Athel (21 page)
Authors: E. E. Giorgi
Chapter Twenty-Two
Athel
Day Number: 1,591
Event: The Underground City is our new
home
Number of Mayakes left: 382
Goal for today: Rebuild.
The horizon is yellow and gray.
Untouched by the events of the past forty-eight hours, the Gaijins factory
keeps spewing ashes and pollution onto our land.
Not much
is left of the Tower. The north wall is still standing, but the rest is a pile
of rubble, whiskers of steel bars gnawing at the sky. Parts of the forest are
still burning, and plumes of smoke rise over the treetops, tingeing the air
with the reek of fire. The Kawa River carries downstream burnt logs, black
ashes, and sometimes even bodies. Our fishing platforms, so carefully and
promptly rebuilt, are once again gone.
Kael
squawks and swoops over the rubble.
“I bet he
misses the Tower too,” Dottie says.
“Of course
he does,” I reply. The falcon still hasn’t come to see our new underground
quarters. Can’t blame him. There’s no view down there.
Our boots
crunch on the debris as we take careful steps around the devastation left behind
by the Gaijins’ attack.
It
could’ve been worse. Many more would’ve died if we hadn’t evacuated the Tower.
Even more, had we not unlocked the Underground City. Tahari’s plan backfired,
and now the conspirators are dead and the Mayakes, once again, have survived.
Decimated, and wounded both in their bodies and in their pride, but we
survived.
Lukas
climbs over a pile of crumbled cinder blocks. He digs in the rubble and finds a
piece of foam gushing out of what used to be one of our charging stations.
“I doubt
you’ll find anything useful,” I say, scuffing the ground with the tip of my
boot.
Lukas
crouches and examines the foam. “You never know. I think this has just become
our new landfill.”
I shrug
and walk around the north wall. Dottie points to the blackened solar fields and
the charred pile of debris that once was our barn. She and Wes decide to go
check it out, while I stay behind with Lukas, scavenging for anything
salvageable. I watch my sister limp across the burnt grass, her injured leg
still recovering from Golow’s fangs, and wonder what will become of us.
We’ve lost
everything. Our home, our belongings, our leaders.
We’ve lost
our identity. Who we were is no longer who we are. Who we
thought
we were, the Mayakes, the meek, the survivors.
Lukas pulls
something out of the dirt.
“What have
you found?” I ask.
“Just
wires,” he replies. “But you can never have enough wires.”
“Right,” I
say, looking for anything that reminds me of home, maybe a doorknob, or a
bathroom faucet, anything. I find nothing.
“Athel!”
Dottie calls. “Come!”
Lukas and
I scuttle over. Wisps of ashes scatter at our feet as we cross the burned soil.
“Something’s
stuck beneath these metal sheets,” Wes says when we get there. Both Dottie and
he bend over trying to free a panel of rugged metal from underneath the debris.
I can hear a distinct moaning coming from below. Lukas and I roll up our
sleeves, and soon the four of us are all digging, our arms and clothes caked in
ashes.
We manage
to lift the sheet of metal a notch, enough for me to shove a rock underneath
and then use a metal beam as a lever to pull it up. Dottie crouches and takes a
peek inside.
“Something’s
there,” she says. “Alive.”
“Move
over,” I tell her. “I can see in there better than you.”
I peer
under the metal and finally see it. “It’s a mama goat,” I holler. “A mama goat
with her newborn baby!”
“You’re
kidding,” Wes says. “How could she survive the fire?”
“The metal
saved her life,” Lukas interjects. “It protected her from the blaze.”
We help
the mama goat and baby out of the pit, our excited voices adding some color to
the gray landscape around us. Both animals look scared but seem to be doing
fine. The goat bleats and we give her water from our bottles.
Dottie
cuddles the baby goat in her arms, tears shining in her eyes. “Guys. This is a
sign. A new life in this utter devastation. It
has
to be a sign, don’t you think?”
Lukas sits
on the ground, his cheeks floured with gray ashes, and digs through his
satchel. Yes, he was able to save his satchel and data feeder. He wouldn’t be
Lukas without those.
“All
negative has a bit of positive,” he says, in his typical, cryptic wisdom. He
shows us his open hand, where a tiny microbug is peering at us from the tips of
his fingers. “Thanks to Golow, I now have lots of pieces to make an army of
these.”
I chuckle.
“Right,” I say. “Suit yourself.”
Lukas
flashes me a miffed look. “Go ahead and laugh. No matter how much stronger than
us they think they are, we can still defeat the Gaijins. Don’t underestimate
what tiny crawlers can do.”
Dottie
tilts her head, intrigued and skeptical at the same time. “And how would an
army of those help us defeat the Gaijins, Lukas?”
He shrugs.
“For one thing, they can carry tiny things inside.”
Wes raises
a brow. “Like weapons? But how can you make a weapon so small that it can fit
inside—inside
that
?” he asks,
pointing at the critter on Lukas’s finger tips.
Lukas
gives us one of his pitying looks, as if what he’s saying is so obvious it’s a
mystery we haven’t grasped it yet. “No, not weapons. Not manmade weapons,
anyway. Nature already has beautiful weapons. Why bother with new ones?”
We all
blink and frown. The goat bleats.
“It’s very
simple,” Lukas says. “I’m going to put a bug inside them.
The
bug.”
The Plague
. The one thing the Gaijins
fear the most.
That’s
when I finally see it. Lukas
is
a
genius.
Wes pats
him on the back, Dottie claps her hands. They walk back to the
Tower—what’s left of it—talking excitedly among them. I stay behind
a bit longer, my gaze straying back to the mesa. Out there, beyond the cliffs
and the walls of rocks, a factory keeps spewing ashes at us. And beyond that
factory, different people live, people who hate us so much they destroyed our
home and our land.
Then Lilun
happened.
And that
changed everything.
~
END OF BOOK 2 ~
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Also from E.E. Giorgi
The
Mayake Chronicle
series:
AKAELA
(Book 1)
ATHEL (Book 2)
ASTRACA (Book
3, pub. 2016)
Detective Thrillers
:
CHIMERAS
(A Track Presius mystery)
MOSAICS
(A Track Presius mystery)
GENE CARDS
(A Skyler Donohue mystery)
Set in the
Apocalypse Weird
world:
Another story
went by. As always, I wouldn’t have made it this far without the loving feedback
of my beta readers. Thank you
John L. Monk
, author of the
Jenkins Cycle trilogy
,
Carol Kean
,
Perihelion
book critic and an amazing writer
herself, and special thanks to my good friends
Karen Alaniz, Gianluca Memoli, Kat Fieler, and Lily Chylek
. I’m
sorry I bug you guys so much. But then I see how much better my stories turn
out because of you, and I can’t help but bug you more.
Heather Holden
, author of the webcomic
Echo Effect
, made the map of the
Five Chavis
. Background image provided by
Ayelie-Stock
.
E.E. Giorgi is a scientist, a writer, and a photographer. She spends her
days analyzing HIV data, her evenings chasing sunsets, and her nights
pretending she's somebody else.