Legion Lost (4 page)

Like the blackness of a gunshot
wound.

I feel the tears coming on, but I’ve
no strength left in my body to stop them flowing. My torso rattles where I
cling to the tree trunk, bended knees giving way beneath me as I flop to the
ground. The plain ahead is too vast, and it is too great a prospect to believe
that I can cross it alive. My cold, hopeless grimace grows hot with anger and
salt water. My heart thumps a furious pulse through my quivering form, keeping
time with my sobs. Despair captures me so completely that I don’t see the
shadow coming closer to where I lie crying my heart out.

“Hey mate,” a voice calls, “are you
okay?”

The voice is male and friendly, but
my sobs are too violent to catch my breath enough to answer it. Soon, I
recognise the shadow moving across the blurred veil of my tears, and two hands
grab me under the arms to pull me upright. The stranger’s hands smell like
metal as he wipes the water away from my eyes.

“You look like death,” he tells me.
“Say . . . you’re not diseased or anything, are you?”

When I find my focus, I realise that
I’m looking at a boy with saffron-coloured skin. He has the rim of his jumper
pulled up over his nose, his narrow black eyes observing me as he holds his
mock gas mask in place. I mumble through my sobs, trying to shake my head.

“Not diseased,” I manage to say.
“Just hungry.”

The metal pot on the makeshift stove
contains some sort of stew. After the boy has dragged me closer to the fire, he
props me up against a trunk and dips a wooden bowl into the stew pot. I gaze
down sleepily into the hot mixture, watching as the dark-eyed boy blows away
the steam. He lifts the bowl to my lips, gently tipping some of the mixture
forwards for me to sip at it. I splutter and choke with the effort, but
eventually I can feel the warmth of the much-needed sustenance travelling down
into my eager gut.

Once I’ve swallowed the last mouthful
from the bowl, the exhaustion of the day’s trek hits me again. I slump against
the tree, my head lolling back as my body begs for sleep. It takes every scrap
of energy that I have to force my eyes to flicker open, lips parting to whisper
two words before I fall asleep.

“Thank you.”

*

By morning light, the terra-cotta
plain looks more grey and ashen than it had at dusk. The world is full of
bright white clouds as I slowly awaken, instantly overcome once more by the
sensation of no longer being safe underground. My only relief is that I’m no
longer alone. The boy who shared his meal with me is already filling two bowls
with water from a plastic bottle. In the daylight, I can see that he must be
younger than me, but he moves like a concerned father as he puts one water bowl
into my hand.

“I’m feeling better,” I croak,
lifting the bowl to show him that I can feed myself now. “Thank you for sharing
your supplies.”

The boy waves a nonchalant hand. “I
figured you must be going to the Legion,” he begins. “If we’re going to be
brothers-in-arms, it pays to get off to a good start.”

A few short days ago, I would have
been eager to correct him about calling me his “brother,” but now I let one
hand cup my short-haired head as I gulp down the water. I am an escapee, after
all, and giving out information would be a stupid move. If he wants to think
I’m a boy, it’s best to let him for now. I slowly piece together a reply that
won’t give anything away.

“Where is the Legion?” I ask.

The boy points out into the vast,
arid plain ahead.

“I’m told that if we walk for about
an hour, it’ll come into view in the west,” he explains.

I have no idea which way west would
be, but I nod as though I understand him.

“What’s your name?” I say.

He shakes his head at me with a
knowing look.

“It doesn’t matter,” he replies.
“We’ll get a new one when we enter the Legion. Everything we’ve been through out
here will be forgotten and forgiven. New name, new life, new everything.”

I mull it over quietly. A place to
erase one’s identity and start afresh. It seems like an ideal location to hide
in whilst I find out what’s happened to my family.

“You’re Indian,” the boy remarks
brightly. “Don’t see many Indian fellas around these parts. You must have
travelled a long way.”

“I ran out of supplies in the
forest,” I lie with an eager nod. “I, uh . . . I didn’t
think it would be so far away.”

“I guess some kids have more time to
prepare than others,” the boy replies. “It depends on how fast you need to get
away.”

“Does the Legion only take children?”
I ask.

The boy nods. “A military safeholding
for ages eleven to nineteen.”

He
reels off the lines as though he might have memorized them from some sort of
brochure.

“If
you complete the training, they give you a proper job in the System when you’re
twenty.” A forlorn look overtakes his small features. “But that’s six years
away for me. How about you?”

It takes me a moment to realise that
he’s asked me a question—my mind is addled by so much new information.

“I’m sixteen,” I tell him, trying to
piece together the facts in my head.

The Legion is run by the System. The
System is the new government that rose up twenty years ago, when my family and
countless others like us went into the Underground to escape their new world
order. Father used to say that the System was responsible for the destruction
of every major city in the nation. And now, I’m on the verge of walking right
into one of its projects to seek shelter. It seems unbearably wrong, but other
options are nonexistent. The soldiers who were chasing me may not have given up
yet, and the Legion would offer me a chance to vanish for a while and think
things through.

“It’s okay,” the boy says, snapping
me back to the present. “I won’t make you ask me, male pride and all that. You
can share my supplies ’til we get there. I’ve got plenty.”

Again, the urge to tell him I’m a
girl rises, but for all I know, this Legion place might only accept boys into
its ranks. Instead I simply smile and punch my new companion lightly in the
shoulder, like I would with Pranjal. He flashes me a grin filled with small,
white teeth.

“How soon do you think we’ll reach
it?” I ask him.

“Tomorrow, if I calculated it right,”
he replies, “and that’s if we leave right now.”

He springs to his feet to gather his
things, leaving me to clamber up with all the grace of a dizy toddler. My head
spins as I stand upright, facing the emptiness of the land ahead. It will be
one hour, so he says, before our destination comes into view. After so long in
the closed-off comfort of the Underground, one hour exposed to nothing but the
sky is a tall order indeed.

“You all right to go?” My new ally
asks the question with a quirked brow.

I clench my fists, filling my chest
with air as I gather my strength.

“Lead the way.”

With
the past off-limits, it’s hard to know what to talk about on the long march
forward. My companion was right about the Legion coming into view after the
first hour, and now I can see it taking a clearer shape with every minute that
ticks by. At first, it was little more than a boxy, grey blur on the horizon,
but now I’m starting to make out the long perimeter walls that stretch between
its austere towers. It sits in the middle of nowhere, a concrete castle on a
dusty, never-ending plain.

“It’s
starting to look a bit like a prison,” I say, desperate to break the silence of
the trek.

My
young friend gives a little nod. “Spartan living,” he concludes.

I
shake my head at him. “Sorry . . . Spartan?”

“You
know,” he replies. “Fierce warriors living in the most basic conditions. Luxury
breeds a weak spirit. All that stuff?”

I
blink at him, still waiting for a proper explanation.

“You
don’t know about Sparta?” he remarks. “Blimey, where did you go to school?”

School.
It’s a word I know, but I’ve never been to one of those places. In the
Underground, you learn only what you need to learn, and there were a limited
number of salvaged books. Once I’d read them all, there was little left to
discover, except for a few fairy stories about knights and kings that my mother
used to tell us late at night. I shrug my shoulders as I walk, giving the
dark-eyed boy an apologetic frown.

“My
parents taught me at home,” I reply.

The
boy nods, his long lashes flickering down at the ground before him.

“Parents,
eh?” he says. “Lucky you.”

*

Sometimes,
the arid land gives way to clumps of half-dead bushes, and it’s beside one of
these growths that we make our camp for the night. The ground glows scarlet
again in the darkening sunset, and I find a moment of solitude when my kind
companion falls asleep. I have to sit with my back to the bushes so that I
don’t feel so exposed here, in the middle of nowhere. I find myself facing the
shadow of the Legion as I breathe in the night, watching its turrets cut a dark
slice into the sky, until everything is fading into shadow.

I
didn’t realise before quite how huge the facility would be, but now I’m
starting to wonder about the people I’ll soon be meeting within its high,
impenetrable walls. The boy I’m with is running from something, something that
needs to be forgiven and forgotten. Will there be teenage criminals looking to
the Legion for escape? Or will the young people be more like me, just looking
for somewhere to shelter when hope is barely alive? All I can fathom is that
the Legion must cater to those who have lost their way. So long as they don’t
ask me
how
I became so lost, I can try to survive by their laws, for now
at least.

“No!”

The
boy beside me breaks my chain of thought as he begins to thrash on the cold,
hard ground. Caught in the grip of what appears to be a powerful nightmare, I
watch his amber skin turn pale, his jaw clenching as his small eyes squeeze
tighter shut. His fists are balled against his worn-out T-shirt, legs kicking
out towards the dying embers of the fire we made earlier.

“No,”
he says again, “I didn’t see her. I didn’t see her. I didn’t know… she was in
the road . . . see her, I didn’t. No. No. No!”

I
reach out and nudge him in the shoulder with the tip of my shoe. Suddenly, his
eyes shoot open. Water collects instantly along his lashes, which he tries to
blink away as he lifts his head to observe me. I want to ask what he was
dreaming about, but the guilty look on his sweat-soaked face makes me think
better of it. If he won’t even tell me his name, then he’s not going to tell me
what haunts him in the depth of night.

The
boy turns over to shield his expression from my view. From a lifetime of
sharing a room with my brothers, I know by his breathing that he hasn’t gone
back to sleep. I don’t feel much like sleeping either, but the heaviness in my
limbs makes me give in and curl up at the roots of the bushes. I lie in silent
thought for a long while before sleep begins to dull my mind, the shadow of the
Legion still lingering, even behind my closed eyes.

*

It’s
my turn to be nudged awake by the toe of someone’s boot. I jump, nerves
coursing through me at the sudden contact, then scramble wildly onto my back to
gaze up at a sight that I’ve dreaded seeing. A terrified shiver ricochets
through me as I take in the all-black uniform and the heavily armed torso above
me. The mask with the slit for eyes to peer through is all too fresh in my
memory. I want to rise and run immediately, but one look around me tells me
that this dark figure is not alone.

The
soldiers from the raid have found me.

“You
two,” says the soldier nearest me. “What are you boys doing all the way out
here alone?”

My
little friend is clambering to his feet, but he doesn’t even reach two-thirds
of the height of the soldier he addresses.

“We’re
headed to the Legion,” he explains.

I
can hear my heart thumping in my chest as the soldier looks down at me again,
then back to my companion.

“I
see,” he says, his voice surprisingly bright. “We’re headed back there
ourselves. Come on, we’ll give you a lift.”

The
soldier offers me his black-gloved hand, and it takes a moment for the sense of
relief to register in my head. These aren’t the raid soldiers. They’re helping
me get to my feet. They’re helping me get to the Legion. There are six of them
altogether, including one who sits in the driving seat of a strange-looking
craft. It floats a few inches above the arid earth, making a peculiar whirring
noise as jets of air swirl underneath its round, rubber base. When the soldiers
guide me to board the rear of the open-air craft, I hang back for a hesitant
moment.

“What’s
the matter?” one of them asks in a snappy tone. “Haven’t you ever seen a
hovercraft before?”

I
don’t reply. Her voice is definitely young and female. If these are the
Legion’s recruits, then it does take girls in as well. I climb uncertainly into
the hovercraft, sitting on the wide inflated rim as it vibrates with the force
of the air jets beneath it. I notice that red fabric straps are sewn into the
edges of the rubber, so I cling to them furiously, watching my brown knuckles
turn almost white with the strain. Flanked by soldiers on all sides, I can only
hope that their offer of help is genuine as the craft shunts off towards the
Legion itself.