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by Jaymin Eve
I really need to think things through more often.
There was a beat of dead silence, before one of them groaned. Aros’s words were far less smooth than usual. “I’m out, guys.”
The sound of steps and then a door shutting followed. I knew I should roll over and get back to my feet, but now that I’d managed to make a fool of myself for the hundredth time in front of them, I really didn’t want to move. My ass was showing, but nothing else. Which seemed like something I could deal with.
Something warm draped over my body, and I lifted my head to find Siret crouched right beside me. “I thank the gods every single sun-cycle that you tripped into our lives, Soldier.” His smile was so bright, like he was on the verge of laughing. “But you really need to get dressed now, otherwise Chaos might get his wish.” He stood and was almost out of the room when he turned back and said, “Move that perfect ass. You have one click or I’ll be back to dress you myself.”
He was gone then, and the room felt so empty without them in it. I pulled myself up from the bathroom floor, praying to the gods—except Rau, that asshole was getting no prayer from me—that the floor in there was cleaned by a super-dweller like Emmy or Atti, and not a lazy, face-planting dweller like me.
Stumbling across to the pile of clothing left by the Abcurses, I found clean sets of everything I usually wore. Underwear, dark fitted pants, and a simple black shirt. My boots were sitting a little further away; I pulled them on when I was dressed.
I pushed the door open to find the Abcurses lined up and ready to get out of there. I caught Coen’s eye, since he was standing closer than the others. His gaze dropped from my face for a moment, settling on my chest and then flicking lower, before he quickly pulled his head up and stormed off down the hall. He really needed to stop looking at me like that. I was kind of regretting the nudity now, because my legs were a little too weak. It wasn’t good to have weak legs right before a kick-ass mission. Not that I had any experience with kick-ass missions. But … I assumed.
“Let’s do this,” I announced, filled-to-the-brim with a confidence that didn’t really make sense, since I had no idea what we were actually doing.
I knew that we were going to hunt down Elowin, and that she was going to wish she’d never messed with me on account of the five badass sols apparently hell-bent on defending any threat to their pack—a pack that I was now a part of. But that was where my knowledge reached a bit of a hurdle, because I didn’t know how we were going to get our revenge, and I didn’t even know if it would be possible. The boys weren’t normal, but they weren’t gods, and Elowin was older than them. Older—with more experience, and enough of a brain to get herself out of Blesswood. Just in case.
Maybe she was trying to draw them out. Maybe they also presented a threat to her natural order of things. Maybe she was pissed at them for dragging me out of my place and standing me above the dwellers; for excusing me from the duties that she had given me, and refusing to accept the repercussions of their actions.
Maybe … shit, maybe this was her revenge-plan.
“Her who?” Yael asked, as the others spun around and strode off. He must have been assigned Willa-duty.
“Elowin,” I said, hurrying to catch up with the others. “What if this was her plan all along? To draw you guys out of Blesswood—to get revenge on you for upsetting the hierarchy here at the academy?”
“What, and ambush us with a couple of sols?” Rome shot over his shoulder, flashing me a rare grin. He clearly found the concept amusing, so I shut up about it.
“Could you guys maybe stop hearing my thoughts?” I asked, only just realising that Yael had questioned something that I’d said to myself. “It’s bad enough that you’ve all seen me naked, and that you’re keeping the poor pieces of my soul prisoner—do you really need to butt into my private conversations too?”
“Firstly, it’s your own fault for talking to yourself so much,” Siret countered as we hurried through the abandoned hallways. “Normal people aren’t constantly speaking to themselves like they’re actually expecting an answer. Not that you should change it. It’s damn entertaining.”
I scoffed, choosing to ignore him. The anxiety was beginning to claw into me as the streaks of dawn sunlight began to flicker through the windows. I had felt some safety in the darkness, but now I was afraid that the world was waking up. Or, more specifically, that the gods were waking up.
“And secondly,” Aros added, glancing over his shoulder at me before following Rome up the staircase ahead, jumping four steps at a time without even a puff in his breath, “we aren’t keeping your poor soul prisoner. It’s keeping us prisoner.”
Yael fit his hands around my waist, pulling me off my feet as he jumped up the stairs after Aros, setting me down again at the top. Coen and Rome were pulling ahead again, since I was holding the other three up, but they paused at the archway leading outside, waiting for us to catch up to them.
“And thirdly,” Yael pushed low on my spine, encouraging me to move faster, “it’s not like we tied you down and ripped all your clothes off. You chose to be naked. It’s your thing. You have something against clothes.”
“I do not!” I countered, falling to a stop and holding up my hand to catch onto Coen’s shirt so that he wouldn’t immediately go bounding off again like the most annoyingly agile giant in all of Minatsol. “And you might as well have tied me down and ripped my clothes off! You should have stopped me. I’m not the responsible, intelligent super-sol around here. I make bad decisions. I’m a dweller. We have flawed minds like that.”
“What the hell are you four talking about?” Coen groused, gripping my wrist and untangling his shirt from my fingers.
“Can’t remember,” Siret said, completely deadpan. “My mind is stuck on that last visual.”
“Pact,” Rome grunted, flinging out an arm and punching Siret right in the stomach.
Pact, I thought derisively. Now I was angry again, because they’d reminded me of the stupid thing, and because they were talking about it right in front of me, even though I wasn’t supposed to know a thing about it. It made me wonder how many other things they spoke about right in front of me, assuming that I was too dumb to understand. Which … actually would have been pretty accurate, because I hadn’t picked up on any other hidden meanings yet. I realised that they were all staring at me, then, and I squared my shoulders, yanking my wrist out of Coen’s grasp and striding right past him. He grabbed the back of my shirt as I swung my leg out, ready to take another defiant step, and I glanced down … at the staircase. A staircase I definitely would have tripped down, because I hadn’t noticed that there was yet another one right there in front of me.
“Why the hell is there a staircase going down?” I muttered, like it was the staircase’s fault that I’d almost fallen down it. “We just climbed up, and now, immediately, we’re going down again? This academy makes no sense. This is a stupid academy. You’d think with how blessed it is and how all the best and most sacred sols come here, and what with the gods visiting and everything—”
“Can I kiss her just to shut her up?” Rome grumbled, brushing past me.
Nobody answered him, which was good, because I would have been forced to punch them in the face to defend my honour—if honour was a thing that I had. I would have punched Rome for saying it in the first place, but I didn’t want a broken hand. It was bad luck to break your hand before a kick-ass mission. See? I was learning so much already.
“Come on, Rocks,” Yael re-captured the wrist that I had freed from Coen, his tone sombre, as though he had taken Rome’s question as a threat of some kind.
Evidently still on Willa-duty, Yael pulled me down the stairs and we were running again—except faster, this time. Rome led us to a small, cobbled pathway which wound a crooked path along the side of the academy, eventually leading us to the very front. To the courtyard where I had first encountered Coen and Siret. The memory seemed … odd. I couldn’t quite piece together the version of me who h
ad dropped to the ground a mere click before a bolt would have pierced her chest with the version of me that was now running alongside the five arrogant sols who had become, somehow, the most important people in the world to me.
Not that Emmy wasn’t important. Emmy was family. But those Abcurses? They were … they were the missing piece. It was like coming home. I wouldn’t call them family, the way Emmy was family, but I belonged with them, and they belonged with me. It was that simple. We were six shades of weird, all stitched into the same cloth, and without even one of us, the whole thing would unravel.
But … I still had to file away a reminder in the back of my mind that it ended there, as per their preference. We weren’t ever going to be anything more. Not that it would even be possible. Not with one of me and five of them. And I was thinking about this again … why?
We passed through the courtyard and started down the long line of steps that led back down to the water. I almost expected the giant, floating platform to come and take us away, but instead, Coen turned off to the side, following a wooden boardwalk that edged the water.
“We’re not taking the platform?” I called out.
Siret, a few steps in front of me, snorted. “The barge? No. They save that for dwellers and bullsen.”
Wow. Ouch.
“Wait, how are we getting across the water, then?”
“Train,” Aros answered, pointing in front of us, his arm raised almost to the line of the horizon.
I glanced up, taking in the tall, thin bridge that stepped all the way over the water, and then seemed to go on and on … even over the land. I had no idea what a train was, but if that was a train, then I would have actually preferred the bullsen barge. I could see gaps in the steel, like it had no proper space to walk across the bridge, only steel rods and steel bars and steel bolts. The gaps were massive, almost too big to jump over. I had always thought the sols were a little too obsessed with showing off their bravery for the gods, but this was something else entirely.
“That can’t be safe,” I muttered, just loud enough that the Abcurses might hear me. I didn’t want to be the wimpy one of the group, but I felt it needed to be said.
“Just you wait,” Aros promised, his lips curling into a smile that immediately sent my mind spinning.
He’s talking about the train, I had to remind myself.
His golden eyes momentarily darkened, since he had clearly heard that last thought, and I coloured, quickly turning my head away and pretending the moment never happened. The others didn’t react, so it was relatively easy. As we walked along the boardwalk, I worked on trying to muffle my inner dialogue. It had proven impossible to stop the thoughts before they formed, so I needed a new technique.
Five, four, three, two, one. I visualised the numbers, counting them out over and over again. It was something that Emmy used to make me do when I woke up from a nightmare. She’d say, ‘Count backwards from five, Will, and take a deep breath with each number. By the time you get to one, everything will be okay.’
Five, four, three, two, one.
Five, four, three, two, one.
Five, four, three, two—
The sol in front of me had stopped walking, and I smacked into him, bouncing backwards. I didn’t go far, though, because Yael had been walking right behind me. I blinked my eyes up, rubbing my face. Rome turned around, staring down at me. The others had stopped, and were similarly staring.
“What?” I demanded, looking back down at myself. I was still clothed.
“You were calling out to us,” Aros supplied.
I waved a hand in the air. “Just counting. Proceed.”
They didn’t proceed. Probably because I was ordering them to and they’d never taken orders from a dweller before. Whatever. I started walking on my own, heading toward the big, steel train. Someone fell into step beside me. I didn’t glance over, but then the back of my shirt pulled tight across my chest, and my forward motion halted. Four of the Abcurses passed me, which left one behind me, holding me back.
“Five,” I grumbled.
Siret chuckled, releasing my shirt, and we started walking again—this time at the back of the group. “It’s not that we don’t like watching you walk in front of us, Soldier—especially now that we can visualise you without clothing … but you have no idea where you’re going.”
I was about to open my mouth and declare that there was only one possible direction to walk in, when Coen suddenly changed direction, splitting from the main boardwalk and beginning to climb a steep set of stairs that seemed to lead to the steel train. I shut my mouth, then, and followed. Halfway up, I started panting, which was actually pretty surprising since I’d tackled almost five flights of the rickety wooden stairs that stepped up the side of the mountain.
The higher we climbed, the faster I fatigued. “Is the air harder to breathe up here?” I huffed out, not caring who answered.
“Yes,” was the reply shot back from what sounded like all five of them.
Well, okay then.
Finally, I could see the end of the staircase approaching; I dragged myself up the last few steps on hands and knees, collapsing onto the platform. My face felt hot and flushed, my breathing was ragged, and my hair was falling in messy curls around my bent head. This was it: the place where I finally met my end. Luckily, I seemed to have a penchant for nudity, because I was about to become a Jeffrey.
Heavy black boots stepped into my line-of-sight and I was picked up and placed on my feet by Rome. “You’re not going to die; just give your body a few clicks to adjust to the altitude.”
My wheezing did seem to be improving slightly, the stabbing pains in my lungs abating. “Why did they … build this damn thing … so freaking high, if the air is so bad up here?”
Rome nudged me forward, pushing me toward his brothers who were nearby, standing on some wooden planks beside a huge metal beast. Holy god monsters. What the hell was it? Was this the train? Because it looked like a metal monster and I was pretty certain that it was staring at me. I was pretty certain that it wanted to eat me. I was pretty certain—once again—that I was about to die.
Rome shocked some of the fear out of me when he answered my previous question. “They built the train platform closer to the gods, Willa. Everyone wants to be closer to the gods.”
I still wouldn’t take my eyes from the train-monster, but I did manage to murmur back, “Someone should tell those idiots the gods live at the end of a dingy cave.”
Siret, who was close enough to hear that, laughed. “That was just the dingy back entrance, the other one is much nicer. Of course, very few will ever get to see that.”
I definitely wouldn’t, that was for sure. Unless of course they rolled out the welcome wagon for the Jeffreys, lured them in with a false sense of shiny awesomeness, and then once they got them inside it was all about the mind-washing, shaved heads, and degrading, ugly skin-clothes.
“You know they aren’t all called Jeffrey, right?” Yael had apparently picked up on pieces of my inner chatter, and was once again amusing himself with what he had heard. “Last time we were there, there was definitely a Bob and a Linda helping out.”
“Sandy and Mitchy, too, if I remember correctly,” Aros added.
Seriously … Now this was something that was going to steal my full attention. “How is it that you five know so much about Topia? Like you even know the names of the servers?”
They had far too much knowledge for a bunch of rebels who occasionally broke through the dingy back entrance into Topia.
Yael just shook his head at me, that damn amused smile still on his lips. “We have friends in Topia. We know how to cultivate relationships. All of which will help to keep you safe, Willa-toy.”
Blah, blah … sounded like a whole lot of deflection, which was something that worked very well on me. Deflection and distraction. Which happened then as the train-monster let out a loud whooshing sound, and steam suddenly filled the air above us. And I was back to staring at the bea
st. It looked like a massive, metal furline—one of those fuzzy, cylindrical-shaped bugs, with way too many creepy little legs. The train-monster had way too many legs too, but they were more like hollow metal wheels, hooking over the metal tracks that ran along the base of the bridge. Its body was hairless, too, the shape long and bulbous, with carts scattered back along the path which led out over the water and into the distance.
“Come on, Soldier.” Siret placed his hand on the small of my back, pushing me toward the door which was now open on the second carriage. “Time for a little trip into Soldel.”
My breath caught in my throat and I wondered if the air had gotten even thinner all of a sudden. There were three small steps leading up to the door, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what I was going to find inside.
“This is not natural.” I tried to backtrack, but Siret wouldn’t let me move an inch. “Like how does it move? Why is no one driving it like the carts? Why are no bullsen pulling it like the carts? Can’t we just take the damn carts?”
Arms wrapped around me and before I got a single answer to my very important questions, I was hauled up and into the dark interior. My shriek was stuck in my throat, but that didn’t stop my panicked hands from clawing at whichever sol held me.
“Pain will get you nowhere with me, dweller.”
Coen’s low, growly voice was enough to have my hands calming. My body calmed too. In fact … I felt downright calm as he strode with me down the cart, dropping me into one of the chairs which spanned along each side of the carriage. Yael smirked at me as I sat down, indicating that my sudden calmness had much more to do with his sneaky Persuasion than my own adaptability. A huge window stretched along the wall beside me, and I was gifted an absolutely jaw-dropping view of the valley below. And … wow, Blesswood was huge. Despite having been there for a few dozen sun-cycles now, I’d had no idea that it was that size. I certainly had not explored even a small percentage of it. But I had been to Topia, so I was officially the most well-travelled dweller in the world. Unless you counted the Jeffreys.