The Green Ones

Episode 1, Part 2

I tear at the skin on Olin’s wrists until we are ripped apart by the trunk of an ojé tree. I lose track of him as I crash into the underbrush and tumble to a stop face down. I lift my head in time to watch a second large section of shield wall sheer off and implode—crushed into a nugget of ore too small for me to see.

“Olin!” This can’t be happening, not today—not that any day would be a fitting one to disintegrate. The ground beneath the shield wall explodes, a Masa defense car birthing from the crater. Cracked open like an egg, its five person crew is dead and gone instantly.

Gods, we’ve gotta get out of here. “Olin!” I scramble to the bench where we were sitting. The forest canopy that sheltered us moments earlier is gone. The shield wall shimmers with telekinetic energy both coming and going. Tumbling off the bench, I roll clear as the crater swallows it. Finally, I spot Olin half buried in leaves.

There hasn’t been an attack of this magnitude on Worker City during my lifetime. I’ve only heard stories. The most frightening ended with Masa withdrawing the telekinetic defenses from an entire district, leaving everyone inside to be killed. On hands and knees, I reach Olin.

Trembling and ashy white, his skin is clammy to the touch. “Xoxochueyi!” I slap him. “Not now, not again.” His eyes have gone empty, like when our parents died. I try to yank him up by the arm, but my feet slip as the ground beneath us disintegrates. I stop breathing as the air dissipates. My braid unfurls from around my neck and floats in the space between us.

My little brother becomes light as air, and for a moment I feel that way too. I clutch him to my chest. Our troubles are over now, little Olintl. Don’t worry, wherever you go, this time I’ll go there with you.

The tear struggling from the corner of my eye evaporates. My heart shudders. Without closing my eyes, the world goes dark. I think about how the other kids and I were wrong when we were little. Telekinetic disintegration is actually a wonderful way to die.

Then my lungs spasm. A hot blast scours my face, whipping my braid out behind me as the void transforms into a ball of fire. I dig my nails into Olin’s back and hold on. I call his name, the sound of my voice consumed. For the first time in my life, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I’m scared—helpless and scared.

I’m screaming at the top of my voice when the firestorm disappears as suddenly as it started, and Olin and I are falling. Together, we strike the soft, pulverized soil at the bottom of the crater and slide to a stop.

Only after I register that Olin has placed his hands over his ears do I realize I’m still screaming. Embarrassed, I stop. The faint hum of the restored shield wall is interrupted briefly by a fluttering sound followed by a thud as the millennium sign lands beside us.

“Olin.” I brush the dirt from his face, his closed eyes flickering at my touch.

“Calli,” he whispers my name.

I hold back tears of joy.

“Why are you screaming?” he continues.

I start to laugh. Then it strikes me he’s not joking. He’s confused. He doesn’t realize he’s lost control of his telekinesis. “Oh, no. Oh, no. Olin, wake up.”

“I’m tired.”

I lift his head and shoulders in an effort to drag him out of the crater, but we’re several meters down. It’s happening again, like last time. Now we’ve nowhere to go, no one to pay the medical expenses if he slips into another coma. And we’ve only five days. “Olin, stay awake, please. Something terrible has happened.” I drag him another meter. “We have to go.”

I shake him, on the verge of panic. “You have to help me!”

“What do you think I’m trying to do?”

I flinch at the voice coming from overhead before identifying it, “Neca.” Of all the people to be first on the scene. “It’s my brother, he needs help.”

“I’ll say.”

“Xoxochueyi,” I swear. “Please, just—”

“Hold on.”

Olin begins to float. I clasp my hands around his stomach. Quickly, the two of us rise from the crater. Neca is smirking as usual, but at least it’s his concerned smirk. Using an illegal demonstration of telekinesis, he sets us down away from the crater. I gasp at the widespread totality of the destruction. The attack from outside the city couldn’t have possibly caused it all.

“Calli, is that you?”

I turn toward my brother, “I’m right here.”

“You look different.”

His eyes are shut. I can’t see whatever it is he is seeing. I panic, remembering the backpack Olin had on earlier. “Your medicine.” I turn toward Neca. “He needs the medicine from his backpack, quickly.”

Neca shakes his head. “Honey, there’s no backpack. There’s barely a perimeter. And besides that, we’re missing a whole block.”

I scan for the bench where we were sitting. Of course, he’s right.

“I can’t figure how the two of you aren’t pink mist.”

His words spark an unfocused rage within me. I don’t know how we survived. Or maybe I do, and I can’t swallow the implications. “Well, here we are,” I growl, “are you going to help us or not?”

He scowls, “I could throw you back in the hole if you’d like.”

“Just shut up. I need to think.” I’m being unfair. The whole situation is unfair. After people comb the rubble for survivors, their eyes will fall on us. I know what it will look like, but none of this is Olin’s fault.

“I’m getting dizzy.” Olin tugs my sleeve as he stumbles.

Neca catches him and stares at me. Eventually, the self-absorbed, dark-skinned chadzitzin cage-fighter clears his throat.

I bare my teeth, even while nodding my head. Not knowing where to go is a poor excuse to stay put. Carrying Olin between us, Neca and I weave our way through the jumble of shattered adobe and sheared iron foam until we reach the shelter of a mostly intact building.

After Olin barely survived the last coma, the doctor said the next one would kill him. The medicine I made from my mother’s garden had been the only thing that helped. But the last of it disintegrated with Olin’s backpack. I need time to make more.

As if reading my mind, Neca interrupts, “Time is a luxury we don’t have, honey.”

In the distance I hear the wind-up siren clearing the way for district four’s Justice of the Peace. That means New Teo’s lead detective, an immortal called Huatiani, has already arrived. “We’ve nowhere to go.”

A glimmer dances in Neca’s eye, as if he’d been waiting for those exact words. “There’s one place, but you’re not going to like it.”

In Neca-speak, this means I will hate it only slightly less than watching my brother die in holding while Huatiani grills me about the morning’s attack.