Wind-Scarred (The Will of the Elements, Book 1) (6 page)

Ezra woke up groggily as the door to his
holding cell opened.

“
Come with me,” grunted a uniformed DOLT officer. So he was in
custody. Well, at least whoever the other people were, they'd have
to go through DOLT to get to him. He climbed to his feet slowly,
muscles aching.

Mental note: avoid electrocution in the
future.

He followed the guard
through the building, where people in uniform were moving about
briskly and efficiently. The guard left him in a room with a table
and two chairs facing each other across it. He walked around the
small room warily. Five minutes later, the door opened to admit a
hard looking man in his early forties, a public workspace hovering
translucently before him. He gestured to the chair on the far side
of the room. “I'm Lieutenant Jeffries, a detective for the
Department, and I'd just like to have a quick word with you before
you go on your merry way. Have a seat,
Mr.
Hawkins.” He managed to convey a
tremendous amount of disrespect in the slightly emphasized
honorific. Ezra sat down.

Jeffries touched the table, which began
displaying holographic depictions of the state in which Ezra had
left the museum. They sat in silence and watched the pictures of
broken glass and overturned display cases scroll by.

“
What were you doing in the university district tonight, Mr.
Hawkins?”

Ezra blinked. Surely Miss O'Donnell had
already told them this. “I was setting off a glider for an
experiment.”

“
T
hat's funny, because no-one saw a
glider being launched from anywhere near there tonight at all. Do
you maybe have a different story you'd like to try?”

“
Nooo, that's why I went there. I took a shuttle to higher
ground but I-”

Jeffries slammed his hand down on the table,
killing the images. “Don't screw with me here, kid. We have records
of your wormhole travel to the plaza. We know you went to the city
Center with a large, unmarked package. We know you went back into
the inner workings of the space station wormhole generators and
didn't come back out and we know that you had several generators
turned off tonight for 'inspections.'” He made quotes in the air
around the word. “We know you had a radiation badge in your pocket.
What were you testing Ezra? Now we have several wormholes that have
been unlinked from the network, and a package that was not on your
person when you were brought in that we cannot find anywhere in the
Sanctuary Center or the Conservatorium, the only two places we can
reliably put you tonight. What was in the package?!” The
detective's face has turned red as he practically shouted this out
at Ezra.

“
It-it was just my glider.”

“
Okay, you want to play it that way, that's fine. And where is
your 'glider' now?”

“
Back in my lab, assuming my experiment went fine. It may still
be out somewhere past the barrier, and then I'll have
to-”

“
Wouldn't that just be convenient? We're already getting a
warrant for your home, so we'll know soon enough. A package that
no-one knows anything about, that you drag halfway across the city,
and now it's just gone. What did you take from the museum Ezra?
We'll find out eventually, but things'll go a whole lot smoother
for you if you just some clean now.”

Ezra stared at the man in front of him. He
didn't understand what was going on. “What are you talking about? I
didn't take anything from the-”

“
Ah-ha! So you left it there, is that it? Just going to mess
around with the ports, maybe have a little fun at everyone else's
expense? You freaking Legacies.” The man scowled in disgust. “You
think that just because your mommy or daddy had one idea that now
you're god's gift to the Sanctuary. Well, let me tell you, you're
all a worthless bunch of leeches, keeping us down
under-”

“
Excuse me?” Ezra's voice had taken on a cold, quiet tone.
“What did you say about my parents?”

“
Oh, did I strike a nerve there Mr. Hawkins? Maybe you were
sabotaging the space station wormholes. A little revenge for mom
and pop. Well, I hate to say it, but we ruined that plan. We had
those shut down the moment we heard you were running
loose.”

“
My parents were heroes.” Fury was building in Ezra. He
clenched his teeth and continued. “You will take back what you said
about them.”

“
Or what? You wanna add assaulting an officer to your charges?
Go ahead, be my guest, tough guy.” Jeffries sneered, sticking his
chin out across the table. “Take your best shot. If you ask me,
the
Millennial
explosion was the best thing to happen to the world since
Founding. Opened up all those data banks to the public, like they
should be. Only one real problem, and he's sitting right in front
of me.”

Ezra's hands balled into fists and he
started trembling with rage. Jeffries flashed him a malicious smile
and whispered, “Go on Ezra, do it. I always thought you Legacies
were a bunch of pansies. Prove me wrong.”

“
That will be quite enough, Mr. Jeffries.” The door to the room
slid open, revealing a slight, unimpressive man with short,
unimpressive medium blonde hair swept back from a widow's peak. The
dark glasses that obscured his eyes and well-tailored suit
practically screamed 'government'. Jeffries jerked up from where he
had been leaning over the table.

“
This is a legal interrogation over a matter of Sanctuary
security. I'm going to have to ask you to leave Mr...”

The man smiled slightly. “My name really
isn't important here.” He pulled up a virtual document with the
Chancellor's seal on it. “However, according to the Chancellor, I
will be taking over this case.”

Jeffries snarled as he seized the document
and angrily scanned it, eyes lingering on the signature at the
bottom of the page. He turned furiously back to Ezra, leaned back
over the table and said in a low voice, “This isn't over, Mr.
Hawkins. I will find out what you are up to, and I will see you
burn for it.” He whirled and glared at the other man in the room
before storming out.

The slight man sighed and walked to the
door, locking it shut. He then went and checked the small bump that
denoted the camera on the wall. “Ah, I see he already disabled it.
How thoughtful.”

Ezra stared at the man who had just come to
his defense and wondered if he would have had a better chance with
Jeffries. He was clearly not DOLT. That really only left one group
of people who knew where and who he was. If that document was
legitimate, it meant that they were backed by the Chancellor. He
had a sudden sinking feeling as he realized that he wasn't getting
out of this.

“
Ezra James Hawkins. Named for your grandfather and your
father, I believe. You've had a rather interesting Founder's Day.
Slipping away from home and sneaking up to the space elevator.
Flying a glider out of a sector where you had already told DOLT you
would be doing it. An admirable display of competence and
resourcefulness, by the way. Setting a wormhole through a wormhole
and documenting evidence that the world outside is not only
inhabitable, but inhabited. Sneaking into and back out of a secret
base. Granted, it was mostly empty due to your earlier endeavors
but still, quite the accomplishment. Rerouting a wormhole to
prevent immediate pursuit and apprehension, thereby forcing an
agent to reveal herself to you and leave you in the hands of the
more... traditional authorities. Quite the Founder's Day indeed.”
He paused to access the table's holographic drives and glanced over
the images playing there.

Ezra gave what he hoped was a roguish grin.
“You should see what I do for Christmas.”

He received a very direct look. From behind
the glasses. It must have taken practice. “Mr. Hawkins, while I
appreciate the ability to keep one's wit in the face of
insurmountable opposition, I happen to know that you spent last
Christmas attempting to appear horribly sick so as to avoid a
second date with Miss Mitzi Parnasus. I also know that you failed.
I heard the crepes were delicious.”

Ezra stopped attempting to smile. “Who are
you?” he whispered. It was probably only the residual anger from
his earlier confrontation that gave him the nerve to ask the
question.

“
Ah, good, I see we understand each other. It's always nice to
meet a young man who can keep up. You may call me Mr. Blair. I have
a few questions for you, Ezra. May I call you Ezra?”

“
Do I have a choice?” Ezra tried, and failed, to keep the
resignation out of his voice.

Mr. Blair, or whatever his name really was,
smiled again. “Of course, Ezra, you have all kinds of choices. In
fact, that's why I'm here. But first I need to ask you: what do you
know about the history of Sanctuary?”

Ezra blinked. He had expected thinly veiled
threats, maybe, but if this was a threat it had clearly put on its
winter clothing. He answered hesitantly. “Well...much of our
history has been written by the Legacy houses. A house is elevated
to Legacy status by developing some new and note-worthy technology
and keeping it in their genetically encrypted data banks-”

Blair waved his hand dismissively. “No, no,
earlier than that Ezra. What do you know about the founding of
Sanctuary?”

“
Um, the Founders were a group of men and women dedicated to
science. They stayed out of the Great War and created Sanctuary as
a safe haven for mankind to live in peace. Only, after the war,
there was no-one left. There was nothing left. They put up the
barrier to protect themselves and try to preserve as much of
humanity as they could.”

“
That's very good, exactly what they teach in the history
classes.”

“
But,” Ezra took a deep breath, “but it's not like that
anymore. There are people outside. I saw them! Healthy people! The
world is healthy again! There's no reason for us to be stuck here,
hiding in our city like... like hermits or some kind
of-”

“
Prisoners?” Mr. Blair gave Ezra a sad little smile and took
off his glasses, setting them on the table. His light brown eyes
initially seemed unimpressive, much like everything else about him,
but on a second glance Ezra glimpsed a hard, fierce intelligence
behind them. “Unfortunately, Ezra, prisoners are exactly what we
are. What we've been since the beginning.”

“
What do you mean?” Ezra's voice wavered
uncertainly.

“
There was a Great War, Ezra. We lost.”

Ezra took a moment to try
digesting what he had heard.
Surely he's
joking, or trying to trick me
, he thought
to himself. How could they be prisoners? The barrier didn't prevent
them from leaving. They had the greatest technology the world had
ever seen at their disposal. They had left the planet, built a
colossal space station. They had more freedom at their disposal
than they knew what to do with. “That doesn't make any sense,” he
said, “even if there was something to actually keep us in here,
which there isn't, we could get up and leave to space whenever we
wanted.”

“
Perhaps prisoners isn't quite the word, although I assure you,
we are that. Maybe 'quarantined' better describes it. Not many
records survived the Great War, and the Founders of Sanctuary began
changing history the moment they had a history to write. All that
we know is this. We are the zero point zero zero zero one percent
of the human population that decided to cling to technology in the
face of an enemy who had overcome us. We do not know who this enemy
was, but we know what they were capable of.”

He inserted a small card into the table.
Ezra raised his eyebrows. Not much was kept on external data, off
the net, these days. He shot a discreet glance at the man, and
mentally opened a private program to record whatever he was about
to see. The program failed to initialize, blocked somehow. Ezra
blinked at this in surprise, as a two dimensional video began to
play. “This is one of the last recovered recordings from before the
dark years of the Great War, during which nearly all technology on
the planet ceased to function.” Ezra quickly engaged another
program to check for signs of file manipulation with what he was
seeing. There was an image of a city, glimmering under the sun,
surrounded by more water than he had ever seen up close. Two
bridges reached out to it, gracefully connecting the peninsula to
the land on either side. “The city you're looking at,” Mr. Blair
stated, “was called San Francisco. It was one of the first to be
wiped out during the War.”

Ezra watched in fascination as the camera
zoomed in to the closer of the two bridges, a monstrous red
construction suspended from steel cables. The frame wobbled back
and forth as it adjusted, and Ezra realized that this was an
amateur filming. There was a low buzzing that must have been
narration, but whatever he was saying had clearly been lost long
ago. On the bridge were people. Ezra quickly estimated that there
must be close to a million of them. About as many as lived in
Sanctuary.