Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)
Joshua Guess
Dedication
To the 100 Kickstarter backers who made this book possible.
You're all stars.
Special thanks to my friend Eshton Brogan,
who suggested his name for a character.
I promise, all the bad parts are fiction.
Part One
What We Have Become
1
Beck sat in the blowing dust, waiting for her family to be killed.
The thin particles stuck to her face, darkening where they merged with her tears. She took no notice of it. In the Outers, the dust was everywhere. She was hundreds of miles from the nearest patch of reclaimed land so long as you didn’t count the crops inside the Rez itself. And who did? The food grown here was nothing like what she’d seen in pictures from the Inners. Even the cream of the harvest crop was wilted and thin no matter how hard the citizens toiled.
The people of Rez Brighton didn’t need the crops, after all. There was a hardy biomass food reactor in the commons, more than sufficient to provide every person within the vast circular wall all the calories they needed. The crops were an experiment, an ongoing trial to determine how best to tame the damaged land and make living things thrive again.
In that, the crops weren’t much different from the citizens themselves. Barely living and ultimately expendable, or so Beck thought at that moment.
The enormity of what was about to happen had only begun to make itself felt. Like an iceberg, the vast bulk of it was still below the surface. The weight of an uncertain future brushed against her, gentle at first but inescapable. Just a few weeks short of her eighteenth birthday and Beck’s entire world was about to collapse.
No noises filtered from her home across the narrow street. The cube of printed stone stood silent, though she knew her parents and little brother waited inside. Still alive. A one in the binary of human existence, soon to flip over to zero.
She sat on the tiny stoop of the house across from hers, hands wrapped around her knees painfully tight, and dug her nails into her forearms to keep still. Every instinct screamed to go to them. To comfort them. To somehow make it not be true.
Beck did none of these things. Not only because those who showed symptoms of type B were to be immediately quarantined, but because they had made the choice. Told her to leave, that they loved her. Not to feel guilt. Aaron, not even in his teens but more of a brat than any little brother in human history, had pelted her face with kisses.
She lost count of the times he said those three words.
I love you. I love you, Beck. Never forget it. I love you.
Gone, but not gone. They were only a couple dozen feet away. Beneath the grief, which had burst into existence fully formed when her family woke to find the bruises and lesions on their skin, something rose. The pain was almost liquid, shifting inside her head from moment to moment as she tried to find some purchase in the new reality on the cusp of unfolding. Below, anger solidified. Fury at the Fade in both its pestilent varieties. Rage for the system, however necessary it might be, that required the deaths of anyone who developed its rarer strain.
With effort, Beck uncurled her fingers and took a few deep breaths.
“Fuck this,” she muttered to herself, voice uneven but determined. If she went inside, she would be killed. Better to die with them than spend a lifetime recovering from their loss.
Beck didn’t get further than straightening her legs when the sound of approaching footsteps froze her in place. When a call like hers went out—mandatory with any type B incident—everyone but the reporting citizen was sent indoors. They locked themselves into the isolation room every home was required to have and waited for the all-clear. Only one person, or rather one kind of person, would be moving about freely. That fact alone told her what she was about to see.
It was a sound every person knew. The heavy, hard footfalls of an armored body all in black. Beck looked up just in time to see a figure step through a dervish of whirling dust.
It walked toward her unerringly, as if the obscuring cloud was no hindrance to its sight in the least. For all she knew, it wasn’t. No one knew what technology lay inside the armor, only that the men and women within were dedicated to their work with a degree of unflinching relentlessness most often found in earthquakes or storms.
The normally shining black armor had not escaped the blowing grit. A thin layer of the stuff coated every surface and caked in the joints. If the grains interfered with its function, Beck couldn’t tell. The only section of the segmented mechanical carapace free of the dust were the smooth, shadowed glass lenses over the eyes. That much she understood. She used a hand held terminal down in the mine that repelled dust with some kind of field.
The figure stopped uncomfortably close to her, the tips of its metal boots nearly resting against the base of the stoop.
What’s wrong with me? Beck thought. Why was she thinking about her terminal and how it shared technology with the armor? Her family was about to die. What kind of person let their mind wander to such trivial things in these circumstances? She bit back the wailing sob trying desperately to rip its way from her throat, and looked up at the armored shadow.
Its head tilted slightly to one side, a tic Beck thought looked insect-like.
“Are you Rebecca Park?”
She nodded. “Beck.”