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Years of Madness
Jan. 12th, 2004 01:32 am“It’s rather dark outside for this time of day, isn’t it?” Mina’s voice rang across the room like a bell softly struck; stirring Doro from tinkering that had drawn her attentions too far into her firearm. Upon looking up, Doro first took a secret moment to watch Mina check her wristwatch. That pale, swan neck craned slightly, an instinctual stretch of muscles atrophied into bent position from sitting that way too long. A few wisps of that cloud of auburn drifted against her face. Doro suppressed a sigh and turned her eyes lazily toward the window. “Certainly it’s…” Mina trailed off, both their gazes now resting upon the distinctly shadowed glass.
“It can’t be past four…” Doro answered at length, her brow furrowing deeply as she rose to make her way to the window. It was rather dark outside, and it wasn’t a natural atmosphere for the night, or even a cloudy day. Whatever shadow had fallen across their city was deeper, more ominous. Throwing the glass wide, Doro leaned out precariously beneath the broad eve that concealed the one window of their room from the sky.
Indeed, there was a dense, subfusc pall against what had earlier been a clear sky. Frowning, Doro nearly lost her hold on the casement when she realized what had come to pass since she’d come home for the afternoon of work in the room they were sharing. Mina gasped from behind, and knocked over an empty beaker rushing to her.
Fairly tumbling from the casement as she slammed the glass closed and shuttered it firmly; she grabbed Mina’s narrow shoulders, holding her firm as she spoke.
“Pack you’re things. We’re leaving the city.”
Within hours, they were extinguishing hastily lit torches. Power had been cut from the building as they drew together the sundry pieces of Mina’s laboratory, suspending them in that unnatural dark. It was an eerie feeling, to have that shadow on one’s skin… to be reminded of the impenetrable cloud of metal and glass that hovered, even now, over the capital.
Ships. Ships, gathered so densely so as to resemble a school of silver tuna, churning in small circles, silently.
“Where are we going to go?” Mina breathed, her doe-eyes glittering in the near-dark of the covered alley as the pressed together, flush against the stony wall of the building. Doro shifted the duffel on her shoulder, settling it as comfortably as she could against her body. They were going to have to run. Already, she could hear cannon fire beginning to triturate the structures along the inner vein of the city, that stretch of established business and transportation that fed life to the rest of the historic settlement. It wasn’t being done to further military gain, on the part of the Rhyme. It was to impel the citizens of the old city – most of whom were holding out, waiting for peace to return – into action that would make them vulnerable.
Sickened, Doro tilted her head back against the cool concrete, feeling the vibrations of those shots faintly through her skin. “We’ll have to make for the embassy.” Rolling her eyes over to Mina, whose gaze was seeking her face for answers to their predicament, she winced. They needed Mina. She needed Mina. Mina had to make it to the Embassy.
The younger woman’s lips were parting to frame the word ‘how’, her eyes widening to emphasize it, when scarcely half a block from them, an explosion rocked the construction of their former, temporary residence. Instinctively, Doro’s arms shot upward, the woven polyester of the duffel scraping against her arm painfully in the hurried shift. The tremor that echoed through the ground beneath them subsided seconds later – the moment extended in her mind by her already-rushing adrenaline – and as she craned her eyes upward, she cringed. Though no masonry had fallen upon them, thin light sifted through substantial cracks in the alley’s ceiling.
Fate had afforded them no more time to plan their escape from the assault. Looking down at Mina as her brain kicked into gear for the battle that was soon to ensue, her lungs hung on their inhalation. Mina had ducked partially beneath her raised arms, like the gesture it was also instinct on her part, and was now but a breath away from her. Frightened but holding out, weary but ready to run. Admiration sparked a reverent smile on her face, despite the gravity of their shared circumstance. Action, however, left no time for Mina to wonder at the brief expression.
No further words were spoken. The pushed out across the high street, moving as the parts of a machine move. The city grew silent, all its usual evening murmur suspended in the horror of a thousand people listening. They waited for the punctuation of the cannons, and the macabre cadence came. The two women below, doing their best to confine their travels to covered areas and seldom used bystreets danced through the litany of shells, making what Doro presumed would be good time toward the embassy.
Their embassy had formerly been a hospital, and before that a prison. It had been built in the older, more cautious ages of the city… all of it reinforced steel and concrete, its broad walls grim and windowless. It was a shelter, but despite the power and protection the structure had the potential to offer, people were rarely sheltered there. It was machines. Vehicles and weapons resided in the myriad corridors, all honed to the purpose of moving soldiers and civilians into, or out, of the capital. And it was that, not the strength of the walls, which Doro was now relying on. They would have to make it out.
That pensive quiet that blanketed the streets between impacts – both close and far – erupted into the sound of boot falls and men shouting. The first of… likely hundreds of concentrated company had gone to ground. Doro’s face when white below the sweat-lank fringe of her hair, and she grabbed Mina’s arm, driving both of them into a yet narrower alleyway.
Her stomach sank like a stone. Mina was shaking shallowly, waiting in the darkness for Doro’s order… her arbitration, her making-right of their dilemma. The other woman’s mind was dangling in a painful blank-state, unable to reason. Footsteps and voices were passing their shadowed refuge in the street they’d stood in moments ago. A dozen men, at least. A tightly woven platoon of well trained, uniformed soldiers, armed with high-powered rifles. She knew the Rhyme’s ranks well, having been part of them once. Ages ago. The memory was fleeting, only serving to further wrench her toward a panic that she couldn’t afford.
Glass shattered, spraying across the concrete of the road beyond the sharp corner they were hiding behind. There was shouting, though she could not tell if it were a Rhyme soldier or a citizen… a child started wailing above the din, and the guns were going again, drowning out any human sounds. Ducking her head into the darkness, she put her free arm around Mina’s shoulders, guiding the silent woman in front of her through the narrow passage. It dead-ended several yards forward, a narrow shaft of dishwater-light filtering downward from above. Mina was already at climbing the ladder that reached toward it, as if an uncertain banner to heaven itself. All of her thought had condensed upon that one purpose: whereas months ago it had been anything to bring the Rhyme to their knees and reclaim the nation that had taught her loyalty, that had been her birthplace and would be the ground she died upon, it had now distilled into a more pure, singular notion. Mina. Mina would be safe, she would leave the capital alive and they would fly her to safety.
Holding the ladder steady beneath the emburdened woman, her mind into action. They couldn’t be far from the Embassy now… not with how far they’d come before the ground soldiers were deployed. Mina reached the top of the ladder and scrambled away to hide beneath a ramshackle tower of storage crates, and Doro began to climb. Her head coming up like a groundhog from the shaft that lead down into the alley, Mina snatched at her, pulling her into the relative safety of the shadow and jabbing a finger out into the shallow light. Granite eyes flashing, Doro followed the gesture to where the concrete visage of the embassy seemed to glow, a temple of reprieve just out of reach.
They had but to get off the roof of the building which they now hid atop, and cross the broad square that preceded the steps down into the safety of their haven. And it would be that home stretch that would be the most difficult to surmount, in the open, beneath snipers and scopes specifically instructed to fire at anything that moved below not clad in Rhyme livery.
Seconds stretched into minutes, the din of the attack peeling away into a muffled white noise, outside of the parameters of her thought. Staring down the face of that windowless building, reason distilled even the most fanatic of possibilities into the one directive: they would simply have to run for it. The side street they’d hidden from the ground crew in had been lower than the square, and she could jump down from the roof at this height, with Mina and the equipment they carried, if need be. The bolt across the roof, the jump that would not be as stealthy as was warranted by such a situation, and the final leg of the journey toward the waiting arms of their comrades left them infinitely vulnerable to enemy fire, or capture. Angling her chin down, Doro dared to peek out from around the splitting plywood boxes, surveying first the empty ground and then the milling sky.
“I’ll say the word.”
Mina did not answer, hovering in the advantageous understanding that had begun to exist between them after so many weeks of working so closely with one another.
“Go.”
Both women moved simultaneously, each flowing like snakes or like water across the rooftop to the concrete ledge that ended it. A threadbare glance told Doro that Mina would make it down, and she pushed off the ledge from that short running start she’d gotten from the crates. There was a shout from behind, and below. Doro’s boots met pavement first, the impact heavy, sending sparks of pain rippling through her legs and hips. Mina landed seconds after, continuing to run as if the drop had never occurred. Not recovering as quickly as the lighter, lither Mina, Doro hung behind a few thin moments, and mistakenly looked over her shoulder.
Exiting the mouth of the bystreet they’d been in when the ground crew’s landed were half a dozen Rhyme soldiers, their matte black helmets making them not unlike a small crew of fantastic insects, scuttling forward with their amour and their artillery.
Doro sprang forward, following close at Mina’s heels, the muscles through her thighs and back burning protest to this new exertion. Her eyes were fixed on the wild cloud of Mina’s hair, her lean body the standard beneath which Doro did battle under now, the sound of Mina’s labored breath the orders she took action by. Behind all of those keen perceptions, machine gun fire peppered the air around them, sound bursting in the frayed periphery of her senses. They were rapidly closing distance on the opening maw of the embassy. Her colleagues had expected them. They were waiting with a transport. Twenty odd mouths howled encouragement, black eyes like birds aflame in the shadow.
Even as that distance fell away, the sound of those gunshots seemed to draw ever nearer to Doro’s consciousness.
As abruptly as a spring thunderstorm would howl into the lake-riddled valley that Doro had grown up fishing in, the full force of her surroundings came crashing in upon her immaculate concentration. Pain shattered through her body, erupting into her blood at the left shoulder, hip, right thigh and calf. Shells sawed diagonally across the back of her body, the agonized reaction delayed… allowing her time to realize that she could no longer move but to careen ground ward in a jumble of limbs and shouts, all before the full impact of the pain enveloped her mind.
Where time had been reduced to the tormented progress of a wounded animal, dragging past the seconds horrified, as one does a carnival-spectacle, it now accelerated to an absurd rate. Voices surrounded her, impending ever inward, crushing out her own consciousness and replacing it with their crazed pandemonium. The timpani of weapons sounded around her, coming to be the spasmodic heartbeat of the air, heaving awareness in and out of her until she spun off into oblivion, and silence.
“It can’t be past four…” Doro answered at length, her brow furrowing deeply as she rose to make her way to the window. It was rather dark outside, and it wasn’t a natural atmosphere for the night, or even a cloudy day. Whatever shadow had fallen across their city was deeper, more ominous. Throwing the glass wide, Doro leaned out precariously beneath the broad eve that concealed the one window of their room from the sky.
Indeed, there was a dense, subfusc pall against what had earlier been a clear sky. Frowning, Doro nearly lost her hold on the casement when she realized what had come to pass since she’d come home for the afternoon of work in the room they were sharing. Mina gasped from behind, and knocked over an empty beaker rushing to her.
Fairly tumbling from the casement as she slammed the glass closed and shuttered it firmly; she grabbed Mina’s narrow shoulders, holding her firm as she spoke.
“Pack you’re things. We’re leaving the city.”
Within hours, they were extinguishing hastily lit torches. Power had been cut from the building as they drew together the sundry pieces of Mina’s laboratory, suspending them in that unnatural dark. It was an eerie feeling, to have that shadow on one’s skin… to be reminded of the impenetrable cloud of metal and glass that hovered, even now, over the capital.
Ships. Ships, gathered so densely so as to resemble a school of silver tuna, churning in small circles, silently.
“Where are we going to go?” Mina breathed, her doe-eyes glittering in the near-dark of the covered alley as the pressed together, flush against the stony wall of the building. Doro shifted the duffel on her shoulder, settling it as comfortably as she could against her body. They were going to have to run. Already, she could hear cannon fire beginning to triturate the structures along the inner vein of the city, that stretch of established business and transportation that fed life to the rest of the historic settlement. It wasn’t being done to further military gain, on the part of the Rhyme. It was to impel the citizens of the old city – most of whom were holding out, waiting for peace to return – into action that would make them vulnerable.
Sickened, Doro tilted her head back against the cool concrete, feeling the vibrations of those shots faintly through her skin. “We’ll have to make for the embassy.” Rolling her eyes over to Mina, whose gaze was seeking her face for answers to their predicament, she winced. They needed Mina. She needed Mina. Mina had to make it to the Embassy.
The younger woman’s lips were parting to frame the word ‘how’, her eyes widening to emphasize it, when scarcely half a block from them, an explosion rocked the construction of their former, temporary residence. Instinctively, Doro’s arms shot upward, the woven polyester of the duffel scraping against her arm painfully in the hurried shift. The tremor that echoed through the ground beneath them subsided seconds later – the moment extended in her mind by her already-rushing adrenaline – and as she craned her eyes upward, she cringed. Though no masonry had fallen upon them, thin light sifted through substantial cracks in the alley’s ceiling.
Fate had afforded them no more time to plan their escape from the assault. Looking down at Mina as her brain kicked into gear for the battle that was soon to ensue, her lungs hung on their inhalation. Mina had ducked partially beneath her raised arms, like the gesture it was also instinct on her part, and was now but a breath away from her. Frightened but holding out, weary but ready to run. Admiration sparked a reverent smile on her face, despite the gravity of their shared circumstance. Action, however, left no time for Mina to wonder at the brief expression.
No further words were spoken. The pushed out across the high street, moving as the parts of a machine move. The city grew silent, all its usual evening murmur suspended in the horror of a thousand people listening. They waited for the punctuation of the cannons, and the macabre cadence came. The two women below, doing their best to confine their travels to covered areas and seldom used bystreets danced through the litany of shells, making what Doro presumed would be good time toward the embassy.
Their embassy had formerly been a hospital, and before that a prison. It had been built in the older, more cautious ages of the city… all of it reinforced steel and concrete, its broad walls grim and windowless. It was a shelter, but despite the power and protection the structure had the potential to offer, people were rarely sheltered there. It was machines. Vehicles and weapons resided in the myriad corridors, all honed to the purpose of moving soldiers and civilians into, or out, of the capital. And it was that, not the strength of the walls, which Doro was now relying on. They would have to make it out.
That pensive quiet that blanketed the streets between impacts – both close and far – erupted into the sound of boot falls and men shouting. The first of… likely hundreds of concentrated company had gone to ground. Doro’s face when white below the sweat-lank fringe of her hair, and she grabbed Mina’s arm, driving both of them into a yet narrower alleyway.
Her stomach sank like a stone. Mina was shaking shallowly, waiting in the darkness for Doro’s order… her arbitration, her making-right of their dilemma. The other woman’s mind was dangling in a painful blank-state, unable to reason. Footsteps and voices were passing their shadowed refuge in the street they’d stood in moments ago. A dozen men, at least. A tightly woven platoon of well trained, uniformed soldiers, armed with high-powered rifles. She knew the Rhyme’s ranks well, having been part of them once. Ages ago. The memory was fleeting, only serving to further wrench her toward a panic that she couldn’t afford.
Glass shattered, spraying across the concrete of the road beyond the sharp corner they were hiding behind. There was shouting, though she could not tell if it were a Rhyme soldier or a citizen… a child started wailing above the din, and the guns were going again, drowning out any human sounds. Ducking her head into the darkness, she put her free arm around Mina’s shoulders, guiding the silent woman in front of her through the narrow passage. It dead-ended several yards forward, a narrow shaft of dishwater-light filtering downward from above. Mina was already at climbing the ladder that reached toward it, as if an uncertain banner to heaven itself. All of her thought had condensed upon that one purpose: whereas months ago it had been anything to bring the Rhyme to their knees and reclaim the nation that had taught her loyalty, that had been her birthplace and would be the ground she died upon, it had now distilled into a more pure, singular notion. Mina. Mina would be safe, she would leave the capital alive and they would fly her to safety.
Holding the ladder steady beneath the emburdened woman, her mind into action. They couldn’t be far from the Embassy now… not with how far they’d come before the ground soldiers were deployed. Mina reached the top of the ladder and scrambled away to hide beneath a ramshackle tower of storage crates, and Doro began to climb. Her head coming up like a groundhog from the shaft that lead down into the alley, Mina snatched at her, pulling her into the relative safety of the shadow and jabbing a finger out into the shallow light. Granite eyes flashing, Doro followed the gesture to where the concrete visage of the embassy seemed to glow, a temple of reprieve just out of reach.
They had but to get off the roof of the building which they now hid atop, and cross the broad square that preceded the steps down into the safety of their haven. And it would be that home stretch that would be the most difficult to surmount, in the open, beneath snipers and scopes specifically instructed to fire at anything that moved below not clad in Rhyme livery.
Seconds stretched into minutes, the din of the attack peeling away into a muffled white noise, outside of the parameters of her thought. Staring down the face of that windowless building, reason distilled even the most fanatic of possibilities into the one directive: they would simply have to run for it. The side street they’d hidden from the ground crew in had been lower than the square, and she could jump down from the roof at this height, with Mina and the equipment they carried, if need be. The bolt across the roof, the jump that would not be as stealthy as was warranted by such a situation, and the final leg of the journey toward the waiting arms of their comrades left them infinitely vulnerable to enemy fire, or capture. Angling her chin down, Doro dared to peek out from around the splitting plywood boxes, surveying first the empty ground and then the milling sky.
“I’ll say the word.”
Mina did not answer, hovering in the advantageous understanding that had begun to exist between them after so many weeks of working so closely with one another.
“Go.”
Both women moved simultaneously, each flowing like snakes or like water across the rooftop to the concrete ledge that ended it. A threadbare glance told Doro that Mina would make it down, and she pushed off the ledge from that short running start she’d gotten from the crates. There was a shout from behind, and below. Doro’s boots met pavement first, the impact heavy, sending sparks of pain rippling through her legs and hips. Mina landed seconds after, continuing to run as if the drop had never occurred. Not recovering as quickly as the lighter, lither Mina, Doro hung behind a few thin moments, and mistakenly looked over her shoulder.
Exiting the mouth of the bystreet they’d been in when the ground crew’s landed were half a dozen Rhyme soldiers, their matte black helmets making them not unlike a small crew of fantastic insects, scuttling forward with their amour and their artillery.
Doro sprang forward, following close at Mina’s heels, the muscles through her thighs and back burning protest to this new exertion. Her eyes were fixed on the wild cloud of Mina’s hair, her lean body the standard beneath which Doro did battle under now, the sound of Mina’s labored breath the orders she took action by. Behind all of those keen perceptions, machine gun fire peppered the air around them, sound bursting in the frayed periphery of her senses. They were rapidly closing distance on the opening maw of the embassy. Her colleagues had expected them. They were waiting with a transport. Twenty odd mouths howled encouragement, black eyes like birds aflame in the shadow.
Even as that distance fell away, the sound of those gunshots seemed to draw ever nearer to Doro’s consciousness.
As abruptly as a spring thunderstorm would howl into the lake-riddled valley that Doro had grown up fishing in, the full force of her surroundings came crashing in upon her immaculate concentration. Pain shattered through her body, erupting into her blood at the left shoulder, hip, right thigh and calf. Shells sawed diagonally across the back of her body, the agonized reaction delayed… allowing her time to realize that she could no longer move but to careen ground ward in a jumble of limbs and shouts, all before the full impact of the pain enveloped her mind.
Where time had been reduced to the tormented progress of a wounded animal, dragging past the seconds horrified, as one does a carnival-spectacle, it now accelerated to an absurd rate. Voices surrounded her, impending ever inward, crushing out her own consciousness and replacing it with their crazed pandemonium. The timpani of weapons sounded around her, coming to be the spasmodic heartbeat of the air, heaving awareness in and out of her until she spun off into oblivion, and silence.