I FLEE THE GUNFIRE THAT killed my brother.
My baby brother, who I helped raise, who I made a notch in the doorframe for every time he sprouted a bit taller. Used to joke he was a weed so tall his head would one day touch the sky. Now I leave him in the mud.
Each heartbeat is a sledgehammer. Tears stream so thick I can barely see. Mud cakes my burning calves. The plastic homes flash past. There’s more sounds now. More gunshots and the warbling of energy weapons. They’ve come by land too. I hear the squealing of hovertrack sleds. A fire’s started near the southern fence. I see four-wheeled land vehicles there and men with floodlights and torches. They carry guns and slingBlades.
Our lane is still quiet as I make it home. As if in denial about what the night brings. I burst in through the front door. My sister still sits at the table, wearing her new shoes. “What happened? Were those gunshots?”
“It’s the Red Hand,” I say just as the monsoon siren begins to wail from the antenna array behind our home. They didn’t make a siren for the Red Hand.
“No…” she whispers. “Where is Tiran?”
“He’s—” My throat constricts. “Gone.”
“Gone?” She tilts her head as if she doesn’t understand the word. “What do you mean ‘gone’?”
“They shot him.”
“What?”
I feel myself shuddering. Losing control of my own body. “They shot him.” I’m sobbing. My chest heaves. I feel my sister’s arms around me. Holding me. “He’s dead. Tiran is dead.”
Not just dead. Mutilated.
“Get Da,” my older sister says, ghostly pale. She grips my head. “Lyria, get Da up. We have to go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t know. But we can’t stay here.” I nod, still dazed. She shakes me. “Lyria, do it now!” How can she be so calm? She didn’t have to see Tiran’s head dissolve into fragments. She pushes me toward the bunkroom.
I find Da awake and staring at me, as if he already knows. Did he hear about Tiran?
“You know what’s happening?” I ask. He barely nods. “I need you to help me with your arms.” Tiran usually lifts him from his bed into his wheelchair. I’m not as strong.
I slip my hands under my father’s armpits. “One…two…three…” For the first time since Mum was buried in the deeptunnels, Da says something.
“No.” It’s more of a moan than a word, but it is unmistakable. His eyes are wide and emphatic. Shakes his head and repeats it, “No.” His eyes glance down at his body, then shoot toward his chair. He’s right. There’s no way we’ll escape the Red Hand with him on our backs. Or that chair in the mud. Not without Tiran.
His milky eyes watch me. They see me now. That’s what breaks my heart. He could have seen me sooner. He could have looked at me instead of draining his life away into the HC. Why now? Why when we have so few seconds left? I wrap my arms around him. I kiss him on the forehead, staying there, smelling the musk of his skin and greasy hair, remembering what he was.
With a heave, I hoist the old man from the bed toward his chair. I sag under his weight, nearly falling to the floor. The muscles of my lower back seize up, but I manage to twist my body and lever him into his chair. He lands roughly on his hip. More groans. “Hold on, Da. We have to say goodbye.” I push him into the front room, where my sister and her children are readying to leave.
Through the doorway, my sister has gathered her little ones. “I need you all to hold hands,” my sister is saying. “And don’t let go of each other no matter what. That’s very important. Stay together.” She looks at me. “Lyria…Liam’s still at the infirmary.”
“Dammit.” How could I forget him? Conn starts crying.
“It’s all right, love. It’s all right,” Ava says. Ella is silent and pinned tight to her breast, swaddled in blankets. My sister won’t be able to make it to the center of the camp and back, not with her children.
“I’ll fetch Liam,” I say. “You make for the jungle. We’ll meet you there.”
“The jungle?” she asks. “You’ll never find us in there. The east guard tower…”
“There’s trucks there,” I say. “The north looked quiet.”
“Then meet us there, at the north. Then we’ll go together to the fishing boats. We can go downriver.” A distant explosion rattles the plastic home.
“What about Da?” she asks. He sits in his chair watching us impassively.
I shake my head once.
“We can carry him…” my sister says.
But we both know we can’t. We wouldn’t make it twenty meters dragging him and the children. I look at the terrified children, then at my sister.
“Children,” I say hollowly, “come kiss Dada for luck.”
Ava understands. Her calm cracks. In the tears, I see the scared little girl who wept in her bed when our mother passed. The one I’d have to sing to sleep even though she was older.
“I don’t want to leave Dada,” Conn cries.
“I’ll bring him,” I say. “You all just have to go on ahead. Now kiss him.” Believing me, the children rush to kiss my father on the cheek. His eyes brim with tears as they dart back and forth. My sister bends and kisses him on the brow. She stays there, trembling, before stumbling back. Conn holds on to him, not letting go till his mother rips him violently away and moves them toward the door. “The north watchtower,” she says. “Be there soon.”
“I will.”
“Lyria.”
“Yes?”
“Bring me my boy.” We hold each other’s hands, a life full of wedding skirts, births, and love reduced now to a single second of fear. And then our hands are parting and the door closes and she’s swallowed by the nightmare outside. Through a crack in the plastic, I watch her run, clutching Ella to her breast and dragging her two boys along into the dark. I stay behind with my father in the hut, listening to the world ending beyond the thin walls. Some part of me thinks that if we stay here, the storm will pass us by. The plastic will somehow keep the Red Hand and their guns and slingBlades out. I want to tell Da it will be well. That I’ll see him soon. It’s the most present he’s been in a year, looking at me, knowing this is the last time he’ll see me. I kneel so that we are eye to eye, and clutch his face in my hands. This is the man who tucked me in at night. Who would sit me on his knee at Laureltide and tell stories of mining glories and pitvipers and fights. He was as vast as the sky itself. But now, he is a broken man watching helplessly as the world swallows his children.
“I will see you in the Vale,” I whisper to him, our foreheads together. “I love you. I love you. I love you.” Then I throw myself away from him. In three steps I am out the door.
Leaving him behind is like tearing a part of my body away.
My eyes sting with tears, but a cold clarity fills me. I have to get Liam. My sister is already gone. The camp’s given over to madness. Gammas fleeing their houses. Flames in the distance. Two ships roar overhead through the black sky. The rattling of automatic guns, and the occasional whine of an energy weapon. Screams careen in from everywhere, swirling and swarming around me. I sprint diagonal between the homes, weaving my way through Gamma township to the central infirmary. I collide with a man full on and spin down into the mud, taking his elbow to my face. It barely jars him. He stumbles back, carrying a child, then rushes on. I know him. Elrow, one of my father’s headTalks from years back. He doesn’t even look down at me.
Struggling back to my feet, I find the infirmary with its door locked. A peaked white plastic building stained on its fringes by mud. Waiting there in the rain like a girl in a white dress. I hammer on the doors. “Let me in! It’s Lyria. Let me in!” I kick the doors twice before they unlock from the inside and open. Three men and a woman stand in their yellow nursing livery, holding heavy medical instruments intended for my skull. I hold up my hands.
“Lyria!” Janis, a Yellow doctor and head of the infirmary, shouts. “Let her through!”
“Janis, where’s Liam?”
“In the back.” Janis guides me through rows of cots filled with terrified children and infirm patients till we reach my nephew in the back. He’s sitting in his bed with his hands wrapped around his legs, sightless and listening to the horror outside. “What’s going on out there?” Janis asks.
“Red Hand,” I say. “Dropships and trucks.”
“They’re here?” she asks. She can’t believe it. “But the Republic…”
“Damn the Republic,” I say. “We’ve got to run. Liam…” I wrap my arms around the little boy. He’s so thin he could be made of glass. His hair’s an unruly explosion of red, like mine, but more closely cropped, and his mannerisms are all hesitant, like a boy asking a girl to dance at Laureltide. I kiss him on his head and wrap him snug in the little blue jumper I brought for him. I pull the hood up on his head so his little pale face is all that peeks out of it. “It’s well. It’s well. I’ve got you.”
“Where’s Mum?” he asks in a small voice.
“Waiting for us. But you have to come with me.”
“Is she all right?” he asks.
“I need you to be brave. Can you do that? Can you be like the Goblin? When he followed the Reaper to the Dragonmaw? Can you do that for me?”
“Yes,” he says, nodding his little head. “I can.” I heft him from the bed and move to the door. Janis blocks my way.
“It’ll be safer here,” she says. “It’s a hospital. Even they have to respect that.”
I stare at her, dumbfounded. “Are you bloodydamn bent in the head? You need to get everyone and get out.”
“Lyria…”
I don’t stop to reason with her. I shoulder past and burst out of the infirmary, running with my nephew clutched to my chest. The gunshots are closer now. Rough voices yell to one another. A woman’s screams are silenced with a wet thump. I weave through the gaps between the houses, heading for the north watchtower. Doors are broken off plastic hinges, young men run about with arms full of food and tokens and HCs and a thousand things less precious than the life I carry. Liam’s little pale arms cling around my neck. Someone screams “Gamma” and points at me. Terrified, I duck into an alley and lose them in the shadows.
The guard tower is abandoned when we reach it. Its spotlight stares directly into the sky. The Republic soldiers who were there have fled. Somewhere a dog barks. My sister is nowhere to be seen. “Ava,” I call quietly, hoping she’s in the shadows waiting for me. No one answers. Then men’s voices come from between the houses behind me. They followed me into the alley. I rush through the gate. A muddy field stretches all the way to the dark jungle. We’ll never make it. To the right is the camp’s dumpsite, and beyond that the river.
“Ava,” I whisper again. The feet are closer. I pull Liam to the side and scramble into the shadows of the rubbish heap. I dive to the ground at the top of a mound and slide halfway down the other side. I tell Liam to be quiet and crawl a little back up the mound to look at the path I fled. A tide of Gammas from my township rush through the gate toward the jungle. I know all of them. I don’t see my sister among them, so I stay silent and hunkered down in the shadow of the rubbish. But as the sounds of their footfalls fade into the night, a terrible fear of being left behind fills me. I’m about to rush from my place to join them, when I see the glimmer of something near the treeline. I want to shout at my kinsmen. Save them. But it’s too late. The glimmer becomes a hundred. Like the jungle itself is grinning and baring its pale teeth. My kinsmen scream as the men in the jungle come out to murder them in the dark with slingBlades.
I flee the screams, push deep into the dumpsite. Metal scratches my thigh as I run up a mound. I lose my balance and pitch sideways, tumbling down. Crash hard into the refuse, barely shielding Liam. He’s crying against my chest. The sweet scent of rot makes our eyes water something awful. A rat skitters across my arm. I push myself up and gain my feet, cradling my little nephew, leg stinging from the wound. Insects throb around my bare calves in thick clouds, biting and crawling. Heat from decomposition pulses up from the garbage. I find a hiding spot and huddle low underneath the remains of a broken industrial washer. Liam’s shuddering in fear, small body racked by silent sobs. I set him down. My arms are numb from carrying him. Men rove near the path now, close to where we entered the dump. Their flashlights slash at the darkness.
I flatten myself to the garbage and push a dirty finger to Liam’s lips. A light beam goes overhead. The mosquitoes buzz around his face, casting shadows. I tighten his jumper so only his nose and mouth are showing out of the hood. Water from the rain slithers and drips through the garbage as the men speak to each other. The voices are like my father’s, like my mother’s, like my sister’s and brothers’. But now their tongues sound cruel, all hard and dark and sharp-edged. How can Reds do this to their own kind? One comes close enough for me to see his painted hands. It’s not paint that covers them, but blood, dried and cracking.
The flashlights move on, men speaking amongst themselves. I’m left with fear. Where is my sister? Was she found? I pray she pressed on to the boats. I don’t know what to do, where to go, so I hunch there and peer out at the dark shadows moving along the path. With the flashing of flames from inside the camp, I catch their faces. They’re boys. Some no older than fourteen, with fledgling scraps of beard on chins. Lean and gleaming with sweat. Shouting to each other, they peer into trash heaps, bent like hungry wild dogs.
Liam’s small hands clutch together. In permanent darkness, he can only hear the wounds these angry young men have carved into the night. He trembles. I brush rainwater from his face, wishing I had the power to take him from here, to stop this.
“You’re so brave, Liam,” I whisper. “Goblin brave, you are.”
“Where is Ma?”
“We’re going to meet her. She’ll be at the boats, I reckon. Since you’ve been so brave, I’ve got something for you.” I reach into my pocket and find the chocolate that I kept from dinner to give to him. I press it into his hand.
“Thank you,” he says. As he eats, I hear whispers in the darkness near to us. I ease up and see several sets of eyes catching moonlight from beneath discarded water containers. A family in hiding. A little girl raises her hand to wave to me. I wave back.
We’re not alone.
We can survive this. Somewhere out there Ava is waiting for us. We’ll go to her soon, I just need a breath. But then I smell the fire.