Petrichor mixed in with the scent of blood in the air.
Icy droplets dropped from the sky, pattering against the ground. The water mixed in with the
blood that had already soaked the earth, and spread the crimson puddles everywhere. After more
than two hours and a half of the steady rain, the bodies strewn across the district were half-
drowned in the puddles, floating about grimly. A few limbs here, a dozen severed heads there,
human and inhuman.
Blinding light flashed through the storm clouds overhead, and was accompanied by the fierce
rumble of thunder.
It was at the sound of the thunder that Chloe stirred. She cracked open one eye and squinted
to bring her vision into focus. She was in a room lit by the dim, sterile glow of fluorescent bulbs,
gloomy shadows clinging to the corners of the room’s bare concrete floor. Her bed was placed
against one of the shadowed corners, just beside a window that provided a sufficient enough view
of the district beyond.
She pulled the window’s curtains apart, peered out onto the district. Lightning flashed through
the sky again, illuminating for a moment the outlines and shapes of the bodies and limbs that
floated around in puddles and pools of water and blood. She saw also the outlines of half-collapsed
buildings and entirely collapsed ones, the outlines of massive shapes, creatures with multiple
spindly limbs. Dead, of course, but chilling still to behold this time of day. It was the stuff of
nightmares, the sort of stuff she’d seen in crappy horror films when she’d been growing up.
There was someone out in the rain, someone who wasn’t half a torso or a floating head.
Someone whole and alive, sat at the edge of the rooftop of a dangerously lopsided building that
was missing a good chunk of its walls.
Chloe shut the curtain again, then climbed out of bed. She’d gone to sleep in a baggy tank top,
and pajamas pants, both of which she’d helped herself to. The district had long been evacuated
and most of what was left around, was anyone’s to take. Beneath her bed, she’d thrown her regular
clothes in a pile. She changed from her pajamas pants into a well fitting pair of denims, then
contemplated about whether or not to put on shoes.
On one hand, she didn’t want to get her boots wet. On the other hand, she wasn’t sure she
wanted to move across gruesome puddles of blood and water and flesh while entirely barefoot.
Eventually, she threw on her boots and fastened them firmly.
Then she slipped out of her room and onto the long, narrow hallways that ran through the
Chancellor’s Hall, hallways just as sterilely lit as her bedroom.No one else seemed to be awake. She heard no movement coming from within the hall as she
went, heard nothing at all, except of course for loud snoring when she moved past Chancellor
Hardy’s room, the door to which had been left slightly open.
A peer through the crack in the door revealed the Chancellor bare-chested and in a pair of
briefs, spread rather comically on his little mattress, one hand and foot dangling toward the ground.
His back and chest heaved rhythmically as his snoring filled his room, doing its best to compete
with the sound of rain and thunder beyond the walls.
She oddly found a weird pleasure in seeing the Chancellor like that. He was, after all, the man
who’d been long since tasked with ensuring their district’s stability and continuity and most of the
time, he’d done so by being strict and intimidating. He’d given her and her unit orders and had
been pretty no-nonsense in doing so. And then great trouble had come to the district and there’d
been a great battle, and the district had been all but lost.
That’d been the first time when she’d seen him like this. Just as stressed as the rest of them,
just as plain. She almost considered him just as human, then reminded herself that she wasn’t
human to begin with. Other than the Chancellor, none of them were.
She left his door behind then, and a minute later, she’d slipped out of the Chancellor’s Hall
and into the rain outside, cold droplets pelting against her skin and very quickly soaking her. Her
tank top clung to her skin and felt a little heavier on her. Her blond hair dripped rain water, strands
of it matting to the front of her face, some of it getting in her eyes. She brushed the wet strands
out of her face, and made for the lopsided building.
The lopsided building was a four-minute brisk walk from the Hall, and it took her another
thirty seconds to scale up the side of the lopsided building and arrive on the rooftop. When she
did, she saw there the figure she’d made out from her bedroom window.
It was a boy, clad in a white T-shirt glued to his skin now such that she could make out and
with great detail, the lines on his back, the perfect broadness of his shoulders and the defined
bulges of his arms. The boy’s hair was blond, a lighter shade than hers, almost white even and
angelically so, even in the gloom of the night and the rain. The rain had flattened his hair, stuck
strands to his face like with her, but the wind still sent other strands whipping about.
Silently, Chloe walked up to the boy, the sound of rain masking her approach. When she
reached him, she said nothing, simply dropped next to him, sitting too at the edge of the rooftop,
her feet dangling over the side of it in a manner that would have been most frightening for a regular
person, but that was just playful for her. After all, a fall from this height would do little more than
just scrape and cut her a little.As soon as she’d sat next to the boy, he shifted suddenly and in surprise, turned to her. Thunder
rumbled again and lightning flashed overhead, illuminating for a moment Lucas’s dark blue eyes,
devoid now of much of the excitement and mischief Chloe had come to associate with them over
the previous few years.
“Chlo,” Lucas murmured. “What are you doing here?”
“Could ask you the same.” Chloe shrugged, her gaze focused below them, at the particularly
harrowing sight of the remnants of decapitated monsters. “It’s not a particularly good view, is it?”
Lucas snorted. “I’m not here for the view.”
“The ambience then?” Chloe asked.
Lucas was quiet for a moment. Then he chuckled. After a while, he shook his head. “No, just
got tired of feeling cooped up inside the Hall.”
“Cooped up?” Chloe repeated. “We were sleeping out of tents before this.”
“Tents felt like home, hall feels kind of like a lab, like prison,” Lucas answered. “Hard to sleep
in there, especially considering—,”
His voice trailed. He shook his head again. “Doesn’t matter.” He turned to her and smiled a
little, his eyes twinkling for a moment like they’d used to. “What are you doing up?”
Chloe shrugged. “Think my body’s getting annoyed by the amount of sleep that’s been forced
onto it the past three weeks. Heard the thunder and woke up immediately, half-expecting that
there’d be some fight to charge into.”
“Yeah, I get that.” Lucas nodded. “What do you think about it?”
“About what?”
“This place’s pretty much running on backup power now, not enough to keep the fences going.
It’s literally No Man’s Land right about now and yet, there’s been no Servants or nighthounds or
angry gods in the past three weeks. Weird, isn’t it? What’s happened to them? Why aren’t they
coming after her anymore?”
Chloe shuddered as she pondered it, although that might have been more to do with the chill
of the rain. She stared at the Servant remnants floating about in the rain, remnants of the diseased,
flesh-eating, zombiefied morons who’d attacked the district three weeks ago, along with
nighthounds and angry gods, fifteen-feet tall monsters.
In the three weeks since the battle, there hadn’t been a Servant sighting close to the district.
Not even a nighthound or an angry god. Nothing. It was most odd because Chloe knew for certain
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that there were still swarms of these monsters out there and so if they weren’t coming within
vicinity of the district, it was because they must have had orders not to do so from the alien
invaders who’d let them loose on the world.But why?
What were The Others planning this time?
“Things go quiet this long, it’s rarely ever a good sign,” Lucas said quietly. “And why haven’t
we heard back from The Capital yet? We’re supposed to standby and await redeployment orders.
It’s been three weeks. Where are the orders?”
“Capital’s a bureaucracy.” Chloe shrugged. “It takes them all the time in the world to arrive at
even the simplest decisions. And there’s nothing even remotely simple about what we’ve told them.
They’re going to be thinking about what to do with us, with her.”
Lucas stiffened at the mention of her. His eyes darkened and she saw his jaws clench. He said
nothing at all and so she chose to say nothing, at least for another few minutes.
Once five minutes had gone by, she cleared her throat. The rain had only gotten heavier,
roaring loudly now as cold drops poured from the sky, the rumbling of thunder turned much more
frequent. “Rain’s not letting up,” she said, rising to her feet. “We should head back inside.”
“Why, scared we’ll get a cold?”
“I don’t think we’re even capable of getting colds.” Chloe snorted. “One of the extremely few
benefits of what we are, I suppose. Just best to head back inside before Jon wakes and loses his
shit thinking we’ve been kidnapped.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” Lucas said, rising to his feet then too, water dripping from him rather
significantly. “Although, it would be fun to see Jon go into a panic.”
Lightning took out the power supply during the downpour. Chloe woke later in the morning,
when sunlight was filtering into her room through the curtain over the window, to the sound of
Hardy barking at Cole and Glenn about getting the power back up.
“It’s completely fried,” Glenn was explaining to the Chancellor. Chloe could identify him by
his thick Southern accent. “I can try to work some magic, but I can’t make any promises. It’s going
to be lights out for quite some time.”
Hardy grunted. “Go on then. Try the magic, and I’ll try to reach out again to those blockheads
over in Capital. Can’t keep sitting ‘round here, waiting till they try to kill us again.”
The focus of her hearing shifted then from the slightly distant conversation between Hardy
and the two, to the sound of footsteps, gentle and rhythmic. The footsteps grew louder and louder
with each passing moment, getting closer and closer to Chloe’s room and then…someone knocked
on the door.
“Chlo?” came Jon’s voice from the other side of the door. “You up?”
“One sec!”Chloe was at her door in exactly a second, covering the distance between bed and door in a
blur. While she unlocked it, she slipped on a blue denim jacket. She pulled it open later and looked
up at her stepbrother’s face.
Jon’s face didn’t have the lines that typically creased it, the lines of worry and stress and burden.
These past three weeks out of action had been somewhat of a much deserved vacation for him.
He’d cut his black hair short, and was sporting a buzz cut now. His eyebrows also looked like
they’d been shaped, appearing more angled now, sharper and darker, giving his face a different
edge. His gray eyes, typically stormy or brooding, looked a little lighter now.
He was pulling on a baggy white Tee when Chloe opened the door, his muscles flexing slightly
as he did. He finished with the shirt, and started to slip on a brown leather jacket. As he did so, he
glanced at her, frowned, then tipped his face forward just a little, past the threshold of the door.
He sniffed at the air.
on.
“You went out last night?” he asked, raising one eyebrow over the other, slipping the jacket
“Smells like rain in here.”
She told him about Lucas while they made their way out of the Hall, and of the conversation
they’d had in the rain.
“A little worried about him,” Jon said as they emerged out of the hall. There were still puddles
of water around but greatly reduced in depth now that the rain had subsided. The air, however,
reeked greatly of Servant and hound remains, worse than it’d been before the rain. Outside, there
were men scooping Servant remains into wheelbarrows, and doing so with greatly disgusted
expressions on their faces.
“But he’s not wrong,” Jon continued as they started in the direction of the Grove. “It’s been
too long without any signs of the Servants, without any movement from the Others. And Jin’s
been incredibly quiet these past few days, like even she doesn’t know exactly what might come
next. Like she’s scared.”
“She’s got a million different reasons to be scared,” Chloe said. “More than just the Others. If
we do get called in to one of the other districts, they’re not going to be particularly welcoming
toward the princess of the alien civilization that’s all but reduced our world to a rotting wasteland.”
“Hardy’ll vouch for her.
” Jon sounded uncertain even as he said it. “She should be fine.”
“Even you don’t believe that.”
“I don’t, no.” Jon shook his head. “But let’s face it. She’s strong. Stronger than the Pandorans.
Regardless of how hostile her welcome is, there’s extremely little anyone else can do to hurt her.
So again, she should be fine.”
“Should?”“District 1’s a different story,
” Jon said.
“You think we’ll be going there? To the Capital?”
“I think if we were going to be redeployed to any of the other districts, we would have been
by now. We were all there when Hardy first filled in the Capital on everything that had happened,
everything we’d learned. They’re not going to have just moving around with someone like Jin in
tow. They’ll want to see for themselves, want to assess the threat she poses. Something tells me
that’s why we haven’t heard back from them yet. They’re preparing.”
“For us?”
“For her,
” Jon said, lowering his voice as they came within view of the Grove, the small park
in the district where they’d taken to having all of their meals together recently. Already there were
Lucas and Aiden, sat at one table, blood bags in front of them. At the other tables were what
district guards that had survived the battle three weeks ago, all looking rather lean and miserable,
steaming bowls of unimpressive-looking soup in front of them.
And then, at a table all to herself was Jin, black hair falling loosely around her face. She was in
a gray tank top, so the tattoo on her hand was visible. On her table, a plate of smoked meat
although it looked more charred than smoked. Jin was examining the plate with a quizzical, almost
puzzled expression.
Chloe and Jon stopped at a cooler, fetched blood bags from it, then made their way to Jin’s
table, joining her there. Jin’s expression shifted slightly as they sat, looking almost relieved for a
moment before going right back to appearing baffled by the plate of food in front of her.
“What is this?” Jin asked, lifting the plate and craning her head slightly to examine it from a
different angle.
“Meat,” Jon answered, in an almost revolted manner. Chloe thought she could hear his
stomach stir, and not in the good way.
Part of the downsides of what they were was an aversion to cooked meat. Cooked anything,
generally. Anything that wasn’t blood would, for them, trigger great nausea, leave them sick for a
bit if they ate some. Chocolates and sweets were the only exception—they did still trigger some
irritation, but not the sickening sort, more the sort that dulled their appetites and let them go a
little longer not needing to feed on blood.
“What meat is this?” Jin queried. “Nighthound?”
“No, should be lamb.
” Jon shrugged. “Would you please eat that already?”
“It’s scorched,” Jin said, setting the plate back down and looking rather thoroughly displeased.
She crossed her arms and pouted. “Such a meal is beneath me, not fitting at all for someone of my
royal station.”Jon blinked once, incredulously. “Y-you’re joking, right?”
“Would you eat this?” Jin asked, pushing the plate toward Jon. Jon recoiled, and was quick to
shove the plate back in her direction.
“No,
” was his cold response. “And you know why.”
“We all have our dietary restrictions,
” Jin said. “You cannot eat meat, I cannot eat filth.” She
rose to her feet then, taking the plate and moving toward one of the other tables, with the district
guards.
She spoke to people at the table for a while, and despite their clear discomfort at Jin’s presence
and her speaking to them, one of them still accepted her plate of food.
That alone, was enough indication of how dire things had gotten.
The evacuation before the battle meant all the cooks had moved, and so the meals that came
out of the kitchen now were being prepared by Cole and Glenn, neither of whom knew their way
around a kitchen all that well. Chloe tried to wonder just how awfully the soup must have tasted
if someone was willing to accept charred lamb as an alternative to it, and from Jin no less.
Jin returned to their table.
“Your people have shockingly low standards,” she said.
“Any word
from your leaders yet? Any orders?”
“None yet.” Jon shook his head.
“Do you trust them?” Jin queried.
Jon frowned. “Sorry?”
“These leaders of yours in the Capital, the Council. Surely, you must know some of the people
who sit on the Council? Do you trust them? Their judgement? Do you trust that they will do the
right thing?”
“Are you asking if we think they’ll try to kill you?” Chloe raised one eyebrow over the other.
“I have heard that the ones there like you, they’re a lot stronger than you are,” Jin said, and for
a moment she did look concerned. “I do not trust that my fate will be as secure with them, as it is
with you.”
“They’ll do what they consider to be right,” Jon answered.
“And if that involves the forfeit of my life?”
“Won’t happen,” Chloe said. “They’re politicians. They’ll listen to what we have to say. You
have a lot more knowledge about what’s going on than any of us do. That kind of knowledge’s
priceless. If they can see how useful you could be then they’ll be a lot more willing to play nice.
But they will want you monitored.
”
“I am not a child.
” Jin returned to pouting.After breakfast, Jon, Chloe, Lucas, Aiden and Jin set out on their usual patrols, scanning the
immediate vicinity of the district for any signs of trouble. This included the road that led up to the
district, and the woods that surrounded it. Other than a few starving stragglers here and there, and
a couple deer in the woods that had been infected, there was nothing.
“Ravan will be dead by now,” Jin said after their patrol, speaking of the crazed alien scientist
who’d apparently been responsible for the angry gods and hellhounds that had given them great
trouble before. “No doubt my father would have been enraged by his failures. One failure, my
father might forgive. A second, he would deem as incompetence, perhaps even disloyalty. Neither
of those are things he would forgive.”
“So if the crazy scientist’s dead, that’s it?” Aiden asked.
“Not much left for us to worry about?”
Jin snorted. “Ravan is not the only man of brilliance in my father’s employ. Others will have
filled the hole of his absence, no doubt devising plans of their own as we speak. It is perhaps why
trouble has not yet sought us out. I am not so sure that we should be wishing for it to do so. When
my father attacks again, there is no doubt it will be with force more overwhelming than Ravan
could conjure.”
Back at the district, they split off to do their respective things. Jon went straight for the hall to
speak with Hardy, find out if there’d been anything at all from Capital. Lucas vanished, not telling
anyone where he was headed but it was a fairly easy guess for Chloe. He was headed to Spike’s
grave, which he’d visited all too frequently in the past three weeks.
Aiden, Chloe, and Jin joined those involved in the district cleanup, although only Aiden and
Chloe offered much help in the cleanup while Jin stood aside and berated them for doing things
clumsily and inadvertently creating worse messes.
“I know this is supposed to be for the greater good,
” Aiden said, while lifting three hellhound
corpses to a wheelbarrow, “But I swear if she doesn’t shut up, I’ll haul her over to her father
myself.”
Chloe snorted, then glanced over her shoulder at Jin who was standing now atop a pile of
rubble, arms folded, staring down at them all with her gaze narrowed. She was certain that Jin’s
intention was to look royal, or intimidating, or as though their rightful place was beneath her. But
all she looked like to Chloe was lonely, and afraid.
Cleanup went on uninterrupted for another two hours, and might have gone on even longer if
Chloe, Aiden and Jin hadn’t all heard it at the same time.
As soon as Chloe picked up on the sound, her ears twitched and the hairs on her stood. She
straightened at once, face darkening as she lowered the mud-and-blood-stained shovel in her hand
slightly.She turned slightly and glanced straight into the horizon, eyes narrowed with focus. Jin leaped
down from the pile of rubble, grabbed a shovel and snapped it, holding on to the more lethal end
of it.
The sound got louder and louder, got nearer and nearer to the district. There was the
unmistakable hum and whine of an engine, the loud, sharp, mechanical but rhythmic thwop-thwop
of rotor blades slicing through air.
A few seconds later, dark shapes came into view in the horizon. Six of them to be exact. At
the same time, Chloe picked up on more sounds, not from the choppers that had now appeared
in the sky but from behind her. The sounds of tires crunching against earth.
She spun around just in time to see armored trucks drive into the district, the letters N.A
painted onto the sides and hoods of the truck in gold.
The National Army.
The trucks cordoned off the district entrance, a few more drove in their direction and
surrounded them.
Jin shifted uncomfortably, eyes narrow, darting from left to right while she gripped her
makeshift spear hard, ready to let loose any moment.
The choppers were directly above them now, and they watched as they started to drop in
altitude, the sounds of their blades and engines incredibly loud now, enough that Chloe winced as
she attempted to dull out some of the noise. The choppers touched down around them,
surrounding them just as the trucks had.
Men and women clad in camo and tactical gear complete with battle helmets emerged from
the trucks immediately, all of them wielding dangerous-looking rifles that pulsed with light. More
emerged from the choppers but amongst these were people who were clad in different tactical
gear, clad in black instead of camo, people who hadn’t bothered with helmets or with rifles.
There were three of them, and all of them had dangerous-looking sharp eyes. On the sleeves
of their gear, each one had been branded with an emblem, a badge of sorts, identifying them not
with the Army, but with a sponsor.
Chloe read House Lincoln off the emblem on one of them, a tall, thin freckled boy with
middle-parted brown hair, a few strands of which fell down his forehead and got in his striking
blue eyes. His jaw, chiseled and looking almost hand sculpted was clenched in an expression of
seriousness, his lips pressed tightly together.
He marched right in their direction and she caught a tattoo on the side of his neck, but was
unable to make out exactly what it was. He stopped right in front of Chloe, staring into her eyes
coldly and with some disregard. His lips parted, and the voice that came from him was cold.“Where’s your Chancellor?”
Hardy arrived then, with Jon, Aiden and Lucas who was shooting distrustful gazes at the
soldiers who’d surrounded them.
Hardy stopped in front of the brown-haired Pandoran, and offered a handshake. “Chancellor
William James Hardy, Seventh District,” he greeted.
The boy, despite appearing unimpressed and a little annoyed, accepted Hardy’s handshake.
“Andre Nicholson,” he said. “First District.” He cast a scanning glance around then, his eyes
lingering on Jin a little too long and darkening as they did so.
Chloe shifted a little, placing herself directly in front of Jin, a fire of defiance in her eyes as she
did so.
Andre’s gaze moved to her. His expression shifted slightly, as if he’d been amused by the
gesture. Then he returned his attention to Hardy.
“We have orders to lead you to the Capital,” Andre said. “You and anyone else who’s left here,
you ride with the ground convoy.
” He gestured toward the trucks. “But her,” he added, pointing a finger past Chloe and straight at Jin. “She comes with us in the choppers.“