Book Excerpt: The Slave Girl Chronicles

Jet slammed her back against the wall of the ruined warehouse, panting. Crouching down by the moldy cement bricks, she fought to make her breathing silent. Her sword dug into her spine in the middle of her back, but she barely felt it.

Panic filled her, making her sweat even in the early morning air.

She was too late. Surely, they’d seen her.

They always said it happened this way. The older adults had been warning her for years about this kind of thing, warning all of them. It never happened when you were looking for trouble. It happened when you were going about your regular business of living, just a few seconds of letting your guard down...a few seconds of inattention...that was all it took.

Being in the wrong place at the wrong time when your mind was wandering, that was the real recipe for death. For being disappeared without warning.

Jet hadn’t even heard the cullers when their engines glided overhead. Not until they’d already gotten a lock on her bio-reading and slid lower in the sky for a closer look.

She’d been lost in her thoughts, thinking about what she had that she might be able to barter with Everest to get some fresh eggs. She’d brought a few shirts her mother made, nearly brand new, and she had some fish, some apples from the orchard, even some plums that weren’t too moldy from the never-ending rains. Everest wasn’t often tempted by fish, but the fruit might work, she’d been thinking, if he was in the mood.

Like as not, he’d want something from her she wasn’t willing to give...one of her knives, maybe. Sword-fighting lessons.

Or he might even try for something more personal, since she’d come alone.

It had been stupid to come alone, but that was one of those thoughts it was easy to torture yourself with in retrospect, too.

Jet had been thinking about her little brother, Biggs, in between her more practical thoughts about trading and bringing back some real protein for a change. She’d noticed Biggs hanging around the docks a lot lately. It might be innocent enough, but the fumes down there, especially this time of year, were bad enough that she couldn’t help but be suspicious.

She’d heard talk about meetings happening at the docks lately...secret ones, as well as the more open, recruiting kind. She hoped like hell that Biggs wasn’t dumb enough to get sucked into the rhetoric of the rebels, but she feared the worst.

She’d seen that look in his eyes before. It had gotten more intense lately.

Anyway, Jet knew how obsessive he could be, how single-minded. She’d noticed him reading more, and a lot of the book covers were new, and didn’t come from the library they shared with their longhouse families.

He did his best to hide it from her, but she’d also seen him practicing more with the bow, and even once with one of her old, wooden, practice swords. He was only thirteen, but she knew they recruited a lot younger than that, these days. The rebels had been coming by the camps more often, too, trying to recruit younger and younger, likely because they’d run out of full-blown adults willing to become cannon fodder fighting the Nirreth.

Jet even understood.

It was the same reason she practiced with her sword, day in and day out, even when she had no reason to use it. Nothing was worse than sitting around, waiting to be picked off like sheep. The rebels talked a good talk, about honor and sacrifice and standing up for the race. They seemed like an alternative at times, even to her.

But she’d buried too many in their settlement to be all that convinced.

Anyway, the more cynical side of her pointed out that a lot of those rebels were smugglers. She’d heard tell that even Richter had been seen trading with the Nirreth, and supposedly he had more rancor for the invaders than most. All of the smugglers and bandits were known to cut corners, though...especially when it came to dealing with the Nirreth and their ‘watch’ squads. Who knew if those same rebellion leaders were selling some of the local kids to the cullers, to get the authorities to look the other way?

All of this had been going through Jet’s mind as she walked.

She’d thought about how she might talk to Biggs about it, or at least get him to visit the crumbling lighthouse near the sound, where old Chiyeko lived. Chiyeko might get him to see reason. Biggs always got along well with the old woman, better than Jet did, truthfully. He might even listen, if Chiyeko told him to leave the rebels alone.

Jet was lost in half-baked thoughts around this, as well as a made-up argument with Biggs about the rebels, when she felt the wind of the culler’s hovercraft.

A warm, hot wind. It had a distinctive smell, like the smell that followed lightning after it struck the earth. Jet felt that whisper of wind and it seemed to crawl down her spine like a living thing. Adrenaline flooded her bloodstream, bringing bile to her throat.

After a split-second of paralysis...she ran.

She sprinted straight for the nearest cover, a narrow alley off the main street where she’d been walking. She’d kept under the eaves of the buildings and out of the center of the road, of course, but that alone wasn’t enough. It was never enough to stay roughly out of sight...not when one traveled on a road wide enough for the culler hovercrafts to patrol. Her mother drilled that into Jet since she first learned to walk.

She’d been watching her feet, instead of the skies like she should have. She’d been listening to her thoughts, not to the birds, or the wind, or the rustle of paper and dirt, or any change in direction in the shifting air of the street.

Otherwise, she would have seen, a hair’s breadth sooner, that the paper had begun to swirl and dance lightly from the hovercraft’s exhaust. She would have noticed the birds had grown silent. Jet did notice these things, but that small gap in her awareness was enough to make the difference between ‘just soon enough’ and ‘too late.’

It was enough for her to feel the wind of the hovercraft on the back of her neck.

Jet sprinted to cover deep in the shadows of the alley.

Once fully in the dark, she waited.

She crouched there, unwilling to risk moving until she could see the ship. Fighting to keep even her breath silent, she stayed where she was, peering up at the sky to try and determine if the glider’s pilots had, indeed, spotted her. Movement without cause was risky. She’d learned that young, too. Most people who got caught did so because they panicked and couldn’t stop running. Running from the Nirreth was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

If they hadn’t seen her, they might just pass by.

If they hadn’t seen her, running would only be more likely to get her noticed.

If they had seen her, running wouldn’t save her. Once she’d done that, they would give chase no matter if they were trawling for skags or not. It was hardwired into the Nirreth’s instincts to chase anything that ran.

Humans who ran got culled.

These rules had been hammered into Jet’s brain so frequently and so vehemently that to think them was like breathing. They whispered through her mind like a mantra, more of a prayer than even a reminder...a reassurance that if she followed the rules, she just might get out of this alive.

Then she saw the searchlight flicker to life.

Jet held her breath, watching it as a mouse watches the stalk of a cat from where it crouches in a hole. The shockingly bright beam seemed to follow a random path at first, rolling over the ground near where Jet had been walking. It paused in that general vicinity briefly, maybe to try and scare her, to flush her out. Jet exhaled only when the swath of white light moved on, glancing over nearby buildings and a metal drain cover before it searched the other side of the street with equal care, lingering under the eaves.

Then the sharp beam flickered directly towards her. It roamed the nearby walls, then abruptly fell to almost exactly where Jet stood, even as she inched away from the range of its glow.

Jet cursed.

They’d seen her. They were toying with her...looking at her with the heat sensors most likely. They’d been trying to get her to run by skirting near to her, but they’d known where she was all along. Which meant they were probably hunting, looking to bring someone in.

Either way, she had no choice, not once they had her in their searchlights.

Leaping to her feet, she ran, full out, down the alley.

She nearly slid on the slick ground, even with her heavy boots. Jerking herself upright, she forced her mind back on the terrain, picking out the driest parts of the stone to lay down her feet. The paving stones were slick from the monsoon rains. Moss covered the hard slate, along with just enough water that when she hit a patch, it was like trying to run on ice. She tried desperately to remember where the nearest manhole opening into the sewers lived, but the only ones she could remember were too far away, and in the opposite direction.

She was outside her normal stomping grounds, deep in the ruins of downtown Vancouver. She should have mapped the route to Everest’s new place with more care...or taken a longer stretch of the underground passage, even with the rats, the toxic fumes and the rot of the monsoon. She should have had Anaze highlight a few more safe zones.

As it was, all she could do was head for the narrowest streets and nooks and alleys she could find, and hope she lost the hovercraft before it could trap her somewhere in the open. So when Jet reached the end of that first alley, she sprinted across the main street as fast as her legs would carry her, aiming for another fissure between buildings on the other side.

She did that a few more times, trying to zig-zag as much as possible, but not when it meant spending more time on any street wide enough for the hovercraft to get over her.

Despite the water running everywhere, bleeding through brick and cement walls, the day was already heating up under the heavy cover of low-hanging clouds. Jet left the longhouse while it was still dark, but now the sun was warming the eastern side of the city, heating up the air and water even through the thick cloud cover directly overhead.

Within seconds of first breaking into a full sprint, Jet’s clothes were drenched with sweat. Her nylon pants clung to her skin like an oily paste.

Her breathing got thicker, too.

She ran harder, trying to ignore the increased pounding in her chest, wishing she’d drank more water as she’d been walking down the road. Jet was in the habit of conserving there, too, only drinking what she thought she absolutely needed and no more. Clean water was hard to come by these days, even when they had fuel. With all the bacteria and other problems with anything they left sitting for more than a few hours, the water didn’t stay fresh for very long, even when they boiled it. The hotter it got, the worse their problems were, until even drinking it an hour or so after boiling left room for doubt.

These days, they boiled every liter of water they used, even for washing clothes, cleaning eating and sleeping areas...even watering plants. Pretty much for everything except maybe cleaning the latrines. They boiled water more frequently for anything to drink, especially during the monsoon, when all the water tables rose high enough to mix with the contamination in the ground soil and even run off from the sewage.

Since the Nirreth had come, the weather seemed to get worse.

Her mother told her that monsoons didn’t happen in Canada at all when she was a child. She said it was something that used to happen only in faraway, exotic places, like Thailand and Sri Lanka and Laos. The only monsoons her mother ever heard of happening in North America before occurred in the deserts of the Southwest, and those were just thunder storms...nothing like the mold-soaked madness that started once the rain came day after day, heavy enough that an umbrella was useless, heavy enough and hard enough to wear away rock and soil and asphalt and make even the concrete sprout ferns. By the end of the three to five month season every summer, they all felt like they lived in a massive petrie dish.

They lost people every year too, from the sickness that inevitably swept through the longhouses, each strain more deadly than the last.

Every year, it was hotter, too, it seemed.

But even the ruin of their planet didn’t keep them safe. The Nirreth liked it hot, so the increasing temperature only brought more of them.

It was enough to make the remaining humans wonder if the Nirreth were engineering the atmosphere to be more like that of their home planet. They now had processors everywhere, even this far north, where it was borderline too cool for their thick skins. The Nirreth claimed to be ‘fixing’ the Earth’s atmosphere, of course, from the damage done to it by humans over the years, but Jet hadn’t seen anything that would make her actually believe that.

The reality was, they could be doing anything to their world, really.

No humans she knew even understood Nirreth technology, so all the skags had to go on were the Nirreth’s lies and the stories told by rebels and bandits.

No one seemed to know the truth of what was really happening.

Or if they did, they weren’t talking.

Either way, it really did seem that the heat crawled inexorably up the map. That had been happening before the Nirreth too, according to her mother...but it seemed to happen faster every year. The last of the summer ice had gone nearly twenty years earlier from southern Canada and the northern United States. Now ice barely formed at all, even in the deepest throes of winter, even for a few weeks, as far north as Alaska and northern Canada.

Those weeks seemed to grow shorter, too.

The rebels claimed, of course, that the Nirreth were trying to cook them out, to kill off the last of the skags by making it too hot for any humans to live outside the shelter of the Nirreth cities. Jet didn’t know why they’d go to so much trouble though. If they really wanted the skags gone, they could probably bomb them to oblivion in a matter of weeks.

Anyway, sometimes it seemed like the rebels knew a little too much about those mythical Nirreth cities.

While Jet ran, she wasn’t thinking about any of this, though.

Instead she thought about how long she’d have these narrow alleyways to duck into before she ran into a warehouse district, a freeway, a rotted city park, one of the business areas, or the lapping water of the sound or one of the lakes. She thought about how long she could keep up this pace before her legs or her lungs gave out. She thought about how much time she would have before they landed the hovercraft and came after her, if she stopped in one of the smaller alleys and looked for an entrance to the underground.

While Jet ran, it was difficult to listen for the culler.

With its nearly-silent engines, the ship could be hovering just out of her peripheral vision, nets hanging over her while the Nirreth grinned from the hatch. She couldn’t hear anything but her own breath, the slap of her rubber-soled boots on the wet stone, the jostle of her pack and the curved sword against her back, the flap of the long coat she wore. She’d tied her long, black hair in a knot at the base of her neck when she left the longhouse that morning, but now found herself wishing she’d tied it with leather instead, as the knot slowly began to unravel.

Given all of this, Jet had no idea how close the craft was to her now.

She wasn’t about to slow down enough to look, though.

If they really were using heat-sensing to locate skags, then they were likely trying to drive her to open ground where they could more easily pick her up with their nets.

She had to get off the road, and now.

Thinking this, Jet forced her legs faster, wishing she’d left the backpack with her barter materials and tools on the ground back in that alley. Everything but the sword, she could afford to lose and replace. She had those few seconds of breathing time; she could have come back for it later, maybe, if someone didn’t happen along and take it.

Or she could have just let it go. It was just stuff.

The sword was different. Swords were difficult to come by. Anyway, her sword was different. It was a part of her...like an extension of her hand and arm. The old swordsmith who made it, Mishio, had died in the monsoon the year before, from complications around breathing too much mold and having bronchitis and asthma and a bunch of other things.

He’d been one of the last who really knew how to make a good sword, at least of the smiths Jet knew of in Vancouver. If she lost it now, she had no idea how she’d ever replace it.

Her sword even had a name. She called it Black.

Kind of a stupid name really, unless you knew her name was Jet. That, and the handle was blackened steel wrapped in black-dyed leather grips.

Before he died, Mishio told her that the name ‘Jet’ actually meant black in Latin, too.

But the pack, even with her knives and her tools, she could have replaced. Really, it just showed how complacent she’d gotten, that it hadn’t even occurred to her to dump it.

Either way, Jet was unwilling to try and fling the pack or the heavy coat off her shoulders now. The extra movement would only slow her down, make her lose her balance. The mere fact of removing the bulky weight couldn’t help her enough to make up for the ground she’d lose in trying. She needed speed, yes, but she needed those extra seconds more.

She looked up at the tall buildings on either side.

Some were brick, but those of course were boarded up, and most would be impossible to break into quickly enough to make her escape. Even if no one was using this particular row of warehouses as shelter, most had been contaminated during the first cullings, and there was no guarantee any particular one she chose would have an entrance to the underground.

The truth was, she didn’t know this side of town well.

She should have brought Anaze with her, like he wanted.

Anaze knew this part of the city like the back of his hand, having lived here for a spell in his teens while his mother followed Richter. Anaze offered to come along with Jet to see Everest that morning, but for some reason she’d said no. It wasn’t Anaze himself; she liked his company well enough. He was one of her best friends. Most days they went trading together, or mapping out new routes in and out of the orchards so they wouldn’t be caught growing.

He was okay with a sword too, but even better with a bow. And Anaze was a lot more into the gardening stuff than Jet ever would be. She was much more interested in finding ways to build new tunnels and structures underground...or learning how to crack the few pieces of Nirreth tech that came her way.

So in retrospect, Jet didn’t really know why she hadn’t invited him along.

She’d really just wanted the time alone.

She never got a moment’s peace these days, living in the cramped, underground spaces of the longhouse, or even the wider settlement. It only got worse every year, with the dangers multiplying aboveground and the more people migrating north to get away from the heat and the burgeoning Nirreth enclaves. It was part of the reason why Jet and the other builders kept trying to find ways to heighten the caves, and to grow more real plants down there.

They knew at some point, they might not be able to leave the caves. They might need to stay down there and survive on what they had, at least for awhile.

Not only did they have the Nirreth to worry about, but also the Richters of the world, as well as the rebels and new immigrants. In the realm of more mundane worries, the list got even longer: bad water and soil, rats and snakes and feral dogs, diseases, diseased animals wandering into the camps and poisoning the water, parasites attacking the few crops that would still grow, the occasional bout of acid rain or wind blowing poisonous gasses from the ocean.

Jet understood why she’d wanted to be alone. With that hanging over all of their heads, people took every chance they got for a little quiet.

Now she wished she’d made an exception for Anaze.

Jet glanced up at the metal towers that also lined the streets.

The brick buildings were preferable, if only because they were older and more likely to have an underground entrance, but the glass and metal structures might do in a pinch. Being inside their metal skeletons made it hard for the Nirreth to use the culling nets; they’d have to come down for her, and might not want to bother just for one skag.

She couldn’t keep running down these alleys forever.

The metal buildings were also infinitely easier to break into, if only because only a few of their green-tinted windows remained...the rest had been smashed to powder or knocked out by the sonic waves of the passing Nirreth ships. Those that managed to stay intact in their metal frames stared out like oddly reflective eyes, looking almost sentient.

The Nirreth had promised to rebuild the human cities too.

But like with the environment, Vancouver looked roughly the same as it had when she’d been born, roughly nineteen years earlier.

Jet was trying to decide if she should dart into the next of those rusted giants, find a place to hide in the pock-marked walls and charred furniture, when she saw a flicker of movement.

Her eyes jerked immediately to the left.

A light. Someone or something was signaling her.

Jet tried to find the source with her eyes, but everything in front of her was gray and green. Even here, in the swath of old metal buildings and concrete walls, moss and mold covered every corner of the buildings and overgrown trees and plants poked through the walls. Black and rotting plant matter covered most of the street, as well, and trickling water from ceilings sagging from water damage. Broken glass scattered the curbs and streets in a few places, but most of the buildings looked like skeletons of long-dead beasts, with few of the details intact.

Jet could just see the remnants of rooms inside one or two of the larger metal towers, but mostly all she saw was sky framed by rusted metal worn into odd shapes by sea water and rain.

Darting down another alley to get off the wider road, she ran across another wide street and into a narrower one, paved with cobble stones. They were slippery, but the road might be too narrow for the ships, too.

About a hundred yards ahead of her, the flashing light repeated.

Whoever it was, they were following her...likely using the sewers.

On the second set of flashes, Jet located the source. Unfortunately, reaching the opening in the ground where it originated meant breaking cover. It also meant stopping, fully visible for at least a few seconds, in one of the widest of the main thoroughfares.

Jet wondered if maybe it was the Nirreth after all, trying to lure her into a net.

Still running, she glimpsed a cracked doorway leading into the ground. Pale, ground-dweller fingers lifted a metal cover a bare few inches. The fingers of a skag.

Whoever it was, they lifted the manhole cover just high enough to leave a dark, circular crack, and for her to see a pair of eyes reflecting up at her.

She could see nothing of the face itself.

“Over here!” a voice whispered urgently. “Quickly!”

It sounded like a man’s voice.

In fact, it almost sounded familiar, but Jet couldn’t be certain, not with everything else...

It was irrelevant, anyway. She would have taken shelter from Richter himself at that point, even if it cost her more than just a few apples.

That being said, Jet knew full well that she couldn’t trust strangers among the skags. Richter, the worst of the human bandits who regularly raided their settlements, was certainly a case in point. He seemed to view the arrival of the Nirreth as a personal business opportunity. Anaze told Jet that while his mother had run with Richter’s men, he found out that most were ex-cons and ex-military who’d survived the wars.

Most had fought back during the first rounds of culling by the Nirreth, too. According to Jet’s mom, those first rounds were what had really thinned their numbers down to the bone. Since then, the Nirreth took a few, maybe every couple of months.

Richter’s men never let go of their hatred of the Nirreth. Neither did Richter himself, if rumors could be believed. Disillusioned with their chances following that aborted war, they’d gone mercenary in the aftermath, seeming to blame the other humans for their failure as much as they did the Nirreth themselves. Richter’s men viewed the rebels with scorn, along with the skags and anyone else unfortunate enough to have survived.

The only thing they had in common with the other humans seemed to be their hatred of the Nirreth. While they seemed willing enough to raid the stores of others among their own race, they still did most of their stealing from the Nirreth holdings further south, coming north to hide and regroup, selling spoils to the highest bidder. Their real crime was the extortion-type prices they forced the skags to pay, especially for critical things like medicine and tools.

They’d even take the odd job freeing slaves, it was said.

For the right price, of course...and who wanted to trust their money to them?

Anaze told Jet that if she ever ran into Richter or any of his people, she should run as fast as she could. He didn’t say it outright, but she got the impression he didn’t think females of her age were particularly safe with that lot, in particular.

Anyway, for as far back as she could remember, Jet had been hearing from her own mother that having a common enemy still didn’t make all of the remaining humans their friends, or particularly safe. Her mother was also in the annoying habit of warning Jet almost daily that a sword would only do so much, if she was ever really threatened.

Like Jet needed to be told.

Still, in this case, she didn’t have the luxury to be picky.

If help was being offered by someone human, she would take it...especially if it got her underground. When it came down to it, it was still a lot less frightening to be caught by one’s own kind than it was by the Nirreth.

The devil you know maybe. Or maybe it’s just that some skag wasn’t likely to eat her...or to turn her into some kind of medical experiment while Jet was still breathing.

So after a bare pause, Jet broke cover.

She entered the main street, as there was no other way to reach that open manhole.

Once she had, Jet threw every last ounce of speed she had left towards making it to that voice. Staring at the lifted metal cover, she felt another surge of that hope, jerking her legs even faster. The mere sight of that crack of darkness peering out of the ground felt like a lifeline, her only chance to survive.

Nothing could be worse than being caught by the Nirreth.

Just then, a sound echoed off the row of buildings. It was soft despite the high pitch, a bare murmur above Jet’s panting breaths, but she knew that sound. She would know it anywhere, even though until that exact moment, she’d only heard it from a distance.

With that high, scream-like whisper overhead, came another warm flush of breeze.

The culler was over her.

Forgetting about her vague trepidation about who might be trying to help her out, she started running even faster for the eyes and hands of the skag she’d seen looking at her from the under the ground. Feeling the warm air wash over her a second time, this time close enough to whip her hair in stinging strands against her cheeks, Jet realized the hovercraft was descending.

She let out a shriek, pumping her arms and legs faster.

Her backpack and sword swung harder against her back and shoulders, in a rhythmic, swaying pattern that was probably leaving bruises by now.

As Jet ran, the eyes watched her from the crack in the ground, white fingers holding up the metal plate. Jet noticed that the expression in those eyes looked different now. They looked worried, or maybe just like they were assessing her chances and not finding them good.

Whoever they were, Jet agreed with them. The eyes and dim outline of a face looked too far away for what she could feel behind her.

She barely had time to think that much when something caught hold of her foot.

Yanking abruptly on her ankle as it climbed up her leg, the vine-like appendage jerked her backwards and up.

Jet screamed as her feet left the paved road. She reached out with her arms, her fingers and arms splayed to grasp hold of something, anything, to keep her from leaving the earth behind her.

There was nothing to grab hold of.

Jet found herself being hauled backwards up into space, her leg and arms waving ineffectively in the air as she ascended.

Throughout the entire ascent, she didn’t stop screaming.

She also didn’t stop trying to unsheath her sword.

 

 

Jet landed hard on a metal deck. It felt as if she’d been thrown there bodily by two large men, each holding one half of her arms and her legs.

For a long-seeming second, she sat on the ridged metal floor, panting, gripping the wall with one hand. She gripped the hilt of her sword in the other.

The instant she could focus her eyes, blinking back the tears from the wind and her screaming as she rose in the air, Jet lurched drunkenly to her feet, holding the sword in front of her. Both of her hands gripped the hilt as soon as Jet pushed off from the wall.

She could barely see the creature in front of her, but she heard a hiss as it backed off. She stepped towards the lit hatch door, moving sideways so that her eyes never left the tall, midnight blue-skinned shape in front of her. When she finally chanced a glance down, her heart sank. The hovercraft stood at around the fifth story of the nearest building.

If she jumped, she’d die. And she didn’t see a ladder, or even the vine-like rope they’d used to haul her up.

“Let me down!” she shouted, taking a step towards the creature with the sword.

He slid gracefully back, moving with an incredible lightness for such a tall creature.

“Let me down!” she insisted, louder. “I’ve broken no laws!

Which wasn’t true of course. Just living underground, squatting in caves and growing their own food was technically against the law. Much less the poaching they did, or the bartering with others, including black marketeers. Really, the only way to live outside the Nirreth cities and not break the law was to work for the Nirreth directly and live in their assigned settlements, what humans called the ‘Hamster Cage.’ Even those people starved unless they cut corners.

Jet knew that because her settlement traded with them for some of the staples they had no other way to get locally. Like rice. Flour. Even sugar on occasion.

But the laws were just an excuse. The Nirreth must know just like we did that everyone broke them, pretty much every day. They picked up skags because they could.

“Let me down!” Jet yelled again. “You have no right to keep me!”

She tensed when the creature met her gaze with its large, black eyes. It gestured towards her, in one of the few Nirreth signs she knew.

It was a peace gesture, an offering to parlay.

“No,” she said. “No parley! Let me down...right now!”

It took another step towards her, it’s three-fingered, claw-like hands held out carefully. When she didn’t move, it took another step, until it was in range of her sword.

That time, Jet moved, swinging the sword expertly towards the creature’s upper body. The end of Black made a upward slash across the front of what would be a chest on a human. She felt the blade meet flesh somewhere near its shoulder, and sawed forward, throwing her weight forward to press it in deeper.

The Nirreth hissed, louder and more angry-sounding.

Grabbing the sharp end of the blade with its three-fingered claw, the Nirreth leapt backwards and to her right. The sword cut its hand of course, so it let the blade go, clutching its upper chest with its hurt hand. Jet saw a streak of color in the dark, where her blade sawed through its skin.

Somehow the fact that their blood was red, too, made the whole thing finally seem real. She swung at it a second time, but the Nirreth moved faster, circling around her to avoid the arc of the blade. Its eyes appeared concentrated now, as they followed her sword.

Jet adjusted to follow...

But she hadn’t been watching its tail.

She had just thrust the blade forward, narrowly missing its arm, when the snake-like whip caught hold of her from the other side. Wrapping around her arm, it flung Jet into the wall, smacking her head against the metal bulkhead. Stunned from the hit, she straightened, but not before the tail uncoiled from her arm, then re-coiled around her wrist.

Before she could even try to free herself, it jerked the blade and her body violently to the side. That time, it nearly threw her to the ground.

She barely kept hold of the sword.

Struggling against the muscled appendage, Jet tried to loosen its grip, wrestling first with her own arm, then trying to pry the tail off her skin. The deep-blue flesh seemed impervious to her jerks and grasping fingers. Solid muscle, even the very end of its tail was as thick as her lower arm, straining with effort under the dark-blue skin.

Jet finally managed to twist her body sideways, gaining enough leverage and angle to use the sword on the tail itself. Before she could slash at it, however, another Nirreth approached from behind. It grasped hold of her free wrist with a three-fingered hand.

She struggled with both of them as they tried to force her to drop the sword.

She started backing away, towards the open hatch door, when a third Nirreth, one Jet hadn’t seen at all, emerged from the darkness of the deeper reaches of the hold. Ignoring her limbs altogether, it caught hold of the blade with another of those tails...

...and yanked it straight out of her fingers.

Jet watched it go in disbelief.

She’d never let go of her sword in a fight before. Never.

Before she could lunge after it, the nearest one, the one whose shoulder still bled down its dark brown shirt, shoved her in the middle of her chest with one thick claw.

It wasn’t a gentle nudge.

Her feet left the ground as Jet flew straight backwards.

The creature’s muscled arm propelled her so quickly, she barely knew what happened when her head and back slammed into the bulkhead a second time. That time, the blow stunned Jet for real. The backpack crushed into her back, making her gasp when it hit the bones of her spine.

The wind knocked out of her, she leaned forward, clutching her stomach as she fought in air in ragged pants. For a few seconds, she couldn’t move at all.

She was still sitting there when something grabbed at the pack on her back, forcing it off her arms. She tried to keep hold of it, wrestling them for it briefly, but they merely pushed her back to the ground with a claw-like hand. They took her winter coat in the process.

Jet felt briefly naked with both things gone.

She rarely left the undergound without either. Anyway, her backpack had her knives, even a small bow in a tube that she’d brought for possible trade with Everest.

Without that or Black, she would be helpless.

But there were more of them now, a sea of faces she could feel peering at her from the dark. Looking around at those reflecting black eyes, Jet got the feeling not everyone they netted fought back, much less managed to nick one of them with a sword.

She watched her pack and long coat disappear into the darkness. She could hear claw-like hands going through it then, pulling items out of the canvas and probably inspecting them one by one. Biting her lip, she tried not to care when she heard the clatter and tug, the rip of cloth as they found her mother’s shirts, the sound of the bow she’d made and arrows she’d feathered fall out of the tube to the metal of the deck.

When she finally forced her eyes up, she found herself staring at the midnight blue face of one of her nightmares. The creature stared back at her. He continued to hold his shoulder where she’d cut him with the Japanese-style sword, but she couldn’t tell if it was still hurting him. He looked more puzzled than in pain. Jet watched the Nirreth take in the length of her body with a slow stare, as if she were as much of an animal to it as it was to her.

Black, opaque-seeming eyes scanned her hands and feet where she sprawled, as if looking for more weapons, anything that might be a threat.

After the faintest pause, it bared its teeth.

It smiled too wide, showing too much gum, ape-fashion. The effect caused her to recoil even more, until her shoulders met the ridged metal of the bulkhead behind her.

Her uncle Draven told her once that the Nirreth tried to smile because they knew humans did it. They tried to copy other mannerisms too, apparently, but she couldn’t remember much of anything else of what he’d said about the specifics.

Her mind was too busy churning through the reality of her situation.

Anyway, she couldn’t help but see the thing’s attempt to reassure her as pretty superficial.

She’d been caught.

The Nirreth had caught her. Worse, they’d taken her sword.

It was the unthinkable thing, the thing she spent most of her waking days worried would happen to Biggs, not her. She’d always assumed it would be him one of these days, if he didn’t grow up a little and learn to pay attention. Biggs refused to follow all of the precautions everyone else did. He wandered alone, at night. He explored the overworld even when he didn’t have to. He was fascinated by the parks, which everyone knew weren’t safe, as the Nirreth often spent time there too, collecting samples and rooting out the squatters who tried to grow gardens and orchards in the relatively clean soil.

He even tried to catch animals, not to eat but as pets. He’d been found trying to rope a wolf once, down by the water. If old Kimchee hadn’t been there, he probably would have gotten his throat torn out.

But it hadn’t been Biggs who got snatched by the cullers.

It had been her, Jet.

She’d been the one who’d been caught off her guard. It would be her, Jet, who would be taken to one of their floating cities and be experimented on, enslaved, beaten...maybe even eaten, once they were finished doing whatever else.

Assuming they didn’t just drop her out the hovercraft door to watch her body explode on the moss-covered pavement below, for the fun of it.

Her mind went into a kind of static.

Somehow, that blank, empty state left her surprisingly calm.

Rubbing her ankle, which hurt from the vine that dragged her up into the air, she realized that the hovercraft still wasn’t moving. They remained over the same section of street where they’d picked her up, not far from what used to be the Gaslamp district.

She wondered again how high they were off the ground. Maybe she really could jump, suicide or no. Her chances would certainly be better now, from a stationary position, than they would be in a few minutes.

The thought was absent at first, almost a muse, but it quickly turned more pointed. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the flat top of a brick building. She couldn’t be certain, but it looked to be within landing distance.

It would be suicide to jump, her mind reasoned. Anyway, they would only rope her back up to the hovercraft again.

But how much worse could it be than staying here?

Could she ever forgive herself for not at least trying to get away?

Jet pondered this as she tried to get a sense of the layout of the small cargo hold. She didn’t fully take her attention off the Nirreth’s face, though. She only took her eyes off him directly once, to look quickly around the dark space in the back, where they presumably had her things. Her eyes couldn’t penetrate that blackness though, not enough to locate her sword anyway.

In the same motion, she glanced at the brick building outside.

It would be a long jump.

Too long, she suspected.

Even so, Jet could feel the part of herself that wanted to try it. Her heart beat louder, deafening her, so Jet knew she was on the verge of making a dash for the opening.

But she’d already stared too long, shown too much interest.

Even as she thought it, the Nirreth she’d stuck with her sword kicked her with its two-toed, flat foot. It wasn’t a hard kick, or even a particularly threatening one. But she found she understood it well enough. He wanted her eyes off that hovercraft door.

Looking back into the dark, she saw more black eyes staring at her, reflecting light.

A few bared teeth at her as well. Most only stared, their faces unmoving.

Fear clenched her stomach, knotting it. Jumping was crazy, but she couldn’t think of anything else...nothing else would come to her mind as a solution. Breathing was difficult, but the static in her mind remained. It didn’t seem all that realistic to try and fight them using only her body. The one standing over her had a hundred pounds on her, if not more.

No, the sword had been her only chance at fighting them. That chance had passed.

 

***

        JC Andrijeski has published novels, novellas, serials, graphic novels and short stories, as well as nonfiction essays and articles, including the Allie’s War series and The Slave Girl Chronicles. Her short fiction runs from humorous to apocalyptic,and her nonfiction articles cover subjects from graffiti art, meditation, psychology, journalism, politics and history. JC currently lives and writes full time at the foot of the Himalayas in India, a location she drew on a fair bit in writing the Allie's War
books. Her book The Slave Girl Chronicles is available for purchase at:http://amzn.com/1478284552
Please visit JC's blog at http://jcandrijeski.blogspot.com