Chaos (4 page)

“How are we going to get in?” I asked, my voice trembling. This was it. Was I ready? Was I strong enough?

I had to be. Ana and I were the only rescue squad available.

“They’ll see us come in,” Ana said. “The crowd isn’t big enough for them not to notice us crawling through the opening you make.”

“Have a little faith,” said Raphael. “I’ll get you in without incident. Once I do that, though, you’re on your own.” My heart stopped as his voice hitched, catching on those final words. Somehow, that tiny emotional breach was worse than Michael’s red-rimmed eyes and roared curses.

I stepped back from the dome. “Be honest with us. Is this possible? Or is this a suicide mission?”

I expected him to smile calmly and repeat his standard reply, that I didn’t need to know. But his freckled face was arranged in a very strange expression: part pity, part sadness, part uncertainty. And then he looked up at the sky, closed his eyes, and drew in a breath. It was the most human thing I’d ever seen him do.

“If anyone can complete this mission successfully, the two of you can,” he said as he opened his eyes and turned to the orange glow at the horizon. He stared without blinking at the thin strip of flame forming as the sun began to rise from the sand. “You have everything you need. It is only a question of will and gut, and of the choices you make.”

I turned to Ana. “Say the word, Captain.”

Her dark eyes met mine. “Fast and focused, Lieutenant. We go in, get our men, destroy the portal and the Queen, and get out.”

I nodded and put my hands on my thighs, feeling for the blades through the thick material of my cloak. Malachi had trained me well. I knew how to survive. How to kill. How to endure. And I knew what I wanted. Him. Only him. “Let’s go.”

Faint lines creased the corners of Raphael’s mouth as he turned away from the rising sun, his gray eyes now blazing with an oddly orange tint. “Very well. When I give the signal, dive for the sand. And good luck.”

He spread his arms, and twin balls of bright-yellow fire formed on his palms, like two tiny suns. I spun around, facing the dome. I watched his reflection as he lifted his head, his eyes still glowing, and hurled the balls of flame into the air. They hit the dome with a deafening explosion, right over the Mazikin guards. Their heads jerked up, their mouths wide and snarling; at the same time Raphael’s hand reached between Ana and me. He drew his finger across the dome, then grabbed at its surface. It crumpled and tore like paper, letting the cool, fetid air of the Mazikin city rush out.

I dove through the window he created, landing in a heap a few feet away from the edge of the dome. I scooted toward the center of the sand as the Mazikin hooted and growled, their attention riveted on the dome above them. A muffled crack and a blinding light made me duck my head. Probably more balls of flame to keep them distracted. Ana grunted as she hit the sand next to me, spraying the yellow-gray granules across the tops of my gloved hands.

I turned my head in time to see Raphael’s face through the opening of the dome, the night-blue sky behind him, wide and endless, the sun a half circle on the horizon. He nodded at me, then swiped his hand across the dome once more. Shutting us in.

He disappeared, and all I could see was my own ashen face reflected in the wall of my new prison. My fingers dug into the sand.

The Mazikin were still growling at each other, their shoulders drawn up and their claws twitching.

“They’re nervous. Never seen anything like that,” Ana whispered as we scrambled to join the small crowd of clothed humans huddled next to the Mazikin guards. She cursed. “They’re saying they should report it.”

“You can understand them?” I muttered softly as we pressed ourselves in among the others. Then I realized that made sense, because Malachi could understand them, too, after decades of eavesdropping on them in the dark city.

If she answered, I didn’t hear. Because that was the moment when the Mazikin grabbed my hair and wrenched my head up. His black-marble eyes gazed deep into mine. His rotten-meat breath fanned across my face. I gagged and tried to turn my head away, but he only leaned closer, nuzzling his warm, wet snout along my cheek. “Ah,” he sighed. “English?”

His black-lipped smile glistened when he saw the recognition on my face. An involuntary sound of disgust squeaked from my throat as he drew his tongue across my forehead. “These two must be straight from the Queen’s dinner hall,” the other Mazikin said. “They smell delicious.”

Somehow I knew he was speaking English because he wanted us to be scared. The Mazikin stationed at the gates probably knew several languages, to help them terrorize efficiently. And it was working. The Mazikin holding me nodded, still looking in my eyes. He grunted at his friend, who was holding Ana in a similar grip. Then they shoved us toward the open gates. My elbows hit the sand as I fell, but all I felt was relief. They were herding us into the city, as we’d hoped.

Ana didn’t appear to agree with my rosy assessment of our situation. Crawling forward on her hands and knees, she grumbled under her breath as we drew even with the city gates.

“What is it?” I whispered as we inched toward a huge cart crammed with a few dozen cloaked women, all wearing completely defeated expressions. The Mazikin standing next to the vehicle were watching us, clearly expecting us to climb aboard.

“The Mazikin guards have pronounced us edible,” she said quietly. “We’re being taken straight to the meat factory.”

FOUR

“I
THOUGHT THEY ATE
goats!” My heart thrummed as I stared up at the waiting Mazikin. They were using canes tipped with metal hooks to poke at the whimpering women inside the cart. Their yellow-white fangs flashed as they snarled at their victims.

“Either there weren’t enough or their tastes have expanded,” said Ana.

We were only a few yards from the cart now, still on our hands and knees in the middle of a small square. Three crumbling roads led away from the city gates. A similar cart, this one holding several gray-faced men, was sitting on the other side of the square, near a road that ran right along the wall. In the distance, high smokestacks belched black plumes that curled in wisps as they hit the top of the dome. The faint clamor of industrial machinery reached my ears over the sounds of human suffering in the square. There was some type of factory up there, and my guess was that the men were the labor force.

On Earth, the Mazikin had been most fond of the night, and now day was breaking. Here, all the Mazikin in the square were growling impatiently at their human charges and glancing over their shoulders as the sun, the only thing visible through the dome, peeked over the bricks of the wall behind us.

I sucked in a breath of cool, moist air that left a sour taste on my tongue. The smell of this place was incredibly bad: rotten eggs, acrid smoke, and raw sewage. “Orders?” I asked, hoping Ana had a brilliant plan that did not involve becoming a nice flank steak.

“We get in that cart,” she said, leaning close and speaking directly in my ear as we inched forward. “I think we’re going to have a chance to get away when the sun gets higher, but if we try it now, the entire city will know we’re here. They’re already on guard because of Raphael’s fireball-juggling act. Don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself.”

I tugged my hood low over my face as I reached the boots of the Mazikin waiting at the cart. Mazikin feet were broader than human feet, and their knees seemed to bend backward—much like a dog’s. Still, they alternated between standing on their hind legs and running around on all fours. They also had no trouble kicking—my captor’s boot made a firm connection with my ribs. “Up,” he snarled.

I let out a pathetic whimper and obeyed, despite my desire to whip out one of my knives and get to work. Ana was right—this seemed like the quickest way to get deeper into the city. Closer to Malachi, wherever he was. As convenient as it would have been, I’d known he probably wasn’t hanging out right next to the exit to the city.

The cart rattled as Ana and I climbed aboard. It was powered by a huge clunky exposed engine at the front with crazy coils of pipe and gauges sticking out at seemingly random places. It sputtered as the Mazikin driver twisted a key in the ignition, making the vehicle shudder and creak. The woman squatting next to me wrapped her skinny fingers over the metal edge of the cart, as did the woman on her other side. They bowed their heads, waiting. I bowed my head in imitation, then jerked it up when I felt a sharp jab in my shoulder.

A Mazikin was standing right in front of me. “Hands out!” he barked, then repeated the command in a few other languages. Like all the others, I wrapped my fingers over the metal wall of the cart, waiting for him to notice I was wearing gloves and preparing to punch my fist right through his face if he made a move. But he barely looked at me. All he seemed to care about was getting the job done. He flicked an irritated glance at the rising sun, and with quick, practiced movements, snapped a metal cuff onto my wrist. I flinched back out of sheer reflex, but not fast enough to keep my other wrist from being captured. Without looking at my face, the Mazikin fastened the cuffs, connected by a rusting chain, to a metal ring on the floor of the cart. Two other Mazikin were doing the same thing to the other captives, none of whom resisted. I met Ana’s eyes and saw a flicker of uneasiness.

Chained inside the mechanized cart, squatting on the floor, shoulder to shoulder with Ana and a bunch of other women, I tensed as we lurched into motion. The woman next to me, her hood covering her face, sniffled and sobbed. “Oh God,” she whispered over and over again, and I couldn’t help but picture her prayer rising high in the ai
r . . .
and then hitting the dome and falling, unheard, to the dirty streets below.

We rumbled along the rough road as the sun finally broke free of the city wall and turned into a circle of fire. As the heat struck me, I lifted my head and let the hood fall away. The air had turned from cool to warm in a matter of a minute, and the temperature just kept rising, drawing tiny beads of sweat along Ana’s temples as she scanned her environment with a predator’s calm. The Mazikin driver shook his big hairy head back and forth, his ears twitching as if trying to toss off the heat. The engine belched, and the cart accelerated sharply, throwing me off balance. Not that it mattered—we were packed in so tightly that I couldn’t have fallen over if I tried.

I sucked in a breath of scorching air and tugged at the shackles on my wrists. The rusty cuffs were crusted with dried blood, and maroon flecks scraped off with my movements, remnants of someone else’s pain and desperation. On either side of the road were gray concrete buildings, all of the same design. Three stories high, square openings every ten feet or so, windows without panes, dark inside. The only thing that distinguished them were the paintings all over their exteriors. Some of the markings looked like graffiti, black and jagged, and some of them looked more like murals. But all of them were chipped and pockmarked, cracked and faded. Nothing thrived here.

That thought stamped itself on my brain as we passed by a Mazikin trotting down the street on all fours—walking a woman on a leash. The human was young, but the look on her face reflected a century’s worth of suffering as her captor yanked the leash tight, making her gulp for air. The Mazikin dragged her through the entrance to one of the buildings. All around us, the creatures were fleeing indoors as the temperature rose and the sun’s light was magnified through the dome, pouring over the city with brutal thoroughness.

“Get your hood up or you’ll burn,” muttered Ana. “God, this is awful.”

I gave her a sidelong glance. She was twisted into a weird position, with her hips pressed downward and her back bowed. Her fingers stretched and scrabble
d . . .
She was trying to reach her knives. “I can help,” I whispered. “Stop tugging on those or you’ll hurt yourself.” Unlike me, Ana wasn’t wearing gloves.

“I’m pretty sure I can pick the lock,” she told me as I leaned down. My hood flopped over my head as I fastened my teeth onto the hilt of one of her double-edged throwing knives. I began to draw it back just as we went over a bump. My forehead smacked the metal edge of the cart, and for a second I saw stars, but then I returned to my task of unsheathing the knife. After a few seconds, I pulled it free, and then bent sharply so she could snatch it from my mouth.

As I straightened up to give Ana room, I turned to see the woman wedged in next to me watching us carefully. “Are you part of the Resistance?” she asked me, her eyes darting back and forth like she was afraid we’d be overheard despite the roar and cough of the engine, the rumble of the cart along the potholed road, and the sobbing women around us, who were babbling in a dozen different languages.

My heart skipped. “Resistance?”

She paled when she saw the clueless look on my face. “No, no,” she stammered. “That’s not what I said.” She ducked her head and pressed her forehead between her hands, her shoulders trembling.

Next to me, Ana was working on her shackles, her cloak concealing her movements. I shifted onto the balls of my feet and pulled myself forward to get a good look at where we were going. Dozens of blocks ahead was a massive building, partially obscured by greenish-brown smog, through which I could make out the tips of a few smokestacks.

I could already smell the oily scent of roasting meat.

I blinked away the image of what awaited us at the meat factory in time to notice a black-cloaked figure disappearing between two buildings a block away. From the shape of the silhouette, I could tell it was a human and not a Mazikin, but he moved with sure-footed confidence rather than the broken, raw fear that bent the backs of the humans I had seen so far. I tingled in anticipation as we drew closer—I wanted to see where he was going, what he was doing. But we ground to a halt behind another mechanized cart, this one carrying a load of concrete blocks. It had hit a huge pothole and canted to one side, spilling several bricks onto the street and sidewalk. The driver was galloping around, prodding at two humans who were trying to push the vehicle’s tire out of the hole.

Our driver stood up and began to grunt at the other Mazikin, who raised his ugly head and spat at our cart. He rose to his hind legs and brandished a club that looked strikingly like a human femur. Our driver sat back down, growling to himself and pulling his hood up against the sun. My own skin felt like it was slowly cooking, especially now that we didn’t even have the heated air rushing over us as we flew down the road. “How are you doing?” I asked Ana, who had yet to raise her head from her work.

“Almost there,” she mumbled from beneath her hood. “Why are we stopped?”

“Broken-down vehicle. They’re clearing the road.” I watched the straining forms of the men struggling with the loaded cart. They were naked from the waist up, and the skin on their backs was blistered, scarred, and oozing with sores. The driver of the concrete cart smacked one of them in the legs with his bone club, but the man didn’t cry out. He merely nodded as his Mazikin master hooted at him.

“He’s telling them to hurry before the ‘fire hour’ arrives,” Ana said. “No idea what that is, but I think I’d like to be inside when it happens.”

“Me too.”

The men, perhaps motivated by the reminder about fire hour, finally shoved the wheel of the cart out of the hole. With near-frantic movements, they tossed the fallen bricks back in the cart and leaped on top of the load, hanging on as the vehicle rolled forward. Our own driver cackled, then gunned the engine of our cart.

“Got it,” whispered Ana, and by her movements I could tell she was completely free. “Your turn. Hold still or I’ll end up cutting your fingers off.”

I clutched the edges of the cart and leaned back as she went to work on my shackles. As we bumped down the road, I squinted up the block where I’d seen the black-cloaked figure run, but there was no one in the streets now. At least, not that I could see.

Some of the women in the cart had noticed our efforts and were watching us with a mixture of curiosity and fear. From behind me, I once again heard the word “resistance,” followed by the soft hiss of whispering in a language I didn’t understand. I tilted my head toward the woman who’d spoken to me initially. Her forehead was still pressed between her hands.

“What’s the Resistance?” I asked. “If you’re afraid of getting in trouble, don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.”

Her knuckles turned white, which stood out in stark contrast to the red skin on the backs of her hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, her voice muted by the leather folds of her clothing. “But don’t let them hear you mention it.” She jerked her head toward the front, where the driver had his shoulders hiked nearly to his ears as we raced toward the meat factory. It still loomed far in the distance but was growing closer by the second.

The cuff around my right wrist clicked and fell away, and Ana pressed the knife into my free hand. “Do the other one yourself. I’d practically have to lie on top of you to do it, and we’re already drawing too much attention.”

She was right. The low whispers around us were nonstop now. It was only a matter of time before the driver heard them. I grabbed the knife with my right hand and jammed the tip into the keyhole on the underside of the cuff on my left hand, knowing one pothole could cause me to slit my own wrist. My heart pounded as the cart slowed to keep from hitting a massive truck rumbling along in front of us. I didn’t know what was in it, but a thick reddish-brown substance was leaking from beneath its rear door. We almost came to a standstill as it negotiated the deep divots in the road. The gouges were regular, set across the road in a way that made them nearly unavoidable, like speed bumps. It almost looked like someone had created the holes with a pickax or something. Next to me, Ana was chanting—
hurry, hurry, hurry
—like she was about to explode. I couldn’t blame her. The only thing keeping us in this cart was the fact that I wasn’t very good at picking locks.

I rotated my wrist, trying to slip the blade deeper into the keyhole, then hissed as we hit one of the divots and the knife poked into the fabric of my glove, just missing the skin. I yanked it out and got back to work, raising my head in time to see another dark-cloaked figure standing in the alley between two buildings. The person pressed further into the shadows as we passed. The face was hooded—I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. But it was definitely human; I caught a glimpse of bare skin peeking from beneath the cloak.

Ana nudged me with her shoulder. “We need to get out before we speed back up. This is our chance.”

“Doing my best, Captain,” I said from between clenched teeth.

In front of us, the massive truck, now leaking the reddish-brown fluid in a steady stream, slowed further and began to pull over to the side of the road. Up ahead, the smokestacks of the meat factory were easily visible, and the odor of cooking flesh hung heavy in the air, a stench that made me very glad my stomach was empty. “Jump,” I said. “I’ll catch up with you.”

“Shut up and work. That’s an order,” Ana snapped.

I’d never stopped trying the lock, but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. Still wriggling the tip of the knife in the keyhole, I turned to her. “Go, Ana. Before it’s too late.”

She shook her head. “Not without you.”

“You said you wouldn’t take care of me. So don’t,” I whispered, glaring at her. Sweat tickled the back of my neck as I bent over my shackled wrist again, wanting to scream in frustration.