Daughter of Rebels

Chapter 2 - Paradise Hill

Sharp air bit Mara's nose and cheeks as she followed Eli out into the dark alley behind the townhouse she'd called home for the last five years. The alley was silent this time of night, this time of year. No wailing cats or stumbling drunks. Just silence. Ghostly gray clouds raced mutely across the sky overhead, limned in the pink-silver light of the crescent moon.

Eli turned left, toward the heart of the city. Toward the Hive, where the Keepers of Truth lived behind windowless granite walls, cloaked in secrecy. Mara had always found the Keepers' mythos to be a little overgrand. A little theatrical. Then again, she'd never been to see them. Davy had, and he said if anything the performance fell short of their raw power.

Eli skirted a puddle and she followed, her feet treading in his path, her eyes fixed to Nick's head, resting against Eli's shoulder, little more than a dark lump. She knew the back routes of these alleys well enough, having spirited herself all over the city in the early years of her career. Before Davy, her clients never came to her. She traveled to them, promoted by whispered word of mouth, summoned by code words. Despite the hobbled grief, the eerie calm, her heart skipped now as it had then, fueled by a remembered fearful, joyful thrill.

She dogged Eli's footsteps for ten minutes, thirty, an hour as the buildings around them morphed and grew. They left behind the low, humble townhouses of Mara's neighborhood for the more impressive merchant district--tall brick buildings that housed both shops and residences. Though not as distinct as it was in the height of summer, the smell of the alleyways evolved as they passed from one row of shops to another. Sour to fishy to musty to sweet and back to sour. Some of the windows glowed yellow--bakers, probably, kneading and proofing the day's bread--and she followed Eli as he tucked himself and Nick into the shadows when they passed those windows, skirting the dim light slanting across the packed dirt of the alley.

They moved through the city like lone insects, parted from their swarm. Streets that bustled beneath the sun were wiped clean of humanity by the Order's curfew and the formidable penalties its violation incurred. Even the back alleys were abandoned, the unfortunate souls that occupied them during the day gone into quiet hiding until the sun rose and they were able to emerge back into the world, albeit no more visible to the crowds that packed the cobbled streets.

Her feet were sore, her back aching beneath the weight of her pack by the time they left the merchant district behind and skulked into the outer edges of Paradise Hill. She hadn't been here since her traveling days, and guilt gnawed at the edges of her conscience. The folks here were confined to the limits of the slum and their plodding routes to and from work. None would have been able to visit her without risking discovery and arrest.

She knew she'd done more good for the rebellion since marrying Davy. More lofty good. But had that lofty good ever touched the residents of Paradise Hill? Would it ever?

Their route meandered as they plunged deeper into the slum, main thoroughfares barely distinguishable from back alleys. Brick gave way to cheap, rotting wood, the myriad scents of fresh garbage to the uniform reek of decay. The air was closer here, and cooler, the silence a bated breath. Living. Waiting.

Without warning, Eli slowed and stopped beside a gate that hung off broken hinges, set into a wall of rotting planks. Before she could speak, he ducked through the gate into what appeared to be little more than a repository for garbage. Rats scurried beneath a rank heap of sacks and decaying food scraps in the corner as Mara followed him into the shadows.

"Rest a minute," he murmured, somehow quieter than a whisper, pressing Nick into her arms. "I'll be back."

Her son had fallen asleep and she hefted his floppy-limbed body higher in her arms, back twinging with the effort. "Where are you going?"

"Scouting ahead. Twenty minutes. You'll be safe here."

She believed him, if only because she knew Paradise Hill, knew the way these people lived. Up at dawn, down at dusk, they passed their days in contented squalor, held in thrall to the Order and obedient no matter the injustice leveled against them. There were some, she knew, who saw the circumstances and resented them, but they were held in thrall themselves, bound to the distant promise of the rebellion. Waiting patiently for salvation.

Eli shrugged off his pack--Davy's pack--and set it against the wall, gesturing for her to sit. "Twenty minutes," he said again, unnecessary reassurance. The oppressive calm suffocated every strong emotion within her, every flicker of fear or anguish.

She sat, tucking Nick's head beneath her chin, and watched the dark shape that was Eli duck through the narrow opening and disappear.

She tried to stay alert, but the longer Eli was gone the more the calm faded. At first it was just a tickle of uncertainty. Then, an itch. An irritating, beneath-the-skin prickle. Davy is dead.

No. He couldn't be. Davy couldn't be dead, because Davy was life. He was color, he was joy, he was strength. He wasn't a candle, to be snuffed out with no warning, mere hours after she'd last felt the heat of his touch, tasted the sweetness of his kiss. He was a bonfire. Roaring. Powerful. Bright.

The prickle beneath her skin tightened to an ache, muscles clenching, ribs contracting around her lungs. She lowered her face to Nick's head and struggled to draw a breath. Davy is dead.

Perhaps she was dreaming. Yes, yes that must be it. She'd had this dream before, after all. Davy dead, Davy lost, Davy hurt, Davy captured, Davy discovered. She always woke from those dreams with tears on her face and her chest tight with swallowed sobs. She always woke from those dreams with Davy's arms around her, his voice warm in her ear. "It's okay. I'm here, Mara. I'm here."

Mara closed her eyes and tried to wake. She imagined herself coming loose from this false earth and drifting up into the sky until the universe inverted and dropped her back into reality. But that sense of falling never came, and when she opened her eyes she still sat on Davy's rucksack with Nick her lap, amidst piles of garbage that rose up over her head on three sides and reeked sweetly of death. Davy is dead.

Davy was dead and Eli–a man she hardly knew, beyond her husband's assurances that he was a friend–had come to spirit her away from what remained of the life they'd built. She didn't know where they were going, why they were going. She didn't, she realized suddenly, even know if Davy was truly dead. Eli was duplicitous by nature, as was Davy, as was she. They were rebels, living underground beneath the Order's nose, their lives little more than a tangle of lies and half-truths. So why should she believe something so unbelievable just because Eli had said it?

Comforted by this reasoning, she leaned back against the damp wood of the enclosure and waited. When Eli returned, she would confront him.

By the time he did return, nearly an hour later, the calm within her had faded to a distant memory. Only common sense kept her voice low and her temper under control when he ducked through the gate.

"Where are we going?" she demanded, her words a hiss of challenge as she shot to her feet.

"The Hive," he answered, skirting her to pick up his discarded pack–Davy's pack. He gave it a little shake to dislodge whatever refuse it had collected from the ground.

"Davy isn't dead," she whispered, and his eyes lifted, just a glimmer of life in the shadows.

"What?"

Her arms clenched spasmodically around Nick and she shook her head, harder than she needed to. "Davy isn't dead. I don't believe you."

He stepped closer, and she could just make out the whites of his eyes, the depth of the irises, rendered inky black by the darkness.

"He is," he said simply, and the calm again came over her, part comfort and part prison. She couldn't even resist, didn't want to, as he lifted Nick from her arms. "We have to go."

She hefted her pack higher and followed him back into the maze.