Citadel: The Concordant Sequence Read online

  Citadel

  The Concordant Sequence

  Matthew S. Cox

  Citadel: The Concordant Sequence

  © 2017 – Matthew S. Cox

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual persons, places, or apocalyptic events is purely coincidental.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the author.

  ISBN (ebook): 978-1-949174-70-0

  ISBN (print): 978-1-949174-71-7

  Contents

  1. Little Glitches

  2. Perfect Run

  3. Womb

  4. Born of Earth

  5. Three Merchants

  6. A Place to Hide

  7. The Fallen

  8. Dust and Ash

  9. Small

  10. Voices of the Dead

  11. Nightmare's Teeth

  12. No Better Option

  13. Exxo

  14. Teryn and Mala

  15. The Gathering

  16. A Strange New Life

  17. Cloudfall

  18. Stolen Goods

  19. Petabyte

  20. Left Behind

  21. Undue Attention

  22. Noob Gun

  23. The Seeds of Genesis

  24. Threatened

  25. Ten Thousand Souls

  26. Where They Cannot Follow

  27. Broken Home

  28. The Fabricator

  29. Norz

  30. The Earth Child

  31. Shadow of the Citadel

  32. Nobody Home

  33. Negotiations

  34. Criminals

  35. Mark of the Beast

  36. Rock, Paper, Scissors

  37. Tessa

  38. Second Dawn

  39. Citadel Corporation

  40. Loading Screen

  41. Lesser Evils

  42. Option Three

  43. Mouse in the Wall

  44. Hardware Upgrade

  45. Save Games

  46. The Concordant Sequence

  47. Dangerous Powers

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other books by Matthew S. Cox

  1

  Little Glitches

  Unease circled Kiera’s thoughts, melting the voice of the boring teacher at the front of the classroom into a meaningless warble. A pleasant sunny day mocked the kids for being shut up inside, even though it would kill them to spend too long out of doors. Bored and exhausted, she stared at a row of decorative pines along the edge of the school grounds, all statue-still except for one tree that flailed about like a spaghetti noodle in a hurricane. She caught herself nodding off and snapped upright. After wiping her eyes, she gawked at the windows, but the crazy tree had gone back to normal. The wall of greenery circling the immaculate field shifted and fluttered in a mild breeze.

  Kiera had been one year old the last time any kids had been allowed to play out there.

  A yawn forced its way out while video game corridors flashed by in her mind. She’d played the same level over and over again until she’d fallen asleep on her floor, not crawling into bed until sometime after twelve in the morning. She got lucky: Mom hadn’t noticed how late she stayed up, but attending this class while sleep-deprived amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Mr. Powers could knock her straight out after a good night’s rest plus two cups of coffee. Going in half-zombie had been asking for detention, but he hadn’t reacted to her near-faceplant on the desk.

  The room full of sixth-grade students bothered her more so than any other day. Something about them right at that moment made her nerves prickle at the wrongness. Clothes and faces didn’t match. Meredith had the same outfit down to the socks yesterday that Brittany wore today. Keith appeared to wear Spencer’s shoes. She could’ve sworn the blue backpack on Mike’s desk had been on Yasmeen’s two days ago. And it still looked new. Like, right-out-of-the-store new, despite it feeling like the 5,001st day of school that year.

  Kiera stared at Mr. Powers in his frumpy red sweater and beige pants. The same thing he wore every day; only the tie ever changed. Even his ramble about native tribes in the Amazon rain forest attacking military vehicles and drilling company property with spears and arrows sounded like she’d heard it dozens of times already.

  Her light pen left swirls in its wake as she doodled on her QuickTab. As much as she could practically quote the teacher, she couldn’t find any notes that she’d taken before. Not that she had a whole lot of interest in hearing about thousands of villagers being massacred. Powers harped on and on about how the planet was in trouble, the biosphere threatened by pollution, worsened by new wars that broke out all over the world. Small wars that lasted days or weeks, like two nations getting into a pushing match in the hallway between classes and then walking away grumbling. Resources, money, someone always wanted something someone else had. His list of nations that had collapsed felt like it grew by one every few days, but somehow also stayed the same.

  I remember writing this down already. She leaned back and stared open-mouthed at the drop ceiling, so bored and agitated she wanted to scream. Agitated like a little brother she didn’t have kept poking her in the back and she couldn’t stop him. Whatever bothered her sat beyond the edge of understanding, and not being able to figure it out made her fidget. She opened a messaging application and tapped out a note to her best friend Ashleigh, who sat one row left and two seats back.

  Ugh. This sucks. I can’t wait to go home. Didn’t Powers give us this assignment already? He’s gonna show a video of half-naked people running at trucks with spears.

  She flicked her nails on the edge of the silver tablet, wishing it could run her current video game obsession: The Concordant Sequence. Dad picked it up for her… a while ago, and finally, last night, she’d come close to the final level.

  Beep.

  Powers is sooooooo boring. What are you doing later?

  Kiera peered over the top of her QuickTab to make sure the teacher wasn’t watching her, and sent another message.

  Almost got to the end of TCS last night. If I don’t get too much homework, I think I’m going to beat that game tonight. Do you remember this? I swear he already taught this.

  Kiera glanced out the window. Blue skies. Puffy clouds. Light breeze. Chirping birds. All of this would’ve been wonderful, except for her QuickTab announcing the date as October 11. It should’ve been blustery and chilly, leaves falling off trees but… nope. She stared at the white line along the top of her eight-by-ten inch tablet. The social studies e-textbook blinked at her from the icon tray, a passive nag scolding her for minimizing it during class.

  Shouldn’t Powers have yelled at me by now?

  Most of the other students appeared to be reading along with the teacher. A longhaired boy named Steve in the back slept, head on his folded arms. Kiera looked at her screen again, noting the odd format of the date: no year.

  Ash, what year is it?

  She twisted to peer back at her friend, but froze at a glint in the sky. A passenger craft, supersonic judging by its arrowhead-like shape, hung motionless among the clouds. Flying, but not going anywhere.

  What the heck? Kiera opened a video app and held her QuickTab up to the window to record the… moving plane. Sighing, she lowered her arms into her lap and frowned at the distant aircraft. I’m losing it. Planes don’t hang still in the air like that.

  Beep.

  That’s a video game right? TCS? Is it any good? You really should work on finishing it.

  Kiera scowled.

  Ash, what’s wrong with you? I asked you a question. What year is it?

  Her friend looked up at her with a confused expr
ession for a second before bowing her head into the glow of her tablet screen.

  What kind of question is that? You don’t know what year it is? Lol. You need to chill. We’re gonna get in trouble for texting.

  Kiera shifted to face forward. Powers continued talking, reading from the textbook as he always did about how oil companies hired military contractors to ‘control’ indigenous populations. He hadn’t reacted to their texting, didn’t even clear his throat at her for twisting sideways. A meteor smashing in through the windows would’ve been less obvious than her not paying attention.

  She raised her hand.

  “Miss Quinn?” asked the teacher.

  “Mr. Powers, what year is it?”

  Some of the students chuckled.

  “November of 2026, which you’d know if you were paying attention. Six months later, right-wing religious extremists attacked the Green Wall.”

  She sighed. “No, Mr. Powers, I mean what year is it right now?”

  The boy behind her tugged on her hair. She yanked it out of his grip and gave him a quick glare.

  “Since you seem to know today’s lesson already, perhaps you can tell us why the Green Wall was attacked?” Powers raised his caterpillar-like eyebrows at her.

  “But we haven’t gotten that far,” said Marlon, a bookish boy with dark skin. He glanced her way and smiled. Every day felt like the day he’d finally get up the nerve to ask her on a date, but he never did.

  Powers smiled. “Precisely the point of me asking our non-attention-paying-redhead.”

  Kiera sighed before reciting in monotone. “The Green Wall was a group of scientists who worked to raise awareness of global environmental dangers and claimed the ecosystem was going to collapse. On May 4, 2027, five men from a fundamentalist church snuck into the audience of a presentation and shot the scientists dead. Later, law enforcement killed them during a prolonged hostage crisis. Fourteen audience members died as well. It leaked months later that the gunmen had ties to Big Oil as well as major chemical corporations, and were not in fact members of any religious group.”

  Mr. Powers blinked and coughed. He broke eye contact and wandered over to his desk. “Well, I suppose you have been reading ahead. There’s a video presentation, mostly news footage for today’s lesson.”

  Reading ahead? No, you taught that already. I know it! Kiera glared at the enormous monitor screen lowering from the ceiling at the front end of the classroom. A blip of white caught her eye behind the teacher’s desk, an old-fashioned paper calendar on the wall open to October 2032.

  The lights dimmed as the screen lit up green with rainforest. Speakers in the ceiling rattled the classroom with the roar of heavy machinery smashing down trees and crunching branches under heavy treads. Kiera slouched in her seat, gaze locked on the spot where the calendar hid in the darkness.

  It can’t be October 2032 or I’d still be ten. She closed her eyes and pictured her eleventh birthday party. Ashleigh, Kelly, Tashawna, Gerilyn, and Tamika all laughed at her when she couldn’t blow out the trick candles her dad got. Sparkers. Mom had to drop them in a bowl of water to put them out.

  Okay, that’s an old calendar from last year. It’s gotta be 2033.

  Screaming war cries, a group of brown-skinned men and women in loincloths charged at oil company workers and their trucks. One tribal warrior died when his spear punctured an e-cell along the side of a vehicle, frying him in seconds. She had a feeling the actual footage showed it, but the edited-for-school version blurred it out. They even dubbed in a cartoony scream, like they mocked the ‘dumb natives’ or whatever.

  Kiera scowled. This is so racist. Those companies are ruining the planet and even the news is picking on those poor people.

  Head down, she tried to tune out the shouting, the machine noise, and the deep-voiced narrator droning on about the ‘desperate but futile struggle.’ Staying up too late playing games caught up to her. She slumped forward and put her head down, not caring if Powers gave her detention. The instant her forehead touched her arm, a chill ran down her back. Her hands and feet went numb. Pins and needles crawled over her skin. For a split second, it felt like all her clothes had disappeared.

  “Aah!” she shouted, jumping up. Pink shirt, blue skirt, flip-flops. Check. She patted herself down to make sure her outfit was really there.

  Jordan, the boy behind her, tugged on her hair again. “What’s wrong with you today? You’re all spacey.”

  Kiera twisted around to look at him. His burgundy cardigan didn’t feel right. He should be wearing a flannel shirt. Thomas had the cardigan. “Stayed up too late.”

  “Lucky,” whispered Jordan. “Gotta be nice havin’ parents who always work. My dad―”

  “Runs a service station and your mom’s a nurse. You’ve told me already.”

  He stared at her. “Uhh, no, I haven’t.”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “When?” He leaned closer. “When did I tell you that?”

  Kiera stared into his eyes, drawing a blank. “Umm. Before.”

  “When before? I don’t remember.”

  “I… don’t either.” She whirled around to face front.

  Mr. Powers started to drift sideways off his chair with no apparent cause. He stopped, floating in midair two feet to the left of his seat, not falling, and not reacting to having no chair under him.

  She buried her face in her hands, rubbing her eyes. “I’m asleep and dreaming.”

  When she looked up, the teacher had returned to his chair. No floating.

  The bell rang.

  Everyone except her jumped to their feet at the same time. Kiera’s sense of wrongness increased amid the commotion. A flash of memory came and went, of her rushing after Mom and Dad down a bright corridor, like something out of a hospital. Her parents glanced back at her, yelling, but their words came as indistinct blurs of sound. Overhead lights smeared by in slow motion. She didn’t want to go with them. She remembered being terrified and dreading that something horrible waited for them in the room at the end of the hall, but couldn’t recall exactly what.

  Or if it had ever happened.

  Kiera snapped back from the waking nightmare and stuffed her QuickTab into her backpack before standing, clutching it to her chest. The familiar dream had happened before, but never during the day. Always being dragged down an immaculate hallway by her parents, scared out of her mind at what lurked behind the door at the end of the hall. Irrational fear, like her mom and dad decided to donate her organs or something and they’d been taking her in to die.

  She blinked at herself. Raised and lowered her toes. Short-sleeved T-shirt, skirt, flip-flops. Summer clothes in October? Confused, she looked up at the shrinking class. Tashawna walked through the still-closed door like a ghost. Mike got one arm into it before the door shifted to being open in the blink of an eye.

  Ugh. That’s the last time I stay up ’til midnight.

  Kiera filtered out of the room with the flow of students, bumping and jostling in the crowd toward her locker halfway across school. Ashleigh hovered at her side, laughing. Her friend had a coral-colored sundress on and also sported flip-flops. The girl’s shoulder-length black hair flared as she shook her head.

  “You’re completely out of it today, Kier. Are you feeling okay?”

  “I dunno. I think I’m exhausted. I stayed up super late last night. Is it really October or is it like June and school’s almost over?”

  Ashleigh dodged a running eighth-grade boy and scurried to catch up. “It’s October, silly. We’ve only been back for like two months.”

  “Ugh. It feels like it should be the end of the year already. Why are we dressed like this for October?”

  “Duh.” Her friend swatted her head. “Have you like been replaced by an alien or something? New to planet Earth? The biosphere’s all messed up. It’s like 109 degrees out.”

  “Oh.” She stared down at her raspberry-colored flip-flops. “Right. Yeah. That makes sense. It hit 126 last July, didn’t i
t?”

  Ashleigh squealed. “Yes! It was so awesome not to have to go to school for that whole week. Too hot to let people outside.”

  “We still had to remote in.” Kiera squeezed her QuickTab to her chest. “Crap. I have a test in robotics today.”

  “Mr. Conroy is kinda cute.” Ashleigh skidded to a stop by her locker and typed in a code.

  “Eww.” Kiera unlocked her cubby, right next to Ashleigh’s, then stashed her bag and QuickTab.

  Neither spoke on the way to the cafeteria. Children sat at long row tables, assigned by grades from three up while the younger kids ate lunch in their classrooms. She ignored the roar of several hundred conversations and added herself to the end of the lunch line, standing behind a pair of tall eighth-grade boys. A short distance past the payment station, a fourth or fifth-grade boy in a green plaid dress shirt stood at the soft drink machine, holding an enormous cup under a stream of soda.

  Kiera eyed pizza squares, sandwiches, spaghetti, chicken, salads, and macaroni through the glass. When her turn came, she pointed at a grilled chicken salad.

  “Here you are, sweetie,” said the middle-aged and somewhat chubby woman behind the counter. “How’s that game of yours coming along? Beat the end boss yet?”

  Thinking of her game made her tired all over again. She yawned. Why is she asking about TCS? “Uhh, not yet. Thanks.”