I had so many questions. What does this all mean? Is my father alive? I tried to ask the girl, but she just shrugged and gestured broadly at the scene. Half of the neighborhood must have been out by now, all of them pressing in to find out any little bits of information they could. Baila started working her way toward the back of the crowd, never quite disappearing because of the helmet she wore. I tried to join her, but felt a hand grip my shoulder.
Baila looked back toward me, but didn’t make any motion. The others looked at her with mixed curiosity and disgust, likely assuming that she was one of the Skyfallen, come to survey the city before the larger mass of Terrans came. She turned away, ignoring the onlookers and their comments.
As she disappeared from my view, the hand that had stopped me spun me back around. The man was short and thick, his red-rimmed eyes glowing against the semidarkness of the setting sun. He looked like every other knight that I had seen in this type of post – out of shape, probably on one stim or another. His uniform was wrinkled, thrown on in haste, as if he had forgotten he had work today.
I pulled away from him, careful to keep my hands raised. He lifted the prod in the harness on his belt, and I took another step back.
“Are you Divan Sadie?”
“Yes,” I looked at the knight, my hope reignited. “Have you found my Gr’apa?”
His expression stayed stony, his eyes slightly unfocused. “I am Droga, a knight of the crown. I need to ask you a few questions regarding the incident with your family’s store this afternoon.”
“I asked you a question. Has anyone found Olario Sadie?”
His name hung in the air for a second before Droga continued.
“We have not recovered anyone from the scene. Now, if you would please answer my questions. Where were you this afternoon?”
It took me a second to register exactly why Droga would want to know where I was. “I had run home to watch the broadcast, then went to the Upper Third to get some parts for the shop. I was only just returning when this happened.” I nodded toward the destruction on our left.
“Do you know why anyone would want to destroy your grandfather’s store?” he gazed intensely at me, as if he were expecting to frighten some devious confession out of me that would send him all the way up to the red robes in Altura.
I did not flinch from his questions. “I suppose the Skyfallen would want to see it gone. One of his best products was built on the idea that Terrans are worse than animals.” We had received a few unofficial warnings from Terran ambassadors, as well as one official visit from one of the King’s men regarding the silly cubes that I had come up with as a child. Now that the Terrans were in charge, the line of thinking wasn’t too farfetched.
“Well, I can’t very well say that the Skyfallen bombed a toy store in my report. I know that everyone is up in arms about it, but I just don’t think that blaming them for every speck of sand will save us from the desert.” Droga looked at me for a long while. I could almost see the headline he was imagining in his head. Local Hero Knight Stops Greedy Grandson, Next Stop: Altura
“I don’t much care how you word it in your report. Either the Terrans want to send a message, or they have some sympathizers trying to earn favor with their new overlords. Isn’t it your job to figure that out?”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“I understand that you are distressed, but I need your cooperation so that I can rule you out as a suspect. Is there anyone that could confirm where you were before arriving back here? Could you tell me what exactly you were working on that required the kind of technology that you were carrying on you?”
“Look, I don’t know. I truly do not know.” I was tired of going back and forth with him. “I expect you have all the information that you need for your report, and the bugs are already done scanning the scene, so they will be the ones that actually determine the cause of the explosion. If you don’t mind, I have to find my Gr’apa and make sure that he is alright.”
I pushed past Droga, my head pounding and my stomach whirling. He called out to me, but didn’t make any effort to chase me. I had not heard news of my Gr’apa from any of the people I had come across yet. I hoped that I would be able to find him now that things were clearing out, I noticed that the medical team had left, leaving only a few bystanders and a couple of knights meandering around the wreckage.
I tried to get past the large knight that was coordinating the beetle extraction. He raised an eyebrow at me. “Where do you think you are headed?”
“This is my shop. My Gr’apa is still in there.”
“Oh. Look, kid. I’m sorry, but there’s nobody still in there.” He gave me a sympathetic shrug
I stared at him blankly. My jaw frozen, I asked, “So where did they take him?”
He returned my blank gaze now. Finally, he reached a massive hand out to my shoulder. “I’m sorry, they didn’t find anyone alive to bring out.” I stepped away from his hand, turning and ducking under the rope.
I ran for a couple of minutes, until my chest heaved and I felt dizzy. I shook with anger and sadness. If he hadn’t been brought out, then he couldn’t have survived. I looked down at my leg, thinking of the way it felt, crushed between the large stone pieces that had been my family’s store. Now it looked as good as ever. I bent the leg up and straightened it out repeatedly until I was breathing regularly again, then walked down the path.
I followed my feet to the place that I had first encountered Baila. When I thought that she was a Terran, and that I could somehow defeat her and all of the oppressive Empire with nothing but my anger and good intentions. In less than a sun-cycle, I had been knocked unconscious, was almost killed – three times – and had lost the only family I had left. I didn’t know what to do, where to go. I went to the back of the alleyway, walked up to the wall, and put my head against the hard, warm brick.
I felt like I could cry, but I didn’t want to lose any more of myself than I already had. Instead, I took a deep breath and turned around, resting my back against the wall and looked around the alleyway. Now that I was not focused on the threat I had followed into the alley, I could look more closely at the doors. There were three, all on my right side. At first, I couldn’t think of why they were so familiar. After a moment, however, memories of the alleyway came flooding back to me. Not from earlier today, but from years ago.
When I was a young boy – one of the very few times I was allowed to play with the other children – I had been in this alleyway with Fabian and his brothers, along with a couple of others from the neighborhood. We had come into the alleyway for some privacy, some space to play with Fabian’s new JumpBoots. He let each of us take a turn. It was amazing how much higher we could leap on the Terran boots than we could even with the best dust jumpers on the market.
When it was finally my turn in the boots, I pushed as hard off of the hard ground as I could. I shot up like a missile, keeping my body as rigid as I could to get up higher. I tried to flip like I had seen Fabian and some of the older boys do. I landed up on the wooden roof of the building I had just been leaning against. Before I could shout down to my friends for help, a man came from the middle door and ran the other boys out of the alleyway.
After Fabian and the others left, I shrunk down close to the edge of the roof. I watched a handful of men – about a dozen in all, a mix of blood mages, knights, and even an Avian sage – pour out of the door. They didn’t say much, but I could hear one of the knights talking about putting a stop to the Terran threat before it became too big to stop.
I squared my shoulders toward the door. I knew that there had to be a reason that Baila had picked this alleyway when I had followed her before. I didn’t know what other choice was left to me. I took a deep breath, walked up to the center door, and pounded my fist against the sand-smoothed wood.