City of Cruelty and Copper (Temperance Era) Read online

  Rhiannon Paille

  www.yafantasyauthor.com

  Copyright © Rhiannon Paille, 2012

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover by Emma Michaels

  www.emmamichaels.com

  www.rhiannonpaille.com

  Summary: May today be the day she dies. Fable Ketterling is the only immortal in the last city on earth. Thirteen hundred and five years of captivity, fame, and death. Temperance Day is the only day Fable sees the sun, and each year, she hopes it’s her last.

  [1. Dystopian 2. Adventure 3. Science Fiction 4. Fantasy ]

  I. Title. II. Series: Paille, Rhiannon: Last City on Earth; bk. 1

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead; is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: (electronic)

  First Edition: January, 2012

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means–electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise–without the prior written and signed permission of the copyright owner.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Thanks

  DEATH SENTENCE

  EAST SIDE BOY

  CARNIVAL

  About the Author

  Also by Rhiannon Paille

  Thanks!

  Thank you in advance for taking time to read City of Cruelty and Copper. If you enjoy it, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review. Word of mouth is an author’s best friend and much appreciated.

  DEATH SENTENCE

  3325CE | 1305TE

  They were going to try to kill me.

  Again.

  I waited, listening to the silence, the beat of my heart ringing in my ears. I wrung my hands out along my sides and tilted my neck back and forth, working out imaginary kinks.

  My entire body was the pinnacle of perfection from my thirty-two-inch hips to my twenty inch waist and plastic chest. Aches and pains had melted away centuries ago with the faint trickle of water that had slipped down my throat. I no longer felt much of anything, nothing except the excruciating pain in my traitorous heart.

  I took a deep breath and blew it out. Opaque shapes hung in the pale light. I looked at the slits at the top of my lead container. The slits were so miniscule I couldn’t fit my fingers through them. They led to a narrow tube that filtered in light from the surface. I turned my hands over and back again, over and over, contemplating scars from wounds that never hurt to begin with. I had seen my own blood smeared over top of my skin like it was a personalized blanket. Endorsed by Fable.

  This was the waiting room. I was used to standing here in my nine-inch combat boots and tight leather pants and black and red corset. It pushed my plastic chest so sky high it was almost tumbling out of the top. I squared my shoulders as footsteps marched down the hallway. My orange red hair was a mess of knots and curls that trickled towards my lower back, my face covered in prepubescent freckles that hadn’t faded in centuries.

  Nothing about me ever faded.

  I was everlasting.

  I was never-ending.

  I was immortal.

  The creaks and groans sounded as gears shifted and the ten-foot-thick lead door slid out of the way. A flash of blue hit my shoulder care of the stun gun Hattie Alexander held. I let the electricity run through my body and instinctively dropped on one knee in a crouch. Colin Cray came around me with the thickest adamantium chains I had ever seen. Colin made quick work of the bolts and forced me to stand. I felt his labored breath on the back of my neck and I thought about a backwards head butt, but didn’t do anything out of the ordinary.

  Hattie smiled at me, her stun gun pointed in my face. She was a pretty woman, in her mid forties, showing laugh lines around her eyes and mouth. She had that blood-red auburn wavy hair thing going for her, and was wearing the standard issue one-piece. She dressed up the black jumper with a butterfly-designed belt that only made her mid section look fatter than it was. I always said, ‘Don’t flaunt it if you don’t got it.’ Maybe they stopped airing those commercials.

  “Ready for your big performance, Fable?” Hattie asked, her high-pitched voice practically sawed my brain in half.

  I kept my black eyes cold on hers and nodded. Colin nudged me forward, and that was when I realized he had hooked up my feet. Same unbreakable material, nothing but the best for Fable Ketterling. Colin had grown colder since I last saw him, blonde stubble on his firm jaw, grayish-white hair spiking from his scalp. I was a five-foot nothing and he was a six-foot something. My head barely reached his chest and behind his uniform I heard his pulse. Underneath that death trap of a fashion statement he had faded tanned skin from the heat of the deadly sun and scorch marks burned into the edges of his fingers. I tried not to blush when his right hand covered my pale spaghetti arm to guide me.

  We walked down the long, dimly-lit tunnel in silence, chains rattling with every step I took. I was numb to the process, numb to the cool air filtering through the manicured underground caverns. People in Temperance didn’t let anything happen by accident. The things they did were deliberate. They had to be, after all that had happened and the consequences that followed.

  They turned the corner, the same corner I had turned thirteen hundred and five times since I had been born. If we were still counting using the old calendars, it would be 3325CE and I would be thirteen hundred and twenty years old.

  I was the only one counting my age anymore.

  I didn’t look a day over fifteen.

  They ushered me down another hallway which went from clay structures to embroidered Turkish rugs that lavishly stretched on across the mahogany-plated hallways. There were all sorts of gold-framed mirrors and glass lights lining the walls. They were pretty with their rose-colored light bulbs and intricate artwork. I admired the brass, and tried not to think about bucking against Colin and knocking them off the walls, causing the pretty carpet to catch fire.

  We reached a set of double doors at the end of the hall after what seemed like hours of trekking up a gradual incline. The room I was ushered into was oval, and stretched out like an accordion. Hattie’s footsteps clicked along the white stone as she crossed the room, fluttering like a bird and screaming at the actual teenage girls that were perched on a white settee in the center of the room. They scurried behind a screen as I was led over to one of the four marble pillars, the chains fitting around it to secure me in place. Colin stepped away and I watched the muscles in his back contract underneath the one-piece. He wasn’t going to stay for the girl time.

  Hattie clapped her hands together and the girls stopped giggling and came out from behind the screen. Both of them had handfuls of fluffy fabric. One of them was ‘asian’, but they didn’t use that term anymore. They preferred to call them Eastern Earthly. The other was Western Earthly; or ‘white’ as I would have called it back when I was actually a fifteen-year-old girl in 2020CE.

  The Eastern Earthly girl had coal black eyes and straight black hair with bangs that covered her eyebrows. She might have been beautiful if she wasn’t in the black one-piece like everyone else. Western Earthly girl was about the same, but the blonde version with blue eyes. They blinked at me in rapid succession, either trying to get over the shock of my fame, or the shock of the reason I was famous.

  I wasn’t going to hurt them.

  But it looked like I was going to, didn’t it? Colin was an idiot chaining me up to a pillar and leaving me here like live bait.

  “Ursula, Eden,” Hattie called, a sharp tone in her vo
ice. Her eyes were like daggers and the girls disappeared into one of the side rooms.

  Hattie sauntered over to me and I smelled the perfume she had applied since I’d last seen her. She took a handful of my hair and sniffed it. I could tell her it smelled like metal and sewage and garbage, but she scrunched up her nose and snapped her fingers. The girls came back, their hands empty this time. “Draw Ms. Ketterling a bath,” Hattie ordered.

  I waited while Ursula and Eden disappeared, and then the sound of running water wafted through the spacious room.

  Hattie inspected every inch of my body, looking me up and down, pausing at the hem of my leather pants and frowning at my breasts. I hoped she wasn’t thinking about another breast augmentation, and if she was, I hoped her mind was on reduction. Before the bombs began dropping I had a modest A cup, but since all the fame and heroism, I had to have some minor adjustments made.

  “How do you feel about flame-resistant spandex?” she asked, a finger on her lips.

  I raised my eyebrows. “I have flame-resistant skin,” I said dryly.

  “Yes, but some of the parents complained about you being naked after the flame-throwers last year.”

  I groaned. Flame throwers, that was new. “Then I have no objections as long as it doesn’t itch.”

  Hattie nodded. “Great, and we wanted to give you a cape.”

  “Is the F-16 team back this year?” I asked.

  Hattie laughed. “Yes, but we don’t want to do that much bodily damage.” She glanced at my hands, the ones with all the scars on them. I grimaced. “We can ditch the cape, but we’re not going to have you looking like a boy again.”

  Great, always loved getting pulled around by my hair. Steam billowed out of the adjoining room and crawled across the ceiling. “What’s the theme this year?” I asked, feigning interest.

  Hattie’s heels clicked along the floor. She went to check on Ursula and Eden. The door opened and more steam billowed out, making her wave her hand in front of her face.

  “It’s boiling,” Ursula or Eden said. I hadn’t heard either of them speak yet and so I couldn’t be sure, but the voice wasn’t Hattie’s. Hattie ducked into the room for a moment, the steam still circling her in wisps as she emerged and moved towards me. She didn’t look at me as she unchained me from the pillar, but didn’t set me free from the chains. I rattled like jingle bells as I crossed the floor and entered the steam. Both Ursula and Eden were on either side of the lavish tub. There were stairs leading to it, a perfect seashell sunken into the porcelain, and funny-looking soaps in the shape of ducks on the side of the bath. They were right: it was bubbling like it was hot as hell in there. I wasn’t nervous as Hattie removed my clothes. I boldly took the stairs, chains and all, and lowered myself into the boiling water. My skin reddened and my cheeks flushed. I couldn’t feel the heat. Not in the way I used to at least. I was still curious about the theme and with my hands bobbing on the surface I narrowed my eyes at her.

  “The theme?” I asked.

  Hattie looked unpleasant. She glared at Ursula and Eden and both of them ran out of the room like she had dangled a scorpion in front of their faces. She folded her hands together and gave me that this-is-all-for-the-best expression I hated. “You know how the kids are these days. They want the gore.”

  Bloody stuff, exactly what I wanted. I opened my mouth to protest, but she put a hand up to silence me. The old Fable Ketterling was a hero, she was a saint. She signed autographs until her hands were numb and posed for pictures with every little kid that came her way. She appeared at not only the big Temperance Day, but at all the major festivals throughout the year. She traveled to the East side and shook hands with the sheriffs and people in the slums. That Fable Ketterling was a dare-devil, sky-diving without parachutes, setting herself on fire, letting herself be ravaged by feral Tigers. That Fable Ketterling was a superhero.

  “They want a masacre,” Hattie said firmly.

  I looked away, not willing to let her see me cry. Things weren’t the same anymore and I regretted all the years I took my immortality for granted. Hattie would never understand. She was a child compared to my years. If I wanted to I could pull her into the tub and boil her alive. I didn’t though. I stared at the beige-tiled walls and squeezed my eyes shut, pretending they were watery from the steam.

  “Colin,” I whispered, gulping back more tears.

  “Colin won’t be a problem, Jonathan is learning, he’ll take over soon.”

  I pursed my lips. Colin Cray had hated me since the first day he met me, and every Cray before him hated me too. Over fifty generations raising their voices against me. He was by far one of the most influential members of Senate. His ancestor was one of the eight that originally founded Temperance and gave the entire human race refuge from the nuclear bombs that tore apart everything anyone had ever known.

  I was the last one left from that grim reality. We used to live in Argentina. My parents owned a lucrative mining company based out of Ontario, Canada. We were knee-deep in rubies, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, you name it; we mined it. I had started working for them when I was twelve. I knew how to harness up and spelunk through the caves like the best of them. I knew my way around the rain forest and I was pretty handy with a knife. When the sirens went off and the bombs began dropping they rocked the entire planet to its core. Storms erupted all over the world and because of the velocity of the blasts, the entire planet tilted on its axis. The United States and Canada became the North Pole, and Asia, the South Pole. Nuclear waste destroyed the rest and what didn’t kill people immediately killed them slowly, a poison made of isotopes that deteriorated a person over time. There wasn’t a cure.

  I had been in the middle of a diamond mine when the blasts hit and I was cut from my rope. My parents weren’t as lucky. They were on the surface when the blasts hit and the radiation washed over the land. Later, somehow still alive, they found me in the caves, bloody and bruised. Together we made our way through the underground systems in Argentina, all the way to the shores. We built a boat and crossed around the same time Cray, Chung, Withers, Grim, Brighton, Jenkins and Alexander did. We were the first ones to discover Temperance, all the credit going to my parents and the others who arrived with them.

  What we found shocked the world. It was a city, carved out of stone and marble and brass and iron. Oil thawed in the open-faced iron pipes that stretched a-top the thick stone walls. The city was big. It seemed like it never ended. It was an empire like Rome, hidden two hundred feet under permafrost, and completely inaccessible to the human race until 2020CE.

  As the first teenager of Temperance I took my chances exploring the various caves and passageways, looking for buried or hidden treasure. Then I came upon it. A clay stone sidewalk curled downwards, like a spiral staircase, down, down, down, the sun becoming a memory behind me. I ended up in a courtyard, decaying brown vines hanging on the walls and orange leaves crunching under my feet. It was a dead end, all I could see above me was a pinch of the clear blue sky.

  I thought it was a simple fountain. I ran my hands in the cool trickling waters and pressed my fingers to my mouth. That was all it took: one drop sliding down my throat and my entire body convulsed. I had an epileptic fit. There were screams from the spiral sidewalk as my insides congealed, my entire matter and energy shifting and changing. Footsteps found me, arms circled me. My father whispered something comforting in my ear.

  It hurt like hell, until nothing hurt anymore.

  And then the first Cray I had ever met walked into the courtyard and gasped. He called it the Fountain of Youth. He didn’t hesitate to drink from it, and the others followed, drunk with the passion and romanticism of it. I lay on the ground immobilized by the buzzing sounds of the earth, a sound like everything was alive, vibrant, fresh.

  Hattie snapped in front of my face and I realized the bath was ice cold. I nodded to her as I pushed myself up, still clad in chains and accepted the towel around my shoulders. We went back into the spacious room and I cau
ght a first glimpse of my costume for the thirteen-hundredth-and-fifth annual Temperance Day.

  Black corset stretched over top a gray pin striped suit. The worst part? The fedora. There were symbols embroidered on it, from the new language developed by our linguists. While most of the people who migrated to Temperance spoke English, after over a thousand years, the language was archaic and overused. Instead they switched to a series of symbols. The language was intricate and I didn’t speak it. My handlers spoke it, but not in my presence. I was, after all, the most ancient thing in their fair city. Hattie spoke English to me out of respect and Colin Cray did it to remind me of what I am.

  The bodysuit had been embroidered with the symbols of hope, peace, bravery, and survival. There were never any wars in Temperance, but then, there weren’t any flights to Paris either.

  There wasn’t a Paris anymore.

  Attached to the body-suit, which reminded me of a strip joint, were leather holsters for guns, incredibly high stilettos, and a giant silver belt buckle, with the traditional symbol of Fable the Immortal. This was something I would have worn circa 3040CE, during the reign of Charles Cray.

  Hattie put her hands on my shoulders. “Do you like it?” I coughed, rattling the chains, and said nothing. She sauntered over to it and thoughtfully put her fingers on the collar. “I thought it would bring back fond memories.”

  I cringed away from Ursula and Eden as they casually flanked me, fussing over the chains, removing them from my hands and feet. I could have killed them in three seconds, snap, snap, leave them lying on the floor. But even naked I didn’t touch them. Hattie moved away from the mannequin as Ursula, I think- the Eastern Earthly one- took the gray suit off it and began fitting me into it. I stepped into the trousers, they hung around my slim legs. Eden pulled the belt around my waist; it was shiny in an obnoxious kind of way.

  I put my feet into the stilettos and let the girls attach the straps to my ankles, keeping my gaze hard on Hattie. She thought it would remind me of Forest. Those, seemingly, were the memories she wanted to bring up. The worst part was that it wasn’t even the Fountain of Youth that made him special, it was purely his birthright. Forest was psychic, and he knew me in ways that nobody else had ever tried to know me. I let him get close to me for a good fifty years before the radiation poisoning took him away just like it took everyone away.