Iron Gold

  “Children,” I say hollowly, “come kiss Dada for luck.”

  Ava understands. Her calm cracks. In the tears, I see the scared little girl who wept in her bed when our mother passed. The one I’d have to sing to sleep even though she was older.

  “I don’t want to leave Dada,” Conn cries.

  “I’ll bring him,” I say. “You all just have to go on ahead. Now kiss him.” Believing me, the children rush to kiss my father on the cheek. His eyes brim with tears as they dart back and forth. My sister bends and kisses him on the brow. She stays there, trembling, before stumbling back. Conn holds on to him, not letting go till his mother rips him violently away and moves them toward the door. “The north watchtower,” she says. “Be there soon.”

  “I will.”

  “Lyria.”

  “Yes?”

  “Bring me my boy.” We hold each other’s hands, a life full of wedding skirts, births, and love reduced now to a single second of fear. And then our hands are parting and the door closes and she’s swallowed by the nightmare outside. Through a crack in the plastic, I watch her run, clutching Ella to her breast and dragging her two boys along into the dark. I stay behind with my father in the hut, listening to the world ending beyond the thin walls. Some part of me thinks that if we stay here, the storm will pass us by. The plastic will somehow keep the Red Hand and their guns and slingBlades out. I want to tell Da it will be well. That I’ll see him soon. It’s the most present he’s been in a year, looking at me, knowing this is the last time he’ll see me. I kneel so that we are eye to eye, and clutch his face in my hands. This is the man who tucked me in at night. Who would sit me on his knee at Laureltide and tell stories of mining glories and pitvipers and fights. He was as vast as the sky itself. But now, he is a broken man watching helplessly as the world swallows his children.

  “I will see you in the Vale,” I whisper to him, our foreheads together. “I love you. I love you. I love you.” Then I throw myself away from him. In three steps I am out the door.

  Leaving him behind is like tearing a part of my body away.

  My eyes sting with tears, but a cold clarity fills me. I have to get Liam. My sister is already gone. The camp’s given over to madness. Gammas fleeing their houses. Flames in the distance. Two ships roar overhead through the black sky. The rattling of automatic guns, and the occasional whine of an energy weapon. Screams careen in from everywhere, swirling and swarming around me. I sprint diagonal between the homes, weaving my way through Gamma township to the central infirmary. I collide with a man full on and spin down into the mud, taking his elbow to my face. It barely jars him. He stumbles back, carrying a child, then rushes on. I know him. Elrow, one of my father’s headTalks from years back. He doesn’t even look down at me.

  Struggling back to my feet, I find the infirmary with its door locked. A peaked white plastic building stained on its fringes by mud. Waiting there in the rain like a girl in a white dress. I hammer on the doors. “Let me in! It’s Lyria. Let me in!” I kick the doors twice before they unlock from the inside and open. Three men and a woman stand in their yellow nursing livery, holding heavy medical instruments intended for my skull. I hold up my hands.

  “Lyria!” Janis, a Yellow doctor and head of the infirmary, shouts. “Let her through!”

  “Janis, where’s Liam?”

  “In the back.” Janis guides me through rows of cots filled with terrified children and infirm patients till we reach my nephew in the back. He’s sitting in his bed with his hands wrapped around his legs, sightless and listening to the horror outside. “What’s going on out there?” Janis asks.

  “Red Hand,” I say. “Dropships and trucks.”

  “They’re here?” she asks. She can’t believe it. “But the Republic…”

  “Damn the Republic,” I say. “We’ve got to run. Liam…” I wrap my arms around the little boy. He’s so thin he could be made of glass. His hair’s an unruly explosion of red, like mine, but more closely cropped, and his mannerisms are all hesitant, like a boy asking a girl to dance at Laureltide. I kiss him on his head and wrap him snug in the little blue jumper I brought for him. I pull the hood up on his head so his little pale face is all that peeks out of it. “It’s well. It’s well. I’ve got you.”

  “Where’s Mum?” he asks in a small voice.

  “Waiting for us. But you have to come with me.”

  “Is she all right?” he asks.

  “I need you to be brave. Can you do that? Can you be like the Goblin? When he followed the Reaper to the Dragonmaw? Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes,” he says, nodding his little head. “I can.” I heft him from the bed and move to the door. Janis blocks my way.

  “It’ll be safer here,” she says. “It’s a hospital. Even they have to respect that.”

  I stare at her, dumbfounded. “Are you bloodydamn bent in the head? You need to get everyone and get out.”

  “Lyria…”

  I don’t stop to reason with her. I shoulder past and burst out of the infirmary, running with my nephew clutched to my chest. The gunshots are closer now. Rough voices yell to one another. A woman’s screams are silenced with a wet thump. I weave through the gaps between the houses, heading for the north watchtower. Doors are broken off plastic hinges, young men run about with arms full of food and tokens and HCs and a thousand things less precious than the life I carry. Liam’s little pale arms cling around my neck. Someone screams “Gamma” and points at me. Terrified, I duck into an alley and lose them in the shadows.

  The guard tower is abandoned when we reach it. Its spotlight stares directly into the sky. The Republic soldiers who were there have fled. Somewhere a dog barks. My sister is nowhere to be seen. “Ava,” I call quietly, hoping she’s in the shadows waiting for me. No one answers. Then men’s voices come from between the houses behind me. They followed me into the alley. I rush through the gate. A muddy field stretches all the way to the dark jungle. We’ll never make it. To the right is the camp’s dumpsite, and beyond that the river.

  “Ava,” I whisper again. The feet are closer. I pull Liam to the side and scramble into the shadows of the rubbish heap. I dive to the ground at the top of a mound and slide halfway down the other side. I tell Liam to be quiet and crawl a little back up the mound to look at the path I fled. A tide of Gammas from my township rush through the gate toward the jungle. I know all of them. I don’t see my sister among them, so I stay silent and hunkered down in the shadow of the rubbish. But as the sounds of their footfalls fade into the night, a terrible fear of being left behind fills me. I’m about to rush from my place to join them, when I see the glimmer of something near the treeline. I want to shout at my kinsmen. Save them. But it’s too late. The glimmer becomes a hundred. Like the jungle itself is grinning and baring its pale teeth. My kinsmen scream as the men in the jungle come out to murder them in the dark with slingBlades.

  I flee the screams, push deep into the dumpsite. Metal scratches my thigh as I run up a mound. I lose my balance and pitch sideways, tumbling down. Crash hard into the refuse, barely shielding Liam. He’s crying against my chest. The sweet scent of rot makes our eyes water something awful. A rat skitters across my arm. I push myself up and gain my feet, cradling my little nephew, leg stinging from the wound. Insects throb around my bare calves in thick clouds, biting and crawling. Heat from decomposition pulses up from the garbage. I find a hiding spot and huddle low underneath the remains of a broken industrial washer. Liam’s shuddering in fear, small body racked by silent sobs. I set him down. My arms are numb from carrying him. Men rove near the path now, close to where we entered the dump. Their flashlights slash at the darkness.

  I flatten myself to the garbage and push a dirty finger to Liam’s lips. A light beam goes overhead. The mosquitoes buzz around his face, casting shadows. I tighten his jumper so only his nose and mouth are showing out of the hood. Water from the rain slithers and drips through the garbage as the men speak to each other. The voices are like my father?
??s, like my mother’s, like my sister’s and brothers’. But now their tongues sound cruel, all hard and dark and sharp-edged. How can Reds do this to their own kind? One comes close enough for me to see his painted hands. It’s not paint that covers them, but blood, dried and cracking.

  The flashlights move on, men speaking amongst themselves. I’m left with fear. Where is my sister? Was she found? I pray she pressed on to the boats. I don’t know what to do, where to go, so I hunch there and peer out at the dark shadows moving along the path. With the flashing of flames from inside the camp, I catch their faces. They’re boys. Some no older than fourteen, with fledgling scraps of beard on chins. Lean and gleaming with sweat. Shouting to each other, they peer into trash heaps, bent like hungry wild dogs.

  Liam’s small hands clutch together. In permanent darkness, he can only hear the wounds these angry young men have carved into the night. He trembles. I brush rainwater from his face, wishing I had the power to take him from here, to stop this.

  “You’re so brave, Liam,” I whisper. “Goblin brave, you are.”

  “Where is Ma?”

  “We’re going to meet her. She’ll be at the boats, I reckon. Since you’ve been so brave, I’ve got something for you.” I reach into my pocket and find the chocolate that I kept from dinner to give to him. I press it into his hand.

  “Thank you,” he says. As he eats, I hear whispers in the darkness near to us. I ease up and see several sets of eyes catching moonlight from beneath discarded water containers. A family in hiding. A little girl raises her hand to wave to me. I wave back.

  We’re not alone.

  We can survive this. Somewhere out there Ava is waiting for us. We’ll go to her soon, I just need a breath. But then I smell the fire.

  IT BEGINS AT THE EDGE of the dumpsite near the watchtower and soon spreads as more Red Hands light small blazes till a wall of fire rolls toward our hiding place. The air dances and writhes as tongues of smoke slither through the garbage, licking at my feet and legs. Liam screams in fear. I haul him up and clamber from our hiding spot. I run from the flames, but I’m hacking. Can barely breathe. Can’t see, eyes streaming with tears. I stumble over mounds of garbage. Legs sliced by metal and glass and feet sinking in mire up to the knee.

  Then, faintly, I hear the voice of a young girl calling to me through the smoke. It drifts to me like nursery song. So small and gentle. And then I see her in the chaos of ash, waving her arm frantically for me to find my feet.

  I stumble up and follow her voice to find a seam in the smoke where I can gulp down clean air. There’s others running ahead of us. Twenty, forty manic souls stumbling through the garbage, away from the flames, all bound for the river, where the fishing boats are moored. I clear the smoke and heave for air on the edge of the dumpsite. Other refugees stream ahead of us through the brush, going toward the boats.

  Cradling Liam, I join them and spare a look back. A pillar of smoke rises from the burning dump, a smear against the orange dawn. The sun rises over the camp that was once my home.

  Ahead, mothers run with children and tattered scarves flowing behind them. Young men stumble on, all earthly possessions left behind, carrying elders or wounded friends. It’s not just Gamma. Not just the collaborator clan. I rush with the masses through the green underbrush toward the flowing river. Weeds slap my shins. Mud clings to my feet. We’re so near the river. Almost free of the night when I hear a scream ahead of us. Then a second.

  In the muddy plain beyond the brush, a woman has fallen to her knees. Her children behind her. Her hands outstretched, begging for mercy. The refugees have stopped, making a staggered line. I can’t see past them. Before me, an old man falls to his haunches and sits in the mud, staring emptily ahead.

  In Lagalos, when the headTalks wanted to clear a tunnel of a pitviper infestation, they would light fires and force the pitvipers from their hiding places among the gears and nooks and crevasses. Now we’re the snakes. The Red Hand lit fires to force us from our refuge in the dump to bring us here. Barring our way to the boats is a staggered line of twenty young men covered with soot and sweat and carrying automatic weapons. Their hands are covered in red to the elbows. A lone woman stands with them. The same I saw kill Tiran at the shuttle. Her rusty hair is streaked with white. Half her face marred with terrible scars. The other half is worn beauty. She wears an armored vest and carries a slingBlade brown with blood. She says something to a man, who lifts his gun.

  Time is stuck with us in the mud.

  I push Liam behind me. There’s a crack. Something hot and salty sprays my face. I wipe my eyes, hands coming away red. I see the old man sitting in the mud wobbling now. His head strangely lopsided. His body shudders again. Only in the back of my mind do I realize metal is doing this to him. Another bullet rips through him and he pitches sideways, howling. The children shriek and try to run. Metal shreds them, kicking their heads back, contorting their bodies into a manic dance. I push Liam down. Something hot and hard punches me in the shoulder. I’m off my feet and sprawled in the mud. Cool veins of shock trickle through my arm as I suck mud through my nose.

  This is not real.

  This is happening to someone else. I roll onto my back.

  The sounds of the guns fade as I stare up at the blue sky.

  I’m rising into it like I did the first time I saw it with my own eyes. Up. Up. Toward a single silver teardrop.

  Flying closer.

  Closer.

  The teardrop glimmers hopefully. Is it the Old Man who watches the Vale? Has he come to take me home to be with my father? My mother? Tiran?

  The teardrop divides, becoming three. Or maybe it was always three. And maybe I’m not sinking into the sky. Maybe the sky is falling down on me. I hear in the distance the whisper of angry metal. It’s a ship. Three ships. They leave vapor trails in the sky. One fat. Two thin and quick. “The Republic!” someone shouts a million kilometers away. “The Republic!”

  Heartbeat concussions ripple through the earth as missiles fall. Whump. Whump. Whump. The fat ship litters the sky with little sparkling seeds. The seeds begin to fall. Faster. Faster. Coming together like a flight of swallows, then splintering apart a thousand meters above us. One roars straight toward me, a hot stream of metal and vapor. It slams into the mud. A demon of metal in the shape of a man. His armor is orange. His helmet shaped like the face of a snarling canine. He lifts his left fist and points it toward the raider firing line. Sound and fury erupt. Currents of distorted air shriek over the mud. Men run for cover or melt. Then he’s gone, back into the sky, trailing a war howl through an electronic speaker. “—elemanus!”

  “Lyria,” Liam says, touching my leg. He follows it up till his hands find my face. He’s alive. Covered with mud, but alive. “Lyria, are you hurt?” he says through tears.

  “I’m here,” I say. I sit up and clutch him with my right hand. “I’m here.” I hold him and sob among the corpses. “I’m here.”

  Something is wrong with my left shoulder. It hurts more than anything has ever hurt. Blood leaks from it and a splintering pain threads its way down my throbbing arm. We’re in a soup of broken, squirming bodies. The Red Hand are dead or fled to cover to fire up at the sky. The two bone-white Republic ships fire at the Hand trucks and landed transports. Steel men whip through the air.

  It’s too much. Too loud. I take Liam away from it, following the few survivors of the massacre to hide amongst the reeds in the riverbed.

  There, hunkered in fear, we listen to the battle. A dozen others survived. They flinch when a bomb goes off. But I sit in silence, rocking back and forth, watching bugs go out over the water. My sister is safe. Her children are safe. We’ll see them soon and share a smile. Liam and I will be with them soon. “Look!” someone beside me shouts, pointing up. The knight with the canine helmet plummets from the sky, trailing smoke. He lands with a splash in the river thirty meters from us. We all watch the water. He does not reemerge. I look around at the survivors. Not one moves.

&nbs
p; He’s going to drown.

  “We gotta help him,” I murmur through chattering teeth. Cold despite the heat. No one looks my way. I say it louder, “We gotta help him.” Still no one moves. “You gutless slags.” I tell Liam to stay put and I stumble to the water, wading out into it until it’s at my neck. Deeper than I thought. I won’t be able to lift him by myself. I curse and look around. Spotting a long length of rope tethering a half dozen of the fishing boats together, I wade back to the boats and unravel the rope, then press back into the depths as the boats drift apart. The current tugs at my waist like a bad dancing partner, threatening to pull me downriver. Soon the water’s over my head. I dive down, looking through the murk for the fallen knight.

  I can’t see him.

  The silt is so thick I have to surface twice before I find him by luck when my right foot kicks a piece of metal. I trace my feet over the armor, barely able to find the outline of the man. I tie the rope around his leg as best I can with my wrecked shoulder and kick my way back to the surface, trailing the rope behind. When I make it back to the shore, a group of Reds waits to help me, all brave and heroic after I do all the bloody work.

  Ten sets of hands tug on the rope till, with a great heave, we manage to drag the knight free of the water and into the shallows.

  We hunch over him in the mud. The orange armor is filthy and charred at the abdomen from where something hit him in the air. He’s a giant. Biggest bastard I’ve ever seen. His helmet alone is nearly as large as my torso. The great gauntlets of the armor could squash my head like a pitviper egg. Water pulses out of the holes in the metal. I run my fingers over it, expecting it to be hot for some reason. It’s cold and faintly iridescent.

  “Look at the size of him,” someone gasps.

  “Has to be a bloodydamn Obsidian.”

  “No, they wear white feathers….”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Blast hit his generator,” an old man says. I think his name is Almor. He was a drillBoy for Delta years ago. He kneels in the mud beside the knight, running his hands over the metal. “PulseShield is off, but means he got no oxygen down there. Could be drowned.”