Ashes of the Fall (19 page)

Adriana tumbles on to the roof, almost rolling off the edge. I catch her as the bank begins to quake.

“This stays with me,” Adriana says, tapping the drive with her pistol. “I’m watching you.”

“We gotta get moving,” I say.

But the massive roar of the broken tree ripping loose drowns out her reply. I unclip the carabiner, take her hand in mine and stare at the ground. Spot a patch of tall ferns nearby. Prickly, maybe, but softer than the torn asphalt.

As the tree begins to fall, I yank her off the edge and we jump.

We both land hard
as the tree pitches over and slices through the middle of the bank, bisecting it like the blade of a sword, sending up a plume of dust and a shockwave that feels like an earthquake. I feel my face and my arms, covered in small cuts, but I can tell there are no broken bones.

Then I hear the screams.

“My leg,” Adriana says, the words guttural.

I glance down, amidst the trampled branches and leaves. In the near-zero visibility, thanks to the dust shot up by the impromptu demolition, it’s difficult to tell what’s wrong. But Adriana’s knee looks askew, the leg flopping in the wrong direction, like a broken appendage on an action figure. She landed on her bad leg, coming in at the wrong angle in an attempt to protect it.

Worse, there’s the distant sound of engines on the horizon. I try to get up and survey the land.

“Don’t leave me. You can’t leave me.” Adriana’s arm is gripping my wrist so tight that I don’t think I could, even if I wanted to. Her pupils are dilated into pin pricks.

“I gotta look for Sammy.” I shake free of her death grip and sprint to the middle of the lot. The bank is completely destroyed. The concrete groans slightly, still crumbling in on itself. Amidst the tangle of metal and dust, I can see patches of splintered wood.

“Sammy,” I call. The engines are getting louder. They’ll be here in a minute. “Hey.”

No answer. He’s gone. I run back to Adriana.

“We gotta go.”

“The drive,” she says. “Get the drive.” Her fingers are pointing to it, grasping for it. I pick it up from a patch of soil about ten feet away and brush it off. Hopefully it still works. I hand it to her. She looks surprised.

But I have bigger things to worry about.

I can’t outrun the bikes. There’s nowhere to hide in the immediate landscape, except the bank. That’ll be the first place the Rems search. The dead guards—they didn’t walk. I scan the area for bikes, spotting them about twenty yards away. Unfortunately, that’s closer to the growl of the attack party. I begin jogging, but then remember.

The keys.

Gritting my teeth, I turn around and race over to the downed guards, frantically searching them. I find a keyring in one of the dead man’s breast pockets. Sprinting back to Adriana, I try to figure out the fastest way to do everything. Headlights are visible on the horizon amidst the dust.

It’d be easy to leave her behind. Hell, she might even deserve it. But I throw her over my back and start to run like hell towards the bikes.

A searing pain rushes through my shoulders, begging me to put down the hundred-pound woman draped across my shoulder. She’s tall, five ten at least, which spreads the weight out in an odd way, like when you have to pick up a big dog, an old friend who’s all limbs and can’t move too good any more.

Her brown hair, tied back in a hasty ponytail, scratches my nose when I run. The keys jingle and the engines scream. I hear the bark of a firearm, the bullet colliding with the nearby pavement. With no time to set her down, I adjust all her weight on to one shoulder and throw my leg over the bike.

I jam the key into the ignition, hoping that this is the right one. Another gunshot screams nearby, hitting the other bike with a metallic
ting
. I turn the piece of metal, and the engine roars to life. Squeezing my palm tight around the throttle, we speed off into the night, the scent of torched rubber clinging to my nostrils.

A couple more shots follow, but the Rems don’t give chase for long. I hear a whistle, and the bikes trailing us up the highway on-ramp turn around. The sound of the other engines fades, and then it’s just me and Adriana atop the stolen bike, racing along the ruined highway.

I leave the bike on the side of the road next to our truck—parked about ten miles from the bank—and then I settle into the driver’s seat for a long trip back to Atlanta. Adriana sleeps in the passenger’s seat. There’s nothing I can do for her leg with the limited medical kit in the back. They’ve gotten smarter—didn’t risk losing anything good if I ran off again.

We pull into the outskirts of Atlanta around sunrise. I’ve had to refuel twice. The Circle guards wave me through after I pull a special order from Blackstone out of Adriana’s pocket. I park the truck outside AoF HQ. There’s a large fence around a quartered off city block—half broken skyscrapers and the like. Not much of a campus, but they make it work.

An AoF guard points a rifle at me from a gunner’s nest. “State your business.”

“I got a drive for Slick.”

“State your business.” The safety clicks off.

“Jesus, I’m here to see—look, I got an appointment with the president.” It sounds stupid, calling Slick that. “Luke Stokes coming to see President Knute.”

He taps his ear and murmurs something into his communications unit. Then the gate rattles open, brought alive by a rusted automated mechanism that screeches and scrapes. I drive through and park outside Slick’s building. The nicest one—it’s even got a roof. Adriana groans when I lift her out of the truck.

Kid Vegas comes out to meet me. His side part is gelled down, well kept. Like he’s ready for a big announcement.

“Always complications with you, Stokes,” he says as I pass him by. “Sammy in the back?”

“Sammy’s dead,” I say. “But I got your drive.”

“Slick will want that,” Kid says. “I mean, President Knute.”

“She’s got it.” I hand Adriana off to a guard, who takes her inside the dilapidated skyscraper. “So the Prez himself is too busy to see me?”

“Things have changed since you pulled that stunt in the plains,” Kid says. “Our movement’s growing.”

“Like you give a damn about any movement,” I say. Grift knows grift. I don’t know his angle, but it isn’t being VP of this dump.

“I heard you had somewhere to be,” Kid says, turning to go back inside. “Shouldn’t you be looking for the good treasurer? Debts must be paid.”

“Yeah, just tell the man upstairs to wipe one off the ledger,” I call to him.

Kid waves his fingers in the air and disappears inside. A guard comes over and hands me a folded piece of paper, then salutes and walks away. On the letter—stamped with the official phoenix symbol of the AoF—is an address with directions that lead across town.

Written in Slick’s hand, at the bottom, is an additional message.

Be careful out there. They still want your head.
You wanna save your new friends, you best save yourself.

It’s not a surprise.

Slick knows that saving myself is what I’m best at, after all.

I walk through the
winding, corpse-like shadows of half-built skyscrapers. Trash can fires flicker in alleyways, occasional gunshots bursting out followed by shouts and broken glass.

I put my head down and trot faster, edging closer to the center of the city—colloquially known as the Black Hole. Its fringes are the most popular and populous place in the entire Otherlands—a city of lawlessness. But past the threshold of the giant screen in its center square is a place where no one goes.

And no one returns.

That makes Black Hole an apt name—and probably why Slick and Kid decided I’m the man for the job of locating Andrew Marshwood. They could’ve recovered the drives themselves. But I provide them an essential service in this quest—the ability to grease the wheels with my skills and my connection to Matt. I also possess one other fantastic bonus: I’m expendable. It might even be better, at the end of this, if I simply die. It’s a strange feeling, being both useful and marked for death.

As I get closer to the city’s center square, I have to weave in and out of pedestrians. Most of them clutch weapons—rusted crowbars, bent knives—in their hands, ready to fight for their lives at a moment’s notice. But somehow, down here, the uneasy peace remains intact. The sounds of struggle that punctuated my early walk from the AoF base are absent here.

Such is the power of mutually assured destruction.

The hustle and bustle doesn’t stop until everyone hears a warning siren. It’s an official Circle message, coming across the city’s only remaining mega screen. Everyone stops and stiffens in place. I keep going, which gets me strange looks.

Apparently, when the man in the high castle speaks, you’re supposed to listen. Even down here. I make my way to the center square, where I see Tanner’s towering headshot broadcast on a screen over a hundred feet high. The people who were already in the square stand in rapt silence, distracted from their shopping carts, tents and retrofitted vans.

This is when I notice a strange thing: there are Circle soldiers patrolling through the crowd. That’s a rare sight in the Otherlands. The place polices itself, for the most part—only in the direst situations do any soldiers come through, according to the scraps of conversation I overheard while recovering from my knife wound at AoF HQ.

Tanner’s announcement must be important enough to demand attention. No wonder everyone has stopped what they’re doing. Defiance isn’t worth a kneecapping. I glide in behind a decaying food truck parked on the corner and watch the screen. No need to draw attention to myself by ignoring the good Chancellor’s message.

I do have one burning question, though: how does a man with terminal cancer and only weeks to live survive for
months
? After a brief preamble from Old Silver Fox about the importance of the following announcement, Tanner’s scratchy voice comes over the speakers, offering me no answers.

“My fellow citizens,” he begins, sounding as irritating as ever, “the last six months have been trying for our great nation, but I believe we have come to a turning point in our fortunes.”

There’s no response from the crowd. No one here believes that this turning point will have any effect on their fate.

“Our enemies have sought to destroy us, but we have held strong. Still, concessions for the good of public safety must be made. Transcontintental Hyperloop travel has been made impossible by terrorists bent on destroying our ideals. Subsequently, I have made the difficult executive decision to officially separate the Western Stronghold from the Circle’s purview. The disasters have made these areas a drain on resources that I cannot, in good faith, continue to allow.”

Murmurs in the crowd. Things must be bad if Tanner’s conceding the Wild West. That leaves the Circle with a much smaller foothold to play with.

“Unfortunately, despite our repeated efforts and the resounding success of the Otherlands” — light jeers from the crowd, which result in bullets fired in the air from the guards— “criminal activity has not yet been completely eliminated from the Eastern Stronghold. As such, until further notice, I have declared martial law, with myself as acting head of the Circle’s Armed Forces. Soldiers will have full authority to immediately stop the spread of discontent and rebellion until the desired stability returns.”

As if to illustrate this point, one drunk guy boos heavily, calling Tanner a fraud and phony. A single shot cracks out across the garbage-strewn plaza and he’s silent.

“If you are caught in the company of any known member or sympathizer of the Lionhearted, Ashes of the Fall, or Remnants, you will be immediately declared an enemy of the state and subject to the harshest sanctions available under law.”

It’s the first he’s mentioned the Remnants officially. There are whispers about who exactly they are—even down here, most are unacquainted with them—but I’m more concerned with his actual words. Translation: you will be put down like a dog if we suspect you of anything. I watch the soldiers move about the flickering fires, just waiting for someone else to dissent. But everyone’s learned their lesson from the first guy. No one values their own opinions enough to offer their life in exchange.

“And finally, dear citizens, we have received word Luke Stokes has been spotted in the Otherlands. Mr. Stokes is responsible for much of our current predicament” —that seems like a stretch— “and has helped create many threats to our great nation. That a known murderer and enemy of the state has gone unpunished for his heinous actions is as unacceptable to me as it has been to you. Subsequently, I am doubling the bounty for Mr. Stokes’ capture to a million credits, a full pardon, and a high-ranking position in our nation’s military. The man or woman responsible for his capture or death will be recognized as a true patriot and champion of our cause.”

I watch my picture flash across the screen. A red label beneath the shot announces that I’m wanted for high treason. Enemy of the state indeed.

The image remains as Tanner ends the broadcast with his standard line.

“And remember always—progress lies in all that is larger than yourself.”

The broadcast ends, but my unsmiling face stays. After a few minutes, I realize that it will be there until I’m caught—a constant incentive for those here to hunt me down. I shove my hands in my pockets and move to the fringe of the plaza. Most of the people weren’t watching the broadcast, so they don’t know my face. But, soon enough, they will.

As the crowd begins to thin out, I laugh grimly to myself.

Because what Tanner should have said is that progress lies in catching Luke Stokes.