Evan Currie - Heirs of Empire

Surviving the experience of having one of them annoyed with you was enough to shave a few years off your life all the same.

A few days had passed since the refugees had moved into the area, and for the Scourwind twins, they’d not been pleasant ones. It was easy to slip into the new mass of people, hiding their identities and listening to what had happened. Lydia, in particular, was horrified by what they’d learned.

In the aftermath of the coup at the palace it seemed that several centuries of men had openly opposed the new regime, but they were seen as rebels rather than loyalists. The general consensus among the populace, so far as they could tell, was that a Scourwind had survived the attack … though no one could say which it was.

So the men, women, and children of the refugee band all believed that they were on the run from the retributive attacks by the empire, on command of a Scourwind.

As bad as that was, however, what Lydia was seeing firsthand was almost worse.

“These people are starving,” she hissed to Brennan as they toured the camp. “They don’t even have enough water for everyone.”

Brennan nodded. “I don’t understand why. There’s a garrison not three miles from here. Maybe they don’t have enough food, but the moisture condensers should keep a legion served indefinitely.”

Lydia was quiet for a moment before she spoke. “I think the empire recalled the garrison. When I broke in, there was barely a token guard.”

Brennan shot her an amused glance. After he’d gotten over the fact that she’d put herself at risk when she’d broken into the garrison for rations, he’d asked her about how she did it. Lydia had told a somewhat more dashing story than “there was barely a token guard.”

“All right,” he said. “What can we do about it?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “We can’t exactly tell anyone who we are—”

“No, we can’t ,” he cut her off, putting his foot down.

Brennan was willing to entertain a lot of his sister’s ideas, but he drew the line well before that .

Lydia just nodded, showing no notice of his tone. “And without our name for credibility, I don’t think anyone is going to listen to a couple of teenagers.”

Brennan shrugged but didn’t argue. She wasn’t wrong, though he’d heard enough rumors to wonder just how much credibility the Scourwind name would really hold. “For the record, I vote we take my skimmer and find someplace quieter.”

That caught her attention, but a glare was the only answer he got.

“All right”—he sighed—“then all I can say is what we were always taught, Lyd. If you’ve got a huge problem, break it down into pieces and solve them one by one.”

Lydia nodded slowly. “Right. We can’t solve it all at once, so let’s deal with what we can … Come on, I want to look around a bit more.”

Both twins had learned from a young age how to fade into crowds, to appear as if they belonged but not like they were particularly important. It might seem an odd skill set for a pair of pampered kids from the emperor’s blood, but neither of them had been particularly interested in wandering around with bodyguards surrounding them at all times, so they’d had to figure out a way to keep said guards from finding them after they’d ditched their escorts.

So the twins inconspicuously made their way through the refugee camp, watching everything with eyes glittering.

Men, women, and children were collapsed along the side of the makeshift roadway, most clearly injured or exhausted beyond reasonable measures. Neither of the twins had medical training, but they could recognize blaster burns and shrapnel injuries, the sort of thing you only saw in a real fight.

They’d both seen their fair share of those, which often struck people not close to the Imperial Court as surprising. Both of the twins had survived several assassination attempts in their young lives, and though most seemed to believe that the attempts were more likely warnings than real tries to see them in their pyres, it didn’t lesson the injuries to those who had been sworn to protect them.

Death was an old friend to any Scourwind, but normally it came quickly on the beam of a blaster, not from the slow descent into starvation.

A scuffle ahead of them caught their attention, and they made their way quietly toward it. A single young boy, about their age, was standing over a weak figure of a girl. Five others surrounded them, trying to steal the girl’s blanket and a small bag that the twins presumed contained what little she still owned. The boy they’d first noticed was fighting viciously, but it was clear he wasn’t going to last much longer.

Around them a few others looked on, some with concern and some with varying degrees of disinterest. No one had the energy or, apparently, the desire to intervene, much to Brennan’s disgust.

“Bren …” Lydia softly spoke up.

“I’ve got lead. Follow me in and watch for stragglers.”

Lydia nodded firmly. The two stepped up their pace and angled their approach to close in on the attackers’ uncovered flank.

Under other circumstances, Kayle would have been disappointed in them for getting into a fight, Lydia reflected as Brennan launched his attack. He snap kicked the knee of the closest attacker, then followed through with a palm thrust to the shoulder that sent the man hard to the ground. There was a cracking sound when his knee met dirt, probably a dislocation, thought Lydia as she stayed close to Brennan but let him take the offensive actions.

They’d been trained in the basics of fighting most of their lives, but Kayle had always told them to never call attention to themselves. Enough attention rained down on them as a matter of course; anything else was superfluous and could actually give their enemies information that could be used against them.

Before the others could react, Brennan swept the next man with enough force to take him off his feet, then dove at two others and got them in a headlock as he drove them to the ground with all his weight. Lydia casually snap kicked the second target as he struggled to get up, putting his lights out with the edge of her foot. She stayed focused on the last attacker, who was rushing in to help his two compatriots as they struggled on the ground with Brennan.

She met him with a heel kick, launched straight out from her core and braced directly to the ground via her other leg. The air rushed out of his lungs and he collapsed, curling up on the ground and only moving to gasp and moan.

Lydia looked around and then down to where Brennan was still struggling with his last pair. “You good?”

“Sure,” Brennan gasped as he winked at her. “The hard part is not snapping their necks when they struggle, Lyd, you know that.”

Lydia smirked very slightly as the duo went very still at those words, and she shook her head slightly. Brennan was always a better master of wordplay and psychological games in fights than she was. Normally he used it to drive his minders mad, of course.

She turned her attention to the two they’d stepped in to help, appraising them carefully. They were both clearly hungry, like everyone else, but their dehydration was obvious. Water wasn’t exactly hard to come by in the empire, but it wasn’t precisely easy to get either. Rains habitually swept most regions, even the deserts, but there were few natural sources available.

Water that fell from the skies just … vanished into the ground.

No one really knew where it went, and people had dug hundreds of feet down without finding any hint of moisture. In fact, past a couple hundred feet it was like there had never been any water.

Unfortunately that meant that there were few streams, lakes, and the like, and if you didn’t have a condenser or a good aquifer available, then you could easily go thirsty waiting for the rains. Imperial garrisons were all well equipped, of course, and every town had both emergency supplies and a reasonably outfitted aquifer for their needs. But the closest town to their current location was far too small for the number of people present, and the garrison had been locked down with only a token number of low-ranking guards remaining, who were unlikely to do anything without orders.