Sam Sisavath - The Isles of Elysium

“Perks of the job. One of many.”

“So what’s not to like? Free food, a steady job, and Gillian. Sounds pretty good to me.”

“And you’re not holding a grudge about what happened yesterday?”

“As long as you’re not holding a grudge about me killing three of your guys.”

Steve shrugged.

“So that’s that,” Keo said. “Am I pissed off about yesterday? Yeah, sure. But I understand why you did it. Hell, I can even respect it. It was clever, and a win-win situation for you however it ended up.”

“You could have died yesterday.”

“Same shit, different day. I could have died a thousand times in the last year, so there was nothing special about yesterday.”

Steve chuckled before snatching up Tobias’s ring and spinning it on the desktop again. He didn’t say anything and just watched the jewelry go round and round in front of him.

Keo waited.

Had he been convincing enough? The Keo from one year ago wouldn’t have had any problems selling Steve on what he’d just said, because it would have been the truth. But this version of him, this Keo who had voluntarily stayed on Song Island even when he didn’t have to, then stayed even longer on the Trident , was less predictable.

Finally, Steve picked up the ring and put it away before standing up. “Come on.”

“Where we going?”

“It’s a surprise. You like surprises, don’t you?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No,” Steve grinned back.

*

There was a plain white golf cart waiting for them outside Marina 1 that wasn’t there when they first entered the building. It had solar panels on top and at the back and looked pretty well-used.

Steve climbed behind the steering wheel. “Hop in.”

Keo walked around and slid in the front passenger seat. There were two seats in the back and more space where the golf bags were supposed to go. Dry mud caked the floors and fell off as Steve started the electric engine and maneuvered them through the marina, then toward the exit Keo had only seen but never gone past.

“How many of these do you have?” Keo asked.

“Three,” Steve said. “Solar panels don’t charge for shit, and it takes weeks just to get enough juice to power the batteries, so I usually end up having to switch between them.”

“Sounds like a tough life.”

Steve grinned. “Everyone’s gotta make sacrifices for the greater good.”

“I hear that. So, you wanna tell me where we’re going?”

“Relax. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. The only reason you’re still alive is because you’re right. I can use a man with your particular set of skills. You’re going to be my personal Bryan Mills.”

“Who?”

“Liam Neeson’s character in Taken .”

“I don’t watch a lot of movies.”

“You’re missing out. In the film, Neeson plays a badass ex-CIA agent with ‘a deadly set of skills.’ Some guys stole his daughter and he has to get her back. Never seen it?”

“Like I said, I’m not much of a cinephile.”

“We can change that. I have stacks of Blu-rays at my house. Just the first two Taken , though.”

“How many were there?”

“Three.”

“They took his daughter in all three parts?”

“They took his wife in the second part.”

“What about the third?”

“I don’t remember. It was kind of a shit movie. Anyway, you like classics?”

“Sure, why not.”

“One of these days you should come around and we’ll have a movie night.”

“You have electricity at your house?”

“Generator.”

“I thought the whole point of living in this place was to go back to our roots. Off the grid.”

Steve chuckled. “You believe everything you hear?”

“Apparently so.”

“You’ll learn, kid.”

The golf cart hummed toward the entrance, where two soldiers rushed out of a booth to manually raise a large metal slab blocking their path. They drove past the gate, and Keo finally saw what was on the other side.

He wished he could have been surprised, but he had heard the stories and expected something like it. Even so, he was still stunned by the scope of what he saw as they drove up a road flanked by wide fields to both sides of them.

T18 had a thriving farming community, with acres and acres of crops spread out as far as he could see, hundreds of people of all shapes and sizes moving among them. There was only the tree lines to his right and the river to his left to stop the rows of wheat swaying in the slight breeze. They drove past more fields covered in stalks of corn, along with dozens upon dozens of rows of plants, fruits, and red and green and yellow things he didn’t even know the names for.

The closest Keo had ever been to a farm was in the outskirts of Colombia a few years back, when he’d had to sleep inside a sugarcane field while waiting to kill someone. He’d grown up in San Diego, and before that on military bases around the world. As an adult, he’d spent almost all of his life in cities, working in jungles made of concrete instead of dirt. He couldn’t have grown a tomato if someone put a gun to his head.

The cart was moving slow enough that Keo was able to get a good look at his surroundings, and he wondered how long they had been at this. He could only spot a few soldiers, most of them on horseback moving among the fields. They were less guards and more security, which made sense because he wasn’t looking at prisoners forced to garden under a warm sun; these people wanted to be here, just like the women at the riverbanks.

“What are you growing?” he asked Steve.

“Everything,” Steve said. “Wheat, corn, vegetables, fruits… When was the last time you had fresh corn?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Or tomatoes? Potatoes? What about fresh from-the-oven bread? This is just one of our agricultural fields. We have two more on the other side of the subdivisions.”

“It’s…impressive,” Keo said, and realized that he actually meant it.

“This is what Tobias was trying to save them from. Now do you understand why he’d never have won? But that was something he could never understand. I tried to explain to him. I really did, but he just couldn’t fathom why this is a better life than running around out there scavenging and hiding from the crawlers. That’s no way to live.”

“You’re right. That is no way to live.”

“I’m glad you agree,” Steve said, and reached over and slapped Keo on the shoulder. “My brother Jack’s a good second-in-command, but he’s a little gimpy right now.”

“You offering me a job?”

“Why, you interested?”

“I’m not opposed to it.”

“That’s what I wanna hear. But not just yet. You did me a favor removing Tobias, but let’s wait and see how you feel tomorrow. After all, it’s probably going to be the biggest decision of your life.”

They drove on past the fields, which seemed to keep going and going around him. And to think this was just one of three in T18. Keo didn’t even want to imagine how much bigger the other two were, or how much manpower was working them.

“Around 4,000,” Jack had told him when he asked about the population of T18.

Eventually they passed the fields, and Steve turned into a subdivision blocked by a tall rolling gate. It had a sign across the front that once read “Wilmont Heights” but had since been covered up with a banner now reading, “T18A1.”

Like the marina entrance, this one also had a guard booth. A soldier rushed out as they approached and pushed the gate open for them. Steve drove through.

“There are five subdivisions,” Steve said. “One’s for military personnel only, and the rest are for everyone else.”