The Apocalypse Ocean (8 page)

Kay looked at the burning ruins of dock seventeen from the safe vantage point of several docks over. She sat on top of the bomb crate and watched the men trying to put out the fires from nearby boats as the oily smoke roiled past her.

The crate rested on a wheeled dolly. She’d loaded it herself, after slowly, painfully, dragging the crate up the stairs from the basement to the street.

From there she’d pulled it all the way from the safe house to the spotter’s house where Bakeem had died.

There was no body, of course. But most of the house they’d used was missing. Swallowed by the Doaq’s insatiable maw.

She’d gone to Market-square, and found more missing chunks of her world.

THIS ISLAND IS MINE, NOT YOURS. The Doaq’s words seared themselves into the back of her brain. 

Not hers. For two years she’d been building toward taking control of her surroundings. Learning about the world outside Okur. Gaining control. And the Doaq had undone it all in a single day.

She could not see a way through the creature.

She’d thought she had. She’d been wrong. Very wrong.

The city’s alarms split the sound of burning fire and sizzling water. Kay frowned, looked up at the mountains, and saw mist topping the peaks and sweeping toward the harbor.

As the first stinging drops burned her upturned face someone ran over to her with a steel umbrella. “Get aboard the ship, miss. We’re going to leave, right now!”

But Kay didn’t budge.

She remembered the first time she’d stood on these docks, looking up toward the sky, her skin sizzling and burning as the storm’s droplets struck her face.

#

The Liberation of Okur began after a long, slow sunset. 

Just after curfew Ox-men huddled together outside the longhuts of the Sizit estate, staring up at the sky. They didn’t notice the Caretakers appear, though they had to have known the Caretakers would hear their muttering and realize someone was out after curfew.

Insubordination like that would not stand.

Her fathers and mothers spread out into the square with their red cloaks fluttering. They didn’t bother to speak just yet, they just raised their glimmering, metal Fists into the air. It was a warning. The Ox-men knew what those metal-gloved right hands could do to them.

Everything fell quiet.

“Please,” one of the Ox-men begged. “Look up.”

Unlike her mothers and fathers, or even her other brothers and sisters, Kay looked up.

The sky was full of falling stars.

Thirty, no, fifty, bright trails of fire all spread in different directions. They streaked across the deepening purple and among newly appearing stars.

Blue-green lines flickered abruptly between them. Some of the falling stars faded away. But more appeared behind them, and then even more.

No wonder the Ox-men were terrified. The sky itself seemed to be falling. Or the stars themselves were in the middle of some vast, distant, heavenly battle.

But that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that the Ox-men had violated curfew. As Kay looked back down, her mothers and fathers pointed their Fists at the Ox-men and squeezed.

The Ox-men screamed. Their shaggy, muscled bodies arced in pain. They fell to the ground in fits, tears spilling from their large, round eyes.

“There are consequences for ignoring curfew,” one of her fathers said sadly as the Caretakers all opened their hands, releasing the Ox-men from the pain that had seared them from inside of their own brains. The panting Ox-men stared at the Caretakers.

“But there never used to be curfew,” one of the larger Ox-men protested, struggling back to his knees. “We work hard. We do not ask much. Why?”

One of Kay’s mothers walked over to the Ox-man and kneeled next to him. Kay couldn’t hear the words, but seeing the posture, she could imagine what was said. Eventually the Ox-man nodded in submission.

“It is not our place to question the Lords who provide so much for us,” he said in a deep, rumbly voice to the group. “It is enough that they shelter us and feed us, and in exchange, we give them our muscle and obedience.”

One by one the scared Ox-men followed his lead and returned to their longhuts. The stairs and thin plastic walls shook as the massive men trudged inside.

That left the Luminoids who mingled about nearby, confused and scared. They did not have a curfew. They were
supposed
to be out here, waiting for the Caretakers to come for them.

They had spent the day sleeping in the open, their green skin soaking in the sun’s rays. Now they glowed in the twilight, the light they cast dappling the dirt around them as they milled about in one giant, nervous cluster of illuminated human flesh.

The Caretakers led them off toward the Lordhouse. It was time for them to line the great rooms and walkways of the Lordhouse now.

Kay prodded at three Luminoids with her own small Fist, and they shivered and shied away from her. “With me,” she snapped.

She preferred not to use the Fist. She didn’t like pointing it at them, or feeling it tug her fingers as it confirmed the connection to the subject she’d selected. The crackling sensation as she curled her hand into a fist always startled her.

Worse were the screams that would follow; they always tugged at her stomach.

It was better to use your voice, and your ability to read them, she felt.

In the lush, covered, and protected gardens, Kay found the three markers for the Luminoids. They climbed awkwardly onto their pedestals and stood proudly, straight and graceful, where they would remain for most of the night.

The Lords didn’t need Luminoids. The Lordhouse had solar panels and electric lights. The Luminoids were more a status symbol that only the best Lords could afford to feed and breed.

In a way, it was an honor that she got to direct them to their pedestals every night.

“Arms to your sides,” Kay directed.

The Luminoids adjusted their pose, and Kay stepped back.

“Okay.”

Kay paid close attention to these details. There was a wide dust bath in the area between the three pedestals that the Lords sometimes visited in the twilight, fluttering their wings around in the soft, imported dirt that had been so carefully raked and groomed. And if anything was wrong, she would be disciplined for the slip.

The Luminoids watched her inspect the dirt bath and their poses, but said nothing.

They couldn’t. Their tongues had been surgically removed at three years old, once they’d learned language. The timing was critical. They understood commands and language better, the Lords said, as they’d been able to practice it a short time.

A Luminoid didn’t need to clarify instructions or help with complicated work. They only stood in one place and lit it up for the enjoyment of the Lords. They did not need to ever speak up or intrude on a Lord’s personal space.

Signing was also forbidden. Some of the Luminoids had learned in secret and practiced it anyway. They now stood among the art collection, their arms amputated to the shoulder. Runners and stewards fed, bathed, and cleaned them as needed. The other Luminoids regarded them with disgust.

The ground shook. Thunder rolled across the desert plain, and despite her lifetime of training Kay ran through the garden to look out in the direction of the steady thumps.

Light danced and glowed in the dark over the edge of the Ulurura Mountains. It looked like a lightning storm, but it was too far away to be that.

There was a city somewhere past those mountains, Kay knew. None of them had ever visited it, but the Lords sometimes flew out there and back.

One of the very old Caretakers had told them he’d visited it when he was child. He said that the Lords lived in buildings crammed seven or eight paces apart, and that most of the buildings rose hundreds of feet high.

Many assumed he was lying, of course.

But every so often the Lords purchased a new Runner, or Ox-man, from another Lordhouse far over the horizon. Some of them talked about the distant cities.

If it was a legend, it was a persistent one.

The lights danced some more.

“Caretaker!” buzzed the voice of a Lord.

Lips dry and terrified, Kay turned around and dropped to a knee.

It was Kestreyya, one of the Lord’s Ladies, she saw as she glanced upward. Kestreyya had lean and scaly legs, typically massive feathered thighs, and large, round green eyes.

Her handwings fluttered in what seemed like a nervous pattern in front of her chest. Those dangerous quills that looked like feathers from a distance were all matted every which way.

Normally Kay would expect that meant Kestreyya had come to use the dirt bath. Instead Kestreyya glanced off in the distance at the dancing lights, her long and graceful neck bending as she did so. “Go and fetch Ox-men, thirty of them. There is work to be done. You will lead the crew.”

“I will do so. Once I have the Ox-men assembled what will I do for you?”

“The Lord Sassimich will join you outside.”

Kestreyya spun around and loped off, leaving Kay still trembling on her single knee.

#

Back at the Caretaker’s longhut she found one of her fathers. He sat near room J and he smiled when he saw her.

“I’m to assemble thirty Ox-men for Lord Sassimich,” she told him.

He looked puzzled, but snapped his fingers for everyone to fall silent. “Did our Lord say why?”

Kay shook her head. “Kestreyya gave me the order.”

“We will help you assemble them. How long?”

“Right away.”

The longhut broke into motion, Caretakers pulling their metallic Fists away from their chargers and following her out.

They roused Ox-men and herded them quickly out. She’d barely gotten them lined up when Sassimich came pelting down between the longhuts.

“All of you, follow me,” he ordered.

Their Lord led them almost a mile into the desert. Well away from the gardens and roads of the Lordhouse.

He stopped them in an area bracketed by two high rock walls, and stamped the ground.

“Tonight you will begin digging a pit. It will be fifty feet deep and a hundred feet wide. All other tasks at the Lordhouse are secondary to this. Do you understand?”

“It will be our primary task,” said one of Kay’s fathers.

“Every second of every day, as fast as you can make them work,” the Lord said. Then, in a quieter voice to Kay’s father, “work them to exhaustion. Even if they drop.”

#

The ground, packed hard by cycles of rain and sun, resisted their pickaxes and digging machines. It was hot, cruel work, and Kay watched her mothers and fathers use their Fists to drive the Ox-men hard to dig deeper into the ground.

They put even the thin, bony Runners to work. They complained incessantly, as they preferred their runs from Lordhouse to Lordhouse, delivering sealed messages in encrypted notes. That was honest and proud work. Not digging.

Kay strolled the rippling hot sands, patrolling the Ox-men, squeezing her Fist when she found them slacking.

The lightning and the glowing thuds and booms from the other side of the mountain continued on through the next day. Occasionally fingers of light stabbed upwards in the distance.

After all the fear of the first night, it became background noise. They were more worried about the great pit.

“It’s aliens that are attacking,” said one of Kay’s mothers. “I heard one of the Lords talking about it.”

“In their tongue?” one of her father’s asked. “Forget you heard that. And don’t talk about it again. We’re not supposed to understand their tongue.”

It was hard to do that, though. The Lord’s language was made of a lot of clicks and hisses and squawks, mainly. But after a lifetime it was hard for a Caretaker to
not
learn it. Caretakers noticed body language, words, and intent. That was what Caretakers had been bred and designed for, so that they could keep the Luminoids and Stewards, Runners and Ox-men, and other variants of people smoothly operating a Lordhouse for their Lords.

“If there is a war, it explains the thunder.”

They all looked at the mountains thoughtfully. The distant thunder continued, always present in the background.

#

When the Ox-men finished the pit, one of her fathers took her with him to the Lordhouse.

“The Caretaker assigned the task should always report to the Lord that it is completed,” he told her with a smile. “Now don’t be nervous. If everything has been done right, our Lord never gets upset. They admire precision. They reward our good work.”

Kay had been taught that the Lords found people in a savage state and had chosen to bring them away from their fallen home world to give them a chance to live well. Sometimes life in the Lordhouse was hard, so Kay couldn’t imagine how horrible life had once been for people.

It made her grateful for her current life.

And even more grateful to be a Caretaker.

The cool air of the Lordhouse swept over them as they entered. They bowed to the Stewards inside, who bowed back and led them to the Lord’s room at the heart of the Lordhouse. The Stewards were short, no more than three feet high so that they could run through the service tunnels throughout the Lordhouse.

At the very center of the round Lordhouse, the well-polished marble floors of the center nest were dimly lit and mysterious. Kay had only been here once before, when she’d been given her very own Fist. Today Lord Sassimich and his flock lounged around, tucked into wicker baskets. There were twelve Lords and five Ladies. All of them seemed fixated on the globe at the heart of the room, which chattered away in the Lord’s Language.

Kay and her father dropped to their knees at the entrance.

“Is the project done?” Lord Sassimich asked.

“It is done, Lord,” Kay said, after her father nudged her arm with an elbow.

“Gather all the people down around it. The next stage begins,” the Lord told them.

Kay wanted to ask what exactly that was, but bit her lip. It would be revealed in time. And asking a direct question of the Lord would garner her father using his Fist … on her.

“Thank you my Lord,” she said. “I will gather all the people of the Lordhouse.”