The Quarries

Lyra closed her eyes tightly as another scream ripped through the air outside the cave. The light, dim and flickering, filtered through the cracks between the rocks, coloring the pale faces around her with the warm orange glow of fire. Damn rebels.

She wasn’t scared, not about screams. Nor was the rock slide which had trapped them in the tunnels particularly unsettling. Unlike the people around her, hardened murders mostly, she wasn’t afraid of suffocation or starvation or being crushed alive by the tunnel collapsing any further. 

Mostly, she was just pissed. 

The scream died out into a garbled moan. It was close, probably just on the other side of the uneven wall of rocks. She thought she might have recognized it, just for a moment, but it faded before she could be sure. 

So close. She had been so damn close. After three years in this hell, she had almost gotten out. Legally, too, she might add. She’d escaped other camps within a week, but this time she didn’t have to. Edhit had assured her, as her court appointed defender, that she could be exonerated of the charges, let out and actually free for the first time since she was a kid. 

Because this time, she was actually innocent. 

“Help!” a faint voice screamed from outside. 

Lyra knew this one instantly. Ondut, the kid who slipped her an extra roll when she had been punished for mouthing off at a guard. No food, no water. He was only seventeen, the youngest at camp. She didn’t know what he’d done to land him here, but even the life-sentencers left him alone. 

Her hands started to move, as if to dig through the rocks in front of her. But she stopped herself. He would be no safer here. Fires were frequent in the quarry, she had gotten used to them. But this time, they were everywhere. 

She remembered reading about things like this before. A museum, probably. Her father had dragged her to all of them when she was little. She remembered the black and white pictures from long ago. Stories of the earth shaking and burning beneath the shells. 

Another one landed as if answering her thought. Bomb. 

She didn’t know how many others the bombs had taken already. There were maybe a dozen in here with her. The software back at the main base would be counting each heart that failed, in fear or fire. Though she doubted anyone was actually paying attention to that anymore.

The museum had talked about different kinds of bombs. These were likely incendiary, ones that were made to burn. Those were survivable, more or less. The distant words of the display reordered themselves until she could read it. 

Nuclear power, once considered the energy of the future, was first harnessed in the complete destruction of towns. Renowned for its ability to destroy everything for many years in the future, pockets of the world are still rendered uninhabitable by blasts over a century ago. 

But these weren’t nuclear. Even the rebels wouldn’t risk these precious quarries. Lose the men and women who mined them, sure. There were always more prisoners and criminals to fill the ranks on either side of what the Company still declared not-a-war. But the ore in these caverns was too precious to the Company or the rebels. 

Guns, tanks, planes, everything seemed to be made of this stuff. Lyra had worked in a factory before coming here, she couldn’t remember how long before. She had been running from somewhere when she had been caught. Maybe that was it. It was all a blur that burned with the smell of smoke. 

“Jezi!” a man screeched behind her, shoving to the front as a distant woman screamed. Marcus, all six-foot-six of him, was quivering. Lyra remembered stories, curled at the edges, of giants with hearts of gold. She thought dimly, almost giddily, that it would require having a heart to begin with. 

Marcus pounded on the stones. He screamed for Jezi. Lyra tried to place the name to the thousands of faces that lived and worked at this camp. Perhaps she was the woman who always seemed to hover at Marcus’s shoulder, all dark skin and bright grins. Somehow, she kept her neat braids tidy in this heat and labor and even, on occasion, had bright beads woven through the plaits. 

Lyra had hated her from the beginning. A hatred that had only grown over the years, watching her steal clothing from the women as they showered, pulling sheets onto the dust littered ground, and shoving heads into the toilettes. 

But the way Marcus pounded on the stones. 

If either of them had a heart, Lyra thought sardonically, it was for the twisted hole that the other possessed. 

There was another scream, far closer. Lyra heard the crack of stone on skull as she was shot back against the wall with the blast of the next bomb, but she didn’t register the pain. That bomb couldn’t have been more than a couple feet from the caved-in entrance. 

Bodies lay around her, dead or senseless, she couldn’t tell. Marcus lay over her legs, practically pinning her beneath his massive weight. It shouldn’t have been possible for him to be this heavy. At least, not if he was receiving the same portions as the rest of them. 

She pushed Marcus off her, stumbling to her feet. The impact of the last explosion had tossed some stones away from the entrance, just enough that she could pull herself through. She didn’t bother looking to see if anyone was there to shoot at whomever came out. Bullets or bombs or suffocation. It didn’t terribly matter how she died. 

The mountain around her lay in shatters and pieces. The forest, not a hundred feet below where she was now, was a great bonfire, coughing smoke and cinders into the air. Lyra couldn’t see the camp from where she was, but she imagined there wasn’t anything to see. Just a pile of charcoal and some skeletons. 

A screech that couldn’t be made by a human sliced through the air. Lyra lept behind a boulder as if that would protect her from anything those monsters let loose on her. The whine just continued, growing and growing before suddenly fading off. Lyra didn’t remember much about her childhood, but she remembered the sound of planes flying overhead. 

She peeked over her boulder, watching the metal birds disappear into the smoke. Her eyes locked onto the painted targets scrawled on the side of one of the planes just before it vanished. 

A distant memory called itself up. A male voice telling her about those targets as the sound of engines came and went and came and went. Her father, maybe. A taunt, the memory whispered. Something recruits say to each other at the academy.

“Bet you couldn’t hit me with a target painted on my back,” she muttered, mouth forming the words clumsily, as if she were speaking another language.

She knew the taunt. Half the time it came from her. 

The Company’s academy. The Company’s force.

The Company was attacking its own mines. 

She opened her mouth to scream, profanities or like a little girl, she didn’t know, but another plane beat her to it. This time, they saw her. 

The gunshots came after the hail of bullets hit the ground, sending up puffs of dust in Lyra’s wake. Long after. In fact, she wasn’t sure she heard them at all. All she heard was the deep, thudding beat that must have been her heart, jackaloping around her chest. It seemed to practically rattle within her with each gasping breath she took. 

She watched the mountain’s edge come closer, taunting her like the cliffs by her old house. The cliffs the other kids used to jump off, daring each other into the frigid and rocky water below, churning in a vicious whirl of white. 

This time, it wasn’t a white river or the great blue ocean that her father had taken her to so long ago. This sea was green, shivering in the wind of rippling explosions still going off behind her. The even pounding of the bullets of the dry, rocky ground pushed her faster and faster. 

Part of her thought that maybe she would just soar. Maybe she would take off like the planes she used to watch with her father, swooping through the air to places she couldn’t pronounce, much less imagine. Yes, that’s where she’d go. A far off place, where they’d never find her. 

She screamed the words that the other kids yelled as they jumped into the river, calling as she leapt through the smoke and heat waves. 

“Never live forever.”