Killers, Traitors, & Runaways Read online

  Killers, Traitors,

  & Runaways

  by Lucas Aubrey Paynter

  Arm in the Wall Books • Burbank, CA

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  KILLERS, TRAITORS, & RUNAWAYS

  Copyright © 2016 by Arm in the Wall Books. All rights reserved.

  Edited by Alissa McGowan

  Cover designed by Travis J. Wright

  Cover typesetting by Dean Brown

  Interior design by Richard A. Dueñez

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published by Arm in the Wall Books

  556 East Palm Avenue, #202

  Burbank, CA 91506

  ISBN: 978-0-9906323-3-7

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means—including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact: [email protected].

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE: All Good People

  CHAPTER ONE: Among the Floating Bodies

  CHAPTER TWO: Cogs in the Machine

  CHAPTER THREE: New Destinations

  CHAPTER FOUR: Forces of Change

  CHAPTER FIVE: Innocent Things

  CHAPTER SIX: A Broken Home

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Those Who Follow

  CHAPTER EIGHT: True Allegiances

  CHAPTER NINE: Captains of Destiny

  CHAPTER TEN: Trails of Blood

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Eye of the Storm

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Altars of Worship

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Living in the Past

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Last, Lonely Night

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Hated and Feared

  EPILOGUE: In Pieces

  PROLOGUE: All Good People

  Mei had learned long before not to give hard toys. They broke in hand, shattering easily and drawing unwanted attention. It was not that Mei herself was special, or warranted any particular notice, but her daughter, Jean, was.

  She was eight years old, and currently playing in the corner with a rag doll named Miss Puffy. From across the room, Mei could see how the doll’s arms rattled gently in her daughter’s hands; she would have to refasten the stitches, in time.

  “Momma?” Jean asked, more focused on the doll than her mother. “When’re we goin’ back to Vilvenn?”

  “We’re not welcome back in Vilvenn, honey,” Mei told her.

  “Why not? Looked like there were plenty of good folks there.”

  Mei avoided looking at her, surveying the perimeter through the curtains. It hurt to break it to her like this, and she avoided eye contact. A child had to learn eventually.

  “They think they’re good people. And we’re … different, from them. You’re different.”

  Jean often forgot to get up using just the strength of her legs. She pressed a palm to the ground for balance, and the whole house rattled before she thought better of it. Dirt sifted from the thoroughly cracked ceiling and walls, but the abandoned home that had survived bombardment and the passage of centuries would endure a child’s carelessness as well. Paranoia kept Mei at the windowpane, but there were none outside to notice.

  Miss Puffy dangled as Jean waddled to her mother. “Can’t I just change? I wanna be good. I liked living in Vilvenn.”

  Realizing she should have been clearer in her meaning, Mei measured her next words carefully. “Jeannie, dear? Do you know why they first welcomed us?”

  As Jean pondered the question, Mei let the curtain fall and crossed to the wreck of a kitchen where, by some miracle, the coffee maker still worked. While she filled her mug, duct-taped together as it was, Jean came to join her, nearly placing a hand on the counter before thinking better of it. Everything she touched shook, and she loved to touch everything.

  “They said we seemed like good, honest folk … like them. Like they said they were.” Glumly, Jean added, “You wouldn’t let me meet ’em, though.”

  “We’d have been welcome ‘til they knew us.” Mei sipped her coffee. It was bitter, but did its work. “They’d have shunned you, and me for protecting you.”

  “But why?”

  “For good folks, the only other good ones are those they see as being like themselves,” Mei explained. “What that means might change from time to time, and some won’t even know it until they find some otherness to fear.”

  “We’re just in the bad times then, ain’t we?” Jean asked.

  Mei nodded. “The good ones know who they are. And if they’re good, that means we’re not.”

  Thinking about what she’d been told, Jean went off to explore their current accommodations. Mei tried the sink, and it creaked and groaned as water coughed from the faucet. She hummed to herself while washing her mug, then the coffee pot. As she tended the smaller utensils, only then did Mei dare to look and ensure Jean remained distant before reaching in her coat. Mei found the knife, sticky with dried blood. It had seen more blood than this, and she remembered crying once while cleaning it. Now all she felt was hollow, but her daughter needed to eat. So too did Mei.

  “Keep quiet”, she had told Jean in Vilvenn. “Don’t say a word. Don’t let them see you; don’t let them even notice you. It’s the only way you’ll be safe in the company of so many good and honest people.”

  Small comfort that Jean had slept when Mei had last drawn the knife, and was still too tired after the deed to realize her mother’s handiwork.

  Ugly though these things were for a child to see, they couldn’t stay hidden; least of all with so many people in the world who thought themselves honest and good.

  CHAPTER ONE: Among the Floating Bodies

  Under the twin desert suns marched a force ten thousand strong, one whose soldiers flew no banners, whose sheathed weapons tasted no blood. Not all in this procession were soldiers—in their center were refugees, unarmed and many times outnumbered. They shambled, weak and weary, and at times they fell, but always they were helped back up by their escorts. These soldiers were their protectors—sent on a mission of mercy on behalf of the Living God.

  Onward they advanced through the canyon, craggy and barren but for a shallow stream that wet their feet. Among them was Flynn, hooded in a ratted blanket so no one saw him for who he really was. He paused to kneel long enough to cup a little water, the slitten pupils of his yellow eyes tightening from the glare as he drank quickly and hurried back into the crowd.

  It had been easy to slip in. His disguise had been found by the side of the road, too frayed and full of holes to be of any other use, and Flynn was adept at playing the victim, a skill that allowed him to ply information from the refugees along the way.

  Yet I could do more. I could tear them apart.

  But even at his worst, Flynn would not have incited such strife for its own sake. There was little point, in his mind, unless it realized some intended end. The god they advanced toward, shackled on the distant world of Terrias, welcomed all good people, and promised a paradise that would be built on the ash and ruins of the corrupt worlds of old. The deaths of all the innocents surrounding Flynn would do nothing to deter this plan—but it would wound his nemesis, and that thought almost led Flynn to speak.

  Before even a word could emerge, he silenced himself. He kep
t his head low, and admitted privately, Perhaps I’m just jealous. He had never wanted part in such a paradise, but nor was he welcome.

  The canyon stretched on for miles, but it was time for Flynn to leave. A path ascended out not far ahead and he drifted toward it, through the crowd. Stay a while, and he would learn how such a mass of people could be brought from one world to another—but there were still many days to go, and he had been gone too long as it was. Flynn broke away without attracting any notice, for the glare of Neroth’s suns kept many heads low.

  He paused on the twisted path and looked down, tempted by the damage he could do. But he was a key to the ways between worlds, and without him, his friends would be hopelessly lost. So he discarded his makeshift cloak, revealing his bestial body. Though still human in form, his jagged ears and woolen forearms signified something Other. The sweltering winds were worse from above, and Flynn shook the beads of sweat away.

  He was comforted as he walked against the flow of the procession below, for while he wondered how far-reaching and numerous their forces were, he could enjoy some relief at knowing their Living God was shackled. As long as he remained so, the miracles he might wreak were still limited as well.

  A friend waited up ahead. Beyond her, something nameless yet sensate pulled at Flynn, guiding him to the ways between worlds. While the enemy gathered new followers and new forces, he would return to a party of only seven. Faintly, Flynn yearned to remember when smaller problems had seemed insurmountable.

  * * *

  Far removed from the woes of Flynn and the refugees on their fateful exodus, on the distant world of Breth whose sky only knew one sun, Leria Rujet sat in class.

  Absentmindedly, she pulled the skirt of her school uniform up and scratched an itch on her left thigh, where her skin cut off to make way for the prosthetic leg that replaced it. The color of the prosthetic was a hair lighter than her natural, dark brown flesh. Leria preferred it that way, having never accepted the leg, however superior her doctors claimed it to be; she didn’t want to chance thinking of the replacement as part of her. After giving up her right arm as a child for a similarly less genuine substitute, she had sworn never to lose another piece of herself. It was a vow she had failed to uphold.

  Still, she was more intact than her classmates, whose synthetic skins betrayed how little humanity remained in each, and not one of whom showed their teacher his due interest as he spoke.

  “… and so, how does Denacles’s struggle relate to us?”

  One of the old myths. Denacles, the Teraliq hero of yesteryear, returns to his home village from a life of war to find it besieged by Terrors. The sacrifice of a thousand daughters (the number changed in different tellings) had kept them at bay for a time, but there were none left to offer. Disguised as a maiden to near the Terrors, Denacles then reveals himself and is lashed again and again, rising each time until the last Terror falls to its death with him.

  “It doesn’t,” one of Leria’s classmates said. Zoë Hecrest, stone-faced and dispassionate. “The old myths are irrelevant, the old gods are dead. We killed them when we began calculating our limitations, when we abandoned the uncertainties of flesh and blood that Denacles suffered.”

  “I was looking for a more … interpretive answer, Miss Hecrest.” Mr. Barque conceded, “But it is true, in our time, Denacles wouldn’t have died from his injuries. Most likely, he’d be back on a new pair of feet the next day.”

  Mr. Barque surveyed the room, and Leria mouthed the nameless prayer of ‘please don’t pick me.’

  “Mr. Ettle?”

  Ruelim Ettle shifted in his seat, but to Leria’s surprise, he spoke. “Remind me how this matters? If all it took was one guy to take those things down, couldn’t the rest of the village have ganged up and just jumped ’em?”

  There was some laughter in the classroom, and even Mr. Barque grinned as though pleased with Ruelim’s tactlessness.

  “It’s not about numbers, Mr. Ettle, it’s about nerve,” he explained. “It’s true. In a braver world, Denacles needn’t have died for his people, but he was the only one with the guts to chance it.”

  Mr. Barque went on about great causes, and the disconnect between those who believe in something and those who do so enough to fight for it. Leria zoned out, gaze straying around the room to the half-installed components of the virtual learning system that was only a year away.

  Looking at her teacher, whose synthetic mouth smiled in earnest of what he preached, Leria was sad to see a system coming into place that would eliminate the need for people like him. Perhaps he’d be lucky enough to be used as the basis for one of the virtual educators the school would eventually use, but it wouldn’t be the same when newer students could just jack in and download all the information into their heads.

  Leria wanted to tear those components from the walls right then and there, even if a special-needs student like her could have still gotten the classroom environment her limited infrastructure required. And being so close to graduation, it wasn’t likely that the implementation of such a system would even affect her.

  Looking around at her classmates, she wondered how many pounds of flesh remained. With a population in the tens of billions, Breth was effectively dying.

  She touched her hand to her heart and felt its beat, wondering how many other beating hearts remained in this room.

  * * *

  It was by request Leria stayed behind. Strictly speaking, the phrase ‘I’d like to have a word with you after class’ wasn’t an order, and so she’d told herself she was remaining by choice.

  “I wish I’d known you before you first joined my classroom,” Mr. Barque commented while closing the door.

  “I’m sorry?” Leria didn’t quite follow.

  “I imagine you, Miss Rujet, a younger girl,” he went on, “One with fire in her, ready to take on the world. Now more than ever, when you’re so close to really facing it for the first time.”

  Leria felt her cheeks flush, but she shook her head. “No, I–I was never like that. At least, if I was … I don’t remember being.”

  “You think I don’t notice you in class,” he said, his mood dimming. “I do. I see the thoughts in your mind, watch them die before reaching your lips.”

  Leria fidgeted in the glare of his soulless eyes.

  “Each passing day, you come in and do only what you’ve been asked,” he went on. “Just enough to not get noticed.”

  “It’s because I won’t ever be,” she countered while gathering her belongings. Yet upon reaching the doorway, she froze. Disappointment paralyzed her, and it was all she could do to look back. “I wanted to make music, once,” she admitted, and it hurt to share even that.

  “Why let that go?” he pled. “I know as well as you the sort of dreck today’s lyricists churn out. They echo the same tired, sentimental refrains again and again—”

  The look in Leria’s eyes gave him pause, and he understood then it wasn’t just the writing she wanted, but the singing; to be the world’s center, however fleetingly.

  “Leria …” His reluctance was palpable. “You know what society asks of us. No matter how good you are, nobody is going to want to see you sing.”

  Leria wasn’t stung. Mr. Barque’s mechanical voice spoke with near-human compassion. Even had there been none, it was a truth she’d known well. “If that’s the case, then nothing I do means anything. I’ll have no chance to impact the world without giving myself up in the process.”

  Their conversation had stalled. Mr. Barque had already pushed the professional boundaries between them, and Leria could only look at him and feel pity. There was little remaining in him that was not yet machine.

  “If I compromise myself so completely in order to make a difference,” she asked, “what good does it do if nothing of me remains to reflect it?”

  * * *

  It had been almost an hour’s
walk, and the shallow stream in the canyon below glistened mockingly as Flynn’s parched throat ached. Past journeys had seen him through worlds whose winds bore sand and ice, but never one whose breezes carried such merciless heat. Blinding sunlight bounded off the stones around him and he cursed himself for leaving his sunglasses behind.

  A blue-skinned figure reclined on a flat rock ahead, too bleary to identify clearly. Flynn knew her as Zaja DeSarah, and at the moment, she was taking in the sun. Adding insult to injury, he soon realized, she was wearing his spectacles.

  He staggered up to her, snatching them from her face as he muttered, “So that’s where they went.”

  Zaja sat up, shielding her eyes with her hand. There wasn’t a bead of sweat on her, but that was hardly surprising; she was coldblooded.

  “Sorry.” Her gray teeth shined through a half-guilty smile. She stretched and her shirt briefly rode up, exposing four dark blemishes on her stomach. “Got tired of counting heads,” she explained. “Are we going back then, getting the others?”

  Flynn shook his head. Knowing Zaja’s ecological preferences, he was sorry to disappoint. “Too many risks. More than the army, the conditions … and I don’t feel a way out through here.”

  Zaja nodded reluctantly. Her arms and neck were exposed, far more than she’d normally show. Hers were a modest people, in part owing to the extreme cold of their native environment, and she was still adopting new ways of thinking. When they’d first met, she’d been covered head to toe; now she wore a red choli with a glowing hex pattern and a matching skirt, with black tights underneath.

  She donned the heavy coat she’d worn coming in, pausing partway through to look at the procession below, which was only now beginning to thin.

  “Do you think he’d have come here himself, if he could? Or do you think he’s, you know … above all that?”

  “I can’t guess what Taryl Renivar would do.” It was a reluctant admission for someone with Flynn’s particular people skills. But he’d had only minutes in the Living God’s company, barely enough time to begin to know him.