Arise: A Dystopian Novel (The Ravenmaster Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  Tapping the last sequence of swirls and dots, I complete the scan.

  Part request, part plea, this one is a simple summons called “Arise.”

  Finishing his surveillance run of huge loops above the city and soaring down out of the sizzling hot sky, Render belts out a hacking series of kraas! before spreading his wings wide and parachuting down to land on my forearm. The coal-black raven shakes his spiky-feathered head and ruffles his hackles.

  How’s the city look? I ask.

  ~ It’s not pretty.

  If it were, I guess we wouldn’t need to be here.

  ~ There are some dangerous neighborhoods between here and the arcology. It won’t be hard to find several good ways to die.

  I’m not planning on dying.

  ~ Death doesn’t need you to plan anything. It shows up when it wants to.

  Relax. We’re going to do some simple reconnaissance for now. And, if the opportunity arises, we’ll take down the Devoted, overthrow the Wealthies, and liberate the enslaved Army of the Unsettled.

  ~ Oh, is that all?

  It’s why we’re here, right?

  ~ It’s too much, too soon. Too many unknowns. Too many dangers.

  We need to act fast. The longer we wait, the more powerful the Devoted will get. This is what we’ve been waiting for and training for. And it’s not like there’s an eager legion of other people out there with the ability, desire, and opportunity to make a difference in the world.

  ~ You know, for a human, you’re kind of a pit bull.

  You know, for a raven, you’re kind of a chicken.

  Croaking his offense and his undisguised displeasure, Render severs our telempathic connection and flutters up to perch on the top of the rusted, windowless husk of the bus behind us. Pouting, he struts along the hot steel edge and chirps a string of guttural clacks at me.

  I feel my eyes drain to their normal hazel-brown from the inky all-black I know they become when I connect with Render.

  I don’t even realize I’m laughing out loud until Brohn asks, “What’s so funny?”

  Wiping my eyes, I tell him, “Render was giving me a hard time, but for the first time ever, I got the last word!”

  Grinning and tucking his scope into his belt, Brohn gives me a round of slow, sarcastic applause. “Congratulations. You outsmarted a six-pound bird.”

  “A unique six-pound bird,” I remind him.

  “And what does he have to say about our little mission?”

  “Not much. Only that we shouldn’t do it. But that if we do, there are a few thousand people, including a lot of the ones we’re trying to save, who are just as likely to kill us.”

  “Great. He doesn’t have any other optimistic nuggets to offer?”

  “He just tells the truth,” I shrug. “After the Great Flood of the Old Testament, Noah sent out a raven, and it didn’t come back. Ravens do their own thing. They’re survivors, not saviors. If you want a bearer of good news, we’d need to send a dove.”

  “Since I don’t see any doves around,” Brohn pretend-sighs, “I guess Render will have to do.” Gazing out over the walled city, he offers up a melancholic groan. “I wish we could just drive right through the front gate, bulldoze our way to the arcology, take down Justin and Treva, and be on our way.”

  Pointing back the way we came, I tell him we can always go back and get the Terminus and give it a try.

  “I’m pretty sure the Devoted guards down by that wall would blow us up the second we were in sight,” he grunts.

  “I agree. So we’ll need to find another way in.”

  It only took a few hours to get here from the Academy. We had to park the Terminus—our decked out, twenty-ton military transport—far enough away so it wouldn’t be spotted.

  With Render’s help, we’ve already scoped out the crowded township of tents, sheds, and other temporary shelters on this side of the enormous, reflective synth-steel wall surrounding the city. So we know about the Scroungers who’ve set up camp down there. They don’t seem prone to unnecessary violence. But they’re also living desperate lives, which tends to make people act…well, desperately. So we need to tread lightly.

  If we can get past them, there’s the wall. After that, between the wall and the arcology, there are more dangers scattered through the city than Render can count.

  “There were once a million people living here,” Brohn muses, his eyes scanning the giant, fragmented tower rising up from the broken, flattened mess of a city below.

  “Render says there aren’t more than a few thousand now.”

  “It only takes one to kill us.”

  “That’s bleak.”

  Laughing, Brohn apologizes and promises to be more optimistic from now on.

  I point down to the shipping station in between the perimeter tent city and the border wall.

  Crowded with trundling forklifts, front-loaders, dump trucks, and giant shipping containers, we know it’s one of several ports or transportation hubs for the city set up every few miles along the high, curved wall.

  “They’re bringing supplies in through there,” Brohn says, pointing to the forty-foot-high sliding gate in the wall. “If supplies can get in, so can we.”

  “I love your logic,” I tell him with a broad smile.

  “Hey,” he says, slinging on his arbalest—the giant crossbow he’s carried into battle since picking it up in London, England five years ago—“a kiss for luck.”

  His arms around me, his hands clasped together loosely against my lower back, Brohn leans in until his lips are on mine.

  It’s beyond hot out. We have limited weapons. And we’re about to sneak into a walled-in city to confront a pair of tyrants and their murderous, heavily armed cult.

  I don’t feel confident about this mission or about our chances of surviving all the dangers Render says we’re going to face along the way.

  But I have to admit, with Brohn’s lips on mine, I do feel lucky.t

  2

  Delivered

  Brohn points to two single-file lines of rumbling yellow dump trucks moving in opposite directions.

  Hovering above a long, electric blue mag-strip in the middle of the polished roadway, the bulky rigs glide along like marching ants in and out of the wide, heavily-guarded security gateway.

  At the end of the line on this side of the wall, the huge trucks—their deep hoppers loaded with mounds of steaming garbage and a jumble of clutter and construction scrap—rumble off the mag line and onto a fresh strip of pavement that cuts through the shanty town where the Scroungers living outside of the wall have carved out their own meager territory.

  The deep band of tents and shacks runs around the entire perimeter city in the shadow of the wall. We haven’t been down in it yet. All we know is that it’s called “The Belt” and that it’s not a place anyone with reasonable options would choose to live. What we don’t know is if the Wealthies cast the Scroungers out a long time ago, if the Devoted evicted them more recently, or how the inhabitants of the blighted Belt might react to two strangers suddenly strolling out of the desert and into their midst.

  “It’s not ideal,” Brohn points out, “but we’ll need to go through them to get to the wall.”

  “And past the wall and through the city to get to the arcology,” I add.

  “One impossible task at a time,” Brohn chuckles.

  Kneeling behind the front edge of the overturned bus, we continue to watch the procession of trucks grumbling back and forth, in and out of the gates at the city’s border. A hundred yards outside of the wall, the wheels from the rigs leave the blue mag-strip and strike the pavement with a rubbery screech.

  After that, they drive along the glistening, unblemished roadway, headed toward one of the dozens of steaming, hundred-foot-high mounds of garbage rising up like mountain peaks above the Scroungers’ frail tent city.

  On either side of the barricaded road, angry protestors—raw-skinned and clothed in scraps of drab, muted rags—pump their fists, sho
ut obscenities into the air, and hurl fist-sized hunks of red rocks at the procession of trucks.

  The rocks thunk against the steel sides of the rolling rigs and explode into clouds of pebble, crumbs, and dust.

  “They don’t look too happy about those rigs driving through their territory,” I point out to Brohn.

  Staring straight ahead, Brohn frowns. “Can you blame them? The Wealthies are dumping their garbage in the Belt.”

  We watch in silence for a while longer, taking in the scene, analyzing the patterns, and trying to come up with a plan for getting through the Scroungers, past the barrier wall, and into the city.

  “It looks like those rigs are the only things going into or out of the city.”

  “Exactly. Which means they’ve got to be our ticket in.”

  I size Brohn up and down and then scan myself, top to bottom. “We don’t exactly look like construction vehicles,” I remind him.

  “We don’t need to,” he laughs. “They have drivers.”

  I look closer, and sure enough, these aren’t the automated construction rigs we’ve seen in other places.

  “Human drivers…,” I begin.

  “…are their Achilles’ Heel,” Brohn finishes.

  My hand on his arm, I remind him that the drivers down there aren’t the bad guys. “It’s not the fault of the Unsettled that the Devoted are using them as slave labor.”

  “I know. I don’t want to kill anyone, either.”

  “Then we won’t. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” Brohn smiles and pats his arbalest. “The Unsettled drivers are safe. But when it comes to the Devoted and the Wealthies…no promises.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of asking,” I laugh.

  Brohn squints toward the setting sun. “It’s dark enough. Let’s go.”

  Slipping away from our hiding spot in the shadow of the overturned bus, we pick our way down a rocky hill, staying low and dodging between ridges of rugged dunes, dusty ravines, and waist-high clumps of crispy brown scrub brush as we scramble along.

  Behind a steaming sheen of broiling air, the red sun is finally disappearing below the horizon.

  Crouching down in a dry riverbed about a hundred yards from the road, we wait a while longer until it’s completely dark.

  With the night settling over us, we jog along the shallow riverbed, staying low but keeping our eyes on the line of yellow dump trucks grumbling along toward one of the mountainous piles of garbage planted right in the middle of the Belt.

  From here, the stench from the soaring heaps of garbage is nearly overpowering. I can’t imagine what it must be like for the Scroungers who live in their shadow.

  Brohn and I pause at the edge of the road leading up to the giant rubbish heap, watching as the trucks stop and back up to the edge of an elevated lot overlooking the dump. One by one, the drivers extend their arm out of the window, pass their wrists in front of an automated, hovering identification pylon, and then swing their rigs around to the far side of the lot. They reach out a second time and scan their wrist tags on another pylon as a mammoth crane swings high over their heads. It lowers a palette of building materials into the bed of each truck, which then—now fully loaded—trundles its way back toward the city about half a mile behind us.

  “Dump the trash, pick up supplies, head home,” Brohn whispers. “Pretty efficient.”

  “Efficient is great,” I whisper back, pointing to the piles of steaming trash rising above the Belt. “Except when the Wealthies make it happen at the expense of everyone else’s quality of life.”

  “Then I guess it’s our job to make things a little less efficient for the Wealthies,” Brohn announces through a grin.

  We’ve been scouting out this garbage drop-off, supply pick-up port for over an hour now. The lot is busy, but Brohn’s right. The routine is pretty basic:

  The drivers leave the city, dump their load of garbage in the Belt, get scanned, wait for two minutes, pick up a load of fresh materials that are dropped into their open hoppers by the automated crane, wait another two minutes, get scanned again, and then they’re on their way back to the city.

  With the timing of the whole operation ingrained in our heads, it’s time to make our move.

  Brohn plants a hand on my shoulder. “Ready?”

  “No. You?”

  “No.”

  “Perfect. Preparation is overrated. Let’s go!”

  The road is protected on both sides by a barely visible volt-fence. Buzzing and shimmering, it’s a nice bit of modern technology, combining projected laser-wire and the slight air distortion of a Veiled Refractor. I admit to Brohn that I’m a little jealous. “This is the kind of tech we need at the Academy.”

  “If we do our job right down here,” he reminds me with a baritone whisper, “this kind of tech will be available to everyone.”

  “At least there aren’t any patrol drones.”

  Brohn asks how we’re supposed to get past the volt-fence and then looks offended when I break into a light laugh. “Which part is funnier?” he asks with an annoyed snort. “The part where we give up and go home as failures or the part where we charge the fence and end up in a few dozen char-broiled pieces on the side of the road?”

  “Neither,” I assure him, pointing to the fence. In the combination of the deepening nighttime darkness and the flickers of lights from the dump trucks, the cranes, and the assorted warning and indicator lights blinking around the lot, the volt fence’s light buzz and pinkish aura look like a trick of the light—to someone with normal human eyesight, that is.

  To me, with wisps of Render’s hyper-sensory perception still lingering in my head, the fence is a rainbow of explosive colors, magnetic distortion waves, and energy pulses I can feel on my skin.

  “There,” I say to Brohn, directing his attention to a section of the volt fence about twenty feet away. “Some of the series circuits must be glitching. There’s a gap.”

  “A gap?”

  “Big enough for me to walk through,” I laugh. “Easily.” I scan Brohn up and down, taking in his broad shoulders, his muscular body, his powerful, triangular build, and, of course, the hefty crossbow slung over his back. “It might be a bit trickier for you, though.”

  “You’re going to let me get fried, aren’t you?” he jokes.

  “Only if you doubt me.”

  Brohn raises his hands in surrender. “Lead the way.”

  Taking him by the hand, I guide us up the riverbank and through the gap in the volt-fence. “Stick close,” I warn.

  “It tingles.”

  “It’ll do more than that if you don’t follow in my exact footsteps.”

  “I’m with you,” he assures me.

  I know he means that he’ll stick close until we’re through the volt-fence, but hearing those three words gives me a tingle far more pleasant than the mildly electric one I’m getting as we inch our way through the fence’s energy field and onto the road.

  Now past the volt-fence, we dart across the paved road behind one dump truck and well before the lights from the next one can catch us in their beams.

  A quick sprint later, and we drop to a jog in the shadow of one of the thundering yellow rigs as it slows and then chugs to a stop at the Identification Pylon.

  Brohn inches up toward the cab on the passenger side, while I slip under the belly of the truck and pop up on the driver’s side as the driver reaches an arm out toward the scanner.

  The pylon scans the driver’s bracelet with a beam projected from its single red eye. The bracelet pings white, and the pylon’s eye closes.

  That’s the split-second window I need to grab the driver’s wrist with one hand while I pop the door open with the other and slide into the cab. Brohn slips in from the other side, and the startled driver is instantly sandwiched between us.

  The driver, a woman, is older than us, maybe forty or fifty. She’s thin and full-lipped with glossy black hair streaked through at the temples with ribbons of silvery-gray.

 
I’m expecting her to shriek, scream, flail, or possibly press some hidden panic button on the dashboard control panel.

  Instead, she whips her head back and forth between me and Brohn, smiles with uninhibited delight, and plants an open hand on her chest. “It’s me!” she squeals. “Zephora!”

  “Zephora,” Brohn repeats through a puzzled frown that I’m sure matches my own.

  “Yes! Of course!” I exclaim, reaching across Zephora to give Brohn’s thigh a punch that makes him say, “Ouch,” even though his muscles are techno-genetically enhanced and his skin is practically indestructible. “Our students told us about you. You’re part of the Army of the Unsettled.”

  Sad-eyed, Zephora tells us all the drivers are from the Army of the Unsettled. “What’s left of us, anyway. We’re the ones the Devoted didn’t kill.”

  From outside the truck, the pylon’s eye pings open and starts flashing yellow. “Um, do you need to be driving this thing?”

  “Only if you don’t want the pylon out there to sound an alarm and bring in Devoted guards to kill us.”

  “Let’s switch.”

  Laughing, Zephora lets me slide past her, and she takes the wheel with me and Brohn now sitting next each other on the passenger side.

  As the behemoth of a rig trundles along, Zephora tells us about the shipping stations, explaining how this is just one of dozens of them around the perimeter of the walled city.

  “Most of them are like this,” she explains. “We bring supplies in from outside, and we ferry garbage from the inside out.”

  “Can you get us inside?”

  “Maybe we could hide in the cab?” Brohn suggests.

  Zephora shakes her head. “They scan the cabs each time we pass through the gates. They’d detect your heat signature.”

  “You can control your heat signature,” Brohn reminds me.

  “But you can’t,” I remind him back.

  I point back to the rig’s now-empty hopper. “What about in there?”