Colony 41: Volume 1 (The Era Rae Series) Read online

  “Sedate her,” he said, those two simple words bringing the world crashing down on me. “Put her in Isolation. I’ll run the tests myself. To see if she’s infected,” he added after a heartbeat.

  “Infected? First Marshall… Avin… I’m not infected.” I began backing up as the gray uniformed Enforcers advanced on me. “I’m not infected! I didn’t go in there where Saskia is. I stayed out here.”

  My arguments fell on deaf ears.

  One of the Enforcers reached me, and grabbed my arm. “Hold still, kid.”

  “I’m not infected!”

  “Don’t fight them, Era,” Blake told me.

  Saskia’s fists pounded on the heavy glass of the Observation room.

  The other Enforcers advanced on me in a group, hands up, standard approach vectors, eyes intense as they carried out their orders with no thought to what I kept trying to tell them.

  “I’m not infected! I’m not infected!”

  One of the Enforcers held a spike needle in his grip, ready to use. A tiny drop of yellowish liquid dripped from the tip.

  My mind went blank.

  In the space of a heartbeat muscle memory took over and my body became what it had been trained to be. A weapon.

  Twisting underneath my own arm I broke out of the Enforcer’s grip, turning his wrist backward and doubling his body over with pain compliance. With his backside to me, I drove my knee up between his legs and felt something go squish.

  As that one fell to the floor I kicked out with my left boot and caught the next closest man in the chest, sending him stumbling back. Surprise was on my side, like it had been in the arena. It was the only explanation for me to get in a lucky side strike with the blade of my hand against an Enforcer’s throat, sending the woman choking and spluttering to her knees. Lowering my center of gravity, I swept my leg around, knocking another off his feet and then I came up with my fingers interlaced to drive a hard blow under another’s chin, maybe break his jaw or—

  The spike needle burned into my ass from behind. As it injected its chemical directly into my bloodstream, the world went blank around me by degrees.

  The last thing I remember seeing was Avin Blake’s face hovering over me, his handsome features scrunched up and pinched with anger.

  “You stupid, stupid girl. You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  Part II

  Chapter 4 - Infection

  Era’s Journal, entry #2310

  Even though I’m one of the few students at Colony 41 unlucky enough to have actually seen the Event as it happened, there’s still not much to tell. I was only six, after all. I remember the fire, up in the sky, and I remember the absence of sound. Something that destructive should have been accompanied by explosions and the booming voice of God Himself.

  Instead there was just silence. Aching, terrifying silence.

  I don’t know what most of the other 26ers think about the Event. We don’t discuss it. I think that the Event itself is as mysterious as the world beyond the horizon. Unknowable. Forever alien. We are taught who was responsible. We are taught that the three Rogue nations were punished for their crimes against Humanity. Other than that, we don’t go into details. It’s like we want to forget.

  I’ve thought about it, deep in the night. I’ve wondered what this Event was that put an end to the old societies of the world. America, Europe, NovoRussia, the East and all the rest.

  Billions died. The whole of Humanity came close to extinction.

  Any one of us at the Academy could go through the archives to see the video stills of the blasted cities, entirely flattened, the ghostly lines of rubble marking where highways once stood. Shadows of humans that were outlined in the dirt.

  But we don’t, because we don’t like to look back on our past. Not that part of it, anyway.

  Millions more died of starvation, from disease, by the hand of their fellow man as the world fell into madness. There were even some who claim the old societies released diseases on their enemies after the Event. Diseases created in a lab. Diseases that no one had ever seen before and that had no cures.

  That was stuff we knew, facts written in our electronic texts, but it wasn’t what I saw. All I saw were bright lights, and then hospitals, before coming here.

  If anyone were to ask me now what the Event was, I would say that it doesn’t matter. What mattered was that we survived. What mattered was what came after. The Restored Society brought us back from the brink with the help of the Enforcers. The Colonies were set up as safe places for Humanity to thrive once again. First, there was twenty Colonies, and then thirty, and then forty. Ours was the last. Colony 41. All of them were little havens of paradise where children could grow up and learn the truths of life and peace.

  We hold the future in our hands. We strive against the darkness. We carry the hopes of all.

  We learn these truths so we can grow up, and then we go out into the world to fix what was broken.

  I woke up in a hospital room. I was alone, and I was terrified.

  The room had a bed. More of a steel frame with a thin mattress on it, not that it mattered. The Enforcers hadn’t seen fit to put me in it. I woke up on the cold, hard tile floor, staring at a white ceiling and white walls and a little window in the white steel door.

  I was still in my jumpsuit, the pain of the spike needle still a throbbing point in my ass.

  Panic set in. My legs were still numb from the sedative but I rolled onto my knees and crawled to the door. It was locked, of course, and on this side there was no control panel. Standing up, pins and needles prickling my legs and my forearms, I looked out through the square window. This was just like Saskia’s room, and I wondered if maybe I wasn’t in Isolation after all. Just in Observation. Maybe a few doors down from her, even.

  Then I saw the red stripes on the walls outside in the hall. Red was the color for the Isolation ward.

  Black was the color for Quarantine. At least it wasn’t black stripes.

  Which was probably where Saskia was right now.

  Saskia. I remembered what had been done to her, and in a panic I unzipped my jumpsuit and felt over my own belly, examining myself with my eyes when I didn’t trust my hands. No scars. No cuts. My milky white skin and smallish breasts were unharmed. Whatever had been done to Saskia, it hadn’t been done to me.

  “Hello?” I called out. Then, louder, “Hey! Let me out!”

  A face appeared at the window. I recognized him. The Enforcer I had dropped in the hallway with a well-placed knee to his crotch. Skinny pinched face, scruff of a beard. His eyes met mine, then drifted down, and a smirk twisted his lips.

  I realized I still had my jumpsuit open, my purple bra exposed, holding my breasts up for his examination.

  Turning my back on him, I zipped up again, feeling my face burning, hating him for the way he looked at me and hating myself for letting it bother me. When I was decent again I turned back.

  “How long am I going to…”

  Stay here, was the end of that sentence. No reason to finish it. The Enforcer was already gone.

  I figured out why a few minutes later when the door opened, and First Marshall Blake entered.

  "So. I hear you’re awake.”

  At that moment, at that exact moment, I didn’t know what to think of Avin Blake. He had always been a mentor to me, a man I had looked up to for years. As I grew up, in both mind and body, he became something more. He was the object of my desires, a crush that had became a secret ambition. I had been determined to find some way to get him to notice me, admire me, desire me in return.

  What an idiot I’d been. I could never understand this man standing in front of me. How could he let Saskia suffer like that? How could he leave me in here?

  “Not very talkative?” Avin asked me, raising an eyebrow. The Enforcer appeared in the hallway behind him, and with another leer at my front, he closed the door on us.

  Whatever I had thought of the First Marshall before this moment, I at least knew what h
e was now. He was my captor.

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I finally said to him.

  He leaned his back against the door, motioning for me to sit on the pallet bed. In a little act of defiance, I stood my ground and crossed my arms.

  He shrugged. “Have it your way. Tell me. What part of this don’t you understand?”

  “Any of it!” A thousand questions crowded my mind, all needing to be asked at once. “What’s going on? Why am I in Isolation?”

  “To keep the Colony safe from infection,” he answered right away.

  “But I’m not infected!”

  “You don’t know that, Era. Saskia’s case is… special. We have to be careful. When I’m sure you aren’t contagious, then I’ll let you go back to the other 26ers to take your place at the Academy.”

  “My place at the… what’s that got to do with this?”

  “Everything. There are many forms of infection, Era. Not all of them involve your body.”

  I tried to figure that in my head while a terrible kind of idea began to form. Infection spreads. From one person to the next. It was the duty of the Enforcers to stop the spread of things that could endanger for the Colony.

  Avin Blake was First Marshall of the Enforcers.

  He had to keep the Colony safe.

  From infection.

  What kind of infection did he think I had?

  “Tell me, Era,” Avin said to me, his tone serious. “What did you see in the observation ward?”

  “I saw Saskia! She was burned, and bleeding, and her chest had been…”

  When I couldn’t finish my thought Avin grimaced and finished it for me. “Cut open? Stitched back together?”

  I remembered how that had looked. I remembered the torment on Saskia’s face. I doubt I would ever forget it. “Yes,” I answered him in a small voice. “All of that.”

  “And what did that mean to you?”

  “There was no reason for her to be cut open like that. She was burned. Even if the burns had caused infection there was no reason to cut her chest open.”

  “Are you suddenly skilled in the medical arts?”

  He’d asked me something like that before, and he knew the answer. “Of course not. I don’t need to be. She was cut open like a corpse!”

  That eyebrow rose up again. “That’s what you think?”

  “That’s what I saw.”

  His green eyes were calculating every word I said. “Era, let me ask you this. Can’t you imagine some circumstance in which Saskia’s injuries would have required internal surgery?”

  I wanted to tell him no, because I know what I saw. I wanted to tell him that my friend had been butchered, not given any kind of life-saving surgery.

  But suddenly I wasn’t sure.

  “Let me remind you, Era, that you’re studying to be an Enforcer. You know a thousand different ways to inflict injury. You know nothing of curing it.” He chuckled, and scratched a finger to the side of his neck. “I have to say, that performance in the hallway was impressive. Five Enforcers, and just one of you, and you very nearly put each of them down. I always knew you were something special.”

  In spite of myself, a little squirm of pride wriggled through me. “I was, uh, scared. I guess. I just didn’t want to end up in Quarantine.”

  “Of course not. No one wants that. You understand that Saskia was sick, then?”

  “Yes.” It hurt me to admit it, but there it was. Saskia was sick. She was burned, and she was infected, and it was because of me.

  And I didn’t want to end up like her.

  “That still doesn’t explain the cuts on her body,” I said, stubbornly holding onto that fact.

  He cleared his throat before saying anything else. “What did Saskia say to you?”

  “She said…”

  She said that I should run before they did the same thing to me.

  But could I say that to Avin? If I did, would he take it as evidence that I was infected? Would he call me diseased and put me in Quarantine?

  Could knowledge be infectious?

  I was starting to see it that way.

  Avin Blake saw it that way, too.

  I couldn’t tell him what I knew. I couldn’t stand up for my friend and say those words out loud, or else I’d end up just like Saskia. I was sure of it.

  “She was hard to understand,” was what I decided to say. Kind of the truth.

  Mostly a lie.

  He nodded, though, like that was the answer he was looking for.

  At this point I figured that my priority had to be getting myself out of this situation. I wasn’t going to do Saskia any good locked in Isolation.

  “All right,” he said, pushing away from the wall and pulling the infectious disease scanner from a slot at the back of his belt. “Let’s just be sure.”

  I held my breath. I knew I wasn’t infected. Not to mention that Avin had scanned me just this morning! None of that mattered. If that slender little piece of metal said I was diseased, then that was the final answer.

  And it was Avin Blake, First Marshall of the Enforcers, who was going to interpret the results of the scan. The man who had to do what was right for the whole Colony, not just little Era Rae.

  “I feel fine,” I protested. “Really. Um, I didn’t even open up Saskia’s door, remember? No contact. I’m fine.”

  He stopped, halfway across the floor, while I retreated to the back wall of the little room. Holding the scanner up in his hand, an obvious reminder of the stakes here, Avin pursed his lips. “Well, that is true. Perhaps you’re fine, after all. You’re not worried about Saskia anymore?”

  Hellfire. Forsake my friend to save my own skin from Quarantine, or stand by her and join her in her fate. Those were my choices.

  “I’m not worried about her,” I said. The words were ashes in my mouth, bitter and dry and hot.

  “She needs our help,” he said to me. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  No. Absolutely not. “Yes, I understand.”

  “Saskia is very sick.”

  No, she’s not. “She needs medical attention, First Marshall. I understand that now.”

  It was getting hard to keep my thoughts separate, the true ones from the lies that First Marshall Blake was forcing me to tell. He nodded, like he was glad for my answers, and twirled that little scanner in his fingers again.

  “Saskia,” he said, very deliberately, “was a stupid, arrogant girl who got herself into trouble that risked all of our lives.”

  No, she wasn’t.

  “I should shoot her myself—”

  No.

  “—and save the Colony the trouble of providing for her while she sits in Quarantine.”

  No.

  “Then all memory of this threat to our society can be erased.”

  “No!” I lunged forward a step, my fists at my sides, my blood pounding red in my vision. “Saskia is one of the smartest and prettiest and strongest women I know! She got burned because of me and I came here because she needed my help! I don’t know what got done to her in here but I will not let you say those evil lies about her!”

  He stared at me, a smile slowly spreading across his face. I’d just fallen into his trap, and he knew it. He knew exactly what he was doing to me.

  I had just sealed my own death warrant.

  But I had stayed true to my friend.

  Great, I thought, taking a breath that brought me back to the reality of where I was standing. Saskia and I would be able to hold hands together as they murdered us. For the good of the Colony.

  How had my life turned so completely upside down?

  “First Marshall Blake, I…” There were no words. I could still try to recant what I’d said, take it back, tell him that I agreed with killing those who became diseased, like we’d done for a decade now, like the law said we should.

  I could tell, just by looking into this man’s perfect eyes, that it wouldn’t do any good to take it back.

  Besides.
I didn’t want to.

  The disease scanner bounced in Blake’s hand, and a little green light on the stem began to blink. He regarded me with his head tilted to one side and I knew he’d made his decision. “I think, perhaps, you need a little more time to heal. Your answers might be different if I check on you in, say, a few hours.”

  With the heel of his boot he kicked against the door, a hollow sounding boom that repeated three times. Still eying me, he waited for the Enforcer to open the door from the outside, and backed his way out into the hall. “Goodbye, Era. Think hard about what I’ve said.”

  “First Marshall Blake, please.” I hated myself for begging, but I was scared. All this training at the Academy, all this endless instruction to make us suppress our fears, and here I stood terrified that this door was going to close and never open again, ever. “Please, don’t do this! I’m not infectious!”

  “I think maybe you are,” was his answer. “An infection of the worst kind.”

  The Enforcer stood in the doorway, blocking it with his body in case I decided to bolt and try to run. I didn’t do that. I decided I wanted to live, even if it was alone in this room until I died of starvation.

  When the door slid closed, the Enforcer winked at me.

  Hellfire. I was so very screwed.

  There are no clocks in the patient rooms of the Isolation ward, for obvious reason. So I have no idea how long I was actually left alone. I’m pretty sure it was a matter of days. Counting the meals that were slid under the door, I came up with two days. Maybe three.

  Through the little rectangular slot, too narrow for me to even get an arm through, a metal tray would be slid at what I supposed were regular intervals. Juice pouch. Fruit paste. Fiber bars. Something that was supposed to be bread in a sealed foil container. It was all very bland, and it was just enough to keep me from starving.

  I don’t want to discuss how I went to the bathroom.

  I thought about refusing to eat anything, at first, but then I figured that would be more cause for Avin Blake to decide I was sick, and keep me where I was. The whole thing had been a setup. Letting me get into the medical facility with nobody stopping me at all, except for Nurse Simmons. Finding Saskia. Waiting to see if I would help her or turn my back on her. All of it was a trap and I stepped right into it.