Young Writers Society

They had made it halfway around the central building when the air split open in front of them. A blinding flash of light turned night to washed-out day.
After the light came the sound, a blast like a knife through Dameon’s skull.
And after the sound came the shock wave. It slammed into Dameon and knocked him backwards. The world swam around him, his head ringing as he fought to keep his mind clear. Focus. Get the others, assess injuries, get out.
The pain. It seared through him, like hundreds of tiny fires boring through his skin. Shrapnel wounds, he realized dimly. Have to see… if anything too big hit me. Stop the blood…
His fingers worked. He moved them slowly, and then his arm, and then his other hand, checking for broken bones like his sergeant had taught him years ago. Then the legs, the body, and finally, the ribs.
He was bleeding from a dozen tiny wounds. But no fragments larger than his smallest fingernail had pierced him.
Got lucky… there.
Up. He surged to his feet, pushing away the pain. “Jade! Limena!” They had been right behind him, they couldn’t be far, but it was so damned dark—
“We’re here, we’re all here!”
Jade. He stumbled toward her voice, blinking away the bomb’s afterimage — and there. Jade, leaning over Sam, Meghan and Limena hovering beside them.
“Sam!” Dameon surged forward, pushing Meghan aside. He was moving, definitely moving, and maybe groaning, but Dameon’s hearing was muted from the blast, as if he was underwater. “What happened? Is he—“
“Shrapnel to the thigh. Didn’t hit the artery. He’ll be fine,” Jade said shortly, ripping a length of cloth from her clothing to serve as a bandage. She sounded just loud enough to Dameon’s ears — her hearing would have been damaged from the explosion too.
Relief swept through Dameon, leaving him lightheaded. He sank to his knees, taking his brother’s hand. “It doesn’t hurt,” Sam told him, though he was grimacing with pain as he said it.
“Thank God,” Limena said, her face pale. “That could have been so much worse…”
At that, Dameon’s blood went cold. “Wait. Where’s Ian?”
He searched their blank faces.
“He was in front of you,” Meghan breathed, realization settling in.
Right at the edge of the explosion.
No. No. Dameon turned, jaw set, ready to launch himself forward into the night. They weren’t leaving without their guide. Not after everything he’d done for Dameon. Not after he’d come back for them.
“Dameon—“ Jade began, but he was already gone, feeling his way in the dark, hurrying recklessly along the side of the building towards the explosion, straining, straining to see by the light of flickering fire behind him and the stars above.
Rubble. He rounded each pile, shuffling his feet, searching by touch as much as sight.
A muted thud overhead marked another bomb. This one had landed on the other side of the compound. He thought. He couldn’t be sure, not with the state of his hearing.
Dark. It was too dark, too many corners a body could hide in. There was the edge of the crater, but no body inside— and that could mean anything from Ian having walked away unscathed to the only bits of him left being… Dameon didn’t like to think.
He had to keep searching. He couldn’t abandon him now. Stumbling forward again, squinting, fingers searching, ignoring the pain…
A hoverjet’s searchlight swept the compound, and in its light, Dameon found Ian. Thrown like a rag doll, he had landed on a pile of rubble at one corner of the bombed-out central building. His head lolled beside an enormous, jagged rock.
Dameon ran. He was there in an instant, squatting beside the larger-than-life man, checking his pulse and lifting his head. Ian’s long hair was matted with blood, and Dameon’s fingers quickly found a noticeable dent in the back of his skull. He shuddered in horror.
“No,” he whispered, looking at Ian’s sightless eyes. “No.”
He checked his pulse again, blindly. Still nothing.
Compressions. CPR. He hadn’t done it before, except in training, but….
Who was he kidding? He had known the moment he had seen Ian’s limp body that he was gone and wasn’t coming back, not with a dent like that in his skull. Maybe back home, if an ambulance was a phone call away, if Ian could have been revived immediately, placed on life support…
But this wasn’t Layer 7. Or even Eos. Slowly, Dameon lowered Ian’s head to the ground and leaned back. In death, the old farmer looked smaller. Shrunken, somehow, now that the light in his eyes was gone.
A hand appeared on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
Dameon turned and met Jade’s eyes, and an understanding passed between them. Jade offered her hand. After a long moment, Dameon took it and allowed her to lead him away.

Chapter 13
By the time dawn breached the horizon, the hoverjets from Eos were long gone and half the population of the compound sat huddled on the scrubby desert floor a hundred yards away, staring back at their home with glassy eyes. The fires still burned low, revealing the blackened husks of the buildings.
The other half, so far as anyone knew, had been lost to the explosions and the flames.
Dameon found himself sitting on a rock, staring at the ground, not thinking. Just listening. Listening to the crackle of flames, the memory of explosions and screams, to the crying children and weeping mothers and fathers around him. Sam sat beside him, just as silent, favoring his thigh where he had been hit by shrapnel. Jade’s bandage had done the job, for now.
But the ones who had died quickly — they had been the lucky ones.
“Dameon?” It was Jade. She crouched beside him, putting her hand on his knee. “They’ve finished the census. They’re going to start letting people back in now.”
Dameon didn’t move.
She took his hand. “They’ll need us to help rebuild.”
“We can’t rebuild,” Dameon whispered, lifting his head to stare at the ruined compound. “They killed the crops and bombed out the storehouses. We’re going to starve.”
“Of course we’re not!”
That was Dominic, of all people. Didn’t he have somewhere to be? He had appeared behind Dameon suddenly, slapping his hand against Dameon’s shoulder in a friendly gesture. He looked exhausted, his normally sharp uniform torn and covered in dust. One arm was in a sling, but he had still managed to put on a grim smile for the benefit of the townspeople.
He’s a good leader, Dameon admitted to himself. In a way I never was.
“How?” Sam said quietly. “He’s right. You can’t sustain this population.”
“Didn’t you ever wonder where Soran has been all this time? Where I go when I leave?” He shook his head. “We aren’t rebuilding. We’re relocating. The hoverjet will be here in an hour. It’ll take a day or two, but we’ll get everyone out.”
“What if they come back?” Limena spoke up from where she had been sitting with Meghan.
Dominic fixed her with an oddly intense gaze. “Samuel knows he’s destroyed our technology and our crops. To him, we’re as good as dead, an example, even. He won’t bother to come back and waste resources cleaning up loose ends.”
Dominic’s voice changed whenever he mentioned Samuel or Eos. It became colder, harder. Dameon knew that, more than anything, had left Jade reluctant to defect, and Dameon had agreed with her. But now… dammit, Dameon felt the same way. He couldn’t ignore it, not without lying to himself. He had been pretending differences that weren’t there.
And this attack only confirmed what, deep down, Dameon had always known.

President Samuel wasn’t Dameon’s brother. He may have his face and his DNA, but that was all they shared. His brother was sitting here beside him, just as hollow-eyed as the rest of them. President Samuel was a monster. And no matter what he had done in the past, he didn’t deserve to lead Eos now.
And that goes for all the rest of them, too, he thought bitterly.
He stood suddenly, taking Dominic by the elbow. “You were right. You were exactly right about him.”
Dominic shrugged, as if to say he wished he hadn’t been.
“And I want to tell you,” Dameon continued. “I’m in. This time, I’m really in.”
Dominic’s face spread slowly to a grin, and then he pulled Dameon into a bone-crushing hug. “I knew it! I told you you’d see reason one of these days. Welcome to the fold, brother! But damn, I wish it hadn’t taken this to get you on board.”
Behind him, Jade stood just as suddenly. “I’m in too. There’s a rebellion growing in Eos. I have contacts. Better to work together than to fight apart.”
“Perfect,” said Dominic, shaking Jade’s hand. “Well, that’s a load off my back, and I won’t lie. We lost too many people last night. I need people who know what their doing to help my people through it all.”
Reflexively, Dameon glanced over at Meghan and LImena. He thought he caught a look of shock and fear on Meghan’s face before she quickly composed herself. Limena was as obscure as ever, though Dameon knew how strongly she must disapprove. But that didn’t matter. He was in. Welcome to the fold.
Damn, it had felt good to hear those words. He stood slowly, joints stiff and bruised from… well, everything. Beside him, Jade took his hand in hers, squeezing it tightly.
“Ready?” she whispered.
“Yes,” he said simply. Her eyes. They were like an entire forest, full of hidden depths. It took his breath away. He took her other hand, pulling her closer. Suddenly, he had never wanted anything quite so much in his life as to have her near. Closer than a friend, he finally admitted to himself. Much closer.
Jade’s lips curved into a sly smile. She leaned into him, warm against his shoulder, and then, before he knew it, she had reached up and planted a light kiss on his lips that tingled all the way through him.
Dameon drew in a heady breath and leaned forward for more, chasing those sweet lips. But she pulled away from him with a wink that said “Later.”
He watched her as she spoke with Dominic — he was telling her how to help organize those who had escaped the bombing. Her hair bounced when she shook her head, like ripples of fire.
God, he’d been blind. Why had he ever tried to hide it? Tried to persuade himself they were better off as friends? He wanted her, and she wanted him. He was sure he had a stupid grin on his face, and he didn’t bother trying to hide it.
As he strode off to carry out Dominic’s orders, Dameon felt like he was standing taller than he had in years.

“Hey, Dameon.”
It was Dominic, approaching him from the entrance to one of the few still-standing buildings in the compound — the cafeteria, of all places. Dameon stood to greet him with a shake of the hand and a clap on the back. Dominic looked even more tired. Had he slept at all the night of the attack?
Dameon had been sitting in a large circle with his team, minus Jade, who was still helping look for wounded in the rubble. Together, they had found Ian’s body and burned it with the others. There had been no time — and hardly any tools either — to bury them properly. For the last several hours, Dameon had been directing groups of refugees to the stretch of open ground where the hoverjet landed every hour or so.
“You and the others are on the next jet out, with the last of your group,” Dominic told him. “Jade should be here in just a moment.”
Dameon stood quickly. “You need me to have everyone there in five minutes?”
“More like ten.” Dominic lowered his voice a little, glancing over to where Limena and Meghan were sitting. “I wanted to warn you. The moment you step off that hoverjet, you’re going to be taken to meet Soran.”
“Okay.”
“He’s angry about the attack.”
“So am I.”
“Everyone is. And that’s the problem. We can’t afford this anymore, brother. Keeping ‘enemy spies’ here, not really even as prisoners — it’s bad for morale. People are muttering, saying one of you leaked our location and caused the attack.”
“How?” Dameon said angrily. “How do they think we’ve been able to get in contact with Eos?”
Dominic caught Dameon’s upper arm. “Sam. He’s been helping with our systems for weeks. Damn, Dameon, to an outsider it looks like a done deal. Even I thought, when the bombs first started —“
He broke off. “That’s beside the point. I wouldn’t put it past your Limena to do something like that, but your Sam doesn’t have a lying bone in his body. He wouldn’t send unless you gave him the order, and I trust you.”
“Then what’s the problem?” He’d meant it this time, when he promised. Couldn’t they see?
“You and Jade are fine. It’s Limena, Meghan, and your brother. Soran is going to force them to make a public declaration. They’re with us, or they’re against us. I thought you’d want to tell them in advance.”
“What happens if they’re against us?” He shook his head. “Dominic, Sam’s already in, I know that. He’s with me. Meghan… I don’t think she actually cares about any of this. I know she just wants to go home. I don’t know what she’ll do. But Limena… she’s a patriot through and through. She’ll never switch sides, I’d bet my life on it.”
“Well,” Dominic said, something hard in his eyes. “Everyone has to choose their way.”
“What will he do to them if they don’t agree?” Dameon asked bluntly.
Dominic didn’t answer for a moment.
“You could let them go,” Dameon said quietly. “Now, before they’ve seen the other base.”

“That’s what I told Soran. But he says they’ll still be a security threat.” Dominic shrugged. “I figure he’s probably right. Sorry, Dameon. It was the best I could do.”
“Yeah,” Dameon said.
“What was that about?” Limena demanded the moment Dominic walked away.
This was as private of a place as they were going to get — it would only be more crowded on the hoverjet. Better to tell them now. But all Dameon said was, “I’ll tell you when Jade gets here. We’re all flying out in ten minutes.”
“I’m here, Dameon,” said an out-of-breath voice behind Dameon. It was Jade, clutching her side as if she’d been running. “Are you guys ready?”
“We will be,” Dameon said. “But I’m supposed to warn you — once we get to the other base, they’re going to take us to talk to Soran. He’s going to ask us to swear allegiance to him. All of us.”
“And if we don’t, we’re imprisoned at best, killed at worst,” Limena finished for him.
“He didn’t say—“
“Sure he didn’t,” Limena said sarcastically.
“Yeah, okay,” Dameon said, his temper rising. “All I’m saying is you’re going to have to make a choice. So do us all a favor and pick the right one, alright?”
He couldn’t help but be strongly reminded of Isa’s words to him in the underground bunker only a few short weeks ago. She had been right. He had needed to pick a side eventually. And so did they.
Then Jade poked him in the ribs teasingly and nodded to the group they were supposed to be chaperoning to the hoverjet. Dameon smiled at her, anger gone, and strode over to them, helping them to gather their meager belongings and ensuring they had everybody with them.
The hoverjet landed in a plume of dust in between the command building and the residential housing, where a wide strip of land that had once been cordoned off to form pathways and vegetable gardens was now little more than a flat expanse strewn with rubble. Dameon waved the group forward, himself and Jade at the head, the other members of his team bringing up the rear. With about thirty people to a group, they severely overcrowded the jet — it was just slightly larger than the ones used in search-and-rescue missions, and they stood as packed as commuters on the New York subway during rush hour.
Dameon and Jade found themselves pressed up against the doorway leading to the cockpit as the final people piled in. “Are we clear?” he called back.
“Clear,” Limena told him, and after a moment, the door swung closed and the turbines began to roar, pushing great gusts of air downwards to give them lift. The hoverjet shuddered, and the landing struts retracted. Then they began to rise.
“Here we go again,” Jade whispered, gazing over the heads of all the people. A child was crying, but otherwise they were silent, somber.
Suddenly, she took his hand. Dameon looked down at her, at those perfect lips, and longed to kiss them. But he knew her well enough to know that now wasn’t the time. She wasn’t leaning into him, or looking up with a sly smile. She seemed distant, thoughtful, like she just wanted some comfort.
Dameon squeezed her hand gently and nudged her in acknowledgement. Right now, he thought he could handle that.

Around half an hour later — without a timepiece, Dameon couldn’t be sure — the hoverjet touched down with a slight thump. Murmurs swept the cabin, and everyone got elbowed a lot as people shifted around, grabbing bags and children.
The door hissed open again, people spilling out much faster than they had packed themselves in. Within moments, he was stepping over the threshold to find that they had landed in a small hanger, large enough for several hoverjets, but probably only one of the old commercial planes.
He couldn’t pick out the entrance — where the hoverjet had flown in. That bothered him. Were they underground or several stories in the air? Where nearby could possibly have the level of working technology required to automatically open and close a door large enough for a hoverjet to fit through?
Limena had stopped the crowd a few paces away from the hoverjet. Dameon looked around, frowning. Where —?
There. Half a dozen black-suited men, carrying handguns at their waste and watches on their wrists, streamed from a small side door. They spotted Dominic immediately, surrounding him and Jade in seconds. Reflexively, Dameon’s hand went to a gun that wasn’t there.
“D-7,” one of them said. “And your team?”
So this was their escort. There was no point in being uncooperative. Dameon called Limena, Meghan, and Sam over to him. The leader, a stony-faced man with a scar down one cheek, checked their faces against pictures that Dominic must have sent. Then he gave a curt nod.
Immediately, a guard seized each of the five of them, wrestling their hands behind their back and handcuffing them in place.
“Really?” Dameon grunted irritably, trying to wrench himself out of his agent’s grip. They could at least let him walk without being steered. But the man’s iron fingers only tightened painfully on Dameon’s shoulder, and the leader didn’t bother with a reply, even when Limena swore at him.
The crowd stared at them as they were led away, and Dameon felt red heat creep up his neck. He’d thought he was one of them now. He’d been deluding himself. In Soran’s eyes, he was still an enemy spy. In these people’s eyes… surely they had noticed how he had helped them. He thought he saw a little more sympathy in many of their faces, at least. Then the hanger door slid shut behind him and they were gone.
Down corridors, around corners, through doors that required a guard to swipe his badge… once Dameon would have tried to keep track of it all, but he couldn’t be bothered today. He did notice Limena counting under her breath and was entirely unsurprised.
At last, they reached a set of doors just as plain as all the others. They slid open with a whoosh that forcibly reminded Dameon of the doors in Samuel’s Throne Room. The guards halted at the threshold, ushering Dameon’s team inside.

Once they were in, the doors closed behind them.
Dameon swallowed. The man who sat at the long table inside was not Sam, but damned if he didn’t look more like him than all the rest of Sam’s dupes Dameon had met. He was the right age, for starters, and he wore his hair in the same style of afro, and something about his hands – maybe the way they drummed on the table, flickering faster than the eye could follow – carried Sam’s same energy. But he was Soran, not Sam, Dameon reminded himself as the man rose to greet them.
Soran was smiling with all his teeth, hands outstretched. “Welcome! How good of you to join us. Please, have a seat.”
Dameon jangled his handcuffs conspicuously. Soran’s smile grew wider. “A precaution, nothing more.”
No, this wasn’t Sam. Sam didn’t have this easy confidence.
One by one, they took their seats, awkwardly pulling out the chair with pinned hands. Dameon sat directly opposite Soran, with Sam on his left and Jade on his right, Limena and Meghan beyond them. He tapped his fingers against his palm, wanting nothing more than to have this meeting over with. He would swear loyalty. He had made that decision back at the destroyed base. Jade and Sam would follow him.
The trick would be making sure the other two didn’t get themselves killed by refusing.
Well. Time to get things moving. “I think we all know why we’re here. You want us working for you.”
“It would be much preferable disposing of you, yes, or… forcefully extracting what you know,” Soran said mildly. “Just swear an oath to me, and I will accept it as binding. You will be questioned on your past operations in Eos’ government, and then you will be watched, of course, to ensure your loyalties don’t… swerve. Questions?”
“What are you trying to do?” Limena put it bluntly. “I don’t want the propaganda, I want the truth.”
“The truth? The complete and utter reformation of Eos. The deposition and trial of Samuel and his inner circle to trial for their abuses of power. Nothing less.”
“Rebellion is easy,” Limena shot back. “What goes in Eos’s place?”
“A reformation under my leadership, at least at first. Free trade. Democracy. Open borders. You’ve heard all these things from Dominic, I’m sure.”
“Yeah. One last question.” She actually leaned forward now, meeting his eyes in a defiant glare. Dameon’s breath caught at her audacity, and he would have pulled her back if he could. Don’t push him.
“Why you?” she said.
Soran nodded, acknowledging the question as fair. “Because I can do it better. I will do it better. You know I was with Samuel for years. He had good intentions, at the start. And then, after we thought the hard work was done, after the people were united and infrastructure running… he got comfortable. I never was. There’s always more to be done. Samuel has stalled. That leaves me.”
He spoke with utter confidence, and watching him, with his fingers intertwined and his easy pose, Dameon believed him.
“You’re gathering an army,” Limena said, as if he didn’t know. “You’re going to start a war.”
“Well, that’s war’s for, isn’t it?” Soran said with the tiniest hint of a shrug. “Change doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”
“It doesn’t have to happen with violence, either,” a new voice said.
Dameon stared at Sam in surprise. In the week they had been here, he had hardly heard Sam say anything either for or against Eos or the Silver League. Not you too. Sam was right, violence shouldn’t have to be the answer. But it was about time he learned the real world just didn’t work like it should.
The hint of scorn that flashed in Soran’s eyes mirrored Dameon’s thoughts. “That’s what I used to think,” he said with a long-suffering shake of his head.
“Then how—“ Sam began.
Soran held up a firm hand. “Enough. I have told you enough. No more deliberations. Choose. Now.”
He looked at each one of them in turn. “Will you be proud? Will you stand stiff-backed and defiant alone, in support of a government a thousand miles away, a government that has failed? It would be a pointless sacrifice.”
“You know what I’ve chosen,” Dameon said impatiently. “I swear. I swear to the cause of the Silver League.”
“And I,” Jade added.
“Me too,” said Sam in a voice that was almost a whisper.
“I swear,” Meghan said in a flat tone.
That left only Limena, sitting rigid and proud just as Soran had said. She seemed to know it, and inch by inch, her spine curved forward and her shoulders sunk. Dameon tried to catch her eye, but she shot him a glare that seemed to say my decision. Stay out of this.
She took a long, shuddering breath, and something in her eyes changed.
“I swear,” she said softly. “I swear.”

Chapter 14
Two weeks after he had sworn his oath to Soran, Dameon found himself resigned to trudging along an endless, broken road for another day. When Dominic had knocked on their bunkroom door with this assignment, Dameon had assumed they would be riding in the Jeeps, but after two days of that the road had become so broken and overgrown it was impossible to really drive. So they walked, the hot Georgia sun beating down on their necks with a vengeance.
Soran had sent only four people: Dominic as leader, of course, then Dameon, Jade, and Limena. Sam and Meghan had both been put to work back at the main base developing and fixing technology for the Silver League. Despite the drudgery of walking, Dameon had thoroughly enjoyed the company of Dominic and Jade. They walked together for hours, discussing Eos and Dameon and Dominic’s similar pasts. Dameon had never asked about the differences between his life and his dupe’s before, but the comparison revealed fascinating differences.
The odd one out was Limena. She alone had hardly said a word the past four days. Dameon frowned, glancing back at her. Even now, she was walking behind the three of them, rather than beside them, picking her own path through the rubble of the ruined road.
He decided this had gone on long enough.
“Hey,” he said, slowing down to fall into step beside her. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Are you saying I can’t handle the pace?” she demanded.
“No,” said Dameon quickly. “I meant about… you know. Everything else.”
“Why do you care?” she said, stabbing her walking stick down with more force than was necessary.
“Because I know you don’t want to be here,” Dameon pressed.
“Better than being tortured and killed.”
“I — “ he began.
“If you start up one of your little speeches about Eos again, I’m going to punch you in the throat,” she said flatly.