FREE
OCTOBER 2098
SPREAD THE WORD but don’t be heard
WARRIOR She meets her father at the end of the world. He's there among the stars, his face glowing from out of the dark dripping space, as if he had always been the moon. There are security cameras everywhere. This moment will be broadcast to each corner of the galaxy, so she makes sure to look him in the eye and smile. She squares her shoulders, trying to look as different as she can from a scared little girl on a desert planet. Trying not to look like she's a million light years from home. Trying to forget she was ever the girl who cowered underneath the bed while soldiers stamped through the safe-houses and tore bedrooms apart, pilfered safety boxes, broke windows, as the planes came overhead- you could never hear them coming. They shone bright lights into all the hiding places. Does he recognise her now? She is a thief, a con artist, an orator, a warrior. She had wanted to go to sea, long ago, study the behaviour of whales. Now, she stands at the end of it all with a big gun and a bigger smile. The threats worsened as time passed, but her outer shell grew harder, hands steadier. Time can work wonders, if you want it to.
3
CHASE Her starship gets stolen and she doesn't realise it until it's too late. She's running where strange plants grow, through grasses that scratch her legs, waving her pistol, shouting in every language she knows: how could you do this? How could you take this away from me? How could you break open my chest, take out my heart, and then crush my skull with the weight of my own birthright? Eventually, as the hulk of metal recedes into the disappearing distance, she stops and gives up, breathless. Red light bleeds into the sky. She has nothing to hold onto anymore, and nothing that stirs her to chase after something else.
QUIET They huddle together as they sleep. They had taken the pots and pans off the wall, put away the plates and cleared the shelves, for the walls would be shaken with the thrum of war, and everything in the house would clatter too loudly. We might as well paint a red mark on our door, his brother had said. When he is asleep, it's the only time he is able to pretend that he isn't going from place to place with no home. He isn't running for his life. They aren't being hunted. That there is a place somewhere in the galaxy where he can go and the predators won't find him. When he wakes up, reality solidifies around him, colder every day, but for a few seconds before he opens his eyes he is still somewhere else. This morning, as he comes out of sleep, he is for a moment in a different sort of huddle. He can hear his mother's voice-the sweetest voice- calling for him from the other side of the lake. How long will he be able to preserve that memory of the way she laughed- like the tinkling of polished glass? How long before they invaded his sleep and found him there?
4
RUTHLESS Her mentor had shaped her into a weapon- sharp mind, sharp blade, sharp vision, sharp instincts. This combination could be what brings the empire to its knees. To its bloody end. She doesn’t feel startled or moved at the sight of blood these days. She spat up blood every day. Her nose was broken into a new shape. Her teeth, little daggers. Emotion is your enemy, her mentor had told her, from the start. The old son of a bitch who cared for nothing and nobody and was proud because all he had space to care for was freedom. He would tell her that she was a device, that she had one purpose. She couldn't feel things that that once were a part of everyday, but she couldn't remember those things, and didn't miss them. Her purpose had become everything. What do I do when I reach my target? she asked him. You do what you do best, he said. Activate.
LEGEND The last place he had been before going on the road again, he had met some of the locals who had stories about the Other World. No one knew how to get there, and the gates were barred and guarded, and you'd die trying to get anywhere near the walls at the edge. His knuckles whiten around his steering wheel, the morning fog billowing in. He drives into it, wondering if he will be the same when he comes out the other side. He presses down on the accelerator. Faster, faster. If he had hope, he would throw it to the wind. He doesn't know where he's going, but he will find that gate. The entrance to the Other World, the way out of This World, and when they kill him, at least he will die trying.
PROMISE He had asked her to marry him on a clear, cold night when they were following the river to get to the coast. The resistance was rumoured to have an escape route to another planet, a neutral planet, where they could start at the beginning again. Get married, maybe, like their parents had done, or become parents themselves. Of course I do, he had said, and they made love under a canopy of tree branches. The birds were still singing. How long had they been travelling? How many times had they lost and found one another? Then the world had taken another tumble. Gunfire, gunfire, and eventually forest fire. They were both reduced to ash. Their remains brought up new flowers in the place where they had held one another the stars, where the forest used to be.
RESILIENCE People used to say that humans were destroying the earth. This was an arrogant belief. They didn’t need to worry. The earth was going to destroy them before they could harm it. They could burn down forests, reduce civilisations to dust,, but the earth never stopped regrowing, repairing the damage, and try as they may, they could not bring down the mountains, and they could not drain the sea.
7
TRADE He had forbidden his children from fighting. They saw him cleaning the barrels of his guns, go down to his underground bunker where they knew he was building explosives. Strangers came to him, gave him food or books or the parts he needed to build a radio in exchange for the weapons and armour that he made. He could give them gifts on their shared birthdays because of the demand for weapons. Even if fighting was the right thing to do, he told the twins that they weren’t to fight, they weren’t to go near the weapons. If he lost them, what would he have worth fighting for? He slept with a revolver under his pillow, He cried in his sleep, and his dreams were in black and white.
SACRIFICE They had decided to disobey their father. He would come nightly from his underground room to kiss them goodnight. When he was gone, she would get into bed next to him. They were only able to sleep when they had one another to remind themselves that they still had each other. They slept face to face. When they woke up, they wore one another’s faces. One morning, their father would wake to find armour and guns missing. He raged at their stupidity, at their disobedience, and waited, He could do nothing else. He had to believe in them. And he did, until his son brought back a helmet, spattered with blood. I couldn’t find her body, were his only and last words. I’m sorry.
APATHY
Do it for your people, his mother would say. She had the idealism that he lacked, even though he was younger and ought to have been more naive. All he could see was it getting uglier and uglier. No victory, no mercy, just endless sacrifice, and for nothing. But he went anyway. He did it because he had nothing and no one else, and because he couldn’t have tolerated himself if he ever saw her look at him with the same eyes she used on other people. Those who didn’t cooperate for the greater good were, in her eyes, just as bad as the enemy. He didn’t think he’d survive if he was ever on the receiving end of a look like that from her. Without friends, having had a menial job at a telecommunications company that he had lost when the business was shut down, his existence was devoid of personal or professional pleasures, no reason to feel good about himself. All he could do was keep from disappointing her, keep her proud of him. If not proud, then at least not ashamed. So whenever she told him to go out into the desert, he went. Go and get it back, she would say. Bring it back, what is rightfully ours. She told him how he needed to look for that which had been stolen out of the hands of those who had never held their own belongings for more than seconds at a time. Be a good dog, she says. Her fingers rest on his shoulder, providing some tactile evidence of her connection to him, her dependence on him. Every time, just as he was leaving, saying goodbye, taking the pistol she made him carrythough he would never have used it, even in the direst, most threatening of situations, for he was not a fighter, despite what she wanted to believe about her son- every time, she said, Bite the bullet, or bite the dust.
TRAP The very moment their trap was sprung, he knew that they were all going to die. Arrows shot from crossbows, piercing flesh. Heads separated from bodies. Fire and noise and twisted metal and brutality- that was the world in its entirety. His sword slipped from his grip, but he ran into the thick of it, because the battle was the only place for his kind of anger,. He was determined to fight with the might of his hatred, even if it would only speed up his end.
CAMARADERIE They were standing on the edge of a towering red rock. If you went over the edge, you would freefall for seven whole seconds before your death at the bottom of a ravine. This was the place they had seen in history books. There used to be a population here. It was once called the Sin City. People came freely, gambled freely, drank freely, spent money freely, moved around freely, and went home freely. Now it was only desert. They thought that they they could disappear there, if they were well enough prepared, and travel across it to whatever lay on the other side. In the desert, they were safe from the glare of searchlights at night, They were just grains of sand by day. Every day their pace slowed down a little. It was never said, but they knew that they weren’t going to make it to the other side. They would rather die together in the quiet of a desert night than be killed. As they went, one by one, they had to be grateful for having fewer mouths to feed. They promised each other that whomever was still alive would never give up, but when all but one were gone,, the last survivor gave up and took his own life.
10
PREPARATION There are bruises and scars making an atlas of his arms and legs. They are badges from his days in training. He is a master swordfighter. He has severed the heads of seven men. He tells this to the younger generation who are now training under him. When he was in their position, no one had quite warned him that at night, he would dream a bloodbath. That he would come to feel alienated from everything he’d once derived pleasure from. Now he was a mentor, he knew he had to prepare them. There was no margin for failure, for mistakes, for errors in judgement, for being a fraction of a second too late, for thinking that trying hard is enough, for leisure or affection or matters of the heart, for hope beyond the kill. It’s for their own good, he told himself as he hardened against the eleven pairs of wide, frightened eyes looking up to him in the gymnasium. Prepare them now for what they are going to see and what they are going to do, and I have a better chance of saving them. Saving the galaxy? That was different. He had built his life around this fight, but he had never thought about the possibility of winning it.
ILLUMINATION He meets his daughter at the end of the world. She is smiling against a backdrop of stars. A vision in the dark, dripping space. He's come to know the darkness, but seeing her in it, she is light. He is a revolutionary, a warrior, a member of the resistance, galaxy-wide rebellion.. He is a father. He had forgotten that. Her smile has a wicked edge, and she stands differently, looks at him differently. She doesn't look up to him anymore, but straight at him. They are equals. But her eyes still look just like they did when she was born, in those days when she needed him. He wants to tell her that he changed and went away to protect her, that he broke something to be certain that she would never be broken again. In her, he can see himself. A deadly mirror, an eternally complex puzzle, part of a whole but somehow a whole, and it scares him. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to neglect the things that were once most important to you. You can’t imagine the things that, someday, you will have forgotten. In the reframing of your promises, you detach, the ache disappears. You lose memories that hurt because they remind you of the way it was, the way you were. Time works wonders, even when you don’t want it to.