Carry the Flame (20 page)

The girl forced a smile. Yurgen waited for Sam and her to climb on before he snuffed the torch. Much as Cassie liked ladders, this one did indeed sway a lot, and in the sudden blackness it seemed to sway even more. She felt like she was hanging in a vast open space where nothing was real but the rope, branch, and the darkness pressing in from all sides. Like emptiness would eat her, too. Leave her hollow as a husk. Her palms turned greasy, and she death-gripped the ladder, squeezing even harder when Yurgen stepped down.

His weight jerked them forward. Not much, but it lifted Cassie's feet higher than her head, and for a moment left her feeling like she was clinging to a ceiling. Her heart hammered mercilessly. The ladder straightened.

“Ready?” Sam asked just below her.

“Yes,” she said, voice shaking.

“You'll be okay,” Yurgen said from above. “I can pick the winners at the starting gate. You'll do great.” He closed the hatch.

Cassie's stomach lurched. She gulped air and followed Sam, sliding her hands an inch or two at a time, never losing contact with the rope. The ladder swayed with each step they took.

She could not imagine a blacker or more forbidding place in the world. Seconds later her eyes squeezed shut in anguish. When Sam reached up and touched her foot, Cassie realized she'd stopped moving again.

“Do you hear that?” Sam asked.

“Hear what?” Cassie cried softly.

“Just listen.”

She held her breath, and the whisper of flowing water rose from the void. Cool, moist air swept over her, lifting the heat from her skin and opening her eyes to the densest darkness she'd ever known.

O
utside the Mayor's chamber the guard cinched Bliss's hair tighter around his hand and wrist till it looked snug as a glove. Then the bullishly built man jerked her head so hard roots exploded from her scalp. Her eyes spilled, but she did nothing to try to stop him. He'd almost snapped bones in both her arms when he pinned them behind her back, tying her hands so tight her fingers tingled painfully. Only her feet were free so he could drag her along. Though filled with a furious urge to kick and stomp him to death, she didn't dare try anything so futile.

Another guard rushed from the gloom and grabbed her right arm, defeating her last feeble fantasies of escape.

“She's going to Section R,” explained the first guard with a smile. “That's where he wants her.”

“Hey, he's got plans for her.” The new guard, tall and lean and blacker than night, hurried ahead, then backpedaled to look her over. “I
like
you.” He sounded surprised. “I like you a
lot.
You're a lucky girl.” Still backing up, he switched his attention to the other warder. “We get first crack?”

“First ‘crack'? Is that a joke?” He was white, but dark, too, from the sun. “I don't think we would be her first, would we?” He shook Bliss's head. More roots ripped out. She wept, unable to stop herself.

“What was that?” He shook her viciously. She cried out. “I missed that, too,” he yelled. “You say something? You better say something when I ask.”

“Not my first,” she managed. “Others.”

The black guard laughed. “They all say that. They don't know, do they? You're stupid,” he yelled, still facing her as they moved. “It's much better if
he's
first.”

He looked past her and she knew he meant the Mayor. Sick with pain, she still worried about Ananda, even more than the other girls stuck with that insane bastard. He might figure out that Ananda was her sister and take vengeance on her. Or he might realize Ananda was the daughter of the woman who defied him outside when the girls were taken away. Then there was Ananda's health. Would she get enough water?
Why does she need all that water? What's she got?

“I'm not sure the Mayor's really going to want this bitch,” the white guard said, hauling Bliss forward. “She tried to kill him.”

“You did what?” The black guard stopped backpedaling, waited, and walloped her in the stomach with a fist as hard as a stone-headed club. Bliss's legs folded.

“Uh-uh.” The white one yanked her upright. Her scalp screamed. “Don't make
me
work harder.” Then he pushed the black man away. “And don't
you
go damaging the goods. She shows up hurt and you're fucked. Those guys'll be eating
you
alive. I'm not taking the blame.”

“Look at her face, man. You fucked her over good.” Blood trickled down Bliss's brow, and she thought she'd vomit from the pain in her belly. “Least you can't see my shit.”

“I can wipe that off,” the white guard said. “You go busting up her guts and there's nothing we can do.”

But the black guard wasn't through with her. He shouted at Bliss from inches away, “You try to hurt my man again and I will bite your fucking face off. See how you like that.”

Spittle landed on her cheeks and eyes. She tried to blink it away. He was still so close his teeth brushed her lips, smearing the top one. She tried to pull her face away, fearing he'd bite them off. The grip on her scalp tightened.

They turned, hauling her down a corridor formed by more stone torch stands. Night might have fallen. Bliss saw no daylight, but didn't know whether distant walls blocked a view of the desert.

She did see a large cage coming up on her right, crowded with women about her age and a few years older. She hoped the guards would leave her there—anything to relieve the agony of her hands and scalp and stomach.

Bliss looked for a door but all she saw was one large wall made from the same pale bricks she'd seen elsewhere in the City of Shade, with more bones for rebar.

Bones were also used as bars in the cage, like in prisons. The whole country was packed with prisons near the end, her father had told her a few years ago. They were sitting in their camp on a dry reservoir bed when he said he'd been put in a large federal facility in eastern Oklahoma on terrorism charges, but escaped in an uprising that freed five thousand political prisoners.

“The U.S. had more prisons than anywhere on earth,” he explained. “Huge ones.”

But even all those prisons couldn't keep the richest of the rich safe, he added, because the lone renegade the government and bankers and energy corporations couldn't control was the earth itself. When they tried—and he said they tried mightily for many years—the entire planet turned into a prison.

“There's no escape now, not for anyone.” He had nodded at the reservoir walls surrounding them, and she sensed the torment of his last few words.

She felt a similar anguish now in the eyes of the young women staring at her through the bars. Bliss had never seen such ruined gazes. What made them like that? They looked starved, like they might tear off her limbs. Not just bony—everybody was scrawny—but gaunt, the sapped look of severe deprivation, of people denied so much for so long their skin seemed ready to turn inside out, to let blood—and blood alone—have its final sway.

Two of the prisoners reached for her. She saw scabs and gashes on both their arms. The black guard whipped out his truncheon, and Bliss heard a bone break, a
crack
so loud she was unsure whether it belonged to a living woman or skeletal remains. An unbearable scream blasted from feet away, and she knew the answer. Other howls followed, along with painful babbling she couldn't understand.

“Wicca,” the white guard said to her, though in a tight voice. “And first chance they get, they'll give it to you.”

“Or you,” Bliss spat back. He jerked her arms up till she thought her shoulders would explode. But all he said was “Section
R,
” like it was much worse than the cage, a simple letter that was more ominous than any taunt.

They dragged her faster, and she felt their unnerving excitement in the quickening pace. The horrors of the cage faded as a plume of torch smoke scorched her lungs. She coughed so hard her chin banged against her chest. She couldn't look up until they slowed down.

The smoky corridor ended at a walled room. Two guards with Asian facial features stepped from the sides of the entrance and opened a set of double doors. One of them grabbed a torch from a stand as Bliss was pushed into a fully enclosed amphitheatre with tiered earthen benches. Manacles hung from varying heights on a brick wall at the rear of the stage.

She made a frantic effort to back away, already sensing the worst. But the black guard who'd punched her now jammed his elbow into her jaw and smashed her shin with his club. Sharp pain shot up her leg so fast she shrieked and lost her balance. The white guard seized her throat to keep her upright. She found her footing, dimly aware that her leg wasn't shattered, and tried to move her mouth. She couldn't. The white guard yelled at the black one.

“Better hope you didn't break
that.
”

One of the Asian guards untied her hands. Manacles were clamped around her wrists and ankles. Pain receded from her shoulders and scalp, and her fingers came to life slowly. Her jaw was still numb.

The four guards stared at her. The white guy shook bloody clumps of hair from his hand and said, “Yeah, she's a keeper all right.”

He stepped closer and grabbed the neck of her shirt. She knew what he'd do before he did it, and that he wouldn't stop there.

G
unmen from the City of Shade lit a torch and started stripping cloaks and weapons from the bodies. Hunt stared at the dead for a full minute, appearing to savor the kill.
Or is he praying?
Esau asked himself.

His master reloaded calmly while the gunmen rushed to gather a sorry plunder: ragged clothes, two small, chipped pistols, a spear, a slingshot. A few flint knives. Esau wondered how the dead ever figured they'd survive, much less prevail.

The slave trailed Hunt down the dune. His master stood on the periphery before using his fingers to rake through sand around a bullet-riddled man. Then he rolled him over and checked underneath. He repeated his careful search with each of the fallen before unearthing a revolver near the fifth and last body. He turned to Esau.

“They were all dying. This one knew it, so he buried his weapon.” The slave noticed the gunmen listening in from the shadows. “For a lot of them, saving something like this,” Hunt held up the pistol, “is the most important thing they'll do in their whole lives. If their people had got here first, that's what they would have been looking for.”

Hunt stood and wiped down the revolver with the tail of his shirt, eyeing the blue steel appreciatively. Even in the flickering torchlight the gun looked like a prize to Esau. His master squinted to check the cylinder, then cranked the hammer. It sounded well-oiled, ready to fire. He eased back the hammer and slid the gun into his belt.

None of the gunmen challenged his claim. None dared, in Esau's estimation, because his master had somehow assumed command without a threatening word to any of them. The slave knew it was more than Hunt's considerable size at play. It was his master's fearlessness, as if it would never occur to the fair-haired man that others would ever object to his taking the lead, or find themselves as capable as he.

Until tonight, Esau had not seen Hunt shoot or kill. Slaughter, really. His master had systematically gunned down three of the men from behind. Each had mortal wounds in his back and his face in the sand. Their assailant was no mystery.

The slave wasn't shocked by his master's pitilessness. He had long sensed a final unforgiveness in Hunt's eyes, an unblinking willingness to claim lives for the riven Christ of the cross, God the Father's most holy creation crucified by bent men of bent means. By filth, craven and cursed. To know Hunt was to know a man driven by the scourge of divinely endorsed fury.

Driven by more earthly needs, too, as Esau saw night after night, though only God Himself knew what Hunt had claimed of the living all those times he rode from the base alone.
Boys?
The slave shook his head, but no mere gesture could cool the jealous burn in his belly. Y
ou're with him now,
he tried instead. But memories of their sex, vigorous and wild, immediately stirred Esau's body, and he said a quick prayer, not in penance but to drive away thoughts of pleasure that could point to his foul desire. Hunt wouldn't be the only unforgiving man in their midst.

What about you?
he asked himself.
Do you forgive?
He raised his eyes to the night sky.
Do you?

His master picked through the bounty grabbed by the gunmen. They made no attempt to stop him. “I want these.” He held up two of the dark cloaks.

The slave hurried to take the clothing, seeing the men closely for the first time. They had burn tattoos, even on their faces. Esau thought the scarring cruel. He rued his own black S and could not understand why men would mutilate themselves so readily.

“Did anybody get away before we showed up?” Hunt asked.

“One guy,” said a gunman with a peculiar shock of dark hair sprouting from the side of his otherwise bald head. The length was about an inch thick and hung past his ear. “We saw him take off for over there.” He pointed to a distant dune barely visible in the starlight. “But we didn't see him for long, and these assholes had us pinned down.”

Till we came along.

“Just one?” his master asked.

The gunmen nodded, though less assuredly, Esau thought.

“Because I saw two,” Hunt said.

The gunman shook his head. His odd hair brushed his shoulder. “One, that's all.”

“I saw one of these.” Hunt gestured toward the cloaks. “But I saw something that was blond, too.”

“No, I'm telling you, it was one guy
.”
The gunman crossed his arms. His pistol pointed casually to the side.

Hunt studied him openly. “Was he from the caravan?”