Rising - Patrick Sean Lee (big screen ebook reader txt) 📗

in the street with the countless others—with Gerstam, and Darra, who will no way defile my home with his presence. Faerborn and feisty Gerstam will watch for two girls walking toward the gates. When they arrive, it is at that moment I must decide what to do next. If he hasn’t already, Darra has to be drawing up his own plan of escape, the slaughter to begin shortly afterward. I hear Sant draw in a deep breath. He stops immediately and surveys the cramped interior.

Someone, perhaps Mother and Mondra, scrubbed the floors and walls, and put everything back in its place before they left? The unfortunate remains of the door are stacked just inside, waiting to either be rebuilt, or broken into smaller pieces. The remnants of the low stool Jeren sat on when the two beasts smashed the door in have been removed; stacked neatly on the hearth, across the room, ready to be burned. The fireplace is cold and lifeless, but no ashes lie at its bottom.

Father is lying, back to me, covered with a clean blanket on Jeren's cot. I’ve no idea who brought the blanket into the house. A neighbor, for Jeren to curl up under on cool nights after his world was ripped away? On the other side of the room, our dining table, with a small wildflower bouquet stuck in a clay jar sitting atop it. Hastily arranged and set while we scoured Faerborn and cleaned out the hold of the Helicere, I’d guess.

Welcome home, Alana.

Jeren begins to jabber, knowing, he says, that I was dead. Bitter nights and days that followed. A thrashing by the cops the afternoon they came back and grabbed our sisters. I half-listen, kiss the unruly black hair on top of his head, but I am searching Sant’s face. His eyes show pain. How could a family exist here?

Yes, I know. But it was easy, considering any other alternative. We were together, and most days and nights the rain inside was much less severe than the downpour outside. Most times we were able to scrape enough wood, or pieces of smuggled coal to keep the fireplace alive in flames. And heat. We knew nothing else, and in a weird way there was happiness in this crowded room.

Father groans, rolls onto his back and pulls at the blanket. Mother is at his side in a heartbeat. When she turns back to Jeren, Sant and me, I cock my head sideways and raise my brows.

“He’ll be fine,” she says, adjusting the cover. Despite having cowered under the demands of Darra and his monsters, I still love him. My heart bleeds for him. I’m not so certain he’ll be fine, as Mother put it. The Jades beat him badly. One eye is swollen shut, purple. Dried blood mats his thinning hair. If he dies, at least it will be inside our home.

“I-AM-FAERBORN!” A deep, booming voice rattles the walls and ceiling. I hear the scuffling of feet and bursts of laughter from the children outside. Sant and Jeren rush around me through the doorway. I am exhausted, and I know without looking that Faerborn is entertaining the kids, so I move slowly to join them; see what the giant is up to.

Darra is sitting, back against the wall just outside to my left, Gerstam standing in front of him, knife in hand, relaxed, gazing over his shoulder at the goings-on ten feet away in the road. The adults—mostly elderly, who have no business during the day outside the walls, and have joined us—have stepped back nervously, encircling Faerborn and the host of children jumping up and down on his stomach, pulling at his fat cheeks, exploring the eight toes on his feet that are nearly the size of their emaciated little torsos. He tosses one child, a boy, ten feet straight up into the air. Squeals of delight. He rockets an arm upward and snatches the kid as he begins to fall. Even if Faerborn had miscalculated and the child plummeted, his landing spot would have been a pillow of fur.

I look up. It is threatening rain. Where are my sisters? I leave the tousling and push my way through the crowd blocking my view of the gates and the desolate stretch of road beyond.

Nothing.

I return, grab Sant’s hand, and walk over to Darra. He is looking up, as if expecting a ship to rupture the clouds and snatch him out of our grasp.

“Where are they?” I snap at Darra.

He shrugs, but doesn’t answer. He has that evil smile on his face that causes his brows to lower. Who knows how closely Gerstam monitored him back in the Helicere? Maybe for a second or two or three the cripple left Darra alone—to step back into the hold to see what was happening outside the craft. Maybe it was then that Darra hatched a plan and quickly gave instructions to those listening in Polit.

Maybe he simply doesn’t know. I want to slap him, but I resist the temptation. He’s a dead man once Mondra and Tereka arrive, and I figure out what…what can I do if twenty or thirty gunships suddenly appear and start firing on all of us down here?

They have to rescue their leader. My ace in the hole. There will be no shooting until he is safely away, and that isn’t going to happen.

I am just about to pull Sant back inside where we can formulate a plan that won’t get us all killed when I hear it. A low rumble outside the gates. Engines going to idle. Lots of them.

They’re coming.

"Move! Move!" I shout at the crowd again. They open a pathway, startled. Sant and I blaze through it and run to the opened gates.

Oh gods. There they are, being pulled out of the lead Skirter roughly. A column, five wide, I can’t even tell how deep, fills the entire roadway behind the lead Skirter. Mondra and Tereka are dressed exactly like I was when the guards led me into the ship a month ago. Plain, short white shifts. Barefoot. Their hair is brushed, but it’s depressingly dull-looking. They aren’t bound, and no blindfolds were put on either of them. I stop. Raise my hands outward, palms facing them.

What am I thinking? I lower them and rush to my sisters. Neither Mondra nor Tereka seems able to respond and run to me. They move slowly in hesitating, halting steps. Five feet from them I can’t help but see the dark reddish-purple lower tip of a bruise snaking down on Tereka’s inner thigh. I’ll kill them, every last one of them. But first I’ll kill Darra myself. Slowly.

Get them to safety!

I throw my arms around both of them. All of us are in tears. I think this is the most horrible, joyful second of my life. Tereka wants to collapse, but I hold her up. Not here, darling, not yet.

“Come, come, come!” I say to them. “Help me, Mondra. We have to get you inside quickly.”

The distance to the gate has grown from a few hundred feet to a few thousand miles. Every other step I turn my head back, almost expecting to see the cops gathering raise their weapons and sight on us. They form straight ranks, but hold their weapons upright instead.

Sant is waiting when we get to the gates. The crowd of adults is dispersing, grabbing stunned children as they run farther into the ghetto. Little good it will do them if the troops decide to open fire.

“My sisters,” I say to Sant. “Help them inside the house.”

The view of my home is unobstructed, now. Aside from Faerborn, who has left the children and is walking in gigantic steps to me, very few people, young or old, are still around.

And neither is Darra.

 

 

 

SIX

 Gerstam is lying near the wall where I left him not five minutes ago. He's bleeding, and the knife is nowhere in sight.

“Sant, help me!” I scream.

This can’t have happened! How could I not have seen it coming? Poor Gerstam must have stepped away from Darra to see the scene outside the gates. I probably would have done the same thing. That’s all the time it would have taken for Darra to make his move. But his hands were tied behind his back! How could he have overpowered even Gerstam?

Sant is at my side, but only for a second. He’s running past the house tucked closely to ours, pointing back with his left hand. “You go that way. I’ll try to cut him off.”

Darra can’t have gotten far. Someone else is certainly with him. If I were them—it has to be more than just Darra—if I were them I’d be on my way to the ship, but I can see the back of the Helicere and the road leading to it clearly enough. Only a scattered few Blacks are visible, racing to their hovels.

Sant is five doors down before I begin the dash between my home and its neighbor, headed for the meandering street...how far away? The layout of streets is a disaster, I rediscover. The ghetto grew long ago, but in no particular, rational fashion. Ratty fences, half of them ready to fall, separate the properties in jagged lines. I must jump or push my way through three fences before I can reach the next street. And then it’s only a guess whether Darra went this way, and even if he went south.

Think! Which direction? The Skirters and troops aren’t far away. Darra and his rescuer could have doubled back anywhere, and are even now running through the gates to safety.

“Sant! Wrong way!” I scream as loud as I can. It’s Faerborn who answers, though. Answers by plowing the eave of the roof off the house on his right in his Faerborn-haste to catch me.

“What wrong, Alana?”

Oh Faerborn. If you only knew. I stop. I am wasting precious seconds.

“Go back, Faerborn! Get to the gates. Stop Darra. Hurry!”

He seems to understand. Faerborn hesitates for a mere second or two, and then turns and bashes his way back the way he came. Oh beneficent gods, if any of you exist, put wings on his massive feet!

I take the back route through the motley array of scrawny vegetables in the yard behind ours, praying that something made them stop. Perhaps for a short few seconds before reaching the perimeter road so that the snake with Darra could cut his bonds. There is a clear path beaten through the yard. They went this way.

“SANT!”

The final fence—I can’t remember who it belongs to—is made of wires, with posts eight or nine feet apart. One of them is snapped from its anchor of ground. Rotted there. It takes me only four steps to leap over it. I am at the broad roadway, the northern wall ten feet away. The street is empty. But they went this way, I am positive now. As I make the turn and head for the gates, I see Faerborn rushing across my line of sight through them, his arms pumping. He’s gone just that quickly.

I hear the roar of his voice first. The sounds of all the underworld breaking loose a split second later. Thunder everywhere. Madness. Faerborn rushes back through the gates as I arrive. He is a