A Chain Across the Dawn Read online

  For Presley Luna Barnacastle—Welcome!

  ACT

  ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  The air-raid sirens were still screaming, echoing out across the golden sky of Kandriad like some sort of terrifying lament, hollow and vast and loud as all hell. The sound bounced off the concrete and the steel of the long-abandoned factory city around us, rolling out over the plains of metal toward the distant horizon still tinged with the faintest blue hints of the dawn.

  There shouldn’t have been air-raid sirens on Kandriad. Not because the pulse had repressed the technology for sirens, but because it had repressed the ability for anyone to conduct air raids at all: flight was supposed to be impossible in an atmosphere this choked with pulse radiation.

  Except it wasn’t. Jane and I had seen the shadows of the warplanes hurtling over the factory city as we approached by the bridge, dropping bombs and executing amateurish evasive maneuvers to wheel away from the strafing gunfire of the defenders’ anti-aircraft weaponry. The planes hadn’t exactly been modern spec—prop-driven, combustion-engine relics cobbled together from spare parts—but that didn’t change the fact that they shouldn’t have been able to get into the air at all. Something weird was happening on Kandriad.

  Something weird always seemed to happen to Jane and me, but this was weirder than most.

  “So we . . . knock?” I asked, shifting my weight from side to side, staring up at the massive barred door that was the one and only entrance to the factory city from the south. We hadn’t seen a single native as we made our way down the abandoned railway line toward the factory—they were all hunkered down inside their converted city, being dive-bombed by impossible airplanes. The sect wars might have been forgotten by most of the galaxy post-pulse, but on Kandriad they’d never stopped, the locals locked in the same stupid conflicts that had led to the pulse in the first place. “Or . . . like . . .” I winced as the sirens came around again; I winced every time. I always thought they were finally going to stop as they dopplered away across the distance, and then . . . nope. Still going.

  “We should probably wait until they’re not having the shit bombed out of them,” Jane said mildly, leaning against the railing of the dilapidated bridge and smoking one of her awful cigarettes. Jane wasn’t fidgety. Jane never got fidgety. Taller, leaner, and in significantly better shape than I was, I’d seen her be more collected under sustained gunfire than I usually was making breakfast.

  “Do you think that’s likely to happen soon, or . . .” I winced as one of the bombers overshot its target, its payload coming down instead on the empty urban district beside the bridge—otherwise known as beside us. I was holding a telekinetic shield in place over both Jane and myself, and the feeling of the shrapnel from the blast smashing itself to pieces against what was basically a psychic manifestation of my own will was . . . not overly pleasant. Still, the shield held, and even if it hadn’t, our intention shields—hardwired into our nervous systems—would have protected us. Hopefully.

  I didn’t particularly want to die on a bombed-out hellhole like Kandriad.

  Jane waved her hand—and her cigarette—in front of her face, not so much dispelling the cloud of dust that had risen in the wake of the blast as adding to it with her cigarette smoke. “Doesn’t seem that way,” she said.

  “So can we talk about how there are warplanes flying and dropping bombs in a pulse-choked atmosphere?” I asked instead. Since we appeared to be stuck out here, underneath the falling bombs, that seemed a topic of particularly hefty import.

  Jane frowned at that. “I don’t know,” she said shortly. I almost grinned—despite the nearly-being-blown-apart thing—just because Jane hated to admit when she didn’t know something, and a part of me was always a little bit thrilled when circumstances forced her to do so anyway.

  Still would have traded it for “not huddled just outside a factory door, hoping not to get bombed,” though.

  “But how—”

  “Still don’t know, Esa,” she sighed, dropping her cigarette butt to the bridge and grinding it out with her boot heel—though it wasn’t like there was anything out here to catch on fire. “And either way, we’re not likely to find answers standing out here. Go ahead and knock—we’ve got a gifted kid to find.”

  “I thought you said we should wait until they weren’t getting bombed.” As if cued by my statement, the air-raid sirens finally cut off, the last hollow howl echoing out over the horizon until it faded into the golden light of the day.

  I looked at Jane. She was grinning. I glared at her; that just made her grin some more. She opened her mouth to say something, and I simply held out my hand, forestalling whatever smartassery was about to emerge. “Don’t,” I told her flatly. “Just . . .” I sighed, and reached for the heavy knocker welded to the riveted steel of the door. “I got this.”

  I knocked.

  CHAPTER 2

  In relatively short order, we got a response to our banging. That response was, of course, half a dozen rifles pointed at us from murder holes carved out of the sides of the high wall, but it was a response nonetheless. “Travelers,” Jane said, spreading her hands wide to show that she was unarmed—well, to show that she wasn’t holding a weapon, at least. On a world like Kandriad, nobody went anywhere unarmed, and the rifle butt sticking up from behind Jane’s shoulder would have just seemed like an everyday necessity to the locals, no different than a farmer carrying a hoe would have been on my homeworld. “Seeking shelter.”

  “This city is at war, traveler,” a voice said from one of the murder holes—sounded like a Wulf, which made sense, since the vaguely canid species had made up about a third of this world’s population, before the pulse. “There’s very little shelter to be had here.”

  “Very little to be had out there, either.” Jane jerked her thumb behind us, indicating the smoking craters the poorly aimed bombs had blown in the urban “countryside” of what had once been a factory planet.

  “How do we know you’re not enemy spies?” the Wulf growled. I mean, Wulf almost always growl, the sound was just what their muzzles were built for, but I detected a distinct note of aggression in the low-pitched rumble of this one’s voice.

  “Esa,” Jane prompted me, and I reached into my jacket—slowly, as the rifles were still following my every move—to produce a tightly rolled-up scroll. The parchment was as close to what local conditions would have allowed the natives to create as Schaz had been able to make it; hopefully they wouldn’t ask too many questions about its provenance beyond that, questions we wouldn’t be able to answer given that we’d actually printed it on board a spaceship in orbit, a concept that had receded mostly into myth for the people on Kandriad.

  I held the scroll up, where they could see. “Reconnaissance,” Jane told them simply. “Aerial photography of the enemy assaulting your walls from the north. Troop positions, fortifications, artillery emplacements—enough intelligence to turn the tide of the fight.” Neither Jane nor I really gave a damn who won this particular battle, or even this particular war—whatever conflict it had spun off from, the fighting on Kandriad had long since ceased to matter to the galaxy at large, let alone to the doings of the Justified. What we did care about was getting access to the city, and to the gifted child hidden somewhere inside.

  “You have planes? Like they do?” The guns were still holding . . . pretty tightly on us.

  “Kites,” Jane said simply. “And mirrors.” That was a flat-out lie, but “we took images from our spaceship in low orbit, then smudged them up to look like low-tech aerial reconnaissance” wouldn’t have gone over nearly as well.

  A low sound from the Wulf, not that dissimilar to his growl from before; thankfully, our boss back on Sanctum wa
s also a Wulf, and I recognized the sound of a Wulven chuckle when I heard one. “Kites,” the unseen sentry said to himself, almost in wonder. Then: “Open the gate!”

  The big metal gates rumbled open; Jane and I stepped along the train tracks, into the interior of the city, where the sentries—Wulf to a one, their rifles still held tightly, though at least not aimed directly at us anymore—watched us closely. Jane handed over the map to their leader, the one who’d spoken. He unrolled it, studied its contents for a moment, then without a word handed it off to one of his subordinates, who promptly took off, presumably for the factory city’s command. “It’s valid, and it’s recent,” the lieutenant acknowledged to us, his ice-blue predator’s eyes still watching us closely, not as friendly as his words. “I recognize shelling from just a few days ago. Intelligence like that will buy you more than just entry here, strangers. Name your price.”

  “We’re looking for some intelligence of our own,” Jane replied. “Looking for one of your citizens, actually. A child, younger than my associate here.” She nodded her head toward me; I didn’t know how well the local Wulf population would be at gauging a human’s age, but at seventeen, I guess I did still have a slightly “unfinished” look, as compared to Jane, at least.

  “And why do you seek this child?” the lieutenant asked—not a no. Progress.

  “He or she will have . . . gifts. Abilities. We seek children with such gifts, and we train them.” All true, for its part. It was simply a question of scale that Jane left out.

  “Train them to do what?”

  “Whatever is necessary.” That part wasn’t exactly an official piece of the Sanctum syllabus.

  The Wulf nodded his head, once. “I know the child you’re looking for,” he said.

  Finally, something going our way for once.

  CHAPTER 3

  The lieutenant led the way, at least for a little bit, guiding us through the fortifications and the armories and the aid stations and the endless walls—the factory had been remade from a place where things were fabricated to a place entirely structured around war, and it looked like it had seen plenty of the latter.

  Beyond the final checkpoint, he took his leave of us with instructions to head toward the “lower wards” and ask around: apparently the maintenance tunnels built beneath the complex, underground, where most of the civilian population lived, safe from the constant artillery attacks and bombing raids. Jane thanked him, and shook his hand—that curiously human gesture, for whatever reason, had spread through almost every alien culture during the Golden Age—and then we went our separate ways, the Wulf sentry back to his post, Jane and I toward the elevators.

  We packed onto the massive lifting platform with a group of civilian volunteers covered in dust and stained with smoke, returning from work at the front. The elevator was operated by a clever mechanism of counterweights and interlinked chains: it’s always impressive, what people can come up with when they don’t have access to the levels of tech that actually built the world around them.

  As the platform shook to life and began its descent, I looked around me, finding spots in the crowded elevator where I could peek in between the various civilians and out the chain-link cage that surrounded the descending platform. There are various advantages to being short; seeing above the heads of a crowd of people is not one of them. Still, I could make out some of the city passing us by, levels and levels of retrofitted factory turned into districts and facilities and homes. “Is this what it was like?” I asked Jane curiously, not really apropos of anything in particular.

  “What what was like?” she asked, her gaze still set forward, staring out the cage around the elevator as we were lowered through the factory floors, the spaces once meant for building . . . who knows what, ball bearings or spaceship engines or anti-grav frictionless coagulant, and now retrofitted into armories and schools and churches.

  “The sect wars. Your sect wars.”

  She shrugged, one hand linked into the chain, her fingers tight against the wire. “There were as many different wars as there were sects, kid.”

  “I know. I get that. I’m asking you if yours was anything like this.”

  “Some parts were. Other parts weren’t.”

  “You don’t like to talk about it, do you?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “But you were—”

  She sighed, finally turning and looking at me. “Esa, if you’re asking me if I was born in a city under siege, a city like this, the answer is yes. If you’re asking me if there was still . . . life, and people trying to live their lives, even under those conditions, people trying to normalize the aggressively abnormal until it was . . . just the way things were, then yes. It was like this. If you’re asking me if I grew up in a massive factory complex retrofitted into a city retrofitted into the forward operating base of a theater of war, then no. No, I didn’t. Okay?”

  We were both silent for a moment; around us, the elevator still groaned as it descended, and the civilians sharing the space with us still spoke quietly, though none of them seemed inclined toward raising their voices, either, having just come from the destruction of the front. Finally, I spoke again. “I get that in your hundred and ninety-three years—”

  “I’m not a hundred and ninety-three years old, Esa.”

  “Fine. I get that in your hundred and ninety-two years in this universe, you’ve seen a great deal, and not a great deal of it pretty. I came from a world that I’m not in any rush to remember either, yeah? So I get that. But a home’s a home, Jane. It still . . . where we come from still matters. You don’t get to just . . . turn that part of you off, make it into something else. Your life didn’t just . . . restart itself, after you joined the Justified. Or after . . . after the pulse.” I’d almost said “after you detonated the pulse,” which would have been true, but also unfair. Not to mention a stupid, stupid thing to say when we were surrounded by strangers, even if we were conversing almost sub-aurally, thanks to our implanted commlinks. “You’re still who you were, then. At least a part of you is.”

  “I’m really, really not, kid.” She shook her head again. “Maybe you’ll understand when you’re older.”

  I gave a small smile at that. “When I’m a hundred and ninety-one, you mean?”

  “Also not a hundred and ninety-one, Esa. We’re here.” The elevator shivered to a stop; the chain gates slid open, the maintenance tunnels before us as cramped and claustrophobic and silent as the factory floors above had been open and alive. Apparently almost everyone who lived down here was above, either heading to or from the front, or working in the various other areas of the city.

  The locals shuffled out, still muted, making their way toward various side passages and the closets and storage rooms they now called living quarters. I mean, I get it, I was used to cramped quarters—Scheherazade’s interior was not exactly palatial—but still: it was a tight fit, even to me. Jane stopped one of them, a female Wulf who hadn’t shrugged off the armband marked with three diagonal blue lines—the universal symbol for “medic.” “We’re looking for a child,” Jane told her. The medic stared at her face, her bone-deep exhaustion warring with open curiosity at the human asking her questions. “One with . . . talents. We were told to ask down here.”

  The Wulf nodded, then sighed. “I know the child you mean,” she said. “I’ve . . . tried to help. He lives with his mother, in the subway line apartments. Find the ladders; go as far down as you can; ask around again. Everyone knows who they are. All the way at the edges.”

  “Do you—can you tell me what the child can do?”

  The Wulf stared at Jane for another moment, then shook her head. “It’s not my place to say,” she answered. “Not my story to tell. Whatever it is you expect, though, prepare yourself for disappointment. It’s a sad story. Like so many in this city.”

  Jane nodded, taking a step backward. “Thank you for your help,” she said.

  “Of course. Good luck. I hope you can help them.
They deserve it.” With that, she faded into the rest of the shuffling crowd, off to catch some well-deserved rest.

  Jane looked at me; I looked back, then shrugged. “At least we know we’re looking for a male,” I said. “That’s something, at least.”

  “True. ‘Prepare yourselves for disappointment,’ on the other hand, is . . . less than promising. And the boy still has his mother. That might be . . . tricky.”

  For whatever reason—most likely the activating trauma that most of the children we were seeking out went through—a substantial percentage of the kids we took back to Sanctum were orphans, more than half, at least. As an orphan myself, I kind of recoiled at the notion that it was a “good” thing, but the truth was it did make it easier to convince a child to leave their homeworld—usually the only world they’d ever known—if they wouldn’t have to leave parents behind as well. Jane and I had managed it a couple times in the three years we’d been working together, but she was right: it did make things more complicated.

  We couldn’t offer to take his mother with us, either. That wasn’t in our mandate. I gathered it had been tried before, in the early days of Sanctum, with . . . less than ideal results. It wasn’t something operatives in our line talked about much—but it had been made very clear to me in my training that, of the things we were allowed to promise the kids to secure their cooperation, a place for their parents wasn’t among them.

  Still, a way off of a world like this one, most parents would want that for their child. That was usually our opening bargaining chip, and as chips went, it was not half bad, especially given the state of siege they were living in now.

  We started forward, into the tunnels, looking for a ladder down.

  CHAPTER 4

  It took us some time, wandering the subway tunnels, asking around about the boy with the gifts, our theoretical cargo—Jane’s term, by the way; I kind of hated it, but she used it often enough that it had snuck its way into my vernacular all the same. As it turned out, we needn’t have bothered. People were helpful, in a vague enough sort of way—some of them were, at any rate; some growled and refused to speak, others called him a “demon” and made warding symbols with their claws, but a few were helpful. Ultimately, though, we could have just wandered the subway at random until we came across the surest possible sign that we were in the right place.