In the weeks that followed Kad’s awakening and departure from Rootsaw, a lot of events began to happen. They ranged in importance from completely irrelevant, such as the string of one night stands and half-hearted relationships that came from such a calamity happening so close to town. To the moderately important like the increasing involvement of the Expedition Force on the lowland civilizations. All the way up to the events that could one day be considered to be the catalysts of change on a continental scale. These events, naturally, came in the most exciting format imaginable, meetings.
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Kristin sat behind the giant desk of her office, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. The throbbing had begun when she was informed that an EF skimmer holding two high ranking Diver team members had docked in town. Now, looking at the massive towers of paperwork that had accumulated on her desk, she feared the headache might just be permanent.
She didn’t blame Kad for the paperwork, but she had certainly been cursing his name on a more regular basis than she ever had before. She looked at the piles and felt the smallest twinge of jealousy at Kad. She’d been training for months when she managed to get her second coil. It would take months to condition her body properly to be cleared to take the serums and concoctions to push her body to the level where she could get her third. Then, it was possible for her to be given an instinct, to be awakened.
Kad gets roughed up in the Reef one time and now he’s awakened and being swept away to get trained by some of the most powerful awakened on the continent. She shook her head, shuffling papers around as she tried to avoid the guilt she felt for even thinking that about Kad. He wasn’t a bad guy, and nobody deserved the kind of beating he received out there. Even hailed as the one of the most effective awakenings in recent history, who knew if his body could handle the strain that this would put on it.
The piles that the paperwork had been organized into were teetering wildly on the sides of her desk. On one side was the personnel pile, including applications for enlistment and all the people who were trying to make their second coil after seeing the powerhouses that walked through. On the other side of her desk, a stack that was taller than she was when she stood up. It was the incident report stack and as it turned out, when a civilian is brutally assaulted by a former member of the EF, awakened without consent, then escapes custody, the commanding officer in town is actually responsible for all of that.
The tower of paperwork actually leaned over the edge of her desk, over the trash can. She fantasized momentarily about a sudden malfunction of the walker platform the building sat on, that a leg would give for a second and the entire stack would just tip over into the can, making not her problem anymore. She knew that wouldn’t actually make it someone else’s problem but hey, a girl can dream.
A knock at the door interrupted her musings, and Kristen looked up.
“Come in” her voice was raspier coming out than she expected it to be. She realized she’d been in this office working for hours without saying a word to anyone.
The door opened and Simon stood in the doorway. He was out of his guard uniform and instead wore the dark blue overalls that he wore when he worked in his uncle's workshop shoveling coal into furnaces. His hands were caked in soot, the black dust worked into every groove of his hand until you could see the swirls on his fingertips. His normally kempt black beard was an angry black cloud that obscured half his face. Combined with the dark circles under his eyes and the soot that stained his face, he looked like a wild animal.
“Kristen.” He nodded. She gestured at the chairs that sat on the other side of her desk, shuffling papers around to make it look like she hadn’t just been daydreaming.
“Simon, what can I help you with?”
“I want to apply for the EF” The look in his eyes was one of quiet determination. She didn’t ask why, she didn’t need to.
“Simon, you know he’s going somewhere you can’t easily follow” He nodded before she even finished speaking.
“It’s not about following him. It’s about being there for my friend.” He hesitated for a second “It’s about being able to be there for my friend. He’s gonna need someone to remind him where he came from or he’ll just get a big head and dive in too deep”
Kristen didn’t argue. She wasn’t much older than the Kad or Simon, and she’d seen them growing up. Kad was a menace the second he figured out how to talk, and Simon had been the silent protector the entire time. Everyone wanted to smack the shit out of Kad every once in a while, but nobody wanted to deal with the brute that was watching closely from a comfortable distance.
The way Simon treated Kad was a big factor in why he was such a good town guard. He knew how to watch body language and be within range should a fight break out. He knew how to pay attention. A skill that made him a desirable employee in their line of work.
“Okay, are you applying for the general militia training or do you have a special sector in mind?” She pulled a fresh set of forms out and plopped them down on the desk in front of her. She was filling the form out without even having to really look. She knew where this conversation was about to go and it was giving her an uneasy feeling.
“I want to work either as a Diver or for a Containment unit” The surety in his voice never wavered, but Kristen’s trained eyes saw the goosebumps ripple across his arms as he said it. She flinched internally, trying to keep her face passive. How much had Kad managed to tell them before he left?
Divers were a known factor in the EF hierarchy, people sent to take down dangerous creatures or people, but Containment was officially a classified department. Containment teams were sent to areas of the Okocea where it wasn’t possible to just eliminate a problem. They did just as the name implied, going in and pushing back whatever threat was coming out, pacifying it for as long as possible and withdrawing. It had the highest casualty rate of any division by far. If you managed to make it in Containment you could write your own ticket to do anything.
They sat in silence as she scratched the words onto the forms. Every rake of the pen across paper felt like it was chiseling a fate into Simon’s bones. To his credit, he never blinked at it. She eventually set the pen down and looked Simon in the eye again.
“So, how much did he tell you?”
“Enough for me to know what this means” He said, gesturing with one soot stained hand at the papers on her desk.
Kristen nodded, searching for words to describe what she wanted to say. She wanted to tell him to walk away. To take a general EF job and be a warden or a city liaison like she was. She wanted to tell him not to throw his life away following in the footsteps of someone as deeply cursed as Kad seemed to be. She opened her mouth with a thousand ideas, feeling the hoarseness of wanting to scream at someone.
“Good luck Simon, make it home” She stuck a hand across the table. He stared at it for a second, the first sign of real hesitation at following the path. He met her hand and shook, and Kristen felt a hollowness in the middle of her chest.
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Moz walked quickly through Night valley, her hands shoved deep in the pockets of her coat. In one hand she gripped the letter she’d gotten from Kad, crumpled and smoothed over, letters smudged and smeared from the angry tears she’d shed over it.
Every step she took punched a hole in the layer of fog that hung low to the ground. Looking off over the valley as she walked, she could see the small bridges that arched back and forth over the river. It looked like some mythical serpent weaving its way through the fog.
The valley sat between two of the higher mountains that formed the natural barriers of the city. It nestled deep in the shadows, and it’d be midafternoon before the sun managed to burn off the fog. She looked up to the sky, watching the heavy, dark gray clouds as they pushed across the sky, dragging the first chill of the year with them. If the sun managed to burn off the fog.
Night Valley had a reputation as the most run down and corrupt part of the city. The buildings were poorly made, most of them leaning on the mountainsides. They seemed to peel away from the cobblestone roads. The balconies that hung out were filled with old timers, their sagging faces scowling down at her green hair and combat boots.
Her long curls were dyed in various shades of green, a technique she’d been working on for years to have her hair match the colors of the Okocean canopy. It had started as her emulating the root workers from the Highlands, who took every advantage possible to make themselves harder to detect out in the deeper spots. Now she did it because of the looks she got from the little girls who ran around Rootsaw. They stopped and stared, pointed with wonder and awe in their eyes.
It didn’t take long for Moz to make her way over to the place she was looking for. It was one of the oldest standing buildings in the city, from back before the walls went up. She looked over the half rotted boards, the rusted roof, and the supports that seemed to be the only thing holding the building up.
This is the place that Kad always raved about, and tried to get her to come drink at? It smelled like old cigarettes and vomit, and the hand carved sign with “The Filthy Mutt” was broken, only hanging on by one side. She stepped up onto the wooden deck and winced as the board gave underneath her.
She pushed the door open, holding her breath as a wave of cigar smoke and the smell of cheap liquor slammed into her. The small building was mostly empty this early in the day, making the half broken tables and mismatched chairs just look sad in the midmorning gloom.
A group of men sat at the bar, smoking cigars and chatting when she walked in. They were mostly old timers, white haired and with sunken, sallow faces. A couple of them had crisscrossing scars that ran up their arms, the white lines stood out against the tanned leathery skin like tiger stripes. One of the men with scarred arms looked at her, and she felt a catch in her chest.
He had a tattoo on his throat, a deer skull with antlers made of thorns that stretched up his neck onto his jaws. It was an incredibly recognizable symbol that belonged to a particularly ruthless band of mercenaries that roamed the lowland mountain range doing underground work for whoever paid them the most. His gaze was appraising, flickering to the spots on her body where she’d be most likely to hide a weapon. It only took seconds before his eyes glazed over and he returned to the glass of liquor he was nursing.
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Among the men at the bar sat the massive form of Cornelius, red faced and chuckling at something one of the men grumbled. He had a fat cigar in his teeth, and when he locked eyes with Moz, the humor left his face. He took another puff from the cigar before snuffing it out directly on the bar, shoving the half smoked thing in his shirt pocket.
He stood, running a hand over his face and smoothing out the thick bushy mustache on his face. He stood and walked over to meet her halfway, giving her a tight smile.
“Glad you made it here, are you sure you’re ready for this?” He was scanning her, seeing the way her jaw was clenched and her hands were shoved into the pockets of her coat.
“I’ll survive. Where’s the meeting at?” She said, gripping the letter in her jacket pocket tighter. She was keenly aware of the knife shoved in her boot, and even more aware that it would be totally useless if this went wrong. Kad’s letter had revealed some terrifying information that didn’t seem possible, and when she met with Cornelius about it, the lack of surprise made her shiver.
Cornelius smiled at her and turned toward the back of the bar. “It’s this way, follow me” and headed toward the hallway.
Moz frowned, the bar was old and rickety, and it honestly didn’t meet the expectations of what she had been told was a pretty clandestine meeting. Where were the codenames, the heavy-handed metaphors, and the spies taking shots at each other?
She was supposed to be having this important meeting in the back room of a run-down bar. Yuck.
She followed Cornelius to one of the rooms in the back, a storeroom full of shelves that held crates full of different kinds of alcohol. It was shockingly well stocked for a dirty bar in the middle of one of the poorest districts in the city. Cornelius walked to the back of the room and grabbed the edge of a shelf set into the wall. He looked back at her with a smirk and pulled. The wall swung outward, revealing a door set into the mountainside behind the bar. Moz’s mouth dropped open.
“This city has more secrets than it does citizens,” Cornelius said, fishing a ring of keys out of his pocket. Moz was still staring agape at the door set into the mountainside. Maybe she was wrong, maybe this was a clandestine meeting befitting the name after all.
The door was white stone, with bands of iron stretched across it. A small symbol of a leaf was set into the door, made of some dark green material that seemed to glow in the dim light of the storeroom. Cornelius flicked through his keyring, pulled one out, and unlocked the door.
The locking mechanism on the door moved with a satisfying mechanical snick, and Cornelius placed one huge palm on the door and pushed. It slid open smoothly, revealing an office. The room was made of the same white stone that the door was, heavy slabs of it laid so close together that it created the illusion of the room being carved from a single piece of stone.
A heavy desk sat in the middle of the room, dark wood polished to a shine, with high-backed chairs on either side of it. There were bookshelves carved into the stone itself, thick leather-bound tomes lined every shelf, embossed with different letters and numbers.
Cornelius walked over and took a seat in one of the plush chairs that sat on their side of the desk. He looked at her, amusement clear on his face, and gestured to the other one.
“Have a seat, we’re still early so who knows when our contact will be meeting us”
Moz moved over and sat in the seat, still taking in the room. “This is ridiculous. Nobody needs a secret office set into a mountainside” Cornelius laughed and nodded.
“You’re right. Nobody needs this office, it’s more for show than anything else. But it does make a certain impression.” He pulled the cigar out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his teeth as he fished around for a match. “Now I’m going to tell you something and you need to promise me you’ll do as I say okay?” His voice was steady and he leaned back comfortably in the chair, but Moz saw a tremor run through his hand as he held a lit match up to the cigar, puffing it back to life. She nodded at him, not trusting the strength of her own voice.
“The man we’re meeting with is what's known as Awakened, like the person who attacked Kad” A chill ran down her spine. The letter she got had described a monster who could crack the thick-trunked trees of the Reef like they were twigs. The idea of someone like that coming into a room this small with her made her feel like she couldn’t breathe. Cornelius put a hand on her arm.
“They’re not violent, but that doesn’t make it a safe situation. Be calm and still, don’t stare, and answer honestly. If I tell you to leave, you get up and leave and don’t say anything else. Understood?” Moz nodded, her eyes wide. She took deep breaths through her nose trying to calm down.
The wall on the opposite side of the room clicked in a familiar way, and Cornelius shot Moz a glance before straightening up in the chair and looking ahead. Moz followed suit, straightening out the jacket she wore and keeping her hands folded in her lap. She didn’t want to make whoever they were meeting feel like she had a weapon.
The wall slid open on the other side of the room, and a man who looked to be in his mid-thirties was standing on the other side. He was wearing traveling clothes, dusty from the dark tunnel he walked through to get here. He walked in, smiling at the duo, and closed the door behind him.
He closed it, walked to the desk, and sat behind it before looking over each of the people meeting with him. He glazed over the cautious expression that Cornelius put forward, but Moz saw a slight twinkle of amusement when he saw the sweaty nervousness that she was trying to hide.
He placed his hands on the table, and Moz’s eyes widened. One of them was tanned and muscular, with an expensive-looking watch on his wrist. The other was easily twice as big around, with short thick fingers that ended in yellowed claws. The pads of his fingers were thicker than they should have been. Like he’d grown a layer of leather over each one. He smiled at them, revealing a mouth full of sharp-looking teeth.
His eyes flashed from green to a solid amber color. He looked directly at Moz.
“So, I’m told you want answers the Expedition Force isn’t willing to give you” he pulled open a drawer in the desk and plopped a thick folder down.
“Let's talk.”
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Raya sat at the bar, swirling a glass of blackberry wine as she listened to the old men talk around her. She’d stopped drinking already and was just swirling the glass, watching the deep purple liquid spin. Moz and Cornelius had been in their meeting for over an hour now, and she was waiting for them to finish.
She didn’t care much for the little rebel leader they were talking to, she found men of his ilk to be pretentious and annoying. Always grandstanding, always on a soapbox about something that was ultimately pointless or futile. She much preferred men like Kad, dumb little guys who’d rather slam a bottle of liquor than get in a spirited debate about the plight of man in the modern age.
She felt a twinge of sadness thinking about Kad. maybe his days of slamming shots and jumping off of buildings to impress women were over. A twinge of pain spiked through her stomach, knocking her out of her daydream. It was another half an hour before Cornelius and Moz walked out of the back room.
The mammoth of a man had a glassy look in his eyes, and Raya spotted a large rectangular bulge in his coat. It had to be the file she put in the office for them. Spooky stuff in those papers. She threw back her glass, letting the sweetness of the wine wash down her throat. Another spike of hot pain lanced through her, and she poured another glass.
Moz walked out soon after, a look of fierce determination in her eye as she stomped her way out. Raya rolled her eyes. The girl just found out about super-powered mutants and was probably offered the chance to become one and she was still upset. Some people just don’t deserve their own luck.
She’d heard about Simon enlisting with the EF while they were in their meeting and she shook her head at the idea of it. That kid would be an absolute monster if he managed to survive long enough. All of them would be, and she’d be here, rotting. She thought about the pain that lanced through her every once and a while. Her father had paid most of his salary as a city councilman to have her treated and nothing had worked.
She’d used her position as a known lush and seedy bar owner to make contacts with the criminal underbelly of the city, looking for other options. She was the first to admit that she’d gotten a little carried away with that one. She’d inherited her father's penchant for organization, just with a better stomach for unsavory deals.
The pain reignited as she stood up, moving back to the locked room in the back of the bar that she called home. She moved to the desk in the corner and pulled an envelope out. It was bulging with papers, and she stuffed it in her coat pocket. She looked into the mirror by her door and sighed. The dark circles under her eyes, the scattered red spots on her cheekbones and forehead that could be mistaken for freckles at a distance were actually broken blood vessels.
She was getting thinner, though the baggier coats and pants she wore in the cooler months were working overtime to hide the changes in her. Raya knew, her time was running out. So she figured it was time to call in every favor she had, pull every string, and do what she could to make this right.
The entire situation with Kad held a secret that she had to take to her grave. She’d received a message from an anonymous source that came with instructions and a stack of cash. She’d ignored it for nearly a month before she got a very different message with an offer she couldn’t just walk away from.
The message had burned into her eyes from her staring at it so long. “We can make you better” was the opening line of it. Then the same set of instructions she’d received before. She did it, no hesitation. It only took two messages to have the last route in Rootsaw territory set to R2 and above only.
Raya walked out of the Mutt, heading toward a back alley road that led toward the sunken towers in the center of the city. She hadn’t thought anything of it at the time. She assumed it was to keep people out of a certain part of the Reef, drug smuggling, or something like that. She never imagined anything like what happened to Kad.
When she realized what happened, she felt sick, and hadn’t gone to pick up her payment. She didn’t even know what it really was that they were giving her, only that it was supposed to completely reverse whatever this illness was. She wasn’t an idiot though. She knew this could be a way for them to silence her in case she had managed to track the messages she’d received back to their source.
Which she had, to some degree. She’d found every underground messenger in the city, every dirty politician, every degenerate with a disgusting habit they wanted kept quiet. She’d turned over every rock and uprooted every plant looking for something. And she’d done it. She had information that would turn the entire lowlands into a war zone if she unleashed it all at once.
She stopped at a nondescript house in a nice neighborhood and handed the envelope to her man who worked in city hall. If anything went wrong, if she didn’t come back, if she wound up dead somewhere, the entire file would be shipped out to the highest offices in the Highland cities. She’d let the people she was dealing with know exactly one time. If they fucked with her, she’d bring down a hammer big enough to shatter the mountains.
She made her way to the center of town, walking up the makeshift wooden ramp that led onto the second-floor balcony of one of the sunken towers. Well over a hundred people were milling back and forth across the bridges that stretched between the teetering buildings. She walked in, following the strings of emergency lights that served as the only way to see in the darkness of the buried parts of the buildings. She walked down the stairs, staying in the center to avoid the majority of the mud that was caked onto the steps.
She only had to walk halfway down the hallway before she reached a set of doors that looked barred off, like most of the rooms down here that had been sealed to stop the mud and water leaking in. She pushed and they swung in with little effort. She had to squint against the brightness of the lights down here. They had to have some sort of generator running in the back that kept the place so well-lit.
The floors were clear, and people walked around between the rooms down here, carrying weapons and drugs in quantities that even Raya found reprehensible. Most of the doors down here were propped open, signs nailed into the wall above each doorway. There were only a couple of doors that weren’t publicly open. The second room from the end of the hall on the left was shut. It had a sign above the door that was simply a green vine carved into a wooden plank.
The doors on either side were boarded up, crude arrows cut into the walls above each door pointing toward the one with the wooden sign. Whoever this was, they owned three full rooms in this market. It was either a foolish display of wealth or a warning of their strength.
Her heart was pounding, all she could hear was the sound of her blood rushing in her ears. Every heartbeat brought another spike of pain through her stomach. Raya walked up to the door and knocked. It opened, and a man stood in the door frame, wearing simple green robes. He stared at her, his face a mask of impassivity.
“I’m here to collect my payment” her voice cracked, and she hoped she looked more confident in this plan than she felt. The man simply smiled, stepping aside to allow her in.
Raya took another deep breath and stepped inside the room.