SWAB (A Young Adult Dystopian Novel) (22 page)

“Please, Cat.”

The water gurgled and splashed. Derrick grunted with the effort of keeping the flier submerged.

There was no way I would let her save him. The scarb were trying to enslave us. But I could feel the love she had for him burning in my own heart.
Why am I so confused
?
“You didn’t show mercy to the man I loved,” I spat back at her as the flier thrashed about in the water. “Why should I help you?”

She closed her mouth, resolve settling into the lines of her face. Her lover gave one last gurgling cry, and then the water stilled. A single tear streamed out of her closed eyes. It glimmered like silver before it ran off her chin onto my clenched fingers. “I can’t let him go.”

Her words stabbed at my heart. It pierced through my fear, my resentment, my hate. I felt her pain as if it were my own, and I knew how horrible it was to have to let someone go. I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Go,” I said. Like a streak of red lighting, she flew to the edge of the pool and dove into the water. The battle was still thick and none of the other scarb were watching as the flier’s body sank down with the pull of the falls. Derrick made to go after Iva, but I put a hand on his chest. “Don’t,” I said. Iva’s hair waved in the current like red ribbons as she went down.

Is it suicide, then? A double death of lovers?
She had to be at least eight feet deep now. A watery grave.

But then, her arms sprang to life, wrapping themselves around the body of her lover. She kicked her legs ferociously and jetted out of the pool with a burst of water. She climbed out onto the rocks and pulled him up beside her.
She’s alive
!
How did she not die
?
But his body was completely stiff.
Is he still alive, too?
He couldn’t be. No scarb could survive that much water, but the water seemed to have no effect on Iva.

Iva put her palms on either side of his head and kissed him.

“Bram, please come back,” she whispered. His chest rose, and she exhaled, then looked up as if suddenly aware of us again. Quickly, she heaved his massive body into her arms, and began to flap her damp wings. I couldn’t believe she could hold him.

Her green eyes were on me. “Don’t tell anyone I’m a swimmer.” With a mighty beat of her wings, she lifted her lover into the air and flew out of the cavern.

More scarb surround Derrick and me. My arms twisted sharply behind me before I could even blink. Two massive guards held me.

“Grahhh!” They had Derrick as well.

I tried to smash their noses with the back of my head, but their arms were long and they held me back.

“Don’t fight,” Jack’s voice said as he reappeared amongst the guard. Saki came beside him, looking sad. Someone had cut a deep gash in her check. Scarb got Nathan and the others too. My heart sank. We’d barely gotten to the waterfall, hadn’t even made it to the passageway, and now it was all over.

“You need to learn to mind the queen,” Jack said, turning to each of us. “There is an order here in the colony. You will learn to follow. The queen has ordered you to the dungeons.” They clasped our hands in handcuffs and forced us out of the cavern. We were taken through a door at the bottom of the hall. Steep stone steps led us downward several flights. We were deep into the earth. The air was musty and rank, like fresh air was a foreign concept. Down we went.

Chapter Twenty

The Queen

“Cat, are you awake?” Nathan’s voice called to my mind. He was two cells down from mine.

“Of course I’m awake,” I answered him, not caring that the guards or any of the others could undoubtedly hear my conversation with my brother. “How could anyone sleep on this blasted cold floor?”

The entire space was excavated out of rock and earth. Iron bars kept us contained in cells less than fifty feet square. Seven burly guards watched us. It was only by the light of their dim, bluish lanterns that we could see at all. We were the only occupants in the prison. All the other cells were dark and quiet. “Emerald probably doesn’t keep prisoners for long,” Derrick guessed. We’d already been stuck there for several long hours.

The ground beneath me was stiff and frozen as winter. There was no cot, nothing to sit on. “You’ll stay here until the queen determines what to do with you,” Jack told us, before he left with the others. That’s all we had to go on. It didn’t feel like much.

Gray let out a long snore, answering my question, but Derrick was awake, despite the late hour.

“I’m here if you need me, “he told me with a gentle thought, but he didn’t intrude on my conversation with Nate. I rubbed the points of the barbs on my scalp. I liked feeling the sharp tips, like knives against the soft skin of my fingers.

“What do you think is going to happen now?” Nathan asked. He pressed his face against the bars, and I could barely make out the
shape of his nose and his eyes. I could hear the gentle rustle of his wings.

I thought about his question.
What on earth
is
going to happen now?
“Well, the queen ordered us captured, not killed, so she obviously still wants us alive.” That wasn’t much consolation. “She’ll probably force me to carry out her breeding plans.”I wrapped my fingers around the icy bars. “I may spend the rest of my life down here, spitting out larva as fast as possible.”

Nathan spat. “I won’t let her.”

“And what are you going to do about it Nathan?” I said, directing my anger at him. “You’re just as stuck as I am! Our plan failed! We’re at the mercy of a monster.”I sank to my knees, my head falling to my chest. A sharp blade twisted in the chambers of my heart. I thought back to the days on the island—gathering food and wood, sparring with Ray late in the evening, feeling the grass brush against my legs, even sitting in Mr. Blackwell’s class. Life had been so simple then, though I never knew it. I wished I could go back, wished I could bite into a juicy turkey leg hot off the campfire, watch the afternoon sun sparkle on the lake, hear the jays calling in the trees, fall asleep in my own sleeping bag. Not entirely safe, but still human, living my own life.

“Even though we’re scarb now, we can have that kind of life again,” Derrick said quietly, almost imperceptibly to my mind, like a hush of wind afraid of stirring the leaves.

We can have that again.
I played the idea around in my mind, loving the hope it offered. But his breeze created a storm inside me.
We can never have that again! Everything’s changed. We’re scarb now. We’re part of world we don’t understand and have no control over. Even if we get out of this colony, nothing will ever be the same.

*****

The next morning, the guard changed. They came with yellow lanterns, which made me think a new day must’ve come. But nothing was different. We were still prisoners. Even worse, we were prisoners of our own despair, trapped by hopelessness.

Our food consisted of celery, some kind of grass, and water. The others ate, but the food only made me more despondent. If they were feeding us, they weren’t planning to let us out any time soon. I was right. We were trapped in the underbelly of the colony mountain for five days. No one but the guard came to see us, and they never spoke a word or answered any of our questions like when the queen would come to see us or when will we might get out of there?

By the evening of the sixth day, my face was set in rigid lines. I’d stopped talking to the others for the most part. I let them tell stories and jokes to pass the time, but I had nothing to laugh about. I’d resigned myself to the fact that I’d likely never leave the dungeon. My life was to be one of forced servitude. There was nothing I could do. No amount of pounding my fists against the walls, no shrill screams, no shaking of the iron bars would free me.

I wished that I wasn’t a Bearer. To be scarb was bad enough, but to be one with valuable abilities was so much worse. If I’d just been some rebellious Newborn, they would’ve killed me. I could be lying in a deep, eternal sleep now, instead of being a bug stuck in a cage. But now my body would be used to produce soldiers, warriors made for no other purpose than to go into battle field and die. I didn’t care how much the scarb of this colony praised and adored their queen for her goodness, her wisdom and nobility. She was nothing but a deranged, power-hungry psychopath to me.

“The queen approaches,” a guard suddenly announced. All the guards straightened and tapped the floor rhythmically with the poles of their long lanterns. Gray, Nathan, Jorge, and Travis emerged from the dark corners of their cells. Even Derrick came close for a look. I
stayed where I was, with my back to the wall, rubbing my fingers up and down the last bar of my cage.
Here it comes.

We heard their footsteps down the stone steps before we saw them. Their thoughts were completely shielded from us. First came a half-dozen guards, most of them with black hoods drawn over their faces like some kind of cult. Then I saw the hem of a forest-green dress. Her face was even sharper and more pointed than the murals around the colony depicted her, it was as if the artists had tried to soften her face to make her more likable. Short, curly brown hair that was starting to show the signs of age bounced as she walked in clipped steps along the stone floor. She passed my cell without pausing, filling my nose with the smell of lilac perfume. Iva was behind her. A growl came out of my throat.

“You witch! I yelled at her. I saved your lover, and now you’ve come to gloat over me in my cell?”

Iva said nothing. She didn’t even look at me.

The queen stopped and addressed the guard. “Where is she?” The guard pointed his fat finger wordlessly at my cell. The queen’s dress flared as she turned. Her expression was all hawk as she looked into my cell. That was when I saw the eyes that she was named for: pure, cold emerald, unusually divided into only two irises.

“Cat,” she spat my name like it was a hairball in her throat. “Or have you chosen another name more suited for what you now are?” I disliked the course sound of her voice in my head, like a bad chord struck on a piano.

“And what am I now?” I asked, fighting the urge to stand and face her on my feet. I wasn’t going show her the slightest bit of fear or loyalty. So I sat.

“A scarb in the greatest colony on the earth,” she said with a smug up-turn of her chin. I felt Derrick trying to tell me something, but I pushed his thoughts out of my head.

I pursed my lips and pretended to think about what the queen had said. “Slave, captive, even breeding mutt would fit a bit better, don’t you think?”I tilted my head to look up at her from an angle.

Emerald swept her hand through the air in a beheading motion. “Enough!”She rubbed her temples with her hands. Without looking, she spoke. “I assume six days down here,” she twirled her wrists around at the dank dungeon, “has been enough to convince you it would be wise to cooperate.”

I rubbed the pointy tips of the barbs on my skull.

“Those sure are pretty,” the queen’s voice interjected into my thoughts. She was bending down to get a closer look at me.

“Thanks,” I spat, shifting away. She was assessing me like a poodle she’d like to see puppies from.

“So, what do you say,
Cat
?” she grinned slightly. “If you cooperate, I can give you much better accommodations. Your friends, too.”She cocked her head to the side. “Isn’t it wise?”

I dug the tip of my longest of my barbs into my pointer finger until it drew a small drop of blood. We were in a predicament. If we refused, it wasn’t hard to guess that the queen could just easily kill us. But not me. No, she’d keep me. And probably Derrick too. But she’d probably kill the rest. It is wise,” I agreed. “Unfortunately, it’s also impossible.”

The lines of her face flinched and her eyes glowed hotly. “What do you mean, ‘impossible’?”

I twirled a strand of my blonde hair around one of my barbs. “Well, you see,
Emerald,
” I emphasized her name like she had mine, “I can never agree to what you want to do with me or my friends.”

“Well done,” Derrick said approvingly from the other cell. He and the others were already in fighting stances.

Emerald clicked her teeth. “What a shame. Well I suppose I’ll just have to get your cooperation another way.”She motioned to Iva,
who. had a set of keys in her hands. She didn’t look at me as she unlocked my cell, but her voice came into my mind.

“Bow to no one,” she said. “For you are a Swab.”

Swab? What on earth does that mean?
Surely, it was a trick.
Or just something to confuse me
.
Iva didn’t say anything else as she unlocked the other cells. The guards marched into one. Derrick and Gray started protesting, but were stilled by the tips of spears aimed at their hearts. The guards came back out, holding Nathan. They had his arms twisted behind him.

“Your brother,” Emerald said, sounding bored. “You care for him; I can see it in your eyes.” She pulled a knife out of her gown. I stepped out of my cell. “Perhaps you will be willing to cooperate now.” She handed the knife to the guard at her left. He pressed the blade against Nathan’s throat. He inhaled sharply. His eyes were wide, and the whites of them shone brightly in the yellow light of the lanterns.

The queen held her hand up, pointer finger extended to signal the command. Her dark green eyes were on me. “I will spill your brother’s blood right now. Tell me you will serve me.”

Bow to no one, for you are a Swab.
Iva’s words repeated in my mind. My eyes jetted from my brother, to the guard, to Derrick; hoping to find an answer anywhere. I wouldn’t let Nathan die for me, but Iva’s words echoed inside me.
Bow to no one.