our lakes. On the stage, men are covering an altar with crimson cloth. Suspended over the cages at the back, a massive vid-screen made from loads of little screens shows our glorious leader, the Saviour himself.
He stares down at us, magnified a thousand times.
Me, I’ve only seen him on faded posters before, where he looks old and severe. Here on the screen though I see he’s still barrel-chested, strong and vigorous for a man his age. A mane of thick grey hair falls over his broad shoulders and he’s got a mouthful of the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. We get to see a lot of them too, with him smiling as he does his famous ‘reaching out to the people’ pose that Rona hates so much. Like he’s a father figure, not the dictator she’s always saying he is.
It’d be confusing if I could be bothered thinking about it.
I stop watching him and look out instead for that scowling girl with the white dreads and the flamer. In this crowd it’d be easy for her to sneak up behind me and slide a knife between my ribs without anyone seeing.
Turns out Nash was right. The leathers and those marks on the girl’s face means she’s windjammer crew. Me, I’ve never seen a windjammer, but like all kids, I know about these ridge-running glider transports. Cobbled together from the scrapped orbit-to-surface dropships that dumped us here back in the day, they’re crude enough flying machines, but as hi-tech as it gets here. Worlds like Wrath are where whoever runs the galaxy disposes of criminals, and that’s a locked-down, marooned and forgotten kind of deal. We’re left to fend for ourselves.
So folk say anyway, but what do I know?
I’ve wanted to be a windjammer pilot since forever.
Down on sleep after a bad night, I yawn. Whenever I closed my eyes, I kept seeing that flamer. But that wasn’t the worst thing – I wish I’d had the guts to tell Nash and that old man to drop dead. I should never have picked up that pole thing. Okay, so the twist looked nasty, but – and I know this is heresy – wouldn’t being tortured and tormented, day in, day out, turn anyone into a monster?
A trumpet sounds. At least, I think it’s a trumpet. We don’t go in much for music in the Barrenlands – it’s nice, but you can’t eat it.
‘What’s happenin’?’ squeals Cassie.
People file on to the stage. I can tell straight off they’re important because they’re sleek and fat and wear rich-looking clothes. You have to be a big deal on Wrath to be fat. One by one they waddle along and crush their seats.
‘They look down, we look up,’ somebody hisses.
The crowd starts muttering now.
I’m twisted round, trying to hear what’s being said, when I hear gasps. I look back and have a gasp sucked out of me too. A raven-haired young woman stalks across the stage, swaying her hips, a long brown cloak draped over her shoulders. Under this she wears a fancy black-leather uniform, trimmed with shimmering nightrunner fur, cut tight and clinging to show off her figure. She stops at the altar, turns and faces us. Even from here I see her fingers clenching and unclenching. She reminds me of a spider – all long, spindly arms and legs, waiting to pounce. Trumpets blast, then fade away. Cassie kicks me in the shin.
‘All right!’ I hoist her on to my shoulders.
The people behind us moan, but I ignore them. Cassie’s thrilled. I’m not – she stinks. She also thinks it’s okay to hold on to my ears.
‘Who’s the tall skinny woman?’
‘A High Slayer.’
I’m pretty sure, seeing how much gilt she’s got on her uniform.
The only Slayers I’ve seen before are those who come for our idents, when it’s time to cart them off to the camps. Everybody always turns out to watch because, let’s face it, nothing else happens in Freshwater. Rona says they’re stone-cold killers, the Saviour’s special forces from the war. They’ve got some other fancy names too, like Preservers of Human Purity, but I like Slayer better.
‘What’s her name?’ Cassie asks me.
‘How should I know?’
‘Commandant Morana,’ whispers Mary, Cassie’s sister. ‘High Slayer for the Barrenlands.’
‘Nasty piece of work,’ adds Mary’s mother, quiet-like, out of the side of her mouth. ‘Eats babies for breakfast.’
I shudder, and try to imagine what babies might taste like. Disgusting, if Cassie is anything to go by.
The Saviour fades away and the big screen zooms in on the woman’s face. She is beautiful, but there’s a harshness stamped into her features no creams or powders can hide. Her eyes stare back at us, so cold and bleak I shiver, even though I’m hot. And when she starts talking, her voice is impossibly loud. Her words crash around the arena, like thunder echoes around our hills. I’m gobsmacked, until I see the microphone clipped to her collar and the speakers up on poles.
‘Good afternoon, citizens of the Barrenlands,’ she booms. ‘Welcome to Deep Six on this, the last day of this year’s Peace Fair. It is . . . gratifying to see how many of you have chosen to make the difficult journey here.’
I can’t help sniffing. Chosen? Okay, so I chose, but it’s the law.
‘I would like to begin,’ she continues, ‘by asking you all to show your appreciation for our hosts, the loyal and industrious mining community of Deep Six, who once again have made this year’s Fair such a success.’
The bigdeals haul themselves up from their chairs and the crowd starts clapping. Hardly deafening though – nobody will be going home with blisters on their hands. And this lack of enthusiasm isn’t lost on Morana. Magnified on the screen above her, she stiffens and her scowling face lifts to look behind us. Uh-oh. Turns out that she isn’t the only Slayer in Deep Six today. When I look, I see loads more have spread out behind us around the rear wall of the arena. Some are only carrying non-lethal shockers, but most are armed with pulse rifles.
The clapping gets louder – some creeps even cheer.
Deep Six’s Elder, a red-faced woman with a whiny voice, makes a speech. She thanks the High Slayer, then bangs on for boring ages about new productivity records for the iron-ore mines. It’s worse than studying maths, so I’m glad when she eventually sits down and Morana returns to the centre of the stage.
The crowd, which had started muttering again, quiets.
‘We are gathered here today,’ Morana announces, ‘to celebrate thirty years of the Saviour’s peace. A peace which has allowed us to rebuild our shattered world and raise new generations of pureblood singleton children. A peace which sees us looking forward from our dark past towards an ever brighter future.’
She pauses. The speakers blast out the first verse of ‘All Hail the Saviour’.
We chant it back, like good little citizens.
What follows is a history lesson from her that makes me sigh. I mean, as if I haven’t had this drummed into my head a thousand times already by our preacher, Fod, back in Freshwater. Anyway, Morana reminds us how the outbreak of ident births was first considered a blessing as we struggled to survive in those early days after being
