As a whistle blew over the installed loudspeakers located throughout the city, the trio collapsed heavily in the snow, caring very little about the cold that seeped into their skin. For two weeks, they had been laboring in the city, unable to escape. The Terrans had established a curfew and enforced it with deadly efficiency. The time they had chosen, time that would have been considered nighttime before, had been chosen arbitrarily. It was always nighttime in Miller’s Glen.
Keryn looked dejected as she collapsed in the snow next to the other two, ignoring the frigid cold that spread into her skin. Adam pulled out a nutrient bar, the staple of their new diet. Grimacing at the texture, he swallowed hard, forcing the rubbery food down his throat. The Terran guard nearby gave them an erstwhile glance before turning and pacing further up the street, the light on his helmet adding to the strong illumination from mounted spotlights which filled the ruins in which they worked. When he was far enough away, Keryn dropped the facade of being beyond exhaustion and the defiant look returned to her eyes.
Reaching into her thick winter jacket, Keryn pulled out a battered piece of paper. Unfurling it on a piece of stone rubble, her lithe, tan fingers traced the outline of a crudely sketched city. They had created the map over the past two weeks as they transferred through a myriad of work groups, clearing rubble from different parts of the city. Overall, they had mapped the major locations of the Terran occupation force.
“We need to get off this planet.” she said bluntly. “We can’t stay here. I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of slowly but inevitably freezing to death.” The other two nodded in agreement. “We need a plan, something the Terrans won’t expect. Ideas?”
Adam reached over, pointing to a collection of hastily drawn buildings near the easily identifiable crater. “These are the barracks they established for the soldiers. They’re prefabricated structures, the type that burn easily if given the right incentive. We could take out most of their invading force with a couple well-placed explosives.”
Keryn shook her head. “No, no, that won’t work. We might be able to take out their entire occupation force in Miller’s Glen, but what’s to stop them from just glassing the planet from space after that? No, we need something that won’t result in the entire city being destroyed… again.”
“Then we get out of the city,” Penchant suggested. He pointed out a series of dotted lines that ran through all parts of the city. “We have mapped the majority of their patrol routes and could easily avoid them. We sneak out of the city one night after curfew and find another way off the planet.”
“We can avoid the patrols easily enough, but they’ve set up sensors all along the perimeter of the city,” Adam replied. “We trip one of those and we’ll be lucky if they just set off an alarm. More than likely, we’ll be triggering an explosive that will be just strong enough to amputate both our legs as a warning to others. Anyways, where are we going to find help? From everything I’ve heard, they’ve taken control of every major city just as efficiently as they did Miller’s Glen. There’s no place left to go to on the planet”
“And smaller cities?” Penchant suggested. “They might have small puddle-jumper ships that could get us off planet.”
Adam and Keryn both shook their heads. “The Terrans glassed them all,” Adam explained. “If it was too small to bother occupying, they just destroyed it.” Adam raised his hand to stop Penchant’s inevitable next question. “And getting a ship out of one of the warehouses here will be suicide. We don’t have the access codes to get inside or open the bay doors on the roof. And even if we did, we’d be swarmed with soldiers before we got off the planet.”
Keryn stood and stretched her legs. She covered her eyes as she watched the other survivors eat their lunch meal, their clusters of groups spotting the white landscape. Where they had trudged back and forth through the deep snow, the intersecting walkways had turned to brown mush as the snow was trampled underfoot. By this evening, however, the new snow would have hidden any disturbance from the day before. When they arrived for work tomorrow, the landscape would be pristine once more.
“There is another option,” Keryn said flatly, knowing how the others would respond. They looked up from their meals. “There is another ship out there.” They had the same conversation at least three times previously, always with the same recommendation: just wait. She was tired of waiting. And, more importantly for her, the Voice was tired of waiting as well. At night, when others had already fallen asleep for the night, the Voice crept into her thoughts, urging her into action. She wasn’t sure if her resolve was weakening or if she genuinely agreed with its rhetoric, but she was starting to believe the Voice was right.
“We don’t know that the Cair Ilmun survived, Keryn,” Adam said chidingly. “If you go out there, you could be walking into a trap.” He put a hand on her strong calf. “We couldn’t afford to lose you.”
Keryn looked down, surprised to see genuine compassion reflected in his eyes. She wanted to reply, but the blaring whistle sounded again, notifying the workers that lunch was over. Keryn quickly slipped the map back into her jacket. The others stood, separating only slightly across the rubble to avoid suspicion, and began loading rocks into the back of the truck once more.
Adam passed her, heaving a large stone into the back of the flatbed truck. As he walked past her again, he paused, his hand slipping affectionately around her waist. “Promise me you’ll stay with me, just a little bit longer,” he whispered gently into her ear. As Adam slipped past her and moved back into the rubble, Keryn stood both stunned and, to her surprise, yearning for his touch once more. She stared after him, unsure of how to respond.
She lifted a few rocks absently and loaded them on the truck until her immediate area was clear of debris. Glancing around, Keryn looked for the Terran guard who would quickly separate any survivors who strayed to close to one another for too long. Congregating outside the sleeping areas was strictly forbidden under the new regime. Not seeing the guard anywhere nearby, she meandered through the rubble until she was only a few feet away from Adam. His back was still turned as he moved another stone and he hardly noticed as she stepped through the dirty mush that accumulated on the ground and stood by his side.
“I don’t think I have much of a choice,” she conceded, wanting to recapture the tender moment they shared a second ago. “Even if I wanted to go, I have no idea how I would get out of the city unnoticed.”
A polite cough interrupted the two and they turned to find Penchant standing nearby. “I think I might have found a solution to your problem.” Gesturing, they followed his gaze to where he had been removing the rubble of a collapsed home. Beneath the shifted rubble laid Keryn’s answer and her encounter with Adam fled from her mind.
On the ground where Penchant had been working laid an exposed sewer entrance.
CHAPTER 14:
Yen awoke with a start the following morning, his throbbing head sending sparks of white exploding in his vision. Even from his prone place on the bed, he knew that trying to stand today would cause immeasurable suffering. His requirements, including his meeting with the Captain on the bridge later that morning, forced him up.
Crawling from bed, his mind screaming in protest, he pulled his knees underneath him and tried to stand, using the bed as a support. As his feet were pulled underneath him, a sickening sense of vertigo overwhelmed Yen and he staggered forward, dropping to his knees. Bile rose, burning the back of his throat and causing him to gag. Fighting off the pain in his skull, Yen rushed to the bathroom, sliding to his knees in front of the toilet only moments before he vomited violently into the bowl. Yen stared in horror as he saw the water in the bowl turn bloody red, the coppery taste filling his mouth and dripping from his lips. His vision hazed, wavering as though looking through a desert mirage. Above his head, a sharp crack resounded, followed by a crash as his toiletry kit dropped from the sink’s countertop. Looking up, Yen noticed the wavering tendrils of power, larger and more powerful than he had seen them before. A single tendril pulled away from the now shattered mirror as another drew its length across the sink. Still others curiously searched the shower to his right or rolled lazily up the length of the doorway.