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

  The first fact I remember latching onto was that I was not in a Colony. I was in the Outlands.

  I got nursed back to health, back to myself, with broth and heavy brown bread and herbal medicines whose names I couldn’t pronounce. I got to know my rescuers, their peculiar ways, and I told them my story.

  And they told me theirs.

  They told me stories of how the world had almost ended after the cult calling themselves the Restored Society had unleashed nuclear weapons on two continents. The cult had some crazy plan to repopulate the world with genetically-enhanced babies grown from their secret Colonies spread all over the world.

  The world had almost ended. Almost. Slowly, people were starting to band together, to form a society of new alliances. It was a struggle to survive against the gray and black clad Enforcers who were trying to impose the ways of the Restored Society.

  The very thing that I had wanted to be.

  I turned my head and cried, because that part of my life was gone.

  Like Saskia was gone.

  The house where I had my sickbed was in the middle of a town of Freemen. They had a living here, meager as it was. But at the same time, not very far to the south, the Restored Society have gained a foothold along the coast, spreading inland.

  Like a disease. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

  I plan to go down there, when I’m fit enough. I’ll join the resistance, do my best to put right what Colony 41 did to me. Maybe I’m not human, not really, but I’m not what they wanted to make me, either. I’ll choose which side I’m on.

  That’s the plan, anyway. Hopefully, I’ll see a blonde-haired Enforcer down there again, and this time I’ll be able to help her escape.

  Once more, I’ll step into the fire, and I’ll hold my breath.

  Book Two – Into the Outlands

  Part I

  Chapter 1 - Waking Up

  Era’s Journal, Entry #2981

  Have you ever had the feeling you were meant to be somewhere?

  I don’t mean like you check the time and, oh no, you’re late for a class or to meet your friends. I mean, have you ever felt that you had a proper place in life, a… purpose that you were meant to fulfil?

  Well, I have. At least, two weeks ago I did.

  Now I’m lost.

  Colony 41. That was where I belonged. When I was there, I had a purpose. I had a reason for being alive. The Academy was teaching me everything I needed to know to be an Enforcer. An Enforcer who could help the Restored Society bring order and light to the darkness that had fallen over the entire world. At sixteen years old I knew everything I needed to know.

  Only now I knew better. Everything the Academy taught me was a lie.

  More importantly, everything First Marshall Avin Blake taught me was a lie.

  I hate that man so much. I’m not sorry that he’s dead.

  The Event that nearly destroyed the Earth wasn’t caused by a trio of evil nation states waging war against the countries of the Old Society. That was the lie they fed us. Here’s the truth. Avin Blake’s cult did it. The Restored Society. They were the ones who detonated the bombs that killed billions. Now they were trying to style themselves as the saviors of Humanity.

  And I had fallen for it. All the way.

  Until my best friend Saskia had gotten hurt, and then butchered, and then turned against me.

  In the end, she chose me over her loyalty to Blake and the Colony.

  Which is the same choice I made, for her. That’s why I had to run away from the only place I had ever really called home. I had to run away from Colony 41, or end up with my brain cut and hacked together with electronic circuits, my internal organs replaced with machine parts…

  Saskia wasn’t Saskia anymore. But she was still my friend.

  Someday I’ll find her, and I will rescue her.

  No matter what it takes.

  His hands felt nice on my bare back.

  I really wish he’d stop.

  “Jadran…”

  “Your shoulder seems fine,” he told me, cutting off what I was going to say. He does that a lot. Maybe because he doesn’t want me to turn him down again. “The cuts on your sides are healing nicely, as well.”

  Under the careful caress of his fingers I could feel my muscles relaxing. My skin tingled under his warmth. It really was nice. It just wasn’t what I was looking for.

  I lifted the rough wool blanket higher up my front, covering the front of my slim body up to the hollow of my throat. I was naked down to my waist so he could tend to me. I tried not to think of it as the awkward, intimate situation that it really was.

  He was good looking, which didn’t make my decision to gently push his hands away any easier. Tall, lean, all springy muscles in all the right places. His skin had been tanned to the color of warm caramel and his eyes were the same brown as the rich soil he worked to grow food for his village. He kept his dark hair long and tied into a little tail at the back of his neck.

  Just a few years older than me, cute, smart, and those hands of his were amazing. If I wasn’t so messed up inside, I think I’d like there to be something between us.

  When I say I’m messed up, on the inside, I’m not talking about my injuries.

  After escaping Colony 41’s island I washed up on the shore not far from this tiny Outland village. Refuge was a small community trying to keep its head down and go unnoticed by the Enforcers. For a full decade after the Event, they had made a life for themselves here. They hadn’t so much thrived as survived, but they were happy.

  Now I show up, and put everyone at risk.

  I’ve been here for two weeks now, recovering, getting my strength back. The Healers here didn’t have access to the tools and medicines that the medical staff back at Colony 41 did. Things that would have taken a day or two at most to heal back there were taking longer here. Plus, keeping to myself in this little back room in Jadran’s house was for the best. I made the people here nervous.

  The Elders had been in to see me more than once, to talk with me and ask their questions. It became pretty obvious right from the start they didn’t want to know too much. I was from one of the Colonies, and there was the chance that I had dragged the attention of the Restored Society with me. Especially since the Enforcers had already arrived on the coastline to the south, setting up a base of operations. Everyone was nervous. Everyone wanted me to stay out of the way so they could keep living their lives the way they had been for years.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell them that it didn’t matter how they tried to hide. The Enforcers found everyone, eventually.

  Just like they would find me. Eventually.

  Jadran said several times over these weeks that I was tougher than I look. I might be small, I would tell him, but I’m not weak. A sprained wrist. A badly bruised shoulder. Bumps and bruises and scrapes. A gash on my right leg that had required one of the Healers to give me thirty-two stitches. I counted each one she did. Other cuts up and down both sides that she treated with some type of gooey jelly. So no, it wasn’t the same kind of attention I was used to. I was healing, but a lot slower than I would have in my previous life.

  This was me, beat up and broken.

  But none of that was as bad as what Avin Blake had done to me. That man had shaken my confidence down to its core. He took away everything I had ever known as a truth and left me dangling out over a precipice of doubt and confusion. Lying in a sickbed, trying to get better.

  Trying to find a direction for my life.

  For now, at least, I was safe. Maybe that was enough.

  Jadran sat back on the wooden stool next to my cot. The Elders had made a little corner for me in this back storage room, under shelves full of potato bags and canned vegetables. Dried herbs hung from the ceiling. The floor was dirt and the only light came from a window high up in the wall. Two burning lamps kept me company during the day, when I wasn’t outside trying to walk around and regain my strength.

  “In a few days, you should
be able to leave here,” he said to me, reluctance in his voice.

  “And go where?” I asked, running a hand through the short strands of my dark hair. “Don’t tell me you’re trying to get rid of me?”

  His lopsided grin sparked in his eyes. “You know I want you right here.”

  “Too bad everyone doesn’t feel that way.”

  Jadran rolled a hand in the air, indicating the village all around us outside of these walls. “There are a few who are worried—”

  “Just a few?” I interrupted him, arching one black eyebrow. “You’ve seen the way they look at me.”

  He tilted his head to one side. He knew what I meant. “You have to understand the people of our village like I do. Worried, is what they are. They worry you will bring the Enforcers down upon our heads.”

  An image flashed through my mind. Gray-suited troopers and motorized attack vehicles and heavy weapons, all surging through the streets… Refuge was a place of humble wooden homes and farmers and fishermen. The most advanced piece of technology they owned was a horsedrawn plow. The Enforcers would wash through here like the sea at high tide and leave only wreckage behind in their wake.

  Especially with the new security droids Avin Blake had brought online.

  “It might help,” Jadran was saying to me, “if you would tell them more about you. Quiet and withdrawn, you are. This might be the time to let go of certain… secrets.”

  I liked listening to him talk. Everyone here in Refuge had this way of bending words like poetry but from Jadran, it made a simple conversation into something secret and private. Like it was just the two of us in the whole world.

  When I’d washed up on shore I hadn’t been in much condition to talk. Then, when I came back to the world of the living, I was in too much pain to string together coherent sentences. Plus, I was ravenously hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything at all since escaping the cargo ship. They fed me, and fixed me up, and after that I felt more like talking.

  A little.

  They were all simple, honest folks here, and my silence confused them. More than that. It worried them. I told them just enough to let them know I wasn’t telling them everything: My name was Era Rae. I was from Colony 41. I left there because I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t going back.

  Enough of the truth so they let me stay. A poor little girl of sixteen. Just barely an adult. In trouble, and needing their help. I was hurt. Sick. What good-hearted person of the post-apocalyptic world wouldn’t want to take me in?

  In Colony 41, the answer would be no one. In the years after the Event, sickness was almost always a death sentence. Disease was stamped out immediately. Anyone who might be contagious was sent to quarantine and then killed, if necessary.

  Here, they were doing everything they could to nurse me back to health.

  Possibly because I’d only told them so much. I left out all the other parts. Like, how I had been training to be an Enforcer. Like, how the Restored Society was doing experiments on people. Like, how the Enforcers ran the Colonies now and the Prelates were just puppets. Like, how the Event—the bombs that had destroyed the world—had been initiated by the Restored Society.

  Like, how I’m a clone.

  Maybe that’s the wrong word, but it doesn’t matter. The facts are still the same. I wasn’t born, I was created. I’m a scientifically crafted mix of genetic material brought together to form me. There were others at the Colony like me, too. We were supposed to be the next step in human evolution, or something. A whole generation of people that the Restored Society thought would make better human beings. Smarter. Stronger. More intelligent. Most of all, people who followed orders without question.

  Well. I asked my questions.

  I got my answers.

  Now I knew too much. And I was marked for death. No. Worse than death.

  They were going to do to me what they did to Saskia.

  It was too much to think about. My tongue was tied in knots.

  “Well,” Jadran said, slapping his palms against his knees. “In your own time, I’m sure you will tell us. I just wish that time was now, Era Rae. Your presence is making some people in Refuge nervous. The Enforcers coming down on us because you are here, is what they worry about now.”

  “So… it’s the others who want me to go.”

  He nodded. “A few.”

  I kept my eyes on him until he sighed. “Fine. I admit, more than a few. An impression on people, is what you make.”

  “Not a good one, either.”

  I shifted in the bed, and the blanket slipped away from my side. I kept it tight across my chest but still Jadran’s eyes fell to my exposed skin as he spoke. “Sometimes the impression you make is very good, Era Rae. It was for me.”

  The blanket was more than enough to cover the important bits, but I felt like he could see right through it, see the real me exposed and vulnerable. I should have enjoyed the attention. I should have liked the way he looked at me. In a way, I guess I did, and maybe having a good looking guy spend his attentions on me wouldn’t be so wrong.

  Only, my heart just wasn’t in it.

  “Jadran, you’re cute, and I really am grateful for everything you’re doing for me. I still can’t understand why you got stuck taking care of me. I’m glad it was you, really, but… there’s someone else.”

  His face fell. The disappointment was easy to read. “Well, there it is. One of the secrets you were keeping has come to the surface.” He stood up and put his hand on my shoulder one more time. It was warm, and nice. “I’ll leave you alone to get dressed. When you feel up to moving around, come and find me. I’ll be in the main square tending to the gardens.”

  “That’s a long way to walk,” I tried to complain.

  “Just yesterday, you did it. And the day before.”

  He was right, of course. I was just trying to make excuses. Someone else, I’d told him. There was someone else… only, she might actually be dead. The thought of what they had done to Saskia made my insides twist. In the end she’d helped me escape by killing Avin Blake. I doubt the Restored Society would be gentle with her when they found out.

  If she wasn’t dead, she still wouldn’t be the same Saskia I had grown up with.

  Who I’d fallen in love with, when it was too late.

  A single tear streaked down my cheek as Jadran turned away. Did he see it? Somehow I think he did. He didn’t say anything. He just hesitated at the doorway out of the storage room, for just a moment, and then walked away.

  “Jadran?” I heard myself calling after him.

  He didn’t turn around, but he did rest a hand back on the doorframe. “Yes, Era Rae?”

  “You don’t think I’d bring the Enforcers here on purpose, do you?”

  Now he turned his head to the side, looking at me from the corner of his eye. “I don’t think you would. No. That kind of person, you are not. I may not know everything about you, but I have seen enough of your heart to know that deadly is something you could never be.”

  Memories came to me unwillingly.

  My hand, flashing out from where I held it tucked in close to my body, a short strike that took the Enforcer in the solar plexus, the life force chakra, one of the weak points our training had taught us to focus on in a fight.

  In rapid succession, I struck twelve others on his body…

  That had been me doing that. I was a genetically created fighting machine. It came easy to me. I didn’t even have to try. In spite of what Jadran might think, deadly was exactly what I was.

  And that was one more secret I couldn’t tell him.

  “The time has come, Era Rae,” he said to me now, “when you have to decide for yourself. Stay here, earn your keep, become one of us. Or, move on and make your own way. What the world out there is really like, I think you already know. Cold. Harsh. Some places are still radioactive or just… gone. It is a nightmare made real.”

  “This place isn’t like that.”

  “True,” he said, with more than a little bit
of pride. “We do the best we can with what we have. But a choice to make, you still have. Become one of us, or carry your secrets with you when you leave.”

  He smiled, and then silence fell between us again.

  I studied him, there in the doorway, committing him to memory one more time. His face, his long body, his every shape. I’ve seen him with his shirt off, too, and I take that memory out to look at sometimes in the middle of the night. There were girls back at Colony 41 who would gladly jump off a boat if it meant having Jadran Rill take care of them.

  And yet here I sit with all my complications and secrets, pushing him away.

  His question is one I’ve asked myself over and over. Stay, or go? I’ve got good reasons to do both. Should I tell him, I wonder? Let him know what’s really in my heart? He might be able to help me decide.

  No. Little Era Rae, the girl who grew up in Colony 41, is gone. I have to be grown up now, and that means making grown up decisions, no matter how inviting Jadran makes his simple life here in Refuge sound. Besides, there’s no way he could know what I’m going through.

  He left me after a moment, alone with my thoughts.

  When his footsteps left the house I let the blanket drop away and stood up to stretch, feeling my muscles pull tight around scars that would become permanent. I traced the crisscross of the red lines up along my ribs. The level of care here was, well, primitive. I was used to sonic scanners, dermal strips, liquid bone graphs, that sort of stuff. Here it was sutures of thread coated in animal fat and plaster bandage wraps. At least it worked. I guess.

  I slipped my hand down over my breast, down the sculpted muscles of my torso, feeling the puckered scar tissue. It reminded me of what had been done to Saskia when Avin Blake had… had…

  The strength went out of my legs and I dropped heavily back down onto the bunk. Face in my hands, strands of my hair falling forward, I let the tears fall.

  When I’d been in the Colony, my hair had been full and long and lovely. In my escape, locks of it had been torn into uneven chunks, forcing me to trim it up around my ears to keep it even. One more thing I’d lost. It seemed so stupid to cry over something like that. It wasn’t how we were taught to act at the Academy, but I couldn’t help how I felt. I was only human, after all.