City of Cruelty and Copper (Temperance Era)
Read City of Cruelty and Copper (Temperance Era) Online
Authors: Rhiannon Paille
Tags: #dystopian, #adventure, #Science Fiction, #Fantasy
Rhiannon Paille
Copyright © Rhiannon Paille, 2012
All Rights Reserved.
Cover by Emma Michaels
Summary: May today be the day she dies. Fable Ketterling is the only immortal in the last city on earth. Thirteen hundred and five years of captivity, fame, and death. Temperance Day is the only day Fable sees the sun, and each year, she hopes it’s her last.
[1. Dystopian 2. Adventure 3. Science Fiction 4. Fantasy ]
I. Title. II. Series: Paille, Rhiannon: Last City on Earth; bk. 1
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead; is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: (electronic)
First Edition: January, 2012
All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means–electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise–without the prior written and signed permission of the copyright owner.
Contents
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DEATH SENTENCE
3325CE | 1305TE
They were going to try to kill me.
Again.
I waited, listening to the silence, the beat of my heart ringing in my ears. I wrung my hands out along my sides and tilted my neck back and forth, working out imaginary kinks.
My entire body was the pinnacle of perfection from my thirty-two-inch hips to my twenty inch waist and plastic chest. Aches and pains had melted away centuries ago with the faint trickle of water that had slipped down my throat. I no longer felt much of anything, nothing except the excruciating pain in my traitorous heart.
I took a deep breath and blew it out. Opaque shapes hung in the pale light. I looked at the slits at the top of my lead container. The slits were so miniscule I couldn’t fit my fingers through them. They led to a narrow tube that filtered in light from the surface. I turned my hands over and back again, over and over, contemplating scars from wounds that never hurt to begin with. I had seen my own blood smeared over top of my skin like it was a personalized blanket. Endorsed by Fable.
This was the waiting room. I was used to standing here in my nine-inch combat boots and tight leather pants and black and red corset. It pushed my plastic chest so sky high it was almost tumbling out of the top. I squared my shoulders as footsteps marched down the hallway. My orange red hair was a mess of knots and curls that trickled towards my lower back, my face covered in prepubescent freckles that hadn’t faded in centuries.
Nothing about me ever faded.
I was everlasting.
I was never-ending.
I was immortal.
The creaks and groans sounded as gears shifted and the ten-foot-thick lead door slid out of the way. A flash of blue hit my shoulder care of the stun gun Hattie Alexander held. I let the electricity run through my body and instinctively dropped on one knee in a crouch. Colin Cray came around me with the thickest adamantium chains I had ever seen. Colin made quick work of the bolts and forced me to stand. I felt his labored breath on the back of my neck and I thought about a backwards head butt, but didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.
Hattie smiled at me, her stun gun pointed in my face. She was a pretty woman, in her mid forties, showing laugh lines around her eyes and mouth. She had that blood-red auburn wavy hair thing going for her, and was wearing the standard issue one-piece. She dressed up the black jumper with a butterfly-designed belt that only made her mid section look fatter than it was. I always said, ‘Don’t flaunt it if you don’t got it.’ Maybe they stopped airing those commercials.
“Ready for your big performance, Fable?” Hattie asked, her high-pitched voice practically sawed my brain in half.
I kept my black eyes cold on hers and nodded. Colin nudged me forward, and that was when I realized he had hooked up my feet. Same unbreakable material, nothing but the best for Fable Ketterling. Colin had grown colder since I last saw him, blonde stubble on his firm jaw, grayish-white hair spiking from his scalp. I was a five-foot nothing and he was a six-foot something. My head barely reached his chest and behind his uniform I heard his pulse. Underneath that death trap of a fashion statement he had faded tanned skin from the heat of the deadly sun and scorch marks burned into the edges of his fingers. I tried not to blush when his right hand covered my pale spaghetti arm to guide me.
We walked down the long, dimly-lit tunnel in silence, chains rattling with every step I took. I was numb to the process, numb to the cool air filtering through the manicured underground caverns. People in Temperance didn’t let anything happen by accident. The things they did were deliberate. They had to be, after all that had happened and the consequences that followed.
They turned the corner, the same corner I had turned thirteen hundred and five times since I had been born. If we were still counting using the old calendars, it would be 3325CE and I would be thirteen hundred and twenty years old.
I was the only one counting my age anymore.
I didn’t look a day over fifteen.
They ushered me down another hallway which went from clay structures to embroidered Turkish rugs that lavishly stretched on across the mahogany-plated hallways. There were all sorts of gold-framed mirrors and glass lights lining the walls. They were pretty with their rose-colored light bulbs and intricate artwork. I admired the brass, and tried not to think about bucking against Colin and knocking them off the walls, causing the pretty carpet to catch fire.
We reached a set of double doors at the end of the hall after what seemed like hours of trekking up a gradual incline. The room I was ushered into was oval, and stretched out like an accordion. Hattie’s footsteps clicked along the white stone as she crossed the room, fluttering like a bird and screaming at the actual teenage girls that were perched on a white settee in the center of the room. They scurried behind a screen as I was led over to one of the four marble pillars, the chains fitting around it to secure me in place. Colin stepped away and I watched the muscles in his back contract underneath the one-piece. He wasn’t going to stay for the girl time.
Hattie clapped her hands together and the girls stopped giggling and came out from behind the screen. Both of them had handfuls of fluffy fabric. One of them was ‘asian’, but they didn’t use that term anymore. They preferred to call them Eastern Earthly. The other was Western Earthly; or ‘white’ as I would have called it back when I was actually a fifteen-year-old girl in 2020CE.
The Eastern Earthly girl had coal black eyes and straight black hair with bangs that covered her eyebrows. She might have been beautiful if she wasn’t in the black one-piece like everyone else. Western Earthly girl was about the same, but the blonde version with blue eyes. They blinked at me in rapid succession, either trying to get over the shock of my fame, or the shock of the reason I was famous.
I wasn’t going to hurt them.
But it looked like I was going to, didn’t it? Colin was an idiot chaining me up to a pillar and leaving me here like live bait.
“Ursula, Eden,” Hattie called, a sharp tone in her voice. Her eyes were like daggers and the girls disappeared into one of the side rooms.
Hattie sauntered over to me and I smelled the perfume she had applied since I’d last seen her. She took a handful of my hair and sniffed it. I could tell her it smelled like metal and sewage and garbage, but she scrunched up her nose and snapped her fingers. The girls came back, their hands empty this time. “Draw Ms. Ketterling a bath,” Hattie ordered.
I waited while Ursula and Eden disappeared, and then the sound of running water wafted through the spacious room.
Hattie inspected every inch of my body, looking me up and down, pausing at the hem of my leather pants and frowning at my breasts. I hoped she wasn’t thinking about another breast augmentation, and if she was, I hoped her mind was on reduction. Before the bombs began dropping I had a modest A cup, but since all the fame and heroism, I had to have some minor adjustments made.
“How do you feel about flame-resistant spandex?” she asked, a finger on her lips.
I raised my eyebrows. “I have flame-resistant skin,” I said dryly.
“Yes, but some of the parents complained about you being naked after the flame-throwers last year.”
I groaned. Flame throwers, that was new. “Then I have no objections as long as it doesn’t itch.”
Hattie nodded. “Great, and we wanted to give you a cape.”
“Is the F-16 team back this year?” I asked.
Hattie laughed. “Yes, but we don’t want to do that much bodily damage.” She glanced at my hands, the ones with all the scars on them. I grimaced. “We can ditch the cape, but we’re not going to have you looking like a boy again.”
Great, always loved getting pulled around by my hair. Steam billowed out of the adjoining room and crawled across the ceiling. “What’s the theme this year?” I asked, feigning interest.
Hattie’s heels clicked along the floor. She went to check on Ursula and Eden. The door opened and more steam billowed out, making her wave her hand in front of her face.
“It’s boiling,” Ursula or Eden said. I hadn’t heard either of them speak yet and so I couldn’t be sure, but the voice wasn’t Hattie’s. Hattie ducked into the room for a moment, the steam still circling her in wisps as she emerged and moved towards me. She didn’t look at me as she unchained me from the pillar, but didn’t set me free from the chains. I rattled like jingle bells as I crossed the floor and entered the steam. Both Ursula and Eden were on either side of the lavish tub. There were stairs leading to it, a perfect seashell sunken into the porcelain, and funny-looking soaps in the shape of ducks on the side of the bath. They were right: it was bubbling like it was hot as hell in there. I wasn’t nervous as Hattie removed my clothes. I boldly took the stairs, chains and all, and lowered myself into the boiling water. My skin reddened and my cheeks flushed. I couldn’t feel the heat. Not in the way I used to at least. I was still curious about the theme and with my hands bobbing on the surface I narrowed my eyes at her.
“The theme?” I asked.
Hattie looked unpleasant. She glared at Ursula and Eden and both of them ran out of the room like she had dangled a scorpion in front of their faces. She folded her hands together and gave me that this-is-all-for-the-best expression I hated. “You know how the kids are these days. They want the gore.”
Bloody stuff, exactly what I wanted. I opened my mouth to protest, but she put a hand up to silence me. The old Fable Ketterling was a hero, she was a saint. She signed autographs until her hands were numb and posed for pictures with every little kid that came her way. She appeared at not only the big Temperance Day, but at all the major festivals throughout the year. She traveled to the East side and shook hands with the sheriffs and people in the slums. That Fable Ketterling was a dare-devil, sky-diving without parachutes, setting herself on fire, letting herself be ravaged by feral Tigers. That Fable Ketterling was a superhero.