She didn’t mean the destruction of the city; that was an ending that she could have written herself, in all honesty. No, what Simone was perplexed by was the fact that somehow she’d wound up as the person the survivors of that mess now looked to.
She had spent a good portion of her life fighting—sometimes she’d even been the one in command—but one thing she had long avoided was any hint of responsibility over the denizens of the city or any other non-fighting group of people. Fighters were people she could understand. For all that she, herself, farmed…Simone did not understand farmers. She’d been known to sell and trade a thing or two in her day, but she would never assume to understand the thinking of a trader or a shop owner. The only other group of people she had ever understood in her life were children, which, given the propensity of your average warrior to bouts of childishness, made sense to her.
Now she found herself leading a column of traumatized, stricken survivors along the coast to the south of the city…the remains of the city…and all she could think about were the last two children she’d been entrusted with.
Simone hadn’t really known Elan well, or at all really. The girl had promise, Simone could see that, but she was in the early stages of trauma. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen it in a child, and the fates willing, Simone hoped it wouldn’t be the last…because she was realist enough to know that the only way she would not see it again is if she were dead…or all the children were.
Caleb, though, had been with her for years. She’d brought him up from the age of eight or maybe nine. He wasn’t the first orphan she’d taken in, but he’d been with her longer than most. She hoped Kaern was right, that Elan was alive and somehow Caleb was with her, but now she found herself doing what she had always done in her life.
Moving on.
“Simone.” One of the former guardsmen crossed over to her. “People are getting tired.”
“Already?” Simone asked scornfully. “The sun will be up soon. We don’t stop until we reach the river, and even then only long enough to drink and fill the skins.”
He nodded nervously. “I…Simone, I don’t know if they’ll make it.”
“We have an army of demons at our backs,” she said, glaring. “They walk until they drop. If no one is willing to pick them up, then they stay where they drop. Pass that along. We don’t stop until the river.”
He nodded, a little fearfully, and rushed off to relay the message.
Simone turned away, hiding her expression. This was not the time for them to get a hint of softness from her. They had to keep moving, or they would die. If she had to beat them to keep them on their feet, that was what she would do. If they hated her for it, so be it. At least they would be alive to hate.
She glanced at the position of the stars above them, then at the gleam showing on the horizon. The sun would be up soon, and they were hours from the river. Once the heat of the sun began to beat down, it would get worse. Much worse. With all that water on one side of them, none of it fit to drink, and the badlands on the other, Simone was sure of thing…
The desert will claim some of them before the demons get a chance.
*****
Elan and Caleb stepped off the Gate platform as the after-flash of their arrival faded and examined their surroundings.
Blood trails marred the temple floors. Spatter decorated the walls, both human and obviously non-human in nature, but there was no sign of any occupants in the area.
“What do we do?” Caleb asked, uncertain as he looked around.
Elan didn’t know herself, really. She only knew she had a goal, but how to achieve it? That was beyond her ken, and she knew it. Still, she refused to admit that, either out loud or even to herself as much as possible.
“We need to find out what’s going on outside,” she said.
“If the demons are out there, you can be sure they’re watching those doors,” Caleb said, nodding in the direction of the large broken wood doors that had once secured the temple.
Elan sighed, knowing he was right. She glanced in the direction of the bolt hole everyone had evacuated through under the direction of Kaern and Simone.
“We go that way,” she said, pointing.
“Do you know where it comes out?” Caleb asked, heading in that direction.
“No,” she admitted, “but it can’t be too far, and we can double back if we need to, once we’re in the open.”
The passage was sealed, but Elan found she could easily see it as they approached. When she was within a few feet of the door, it opened without her even having to do anything.
“That’s creepy,” Caleb said.
“I know,” she agreed. “I think it’s this armor.”
Caleb shot her a sideways glance, but didn’t say anything. Elan did catch an odd expression in his glance, though.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing…it’s just…are you sure that’s armor?” he asked hesitantly, looking at her only with quick glances before he would look away again.
Elan sighed, looking down at herself. The mottled grey material clung to her form in ways that she found more than a little odd, but it didn’t feel uncomfortable. It certainly didn’t chafe like her previous leather and cloth clothes did on occasion, the shirt she’d gotten in the old Redoubt aside.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, “but after my shirt stopped a dagger once, I’m ready to give it a chance.”
They were moving down the tunnel, the lighting dimmer and more red-colored than the bright white lights of the temple.
“Your shirt stopped a dagger?” Caleb asked. “How? When?”
“Just before I met you,” she admitted. “I was still recovering when Simone took me in.”
“Recovering? I thought you said it stopped it?”
“It did, mostly. It’s hard to explain,” Elan said, masking the fact that she had no idea how it had worked herself. “It just did, okay? I’ll show you later, maybe, but we have things to do now.”
“Right.” Caleb nodded. “Right…”
He snuck another glance at her out of the corner of her eye, drawing her attention again.
“Please stop that,” she said. “It’s…distracting.”
“What?”
“You keep looking at me,” Elan snapped.
Caleb flushed a little and a set of numbers appeared over him, slowly increasing as she watched, causing Elan to stumble as she focused on them.
“Hey, you okay?” he asked, reaching out to catch her, but she waved him off.
“Yeah, it’s just this…weird armor.” She shook her head. “It does strange things sometimes. I don’t understand it.”
He looked like he wanted to ask some questions about that, but they reached the end of the tunnel and stepped out into a stone room and looked around.
“I think this is under one of the buildings near the wall,” Caleb said. “Some of them have cellars like this for people to hide in if things get bad.”
“No one hid here. Didn’t this qualify as bad?” Elan asked.
“Maybe they were caught outside, I don’t know. There’s the stairs.” He pointed and started in that direction.
Elan got ahead of him by the stairs, holding him back. “Let me. If the armor works, I’ll be more protected.”
“And what if it doesn’t?” he objected.
She shrugged. “Then try and kill whatever got me.”
She started up the stairs, leaving Caleb to shift his grip on the pommel of his blade and pass it back and forth between his hands before he followed her up.
“Crazy girls.”
As they neared the top of the stairs, a rumble shook them, causing dust and dirt to fall around them as they clutched to the rail on the stairs to keep from being thrown to the ground.
The pair looked at one another, argument forgotten, raced the rest of the way up, and rushed out into the building above.