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1 | Echo
Trash City
I’ve never been so afraid.
I’ve never been so afraid…and I know all about fear. No, not fear — Fear. That irreverent yet loyal madame. She’s been my only unfailing companion these twenty-eight long years. When I’m wide awake in the deepest parts of the night, listening to the sounds of larger creatures tearing smaller ones apart, she’s there.
When I ascended as an Omega and was exiled from the Beta compound I’d been living in for over a decade and tossed into Paradise Hole she was there, waiting with arms outstretched, fangs flashing, wicked claws reaching, reaching, reaching out to welcome me back into her embrace. And I ran to her, because I knew that from this bitch, there was no escape.
Escape what? There’d never been any hope for that as a Beta and there sure as hell wasn’t any hope for that after I woke with my body on fire, soaking wet with that painful arousal that Betas are blissfully immune to. That was six weeks ago, now. Six weeks since November, Lima, Antonio, Maven, Victor, Romeo, João, Hannah, Yankee, Jesus, and the other Betas I dared to call family cast me out of our shared home and shoved me through Prayersville’s gates, high and imposing, all shiny and chrome.
I didn’t expect them to try to protect or hide me, but what hurt most was that they didn’t need to physically push me down the road. I would have gone on my own.
They didn’t even give me time to grab my stuff or any supplies. I think maybe, they didn’t expect me to make it very long — certainly not six weeks and counting. I don’t thinkIexpected to make it this long, either. But I did — I have — and now, as I scramble hand over foot up the mountain of trash, trying to get to Trash City where I might be able to hide my scent, it occurs to me that six weeks might be all I get.
I can hear them on the wind.
Different Alphas from different cities have different preferred methods of travel. Glass City Alphas use carriages, Dark City ride motorcycles, Gold City use camels, Shadowlands and Mirage City use horses, Ruby City are conniving enough not to bother with land travel at all and are content to steal Betas trying to cross the Sea of Zaoul by boat…
Judging by the cacophony of sounds, I count no less thansixdifferent Alpha gangs converging dangerously close to where I’m at and if they catch me… No. I have no intention of being caught —
—alive.I won’t be caughtalive.
My foot punches through a cardboard box and sinks into whatever was once inside of it. Wet and squishy, whatever it was, it reeks. A rabbit must have burrowed its way into the box and couldn’t get back out. Its corpse is fresh, covered in maggots. My throat muscles work, vomit rushing into my mouth, but I know what I need to do. A scent like this might just be strong enough to save me.
Pushing aside the wet cardboard flap, I reach into the rabbit’s open stomach. I dip my fingers in the black, rancid blood and smear it across my chest, around my neck and around both my wrists. Behind my ears, too.
I wrap a torn bandana around my nose and concentrate on just breathing out of my mouth as I climb the trash heap, collecting stenches as I go. By the time I slide down the other side, my arms and legs are shaking, my eyes are burning and bile is prairie-dogging up and down the back of my throat. I stagger into the center of the small clearing where trash is packed down and covered by large slabs of discarded metal, making a sort of floor.
It pops and bends underneath my feet and I hold out my arms for balance, like I’m on a boat. I remember being on a boat, but only once. I’d liked it. I’d been young, on a boat of orphans bound for Ruby City. That was the first time I met November. She’d been eighteen and one of the rebels who helped steal us off of the Ruby City Berserker’s ships. I’d been six and thought she was a queen. Even though her fist was tightest on my collar when she shoved me out the Prayersville Beta compound, I still think she is.
She saved me once and I knew that, when she tossed me out of Prayersville, it was to save the other Betas who lived there. There is no doubt Alphas would have ransacked Prayersville if they knew the compound was keeping an Omega from them. It’s happened before. And she couldn’t have killed me, either. If they found out what she’d done, it would have been worse than if she’d tried to keep me.
No, as much as it hurts, what she did was right. What was necessary.
Wind picks up, like it senses the battle at my back and is ratcheting up tension to set the scene. The sky is already dark — it’s always dark in Paradise Hole, which is anywhere in the outer lands that isn’t an Alpha city. Dark and grey. Not a light grey either, but a dark, oppressive grey-blue-purple that makes me think I’m stuck in a world that’s getting perpetually smaller and smaller around me, shrinking until one day I won’t be able to escape.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time before Paradise Hole when the entirety of Gatamora was rich and abundant. A time before cities. A time before someone gave names to the different pheremones that distinguish Alpha from Beta from Omega. That’s all it is. Just a scent — an instinct. A telling premonition of something that could be. Everyone is born a Beta, though just over half of Betas ascend as Alphas, if you’re lucky. An even luckier few ascend as Berserkers. An even unluckier few ascend as Omegas.
Omegas, whose scents appeal so strongly to Alphas and whose extraordinary gifts make them precious, were fought over during the Alpha Wars. Cities were built and walled and resources were preciously reaped and hoarded within them — Omegas included. Berserkers, too strong to be challenged, took control. Alphas fell in line beneath them and occasionally challenged and took down ruling Berserkers by forming packs. Betas, rejected from the Cities — or enslaved within them — fled and retreated to compounds in the swamps and deserts only to return if they ascend as Alphas…or are enslaved by Alphas as Omegas.
During the Wars, once fertile, paradisical lands, over time, became this grey, muddy, murky tomb that stretches miles and miles — all the way to the sea of Zaoul and across it — that we no longer call Paradise but Paradise Hole, where sunshine and salvation have become things of a history long past. Where the best hope for salvation for a runaway Omega like me is a compound made out of trash.
I slip over the pocked metal floor and arrive in front of a small door that you wouldn’t be able to spot if you didn’t know it was there. Built directly into the trash pile, it’s just a flap of jumbled pieces of metal strung together by rope. Any Alpha would be able to tear through it with a slash of their claws. The rebels of Trash City built the place on the fundamental creed all of us non-Alphas live by: Hide to survive. Resistance is futile.
I knock on one of the metal slats paneling the door and a shiver racks my body even though I’m dressed in most of my clothes. Last time I traded with Trash City, the entrance opened quickly, but not today.
The roar of two horses and an engine screeches through the cold fangs of the wind.The Alphas are converging.I duck my chin lower into my hoodie and knock again.
The door swings open. Bright blue light hits me and even though it hurts, I blink my eyes open and let them search my pupils for the signs. There’s no red or gold tint to my irises. My pupils don’t refract light.
The light dims as it parts around a shadow. A gruff, muffled voice says, “What do you have to trade?”
Not much. I’m low on supplies. I’ll have to give them everything I’ve got to hide here for the night. “I have a jar of lavender oil, a jar of pesto and the dried meat off of three rabbits.”
“You pressed the oil yourself?”
I nod sharply.
