Revenant Slaves Chapter 13: Chapter 12: Ash

Read chapter 13 of Revenant Slaves by Zee on NovelPedia.

Chapter 12: Ash He had done it again; he had killed again: two more people. Why had it been so easy? There had to be a karmic debt. If so, Ash wondered how quickly it would come to collect from him. Ash was sitting in a dark room. The only sources of light were the mounted torches on the weapons of the soldiers they had killed. T he whole city had inexplicably gone dark. Xander wasn’t currently in the room; it was just Ash and Miru now. Ash was actually glad of it. At first, Xander had been a stranger with crazy words but good intentions. He seemed to know Mother, but ever since the fight, Ash had caught him smiling blissfully when he thought Ash couldn’t see. ‘Maybe he is nothing more than a blood-crazed lunatic,’ but Ash felt wrong just thinking that. He still had the blaster Xander had given him, the one he had used to kill two people. Ash got up and started pacing. Being alone with his thoughts wasn’t doing him any good. He went to check on Miru once again. “Miru! Miru! Come on, wake up already,” Ash said as he gently shook her shoulders. They were in an apartment; Xander hadn’t explained how he had acquired it, and Ash hadn’t been able to make out much of their pathway because of the darkness. Xander had guided them inside in pitch dark, which had been unnerving. He hadn’t allowed Ash to use the flashlights until they were already inside the apartment and securely in this room. When Ash could finally see, he realized there weren’t any windows in the room either. He tried opening the door just to be safe, and to his great relief, Xander hadn’t locked him inside. Miru wasn’t waking up, so Ash decided he would go look for Xander and get some answers, hoping beyond hope that those answers wouldn’t make him wish he had never asked. He grabbed a blaster and used its flash to light his way as he exited the room. Ash made sure to keep the light aimed at the ground, away from the windows. He located Xander a moment later, sitting with his back turned. Xander looked different. He had taken his huge coat off, and Ash finally saw the tall, skinny boy beneath. Xander was taller than Ash; his body was extremely thin, even by Ash’s slave diet standards. It almost seemed as if his limbs were unnaturally elongated. His feeble body was encased in a rigid, dark metal frame that mirrored and overlapped the human proportions within. Thick mechanical struts ran alongside his legs, fixed in place with clamps and braces that held the frame close. At the knees and hips, large exposed joints sat, rotating and locking with a heavy, deliberate precision. The same structure rose over his torso like an industrial harness. A metal spine ran behind him, parallel to his own, with rib like supports arching around his sides without fully enclosing his chest. At the tail end of the metal spine was a huge cylinder wide enough to extend beyond his waist on either side. His shoulders sat free inside the frame, while mechanical arms and mounts hovered just beyond them. “Ash, will you just stand there, or will you help a brother out?” “Uh, sure. What do you need?” “The huge cylinder at the back. You see it?” “Yes.” “That’s the battery housing and the lock holding the suit together. Try twisting the valve at the end.” Ash complied and came forward to get a closer look. There indeed was a valve; he twisted it, and with a hiss, the cylinder split in half. “Good. Now pull on the split to dislodge it.” The cylinder opened with little resistance and split into two. One was empty while the other had something sticking out of it with a red handle on top. For the next few minutes, Ash bent over Xander’s back, following his instructions, removing the power unit from its housing and replacing it with fresh batteries stored in the apartment. According to Xander, there were a bunch of batteries stashed in the apartment, so at least the power outage wouldn’t affect his new friend. “How long were you stuck like that?” Ash asked as he rummaged around. “It’s been a minute,” Xand