Emergent, Book One : Isobel

Emergent

  Book One

  :

  Isobel

  Published by

  Virginia Nikolaou

  Copyright 2016 Virginia Nikolaou

  Thank you for downloading this eBook.

  This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Thank you for your support.

  To my editor,

  Isabella Cook,

  without whose patience, humor, and grasp of the absurd this book would have remained an unrealized dream.

  to Nasso for planting the seed

  to Sanna for tending the seedling with such care

  Cover Art

  Photography

  Jesse Campbell Photography

  Graphic Design/Art

  Kyle Hovey

  All Rights Reserved 2016

  ~

  Even after all this time,

  the sun never says to the earth,

  'You owe me.'

  Look what happens with love like that.

  It lights the whole sky.

  Hafiz

  ~

  Chapter One

  Perched at the precipice of the vast, ice capped Pythean Mountains stood the stone power plant known simply as Bucky. Several hundred feet tall, the towering obelisk structure reigned over the surrounding territory like a granite titan, the thundering booms of its unchecked power playing constant company to the people of Landgraevan below.

  Isobel's breath crystallized in the frigid night air as she stood on the rocky crag, Bucky's stronghold wall at her back. From her vantage, she could see the nation of Landgraevan, her home, stretch to the vanishing point in every direction, a glowing holographic canopy covering it like a translucent dome.

  Lightening ripped the inky sky, illuminating the lone figure of Montgomery clearing the edge of the bluff. He joined Isobel by the wall and huddled close, pulling his black knit cap over his ears, leaving only wisps of brown locks to whip in the harsh wind. His cheeks were flushed a ruddy red from the long hike up the side of the cliff, spreading across his slightly crooked nose and down his neck.

  "What's the emergency, Isobel?" he asked breathlessly.

  "I found a way in. An old door at the north face of the wall. We can get into Bucky tonight," she said into his ear against the thundering rumble. Long strands of chestnut hair had escaped the messy bun she wore and lashed about to the gusting wind, her dark green eyes glinting with anticipation as she smiled up at Montgomery.

  Montgomery took a step back, eyeing the impenetrable stone wall behind his friend with uncertainty. The wall disappeared into the dark ether of the night, the uppermost rim visible only as lighting licked the sky. The bulwark had been raised around Bucky after the great meteor storms and was now patrolled by hologuards and, more frighteningly, one of Landgraevan's most feared anti-civilian control weapons, orbitals; silver spheres small enough to rest in the palm of a hand.

  "Are you sure we should do this?" Montgomery asked.

  "I thought you'd be excited. We have a way in! We wont ever have another chance like this. We finally get to explore Bucky," she said.

  "But there are orbitals and hologuards everywhere."

  "There are always orbitals and hologuards. But we don't always have a way in. Come on, Montgomery! This way," she implored. Casting a quick glance behind her to make sure he was following, she started across the ice-slick, rocky terrain, breathlessly waiting out the occasional hologuard or orbital, stopping at a doorway leading to the inner grounds.

  Bucky spit lightning, rumbling from the bowls of its gut like a great goliath, and there, stark against its solid stone face, stood a solitary doorway.

  "That's it, over there, but we need a distraction," she said, reaching into her worn leather jacket.

  Montgomery judged the considerable distance and shook his head. "That will have to be some distraction," he said. Glowing orbitals flitted about erratically, casting an eerie glow over the grounds like a luminous floating moat.

  "That's why I brought these," she replied, holding up a handful of hologram fireworks.

  "Where'd you get those?" he asked, taking a gold foiled ball from her cupped hand.

  "The old storeroom we found in the basement next to central station the other day, in an unopened box," she said, and chose a red, cone-shaped firework herself. Handing him a few more she dropped the remainder into her pocket. "You throw yours to your left. I'll throw mine to the right. It'll part a path for us to run. One - two -," she counted and they threw the holoworks into the air with a practiced, sharp thrust.

  The holoworks self-propelled into the sky with a high pitched whistle, disappearing into the impenetrable dark some distance over Bucky. They held her breath, waiting, and just as they reached for another holowork, thinking the first one was faulty, the sky erupted in a dizzying display gold and red.

  They hit the ground as the snarling gold hologram tiger pounced from the heavens, claws swiping at the grounds, ivory fangs gleaming luminescent from powerful sneering jaws. A red dragon then appeared from the ether, breathing blood fire, its spiked indigo tail sweeping straight through Bucky as massive iridescent crimson wings unfurled in the chaos.

  Mayhem ensued, orbitals and hologuards rushing to quell the fireworks display, opening a path to Bucky. They ran for the entrance, keeping low to the ground, drooling hologram muzzles and blazing wings hiding them. Isobel threw a few more gold foiled balls behind them as they slid into the doorway and the holoworks exploded on ground level, revealing the dim hallway before them in shimmering yellow.

  They stopped to catch their breath, backs to the damp wall. Flickering lights hung from the low ceiling, casting the cracked walls into high relief. The air was cold, humid and heavy with the dank smell of mold and the floor, slick with moisture, glistened to the dancing light.

  "It looks like ghost nation ruins in here," Isobel mumbled, raising her scarf to her lips, her muffled voice resonating down the long hallway.

  "Thanks, Isobel," Montgomery replied, hand to his nose against the noxious smell.

  Any mention of the ghost nations, the countries that had not survived the great meteor storms, made him blanch in fear. The displaced people of these countries, known as the ghost nation nomads, roamed the frozen wastelands surrounding Landgraevan like packs of wild dogs, scavenging, hunting; their prey of choice was anything with a beating heart.

  "Anytime," she said with a wink, though she found the building's obvious structural disrepair more than a bit disconcerting herself.

  "Don't wink at me like that. It always leads to trouble," he whispered harshly from behind his hand.

  "Not today, my friend," she assured him with as much confidence as she could muster.

  "You said that last time."

  "Last time we didn't get this far," she replied and motioned to a doorway at the end of the corridor.

  The air got colder as they approached the end of the hall, so cold that the walls and floor were covered in ice in areas, slick, like thick glass. Orange icicles grew from rusted iron sconces, some nearly touching the floor. The entry into the lobby was crowned in them.

  They ducked under the icicles, into the lobby, and glanced around the cavernous room. Lights swung by thick industrial cables, illuminating the vacant space in a slow waltz of shadows. The bowed steel support columns were scored with deep, rusted cracks, and the air, by far colder there than in the corridor, crystallized, falling around them in fine ice crystal dust like a frosting of
snow.

  Isobel pointed to a lift at the end of the room. "Look, over there. A stairwell. Easy."

  Montgomery shook his head. "You have an odd idea of easy, Isobel," he said, following her over strewn furniture and piles of crumbled mortar to the stairwell.

  The exposed steel cage elevator hung at the center of a circular stairwell, swaying from the constant air riding the shaft, and the steady rhythmic clang of metal on metal played on their nerves as they climbed. The guardrails had fallen away and the gusty air sucked at them, pulling them precariously close to the edge of the shaft at times.

  "Strange," Isobel said as they paused to catch their breath, "not a human to be found, anywhere."

  Montgomery looked at her reproachfully as though he half expected someone to appear suddenly. "Isobel, some things are best left unsaid," he retorted.

  "Well, it's strange that we haven't seen a single person in here," she replied when a violent clap of thunder tossed them to the edge of the shaft.

  They carefully crawled back to the wall and continued to the next landing where Isobel stopped to read a grime covered plaque on the wall. She wiped the surface of the plague with the sleeve of her jacket and turned to Montgomery.

  "Look. This is where they keep the surveillance operations. Come on," she said, and reached for the door when another booming clap of thunder slammed them against the wall.

  Isobel exhaled on a shaky breath and smoothed errant locks of hair away from her high cheek bones, stained crimson from the cold. She regarded Montgomery and smiled, her eyes alight with excitement. After adjusting the high neck of her woolen sweater, Isobel rubbed her hands together for warmth, the fingerless leather gloves worn through to the palms, before opening the door.

  They entered into a corridor that was bathed in blue light, like a wash of winter sky. Long rivulets of orange rust flowed from metal sconces along the walls, like veins leading to a heart. Faint, discordant music streamed from the room at the end of the hallway, an oddly sweet melody woven through an incessant crackling noise.

  The corridor opened into an immense, storied chamber covered in glowing blue screens, from the floor to ceiling. Images of Landgraevan citizens played on each monitor to the dissonant music and static crackling, and though Isobel and Montgomery were alone in the room, there was a resonant movement of the air, as if some unseen entity was breathing.

  Gossamer webs softened some of the profane images, of Landgraevan citizens lain bare in their most private, and sometimes heinous, moments. A child, a boy, sits on a chair as a man wraps a leather strap around his fist, brass buckle dangling. The child looks away, silent sobs stilled by fear, as the man raises his arm, bringing the belt across the boy's slight body. The belt comes down on the boy again and again, but the child doesn't utter a word, until, unconscious, he falls to the ground.

  "No!" Isobel hissed, turning to Montgomery as if he could somehow stop it. The screen flickered and the boy was gone, another image popping up, this of a group of young kids playing ball on a deserted avenue, dim streetlamps lighting their game.

  "This is what all that surveillance is, all those cameras, everywhere, being fed into this one room," Montgomery said, staring unbelieving at the images flashing about in the massive chamber.

 

  "Everything in Landgraevan is being watched," Isobel stated, stunned by the realization, and she craned her neck at the stories high ceiling, a barely visible dome crowning the room like a glaring eye.

  At the center of the room stood an imposing crescent shaped console covered in dust and webs, lights flickering across its face in rhythmic cadence, as if on voyeuristic auto pilot.

  Isobel approached the console warily, the sound of crackling static playing to the wild beating of her heart. She ran her hand over the console and shook the sticky webs from her fingers as she perused the various controls set before her, quickly finding three large corrosion crusted levers on the far left labeled as the main circuit breakers.

  Isobel wrapped her hand around all three levers and the monitors flickered briefly, went blue, then after a pause, every screen showed her and Montgomery, as they were, standing at the console, the sound of breathing in the room turning strident.

  With a gasp of urgency, she pulled down, and the room settled into momentary absolute silence, the solid blue screens saturating every surface.

  Montgomery grabbed her hand, pulling her into the corridor as Bucky erupted in violent deafening booms. They flew down the stairwell, hanging onto the swinging lift over the howling shaft as the building quaked, and ran through the lobby, not stopping once until they stood outside amidst a whizzing army of orbitals.

  Isobel reached into her pocket, pulled out the last of the holoworks, handing two to Montgomery, and keeping two herself.

  "Same as last time," she said, motioning for him to throw his to his left.

  "Right," Montgomery replied, "on the count of three."

  "One - two - three -", she said, throwing her gold foiled ball as hard as she could in one direction, Montgomery the other.

  The holoworks whistled into the night sky, but after a brief spurt, one fell to the ground, smoking and fizzling sadly, while the other evaporated into nothing. With one firework left to each, they nodded in silent agreement, then on the count, they threw the last of the holoworks.

  Isobel's self propelled into the air, but Montgomery's fell to the ground a distance away.

  Daring the attention of nearby hologuards, she sprinted for the sputtering gold ball and picked it up, throwing it with all her strength. It stammered and lisped forward, falling to the ground again with a tiny puff. With a frustrated gasp, she grabbed it off the ground, tossing it with one last hope.

  The firework shot into the sky on a sharp sputtering whistle, exploding into a growling beast, its golden mane radiating like the sun. Ruby eyes glinted as it snarled, and paws, set with iridescent red claws, swiped the peak of Bucky, its thick barbed tail sweeping through the orbitals and hologuards surrounding it.

  Isobel and Montgomery made a dash for the wall, skidding to the ground as they neared the stone entrance, straight into a pair of orbitals analyzing the breach in the stronghold, and despite her best efforts to avoid them, she slammed directly into one, Montgomery following straight behind, knocking the other into the wall. The orbitals recovered and locked onto them.

  Isobel and Montgomery glanced at each other just as another bolt of lightening split the sky and, with a nod of understanding to meet up at one of their two secret meeting places, they turned and ran in the opposite direction of each other, the orbitals in close pursuit of both.