Mark Newton: City of Ruin

'I need to know where the Night Guard have been sent,' she demanded.

'I'm afraid, miss, that's classified information.' He nonchalantly turned to continue on his way, but Beami grabbed his arm.

'Tell me where the fuck they are, all right, or I'll hit you with an energy so hard…'

The soldier snatched his arm back, laughing, so she slapped him with a Tong relic, a metal device that clamped itself into his arm like teeth and brought him gasping to his knees. 'Tell me where they were sent.'

As he scrambled about on the floor, half trying to maintain his dignity, half convinced he would die, he spat out the location of the warehouse and what they were supposed to be doing there.

'So much for classified information,' she sneered. 'Thought you guys were trained to withstand torture?'

After she removed the device he said nothing, merely rubbed at his arm and breathed heavily through his nose. His mouth was now clenched tight, but it was too late. She had the information and was on her way to wake up Bellis.

*

With their bags of relics slung across their shoulders, the two women headed back across the warscape. In daylight now, the ruins were clear to see and ordinary and depressing. Beami's heart sank when she realized just how much damage her city had suffered because of the war – war with some enemy she knew nothing about, a conflict that seemed so distant from her previous existence. Her life had little context in all of this.

In the Imperial zones, the citizens did not seem willing to leave. Babies shrieked from doorless buildings and distraught women sobbed openly in the streets. In one plaza, at a table propped up against a whitewashed wall, two old tramps still stubbornly played their game of dice. This was their home, after all, this was all that many people had ever known – their reluctance to abandon it was understandable.

In the contended zones, corpses lay in the snow, in decrepit armour, amid isolated limbs, bloodstains and rotting flesh, and the streets reeked with the taint of death. Where windows once glimmered, black holes seemed like gateways into hell. Red mist was sprayed across the banks of snow, where people had been slaughtered. Without the street cleaners' regular attention, there was little to stop the weather from reclaiming the city, and it almost seemed the kindest thing to do would be to bury Villiren, to let it suffocate under the elements.

A warehouse, that's what she'd been told. With street locations, and grid references discovered from a map, Beami and Bellis crept past the blockades, using relics to bend light around them, to create invisible stairways over ruined buildings. Every trick they knew of, they used. Every step was weighed down with a sense of dread that Lupus had been crushed.

At one point, she defended them both against a couple of Okun who skittered across the rubble so clumsily that she wondered how they could have inflicted so much damage in the first place. She employed whips made of light that fizzed and sizzled across the Okuns' shells, flinging the vile creatures across the desolate street.

'Oh, well done,' Bellis trilled. 'Very good use of energy.'

*

The two women had been walking for miles now, their feet aching and legs growing weary. Fast-moving clouds brought sleet but nothing worse. They'd been moving slowly for at least three hours now, taking occasional stops to sip from bottles of water.

Beami checked the map again, but the further west they moved, the more meaningless the lines on it became. Former streets had reorganized themselves into intermittent chaos. In places navigation became guesswork. Luckily Bellis had been studying the topography of this city for years, and soon felt confident that they were heading in the right direction.

An hour later, they were approaching the area where the warehouse should have been.

'Where is it then?' Beami asked. 'I can't see anything that looks likely.'

'It's just possible that our cephalopod friend managed to destabilize some of the buildings.'

'You mean your fucking squid flattened the warehouse,' Beami snapped.

'Oi!' The voice echoed across the street. A unit of rumel – citizen militia by the look of them – came trotting across the snow-strewn rubble. Two black-skinned men and a brown-skin arrived, a troop behind them, all equipped with cheap armour and swords. 'Ladies, get off the street.' They ushered the women behind a broken terrace of housing, then explained to them who they were and what they were doing.

Beami turned to the Rumel Irregulars. 'What happened to the Night Guard?'

There was an awkwardness to their expressions, a tentativeness about their manner, and Beami had her worst fears confirmed. One of the citizen-soldiers, a young brown-skin by the name of Bags, explained, 'Roof came down, miss, when they were all in there. They'd been clearing the place of civilian hostages – over a thousand – then fuck-knows-what comes flying across the city and heads out to sea. Wasn't the thing itself what knocked it down, more the rumblings, if you see what I mean.'

Swallowing, Beami suppressed her concerns for the moment. 'I need to go inside there.'

'Impossible, miss. We've been looking all around there, but there ain't nothing but rubble.'

'They're Night Guard. They're enhanced soldiers. The collapse may not have killed them all. That means some of our best soldiers might still be alive.'

There followed a swift discussion amongst the Irregulars, whispers and nods. Bags then said, 'We can lead you up to the building, and pick off any of the enemy that are still around while you go in.'

*

As they approached the wreckage of the warehouse, her heart sank. How could even Lupus survive this? Rubble was strewn far and wide, where the structure once stood, chunks of masonry of varying sizes, brick and slate and tile scattered haphazardly. Jagged knuckles of stone jutted skyward.

In this corpse of a building, its broken pieces scattered over hundreds of yards, where could they possibly begin?

'Watch out for any Okun, miss,' Bags called out as his troop disappeared behind the ruins.

'Let's get started,' Beami sighed.

She first deployed the Brotna, intending to break up all the stone around them so they could more easily scour the site. She unravelled the tendrils of the large metal cone, then aimed the top of it across the first cluster of rock. As she charged the device, a humming sound could be heard, before a bolt of energy disintegrated the entire mass. Bellis assisted with some extraordinary fork-like implement that expanded to lever up larger segments.

Presently, citizen soldiers began to gather and, once they realized what they were doing, even offered assistance. Where they came from, Beami didn't know, but soon other tools miraculously appeared: lengths of rope, spades, crude pulleys and even a bucket of biolumes for searching under the darker crevices. An uplifting mood descended on the scene: these people wanted to see their best soldiers get out alive, a repayment for their efforts in coming to this city to defend them.

An hour passed. Then another.

Finally, Beami led the way into the centre of the now revealed structure. Everywhere they found broken bodies, and she sighed with relief each time she realized one was not clothed in the familiar black uniform.

*

Everyone took a break, apart from Beami. Exhausted though she was, her body seemed beyond pain. Snow came and went, a brisk wind blew dust into her eyes and mouth. She merely wiped it away and continued. There was only one thing she could focus on. She shamed everyone into working almost as hard.

Dusk approached and Bellis came to tug at Beami's sleeve. 'My dear, you've got to get some rest.'

'Not yet, there's still light enough. Then there's the biolumes to help. You go back to the Citadel if you want to.'