Chapter 49 - Gedeon
GEDEON
From high up, people often resembled scurrying ants: busy with their days, rushing after their tasks, never pausing, never resting, moving and moving, day and night. But if you were on the same level as the street, you could see their expressions: concern, joy, sadness.
Any and all of them indicated they were alive. Their muscles carried them around, their diaphragms expanded their lungs, and their flesh was warm and soft, not cold and clammy. Though in both cases, it reflected the yellow beams streaking the road identically.
I turned away from the window in my study.
“How many did we get out?” A day had passed since the auction, and we finally had the numbers of our losses and new arrivals, the majority in shock from learning of our existence and the rest outright resisting the change in their lives.
Despite that they had willingly chosen to come with us.
Sitting on top of my ebony desk, Zion dangled his legs.
“Fifty-seven.” The dim table light danced on his relaxed posture, and my fingers itched to run them through his golden-brown hair he had recently trimmed.
It suited him. Created an innocent image of a man I once knew as a child who had always found his way into trouble.
Only I had ruined him. Torn him to shreds.
Yet the flow of my thoughts would not cease straying to him every night he slept on the other side of Kali, every morning he trained with me to keep up our skills, every day he wandered into perilous situations, every evening he undressed and his scars called out to me, and every time his lips playfully quirked when he caught me perusing.
Like right now.
Tearing my gaze off his mouth, I leaned on the windowsill. “And how many did we lose?”
“Eight.” Hopping off the desk, he fixed the pile of my notes he had messed up with the movement.
He knew crooked edges would nag me relentlessly until I aligned them.
“But they all knew what they were going into. It was a risk they took willingly. We expected consequences, and not good ones. We’d prepared for them. ”
Eight fewer of our residents in the streets. Kali could have been one of them if we had not left her behind. And when the bullets had almost struck Zion at the auction site, I feared he would become another casualty.
A corpse. No facial expressions, no heartbeat, no teasing remarks. An empty shell.
If his snapping point had befallen him twelve years ago, mine was tethered to their lives.
“No.” Zion crossed the space between us, stopping a foot away, half-inside my personal space.
Too close and nowhere near close enough.
“You’re not getting more tattoos. If you don’t listen to me, listen to Kali.
It’s enough. We’re more than ready for death, Gedeon.
We live with a possibility of it looming at our backs every fucking waking moment. ”
Perhaps he was right. During the war, there would not be enough space on my body to mark all the losses certain to fall. They would be lost in history, erased from the memories of survivors during the years to come.
But not yet. We had just managed to adapt to their security update and restore our supply chains.
Our storage had been depleted, and the sole resource we had enough of was people.
In other words, meat for slaughter. If we marched to the city now, the lever would swing to the wrong side of the probability of victory.
There was no point in attacking when it all would come crashing down to luck. Betraying the trust of the thousands residing in our compound to play a game match with the fortune in hopes of a positive outcome was not something I was willing to do.
Ryder strolled in through the wide-open door, pausing a few feet inside. “You said you wanted to talk?”
“Sit.” I situated myself behind my desk while Zion remained hovering near the window. “What did you find out?”
“Where do you want to start?” Ryder took a seat across from me, his tight caramel curls framed by the ebony bookshelves lining the wall.
All the tomes had belonged to my parents, most collected by my father due to his love for fictional stories.
He used to say reading would imbue you with an ability to view the world from different perspectives, and that it was the most valuable skill a leader could have.
The genre or the story type held no sway over him as he had believed all stories were worth telling, all were equal, and your dislike of a character or a plot line could not diminish their worth.
They all depict life, he would say. Whether about a journey of someone’s life, an adventure on another planet, a battle between different races, a clash of religions, or a mix of everything the author could imagine, it all had been inspired by their experiences, their life.
A book is like a window to peek out of and see the world through their eyes.
The eighteen windows in our house look into eighteen different parts of our yard and the street and, similarly, eighteen different books can show you a glimpse of eighteen different worldviews.
After his death, I had read each page, inhaling the scent of old paper as a drug that carried a whiff of the past. Because a leader could not succumb to addiction, a leader could not lose the trust of his people, a leader could not waver when faced with a dilemma of punishment, no matter if it involved the sole person alive they cared for at that time.
What the leader had to do was stand straight, issue orders, and pull on the strings controlling others’ lives.
Cut the first one, make an incision in the second, tangle up the third with the fourth, paint the fifth in red, all the while his own thread had been severed years ago because of his own fatal mistake.
“Let’s begin with the upcoming auctions.” I pulled out a sheet of paper from the stack and grabbed a pencil. Making notes by hand grounded me. Create enough of them and their pile would resemble an unbound book.
“We have the dates of the next two scheduled,” Ryder said.
“The first is planned in three months. My guess is that the auction won't be hosted in the same building, though. But the software I planted should let us access their system remotely, and if they detail the locations on it like before, we’ll know it.”
If I was in their place, I would not only change the location, but wait for the enemy’s arrival. Set a trap.
However, most ploys functioned using three levels: an entrance point, a bait in the middle to entice you, and a false exit.
Kind of like an obstacle course we used as a training method.
You would get thrown in without a clue of what your opposition had planned for you, but there were always loopholes, things they had brushed off as irrelevant.
Same with the auctions. Ilasall could switch them up, but we were going to put an end to each one, halt their supply chains of human cattle.
Less fertile people—fewer people in general.
“Are they aware we are in their system?” I scribbled down the date of the upcoming auction—or the Matching, as the cities had named the detestable practice. “Can they detect it in any way? And can we know if they do?”
Ryder scratched his forehead, glancing at Zion as he cracked open a window and observed the late evening activity in the street. Chilly wind ruffled his hair, and a need to hold the wayward strands in my grip rose to the surface.
“Yes and no,” Ryder admitted. “They shouldn’t have been alerted of our presence, but if they search for us specifically, they’ll find us.”
“Will we know if they do?”
He shifted in his seat. “We should get a ping in such a case, but if they are smart enough, they could work around it, and we wouldn’t be notified.”
“So they could plant any information they want in the system and use it to set up a ruse,” Zion spoke up.
“They could,” Ryder confirmed.
“What about access to their other systems? Lists of residencies, resources, military, governance? Anything?” Coming up to my right side, Zion plucked his knife out of the sheath strapped to his upper arm and twirled it between his fingers, muscle memory alone preventing injuries.
He always did it when restlessness consumed him. Yet he did not seem to realize unrest would pull him back into the memory of losing his sister.
“Not yet.” Ryder sighed. “We ran out of time. I managed to leave something in place, but I can’t tell you more until Sadira and I look into it more deeply. We might need another chance to go into the city and access their systems directly. And for more than half an hour.”
Reclining in my chair, I twirled my charcoal pencil to distract myself from the pressure the next question carried. “What about the other thing we had discussed? Her whereabouts?”
“I found her records.” Ryder’s shoulders slumped. “They have expired.”
The pencil in my hands snapped in half.
Zion stabbed his knife into my desk. The handle vibrated practically audibly from the impact, but I gave no shit about the groove he had certainly carved out in the wood. Not when the news meant the string of her life had been severed.
“Are you sure it was her?” I squeezed the broken ends of the pencil. Yet the jabs of pain they caused could not kill the nightmare that was going to destroy Kali.
“Yes,” Ryder said. “I checked every class from thirteen years ago, and the records of a year before and after. There was only one school with a person named Alora. It’s a unique name.
She was assigned to a partner immediately after graduation and died due to complications during the labor of her fifth child. ”
“She’s dead?” Kali’s voice leaked disbelief as she stood frozen in the doorway. “Alora is dead?” she repeated, scrunching the hem of her black t-shirt with Vice embroidered above her chest in white thread.
Zion strode toward her. “There was nothing you could do.”
She staggered back, holding up a hand to stop him. “No, I could have done everything. I could have taken her place. I was supposed to be in her place. She’d be alive if it wasn’t because of me.” She viciously swiped under her eyes. “I have to go to work.”
“Wait.” Ignoring Ryder, I slowly made my way to her.
Small, leisurely steps, controlled pace, anything to avoid eliciting an unwanted emotion.
Fight, freeze, or flee were the usual responses to danger, but knowing her, she would employ all three.
Fight Zion and I, flee her home, and then freeze in the clearing where she wandered to be alone.
“Someone can take your shift.” I reached out to caress her cheek. “Stay.”
“Don’t touch me.” She evaded my touch. “And don’t follow me,” she hissed, then bolted down the hallway. Shortly, the echo of her footfalls faded into silence.
“I’ll check on her,” Zion promised, moving past me.
I grasped his bicep to prevent him from chasing her. “Let her be. We will find her after her shift.”
“She shouldn’t be alone right now.”
“She wants to be.” I was going to respect her choice.
“Remember how you shut everyone out after your family perished?” Seeing the skin flayed off your parents’ backs by a spindly branch used as a sharp-as-a-scalpel whip would undoubtedly mess anyone up irreversibly.
Not to mention the other things the military had done.
“I didn’t shut you out because of that.” He ripped his white sleeve up to his elbow, revealing the scars he had burned into himself by my order. “And that was war. This is different.”
I clutched the other side of the door frame to steady myself. The matte and shiny swirls on his forearm leeched my strength, drop by drop. “It’s death,” I gritted out.
“That’s the point. She shouldn’t have to deal with it by herself. Believe me, I know.”
“I—” I hit the door frame, and the dull thump morphed into a hammer striking my ribs. “Give her time until her shift ends.”
Losing someone felt like being shredded apart. Like a part of you had been torn off, never to return, and the gaping hole never to fully heal.
There was no difference in losing someone by their untimely death or because of your thoughtless commands.