Exiles

Chapter 1Javi ran. Shouts came from all around him. They’re coming. They’re here. They’re at the West gate. They’re in the square. If all the shouts and rumours he heard proved true, then the soldiers must be hitting them from all sides. Javi kept on running to Queen’s Plaza. He’d promised that’s where he’d stand when the time came. When the talks inevitably broke down and the Patran soldiers came to forcibly evict the residents of the shanty town they called Sabelville. He weaved around people, some running to fight like him, others, more resigned to fate, carrying belongings, ready to evacuate. Hard to judge or blame those people for giving up. Most had kids. Javi didn’t. He could fight without fearing what happened to hungry mouths left behind if he fell. There had only been him and his mother until he was twelve. Then there’d only been him. He skidded into the Queen’s Plaza. A grand name for one of the few large open spaces in Sabelville, bound on all sides by the mass of ad hoc houses, built from whatever was lying around, which was often the remains of earlier houses that had fallen down. At least a dozen streets—again, the term was a loose one—led into the plaza, and the largest ones had been barricaded. The barricades were high, and makeshift. Furniture, scavenged building materials, junk of all kinds. Javi spotted Anya, and her group, ran up and crashed into them. Stefan shoved him and held his arm until he had his balance. It had rained all day and dropped to below zero after darkness fell, leaving the ground slick. Still, that had to hinder the Patran troops too, right? Except they for sure had better boots than the thin things Javi had managed to buy for this winter season. His feet were already wet and ice cold. “I’m here,” he panted. Anya rolled her eyes. “We’re saved,” she said. We’re screwed, Javi thought, ignoring her sarcastic tone. Not unreasonably, she’d never rated him as much of a fighter, since the day at Mrs Zhintaq’s school that he’d pulled her pigtailed red hair and she’d wrestled him to the ground and put him in an armlock until he submitted. “Got a weapon?” Stefan asked. He carried an iron pry bar. The rest of the group carried various makeshift clubs. Oh, we are so screwed. “I knew I forgot something.” “For f**k’s sake, Javi.” It didn’t matter. Did they think their sticks were going to help against the shock batons, stun rounds and tear gas the soldiers would be coming in with? Anya and Stefan thought they were tough, but they were amateurs even in comparison to the gangs. The gangs they—and Javi—had stayed out of thanks to teachers like Mrs Zhintaq. And the gangs would accept the destruction of Sabelville, because they’d continue their rackets in the new town outside the city that the government wanted to move the Sabellans to. But Anya, Stefan, Javi and many others had jobs in the city they’d be unable to get to except by a long and expensive bus ride. A shout went up from lookouts on the barricades. “They’re coming!” “This is it.” Anya jumped up on a nearby crate. She’d put it there deliberately, Javi guessed, for this moment. “This is our time to fight!” A cheer went up from the crowd. “Our grandparents were the Legion of Ixellan. They knew how to fight. Let’s show these bastards that we do too!” More cheers. Anya’s grandfather had been a major in the Legion, his old war stories no doubt inspiring his grandkids. She’d always been ready to fight, and people had always teased her that her red hair made her fiery. But it wasn’t her hair. It was in her, in all of them. They were the Legion! Yeah, but the Legion of Ixellan had guns, Javi thought, coming back down to reality with a bump. And a spaceship. And body armour and force fields and communications, and probably better sticks even than we have. And they still lost. Their derelict ship drifted in high orbit of Patran, dark and dead. Now the descendants of that first generation of refugees prepared to face their own battle. For their homes, their jobs, and the chance to make up for fifty years of being on the losing side. “Drones!” The yell came from the barricade, even as the buzz of engines swelled. Dark shapes flew over the barricade and swooped down over the crowd. They were met with a hail of ball bearings fired from slingshots, or thrown rocks. A few fell. But others dropped their payload of grenades. Clouds of gas billowed up from where those landed. Some of the fighters pulled on cheap face masks and goggles. Javi had neither. He tied a scarf he’d brought for the purpose over his mouth and nose. Someone shoved a pair of goggles into his hands. Javi only saw a pair of dark-skinned hands, thought they were Stefan’s, but his benefactor was gone into the cloud of gas before Javi could be sure. He put the goggles on and ran from the gas. It engulfed him briefly, but he barely tasted the bitterness of it before it cleared and he saw Anya had trapped the grenade under a bucket. It had a hole cut in the bottom, a funnel in the hole. “Javi! Water!” she called. He saw the buckets set up around the crate she’d stood on, grabbed one and ran. They’d trained for this. She flipped open a lid on top of the funnel and some gas belched out, before Javi tipped the bucket and poured the water down the funnel. It splashed them both liberally, shards of floating ice in it, and ran from around the edge of the bucket, where wisps of gas had been leaking out. But it doused the grenade effectively. Anya snatched up her tactical bucket and funnel and plunged into another cloud of gas. Javi ran for another bucket of water. Damn, that was heavy. A drone swooped so low over his head he instinctively ducked. Hoping he could bring it down, he grabbed at the drone, but he was too short to reach. Someone else got it first. Joze, who had the advantage of being six and a half feet tall, swung at the drone with a bat and landed a shattering blow. It nosedived to the ground, smashed into a thousand bits. Javi ran after Anya. Defenders jumped from a barricade and ran as the tangled mass of items bowed inwards and a bulldozer barged through, the furniture and building material falling away either side. Black clad, helmeted and fully masked soldiers came behind the bulldozer as it swept all before it. The fighters in the plaza scattered. Some ran from the soldiers, some ran toward them. Stefan ran to the bulldozer and tried to climb into the driver’s cab. But a soldier grabbed him and pulled him to the ground. They went down in a tangle of arms and legs, fighting. Javi had lost sight of Anya among the clouds of tear gas still blooming up all over the plaza. The first bulldozer headed for another barricade, even as two more dozers swept their way into the plaza. The barricades were only the start. Soldiers started running into the buildings, to drag people out. Once they’d emptied them, the buildings would be next to be flattened. He wondered if his own home, in Mrs Ithil’s rooming house, had gone already, his stuff destroyed—what little stuff he had. They even planned to knock down the real buildings. The ones that had been here in a small abandoned settlement before the refugees from Sword of the Queen were allowed to take them over and build makeshift dwellings around them. A supposedly temporary solution, that had turned into a shantytown, and then been swallowed up by the expanding city. Then the authorities decided it was time to clear out the district for redevelopment. And the people? Hey, they weren’t really citizens after all… Javi cried out and spun around, the empty bucket he’d been carrying falling from his hand. A stun round had narrowly missed him, but struck a metal wall beside him, setting off a shock wave. He dropped to his knees briefly, but scrambled back up, even though his head spun and his brain suggested a nice lie down would be just the thing right now. Oh, he did not want to be on the ground in this melee in the dark. That’s how you died, kicked in the head, trodden underfoot. Nobody intended it. Even these soldiers weren’t here to kill. But accidents happen in this kind of confusion. He reeled toward a side street, deeper into Sabelville. People passed him, in both directions. Shouting. Screaming. He started to run, panic rising, ducked into a dark narrow alley. Why the hell had he volunteered for fighting? That was not his kind of thing. His kind of thing was some fried food, cold beer, and a hot guy. He should have had the sense to give in. The new town would probably be fine. The bus to the city would be fine. Or he’d get a different job. It would be fine. He should go quietly to the buses that waited outside ready to transport the residents. The willing ones anyway. The unwilling would be having a couple of stops on the way. Like court and jail. His head still spinning, he stumbled out of the alley and realized he was right by the school. The one that had given him options after his mother died, when he’d otherwise have followed his father’s footsteps into the gangs. The door to it stood open and before he could move a soldier came out, Mrs Zhintaq, the school’s head teacher, with him. Him? Her? Impossible to say, the form made sexless and barely human by the body armour and mask. He or she grabbed Mrs Zhintaq by her arm when she made a move to turn back and she struggled. “My bag,” she cried. “I forgot my bag. Let me get—” “You’ve had time. Move it.” Voice sexless too, made mechanical and gruff by the gas mask. The fucker, manhandling an old lady. Mrs Z was well past sixty now. How f*****g dare they, Patran bastards, treating us like we’re nothing, like they can just push us around. Fifty f*****g years of this. Javi yelled, incoherent. He grabbed at something, a piece of wood. It resisted, attached to something, but he tore it free and ran at the soldier. They would not lay hands on Mrs Zhintaq. Javi, Stefan, Anya, Joze, and so many others would be dead without her guidance. Or would be killing others with the drugs the gangs sold. The soldier raised a shock stick to give Javi a blast, or fire a stunning round, but Javi was too close already, coming out of the darkness. Javi swung at the stick and the shot went wide as his club connected. It jarred out of the soldier’s hand and fell, sinking into the mud of the unpaved ground. The soldier reached for the baton on their belt. Those might not carry a payload, but swung right a blow from one left you remembering meeting it for days afterwards. He swung at the soldier. Not at the baton, not trusting his luck twice to knock the weapon away, not when the opponent was ready for it. He swung at head height, to whack them on the helmet maybe, stun them, so he could grab Mrs Zhintaq and run. The wood connected with a sickening thud. When he tried to pull it back it resisted. The soldier cried out and recoiled, jerking the crude weapon from Javi’s hands. The club didn’t drop to the ground. It twisted and hung from the soldier’s neck. The world slowed as Javi stared. The soldier grabbed the club and wrenched and the nail that had been driven through the piece of wood slid out of their neck. Blood came in a spurt, then a stream. The soldier went to their knees and then toppled face down into the mud. Javi only unfroze when Mrs Zhintaq dropped to her knees beside the feebly moving form and tried to turn the soldier over. Javi snapped back to life when he saw her struggle with the heavy, armoured form. He fell down on the other side and turned the soldier over. Mrs Zhintaq pulled the mask away, revealing—oh f**k oh f**k oh f**k—the face of a young woman. She never spoke. One hand moved feebly toward her neck. Desperate, not knowing what else to do, Javi pressed his hand over the wound he’d made, trying to stop the blood. It pumped out over his fingers, hot in the freezing night. “Carotid artery,” Mrs Zhintaq said, dully. She took the woman’s hand and the soldier’s desperate eyes turned to her. “Mama’s here, sweetheart. Mama’s got you.” She’d held the hands of dying people before, Javi knew. Knew what they needed at that last extremity, who they looked for in the last face they ever saw. He covered his own face with one hand so she didn’t have to see the man who’d killed her. I didn’t mean to. Oh f**k, I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry. He kept the wail of guilt and pain inside, so as not to interrupt the soft voice as Mrs Zhintaq comforted the woman. All his focus was on the blood flowing over his hand. Slowing down. Stopping. He took his hand away. The soldier was still. Mrs Zhintaq swept one light brown hand over the woman’s face to close her eyes. “Javi.” He didn’t look up. He couldn’t look at Mrs Zhintaq now, in this moment. She’d saved him from a life where a murder was another day at work and he’d thrown it all away. “Javid Barasa, you look at me.” The classroom snap. The tone that made even him stop goofing around and pay attention. He looked up, twelve years old again. A hundred years old already. “I didn’t mean to.” He whispered it. The sounds of the battle were far away. They didn’t muffle what he said. But maybe she knew what he said because he’d said it many times to her as an excuse for his latest disaster. I didn’t mean to. Eventually she’d told him to get his act together and start doing things he meant to do. And he had. Mostly. Until tonight. “I know,” she said, almost as gently as she’d spoken to the dying woman. “But now you have to go. Both of us have to go.” “They’ll…find her.” “But not us. Go, Javi. Wash the blood off as soon as you can.” God, he was covered in it, his hands, his arms. He almost threw up at the stink of it. “I should—” “You should go. Now!” She rapped the word out and it galvanized him, brought him out of his shock. He scrambled up, moved to help her, but she waved him off. One last, “Go!” Javi ran.