Legion Lost, page 21
“I keep thinking I’m going to sleep through the night,” Malcolm confesses, almost laughing at himself. “I keep thinking ‘Tonight, I’m not going to wake up on red alert again’. But then I see their faces. All those men and women.”
Malcolm did not just lose Stirling in the quake. I can’t imagine how much bigger his grief must be than mine, for the fellow rebel leaders who were crushed by the prison’s collapse, and all of their followers. Malcolm lost a hundred of his most powerful allies in Prudell’s cruel trap, a crucial force in the rebel movement. His silver hair lies flat and unkempt against his head, and his gnarled hands and face are more bony than ever. Part of Malcolm’s dream has died, and the flame in his heart seems to burn less brightly than it did before.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Malcolm says, and for a moment I feel proud that I can be there for him, but the sensation doesn’t last. “I’ve called a midnight meeting. I was going to send Goddie to wake you.”
Silence follows, and a sad realisation passes me by. I may well just be another cog in Malcolm’s war machine, even if we do have a loved one in common. Still, I venture to speak the terrible thoughts that are on my mind, because there’s no one else who will listen without judgement.
“Do you think it’s bad that I grieve more for Stirling than Mukesh?” I ask in a quiet voice. “I think I’d already let go of Mukesh, grieved for his loss when I was at the Legion. Part of me had already left him for dead. But Stirling . . .”
I can’t go on, and Malcolm lifts a hand, like he doesn’t want me to either. He hasn’t looked at me since I joined him in the fishbowl, he just stares out into the view with his steely gaze.
“You’ll grieve differently for different people,” Malcolm explains. “I’ve never lost blood kin before. I never knew my parents, there was only Sheila and I growing up. I put her and Stirling where I thought they’d be safe, spying on the System from the inside.” Malcolm pauses there, leaning forward to rest his forehead on his fingertips. “I haven’t told Sheila that her son’s gone. I don’t think I can.”
Sheila is a medical and tactical adviser in the Legion, one of the System’s most trusted servants, and our finest spy. I can’t imagine how she might fly off the handle if she gets the news about Stirling, she could easily blow her cover and end her career. Maybe even her life. Malcolm takes a breath, then sits up straight again to compose himself. He finally turns in his chair, fixing me with that all-business look that he gets when there’s a mission on the horizon.
I must look strange to him now that he knows I’m a girl. I still wear the boys’ combat trousers and emerald green over-garments that the Highlanders wear to camouflage themselves in the trees, along with my boots from the Legion. Though my hair has tried to start growing longer in the weeks that I’ve been with the Highlanders, Delilah has been kind enough to shave it back down short for me. I like the cool, lightweight sensation of short hair, and I never have to worry about it being in a mess anymore. If Malcolm finds me peculiar, then he has never had the poor manners to say so.
“Raja, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he begins.
The door to the fishbowl creaks, and I turn to see an imposing figure pushing open the glass panels. It is Delilah, the hacker, who wears a striped mask to cover most of her face, only one dark eye visible against golden skin. She is covered by the thick smock that is usually draped about her shoulders and tied at the waist, and it isn’t until she enters the glass office that I realise there are two other people behind her.
“Dis better be really good,” says Goddie with a yawn. “I was in de middle of a heck of a nice dream.”
Godwin Cole came with me from the Legion, a loyal second under Stirling’s command. He walks with powerful strides now, the interior bones of one of his legs replaced with solid titanium by the Highland medics. He is as stout and muscular as ever, but he looks less like a soldier dressed in his pyjama trousers and long grey robe. I have long since given up on changing into nightwear, for I know that I’ll never sleep long enough to benefit from it.
“Apryl May June and Godwin Cole, reporting for duty, sir,” says a second voice.
Apryl’s wide frame is the last to enter the fishbowl. Her young face has become lined by grief, and there are dark shadows under her eyes from her work as a junior hacker alongside Delilah. Her short blonde hair has grown long to start brushing her shoulders, and she keeps flicking at it nervously, glancing between Malcolm and me.
“Thank you all for coming up at this hour,” Malcolm tells them. “I know it’s a bizarre time for a meeting, but this is highly confidential information. We can’t afford daytime eavesdroppers.”
At once my vision flicks to the air vent above my head. It is the one I sat in when Governor Prudell was here the base, negotiating with Malcolm for the return of Senior Commander Briggs, the Legion’s war hero leader. I was supposed to shoot her then, but Stirling had emptied my gun. If he hadn’t, Valkyrie would never have happened, and he would still be alive now. Grief chokes me as I listen to Malcolm’s briefing, and though he looks at me often, I can hardly bear to look back with Stirling on my mind.
“I think it’s time that you three got to know Delilah a little better,” Malcolm begins. “Apryl, I’m not sure what you know already, but the research I’ve asked you to do is about to become very, very clear in its purpose.”
“I’m all ears, boss,” Apryl replies.
She stands proudly with a yellow dossier folder under her arm, and she looks supremely official, uniformed in similar dark colours to Delilah. As Goddie leans against one of the glass walls and lets out a casual yawn, Delilah moves to take centre stage in front of Malcolm’s desk. To my surprise, the first thing she does is remove her smock. She takes it off over the striped mask which covers her face, and then Delilah proceeds to pull off the long gloves which reach all the way up to the sleeves of her undershirt. The first arm I have seen before, with its perfectly slender, muscular shape. The second arm, I have only glanced at once in the darkened computer suite, and now the full sight of it fills me with something akin to dread.
It is made of solid, shining metal, and the place where the arm joins Delilah’s flesh is fused in scarred skin, wires and tubes. She can move this arm in just the same way as her own limb, folding them together for a moment, before she reaches up to the mask upon her face. The black and silver stripes have hidden her from us for weeks, but now Delilah reveals her visage at last.
“Holy hell,” Goddie breathes.
“Excuse him,” Apryl says at once, though she too speaks in a whisper. “He’s just . . .”
“Shocked?” Delilah asks. “I should think so.”
Her lips are half flesh, half metal. She only has the one human eye that was always visible through the slit in the mask, and the rest of her face has been reconstructed in titanium. Wires filled with what looks like blood filter up towards the top of her cranium, pumping and draining vital fluids to the flesh and organs which still remain there. She still has some hair, long and black, growing on one side of her face above her real eye. It is hard to tell what she might have looked like before the grisly procedure that she has been through.
“Did the System do this to you?” I ask, finding my voice at last.
Malcolm rises from his desk and walks to Delilah, taking hold of the hand that is still human. She squeezes his fingers tenderly as they interlock with her own.
“I was in a battle,” Delilah explains, her voice slow and methodical. “I was left for dead on the field, bleeding and fading out of consciousness, when a strange machine came along and picked me up. It was an unmanned craft, automated to recover the near-dead and keep them on life support as it transported them back to the System’s laboratories. The machine is called a Reaver. I believe you know the term.”
“Lucrece’s diary,” Goddie says, and he and I share a painful look, old grief stabbing in against the new.
“Lucrece’s father built the Reaver as a medical aid,” I continue, “but we know that the System took them over for a more sinister purpose.”
“That’s right,” Delilah confirms. “The Reavers are used to transport bodies back to the System for experimentation. I’m an escapee, but I didn’t get out before they’d done this to me.”
Delilah lifts the hand which is locked in a grip with Malcolm’s. On the inside of the soft, golden skin there, I see the tattoo which I have glanced at before: 27072126.
“They gave me a serial number, like a machine,” Delilah completes with distaste. “It looked to me as though they were trying to reprogram half-dead rebels into soldiers who would work for them instead. This titanium arm packs one hell of a punch. I might have been very useful to their cause, and utterly expendable.”
I know, perhaps better than anyone, how Governor Prudell feels about expendable bodies. She uses the children of the Legion like cannon fodder, and sacrifices her own prison guards and prisoners in order to kill rebels. It makes sense that she would also turn her enemies into weapons, though the technology of doing such a thing is totally baffling to my sleep deprived mind. There is only one real concern that interests me, and it’s all I can voice when silence falls on our little secret meeting.
“Where is this going?” I ask. “What do the Reavers and the experiments have to do with here and now?”
It is then that Apryl takes a deep breath. She recovers the yellow dossier folder from beneath her arm and begins to open it. She takes a few pages from the top and passes them to Goddie and me. Goddie leans on my chair as we peruse them together, and I find with horror that I’m looking at the exploded crater of rubble where Valkyrie collapsed. Goddie points silently, his dark fingers tracing the shapes of small, black objects that are swarming the scene in the photographs. They look like beetles searching a giant mound of grave-dirt.
“A helicopter sweep showed us this the day after Valkyrie fell,” Apryl explains. “We believe the black spots are Reavers, searching the ruins for survivors.”
Survivors. The word sparks a terrifying yet wonderful new possibility in my mind.
“Stirling,” I say at once, and then: “Mukesh. Are you saying-?”
“Try not to get ahead of yourself, Raja,” Malcolm says in a measured, low burr. “The odds of surviving a collapse like that are extremely slim.”
“However,” Delilah interjected, “we intercepted signals from the Reavers, and we think they did find some people still alive.”
“We’ve spent weeks tracing the signals to track them down,” Apryl continues hastily, “and the Reavers seem to have delivered their cargo to a base under the System city of Mancunia.”
“Den dis is a rescue mission!” Goddie exclaims, suddenly alive and bright with his usual bold spirit.
He reaches down and kisses my cheek with sudden enthusiasm, and I wish I could experience the joyful hope that he possesses.
“If that’s what you want,” Malcolm says calmly. “I’m putting together a select band of fighters to infiltrate Mancunia and recover anyone who might have been taken from Valkyrie, rebels and prisoners alike. Make your choice now if you want to be with us. Training starts today.”
Goddie salutes at once, then looks down at himself with a playful frown.
“Maybe it’s time I put some clothes on, huh?” he asks.
Apryl gives him an eyeroll, and the boy races from the fishbowl, disappearing into the night. Delilah has been busy replacing her smock and mask during this last exchange, and now she stands to attention beside Apryl. Malcolm is no longer clasping her hand, but looking her over as if she were just another of his soldiers.
“You two are committed?” he asks.
Apryl and Delilah nod, and they too march from the scene dutifully. That leaves me and Malcolm to stare at one another, surrounded by night and mountain air.
“Do you think Stirling’s one of the survivors?” I ask Malcolm.
“No,” he says at once. My heart drops into my stomach with a thud. But then, Malcolm adds: “Though, I hope he is.”
I nod, and then I rise from my chair with a whole new sensation in my body. Finally, I feel as though I might be able to sleep, with this strange fragment of hope brimming at the back of my mind. Malcolm puts one hand on my shoulder as we walk to the door of the fishbowl together, and he speaks with a measured gentility that I have never heard him use before.
“Talk to your family before you commit to this,” he tells me. “You have a lot more to lose than the rest of us.”
Can’t wait for more adventure and intrigue? Then why not try these other titles from K.C. Finn:
The Mind’s Eye (Synsk, Book 1)
2nd Place: Best YA Paranormal - RONÉ AWARDS 2015
A girl with a telepathic gift finds a boy clinging to his last hope during the war-torn climate of Europe, 1940.
At fifteen, Kit Cavendish is one of the oldest evacuees to escape London at the start of the Second World War due to a long term illness that sees her stuck in a wheelchair most of the time. But Kit has an extraordinary psychic power: she can put herself into the minds of others, see through their eyes, feel their emotions, even talk to them - though she dares not speak out for fear of her secret ability being exposed.
As Kit settles into her new life in the North Wales village of Bryn Eira Bach, solitude and curiosity encourage her to gain better control of her gift. Until one day her search for information on the developing war leads her to the mind of Henri, a seventeen-year-old Norwegian boy witnessing the German occupation of his beloved city, Oslo. As Henri discovers more about the English girl occupying his mind, the psychic and emotional bonds between them strengthen and Kit guides him through an oppressive and dangerous time.
There are secrets to be uncovered, both at home and abroad, and it's up to Kit and Henri to come together and fight their own battles in the depths of the world's greatest war.
http://www.amazon.com/Minds-Eye-Synsk-Book-ebook/dp/B017Q4DSMO/
The Book Of Shade (Shadeborn, Book 1)
A finalist in the Chanticleer Paranormal Awards.
Lily Coltrane’s to-do list for starting university life is pretty simple:
1. Make friends
2. Meet a cute guy
3. Survive her first year in Modern History
In the little English town of Piketon this seems more than achievable, so much so that Lily even joins The Illustrious Minds Literary Society, an extra-curricular club that promises a truly unique social experience. What Lily doesn’t bank on are the society’s monthly visits to the mysterious Theatre Imaginique at the edge of town, a dark venue that houses the most obscure cavalcade of carnival performers she has ever laid eyes on.
Stranger still is the emergence of the theatre’s enigmatic proprietor Lemarick Novel, a stupendous showman with a frosty wit who never seems to smile, and who raises a plethora of questions in Lily’s fearful mind. How does he levitate with no sign of wires or mirrors? Why do the lightning bolts that shoot from his hands look so real? And why, of all the people in the theatre, do his pale eyes keep locking on hers?
The answers to this and more lie buried in heritage and blood. The Book of Shade is opening, and Lily Coltrane will read it, whether she wants to or not.
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Shade-Shadeborn-1-ebook/dp/B00RD7SGK4/
K.C. Finn, Legion Lost
