BLUEMANTLE by Karen Langston (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud TXT) 📕

loaded gurney pushed against another. The body was of a young man in a prisoner’s tunic. His flesh was a patchwork of grey, blue and black. His eyes were open, maintaining their terror in death.

In the centre of the room was an autopsy slab, crusted in dark brown blood. Beneath that, the floor was tiled, with a gully leading away to the right. Dent traced its course, as it deepened and widened before reaching the base of the outer wall – a drain, dropping down to an iron grilled cavity, which led to outside. A cavity just wide enough for a body to squeeze through.

The grille was badly rusted and gave way with little force. The clatter of iron on stone as he kicked it out could have easily raised alarm, save for an Ops truck that happened to trundle past at the same moment.

The feeling of good fortune was short-lived. When Dent lay on the floor to peer through the opening, his heart sank. On the other side of the wall was the parade ground. Every morning at half-past five, over a hundred cadets assembled for dawn drills. Within a matter of minutes, the entire square would be full of young troopers-in-training, formation marching and saluting the Governor’s tower.

There wasn’t a second to lose. He had intended to pick his moment, wait for a convoy for cover, perhaps, or the brief interval between patrolling guards. Such caution was denied him. If he waited until the drills were over, Wulfwin would already be in the building and Ursel’s absence would be discovered.

He picked her up and lay her on the floor, next to the opening. Without even looking to check if the coast was clear, Dent squeezed his own body through, feeling his ribs straining within the too-small gap. Once clear, he crouched low and pulled Ursel through, still wrapped in the blanket. He picked her up and gently placed her over his shoulder, murmuring to her, telling her not to be afraid. Checking that the blanket covered her completely, he began walking, head down, away from the square.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

A hundred metres ahead, Wulfwin emerged from a building, flanked by several Deaf Squad troopers. Headed for C-Block’s main entrance, they marched directly towards him.

Dent froze, staring at Wulfwin, his heart pounding. If he hadn’t already been spotted, he figured he had a matter of seconds before he would be.

He spun around and hurried back the way he had come, in the direction of the cadet barracks. Just as he reached the far end of C-Block and the edge of the parade ground, wailing sirens filled the air: the call to dawn drills. Scores of cadets, in combat shorts and vests, poured out from the barracks and into the square – a swarm of young men and women, eyes fixed ahead, filling the space around him. He ducked his head and pushed against the current, grateful for the myopic obedience of Authority youth.

As the final cadets spilt through the doors, Dent crossed the road and slipped through a gap between barracks. He feared for Ursel, suspecting she had fallen unconscious, but he daren’t stop. He still had to clear several hundred metres of Complex ground before he would gain cover in Welspek Breach.

Luck, or chance, continued to back his corner. Everyone he passed was heading somewhere in a hurry. If anyone did notice him, no one paid attention. He was an Authority trooper, just like them, dressed in fatigues, just like them. Only, he had a blanket thrown over his shoulder. And, beneath that…

Dent reached Welspek Breach and crawled through the gap in the chain-link fence that he had made on his way in. Only when he was far enough into the farmland that dominated the Hundred of Hole, out of range of the Complex’s security cameras, did he stop to check on Ursel.

He laid her down on the unploughed edge of a corn field. She was unconscious but, mercifully, alive. He could not bear to look at the wounds on her arm and legs, the deep cuts and swelling to her face, the blood that had run from both of her ears, now dried and black-red.

Instead, he focused on tasks intended to comfort. He ripped off his shirt, bundled it up and placed it beneath her head. He took a canteen of water from his belt and let drops fall onto her cracked lips and trickle into her mouth. Her tangled hair clung to her head. He pushed it off her forehead with gentle strokes.

“You’re safe now,” he said, lullaby-tender. “They can’t hurt you anymore.” He kept stroking her forehead, repeating the words. Tears welled in his eyes and fell onto her face, rolling down her cheeks as if they were her own.

In this frail young woman, her tortured, broken body, Dent beheld the wounds of every innocent victim of the Authority’s brutality. All the times he had turned a blind eye to stay true to the cause, resisted the instinct to intervene for the sake of loyalty, they played back before him now. He had saved Ursel, but he knew there were countless more he could have saved. Her wounds, her pain, came to represent all the suffering he had witnessed but walked on by.

The Authority had taken and made a monster of him.

He held his hands to his face and wept.

Chapter Thirty-Three

“What do you mean, ‘she’s gone’?” roared Blix.

The routine rhythm of morning drills had transformed into a cacophonous state of emergency. A clash of klaxon and siren, the rumble of combat boots on concrete, dogs barking in floodlit outposts, orders screamed.

Inside Blix’s private quarters, the alarm intensified.

“Gone. Taken,” said Wulfwin, his face contorted and crimson.

“How could that even happen? Why wasn’t she guarded?”

“She was. I’ve not spoken to the guard yet. I came straight here.”

“This can’t be true…” Face white, her bloodshot eyes bulged. “How could you let this happen?”

“There’s something else.”

“What do you mean? What else could there possibly be?”

“Lore. He