Rise of the Red Hand by Olivia Chadha

Author:Olivia Chadha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Erewhon Books

21 //

Riz-Ali

It’s like I’m already dead.

She won’t tell me her name or even look at me. I’ve read about this technique in a military studies course at school. I know what she’s doing. The less she cares, the more she ignores my humanity, the easier it will be to do whatever bad thing she’s going to do: attach a bomb to my back and send me into Central. Or like Jai said, flay me.

I’m lying on the hard ground of a broken building, all twisted metal and broken glass. It’s night. The small bonfire lights her face like the moon and I see her scars, her worry. She’s a soldier of some kind. Focusing on whatever she’s doing. There are two elders. Their code names tell me nothing. Though she is young, she seems like their leader. Or at least, she’s the bossiest. Curious.

Or maybe I’m not even here. It’s hard to get a lock on reality. My mind is a flurry of my past life in Central and with Solace, and in this present one. And sometimes it’s difficult to tell which one is which. The one thing I see through the haze and echoes of voices and thoughts, and sickness is Kanwar Uncle sitting on the edge of my bed the last time I saw him, as my heavy eyes fight sleep. I want to leap up from my bed to tell him to not go to work the next day. To force him to stay in our house. Maybe if I was sick or something that would convince him to avoid his own death. Anything. Everything. But I watch as he leaves my room to die in a lab explosion the next day.

I don’t want to be powerless anymore.

The next moment I wake, the sun is about to rise and they are taking me along the streets to what looks like a dark market: Thin people have strange items for sale set out on unsanitary plastic tarps for purchase. Baskets of old tech piled high. I count one, two, three sets of ladders, five food vendors and then I stop counting. Who wants that obsolete junk, I don’t know. When they see us, most cover their things, turn their backs. A few give nods and hand the girl something. I don’t know what scares them, me or my kidnappers. Or maybe it’s both. It might be that my wrists are tied.

“Please,” I say over and over to their silence.

“Shut up and be thankful you’re breathing. We could cover your head, you know,” the girl says.

We go through a dizzying maze of alleyways. I almost think they are trying to confuse me. But they keep on.

The elderly woman says, “It’s up there.” She reads info on her wrist reader. “Two lefts and a right.”

“Finally,” the girl says.

I think we are in the Liminal Area on the edge of Central. Where I got snatched by the goonda crew of street kids. I want to scratch at my neural-synch; it feels like it’s growing in my head, spreading out its tentacles.

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