Lower Earth Rising Collection, Books 1-3: A Dystopian Contemporary Fantasy Read online

  The woman raised her head, her heartbeat continuing to accelerate. Aria focused her attention into the woman. She listened to the movement of the woman’s blood, the air as it entered, as it converted, as it was exhaled.

  Accelerated heartbeat is normal in such circumstances. Her breath is shallow. Batrasa planted a seed of fear in her.

  “You are right to fear me. But I won’t hurt you. I am not the enemy.” Aria watched the woman’s eyes, which seemed desperate to break her gaze, and yet didn’t. “What’s your name?”

  The woman stared at her.

  “I said, what is your name, woman?”

  “Ingrid of the ninth line.”

  “Why are you here, Ingrid?”

  Her heartbeat slows, along with her breath. Pride.

  She is proud of her crime.

  Ingrid’s cheeks raised; her eyes narrowed. Aria didn’t recognize the expression. She spoke quietly, “You, you want to know what I did? The Future Queen cares what a lowly citizen of Geb may have done to be disappeared?”

  She challenges me.

  Aria straightened her spine.

  “We are all citizens. Equal under the first Directions of the settlers.” Aria listened to the blood of the woman; it still rushed but with less intensity. “Come with me.” Aria stepped away from the others. Ingrid followed. “Now you are speaking only to me. No one else can hear what you have to say. Be straight and don’t play with words. I can tell it is bursting inside you.”

  Ingrid cocked her head. “Future Queen,” her eyes narrowed, “I killed the child that was growing inside me. That is what they say was my crime.” Ingrid stopped there, staring deeply, holding Aria’s gaze.

  She awaits my reaction. I will invite her. I need this more than I need childish battle games.

  “You committed a great crime indeed. Do you have no remorse?”

  “Remorse? Future Queen, I did what was right. They put an abomination inside me. You don’t understand. You don’t know what it was. It was no human child. And yet look where I am because of it.” Ingrid stood taller and opened her lips a sliver. “I know it doesn’t matter that it was an inhuman creature. I was a Willing Woman.”

  “By all laws, you are a killer.”

  “I may have been a genetic deviant, I could never be mother to a monster.”

  “You violated the most sacred trust.”

  “No one asked me if I wanted an experiment in my body.”

  “Willing Women are always asked.”

  “I was in Cork Town! Nobody cares what they do with the women of Cork Town. They took my blood, then they forced life in my womb, and here I am. I know you’ll never let me go back.”

  Heat ran through the woman’s veins. Aria could tell there was more. The thought of it excited her. The group of women and Batrasa awaited their return, but Aria had to know.

  “You resent me, Ingrid. I feel it. Why?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to know why.”

  Ingrid inhaled deeply, her voice starting low but growing as she grew bolder.

  “Where were you when we were starving, Future Queen? Playing games, playing with the disappeared people on forgotten islands." Ingrid stepped toward her. “We needed you, Future Queen. We needed a future. They made me believe I was doing my part. They didn’t tell me until it was nearly the end that they’d planted this creature in me, some test of the limits of humanity. By killing it I did that thing a favor. It was my right and it was the right thing to do. Now I pay the consequences for it. And where were you?” Ingrid stopped, and then shouted, “Where were you? Where was every Queen when we were most in need? Where!”

  Aria walked away, calm and collected. She’d heard exactly what she wanted to hear, but she also couldn’t let the others see Ingrid speak to her that way and get away with it.

  Ingrid shouted at Aria’s back, "I asked you a question, Future Queen. When we were suffering under the pests, and infant deaths and poisoned water, where were you?”

  The other three prisoner women stood dumb.

  Aria wandered a few steps away. She took her time, adjusting her long leather coat, buttoning it to the top of her neck.

  “You’re right, Ingrid.” Aria kept her back to the women but cocked her head to one side as she looked out across the pond. “You’re never coming back to Lower Earth. Not after what you’ve done. Not after the disrespect you’ve shown.”

  Aria turned around, slower than the earth turned, letting the four women watch her every movement. “Where was I, you ask?” Aria strode tall toward Ingrid, coming chest to chest where she stood more than a head taller than the convicted woman. “I was instilling the history of every Queen who ever came before." Aria caressed her own arms and neck. "They run in my blood; their wisdom etched on my bones. But I had to learn their ways. This is what I had to do in order to become the Queen you all need and deserve. What you call games were my blessed preparations; the generations are now infused in me and all their wisdom with it. How else could I know your movements before you made them? Those preparations will save us when the enemy arrives.”

  Aria heard doubt in Ingrid's breath.

  I must show only as much as is necessary, no more.

  "Say what you have to say, woman. You’ve said so much already."

  Ingrid's voice barely spoke, her lips hardly moved. Only Aria could hear her.

  “There is no other enemy. We are our own enemy.”

  Aria took Ingrid’s cheeks into her hands and looked deep into her green eyes.

  “Wait until you see what the men of Upper Earth have in store for us. You are naïve. And you’ll die a captive animal on this forgotten island prison because of it.”

  Aria walked away from the women but spoke loud enough to Batrasa that they could hear.

  “Take them back to the closed area. And get them some shoes. The Queen may have had them disappeared, but they’re not animals.”

  2

  Aria

  Batrasa stoked the fire in their safari tent, ensuring the flames licked toward the open side and away from their sleeping space.

  Aria dropped into the fabric folded seat. It creaked under her weight. It was barely large enough for her hips.

  "You've slackened, Batrasa," Aria loosened the laces of her boots which climbed up nearly to her knee, but she kept an eye on the old warrior woman.

  There was no love between them, even after nearly sixteen years, nearly all of her life. So many of Aria’s memories were of Batrasa and the Ganese priestesses, but it had always been an arrangement. A Protectorate and her charge. Nothing more.

  Batrasa didn't respond.

  "Is it age?"

  Batrasa pursed her lips and kept poking at the fire.

  "Do you resent spending your last days in my company?"

  Batrasa laughed quietly, something of a mocking snicker.

  Aria listened to what Batrasa didn't say.

  Her heartbeat is irregular. Her breath is forced. She wants to say something.

  "Speak, teacher."

  "You command me?"

  "I invite you."

  Batrasa stood, but did not turn from the fire.

  "Your skills in collective thought are strong, Future Queen."

  "But?"

  "But you are too confident. There is much you do not know."

  Aria started to speak but stopped herself.

  Let her say all she has to say. Her blood is flowing hot.

  Aria scanned back into herself, the voices of the Queens before her living just under the surface. But she had never mastered how to call on them. The voices would come when unexpected, when they had something to say, and not when Aria sought them.

  "You don’t see the moving pieces. You are the center of your own world."

  Aria sat back in her seat. "You've been saying the same since I was a little girl. I'm failing to see why now it’s suddenly a revelation."

  Batrasa swung to look Aria in the eye. "Because it was my job to beat it out of you. To m
ake you into what you needed to be." She turned back to the fire. "And I failed."

  "You overstate your position, teacher. I am confident but not cocky. I don't take unnecessary risks, and you know that I have good cause for my assertiveness. I have what you don't, we both know that."

  "Even now," Batrasa shook her head at the fire, "you still maintain that position. You don’t change." Batrasa walked toward her chair on the other side of the safari tent and lowered herself, hands on the armrests taking her weight. "But times are changing, Ariane, and I'm not going to be of use to you for very much longer. You will have to abandon the Aria you’ve become if you’re to be the Ariane this world needs of you."

  "You know something about my coronation?" Aria held herself back. For years she'd been waiting for a sign. Perhaps this was it. She was ready. She’d been calling to the Queens of Before about it for years.

  Batrasa tilted her head. "What do you know about your mother's coronation?"

  Aria had heard the story many times over from the priestesses in varying degrees of detail. "Old Queen Idia died. Queen Maeva stepped in when she was eighteen years of age. Just like I am now.” Aria felt her chest puff at the thought. “I am ready for my time, to bring the world into balance. To honor the settlers and keep their wish for life at the fore of Lower Earth’s pursuits."

  "The Queens in your blood, do they speak of this?"

  She knows nothing of the Queens in my blood, as if they spoke in words.

  "They give me signs. Comfort and warnings. Screeching in my veins or low rumbling. But they do not read the future, you know that well enough."

  Batrasa laughed lowly. "You speak of these voices as though they are a gift."

  They sat silent, crackling fire casting shadows against the tented roof.

  "They are a curse," Batrasa whispered. "Punish me for saying it if you like, but listen first. You know I didn't want you in my charge. But you don't know why. It's not my role to speak of it, my role is only to prepare and I promise I did it as best I could. I would not put Lower Earth at risk because of my own moral dilemma. But now? Ariane," Batrasa leaned forward, "Ariane, you have to start learning of Lower Earth on your own. Listen carefully to those voices inside you, but do not trust them. They are a byproduct. And one that I do not envy for a second. I saw what they did to Old Queen Idia."

  Batrasa stood, unmoving, eyes frozen in an unseen distance.

  Perspiration on her forehead. She doubts herself. She has spoken more than she intended. Nostrils heating the air within them; she doesn't calm though she tries.

  Batrasa inhaled deeply and looked to Aria.

  "Perhaps you shall soon be called to the capital. But the city is nothing like you have imagined. Now sleep. We cast off for Lower Earth before dawn."

  Aria lay in bed, various parts of her body contracting as they did most nights, especially after a day of combat. She scanned from the inside.

  Minor tears to muscle tissue in right calf.

  She pulled blood from her torso towards the place, rushing hot and fresh. She inhaled and sent the cells which split, recreating and strengthening.

  And she was healed.

  Elongation of latissimus dorsi. Result of thrust against second attacker. Must lower elbow during turned movement.

  She closed her eyes, the heat of oxygen and sensation of waves, the blood rolling over itself to the place. Cells split. Cells recreated. Cells healed.

  She opened her eyes. And waited.

  The reflection will come.

  She called it a reflection, as she had no other name for it. She’d experienced it since the age of three when she first learned to consciously regenerate. A reflection because it was the counterattack of change that came back at her after she healed herself. Like throwing a spear at her image in the mirror, but she became the reflection just as the spear arrived unto herself.

  She had no other way of explaining it to herself, nor had she ever explained it to another soul.

  The reflection gripped her. She was on the cot when the pain came, lying ten feet from Batrasa who slept deep. A ripping searing pain started in her neck. Then her shoulder. Further down and around, the reflection tore at her, shredding muscle instants before recreating it.

  Recreating it stronger than it was before.

  It never followed the same path; it was predictable only by its timing.

  Aria breathed heavily through her nose as the pain subsided, leaving her skin slick and taut. She closed her eyes but didn't sleep. She hadn't slept, not in the way others slept, not since she’d been born.

  The voices of the old Queens rumbled while she throbbed across her ever-strengthening body. She forced herself to rest.

  3

  Aria

  Steps, approaching at 64 miles per hour. Mother is coming.

  Aria had been in the process of memorizing the currents of the Gana River. They had been changing in recent months, which she could only attribute to another climatic change.

  But her mother's steps, running, were enough to stop her cold. A visit from the Queen could mean many things, but rarely anything good.

  She stood and walked to the gate, the entryway of Gana that was the limit of her access to Lower Earth. She knew her mother would hear her moving to meet her. The Queen could hear almost as far as Aria.

  Almost.

  None of the warrior priestesses would even be aware of the Queen until she was within their territory. The flurry of activity would be manic once word got out, and invariably Batrasa would make comment about the benefits of forewarning.

  But Ariane always heard her before she arrived. And more than a year had passed since the last time.

  The flaps of the Queen's dress blew in the wind as Aria watched her advance from afar. The Queen slowed to a walk from a few hundred feet away. Her mother's voice spoke to her even though she was still 3 miles from the gate where Aria stood.

  "I see you, child.”

  "Child? I'm the same age you were when you took the throne."

  The Queen cocked her head. “And I was hardly more than a child. You think eighteen years alive qualifies you to be Queen? You haven’t changed. Your training here has kept you soft."

  She doesn’t how I have been preparing myself since the scout was discovered. There is nothing soft in my training.

  "Mother,” Aria barely spoke, just loud enough so that the queen could hear, the sound traveling on the breeze across the expanse before Gana officially began. “I have dedicated myself to preparation, taken myself to the far corners of the dark counties. The Queens of old are well in me. Healing, collective thought, the ancient accounts. I am preparing. Gana is no fortress."

  The Queen's head snapped, upward, chin high and proud. "You think I'm resting on my laurels in Geb? You think because I live in the fortress that somehow my lifestyle is privileged? You have even farther to come than I thought. You have no idea the trials I went through to become Queen. You have been spared all that."

  Aria trod carefully. "What I'm trying to say is that you've kept me here. You wanted me shielded, wanted me to focus on my own training and learn the power of collective thought. But now my skills have surpassed Batrasa’s program. Remember, you are the one who said I should not be among the people in order to prepare to lead them. I have turned every attention to that cause. I have even practiced in disguise through the Dark Counties to observe their movements. I am now ready."

  “You are not allowed in the Dark Counties.”

  “I am not a common Ganese. I go for my preparation – "

  “You are not allowed! Yes, you were isolated, that was an intentional decision. And now you are undermining its very purpose. We cannot risk decisions being based on individualistic loyalty."

  "I have no loyalty here. My collective thought is highly attuned."

  “I know Archer comes to see you even when I have not commanded it. What is your relationship with him?”

  “Archer is a servant of Lower Earth, no more.”

 
“He considers himself more than that to you.”

  “Then he overstates his position."

  “Isn’t he the one who named you Aria?”

  “It is you who named me Ariane. That is my name.”

  The Queen cocked her head at Aria.

  "The priestesses say you practice dark arts like the Sisters over in the Strangelands."

  "That's only because I so far exceed what they can do."

  "So you say. But you've become dependent on your Protectorate." The Queen was arm’s length from Aria now, her forehead pulling into a line of criticism.

  Her eyes are cold and I cannot hear her heartbeat. She is masking it.

  "Mother, I spend every moment listening, waiting, preparing. Fighting even, in disguise and without drawing unnecessary attention, dirty brawls, so that I can heal myself from the wounds of the mad, deep wounds that would kill anyone else."

  "Upper Earth will not arrive here mad."

  "I am trying to - "

  "If anything, they will arrive and we won't know it at all." The Queen looked past Ariane.

  Run the scenarios: she's avoiding the point. More input required. Test her regard. Question of leadership? Likely not. More likely a scenario yet undisclosed.

  Aria straightened her back. "Queen, are you concerned about my abilities?"

  "No."

  "My acumen?"

  "No."

  Aria waited. Unwavering but silent.

  Something softened in the Queen’s face. Her cheeks relaxed, her eyes calmed.

  “Ariane. Designed nearly to perfection. My own code, advanced. You, more than anyone, more than I, are connected through collective thought. I can feel it in you, even now. It will make you a fair leader. The people would swiftly come to love you.”

  The Queen closed her eyes and leaned closer. Aria felt her breath pass between them, landing on her chin. It was hot and sweet, like aged prunes fermenting to wine.

  "My Ariane."

  She moved closer still, their heads nearly touching.

  There is a wave coming across her. She is vulnerable.