Legion Lost (29 page)

There
was a time when I thought that way too. Every minute I spent in the Legion, all
I wanted was to find my family and run. Hiding from the System under the
rebels’ protection would have been an ideal solution a month ago. Now, I can’t
imagine trying in vain to return to normality with what’s left of my family. If
I leave the base, I leave the last remnants of Stirling behind. I’m not ready
to do that, but Mumma won’t accept it. There’s only one person who really
understands me, and it’s the one whom I feared like a demon the first time we
met.

Malcolm
is sitting at the desk inside the fishbowl, his glass office at the top of the
mountain’s peak. I am glad to escape the bitter spring wind as I reach the
doors and force one open, letting myself into his private space. Malcolm only
kicks the chair beside him, sliding it out for me to sit down. We have met in
the night on the peak many times since the fall of Valkyrie, and I sit in the
temperate glass box, gazing out upon the vast, dark forest. Beyond the trees, I
can still see the dark, boxy shape of the Legion in the centre of the
wasteland. Beyond that, the illuminated spires, domes and connecting passages
of the System glow white on the horizon.

“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.