Chapter 1

  For two weeks they had been arguing. The same subject, over and over.

  Aïlen had finally come up with a solution.

  It had started with intelligence missions, asking Selene to collect as much on the Corbis clan as her team could manage. It wasn’t easy, stranded as they were in a dilapidated village.

  But the spy master had come through.

  Aïlen just had to get the other two commanders on board, including her father who had stayed mute in horror.

  “Clans are the enemy, Aïlen. Have you lost your mind?!” Whiliam finally exclaimed, staring into his daughter’s eyes.

  Aïlen held his gaze, offering a neutral face in opposition to the angry twitches of his mouth, his drawn eyebrows. She had crossed her arms on her chest, in this defiant way she always had whenever he tried to contradict her.

  She knew she was right. And her father banging his fists on the table wouldn’t change her mind.

  Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Selene twitch, waiting for what Aïlen would say next. She drew a breath; a small smile tugged at the corner of her lips.

  “I’m perfectly sane. Next you’re gonna say that they’re still cannibals.” Aïlen had trouble hiding her growing smirk at her father’s exasperated sigh. “Anyway, the discussion wasn’t on what they did a century ago. Point is, crossing their border would help us greatly, it’s not like we have the time or resources to go around all the clans’ territories. Banham?”

  “Me?” the man startled like he hadn’t expected to be brought into this conversation. Like it wasn’t a meeting they held for the future of their group.

  He looked in turn at his fellow commanders before giving a sigh; Aïlen bit the inside of her cheek, raising an eyebrow at Banham’s expression.

  Like hell she wasn’t going to drag him into the argument.

  “I hate to admit it, Whiliam,” he finally let out, side-eyeing Aïlen, “but she’s right. Don’t look at me like that! If we don’t find a way to move soon our men are going to be the ones eating us! And jokes aside, we’re going to have a mutiny on our arms if we don’t act.”

  Aïlen’s smile dimmed.

  They had been arguing since they had landed in the abandoned village. Their soldiers had held still for a few days, convinced their commanders would find a solution.

But now they were growing restless.

  One of their generators had broken down without any way of fixing it. The radios were dead too and they had no way of contacting the part of their group that had been left behind the mountains. And since the local clans weren’t known for running and maintaining phone and telegraphic lines through this part of the wastelands, their hopes for reinforcement was non-existent.

  “We’re supposed to fight those monsters, not make alliances with them!” the old man gave a desperate shout, a last useless cry before he would admit defeat.

  Aïlen stared at her father, exasperation taking over. How great they all looked, babbling like children.

  They led the Brand New Light, one of the most powerful militias of the peninsula but weren’t even capable of settling on a simple solution without it turning into a shouting match. She wished her father would admit they had no other options already. Without his approval this would go on for far too long.

  It had already gone for far too long.

  Banham could say he didn’t like her plan all he wanted; at least he understood it was their only hope.

  Since the attack in a Pyrenees’ pass two weeks prior, they had no means of getting back to the half of their unit that had been left behind. They couldn’t go back themselves, except if they all wanted to die in another attack. And with most of their equipment, food and fuel being stolen from them and their generators breaking down, rendering them unable to charge their weapons properly, even the thought of going back was ridiculous.

  Aïlen’s plan was their only option: creating an alliance with one of the most powerful clans of the region, the Corbis clan. Because without an alliance, they wouldn’t be able to move North like they had wanted to. Without Corbis approval steamboats and airships were not an option anyway; they controlled all the Atlantic’s shoreline on this side of the mountains.

  It was out of the question to go East with as little fuel as they had; they would be faced with the Aschilea clan, the Corbis’ neighbors and rivals. But their intense rivalry was no secret to anybody: Aïlen had planned to use it to get their group across the Corbis’ territory.

  “As I said,” she started again, “an alliance. The last reconnaissance operations weren’t for nothing, Selene gathered for us plenty of intelligence confirming what I had previously heard,” she nodded at the ginger woman who had crept up against the wall until she found herself standing back in a corner. “And now we even have our own rats in the city, but I digress.

  “The Corbis depend on the Aschileas for most of their food and the prices keep on rising, which will render them incapable of paying for what they need in a few months. And with winter coming, we can be sure that the Collector is thinking about it.

  “The Corbis are known warriors but they’ve lacked an actual army apart from their city guard since their rebellion. Otherwise they would have marched onto their neighbors’ territory a long time ago, knowing the Collector’s reputation. So let’s go to them, offer our help, give them an army to march on their rivals and in exchange we’ll ask for safe passage through their territory. And maybe some resources we are lacking. That sounds reasonable to me.”

  Silence followed Aïlen’s speech; the men’s expression showed them finally adding up everything she had said. She had never been more sure of herself. They knew she would never suggest such a plan if she wasn’t nearly sure the odds were in their favor.

  “Let’s imagine for a minute that your plan works,” Whiliam conceded, “are you planning on negotiating with the Collector yourself? She’s more dangerous than all the mountain clans we had to face reunited, this is madness!”

  “I said I was perfectly sane. I’m not going to let this opportunity pass and I can’t send just about anybody, it would be disrespectful. Plus, I’m the one with the plan.”

  “I’ll come if that reassures you,” Banham sighed, visibly not pleased at the prospect of journeying to the Corbis city. “Selene, go fetch us a messenger to ask the Collector for an audience. The faster the better.”

  Whiliam didn’t try to stop her as she exited the room without a sound, almost running. That was approval enough for Aïlen. Whiliam was soon to follow Selene, defeated but no less angry than before, if the tightness in his shoulders and his scowl was any indication.

  Aïlen stayed the longest, sitting on the camp table once the others had departed, feeling the sun coming in from the ruined windows as it warmed her skin, turning it a golden brown and toying with her white locs the way she always did while deep in thought. She scratched her shaved side.

  She had heard the legend of the Collector and her rebellion so many times during their travels, of course she wasn’t going to miss an opportunity of meeting her in person. She needed to see who was the woman who had upturned her entire clan at barely seventeen.

  Even if Emra Corbis rejected the Brand New Light’s offer, Aïlen would learn a lot from even seeing her.

  When Aïlen finally left to rejoin the rest of her group, Banham was handing a roughly written note to a messenger. Whiliam still hadn’t voiced his approval out loud but neither did he object when the messenger left with enough silver coins to pay the fee to enter the Corbis’ walled territory.

  They hadn’t expected much. The answer came back faster than any of them had hoped for: the messenger was back before sunset, sporting a creamy envelope with a black wax seal etched with the clan’s emblem. It was written in a very delicate handwriting, the hand of a well educated lady.

  It asked them to present themselves at the city’s southern gates in two days’ time; a good omen if Aïlen had ever seen any.

*

The village they had set their campsite in was a typical sight in the wastelands: houses in ruin with their stone walls crumbling down and tiled roofs falling apart, overgrown plants creeping on any piece of rotting furniture left behind.

  It had probably been abandoned a long time ago like many others, when its inhabitants finally decided to gather behind a clan’s great walls or form larger communities in the hope of surviving longer against the incessant fights, the raids and other catastrophes that had plagued the wastelands ever since the Great War.

  The group had set their tents inside the crumbling houses with the hope that what remained of the walls would at least protect them from the harsh winds of fall. Hopefully they wouldn’t have to be around for winter.

  Aïlen was once again walking through the old streets, making her rounds before she would leave with Banham for the city.

  She could imagine the place had been quite pretty when it had been inhabited, with its small river coursing through it and the wrought iron gazebo overseeing it. She still found a lot of beauty in those crumbling houses, in the way the changing leaves coated the ground, covering the overgrown pavement.

  Sure, for her father this was just another testimony to the clans’ ruthlessness and yet another reason to hate them. But for her it was something more, a glimpse of the past, of how things were before the Great War.

  As Aïlen and Banham got into the military-grade steam car, all the soldiers of the militia had gathered on the village’s main square, rows of people anxiously waiting. Two of their commanders were leaving on their own, for what could possibly be a deadly mission if the Collector wasn’t as welcoming with her guests as Aïlen thought her to be.

  Despite the coolness of the wind, the air felt thick and hard to breathe as hands twitched in anticipation, the tension more palpable with every passing minute.

  Banham turned the key in the ignition, heating up the fuel tank that then quickly raised the temperature of the water tank until it boiled, sending hot steam through the car’s pipes. In a few seconds they were going, headed as fast as the car could manage down the roads that would lead them to the southern gates of the Corbis city.

  The village quickly disappeared behind them between puffs of steam. Aïlen was left gazing out of the window, admiring the landscape that unfolded before her, daydreaming about what life could have been before the Great War more than two hundred years ago.

  The war at the beginning of the twentieth century had lasted for more than fifty years, seeing the world collapse in continuous fights, countries disappearing one after the other. Clans rose on these ruins, small communities of warriors led by one leader and their descendants. They had later grown and evolved to be their own form of government, safe havens in the middle of what was now called the wastelands. It was the war that had created the world they were living in today and, ultimately, it was the reason why they were headed towards the gates of one of those clans.

  The tall walls of the Corbis clan appeared in the distance and, beyond them, the great industrial city that formed the majority of the clan’s territory.

  The walls were an impressive thirty meters tall work of engineering, all gray stone and metal reinforced every few meters, a straight cut line in the landscape around them. Aïlen had often wondered how life could be beyond those gates, how people lived in a city that big, bigger than anything else she had seen before.

  As the thoughts passed through her head, the gates got closer. Making a clear cut into the walls, they were adorned with the giant crow wings that were the symbol of the clan, a display of wealth and power visible from far away.

  Banham stopped the car, ignition still on, next to a smaller door fitted directly in one side of the gates.

  Aïlen got out to knock on it.

  She didn’t have to wait long for the knob to turn and the door to open until it caught on a deadbolt. Behind it was a young blond man in a ponytail, the long sleeves of his white shirt rolled up over his elbows revealing a pair of worn leather gauntlets. He quickly examined Aïlen from head to toe before speaking in a voice that seemed too deep for his juvenile face.

  “Who are you and what do you want?”

  “We are Aïlen and Banham, commanders of the Brand New Light,” she replied with a calm that contrasted with the man’s hostile tone. “We have an audience with the Collector.”

“Oh it’s you we were expecting!” he smiled, his demeanor taking an unexpectedly friendly turn. “I’m Jedharia, gatekeeper in chief. The Collector told me you could enter without paying any fee. Please go back to your car, the doors will open.” Aïlen did as she was told, puzzled by the man’s sudden change of attitude.

  The moment she got back to her seat, the sound of the heavy machinery working the doors’ mechanism filled up the air. Cogs caught into each other, the hydraulic machines worked as the gates parted, revealing the road ahead leading to the city, making way for the car.

  With the doors now fully opened, Jedharia came to them once again to give them directions to the city and the Collector’s headquarters right at its center. He wished them a safe rest of their trip, waving them off.

  Aïlen watched him getting back into the small shack that was probably his office as the car started once again down the long road. The commanders heard the loud sound of machinery being reactivated as they neared the first buildings of the impressive city.