Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “I know.” Immediately the telescope sentry was back, though smaller this time, its construction more streamlined. The height was the same, but the legs were spindlier, the telescope narrower as SABRINA conserved its material. “Like this?”

  “Exactly like that. That’s perfect. We should be back before they need their next dose of pain pills, but if we’re not—”

  “I’m on it.” Dog-SABRINA appeared next to the telescope, lifting one paw in a weird little salute.

  “But part of you has to come with me. I can carry the water but not find it. You can find the water but not carry it. We have to work together.”

  “Copy that, partner,” SABRINA said.

  “This time, just do the boots. To make my footsteps quiet so the worms don’t find me.”

  Before she’d even finished talking, the boots were on Jillian’s feet, the particles condensing into solid form without her even noticing. She lifted one foot to inspect it and broke into a smile. The boots were blue, and they had wings.

  She knelt beside her parents and just looked at them for a moment, not saying anything. It was amazing how even grown-ups looked peaceful as little babies in their sleep. She reached out and brushed their hair back from their faces, wiped a smudge of orange alien dirt away from the side of her mom’s nose. She felt suddenly very small. Very helpless. Very alone.

  Jillian was used to being away from her parents for days—but that was when she stayed with Aunt Alex, with all those wonderful Earth things she’d always taken for granted. Things like food and beds and drinkable water. Her worst enemy at Aunt Alex’s was boredom. Now it was a whole planet. And she wasn’t a hundred percent sure she was going to make it back alive.

  “I don’t know if you guys can hear me,” she said, “but I’m going to go find water. SABRINA showed me a place where there’s clean water just a little ways away. So if you wake up and I’m gone, that’s where I am. I’ll be back real soon.” She paused, eyes prickling with tears. “I miss you guys. But I’m not sorry I didn’t do what you said before. I couldn’t just leave you here. And I’m not going to now either. I’m going to get you home.”

  She gave the whole makeshift camp one last once-over, seeing if there was anything she’d forgotten. SABRINA was pillows for her parents and the sentry guarding their sleep. They still had their blankets and tarps, and SABRINA had just finished dripping their breakfast into their mouths. The remaining water was secure in the pouch, and the food and supplies were all safely piled off to one side where her parents couldn’t accidentally kick anything important off the boulder if they woke up again feeling uncomfortable.

  After all this and the boots, just enough was left of SABRINA to trot along beside Jillian. It looked like a ferret now, except it was apple-green and had eight eyes like a spider. It still somehow managed to be cute.

  Jillian nodded at her parents, because if she said anything else, she knew the fear of what was out there would catch up with her and glue her to this boulder, and that would be the end. Instead she got to her feet, picked up the water container, and set off down the ridge.

  Chapter 9

  Descending the far side of the ridge looked much easier than the scramble down to the swamp. It was a gentler slope, and not so rocky. That was just fine by Jillian, because even empty the water container was big and awkward and hard to carry.

  At least the SABRINA boots kept the worms from following. They still massed and clustered around the remains of the water spill, but the worm-pile was noticeably smaller than it had been last time Jillian checked. Where had the others gone? Back underground? Down to the swamp? She didn’t know. They were paying approximately zero attention to the boulder, and that was good enough for her. She walked past that worm-pile in a careful wide circle, keeping one eye on it at all times. Weren’t people mostly made of water? Was that why they’d attacked her parents?

  Hush, she told herself.

  When they reached the far edge of the ridge, Jillian paused and looked down over the landscape. The worms were paying attention to the puddle here, but she didn’t see any water down there. Nothing to keep the worms from noticing her instead. Before she took even one step into that wilderness, she had to know exactly where she was going and exactly how she’d get there. Point A to Point B, straight shot, no surprises.

  From here it looked simple enough. Bare orange dirt down to the foot of the ridge and a little ways past it, and then from there it was overgrown with plant matter—short, sparse grass at first, then distant trees. A forest. It looked dark and mysterious and strangely inviting. She wished it were safe to explore and her parents were okay and they could all do a nice long hike in there together and end the day with a campfire and some space s’mores.

  Instead she adjusted her grip on the water container and pointed out toward the trees. “The waterfall is in there?”

  “No.” The SABRINA ferret appeared on Jillian’s outstretched arm. One green paw reached and nudged her pointer finger a fraction of an inch to the right. “It’s in there.”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “It is not. You were a full two degrees off. You could have walked right into a bottomless abyss.”

  “There’s a bottomless abyss?”

  “No,” SABRINA said patiently. “But you didn’t know that.”

  “You lead, then,” Jillian said. “I’ll follow.” In her mind she was laying out her worm-escaping strategy. After the footage SABRINA had shown her of the pod crash, she didn’t want to be caught out over open ground. She scanned the space between her outstretched finger and those distant trees. There’s a big rock I could probably get up onto, she noted. And another. Three together in a group over there. It was like plotting out a course for a game of The Floor Is Lava, except across what looked like miles.

  Could the worms climb trees? She had no idea. But they hadn’t climbed the boulder. They hadn’t even tried.

  Besides, on her to-do list for the morning, navigating that distant forest was step, like, three. Step one, of course, being: she had to get there.

  “Ready when you are,” she told SABRINA. “If you see anything suspicious, don’t let me walk right into it this time, okay? Not like with the pod?”

  She wasn’t trying to sound mean, and she regretted it as soon as it was out of her mouth, but SABRINA just shrugged. “Sure,” it said. It didn’t sound even a little annoyed.

  Of course it doesn’t, Jillian chided herself. It’s a machine, remember? It doesn’t have feelings. You just thought it was sad earlier because it talks like a person. But it—

  Mid-step, Jillian toppled over into powdery-soft orange dirt. It didn’t hurt at all, but it was totally unexpected. She’d tripped on a rock? She hadn’t thought there were any nearby.

  No. The blue SABRINA-boots had adhered themselves to the ground, and Jillian’s momentum had carried her forward with nowhere to go.

  “Just testing,” SABRINA said airily.

  “Hey!” Jillian yelled, but she found that she was laughing. “Who taught you how to prank people?”

  SABRINA twitched its ferret nose. “Natural talent, I guess.”

  “It’s cartoons, isn’t it.”

  “It . . . may be slightly that to some extent possibly yes.”

  Jillian picked herself up, which the boots allowed. “Teach me sometime?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  From there they went down the rest of the ridge in silence. Either the shock-absorbing padding SABRINA had added to the blue boots was definitely working, or there were no worms on this side of the ridge anyway, because the whole way down, none appeared.

  Jillian wanted to ask SABRINA about her parents but decided against it. You’ve been gone five minutes, she told herself. Focus. They need water. They need to be able to rely on you to get it. If the worms were coming up onto the boulder, SABRINA
would know. SABRINA would do something.

  The flip side of that reassuring thought, though, was: most of SABRINA had stayed on the boulder. Where it could do nothing to help Jillian if she ran into trouble.

  Suddenly Jillian wished she had a weapon of some kind, not that she knew how to use any. Something. Even a stick would be better than nothing. But there were no trees here. There was a lot of walking yet between here and trees. She picked up one of the spiky black rocks and weighed it in her hand. It was small—not any bigger than her fist—but sharp. Holding it made her feel just the tiniest bit safer.

  At the foot of the ridge, Jillian’s boots spoke to her. “Back in a sec,” they said. “Need to run a tiny errand real quick.” But they stayed on her feet. Then she realized the spider-eyed SABRINA ferret was no longer beside her.

  “What the—?” she said, glancing around. She wouldn’t put it past SABRINA to turn itself into a rock and hide itself in plain sight in the landscape as a joke.

  “Come on,” she said, feeling slightly silly as she directed her voice down toward her boots. “I didn’t mean teach me pranks now, I meant after we—ahh!”

  The spider-eyed ferret was back, except now it was smaller. It had repurposed some material to make itself a set of bat wings, and was using them to hover inches from her face. And it had used more material to make a thing on its forehead like an anglerfish lure, dangling out in front of its nose. Except at the end of it was another little cage, just like the one SABRINA had made earlier.

  In the cage was another one of the green worms. It writhed and squirmed and bit at the bars without obvious results. “Quiet, you,” SABRINA advised it, shaking the cage a little. “Settle down.”

  Jillian scrambled back from the worm so fast she almost tripped again. “Keep that away from me!” Then an idea struck her. “Is that to help us find water?”

  “I’m keeping myself occupied during the trip,” SABRINA said innocently. “So I don’t get bored. You don’t want me to get bored. You know how a bored dog starts chewing on the furniture?”

  Jillian nodded warily.

  “It’s like that. Except a whole lot worse. And I’m all out of furniture.” It stared at her for a second and then winked half of its spider-eyes at her. “No, you’re right. It’s to help us find water.”

  “What about the waterfall? I thought you knew where that was.”

  “I do. But just like with the swamp, the landscape elsewhere might have changed too. There might be other water sources that my mapping missed, or that have appeared since. This little guy might help us shorten our trip.”

  “But your probe things. Couldn’t you just send one on ahead?”

  “Already done. But I don’t want to rule anything out, and there could be underground water sources I wouldn’t be able to see.”

  “But the worm might smell them,” Jillian realized.

  “Bingo.”

  “Huh,” Jillian said. “Good thinking.”

  SABRINA did a weird little curtsy. “I try.”

  “Well,” Jillian said, “let’s get walking, then.”

  She took a few careful steps, then a few more. Even off the ridge, the SABRINA boots seemed to dull her footsteps enough that the worms didn’t notice. She started walking faster. The SABRINA spider-ferret floated in front of her, kicking its goofy little legs like it was swimming in midair.

  Jillian followed it for a while in silence. She counted her steps. One hundred, two hundred. When she got to three hundred, she paused and looked back over her shoulder at the ridge. It didn’t look as far off as she’d hoped. Her arms were getting tired from holding the container. At least her feet were super comfy in the SABRINA boots. It felt like walking on a really soft mattress. She set her shoulders and kept walking.

  At step five hundred and four, SABRINA sighed. “I’m bored. Why do you humans like hiking? It’s slow.”

  “It’s supposed to be slow,” Jillian said. “So you can see what’s around you. You don’t really get a chance to see it most of the time. You’re too busy doing other things. That’s the whole point of hiking. To put that other stuff on pause and just, like, explore.”

  “I can explore much faster than this,” SABRINA said. “When we get home, I’m going to have a nice long talk with Dr. Park about making me stronger so I can carry heavy things. I could have had that water back by now.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” Jillian said, and realized she meant it. Out here walking meant doing something. Not just waiting. Actively trying to fix a problem. She was headed out into open alien wilderness, but she was about twenty times calmer than she’d been sitting on a rock thinking about worst-case scenarios. Compared to that, this wasn’t that bad at all. She felt downright cheerful. “My mom and dad used to play I Spy with me on long car trips.”

  “We can do that!” SABRINA made a show of glancing around. One wing curled in to tap its chin thoughtfully. “I spy with my little eye . . . something that begins with . . .”

  “Rule number one,” Jillian said. “Things I can’t see with my human eye don’t count.”

  SABRINA groaned.

  There was something very satisfying about getting ahead of its line of thinking. It wasn’t even all that hard, now that Jillian was beginning to understand SABRINA a little better. “You’re predictable, you know that?”

  “You’re predictable,” SABRINA declared. “So predictable I knew you were going to say that.”

  There was a pause of exactly three seconds, and then both said at once: “Then what am I thinking right now?”

  Jillian clapped one hand over her mouth in surprise. SABRINA had mimicked her voice perfectly.

  “Point for SABRINA,” it said.

  Jillian laughed. “No more of that game,” she said.

  “Why? Because you’ll never win?”

  Well, yeah, Jillian thought.

  “Where did you find the worm?” she asked instead. “Was it in that big pile of worms where we”—you, she thought but did not say—“spilled the water?”

  “Down by the swamp,” SABRINA said. “Okay, pretty much in the swamp. Really, it should be thanking me. I just saved its miserable little life. Instead I get this.”

  Jillian got a brief glimpse of the worm trying to squeeze out of the cage to head back the way they’d come. But she didn’t watch for long. They were down near the grass now, and the grass was surprisingly sharp-edged and stiff, whispering harmlessly past the SABRINA boots.

  Still, it was hard to see where she was going. She brought her gaze back to the ground and kept it there. “It wants to get back to the water,” she observed.

  “Well, too bad. It’s . . .” Suddenly, SABRINA fell silent. “Hmm. Look.”

  The worm was slowly swiveling its head in various directions, as if it was trying to pinpoint its next target. Other than that, it had gone very still, like it was saving up its energy for something.

  Jillian had a pretty good guess as to what that something might be. “What?” she asked. “Is it looking for more water? What’s it doing?”

  “Lots of things,” SABRINA said. “Lots of very contradictory things. That’s what’s weird.”

  “Like at the swamp?” Jillian asked. “You said the worm back there, what was it, it wanted to get in the water, but it didn’t, but it did? Like that?”

  “Signaling confusion,” SABRINA said. “Specifically, in the presence of water, it was indicating fear—”

  Jillian thought of all those drowned bodies and nodded, shuddering a little.

  “—but also expectation of reward.”

  “Reward?” Jillian thought a moment. “Like when a dog does a trick and gets a piece of food, and then it learns to do the trick anyway because it thinks it’ll get food if it does?”

  “Not exactly,” SABRINA said, “but close. The one back by the swamp definitely thought somethin
g good was going to happen to it in the water. Well. Thought might be the wrong word for such an obviously idiotic life-form. If I were to put its train of thought into words I could explain, it might go like: water bad! water good! water scary! need water! need bad scary water right now!”

  “So what if we showed the worm some water?” Jillian asked. “Do an experiment. See what it does.”

  But there was no water to show it. Of course there wasn’t. If there had been, they wouldn’t be out here now. They’d still be waiting on the rock with Jillian’s parents.

  Still, everything about the worms was so out of the ordinary that Jillian had a hard time just letting it go. It was a puzzle. She loved puzzles. Besides, it gave her something new to think about that wasn’t worrying about the portal, or her parents’ wounds, or running out of food, or not being able to find water.

  “Maybe there’s, like, something in the water that it wants to eat? Something too tiny for us to see? They were hungry enough to eat the pod, and that’s made of plastic!”

  But the worms hadn’t been going into the swamp for food. That much had been immediately, sickeningly obvious.

  Local fauna, behaving very abnormally.

  “Bring it closer?”

  SABRINA gave her a look over one shoulder. “Really?”

  “I want to see something.”

  SABRINA hovered over, the worm bobbing in its cage before it. Jillian held out her hand.

  “It’s not trying to bite me.” She waggled her hand closer. The worm ignored it. “You’re sure this was from the same bunch of worms that bit my parents?”

  “Maybe it’s not hungry anymore,” SABRINA suggested. “Maybe it’s still full of . . . you know, never mind.”

  “They shouldn’t have been hungry to start with,” Jillian said. “They eat stuff in the dirt. My dad told me about them, back in the lab before we left. Humans aren’t a food source here. The worms don’t need them. They can’t. They must have bitten my parents for another reason.” She pressed one fingertip right up to the bars of the SABRINA cage. Nothing happened. “Whatever that reason was, it isn’t happening now.”