Read Online Adversaries Together by Daniel Casey - Free Book Online

been doing this. Fortunately, such attempts had gotten fewer
and fewer over the recent months. After three years, The Blockade
was entering its endgame.
    He thought of his own home in the city.
Ransacked so many times now, he could barely remember what the
villa had looked like before The Blockade, before the roving mobs
desperate for any kind of food or fuel had begun scouring the city.
He had been at the municipal when the first mob swarmed through his
ward. On the roof of the hall with the other civics surveying the
damage out over the city, he saw the first strand of black smoke
rise from only a couple of boroughs away. The black strands came
closer and closer accompanied by a hard bitter growl, a cruel wave.
It wasn’t long before it was joined by several other tendrils and
it was clear that the mobs were rampaging in the sixth, his
ward.
    The mobs arose after last winter; it had
surprised many of the civics that something like them hadn’t
already happened. Birds didn’t fly over Rikonen, the bay was fetid
and near fishless, and even rats had become scarce. What had begun
as the frustration of a few random gangs grew and soon there were
riots in the second ward, the market district. Soon after the first
hospital was burned down in the aftermath of the mobs looking for
supplies, panic spread through the city. Rumors circulated that the
mob had stormed through the hospital looking to kill the sick and
dying for their meat. It sounded extreme at first but as the mob
grew, more and more wards reported desperate stories.
    When Wynne saw the fires in his ward, he
hadn’t thought much of it. He made his way home that night with a
few guardsmen finding the villa’s gate torn down, the chest high
wall around it smashed in at various places. Getting closer to the
house the doorway was a black gaping hole and the windows shattered
like gouged out eyes, black stains marked the walls where flames
had burned. Walking through his home, he saw everything overturned,
shattered, smashed, and thrown aside or seemingly pushed through
the halls to the back garden. The mob, a human flood, had swept
through his villa leaving fire in its wake. His daughter wasn’t
there. There was no blood. There wasn’t anything. It was as though
his home had always been a ruin or an abandoned slum.
    There was no sign of Fery or of the three
personal guardsmen that Wynne had left with her. None of his
neighbors could tell him anything useful—their own homes sacked by
their brethren. He held out hope that she had escaped, but children
were seldom seen in the city now, most starved or killed by the mob
violence. Still, he gave himself hope. At twenty, Fery wasn’t a
child or some delicate flower, but she had no skills for surviving
on the streets. Wynne doubted he even did; he was barely hanging on
himself. His hopes had dimmed every day there was no news of her
and more detailed accounts of other wards being burnt and
ransacked.
    His home was a husk so he had no reason to
leave the municipal; they needed him there more than ever. What few
resources were available had to be defended as well as rationed.
His men and the stragglers from other wards were wasting away,
their own families barely hanging on. Keeping communication open
with the other wards of the city was becoming more and more
difficult. News became scarce and soon Wynne was holding together
four wards by sheer force of will with the rest completely blacked
out. Finally, the mobs were larger than the civics. Pushed off the
streets, then forced out of their homes, and now cowering behind
the walls of the municipal, Wynne had guided his people into a
corner. It had become a simple waiting game. When the mob came, the
civics he commanded were too weak to hold them back. Wynne’s civics
broke ranks and lashed out at their rabid brethren but to no avail.
Half attacked the mob, and the other joined it. Control was lost;
all was fire and blood. The fourth ward fell with little
resistance, the