The Select's Bodyguard, Page 6

  Chapter 6 - The Journey Out

  Three Years Earlier

  Calea gave Bron credit for one thing--he was quiet.

  Most days she spent in her lab, sometimes working forty-eight hours non-stop, oblivious to time, fatigue, and hunger. She’d drop deep into the problem before her until she understood the contours of the dilemma, its form and shape and idiosyncrasies. Her theories and the symbols on her whiteboard and the experimental applications of magical transference played one off the other, each held loosely so that it could change with the situation. She tested, dissected, recombined, discarded, and retried. Bron very well might leave for hours at a time when these moods took her, but she knew he did not. He took his required days off, but he watched and waited endless hours. Sometimes she returned to her surroundings with him in the other room, a tray with warm food sitting beside her.

  If that had been all a bodyguard was, she could almost have dealt with it, if only because she wouldn’t have to deal with it at all. A shadow was the most forgettable thing in the world as long as it kept quiet. And Bron did admirably--but not perfectly. He urged her to eat or to socialize. He hovered over her, prodded her, gave her looks that showed he thought she was wrong. He did it softly, and subtly, but she noticed.

  It was the principal of the thing, too. She remembered that first night. She knew the perception: she needed protecting, because she could not protect herself.

  Today, Calea was out of the lab and out of the Tower. She had begun introducing cheap, efficient personal transports into the Section Four economy, as well as a host of less visible but more important upgrades to the power grid. Occasionally, she found it necessary to look over her project personally, if only because she didn’t trust others to tell her the whole truth. Her assistants were largely upper-level students who were both frightened of and in awe of her. They performed the task of administrative paperwork well enough, but they certainly could not judge the results of her current experiments with as critical an eye as she demanded.

  So, once a month, on schedule, she descended into the city. She went without announcement. She did not like to draw attention to herself, whatever the rumors in the Wheel claimed. She’d heard the muttering. It was caused by envy. That pleased her.

  Though she walked inconspicuously among the people, she could not come alone as she desired. Bron was at her side, quiet, yes, but still there, on alert, like a hawk. He walked coolly enough, but his eyes roamed back and forth.

  “You do a poor job of remaining hidden,” she said.

  “I am not trying to hide.”

  “I wish you would. I do not need you here, anxious to throw yourself in front of some energy blast. There was a study some years ago showing that less than twenty percent of the population could identify the Overseer by sight, and I’m not the Overseer. I do not think I’ll have an angry citizen see me and attempt to punch me in the face.”

  Bron said nothing, and this, more than some excuse or explanation, aggravated Calea. She was already in a bitter mood. She had woken up that way. Now, she was beginning to roil within.

  “When can I be rid of you?” She tried to say it lightly. Sometimes he seemed to be hiding a smile when she became furious at him.

  “When I am no longer needed.”

  “Ha! Needed? No one’s needed in this world. We’re all extraneous, accidents. Men live and die. Their names sometimes linger a few generations. For what? I’ll be forgotten soon enough, even if I change the whole world with my mind. I’ll hang on as a name in a book and a picture on a wall, if that.”

  Bron nodded. “Then why do you do what you do?”

  “They think they need me. It’s a lie. Someone else would do what I’m doing, if not now, then within a decade. But I might as well do it. It gives me a way to spend my time, and it pleases them.”

  “Well, protecting you gives me something to do as well. Let’s leave it at that.”

  Calea wanted to scream at him. She had rattled off that little speech to make him uncomfortable--and from some uncomfortable emotion of her own. He had accepted it without question. He was either an unthinking brute or he was mocking her. It was possible both were true.

  Her destination was a retailer she’d recently partnered with, a bicycle shop she was using to sell the new motorcycle she’d help develop. With the newest battery, streamlined, magic-powered vehicles were now possible. Most cars were still clunky and over-large, but that was slowly changing. Calea wanted to shock the people with her compact two-wheeled vehicle. She hoped to do some interviews with customers today.

  “This is going to be a nice place to live,” Bron said. He did not often start conversations.

  “The metrics of happiness and prosperity have been rising steadily in this section. Technology is the most efficient means of changing a person’s position in life.”

  “Not the only way.”

  “The most efficient.”

  “Will you spread your work to the rest of the city?”

  “I don’t have much say in other sections. In time, others might borrow from my work, as long as it doesn’t contradict with their own experiments. The technology will spread to Thyrion before it’s publicly released, if history teaches us anything. They’re tech-grubby, and it causes them more than a few problems. The minor villages will get it in time. But my work needs tested over years, and verified by others, then repeated, before the socio-economic blueprint will be made officially available.”

  He did not respond. He was a normal, a native of routinely poor Section Three. He likely disagreed with the process. The non-Select always took the short view of things. “We’re doing this for your own good, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  He seemed to tense up. That encouraged her. He had been hurt in some way.

  People and traffic crammed down the street. This section had more cars per household than any other, not a particularly difficult feat considering how few civilian cars had been allowed in the city. By her estimation, in three years nearly half of all households in Section Four would own one. Her newest battery was more compact, efficient, and long-lasting than any before it, and the method of creation safer. Manufacturing costs would drop, and the retail price to civilians would fall. Previous administrators of Section Four had run a moderately open economy. Calea didn’t plan to make any changes. Let the people work, earn money, and purchase what they would. They’d purchase her work.

  Bron leaned over casually. “We are being followed.”

  So perhaps his earlier stiffness had not been from affront but paranoia. “It’s lunch hour in the busiest part of downtown. You’d have to work not to follow someone.”

  And if she was being followed, what did it matter? She could handle it. It didn’t concern her much.

  She felt a sense of pride walking among the people--people who did not know that she was making their lives better. It wasn’t a sense of identification with these people; she felt as if she were invisible, walking between them as they lived whatever lives these people lived. She did not look down on them. Not much, anyway. She simply regarded them as agents in her experiments, blind beneficiaries of her work. Driving, as many Guides were wont to do, either from desire of speed or a vague fear of the masses, would draw unwanted attention.

  She was beginning to feel eyes upon her, though, but it was a fancy, invented by Bron so he could feel useful. The man was dull, slow, and single-minded, a personality better suited to a dog than a man.

  The bicycle shop was two roads over. The sun was hot, the people close, and her hip was beginning to ache, a flaw in her prosthetic. This was a main road, narrow but busy, men and cars working at cross-purpose, neither yielding to the other. Stores crammed close to one another, savory aromas coming from many, shoes and clothes and books and groceries sold in others. It was all a bit quaint, actually, with two-story buildings, apartments over storefronts, a far cry from the tall towers of Section Six and the relentless propaganda of Section Eight. It would almost certain
ly have to change as technology did, but she had no strong opinions on the direction. She’d keep track of the retail, consumer, and architectural evolutions and let them run their course, whatever that would be.

  She pressed her way across the street, hoping to lose Bron in the crush. He wouldn’t reprimand her, but she would smirk and show him how little he meant to her. The crowd quickly thinned a block over. Calea looked back to see if she had lost Bron. Three men surrounded her. Two grabbed her arms and the third spoke. “Come quietly. Your expertise is needed. We have much to offer you.” They pulled her into a narrow alley.

  Calea was more affronted than frightened. Her mechanical arm easily freed itself from the grip holding it. “You must be from Thyrion. There is nothing I want. Everyone here knows that.”

  “You will come, one way or the other.”

  Bron stumbled around the corner. Blood ran from his forehead. He unleashed a shot from his gun, but the blast streaked above their heads. He wobbled badly, fighting for consciousness. The leader of the three tilted his head. A brick pulled loose from the wall. Bron collapsed, groaning.

  “A non-Select bodyguard. How useless.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Calea answered. “The Overseer naively believes Thyrion will refrain from armed assault on Jalseion. You know, the treaty. The bodyguard’s for more mundane plots.”

  “Who says we’re from Thyrion?” He smiled. “Perhaps we’re just in it for the money.”

  Bron kept twitching, as if his will refused to listen to his body. “This is a crowded area,” Calea said. “What if I resist? You wouldn’t want there to be an incident.”

  The leader snapped his fingers. Fire sprung to life at their tips, taking the form of a miniature sword. Deft manipulation, that. These three were trained in precision. Perhaps the motion was show, but perhaps he still required it to guide the magic properly. “I have found that heating the brain can have lasting effects. Are you willing to risk losing all that precious knowledge of yours?”

  “Are you?” Calea projected confidence, but she was beginning to tremble against her will. Panic shuddered through her at the mention of brain damage. Her mind was all she had. Everything else was already broken. “You need my knowledge.”

  “We can take your arm and leg. There are many smart people in the world. One of them will figure out how they work. You haven’t shown the world everything, I think.”

  She reacted quickly, almost before she had decided what to do. Digging deep from the Well, absorbing the aura of power that surrounded it, she swelled with magic until she wanted to vomit and then forced it out in torrents of raw power. Electricity emanated from her in waves, beating back the thugs. They reacted, pulling bricks down in heaps to bury her, but the electricity sparked into a wall of flame, burning her, scorching her, the blast of its heat knocking the three off their feet and breaking the bricks to pieces. Calea struggled to keep upright as the broken shards fell upon her. Now air hammered the three, keeping them down, choking and compressing them, battering them. She tapped the stone in the brick, throwing aside all her years of technique, and buried the three beneath the rock, melting it into unbroken mounds, where they were trapped, but alive. Probably.

  The energy dissipated, emptying her. It had lasted less than a minute. She stood up straight, testing her limbs. A little stiff. She was covered in bruises and cuts. Blood trickled down her cheek, but she didn’t care. She felt barren, with a hint of sorrow and anger and joy somewhere beneath. Nothing else seemed necessary, no action, no thought. She felt she could stand there, frozen, for a long, long time, wanting nothing, needing nothing.

  She saw Bron rising to his knees.

  “I didn’t need you,” she said. “What use are you? I told you I didn’t need you.”