I thought it was an insect that woke me at first, but the vibrations and the annoying buzzing sound were actually coming from my right wrist. Slowly, I stretched my limbs out from under the thin blanket and yawned my way out of a somewhat fitful sleep. Swinging my legs off the bed, I massaged my wrist in the hopes that the stupid node would shut off; it didn’t, of course, and I resigned myself to slowly rubbing the spot in an effort to make the pain go away. Our nodes were constantly malfunctioning, and mine was no exception. Once again, I cursed the useless little chip and its accompanying ID number tattooed upon my pale skin. To the city of Solstice, I wasn’t Natalie Cross, I was merely 046730; just another number in the crowd.
The buzzing of the node finally subsided about a minute later. The clock projected onto the wall read just past six in the morning, about an hour and a half earlier than I was accustomed to starting my day. I begrudgingly dragged myself out of bed, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to get any more real sleep, and prepared myself for another day at the mercy of my Educational Instructors. Day in and day out, school yielded nothing exciting for me. I couldn’t wait to complete my final four months and attend Occupational Selection, where I at least had a chance to do something interesting for the rest of my life. With my luck, though, I’d be assigned to the Identification Tracking Committee or something like that.
I’ve never had any luck.
Through our little circular window I could see that the morning’s light chill would probably burn off into a wonderful spring day. The Dormitory was the third-tallest building in the entire city; with our seventeenth-story view, I could see far out across the city, almost to the opposite wall ten miles away. Several white fishing boats had already left the harbor of the large artificial lake in the center of the city and sat like fat white ducks on the glassy grey water. Channels from the lake snaked out from the center of Solstice and paralleled the major roadways, giving the city the appearance of a massive circular maze from hundreds of feet in the air. The rising sun straight ahead threw massive sparkling reflections off of the many, many windows on the city’s taller buildings, appearing to set the upper half of the city in a glorious yellow blaze. It probably would have been stunning, had not everything been such a depressing shade of grey.
With a jolt, I remembered that it was not just any spring day, it was the Quarter-Millennial; the day itself meant nothing to me, except that school had been cancelled and that the highly-anticipated Q-M ceremony was to take place that night. Pricella, my pretentious and often infuriatingly angelic dorm mate, would complain about the “waste of any educational opportunity,” of course, but Pricella complained about everything.
Two hundred and fifty years of safety and security, I thought, running my fingers through my hair and trying to pull out most of the tangles. Two hundred and fifty years of boring living after a century of a super-epidemic is definitely a reason to celebrate, I guess. I just wish it weren’t mandatory. I wasn’t a fan of huge crowds.
Truthfully, the list of mandatory things in Solstice far dwarfed the list of optional things; school was mandatory, from ages four to seventeen, and it was mandatory to live in the Dormitory during those years. Occupational Selection was mandatory, as was marriage, two children, and a long list of other things. Solstice chose your job, your living space, your spouse, and even your clothes (grey, of course), and everyone was perfectly happy that way. Freedom was the price of happiness.
The only thing we could choose was whether or not we followed the rules, which really wasn’t even a choice anyway; if you broke a law, you were moved to rehabilitation, where a panel of medical and psychological staff evaluated your condition and decided whether or not you were to be allowed back in society as a second-class citizen. If you weren’t worthy, your ID number and node were (painfully, I heard) removed and you were banished beyond the walls to a world full of fear, disease, danger, and pain. No one wanted to leave Solstice; no one wanted to be a Deviant.
With nothing else to do, I dressed in the customary grey tunic and cotton pants, tied my hair back in a half-hearted braid, and decided to go to the cafeteria to see if anyone else was up. The Dormitory sleeping quarters were a maze of whitewashed walls, linoleum floors, and a faint smell of chemical cleaning fluids. The elevator proved to be empty, making me wonder if I was the only one my age out of four hundred who was awake at this hour. Our floor Prefects were nowhere to be found, which meant they were probably already at breakfast. The elevator deck separated each floor by gender, and we weren’t allowed to cross to the other side without being accompanied by a Prefect.
I stepped into the elevator and my heart skipped a beat, as it had every time I rode down for the past thirteen years; why they put glass floors on the elevators, I’ll never know. Maybe it was to remind us that seventeen floors straight down is a long, long way. It made me feel small. Helpless, ever. I pressed the “C” button on the panel, allowing it to take a reading of my fingerprint first, and forced myself to stare at the polished steel doors. A single smudgy fingerprint stood out against the pristine surface. I fixated on it, wondering to whom it belonged, until the elevator slid gently to a rest and the doors opened.
The cafeteria was easily the most boring room in the entire city, and that was saying something. Grey walls. Grey floor. Even the tables and the chairs were grey. Only the serving trays stood out—a gag-worthy beige—though they, too, were piled with greyish oatmeal. For genetically modified stuff, it actually wasn’t that bad. The only thing that made it bearable was fresh fruit which, of course, was missing from this morning’s array.
“You’re up awfully early,” a familiar voice observed from behind me. I turned around to find my best—well, only—friend Alicia lounging at a table near the wall. I plopped my tray down across from her and settled in, woefully poking at my cereal and wishing for some blueberries.
“Yeah, well it’s hard to sleep with those stupid nodes buzzing off at the crack of dawn,” I remarked, taking a small bite. It wasn’t bad; it was far from good, though. “What are you doing up so early?”
“Waiting for you, obviously.” When she registered my blank look, she sighed and rolled her eyes. “You promised me you’d go with me to the Surgo District to fix my Agrobot! We have the day off; if I don’t get my room clean by tonight, I’ll be cleaning floors again next week!”
“You could always clean it yourself,” I commented, throwing her a look.
“Why, Nat, whatever is technology for?” She said with a smirk. “I won the Agrobot fair and square, and I’m keeping it.”
If I was the “boring” one, Alicia took the cake as the “risky” one. She was always getting into trouble—or not, depending on how you looked at it. She won a basic housekeeping robot in a dare with one of the insanely-rich Apex kids, and had no trouble keeping her room clean until it had quit working a few weeks ago.
I must have been stupid to promise to go with her to the Surgo District—no one left their own district without special permission. Alicia and I fell into the Medion class, alongside about half of Solstice’s other citizens. Apex citizens had family in high places, money, or both, and only one in about twenty citizens were lucky enough to be born Apex. Surgos made up the rest—second class citizens, honestly. Surgos worked all the toughest jobs, lived in the smallest houses, and were the only citizens allowed to leave the city with very special permission. I had only met a few Surgos, and they didn’t seem that different from us. Except for the small letter “R” branded in their left cheek.
“R” stood for “rehabilitated”; Surgos we criminals, or the children of criminals. They were just one short step above Deviants.
“I guess a promise is a promise,” I sighed. I gulped down one more tasteless bite before placing my tray inside a small inset in the wall. With a hiss, my tray disappeared. My wish for blueberries didn’t, though, and my stomach gave a small grumble. Hopefully lunch would be better.
“Great. We’re leaving…” Alicia checked the clock on the wall “…now.” Come on, the ferry leaves in fifteen minutes.” Without giving me any time to protest, she dragged me out of the cafeteria, down the main stairwell, and into the Dormitory lobby.
“Sign out, students.”
The expressionless and seemingly ageless doorman gestured to the digital pad next to the huge mirrored glass doors. We both scanned our palms impatiently; I kept on eye on the doorman. Something about him had always freaked me out. It could have been his almost computer-like monotone… or his eyes. I had never seen eyes so grey or so… dead. He seemed to be a part of the city itself, and extension of the vast grey buildings. We were admitted through the door with two loud beeps.
Outside, the city was the quietest I had ever seen; everyone, it seemed, had been excused from work in preparation for the Quarter-Millennial that evening. Everyone except the Surgos, I observed, with a pang of sympathy. Two men in pale blue jumpsuits were dumping waste by the bin into a large mobile incinerator. One of the men looked up before I could look away. His hollow gaze locked upon my own for the briefest of seconds before he coughed and looked away quickly. I swallowed, mouth dry. For some reason, I felt like it should have been me who looked away.
Solstice’s streets were wide and barren, save utility vehicles. Unless we walked, almost everyone used the SkyWay to commute around, saving valuable space on the ground for maintenance vehicles.
Surgos weren’t permitted to use the SkyWay, but they lived much closer to the wall, so we didn’t see anyone on the ten minute walk to the nearest ferry port. With its maze of channels, Solstice’s waterway served as a better mode of transportation than the streets—especially for us, since there were no SkyWay hubs in the Wall District. As usual, a pair of helmeted Enforcers stopped us before we could board one of the fat white ferries.
“Identification,” prompted the taller of the two. One after another we showed out wrists and allowed him to scan our ID number with a glowing handheld tool. “Let them pass.”
His partner nodded and stepped aside, permitting us to move past the checkpoint and onto a sliding metal gangway. We took two seats on the open deck near the back. A large digital display above the gangway informed us that we wouldn’t be leaving for another four minutes.
Fine by me, I thought to myself. The further from Wall District, the better.
“Students!”
We turned, taken aback at the voice.
“What is your destination?” The Enforcers, having nothing better to do, had wandered over to the top of the gangway and now stood above us, leaning on the metal railing of the dock.
“Wall District,” Alicia said cheerfully, flashing them a winning grin. I coughed a little and gave her a scathing look. Enforcers were unpredictable and often violent; furthermore, I was pretty sure they weren’t supposed to chat while on duty. Alicia paid me no mind and plowed on, “We’re going to get my Argobot fixed before the Q-M celebration tonight. You can join us if you’d like!” She grinned at me and raised her eyebrows.
“Wall District?” The enforcers looked at one another, but I couldn’t see any expression behind their mirrored visors.
“There’s a repair station on the other side of the plaza… Go there instead.” The shorter enforcer advised. Something about his tone made me uncomfortable.
“All the best repairmen are Surgos, everyone knows that,” Alicia said, shaking her head.
“Go another day, if you must.” The tall one rubbed his right arm with his left and shifted his feet. Something wasn’t right.
“Why’s that? The celebration tonight? We’ll be back by midday…” Alicia glanced at me with some worry in her eyes. I’d never actually spoken with an Enforcer before, let alone this.
“Things in the Wall District are… unsettled at the moment.” As soon as he said it, the shorter Enforcer elbowed his partner stiffly in the ribs, feigning adjusting his helmet. A low, droning horn sounded from the front of the ferry and with a low rumble, we began to push away from the dock, churning the glassy water into a foamy froth in our wake.
“Unsettled?” Alicia yelled over the din.
The Enforcer yelled something back, but it was lost in the noise of the ferry’s engine. Alicia cupped her hand to her ear. To our surprise, the taller Enforcer pulled of his helmet and yelled it again, and this time it was unmistakable. He put his helmet back on in a hurry and then he and his partner disappeared from the dock as we accelerated to a reasonable glide.
“He just yelled ‘Nightstalkers,’ didn’t he?” I said, a heavy pit growing steadily in my stomach.
“Hey, no big deal.” Alicia said, but she didn’t sound too convincing. “They attack the wall all the time, don’t they?”
“If you’re trying to reassure me, you’re doing as bad job,” I said bluntly. There was a reason citizens were okay with following the rules, as strangling as they could be, and the thought of being torn in half by a part-machine, part-human mutant was at the top of the list. We heard about Nightstalker attacks all the time; in fact, most mothers and fathers warned their pre-school children that they’d be carried away by the man-eating terrors if they didn’t learn to behave before school. Of course I didn’t have the pleasure of such a gentle introduction to Solstice’s worst enemy; my first encounter involved a blurry video shown to a group of us by a boy in the fifth year, and almost a month of nightmares.
“Let’s turn back,” I advised with a shiver. “The Enforcers were right; let’s just go another day.”
“What if they got inside the wall?” Alicia exclaimed, that look of fascination and dangerous curiosity taking over her features for the millionth time sense we had become friends. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”
“No, it would not. I’m getting off at the next stop.” I crossed my arms and glared at her hard. Alicia was always calling me a killjoy. I preferred to think of it as self-preservation.
“Oooh, what if we end up right in the middle of a fight? How exciting!”
“Sometimes I wonder why we’re friends,” I sighed, only partly kidding.
Alicia flashed me her sweetest smile. “Because, dear Nat, without me, you’d be boring.”
“That, and safe,” I muttered. The next ferry port loomed at the edge of the central lake; last stop before Wall District. I stood up and cleared my throat loudly, making it clear that we would NOT be going any further. Alicia gave me her best pleading look, but I held firm; I was unhappy enough going into Surgo territory on a good day, let alone during an apparent Nightstalker attack. Finally, with a dejected huff, she conceded to me and stood up so we could leave the ship.
We neared the port at a steady chug. A dozen people, Surgos mostly, stood at the top of the gangway in a single file line, waiting to ride to precisely the place we were avoiding. Instead of the usual pair of enforcers, though, five or six where stationed at the dock. Extra security for the celebrations, I figured out loud, and Alicia agreed. A hundred feet… fifty feet… thirty feet…
The ferry wasn’t slowing down.
“Please excuse the inconvenience; we are experiencing a mild technical failure. Please, do not panic.” A pleasant female voice came to life from the large digital map on the wall of the ferry’s cabin.
“Don’t panic?!” I half yelled, watching the confused expressions of the citizens waiting on the gangway. “We’re headed to certain death! Get me off this stupid chunk of metal!” Normally, I’m not one to panic, but this was a special occasion. “I’m going to swim for it!” I made to jump off the side of the ferry, but Alicia grabbed onto my tunic and hauled me back forcefully.
“Get a grip, Nat, we’ll be fine!” Alicia said, a little too harshly. I could tell she was sorry just as soon as the words left her mouth. “Look, we’ll be safe. I promise.”
“You can’t promise that!” I snapped.
“Look, I know how you—“
“How I feel?” I shook my head sharply, locking my eyes on her. “No, no you don’t.”
“Nat—“
“Don’t.” I warned. “Last time I checked, your parents weren’t killed in an attack; I don’t think you have any idea what I feel.”
The ensuing silence was thicker than an autumn fog, and heavier still. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat, but it simply wouldn’t go down. I prided myself in being a tough girl; I stood up for myself, stood up for the Surgo kids in school, said what I thought, and wasn’t afraid to tell people when I wasn’t happy with them. That was the problem, though; it’s hard to be invincible when you had a secret fear, and my secret fear was dying. Not in general, I guess, but dying like my parents. They had no warning, no one around to tell them to look out, no chance. Sometimes the thought of it kept me up deep into the night, robbing me of any rest, brain spiraling in the dark at a million miles per hour. Did they scream? I thought to myself sometimes. Did it hurt? Was it instant?
Did they think of me?
Even after ten years, I didn’t have answers, but I still had nightmares.
“Nat, I’m sorry… I forgot.”
“Lucky you.”
“Would you forgive me?”
I turned and looked at her. Her deep green eyes held the most sincere expression of apology I had ever seen. Though she could be abrasive, insensitive, and confrontational sometimes, she was still my best friend.
“Yeah,” I said simply, managing to muster a small smile.
“I’ll get us out of this,” she promised with a determined nod. We rode along in silence, winding our way through narrower and narrower channels, watching the houses shrink and the profile of the unforgettable wall loom larger and larger. Two hundred feet at its highest point, the massive concrete and steel barrier blocked out the morning sun with a sense of dreadful finality as we slowly churned to a stop at the simple wooden pier that served as the Wall District’s ferry port. The pier, the street, and the entire District, for that matter, seemed to be eerily deserted. Alicia motioned for me to follow her and cautiously stepped off onto the creaky wooden dock.
I had never been to Wall District before; frankly, it was like a whole other city. Our buildings were tall, and though boring, beautifully constructed from glass and steel. These buildings, on the other hand, were short and rather squatty, none taller than two stories. Instead of uniform, even pavement, the streets were made of uneven, broken stones of all tones of grey, bound into rough cement. The thing that stood out to me most, however, was the paint. Every building, though most could have used a major touch-up job, seemed to be painted a different color. I stood, transfixed, amazed at how something so simple could make such a difference.
“Do you hear that?” Alicia stopped at the end of the pier and threw out her arm to stop me. At first, I heard nothing; then, gradually, my ears began to register a low rumble, though totally unintelligible. We looked at one another, and Alicia pointed down the nearest street, directly to our left. We moved closer, trying to make out the commotion. House by house, we tentatively made our way down the street, until it became clear in one blaze of a moment that—“
“Voices!” I realized out loud; we were hearing voices, probably hundreds of them, chanting something in unison. “I don’t know about this.”
“If there are voices, there are people, Alicia advised wisely. “I think it’s worth checking out. Someone could give us directions back to the Plaza District.” With great reluctance, I agreed, hoping against hope that the apparent gathering was just an early Q-M celebration. Within four blocks, we could make out just exactly what the voices were saying:
“E-qui-nox! E-qui-nox! E-qui-nox!”
“Equinox? What does that mean?”
Alicia shrugged. “Who knows? People wouldn’t be hanging around and chanting if there are Nightstalkers, though, so that’s a good sign.”
As we neared the din, it became clear that we weren’t walking into an early celebration; the chant rose from a desperate collection of shouts to a rolling, thunderous roar. We turned the corner and nearly ran smack into the chant itself, or rather, the chanters. The square before us was teeming with bodies, and none of them wore grey. In fact, I couldn’t spot a single color-coded maintenance jumpsuit anywhere among the hundreds of Surgos present. A makeshift stage seemed to have been erected out of wooden crates in the center of the square. We arrived just in time to see a ragged group of men and women climb up onto the stage and throw their arms up, signaling for the crowd to quiet down.738Please respect copyright.PENANA50bEfFFb3O
“Fellow citizens!” A tall woman with silver hair produced a shiny, cone shaped object and held it to her mouth, amplifying her voice many times and making it much easier to hear her words. “Citizens, please, calm yourselves. We haven’t much time before the Enforcers arrive!”
“Oh, good!” I said, a little too loudly, as a hush fell over the crowd. Two boys in front of us who looked to be about our age, turned around and raised their eyebrows at me, exchanging a look. The taller of the two wore a black jacket with a small white symbol embroidered on the left side; the other wore a similar covering, but his didn’t have any emblem. What struck me immediately were the taller boy’s eyes; as he brushed a mop of unkempt dark hair from his face, I almost gasped. His eyes were a brilliant, captivating shade of purple. He opened his mouth partway, but before he could say anything, his companion nudged him and began speaking quietly into his ear. Alicia and I looked at each other, unnerved.
“Citizens of Solstice… or, should I say, servants of Solstice! We have been downtrodden by this wretched city they call safe and peaceful… we have been trampled! Beaten! Kicked!” The woman’s words were met with an angry shout from the assembly. “How long are we going to let ourselves be shamed and oppressed? How long must we endure servitude and embarrassment? In their cozy, warm, adoring homes, the Medions and the Apex are eating things we could never dream of, enjoying drink that we’ve never heard of, and all while we are left to scrap garbage off the streets to feed our families! How much longer must this continue?!”
“Hey, that’s not true!”
Immediately, Alicia clapped her hand to my mouth and feigned a coughing fit, trying to drown out my words. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done. Several people, including the two boys in front of us, turned all the way around to get a good look at us, and one look was all they needed to realize that we belong to the very class that, apparently, they despised. I could feel my face heat up instantly in embarrassment, and my stomach drop to my feet in fear.
“Who let these Medion spies past!?” A huge, ruddy-faced mad with a bushy beard and fists like hams stepped forward and grabbed my arm, leering into my face. His breath stank of garlic and something sour that I suspected was tobacco, which was definitely banned in Solstice.
“Let her go!” In a flash, Alicia’s hands clamped down on my aggressor’s wrist. Her hands looked like a doll’s against his massive forearm, useless against his sheer size. He growled like some kind of huge dog and his other arm shot out, snatching Alicia away with almost no effort. A small crowd gathered around us, murmuring and muttering. I caught phrases like “spies,” “snitches,” and even “murderers” as more people turned to see what the commotion was. On the platform, the woman began shouting about rising up, or something; I was too panic to catch any of her words.
“Hey, big guy.”
Everyone turned to see who had spoken. The tall boy with the violet eyes stepped forward, never taking his eyes off of the giant who held us. “Let them go.”
“Who are you to be ordering me around?” he snarled, tightening his grip. I could feel the tips of my fingers beginning to go numb. The boy tapped his the emblem on his jacket with one slender finger. To my surprised, the man let go, but not without a few choice curses.
“Clear out!” The boy commanded loudly to everyone listening. “Enforcers will be here soon, we’ll take care of the spies.” With that, he signaled to his friend to take Alicia, and walked me firmly around the corner and into a narrow alleyway out of earshot of the crowd.
“I’m not a spy—“ I began to say.
“I know. Wrong place, wrong time. Are you okay?”
“Just shaken up,” I answered carefully. The boy was looking at me intensely, as if he were trying to stare through me, and his eyes were making me more than a little uncomfortable.
“Today was a bad day to come to Wall,” A cheerful voice said. The boy’s companion led Alicia into the alley and let go of her, letting her quickly move to my side. “What are a couple Medions doing alone in this part of the city?”
“We came to get my Agrobot fixed,” Alicia said quickly, “What’s going on out there? Who is the woman with the sound device?”
“Doesn’t matter,” the tall boy cut in, before his friend could answer. “You need to leave. Bad things are about to happen.”
“What bad things?” I asked, heart racing. “Nightstalkers?”
“How do you know about the Nightstalkers?” the shorter boy demanded, moving closer to me.
“Everyone knows about Nightstalkers,” Alicia answered matter-of-factly. “That’s why we don’t come over to the Wall District; you get attacked all the time, don’t you?”
“Attacked?” he laughed. “Hardly. The Nightstalkers actually—“
“—Shut their mouths, if they know what’s good for them,” the tall boy warned in an icy tone. “Your delusion of Nightstalkers is far from the mark. Anyway, you need to leave this area immediately, and you have to promise you won’t tell anyone what you saw here today. It’s the least you can do after we saved your skins.”
Alicia looked like she wanted to retort, so I swiftly stepped up. “Deal. What’s the quickest way out of here?”
The shorter boy started to point back to the main street, but his words were drowned out by the end of the world. With an ear shattering roar, the very ground beneath us seemed to burst with the force of an exploding volcano, sending the four of us crashing into the opposite side of the alley in a spiral of limbs and yells. Rocks and chunks of concrete rained down on us from above, and the very oxygen in the air seemed to be on fire as a tremendous wall of heat blasted into the alley, carrying a huge cloud of ash and dust with it. My ears rang and my vision blurred so completely that, for a full minute, I completely forgot where I was.
“Get up on your feet!”
“What?” The tall boy’s words were muffled and distant, though he seemed to be screaming right in my face.
“Feet! Move!”
Dazed, I pulled myself shakily to my feet, struggling to gain my footing in the mess of rubble that had blown into the narrow walkway. Alicia was being pulled out of the clutter by the shorter boy, who seemed to be drenched in blood. It took me a moment to realize that the last two fingers of his left hand were missing.
“It was a bomb!” The tall boy yelled, pulling me in the opposite direction of the burning street before us. “Enforcers will be here any second to mop up, we’ll have to take the long way around!”
“You’re bleeding!” I pointed out stupidly, trying to shout over the ringing in my ears. The boy raised his hand to his jaw, where something sharp seemed to have carved out a decent amount of flesh. He shook his head, wiping his hand on his sleeve, and motioned for me to follow him. Alicia and the other boy were right on our heels as we unsteadily hobbled down the remainder of the alley and out into the next street over.
The tall boy rounded the corner onto a wider road and we all followed him. I stepped on something slick and squishy, sending me tumbling to the ground in a heap. My hands skid across rough stone and I could practically feel the skin tearing off, though in my numb state I could feel no pain. I rolled on my side only to discover that my foot had slipped on a hand—a human hand. Its owner lay, mangled and partly buried in rubble, only a few feet away.
Who would do this? Was all I could think as I dragged myself to my feet and tried to catch up. Who would do this to innocent people?
The tall boy led us block by block back to the wooden dock where we had first arrived. As was just our luck that day, the ferry was nowhere to be found. We detoured across the road into another alleyway, where the shorter boy finally collapsed with a groan, cradling his wounded hand.
“We can’t go too much further, I think he’s losing a lot of blood,” Alicia gasped, falling against a wall and panting for breath. The tall boy bent down, groping for something in his boot, and produced a sinister-looking black knife. Alicia and I shrunk back against the wall but he ignored us, instead slicing off a long strip of fabric from his companion’s jacket. We watched in curious awe as he carefully and skillfully bound the wound around and around, stopping the slow ebb of blood. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he tie the makeshift bandage off and re-sheathed his knife in his boot. He was about to say something when a group of voices sounded off from the dock. We peered out from our resting place to find a dozen or so Enforcers unloading from a fresh ferry, this time armed to the teeth with guns and armor, a rare sight in the Plaza District.
“Great, now we’ll be boxed in,” our escort growled.
“Maybe they can figure out who set off the bomb and then let us go,” I suggested hopefully. He looked at me like I’d suddenly grown a second head out of my shoulder.
“You Medions are way more naïve than I expected,” he said, shaking his head. I opened my mouth to ask what he meant, but stopped when something caught my eye; it was a Surgo, covered in blood, emerging from the direction of the massive plume of smoke rising to our right.
“Help!” he cried. In an instant, I realized it was the same man who had grabbed us earlier. I felt a pang of sympathy as he fell to his knees, obviously hurt very badly.
“Help!” he gasped again, pleading with the advancing Enforcers. The Uniformed men ignored him, rapidly falling into a single file and marching toward the site of the explosion.
If I could just get to him, I could help him, I thought, struggling to my feet once again.
Neither of us had a chance. As the column of Enforcers passed the wounded man, the very last man in line, the one who appeared to be in charge, stopped and turned toward him. He raised his arm. A sharp crack echoed across the square, and my heart stopped. The large Surgo slumped over, no longer wounded. Time stood still.
“It was them.” Alicia’s voice sounded very small. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the body sprawled out on the street, a maroon stain spreading slowly around the head like a halo. “The Enforcers dropped the bomb.”
“The tall boy said nothing. He propped his friend upright against the alley wall and told us to follow as soon as the last of the Enforcers disappeared. We scurried across the street to the dock.
“This ferry will take you back you your side of the city,” he said simply, motioning for us to board. Alicia and I wasted no time hurrying down the grimy gangway and onto the clean, white deck of the craft.
“Will your friend be okay?” Alicia asked, craning her neck back toward the alleyway.
The boy glanced over his shoulder. “Of course; I’ll find medical attention as soon as I can.
He only nodded as an answer to my unfinished question.
I still couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of Enforcers trying to hurt people—and killing them, in fact.
“Because they can,” was all the explanation he could offer. Below us, the Ferry hummed to life and began ever so slowly creeping in reverse, back toward the civilized Solstice, the Solstice that was safe. The tall boy raised up one hand in farewell, then turned back toward the street.
“Wait!”
He turned back around.
“What’s your name?”
He looked at us for a long moment before making up his mind.
“Sam!”
“Sam! How can we thank you?” I shouted, our ferry gliding further from the dock by the second.
At this, he smiled grimly. “Don’t believe everything the city tells you!” came his shout, and with that, he turned abruptly and disappeared into the haze like a ghost.
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