The Boy with No Name (Part 1 of 'A Tale of People and Apples' Trilogy)

Chapter 27: The Wounded Wolf

Luka silently smashed through the glass of a side door to Aimos's facility with his elbow, and opened the handle from the inside. He had no intention of going to the armory. Not yet. And circling back to where Aimos lived, right beside the Square, was the last place Lleyton and his soldiers would suspect him to go.

He asked Eeva for the password to the armory loud enough for the people all around to hear. No doubt would the people, at gun point from the soldiers, provide this information, fearing for their lives, providing Luka a subtle diversion.

He flashed back to a moment from his childhood. It was Lleyton, giving him a lesson on sacrifice.

"Say right now, a gunman rushed into this room. What would you do, assuming others were here yet petrified and still?" Lleyton said, Luka at first hesitating.

After a moment Luka said, "I would rush him."

Lleyton smiled in admiration of his son, but then said, "You are wrong, and it's not because your response is necessarily wrong."

Luka scowled, confused.

"Luka, if you rushed the man alone, what do you think would happen to the rest of us? Assuming I could die, of course."

Luka thought a moment, and then said, "I suppose I would be shot, and then everyone else."

Lleyton nodded, and then said, "Suppose the man will shoot us all no matter what you do, that is, if you put your hands in the air and did nothing as the rest of this hypothetical group would do. Would you want to do what he says, in that case?"

Luka shook his head.

"Now suppose he comes in, and all of us swarmed him at once. Do you think he would have much of a chance?"

Luka shook his head and then said, "But he'd probably get one of us."

Lleyton nodded and said, "But your death would have saved everyone. What have you learned?"

Luka realized, and said, "You hunt as a pack, to live as a pack." Then, after a moment of thinking, Luka asked, "But sir, what if he only came in looking for a piece of bread? No one would have to die in that scenario. We'd be killing a hungry man."

Lleyton replied coldly, "No man asks for bread with a gun."

Luka snapped back to the present, and before him was the research facility on the lobby floor. It was the one Eeva told him to not go into. He prayed he could find something valuable within. He just needed to take out one soldier, get his weapon. Until then, he was a sheep among wolves.

He broke through the door, and ran into the white metallic hallway of the Orca's research wing. He went door to door, peering inside hoping to see something that caught his eye. Microscopes and chemistry sets would not help him in this fight, which was all he seemed to see.

Then something caught his eye in one of the rooms. There was nothing, which was peculiar in and of itself. He cracked open the room, and realized there was a strange shimmer to the air. He walked into the room, his hand in front of him, closer and closer to the strange refraction. His hand brushed something that felt like a chain, yet he still couldn't see it. He pulled.

The chain was now fully visible in front of him. It was some sort of vest of metal that bended light, probably knowledge acquired from how the Tigers were able to bend light. 

Eeva wasn't lying about creating ghosts. How was this technology ever approved by the provincial Inspectors? Perhaps Aimos wasn't as by-the-book as Luka had thought.

While the vest sheet lay on the table, it had a constant supply of power, and continuously bended the light of the room around it, but now in Luka's arms it was silver before him. He saw a switch on the side of it, realizing it was a battery for mobile use. He switched it on, and again it refracted the light, almost see-through. Luka had his weapon.