Catia Severo

“God, please –

I don’t want to be here anymore.

And if I’m to see the crags again,

I know what I must do now.”

After the first shots

Catia didn’t pay any mind when the first gunshots resounded through the south of the city – she just huddled further into the corner of an abandoned metal hut and braced her head with her arms, hands resting next to her ears in case the shelling began again. She dreaded the moment when the deeper, thundering booms would begin – the ones that would bring her back to weeks before when she’d crawled out of the collapsing tower, expecting to see the others in Zoe’s squad alongside her – and seeing no one.

Then the ground began to shake and Catia heard a different sound – echoing through the city. A sound that made her clutch her shotgun – still intact and loaded though it hadn’t been fired in many weeks – to her chest. Shearing metal twisting itself – and stone contorting to meet the demands of a foreign thing, a power it allowed itself to be subjected to. Catia new the sound very well, for it was the same sound she heard while her friends died around her.

“That Sower,” she muttered under her breath, and rose to her feet.

Gunshots intensified outside, the pops and echoes coming more and more frequently. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Catia couldn’t see it, couldn’t see in the self-imposed darkness of this metal shell far past her own hands, but she could feel the charge in the air, the undeniable empathic rush that came from being in the presence of a battle, even a small skirmish. The fear and hate and desperation, it made the hairs on her neck stand on end.

She took stock of her situation, of the gear she had stashed. Her shotgun, some firestarters, a couple of grenades…

And the extra explosive satchel charges she’d been carrying on her back when the watchtower fell, the ones she’d never gotten the chance to use, that she’d never dared to put to use.

She reached down. Hands slipped around the strap of the satchels. No more lying here in the dirt. No more fear and self-pity. If she didn’t move, she would die.

If she moved, she might die anyway. But better to die on the move than to die while still. When she flexed her fingers and stretched her arms, the mere motion brought a smile to her face. So long stagnant – it felt good to be doing the thing she loved. She shouldered her shotgun.

With the chaos happening all around, Catia found stealth a simple prospect. Those inside the city were watching and listening intently – hoping that whatever was happening outside would go their way. The refugee quarter was mostly empty now – even the few people who occasionally walked through the area were not here now. A spiteful part of Catia considered turning around to burn the camp behind her – might as well give them something else to cry about.

No. Couldn’t spare the time. Had to get to the Rust Gates, tear them down.

When she approached, what Catia saw nearly made her turn her back and run to the refugee quarter again, to huddle down in a corner, maybe pull an old tarp over herself and hope that it would keep her safe. Perhaps when the bombs fell and spat tongues of white fire, it would slide off her. No. Catia Severo was not a woman satisfied by self-serving lies, and she knew besides that this mission was likely to end with her own death. She’d known that. She knew it still. But the gates were moving, spearing Invictans from afar, and guts hung from the iron fingers as they flailed in the air. But all the more reason to move. At the bases, the iron was thin. Perhaps a single charge would be devastating. Catia shifted her shoulders, bringing the weight forward just a little. She cast her eyes to the gates. Then she heard the footsteps behind her.

Catia turned on her heel. A man clad in green approached her – sprinting – his white hair up in a tight bun, his voluminous sleeves trailing behind his arms. His hands were curled into claws. She raised her shotgun and fired. Unexpectedly – he did not fly back and lay still. He simply vanished. Catia shifted the pump on her shotgun and glanced up – right – left – down. Field clear. She stepped forward, swept to the left, to the right. Spun on her right foot, pivot on heel toes face right, pivot again to bring left foot forward, shotgun raised throughout. No one. Then she swept right again and saw the same man running toward the gates. Catia spared one more glance over her shoulder at the mound of shotgun pellets lying on the ground, untouched by human flesh and blood. There was no point in bending down to reload her weapon – she had enough shells to last her the rest of the life. Which would likely be rather short. It did not matter. She made for the gate.

Inside the gate was a confused crowd of porters carrying heavy equipment, and bodyguards who didn’t know what was happening inside the city. No one noticed or cared when Catia ran across the field. She laid her satchels at the base of the iron fingers, first one charge at the base of one, then she ran across to the other side. She saw the man in green with his hand against the wall, saying something she couldn’t understand at the wall as he held his hand to the undulating stone, as the stone shifted around his hand and arm, seemed to envelop him and then let him free again. The mere sight of it made Catia want to retch. The stone took him in – and then it released hm. IT was not his enemy.

“Fucking Mirshalites,” Catia muttered as she set the second charge at the base of the other iron finger. Then she kept running. She turned around and backpedaled toward the nearby tower. That tower – it caught her eye. Perfect place to hide out in case things continued to go south. More south than they’d already gone, anyway. She flashed a smile and flipped an obscene gesture to the first porter that caught her eye, lifted the detonator from her belt, flipped it open, and pressed down on the trigger just as the porter’s eyes widened with recognition and horror.

That porter’s head wasn’t caved in by the force of the blast – but the shrapnel piercing her skull combined with the impact against the cobblestones was doubtless enough. The smoke cleared, and Catia looked up. Waiting to see the fingers fall to the ground.

They did not. The continued to wave in the air, iron striking out. Spears like garden eels, they’d ducked into the earth to brace and reinforce themselves, then when the danger was past, they ventured up again, darting this way and that, seeking out bodies to skewer. Finding no bodies, they settled for standing deadly sentinel.

The porters’ bodyguards finally seemed to notice Catia when the explosion’s smoke cleared, and she grinned, ducking under the spaces where they would shoot in a moment and reaching to her bandolier for grenades to throw back at them. Life! Life and energy! Finally she had it again, for the first time in so many weeks. Catia broke into a run, backwards – hoping it was empty, knowing that if it wasn’t at least she would only have one or maybe two people she had to kill in order to claim it. And hoping – hoping against fear and against her own desperate hate and spite – that that the Sower who’d killed her friends did not know exactly where she stood.

Seeing her grenade explode a dozen paces away from one of the bodyguards, sending him sprawling and cracking his head against the cobblestones, didn’t satisfy her. She had more immediate concerns, such as the safety of the tower.

But once inside, she laughed more gleefully than she had laughed in a long time.

Outside, it grew quiet. Catia thought she could hear – behind the ringing in her ears from the impacts of explosions, from the roar of her shotgun, from the adrenaline slowly filtering out of her bloodstream – a few scattered shouts. She paid them no mind, barricading the door of the watchtower with a chair she found nearby. Up the stairs there was a kitchen, and further up, a bedroom. There was a cat sitting on the bed. It sat up and stared at her. Stretched, continuing to stare. Catia approached, her shotgun pointed toward the ground, one hand on the sling on her shoulder.

She glanced out the windows of the watchtower. Outside, the man in green was chasing Invictan soldiers back toward the lines. Then a great heavily-clad juggernaut of a soldier arrived. Catia smiled. She could see now – the Invictan siege lines were almost complete. Somehow, the Valers had managed to sneak a supply shipment through, but it was unlikely they would pull off the same trick twice. She glanced down at her shotgun. Could die happy, knowing the siege of Kivv would likely succeed. She looked toward the cat. It stared back at her still, and then it relaxed from its stretch and hissed at her – a sudden loud hiss that made Catia jump. She lifted her shotgun, barrel pointed toward the creature.

“Hey,” Catia said. Her voice was hoarse from a painful season of constant silence. And not enough water, Catia realized. She needed to drink soon. Adrenaline took a lot out of her. “Hey. Will you shut the fuck up?”

She tightened her hand on the stock of her shotgun, near the trigger. Ready to squeeze. Catia didn’t relish the idea of killing a defenseless animal, but this thing was seriously getting on her nerves and she needed to think about her next move before –

The door opened several floors beneath her.

Catia knew what was coming and didn’t bother with stealth. She ran up to the cat and punched it – it meowed once and then was silent. She didn’t stop to check if it was still breathing. Wasn’t much of a cat if it couldn’t even survive one punch to the cheek. Catia dove behind the bed and clutched her shotgun close to her body. Then tipped it over the edge, barrel pointed just past the unconscious feline – she saw its chest fall and rise, confirming at least that it was still alive. Pointed toward the door. Waiting. Footsteps approached. Stopped on the floor below her. Stepped toward her – toward her, but underneath. Catia shifted her weight, shifted her gaze, and realized what was about to happen just a moment too late to do anything about it aggressively, but a moment too soon for Aleks Zelenko to have enough time to spear her through the heart. Instead she leapt aside and scrambled away from the twisting piece of stone, shaped into a spike, which thrust past her and upward toward the roof. She spun her shotgun and aimed it downward, thinking to pierce the thinner stone and end the fight before it began. The stone retracted instead, and Catia stopped herself short of squeezing the trigger. It would not do to fire against a wall that could not be pierced, not in so enclosed a space. She turned and made for the door, shotgun in hand.

Another stone spike speared up at her and she avoided it. Then another, and she twisted out of the way of that. Each time the stone retracted too quickly for her to fire down. Then a voice called up through the floor:

“How did you survive?”

At the same time that the voice called, she felt something tickling at the back of her brain, something insistent like an itch that needed to be scratched except the itch was inside her. Someone else was reaching around the recesses of her mind, she knew it instantly. There was one thing she could do to shake it off, but the important thing was not to lean into it, not to treat the tickling as an adversary, a voice that she could out-talk. Instead she did what had to be done. “Hey!” she shouted, at the top of her lungs, and burst forward. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She dodged another stone spike, this time from behind her, and rolled forward, and now she was approaching her quarry – a sandy-haired, short young man with a permanent smile fixed on his face. The look of panic in his eyes was oddly fitting with the way his lips were upturned. It made wild-eyed Catia smile in turn. Her shotgun was pointed the wrong way – she whirled it with the momentum as she turned and twisted out of the way of a hail of bricks. Chunks of stone struck her in the side, glancing blows which nonetheless knocked the breath out of her for a moment and put her on her hands and knees on the ground.

“I thought you were dead,” said the sandy-haired boy as he approached. “I killed you.”

“You killed my friends,” Catia said, shifting her weight slightly to the right. “I made it out.”

“And you decided now, suddenly, to come after me?”

Catia laughed. “I didn’t come after you. This was just a lucky accident.”

“You think if just collapsing the wall would have ended things, the Invictans wouldn’t already have done it? They would never survive a battle in the streets – these are our streets, we know them.”

“Keep telling yourself that. It’s only a matter of time.” Catia grinned. The boy was coming up close behind her. She waited another second, then went into action.

She moved too quickly for him to react – there was stone shaped around his hand in the shape of a spike, ready to drive a hole through Catia’s skull, but the boy’s reactions were still only human and unlike his kin in the Reapers, he felt the whisper of the past, not the future. As she raised her weight upward and swiveled, pivoting her feet, she swung the heavy barrel of the shotgun to the side and struck it against the side of the boy’s head.

The impact must have knocked something loose in the gun, because it fired. The pellets struck stone and sent pillars of dust up into the air of the watchtower’s kitchen.

The sandy-haired boy fell to the ground, curled up clutching his head, and stared blankly at the wall.

Dust rained down around Catia in streams like rain spilling over the edge of the roof. Catia bent down and picked up the boy, threw him over her shoulder. He was still breathing. She grinned, shouldered her shotgun, and rushed down to the bottom of the tower. Almost immediately when she stepped outside, one of the bodyguards – still gathered just inside the town – pointed and shouted. She turned and placed the boy on the ground, still holding onto him by his shoulders so that his body covered most of hers. It was a difficult feat because he was so short, but the bodyguards must not have wanted to take the risk. Catia raised her shotgun and shouted. “I’m leaving. Don’t try to stop me.”

And she went. Step by step. Past the Rust Gates. Once out of the gates, she scanned the area. The man in green was nowhere to be seen, but the heavily-armored special forces soldier lay still on the ground. She walked past him, turning so that her body-shield faced Kivv. Raising her shotgun. She bent down for just a moment, pulled up the soldier’s visor. He stared numbly into the sky, silver-grey eyes reflecting blue tinged with the red of the explosives. His face was flecked with sand.

The Invictan lines were not far. Catia took a step backwards, then another – toward safety. Toward her salvation. With each step, hope that she hadn’t dared feel in so many weeks blossomed.

A gunshot cracked and the bullet cut through the air overhead. Catia ducked, almost lost her footing – almost lost her grip on the hostage’s neck. Standing by the Rust Gates, one of the caravan bodyguards – their uniform, if you could call it that, was in Dresh fashion – lowered their rifle. Another stepped forward and set a hand on the arm of the one who’d fired. Shouted something at them. Both retreated behind the gate. Catia took another step, and another. She glanced up at the wall. Militia soldiers were climbing up the wall – she could see them huddled just under the ramparts, repeating crossbows in hand. She glanced at the Invictan lines – already some of the soldiers there had their own weapons aimed upward, ready to fire anyone who dared lift their head. Catia kept her hostage positioned between herself and the Rust Gate, leaving a part of her side open, as though to taunt the Valers above – go ahead, try to shoot me if you dare. See what happens.

Once she made it to the Invictan lines – far from the reach of the iron gates, even if she didn’t hold the key to their weaponlike strikes, even if the Mirshalites on the field hadn’t already left their dozens of Invictan kills behind and retreated into the city – Catia collapsed. Semi-conscious, escorted along with the prisoner she’d won back toward the siege camp, she allowed herself to go limp. She listened to the voices of the others as they moved along quickly – but the words did not matter. She was safe.