Sonia didn’t know how fast she could run. The truth was, whether running the leylines of the Edge homestead, or even racing up the a mountain trail during her Green Guard training, she’d never completely let herself go. But powered by ley energy or not, no one could out run bullets.
Besides, what was the good of a prize like exile? Her judgment was a death sentence within a death sentence, but it would be a good show for an instant, and Arrowite soldiers always liked a good show.
*
Execution morning dawned bright with sunshine, though the prison’s eaves weeped with the rain water from almost two weeks of torrential showers. A prison guard unlocked the shackles around Sonia’s ankles, leaving her hands cuffed behind her back. Another of them nudged her with the butt of his baton, and pushed her out of the prison and into a waiting jeep, rumbling at a low idle upon the wet gravel.
The driver stiffened at the sight of the prisoner. He’d survived two years and three rotations to the front just to get his final assignment, delivering a dead girl to the front lines where stray bullets ricocheted around the country-side. He would almost certainly catch one, too—all for the sake of a little bit of theater.
Theatrical executions mattered to the regime, and there was nothing he could do about it but lean on the clutch and put the jeep in gear. Pondering long upon the vagaries of life and death at wartime would make a soldier go insane. There was no rationality in war.
The driver didn’t have to speak to the girl, but in the hour since departing the base, as the jeep jarred and jolted over the rutted-out dirt road, his mind roared with the words of his own internal outrage until he had no piece left to keep. The screw that locked his jaw in place loosened and before he knew it, his tongue had softened along with it.
“I had plans! Another three weeks and my mandatory service was up. I was out of here! Back to civilian life where I belong. I have a daughter! She’ll be three next week. Smart girl with a smile like sunshine. I’ll never see her again because of you! You traitor spy! You cretin!”
Sonia swallowed over a tight throat. “I’m not a spy, but if it makes you feel better, go ahead and abuse me for it.”
The driver blinked, recognizing at last that he’d spoken aloud the litany of accusations rushing through his head. “I’ll scream if I want to,” and then he loosed a stream of Arrow-ite slurs.
Sonia kept her eyes on the horizon. “You miss your daughter, and I’ve no idea how that feels. My mother died when I was born. I’ve no accessible memory of her.”
The driver swore. “Sounds about right. They always weaponize the broken ones.”
Sonia balked. “I’m not a spy.”
The driver let go of a sardonic laugh. “Why lie? You’re dead anyway. You may as well confess. I’m as close to a priest as you’re ever going to get.”
Sonia had a fund of her own rage, and she lifted her chin and spat, “And I'm a priest for you. Let’s hear your sins. I’m sure you have plenty with a temper like yours.”
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“You’re smug for a dead girl.”
Sonia fell silent. She’d kept small hopes burning, but it was hard to declare that hope publicly, even to a rank-less nobody.
The driver shook his head. “No one should be so sure of themselves without an ally. You’ve got a plan, though. You really think you can outrun bullets and take your exile? Not a chance. That battle field is miles long. You’ll never make it.”
Sonia shifted her gaze askance. “Now who’s smug?”
“Maybe, but only if the truth hurts, as I think it does.”
Sonia’s stomach dropped as the jeep lurched into a deep rut. “I’m not glad you’ll probably die out here with me. You should live if you can.”
The driver mocked. “Thanks for your permission. Cretin.”
Sonia blinked. “I think you will live. And I’m going to give you something. It’s all I have from my mother—a gold bracelet, engraved. When I conscripted, I hid it behind my father’s house in the alleyway. It’s there across from the Brasserie of the Lupine concessions. At the back, under the bricks. You go and find it. Keep it for me and one day either I, or someone I send, will come and find you and I’ll pay you double its value if you’ll just hold onto it.”
The gravity in Sonia’s voice had a ring of truth that silenced the driver for an hour. And when he unlocked the cuff around her hands, and gave her a rough push from the passenger side of the jeep, it was as if to say, “Remember what you said? I’m going to hold you to it.”
THE BORDER
An age-old Arrow, Flintstock land dispute centered around a ruin with stones of marvelous proportion, anchored on bedrock with veins of gold running through the granite. Adjacent to the ruin, stretched a massive burial site, which Arrow claimed, based upon an obscure reference to their dead made in a piece of national literature—though it had once been banned for subversion. Naturally, the country must recover the burial site and the ruin, which, lying so close, must also be Arrowite.
Flintstock made opposite claims. A minority race within their nation had possessed it most recently, and possession is nine tenths of the law. Of course, the government had also forcibly removed those residents from the territory when the bedrock of the ruin had been uncovered, and the ley energy fueled gold had been discovered. A private developer had made plans to extract the gold metal from the bedrock of the ruin and use it and ley power to fuel a secret innovation, which would have many benefits, but chiefly, offensive applications for national empowerment.
Between the ruin and the burial ground, the ley energy available, even at the surface of the earth, to say nothing of the ground beneath—was like nothing that had ever been seen in either modern Arrow or Flintstock. The potential was unspeakable—and for this reason, the two armies waited, fearful of tripping the combustive seams in the earth and blowing the battlefield and the entire army upon it, to the sky.
*
Sonia stood at the Front; the only front that mattered, since Grater Barren’s destruction, the front was both the battleground and the prize that all three nations had fought over for hundreds of years. All at once, she understood why they had fought so long, even before she set her foot on the war torn ground. She knew ley force when she felt it, and she had never felt anything like this!
The residual energy was so strong that nothing could grow there, and she could see the terrain was riddled with sinkholes—possibly some from artillery shells, but undoubtedly mostly from ley energy eruptions.
Suddenly there was a puff of dust about twenty feet away from her, and then another a little in front of her, and then a distant crackle as more bullets began to hit the earth around her. The soldiers of Flintstock were trying their luck—and not doing a bad job of it, either, at a distance of at least two miles. If she waited any longer they’d be trying real artillery.
But with this much leyline energy—well, she was suddenly glad she’d decided to take this chance, after all.
Keeping her eyes on the Flintstock gun emplacements on the other side of the valley, she flipped the jeep driver a last salute and launched into a sprint.