The Liberator

A small sound rings through the morning, the noise a stone makes when falling from a ledge to the jutting rocks below.

It sounds again. And again.

Something is coming.

Kraven shuffles back, and I match his steps. We breathe hard, waiting for them to show themselves.

A hand whips over the side of the ledge.

And a man, tall with lanky arms and legs, pulls himself up. He’s wearing a steel-gray shirt, gray pants. If it wasn’t for his dark skin, it’d be hard to tell him apart from the stone cliff he crawled up from. One of his pinkies is missing. I wonder how he lost it. Maybe it was from antagonizing a German shepherd as a kid, or from an Indian cooking class.

I lick my lips, nearly tasting the tension.

My legs move toward him before I even think about what I’m doing. I don’t want to think. I just want to feel the crack of my knuckles against this guy’s face. But something behind him stops me.

It’s another arm, pulling another body over the edge. A woman. She stands upright, cracks her neck.

And then another arm. And another. And another and another and another.

Sirens appear, slithering onto their bellies and then rising up like cobras. They’re mere humans who agreed to work for collectors. They don’t have special powers or the ability to survive where we don’t. I should take comfort in this. But there are too many of them. More than I want to count. I lean my head toward Kraven. “What are we going to do?”

“We?” he says, eyeing the sirens. “This is your fight.” Before I can think, Kraven grabs the back of my shirt and hurls me toward them.

I land hard against the cold ground, frozen solid from winter’s fury. I’m out here alone. They’re surrounding me. I should be afraid. I should run back to Kraven and demand he fight alongside me. But this is what I want.

Release.

I jump to my feet and roar like the beasts they work for. “You want her? You’ve got to get through me first!”

They lunge at me.

30 Inside

I feel the crash of fists in my back, the splinter of a kick in my side. Teeth tear at my skin, and hands claw at my throat. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I’m tired of hiding from these people. Tired of running.

I remember Charlie the way I left her this morning, the way she looked at me with fear. I detest that. I detest seeing her afraid and being unable to ease it. Now I can. I grab the next fist I see and spin until I hear joints pop. Then I turn on the next siren, a girl my age. I grab her hair and throw her to the ground.

A siren twice my size wraps his burly arms around my chest. I use what Kraven taught me, throwing my heel back into his kneecap. The man collapses with a guttural groan. I leap over him and throw my elbow into a siren’s nose. Blood sprays across his cheeks, and a smile lights up my face.

I’m doing well. Surviving. Taking them down one at a time. But the problem is that they keep getting back up. Their goal was to get past me to Charlie, and maybe to Aspen, but now they’re focused on me alone. They’re angry. And an easy way to alleviate that fury is to take me down.

They move like a flock of birds. One guy, the one who first stepped over the ledge, races toward me. The others follow his lead and fly forward. Together, they hit me like a wall. I land on my back, and rocks dig into my muscles.

I kick and flail—all arms and legs like an overturned beetle—but they easily overtake me. The first punch feels special, like I’ll remember it a thousand years from now. But the rest blend together until the pain becomes all that I am. Even places they haven’t touched scream out.

Then they stop. One at a time, they stop. Above me, their faces pull away until I see the blue of the sky again.

I try to get to my feet but nothing works. My body is broken.

Kraven moves toward the sirens. His lips curl back, and his eyes blaze, and he may be a liberator, but he looks like a monster.

The sirens seem to understand he’s the bigger threat, considering I’m a bloody heap of tissue and bone. They charge toward him. I pull myself up as much as I can. I have to help. If we fight together, then we may have a chance to overcome them. But I know that’s a lie. There are too many. All we can hope for is to send them back to their caves along the cliff wall.

The sirens close in. They’re only a few feet away. Why isn’t Kraven moving?

Move!

A shadow crosses Kraven’s face and I see it—his rage. The temper he swallows every day. But he’s not going to swallow it now.

The liberator curls in on himself, his arms wrapped around his stomach, head between his knees. A burning smell fills my nostrils.

And then he explodes.

His entire body opens like a thundercloud, and wings burst from his back. A glow wraps around his torso like the sun is pointing a finger straight at him. And he growls. He growls like a tornado and moves like one, too. Sirens scurry backward, but he storms after them, throwing them like they’re made of nothing. They are nothing next to him.

I get to my feet, but my legs are shaking. I’m not sure whether it’s from injuries or from watching Kraven. As I stumble back, I think of how I was terrified the collectors would find Charlie. That they would get to her. I think of how the threat of the sirens kept me up at night, of how I pictured them slinking through the cracks to steal her away.

But seeing Kraven blast through sirens, I know there is nothing to fear. Not now. Not with him here.

A daring siren rushes forward, undeterred by Kraven’s wings. But the liberator just uses his wing like a battering ram and throws the siren twenty feet. When too many sirens charge him at once, he folds his wings around himself like a shield. Then he whips them open, and sirens fly up and out as if a bomb detonated at their feet.

The battle goes on for several minutes and all I can do is stand slack-jawed. I remember the way he fought the night the collectors took Charlie. But I didn’t have the time to really focus then; I was too worried about getting my girl out of there. Now, though, all I can do is watch.

One by one, the sirens admit defeat and scamper toward the ledge. I manage to throw a few hits in as they flee to ensure they keep running. When I glance back, a single siren remains. He stands before Kraven, determined. His hands twitch, and I notice he’s missing a finger. He was the first siren to appear, and he’ll be the last to leave. Kraven rushes toward him, and the siren bends at the knees like he’s going to leap over the liberator. When Kraven gets closer, the siren lunges. He doesn’t leap, he spins.

He spins so quickly Kraven loses track of him, and so do I. When I spot him again, he’s on Kraven’s back. The liberator cries out when the nine-fingered man gets ahold of Kraven’s left wing. He’s tearing at it with his hands, his teeth.

The liberator whirls around and around, trying to grab at the siren. I rush forward, ignoring the ache in my body. I’m almost to him when Kraven jumps into the air and slams onto his back. There’s a sickening crunch, and I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe because I’m afraid of what I’ll see when Kraven rolls off him.

Slowly, the liberator slides to his right. The siren scrambles to his feet, and my airway reopens. I don’t know why I was afraid of the guy being dead. I want them to be dead. Right?

I move forward to help Kraven subdue him. This is good, better than killing the dude. Now we can ask him questions, drill him until we know what the collectors’ plans are. Why didn’t I think of this before? Why didn’t Kraven?