Read The Darkside War Online

Authors: Zachary Brown

The Darkside War (2 page)

The moment the door cracked open, Tristan bolted inside.

“What are you—”

I ate the following words. Two struthiforms in full midnight-­black armor stood in the empty room. They looked at me, dinner-plate-sized eyes not blinking behind their armored visors.

“I'm so sorry,” Tristan said from behind them.

“You asshole!” I shouted as he disappeared out the window and down the fire escape.

I spun around to run and came face-to-face with the compound eyes of a carapoid. The horse-sized beetle of an alien didn't have any armor. It didn't need it. Its bony wings snapped out, filling up the corridor and knocking plaster from the walls. “Surrender peacefully,” it warbled.

I scrabbled backward. Another carapoid grabbed me. Its sticklike arms wrapped around my chest and protuberances dug hard against my ribs as it lifted me off my feet into the air.

“Cease struggling,” a struthiform standing behind me shouted.

The carapoid twisted and slammed me against the wall to make the point. Breath knocked out of me, my head swimming, I nodded and wiped blood from my nose.

“I'm done.”

The carapoid dropped me to the ground, and a struthi­form put scaly claws to the back of my neck.

“Devlin Hart, you are to be detained under the Human Antiterror Act 1451-B. Resistance will be met with mortal force.”

The other struthiform roughly zip-tied my hands behind my back.

2

I rattled the shackles holding my wrists to the table in the middle of a sterile oval room. Two chairs flanked the table I sat at. Ovoid screens displayed deep ocean water and the room was filled with a faint bubbling sound. A contrast to the simple chain-link holding cells I'd been tossed into outside the building along with hundreds of other protestors swept up in the last several hours.

The door opened. The man in the black Armani suit screamed lawyer. He moved like lawyer. Smiled like lawyer.

“You're not Stephan,” I said suspiciously. “Where's my family lawyer?”

The man sat across the table from me. He crossed his hands and gave me the considered, serious look. It came down like a mask, along with a mildly patronizing, lecturing tone. “I'm Gregory Stafford, and I'm your Interceder, not your lawyer. We don't have lawyers anymore, Mr. Hart, you should know better. And I'm assigned to you because there's a conflict of interest in your being represented by your previous Interceder.”

“I've been standing inside a chain-link cell for three hours,” I said. “In the sun. It's too small to sit or lie down in, and too hot to lean against the metal. I want Stephan. I have the right.”

“The right?” Stafford looked pityingly at me. “You have no
rights
, Mr. Hart. You are involved in an act of sedition during war. Your parents are due to be executed, and you'll be lucky to be back out in that cage if everything goes well.”

I tried to jump out of my chair. I shouted at Stafford, and my manacles crackled with electricity. My back wrenched straight and every muscle in me clamped down hard enough that I tasted blood.

My head struck the white table as I fell forward. I lay slumped, drooling out of the side of my mouth, every muscle in my body screaming.

Stafford leaned forward so he could meet my stunned gaze. “The Accordance has been waiting for the right moment over the last few years. All the while, it has been modeling how best to stop threats to recruitment. Now, all over the world, movements such as your father's have been raided and rolled up. There is no more antioccupation movement. Tomorrow morning, live broadcasts will show leaders of movements and cells being executed for treason. Your question, Devlin, is how you survive the next few hours.”

“Tegna Gnarghf,”
I spat as best I could, still trying to get feeling back into my checks as I moved my jaw around.

“What's that?”

I took a deep breath and tried again. “Tentacle licker.”

Stafford's high cheekbones reddened. “Listen, whether you like it or not, the Accordance came here. They have superior weapons. They destroyed DC. They took Manhattan. They sit in every major world capital. We've ceded them the moon, and other planets because we've never even reached them. And in exchange for that legal grant, we get some autonomy. The fact that, under their agreement to follow
some
human protocols, you're considered a minor and will not die with your parents: That's all that keeps you alive. Time to shape up, now, Mr. Hart.”

I could sit up now, though the room wobbled and spun around me. I rubbed my eyes and groaned as I tried to process all this. From betrayal to capture. Everything turned upside down so fast. My father had organized peaceful protests, not fought on the streets. This was protest, not the damn Pacification. “What . . .” I gritted my teeth. “What do we do?”

“There are some options.” Stafford tapped the table, and documents appeared on the surface. “The main concern the Accordance has is that they're in the middle of a war. It was why the Accordance was even created: defense. And they need recruits. You understand about the war, right?”

“Yes.” I rolled my eyes. “We hear it all the time. About the Conglomeration. I've seen the propaganda. Five different species allied against the Accordance.” Hopefully Stephan was meeting with my parents right now, trying to think of ways to stop all this. My heart hammered against the back of my throat, and it wasn't just because I'd been zapped. Every­thing settled onto me like a horrifying weight, trapping me in my chair. You knew the Accordance rule from on high. But then you encountered their boot on your throat, and it was suddenly too real.

“Against us all,” Stafford corrected me. “The Accordance protects us. Anything that hurts recruitment, risks lives. Our lives. And your family, Mr. Hart, has risked many. However, recruitment is voluntary. The Accordance understands the value of good public relations. I think I can help you make a case to Accordance judges that executing a minor would be a horrible PR decision on their part.”

“But not my parents?” I whispered.

“Just you. I'm sorry.” Stafford's lawyerly mask slipped for a moment. I fought to keep seated and still, not wanting another muscle-clenching explosion of electricity to leap through my body.

I slumped farther down into my chair. “The only reason I won't die is because they don't want the bad PR.”

“The war out there is real,” Stafford said. “Even if it hasn't come to our world yet. If we're lucky, it won't. The Accordance needs fighters. From everyone it protects. We stand together under the Accordance umbrella, or we'll fall to something far worse. So they are being very careful here.”

I couldn't imagine something worse than the Accordance. Something that destroyed cities from orbit and marched through the ruins in black power armor, ferreting out the remaining resistance with overwhelming force.

But there was apparently something out in the universe that made the rulers of the Accordance, the squid-like Arvani, shit their tanks. Even if no one on Earth had ever seen it.

And now my parents were going to die because of it.

“My father thought peaceful resistance would work,” I told Stafford. “My parents saw what happened during the occupation; they thought this was a better path.”

“The Accordance is ruled by aliens, not humans,” Stafford said. “The Arvani and the Pcholem do not tolerate dissent, violent or peaceful. And the other species have less power within the Accordance. Your father should have known this; he was jailed for his inability to follow guidelines when teaching Indigenous Mythology.”

Indigenous Mythology. My dad taught History 101 at NYU before I'd been born. He still insisted on carrying the old pre-occupation textbooks, big paper-printed monstrosities, around with us as we moved from house to house.

I blinked my eyes several times and looked away. I was so angry with them right now. Angry for spending my childhood never staying in one place. Angry because they always felt there was a higher purpose in their lives, a purpose far higher than anything I could ever mean to them.

What was a child compared to the past glory of humanity that had once ruled itself ? I knew my place in the world. In my parent's world.

This was their fault, I thought angrily.
They'd
chosen this. It certainly wasn't my fault. Fuck, I was still hungry because of their choices. Even if I got out of this room, all I had was a hot, smelly tent in Yonkers with its moldy history books to go back to.

I clenched my fists.

They'd stolen themselves away from me a long time ago. So why did this hurt so badly?

I clenched my jaw.

“Our tentacled rulers want good PR,” I said softly. They needed the fight to fade away. They needed to hobble the protestors. They needed to kneecap the leaders of the movement.

They needed to kneecap my parents.

Death was one way. “There's another,” I said.

“Huh?” Stafford asked.

“There's another way they can neutralize my parents,” I said. I knew what it was. That anger I'd been building inside had steered me toward a solution, and now it faded to sadness.

Stafford looked curious. “What do you mean?”

“Me,” I said. “You can use me.”

Stafford leaned back, then cleared all the documents off the table with a wave of his hand. “I'm listening.”

“If I do this, I want to see them. I want to see them today,” I said. Because in order to save my family, I would have to first destroy it.

“I can arrange something,” Stafford said.

I took a deep breath and paused. Could I do what I was planning?

Yes. To save their lives. I could do this.

I had to. Angry as I might be, what sort of son would I be if I watched them die and didn't try to stop it?

+  +  +  +

The electrified fence between us prevented any touching. My dad stood in the middle of his cell, avoiding the walls like I had. But he'd spent all day in the sun, and the bags under his eyes from lack of sleep, food, and drink made him look older and frail. His salt-and-pepper hair hung every which way.

He licked bloodied, sun-cracked lips, and hung his head when he saw me enter.

My mother, in the other cell, had managed to fold her legs into a tight cradle so she could sit down, but she also looked frazzled and exhausted. Her normally even brown skin was splotchy with dirt and streaked with blood from a cut on her scalp. Dried blood also stained her shoulders.

“Oh God. Dev!” She tried to stand, but shrank back into her position when the cell sparked. Mine had just been hot, theirs was designed for maximum misery. “You're alive.”

“Mom.” I put a finger carefully between the spaces in the metal grid so we could touch fingertips gently. “I'm okay.”

“I'm so sorry, Dev. We can't even get to talk to Stephan. I'm so sorry. It's very bad. All those Accordance soldiers in armor, they didn't care. They shot people. Right in the street. Live, on camera.”

She was shaking. In shock. It must be a war zone on 110th Street, I realized. Other prisoners in the cages looked worse than my parents. Blood-splattered clothes, distant stares. Gunshot wounds, jagged wounds. Ignored, without medics, some of the protestors trapped out here would die.

“Mom, you know I love you,” I said tentatively.

“Of course. They said there was a chance you might . . . not be in the same position we are.” Her brown eyes teared up. She whispered now, not wanting my father to listen in. “You have to take that. And don't feel guilty about it. Anything we've done, it's only hurt you. And I'm sorry about that. What we've done, it's us. Okay? It's us. You run, like I told you. You run from all this.”

I closed my eyes. “I know.” My voice cracked.

“Devlin?” My dad had cocked his head to stare at me. He used his teacher voice, strong and commanding attention even in his state. “What's going on?”

“I can save you.” I took a deep breath filled with the smell of blood, unwashed bodies, and sewage. “But I'm going to have to say . . . some things. I'm going to have to do things.” I closed my eyes, focusing on the unsteady pressure of my mom's fingertip against mine. A single line of contact. All I would have.

Sometimes I thought about why family members always fought so hard with each other; maybe it was because they were the only ones who could get fully into each other's heads. Dad saw through me instantly. “Don't do what you're thinking,” he said. “That's everything we've been fighting against. We're trying to stop you from having to fight their wars for them. You know none of the recruits they've taken off-Earth have come back yet. We're trying to build a different future for you.”

“Well, that didn't work too well, did it, Dad?” I snapped. “So what other choice do I have?”

“You have choices. You
always
have choices,” he said.

“Like letting you die? What the hell kind of human being would I be if I let my own parents be executed?” I shouted, my voice quavering. Hold it together, I told myself. I bit my lip and calmed down. “There is no choice. The only choice is what you do with the second chance I'm buying you. Maybe you both try to sneak more antioccupation activity in, and I come back and find you dead anyway. Or maybe you get jobs, keep your heads down, and I live to come back and see you again.”

Or maybe, I thought into the silence, we all would die for nothing. I opened my burning eyes to look at my angry, confused, hurt parents. Just as I knew they would be.

You're welcome, Stafford, I thought. I'm breaking them. I'm taking it all out from under them. And in some ways, they would consider it worse than death.

“You sign up to fight for the Accordance,” my mom said, “then they've trapped you. They've talked you into this. Don't do what they tell you. Don't
collaborate.

That word. I pulled my finger back. “I'm sorry.”

A struthiform guard opened the gate leading out. Stafford waited for me on the other side. “Time's up,” he said, pointedly avoiding looking at any of the prisoners.

“You'll be under house arrest,” I told my parents. “You'll get filmed going there. But it will be safe. And good.” And it would make them look utterly like they had made a deal, and would undercut their authority in the eyes of the anti­occupation movement.

My dad grabbed the wire mesh. Sparks danced around his fists. He was crying, out of pain from the electrified wire or from my betrayal. I didn't know which. “You don't let them change you, Devlin. You find ways to fight them. In your own way. Like I raised you. You stay
human
!”

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