Everwinter: The Forerunner Archives (2 page)

By now, Jude and I are moving down the beach, though I hardly notice over my
Father’s invasion of my psyche. The object is beginning to resolve itself into a square shape, and my mind automatically begins to compare it to other objects we’ve found on this beach: small, strange, humanoid sculptures made of a hard yet pliable material; torn and rusted metal sheets of a type unknown to anyone in Krakelyn; peculiar garments, emblazoned with unreadable symbology and fashioned of indefinite materials.

Mundane things, really.

Those kinds of things were sent to my Father’s men for processing and, if deemed safe, put up for auction. Those kinds of things Jude and I rarely kept for ourselves. But there were other things too. Scary and dangerous things, according to my Father. Things that were never meant to be discovered and had to be destroyed immediately. Whenever we found something like that, and we wanted to keep it, well, we had to be careful. Coveting objects of the Forerunners is considered a blasphemy.

The first thing I coveted was a book.

Yeah, just a plain old boring book. 

Except that it wasn’t boring. I found it in a sealed container and the pages were perfect, smooth and glossy lik
e glass. It contained pictures–hundreds of them–of strange and exotic cities of metal and crystal and fantastic conveyances. Cities of the Forerunners. There was text, but I couldn’t understand it. Every image took my breath away, every page a study in wonder and imagination. The people in it looked no different than my fellow citizens of Krakelyn! I looked at those pictures and I knew my Father was right about it having to be destroyed. If the people of Krakelyn saw those pictures, there’d be no telling what would happen. We were always told that the Forerunners were terrible. But from the pictures I saw, I just couldn’t believe that a people capable of building cities so fantastic, so wonderful, could be capable of destroying themselves. It didn’t seem fair to me. But I couldn’t let my Father know that.

I burned the book myself.

Since then, I’ve never found anything nearly half as wonderful as that book. But I have kept some things. We don't know what they are half the time, and I doubt my Father does either. In the beginning, we'd take every object we found before him for inspection and judgment, destruction or auction. This didn’t bother me so much, at first, until I found something truly interesting: a curious reflective surface set into an ornate gold frame. And I could see myself in it! Jude was equally stunned at the find. Of course, we’d seen our reflections before, in water buckets or windows or even chrome metalwork, but never this clearly, never this
defined
. It was like stepping out of my body and looking directly at
myself
. This reflecting glass was special, and I knew I had to petition my Father to keep it safe, to share its wonder with others. When I watched him grind it to dust beneath his boot heels less than an hour later, I knew I couldn’t let it happen again.

A week later, Jude and I smuggled home our first artifact: the book. My
Father’s plan had blown up in his face. Did I mention why my Father gave me this job? My fascination with the Forerunners had him fretting over his only daughter blaspheming, and so when the beach was discovered, he thought that spending time around the desecrated objects of my fallen idols would help me see the light, so to speak. The ways of the Forerunners are the ways of death, remember?

Too bad it didn’t work, because...

Jude and I are running down the beach at a full gallop, racing toward the unknown object, our sandaled feet slapping against the hard packed sand near the water’s edge. The cool wind blows against the shaved sides of my head, my short red hair flailing like whips over the exposed skin. We’ve done this race a thousand times before; it’s become a sort of game whenever we spot an object on the beach.

First one there wins.

Jude is just slightly ahead of me. I can catch him up, if I really want to, but I might need that extra burst of energy at the end. Jude suddenly slips his sandals off midstride and, unencumbered, begins to pull away. I curse and he turns his head back at me, laughing, knowing his victory is inevitable. He turns back around and–

A
nd slams to a dead stop on the sand.

I sear past him, turning my confusion laden face on his, seeing an expression of pure fear
there. 

“JUNO! STOP!”
he shouts.

And I do. Sort of.

Just in time, I turn back around and see the object, a metal cube, on the sand about three feet ahead of me. I leap over it, coming down daintily on the other side, tip toeing to a stop and whirling on the spot. Jude is on the other side and he’s staring downward, but
not
at the metal box. It’s what’s around the box, pressed into the golden beach sand, that has him stunned. 

It’s what caused him to stop the race.
 

I follow his gaze and see them too: footprints,
leading away from the object, up the beach into the woods towards Krakelyn.

And each footprint has six toes.

“
Thou shalt not suffer a mutant to live
,” my Father’s voice echoes in the recesses of my mind.

PART I: E
VERSUMMER

1.

Going about my day, acting as if nothing of significance had occurred the day before, proves to be the challenge of my life. As always, I leave the Manse and make my way toward the Glass Gardens an hour before my shift starts at the sixth hour. The sunvisor from my bedroom window fell out and broke two days ago, and so I’d barely slept with th
e sun’s constant glare in my room. I'd only had a few thin sheets to hang up as a replacement. Adrenaline, mixed with fear from the day before, still lingers, but I'm groggy as hells. 

The streets of Krakelyn are a foggy blur as I walk, all my attention focused on getting one thing: my morning cup of coffee. Coffee is a relatively new thing in Krakelyn, imported from one of the southern cities. It was hard to get (
and expensive as hells) for years, but then a new passage through the southern Bleaklands was discovered that was both passable
and
breathable; a rare combination. Coffee started to flow more readily into Krakelyn. I was hooked instantly, finding I had trouble starting my day without it. My Father likes it too–another rare occurrence–considering he tends to be wary of new things. He always has to know
exactly
where something comes from; to be sure no mutant had a hand in its creation.

But he was the one who led the expedition that discovered the new passage thro
ugh the southern desert, and had been to the cities where the coffee comes from, so he knows that it's safe to drink. He tells me it grows on a vine, like a bean, but the idea seems funny to me. Not that it matters. I just thank the gods everyday that my Father and his Deacons found that passage–and by sheer dumb luck to boot. 

They'd been trying to locate a rumored land bridge across the Great Desert Canyon, finding themselves in a low lying area with little air to breathe. There are many such places in our world. We call them Bleaklands. My
Father says they are a result of the Great Cataclysm that brought the Forerunners to their ultimate destruction. It was to such a place my Father led his caravan. When the men and their horses began to black out from lack of oxygen, he called a retreat. But they were waylaid by a vicious storm, forced to seek shelter inside the canyon itself. The next days found them following the dry riverbed at the canyon’s bottom, their way out washed away by the storm. They emerged near Apollyon, a southern port city, nearly a week later. So uncharted are the Bleaklands that no one knew that the canyon could be followed in such a way before! It’s not exactly easy to map out places you can’t breathe in!

“Morning, Juno!” a breathless voice calls to me, breaking my reverie. I blink my eyes and force them to focus on the approaching form of Rayanne Nedaris, a girl I’ve known my whole life. I guess you could say that we’re friends, though we kinda run in different circles. But ever since she got on at the Glass Gardens a year ago, we’ve been kinda forced together.

I meet Ray’s russet eyes, noticing that she's had her hair undercut like mine. I smile. “Morning.” I look down and see two wooden cups of simmering coffee in her plump digits. Since when did Ray drink coffee? She’s sweating too. Did she run here?

“I got you a coffee!” Rayanne blurts, thrusting one of the steaming cups of liquid into my chest, droplets scorching me as it sl
oshes. I don’t want to take it–there’s no way she’s mixed it right. But it’s then that I realize I’ve forgotten my cup at home and will either have to go back and get it, or buy a new one at the coffee shop.

“Thanks, Rayanne,” I say, taking the cup,
“but I’m in a bit of a hurry. I’ll see you at work.” I push past the plump girl and steal down an alleyway. 

I can hear Ray’s voice echoing after me: “Okay, see you at work!” Without looking back, I dump the coffee before I make
it to the other end of the alley, coming out on Mainstreet with the cup still in hand. 

To my right, the morning traffic is abuzz with the sounds of street vendors, peddlers, performers, gawkers, and shoppers, all spread down the length of a long granite bridge marking
the entrance to Krakelyn’s business district. A farmer with a cart, laden with supplies, trundles past me. I don’t recognize the man and my heart begins to flutter. Instinctively, I look down at his feet, but they’re covered with thick leather boots. 

I can’t tell if he has six toes or not.

Stop it! You’re being paranoid!
I tell myself, driving yesterday's images of the six toed footprints molded in the beach sand out of my head. I want so badly in that moment to go and tell my Father about it, but I can’t after what happened to Jude when he touched the silver box...

“Did you hear? They caught a mutant in the city last night!”

I’m trotting down one side of the crowded cobblestone street when I stop dead in my tracks. I spin on the spot to see old Mrs. Cromarty chatting with one of her girlfriends in front of a fruit vendor, inspecting apples, oranges, and melons, placing them in burlap totes.

“No, I never heard anything,” Cromarty’s friend replies. I slip back against the flow of people and move toward them.

“Morning, Mrs. Cromarty!” I say, greeting the elderly woman warmly.

“Oh, well, hello there, Juno Quinn!” Cromarty returns. “You’re just the girl I wanted to see!”

I cringe at Cromarty’s affectation of calling me “girl” (I’m eighteen, for the sake of the gods), but I brush it off. 

“I thought you might,” I say. Mrs. Cromarty can never resist a juicy piece of gossip, especially one concerning mutants. And with my
Father being the High Deacon, well, I’m often privy to rumor. I say, “You want to know about the mutant, right?” acting as though I know something.

“So, it’s not a rumor then?” Cromarty asks, her expression wanting.

“Well...what did you hear?” I reply, acting coy.

Cromarty frowns. “Well, nothing really. Just that the Nightwatch caught one last night scrambling over the city walls. First one in
quite some time. The kicker is: they say the thing was helped by someone
inside
the city!”

It’
s my turn to frown. Someone in the city helped the six-toed mutant get in? That would be considered treason to the human race! The penalty for such an act is, well, no one really knows anymore because no one is stupid enough to do it!
And yet, I’m stupid enough not to tell my Father what I know! The Deacons would consider that treason too.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I say to Mrs. Cromarty, then pretend to have my attention caught elsewhere. “Oh, sorry, I have to go!” I slip back into the throng on Mainstreet, ignoring Cromarty’s protests that I haven’t actually told her anything.

I’m still planning on getting my coffee, but I have to make a detour first. I slip down a nearby alley, disrupting a group of boys playing Fox Eyes, and work my way toward the center of town. Judgment Square. If there was a mutant caught in the city last night, Judgment Square is where it will end up. I quickly look up at the Clock Tower–the center of Judgment Square and so tall as to be visible from anywhere in town–and am dismayed to see that it is already quarter past five. I only have forty-five minutes to get my coffee and go to work. I’ve been late twice this week already, and unfortunately being the High Deacon’s daughter doesn’t afford me immunity from that offence.

I push through the crowd faster.

Five minutes later, I emerge from a narrow brick alley–I have to move sideways to slip through it–and into Judgment Square proper. To my surprise, there is already a crowd gathered in the shadow of the Tower. A large one. Judgments are not generally advertised. In most cases, nobody knows one is happening until they hear about it through the rumor mill.

My view of the stocks at
the center of the Square is impeded by the throng, and so again I push my way through the people of Krakelyn, something I’ve learned to do well in my eighteen years. I finally emerge from the pack like a lost explorer in a dense forest of sentinel pines. When I look up, I see a man fastened to the center of the trio of stocks here, all standing upon a raised stone platform. He is entirely naked, his enormous and hairy gut thankfully covering that part of his body to which my eyes want to automatically drift. Without thinking about it, I continue to let my gaze fall until it comes to the man’s feet.