Courier's Run

By Ennis Rook Bashe

In a far-future Scotland where alchemy has turned most people into hungry ghosts and given the survivors amnesia, Courier is the oldest of seven clones. Living in a secluded laboratory, she faithfully carries out the orders of her creator, the Professor. Then she's sent out into the world to gather intelligence on a settlement- with her sisters' lives depending on her obedience.

It should be a simple mission. Then she meets Sear.

Sear is a messenger, making the perilous journey between settlements on foot. Haunted by cryptic memories of a lost spouse and children, she's brave and selfless, even if she cheats at board games. Sear makes Courier long for possibilities she didn't even know existed. But if she chooses to save Sear and her people from the Professor's plan to eradicate humanity using mutant ghosts, her sisters will die.

Courier can't run from her problems. She can only keep running. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ennis Rook Bashe
• Release date: Jul 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393410461

Ennis Rook Bashe

Ennis Rook Bashe is a nonbinary disabled romance novelist and future mental health professional. Follow them for information about free books and new releases! Newsletter: https://tinyletter.com/rookthebird TikTok: @rookthebird

Book preview

Her sisters were dying by heartbeats and days. She'd woken up alone; bereft of their usual comforting pile, she'd stretched out for Cici's shoulder, for Cody's mass of dark curls.

But the man who called Cici Unit C2 and Cody Unit C4 had taken them all.

Entering the main testing room, C7, known to her sisters as Courier, saw her six sisters and let out a gasp. She was the toughest of the C series; spliced from the genes of a secret agent and an ultramarathon runner, she could stay on the treadmill longest, go the farthest without food or sleep. But what she saw made her feel weak in the knees.

They all looked mostly alike, and they were all suffering. Everyone except redheaded Coriander had thick dark hair and everyone except Cici, who’d jury-rigged scalpels into a tweezer, had traces of a unibrow. Everyone except Ocean, whose eyes were a luminous cold blue, had eyes that were so dark as to allow no distinction between iris and pupil. They were all pale and sallow from years of life in an underground bunker, and they all had strong noses and stubborn little chins.

But right now they all looked identically still and silent, identically trapped.

They were floating in stasis tanks. It reminded Courier of the first years after the ghost deluge: uneven supply lines to the underground laboratory, eating whatever she could scavenge, painting her sharp cheeks with dried blood. When her sisters weren’t yet old enough to really be friends, and she’d spent time with the cleaning robots and the distant voices of the dead. Roaming the sterile hallways of her home, watching the fluorescent lights flicker, scratching her name over and over into the institutional off-mint walls with a rusty paperclip.

A sliding door opened, and the late-middle-aged man who’d been her caretaker for the majority of her life strode through.

Hello, C7, said the Professor, adjusting his lab coat. The Professor had a serious, craggy face and gimlet blue eyes. I have a very special mission for you. It's different from anything you've ever done previously, and I needed... insurance.

Her hands clenched into fists; she relaxed them with effort. What do you want me to do?

I thought society in the United Kingdom—hell, in the entire world—had been wiped out. If not by the bomb, then by the ghosts it brought into the world. But there's this one nearby town that's had a great deal of success in building a linked trade network with nearby settlements. They've pioneered a practice of sending up people in hot-air balloons to track the ghostides. They're vaccinating people and culturing penicillin. Technology and trade might lead to population growth, and we can't have that. I've sacrificed too much to let humanity spread like a cancer over the planet once again—I mean, I'm even running out of good wine. I've almost completed my invention to defeat them, but I need you to scout out the terrain.

As in... run through? Bicycle through? she asked; hopefully, she wouldn't need to actually interact with the humans.

"Oh, no, I need much more information than that. You're a good liar. Sneaky little worm, you are. I want you to worm your way in, stay for a handful of weeks at least, and provide me with a complete dossier upon your return. How many buildings, and what's stored in them, population—broken down into workers and dependents—any weapons systems or defenses they have. Et cetera, et cetera. Here." He threw a packed rucksack at her. An ordinary person might have stumbled under its weight, but Courier caught it easily.

She didn't flinch when his hand came down on her shoulder, stayed perfectly still when he swabbed her throat with rubbing alcohol and sank a needle in. Some of her earliest memories were of people telling her to lift a hospital gown, to present her wrist, and then the coldness on her skin and the quick, sharp bite: injections to boost her muscles, or collecting tubes of blood. There had been so many people in the laboratory once. Dozens, even.

It's nanotechnology. That's why you're going to be able to heal so quickly. You'll be able to lead humanity to a nice, peaceful death by anti-natalism. I'm so proud of you—and the faint smell of lavender. Courier blinked, bringing herself back to the present. You didn't make me, she thought, meeting her master's disinterested gaze with a cool stare of her own as he withdrew the needle and put the safety cap back on. I remember someone else testing my reflexes, someone else lifting me from the suspended animation tube. Someone else telling me to look away when that cold light burned through the world: