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The Select’s Bodyguard

  Bron & Calea – Book 1

  A Children of the Wells novel

  By Nick Hayden

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 - While the City Bleeds

  Chapter 2 - While the City Sleeps

  Chapter 3 - The Ruined Tower

  Chapter 4 - The Ruined Girl

  Chapter 5 - The Journey In

  Chapter 6 - The Journey Out

  Chapter 7 - Discoveries in the Lab

  Chapter 8 - Revelations in the Lab

  Chapter 9 - Rock Bottom

  Chapter 10 - The Sky is Blue

  About the Author

  This book was originally serialized at childrenofthewells.com as part of an ongoing series. New stories published regularly.

  Bron & Calea

  The Select's Bodyguard

  The Doctor's Assistant

  The Well's Orphan

  Jaysynn

  The Fall of the House of Kyzer

  The Rules Change

  New Wells Rising

  Chapter 1 - While the City Bleeds

  She was wrong. She said my head was full of rocks. It isn’t. I know because there’s blood on my fingers. My head throbs, beats, aches. It burns. My hand is wedged beneath something, but my fingers can touch my scalp. Blood.

  I can’t help but think of her. Where is she? Does she bleed? I want to believe she is safe, but something’s happened, an explosion, an earthquake. I don’t know. I was asleep when...din, motion, pain. I am on my bed. My bed is beneath the roof. The roof has collapsed.

  She said I was too intense, that I would miss the end of the world if it happened when I was focused on something else. Wrong again. She won’t be pleased to hear she’s wrong. Twice wrong.

  My head....

  I think I lose consciousness for a time. Maybe I don’t. I can move my other arm, my left arm. My legs push off some of the weight pressing down on me. I shift. Bruises, cuts. They don’t matter. The fog in my brain is clearing. I realize I am on the floor, not on the bed as I thought. The bed is on top of me. I don’t know how. And on top of that is not the roof, but the brick wall, collapsed. There is light from somewhere. Yes, the roof is gone. It’s morning, almost, somewhere above me. If I listen, I can hear an indistinct roar.

  It doesn’t matter. Something’s happened. Something massive. I need to know she’s safe. She’ll be in the Wheel, in her Tower, in her room. Safe. I’ll make certain she’s safe. That’s what I do.

  Bit by bit I burrow my way out. The walls of my apartment are broken, jagged edges like shards of glass in a broken-out window. I can see across the street. The building there is disfigured, a face beaten bloody. Smoke, fire, more sensed than seen. The roar is clearer now--screaming, crying, shouting.

  An attack?

  I can’t see the Wheel from my apartment. I am on the outer edge of the city, in a room chosen for me by the authorities of Section Three. The current experiment does not go well for those of us on the ground. The wreckage of my room is hardly a loss.

  Screaming, crying, shouting....

  It doesn’t matter. I can’t save them all. They have each other. They don’t need me. But she does.

  My legs threaten to buckle as I stand. I force them ramrod straight. I wipe the blood out of my eyes. I’m not bleeding badly. It has nearly stopped on its own.

  In the corner, my chest of drawers still stands, somehow, like a good soldier. Climbing over the tiles of what was once my roof, I find my legs. I force my knees to hold. They hold. The body will obey. It will obey. I wrench open the top drawer. It always sticks. I pull out my pistol, a rarity for a non-Select, and strap three knives to my belt. Panicked people do stupid things. If it’s an attack, the weapons might not be enough. It doesn’t matter. I’m good with the knives, and a few well-placed blasts at the right moment go a long way.

  My shoes are somewhere in the rubble. I keep them under my bed. I don’t have time to scrounge for them. It’s quicker to wrap my feet. The arm of my leather jacket is visible beneath the fallen bricks of the chimney. I dig it out, cut it up. I tie the makeshift shoes on with belts. It’ll work for now.

  I scramble over the mound of brick and tile, managing the terrain with increasing agility. A creak shivers down the building. I don’t stop to wonder. Hesitation is a sure way to die.

  The stairs are out, or enough to make it difficult. The drop is ten feet. I take it, twist my ankle. Ankles heal. I have learned to let pain skulk in a corner of my consciousness, unnoticed. I have a mission; pain is a distraction. When one is truly immersed in the goal, hunger doesn’t matter, fatigue doesn’t matter, pain doesn’t matter. Focus, mission, her.

  The next staircase is intact. Tenants call me for help. Someone’s stuck beneath the rubble. I’m already past when the words register. A rough hand grabs my shoulder. “I can’t,” I say. “I have to go. She needs me.” He’s yelling at me now, tugging my arm. I swat him away. He grabs again. I push him down, two-handed hard, and move on. I should have socked him, but he was desperate, panicked. I have the one I need to help; he has his.

  She might be in her suite, covered in glass and iron and blood. Dead, maybe. Then I will bury her. If she lives, I will keep her alive. Others want her dead. She laughs at them. I don’t. Sometimes the world shudders. Buildings collapse. She can’t protect herself from everything.

  On the ground floor, I stop. I hesitate. The man above needed my help. Desperately. Who had he said was trapped? His wife?

  In the street, I can taste smoke, fire, death. Above, it was panorama. Here, it’s a punch in the face. And another smell--ionized air. It’s been three years, at least. I was with her when she surveyed the wreckage after the first third-gen battery exploded. Gruesome. The air still sizzled with the acrid tang of spent magic. It sizzles now, so thick it makes my skin itch.

  It’s strangely still. Not quiet, but all the usual sounds are gone, the roar and bustle and rough-housing of the Grunt transformed. Instead, shouts, calls for help, breaking glass, screams of barbarism taking hold, but I can’t see anyone moving or I only see bits and pieces, as if in a series of photos that has been stitched together. One of the trams hunkers against the street, the body twisted into refuse, the wires that feed it power snapped, limp, like arms with broken bones.

  I break into a run toward the Well and the Wheel, the source of power and the siphon. The grocer next door is overrun. Men flee with arms full of food. Already looting, and the city is still shaking off the shock like a man shaking off a deep slumber. I know in my bones it is the city burning, not just the Grunt, not just Section Three. When the shock is past, then what? Men fend for themselves. It’s animal instinct. How do you fight that?

  You beat it down.

  She has decided she no longer needs me, that she can fend for herself. She’s wrong.

  The streets are churned, as by a beast. Buildings lean, topple, expose their innards to the morning light. Some stand pristine. Whole blocks ruined, others untouched.

  If this is the result of a Thyrian attack, it is on an unimaginable scale. But if not an attack...?

  Someone will look into it when the dust settles. The Examiners will question for a decade. Questions are hesitation.

  The trams are out, obviously. A car is discarded nearby, dead bodies beneath. It will take an hour by foot to reach her Tower. Too long. I begin to run, aching. It’s hardly better than walking. With the debris and the people and the sudden shifting of buildings, crumbling one last time, it is almost more dangerous than walking. I deliberately take hold of my racing thoughts. I grab them, jerk them back, force them to slow. It will take an hour. Fine. (It will take longer. The whole city is in my way.) Imagination lives a hundred lives in the sp
ace of a thought, I remind myself. If she still lives, she might live a long time, even pinned beneath rubble. Even if she bleeds. And if she is dying, if she is dead, five minutes is too long.

  What might be does not matter. I do what I can do; it is all I can do. This is the only philosophy that makes sense to me.

  I pass men sitting on piles of broken brick, mothers digging in four stories of collapsed buildings, children screaming for their parents, dozens descending precarious heights that were once homes. They understand, too, now. Life is simple. Politics, rumors, traditions, dreams, jobs--everything that is not survival is luxury. Sweet, unimaginable bliss. To her, life is strife and struggle. She has never understood.

  Does she now?

  A man stops me. He is old, but he surveys the wrecked city street with leisure. By his rags and breath, I am certain he lost little and perhaps even gained by the disaster. “Where are you going?”

  “To the Wheel.”

  “The Select can’t help. They won’t. They’ll watch us and write books about how we ate each other.”

  “Maybe.” I don’t want to argue. I start moving again, and he calls out. I stop because there is something wild in his voice. I stop because there is something I wish to say. I do not know what it is.

  “It’s time to start over,” he says, a fire in his eyes. “No more powers that be. No more distinctions. Every man a king. Down with the Select and their magic!”

  The word has hardly left his mouth before I have his neck squeezed in the crook of my arm. Cold fire is in my gut. “I am sworn to protect the Select. Are you their enemy?”

  “No, no,” he hisses. “I--”

  “I am going to one of them now.” Yes, this is what I wanted to say. In case I fail, someone will know that I tried, that I did not abandon her. “There is a Select I will protect. If she is dead, I will have nothing left. Her name is Calea. If you ever meet her, honor her.”

  I let him go and continue on, picking up the pace. Perhaps an hour will not matter. Perhaps it will.

  The gate to Section Four is near. Already, the people are massing, pushing, swarming, trampling. They think there is safety there, on the other side of the wall that separates the sections. Section Four--the section she controls. Her domain. If this was an attack...but where are the soldiers? What’s the objective? Her Section, where the common man has wealth to rival the Select. Or soon will.

  The immigration offices are hollowed-out shells, walls and furniture and bodies littered on the street. Even from my place, away from the mob, I can see that the wall separating the Grunt from Section Four has fallen.

  It does not have to take an hour.

  I throw myself into the mass of people, silent among the mad. I claw forward, shoving bodies out of my path. They resist. I press harder. I throw a punch, climb over six as they collapse in a huddle. I am inside the Office of Neighborhood Immigration. The thick flow of humanity stagnates. Men are pressing forward and backward, diving into corners and searching out alcoves. I can tell by their clothes the men of the Golden Streets. If they are seeking refuge in the Grunt, then they have been hit hard.

  I hit hard, too. I will not be stopped. I lean forward, head down, shoulder leading, and cleave a path. I am growing angry. Why will they not get out of my way? I must go. I must move.

  I am on the other side, in the place we Grunters call the Golden Streets. The road is blackened by explosions, the avenue utterly destroyed. Every building has been blown to pieces. Emaciated frames remain, shivering in the wind. Blood is splattered on the concrete and steel. Behind me, the breach between the Sections writhes, but the scene before me is still. I count three cars, the newest models, twisted like sheets of paper after the flame.

  It doesn’t matter. She is not here. She is in the Tower overlooking her experiment.

  I spring forward, my legs reaching their full stride. My makeshift shoes have fallen off. I continue. The way is shredded rock. I find my way by honed sense. My feet are beginning to bleed. I take a moment to rob shoes off a dead man. They are too small. I cut a line along the soles to give my feet space. Uncomfortable, but it’ll do.

  I stop. I glimpse handlebars just ahead. I take the moments necessary to pull it upright. Every other vehicle in Section Four has been demolished. This remains intact. It’s one of her creations, a bicycle with a battery-powered engine. The key is in it. The driver moans nearby. I turn the key. It starts. I look at the reading. Nearly empty.

  But not completely empty.

  I rev the engine. Steadying the bike with my feet, I let loose. The front wheel hops over the next mound of rock. I look for the smoothest path; I bump and jolt over riven road. My teeth jar in my body. My insides quake. But I am moving.

  It is bone-cracking work. I sweat. I live moment by moment. My body burns. I force myself not to glance at the energy reading. Like my body, I will it to continue on. It sputters, leaps forward, hesitates, dies. I throw it aside, take two or three deep breaths.

  I am near enough to see her Tower. The top is gone. A jagged summit fumes black smoke. I can see her balcony below the smoke. I hope for a moment to see her there. She is not there.

  I’ll find her.