Present Day
Freedom tasted like dust and blood.
Amari's lungs pulled in air that was thick with both—particulate matter from the burning mine buildings mixing with the copper tang from where he'd bitten through his tongue during the beating. Each breath was a conscious effort, his ribs protesting the expansion required to fill his chest cavity. His legs moved in something approximating a run, though calling it running was generous. It was more of a stumbling forward momentum, his body remembering the motion of flight even as the muscles threatened mutiny.
Around him, sixteen other children moved in similar patterns of desperate locomotion. The tall gangly boy—Amari still didn't know his name—had taken point without anyone assigning him the position, his longer stride eating ground despite the malnourishment that made his joints look oversized against stick-thin limbs. Behind him, the eight-year-old girl who'd screamed in the tunnel now ran with her eyes fixed straight ahead, her small hands balled into fists, her face set in an expression of determination that looked wrong on features that young.
They'd covered maybe two hundred meters down the hillside from the mine entrance. The road was fifty meters ahead, a dirt track wide enough for two carts to pass each other, carved into the landscape by decades of heavy mining equipment. Beyond the road, the terrain dropped away into a valley thick with scrub vegetation—thornbush and low trees that wouldn't provide cover but might slow pursuit.
Zara led the group with the efficient movement of someone who'd mapped escape routes before the operation started. She'd sheathed both weapons but kept her right hand resting on the cylindrical device at her thigh, ready to draw in the half-second it would take to register a threat. The other Liberators had spread out in a loose protective formation—the man with the staff bringing up the rear, the woman with the medical kit on the left flank, the two stronger men on the right.
Amari's right knee buckled mid-stride. He caught himself on his hands, palms scraping across loose rock, fresh pain adding to the catalogue of injuries his body was maintaining. He pushed back to his feet, legs shaking, and forced himself forward. The group was ten meters ahead now. He couldn't afford to fall behind. Couldn't afford to be the weak link that slowed everyone down.
His vision blurred at the edges—not from tears, though those were there too, but from the simple physiological reality of a malnourished body being pushed beyond its limits. His peripheral awareness collapsed to a tunnel focused on the backs of the children ahead of him. Put one foot forward. Then the other. Don't think about the pain. Don't think about the distance. Just move.
The sound of hooves registered before the conscious realization of what that sound meant.
It came from the east, from the direction of the road that led toward Korith's Rest—the town fifteen kilometers away where mine administration was headquartered, where the consortium kept offices and warehouses and the kind of resources that responded to threats against property. The sound was layered, multiple horses moving in coordinated rhythm, the kind of acoustic signature that came from trained cavalry rather than civilian traffic.
Zara's head snapped toward the sound. Her entire body language shifted in the space between heartbeats, relaxed efficiency transforming into combat-ready tension. "Ambush!" The word carried across the hillside with command authority that made everyone freeze. "Scatter formation! Children to the rocks, combatants form a line between them and the road!"
The order triggered immediate response from the other Liberators. The man with the staff moved to the point where hillside met road with economical speed, his weapon already spinning in a preparatory pattern. The woman with the medical kit and the two male Liberators spread into a loose semicircle, creating a physical barrier between the approaching threat and the children.
Amari's brain, still processing the transition from escape to combat, took three full seconds to parse what was happening. Three seconds where he stood motionless on trembling legs while the other children scattered toward the rocky outcroppings that dotted the slope. His body felt disconnected from his conscious mind, unable to translate the understanding of danger into physical action.
Then the riders crested the rise in the road, and understanding arrived with the clarity of immediate mortal threat.
There were eight of them. Possibly nine—the angle made it difficult to count the riders in the rear formation. They wore matching uniforms of dark gray canvas reinforced with leather panels across chest and shoulders. Not military grade—the cut was too utilitarian, lacking the formal precision of government-issued equipment. These were private security. Mercenaries employed by mining consortiums specifically to handle labor disputes, slave escapes, and the kind of violence that official authorities preferred to outsource.
Each rider carried standardized weapons. Swords in hip scabbards, cavalry-length blades designed for mounted combat. Three riders in the front rank held crossbows already loaded and raised, the mechanical tension visible in how they braced the weapons against their shoulders. The bolts were iron-tipped, heavy enough to punch through leather armor at fifty meters, designed to kill rather than wound.
The lead rider—a man whose face looked like it had been carved from weathered stone, a scar running from his left eye socket to his jawline—pulled his mount to a stop thirty meters from where the Liberators had formed their defensive line. The other riders fanned out in a formation that spoke to extensive tactical training. This wasn't their first time responding to liberation operations.
The scarred man surveyed the scene with the calm calculation of someone who held every material advantage. Eight armed cavalry against four Liberators and seventeen malnourished children. The burning mine behind them represented property damage, containable and insurable. The real problem—the freed slave labor—stood exhausted and vulnerable directly in front of him.
When he spoke, his voice carried the flat accent of the northern territories, consonants clipped and vowels compressed. "You've made a mistake coming here. Drop your weapons and surrender the children. You'll be detained until authorities arrive. The children will be returned to their contracts." He paused, letting the word 'contracts' hang in the air with all its legal fiction. "If you comply, no one else needs to die today."
Zara didn't shift from her position at the center of the defensive line. "Those aren't contracts. They're chains. And we're not giving them back."
The scarred man sighed—a sound of disappointment rather than anger, the exhalation of someone who'd offered reasonable terms and had them rejected. "Then you've chosen death. Acceptable."
He raised his right hand, and Amari saw something flicker around his fingers. Not flame, not the obvious manifestation of elemental Uncos. This was subtler—a shimmer like heat distortion, visible even in the overcast daylight, the air around his hand seeming to ripple as if reality was bending around concentrated will.
Uncos user. The scarred man possessed power tied to earth or stone, something that would give him tactical advantage on a hillside made of loose rock and unstable terrain. Which meant this engagement wasn't going to be resolved through conventional weapons and tactics. This was going to involve forces that could reshape the battlefield in seconds.
The scarred man's hand came down in a chopping gesture, and three events occurred simultaneously with the precision of rehearsed coordination.
The three riders with crossbows fired. The bolts crossed thirty meters in less than one second, trajectories calculated to account for wind resistance and drop, aimed with the precision that came from hundreds of hours of practice. Target priorities were clear—two bolts aimed for Zara's center mass, one for the man with the staff.
The staff wielder's weapon moved in a tight vertical circle, and a wall of fire erupted from the ground directly in the bolts' flight path. The flames reached three meters high in the quarter-second between manifestation and impact, heat distorting the air around them. The crossbow bolts hit the fire wall and disintegrated—wooden shafts consumed instantly, iron tips liquefying and falling as molten droplets that hissed when they struck dirt.
The other five riders kicked their mounts into forward motion, drawing cavalry swords as they charged. The horses accelerated from standstill to full gallop in three strides, hooves churning dirt, the combined mass of animal and armed rider creating kinetic force that would shatter a static defensive line.
And the scarred man extended both hands toward the hillside where the children had scattered among the rocks, and the ground beneath them began to crack.
Amari felt the vibration through the soles of his feet before visual confirmation registered. The earth shifted—not violent seismic activity but deliberate manipulation, stone responding to concentrated will. Fissures spread out from a central point directly beneath where the tall gangly boy was attempting to climb to higher ground. The cracks followed him with intentional targeting, widening with each passing second until chunks of hillside broke free and began tumbling toward the road.
Earth manipulation Uncos. The scarred man was controlling geological formation, targeting the children rather than engaging the Liberators directly. Tactically sound—eliminate the objective of the engagement and the engagement ended, regardless of whether the Liberators survived.
Zara processed the same tactical reality. She twisted, drawing the short sword from her left hip with that hand while her right yanked the cylindrical device from its holster. The device was approximately twenty centimeters long, surface inscribed with symbols that intensified in luminosity as she moved. She squeezed something near the base, and the end of the cylinder erupted with crackling blue energy that coalesced into a blade-like form—not solid matter but coherent enough to maintain cutting edge integrity.
Energy weapon. Powered by Uncos channeling or technological means or some hybrid system that Amari's exhausted cognition couldn't parse. Relevant detail: Zara now wielded dual blades, and she was moving toward the charging riders with velocity that confirmed her Uncos was enhancement-based, probably strength and speed augmentation.
The first rider reached the Liberator line. He swung his sword in a downward arc targeting the staff wielder, the blow backed by his horse's momentum—approximately eight hundred kilograms of combined mass moving at forty kilometers per hour, translated through the blade into focused kinetic energy sufficient to cleave through bone.
The staff wielder didn't block. Blocking that much force would have shattered his weapon regardless of material composition. Instead he stepped left—precise forty-centimeter lateral movement that put the descending blade fifteen centimeters from his right shoulder—and drove the heated end of his staff into the horse's chest.
The animal's scream cut through all other combat noise. It reared back, forelegs leaving the ground, throwing its rider. The man hit earth hard, his sword flying from his grip, landing three meters away. He attempted to roll to his feet, combat training overriding pain, but the woman with the medical kit was already on him.
She didn't look like a combatant. Her frame was slight, movements economical rather than aggressive, nothing about her physical presentation suggesting martial capability. But when she drove her palm into the side of the fallen rider's head, there was an audible crack—the sound of concentrated force transferred through specific contact point—and the man went limp.
Palm strike Uncos. Force amplification channeled through deliberate touch, damage output wildly disproportionate to apparent physical strength. Non-lethal application if controlled. Instantly fatal if not. The woman had chosen non-lethal. The rider was unconscious but his chest still moved with respiration.
Two more riders engaged the other Liberators. Swords clashed with improvised weapons—one of the male Liberators had acquired a mining pick from the scattered tools and was using it to deflect cavalry blades with surprising effectiveness, the pick's weight and length giving him reach advantage. The other male Liberator had no weapon at all, but when a rider's sword came down toward his head, he caught the blade between his palms and held it. Just held it, hands closing around steel that should have cut through flesh and bone. The sword didn't move. The rider pulled, attempting to wrench it free, and the blade bent—metal deforming plastically rather than coming loose from the grip.
Strength Uncos. Extreme physical enhancement. The kind of augmentation that let someone treat forged steel like it was soft clay, that turned human grip strength into something that could crush stone.
But while the Liberators held their defensive line against the mounted assault, the scarred man continued his attack on the children. The hillside was fragmenting in sections now, entire slabs of rock shearing away along fault lines and sliding toward the road. Amari heard screaming—high-pitched terror from voices that had been beaten into silence for months but couldn't maintain that silence when faced with being buried alive.
The tall gangly boy was still attempting to escape the spreading fissures. He'd reached a larger outcropping and was pulling himself up the rock face with desperate strength born from pure survival instinct. Below him, the eight-year-old girl who'd been first to flee the tunnel was frozen in place, staring at the crack that had opened two meters in front of her. Trapped—rock wall at her back, crumbling earth ahead, no visible path to safety.
Amari's legs made the decision before conscious thought could interfere. He was running toward the girl, his injured back screaming protest with every stride, his weak legs threatening to give out at any moment. He had no plan. No tactical approach. No idea what action he would take upon reaching her. He just knew she was about to die and he was close enough that maybe—maybe—he could do something.
He covered ten meters before his right knee buckled. He went down hard, catching himself on his palms, feeling skin tear as rock scraped flesh away. The world tilted sideways—pain and exhaustion overtaking adrenaline—but he forced himself back to his feet. Five more meters. The girl was still frozen. The crack was still widening.
Then Zara was there. She'd broken away from engaging the riders and was sprinting up the hillside with the energy blade still active in her right hand. She reached the girl in approximately four seconds, scooped her up with her left arm, and pivoted to run back down the slope.
The scarred man saw her. His hands shifted focus, and the ground directly beneath Zara's feet split open. Not a crack—a genuine fissure, three meters wide and dropping into darkness that suggested depth beyond immediate visual confirmation. Zara's forward momentum carried her toward the edge with insufficient time to redirect.
She jumped anyway. Launched herself and the child across the gap with leg strength that cleared the distance with half a meter to spare. She hit the opposite side in a controlled roll, body positioned to absorb impact while protecting the girl, and came up still running.
The scarred man's expression shifted from professional calm to visible annoyance. He raised both hands higher, fingers spread wide, and the hillside responded. This wasn't precision targeting anymore. This was area denial. The entire slope began to destabilize, rocks breaking free and tumbling down in an avalanche that would bury everything in its path.
Amari was directly in that path.
He heard the sound before visual confirmation—the grinding roar of tons of earth and stone in motion, the acoustic signature of geological formation failing catastrophically. He turned his head and saw the wall of debris bearing down on him. Nowhere to run—the avalanche was too wide, moving too fast, and his legs couldn't support sprint velocity even if there was somewhere to sprint to.
This was how he died. Ten minutes after being freed. Ten minutes of hope before the world remembered it didn't let people like him have hope.
His vision blurred. Tears—from pain or fear or rage at the fundamental unfairness of existence—ran down his face and mixed with the dust that coated his skin. His legs gave out for what he understood would be the final time. He hit his knees, then his hands, then his chest, lying prone on the hillside while the avalanche approached.
Someone was screaming his name. Zara, maybe. Or one of the other children. The sound was distant, irrelevant. What mattered was the wall of stone, close enough now that he could distinguish individual rocks, could count the seconds until impact.
Three seconds.
Two.
One.
The world exploded.
Not the avalanche—that was still coming, still three seconds from crushing him. But the space between Amari and the debris suddenly filled with something else. Not fire this time. Something different.
The air itself seemed to solidify, becoming visible as a translucent barrier that rippled like water but held firm as steel. The avalanche hit the barrier and stopped. Not slowed—stopped completely, tons of stone and earth suspended in mid-air as if gravity had simply forgotten to apply. The rocks hung there for exactly two seconds, defying physics, held by force that Amari's exhausted mind couldn't comprehend.
Then the barrier released, and the avalanche reversed direction. The suspended debris shot back up the hillside with velocity that exceeded its original fall, stones accelerating to speeds that turned them into projectiles. The redirected avalanche slammed into the slope where the scarred man stood, and he barely had time to raise his hands defensively before tons of rock buried his position.
The man with the staff had moved. Amari hadn't seen him disengage from the riders—hadn't registered the tactical shift that pulled him away from defending against the cavalry charge. But he was there now, standing between Amari and where the avalanche had been, his staff held horizontally in both hands, symbols carved into the wood glowing with the same blue-white light that had formed the barrier.
Not fire Uncos. Something else. Force manipulation, maybe. Or spatial control. The kind of advanced technique that required years of training and precise emotional control to execute without killing the user in the process.
The staff wielder—Amari realized he'd never heard his name—lowered his weapon slowly. His breathing was heavy, controlled but labored, suggesting the technique had cost him significant energy. Sweat ran down his face despite the cool air. But he was upright, conscious, and Amari was alive.
"Can you move?" The man's voice was rough, accent suggesting he'd grown up somewhere in the southern agricultural regions. Not asking if Amari was hurt—that was obvious. Asking if he could still function despite the injuries.
Amari tried to stand. His legs shook violently but held. He nodded.
"Then run. Same direction as before. Don't stop until you reach the treeline." The staff wielder turned back toward where the riders were regrouping, his weapon already rising into defensive position. "Go."
Amari went. His body moved on pure survival instinct, legs pumping despite the exhaustion, lungs pulling in air that tasted like blood and dust. He could hear the other children ahead of him, their footsteps and ragged breathing marking the path down the hillside. He focused on that sound and ran toward it.
Behind him, combat resumed. Steel on steel, the staff wielder engaging three riders simultaneously while the other Liberators fought their own battles. Amari didn't look back. Looking back meant slowing down. Slowing down meant dying.
The group reformed at the base of the hillside, Zara doing a rapid head count while the other Liberators maintained defensive positions. Seventeen children minus casualties—Amari counted faces, tried to remember who was missing. The tall gangly boy was there. The eight-year-old girl clung to Zara's leg. Others he recognized from the mine tunnel.
"Move," Zara said. Not shouting—sound discipline remained important even during retreat. "Standard dispersal. Make for the rally point."
They ran. Not as a tight group anymore but scattered, children naturally finding their own pace, faster runners pulling ahead, slower ones falling back. The Liberators tried to maintain cohesion, but after two hundred meters the formation had stretched into a line fifty meters long.
That's when Amari heard it.
Different hooves. Coming from a different direction—not the road they'd crossed but from the north, from the direction of another mining operation or perhaps a secondary response team that had been staged for exactly this kind of contingency.
He looked back and saw riders cresting a ridge three hundred meters behind them. Not eight this time. More. Maybe fifteen. Maybe twenty. Difficult to count at distance with his vision blurring from exertion.
Zara saw them too. She didn't call out—sound would only help the pursuers locate them. She just pointed, urgent gesture that every Liberator understood. The message was clear: scatter, hide, survive.
The children scattered. No coordination, just pure survival instinct overriding any sense of group cohesion. The tall gangly boy veered left, disappearing into a dense thornbush. The eight-year-old girl went right, finding a gap between two large rocks. Others found their own hiding spots—under vegetation, behind stones, in the small depressions that offered concealment.
Amari ran straight ahead. No particular reason—his exhausted brain wasn't making tactical decisions anymore, just reacting to stimuli. There was open ground in front of him, and open ground meant he could keep running, so he ran.
The sound of hooves got louder. Not just behind him anymore but to his left as well. The riders had split up, flanking movements designed to encircle and trap. Amari's legs were moving on pure momentum now, muscle memory keeping him upright and moving forward even as conscious control slipped away.
He heard shouting. Adult voices, male and female, calling orders in language he couldn't quite parse through the blood pounding in his ears. Then he heard something else—a sound he recognized from the mine, from the punishments, from the times when someone tried to escape and got caught.
Screaming. A child's voice, high-pitched terror cutting through all other noise. Then a wet sound, impact and tearing, the acoustic signature of blade meeting flesh. The screaming stopped.
Amari's legs kept moving. Tears blurred his vision but he didn't stop. Couldn't stop. Stopping meant joining whoever had just died. Stopping meant becoming another body left behind as warning to others.
Another scream. Different voice—older, maybe one of the thirteen-year-olds. It lasted longer than the first, three seconds of pure agony before it too cut off abruptly.
Amari ran. His chest felt like it was being crushed. His back sent white-hot signals of pain with every jarring step. His legs were going to give out—not might, would, it was just a question of when.
Behind him: more screaming. Three voices now, maybe four, overlapping in a chorus of terror and pain. Some of the voices he recognized—children he'd worked beside for months, whose names he'd never learned but whose breathing patterns in the dark tunnel he could identify blindfolded.
The sound of hooves was right behind him now. Ten meters. Maybe less. Amari didn't look back. Looking back meant slowing down. Slowing down meant dying.
Five meters.
Amari's right leg gave out. He stumbled, caught himself, kept moving forward in something that wasn't running anymore but was at least still forward momentum.
Three meters.
He heard a horse breathing. Smelled it—sweat and leather and something metallic that might have been blood on the rider's blade.
Two meters.
His peripheral vision caught movement—a sword raised, blade positioned for a downward cut that would split him from shoulder to sternum.
Then the thornbush to his right exploded outward and something pulled him sideways. He hit the ground hard, rolling through vegetation that tore at his skin. Strong hands covered his mouth, preventing the scream that wanted to escape. A voice whispered directly into his ear, barely audible.
"Don't move. Don't breathe. Don't make a sound."
Amari froze. The hands holding him belonged to one of the male Liberators, the one with strength Uncos who'd bent the cavalry sword. They were pressed flat against the ground beneath dense thornbush, branches creating a canopy six inches above their heads.
The horse passed within arm's reach. Amari could see its legs through gaps in the vegetation, could see the rider's boots. The rider was scanning, looking for targets, but the thornbush was dense enough that they didn't register two bodies lying motionless in shadow.
The rider moved on. The hoofbeats faded.
But the screaming didn't stop.
For three minutes that felt like hours, Amari lay pressed against dirt and listened to children die. Some screaming, some silent. Some quick, some taking time. The sounds painted pictures his mind didn't want to construct but couldn't avoid—blades and impacts and small bodies that stopped moving.
The Liberator holding him never loosened his grip. Never whispered reassurance. Just held him immobile and silent while the world ended for children who'd been unlucky enough to choose the wrong hiding spot or run in the wrong direction.
Eventually the screaming stopped. The hoofbeats faded. Voices called out in the distance—riders regrouping, conducting final sweeps, preparing to withdraw. The sounds moved away toward the road, toward the mine, toward anywhere that wasn't here.
The Liberator waited another five minutes before releasing Amari. When he finally spoke, his voice was flat. "We move now. Quiet. Follow me exactly. Step where I step."
They crawled out from under the thornbush. Amari's eyes took three seconds to adjust to the direct sunlight. When they did, he saw the valley stretched out ahead of him, scrubland and rocks and—
Bodies.
Small bodies. Children's bodies. Scattered across the landscape like discarded tools. Some face-down in the dirt. Some staring up at the overcast sky with eyes that no longer saw anything. Some intact. Some not.
Amari counted six before his vision blurred and he had to look away. Six children he'd worked beside. Six voices that would never speak again.
The Liberator pulled him forward, moving quickly but quietly through the vegetation. They found Zara thirty meters ahead, crouched behind a rock formation with three children clustered around her. One of them was the eight-year-old girl. She was alive but not speaking, just staring at nothing with the expression of someone whose mind had gone somewhere else to escape what her eyes had seen.
The Liberator spoke quietly to Zara. "Six confirmed dead. Maybe more we didn't see. The rest scattered—no way to know how many made it."
Zara's face was stone. "Gather who we can find. Five-minute sweep, then we move. They'll be back with more numbers once they report."
They found four more children in the next five minutes. The tall gangly boy was one of them, alive and conscious but moving like something broken inside. Two others Amari recognized. One he didn't.
Eight children out of seventeen. Nine if he counted himself.
Half.
Half of them dead in the time it took to run three hundred meters.
Zara organized them into a tight formation and they moved. Not running anymore—running meant noise, and noise meant attracting attention. They moved in controlled retreat, using terrain and vegetation for concealment, heading northwest toward wherever the safe house was, toward whatever waited on the other side of three days' travel.
Amari walked in the middle of the group, his legs moving automatically, his mind somewhere else. Behind them, the mine still burned. Behind them, small bodies lay in the dirt. Behind them, the world continued the way it always had, consuming people who couldn't fight back and calling it business.
Ahead of them was survival. Maybe. If they were lucky. If the riders didn't come back. If they didn't run into more patrols or checkpoints or any of the thousand ways the world had of killing people who tried to be free.
Amari's face was wet. He'd been crying without realizing it, tears cutting clean lines through the dust on his cheeks. His chest hurt from holding back sobs. His hands shook.
But he kept walking.
Because the alternative was lying down. And lying down meant joining the others. And Amari wasn't ready for that yet.
Not yet.