The Condemned (3 page)

Solitary confinement was self imposed and welcomed.

The people who got close to her ended up dead and so she wouldn’t be making the mistake of allowing anyon
e to penetrate the wall of armou
r she had built around herself. It made the stab of loneliness that occasionally wormed its way through her defences just that touch easier to bear if she told herself she was alone for the good of everyone else.

   Her stomach grumbled noisily and she set her mind to breakfast. Glancing about the alleyway in which she'd
made her bed for the night... I
t was deserted and she slipped out of the end and into the crowded street, brushing against a small man as she did, her hand slipping deftly into the loose pocket of his baggy jacket and pulling out a tattered coin purse. She slid it into her own pocket without checking the

contents and continued moving, weaving amongst the milling bodies.

   Market day was always the easiest. It was so crowded and bustling that the people in the streets were easy prey and the stallholders were so occupied they hardly ever noticed her.

   She sidled up close to a fruit stall and when the owner turned his back she brushed two
only slightly bruised looking
apples into the small linen sack she carried.
Leci repeated
this procedure at several stalls until she had obtained a small,
stale chunk of bread that was only just starting to show signs of green at the edges; not a problem, easy to brush off
, a lump of cheese and a small
plastic container
of
some milky kind of liquid. Possibly even milk
. She didn’t like to think about what kind of animal it might be from if it was.

   Returning to her makeshift home, Leci satiated her stomach with her meagre breakfast
, pausing only once to fight off the wave of nausea that hit when she downed the unknown liquid,
and went back to hiding. The rest of her 'business' could be conducted when darkness began to fall and her position here gave her a good enough view of the passers-by while at the same time keeping her fairly hidden from view.

   If the men she was looking for were around they'd hopefully show themselves eventually. The routine of moving from town to town, bar to bar in search of the men who had killed her brother, the men who had stolen from her the last piece of family she had ever known, had become something close to a religion for her. It was all she knew, all that kept her going. The only reason she had to keep on waking up. Once she had paid back Xavian for making the ultimate sacrifice in her name she could rest.

   Or die.

   Or just fade to nothingness.

   But right now the knowledge that she owed the biggest debt possible was what drove her. She would not stop looking until she had evened the score. Painfully aware that the time she had allowed herself to grieve following his death and the time it had taken for her to recover from her own injuries had probably greatly diminished any chance she
may have
had of succeeding in her goal.

   The men had moved on, were lost to her.

   She did not let this knowledge dishearten her. They were renegades, just as she was, they had no real home and they travelled ceaselessly. All she had to do was show patience until their paths crossed hers again. The faces etched into her memory would never be forgotten and if it took ten, twenty, thirty years, she would find them and take their lives.

   She was always more likely to run into their type at night, around seedy bars. She was drawn to wherever there was fighting and brawling.

   Darkness was not only the time they crawled up from the cracks of the rotting woodwork of society; darkness was also her cover, her friend and ally.

   Without realising it, she had fallen asleep. When she opened her eyes again the world around her was dimming and she
cursed herself for having wasted the day; she tended to sleep for only
an hour or so
at a time, using the night as a cover for her hunting and the daytime to quietly observe, stalk her prey, resting mostly only during those dead hours between night and dawn. Succumbing to weariness was like throwing a day down the drain, it was unrecoverable and though she had an endless supply of empty, lonely days stretching out in front of her, it was still annoying to have lost one.

   She started to move and then paused, suddenly alert. Something wasn't right. She didn't know what, just... Something.

   Leci was still, her head tilted to one side as she strained to listen for any sound that might throw light on the feeling of wrongness, the sensation that something was out of place.

   Her eyes adjusted to the gloom and she swept them across the narrow area. Her breath was shallow and calm as she attempted to keep from panicking, the hairs on the back of her neck prickled and she flexed and unflexed her fingers as the palms of her hands became clammy with nervous sweat.

   She moved to take a step forwards but before she could a hand shot around from behind her and slid over her mouth, clamping hard on her face and preventing her from screaming. A second arm instantly snaked around her chest, pinning her arms to her sides before she could reach for her knife. Her assailant pressed her close to their body, minimising her
movement. She struggled, trying to kick at whoever held her, trying to bite the hand over her mouth.

   Before she knew it she had been turned around and thrown back against the wall of the alley. She reached for her knife but it was knocked quickly out of her hand. She finally got a glimpse of her attacker when he leant in close to her face, his breath warm and foul on her cheek.
He was a stranger to her, but she knew the look in eyes as well as she knew her own name.
She whimpered and tried to press herself back against the wall.

   He laughed and she was taken over by indignant rage.

She knew what he was going to do and she knew she couldn't stop him.

   But it wasn't fair!

   She'd done nothing to deserve this and there was nobody here to protect her, to watch out for her.

   The anger inside of her boiled at the injustice of her situation and for a brief moment a flash of red light blinded her, sweeping over her vision in an angry wave. When it cleared she was unable to comprehend the scene before her.

The man was screaming, writhing, he had good reason to be; he was engulfed in a ball of fire and he tried desperately to put himself out with his hands, which did nothing, since they were also ablaze.

   Leci cowered in a corner of the alley. He didn't take very
long to stop screaming but until he did she pressed her hands to her ears, desperately trying to shut out the sounds. He fell into a twitching, smouldering heap on the floor, the occasional whimper or agonised
moan
coming from the charred mess until eventually that stopped too and he
just lay still. L
ay dead.

   Without thinking, slipping into autopilot mode and allowing the ‘fight or flight’ defence mechanism to kick in and take over for her, Alecia recovered her belongings from her
shelter and fled the alleyway. H
er thoughts were a jumbled, confused mess. Where had the fire come from? Who had killed the man? Where had they gone?

   In her confusion she ran blindly until she was out of breath and could run no further. She slid into the darkened doorway of an abandoned building and slithered down the wall to the ground, clutching her linen sack to her chest. It was only then that she realised she was hurt. She stared down at her blistered and burned hands with a mixture of incomprehension and awe...

   What had she done?

Chapter 3

Dragging the back of her hand across her eyes in an attempt to clear them of the stinging combination of dirt and sweat didn't really do any good, not when her fists were as grimy as her face and her palms were slick and clammy. She wiped them quickly on her pants and returned them to the reins of the horse she'd stolen three towns back.

   Hiding and running was the way she'd
managed to survive
for most of her life but it seemed she'd reached a point where neither was going to be enough to keep her alive any longer. The men she had been fleeing from over the past three days just wouldn't let up, wouldn't give in and she was getting too exhausted and maybe just a little too desperate to evade them for very much longer.

   Accompanied by the worry of her pursuers she was also wrought with the mixed emotions brought on by the events that she was certain had led to the need for her to be running for her life in the first place. Her hands ached and the blisters caused by the burns oozed constantly. She was fairly sure they were infected, but that was the least of her worries right now.

   She understood that she had set the man on fire, knew that
she had killed him and that she was being chased because of what she had done.

She just couldn't fathom how or why and her confused mind drew a protective blank, urging her not to think, just to run… Thinking could be done later, when she was safe.

If she was safe.

#

Three days earlier:

She had been nestled in the empty doorway only moments when the shouting had started; a woman's scream followed by the raised voices of men and then the commanding tone of what she had known must be an Official taking control of the situation.
  
The body had been found.

  
She cowered, relying on the shadows to keep her presence hidden and praying she hadn't been seen escaping the alleyway. Closing her eyes tightly, trying to curl her body into the wall, make herself as small and invisible as she possibly could. She was so occupied with convincing herself she wouldn't be found that she didn't hear the man approaching, didn't know he was there until she was grabbed roughly around
the arm and hauled to her feet.

  
'Here! I got her! She's here!'

  
The man's glee at being the one to locate her distracted him slightly from retaining his prize and she slipped with relative ease from his grasp, leaving his dismayed yell behind her as she sprinted blindly through the streets, the footfalls of those who had given chase ringing in her ears, pushing her onwards with growing urgency.

She was in trouble, big trouble.

  
The majority of the crowd dispersed after only a short chase. The thrill of a kid being hunted through the streets could only really entertain for so long and once she'd cleared the town and moved into the desert she'd stopped being of interest to the majority, it was too much like hard work to leave the comfort of their homes and lives just to grab a bit of excitement.

  
One man tracked her doggedly, a small object in his hand, held close to his face, she glanced over her shoulder once and saw that he looked to be speaking into it. From what he was wearing and the rifle he carried, she guessed he was the Official who had originally taken over the situation and had stuck with it since. The gadget, she could only assume was a radio with which he was calling for aid...

#

She had managed since then to dodge the one
s who had responded to his call and later
the ones who had replaced them when they needed a rest from the pursuit. She had avoided running into the roadblocks that had quickly been set up outside the larger towns.

   After her first night on the run she'd soon learned to stay away from the bigger places altogether. The smaller towns offered some protection in that they allowed her to lose herself am
idst
crowds of people and in dingy back alleys for a small amount of time. The larger places were dangerous, teeming with guards who had already been told to watch out for her.

   Instinct told her that the man she'd killed had been a nobody. They weren't searching because of
who
she had killed. They were after her because of
how
she had done it and this confused her because she didn't understand what had happened and had no idea why it caused such an urgent reaction.

   She was torn at times between being desperately afraid of being caught and what would happen if she were, and alternately finding herself terrified of... well, of herself. What had she done?
How
had she done it? What was she, some sort of a monster? Maybe she ought to give herself up, maybe
she wasn’t supposed to be living free in the general population when she was some kind of freak. Once or twice she swayed towards this thought, almost stopped, almost handed herself over but was prevented each time by a small voice in her that balked at the injustice of handing over her freedom for something that she wasn’t even responsible for. She hadn’t asked for this, why should she have to pay for it?