Banished (The Ravenmaster Chronicles Book 2) Read online

  We don’t stick around to figure out their status or motivation.

  Giving me a quick boost and with his eyes riveted to the dogs, Brohn lifts me up to an open window. I slip inside the building, and he clambers in after me.

  Inside, a wooden chair lies on its side under a pile of aluminum ductwork. Brohn kicks the wreckage out of the way and hauls the chair out, wedging it into the window behind us. “In case they try to follow us.”

  “Good idea.”

  Cranked up by the natural adrenaline rush brought on by fear, my heart is jackhammering away in my chest. Those dogs looked…unnatural. I know desperate times are known to inspire desperate mutations. Just once, though, couldn’t the mutation be one that turns a pack of huge, feral dogs into small, harmless bunnies?

  Brohn, his eyes wide with concern and radiant in the dark room, must sense my elevated state of nerves because he takes my hands in his and asks if I’m okay.

  It’s been his refrain, lately: asking if I’m okay. He’s concerned and naturally protective, and I know he just wants what’s best for me. But with so much danger and uncertainty around us all the time, how can I answer the “Are you okay?” question honestly?

  Someday, I’m going to say, “Yes. I’m okay.” And someday, it’ll be the truth.

  “Just having some flashbacks,” I tell him at last.

  He nods his understanding. I told him about my terrifying experience of being trapped in an arena with dozens of huge, savage dogs and the added horror of watching as they mauled three people to death in front of my eyes. I’ve seen people get shot, stabbed, beaten, and subjected to any number of physical tortures. Seeing a fellow human being get eaten is an entirely different and infinitely more gruesome level of nightmare—one I’m definitely not interested in experiencing again. Or being subject to.

  If you really want to be a vegetarian, watch someone you know get eaten. You’ll never crave meat again.

  I flick my thumb back toward the window Brohn and I just crawled through. “At least those dogs out there weren’t the same killer dogs I saw before,” I point out in a feeble effort to reassure myself.

  Brohn starts to lead us toward an open doorway at the front of the building. “I’d still rather not take any chances.”

  Old metal clothing racks and toppled shelves line the floor along with piles of crispy-fried shirts, ash-coated pants, and a scattered batch of chewed and splintered human bones.

  As Brohn and I make our way through the ruins of the long-abandoned store, we can still hear the dogs issuing their throaty, air-rumbling growls in the laneway behind us. I can’t tell if they’re announcing their resignation to our escape or else gathering more of their pack to try to track us down.

  “I’m just glad we’re in here, and they’re out there,” I say out loud to Brohn.

  He grunts his hearty agreement and urges me to keep following him through the wreckage.

  Weaving the rest of the way through the clutter, we come out on the other side of the building. From there, we dash cross the street and jog down a second laneway.

  Brohn takes a quick look back the way we came. “I don’t think they’re following us.”

  “Good,” I offer with a sigh of relief as I point to where Render, impatient with our pokiness, is flying overhead in a swooping figure-eight. “This is one of those cases where it’s a lot better being a follower.”

  Banking and gliding in the distance, Render is doing everything he can to live up to his reputation as the world’s best living surveillance and detection drone.

  Breaking out of his figure-eight pattern, he uses his natural senses of sight and smell to try to locate five tiny needles in a scorched, one-hundred-and-fifty square mile haystack.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” Brohn points out. “I’d love for this to be a quick and easy search-and-rescue mission.”

  “We’ve never had a quick and easy one before,” I remind him. “Why start now?”

  Sticking to the smaller side streets, alleys, and laneways, we continue on our way through the ghost town. There are craters and impassable piles of rubble in the middle of some of the smaller roads, and we have to keep turning around, doubling back, or navigating our way through more abandoned shops, houses, and bone-filled buildings as we try to keep up with Render.

  Some of the bodies we pass along the way are charred black and fossilized in a variety of ghastly, contorted positions. Some have had their flesh and muscle eaten away by scavengers. Others are emaciated and brittle with decay. The scariest ones, though, are the intact bodies, the ones that haven’t been eaten, picked at, or scorched by war. Those are the ones that look the most like people. They’re the ones that have been left to rot, open-eyed and too diseased to tempt even the most desperate insects and rats.

  The smell doesn’t seem to affect Brohn, but it’s giving me a headache and a borderline migraine that feels like it might turn into a gushing nosebleed. Brohn catches me rubbing my temples and asks again if I’m okay.

  I assure him I am. “It’s just the smell of so much death. I think it’s getting to me.” He doesn’t look convinced, but he lets it go. I’m glad he doesn’t press me. Because what I don’t tell him about the overpowering, vile smell is that part of me is actually starting to like it.

  2

  SURPRISED

  Side by side and on constant alert for danger, we continue to trudge through the city. In some places, it’s impossible to walk without stepping on human remains.

  At one point, we have to clamber over another mountain range—this time it’s one of bricks and wood beams blocking our path. We live on top of a mountain, so we’re no strangers to steep climbs. But this one is different. There are dozens of human bodies embedded here—some completely skeletal, others with pockmarked and blistered skin—all hollow-eyed and permanently packed into the long ridge of wood, stone, and steel.

  If this was pre- or post-war, we’d probably marvel at the sight of this gruesome fusion of flesh and rubble. We’d call it “a daring and avant-garde example of postmodern art.”

  But war is real, and so are the lifeless bodies of the real people it leaves behind.

  Gagging, Brohn and I make it to the far side of the above-ground graveyard before winding our way through the barren streets of a residential neighborhood of fallen trees and flattened houses. About a half mile away, an elevated highway has crumbled in the middle. A whole line of cars and trucks—probably belonging to people who were trying desperately to flee the city—lie in wrecked heaps on the street below.

  The carnage and cadavers aren’t just a reminder of the horrors of war. Lying out here in the shadow of the arcology, forsaken and forgotten, they’re also a reminder of how little anyone up there cares about what’s happened and what’s still happening down here. I’m sure it doesn’t even register with the Wealthies that the war they’ve been ignoring wasn’t even real.

  With our mission in mind, Brohn and I continue on, side by side, our boots kicking up clouds of red dust as we break into a jog to keep up with Render.

  All around us, businesses and office buildings stand without windows or walls, leaving only empty frameworks of wood and steel.

  It’s a gruesome reminder that buildings have bones, too.

  As Render banks and winds his way through the air ahead of us, I start to imagine what this city must have looked like decades ago, long before the Atomic Wars. I let myself give in to blissful visions of bustling crowds of people, commuters making their way to work or back home again after a long day. I see happy shoppers loading boxes and bags into their cars. I picture kids riding bikes together after school or playing soccer in the park. In my mind’s eye, there are people building things because they wanted to, not because they had to. I envision hard workers, eager to improve their lot in life, no matter what obstacles were placed in their path. There must have been people like that here, right? There must have been normal, flawed, suffering, surviving, sad, and happy people. So many people, all of them with
only the most vague and abstract thoughts about the future of the world to worry them. They might have feared the apocalypse to come. They must have worried about it and debated about it over coffee in some of the diners and cafés that now sit broken, empty, and lifeless along the crushed and nearly impassable roads. There must have been normal people here, leading normal lives.

  I’ve got a million scenarios running through my head. But then I slam on my mental brakes. I don’t want to get so distracted by what was done here in the past that I forget about what it is we’re trying to do in the present.

  Snapping me even further out of my reverie, Brohn points to where Render is flying in tighter and tighter circles.

  “Come on,” he urges. “Your bird found something!”

  Our thudding boots echoing in the dead air, Brohn and I worm our way into a house with no doors or windows and with gaping holes in the walls. Once inside, we slip under a bundle of sagging, gray pipes and push through a web of dangling blue, green, and yellow wires snaking down from what’s left of the ceiling.

  Padding along after Brohn, it occurs to me how broad his back and shoulders are. I want to reach out right now and touch him. I want to thank him for being my shield. But I lose my nerve and let my hand drop to my side when it occurs to me: Being a shield isn’t honorable or heroic. Hell, it must be a burden. The shield is the first one to be shot at. It’s the one that takes the brunt of every attack. It’s the savior you forget about the second the war is over. In combat, people always talk about the weapons: spears, swords, bows, arrows, bombs, guns, grenades. It’s rare to remember the shield.

  I’ll always love Brohn, of course. Even before we began our lives as Emergents, he was the one who would put himself in harm’s way so others didn’t have to. As he leads the way now, I make a promise to myself that I’ll always remember and appreciate him as well.

  By the time we emerge on the other end the building and step back out onto the street, we’ve lost sight of Render. Brohn asks if it’s anything to worry about, but I tell him it’s okay. “I can kind of sense where he is.”

  “And how does that work?”

  “I don’t know,” I shrug. “I guess I always thought of connections as a rigid thing. Like the way links are connected to form a chain or how pieces of steel get riveted together.”

  “And now?”

  “This thing with me and Render…it’s fluid. Kind of a back-and-forth mental dance. I send thoughts to him, and he sends thoughts back to me. I think it’s our version of psychic echolocation.”

  “Sounds like your bond is growing.”

  “Or changing.”

  “Do you think it’ll ever be possible for you to have a bond like that with a person?”

  His voice doesn’t betray any sense of fear, worry, or jealousy. But I think I know what he’s really asking:

  Will you ever be as connected with me as you are with Render? Or am I doomed to spend the rest of this relationship playing second fiddle to a bird?

  He doesn’t actually ask the question, of course, which means I’m spared having to come up with an answer. And that’s a relief. Because the truth is, I don’t know the answer. But what I do know—that the original mild, tingling mental connection between me and Render is becoming something very different—is starting to scare me a little.

  His hands plunged into his pockets, Brohn kicks at a crushed, half-burned baby’s crib and curls his lip in disgust. “All this because of the Atomic Wars.”

  I’m quiet for a minute before I suggest that this devastation isn’t really the result of war.

  Brohn frowns at me over his shoulder. “How do you figure?”

  “The Atomic Wars were a nail in the coffin. Not the final nail, thankfully. After all, we’re not dead and buried…yet.” I sweep my hand in a wide arc to take in the car husks, the office furniture, some half-melted metal filing cabinets in the middle of the road, and the sun-bleached bones all around us. “This is the end result of a trajectory.”

  “Oh? And what trajectory is that?”

  “One that’s been storming along for centuries. It’s zero-sum.”

  “Zero-sum?”

  “You know. No room for compromise. There’s a winning side and a losing side. People a lot older than us designed their society that way. You can’t have rich people unless there are poor people. You can’t be powerful unless there are people you have power over. That makes for fertile ground for an ‘everyone for themselves’ mentality.”

  “Which is the opposite of what you were saying before about connectedness.”

  “Exactly. That’s what’s so mint about a conspiracy. People think a conspiracy is about being against something, which—okay—it is eventually. But before all the plotting and planning, we have to be connected with each other first.”

  Brohn offers up a flattering smile. “You have such an interesting way of looking at the world.”

  “Call it my ‘bird’s eye view,’” I laugh.

  Stopping in his tracks, Brohn reaches over to tap my shoulder as he squints into the distance and points.

  “What is it?”

  Up ahead, past a congested pack of old mag-cars, many of them with the atrophied remains of their drivers still at the wheel, we catch sight of a small girl.

  In the blazing light of the sun sizzling in the red sky, we can see that the blistered skin on her face, neck, and arms is mud-streaked and splotchy with burn marks. She stares at us and then rubs her eyes, probably trying to figure out if we’re real, a mirage, saviors, or slayers.

  “Could she be one of the Fallen?”

  “Maybe,” I shrug. “But I get the sense they’re all older. And healthier. She could be a Scrounger.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Even as I say this, I realize what a risky assumption that is to make. The days when danger was the sole domain of men with guns are gone. Mostly. These days, deadly threats can come in a wide variety of genders, ages, shapes, and sizes and with an equally wide variety of motivations and intentions.

  The small girl breaks her daze with a series of rapid-fire blinks and then bolts into the open doorway of the charred, broken building behind her.

  “Come on!” I urge Brohn, while I’m already striding down the middle of the road.

  “This doesn’t look like any of the places you described where you last saw the Fallen.”

  “Maybe not. But I think Render was leading us here for a reason.”

  In a brisk but careful jog, we follow the girl.

  Brohn, his head on a swivel, his fingers curled into loose fists, enters the building first. We duck under the drooping threshold, and I’m hoping it doesn’t choose this exact second to collapse. Huge sections of the ceiling are missing, with piles of debris pushed up against the walls to form bumpy slopes of wood and craggy slabs of buckling drywall. The sun beams down into the bowl-shaped space, and I feel like an ant under a magnifying glass.

  Doing their best to stay in the shadows around the edges of the room, the twenty or thirty people—men, women, and children—glance up as we enter. But the looks they give aren’t ones of hostility, curiosity, or territoriality.

  These are looks of defeat.

  The people in here are broken. Their clothes are fused to their skin, and their bodies are slumped down to their bones.

  They don’t ask us for anything, probably because they can see we don’t have any more than they do. After our latest adventure, we were left without supplies or weapons. Instead, the shadowy figures stare silently at us from the dark edges of the cluttered room.

  Brohn and I are still scanning the dusky space for the little girl when a motion from the doorway on the far end of the room catches our eyes.

  Rubbing his palms together, a boy—maybe fourteen or fifteen years old—steps out from a hallway. As surprised by us as we are by him, he snaps his head around to face us. He’s familiar. Not because I’ve ever met him. But I’ve heard about him. And there can’t be
two people in the world who fit this particular boy’s description.

  His hair is shiny as melted licorice and parted down one side. A pair of round wire-framed reading glasses with badly scratched lenses are perched precariously on the tip of his button nose. Olive-skinned and slight of build, he’s sporting a pair of heavy-duty work gloves, khaki cargo shorts with an array of pockets and zippers, lace-less boots two sizes too big, and an oversized navy blazer with sagging gold buttons barely hanging on by their threads.

  Just as the boy bounds toward us, his name pops into my head, and I say it out loud:

  “Angel Fire!”

  3

  DIVIDED

  Brohn snaps his fingers and squints down at the boy. “Angel Fire. Right! You’re from the Unsettled. The Governor.”

  Angel Fire plants one hand on my upper arm and the other on Brohn’s and beams up at us with eyes glinty enough to start a fire. “Kress! Brohn! I’ve heard all about you from Branwynne and her friends.” Without loosening his grip on our arms, he bounces his gaze back and forth between us. Sprightly and oddly put-together, he looks like a child’s doll in ill-fitting clothes, but he gobbles us up with his eyes like we’re the brand-new Christmas toys he’s been wishing for and is breathlessly eager to unwrap. “We missed each other last time,” he gushes. “You were busy trying to save everyone while the Devoted were busy trying to torture me into surrendering our entire army to them.” Finally releasing his energetic grip on our arms, Angel Fire pushes up the sleeves of his baggy blazer to reveal long, barely healed slashes, bruises, burn marks, and even what look like raised bullet wounds on his forearms. “I showed them, though! Bled all over them, didn’t I?”

  I flick my gaze from my own forearms with their intricate black designs of curved lines, shapes, dots, and dashes to Angel Fire’s and their angry-looking lesions and lacerations. “The Devoted…tortured you?”