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  Massive. Caiden imagined thresher blades peeling out of the hull, descending to mow the crowds.

  The thing landed on the Flat Docks’ plate with a rumble that juddered up Caiden’s soles through his bones.

  A fresh bloom of brightness gnawed at the gray above, and beyond that widening hole hung the colors and shapes of unmoving fire. Caiden stood speechless, blinded by afterimage. Leta gaped at the black mass that had landed, and made her voice work enough to whisper, “What is it?”

  Caiden forced his face to soften, to smile. “More livestock maybe? Isn’t this exciting?” Stupid thing to say. He shut up before his voice quavered.

  “This isn’t adventure, Caiden,” Leta muttered. “Not like sneaking to the ocean— this is different.”

  “Different how?”

  “The adults. This isn’t how it’s done.”

  Caiden attempted to turn his shaking into a chuckle. “The bovine all dead is a new problem. Everything’s new now.”

  The crowd’s babble quieted to a hiss of fear, the tension strummed. A grinding roar pummeled the air as the front side of the angular mass slid upward from the base, and two tall figures emerged from the horizontal opening.

  “Overseers!” someone shouted. The word repeated, carried with relief and joy through the crowd.

  Caiden’s eyes widened. Both overseers were human-shaped, one tall and bulky, the other short and slim, and as he remembered from his Appraisal, they were suited from head to toe with plates of metal and straps and a variety of things he couldn’t make out: spikes and ribbons, tools, wires, and blocks of white writing like inside the aerators. They wore blue metal plates over their faces, with long slits for eyes and nostrils, holes peppering the place where their mouths would be. Besides their build, they resembled each other exactly, and could be anything beneath their clothes.

  “See, it’s fine.” Caiden forced himself to exhale. “Right, Ma?”

  His mother nodded slow, confused.

  “People,” the shorter overseer said in a muffled yet amplified voice.

  The crowd hushed, rapt, with stressed breaths filling the quiet. Caiden’s heart hammered, pulse noosing his neck.

  “You will be transported to a clean place,” the other overseer said in a husky voice amplified the same way. The crowd rippled his words to the back ranks.

  “With new livestock,” the first added with a funny lilt on the final word.

  “Come aboard. Slow, orderly.” The overseers each moved to a side of the open door, framing the void. “Leave your belongings. Everyone will be provided for.”

  Caiden glanced at Leta. “See? New animals.”

  She didn’t seem to hear, shut down by the sights and sounds. He let her cling to him as his father herded them both forward.

  Caiden asked, “Where could we go that doesn’t have infected soil? Up, past the gray?”

  “Stay close.” His father’s voice was tight. “Maybe they discovered clean land past the ocean.”

  They approached the hollow interior— metallic, dank, and lightless— with a quiet throng pouring in, shoulder to shoulder like the bovines had when squeezed from one pasture to another. Caiden observed the closest overseer. Scratches and holes scarred their mismatched metal clothes, decorated in strange scripts. Their hand rested on a long tool at their hip, resembling the livestock prods but double-railed.

  Caiden’s father guided him inside and against a wall, where his mother wrapped him and Leta in her strong arms and the mob crammed tight, drowning them in heat and odor.

  “Try to keep still.” The overseer’s words resonated inside.

  A roar thrummed to life, and the door descended, squeezing out the orange light. The two overseers remained outside.

  Thunder cracked underfoot. Metal bellowed like a thousand animals crying at once. Human wails cut through and the floor shuddered in lurches, forcing Caiden to widen his stance to stay upright. His mother’s arms clamped around him.

  Children sobbed. Consoling parents hissed in the darkness. Leta remained deathly silent in Caiden’s firm grasp, but tremors crashed in her body, nervous system rebelling. He drew her closer.

  “Be still, hon.” His mother’s voice quavered.

  She covered his ears with clammy hands and muffled the deafening roar to a thick howl. The rumble infiltrated his bones, deeper-toned than he’d thought any machine could sound.

  Are we going up into that fire-sky, or into the ground, where the livestock went?

  The inside of machines usually comforted him. There was safety in their hard shell, and no question to their functioning, but this one stank of tangy fear, had no direction, and his mother’s shaking leached into his back as he curled around Leta’s trembling in front. He buried his nose in a greasy sleeve and inhaled, tasting the fumes of the gray. His mother’s hands over his ears thankfully deadened the sobs.

  “Soon,” she cooed. “I’m sure we’ll be there soon.”

  CHAPTER 2

  FEED THE BEASTS

  The box roared for hours. The standing masses sat to rest shaken bones and cramped muscles. Bodies packed tight: sniffling kids, wailing infants, muttering women, swearing men. Arguments surged and faded. The sweltering hollow stank of sweat.

  Caiden— numb from vibration, bruised from sheltering Leta— hugged his insensate legs and stayed alert. He could hardly see anyone in the dark.

  But he could smell them. All of them.

  Leta balled up next to him and clutched his arm like a buoy amidst the sensory chaos. Exhaustion towed her to sleep, while Caiden, twisted up, stayed still for her despite darting cramps.

  His mother depleted weary tears, and her hands found him again, wiping the sweat off his forehead back through his hair. She kissed the top of his head. “Hopefully not long,” she whispered, hot by his ear. “Soon. Imagine where we could be going. Green, do you think?”

  Caiden recalled his picture in the aerator. Crystalline water. Knotted trees. Sand. “Maybe the place everyone gets retired to?” His hoarse voice broke, hardly cutting the roar.

  “Maybe …”

  His only way of marking time was stiffness and pain. He itched to get up and move, but his mother’s arms belted him and Leta. “Soon,” she whispered drowsily, until the word lost meaning.

  There was no way to mark travel distance at all, and Caiden began to wonder if the box hadn’t moved. “They wouldn’t let us suffocate, would they?”

  “No, sweetie, they need us. Who else will care for the animals?”

  The animals are dead.

  He shifted to rest his head on his other knee. Leta woke, wrung dry of tears. Caiden tilted his shoulder to make a better pillow for her, and winced as the cramp shot through fresh bruises.

  Leta pulled away. “You’re hurting yourself.”

  “I don’t mind.” His spirits lifted at having a job to do still. The crowded bodies, stench, and noise were unbearable for him, he couldn’t imagine how they destroyed Leta’s delicate senses. Her ribs quivered with each inhale, her body stiff. The best Caiden could do was squeeze her tightly, his pressure a comfort.

  “Soon.” His mother petted Leta’s forehead. “Soon.” She muttered until the words merged into a constant, sibilant stream escaping her lips, “Soon, soon, soon …”

  A new stench emerged, worse than the carcasses. Defecation. Urine. The real smell of fear. One person started ranting, many joined, escalating to shouts. The overseers, some said, were taking them to new land, or were cleansing the old and they’d be released into fresh pastures, clean soil, sweet air. We’re doomed, others declared, we’re in here to die like the livestock, dropped under the Flat Docks.

  Leta nuzzled deeper into the crook of Caiden’s shoulder and he shifted, enduring torrents of pain. He said, “We’ll get out.”

  “Soon.” His mother completed his sentence with the hated word. “Soon, soon.” She rocked back and forth, trapping them in monotony until Caiden’s father pulled her away, hushing the fear that leaked out of her, the
dead promise, soon.

  The wails and sobbing lessened as voices grew hoarse, breaths labored and rationed. Puke ripened the muggy air more. Caiden fought back gags, suffocated in a soup of human reek.

  Then the roar cut off abruptly.

  The vibrations supporting his body vanished, leaving him empty, electric, a wisp. He hugged Leta, then rattled to his feet with everyone else.

  A blade of light sliced the darkness, lancing his eyes and skull with fresh pain. The door howled upward and he squinted against radiance vibrating between his eyelashes, edged in every color.

  The people closest to the door stood stunned, and the shoving began from the back, rolling into a stampede to the white slit of the exit. A new roar swelled: relief and cries and maddened feet. Twiggy silhouettes careened into the blinding light and disappeared. Caiden’s parents struggled as the tide battered them toward the door.

  His mother pressed him to the wall and shouted at him to stay out of the masses, then she and his father were lost in the chaos of flailing hands, screeching faces, twisting cloth. Children were trampled, yanked up, shoved. Big men waded forward. Slender women wedged through.

  Caiden shielded Leta with his back as he inched along the wall to the farthest corner while the crowd drained into the light.

  “You’re safe.” Caiden made her sit. His heart wrenched as he finally saw her face, wan and bruised, hair plastered to her cheeks with sweat and tears. In her wide eyes, something was shattering, something the travel hadn’t already broken. “Everyone’s just excited to be out, somewhere fresh, yeah? Stay here, really quiet. I’ll come back for you.”

  His words were whittled frail by his own fear. Speech had left Leta, but she shook her head in protest.

  “It’ll be calmer here. Close your eyes? Cover your ears. It’s all right to shut down.” Caiden folded her gently into the corner. “Stay here until I come back?”

  Leta nodded, managing a ghost of a smile, and a last tear trickled down one cheek as she closed her eyes tight.

  “Brave of you.” Something unhitched in Caiden’s chest, soothed by the promise that formed a lifeline between them, keeping them connected even as he pivoted and rushed to the light.

  “Ma!” The shout chafed his throat, lost in the din. He reentered the stampede and washed up through the blazing opening. Body-slammed by someone, he stumbled to the side of the pouring crowds and fell on sand. Cold sand. He gasped fresh air.

  “Up, hon!” His mother shouted by his ear and yanked him to his feet.

  Brilliance surged in his head, throbbing with blobs of afterimage. Sand stretched endlessly, studded in rock like scabbed skin. Caiden’s head rolled back in shock. The sky was black. The ground and air glowed enough to see, but the sky was black. He’d never seen such a thing; the aerated gray of home had darkened in cycles but never like this. Grains of white speckled it, blurring into streaks as his mother pulled him from the stampede.

  “Where are we?” Caiden yelled.

  Bodies scattered from the dark transport cube like swarms of stirred insects. Shrieks severed the air and riveted Caiden in place, the raw pitches braiding into a chorus of terror.

  Then he saw why. Russet creatures charged through the fleeing throngs. They were at least a meter high, four-legged, stocky and muscular. They leapt on runners and tore, crushed, gnawed. Blood sprayed. Caiden gagged, his stomach heaving with terror.

  “Move!” his father bellowed, rushing over to shove them both.

  His mother’s face was flushed and fierce. She took fistfuls of Caiden, spinning him around.

  Caiden’s thoughts stuck as his heavy feet slogged into the horror. One of the beasts charged at his side, claws tearing up sand.

  “Run!” His father’s face shot past. Eyes bloodshot. Mouth wide, screaming.

  Caiden’s mother thrust him into a sprint. She shrieked his name, hands steering him. He gripped her arm and tried to run on sand slipping beneath his feet.

  He swiveled his head back but his father wasn’t behind them. Beasts mowed the crowd with giant paws and dagger nails. They snarled at one another and tumbled together on the sand, crushing already mangled bodies.

  “The rock!” his mother said, hauling him with her. “Quick!”

  Ache stitched Caiden’s side. The knot in his stomach rolled up, and he retched, stumbling. He glimpsed a beast in pursuit, its eyes flashing white. Terror balled up but his mother’s scream spurred him. He scrambled up and she drove him to a slanted rock just wide enough to squeeze under.

  “Get in, in!” Face hard with focus, she jammed him under the ledge, strong arms shoving him as far as she could. Caiden groped handfuls of sand until he latched on to rock and pulled himself deep inside. He tugged his mother’s hands but they skated from his, palms slick. “Ma!” he shrieked.

  A beast crashed her against the rock. The thud echoed in Caiden’s chest.

  A wild scream gushed from him as she hit the ground in a spray of sand beneath muscles and jaws that filled the view from under the rock. Each bite was a yanking, crunching tear.

  Caiden wheezed screams, his eyes stinging with tears and sand, but he couldn’t close them. Teeth snatched her shoulder as a second beast arrived. The first bit a leg, and the two huge creatures wrestled over the body, flinging it from view as they fought. Guttural snarls resonated through their bodies, filling Caiden’s hiding place with vibration.

  He curled into spasms, a dreadful sound raking up his throat.

  It had to be a nightmare. He’d fallen asleep, and none of this was real.

  Two beasts fought over the remains. Over all that was left of her.

  This isn’t real. It’s just a test, like the Appraisal. A nightmare to test that I can be strong. The anguish was a razor in his head like the beasts’ copper-reeking blood, stinging his nostrils as he sobbed. He closed his eyes but the sound of one beast tearing up the other was no better than the sight, and images stamped across his mind. His mother’s body. His father, lost in the crowd. Leta, hopefully hidden.

  Hot blood splashed over him as one monster tore into the other by the overhang. The blood sizzled on the sand, seared across Caiden’s tongue. He spat and balled up smaller.

  The dying beast’s moans dribbled out. The victor’s huge head filled the opening between rock and sand. Jaws, countless teeth. Scaly, dark russet skin rippled with sleek fur. The details blurred behind Caiden’s tears.

  He clamped a palm over his mouth, stifling sobs and gagging on the tang of the beast’s blood. Its muscular neck sloped from high withers to a boxy face with fluttering gash nostrils and eyes like reflective pits. Caiden saw himself flash in those pupils as they jerked to the crevice.

  This isn’t real. He clung to the words as if they were a rope that might pull him back to wakefulness and the green fields and his mother’s arms. He imagined flowers and sweetgrass but his sinuses were colonized by the pungent, razor blood covering his skull.

  The beast pawed at the red mud, sniffing, claws scraping and forearm clearly long enough to hook Caiden out from under the rock.

  He pressed his hand harder against his mouth, but he couldn’t stop the tremors or the shush his body made, drawing attention.

  This isn’t real. I can’t die.

  The beast’s nostrils fluttered shut to slits then dilated scarlet. It grunted.

  A knot of bile tried to rise. Caiden clenched his stomach, his jaw, his shoulders— everything. Warm wetness bloomed between his legs.

  Just a nightmare.

  The creature snorted at Caiden’s face. His lungs were bursting, heart thundering.

  A hot, ruffled inhale, tasting the air, smelling him drenched in blood. Then hard claws slid in and out of sand, paws thudding away. The beast left. Lost interest, not hungry enough?

  It can’t smell me through the blood? Caiden’s exhale stuttered with relief. He opened his eyes.

  Through the crevice slit lay the dead beast’s body and other small, scattered fleshy masses. Caiden heaved, refusing to acknowle
dge what those pieces were. Whose.

  None of it real. Just nightmare.

  CHAPTER 3

  AZURA

  Half a kilometer away, the massive transport box looked minuscule and lonely. Black corpses scattered around it like seeds. Red like sprinkles of water. The sated creatures fought or prowled. There was enough food for all, and no other prey had escaped.

  Reams of time passed and like his mother’s promise, soon, Caiden repeated to himself that this wasn’t real. Tears snaked down his cheeks and dripped, creating little holes in the sand. His eyes trained on the distant scene, hoping to see his father coming for him, somehow unscathed.

  He caved at the thought of Leta— eaten, or still hiding in a dark corner of the horror. The promise he’d made shattered, and with it the lifeline between them. He curled in despair, the rock ceiling cutting into his side. Dredges of bravery urged him to rush back inside and look for her— but he knew … She had died and he couldn’t bear to find her corpse. It would smash his will to survive and that was all he had now.

  An idea sprang into focus, punching him with new energy. The beast blood scent stuffing his nose hadn’t dulled a bit, and the monster had left, unable to smell him through it. There was a chance it could mask him. He shimmied out of the overhang and scurried to the big corpse. Claw marks rent it from cheek to tail. A smashed-open jaw revealed the inside of its enormous upturned skull, glistening pink and white. Blood pooled in the hollow.

  He pretended it was just liquid, and not a carcass, and cupped handfuls of blood over himself, soaking the tangy heat into his clothes. He jerked back as his fingers grazed something that hummed. Nestled in the fleshy skull and violet liquid was a gem, translucent and scintillating every color he had names for, and many he didn’t, mesmerizing amidst the savagery of this place.

  Caiden plucked it out, expecting it to course through his fingers like a droplet of water, but it was solid, and hot, vibrating against his palm. He blinked back fresh tears and gripped the gem— the only thing that had any color besides blood and sand and the black sky above.