my grip on my father’s bow. If I could distract him enough, I might be able to move closer.
“You were caught with an illegal firearm. My guards can be overzealous, but it was clear your mother and boyfriend were working with the resistance. Honestly, I’m disappointed. I thought you were smarter than this. I thought you understood.”
“You tried to kill me in the trials,” I said.
“Of course I didn’t. The other chosen, I could have spared. What I wanted was for you to win, kill the rebels, and make my son happy.”
“But then you did something unexpected,” he looked me over thoughtfully, pursing his lips. “You resisted. Honestly nobody has been able to do that for a long time. It made me careless. That’s when I knew you I couldn’t control you, that you’d always be a danger to me. To be clear, I wasn’t trying to kill you then. I most definitely am now. Especially now that you know about this.”
And then he struck, cutting through the ash like a guillotine. I felt heat blast by me, before I even realized what had happened.
I gasped for breath, checking myself over. I was still in one piece, but my father’s bow was split in half, dangling from the string. I dropped it on the ground and reached for my knives.
I held them close to me, like thorns.
“You lied about everything,” I growled. “You said you were protecting us, from the ash, from the slagpaw. You made both, to keep enslaved.”
“I am protecting you,” he snapped. “Humanity’s doom was always written. Elite were showing no restraint, burning through their food supply. Humanity was the weaker species, bound for an inevitable extinction. We would have bled them out, then slowly starved ourselves decades later. It was already happening. I was just the only one who could see it.”
“If that were true, why the ash? Why block out the sun? If nature meant the elite to thrive, surely they wouldn’t have made you so vulnerable?”
“The elite were being hunted down. I’d discovered a cure for cancer, and the humans were drinking it to get high and hunt us down in the streets. The race wars would have been the death of everything.”
“So yes, I created the ash. It wasn’t that hard to do, actually. We took a dormant, natural volcano and turned it into a massive engineering project; drilling it open with reinforced steel. By that times I’d made billions selling immortality to the wealthy. Of course, nobody could know the truth. My communities are built on trust and consent. The burning sky, though a necessary component of lasting peace, wouldn’t have been understood. The price of freedom is too complex for my people to understand.”
“If that’s true, it’s only because you haven’t educated them. They only feel free. They aren’t really.”
“What’s freedom, if not a feeling?”
“It’s not real. You made all the decisions for them. They’re like rats in a maze, playing out some cruel experiment.”
“And knowing the truth, it broke you, it brought you here. You couldn’t just go on, knowing about this place. You risked everything to find it for yourself. Even though, you know what would happen next. If you turn off the machines, the skies will clear. And then what? Rather than weekly blood donations, given freely in fair exchange for a nearly magical healing elixir that keeps my citizens strong, healthy and happy – instead of that, they’ll run into the untamed wild, and get hunted down by elite. Slaughtered brutally, violently, until there are none left to remember.”
“Maybe at first. But without the ash, eventually they’ll rebuild. They’ll grow. Until they outnumber you.”
“When is that going to happen? Who is going to have time to bear children and keep them alive? Children smell the sweetest, you know, like fresh strawberries. It’ll be decades of bloodshed, then decades of silence, as we drive each other to near extinction and back again, over and over, like red tides.”
I felt a drift of air against my neck, and spun quickly, slashing with my knives. He batted my wrists away playfully, leering at me and flashing his fangs, before disappearing into the ash and shadows. He was toying with me.
“You’ll never be a match for me, you know. You’ll always be weak, human. Also, you’re wasting your time. Don’t you think I took precautions? Even if you reached the lever, you’d still need this.”
He stood over me, flashing a golden key from a chain around his neck, before tucking it