The Select's Bodyguard (Children of the Wells - Bron & Calea Book 1) (6 page)

I’ve chosen Calea. I will not choose another.

We enter the main hall. It’s a disaster. We take roundabout passages, mostly staying on level ground. Twice we navigate heaps of broken masonry, Calea stubbornly at my side, cursing beneath her breath. I stop once to move debris and dig a path through. When we finally reach the spoke and see the sky again, it is early evening.

I set Calea against the decorative wrought iron that acts as a barrier between the road leading to the Academy and the Well below. Calea is pale and can hardly catch her breath. Her injuries are superficial, but her body has been pushed beyond its normal limits. I watch her discreetly as I study the road before us. She is thin, almost frail. I have always thought her weaker than she presented herself, but now she looks broken, like a doll thrown in a corner. “We’ll keep moving after a moment’s rest,” I say. She will not want me to think her weak, but I will delay for more than a moment.

The road itself, two lanes plus wide avenues for walking on either side, seems sturdy enough. Ahead I can see some gaps, but I think we will manage if we keep an eye out. The trees lining the avenues are half bare, green trees with naked branches. The land is harsh away from the wells, verdant within its reach. What happens now?

I can see most of the Towers, too, or what is left of them. Three have completely collapsed. Tower Six stands nearly intact. Tower Five leans precariously over the Well, rooms open to the pit below.

It is hard to comprehend what has happened. I examine each Tower in turn, thoughtless and overwhelmed.

I become aware that Calea is crying. I do not look, to look would be cruel, but my eyes are drawn in that direction. It is then I finally see what I should have seen at first sight.

I had not even thought to look into the Well. It is below and our path is above. Now I step to the railing and stare into the gaping pit. It is huge, immensely deep, more than two miles end to end, and it is empty.

The sight is shocking. All my life, I have seen the shifting colors of magic as they hummed beneath the Wheel. Nothing remains. It is hollowed out. The contrast strikes me cold. And yet, I do not understand what it means. I have lost nothing. It is an emptiness in the landscape, but it has not removed a thing from my life.

But Calea’s life has been drained out.

I glance at her. I am afraid of what she might do, and I want somehow to connect with her. She is sobbing, eyes closed, hand pressed against her lips, trying to keep the sounds from escaping.

“Let’s keep moving.” It’s not what I want to say. It’s the only thing I can say.

She stands slowly, pulling herself up with her one arm, balancing on her one foot. I do not help her. She waits a long time, hand clenched on the railing, trying to breath. I give her time.

“Are you ready?”

“Of course.” She manages to control her voice. “Are you going to help me or not?”

I support her once again and lead her forward. We take to the center of the road, so as to avoid the barren depths of the Well. And we walk.

About midway to the Academy, the spoke starts to show evidence of fractures. I step carefully, watching the cracks. The avenues along the edges fall away for a time, first one side, then the other, the road like a garment with moth-eaten edges. I see the break long before we reach it, but even with time to consider, I have no plan to get across. The road disappears for twelve feet or more, except for girders exposed by the blast and a few thin walkways of unsupported concrete.

“We are not turning back,” she says. I support her almost entirely by my own strength. She has nothing left.

“We aren’t.”

There is no good way to do this. “Calea, I need you to hang on to my back. Can you do that?”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Tightly.”

That gets a little smile from her. She must be exhausted. “All right. I’ll hang on if you promise not to fall.”

“Deal.”

I choose the girder that seems the sturdiest. That’s a guess at best. The girder runs a few feet below the surface of the road. I lower Calea onto her belly and climb down onto the girder. It is barely wider than my shoulders. “Lay your arm over my chest. I’ll grab it and keep you leveraged.”

“You’ll pull my arm out of socket. Here, this’ll work.”

She wraps her arm around my neck, my throat in the crook of her elbow. It’s suspiciously like a choke hold.

“Can you hold tight?”

“I’ll hold. Now go.”

I bend forward, easing her off the road and onto my back as smoothly as possible. I stare at the metal beneath my feet, not into the abyss below. She settles. I raise up, finding my balance. It is difficult to breath with her weight pulling down on my esophagus.

I take my first step. I waver a moment, wait, rediscover my center. Another step. Slow breathing. The wind picks up and I stop. Another step.

“Hurry,” Calea says.

“Don’t look down.”

“Stop talking and go!” she shouts.

Another step.

Since I woke this morning, everything is another step--just one more step. That’s enough. That’s all that matters. One more step.

I find my rhythm. Only for a moment, at the start, did I allow thoughts of falling. After that, it is only the next step. A step is easy. And after that, only one more. And one more.

I am at the other end. I climb the short ascent, leaning forward to ease the pressure of Calea’s weight. I crawl onto the road, lower myself, and allow Calea to roll off.

“Help me up,” she says. “And stop wheezing. You sound like an asthmatic dog.”

I laugh, or try to. I rub my neck. Not crushed, but it might be bruised. Calea held on very tightly.

We resume our journey. The Academy looms before us, the facade broken to pieces but still hanging on. It is an octagonal building, thickly built, squat. The road is pocked and mangled, but it looks as if it will hold, as long as we are careful. “We’ll be there soon,” I tell her.

“Not soon enough.”

Chapter 6 - The Journey Out

Three Years Earlier

Calea gave Bron credit for one thing--he was quiet.

Most days she spent in her lab, sometimes working forty-eight hours non-stop, oblivious to time, fatigue, and hunger. She’d drop deep into the problem before her until she understood the contours of the dilemma, its form and shape and idiosyncrasies. Her theories and the symbols on her whiteboard and the experimental applications of magical transference played one off the other, each held loosely so that it could change with the situation. She tested, dissected, recombined, discarded, and retried. Bron very well might leave for hours at a time when these moods took her, but she knew he did not. He took his required days off, but he watched and waited endless hours. Sometimes she returned to her surroundings with him in the other room, a tray with warm food sitting beside her.

If that had been all a bodyguard was, she could almost have dealt with it, if only because she wouldn’t have to deal with it at all. A shadow was the most forgettable thing in the world as long as it kept quiet. And Bron did admirably--but not perfectly. He urged her to eat or to socialize. He hovered over her, prodded her, gave her looks that showed he thought she was wrong. He did it softly, and subtly, but she noticed.

It was the principal of the thing, too. She remembered that first night. She knew the perception: she needed protecting, because she could not protect herself.

Today, Calea was out of the lab and out of the Tower. She had begun introducing cheap, efficient personal transports into the Section Four economy, as well as a host of less visible but more important upgrades to the power grid. Occasionally, she found it necessary to look over her project personally, if only because she didn’t trust others to tell her the whole truth. Her assistants were largely upper-level students who were both frightened of and in awe of her. They performed the task of administrative paperwork well enough, but they certainly could not judge the results of her current experiments with as critical an eye as she demanded.

So, once a month, on schedule, she descended into the city. She went without announcement. She did not like to draw attention to herself, whatever the rumors in the Wheel claimed. She’d heard the muttering. It was caused by envy. That pleased her.

Though she walked inconspicuously among the people, she could not come alone as she desired. Bron was at her side, quiet, yes, but still there, on alert, like a hawk. He walked coolly enough, but his eyes roamed back and forth.

“You do a poor job of remaining hidden,” she said.

“I am not trying to hide.”

“I wish you would. I do not need you here, anxious to throw yourself in front of some energy blast. There was a study some years ago showing that less than twenty percent of the population could identify the Overseer by sight, and I’m not the Overseer. I do not think I’ll have an angry citizen see me and attempt to punch me in the face.”

Bron said nothing, and this, more than some excuse or explanation, aggravated Calea. She was already in a bitter mood. She had woken up that way. Now, she was beginning to roil within.

“When can I be rid of you?” She tried to say it lightly. Sometimes he seemed to be hiding a smile when she became furious at him.

“When I am no longer needed.”

“Ha! Needed? No one’s needed in this world. We’re all extraneous, accidents. Men live and die. Their names sometimes linger a few generations. For what? I’ll be forgotten soon enough, even if I change the whole world with my mind. I’ll hang on as a name in a book and a picture on a wall, if that.”

Bron nodded. “Then why do you do what you do?”

“They think they need me. It’s a lie. Someone else would do what I’m doing, if not now, then within a decade. But I might as well do it. It gives me a way to spend my time, and it pleases them.”

“Well, protecting you gives me something to do as well. Let’s leave it at that.”

Calea wanted to scream at him. She had rattled off that little speech to make him uncomfortable--and from some uncomfortable emotion of her own. He had accepted it without question. He was either an unthinking brute or he was mocking her. It was possible both were true.

Her destination was a retailer she’d recently partnered with, a bicycle shop she was using to sell the new motorcycle she’d help develop. With the newest battery, streamlined, magic-powered vehicles were now possible. Most cars were still clunky and over-large, but that was slowly changing. Calea wanted to shock the people with her compact two-wheeled vehicle. She hoped to do some interviews with customers today.

“This is going to be a nice place to live,” Bron said. He did not often start conversations.

“The metrics of happiness and prosperity have been rising steadily in this section. Technology is the most efficient means of changing a person’s position in life.”

“Not the only way.”

“The most efficient.”

“Will you spread your work to the rest of the city?”

“I don’t have much say in other sections. In time, others might borrow from my work, as long as it doesn’t contradict with their own experiments. The technology will spread to Thyrion before it’s publicly released, if history teaches us anything. They’re tech-grubby, and it causes them more than a few problems. The minor villages will get it in time. But my work needs tested over years, and verified by others, then repeated, before the socio-economic blueprint will be made officially available.”

He did not respond. He was a normal, a native of routinely poor Section Three. He likely disagreed with the process. The non-Select always took the short view of things. “We’re doing this for your own good, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

He seemed to tense up. That encouraged her. He had been hurt in some way.

People and traffic crammed down the street. This section had more cars per household than any other, not a particularly difficult feat considering how few civilian cars had been allowed in the city. By her estimation, in three years nearly half of all households in Section Four would own one. Her newest battery was more compact, efficient, and long-lasting than any before it, and the method of creation safer. Manufacturing costs would drop, and the retail price to civilians would fall. Previous administrators of Section Four had run a moderately open economy. Calea didn’t plan to make any changes. Let the people work, earn money, and purchase what they would. They’d purchase her work.

Bron leaned over casually. “We are being followed.”

So perhaps his earlier stiffness had not been from affront but paranoia. “It’s lunch hour in the busiest part of downtown. You’d have to work not to follow someone.”

And if she was being followed, what did it matter? She could handle it. It didn’t concern her much.

She felt a sense of pride walking among the people--people who did not know that
she
was making their lives better. It wasn’t a sense of identification with these people; she felt as if she were invisible, walking between them as they lived whatever lives these people lived. She did not look down on them. Not much, anyway. She simply regarded them as agents in her experiments, blind beneficiaries of her work. Driving, as many Guides were wont to do, either from desire of speed or a vague fear of the masses, would draw unwanted attention.