Killers, Traitors, & Runaways: Outcasts of the Worlds, Book II Read online

  *

  A second encounter in a public space was a sign of distrust. Already Flynn and his allies were in the hands of someone he barely knew, on a world that could expose them a hundred different ways. Being asked to meet alone in a diner on the main road during peak hours implied that Flynn himself was not to be trusted, and as Leria nursed a milkshake and looked him right in the eyes, he wondered what she feared he might do.

  She was more assured now than before, and he wanted to share in her comfort, but Flynn hadn’t fully figured Leria out yet. It didn’t help that he couldn’t blame her for being leery—Poe had tried to kill her, after all.

  “I’m relieved you came,” she told him. She wasn’t lying.

  “You know we need your help,” he stated plainly. “We don’t have the means to find our way to Ta… Te…” Teusne. Flynn hadn’t forgotten the name, but it was a simple stroke to lower her guard.

  “Teusne.” She brightened, smiling. “And don’t worry, I’m making sure you’re taken care of. There’s a train leaving early tomorrow morning—I’ve already picked a route.” She reached into her uniform’s coat and produced a stack of tickets, laying them down between them.

  “You’ve seen our company—we can’t afford any special attention.” Flynn reached out for the tickets, resting his fingers on them and spreading them out into a fan pattern. “You only met six of us. Why is there a seventh ticket?” They’d kept Zella hidden away as a precaution.

  Leria stiffened. There was no doubt as she swallowed nervously that she’d been caught doing something, but that in itself wasn’t verification of guilt. “How … how … many of you are there?” she asked cautiously.

  “As it stands,” Flynn replied, “you brought the exact number needed.” He softened his tone; he wasn’t trying to drive her away. “Relax, please. You were planning to come with.”

  “Just as an escort,” she said quickly. “And before you tell me I shouldn’t because it’s dangerous or it’s a big deal, let me remind you that it’s just a train ride and it’s not a big deal and whatever you guys are doing, I’m just going to see you there and head on back.”

  “Leria—”

  “And the time to go to Teusne and back? Two days, tops! I’ve already got Rina covering me, saying I’ll be staying at her place! I’ll get you there and come back and it’ll be like I was never gone!”

  “It’s an awful lot of effort to put forth for a pack of strangers,” Flynn replied, to her clear dismay.

  Still … she’s not lying, Flynn’s reading of Leria told him. But consider what you’ve seen. Where she lives? She doesn’t have anything to leave behind. You’ve noticed that she favors her flesh and bone arm over this fake one, and as for the leg? The imitation twitches every time she hears a train in the distance.

  Leria was carrying trauma, both deep-seated and fresh, and there was no doubt in Flynn’s mind that it defined her. Annora was no place for her, and she’d hoped to casually ride along with them. She had a fire in her heart, but nothing desperate to keep that fire strong; she was soft, born of city streets and at her best among them. Flynn tried to sound heartfelt when he told her, “You can’t come with us.”

  She sat there for a moment, the fan of tickets and her nearly empty milkshake between them. She pushed the glass aside, looked Flynn right in the eyes. “You’re the guy in charge, right? They follow your lead?”

  He wondered how she got her information. Had she learned from Mack in casual conversation? Or had Flynn himself drawn more attention than intended? He was leader by merit of ability, by being the one who’d accepted the desperate quest of a fallen goddess, and by the loyalty of the friends who’d followed him into it. It was not a role he had chosen or was suited to, but rather one he’d fallen into.

  Flynn nodded reluctantly.

  “That’s why I wanted to talk to you.” Something in her words rang false, like a repeated instruction. “I know some of your friends probably won’t want me around—but I’m just going to see you there, that’s it! I don’t know how you got to Breth, if it was some nifty piece of tech or some magic spell, and I don’t need to find out. I’m not planning on following. You need me. You know it.”

  That, on the other hand, felt very honest. It bothered Flynn more than the half-truths she’d been trying to dance around. Even with Zella’s grasp of the local language, there were still so many things that could go wrong. Dissuading Leria could mean risking the group, and as much as he loathed to admit it, Flynn had neither the knowledge nor resources to second-guess her. He had kept the lion’s share of his past victims in a similar spot, and perhaps that was what bothered him the most.

  “As long as we have an understanding,” he conceded.

  She smiled at him even as he responded, pleased that she would get her way for now. It was a familiar sort of smile.

  *

  Zaja hadn’t asked for any company, and made a point of struggling alone as she bore the box of uniforms against her chest, waddling to keep it tilted up, her back arched. It was heavier than expected, and despite what she knew to be right, she felt she was giving something up in returning this box.

  While Zaja goose-stepped behind, Zella strolled casually in the lead. She hadn’t offered any help, only checking ahead to make sure the coast was clear. It was consistent with the role she had assigned herself on the outset: Zella was there as an observer, helping only when needed to keep them on their path.

  “You didn’t have to come with, you know,” Zaja told her as she stopped for a break at a back-alley crossroad. The warm daytime weather had turned to the cool winds of a summer night, and dark clouds were drifting in overhead.

  “It would have been easier to stay,” Zella agreed. She pulled down the guard covering Zaja’s face and drew back the hood over her head. “People don’t come back this way; you don’t need to hide what you are.”

  Zaja batted Zella’s hand away; she’d caught her breath and hoisted up the box once more. “I wanted to do this alone. I’ve spent half my time here just sitting around, waiting to be useful.”

  “I know,” Zella agreed as she drew back her own shawl. She took the other end of the box, but Zaja wouldn’t give up the weight. They walked on down the alley, and only appeared to be sharing the labor. “I don’t care much for waiting either, be it idly or for others to make decisions on my behalf. Yet given how I’ve placed myself, what right have I to complain?”

  Zaja softened, her annoyance with Zella diminishing. “I keep getting sidelined. It used to just be because my health was bad. Now it’s happening because of how I look, and I…” She sighed with exasperation. “I know why. I understand it. But they’re not letting me live in order to keep me alive.”

  “Funny,” Zella said with a smile. “I suffered the same care so that I wouldn’t want to continue living.”

  It was an easy task to find the loading bay of the store that the uniforms had been stolen from and Zaja—as an afterthought—wrote “Sorry!” on the box.

  Zella studied it with an odd expression on her face, then laughed. “They can’t read Omati,” she told her, then scribbled over the alien writing.

  Zaja peeked at the uniforms one last time. “I’d have liked to go, just for one day,” she said.

  At this, Zella shook her head. “Not me. I loathe the trappings of routine.”

  “Says the girl who doesn’t have any,” Zaja teased. As they turned back, Zaja wistfully explained, “I was diagnosed with Nyrikon’s Syndrome before my first day of school. It wasn’t long before they wouldn’t let me leave my room, and tutors started coming in for me. My sisters moaned about how much of a drag it all was, like they were the ones who’d been robbed.”

  A sound came from the shop, and Zaja pulled her hood back up as a precaution. The uniform she’d worn would go on sale, and someone else would end up wearing it. She wondered if they would appreciate it as she had, and added, “I’ve never been. Of course I’m gonna romanticize it.”

  Zella smiled. “T
hat wouldn’t have stopped me, I admit. My mother discouraged interaction with her subjects, so I would sneak out in disguise, walking among the lower folk and thinking myself clever when they didn’t know me for what I was.”

  Zaja looked at her curiously, and so Zella clarified. “A goddess’s daughter.” She gave a melancholy smile and continued, “I still find the simplest joy among people, seeing how they live and taking fleeting part in their lives. Yet I cannot even do that openly anymore.”

  Zaja felt a patch of her own skin. “We’re both marked as different, aren’t we?”

  Zella touched the scars on her own body and nodded. “I lived too freely. Never would I have imagined my father ask that I give back in sacrifice the life he had helped provide. Nor did I imagine his worshippers would brand me, so as to keep me from thinking myself clever again.”

  “Guess you showed them, didn’t you?” Zaja chortled. But Zella didn’t share in her mirth, and seemed sad to have done as she had. Death loomed over them both and, were she asked to choose between consummating her own death or allowing it to creep upon her and take her life without warning, Zaja found that she didn’t have an answer.

  *

  It had been months since Leria had last seen the inside of a train station. The electric lamps overhead could not burn hot enough to ease the waning chill of night, the first sign of a storm drifting in over Annora. Whatever rain fell would seep between the tightly packed buildings and be carried away through the gutters long before it could hit this lower level, always dry as a bone.

  As Leria walked down the steps, a train barreled across the opposing track. Her leg locked instinctively, a familiar pain coursing through it. As Flynn glanced at her from under his hood, she willed her leg to move, lest she risk upsetting an uncertain situation.

  “Lersy!” Mack declared as he ran over. “You came!”

  “I woke up extra early so I wouldn’t be late.”

  A lie. She had been up all night, wracked with anxiety over the day to come, over being unable to say goodbye to her family, whom she knew she might not see for a long time—if ever again. It would have been worse still to lose this chance for transition and acceptance, and she had laid the plan with Crescen after meeting Flynn at the diner. She’d been restless, felt compelled to run for every train she heard in the distance, terrified of being late. She finally slipped out in her school uniform, her parents none the wiser.

  It would soon be dawn, and she would depart Annora forever.

  A train slowed to a halt, but it wasn’t theirs. Leria handed Mack his ticket, and felt worse for it. Crescen had assured her his people’s intent wasn’t to hurt anyone, just to take back one of their own from among Mack’s group. It wasn’t hard then to guess that the girl in question was the one Leria hadn’t met, who sat slumped on a bench and restlessly surveyed the near-empty station. Zella Renivar, Leria remembered. She would have to feign ignorance when they were introduced.

  “Are these ‘trains’ reliable?” Poe glanced sharply at her, speaking the word like he’d never uttered it before in his life.

  “To the millisecond,” she assured him. Poe had taken some effort to conceal his appearance, having wrapped himself in a weathered purple cloak, the hood presently drawn. Two packages were bound in soiled rags and fastened to his back, and she expected they were the same blades he’d nearly killed her with. Despite Crescen’s promises, she wouldn’t feel too sorry if something happened to Poe.

  Jean was keeping some distance and didn’t bother with so much as a ‘hello,’ but Leria attempted to ingratiate herself with the others. Her greetings were met with little cheer, the group either too unfriendly or too tired from the early hour to show any real zest. In fact, Zaja seemed to still be asleep, curled up against Flynn and bundled up tight. It’s not that cold, she thought.

  “This is Zellers,” Mack said as he introduced them to one another. “Zellers, this is Ler.”

  “Leria Rujet,” she said in greeting. And, to sell it, “Zellers…?”

  “Zella,” she corrected, and left it at that.

  The group descended into quiet, and Leria followed Mack as he wandered to the platform’s edge, peering over to look as though it would make the train appear faster.

  “You’re looking the wrong way,” Leria informed him with a chuckle.

  “Ah,” Mack acknowledged, twisting to face the other direction. “Guess school’s out for the rest of us, huh?”

  “I guess it is,” Leria agreed, counting herself. It was then she realized that it was the first time she had seen Mack out of his uniform. He wore a dark, tropical t-shirt whose festive motifs projected holographically from the fabric. His shorts were a patchwork of several different pairs. Dressed as he was, she could see more of him than his uniform had shown. It was upsetting to see someone looking so unwell. “It’s nice to see you like this,” she lied.

  “Thanks! You too! Even if you still got the whole uniform thingie goin’ on.”

  “Well … they had to believe it was just another day.”

  The train’s light glimmered in the distance.

  “It’s coming. Get your friends.”

  Mack hurried off, leaving her alone at the platform’s edge. Leria breathed steadily and deeply, trying to calm herself. She hadn’t ridden a train in months.

  The others were gathering their belongings, all as tightly concealed as Poe’s swords. He wasn’t the only one who was armed, she imagined, and worried that Crescen might not bring enough people to safely subdue them.

  Leria herself carried nothing but the clothes on her back. There were things she might be sorry to leave behind, but nothing—she came to realize—that she truly needed. Her parents would find the note, the monitor streaked from tears of farewell, and soon everyone would know Leria Rujet was gone for good.

  The train ground to a halt, the door opening before her. It would all start here.

  CHAPTER FOUR: Forces of Change

  Flynn felt it creep in like a heartbeat—subtle at first, but growing steadily louder. There was a pathway to another world, but it wouldn’t be until night that they drew near it. As he was the only one who could sense it, he said nothing; Zella’s connection to these pathways paled in comparison to his own, and he knew she was as oblivious as the rest.

  The train was hurtling between the towering superstructures of a great technopolis far too fast to discern any details. When it slowed, and the outside began to clear, it was so the sunlit world could give way to the darkness of a tunnel, and a brief stay at the next station.

  The train doors opened, but no one disembarked. The eight had the car to themselves; more than one would-be passenger had intruded, only to meet the occupants and awkwardly excuse themselves. Jean had parked herself near an entrance to ward commuters off via raw intimidation, but she didn’t risk making any further trouble. Leria had warned them that while lacking augmentations was not in itself illegal, if they were asked to provide their SIN numbers, not having them could cause serious problems.

  “I’ve seen people get pulled off trains on suspicion before,” she’d explained. “If we just keep our heads down and don’t say anything, they probably won’t even notice us. We want to stay on this train.”

  As the other cars filled up, a few passengers eventually braved their company out of necessity, though they were clearly uncomfortable at having to do so. It didn’t help that Mack was ferrying back and forth between conversations, or the way Poe was perched atop a rear bench, surveying the whole car like a hawk. But no incidents erupted, and so it remained while the train passed from island to island and morning turned to midday.

  A cool breeze struck Flynn in the face as he stepped off for a moment at one station to study the digital map. He couldn’t read it, but touching his ticket to the pane highlighted his location, and the route to come. Satisfied, he returned to his seat across from Zella, and the doors shut, muting the waves crashing against the concrete struts that held the station aloft.

  “Now for
the long stretch,” he said as the train began to move. “Ocean for thousands of miles, I’d estimate. Our only stops are apparently a series of man-made checkpoints.”

  “It’s been a while,” Zella recalled. “I think when I went to Teusne, I used a different route, passing through a chain of islands to the north.” Her gaze drifted out the window as she thought. “I don’t know if this route was here, last time.”

  “What was the city like?” Flynn asked.

  “The city I met then dwarfs Annora even now. It was boundless. I don’t believe I ever saw any part of the planet’s earthen surface; the walls are built so high that I think they deliberately try to hide the land until they’ve put it to some use.”

  From what Flynn knew of the old Earth—not the wasteland he grew up in, but civilization before it had bombed itself to rubble—it had never fallen so deeply in love with its own technology to build such metropolises.

  “Do you remember how you left Teusne?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Even if I did, I’ve no doubt that for the decades that have passed, the sprawling city will be unrecognizable to me.”

  Flynn considered sharing what his senses had found, as he became more and more certain that the rift he was detecting was not on the mainland, but someplace on the way. Zella had prompted him to be more forthright in trusting her, but there seemed no practical reason to share.

  “Had I your talent, your connection to the ways between worlds, perhaps I could find that same passage for you,” Zella commented. “As it is, they open at my nearing. I do not know them before I see them.”

  “I wonder why…” Flynn murmured.

  “Wonder about yourself,” she replied. “The Flynn I first met was profoundly unremarkable—at least, so he appeared. That was how you did it, of course. You seemed plain and used that to snare one’s trust.”

  “It helped a great deal,” he agreed.