding above us, she seems
to have acquired a new sense of urgency. I’m mad at her for not letting me help
her earlier, but then realize if she had, I would’ve never made it in time to
save my sister.

You win
some, you lose some.

I plow the
rocket out of the tangle of vegetation and push it up the ravine. More rockets
whistle around us, and every time the ground shakes beneath our feet, I think
of the Tower. I imagine the cracked walls as they come crumbling down, the long
hallways collapsing, the secret places up on the sixtieth floor where Dottie
and I would go looking for ghosts…

“By the
end of the day, it’ll all be gone,” I say, helping Lilun into her harness.

I say it
like that, like an afterthought.

I lick my
dry lips and sigh. “It’s ok. I guess—I guess it was necessary.”

I look at
her, strapped in the awkward harness. The forest around us explodes, the ground
shakes, and Lilun smiles.

She raises
her good hand and opens her palm.

“Grodan,”
she says, and from the look in her eyes I know it means goodbye.

“Grodan,”
I repeat, nodding. “Goodbye.”

She
doesn’t move, her hand still open, waiting. So I raise my hand too, unsure what
to do with it, and then press my fingers against hers, her skin soft and warm.

The rocket
gives a roar. I step back and she runs, black fumes swirling behind her,
covering my last glimpse of her before she takes off and vanishes into the sky,
the very same sky that now is lit up with fire from her own people.

Don’t kill her, you bastards.

Be safe
.

I bend
over and cough, my eyes burning with hot tears from the smoke.

Smoke and
something else. Something that tugs at my heart even though I’m not willing to
admit it.

Arpah
Lilun, I think.
Arpah
like the words you left me to
ponder over.

And then I
run. Because the rocket is gone, but the blasts are far from over.

*
 
*
 
*

The groups Tahari had carefully
assembled have now dispersed. Maybe that was part of the plan, too. I find
people scattered all through the forest. Adults panic, children cry, elderly
wander aimlessly. To each one of them I give directions to the Foresight door.
I know they can’t miss the place, now that there’s a gigantic robot heaped in
front of it. The graver problem is how to get them all there safely.

Bombs
explode above our heads. Each time I hear the whistling that anticipates
another missile, I cringe and close my eyes, not knowing if I’ll be able to
open them again. Sadly, after a while I get used to the rattling and the
roaring of fire. The plumes marring the horizon multiply and spread over the
forest. I find a crying child and it takes me ten minutes to find her parents—both
alive, luckily.

The next
find is not so fortunate. The blast resonates within a few hundred yards of
where I am. It rings in my ears for a good ten seconds, followed by piercing screams.
I run, and what I see is something that will stay with me for years to
come.
 

Body parts
lie scattered over a diameter of two hundred feet. A torso is splattered
against the trunk of a barren tree, and the legs of a beheaded body dangle from
a branch. A faint moan surfaces from a jumble of splintered wood, the ground
all around blackened and smoky. I take a deep breath, refusing to step any
farther and yet forcing myself to. I try not to look at the mess of limbs lying
everywhere, flesh intermingled with burnt wires and pieces of twisted
prosthetics.

I almost
step on a hand, only to see the fingers twitch under my eyes. The arm is so
badly twisted that the bone at the elbow has pierced through the flesh and lies
exposed, bits of pine needles clustered around it. I almost gag before
realizing that the moaning I hear comes from whoever is attached to that arm,
the rest of the body hidden underneath a fallen tree. I carefully remove the
broken branches and pieces of wood, but I soon realize there’s nothing I can do
to save this person. She’s already missing her legs, and her prostheses are now
crumbled into pieces below her chest. Beneath a mask of blood and torn flesh,
her eyes stare wide at me.

“Please,”
she mumbles. “Take my baby. Please.”

I frown,
unsure what to reply. I don’t think she knows her child’s missing, but I don’t
have the heart to break the news to her. So I open my mouth to tell her that
her baby will be fine, when I see a tiny foot emerge from a bundled blanket
next at her side. The smell of blood and burnt flesh is doing a number on my
stomach, yet I lean forward and pick up the bundle, only to find a surprisingly
unharmed baby inside.

“She’s
blind,” the mother says. “But with the right prostheses—”

“I’ll
bring her to safety,” I say.

She
manages to smile through her pain, then her eyes close never to open again.

Another
explosion rocks the sky. I wrap the baby back in the blanket and run.

I find
more lost people in my quest. A young woman offers to take the baby so I can
continue my search through the forest. I run without thinking, no longer
stopping at each explosion, no longer scared or angered, just running. When I
hear screaming I double back, slowly growing accustomed to the horror. I come
to realize that human bodies are much like prostheses: you salvage what you
can, the rest you have to look away and leave it, no matter how difficult it is
to come to terms with the loss.

I run
without thinking, until I’ve got no more strength in my legs and no more people
to find. Eventually, the explosions stop, just like they started. When I get
back to the old plaza by the Foresight door, the place is far from deserted.
People stand and watch the sky, now obfuscated by plumes of smoke and the
flames ravaging the forest. I find Mom sitting on a pile of rubble. She comes
running as soon as she sees me. We hug, she tells me both Taeh and Dottie are
safe. I nod and wish I could tell her Lilun was safe too.

But she
wouldn’t know who Lilun is.

She
wouldn’t understand, either.

Lilun was
not the enemy.

Tahari
was.

The sky
rocks one last time. A huge rumble ripples through the air, making the ground
shake. A mushroom of dust rises behind the trees, so tall it touches the clouds
above.

Aghad
shuffles over and drapes a hand over my shoulder. “It served us well.”

I blink.

“The
Tower,” he repeats. “It served us well. Over three generations of Mayakes. And
now it’s gone, just like everything else.”

He turns
and walks away, this quiet hero who silently saved our lives.