Chapter 5.1: Judgement
Dead Boy groans in agony and tries to open his eyes. Each flutter of his eyelids sends a new stabbing arc of pain shooting through his head.
His mind drifts back to what happened after he was taken. He vaguely remembers struggling and wrestling with … something … in the dark. Then he was thrown upwards with great force, hit his head very hard, and knew no more. Must’ve knocked me out. Lucky I’m still alive…
He tries to reach a hand up to touch his aching head, but can’t. In fact, he can’t move a single muscle in his entire body, which he now perceives is hanging midair from something wrapped around his outstretched wrists and ankles, his head and torso slumping forward in helpless surrender. He feels battered and bruised all over, and he’s sure he must be bleeding from multiple places.
He finally manages to open his eyes and realizes yep, he’s suspended way up in the air. At least twenty feet below him, a polished metal floor reflects an eery blue shimmer. How the hell did I get up here?
He can also see two long indigo multi-jointed legs standing before him, both covered with chitinous spikes and ending in insectile feet with two-pronged claws tapping the floor like an impatient elder.
With a sudden jolt of realization, Dead Boy snaps his head up and comes face to face with his captor.
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“So you’re trying to tell us this gang has, like, tamed the ice wraiths or something?”
Soda covers his face and rubs his eyes with frustration. Don’t these idiots understand anything?
He’s standing behind a tall podium on a wide stage in City Hall’s Grand Meeting Room. Seated before him in rows of rickety old chairs are over one hundred representatives from different enclaves in the North Bay Autonomous Zone: mostly council members from each NBAZ scraper, but also a good dozen or so Crypts platform captains and tunnel tribe chiefs. That last ridiculous question had come from one of the scraper reps, a tall lanky man who sits teetering on a too-small chair near the front of the gathered audience.
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“Has anyone even been listening to me?” Soda blurts out, “I didn’t say anything about taming the wraiths!” He turns around and glares in exasperation at the presiding Committee members seated behind a long wooden table near the back of the stage.
He’d just spent the last twenty minutes telling every last detail of the story about his and Dead Boy’s journey, how they’d found out about the new threat, and how he’d returned to fight off the NBAZ’s intruders. He’d answered question after grilling question, hoping to convey the gravity of the situation with as much verity as Old Man Elvis’ most engrossing pre-Fall story. But it was no use. These people are plain idiots.
An elderly lady seated at the center of the Committee table raises a white eyebrow. Her face is as sharp and severe as her voice. “Just answer the question!” she snaps.
“Well, can’t I speak to anyone more qualified?” Soda snaps back. “Cuz if we’re trying to organize a resistance here, guys like this won’t be any use.”
An outcry rises throughout the room. Soda can’t help but smile just a little bit. He doesn’t live topside and has no fear of these bullies. The elderly Committee Chairwoman rises to her feet, supported at each elbow by assistants who immediately rush to her aid. She begins banging furiously on the table with a large wooden gavel that looks too heavy for her to lift in the first place.
“Order! We will have order in this chamber!” she cries, and the uproar dies down to a disgruntled murmer. The old woman turns the entirety of her rage back on Soda and repeats in a regal tone, “Now, answer the question, young man!”
“I don’t know,” Soda says, his smirk widening and impossible to hide, “but you tell me—those guys who attacked us had frozen eyes and never spoke a word. Do you really think they’re capable of taming anything?”
“Then what the hell does it all mean?” someone in the crowd wonders aloud, sending a low murmer through the seated audience.
Soda only offers an indifferent shrug in reply.
“I know what happened!” someone shouts from the back of the room.
The crowd turns as one to stare at Raz, who is standing in the double doorway leading from the meeting room to the great hall. His clothes are disheveled, and his eyes have a scared, shell-shocked look to them that makes Soda drop his smirk all at once.
“I know why we were attacked. It’s plain as day,” Raz says as he strides forward to join Soda on the stage. He gives the Chairwoman a meaningful look, who merely watches him with an expectant glare.
“Those people who attacked us are being mind-controlled by the wraiths,” he explains, “Or, perhaps, by the fog itself.”
“That seems evident,” the Chairwoman says cooly, although Soda can’t tell if she’d really guessed that on her own.
“So, can’t you all see what’s really going on here?” Raz asks incredulously.
The Chairwoman pauses, her shrewd eyes boring into Raz with cold calculation. Then she says, “Spill it.”
“Something is kidnapping humans from free settlements, and enslaving them with mind control. It’s creating its own society that lives deep in the fog, an enemy that we can’t fight. Once it grows large enough, it’ll wipe us all out, and the kingdoms next.”
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