IT BEGINS AT THE EDGE of the dumpsite near the watchtower and soon spreads as more Red Hands light small blazes till a wall of fire rolls toward our hiding place. The air dances and writhes as tongues of smoke slither through the garbage, licking at my feet and legs. Liam screams in fear. I haul him up and clamber from our hiding spot. I run from the flames, but I’m hacking. Can barely breathe. Can’t see, eyes streaming with tears. I stumble over mounds of garbage. Legs sliced by metal and glass and feet sinking in mire up to the knee.
Then, faintly, I hear the voice of a young girl calling to me through the smoke. It drifts to me like nursery song. So small and gentle. And then I see her in the chaos of ash, waving her arm frantically for me to find my feet.
I stumble up and follow her voice to find a seam in the smoke where I can gulp down clean air. There’s others running ahead of us. Twenty, forty manic souls stumbling through the garbage, away from the flames, all bound for the river, where the fishing boats are moored. I clear the smoke and heave for air on the edge of the dumpsite. Other refugees stream ahead of us through the brush, going toward the boats.
Cradling Liam, I join them and spare a look back. A pillar of smoke rises from the burning dump, a smear against the orange dawn. The sun rises over the camp that was once my home.
Ahead, mothers run with children and tattered scarves flowing behind them. Young men stumble on, all earthly possessions left behind, carrying elders or wounded friends. It’s not just Gamma. Not just the collaborator clan. I rush with the masses through the green underbrush toward the flowing river. Weeds slap my shins. Mud clings to my feet. We’re so near the river. Almost free of the night when I hear a scream ahead of us. Then a second.
In the muddy plain beyond the brush, a woman has fallen to her knees. Her children behind her. Her hands outstretched, begging for mercy. The refugees have stopped, making a staggered line. I can’t see past them. Before me, an old man falls to his haunches and sits in the mud, staring emptily ahead.
In Lagalos, when the headTalks wanted to clear a tunnel of a pitviper infestation, they would light fires and force the pitvipers from their hiding places among the gears and nooks and crevasses. Now we’re the snakes. The Red Hand lit fires to force us from our refuge in the dump to bring us here. Barring our way to the boats is a staggered line of twenty young men covered with soot and sweat and carrying automatic weapons. Their hands are covered in red to the elbows. A lone woman stands with them. The same I saw kill Tiran at the shuttle. Her rusty hair is streaked with white. Half her face marred with terrible scars. The other half is worn beauty. She wears an armored vest and carries a slingBlade brown with blood. She says something to a man, who lifts his gun.
Time is stuck with us in the mud.
I push Liam behind me. There’s a crack. Something hot and salty sprays my face. I wipe my eyes, hands coming away red. I see the old man sitting in the mud wobbling now. His head strangely lopsided. His body shudders again. Only in the back of my mind do I realize metal is doing this to him. Another bullet rips through him and he pitches sideways, howling. The children shriek and try to run. Metal shreds them, kicking their heads back, contorting their bodies into a manic dance. I push Liam down. Something hot and hard punches me in the shoulder. I’m off my feet and sprawled in the mud. Cool veins of shock trickle through my arm as I suck mud through my nose.
This is not real.
This is happening to someone else. I roll onto my back.
The sounds of the guns fade as I stare up at the blue sky.
I’m rising into it like I did the first time I saw it with my own eyes. Up. Up. Toward a single silver teardrop.
Flying closer.
Closer.
The teardrop glimmers hopefully. Is it the Old Man who watches the Vale? Has he come to take me home to be with my father? My mother? Tiran?
The teardrop divides, becoming three. Or maybe it was always three. And maybe I’m not sinking into the sky. Maybe the sky is falling down on me. I hear in the distance the whisper of angry metal. It’s a ship. Three ships. They leave vapor trails in the sky. One fat. Two thin and quick. “The Republic!” someone shouts a million kilometers away. “The Republic!”
Heartbeat concussions ripple through the earth as missiles fall. Whump. Whump. Whump. The fat ship litters the sky with little sparkling seeds. The seeds begin to fall. Faster. Faster. Coming together like a flight of swallows, then splintering apart a thousand meters above us. One roars straight toward me, a hot stream of metal and vapor. It slams into the mud. A demon of metal in the shape of a man. His armor is orange. His helmet shaped like the face of a snarling canine. He lifts his left fist and points it toward the raider firing line. Sound and fury erupt. Currents of distorted air shriek over the mud. Men run for cover or melt. Then he’s gone, back into the sky, trailing a war howl through an electronic speaker. “—elemanus!”
“Lyria,” Liam says, touching my leg. He follows it up till his hands find my face. He’s alive. Covered with mud, but alive. “Lyria, are you hurt?” he says through tears.
“I’m here,” I say. I sit up and clutch him with my right hand. “I’m here.” I hold him and sob among the corpses. “I’m here.”
Something is wrong with my left shoulder. It hurts more than anything has ever hurt. Blood leaks from it and a splintering pain threads its way down my throbbing arm. We’re in a soup of broken, squirming bodies. The Red Hand are dead or fled to cover to fire up at the sky. The two bone-white Republic ships fire at the Hand trucks and landed transports. Steel men whip through the air.
It’s too much. Too loud. I take Liam away from it, following the few survivors of the massacre to hide amongst the reeds in the riverbed.
There, hunkered in fear, we listen to the battle. A dozen others survived. They flinch when a bomb goes off. But I sit in silence, rocking back and forth, watching bugs go out over the water. My sister is safe. Her children are safe. We’ll see them soon and share a smile. Liam and I will be with them soon. “Look!” someone beside me shouts, pointing up. The knight with the canine helmet plummets from the sky, trailing smoke. He lands with a splash in the river thirty meters from us. We all watch the water. He does not reemerge. I look around at the survivors. Not one moves.
He’s going to drown.
“We gotta help him,” I murmur through chattering teeth. Cold despite the heat. No one looks my way. I say it louder, “We gotta help him.” Still no one moves. “You gutless slags.” I tell Liam to stay put and I stumble to the water, wading out into it until it’s at my neck. Deeper than I thought. I won’t be able to lift him by myself. I curse and look around. Spotting a long length of rope tethering a half dozen of the fishing boats together, I wade back to the boats and unravel the rope, then press back into the depths as the boats drift apart. The current tugs at my waist like a bad dancing partner, threatening to pull me downriver. Soon the water’s over my head. I dive down, looking through the murk for the fallen knight.
I can’t see him.
The silt is so thick I have to surface twice before I find him by luck when my right foot kicks a piece of metal. I trace my feet over the armor, barely able to find the outline of the man. I tie the rope around his leg as best I can with my wrecked shoulder and kick my way back to the surface, trailing the rope behind. When I make it back to the shore, a group of Reds waits to help me, all brave and heroic after I do all the bloody work.
Ten sets of hands tug on the rope till, with a great heave, we manage to drag the knight free of the water and into the shallows.
We hunch over him in the mud. The orange armor is filthy and charred at the abdomen from where something hit him in the air. He’s a giant. Biggest bastard I’ve ever seen. His helmet alone is nearly as large as my torso. The great gauntlets of the armor could squash my head like a pitviper egg. Water pulses out of the holes in the metal. I run my fingers over it, expecting it to be hot for some reason. It’s cold and faintly iridescent.
“Look at the size of him,” someone gasps.
“Has to be a bloodydamn Obsidian.”
“No, they wear white feathers….”
“Is he dead?”
“Blast hit his generator,” an old man says. I think his name is Almor. He was a drillBoy for Delta years ago. He kneels in the mud beside the knight, running his hands over the metal. “PulseShield is off, but means he got no oxygen down there. Could be drowned.”
“We got to get him out,” I say.
“Anyone know how this shit works?” a woman asks, pulling on the helmet. It doesn’t budge.
“Should be an emergency release or somesuch,” Almor says. He fumbles at the jawline. “Here.” With a hiss, the faceplate pops loose. Water pours out. The old man pushes the faceplate back till it bends into itself, revealing the knight’s face. He’s no Obsidian, but he looks carved from granite. A red beard covers his heavy jaw. His head is bald and titanic. And a slim scar stretches down his right cheekbone. His nose is smashed flat and his eyes are small and ringed with delicate eyelashes. He’s a Gold. The first I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. The first any of us have ever seen.
“Is he breathing?” Almor asks.
No one moves toward the knight. Still gutless. I lean over the man and put my ear to his nose. Just then, he spasms. I lurch back in terror as he vomits water. As he hacks, I sink back into the mud, bone tired. Overhead, the sky is torn to shreds as more supersonic ships come from the sky and descend to save the camp.
The Red Hand will retreat, but Camp 121 is burning.