NoFace

NoFace
by #9dreamer

Prologue

The wind whistled through the canopy of gray leaves hanging over his head. He looked up. The SkyPatrol was watching. He couldn't do anything stupid while he was on watch. He wouldn't have anyway, not that being in prison was a bad idea. Being a NoFace, he had absolutely nothing to live for. Nothing to die for, either.

He heard racing footsteps through the brush and he tensed, his muscles freezing in position. The sound passed on his right and he bolted into the darkness, his hand slipping to his SoulSucker. It wasn't the best weapon to use for this sort of “operation”, as it put the RunAways out of their dying misery faster, but it would have to do, as the HeadChief and ChiefAssistant hadn't assigned him any other weapons. It bothered him that they didn't trust him with more than a child's toy.

“Better speed it up Jerkiss,” he heard one of the HumanNoFaces say, and he sensed faltering footsteps to his left. He shot his arm out and came in contact with someone's head, the SoulSucker zapping the kid and lighting his face up in the BrightWhite of quick SoulRemoval and his body fell to the ground, lying motionless in the damp, gray soil.

He knelt down, risking the entire mission as he peered at the boy's face. He turned it over with his ProdStick. It wasn't Jerkiss. He shook his head angrily and rose to find the HumanNoFaces had stayed behind, uncertain of what the deputy might do.

He opened his mouth to ask if Jerkiss was there, but reflexively shut it and took them by surprise instead, bolting into the thick, sightless darkness and grabbing one of the younger RunAways by his hair. He screamed and the deputy smacked a hand over his mouth, but the kid bit right into the soft, pale flesh and he let go, the RunAway kid stumbling into the darkness after his gang members.

One lingered behind. He took his chances and sped towards it, reaching out to grab it and instead stumbling over the WatchCam at the edge of the path and falling into the darkness.

He awoke and found himself tangled within the long, twirly arms of a GrabWeed. He snapped the branches and stood, surveying his surroundings. The HumanNoFaces had definitely done a lot of damage, as far as he could see. The HeadChief and ChiefAssistant wouldn't be happy with him.

He groaned as he felt the ProdStick stabbing into his back, and he pulled it out, the tip already covered in the sticky, purple blood of the NoFaces. He pulled back his protective vest to examine the wound. It was just a little hole with smeary, gooey purple blood pulled across it, like a cobweb. Nothing a MedAssistant couldn't fix up. He started to make his way back to the LodgingCamp when something caught his eye. A GrabGun from the RunAways was lying in the gray soil.

He picked it up and smiled as he hooked it to his WeaponsBelt. This would get the job done.

Chapter 1

Wakshavon descended the stairs into his office. Well, office is too... extravagant a word for where he worked. Actually, the deputy worked in a dungeon. It wasn't a dungeon anymore, but the HeadChief and ChiefAssistant didn't bother to clean it out before they assigned Wakshavon to work there. Mainly they used this room for food and weapons storage, but there were also some dead bodies lying around. Occasionally, while Wakshavon was on CamDuty he'd spot one behind some boxes of GrainMeal. And it wasn't pleasant.

Since Wakshavon had already been on BorderPatrol the previous night, he was assigned to CamDuty in his “office”. He tripped over boxes and stepped on mushy bags of SoftMeal, which was a kind of mush NoFaceNoFaces were permitted to eat, as he tried to make his way to the computer screen.

He stumbled into his chair and clicked “ON” on the monitor. As the blurry, skewed image came into view, Wakshavon smacked his palm his head in disbelief. How could he have forgotten to readjust the WatchCam before coming back? He had tripped on it in the darkness the previous night while trying to pursue the RunAways who were constantly hovering around the NoFaces. For once in his messed up life, Wakshavon hated being a NoFace.

His hand extended towards the AlertTalkie on his desk, but he froze. Did he really want to put the HeadChief in a worse mood than he was probably already in? He put his hand back and typed in the coordinates to, hopefully, readjust how the picture came up on his screen, if not at all changing the WatchCam itself.

He sat back in his chair, his gray, pool-like eyes gazing drearily at the screen. He hadn't slept in about three days, thanks to ChiefAssistant Herry, who Wakshavon was sure was out to get him. Herry had put Wakshavon on all of the NightShifts, and had given him CamDuty during the day. He hadn't eaten, he hadn't slept, and he was also pretty sure he hadn't had a bathroom break in the last seventy two hours.

Miserable, miserable life.

He shifted his weight and sat at Attention as he heard clomping footsteps coming down the cement staircase. He wanted to turn and see who it was, since Herry didn't bother to leave his cozy little WorkDen to visit the NoFace deputies and he couldn't believe that he would do so for him, but he kept his eyes glued to the screen, though there was nothing to see.

“Wakshavon!”

“Attention!”

The footsteps crossed the floor swiftly towards him. Whoever it was – how did they do that? Wakshavon could barely take two steps without tripping over some packaged item of unidentifiable origin.

“Wakshavon, Assistant Herry is putting you on PersonalBreakTime for the hour. Let me take over.”

Wakshavon looked up into the pale, NoFace eyes of a young officer, probably only a day older than Wakshavon.

“Thanks, Kerniel.” Wakshavon got up, did the ceremonial bow(though why they still had to do it, even for the most informal of things, confused him), and stepped past, trying hard not to let the bags and boxes on the floor jump out and trip him.

“Welcome, Wakshavon.” Kerniel saluted to the young deputy and turned towards the screen. He suddenly looked confused. “Stop there, Wakshavon.”

Wakshavon halted in his careful tiptoeing over the SoftMeal bags and his foot fell right into the mushy stuff, sticking to his foot, but he couldn't try to shake it off now, not while he was under command of an officer, regardless of the age. “Yes, sir!” he said, perhaps a bit louder than necessary.

Kerniel pointed to the corner of the screen, where it had the coordinates for turning the ProjectionScreen back to the original angle of the WatchCam. “What is this?”

“I, um, the WatchCam.”

“Yes?”

“I tripped over it last night. Sorry. I'll go fix that,” Wakshavon stammered, ducking his head so he didn't have to meet the officer's pale blue eyes with his own watery gray ones.

“Better go fix it before Assistant Herry changes the schedule to NoBreakTime,” Kerniel warned, giving him a crooked grin. Wakshavon faltered. NoFaces, regardless of their ranking, were not supposed to show emotion other than loyal obedience.

They weren't even supposed to have emotion.

Wakshavon didn't know how to reply to such a startling thing, so he just nodded briefly before peeling the bag from his foot and tiptoeing carefully off towards the staircase.

“Oh, and Wakshavon?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Don't run into the HumanNoFaces.”

“I won't, sir.”

Kerniel held his gaze for another moment before turning back to the screen and lazing back in the chair. Wakshavon let out an inaudible sigh and crept across the rest of the cold, cement floor towards the door, where he darted up the stairs and let himself out into the much missed, though dreary and gray like the rest of the world, daylight.

After fixing up the WatchCam and trying to leave under general Luniss' watchful, and quite suspicious, eye, Wakshavon had run in the direction of the opposite border, towards the EquipmentDropOff, which was basically a big junkyard full of the used, broken and rotted possessions of the higher ranking NoFaces.

Wakshavon stopped to take in the view. The piles of electrical and food remains were piled higher than the roof of the WorkHouse,which was pretty high.

As he gazed out at the once-beautiful view, a distant and untraceable MemoryProjection came to him. He saw a boy, young, probably only fifteen, laughing and dancing around in circles with a little blonde-haired girl, who was probably only eight or so. As Wakshavon noticed the usage of illegal emotions, he winced. But then he remembered this was just a MemoryProjection, though he had absolutely no remembrance of anything like this. In fact, the farthest memory he could recall was of being ripped of his soul, the MedAssistants tying him down on the OperationBed and zapping him full of tranquilizers and using a long, rusty SoulScythe to rip down his middle, and then using a ProdStick to dig through his vital organs to find where his soul was hidden...

Wakshavon stopped thinking about it. It hurt too much to try to remember anything older than that, if he even had a life before the Removal. All of the RemovalVictims had been told that they had had a life, but they shouldn't think of it, and then a dark cloud of something musty and sharp to the nose descended upon all the traumatized teenagers, wiping them of any memory before the Removal.

Whatever a teenager was.

He was told he had been a NoFace for about six months now, and though most people working at the WorkHouse had been there for at least six years, Wakshavon felt some strange feeling of something he couldn't place about having survived this long.

He kept walking down the BackWays through the junk and came to a withered, gray fence that had a sign saying:

DO NOT ENTER

THOSE WHO ENTER WILL BE PROSECUTED

And then in smaller print:

AS ISSUED BY THE HEADCHIEF OF STAFF AT WORKHOUSE 404 ON THE FOURTEENTH OF OCTOBER TWO THOUSAND AND NINE

Wakshavon was baffled by all of the information printed on the sign. But most importantly: What does “prosecuted” mean? They never bothered to teach the NoFace students anything beyond the necessary. That's why Wakshavon had always snuck off to the InformationDeck, when he had had PersonalBreakTime at regular intervals, that is.

And when the HeadChief had found out from ChiefAssistant Herry, he had started putting patrols up at the InformationDeck, too. The HeadChief lived by his motto, which was: Do your work, and do it good. Which basically meant that unnecessary information was not allowed to be learned by any of the NoFace students. And because of this, Wakshavon had no idea what “prosecuted” meant. And unless he could get his hands on a WordBook, he would never know.

Unless he just entered and found out the easy way. But whatever it was, it sounded dangerous. He grumbled something under his breath and turned away, making his way down the BackWays towards the WorkHouse. He still had about sixteen minutes left on his PersonalBreakTime, and he desperately needed to go to the bathroom.

He flashed his SecurityID at the GateGuard, who turned Wakshavon over to Luniss, who led him down to the farthest possible bathroom, and, to make matters worse, stood outside the door.

“Make it quick!” snapped Luniss, and Wakshavon, who knew that this was the bathroom for the RunAway PrisonDwellers, had no idea why he had to hurry up, but he made it snappy and was up to his office in a flash.

“How was it?” Kerniel asked lazily, his eyes droopy and on the screen before him. Wakshavon stood at Attention.

“Good, sir.”

“You can take it over,” Kerniel mumbled drowsily, handing him the AlertTalkie from the desk and stumbling past him. “I've got to get to the SleepingBunks.”

Wakshavon knew he wasn't supposed to have or show emotions, but he felt the faintest flicker of something violent pass through him. How come Kerniel got to sleep and eat and use the facilities whenever he wanted?

Kerniel let the door fall shut behind him and Wakshavon was glad that he wasn't there to ask him irrelevant questions. He turned to the computer screen and typed in the coordinates to bring up the WatchCam in the HeadChief's room. NoFace students and workers were not supposed to spy on the HeadChief or Assistant, or even supposed to know how, but as long as Kerniel wasn't there he figured, hey, why the heck not.

The ProjectionScreen showing the HeadChief's room popped up in a mini screen at the bottom and would not enlarge to full size unless you had the SecurityPasscode. Wakshavon rolled his eyes, but figured it would be better to keep it small in case someone walked in unexpectedly and took a look at his screen.

But something else, something on the BorderProjectionScreen caught Wakshavon's eye. He closed the HeadChief's Screen and squinted hard at the BorderScreen. He could have sworn he had seen something move.

And there it was. A HumanNoFace writhing on the ground in the distance.