ElyriasEcstasy Read online

“You really do want to know how I got them, don’t you? I mean, I didn’t have them last time.”

  So she had been here before. Had he successfully impregnated her, and they’d sent her back for another seeding? Probably not. Her tight young flesh showed no signs of stretching.

  Arvra said, “I’m from a border town, right across from the Unsafe. We don’t really get the sun, but we’re not completely in the shadow cast by the outer fringes of the Black Ship either. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble I have to go through before they’ll issue me a travel pass to come here to the city, even when the Guard are the ones who’ve ordered me to.” She was looking down at him, shaking her head.

  He wondered if a Passenger’s claw had given her the marks but didn’t interrupt to ask. He was suddenly engrossed by her unfolding tale.

  “People—regular people, civilians—they go into the Unsafe sometimes,” she said. “You’re a Weapon. I’m sure you know that. People need stuff, and there’s a whole planet of goodies out there. Metals, fabrics, rare things that only—” Her blue eyes darted away once again, this time with a hint of fear in them.

  “That only the Lux get,” he finished for her.

  Her gaze came back to him slowly. She only nodded. Then she continued, voice tightening a little. “My brother was with a band that went into the Unsafe. Illegal as hell, I know. And stupid of him. Not worth the risk. But he got back okay, though one of his buddies…” She shrugged. “Later, though, the Guard came. A squad. The captain was angry. I never found out how they’d learned about the raid into the Unsafe. The squad came into our room and the captain read the charges. Then he started beating my brother. He used a baton. I don’t know why he was so furious. But I couldn’t stand it. I dove at him. The rest of the squad pulled me off, of course. I was stupid, just like my brother. The captain…he…he took out his sword. And—” The tightness of her throat closed off further words.

  Urna found he was moved. It surprised him. He knew the Guard could be overly zealous. They were the police force, in charge of all domestic situations within the Safe. It was the Unsafe that was the bailiwick of the military. He knew there were many abuses of power among the Guard. But to hear it in such personal terms was very affecting.

  “Come here,” he said softly, and she lay down next to him, in his arms. He held her in a firm embrace. Her spiky hair brushed his cheek as she pressed her head against his shoulder. Her body gave a little hiccupping jerk, once, twice. He felt the warmth of a tear on his skin.

  After a few minutes he rolled her gently onto her back and climbed atop her body. He placed a tender kiss on her lips before entering her oiled cleft. He was slow about it, starting with a lazy sliding rhythm, working himself an inch deeper with each delicate thrust.

  Soon she was responding. It seemed a more genuine reaction than when he’d had her finger herself for his amusement. Her mouth was open and panting. A flush spread over her. He felt the heat rising from her flesh. He thrust into her with a little more fervor. Her legs wrapped themselves around his waist. Her pussy was streaming as he fucked her harder still.

  A moment later she was quaking beneath him and he gave himself over to his own come, just letting it take him. It felt less like he was dutifully depositing his sperm in a ready receptacle than…well, what? Was this “making love”—another of those hoary phrases he’d found among ancient fiction? He didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

  But the episode was sweet and pleasant and surprising.

  Arvra took up her gauzy little wrap and called for the guards to come unlock his door. A moment later she was gone. He lay on his bed, aware of the time, aware of the object he’d smuggled from the Unsafe inside his clothes earlier that day. That picture he had found under the piece of glass he’d stepped on. It was the reason he was doing this.

  It was the reason he meant to escape this place.

  * * * * *

  The guard (in this case it was guard, not Guard; the Safe’s police force had no jurisdiction over the military) assigned to this wing of the Weapon quarters marched past Urna’s door right on time. Urna rolled over onto his side and craned his neck, straining his ears to count the single set of bootsteps as they continued down the hall, approximating when the guard would turn the corner to the best of his ability.

  Rune would have known the exact second, of course, he thought with a small smile. A smile which Rune, the bitter bastard, would no doubt have heard as well, were he within range. But the Shadowflashes were housed in an entirely different wing, clear on the other side of the better than mile-wide Citadel. The two halves of the teams were kept apart specifically so they couldn’t whisper to each other, Urna suspected. Couldn’t communicate their thoughts and doubts, notions that came in the night’s silence, ones that they were discouraged from discussing during the daylight hours. It made sense enough. The relationship between Shadowflash and Weapon was supposed to be a strictly professional one. Their bonds were limited to the Unsafe, to the battleground. They were more effective that way, so the thinking went.

  But as useful as Rune might have been at this very moment, Urna was confident that his own special skill set was about to serve him even better. In this instance the Shadowflash would only have slowed him down.

  Three minutes until the guard turned down this hall again. Urna, dressed now, rolled off the mattress, landing in a crouch on the floor. He moved soundlessly in his boots. He wasn’t wearing his combat outfit, rather nondescript clothes that wouldn’t attract any attention once he was on the outside. Easily, he flipped the mattress, running his palm over the rough material until he found the small, nearly invisible slit he’d made in the fabric. He worked his fingers in. They scraped over several items he had picked up in the past—part of a broken shell, an aquamarine stone with a deep crack in it, a tarnished coin with the vague impression of a face still visible. And the bronze plaque with the bullet hole in it. He would leave these objects behind.

  Eventually his fingers closed over the square of stiff paper he had found in the Unsafe tonight. He had stashed it in the mattress shortly after his return, before the doctor had come to lay out his doses for him, his nightly chemical cocktail of supplements and enhancers, or whatever the hell they really were.

  He had already swept those pills off his stand, into a pocket, though he hadn’t swallowed any. He wouldn’t be getting any more, but if his body needed them too badly, he could feed them to himself one at a time until he broke the cycle, or that was the plan. At the moment he was too deep in Weapon mode to feel the narcotic draw of the drugs.

  Still kneeling, he squinted at the image on the old paper. The phosphorescent light still filtered in around his doorframe after his room light was automatically extinguished. His mind conjured up a word from a book he had recently looked at. Photograph. Those things no longer existed. Only the Lux security systems were permitted by law to record images, both within the Safe proper and the semi-shadowed peripheral border towns. This image was faded, yellow and worn to shit around the edges, as if someone other than him had spent long hours looking at it before dropping it on the ground back in that doomed city, perhaps in the chaos that had immediately followed the Black Ship’s arrival. Or maybe it was a much-handled picture that same someone had finally stored behind glass so to protect it from total deterioration.

  But the outlines of three people were still clearly definable. Two large figures, one smaller. A boy. The two bigger ones were male and female, respectively. Parents and son, words as foreign to Urna as the idea behind them. The sun was a bright spot on the background, reflected by an expanse of darker water.

  He sometimes dreamed of a place of warmth and water. As far as he knew, he was the only Weapon who ever dreamed. The last time he had carelessly mentioned seeing pictures behind his eyes when he closed them, they had put him in seclusion for forty-eight hours, evaluating him and adjusting his medication.

  Two minutes.

  He didn’t want to fold the delicate photograph, so he careful
ly curled it and slipped it wholly down into the side of his boot. He rose in an easy motion, stretching once. Preparing. The tips of his fingers barely scraped the ceiling when he lifted his arms and he heard his bones crackle delicately as he did so. The sound invoked a recent memory. Again, he felt the soft breaking of glass beneath his foot.

  Again, he felt smooth bare flesh pressed up against his. He thought it might be Arvra he was thinking of, but an instant later he realized it was Rune.

  If he was going to miss anything about this fucking place, he thought, it would be that. It would be him. As contentious and complex as their relationship had been over the years, he…he, well, loved that motherfucker, didn’t he?

  With a last, full turning study of the walls, Urna stepped up to the heavy door. The doctors used their Lux ident-cards to open the doors from the outside. Strange, considering the Weapons were not prisoners. Not really. They were elite soldiers, fighting for a cause. An ill-defined cause, maybe. But it was enough to keep them here.

  Kill the Passengers. Defend the Safe. Serve the Lux. Eat now. Kill now. Don’t feel. Don’t think. Do as you’re told.

  For a long time that had been enough for him.

  The photograph was not, in final truth, what had started it. It was that feeling, that vague persistent disquiet he felt regarding his life. His uncertain past. The picture was incidental, a catalyst. Because of it, Urna had not swallowed the doses that by now would be making him sleep, or doing that thing Weapons did that resembled sleep. His muscles should have been relaxed but they were taut. Primed. Ready.

  Ninety seconds.

  Without another moment’s hesitation, he drew back his fist and slammed it into and through the wall. He knew these walls. He had covered them in his cascade of words and studied every square inch. He had seen the crack long ago and felt the weakness here, beside the door. He had calculated how much strength he would need to penetrate it. It worked.

  He slipped his arm through and pressed his shoulder to the crumbling maw of shattered lath and plaster, feeling for the lock on the other side. Finding it, he chopped the flat of his hand against it once, then again. It took another sharp blow at the odd angle to break the casing and short out the device. The door clicked opened.

  He did not have a sword, and he wasn’t strapped either. But that was okay. So long as he did this exactly right, the only weapon he needed was himself.

  At that moment he could have sworn he heard Rune at his ear. The voice was so real that he looked over his shoulder. But he was imagining it. He had never mentioned his plan to Rune and it was impossible that the Shadowflash could be aware of what was happening, despite their much-ballyhooed affinity, which the doctors tried so hard with their drugs, and the trainers so hard with their drills, to replicate in the other teams.

  Even so, Rune’s voice, seemingly. Go now!

  Urna turned and ran in the opposite direction the guard had gone. He came to an ell just as the same guard was reaching it, a lone figure, completing another of his repetitious cyclical rounds through this particular wing.

  “Hey,” Urna said conversationally. He allowed no time for the guard to look surprised, let alone respond. In an instant, Urna was down, sweeping with his leg. The guard hit the floor and Urna leaped onto him, knocking the air from his lungs and wrenching his gun from his holster.

  He pressed the barrel to the guard’s forehead, feeling no hesitation about ending the anonymous man’s life right here.

  Until he heard, Don’t. Rune again. Or some ghost version of Rune.

  Urna smacked the pistol against the guard’s temple, rendering him unconscious. Swiping the uniformed man’s card from his belt with his free hand, he ran.

  * * * * *

  In the end there wasn’t much to escaping the Lux’s Weapon/Shadowflash facility—rows of flat, gunmetal gray buildings covering an entire end-to-end swath of the Citadel’s northern quadrant.

  No, not much, Urna thought. Only a maze consisting of what seemed like about a hundred locked doors, easily surpassed using the swiped card. The trick was to avoid everyone else on patrol. Fortunately, he’d long since left behind the personnel quarters. These were administration offices and storage buildings, all silent in the night.

  Unfortunately, he would have needed more than this standard card to get access to the armory. There would be no retrieving his personal sidearm and sword.

  He finally reached the last structure in the row. Sidling along a wall, as soundless as a mist, he halted beneath a high window. Nimbly he leaped, caught the sill and drew himself up. The lock was far easier to force than the last one. This one wasn’t even electronic. No alarms had sounded when he’d disabled his room’s door. Power fluctuations happened occasionally, even here on the Citadel’s grounds. No doubt some trooper sitting bored out of his mind at a monitor screen had seen the interruption of the card-lock on Urna’s room and made note of it. A repair would be scheduled. But that unconscious guard would be discovered long before then.

  Urna slipped out through the high window, jumping, landing and rolling easily, as if he weighed nothing. He’d gone out headfirst and now came up in a crouching position. He took a deep breath as he surveyed the grounds. He was at the Citadel’s periphery. Above him was the night sky, a clean black sheet pricked with icy starlight, so different from the glow of the Black Ship’s underside.

  Enormous solar panels stood on the tops of the buildings and were scattered at intervals throughout the huge yard. These Lux-owned arrays were all over the Safe, gathering what precious energy they could to be distributed throughout the Safe proper, then more sparingly through the surrounding border towns.

  Looming in the night was the Citadel building itself, as grand and imposing an edifice as just about anything Urna had ever seen crumbling to dust out in the Unsafe, and certainly the most palatial structure in the Safe itself. There the Toplux and his council presided. There the Lux jealously nurtured their power. They were the political force that domineered the Safe, using both the Guard and the military to keep themselves dominant. They had the wealth and the technology. With a wrench Urna tore his eyes away from the sight.

  Only a few hundred feet worth of training grounds routinely scanned by camera drones and searchlights now stood between him and the perimeter fence. He would have to take down a few more men once he reached that barrier, beyond which lay the city surrounding the Citadel. He still had the first guard’s pistol, but using it wasn’t his first choice. His own gun would have been more comfortable anyway, but that and his sword were always handed over before debriefings. He would not fire his commandeered firearm. Nothing announced trouble quite like a gunshot.

  Good thing he was such a brilliant Weapon.

  A light swept by, just past the tips of his fingers, which were splayed on the ground, followed by the buzz of a camera high over his head. He was still as a stone, waiting, but could not deny the grin that crept across his sharp features. For all his periodic fantasizing over the years about this night, this escape, he had never imagined it being so much fun. Or maybe this was just adrenaline translated into giddiness. He’d felt this way sometimes on missions, cutting through swarms of Passengers.

  Go. Rune’s phantom voice again. Urna was sure—well, almost sure—this time that it was indeed imagined. Something in the mental timbre was off. Some instinct told him not to trust the voice’s authenticity, even though he had to admit it’d been providing him with good advice so far. Shaking off whatever lingering feelings the presence of the voice had planted in his mind, Urna pushed off the ground and sprinted across the yard.

  Rune, the bastard, was determined to be a part of this, it seemed, if only an imaginary part. The voice had to be some subconscious concoction of Urna’s own mind. Maybe the drug withdrawal was already affecting him. Maybe he was panicking on some level about leaving his longtime lover and antagonist behind.

  He gained speed as he went, a built-in benefit of running full tilt. Weapons were trained so that no living crea
ture could catch up with them should the mission require a quick retreat. Another skill not imparted to the Shadowflashes, who were always supposed to keep their distance from the violence.

  Twenty yards from the fence he would be in full view of the two troopers he could see ahead. One of them, at least, would have time to call in an alert—all this required was the touch of a button on the radio on their belt. Not long after that, real alarms would start sounding, ones that would be taken very seriously. But Urna planned to be far out of the compound before that happened.

  He selected his target, the more attentive of the pair, and raced for him across the final distance. The trooper raised his gun.

  “Hold it right—” But the Weapon’s whisper-quiet feet were carrying him at a blurring speed by now. A quick elbow to the jaw cut off the trooper’s last word, a few red drops of blood flying from his mouth instead. As he stumbled back a step, Urna’s foot met decisively with the center of his chest, sending him sprawling against the metal linked fence.

  Urna didn’t have much experience fighting against ordinary people. He’d trained exclusively with other Weapons, spent his time in the dark of the Unsafe battling inhuman fiends. He thought he heard a rib crack, felt a twinge of sympathy for the poor dupe. But this wasn’t the time for hesitation.

  The one trooper’s chest had stopped his forward momentum. Now he spun on the second figure, a female, who was still raising her firearm. So far the assault had lasted roughly two seconds.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” Urna said. An indulgence on his part. A…mercy? Was it some lingering warm feeling from the episode with Arvra earlier? Such thoughts flitted through his mind and vanished. He watched as the woman, frozen in this tiny instant, seemed to consider her options. Hyper-processing, the way adrenaline allowed one to do. Urna had an inordinate supply of the stuff, a fact he had managed to learn from the doctors over the years, something that was unique to his biology. It was interesting to see the effect of so much adrenaline on a normal human as the soldier’s gun twitched indecisively in her grip. Her other hand was motionless at her side, as if she’d forgotten all about her radio. She had to recognize him, had to know how dangerous he was. She couldn’t let Urna go, she must be thinking. But if she tried to stop him…