Dedication (The Medicean Stars Saga Book 1) (4 page)

The Capital

A Suburban Highway

On the other side of the city, making its way through the sprawling suburbs is another armored van containing another captive, though this scene has a few key differences. There are no guards in this van—instead all the available space is full of hunched and morose forms, shivering despite the oven-like heat within the vehicle. And unlike with Gavitte’s van, no one is going to try to rescue its cargo.

The form hunched in the darkest corner, his knees drawn close to his chest, is William, the misunderstood and yet no longer ignored suburbanite, who barely thirty-six hours ago was celebrating his youth in the rain by an airport. Crouched in the corner, he manages to insulate himself from the majority of bruises those in the middle of the van are receiving. Still his flesh is slowly being tenderized, thanks to the ride quality of three tons moving at a speed of well over three digits on roads that haven’t seen a maintenance crew since they were built.

It is this comparative peacefulness that allows him to begin to form an idea, one which is simple enough that he might even be able to succeed in his pursuit of it.

“I will survive,” he mutters into the ambiance of moaning and flesh colliding with hard steel. He repeats, “I Will Survive.”

With this as his mantra, William passes the next day without food or water and with the ever-increasing stench of vomit, waste, and fear, as he remains huddled in the corner, the van swaying to and fro around him. He draws into himself, allowing his mind to retreat to the dark, quiet room of his interrogation. Sealing himself off from everything that surrounds him, he lets it go blank. Time passes indeterminately, each second seeming to drag by but hours seeming to pass when he blinks.

As the sun rises to mark the beginning of what will be the second day in the van, the vehicle begins to slow. The vibrations from tires on relatively smooth pavement is replaced with the bouncing of tires on gravel, and the van finally comes to a halt. The doors are thrown open, casting the harsh light of day upon the nightmare enclosed within. Squinting through the light, William notices his fellow passengers. Each is as bedraggled as he feels, and a haunted look reflects from their eyes. None are older than he is, and he has more than year before society deems him mature enough to officially be an adult.

“Git out ya’ maggots, it’s time t’ git t’ work,” growls a voice belonging to face that—if it weren’t for the grimace and the lack of teeth—would be called grandfatherly. The face sits atop a portly frame dressed in a military uniform that marks him as a sergeant. “Welcome t’ hell, ya’ pissants, you’ll call me sir, lord, or god if I address ya’ first. Otherwise you’ll keep your mouth shut. Now move it.”

Still too stunned to move, it takes the repeated cracking of a whip and more curses by the rotund sergeant with divine pretensions before the contents of the van begin to shuffle out.

“Now since it’s ya’ first day ’ere and I can tell you all are a bit tired so I’m gonna go easy on ya’. Corporal take ’em to the blast trenches.”

The group of bedraggled teenagers is led towards a large, partially-completed earthwork. On their way, they are handed shovels and wheel barrows before being led down into the baking heat of the trench, and without any more introduction, the whip is cracked and they begin their shoveling.

Shovel load after shovel load passes from William’s hands into the awaiting wheel barrow, until the numbness in his mind that he had hid behind in the van becomes his entire consciousness. With each thrust of the shovel, he grunts another syllable, his voice barely more than a whisper, yet he is unaware he is making any sound at all.

“I… will... sur… vive…”

The Capital

Sewer Tunnels

As another wall peels back, warm dry air invades the cold damp sewer, and a scent of roses reaches Gavitte. Before the misplaced first waft of the scent can be completely lost in the overriding smell of the city’s waste, the scent comes back just as delicately but with a strength and permanence behind it. The scent is accompanied by a rough grip on his shoulder and a toss through the opening onto a lightly rusted steel grate. The grate forms the start of a ramp that leads up a short tunnel before moving out onto a catwalk.

“Come on, we need to move before they check this tunnel,” says the voice connected to the firm grip and rose scent.

Crouched where he landed at the start of the catwalk, Gavitte finds himself looking down upon what appears to be an underground lake in a natural cavern. A faint glow illuminates the water from within but is too weak to leave more than a vague impression of the cavern’s size as Gavitte looks into the distance. As he stands, his view pans about him. The only thing to break the darkness at their elevation in the cavern are the beams of his rescuers’ flashlights, each one casting a bright spot upon the handrail and walkway but finding themselves lost to the darkness beyond as they flit about.

It is in this setting of no specific definition that he gets his first sight of her. She is nearly as tall as Gavitte, only tilting her head slightly to look him in the eyes. Her hair, when illuminated by the flicking of the flashlight beams, glows with a deep red hue that borders on purple. Her name is right on the tip of his tongue, as if he were introduced to her at some party, but he since forgot all but the feeling of her presence. He is about to wrap his tongue around it.

“Angelina, all are through,” says one of the rescue party.

“All right, close it up and rig the charges. We don’t want anyone coming through here after us,” says the voice belonging to the perfectly firm rear below the well hung utility belt of the now-identified Angelina. That catches Gavitte’s attention as she turns, jogging off into the ethereal cavern, her finely shaped legs quickly fading in the gloom but not from Gavitte’s mind.

It all comes back to him as he begins to run after her, making him stagger as if hit in the gut again. The name in his head during the morning news, the note he found in his pocket after being hit by the homeless man, and the strange message written upon it.

“You are the Resistance, aren’t you?”

“He’s a bright one, ain’t he?” comments the man running directly behind Gavitte.

Angelina, who slowed enough to allow Gavitte to catch up, is now running directly in front him and keeps running for almost another thirty seconds before responding; this delay is, of course, fine by Gavitte, as her remarkably tight-fitting combat fatigues outline every movement of the muscle beneath, and the faint scent of roses easily cuts through the musty underground smell of the cavern.

“He has made a public statement against the government from within, and he can’t just be whisked off to an institution and declared insane,” she says, sounding as if she is repeating the lines off a script and not really addressing either of their comments. “He is the figurehead this resistance needs.”

With these words still swirling behind her, she picks up her pace and disappears into the darkness. Only her flashlight bobbing along reveals her location, and then the gloom swallows her completely. Gavitte tries to slow as his mind continues to churn, but the press of the others behind him keeps him moving. Without realizing that the path is no longer clear ahead of him, Gavitte is taken completely by surprise as they burst through a jungle of hanging fabric and into a well-lit camp. Standing amongst stacked boxes and computing equipment, she is the picture of rugged professionalism. Unlike Gavitte, whose face is flushed and covered in dust and muck, she looks crisp and clean as if she just walked out onto a parade ground to perform the morning review.

“Welcome to our temporary camp,” she begins, her voice distant and her eyes looking everywhere but at Gavitte. “This was set up just for the extraction; we need to get everything packed up in the next few hours, or they’ll find us. Then we’ll be moving you to our central base of operations, but first we need to create a new identity for you to get you past the security checkpoints out there.” She vaguely waves to the far wall as the rest of the team enters, and they immediately begin breaking down equipment and packing the crates.

Gavitte is led to a stool before a camera by one of leaders of his rescue party, who pushes him down with a gentle but firm hand and rotates him around until he is facing the correct direction.

“Don’t worry about her,” he says, noting the puzzled look in Gavitte’s eyes as he stares at Angelina rummaging around a crate across the room. “She’ll warm up to you eventually. Now look here at this camera so we can start making your new identification card.”

The flash blinds Gavitte leaving floating white shapes in his vision. He is then left alone as the entire party of rescuers breaks off from packing to huddle around a computer. They begin laughing and jabbing at the screen excitedly. Angelina does not join them and instead begins packing a small duffel from the contents of one of the crates.

With a roll of her eyes and a vague gesture towards Gavitte, she heads over to knock some sense into the group of men. Gavitte, his mind still trying to catch up with recent events, takes the gesture to be a sign that he is no longer needed on the stool and follows Angelina over towards the monitor.

“Just use the one we decided on before,” she tells the men, her voice carrying a note of command mixed with exasperation. “We need to hurry. He has to be on the train before they think to post security at the station.”

The absurd alternative identities that had been creating so much merriment vanish from the screen and are replaced with one that looks almost like the Gavitte elected to office. But instead of occupation listed as politician, it is listed as professor, and the name is changed to Rosenburg.

One of the rescue party grabs a makeup kit and begins applying some plaster and artfully placed shadows to his face to help reinforce the new persona. The look is topped off by a pair of round brass spectacles, and soon he looks at least ten years older.

With the makeup complete, Angelina hands him a folder of papers and the duffel she had been packing. She leads him away from the others, who have begun breaking down the equipment in the room, and towards another tunnel. This tunnel is dry, as if not part of the network of sewers under the city, though the damp smell of earth and decay that is common in underground spaces still lingers here. As she leads him through a series of twists and turns too numerous to count she gives him instructions.

“The folder contains your important documents: passport, tickets, and a research paper you’re supposed to be presenting at the conference you are going to,” she tells Gavitte. “The duffel contains everything a young professor such as yourself will need for a weekend conference in the mountains. You are to get on train number five from track one. We’ll meet you at the other end, but we can’t travel with you, as we are too well known. Take care and try to keep to yourself.”

With the final words, her voice loses part of its bite of command and her eyes, which had still been avoiding him, stop their roving and lock onto his. She pauses, and Gavitte’s entire world seems to slow. Without warning she kisses him surprisingly passionately upon the lips before throwing him through another hidden opening into what appears to be a janitorial closet, complete with a dirty mop resting in brown water. The earthy smell of the tunnel had been wiped from Gavitte’s senses when she kissed him, replaced completely by her own earthy scent; now both are banished completely by the harsh bite of cleaning supplies.

Before he can form any of the many questions boiling inside of him, the portal he had just crossed through shirks and then vanishes, leaving naught but an off-white cinder block wall behind. After standing stunned for a moment, Gavitte soon realizes that if this strange group of rescuers had no plan, then they wouldn’t have risked their lives to save him. Convincing himself that it is the only reasonable option and he is in no way influenced by the smell of roses and the taste of her lips, he concludes that he has only one option. He takes a deep breath, gathers up his duffel from where it was resting against a stack of new paper towels, pushes his new gold-rimmed spectacles up his enhanced nose, and hunches his shoulders as if under the weight of too many years before open books and flickering computer screens. He is now Professor Rosenburg heading to a conference in the mountains. Already he longs to catch a hint of Angelina’s smell again, but all traces of it have been erased from his nose.

The professor opens the only door out of the closet and is instantly swept up into the crush of Union Station at rush hour. It is only after much jostling and a muttered curse or two that he makes it to the hall for surface trains. Here his new passport and ticket are required, though barely glanced at, as he is directed towards his train. Embarking, he finds a window seat on the second level near the middle of the car with no one in the entire row. The car seems subdued and peaceful despite the imminent departure of the train. As he sinks into the entirely too spacious accommodations, he lets out the breath that he didn’t realize he’d been holding since being thrown into the police van that afternoon. What has he gotten himself into? If he’d simply kept his mouth shut, he would have been able to continue on with his comfortable career. Now the future is far from certain, and yet Gavitte can’t help but feel that it is definitely brighter, and not just because a very good looking woman seems to be interested in him, though even he can’t convince himself that it is not a major factor.

Soon the train begins its journey west, and it is not long before the gentle rocking and swaying of his carriage lulls him into a peaceful dream of mysterious women possessing finely crafted bodies and large assault rifles.