Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  “Hey,” she called to SABRINA. “Can you see if the container is still down there? Maybe if you make a hook, we can attach it to the rope I made and—” She caught sight of SABRINA and froze. “What is it?”

  SABRINA sat a little ways away from her, shapeless, perfectly still. Not bothering to pick a form to take, not bothering to hover, not bothering to bother Jillian. Something was very off about this. If it were a person, Jillian would have said SABRINA looked like it was concentrating hard on something, or listening to something very quiet in the far distance.

  “SABRINA?”

  Silence.

  The bottom dropped out of her stomach. Whatever this was, it was bad. “What are you listening to? Is it the worms? Are they coming after me again? SABRINA, I need to know.”

  “For grievously injured, underfed, sedated people,” SABRINA said at length, “your parents are surprisingly strong.”

  Jillian must have heard this wrong. “What?”

  SABRINA tossed up a video feed on the side of its current blob shape.

  At first Jillian was unsure what SABRINA was showing her. Motion, lots of motion. Yelling. Chaos.

  Then she realized what she was looking at, and her throat started closing and her vision went dark around the edges.

  Her mom and dad were fighting with something. The worms, Jillian thought, but then she realized that was wrong. They were fighting with SABRINA. The fluffy pillows and sentry telescope and teacup and all the rest of it were gone, and SABRINA had turned into something like handcuffs, two pairs of handcuffs, binding her parents’ arms behind them. Other restraints had been put on their ankles. Still they fought. They thrashed and struggled toward the edge of the boulder.

  “How long—” Jillian finally managed.

  “They woke up like this while you were climbing out of the pit. I secured them immediately, as you see.”

  “They don’t look all that secure,” Jillian said. Her voice swooped up, panicky, like a bird trapped in an attic. “Hold them tighter! They’re going to hurt themselves!”

  “It’s kind of a work in progress.”

  In the video feed, Jillian’s dad flopped sideways, hard, against SABRINA’s restraints, and started inchworming over the last few feet to the drop. Jillian’s mom, beside him, was doing much the same. “You are going to dislocate a shoulder if you keep that up,” SABRINA told them matter-of-factly, and made a kind of spike that it hammered down through Jillian’s dad’s ankle restraints and deep into the rock below. Then it did the same to Jillian’s mom. Then it did the same with the handcuffs at their wrists.

  As hard as it’d been to get out of the pit just now with so little of SABRINA with her, Jillian was really, really glad she’d left enough of it with her parents that it could stop them now.

  They both lay on their backs, staring wildly up at the sky, trying to flip back over on their fronts and continue on toward—what?

  Still they didn’t speak a word. Their breathing was heavy and labored, and flecks of frothy spit gathered at the corners of their mouths. Their eyes were very wide, bugging out of their heads, and they were staring in one direction only, off to the distance off one side of the ridge.

  There was only one thing down there.

  The swamp.

  Oh, Jillian thought. Oh no.

  “They’re infected,” she whispered. “The worms—the parasites—you said humans would make bad hosts!”

  “I said they might,” SABRINA replied. “I admit I am being forced to revisit that hypothesis.”

  “They just got bitten yesterday!”

  “As I said, I’m revisiting.”

  Jillian could have screamed in frustration. “Can they hear me?”

  SABRINA must have done something invisibly, because it replied, “They can now.”

  “Mom! Dad! You’re going to be okay. I’m coming to help you. I’ll keep you safe. I’ll be right there as soon as I can; just stay still and listen to SABRINA and stop fighting before you hurt yourselves, please—”

  She was babbling. Worse, they didn’t seem to be listening to her. All their attention was focused on that unseen point in the distance. Just like the alien deer had done when Jillian had followed it to the waterfall. And then when it had gotten there—

  Jillian leaped to her feet and started running straight back through the wiry grass, in what she thought was the right direction. It ripped at her podsuit legs. She didn’t care.

  “Not that way,” SABRINA said. “Not—um—one second, please—little busy—”

  Jillian wheeled around. “I don’t have one second! They need me there now!”

  SABRINA had left up, or forgotten to take down, the live feed of what was happening on the boulder. Jillian watched as, with a tremendous wrench and audible cracking that sounded horribly like a bone breaking, her mom heaved herself up off the rock and flung herself at the boulder’s edge. The restraints caught her. Barely. She crashed down face-first, bloodying her nose.

  “SABRINA, which way?”

  SABRINA pointed, and Jillian almost took off running, but then she saw what was happening in the feed and stopped, staring, mouth open. Her dad was fighting the wrist restraints so hard he was drawing blood. Both he and Jillian’s mom looked like any minute they were going to start trying to pull themselves across the boulder with their teeth.

  SABRINA could do a lot of things, but it couldn’t keep up with this kind of mindless ferocity. Every time it clamped them down in a different way, they did something new.

  There isn’t enough of it there.

  The thought hit Jillian like a bolt of lightning. Right behind it, like the thunder, she knew what she had to do. For a moment her mouth froze, paralyzed, around the words.

  Say it, she said. You have to say it. It’s the only way.

  “Go,” she told SABRINA. Gesturing at the shapeless blob displaying the feed. “You have to send the rest back to them. You need it all.”

  “I will have a hard time explaining to Dr. Park that I abandoned you to die of exposure out here in the wilderness,” SABRINA said.

  “I’ll follow the hills back to the ridge. I know the way. I’m not carrying the water now. I can make it on my own.”

  Could she, though? She had no idea. But it didn’t matter. There was only one answer here, splashed across Jillian’s brain in neon letters fifty feet high. It was right and obvious and terrifying.

  Just minutes ago she’d thought climbing out of the pit was the hardest thing she’d ever done. It was nothing, nothing at all, compared to what she had to do now.

  She took a deep breath. Trying, and failing, to hold her voice steady when she spoke.

  “SABRINA,” she said, “I order you to go.”

  SABRINA didn’t say anything, didn’t argue, didn’t acknowledge the order, didn’t grow itself a hand to dorkily salute her. Nothing. It just gathered itself up off the ground and rocketed off faster than Jillian had ever seen it move. Within a minute it had vanished among the trees.

  That was it. It was done. SABRINA was gone. Jillian was alone.

  Alone, and her water container was fifteen feet underground and probably being eaten by worms, and her podsuit was a total wreck from the grass and the climb and the burns. She ached all over. And she’d lost her spiky rock somewhere.

  And—she realized it with a shock like a bucket of ice water—she didn’t know where she was going. She’d been following SABRINA toward the hills, but then she’d climbed out of the hole and didn’t know which way she was facing anymore. Everything looked the same.

  All around was the razory grass, an endless field of it, broken by the tree line all along her right and back behind her. How far could the crater ridge possibly be? It was probably higher than the trees—she should be able to see it. But there was some kind of fog or mist in the air, coming in from her left, that made it so she
couldn’t see far.

  Great.

  But she was only a couple of miles from her parents. She could do this on her own.

  SABRINA had said the hills were a quarter-mile off. The track at her school was a quarter-mile. That wasn’t far at all. If she didn’t find it going one way, she could turn back and try another. She could use the hole as a landmark for her starting point.

  “Okay,” she whispered to herself. “Okay.”

  She got herself pointed in what she hoped was the right direction and started working her way through the grass.

  With the SABRINA boots it had been hard going, but without them it was nearly impossible. The grass seemed to be deliberately reaching up to tangle around her legs. She fell, and the grass cut the palms of her podsuit gloves to ribbons.

  Worse, the ground beneath her started to move. She froze as one worm poked up from the dirt, then another, and another. They began to inch toward her hands.

  As slowly and carefully as she could, she pushed herself back up to her knees, then her feet, pulling her hands away just as the worms reached the place where they’d been.

  But there were worms in the dirt to all sides of her. She was surrounded. The worms crawled up out of the dirt, onto the razory grass—and stopped. Tried to find a way around the grass toward her. After a minute they gave up and sank back into the dirt.

  The grass is too sharp, Jillian realized. They can’t get through it without cutting themselves up.

  She broke into a run.

  She made it just a few more steps before the grass tripped her again. She went down hard, cutting her hands this time. It felt like the world’s worst paper cuts. She bit down on the yell rising up in her. Move, she told herself. You have to move.

  Jillian pushed herself back up and strode forward deliberately, crushing the grass underfoot one step at a time as before. She forced her way across another ten, twenty feet. Dripping blood from her legs and palms. Stumbling and almost falling forward every time the grass caught at her feet. Not letting herself think what would happen if she face-planted in this stuff, not letting herself think about whether SABRINA had managed to restrain her parents, not letting herself think about anything except putting one foot in front of another.

  When she was too out of breath to go any farther, she stopped to assess her surroundings. Grass everywhere, still, but with the vague suggestion of a forest in front of her, like a purple-gray thundercloud sitting on the far horizon.

  Wait. The forest was supposed to be behind her. Wasn’t it? And if she was going the right way, the hills should be visible by now.

  She planted her feet so she wouldn’t accidentally get turned around again and looked over one shoulder, then the other. It was getting really hard to see. The fog she’d seen in the distance was nearing, thickening, rolling in toward her in a mass. She could hear wind lashing the trees. Was it usually foggy and windy at the same time, though? That didn’t seem right.

  When she looked back, the fog was nearer.

  That was fast, she thought.

  And then it hit.

  It felt like a million tiny knives to the face. It whipped past her like the particle cloud of SABRINA, but this didn’t part to go around her as SABRINA would have done. This scoured at her, howled around her, nearly knocked her off her feet. It got into the podsuit and the jumpsuit beneath, into her mouth and ears and eyes, before she finally realized what it was.

  Lots of sandy dirt, blowing down from the hills.

  When SABRINA had described it, it had sounded a lot less violent than this.

  It was like standing in a blender full of needles. She couldn’t see. She didn’t even dare open her eyes. She shoved as much of her face as she could down into the neck of the podsuit and wrapped her arms around her head. If SABRINA had been right, the storm meant she must be headed for the hills now. If she at least knew where she was going, she could walk.

  No luck. She pried one eyelid open a crack and instantly regretted it. Even if she could see the ground—which she couldn’t—she had no idea in which direction she was pointed anymore. The blowing dirt whipped in around her arms, shot down the top of the podsuit, up through the rips in the fabric. She felt like she was breathing more dirt than air, and desperately wished she’d kept the podsuit helmet with her.

  Were her parents out in this? Had SABRINA made some kind of shelter to protect them? She had to get there. How long did sandstorms on Earth deserts last? SABRINA might know.

  But SABRINA wasn’t here. It was Jillian alone. And if she’d learned one thing from survival movies, it was that you couldn’t rush nature. As far as nature was concerned, you were the tiniest speck on the skin of the world, and no storm was going to pass faster because you wished really hard for it to hurry up and go somewhere else and leave you alone. You had to wait for it to do its thing. The best you could hope for was to get out of its way.

  Here, now, lost in the storm and the field of razor grass, Jillian had to settle for the next best thing, which happened also to be the exact opposite.

  It took every drop of willpower in her body to stop moving. To stay still. Not keep walking in some random direction, hoping to get closer to her parents. She squatted down, careful of the sharp grass blades, and slowly, her hands clumsy with injury, untied the spare jumpsuit from around her waist. It would be impossible to shake the dirt out of it without filling it back up with more dirt in the process, so she just unzipped it and tented it over her head as best she could.

  Under the howling of the storm, she could have sworn she could hear SABRINA humming. Like it’d hummed “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” back in the lab. Except this sounded more like a lullaby. Something calming. Something entirely in her head because SABRINA was long gone.

  Still, she focused on the song, because imaginary or not, it was better than listening to the howling storm. And tossed a wish toward SABRINA, that it had gotten to her parents in time.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  And—

  Chapter 13

  —woke.

  Woke? Jillian hadn’t been asleep. Had she? The field, the storm, the dirt in her eyes and mouth and lungs—had she passed out? Did a person remember something like that? She was in the field, and then there was a blank space of time, and here she was, awake but with her eyes closed, afraid to open them into the pelting wind.

  But she couldn’t hear the blasting sound of the storm anymore. That could only be good news. It must have passed while she slept. Just in case, she covered her eyes with her hands and peeked out between her fingers.

  She couldn’t peek out between her fingers. Her eyelids felt crusted shut. Worse, there was something wrong with her hands. Infection, she thought. Her cut hands had become infected and ballooned up so that she couldn’t spread them out flat.

  For a second she almost started shrieking for SABRINA. Then she realized that wouldn’t work anymore. She’d sent SABRINA away. Okay, she told herself. On three.

  Jillian took a calming breath and held it for a three-count, then opened her eyes.

  She could practically hear her eyelids creaking open. Her whole field of vision was a painful, bleary mess, but even so she knew right away that wherever she was, it wasn’t the meadow full of grass where the storm had overtaken her. It wasn’t the waterfall or the crater ridge or the forest or the swamp. It was someplace new.

  It looked like . . . a cave? Sort of? Like a cave where somebody had tried to build a fort out of garbage.

  But when? And why? And who?

  She saw what looked an awful lot like the supply crates from the crashed quadpod, and something that looked exactly like her pod bunk, except this one was broken in halves and filled with dirt. Plants poked up out of it: feathery purple fern things, thorny red brambles with delicate corkscrewing little tendrils, some kind of shimmery blue-black grass with short,
thick blades. There were slimy smears of something glopped on the exposed parts of the cave walls, something like wet blue-green moss with tiny orange flowers. It was glowing bright enough to see by.

  Jillian sat up. Whatever she’d been lying on was soft and warm. It was the exact color and texture of the flexible skin of the quadpod. It looked like someone had taken that fabricky stuff and filled it with dry leaves until it had turned into something like a bed.

  Except the quadpod skin had dissolved. The supply crates had dissolved. The bunks were in the wrecked pod and stuck in the mud by the swamp.

  Then where had this stuff come from?

  The fact that it was even here reminded her of something. She dug around in the back of her memory for a minute, then gave up. Whatever it was, it was staying buried for now.

  She pushed back the blanket—no question, this was the same kind of tarp she’d salvaged from the wrecked pod and used as her parents’ bedding on the boulder—and inspected herself.

  Her hands had felt thick and strange because they were bandaged. Clean gauze. Smell of medicine. More bandaging on the other places where she’d been wounded by the grass and the climb and whatever else. A combination of gauze and smart bandages for those areas, as well as some kind of leafy glop plastered onto the places where she’d been grazed by the worms’ acid saliva.

  All of it—the gauze, the bandages—was clean and shiny and new.

  Not only that, but she was in a fresh jumpsuit, bigger than the one she’d arrived in. Her podsuit was neatly folded at the foot of the bed. All the tears in the fabric of it had been sewn shut.

  “Impossible,” she whispered. She tried to pinch herself to wake up, but her hands were too well bandaged.

  Jillian stood, swaying. There was something on the mattress where she’d been lying, pressed into a dent in the loose material. It looked like a bedpan from a hospital. Luckily it was empty, or she probably would have spilled it getting up. Still, with the change of movement, her bladder began reminding her insistently of all the water she’d gulped down at the falls. Having to pee this badly had to be real.