Out of Exodia Read online

  Out of Exodia

  by Debra Chapoton

  Book 2 of the Exodia Ledgers

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright 2015 by Debra Chapoton

  Smashwords Edition

  Available in paperback

  Other works by Debra Chapoton

  EXODIA

  A SOUL’S KISS

  SHELTERED

  THE GUARDIAN’S DIARY

  EDGE OF ESCAPE

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  OUT OF EXODIA

  Part I 2096

  Chapter 1 On the Edge of Escape

  From the 8th page of the first Ledger:

  He is like a weaned child in his manner, quiet and still.

  They put their hope in him.

  I CLIMB DOWN, duck through the crowd, and run nearer to the edge. I clasp my hands over my ears to muffle the painful cries. I see ribbons of blue diminishing into the depths, but I’m not close enough to see the bottom. The crashing sounds of metal are distant pings underscored with explosions. The thump of each body hitting the rocks so far below is not audible even to me, but I know when each scream breaks off.

  Lydia and her mother, Jenny, come up on either side of me. Lydia pulls my arms down from my ears and takes hold of my hand. There is only a single breath of silence before a cheer goes up.

  “We’re free!”

  The joy is palpable. From their sleds and packs people pull out banners and flags. Children grab the ends and parade around while adults shout and sing and whistle and make more noise than a thousand lions.

  Mira leads dozens of women in a dance line that follows the children as they snake among us. When she passes us she pulls Lydia away and I hate that I’m no longer touching her hand. Without her euphoria coursing through my being I feel as if my special gemfry powers are shutting down.

  Suddenly the shouts and claps fade to nothing. I spot a large group of Reds who have stopped their jubilation and appear to be marching toward me. As they pass through the crowd people act bewildered, ashamed, even horrified. All eyes are riveted on this group. The spontaneous excitement of our victory over the Blues has morphed into a wretched misery. Too quiet.

  “The Mourners,” Jenny whispers.

  “What do they want?”

  “You.”

  I shudder and immediately a deep voice in the threatening group growls out, “Our able hero twinges, Jenny.”

  The deep canyon is only a few steps behind me. I could end this. The long fall would last only seconds. Seconds that I’d fill with thoughts of Lydia, my son, my failure to take these people, my people, to a land where they’d be free.

  But the angry man’s statement revolves in my head, churning out fragments: their jeers, Hebrew agony, an intense job. I’ve almost got the message.

  The Mourners are a few feet in front of me. Their weapons are drawn. They’re ready to give me the punishment I deserve. For my life. For my murders.

  Almost all the letters find a place in a rolling list of words: tongue, atone, rebel, lions, enrage, argue, relent, hero, honor, liberate, north…

  Ronel’s silvery cloud moves to a few yards above my head reminding me that my tongue rests between my teeth unprepared. I have no statement to make, no speech to persuade them, no great oration or fiery sermon.

  There’s a stillness as they await my response. The last sentence spoken aloud, our able hero twinges, Jenny, suddenly shouts its message in my ear only: the real journey begins now.

  I’ve been tongue-tied too long; the word is my only salvation. If ever I need to speak well, it’s now.

  “My heart is not proud.”

  I scan the faces. I know their names, their families, their jobs, their struggles and the sacrifice they made to leave Exodia. I lower my eyes. I can’t be haughty or arrogant. I stare at the feet of the Mourner who is closest to me. “This is a great thing—our escape. Too wonderful for me,” I say.

  I quiet my soul, lift my eyes, and focus on a mother holding a child—a young child, recently weaned and snuggling into her shoulder. I point to them and struggle for the right words, all while I sense the steady movement of this tortured group inching forward.

  “See the child’s innocence. I am no more guilty of causing the Culling Mandate than that baby is.” The mother backs away, slips behind her husband. “But if you need a sacrifice then I’m willing to die, but it won’t bring back your children.”

  Lydia gasps and her mother steps toward the Mourners. An angry man, probably the leader of the Mourners, rough-hands her aside and Jenny stumbles, calling out “Eugene Hoi! Stop this!”

  Both Lydia and I reach to steady her, but Eugene pushes between us, separates me from them and from Harmon and Mira, who are being held back by young men in their twenties, surviving sons of the broken families. Harmon’s arms and Mira’s are pinned to their sides. Eugene’s stringy hair hangs over his eyes like a beaded curtain, but between the strands I see his eyes, dark, smoldering, and violent. He spreads his lips in something like a wild dog’s grin.

  “Eugene, stop this!” Jenny repeats at the top of her lungs. She has every right to be on the side of the Mourners, but she isn’t. Her words ring in my ears and their very letters play in my mind’s eye until my gemfry gift jumbles the letters past formations like the top geniuses and several others and finally settle into a strange message: eighteen spot us. I try to shake the prophetic meaning away.

  I want to say “wait” and “let’s talk this out” and I even have a few other sentences taking form, but I hesitate. Eugene rams me and I stumble backwards, splitting apart the few people left standing between me and the sheer drop.

  My feet slip at the edge and my arms flail round like windmill blades which brings to mind Kassandra, the sheep, how I worked on fixing the turbine, my two years on the ranch—. And before any more of my life can stream through my head I know I’m going to drop into the void that just minutes ago was the death canyon of so many Blue soldiers.

  * * *

  Before the people finished crossing and well before the bridge collapsed and sent the entire Blue army to their deaths, Barrett overheard Dalton tell Lydia he no longer wanted to be called by anything other than his original name: Bram O’Shea. When the celebration began Barrett sneaked a look at Lydia’s radiant face, saw her reluctantly drop Bram’s hand, and join Mira in a jubilant dance.

  Barrett started running, not the freaky speed his special gift allowed him, but rather a purposeful jog to circle round the hundreds of Reds who had escaped the grasp of Exodia’s cruel tyrant. He reached the farthest point as the ecstatic multitude suddenly hushed. For him the short exchange was clear even at the distance he’d gone. He saw Mira and Harmon struggle against four thugs while the rest of the people crammed tighter together. Barrett raced back around the edge of the throng.

  He was ten feet away when a man he knew as Mean Gene smashed into Bram. Bram tottered on the brink. Barrett had seconds to react—to save his friend by grabbing his arm or lunging for a hold on his leg—or to focus the speed of the last ten feet and angle to dive at Gene and send him over the rim too.

  Adrenaline rushed power to his legs and images to his brain. Without Bram to hold Lydia’s attention perhaps he’d have a chance with her. He’d loved her since he was fourteen. B
ut Mira’s cryptic remark that Lydia would never dance with him was tangled with the memory of Lydia rebuffing his last advance.

  He was five feet closer to a wobbling Bram who was flinging his arms forward in an effort to shift his weight away from the abyss. Suddenly Lydia appeared. As if she were a raven-haired angel she leaped over Eugene and flew toward Bram.

  Barrett had no time left to react. He would dance with the girl of his dreams even if it meant it’d be a dance of death.

  * * *

  The fear of falling grips my heart just as Lydia’s shout reaches my ears. I see her lovely dark face explode into my vision, along with the pitiful visage of Barrett, springing from out of nowhere.

  I’m too far off balance. Neither one of them alone could pull me back, but maybe together their feet will find leverage and their hands will yank me from oblivion.

  It can only be an instant, a fraction of the most hopeless of seconds, which plays before my eyes: my brother Harmon escapes the hold the two men have on him in order to pull Eugene back. They tumble backward, away from the cliff, as the crowd erupts in shouts and screams. Lydia reaches for my wrist and Barrett twists his airborne body knocking her to safety and sending himself over the ledge with me.

  “Bram!”

  “No!”

  We thrash and flounder in the emptiness and drop through a couple stories worth of cliff-side brush and stubble, bumping, rolling. There’s no time to think as Barrett clutches at me, hugs me close and takes the landing for us both.

  We’re on an outcropping of rock, our thousand foot descent abruptly stopped far short of a deadly plummet. Barrett has cushioned my landing and taken the shock of the long fall.

  “Bear?” I don’t dare move, but his right arm still circles around me. Limp.

  I can see straight up, maybe thirty or forty feet to the bank where frightened faces peer down at us. I scan the rock face; there are no marks, no scratches to define our trail, no path to ascend. My scrutiny ends a foot above me where only a dew-beaded spider web, one end split from its harness, proclaims our helplessness. I lift my right hand to wave and Barrett’s arm slips off my chest.

  If his back is broken … if his breath is knocked out of him and I’m too heavy … if—

  They shout at me from above, but I can’t wave for rescue. I can’t because I’m holding Bear’s wrist, not feeling a pulse, not sensing his life at all. My head is tucked below his ear, cradled like that child I saw in his mother’s arms. Tears track from my eyes as more faces appear above. I don’t need to count to know there are eighteen. Eighteen spot us. Hundreds more are hanging back.

  Time slows to an eerie beat. Two minutes. Three. Four. I’m crushing Barrett.

  * * *

  Lydia crumpled to the ground when Bram and Barrett tumbled off the cliff. Jenny draped herself over her daughter barricading her from the rush of people, some fleeing the edge fearful that the ground would give way, others blocking their escape, eager to take spots along the rim.

  Lydia’s breath was gone. The shock of what happened stunned every sense. Her eyes blindly focused on the hard scrabble earth. Her ears muted the gasps and cries of those around her. Her mother’s hands upon her back added little to the weight of desperation that crushed her down. The person she felt the most connection to—loved with all her heart—had fallen to his death.

  Someone yelled, “They’re caught on a ledge. Quick get some rope.” Two words broke through the trauma that deafened her: ledge, rope.

  She sprang up with a single hope: the wheeled sled that Mira had brought was laden with supplies tied on with fifty feet of hoarded clothesline.

  * * *

  Five minutes.

  A thin rope dangles down with a loop tied hastily to its end. It slithers past shrubs that vie to catch its end before it reaches us.

  There is no breathing in my ear. No struggle from Bear.

  I let the rope flop against my hand. Our rescuers give it several more feet of slack so I can tie us together. I slip the loop around Barrett’s hand, pull it tight, then twirl my own arm in and out of the slack, all while I lie as still as I can on this precarious ledge.

  They pull the rope taut. With one arm’s worth of warrior’s strength I pull my weight off Barrett’s chest and twist to catch his body with my other arm before they begin to heave us up.

  The rope burns my arm as those above exert themselves. Barrett’s head lolls back and his whole body flops lifeless like a discarded rag-doll. I anchor my feet where I can, trying to find footholds to help with our ascent. The weight of both our bodies makes the rope bite and rip into my flesh. It takes too long to rise. It’s no easy thing to haul us up from this pit. I look down.

  I wish I hadn’t.

  * * *

  Strong arms pushed back the crowd and formed a barrier between the Mourners and those on Bram’s side. Lydia dropped to her knees in relief when she saw Bram being pulled with Barrett the last couple feet past the edge. Bram’s wide chest and strong shoulders were heaving and his breaths broke hard with choked cries as he allowed his rescuers to take Barrett from his grasp. Lydia’s own breath caught as she realized the awful stillness of Barrett’s body.

  “Bear—” She dropped her head and wept into her hands.

  * * *

  Several hands grab for Barrett’s arms, legs, head, back, and I help them lower his quiet frame to the heel-scuffed ground. They slip the rope’s end from his wrist and I untwist the rest from my arm. Trails of blood run off my elbow and splatter in the dust. I can’t hold back the inevitable tears. Through them I see Lydia a short ways away, head bowed, her tall figure folded into a grieving ball. Jenny wraps herself around her daughter. Neither lifts a head to look my way.

  Suddenly I feel my brother’s shoulder hefting up my arm and Mira at my side examining the rope burns. Then her hand grips mine. Both of them lead me away from the edge of so much misery. I hear hushed and angry voices among the mob.

  Barrett’s other friends hurry to dig his grave. Our Exodian custom of quick burials is followed without hesitation, while Harmon sets up a tent for me to hide in. The pain of my grief is far, far greater than the stinging discomfort I suffer as Mira tends to my arm. I’d cut this arm off if it would bring Barrett back.

  I’d cut off the other one too if it meant that Lydia could forgive me.

  Jenny ducks in. “The Mourners are satisfied that a sacrifice has been made,” she says.

  I shake my head in disgust. “What’s wrong with these people?” I’ll have to deal with them somehow. “Where’s Lydia? Who’s with her?”

  “She wanted to be alone.” Jenny lowers her voice. “At the grave.”

  It’s still morning and though we walked all night I think we should continue on for at least half the day. I glance at my brother Harmon and he reads my mind.

  “I’ll get Malcolm up to the north side and start moving everyone that way,” he says. “You can stay back. Come along with Lydia later.”

  “I can bring her back here,” Jenny says.

  “No, that’s all right. I’ll go to her.”

  * * *

  This side of the gorge is flat and barren for half a mile with scraggly trees and brush dotting the expanse. Reds are everywhere, milling aimlessly, though most have turned their backs on the broken bridge. They’re anxious, I hope, to keep moving onward. Jenny pointed me in this direction, west of the crowd, where several people surround a mounded lump of dirt. The rich scent of freshly dug earth reaches my nostrils. I hear whispers. Lydia stands next to a man whose body shudders. She comforts him, her right arm squeezing his shoulders. Barrett’s father. I hardly know this stocky, broad-faced man with thinning hair and gentle eyes.

  I stop to listen, then inch a few feet closer as they exchange memories about Barrett. A mission he finished. A joke he told. A fight he won. How he first revealed his gemfry gifts to his father. To Lydia.

  I stand directly behind Lydia and imagine the enormity of her grief. A thousand words cross my mind and
dance before my eyes. Condolences. Regrets. My own remembrances should be shared, but they stay buried in my heart because my tongue, slow and heavy, fails me yet again.

  I clear my throat; eyes quickly dart my way. My pulse quickens when Lydia reaches back for me and spies my bandaged arm. Her sad face puckers even more with empathy and undeserved concern. “Oh, Bram.” My name slips through her lips as if she’d never called me anything else. She pulls back her outstretched arm without touching me.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. Such inadequate words.

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Barrett’s father nods in agreement and clutches two belt sacks—Barrett’s—to his chest. He mumbles something about his son’s quick actions getting him into trouble all his life.

  But it was my fault. It was my body that crushed his.

  We stand there for quite a while, silent. Slowly I realize that the sound of anxious people settling down around us has created a humming drone that almost soothes.

  “We can’t stay,” I say. “I’m sorry. We have to move on.” I hold my hand out. As soon as Lydia’s dark hand touches mine a pang of deep mourning skips through me. I more fully know her sorrow. The heartbreak in her soul matches mine yet hers is free of guilt. My breath eases out in shared despair.

  And something else.

  Lydia’s heart holds regret for the souls, the Blue souls, at the bottom of the canyon. A whole army. I glance back across the gorge toward Exodia and wonder if the Executive President has anyone to stand with him as he buries his son. Just my mother, I suppose—the woman I thought was my mother. How long before he raises another army and comes after us?

  “We have to move on,” I repeat. There are no tears to dissolve this clinging burden.

  Chapter 2 Sheltered

  From the eighth page of the first Ledger: