Kotire

Cold. Cold. But there is a light at the center of my soul and it’s growing, a heat at the center of my brain and it is the bullet and the spark, the wine and the fire, please don’t take me away from this place, please don’t take me away from this moment, I’m more alive than I’ve ever been, but I’m a healer, I’m not supposed to give myself life, I’m supposed to give it to others, I’m not supposed to take life, I’m not supposed to hoard it – but that doesn’t matter now and the light at the center of my soul is growing until it consumes everything in soft warmth that makes it so nothing matters anymore

-Henryk

Just outside Kurikuneku. 245 YT. Spring.

Before the body hit the ground Kotire had already ended it, ended it for every Invictan bastard still drawing breath on this rocky, blood-soaked pass. The punitive expedition was ended before it began.

Hauling the salvage back up the hill took hours, and Kotire spent most of that time waiting at the bottom, watching the others as they moved. Aside from Henryk there were no casualties – not even major injuries – but still they moved with desultory pace, like an undisciplined army after a crushing defeat rather than scrappy militia fighters returning from a successful ambush.

While the rest of the cell carried loot back up to a staging area beyond the next hill – a concealed area, defensible, from which they could easily make it back to the makeshift camp in the power facility – Kotire dragged Henryk’s body away from the battle, across rocks that tore his skin. The blood that spilled from those scrapes had no force behind it, no longer propelled by his stopped heart. She brought him to a small hill from which she could see the top of the Tower of God in Kurikuneku – and set him to rest there, placing rocks from nearby until he was nearly covered by his own cairn – except for his head, which she covered with a cloth, kept in place by tucking it in between the stones of the pile.

When she was done, Kotire knelt down next to Henryk and slipped her rifle from the strap round her shoulder. She ran her hand down its barrel-top slowly to the stock, set it against the inner hollow of her shoulder, and gazed down the sights toward the tower. Kurikuneku was perhaps a half hour’s walk away.

The sounds of footsteps echoed in the far distance, and the dragging of objects across the ground. Her soldiers still at work.

She turned the lenses in her scope and the Tower grew closer to her, leaping across the intervening space. Already that room from which she’d tumbled – it felt so long ago now that she could see it from this distance – looked to be fully repaired, the glass all back in its places. She lowered her scope. In the gardens below, the broken bodies of enforcers – rotting but still recognizable in their garb and their half-shattered clockwork masks – lay unretrieved.

The Emperor was nowhere to be seen, of course.

She lowered her sight a little more until she caught a glimpse of one of the enforcers who still lived wandering about the hallways near the top of the Tower. Wind stroked her hair like fingers teasing apart the tangled strands. She smiled, and pulled the earmuffs over her head to block out the noise. Ten thousand distant units meant an adjustment of five notches. She raised her rifle, just a hair, above the head of her target. Wind speed was low, but at this distance, not irrelevant. She turned slightly to the left, shifting her foot to pivot and dragging her opposite knee through the dirt. She held her breath.

Fired.

Did not wait for the body to fall, though she knew it would in several seconds. She turned and laid a hand on Henryk’s forehead, leaving him staring lifelessly up into the cloudy sky, and slung the rifle over her shoulder and headed back to meet the rest of her cell.

It was silence as they walked back – no one looked Kotire in the face, and where the others spoke to one another, it was far ahead of her, in clumps as they travelled back to the camp they’d made in the gaps left by Invictan inattention and carelessness. An empire that thought itself invincible could not well protect against threats that were too close for the reach of its many arms – unless it wrapped them up and held them close.

Until they made it all the way back to the power station, and – where before there had been whispers and muttering among the scattered clumps of wandering indigent soldiers – now there was a wall of vagrant warriors with a single opening in it, just enough for Kotire to pass through.

Pass through she did, turning to her right as she went. Corey stared back at her, iron-eyed. “What is this?” Kotire said aloud. “What are you doing?”

“Moving on,” Corey said, even-toned. “We don’t need you anymore.”

Kotire almost laughed, until she realized that Corey was serious – and so were all the others who continued to stand by him, forming that long damned line from one wall of the interior to the other, their weapons in hand –

She lashed out with an open, clawlike hand, swiping forward-up for Corey’s forearm. She caught it, but not before someone grabbed her shoulders from behind and put a sharp wrist up against her neck, digging in just enough to make it hurt, not even to take her breath away. With the pain breaking in on the edges of her awareness, there was no longer enough strength in her hand, and the arm dragged her back a step or two. Then let her go. She sputtered.

“You can’t do this to me. I’m the leader of this cell –“

“We are free people,” Corey said. “You led by example and by our consent. We no longer give it.” All the while, his face – so damn neutral, so even, and his tone never changed from that disgusting monotone! Kotire growled, narrowing her eyes, wrinkling up her nose in disgust. “You planned this,” she said. “You planned this and you took advantage of Henryk dying back there –“

“We,” Corey said, accenting the word, “agreed that if your recklessness got another one of us killed, the rest of us would move on without you.” Corey took a step forward, jabbing a finger at Kotire’s face. “Kotire, don’t you see it? There’s no future here, huddling out in these little buildings hopping from place to place every time it seems like they’re going to find us, never knowing whether we’re going to wake up to an ambush or whether they’ll just bomb us out and sort out the power outages later, or how far they’re willing to go to get rid of us. So, what, we stopped a gang of Invictans? They’ll just send another.”

“That was a punitive expedition,” Kotire said, taking a slow breath. Trying to calm herself, though her heart burned with every beat, and she found words suddenly difficult to grasp. “They were headed south for the Crescent Land, they were going to kill people!” She shook her head, glancing down at the ground. “You can’t be serious about this. What are you going to do?”

“Go south,” Corey said. “We’ll link up with another cell there.”

“But the war in the north –“

“Do you think being here is helping that?” Corey rolled his eyes. “We could sit on our butts shooting Invictan soldiers from hilltops all day long and it wouldn’t do a damn thing to help the Valers. Besides, don’t you think they have enough fucking help? Between half the damn Adma fighting off the siege against them, and the Ordians and the Wypsies all coming out of the woodwork to help defend their little stone city, I think they’re doing just fine without us!” He shook his head. “Do we fight for our own dignity, or someone else’s?”

“Our own dignity is nothing without taking note of our brothers and sisters in the north, many of whom might call some of our own number friends and relatives –“

“Save it,” Corey hissed. “Our decision is made. You’re free to stay here and live out your vigilante fantasy all you like, but you’re not going to drag the rest of us further into it. It does nothing to help us, and it does nothing to help them.” He pointed – out the doorway – toward the mountain pass in the north, where twisting smoke still rose from the place between rocky peaks.

Kotire closed her eyes for a half-second, then opened them again. Already the rest of her cell – the cell – the traitors – they were gathering up their gear from the ground around them and heading out the door. Kotire’s hand twitched and ran over her hip near the gun bolted to her side, but she didn’t bother drawing it, brandishing it, much less using it. She could have shot Corey in the head right then – she was sure she’d be fast enough – but then she’d be dead too, and what would it be for?

A part of her knew that Corey was right, too. A part she tried to keep locked away at the back of her brain, too proud to admit it to herself even as she knew full well that she was too proud to admit it to herself.

“Fine!” she howled as they turned their backs to her and started to shuffle off to the south. “Fine! Leave! All of you! You’re just as useless as…” she took a step toward Corey’s retreating back, undoing the clasp of the holster of her sidearm. “Just as useless as…” She fell to one knee, opposite leg bent, leaning on the lower thigh. “Just as…”

When they were well and truly gone, she stood up from the tear-streaked floor and shuffled further inside the building. After following the pathway of winding hallways further inside, she found the stash of equipment that the Adma had left behind for her – a generous share of rations, and fully half of all the loot taken from the day’s ambush. A stash of guns that would have made the Invictan special forces blush if they’d still been alive. She hefted one of them.

Then at the bottom of the pile, she noticed something – matte-black, boxy in shape. A long-range, portable radio, judging by the shape and structure of the antenna. She held it up, running her fingers between the cracks in its structure, the grille covering its speaker and microphone. Then she opened up the expanding antenna, extended it to its full length, and began to tune it from memory.