Dragon (A Histories of Purga Novel)

“Let’s go!” Darvian yelled.

The last of the refugees were just starting to head down the tunnel. Lights built with nanos hovered along the ceiling, lighting the way. When everyone was safely on their way, Darvian did one last check to make sure there weren’t any stragglers. When he was sure every last person was in the tunnel, he started down it.

His heart thudded painfully and the only thing he could think of was Fiona. He needed to see her. He needed to reassure himself that she was still alive.

Without really meaning to, he started running. He didn’t care about the other people anymore. He’d done his job and saw them all safely inside. Several people were bogged down with large sacks full of whatever non-perishable foods they were able to gather. Others were carrying loads of jugs filled with water. The underground trek to the sea would be a very long one, especially considering that there was a lot of tunneling left to do.

He slipped by the throngs of people, ignoring the dazed looks of shock on almost everyone’s face. Most of the people couldn’t really come to grips with what was going on and a lot of them had watched loved ones get brutally killed in the initial attack.

A lot of people were walking in a slow, nearly dream-like state and Darvian was forced to yell at them to make them move faster. He instantly regretted it because the shouting caused them to jump in fear and several of the smaller children to cry. He closed his mouth, vowing not to do that again and kept going.

Eventually he came to the hole that led to the chamber. More hovering nano-lights lit up the gloomy place, but a lot was still dark and shadowed. He dropped down into it, landing on one knee and came back to his feet quickly, scanning the faces around him. He saw one of Lieutenant Pillar’s soldiers disappear through a door and into a hallway on his right. To the left, the trickle of refugees were heading down a new tunnel Quel was excavating.

He walked over to where the soldier had disappeared down the hallway. He went inside and found the surviving soldiers huddled at a door on the opposite end. More nano-lights showed Darvian that Pillar was among them.

And then, he saw Fiona.

Relief flooded through him, nearly powerful enough to send him weakly to the floor, but instead he forced himself to run. His footsteps were shockingly loud in the confined space and the soldiers all turned to look at him, including Fiona. She looked about to ask a question, but Darvian got there first. He grabbed her around the small of her back and pulled her into a fierce kiss, not wanting to let her go. He could feel her stiffen in surprise at first, her body hard and rigid, and then she just seemed to melt. She returned his kiss with heated passion for several seconds before he broke it off.

“I thought you were gone,” he whispered fiercely to her.

“I’m not that easy to kill,” she replied, smiling. Then she yanked him to her and kissed him again. After a second, she pulled away from him and smacked him hard across the face. He let out a gasp. “That’s for dumping me,” she paused, and then smiled warmly, “idiot.”

He laughed. He couldn’t help it.

“What are you guys doing down here?” he asked. “The tunnel’s that way.”

She nodded at the cracked screen over the door. It was dark now.

“That showed a picture of King Rowan before it went dark. We’ve been trying to force the door open but it’s too strong,” she replied.

“It’s pure cytium and at least six inches thick. That’s all we know from the outside,” Pillar commented. “We’ve tried everything, but the cytium is impenetrable.”

“We have to get the King out. He can rally whoever’s left and try to fight back,” Darvian said, looking at each of them.

“We know. What do you think we’ve been doing down here all this time, twiddling our thumbs?” another soldier asked, heavy on the sarcasm. He was older and clutching his right arm. Strands of graying hair hung in his face but the corners of his eyes were crinkled with humor.

“Play nice, Konor,” a dark-skinned woman said.

“You know me, Yvette. I’m as harmless as a newborn baby.” He smirked again.

“Enough,” Pillar commanded, and the grin slid off Konor’s face. He stood a little straighter. Pillar turned to Darvian. “I’m not above taking help from whatever source is offered. Do you know a way that we can get inside?”

Darvian didn’t. Cytium, being the strongest metal known on Purga, was notorious for being blaster-proof, bomb-proof, drill-proof. About everything-proof. He searched the door, noticing faint black marks from where they had tried to get in previously. Despite the Lieutenant’s efforts, however, there was not a scratch anywhere. Or a dent. Except for the black smudges, it was flawless.

And this time, there was no keypad to hack. The door must have a secret mechanism for opening it.

“You’ll never force the door,” Darvian said, looking away from it and to the wall it had been installed into it. He ran his hand along its length, feeling the cool, slightly pebbled, texture of the cement. “But the walls are a different matter.”

“No, that won’t work either,” Fiona said. “It might be cement but there’s a lattice of cytium to reinforce it. My father told me that it’s standard for any prison.”

“That’s true, but the lattice never reaches the ceiling,” Darvian explained. “The engineers that build the prisons leave about a foot and a half where it’s just plain old cement to try and conserve the metal.”

“How do you know that?” a blonde woman asked, skeptical.

“I happened to overhear King Rowan in a conversation with one of his advisors. The King was the one to suggest it, actually,” Darvian replied. “He…uh…didn’t exactly know I was there.”

He remembered that day. He’d been playing hide and seek with Rone and had crept into the King’s study. He’d cloaked himself and waited there. The door opened at one point and the King and one of his higher-ranking advisors came inside. He’d been too scared to show himself and had accidentally overheard a lot, including the information about the cytium reinforced walls in the prison.

“Are you sure this wall has that weak point?” Pillar asked.

Darvian shrugged. “Not sure, but it’s worth a try, don’t you think?”

They all agreed. It was definitely worth it.

Pillar ordered everyone to step back. The blonde soldier, Mera, and the dark-skinned soldier, Yvette, left the hallway and went back into the chamber. They took positions underneath the hole in the ceiling to make sure refugees kept being herded into the tunnel Quel and his engineers were digging. Pillar, Fiona, and Konor created regulation blasters. Darvian supposed Fiona had gotten the blueprint for hers off one of the men she’d commanded back in Raleigh because it was a design their soldiers favored. The barrel was extended slightly longer than normal and it was slimmer and more compact than normal.

Darvian crouched behind Fiona, unable to help with this part. Being a civilian, the law prohibited him the use of any lethal weapons. Not even Roanoke’s police force was able to use blasters. Instead, they all carried high-grade tasers that could drop a man unconscious in about three seconds.

He watched as the three of them took careful aim, targeting the same spot, and fired. The red light of the blasters’ rays lit up the dark hallway before they smashed into the cement just below its ceiling. They kept the pressure on that spot for several minutes before they released the triggers. The after image of the blaster fire was burned on his retinas and he saw three bright, pinkish lines hovering in the air before him. He blinked several times before the effect faded.

Fiona let her gun burst back into a cloud of nanos that were sucked into her mechpaks. Then she took Darvian’s hand in her own and walked with him to the wall. Before they even got close, she laughed brightly and hugged him.

“You did it!” she exclaimed.

He smiled back at her, looked at the wall, and saw a hole about three and a half feet in diameter near the top.

“Let’s go get the King,” he told her.

****

Darvian and the others looked up at the hole Pillar, Fiona, and Konor created. The prospect of getting someone up there was somewhat uncertain. The height from the floor to the ceiling was nearly fifteen feet, which made the bottom of the hole about twelve feet from the floor. They all stood under it as smoke continued to drift.

“I think I should be the one to go in there,” Darvian said, automatically. “He knows and trusts me. Also, if he’s been tortured, which he probably has, then a familiar face might be easier on him.”

They all agreed.

Pillar and Darvian got closer to the wall and the Lieutenant laced his hands together. Darvian put a foot into it and before he knew it, he was lifted easily into the air. His balance wavered slightly and for a moment he thought he was going to fall. Thankfully, he managed to steady himself and avoided that particular embarrassment.

He reached up to the hole, but his fingers didn’t quite graze the bottom of it.

“I can’t reach. Lift me higher.”

Pillar let out a grunt and Darvian found himself a couple inches higher.

“That’s as high as I can go,” Pillar yelled at him.

“Thanks,” Darvian said.

He was closer. The couple of inches Pillar was able to give helped Darvian get a firmer hold on the edge of the hole. With a lot of scrabbling, clawing, and cursing, he was able to get into it.

The wall itself was pretty thick. He crawled forward two, maybe two and a half feet, until he could see inside the room. He could feel his feet hanging out of the other end of the hole.

He squirmed and wriggled a little more. Then he spotted the King.

The once proud, sturdy man was slumped in a metal chair facing a blank wall. There was nothing else. As Darvian moved closer, the wall suddenly flickered to life and a holo-video started playing. Darvian watched in horrified fixation as the Prince, the King’s only heir, was brutally killed or atleast that’s what they thought. When the camera zoomed in on Rone in the sand dune, apparently not breathing, the screen shut off. A second or two later, it started over.

Disgusted, Darvian slipped all the way through the hole and dangled himself from the edge of it so that the entire length of his body was as far down the wall as possible. Then he let go. Despite his six foot one stature, the drop was still considerable. The shock of the impact jarred him and his foot twisted painfully.

He limped over to the King.

“King Rowan?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper. He ignored the video playing on the wall and instead focused on the tortured monarch. When he didn’t answer, Darvian stepped in front of the man, blocking his view. He was shocked to see the King looking haggard and frail. He’d always been a man of strength. Of vitality. Of life. Now he looked like less than a man. He looked like someone who’s will to live had been removed, forcefully, and the only thing he wanted was death.

“King Rowan?” Darvian asked again.

When the man still didn’t answer, Darvian hunched down so that his face was directly in the King’s line of sight. There was a flicker of recognition deep in his pain-filled blue eye. He even stirred slightly.

“King Rowan? You have to come back. You have to come back to us. Your people need you,” Darvian said with conviction.

He could see more of the King coming back to himself, but he still wouldn’t talk or even acknowledge his son’s best friend. Darvian thought he might be able to rouse the man, if he could convince him that the video was a lie.

“They showed you this film? They showed it to you over and over again, right? You had to watch Rone die again and again, but I can tell you, my King, that it’s a lie. Rone still lives and he is fighting even now. He is out there, trying to stop this and he needs to know that you are still here. He needs to know that you will lead our people to safety,” Darvian told him, his voice genuine and strong. “He came down here to try and save you.”

The King slowly blinked his eye. A single tear fell down the man’s bruised cheek. He seemed to focus again on the world around him. He looked at Darvian and he was relieved to see that the man he’d known his whole life was almost whole again.

“A lie?” King Rowan asked, his voice a throaty whisper.

“Yes,” Darvian replied with a broad grin. “Yes it is. He was attacked and shot out of the sky, but he’s still alive.”

“H-how?” the King asked, not daring to believe. His voice was still a throaty-whisper and he gulped frequently, trying to ease the pain in his damaged vocal cords. “I watched it. Th-they…had a camera. He…he wasn’t…breathing.”

“I know how it looks, Your Highness. He must’ve stopped breathing for a second or two, but he wasn’t dead. I came here with him to help find you and free the rest of our people. He told me everything that happened. He told me they shot him down when he was flying over the desert. He told me that a Terraquois girl found him and saved his life. They couldn’t save his leg, though. It was too damaged. They had to amputate it and now he has a prosthetic.”

It was that last statement that finally seemed to convince the King that Darvian wasn’t playing some kind of trick. That he wasn’t somehow being made to lie to him so that they could hurt him again with the fact that his son was still dead.

But still, he was cautious.

“If…you are lying,” he gulped again, his face twisting into a grimace of pain. “I will…kill you.”

“That’s won’t be a problem,” Darvian insisted.

The King nodded tiredly and let Darvian try to get him out. Rowan tried to warn him about the electricity coursing through the chair, but it seemed the power to it had gone out. Nothing happened when Darvian tampered with it.

It took a few moments but he finally managed to break open all the restraints holding the King to the chair.

Rowan weakly got up. His legs, however, were too feeble and he nearly crashed to the floor. He’d spent over two weeks tied down to that chair.

Darvian rushed to him and helped him up. He held him, barely, and started walking him over to the door. It was obvious to him that the King was too weak to try and climb up through the hole, so their only option was to try and force the door open from their side.

They got to it and Darvian glanced around but there was no keypad on this side either.

“We need to get the door open. Can you do it?” he asked.

King Rowan’s eyes were a little glazed, but he nodded his head yes. He laid his hand on the door in the exact middle. There was a hissing sound and then the door popped open.

“I guess Wilhelm forgot to disengage my override signature,” he said quietly and then his eyes rolled up in his head and he slumped forward, unconscious.

Pillar and Fiona were there to catch him. They laid him gently on the ground.

“Good work,” Pillar said.

“Thank you,” Darvian responded, glad that it was over and glad that they found their King. He hoped his presence would be enough to save them all.

Pillar stood back up after checking over the King. The tunnel was empty and eerily quiet. All the refugees escaped down the new tunnel at the other end. That entire section of the wall, apparently, hadn’t been reinforced with cytium. Considering there were no cells over there, the engineers must’ve felt that the extra precaution wasn’t needed.

“We need a hover sled,” Pillar said.

Mera skimmed her blueprints and a second later one appeared. They gently placed the King on it.

“Is he going to be all right? He doesn’t look good,” Fiona whispered, afraid to even say it any louder, as if by voicing her concerns it would force everyone to really consider that their King might not make it. Afraid, she grabbed Darvian’s hand and squeezed it tightly.

“I don’t know, but we can’t stay here any longer,” Pillar said. “Let’s move.”

With that, they followed the other refugees down the new tunnel.