“How about we take our time coming back to Earth, Evie?” Tate said as they cleared the last of the trees, the shuttle just another fifty feet beyond them in the clearing. “Maybe we can spend some time together flying around the galaxy.”
“I’d like that,” Evelyn said, smiling at the thought of some carefree days ahead. Figuring it was about time to get Buzz the shuttle warmed up for their ascent, Evelyn activated her nanites so she could open the shuttle bay. She felt them warm and hum inside her, and she felt the familiar itch as they connected to the shuttle, waking it from its sleep, and then as if she had been kicked in the gut, she felt an overwhelming feeling of sickness wash throughout her body. She knew that feeling. Immediately her eyes went wide.
“Rangers!” she screamed. She whipped her head around and realized Tate had stopped walking ten feet back. He had a blank look in his eyes, his shoulders were slumped, and then he collapsed, muttering something incoherent as his face smashed into the dirt.
Evelyn rushed to his side. “Tate,” she gasped, sliding into the dirt next to him, and then, not a second later, she felt a horrendous pinch in her side, like she had just been stung by a wasp the size of a hummingbird. She grabbed absently around her middle and pulled a dart from between her ribs. She felt her mouth go dry. Her peripheral vision started fading. She looked up and could just make out the shapes—people coming toward them—blurry against the trees. She could hear their laughter. She wanted to vomit. As if someone was hanging on her head, trying to weigh it down, she slowly turned to look back at the shuttle, not twenty feet away. Her thoughts were stunted. She knew she needed to get there, but she couldn’t move, and the feeling of sickness in her belly grew as the world faded to black around her.
TAKEN
White light. Black shapes. Cold. Icy cold and numb.
Too bright …
“She’s waking.”
Can’t move …
“Is she restrained?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Make sure they’re tight.”
Ouch!
“Something’s wrong here.”
“What?
“I don’t know. The flight controls aren’t working.”
“Well, fix it.”
“I’m trying, but something keeps activating the autopilot. It’s trying to course-correct us into orbit.”
“Help … me,” Evelyn heard herself say through a groggy exhale. Her eyes couldn’t focus, and she felt the room spinning around her.
“Shut her up, will you?”
“What for?”
“Just do it—”
“What’s … happening?” Evelyn asked, trying to lift her head.
Evelyn winced at the pinch in her neck.
“—if I can’t deliver Carson Philips, I’m gonna deliver his daughter, and I don’t need a reason to shoot her before we get there.”
Evelyn’s world began to fade again.
“Aha … there we go … Autopilot’s finally offline.”
GUEST
Darkness surrounded her, like that of a night without a moon, inky black and murky, the hint of shadows looming. Then, far in the distance, a jagged blackness thrust upward without limit.
She walked.
Swirls of blackness became gray around her feet and then scattered into the blackness again.
She walked. She searched. She wondered.
“You are close.”
Evelyn stopped and turned. It was her sister, standing at a distance, impossibly far away, her voice just a whisper.
“You are closer than you think, Stargazer.”
“Closer to what? What am I close to?”
“Yourself.”
“I don’t understand.”
Jane vanished as if she had never been there.
Evelyn turned back around. She saw nothing.
“I don’t understand. What do I do?”
“Follow the stars.”
Evelyn stood still. Before her, the ground fell away into nothingness, and the murky smudge around her cleared. She could see everything. There was no light, but everywhere she looked there were stars.
Evelyn felt the cool softness of the pillow under her cheek. Slowly, as if to preserve the feeling, she opened her eyes. Light was streaming through the two-story window, refracting hauntingly through the sheer draperies that hung down the sides. The light was bright, unfiltered, and her eyes ached as if they hadn’t seen light in ages.
Her eyes searched the wall around the window. She lifted her head slightly to peer down the bed. A table and chairs in the distance. A door beyond. A tapestry on the wall. She recognized nothing, and then her mind was flooded with the last moments she spent with Tate.
The rangers! Where am I?
She sat up quickly and felt the room spin. She looked around. The room was huge—at least thirty feet long and twenty feet wide—and the ceiling above must have been at least twenty feet high. The wood floors were generously covered with plush oriental rugs, and the dressers, tables, and finely upholstered chairs had a distinctly old-world feel to them. The window she had noticed was just as big as she had thought at first glance, easily rising from just above the floor to a few feet shy of the ceiling. It was flanked on either side by two others equally as grand. Even the bed she found herself in was dreamy—a stark contrast to the cots she had grown accustomed to.
Evelyn looked at the wall behind her, and at the great wooden door, which she assumed was the entrance to her room.
Her mind was still struggling to grasp what was happening, and in a daze, she stood and stumbled as she lumbered her way toward the door. The confusion she felt was profound. Nothing made sense. She tried turning the knob. It didn’t move. It occurred to her then that she didn’t know what she would have done had the door opened, given she wasn’t wearing anything but clean white linen pajamas.
Another thing struck her about her current condition, which hadn’t been immediately obvious to her a moment ago, but as she looked down at her sleepwear, she realized something was wrapped snugly around her neck. Bringing her hands up, she felt around her throat. It felt like a thick band, not like a bandage, but hard, smooth, and wide, at least two inches thick and sticking out from her neck at least a half an inch. She tried to fit her finger underneath it, but couldn’t get anything more than her fingernail between it and her skin. As tight as it was, it didn’t seem to be affecting her ability to breathe, but even so, Evelyn felt her pulse rise at the thought of having something stuck around her neck.
She glanced around the room. Figuring the door on the opposite wall was a bathroom, she headed toward it quickly, navigating through the room’s furnishings. The door opened easily enough, and was fortunately a bathroom. As Evelyn clicked on the light, she wasn’t sure she wanted to see herself in the mirror. Slowly she stepped around the corner. She held her breath. She looked at her reflection.
It was her. And she breathed a sigh of relief as her inventory revealed she still had all the right parts in all the right places, even if she was still lacking volume in certain areas. On further inspection, she realized she was correct in that other than her pajamas, the only article of clothing she was wearing—if she could call it that—was the collar around her neck.
She reached up to touch it. It was smooth and black and was completely nondescript, other than a thin crease that ran vertically through its two-inch width from the top to the bottom. She felt another crease with her fingers in the back, and she figured the two pieces of the collar were locked around her neck—by whom, she still didn’t know. Looking around the right side of the collar, she saw the faintest green light emitting from the top, casting a yellow-greenish light on the pale skin just behind her ear.
Once again, she tried to fit her finger underneath the edge of the collar but got nowhere. It felt like the collar was a bandage stuck to her skin, and there wasn’t any way to pull it away.
At least it’s not the tracker Jane had, she thought, remembering the horrible torture device Jan
e had had implanted under the skin in her forearm when she was taken to the DF-23 death camp. The tracker had burned Jane’s arm. It vibrated under the skin, giving the sensation she had a worm crawling through her muscle tissue, and electrocuted her for misconduct. The collar Evelyn wore seemed tame, by contrast, but she let her hands fall to the pedestal sink, reluctant to tamper with it.
Figuring there was nothing she could do about it in the moment, she left the bathroom and thought she’d see if she could get her bearings on where she might have been taken.
Coming to one of the windows, she pulled aside the sheers and immediately felt the stalling thoughts of shock settle over her as she gazed out the window. It was obvious to her now. She was no longer in Texas.
The window she peered through was clearly on the second or third level of the building she was in, which was situated in the belly of a great valley, surrounded by soaring snowcapped mountains on all sides. By the look of it, the building ran in both directions from her window for at least a hundred yards and then jutted out into the valley, leaving a great gravelly courtyard below. The building seemed to be made of stone, with slate tiles on the flanking roofs. It reminded Evelyn of pictures she had seen of homes in northern France, except the building she was in was much larger. If it wasn’t for the fact she had been abducted to get there, she realized she might have been impressed by the grandness of her room and the home she was in—if it was a home.
Below her in the courtyard, dozens of military personnel were milling around, coming and going in open-air troop transports to the fields of the valley beyond. And while the sight of all the military personnel made her nervous, it was what was in the fields that made her freeze in her spot. Two rows of no less than ten shuttles each stretched into the distance, and the trucks were driving out and back, loaded with men and equipment, obviously preparing for something.
She remembered seeing the colonists flying into Philips Landing on the first day, and how that had felt like an invasion, even though it had only been a dozen shuttles filled with research teams and settlers. Here in the valley before her, she saw the same shuttles, originally designed by Carson Philips and his company CP Interstellar. Evelyn had been responsible for designing the engines for these shuttles—back when she was just artificial intelligence. She knew their specifications down to the switch, and she also knew that based on what she was seeing, each of these shuttles could carry dozens of fully-armed men and their equipment.
If those men are the rangers I keep running into … Her stomach flipped at the thought of what might happen to the people who were wherever these men were going. Then it struck her, a momentary feeling of peace before the thought materialized. She didn’t feel nauseous. She was a good distance away from the men who appeared to be members of the National Civilian Guard—but she was close enough—and there were enough of them that if they were rangers, she knew she’d be doubled over and vomiting. Her nanites were definitely active, but there weren’t any offending signals coming from the men below to set off her alarms, and in the moment, she was relieved but even more confused.
A knock at the door and a leaping heart, Evelyn turned quickly to see a shapely woman enter. She wore a plain white lab coat, and credentials on a lanyard around her neck. Her red hair was pulled back into a tail, and as she walked one foot in front of the other on her high heels into the room, Evelyn wondered how she managed to keep all of her chest and hips going in the same direction when she walked like she was balancing on a tightrope.
Behind her a very slight and mousy young woman entered, holding a covered silver tray that seemed much too large and heavy for her.
“Oh good,” the redheaded woman boomed, startling Evelyn with her volume. “You’re not dead. Sometimes we don’t come soon enough when we have VIPs, and then I have to call the cleaning crew.”
She stopped, seeming to take inventory of the room, and then looked at the girl. “Just set that down over there,” she said, gesturing toward the table. Evelyn watched as the girl continued with the tray and then brought her attention back to the woman.
“You are probably wondering why you are here,” she said, clasping her hands in front of her, accentuating the size of her chest. “I assure you, dear, you’ll find all that out in due time. For now, I want you to make yourself comfortable. This is your room. If you feel like freshening up, you have the bathroom at your disposal. There are clothes for you to wear in the wardrobe. They should fit you well enough, and for pity’s sake, eat something,” she added, shaking her head, looking Evelyn up and down. “When they brought you in here, I didn’t know if I should have my nurses bring you girls’ clothes to wear or boys’.”
The woman’s directness took Evelyn by surprise, but she looked at the table anyway. The young woman walked away with the cover, leaving behind an assortment of foods that Evelyn couldn’t identify at a distance.
The woman stepped closer, and Evelyn shuffled a step backward.
“You will not leave this room,” she continued. “There is a guard standing outside the door … He’s there for your own safety. And under no circumstances are you to tamper with that collar. If you do, you’re dead … and I don’t mean that in the figurative sense, like ‘don’t do it or you’re dead,’” she added, wagging her finger at Evelyn with a smirk. “I mean, you’re really dead. A lethal dose of strychnine—”
“Strychnine?” Evelyn mumbled.
“Right. Strychnine … my own little concoction. I know it’s a little old school, but these collars were originally designed to terminate the rangers in our enhanced soldier program. The convulsions the strychnine causes are the only thing that can keep a ranger who is suffering a psychotic episode from killing everyone within arm’s reach. Of course, it isn’t the most humane way to do it, but it’s cleaner than the detonators we used to use in the collars … You can probably imagine.
“So, as I was saying, tamper with the collar and it will inject you with a lethal dose of strychnine, directly into your carotid artery. You don’t want that. I really don’t want that. Nobody wants that.”
Evelyn was horrified. The research she had seen on strychnine poisoning was enough to make her speechless. People had been known to dislocate their backs and necks from the spasms as the toxin worked on their nervous system; it led to a slow and painful death, sometimes taking hours to finally kill the victim. Without thinking, Evelyn found that she had reached up to touch the collar again as she realized she had something far more sinister strapped around her neck than what Jane had implanted in her arm.
“I mean it,” the woman sang, “don’t do it.”
Evelyn dropped her hand, letting her arms hang lifelessly at her sides.
“That’s better. Now, if you want a shower, that’s fine. The collar can get wet, and you’ll probably want to take one. I had my girls wipe you down when you got here, but trust me, you need a good soak in that shower.
“And just between us girls,” she said, leaning in as if to share a secret, “believe me when I tell you that you don’t have any privacy in this room, so you may want to practice modesty … Although, given that you aren’t hiding much under there anyway,” she added, standing straight, her eyes focused squarely on Evelyn’s chest, “you may not be all that worried about such things.”
Evelyn’s mind whirled at the compounding insults and overwhelming information, which still hadn’t answered any of her questions.
The woman continued. “You have a guest coming this afternoon, so do what you need to do to clean yourself up. I’ll see you again, and then we can talk some more … I am so very excited to have you … here, I mean.” With that, the woman gave a plastic smile and turned to follow her assistant out the door.
Tate, Evelyn thought, just realizing she hadn’t thought of him until then, and chastising herself for it.
“Ma’am,” she said quickly, stepping toward her, surprised at her own hoarseness.
The woman stopped and turned on her heels. “It’s Doctor. Dr. Eleanor Pr
itikov, but you can call me Dr. Pretty if you like.”
“Sorry, Doctor, but what about my—” she started, stopping short as she realized she didn’t want to give away Tate’s identity if they didn’t already know it. “… The man I was with … do you know if he is okay? Is he here too?”
The woman smiled. “Yes, he’s here too, and yes, he’s fine … though he doesn’t seem to have the same pep you do,” she added, furrowing her brow. “In fact, the last I checked, he was still asleep, but that’s been a while ago now.” She cocked her head, speaking more to herself, adding, “Oh dear, I do hope he hasn’t done anything stupid with his collar. It would be a shame for us to have brought him all this way only for him to accidentally kill himself.
“You’ll excuse me,” the doctor said, shaking her head slightly and turning. As she exited the room, her words trailing behind her, she added, “Please do try to eat something too, dear. Can’t have you wasting away … You’re going to need your strength.”
With a click, the door closed. Evelyn heard the bolt lock, and with it, her hopes that she and Tate might make it back to Vista alive melted into the vacuum Dr. Pretty left behind as she sucked all the air from the room.
ENABLER
Despite its commonness, the food on the platter left Evelyn feeling as if she was looking at something alien. It was a sausage. A staple of European and American cuisine dating back centuries. Something that had been made in as many varieties and flavors as there are animals and spices. A thing that had powered soldiers and educators, commoners and kings, for as long as there were written records, and yet, with as prolific a food as the common sausage was, Evelyn had never been confronted with one openly. She was at a loss.
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