The Sun Dwellers (7 page)

None of us move.

“NOW!” the ape yells, his voice booming through the naturally acoustic cave.
NOW, Now, now…
His voice fades in the distance, down the “safe” and “unused” tunnel we’re supposed to be heading down.

Still no one moves.

The guy cocks his double-handled gun, probably an automatic or semi-automatic.

“We have no choice. Do what he says,” Tristan commands. Although on the face his words sound compliant, there’s a hint of resistance in his tone, as if he has other plans.

Roc and Tawni are on their knees even before Tristan can obey his own order; I suspect they were halfway there before he spoke. Trevor and I slide down next. Sharp needles of rock pierce and prick my clothes. Ram’s the last to join us, his big nostrils flaring like a bull, his eyes wide and wild, and for a second I think he might attack them all on his own. But eventually he drops to one knee, his other boulder-sized kneecap angled forward as if in a stretch.

“Both knees!” the ape yells, taking three big steps forward. I expect him to beat his chest any second. Instead, he snaps a sharp kick at Ram, who tries to duck, but doesn’t have time. Evidently these soldiers sleep in their boots, because they’re all wearing heavy footwear, their apish leader included. Ram is the unfortunate recipient of the likely steel-toed footgear, his head snapping back at an unnatural angle.

I cringe, and Tawni cries out, but to everyone’s—none more so than the sun dwellers’—surprise, Ram doesn’t fall to his side. His head rebounds forward, revealing a wicked inch-long gash on his temple.

First blood has been drawn.

If the rest of us comply from this point on, perhaps it will also be last blood.

The only problem: most of our group, me included, aren’t too good at compliance.

And Ram’s laughing—of all things, laughing!—a deep grumble of delight, like a foot to the head is just what he needed to make today the perfect day. Still chuckling, he shifts his right-angle knee so it’s also flush with the rough ground. Six ducks, all in a row. At least four of us are thinking of the best way to hurt these guys.

“Secure their weapons,” the ape says to his men. “Bind them.” The men move forward from all sides, as if they’re a single organism, an extension of the ape himself. I do the math. Twelve enemies. Six of us. Assume Tawni stays put. Assume Roc can take one of them. That leaves two for most of the rest of us. I’ve seen worse odds.

There’s a surge of warmth as blood pumps to my extremities in anticipation.

My fingers tingle with nervous energy.

We’ll go down fighting, one way or the other.

Ram’s the first one up, exploding from his haunches like a missile, his shoulder a battering ram, shattering the sternum of the unlucky soldier who was about to use a small snatch of rope to secure him. Tristan, Trevor, and I snap to our feet simultaneously, each attacking the closest soldier. Mine is tall and broad and holding a sword in front of him like he knows how to use it. But even he’s surprised by the swiftness and ferocity of my attack, probably because I’m a girl, and not particularly big. My father’s face appears in my mind a split-second before I hit the guy. His words:
Even the big ones will fall if you hit them in the right places.

He swings high with his sword, a head-lopping attempt, but I duck under and thrust my leg straight up toward his crotch.
The right place.
He’s in agony the moment I connect, dropping the sword and clutching himself. I fling my knee as hard and as high in the air as I can, audibly hearing the crunch of his jawbone as I catch him under the chin, his teeth chattering from top to bottom. The worst hit: the back of his head off the unforgiving stone when he collapses to the cave floor.

One down. I’m due another. Gunshots explode through the night.

I whirl around, searching for my next victim, anticipating the need to dodge a bullet or an arrow—or maybe another blade. Or—

None of the above.

As it turns out, I was deemed a lesser threat. Tristan and Trevor are each finishing off their own victims—Trevor bashing a bulky dark-skinned guy in the head with the butt of his own gun and Tristan straddling a sturdy white soldier, clobbering him repeatedly in the face—but it’s Ram who’s in the thick of things. And that’s where the bullets are flying, both toward him and from him. He’s managed to steal a gun from one of the soldiers and is firing at six or seven sun dwellers, each of whom are firing back at him. His tunic is blotted in at least three places with growing circles of darkness. His face is scarred with the trickling river from his initial head wound. And yet, he’s still fighting, trying to take out as many of the soldiers as he can before they take him out, for our sakes, not for his.

“No!” Tristan shouts as he charges toward the line of enemies. Trevor and I follow in his wake, both yelling at the top of our lungs, as if the loudness of our yells will determine the strength of our attacks. I pass Tawni, who’s splayed on the ground, clutching a bloody knee, Roc hovering near her, a downed sun dweller soldier nearby. Roc got his man and I’m glad.

More gunfire: a soldier drops, then another. To my right: Ram’s fallen to two knees again, his chest covered in swarming darkness, a death plague eating away at him. Still shooting. Another enemy down.

Tristan smashes into one of the last four from the side, knocking him into another. The third and fourth men turn toward Tristan, trying to find their aim. I’m too far away. Trevor is closer, but not close enough.

Boom, boom!

The last two upright soldiers, one of whom is the ape man himself, slump to the ground, their eyes rolling around like marbles. The thump of Ram’s body follows a second later, his final act completed.

My head is on a swivel, trying to take in the carnage before me: Ram’s crumpled mass; Tristan kicking away the guns of the two soldiers he tackled, a strange guttural groan rising from his throat and out his mouth, moving toward Ram; Trevor rushing forward and kicking the final two men in the head, knocking them unconscious; Tawni sobbing somewhere behind me, Roc muttering soothing and utterly unbelievable words; red sun dweller soldiers strewn across the cave like boulders, some dead, some out cold. And me in the midst of it all, dazed and energized and sad.

I walk numbly to where Tristan is huddled over Ram, his head bowed, his hands folded reverently in front of him, as if in prayer. Tristan’s words about Ram echo in my head:
Let’s just say our friendship has had its ups and d
owns. Right now we’re on an up.

The up has crashed to a lower down. The lowest.

I place a hesitant hand on Tristan’s shoulder. He jerks slightly as he tilts his head back to look at me. His eyes are rimmed with red and filled with moisture, but his cheeks are dry. I don’t expect he’ll shed tears today, not while in the Sun Realm with all of us one mistake, one wrong tunnel away from death.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and although I don’t know Ram that well, I avoid looking at the dead man’s face.

“Me, too,” Tristan says, standing up. “We have to make this look like a one-man job.” There’s coldness in his voice—his attempt at pushing aside the loss of a friend.

“Okay,” I say. “What do we do?”

Trevor’s picked up on the vibe and pitches in right away. “All the bodies have to be in the same general area, so it’s believable that Ram could have inflicted all the damage on his own.” He practically did anyway, I think.

“But they’re not all dead,” Roc chimes in. “One of them will just tell them the truth.”

“None of these guys will wake up anytime soon,” Tristan says, giving one of them a harsh kick to the head as if to illustrate his point, or possibly as a final act of revenge for what they did to Ram. “By the time they do, we’ll be long gone.”

“But they’ll know we’re coming,” Roc persists.

“That’s unavoidable,” Tristan says.

“Not if we take the rest of them out,” Trevor says. I bite my lip.

Tristan stares at Trevor. I know they’re both thinking it’s not only the smart thing but the just thing. My lip starts to bleed.

“We can’t kill them—they’re unarmed and unconscious,” Tawni says, the only voice for humanity in our group.

“It’s no different than what they did to Ram,” Tristan says flatly. “It’s what they deserve.”

Tawni looks at me, her eyes wide and white, all color sucked from them under the glare of the spotlight, which continues to cast a beam of light through the center of the cave. “Adele, tell them they can’t do this.”

I’ve endured so much death in just the last few weeks that I feel as if there’s a hole in my heart, because although I know I should be on Tawni’s side, I’m not. I understand what Tristan is feeling; it’s the same thing I felt when I killed my father’s executioner, when I killed Rivet after Cole’s murder. Although they were still conscious and dangerous when I killed them, had they not been, I would have done the same thing. Stabbed Rivet. Pumped hot steel into my dad’s murderer. If I could have killed them twice I would have.

I don’t say anything.

“Adele!” Tawni exclaims, horror creasing her tear-stained face. “Don’t let them do this.”

I don’t say anything, look away from my friend, a pathetic act of avoidance.

I look at Tristan. “She’s right,” he says, to my surprise.

“She is?” I say.

“I am?” Tawni says.

“No, Tristan, we don’t have a choi—” Trevor starts to say.

“There’s always a choice,” Tristan interrupts. “We can fight them, but we can’t become them. And we can thank Tawni for reminding us of that. C’mon, we don’t have time to sit around and talk about it.”

No one argues and everyone pitches in, dragging dead and unconscious bodies in a circle around Ram’s fallen form, like a final monument to his character, like he defended us from all of them. It’s not far from the truth.

Finished, we stand and pay our final respects to a man who was a mystery to me, maybe a mystery to all of us. The only words spoken are by Tristan: “You’ve more than paid your debt, new friend,” he says, and I wonder what his words mean, but don’t ask. It’s not the right time, nor can we linger much longer. We flick on our flashlights and extinguish the spotlight, thrusting us back into a shaky-red form of existence.

From there we run, shouldering our packs and weapons, heads down, flashlights aimed just far enough in front of us that we don’t ram ourselves into a boulder or sprain an ankle in a rut. The shipping tunnel is wide and tall, perfect for trucks hauling goods and supplies to be distributed within the Sun Realm. But not anymore, according to Roc. There are bigger and better shipping tunnels now, leaving this one available for us. Which is probably why the soldiers were camped there, biding their time until their orders came in, to be dispatched to the front lines of the attack on some vulnerable moon dweller subchapter. At least until we came along. Now they’re headed for the infirmary if they’re lucky—or the morgue if they’re not.

An hour later we’re still running, sweating tears of salt from exertion and for Ram, who even in death might buy us some time, help us accomplish our mission. More than six miles already separate us from our foes, but it’s not enough. We need to be a few subchapters over before they learn the truth of what’s happened, and even then it won’t be far enough.

Another hour passes with sweat blinding and stinging our eyes.

Twelve, thirteen, fourteen miles, maybe more. An endless tunnel. We drink as we run, spilling the precious liquid down the tops of our tunics; I relish the coolness on my skin as rivulets of water meander down my chest, my torso, my legs. But my thirst never seems to be quenched; it’s as if the water spills from my pores the moment I swallow it, leaving me wanting. My feet are sore from the never-ending slap, slap, slap of my boots on the pebbly tunnel floor. Every muscle burns, even ones I didn’t think I really used while running—my abs, for example. It’s farther than I’ve ever run and yet I don’t think to stop. Might never stop.

But then I have to pee.

At first it’s just a minor urge, but within a few minutes it escalates into a major problem. “I’ve got to stop or I’m going to explode,” I say, slowing my strides.

“We need to find a safe place to camp,” Tristan says, encouraging me forward with a hand on my back.

“No, you don’t understand, I’m literally about to wet myself,” I say, stopping.

“Me, too,” Tawni adds, pulling up beside me, her face sheened with sweat.

“I’m shocked you made it this far. Usually girls have to go constantly,” Trevor says in such a way that makes it sound like something we should be ashamed of.

“I’ve got to go, too,” Roc admits sheepishly, bent over.

“Okay,” Tristan says, “we’ll all take a bathroom break except for Trevor, who will prove his manhood by holding it until we camp.”

A joke. It’s like a key part of our survival—our ability to laugh. As important as food or water or sleep. The thing we’ve all needed since we watched Ram die protecting us.

I laugh because if I don’t I might cry.

The others do, too, including Trevor, who says, “I didn’t say I didn’t have to go.”

Girls head one way—just Tawni and I—boys the other. We meet back in the middle.

My muscles protest, cramping and aching and burning, as they anticipate the start of the next phase. I’m not sure I can—