~
Spotlights pointed skyward, bouncing off the canopy, while a titanic, military deployment craft hovered at ground level. The collective sound of the craft's idling boosters drowned out the sirens keening through the chaos. Long lines of young men snaked behind the gunmetal gray aircraft, and all of them looked identical with their stony expression, shorn heads and Landgraevan blues.
Isobel pushed through the gathered crowd and stopped at the edge of the staging grounds, short of the cordoning hologram tape. She frantically searched for Montgomery and spotted him standing at the end of a very long line. The battalion commander slapped an identification number on him and the soldiers proceeded into the cavernous mouth of the military craft.
Montgomery Bird was number 1002119.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered, reaching out to him through the hologram caution tape, her hand trembling under the yellow light.
The tailgate shut with a resounding clang and the propulsion boosters turned white hot. The aircraft slowly ascended over the avenue, vanishing into the canopy, and the noise was deafening.
Isobel fought her way through the loud rumbling crowds and ran straight for the alley she and Montgomery had discovered a decade before. She knew that she shouldn't be there, that she should wait before returning to the scene of the orbital attack, but it was the one place that they had called theirs alone. She and Montgomery had grown up swimming in the thermal, spring-fed water of the bathhouse. It was their secret place, their den, and they were blissfully ignorant of the decaying infrastructure and black mold covering the ornately carved buttresses and frescoed walls. Over time they'd packed the small place with found treasures from the tunnels, storing it all within the crumbling walls of the forgotten chamber like greedy little chipmunks.
Ash took the lead as they continued down the dark alley, and images of the previous night's battle with the orbital flooded Isobel's mind, the keen regret of her foolish actions settling painfully in her chest. Had she known that her only friend would be drafted for war as a result made her feel ten tons heavy. She couldn't breathe.
The rickety metal stairs leading to the bathhouse entrance shifted and trembled under her, creaking gratingly, dangerously close to collapsing altogether. She jumped the remaining distance to the bathhouse landing rather than risk the entire staircase falling on her and quickly assessed the entrance door, torn off its hinges and flung to the side. Listening for any unusual noises, Isobel slipped into the humid corridor, and waited, the steady drip of water rising from the murky depths of the bathhouse consumed the silence, sharpening the disquiet she felt.
She pressed the ball of her foot into the rotting oak wood of the flight of stairs, testing it, before continuing her descent into the dimly lit chamber below. The moist walls, hewn from large blocks of limestone, gleamed under the ambient lighting of rusted sconces, gently illuminating the slick black mold gathered in the cracks and crevices.
Isobel stood on the threshold of the bathhouse and held Ash back, silently staring, a deep sense of dismay taking over her. Everything she and Montgomery had held sacred, every treasure they'd hauled to the bathhouse from the tunnels over the course of a life together, had been overturned and broken, as if a cyclone had passed through its walls. The ancient frescoed walls surrounding the oval pool at the center of the bathhouse, having survived both the great storms and the wars that followed, now lay crumbled under the assault of whatever force had just passed through, shot up and still smoldering. She stepped over the broken relics and each step felt a bit heavier than the last, as if she were slowly turning to stone.
She picked up a broken carved wooden box Montgomery had given to her and tried to stick the pieces together, but the fractured mahogany case wouldn't fit back together again. Grabbing the remnants of the box, she flung it against the wall, and it shattered completely.
Their private little world had been irrevocably destroyed.
Isobel walked to the pool and teetered at the cusp, the unbearable sense of loss she felt anesthetizing her, pushing her over the edge. She fell into the steamy water and sunk to the mosaic floor, her jacket and boots weighing her down.
The familiar mosaic on the pool floor, depicting two massive octopi engaged in battle, slowly came into focus. One octopus was white, the other black, their tentacles engaged in a death hold, a blood red halo gradating to pink up the side of the pool.
Isobel's lungs burned for air as bubbles escaped her nose, then her mouth, and without ceremony she was rejected by the misty depths of the pool, booted to the surface to deal with her miserable life.
She surfaced, gasping for air, and floated about on the calm water for some time, eyes to the midnight blue celestial domed ceiling overhead. The bathhouse was silent, and she drifted, thoughts of Montgomery consuming her, until finally, she found herself at the edge of the pool. Laboriously, she climbed over the side, and wrung out her hair as she took in the destruction that had once been her haven.
"Come boy," she called to Ash, and startled at the sight of Beatrice sitting in an armchair at the far end of the bathhouse, casually skimming through a brown leather bound book.
"There you are, Isobel. I was wondering when you'd surface from the misty depths of your wretched guilt. Thankfully, I didn't have to jump in after you," she said, flipping through the pages of the book. "Death is not an answer but a final conclusion, dear, and usually quite irreversible. Next time you willingly stand at death's door make sure your reason is more noble than insipid regret. You must know that there is nothing to be done for Montgomery. Your death will not change his fate."
"I never knew there was a secret door here," Isobel said, finding her voice.
"That's how I escaped the other night after the orbital attack," Beatrice said. "This is what you encountered in the tunnel," she continued, holding up the book for Isobel to see.
Isobel stared at the image of a tunnel rat. "How'd you know I met one of those?"
"The tunnels have ears, my dear. It's quite amazing that you survived the encounter. Tunnel rats have a strong aversion to mystic blood like ours. Please, Isobel, I'm getting vertigo looking up at you. Sit," she insisted, motioning to the armchair next to her.
Isobel walked to the secret door in the wall, peeked inside the lit passage, then circled round Beatrice again, like a wary animal. "Mystic. That's what the rat called me," she said, keeping an eye on the exit.
"We are mystics from a land some distance from here, the territories on the eastern side of the Pythean range called Moredea. It is your birthplace and home to our people, the ancient mystics," Beatrice explained.
"A distant land named Moredea. The mystics. Tunnel rats. This sounds a lot like one of Admiral Vin's fairy tales. My life has been many things, Beatrice, but a fairy tale has never been one of them."
"Well, this story may have a happy ending yet. It depends on you, Isobel. I can only keep you out of so much trouble, dear, but this time you went too far," Beatrice admonished, dimpled smile uncharacteristically absent.
"I'm not sure the orbital finished the job anyway. But, why do you care what happens to me?" she asked.
"I care because a promise made is one best kept. Always remember that," she advised.
"A promise to whom?"
"To your mother, may she rest," Beatrice said.
"My what?"
"Your dead mother," she replied, and stared past Isobel as if there was an apparition in the room.
Isobel motioned for Ash to come to her, clear visions of what this woman had done to the orbital the other night fresh in her mind. She made for the exit.
Beatrice held up her hand. "Isobel, please, wait. Unfortunately, they did manage to get part of your cranial dimensions number bef
ore I had a chance to stop the orbital. If you leave here right now you will be captured and fully integrated into the system by morning."
Isobel touched the back of her head and felt the smooth shaven skin. "You're the woman who saved me from the orbital," she breathed, and half glared at Beatrice as if this was all her fault.
"Isobel, you managed to get yourself imprinted without any help from me. I just made it worse. At the same time though, I'm your only hope," she said with a shrug, and reaching for the brown leather satchel on the floor next to her feet, placed the book into it.
"But, I have nowhere to go," Isobel whispered.
"As chance would have it, you do have somewhere to go. Home. I hadn't planned on taking you yet, but unfortunately, circumstances have forced my hand. I want you to return to Moredea with me. A promise is a promise, and I made one seventeen years ago that I intend to keep," Beatrice said, the inflection in her voice suggesting that it had been a feat nothing short of a miracle.
"How'd I even get here from Moredea?" Isobel asked. She carefully sat down at the edge of the chair, observing Beatrice warily.
"Even as you mother lay dying from an expunged heart, she held you to her breast, a pool of blood bathing you. The light faded from her eyes and with her last breath she charge me with your care. We left Moredea. I took you as far as the railways would allow and that journey took me here. Your mystic ancestry is lined with closets full of skeletons, skeletons with living progeny, some of whom have extremely long memories to go with their highly vindictive natures."
"But, why here? Why not one of the other territories?" Isobel asked.
"Most of our planet was still uninhabitable seventeen years ago, Isobel. Only recently has the sun fully emerged, melting the ice, warming the land, and as I said, the rails led me here," Beatrice replied.
"And the people that you abandoned me to? Why them? They wouldn't notice if I left for good and never returned.
Beatrice winced. "Because it made the inconceivable even more unimaginable."
Rising from her chair, Beatrice slung the large leather satchel across her chest, adjusting the strap. "Landgraevan forces are closing in on us. There are only a few passages leading to Moredea, and one is through that door. It is a long, difficult trip," she said, and held her hand out to Isobel just as military troops crashed through the upper landing.
Turning to look at the bathhouse one last time, she took Beatrice's hand, and, Ash wish close behind, Isobel followed the strange woman into the secret hall she never knew existed.
Just past the threshold of the tunnel, Beatrice pulled a lever on the inside wall, and the heavy stone door closed securely behind them.