Page 2 of Red Demon
“Someone, please help!” Iden called out.
Our voices echoed between the frosted gorges. A dog barked, but no one called back. We started running. By the time we reached the market, the dead lay everywhere.
Do you know what most people do in a crisis, when the right thing to do is act fast? They fucking stand there. They freeze, until someone tells them what to do or shows them by doing it first. There must be some primitive part of our brains our engineers have yet to mod away, though I’ve since tried to train it out of me.
We stood there, mouths agape, at the dozens of friends and neighbors leaning on the market booths, apples toppled into the street where my old tutor lay slumped by a cart. Then there was Marc, that little girl’s dad, lying in the street in a puddle of blood, fresh and freezing on his coat. He lay next to a bright display of flowers, the sign for his corner store streaked with the last of his life. The two women beside him were unmarked: no blood or wounds, neither bruises nor signs of broken bones. They just stared up at the sky with frost-glazed eyes.
I made myself forget much of what I saw in that square, but Marc was important: that blood. He lay stabbed while most others were not, and I knew who stabbed him.
“Keep your knife up, little brother,” Iden said, his voice as icy as the wind in his hair.
“What good is that? A knife didn’t do that,” I whispered, gesturing to the woman crumbled by the apple cart without a mark on her. Ms. Carter had lived three houses down. I was breathing hard, struggling to stay calm. “What happened to her?”
Iden opened his mouth and closed it again, his eyes darting as fast as mine. “Home,” he said, his jaw set. “Let’s go home.”
Iden turned into an alley, his bow up in front of him. I followed, my mind racing, thinking about Mom and my sisters. I didn’t see a point in his ducking down under windows, or choosing the alley over the street. The enemy would find us if they wanted. They’d gotten everyone else. When the alley ended, we jogged in the open, down the road home.
I tried to make sense of the threat. It would have taken some heavy tech to kill our town. But what, and who had it? Queen Azara had outlawed anything she thought the Asri could abuse to hurt us, and she’d outlawed anything she thought we Chaeten could use to hurt them. The priests said Asri magic can corrupt even little things, like electricity, without the right protections. On the fringe of an empire surrounded by Asri towns, we did without a lot of tech our ancestors found essential, to prevent tragedies like this.
“Asri tech—magic, whatever.” I couldn’t get that thought out of my head. “It has to be.” They didn’t teach us at school how that magic worked. They didn’t want to give anyone the key to abusing it. But it had wiped out communities before.
At first, I thought Iden would keep his mouth clamped shut as we rushed on. “Maybe,” he said. “Let’s go home. Hurry.”
We ran.
We crossed the alley between the school and the temple. Ice clinked in the branches of the bushes along the street. A cat mewed from a porch with a door wide open to the winter cold, the body of Dr. Garla lying in the doorway. I recognized the purple in her hair and blue tint to her skin—a more traditional Chaeten, wearing bold, unrepentant colors when the rest of us were coded to blend in.
A pram drifted slowly across the road toward us, blood smearing the outside. We slowed our pace, but I avoided stepping closer to that carriage, too fearful to look and confirm if it was a baby’s blood that stained those blankets. A woman lay cloaked in indigo down the road, blood on her arms and chest—the mom, perhaps.
On every street we jogged down, only the dead greeted us. Then we were home.
Our gate creaked on its hinges. My pulse pounded in my ears. And then I saw my sisters.
The twins, Cara and Samantha, lay sprawled in the front yard, a dusting of snow on their winter clothes. At five, the twins doted on the youngest, Sora. She lay dead beside the twins on the icy ground, her thin blonde hair rustling in the wind. Brushing the snow off did nothing to warm their little bodies.
I wanted to lose it, to scream, but I didn’t. Iden’s chest heaved, and I gripped a hand on his shoulder. Mom taught me there will always be someone else to cling to when a pillar of our life falls down, and she taught me to be that pillar in turn. We kept it together, holding each other up.
Mom lay dead in the kitchen, near the fire… very near the fire. I’ve never had a nightmare that hollowed me out as much as pulling her red, blistered body away from the embers, seeing the mutilated face of someone I loved so much.
I can tell you what it felt like when I realized she wouldn’t be there to turn to. My hope died. It didn’t feel possible that I was here, and she was gone. I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing her, or stop feeling as if she is missing, even if I know she’d hate that. The Chaeten way would be to let her go and never look back. She left me too young to see that lesson home, to teach me how that’s possible.
Resilience is often mistaken for coldheartedness, especially so for us Chaeten. We coded ourselves to survive our near-extinction, never surrendering to fear or heartbreak. When they cut us down and we’d hold our heads high at the end, the Asri saw it as inhumanity, not bravery. But heartbreak sums the same for all of us. I didn’t break that day, but the cost would come later, in my dreams, and in so many quiet moments where I could never fully surrender to joy.
“I’ll check the basement,” Iden said.
“I’ll check the other rooms.”
The bedroom door just off the kitchen creaked as I opened it to see what, at this point, I was expecting. My sister Bella died at twelve, tucking in the young neighbor kids for their nap. There were always extra kids around the house, whose parents were on shift in the mines. That’s how Mom earned coin. Bella’s long blonde hair spilled across the multicolored blanket, her head down as if resting her eyes. I checked her cold body for blood, then lifted a bright-squared quilt to look for clues on the children’s faces and little bodies. Nothing; I’d hoped it felt like sleeping for all of them when they died.
It started snowing out the window. I stayed until I heard Iden’s footsteps behind me.
“Downstairs is clear.” Iden sheathed his knife and stood for a moment, eyes fixed and overcome. He gripped the doorframe, painted over in bold green and blue geometric designs.
“Should we burn them?” I asked, trying to be practical, to not fall apart.
“The mines.” It looked like he considered his own words as if they hadn’t just come from his mouth. “Mal and Oren won’t be back for hours. They might be—Jesse, they might be okay.”
I bit my lip. All seven of my siblings lived at home with me, odd for Chaeten standards, I know, but the frontier was different.
