Banished (The Ravenmaster Chronicles Book 2), page 7
“I was talking about the Wealthies.”
“The Wealthies?” Brohn laughs. “They’re hardly innocents!”
“They didn’t really do anything except get rich. The Devoted are the ones with all the weapons.”
“Money is a weapon, too, Kress.”
Across the table, Bondo grins and nods, and I feel my cheeks go red from a cocktail of shock, anger, and embarrassment.
Softening his tone, Brohn runs his thumb and forefinger along his stubbled jawline. “This is war. There’s collateral damage.”
“It’s not war,” I object. “It’s survival. And what if the damage isn’t collateral? What if it’s primary?”
“How much damage,” Bondo asks, leaning in, his eyes boring into mine, “collateral or primary, has to be done to us before we finally do something back?”
Angel Fire interlaces his fingers and rests his forearms on the table. “Bondo, no one’s suggesting we shouldn’t stand up for ourselves.”
Bondo points to each one of us, himself included, and grins like he’s just won a prize. “Sitting around a table—like we’re doing right now—is the opposite of standing up. Talking has never changed anything in the history of the modern world. Only action builds buildings. Or,” he adds with a jowl-shaking chuckle, “brings them down.”
Off to the side, a girl—maybe twelve years old and with leopard splotches of white pigment on her mocha-colored cheeks and forehead raises her hand and coughs to get Bondo’s attention. “Can I ask them something?”
Bondo turns and tells her to go ahead.
Her eyes flit between the four of us sitting around the table before landing on me. “How dangerous are the Devoted for real?”
I’m about to ask her if she’s kidding or crazy—after all, the Devoted wiped out half of her people—but Brohn rests his hand on the crook of my elbow. It’s his cautionary signal to me about the importance of letting certain things play out before launching an attack.
“They are deceptively dangerous,” I tell her as calmly as I can manage. “They’re historians.”
“We heard that about them,” she nods. “Even before they attacked us. They didn’t seem to care too much about our past when they….”
“Their obsession with the past isn’t a hobby or a whim. And it’s not innocent. They’re terrified of the future.”
“And that includes us,” Brohn tells the girl. “Bondo’s right. The Devoted think we Emergents represent humanity going off course. Their all-out attempt at control isn’t about politics. They want to control the definition of what it means to be human.”
“But you’re human,” the girl insists through clamped teeth. Bondo encourages her to sit at the table with us, but she gives him a polite shake of her head and takes a half-step back. Biting her lip, she scans me and Brohn as if she’s expecting us to slough off our skin and reveal ourselves to be some kind of bug-eyed, alien pod-creatures. “You are human, right?”
Brohn and I exchange a quick look I hope she doesn’t notice. It’s a simple question, but the answer isn’t.
“Yes,” I tell her at last “We’re human. But we’re also something new. Not better. Just new.”
“And the Devoted can’t handle new,” Bondo announces over his shoulder to the rest of the Renegades, who murmur their agreement and buzz with admiration for their young, confident, and potentially homicidal leader. “It’s been said that those who don’t know the past are condemned to repeat it. But there are also those who fear the future. They’re the ones who glorify the past and are less likely to let it go. The bullies have kept us afraid too long. It’s time for us to be the bully!”
“Wait,” I say, hoping to pump the brakes on Bondo’s runaway train of an argument. “The Devoted might want to control the world, but they’re not suicidal.”
“No,” Brohn says with a hint of impatience. “They just want to wipe out every Emergent along with everyone who isn’t them or who would dare to try to advance an uncertain future at the expense of their precious past. They’re genocidal.”
What is Brohn doing? Is he actually still siding with Bondo?
Desperate to steer Brohn back toward a path of empathy and rationality, I ask, “What would we tell our students to do?”
Brohn shrugs. “We’d tell them to try to take down Justin and Treva. Cut off the heads of the Devoted—”
“We tried that. We didn’t come close to finding them. You got taken prisoner, and I got to watch three people get mauled to death by giant dogs.”
“It’s war. Death happens.”
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care that it happens.”
Brown scowls. “Don’t do that. Don’t try to make it sound like I don’t care. I do. And so do you. And so do Angel Fire and Bondo. We just have different ideas about how to turn that care into action.”
“We lost people. We got them killed turning that care into action.”
“I’m not about to let what I do get decided by a bunch of ghosts.”
“Zephora would agree with me.”
At the mention of his sister’s name, Bondo breaks into a deep scowl. His voice is alarmingly even-keel. “I heard she gave her life for yours. Is that right?”
“She saved us and got us into the city,” I tell him. “She would not want you to do this.”
“Her death is the reason I have to do this.”
“You listened to her while she was alive,” Angel Fire reminds him. “You know what she’d say now. Being dead doesn’t make her any less right.”
Bondo’s features soften into a near melt of relaxed resignation. “Okay. You’ve convinced me.”
Startled, I ask, “We have?”
“Yes. You’ve convinced me that Zephora was right and that what I’m about to do is wrong on so many levels.” I’m about to breathe a sigh of relief when Bondo holds up a wait-a-minute finger. “But the arcology…that’s wrong on every level.”
While we sit in a moment of stunned silence, Bondo drums his thick fingers on the table. The thrum is hollow and obnoxiously loud in the high-ceilinged space of the airport lounge, and I really wish he’d stop. As if reading my mind, he does. Standing, he slaps his fist into his open palm. “If we blow it up, we end it all. The wars. The violence. The inequality.”
I stand up as well, my hands planted on the glass-top table between us. “If you blow it up, you’re killers.”
“If we don’t, we’re killed.”
Bondo’s entourage steps forward, most of them brandishing and raising up lengths of pipe or wooden broom and mop handles with sharp-edged scraps of steel tied to the ends with bands of leather and wire.
Bondo stops and locks eyes with Angel Fire. I don’t know the exact nature of their relationship, but the look that passes between them isn’t one of adversaries. It’s almost a look of affection, as if there are no hard feelings, as if each boy is proud of the other for taking a stand and for doing what he thinks is best on behalf of someone else.
Surrounded by his swarming team of Renegades and with Mongolia spreading her enormous wings and powering herself int the air, Bondo marches out of the lounge and into the wide, main corridor.
Angel Fire mutters something I don’t hear. I ask him what he said.
“I said Bondo doesn’t care enough about people because he cares too much about his precious vultures.”
“What do you mean?”
Angel Fire tilts his chin toward the threshold Bondo just crossed and where the last of the fifty or so Renegades are exiting the lounge behind him. “He didn’t used to be like this. He was a decent boy. Gentle. A caretaker. And then he got connected to those vultures of his.”
“You think him caring for vultures is why he’s hell-bent on destroying an entire city and everyone in it?”
Angel Fire sucks in a deep breath and takes an oddly long time to answer. At last, he releases the breath he’s been holding. “I don’t think he’s just caring for vultures anymore. I think he’s becoming one.”
Brohn and I both pause at this. I scan Angel Fire’s face to see if he’s joking or exaggerating. But he’s staring at the now-empty area between the lounge and the corridor like he’s expecting Bondo to come back and announce that he’s changed his mind about blowing up the arcology.
But other than the muffled chatter and fading stomp of their boots on the eternally shiny floor of the hallway, nothing remains of Bondo and his Renegades.
As for Angel Fire’s claim about Bondo becoming a vulture…well, that’s just impossible.
And then I do a quick mental scan of the last few years of my life. Render started out as a bird. Then, he was a companion. And now, he’s a conduit for my thoughts, a sounding board for my psyche, an enhancer of my abilities, a magnifier of my senses, and the provider of my power.
As scary as that sounds, it makes me wonder…if Bondo can become a vulture, do I have to worry about becoming a raven?
And even scarier—if Bondo has his way tomorrow—will I die before I have a chance to find out?
9
CONFRONTATION
“So…,” Angel Fire drawls, stretching the single syllable out until he runs out of breath. “The end of the world just walked out of this lounge with an army of Unsettled Renegades and a vulture.”
“Where’s he going,” I ask. “He’s not really going to—?”
“I’m afraid so. He’ll go back to the Security Center at East Garage. He’ll stew for the night, say one last goodbye to his precious vultures, and then release them from the aviary he’s set up. But then, yes, I’m pretty sure that by this time tomorrow, those vultures might be all that’s left of Denver, which will be just fine with him.”
My breath coming in involuntary spasms of panic, I swing around to face Angel Fire. “What is he going to do, exactly?”
“Nothing much,” Angel Fire shrugs with a playful smile I feel like backhanding off of his cherubic little face. “He’s got a CSD. A Cascading Series Detonator.”
In the silence that follows, I take a moment of internal blind panic to contemplate the enormity of that simple statement. Like neutron, hydrogen, and the whole family of atomic bombs, CSDs have become something of an ominous legend in the field of international global warfare. They’re the kind of weapons that are whispered about in private, as if just saying their name out loud could accidentally set one off or magically summon one into existence like some underworld demon from the depths of Hell. Since their first use against civilian targets over twenty years ago, they’ve been nicknamed the “City Slayer Devices.” On the viz-screens in the Valta, we saw the devastation they caused at what we naively thought was the hands of the Eastern Order. As it turned out, our own government wasn’t above using these earth-shattering explosives to wreak havoc on some of the major cities in our own country. Specifically designed to take advantage of natural fault lines in the Earth’s crust, they literally rip the ground out from underneath you. Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle…as far as we know, they’re all gone. If Bondo really has a CSD, Denver is about to join them.
“We know of CSDs,” I confess at last.
“Then you know they’re capable of blowing up the arcology and leaving a ten-mile wide, mass-extinction level sink-hole where the city used to be.”
“Let me guess,” Brohn scowls. “We couldn’t convince him, so now you want us to stop him.”
“You have your Fallen friends to find. And I know the weight of the dead—Wealthies and Devoted, included—is probably more than you want to shoulder at the moment.” When Brohn and I don’t respond, Angel Fire gives us each a prodding poke to the arm. “Forget Bondo, eh? Forget us. If you get moving now, if you can get far away from here and back to your Academy, you’ll survive. Hundreds of thousands won’t.”
“Maybe we can go back into the city and at least get the Scroungers and the Fallen and all the rest of the other survivors out before tomorrow morning,” I suggest.
Brohn and Angel Fire give me matching “good luck with that” looks, and, unfortunately, I see their point. We don’t have access to mass, above-ground transportation. We don’t know where the last few thousand residents of the city are living, and we don’t have a way to contact them all even if we did. Plus, with no cars, trucks, or military-grade personnel movers, we couldn’t get them far enough away from ground-zero in the single day we have left. Even if we let Bondo bring down the arcology, we just don’t have the means or the time to evacuate the entire city.
“So what do we do then?” I ask, my jaw clamped, my eyes wet with tears of frustration.
“I do see Bondo’s point,” Brohn confesses, his eyes on the wide passageway leading out of the lounge. The long hall is lined with empty shops with mounds of broken glass in front of them. Everything worth anything in here has long since been destroyed or looted. Brohn clicks his tongue at the grim sight. “How many times have we dreamed of bringing down all the Wealthies? And now we can let Bondo do it and take down the Devoted at the same time.”
I slide my arm around Brohn’s waist and press my cheek to his shoulder. He draws me in close and kisses the top of my head. “You see it, too, don’t you?” he asks.
“I do.”
Angel Fire’s eyes go wide, and he’s looking at me and Brohn like we just teleported down from a distant planet of baby-eaters.
“I do see your point,” I promise Brohn. “I’ve had all the same dreams. But I have another one, too.”
“Oh?”
“I have a dream where we judge our lives as Emergents on the number of people we save instead of the number of people we kill.”
Brohn detaches himself from me and scowls for a second before his face eases back into a more-or-less relaxed state. “Is that really your dream?”
“That and living happily ever after with you and without the plague of guilt hanging over our heads for the rest of our lives.”
“If we let Bondo have his way, we have a chance to end a whole lot of problems.”
“And to create a bunch of new ones,” I counter.
I jump a little when he barks, “Damn it, Kress!”
Pacing in a tight back-and-forth line and slapping his palm into his open fist, he mutters an apology and says he’s conflicted. “I don’t want to condone mass murder. And I definitely don’t want to facilitate it. But I also see Bondo’s point. With one properly planted explosive device, by this time tomorrow, the Devoted could be…over. Epic and his Hypnagogics and a few hundred thousand of the Wealthies could be…over. We’re literally in the shadow of the Devoteds’ primary headquarters and their main weapons depot. You’ve seen it with your own eyes. All those stockpiled guns, all the threats, and the very foundation for a new era of cruelty and violence could be over.” Brohn stabs a finger toward the pock-marked wall and in the general direction of the arcology. “Epic and his techno-genetics lab are out there, just sitting in the middle of that arcology in the middle of this city. We didn’t know it a few days ago when we first got here, but this place has turned out to be the hub of a lot of evil operations. So many people are racing for control of the world. I used to think it was a race we could win. But what if we were wrong all this time?”
“What do you mean?” I ask as Angel Fire, still wide-eyed, watches on from just behind my shoulder.
“What if we’re not even in the race at all?”
“We’re in the race, and we’ll win it by stopping Bondo,” I insist, but Brohn shakes me off.
“I don’t think we are in the race, Kress. I’m starting to wonder if we ever were. And if we’re not, maybe instead of trying to win a race we’re not even in, our best course of action is to stop the wrong people from winning it.” Brohn gazes up at the ceiling, and it’s like he’s saying his final goodbye to the universe. “Our sacrifice tomorrow could redirect the course of the entire future of human civilization. Are our little lives really worth more than all that?” Exhaling a humorless laugh, he turns back to me and Angel Fire. “I honestly don’t know what to do.”
“May I offer a suggestion?” Angel Fire interjects.
“Um. Sure.”
Angel Fire steps forward until he’s standing toe to toe with Brohn. It’s quite the sight: the short, gangly teenaged army general—looking like a whittled-down twig in his oversized sportscoat—standing casually in front of my 6’2”, world-saving, bulletproof boyfriend.
Angel Fire slips his gloves off and tucks them into his waistband. With deliberate care, he reaches out and seizes the fabric of Brohn’s shirt in his bony fists. The motion—normally one I’d qualify as an attack—happens so slowly, Brohn seems stunned and barely reacts. Angel Fire’s voice, usually ranging from boyishly modest to carnival-barker flamboyant, pounds out in an impatient, machine-like squawk, and he drubs his fists against Brohn’s chest with each word: “Listen…to…your…goddamn…girlfriend!”
Despite the tension and uncertainty of the moment, Brohn laughs—a real laugh this time—and he says, “Five better words were never spoken.”
As if he’s been waiting for us, Brohn barks out for us to get moving. “Let’s go snuff out Bondo’s fuse before he lights it and blows us all to hell.”
Brohn seems tunnel-visioned and determined now. He’s made up his mind, and there’s no turning back. For me, I’m torn. Brohn may have wound up agreeing with me, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong.
I know I said blowing up the arcology was wrong. But that doesn’t mean I was right.
It takes almost twenty minutes of full-on sprinting—with Angel Fire and Render in the lead and me and Brohn scrambling like mad to keep up—before we slide to a long, skidding stop at a room labeled “Security Center” just outside of the area of the airport Angel Fire calls “Garage East.”
I don’t have Brohn’s strength or stamina, but even he is out of breath and clutching a stitch in his side by the time we stop. Angel Fire, meanwhile, is actually holding his breath, no doubt gearing up to take one last shot at convincing Bondo to cancel his horrible plan of mass destruction.
