Aleks

“Aleks, that’s you? What the hell – you’re still alive. Good.”

“I’m trapped in the Invictan camp. They’re waiting outside the city, trying to wait us out. It hasn’t worked yet but this can’t hold much longer. There’s going to be a battle soon, I know it. What are you doing?”

“Heh. It’s the same situation for me, only on a smaller scale. Just me. Not a whole city. I think this is it.”

“What about your mission?”

“Forget about my mission. I fucked it up. I fucked everything up. And now I’m going to die alone on a hill in a building I shouldn’t have been so stubborn as to lock myself into… but I’m not going down without a fight, don’t worry.”

“Forget about that, just get out!”

“Says you. How did you do this anyway – you’re under guard!”

“Guard’s outside. Doesn’t hear me. Negligence, coincidence, providence, I don’t know. How did you get this frequency?”

“I remembered it. How did you?”

“I remembered it.”

“Please stay alive.”

“No promises.”

In a tent in the Invictan camp

Aleks lay in the dirt, barely conscious, slipping in and out of sleep. The guards occasionally brought things into his tent – food and water, which he mostly ignored, except when he began to grow delirious with hunger. Aleks had never been good at going long without food – his farmboy’s body dense with muscle that would start to eat itself up if he didn’t keep it fed. What the Invictans gave him was not enough, not nearly enough, but occasionally the pangs grew so great that he crawled over to his tray and ate.

He didn’t know how much time passed, but it was one of these times that he found – buried in the dirt – a mess of wires and switches. There was detritus all over the floor of the tent, all kinds of junk. Were it not for the Primordial hanging over his shoulder, keeping him from taking the Sower’s gift, pushing away the shroud every time he tried to grab hold of it, he would have Cultivated the junk into something – a weapon, perhaps, to help him get out of this place. As it was, he could not even fight his way out of his own mind without the Gift. He’d long since given up on begging the Primordial silently to let him have his Gift, even if just to comfort himself while he waited for his fate to be decided.

He hoped that the Valers would make a bargain for him. He knew that there could be no bargaining anymore. And the Primordial made it very clear, through its wordless language of thought and memory and the fire of raw emotion – that it had no intention of deviating even slightly from the order it had been given, and the order it had been given was to block this Sower from using any of his abilities as a Sower.

It whispered in his ear that he was now useless, without his powers – that it was only the manipulation of a gift that should never have been his, should never have belonged to humanity at all, that he managed to rise above other human beings. Now, without that Gift, he was weak – vulnerable even to such pathetic creatures as soldiers.

Aleks would have asked why the creature thought so little of those it served, but he had gathered enough from its silent speech and besides, every time he said anything the Primordial did not like, he felt a surge of pain – intense energy flowing through him that heightened the pain and fear he couldn’t escape. Like an addict suffering withdrawal, he curled up in vain hope that the pain would go away eventually.

And it did not.

So, instead, when he found a mess of wires and switches among the detritus, he gathered it up and pulled it to the opposite side of the tent, close to where his chains met the ground. He gathered the chains around himself as best he could as a shield, and knelt in the dirt, and began to work.

The Primordial laughed and pressed harder on his shoulders, but did not say anything in its wordless speech or call out to its ‘master’ – instead it watched with a strange curious sparkle in its eye.

Aleks managed to work out quickly that what he’d been given was most of a broken radio – and what littered the floor around him, he saw as his mind slowly drifted into full consciousness, was mainly peripheral equipment taken from the bodies of Valers slain by the Invictans in the many small pushes they’d made against the city – and those they’d forced off the walls to be struck down outside. Most of the internal parts, however, were intact – he had to twist a few wires to make connections that had been broken and let the circuits within carry the power they needed.

They device was ready to carry power, yet it didn’t have any to speak of. Aleks returned to scrambling through the dust and the garbage left behind by Invictan soldiers, stripping apart odd pieces of trash from the piles of foul-smelling garbage in which they were covered. Aleks tried, by instinct, to take up the Sower’s Gift, to protect himself from the smell or at least from the distress he felt with each fresh hellish wave of stench into his nostrils. But the Primordial bent over his shoulders squeezed, and pushed away the shroud, and he felt it all completely, with each nerve and each cell. And he muttered quietly to himself to soften the maddening pain.

In time, he found what he was looking for – an old battery which gave off a slight buzz when he connected it by wire directly to the speaker. It wasn’t the sort of battery that the hand radios Kivv’s militia used came with. Those ones were small, button-like, modeled after the ones in wall pagers in the Refuges of the old days. Aleks fished the pack out of the pile and brushed the dust off of it, dragged it back to his far corner of the tent. Quickly he got to piecing together his new radio, and began to tune it to the first frequency that he could remember from his days in the basement of the Sower Monastery.