Melancholy: Episode 1 Read online

  Silence falls.

  “You won’t win,” Quinn informs him.

  Luke shrugs. “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Alright,” Quinn says, obviously realizing he can’t back out of this without looking like a coward. “You win and my soldiers are yours for the war. If I win, you do double time here before we agree to swear you into our ranks.”

  Luke and Quinn shake hands and then move into the ring.

  I thought he was impossible before. But now for the first time in my life I feel dwarfed by someone. By what they are, and what they’re capable of. It’s as if he was not born but created for this very purpose, made with a soul carved in blood and iron. Forged by an ancient Viking god of old and brought here, into this cold world to show us children how they fight in Valhalla.

  When it’s over and Quinn’s bleeding badly on the ground, there’s no smirking or laughing. Everyone in the crowd is a little stunned, a little freaked. Luke is breathing heavily, a bruise on his cheek, some blood on his fists. He offers a hand to Quinn, who takes it, and when they’re facing each other once more, Quinn says, “They’re yours to train. Be worthy of them.”

  Luke searches the shorter man’s face. “They’re yours. But I’ll guide you through the storm and try to be worthy.”

  “We’re honored to have you here, Luke Townsend.”

  “Thank you.” He pauses, glancing at me again, and then at Shadow. “You have spirit, all of you,” he says, looking around at his opponents. “It humbles me, having come from a place full of the soulless. I see you and I have real hope for the first time in my life.”

  The cheering begins, and this time it’s an ocean tide washing over us. It’s contagious, his hope.

  *

  With the moon high I hurry through the night to his door. I knock once and wait. He opens it and I brush past him before he can say anything.

  “Lock the door.”

  “No thanks.”

  I don’t like his tone. I unbutton my coat to show him my naked body. His expression doesn’t change.

  “What are you doing, Raven?”

  “Offering you a gift.”

  “You can keep it. You’re with Quinn. And I have a girlfriend.”

  “The one you left behind? She’s long dead by now, Luke.”

  “No,” he says, and I’m discomfited to see a smile curl his lips. “I guarantee you, she’s not.”

  “How could you possibly know?”

  “Because I know her. Surviving is what she does best.”

  I consider this, tilting my head and moving closer. “It’s another world out here. We do what we can to enjoy ourselves. She wouldn’t mind. And she wouldn’t know.”

  He hesitates, and I know I have him.

  But then I realize his hesitation is simply so he can figure out how best to put it. “Listen to me, Raven. I’m not remotely interested in fucking you. Don’t come back here again.”

  Under the moon once more I am humiliated.

  *

  March 20th, 2065

  Luke

  I work in the fields and train with Shadow in the evenings. He’s started taking me out on hunts and I’m learning to use a bow and arrow, which is spectacularly fun. There’s no shortage of Furies to kill. We don’t go near their camp – not with only two of us – but there are plenty of the things roaming the dead forest beyond it. Shadow doesn’t talk much, but what I’ve managed to extract from him is the fact that apparently the monsters roam the country all the way to the city.

  “How do you know?” I ask him quietly tonight. “That they’re everywhere?”

  We have wordlessly decided that we’re competing for who can kill the most Furies.

  Shadow shoots one in the eye, and we cross to where it dropped. I don’t know why we do this, but we always do. It’s like he needs to look down at the creature he killed before being able to move on from it.

  I figure he won’t answer my question, but then he says, “I walked.”

  “Walked where?” It hits me. “From the city? To here? Holy shit, man.” That is a hell of a long way to travel above ground. I foolishly thought that maybe I could walk a part of it in the tunnel, but I know now it would have been harrowing. And if above is full of Furies, I can’t imagine how Shadow survived it.

  “When was this?”

  “About twenty years ago.”

  “Why?”

  Another long silence as we walk and drag, walk and drag.

  “Heard there was a resistance out here.”

  “The cures hadn’t been administered twenty years ago. What were you resisting?”

  A long silence. “There was a wall around the city,” he says simply.

  The man is hardcore, you have to give him that. “There’s a wall around The Inferno,” I point out.

  “But we can walk through it,” comes his measured response.

  It’s the most he’s said to me in one go since I met him, and it occurs to me how incredibly right he is, how utterly messed up it is that they caged us and wouldn’t let us leave. I can’t count the number of people I stopped from escaping through the wall when I was a Blood. I caught them and escorted them to be cured, like a good little lapdog, and it was sick.

  “So the Furies have been around that long,” I muse. “Reckon they came from the plague?”

  He shrugs. Fair enough. Chat time’s over.

  We hunt and kill over a dozen Furies before turning back for the night. Inside the wall, after I’ve bid Shadow an unreciprocated goodnight, I procure three very enthusiastic followers who’ve apparently been waiting for me to return.

  I have never seen Pace, Hal and Will separated from each other in the two months I’ve been here. And each time they spot me they accost me with questions. How many people have you killed? How long were you a Blood? Who recruited you? What did you have to do? What are you good at? What are the rules? How many of you are there? How did you escape the city? Are you a good liar?

  It’s exhausting, but I can’t help warming to them.

  They also want to know about life in the city, life for the drones. All three of them were brought here by their parents before they were old enough to be cured – more than ten years ago. And all three of them lost their parents to the Furies.

  Tonight Hal asks, “I heard someone say you have a girlfriend in the city.” There’s a measure of wistfulness in his voice; he’s a romantic, bless him.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Josephine.”

  “Why did you leave her?” Pace asks me bluntly. I can hear in her voice the desire to deny the existence of love, bitterness extending down to her bones.

  “Because she’s sick.”

  “How caring of you,” she replies, deadpan.

  “I didn’t know if I’d make it here, or how difficult it would be, and I was pretty sure she’d died on the journey.” I swallow, feeling heartsick. “She was very weak by the time I left her.”

  “So she’s dead now?” Will asked.

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  All three of them think about this for a while. We’re headed to the Den for food. Pace asks, sort of angrily, “How could you love a drone? Do they lobotomize you when you join the Bloods?”

  I smile at her. She’s an interesting creature. “Almost. She’s uncured.”

  They all stop and stare at me in shock.

  “And you left her there?” Hal is incredulous.

  “I told you – ”

  “You can’t leave an uncured in the city on her own! No matter how sick she is! What if they find her?”

  I get it. The uncured are a rare commodity these days. I try to explain. “She’s not like the other uncured.”

  “How?” Pace demands.

  “Can you all just chill out?” I shake my head. “She’s immune.”

  “Bullshit,” Pace says flatly.

  I shrug, walking on. My stomach is grum
bling.

  “Come with me, Blood,” she says suddenly.

  “Don’t call me that,” I warn.

  “Come with me, Luke.”

  “Are you going toward food? Because otherwise I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “You’re gonna wanna see this.”

  I sigh hungrily, following her as she cuts through several streets to reach a narrow demountable I haven’t entered before. Inside is what can only be described as a science lab. When Pace switches on the lights I see long tables filled with lab equipment. Staring into a microscope down the end is a man I haven’t met. He’s been sitting here in the dark. Weird.

  Pace leads me to his side. “This is Dodge.”

  “G’day, Dodge.”

  Dodge is blond and looks like he’d be more at home on a surfboard than in this lab. He looks up at me and his glasses remind me, unbearably, of Harley. I glance away, feeling my blood quicken with an all too familiar anguish.

  “Luke says he has a girlfriend who’s immune to the cure,” Pace tells the man.

  “Not possible.”

  I look around at all the stuff. What strikes me are the vials of blood. There must be hundreds of them.

  “Why do you think that?” Dodge asks me.

  “She was given one of the first test rounds of the drug, before it became the cure. It didn’t work. And now she’s immune to the current anger cure.”

  “What was the earlier drug made of?”

  “I dunno, mate. You’d have to ask my friend Ben.”

  “But what you’re saying is that if we gave this initial drug to people, they would be immune to the cure?”

  I turn to face him. Dodge and Pace are both filled with such excitement that I feel bad for them. I shake my head tiredly, murmuring, “No. Not unless you want a population of mass murderers.”

  As I walk through the night in search of dinner I really, really miss my girlfriend. In my mind I hear her playing the cello.

  Chapter 5

  January 8th, 2066

  Josephine

  I am perusing the painfully crummy selection of books in the ‘library’ – there are, like, twenty books – when my eyes catch on one that must have just been returned, since I’m in here every day waiting for anything new. Something inside me leaps with joy. Brave New World. One of my favorites, in that way that favorite books cause something inside your chest to hurt.

  I pull it reverently from the shelf and open it slowly, taking a deep breath of its ancient pages. It took me years as a teenager to find a real, print copy of it, having read it a thousand times digitally but wanting something physical to keep with me always. It got banned eventually, and all copies were burnt or erased. I kept mine though, hoarded it like treasure.

  “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely,” says a voice from behind me and I turn to see Dodge and his bespectacled eyes.

  “I like being myself,” I answer him. “Myself and nasty.”

  We smile at each other.

  “You returned it?” I surmise.

  He nods. “I came … I need to speak with you.”

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “Oh, no! I … I’m sorry, I – ”

  “Relax, I was kidding. Sort of. Lead the way.”

  I sign the book out and Dodge takes me to his lab, which is very dark and bizarrely as one would imagine a science lab to look like. Beakers and microscopes and vials of blood.

  “I know who you are,” he says bluntly, without his usual preamble.

  My eyebrows arch. “That sounds creepy.”

  “I mean … I know. I know the truth.”

  I frown, watching his handsome face. “What truth, Dodge?”

  “I know your name is Josephine Luquet and that you’re immune to the cure.”

  There is a heavy silence between us. My guts feel liquefied.

  “I won’t tell them,” he murmurs fervently.

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Raven would have you cut into a thousand pieces for experimentation.”

  A cold finger trails down my spine. “What makes you think you know what you know?”

  “Luke told me he had a girlfriend immune to the cure. Your blood looked normal at first, but when I studied it I realized it had strange properties that fought off all number of afflictions.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were given an initial experimental phase of the cure, right?”

  I nod, giving up the pretence.

  “It triggered all kinds of things in your blood. It remains.”

  “Remains? What do you mean remains?”

  “I gather you were given a secondary drug at some point?”

  “An antidote to what the Zetemaphine was doing. A blocker.”

  “Right. Well a blocker doesn’t erase. It … blocks.”

  This is not sounding good.

  “Dodge, just tell me what’s going on.”

  “You have properties in your blood that have stemmed from neurotoxins created by the combination of the Zetemaphine and its blocker. They have resulted in an extremely high rate of regeneration in your cells.”

  “Meaning healing?”

  “Right.” He smiles awkwardly.

  “So I heal fast?”

  “It seems that way. Have you noticed anything?”

  I shrug, thinking about it. I feel like I’m constantly being beaten and battered, and recovering from some injury or another, but if I think back, my beating from Raven – which broke bones and bruised tissue and dislocated joints – only took me a couple of days to heal from. Ranya’s made a few comments about how well I heal, but I didn’t think anything of it – I just assumed all my injuries felt worse than they were because I’m such a wuss.

  “Well … Christ. That’s good, right?”

  “It needs to be monitored, because if one of the two drugs in your system was to unbalance the other then you could find yourself seriously ill. Or … dead.”

  “Oh. Great.”

  “That’s not all. I’ve been studying samples of Luke’s blood since you returned him to us.”

  And just like that, I feel a terrible ache build in my chest. Because there it is again, right there in his eyes – the pity. “What?”

  “His cells are morphing too rapidly for him to survive it.”

  I shake my head. “That’s what everyone says. All the time. But he’s still alive.”

  “I understand that, but the samples I took from him yesterday are drastically evolved.”

  “So what – he’s changing?”

  “Grossly. He won’t last much longer, that I can guarantee.” Dodge swallows and drops his eyes. “I debated telling you, but knowing what I know about your relationship, I felt you deserved to know the truth with … enough time to say goodbye.”

  I take a breath. “How long?”

  “At this rate, a day. Maybe two.”

  “Use my blood. It’ll heal him. Take as much as you want.”

  “I’m afraid I already tried that. It seems the properties in your system aren’t contagious after having been combined with your blood. They become indivisible from each other.”

  “So what – you’re telling me there’s nothing you can do?”

  “I can’t even begin to understand the composition of the synthetic inside his brain and tissue. I …”

  I turn and walk away from him. I need Ben. I have spent the last months sitting around here and doing absolutely nothing except bitching and moaning when I could have been retrieving the scientist from the city.

  “Josephine!” Dodge calls and I pause, unable to even face him, or to believe he has used my name so brazenly. “You said you wanted to be yourself, yourself and nasty. So why do you hide behind another name and another life?”

  I give a soft, bitter laugh. “It’s a fucking quote, Dodge. Grow up.”

  *

  January 9th, 2066

  Josephine

  My back aches and my neck is twisted. The chai
r beside his bed is uncomfortable, but we have a love–hate relationship, me and this damn chair. When first I sit in it, I love it with every fiber of my being. After a hard day’s work, this chair is my best friend. After a few hours I begin to loathe it with all the fire of hell.

  I have been sitting in it, watching him sleep, for four months. For four months Ranya has told me that he has only days, if that, left to live. But every day he does not die.

  They don’t understand Luke Townsend. But I do. He has an iron will.

  I have been here since yesterday morning. I am in trouble, because I have missed two training sessions and two work shifts. I’ve had Pace, Hal, Will, Ranya, Quinn and even Raven in here telling me to leave, to get back to whatever commitment I’m supposed to be fulfilling. But I can’t look at any of them, and I can’t leave.

  I don’t care anymore if they know I love him.

  I don’t care about anything.

  Ranya, Quinn and Dodge arrive and move to surround Luke’s bed. I sit up, not liking the way they’re looking at him.

  “What’s … ?”

  Quinn looks at me sadly. “We’ve come to a difficult decision, Dual. We can no longer sustain the power it takes to keep Luke’s vitals monitored and attended to. We’re going to have to switch off the machine.”

  I feel my heart pick up speed. Remaining calm, I rise to my feet. “He’s not hooked up to anything important, though, right? He hasn’t needed help breathing or anything.”

  “No but I’ve been giving him medicine to help his body heal while he sleeps,” Ranya tells me gently. “Without this, and without the means to monitor his heart-rate, he’ll die.”

  I shake my head. Blind disbelief fills me. “No. You can’t … ”

  Ranya reaches for the cords linking the machines to the generator and I lose it. Something wild comes over me and I lunge at her, tackling her away from the cord.

  She gives a yelp of surprise and then Quinn is hauling me off her. “Don’t touch me!” I snarl, struggling fiercely against his hold.

  He starts dragging me toward the door and I give a scream of fury. “Don’t you dare! Get the fuck away from him! Dodge – do something! Tell them you can solve this!”