Chapter Two

Winged Fever

A normal mother, that’s all Agloff wanted. Someone to be his best friend; to cut his hair and tie his shoelaces until he learned how; to sit by his bed at night until he fell asleep because he was scared of the dark. Whoever the hell the woman described to him was, she surely was not that.

Drake turned through her file once more.

‘Her other request for when you turn eighteen,’ she began, munching on a nut from a bowl on her desk, ‘was that I give you that. It’s a letter, to you, from her.’ She pushed it across the desk.

Agloff wondered if his chest might burst. He wanted to know but was also scared of knowing. His brain was consumed by a multitude of alternate universes, each where the paper in front of him occupied a different truth. He reached a timid hand to unfurl the edges, half-expecting swathes of text to be redacted because they were somehow inappropriate. But no. The words sat there in slanted handwriting in their entirety. With deep breaths, he read.

Agloff,

If you’re reading this, then I never returned. I am so sorry. Now, it’s for your own safety you must stay at Backwater, but I know I would be happy in the knowledge that you’re safe there, from Winter and Jask.

Now you’re old enough, I want you to know what happened. I was a nurse in the Confederacy working with a man called Tomas Wise. We had a confusion with another man, Abbadiah Thawn, and my children and I became hunted by Winter as a result. I fled Ku to Earth as a refugee, and you and your brother, Eron, were split for your safety. You, with me, and Eron with Tomas. We planned to meet on Earth.

Tomas never made it. I thought him dead. I thought my other son dead, so I raised you, as though you were my only child.

When you were three, I received a letter from Tomas. He was still alive! In another fort, far from Backwater. He urged us to move to him, that we were unsafe at Backwater. I do not know what to think but if there is the slightest chance I can bring your brother home, I will take it. It is for that reason, I travel alone, and I write this letter.

I don’t ask your forgiveness, only your understanding. I cannot tell you more. The rest, if you are desperate, I am sure Marty can tell you. I wish I was the person you think me to be rather than the one I am. I am so sorry. Please don’t chase me.

I love you, now and always,

Mum

A paper clip fastened a second scrap of paper to the letter. Agloff turned it over in his shaking hands and saw a faded photograph. His mother stood with waves of dark hair, with two chubby infants nestled in her arms. Scribbled underneath in that slanted handwriting were the words “I love you both”.

Agloff had imagined them, many times. The same fantasy, where he and his twin tumbled through the long grasses that rolled away from the Fort and down to the river. The water carved the flatness of the land in two. The congregation of trees clustered on either side of its banks keeled over, as if kneeling to the water in prayer. His mother sat at the waterside, watching her boys play, contented. His unknown father was circling the pair of them, his arms spread as wide as his smile. They were normal, he thought.

The image lingered, left there like a scar that still hurt when touched. But for all his mother’s letter presented Agloff, he could only throw his head back, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with how nebulous her words felt.

If her intent was to dissuade, she failed. Agloff felt his disappointment punctuated by impulse. It was a relapse, and this urge to indulge in his childhood addiction returned. To understand. To follow her. That journey was his calling, to those places he had already seen so vividly in his mind’s eye. And she had left enough of a trail for him to follow.

But where might he even begin. Marty had told him nothing of this Tomas Wise all those years ago. And who was Jask, really? And Thawn? Names alien to Agloff. The thing that preyed most on his mind though was the industrial accident that killed his grandparents. What if it were more than mere convenience as Drake had described?

What if it was murder?

Agloff read the letter three times before he finally set it down. ‘Where did she go?’ he asked after a long silence.

Drake sighed. She removed her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. ‘I don’t know.’

Agloff stood. Anger welled inside him. Why, he thought. Why has this been kept from me for fifteen years.

‘Don’t lie to me.’

‘I never knew—’

He tried to fight back his rage, he did. He knew who he was talking to. But it was helpless. ‘Don’t lie to me! You’ve lied to me for fifteen years! Keep the truth hidden from me. I had a right to know! Now suddenly it’s convenient for you that I leave, you’re telling me as, what, a courtesy. You’d promised her you’d keep me safe, didn’t you?’

He waited. Drake said nothing.

‘Didn’t you! She clearly thought so.’

Agloff’s cheeks throbbed but he swallowed the feeling, panting in the pause Drake left him.

‘Are you done? I said I never knew what Winter would become. I swear I never knew where she was going. Like she said, Marty might know.’

‘I’m not leaving because of some grand plan you dreamt up for me. I wanted my grades, and I wanted to be a strider. Travel the Colony on my terms. Not yours.’

He saw that was impossible now, just like his other dream. Agloff backed away from her toward the door. Drake’s face looked wounded. ‘Think long and hard about what it is you want, Agloff.’

‘I know what I want.’ He span, yanked the door by hinges and lurched into the corridor. He didn’t know what he was thinking, consumed by primal instinct. He just acted.

Blinking, Ariea looked back at him outside, confused. She cocked her head like an animal. He grabbed her and ran.

‘Agloff, what on Earth—’

They chicaned around absent-minded office workers first, then Drake’s voice boomed down the corridor behind them. They twisted, turned, this way then that. Each corridor led to another, as if this place had been designed to confuse, spinning their heads in dazzling marble swirls.

They arrived at the main hall, as black-clad guards moved to barricade the doors.

‘Where are we— Where are you taking—’ Ariea blurted. ‘Agloff! I’m in heels!’

‘We’re going. We’re leaving,’ Agloff said. ‘Away from here, from Backwater.’ He led her another direction. ‘Drake lied all my life, about who I am, who she was.’

‘Who who was?’ said Ariea. Agloff yanked her arm in another direction, round three more corners and corridors. Agloff then spied an open door and ran toward a smaller passage.

‘My mother. My brother,’ he said. ‘But now she’s kicking me out.’

Ariea yelled for him to stop. ‘Agloff! She told me the same. She said she’d “made arrangements” for you to go. It’s why I was there.’

‘Whatever that means.’ Agloff pointed at a staircase down. ‘Down here. We just need to get away from Drake.’

‘Why can’t we talk to her about it?’

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

‘What chance do we have of that? We’re just kids to her. She’s hidden the truth from me for fifteen years. Who’s to say she’ll tell us it now if we follow her arrangements. We leave on our terms, right?’

Ariea’s face looked flustered, as though all the thoughts in the world were scurrying around her head.

‘We? You want me to come with you?’ she asked.

‘You’re the only person I would.’ Agloff stopped to hold out his hand to her, then she took it. As what, he didn’t know.

Ariea tried to smile. ‘I trust you.'

‘The strider and the doctor,’ Agloff said. ‘I said you could be a travelling physician.’ He tried to smile back at her.

‘We need to get my dad!’ she blurted.

‘We can pick him up.’

Agloff carried on, and the passage sunk into darkness. He reached out a hand against the walls to guide his descent. The lights were dim, and the stairs uneven beneath him.

‘There’ll be a way out beneath these tunnels, bet.’

He could hear tangled voices distantly above them. Searching shouts, and a chorus of footsteps, but the way still looked clear.

The tunnel widened and the steps vanished. Ahead, a cavernous hall had been burrowed into the rock beneath Backwater, half-lit in the gloom of a thousand candles.

‘These tunnels can lead us out,’ Agloff said. He held Ariea’s hand tighter and ran toward the distant twilight.

‘Ariea…’ whispered a voice then.

They skidded to a halt, and dust choked the air. Agloff turned and Ariea led him on. It was then Agloff noticed cells dug out from the walls of the cave, pale hands gripping the bars. This was a prison, Backwater’s prison.

‘Ariea…’

They followed the voice. A purplish face pressed against the bars, a glimmer of recognition behind otherwise vacant eyes. He looked empty, as though all sense of himself had been lost. Creases in his skin fractured like clay, and the whites of his eyes tainted a deep red.

But he was otherwise familiar.

Agloff’s hand taped his mouth to stop himself from screaming. Ariea knelt beside him.

‘Dad,’ she whispered. Her voice was so delicate. ‘No.’ She whimpered, and her chest convulsed as she did. Agloff felt her heart crack, then shatter. ‘Dad! Dad! DAD! HELP ME!’

But what could he do but stare? The horror of it all was somehow addictive. He closed his eyes, and the image lingered there on the backs of his eyelids, a face suspended in unending terror.

Suddenly, Ariea’s grip on his hand slackened, and Agloff turned. Her body tumbled down with a thud, blood at her nose, and a masked guard stood over her.

Agloff’s hesitation was his undoing. His legs froze, and then gave way as a blow struck his calves. He followed Ariea to the ground and in the overhead gloom, two silhouettes leaned across him. Agloff was conscious enough to see the baton rise to strike his face, and then the world sank into the blackness of their uniforms.

*

Agloff shot upright. Ariea was already awake beside him, eyes raw. Makeup and blood painted her face. From a bench opposite, in the candlelit cavern, Warden Drake looked at him through her bird-like features.

‘As I said upstairs,’ she croaked, ‘are you done? Running was never an option.’

‘I’m done.’ Agloff kicked his legs out at the dust.

Then, he remembered. He stared at Michael Finland, face struck in a shaft of light from the tunnel ahead. Agloff stifled all feeling down into his chest to not break down where he sat. In an hour, his life had unravelled. All of it, like a weaver was spinning him into threads.

Ariea gulped and rubbed her eyes by the sleeve. ‘What’s happened to them?’ she said eventually.

Them? Agloff’s eyes passed from Michael to the next cell and the next. Each had the same purplish occupant, forsaken and whimpering.

Drake’s neck sank between her shoulders. ‘Month ago, a construction foreman washed up in an outflow, like them, outside the walls. He was the first. Since then, it’s almost every fort. Every town. We don’t know where it came from.’

‘Ariea,’ murmured Michael. His voice was so faint it may not be heard in anything but the silence that possessed them. Agloff looked at Ariea. She turned, scrunched her eyes shut. Her saw her refusal to look back, for fear of how it would surely hurt her if she did.

Agloff recalled how Mr Finland had been unable to sleep the last two days, how he felt faint, only to brush it off as an autumn cold. He had made his traipse to work in a splutter of coughs and sneezes. It’s why his breakfast was untouched. It dawned on Agloff; the missing. All of them were contained in this chamber, away from prying eyes. That woman’s granddaughter, Tina, she was down here somewhere. Behind bars or a bag of plastic, the distinction scarcely mattered.

'It only becomes infectious within a few hours of death. So, we acquire them, quarantine them and dispose of them.’

‘Dispose,’ spat Ariea. ‘They’re people.’

‘It’s inhuman,’ agreed Agloff.

Drake huffed. ‘You’re children. You don’t understand,’ she growled at them. ‘The shit I have had to deal with. There’s more to this than you’ll ever understand. You don’t know how the world works. You’re children.’

Like Ariea, Agloff wanted to spit back at her. The condescension. The presumption that his age somehow made him an irredeemable idiot.

‘Well, make us understand,’ he said. The want to hold his tone waned. ‘What is it?’

Drake beckoned a doctor from down the chamber. Clad in scrubs, an old man wandered towards them. She waved for him to speak.

‘Our understanding is limited,’ he said, ‘It causes the blood to clot, hence the purplish hue of the skin. It places a great deal of strain on the heart, leading to cardiac arrest. Our efforts to create a cure have been unsuccessful, as is the case with other forts.’

‘Does it have a name?’

‘We call it winged fever, for the blotches across the skin, like wings.’

‘You’re as good as killing them down here,’ whispered Ariea.

‘AND EVERYONE IS AS GOOD AS DEAD IF I LEAVE THEM OUT THERE!’ Drake’s voice commanded the room. The shadows and candles seemed to worship her, baking her in a sickly golden glow. ‘Yes, it’s cruel. Yes, it’s unfair. Get over yourself, girl.’ She cursed to the dirt. ‘I never should have told you the truth. Just moved you on. Dissatisfied, ungrateful as you are.’

‘Would you have told me?’ Ariea asked. She stared blankly at the shapes on the wall as a tear beaded down her cheek. ‘About him, if we hadn’t found this place.’

Drake thought a moment. ‘I doubt it,’ she said.

Agloff followed Ariea’s gaze to the wall.

‘I meant what I said. I— We want to leave on our terms.’

Drake almost laughed. ‘Look around you. With what leverage?’ Half-a-dozen guards closed around them and Agloff’s ears tuned to the tightening of their fists around their batons. Drake stood then, clacking her walking stick on the ground as she did so.

‘You don’t see, do you? I’m offering you a kindness. You’ll be delivered to the Underground to live under their care. Hell, both of you if that’s what you want, not fed to the dogs in the wild.’

‘I want to choose my life,’ Agloff said.

‘Choose what? Life as a drifter, from fort to fort? You’ve never left Backwater. You don’t know what the world is like. Why do you think after the Departure, after the war, those of us that had nowhere to go or were left behind, our first instinct was to lock ourselves behind thirty-foot walls?’

Agloff puffed out his chest. ‘Because it’s dangerous. I mean, it is a prison.’ He meant it more condescendingly than it came out. ‘We’d be careful.’

Drake rubbed her brow. ‘Careful doesn’t cut it. I suppose you don’t know about Scourgers, or vagabonds. And the roads are full of gangs and Winter’s pilgrims. Gangs that answer to Winter. The independence of all the forts, of the whole colony hangs by a knife edge. The further you get from Backwater, the more they’ll come for you. I’m doing you a goddamn favour here, can’t you see!’ Drake choked tearfully. ‘When Winter comes, they will move heaven and earth to find you.’

Drake could try and dissuade him from taking this path alone as his mother did. But it made no difference. He had no home at Fort Backwater. At least, he didn’t think so. It was hard to tell. He had spent his whole life here, but it held no place in his heart. Unlike Ariea.

‘You tell me Jask’s after me, that my mum ran off and leave it there? You just ship us off to the Underground? You’ve told us nothing,’ said Agloff.

Drake’s sighed woundedly. Agloff wondered if she thought herself a good person, for all the secrets she kept, from them, from her citizenry.

Secrets were her trade, he deduced.

‘I told you. Marty Naples knows more than I do,’ she said eventually. ‘That is the Old God’s truth’ Agloff noticed Ariea recoil at Marty’s name. Her memories of him were not the fondest. His bitter tirades and angry performances. Visit after visit. Until one day he decided not to come back. ‘The Underground is beyond the Colony, a dustbowl, but you’ll be escorted there, and safe.’

Agloff had heard tales of the Underground, captured in the imaginations of storytellers. Whole hives of people living under the earth. It was also where Marty had said he was going.

An unlikely coincidence, he thought.

‘We get a say in this?’ Ariea protested eventually.

‘No. Your little childish stunt has lost you any say in the matterIt was a matter of business, between Fort Backwater and Governor Fall of the Underground. He will exchange protections and supplies for you both.’

Agloff thought Ariea might slap Drake and curse the woman, but she resisted, said nothing.

Drake continued, ‘I already have people preparing your belongings for travel. You can sort through what you want this evening.’

‘I’ll get my things myself. We done here?’ Ariea said.

‘Yes. Unless you want to say goodbye t—’

‘No.’ Ariea’s voice was numb. Agloff knew she would regret this later. ‘I want to go home.’

As a guard made to escort them from the chamber, Agloff stopped.

‘Agloff…’ Michael moaned. The word fell from him, half-spoken.

His hand was outstretched. Fingers clawed at the air. Agloff was hypnotised by the fissures of his skin, worn into scars by the labours of his work and the sickness slowly eating him. And yet, Agloff couldn’t bring himself to feel sad, just pity. Mr Finland was trapped in two cells, one of flesh, and one of stone. He would be free of them both soon.

Agloff edged closer. His fingers extended. He wanted to hold his hand, lest he die alone. It was the humanity he deserved. To die as a man, and not as a monster, wheezing and groaning in a prison cell.

Agloff would not be scared of him.

He gripped on to Michael’s palm. The lean man strained a crooked half-smile through a spate of jerks and tics.

Then came a shout. Footsteps hustled through the chamber. Agloff felt a weight drag him back, his arm wrenched from Michael’s. A blow struck his back and Ariea yelled them to stop. But they didn’t. Agloff tumbled against the stone, groaned.

‘Stun him!’

His body shook. He was numb, drifting in and out of consciousness. Voices around him blurred into one. ‘…Hospital… bed… test… Finland…’

For a moment, he seemed to enter the world for the first time again. His eyes squinted and he saw shadows swarm him and a mask lower over his face. From their voices, Agloff could make out two words:

‘He’s immune.’

Then, the world turned black.