Survival Colony 9 (13 page)

“Guns,” my dad said, “would not have saved us last night.”

“And do you deny further,” Araz rumbled on, “that it was on your authority that the colony was forced to remain, defenseless, in its current encampment?”

“I deny your construction of events,” my dad said, but his voice had grown weary.

“And so”—Araz ignored my dad’s answer once again and cast his voice at the audience—“while you armed yourself for an illusory conflict against your own people, you neglected your primary charge as commander of Survival Colony Nine, which is the protection of its members from a very real enemy, an enemy only constant vigilance can hope to defeat.”

My dad said nothing, just shook his head slowly.

Araz smiled as if the case was closed. “Enough talk,” he said again. “Justice will be done.”

He turned briefly to Wali, who edged closer to my dad, his normally cool face murderous. Yov and Kin took a step forward to emphasize the threat.

Araz turned back to face the crowd. He used my dad’s name, but he addressed the camp as a whole. “Laman Genn, for treasonous behavior, for dereliction of your duty as commander of Survival Colony Nine to protect and serve its people, for reckless endangerment of the colony leading to the brutal slaughter of six of our comrades, we, the leadership of Survival Colony Nine, sentence you to death by public hanging on the morning of the day following this.”

A sharp intake of breath circled the camp. Even the people who had seemed to approve of Araz’s lecture fell into a shocked silence. I was too stunned to breathe at all.

“That sounds like the way justice was served in the time before,” my dad said quietly. He looked up at the taller man with no fear in his eyes, only sadness. “Are you sure you want to do that, son?”

“He’s not your son!” Yov nearly screamed. “You’re not our father!”

The shrillness in his voice sent a cold wave down my back.

My dad directed his mournful eyes at Yov. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not.” I expected him to continue, to transform Yov’s outburst into another teachable moment, but he simply looked across camp at me, his craggy face tired and resigned.

That was when Aleka stepped into the circle. I’d been so focused on my dad, I’d forgotten about her entirely.

“This has gone on long enough,” she said. “Araz, you may have elected yourself leader of this camp, but you have no authority to order the execution of any of its members.”

“The execution of traitors lies at the
discretion
of the commander,” Araz smirked. “Lieutenant.”

Aleka had reached my dad’s side, but she didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes leveled at the colony’s new leader, who stood a head taller than her and easily twice as broad. The tips of her fingers rested on the silver pistol hanging at her belt.

“We will not become killers of our own,” she said.

“No one would have died if not for this man,” Kin spoke up, gesturing scornfully at my dad.

Aleka threw her frosty gaze on him. “We would all have died if not for this man. You owe your life to his protection. Many times over.”

Kin scoffed and turned away.

“Don’t think we’ve forgotten about you, Aleka,” Araz growled. “Where were you when the Skaldi was feeding on our comrades?”

“Where were you when a child was crying out for release from living death?” she retorted. “I looked into the eyes of a girl I loved, and I watched my own flames burn her suffering away. Don’t talk to me about loyalty to the colony,
comrade
.”

For a minute they stood face to face, hands on holsters, eyes locked on each other. No one in camp seemed able to move. Yov and Kin’s sneers lingered on their lips. My dad shook his head again, ever so slowly, as if he’d been through this all too many times before.

At last I found the will to step forward. Seeing me move, my dad turned an angry, cautioning look my way. But I didn’t let it stop me this time.

“She’s right, Araz,” I said. “You can’t do this.”

“So speaks the traitor’s protégé,” Araz muttered, not taking his eyes off Aleka. “Better be thankful you’re not up here with him, boy.”

“I
am
up here with him,” I said. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

I stood shoulder to shoulder with Aleka. My heart pounded so hard I was sure everyone could hear it.

“Always by your captain’s side, huh?” Araz said. “Even when he’s consorting with the enemy.”

Aleka lifted her chin in a gesture that reminded me of Korah. I could almost feel her strength flowing into me.

“The only enemy,” she said, “is the one who wields power without compassion.”

Araz’s hand tightened on the handle of his pistol. His face seemed red enough to burst. But finally his shoulders relaxed and his arms fell to his sides. He looked around the circle at the eyes riveted on him.

“This isn’t over,” he said in a low rumble. He gestured to Wali, who jammed his rifle into my dad’s back. “For his own safety and the safety of the colony, Laman Genn will be kept under house arrest until we’ve had a fair opportunity to discover his part in this. But I’m warning you,” he said to Aleka and me, or to the camp as a whole. “Anyone who interferes with the investigation or who offers assistance to the prisoner will suffer the same punishment. I don’t care who he is.”

“That much is obvious,” Aleka said, just short of open sarcasm. It surprised me to hear even that small concession to annoyance in her steady voice.

Araz pretended not to notice. “All personnel will report immediately to headquarters for the trials,” he announced. “This camp is now under quarantine, by order of its commanding officer.” A murmur passed through the crowd, but no one raised an objection. “Take him away.” Araz signaled to Wali, and Wali thrust his gun in my dad’s back until he started moving. The look of resignation and pity lingered in my dad’s eyes as he turned his head to go. This time, he made no attempt to hide his limp.

While most of the camp made their way to headquarters, Aleka and I followed my dad to his jail cell. No one tried to stop us. Yov and Kin tagged along too, as did a few others—Petra, Tyris, the driver named Soon. They kept their eyes lowered and their mouths shut, and my dad gave no sign he knew they were there.

At the door to his prison he turned to face the small crowd that trailed him. I still saw neither shame nor defiance in those dark eyes of his, only a profound sorrow and regret. The scar that seemed like it would never fade rested dark and grimy across his brow.

Aleka placed a hand on her lips as if to blow him a kiss, but she didn’t.

“You brought this on yourself, Laman,” she said.

“We both know what I brought on myself, Aleka,” he said quietly. “But I am sorry I brought it on all of you.”

Then he disappeared into the building and Wali’s back blocked him from view.

Aleka stood silently, facing the empty doorway. Tyris and the others drifted toward headquarters. But Petra lingered, her cheeks puffed out, her eyes blinking a mile a minute. Then, out of nowhere, she laid a hand on Aleka’s arm. She gave it a gentle squeeze before stomping off after the others, arms and legs pumping like a demon.

When we were alone, Aleka turned to me. Her eyes sharpened, but not with anger. “That was a brave thing you did.”

“He doesn’t deserve to die,” I said. “Does he?”

“We’ve had enough death,” she said. “The colony needs to come together, not tear itself apart. But I’m afraid that might not be enough to save him.”

“What are we going to do?”

“First we’re going to submit to the trials.” She held out a hand to silence me. “Compliance is our best cover for now. Beyond that, we wait. And hope. I’ll do what I can, Querry. But I’ll need you on my side. He’ll need you too.”

I made her a promise, right then and there. A promise to support her, the colony, my dad. A promise to fight if I needed to, to stop the fighting if I could. I didn’t know if my promise would amount to anything, but I knew I had to make it. Even if everything my dad had done these past few days had been wrong, I knew that what he’d said to me last night had been right. The time had come to make a choice, and there was only one choice to make. More death couldn’t bring back the ones we’d lost. More death couldn’t restore Korah’s eyes, her dreams, her smile.

I made the vow to Aleka, to my dad, maybe to myself. But in my mind’s eye I saw Korah. Korah still alive and beautiful. Korah still Korah.

12

Cast

We broke camp at dawn.

Everyone saw it coming. Nothing remained for us here but bad memories and a jagged hole in the ground. The burials we held were brief, perfunctory, as if it really was just dust and sand we were burying. Even the people who’d been most enthusiastic about my dad’s plan couldn’t wait to clear out now that his plan had so tragically failed.

Other than the burials, we’d spent most of the previous day fulfilling Araz’s quarantine order. Everyone lined up outside headquarters and, one by one, submitted to the trials, which Araz and his cronies conducted in the same room where I’d seen Petra’s interrogation. I watched people come out shaking from the ordeal, mouths and hands bloody. The old woman had to be carried out by two colonists. When it was my turn, Yov took obvious delight in tightening the clamp on my fingers, jerking the pliers back and forth inside my mouth. But I didn’t say a word, kept the pain to myself. Whether he and Araz really cared about ferreting out Skaldi or just relished the chance to inflict torment on the camp was anyone’s guess. What they did to my dad when it came his turn I could only imagine.

Everyone passed the trials. The only person Araz exempted was Keely, supposedly on account of his age. You couldn’t prove it by me, but apparently there were some perks to being the commander’s son.

Once the trials ended and Araz pronounced the camp clean, he and Yov spent the dusk hours strolling the compound, deciding what to keep and what to leave behind. Without functional trucks, the second category far outweighed the first. The empty water barrels were the hardest thing to part with, but there was no way to imagine ourselves rolling them through the desert. We kept most of the stoves and propane tanks, blankets, bandages, pots, binoculars, tools, rope, both sets of walkie-talkies, some flints, and of course as much of the canned food as we could carry. We left behind all the tents, cots, and chairs, the fuel barrels, the most battered stoves, the emptiest propane tanks. Mika’s flashlight Araz wanted to keep, but it had turned into a twisted hunk of metal within the charred circle that used to be the body of Korah. Personal items, dolls’ heads and ballet slippers, even the craziest of colonists didn’t dream of dragging along. The camp’s new leaders allowed us to preserve collection jars to hold water, but the contents of the jars they scattered to the dust and wind.

And they kept our weapons. Accompanied by Yov, Wali, and the last officer from the old regime, Araz tramped up the stairs to the arsenal, came back down with arms full. The boxes of ammunition turned out to be emptier than anyone had suspected, and the fuel for the flamethrowers had run perilously low thanks to our new leader’s own reckless shooting. He went around camp and demanded we turn over any stray weapon, then distributed a pistol to each of his lieutenants, depositing the rest with Kin for safekeeping. He seemed to take special pleasure in forcing Aleka to hand over her silver pistol. My knife remained safely in my jacket pocket, though what good it would do me at this point I couldn’t imagine. But I kept it there. For luck.

The day of our departure, I rose with the rest of the camp and did my part to pack our remaining supplies. Out of habit I checked my sleeping area, but nothing showed except the mark of my body on the dusty ground. I hadn’t seen Aleka since the evening before, when she’d walked off by herself toward the bomb shelter. My dad remained under guard, Wali standing at the door of headquarters with his rifle held stiffly across his chest. Araz had stationed himself in the front room of the same building, neither he nor Kin showing themselves the entire morning. They left the inspection to the fourth member of their cabal.

With a grin on his face and a swagger to his step, Yov strode out of the command building to supervise the exodus. He strutted among us, poking into rucksacks, throwing out items at random. The little kids almost never cried, but whatever he did to them this morning left them in tears. When he snatched the old woman’s jar and flung it onto the pile of trash, I snapped.

“Give it back to her,” I yelled at his retreating figure.

He barely turned. “Or what?”

“Or you’ll have to deal with me.”

Smiling, he returned to where I stood. A pistol, Aleka’s silver pistol, hung at his belt.

“Getting pretty tough now that daddy’s gone, aren’t we?” he said. “Maybe you’d like to go along with him.”

I tried to stare him down, but he wouldn’t blink. The old woman crouched beside us, mumbling words or nonsense more softly than I could hear. I’m not sure how it would have ended if Aleka hadn’t appeared and taken my arm.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” she murmured as she pulled me away. “But now is not the time.”

“Good choice, Aleka,” Yov called after us. “Little boys shouldn’t try to play a man’s game.”

His mocking laughter surrounded me as I forced myself to focus on arranging my pack.

They led my dad out of his jail cell after all the preparations were completed, so the whole colony could line up to see him. He blinked in the bright light after most of a day indoors. They’d tied his hands in front of him, and a guide rope circled his waist. Maybe in deference to his bad hip, or maybe out of sheer sloppiness, the man at the other end of the rope, Kin, gave him some slack. Not enough to let him fall behind, much less to formulate a plan of yanking free and running. Araz emerged after him, arms crossed in triumph. The only thing that spared my dad from total humiliation was the fact that they hadn’t tied the rope around his neck. That, and the fact that it was Kin, and not Yov, pulling it.

He didn’t look humiliated, though. He held his head high and met people’s eyes with an expression so composed they ended up dropping theirs. The worst you could say was that he tripped a little as he tried to keep up with the pace the younger man set.

Aleka was another story. As soon as she saw what they’d done to him, she charged at Araz, her pale eyes ablaze.

“This is how you treat the man who led this colony for half a lifetime?” she said venomously. “You’re a child, Araz. You’re not fit to wear the same uniform as him, much less to bind him like a . . .” She paused, trying to remember the right expression. “Dog on a leash.”

“We’ve been over this,” Araz said in a gratingly patient voice, like he was explaining a complicated procedure to a six-year-old. “The prisoner needs to be restrained for his own safety as well as the colony’s. While the investigation proceeds.”

“You’re conducting an investigation?” Aleka said.

Araz nodded.

“By departing the site of the alleged crime?”

Another nod and, this time, a smile.

“And how do you plan to collect your evidence?”

“The nature of the offense,” Araz said, still smiling, “is such that the evidence travels with the suspect.”

“Which is another way of saying you
have
no evidence,” she seethed. “This is shameful. Utterly shameful. If you were half the man you claim to be—”

“Aleka, let it go,” my dad broke in. His voice sounded as calm as his jailer’s, though cracked from lack of water. I noticed that, as with the day before, his words carried over the compound far more crisply than those of the camp’s new leader. “Much as I appreciate your help—”

“I didn’t ask for your opinion, Laman,” she cut him off. She seemed as angry at him as at Araz, or maybe she was just angry, period.

But now that he’d interrupted, she didn’t seem to remember what she’d been planning to say. “It’s shameful,” she repeated, spitting the words at no one or everyone. Then she stalked off, her face its usual mask, though her eyes could have bored through steel.

Yov appeared at his boss’s side, grinning a lopsided grin.

“That is one tough lady,” he drawled. “She send anybody to bed without supper?”

The usual suspects laughed. I wished Korah could have been there to shut their stupid mouths.

Kin handed the rope to Wali. He was joined by a second guard, Daren, another teenager who’d known nothing but my dad’s leadership all his life. Both of them seemed only too happy to drag my dad away like the thing Aleka had said, a dog on a leash. They didn’t give the rope any slack.

Araz shouted orders at the rest of us, his voice thin and husky as it floated over the compound. Yov and Kin roamed through camp double-checking our preparations. I ended up being picked to take care of the little kids. Hand-picked, in fact. By Yov.

“Querry-Werry can pway wiff da widdle babies,” he gibed.

I didn’t mind, though. It wasn’t so bad being with them, the only people in camp who knew no more about the past than me. I liked to hear their silly questions, liked trying to answer them, knowing neither the questions nor the answers mattered. How big was the moon? Where did it go during the daytime? When I was with them, not remembering what had happened six months ago didn’t seem that important, and remembering what had happened just yesterday didn’t seem so awful.

I leaned over them as they wiggled into their oversize packs. I pulled the bags up on their shoulders, tightened or loosened straps, moved an item or two from a smaller kid’s pack to a bigger kid’s. Keely wrapped his warm hand around mine. Araz appeared too preoccupied with his own importance to notice that his son was consorting with the enemy.

“You ready to go?” I asked.

He nodded. The pack on his back looked like it should be carrying him.

“Where’s Korah?” he said.

*    *    *

We marched all day in the path of the sun, but we didn’t get far. We’d always known how important the trucks were, and we’d protected them and their fuel supply like living members of the colony. Even named them, if my dad was telling the truth. Turns out he’d been right to do so. We’d never experienced a march entirely without them, and it was grueling.

People collapsed or threw up from the heat, and we had to stop to revive them with what little water we had, what little shade we could find, a lone tree or a ripple in the land the sun didn’t quite crest. I tried to keep the little kids preoccupied with stories or language games, but they fussed, threw tantrums I guess is the word for it, flinging themselves on the ground and refusing to budge, flailing at the dust as if they could pound it into submission. Nessa had to come help me pick them up and carry them, and even then, when they’d forced us to do what they were presumably trying to force us to do, they’d gotten so caught up in their grievances they would fight us off. Some would go boneless in their rescuer’s arms. It’s amazing how heavy a little kid can make himself. A couple times Yov came over and threatened them with what he’d do if they didn’t stop whining, which obviously didn’t help. And Araz was no use at all. He kept to the front of the column, his thick red neck visible between his cap and uniform collar, not turning his head once the whole time to keep tabs on the people he professed to lead.

My dad stayed at the rear of the column under Wali’s watchful eye. They’d wanted to put him at the head where all could see, but his hip hadn’t allowed it. How he was doing under the forced march I couldn’t tell.

By the time night fell we’d traveled maybe ten miles northwest of the compound. We looked back in the dwindling light, but the hill where the gated community perched had fallen below our line of vision. Some people had looked back earlier, in fact they hadn’t stopped looking back the whole day, stumbling and falling out of line. What they’d seen, if they’d seen anything, they didn’t say. I’d stolen a quick glance when we’d covered about a half-mile, and I’d seen a place that appeared as if we’d never been there: skeleton buildings standing squat against a dirt-brown sky, everything that used to be ours, trucks and tents and useless fence posts, hidden from view by the walls and the hill and the distance. Yov, seeing me look back, jerked his head and spat in the dust behind us.

“Good riddance,” he said to the spoiled sanctuary he himself had led us to. His voice bore so much spite you’d have thought the buildings would topple at the mere sound.

Our new leaders’ plan, at least as much of it as they would let the rest of us in on, was to follow the path of the river, which curved gradually northwest a dozen miles past the compound. Rumor had it that mountains rose beyond our sight in that direction, with caves and precipices to conceal us from our pursuers, cooler water and air to shield us from the butchery of the sun. No one in camp had seen this haven, not even the old woman, and the question of whether to prepare ourselves for a fifty-mile hike or five-hundred was totally up in the air. We’d always carried around a couple maps from the old time, maps so torn and patched and faded you could barely make them out, but whether they corresponded to the actual landscape no one could say. For all we knew, the mountains might not be there at all, or they might be so far from the track of the river we’d die of thirst before we reached them. Or—Petra’s warning sounded in my mind—they might be the exact place the Skaldi wanted us to reach. I didn’t know whether Araz had consulted with her, and I doubted he’d take her advice in any event.

But compared to the alternatives, I guess the new plan wasn’t all bad. At worst, it kept us moving. And maybe that was better than standing still.

It was certainly better than looking back.

As darkness gripped the land, we shed our packs and sprawled on a patch of dead ground near enough to the river to reach it in a couple hours’ hike, but not so near we’d be sitting ducks for the Skaldi. The creatures didn’t seem to need water themselves. Whatever kept the bodies they stole going wasn’t fluid. But in the early days of the survival colonies, my dad had told me, they’d wiped out whole units that had been desperate enough or unwary enough to camp on the riverbanks. People who’d forgotten the world had changed. Or who had just liked the sound of the water at night, a flow and gurgle that seemed to wash everything away.

Petra volunteered to scout out the land between our camp and the river, and our new leader gave her the go-ahead. Not that he had much choice. Everyone else was exhausted from the day’s hike, himself included. Araz had been driving a truck for the past five years, and though no better fed than the rest of us, he’d gotten pretty soft around the middle. He didn’t even bother giving orders before he staggered off to the spot he’d chosen as his command post, a bare crest overlooking the encampment’s western periphery.