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  Doomseeds

  Book Two in the Botanicaust Series

  Tam Linsey

  Copyright 2014 Tam Linsey

  Cover art by Tam Linsey

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are a product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Digital Version

  ISBN: 978-0-9859013-5-6

  Created with Vellum

  While Doomseeds can absolutely be read as a stand alone novel, you might enjoy it more if you read Botanicaust first. Thank you for joining the apocalypse!

  A cannibal wasteland isn't the ideal place to fall in love...

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  Eily lost everything in her pursuit of safety, including her twin sister. Now she lives a life of atonement within the walls of the Holdout, tolerated but not accepted because of her green skin and savage past. When news arrives that her sister may still be alive, she's offered a chance to rescue her--all she has to do is deliver a deadly plague to the very people she once called family.

  As a trader, Jubal only avoids two things: slave trading and the green-skinned Flame Runnas. Unfortunately, he's forced to seek out both after a cannibal king takes his father hostage and demands Jubal bring back a green-skinned slave as ransom. The impossible mission is sure to end in Jubal's death, until sweet, green-skinned Eily makes his task far easier than it should be.

  As Eily and Jubal travel across the poisonous countryside, they discover they have more in common than they first imagined, and Eily must decide how much of the peace she clings to is nothing more than an illusion.

  With a father’s life at stake on one side and a sister’s on the other, someone is going to have to lose. And they both risk losing their hearts in the process.

  Prologue

  The Tox

  Cannibal Wastelands

  The plains stretched as far as the pilot could see: undulating poisonous amarantox weeds broken by an occasional jutting rock or umbrella-like yuvee tree. Along the river, gray-green tamarisk with deep roots resisted the competing growth. Beneath the canopy, cannibals stalked each other with ferocious tenacity.

  The com crackled in her ear. “Uma, movement starboard, riverside.”

  With one lazy hand, she tapped the attitude controls and the duster swiveled in the air to follow a bend in the river. In the back of the aircraft, her team clung to the open doorway, flame guns ready.

  Her job was easy—keep the duster in the sky. The other team members had the task of flashing every living thing beneath them. They had to make sure the cannibal hordes never reached the Burn–the desolate circumference of scorched earth surrounding the city.

  A concussive burst from the flame guns told Uma they’d found their mark. She steadied the duster, glancing through the window on her right at the curls of yellow smoke as tamarisk caught fire. Never comfortable with the pitiful writhing of cannibals caught in the flash, she lifted her gaze to the sky. If only the mongrels would surrender once in a while.

  The duster bucked once, and she frowned, returning her attention to the controls. Normally these dusters almost flew themselves. Behind her the team shouted warnings, and the flame guns took up a steady roar. On her dashboard, the mag-gauge flashed erratic numbers.

  The team lead poked his head into the pilot chamber and clamped a hand on Uma’s shoulder. “They’re firing at us!”

  Cannibal spears and arrows would barely dent a nuvoplast duster shell. She spared the man a glance. A smear of blood marred the green skin of his cheek. “Wha–?”

  “These mongrels have guns!” he shouted. “Get us out of here.”

  Uma swore as the duster rocked left and she fought to maintain thrust. She yanked emergency lifters as cries of “Fire! Fire!” came from the back. The port thruster sputtered and the duster twisted in a lazy spin. She compensated with front and rear auxiliaries, but the duster was sinking fast. She tapped her com to access Command. “Mayday, mayday. Duster six delta four November. We’ve been struck by what appear to be bullets coming from—”

  The forward thruster gave out and the nose of the aircraft plunged toward the smoking ground. Her face slammed against the windshield. The rest of the crew screamed as they slid toward the short wall separating the cockpit from the main cabin. The last thing Uma saw before passing out was a crush of brilliant green amarantox leaves against the windshield and the crimson splatter of blood.

  Chapter One

  The Holdout

  Protectorate Territory

  With the nervous crowd skittering across the hard-packed earth, the skeletal trusses of the barn reminded Eily of a ribcage picked clean by hungry vermin. A familiar keening drew her attention to a figure balanced high on the barn’s roof ridge. His slender green arms shone brightly in the autumn heat as he raised a glinting blade toward the sun.

  The Knife Song.

  Beside her, Brother Michael sucked his teeth then spat, his tanned face as impassive as ever beneath the brim of his straw work hat. “Ijon says if you can’t get him down, they’ll take care of it.”

  Her gaze flicked toward Ijon, the Haldanian Protectorate liaison, and his aide, their naked green skin gaudy against the modestly dressed, milky-skinned crowd. At least Ijon made a small attempt to respect the Holdout Order’s sensibilities and wore a sleeveless tunic and short pants. His aide wore only a breechcloth. The aide’s skin was drab, almost muddy, rather than bright jade like Ijon’s, the result of genetically modified chloroplasts mixing with existing pigmentation on dark-skinned cannibals. The very few members of the Holdout who’d elected to undergo genetic modification had emerged with emerald-green skin, giving them a defining look opposite the cannibals.

  One of Eily’s few vanities was that her cannibal heritage had presented as a tawny green; if she wanted to, she could pass as a Native Haldanian, genetically modified as an embryo before implantation.

  Although the aide had once been a cannibal, like herself, converts were often the hardest on each other. She knew what Brother Michael meant by “take care of it.” The Protectorate thought nothing of euthanizing reversions—cannibal converts who were viewed as troublemakers. Her job as Reversion Remediation Specialist was to help those who couldn’t acclimate to life in the city to conform to the rules at the more rural Holdout. She was their final chance.

  Swallowing, she examined a ladder scaling the half-finished barn. “I have to climb up that?”

  “Perhaps it’d be best to allow them to step in this time.”

  With a firm shake of her head, Eily pulled the back of her skirt up between her legs and tucked the hem into the waistband of her apron. Today was supposed to be a time of celebration—the first barn raising since she’d come to the Holdout. Everyone would take a death as a bad omen, and if the death happened to be one of her cases, the Holdout might revoke asylum for the rest of the reversions.

  The crowd quieted as she approached the nearest ladder. She was used to the gawking. For years, she had been the only converted member of the Holdout—the green-skinned girl in the Old Order dress. The people of the Holdout used to avert their eyes, knowing she’d once been a cannibal, fearing her green skin was the Mark of the Beast. After her baptism, she’d gained some acceptance among them, but many still watched her with distrust.

  She gripped a rung and then pulled back to wipe her sweaty green palms against her dress. Barn raising was for men,
and she’d never been up a ladder, let alone to confront a knife-wielding patient.

  Climbing the rungs turned out to be easy, but when she reached the slatted trusses, her muscles weakened. The dusty ground looked very far away, so she turned her gaze upward. On the composite beam above, Lisius raised a slash of silver to the sky, his Knife Song taking the final turn before death. She’d seen what came next several times in her previous life, her cannibal life. She’d urged the song on with joy and anticipation of the flesh-feast.

  “Lisius,” she croaked, then in a stronger voice called out his cannibal name. “Alisis. Hold your song.”

  The singing faltered and she pulled herself up onto the slats.

  Lisius spoke in a dead voice. “Don’t come closer. I’ll jump and take you with me.”

  She stopped, hands in a death-grip on the truss. Lisius had removed his suspenders and shirt, so his trousers hung low around his scrawny green hips. His face glistened with tear tracks. He was younger than she was, a new convert genetically modified with the Protectorate’s green, photosynthetic skin. She’d had more than six years to acclimate to her new skin, her new life.

  “Taking the Knife is a waste here.” She spoke Cannibal, in spite of the Protectorate’s insistence that all things of the past must be left behind.

  “Everything is a waste here. Why don’t they let me go?”

  “Why would you want to go back out there? There is no Hunger here. No fear of hunters. Shelter from wind and rain—”

  “And the sun now makes us sick.”

  Eily blinked, her world spinning for half a second as she was reminded of the alkaloid drugs drifting through her system. She had learned to ignore the “high,” a side effect of the photosynthesis. The sensation would still be new to Lisius. Some converts liked it. Some insisted it dulled their survival instinct. “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I don’t want to get used to it. I don’t want to let them tell me what to do. Or these Holdout people, either.” He sneered at the pale-faced crowd below. The people at the Holdout had made a bargain with the Protectorate: no forced conversions, no euthanizations, and the Protectorate could maintain a peaceful base within the electric fences. Many still viewed green skin as the Mark of the Beast.

  “They’ve done you no harm.”

  “The girls won’t even look at me. And the boys—pfft—they’re worse than the girls. I’d be a man in the tribe now. Here I’m treated like a child before his naming day.”

  “You have to earn their respect, the same as in the tribe.”

  “How do I do that? They won’t even fight back!”

  “They’re pacifists. Earn their respect by following their ways.”

  His nostrils flared. “They wouldn’t survive the Tox.”

  She sighed and looked over the horizon, past the electric fences and the scorched perimeter to where the poisonous amarantox grew thick. Only cannibals call it the Tox. Uncle Levi and the rest of the Order called it the Amarantox Plains. Aunt Tula and the Haldanians called it the Reaches. Whatever it was called, outside the fence was dangerous. “Lisius, look around you. They have survived. Their ways take getting used to, but they’re good. They don’t have to take the Knife here. Their god keeps them safe.”

  “The Flame Runnas keep them safe.” He used the cannibal name for green people.

  “The Protectorate,” Eily corrected automatically. Even she had trouble keeping things straight sometimes. Haldanians, Flame Runnas, converts... the Order called them Blattvolk. And then there were the few green-skinned people called reversions, like Lisius. They all lived under the thumb of the Protectorate, along with the unconverted members of the Order at the Holdout.

  “How did you come to the Holdout?” Lisius asked.

  She turned her face from the horizon to look up at him again. “I let go of my past a long time ago.”

  He crossed his arms, and a sneer twisted his upper lip. “I bet you’re not even a convert. Just another Flame Runna trying to rule the world.”

  The muscles in her neck tightened. “I’m a reversion, like you.”

  The sneer didn’t fade, and she knew she was going to have to tell him her story, even though she’d worked so hard to forget it. He was only her fourth charge since the Protectorate began sending reversions to the Holdout, and she was sure she’d have to tell her story many more times in the years to come.

  She leaned her torso against the beam she was clutching and rested her chin on the wood. The story was as uncomfortable as she was. “When I was converted, the Protectorate still killed reversions. There were no second chances. My sister and I were condemned, but instead of being killed, we were sent to the Fosselites, who tortured us, harvesting our chemicals against our will. Tula and Levi broke us free.” All the new converts knew Tula; she was the doctor who oversaw the influx of cannibals the burn operatives brought in from the Reaches for conversion. “The Protectorate didn’t yet know about the Holdout. They were chasing Tula, who they thought had reverted. We led them here.”

  She trembled. The day the dusters had appeared over the houses still lived fresh in her memory. The Protectorate’s mission was to convert or kill every cannibal, and they’d assumed the Holdout was more cannibals. They’d burned several buildings along with the people in them before Tula convinced them to halt. And afterwards, a compromise had been a long time coming. “Because of Tula, reversions have a second chance. All the Order asks is that we respect their ways and earn our keep. The Holdout is your last shot, Lisius.”

  “Does your sister live here, too?”

  Tears she’d thought long dried filled her vision. “No.” She turned her face to the distant Tox, laying her cheek against the rough wood. “She sacrificed herself to hunters to give the Holdout time to open the Gate so the rest of us could get inside.”

  Lisius’s voice cracked. “Then she wasn’t wasted.”

  Hot tears flowed down her cheeks, and she trembled, her grip on the beam so tight her arms burned. Outside the fence, grief was part of the flesh-feast when a loved one took the Knife, but hunger dulled the loss. Hunger dulled everything out there. Here, with no need for the flesh-feast, death seemed sharper.

  You’ve become one of the Order more than you thought.

  She pulled herself together, gulping at the breeze that carried the tang of the hog barn from three fields away. The smell had been overpowering to her when she’d first arrived, but now it was a familiar sort of comfort—a promise of sustenance. She wiped her eyes against her forearm.

  Lisius lowered himself to his belly along the beam so he could lean close to her, his face long and serious. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to share her flesh-feast.”

  Eily sighed. She had a long way to go to bring him into the Order. “She’s with God, now.”

  “Do you believe in their god?”

  She dreaded the question, but every reversion asked it. “With all my heart,” she said. Then she lowered her voice to barely above a whisper. “But you do not have to believe. Only comply. They do not honor the flesh-feast. Taking the Knife would be a waste.”

  The admonition not to waste, so critical to cannibal survival, seemed to reach him, even if her assurances about God did not. He slumped against the beam, arms dangling on either side, knife glinting in one hand. She stretched out a hand, and he gave her the blade.

  They carefully descended the ladder, Eily’s legs trembling with each downward step. How could going back be so much harder than the climb up had been? She let out a huge sigh as Lisius reached the ground safely next to her. The crowd hung back, allowing her to right her skirts and direct the boy toward the shade tree and the barrel of cool water brought there for the workers. He thrust his chest out, suspenders still dangling at his sides, and strutted, glowering at everyone he passed, even children, who cowered at their mothers’ skirts.

  But at least he wasn’t dead.

  Gideon’s voice caught her attention as he limped his way through the throng toward her. “Eily! Eily, ar
e you all right?” He still wore his occulus strapped to his blond head, straw hat resting askew above the lens. His beardless face with its hideous crisscrossing of scars looked even paler than usual. “I came as soon as I heard.”

  “I’m fine.” She reached up to relieve her fiancé of the electronic magnifier, taking a small liberty to smooth his tangled curls. He shied away, eyes sliding meaningfully to the attentive crowd as he replaced his hat. Public displays of affection were minimal among the Order, but Gid took the restriction too far. Because you are an outsider. A Blattvolk. A cannibal. No, not a cannibal. Not anymore. But the Order—even the New Order—still attached a stigma to anyone not born in the Holdout.

  Gid turned his gaze to where Lisius slurped water from the barrel with both hands while the women in charge of the picnic lunch wrung their dark aprons uncomfortably. Edging over to block her view of the boy’s posterior peeking above the waistline of his pants, he said, “Eily, why don’t you quit now, before you get hurt? You could focus on wedding plans.”

  She let her head fall back to look at the branches of the walnut tree above them and bit her lip. Always with the wedding. Yes, they were to be married in two weeks, but that didn’t mean it had to be her whole world. “Gid—”

  “You won’t be working anymore once we’re married, anyway. What’s a couple of weeks?”

  Her heart shriveled at the reminder. Married women did not work outside the home. She kept hoping to find a way to be the exception. Cannibal women shared equal roles on the Tox. Why not here?

  “Gid, there are no other advocates for reversions here. Even once we are married, I’ll be called to help. I might as well get paid for it.” The Protectorate gave her a small stipend for the time she spent acclimating the reversions to life in the Holdout. She would have done it anyway, but the income was nice since she didn’t own a birthright in the Order’s co-op.