Heir Ascendant by Matthew S. Cox

Author:Matthew S. Cox [Cox, Matthew S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Curiosity Quills Press
Published: 2017-10-04T06:00:00+00:00

apid-fire Chinese shouted in a woman’s voice startled Maya awake. The tirade flowed far too fast for her to make sense of it, though she did pick out the word for ‘idiot’ a few times. She sat up and tried to stretch, an uncomfortable prospect at best in a corrugated metal pipe. Her legs hurt from so much walking, her chest ached from worry and guilt, and her throat felt as though it had turned into cotton overnight.

She crawled to the end of the tunnel and tried to coax any amount of moisture into her mouth. The distant argument raged on while she regarded herself in the surface of a muddy brown puddle. Maya touched the water; ripples broke the illusion where the sky reflected as a strip of bright grey glass next to her face. That she felt no urge to add to the puddle worried her.

I haven’t had anything to drink in two days.

The shouting petered out to a few quick snapped remarks. Maya emerged from the pipe and stretched a leg to step over the mud. She guessed the time at close to noon with a threatening, overcast sky. People tended to stay inside when it rained out of fear of Fade, though she’d gotten inoculated soon after birth―unless Vanessa lied about that too―but it seemed unlikely. The vac shot cost Ascendant about ten dollars to make, and Maya had been valuable. Maybe.

She tried to swallow the cotton in her mouth, half considering attempting to drink the muck. Disgust overpowered desperation, and she walked away, navigating a patch of rough weeds to the far side of the ditch. She climbed the bank, pausing at the top to peer between strands of wild grass at a collection of wheeled dwellings. A portable town made of four white semi-trailers and a pea-green house trailer sat in the shadow of a distant industrial complex.

A short Asian woman with glossy, tight black pants, heeled boots, and a long-sleeved net shirt that didn’t do much to conceal her breasts paced back and forth under an orange awning on the side of the largest trailer. Her black bob cut flared out each time she turned with the sharp twist of a soldier. Dark-blue earrings, wire mesh in the shape of three-dimensional stars, seemed about to fly off. The woman muttered to herself in Chinese while drumming her fingers on a boxy machine pistol hung on a strap over her shoulder.

Maya gathered her courage and pulled herself up out of the ditch. She approached the angry woman and stopped about ten feet away. “Excuse me. Can I please have some water?”

The woman halted, blinking at her as though she’d spoken an alien dialect.

She tried to think back to the handful of Chinese language e-learns she’d dabbled with. “Gěi wǒ shuǐ? Please? I haven’t had anything to drink for days.” Maya twisted her toes in the dirt and added a needy whine.

The woman cringed. “Stick to English. Where did you come from? Who are you working for?”

“I live in Block Thirteen.

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