Mala picked up one of the plastic pouches containing pink hand soap. “What is this?”
“Soap.” Kiera explained it. “That and the TP are ours. Oh, and these…” The set of little plastic figures of comic book and video game characters she decided to keep since they had belonged to Bio-Mom.
“That’s amazing… There’s got to be more stuff in that place.” He put his arm around her. “But, you’re not to go there alone again, do you understand?”
“Yes, Dad.” She snuggled against him. “And yeah, there’s so much stuff.”
“That’s a lot to think about.” Mala sat on the edge. “There’s more than one Citadel?”
“Yes. It’s not the Citadel; it’s a citadel. There are hundreds of them.” She described the map of the globe.
Teryn chuckled. “If we could travel a thousand miles through the Torment without dying, maybe we would find other tribes to trade with.”
“I don’t like that the metal men tried to shoot her.” Mala kneaded her hands. “That’s not right.”
“I don’t understand why the Exalted would be concerned… or even how they could know she went to that place.” Teryn pulled her close.
Kiera curled up against him. “It was so sad watching those people walk away from their son, knowing they were going to die.”
“They wanted him to live,” said Teryn, his voice soft and somber. “Maybe he is still alive, like you were.”
Kiera shrugged. “He is. Those people are still frozen solid. The stuff in the tank was white like milk. When I woke up it was clear, but gooey like syrup.”
“Syrup?” asked Mala.
“Ugh.” She thought for a second. “Have you ever blown your nose and gotten a handful of clear stuff? That. That is what I was floating in… only cold.”
Both of her parents shuddered.
“What if they come here?” Mala stood and went to the window, peering out. “We cannot fight the metal men.”
“We can.” Kiera picked up the laser. “I found this.”
Teryn started to laugh, but wound up staring. “That’s no toy… it looks like the weapons they carry. The firelight.”
“Uh huh.” She handed it to him. “It works, too.”
Teryn aimed it at the wall, closing one eye to look over it. “I have found guns before, but none that have worked… and none that made the firelight.”
“It’s not hard.” Kiera shifted to kneel beside him. “There’s a little frame on the back and a green dot at the front. Look at the dot through the little frame and that’s where the beam will go.”
Pet glided in the window. “Don’t point that at a person unless you want to kill them.”
Mala screamed.
Teryn stared in awe. “What is that?”
“Pet. She’s my friend.” Kiera grinned.
“Amazing.” He reached out to touch it.
“It talks,” said Mala. “What is it?”
“A friend. She knows stuff. She helped me get away from the robots by showing me a way out.” Kiera held out her hand. Pet landed on her palm, and she hugged the cube. “Is it okay if she stays with us, too?”
“Of course,” said Teryn, earning a suspicious look from Mala. “But I think you should keep her hidden for a little while. Not let anyone else see her.”
“Why?” asked Kiera.
Teryn brushed her hair off her face, smiling. “Until we’re sure the metal men are no longer looking for you. If someone sees Pet, they’ll talk about her, and if there’s something going on at the Citadel….”
“Undue attention.” Kiera patted the cube.
“Indeed.” Pet floated back into the air. “I will avoid detection by others until you decide otherwise.”
“Come see my room.” Kiera climbed off her parents’ bed and darted up the ladder with the satchel of comic book figures.
Pet floated up a second later, rotating in midair. The pale blue light from the ion thruster glowed like a bulb in the dim space. “It is… rustic.”
Kiera narrowed her eyes. “That’s a nice way of saying it’s small, dirty, and simple.” She laughed, placing the figures on her shelf. “I guess it is, but it’s home.”
22
Noob Gun
Two days later, Kiera spent a few hours in the afternoon with Teryn at the worktable behind the house going over her finds. All of the items she’d recovered still functioned without requiring repair, so he sorted them in value piles based on what he thought Norven would want. Much to her surprise, he put the dead smartphones in the topmost spot.
She blinked. “But there’s no network left… why would he want those?”
“The Citadel will pay many numbers for things like that, and those folding computers, or bigger ones. They want the information that might be inside, anything that teaches about the world before Cloudfall. Numbers can become food or medicine.”
Kiera grinned. “It’s weird to hear you calling it numbers. It’s like credits or money or something.” Oh.” She pointed. “That’s toilet paper. We are not trading it. It’s for us.”
“Toilet paper?” He blinked.
She explained.
“Huh… they made paper with no other purpose than cleaning your back end?”
“That’s what it’s for,” she sing-songed. “Butt paper. It’s soft. A lot nicer than those old books.”
“Well that explains why all the trees died.” He chuckled. “I can’t believe they’d be so wasteful. Using up paper for that.”
“Maybe. What else would they do? Laser our butts clean?” She giggled.
He chuckled and ruffled her hair.
She picked up the gun, aiming off into the forest. “This thing looks like the noob gun in TCS.”
“It fires noobs?” asked Teryn.
Kiera laughed. “No… I mean it’s the weakest weapon in the game, the one you start with. But in the game, it fired balls of orange light. This is a real laser. You can only see the beam if it goes through like dust or fog or something. I bet it wouldn’t take shooting someone forty times to kill them like the noob gun.”
“You don’t have to shoot someone forty times to kill them… unless your aim is poor.” Teryn rubbed her back.
“In the game. It’s stupid. The gun is weak only because it’s the one you start with.”
Pet glided out the window and floated over. After landing on the table, the glow ceased, so it looked like one more piece of mysterious salvage. “The weapon has a self-regenerating powercell. It can fire about fifty times before it needs to recharge. If all fifty pulses are used rapidly, the capacitor will be ready to fire again in about four minutes. The powercell will last for a total of about 2,500 pulses before it needs to be replaced.”
“Umm, how old is it now?” Kiera looked the pistol over. A small screen above the trigger showed 72% above 100%. “Wait, I think I found it. It’s got all fifty pulses ready, and the main cell is at 72%?”
“Correct,” said Pet. “Kiera, this is not a video game. If you fire that weapon at someone, they will die.”
“I know. I’m eleven, not stupid.” She patted Pet. “I don’t want to shoot anyone… except maybe those buttheads who kidnapped me, but….”
“They’re already gone.” Teryn squeezed her shoulder. “They can’t hurt you anymore.”
“Yeah… How’s your leg?” She glanced over at a huge dark bruise on his thigh. “That looks bad.”
He rubbed the spot. “Ehh. Still hurts a bunch inside, but not so much I can’t put weight on it when I need to.”
“But it’s so… purple.”
He jabbed his finger into a spot a few inches from where the arrow got him, and didn’t flinch. “It’s blood under the skin. The medicine closed the hole, but the inside parts still bled.”
“Oh. So it’s okay?”
“Yes. No fever, no sick.” He took a deep breath and smiled. “I would catch another bolt in the leg if it kept you away from bandits.”
She grabbed on and hugged him. Her other dad
probably would’ve been willing to do the same, but she didn’t remember him much. Did I lose my memory being frozen, or was he never home?
“Hey, no sad.” Teryn ruffled her hair. “You’re not going to go running across the refuge and find more bandits to chase you, right?”
“Nope.”
He chuckled. “Then don’t feel sad. Bandits don’t come here anymore… and before you say those three did, they came here to trade, not to be bandits. They didn’t expect to find you, and when they did, they got stupid.”
“Yeah. Hey… Watch this.” Kiera pointed the laser at a distant dead tree stump, aimed for a few seconds, and fired. A wisp of smoke rose from both sides of a clean dime-sized tunnel all the way through the wood, as well as a spot of ground a distance behind it.
Teryn reached over and took the pistol out of her grip. “Perhaps you shouldn’t be playing with that.”
She grinned sheepishly. It felt kinda weird being treated like a child in a broken world, but also normal enough that she didn’t mind. Bio-dad would never have let her touch a real firearm. “Yeah, probably not. But it’s cool, right?”
“It’s not warm or cold.” He brushed his hand over the side.
Kiera laughed. “No… ‘cool’ means good, fun, interesting. You know… cool.”
He shrugged. “Cool.”
“Food is ready,” called Mala from the door.
Kiera spun around on the box she sat on, facing the house. “I would have helped!” She stood.
“It’s all right. It was not a lot of work.” Mala walked out to assist Teryn, but he wobbled to his feet before she got to him. “Don’t. You’ll hurt it more and take longer to heal.”
He balanced on one leg while she ran up to take his arm. “I’m fine. It’s healing.”
They shuffled inside. Teryn put the laser pistol up on a high shelf, and let Mala guide him to a chair at the table, which had been set with metal plates holding long slices of grilled potato as well as the all-too-familiar yellow protein bars. The room smelled like potatoes and omelets, due to the bars having been heated over a fire as well.
Kiera ran over and hugged her parents together. “Thank you for taking me in.”
“The Sky Spirits brought you to us for a reason. I had been asking them for a child for many years.” Mala kissed her on top of the head. “As soon as you walked up and asked me for food… From the moment I saw the look in your eyes, I knew you needed a home.”
Wiping away her happy tears, Kiera took her seat and dusted her potatoes with a pinch of pepper from a small bowl in the middle of the table. She hadn’t plunged into a nightmare. Kiera Quinn didn’t flop on a bed in perfect suburbia, dreaming about a ruined world. No, this place of tribes and dust was as real as the love she’d developed for two strangers she’d stumbled across a few months ago.
She looked at her parents, who watched her eat with broad smiles.
This is my world.
23
The Seeds of Genesis
Like she did whenever Ashleigh slept over, Kiera stayed up too late talking to Pet.
Her new friend even sounded a bit like her, not by voice so much as the way she glided from topic to topic at random. The cube had perched on the top shelf in the little cabinet, among the row of figurines. She’d left the toy rocket ship and ancient teddy bear in the middle. Though she felt too old to play with either one, they belonged to this room. Also, if ever she had a sibling, she’d give them to the baby.
Pet had happily rambled on about the village, her new friends, even video games and some of the comic characters the figurines represented. Evidently, Bio-Mom had been a massive geek. When Kiera realized she’d forgotten herself and thought she chatted with Ashleigh about some of the bands she liked―in the false VR world―a cloud of gloom came on and she decided to go to sleep.
Kiera awoke in near-total darkness, drowning in sweat. Droplets slid down her cheeks, gathering at her neck. Tickles crawled on her legs wherever her poncho hadn’t adhered to her skin. No air moved in her room, leaving her in a cinder block oven. She groaned and sat up, flapping the dog-leather garment at her chest. When that didn’t help much, she decided to take it off, which made her feel much cooler right away. She lay the swath of hide across the mattress, fur side down, and wobbled to her feet. Dripping trails of perspiration ran over her body as she descended the ladder to the main area, noticeably less stifling than her second-floor bedroom. Her parents slept in their bed, looking content.
A table near the front door held the large plastic pitcher they used to bring water from the collector in the middle of the village. She grasped it in both hands and raised it to her mouth, gulping down mouthful after mouthful. Despite being tepid, it felt like drinking pure life. A fair amount dribbled down her cheeks onto her chest, and on down her legs, but she didn’t care. If not for being wasteful of drinkable water, she’d have dumped the whole pitcher over her head to cool off. She squinted at the back door, contemplating a midnight swim, but the river would be cold enough to shock her awake.
Once she couldn’t swallow any more, she dragged herself back up the ladder and oozed into an ungainly heap on her mattress, fanning herself. When it struck her that it didn’t bother her at all to lie there with nothing on, she chuckled.
I guess I have become a primitive.
She lacked the energy to laugh at the reaction Bio-Mom or Bio-Dad would have had to catching her sprawled in bed like that, and managed a weak smile. After a while of staring dazedly at the ceiling, exhaustion won over discomfort, and she drifted off.
She opened her eyes to daylight, still baking. Sticky and miserable, Kiera groaned and pulled herself up to sit on the edge of her thin mattress. She may as well have been on the floor, but at least it offered cushioning. After wiping her eyes, she crawled to the ladder, turned to go feet first, and wobbled down into the house. The room spun in a disorienting blur of half-awake haze. Between not sleeping well and still being overheated, she couldn’t tell if she’d actually gotten out of bed or only dreamed she’d woken up. On autopilot, she felt her way to her chair at the table and sat. The old fake leather cushion squished warm against her sweaty skin.
“You’re awake,” said Mala. “Something wrong with your dress?”
It’s not a dress; it’s a poncho. Just a sheet of hide with a hole in it… and a hood. “It’s so hot, and that thing is fur. It’s so hot today I can’t breathe, even without it. I couldn’t sleep.”
“I thought so.” Her mother set a bowl made of scrap metal in front of her. “That’s why we let you rest for a while longer. Are you going to leave it off all day?”
Kiera sniffed at the contents. Beans, roasted over a fire, but allowed to cool. She picked up a spoon. Her mother didn’t sound ready to scold her for it, more curious. “Thinking about it. It’s horrible today. Too hot for clothes.”
“Your face isn’t red anymore.” Mala sat and slid two pieces of bread across the table.
“Yeah.” She shrugged, somber as her mind circled around all the things she no longer had to worry about: tests, school in general, bedtime, laws… No one would yell or make fun of her for not getting dressed. On the other hand, having enough food to survive had become a question mark. “The world isn’t the one I remember. I’m part of the tribe.”
Mala ruffled her hair.
“It’s 110 degrees,” said Pet, gliding down from her bedroom.
It’s like April now, right? “Ugh. It’s gonna get hotter.”
Pet landed on the table by her right elbow. “It has cooled off somewhat compared to the world you remember. This is unusually warm for the spring. Highs around this time of year have been about 110-112, not the 130 degrees you remember from 2033. It might reach 120 in the dead of summer, though. The worst recorded temperatures before the citadels began processing hit the 150s.”
“A hundred and twenty? How do people survive that without air conditioning?” asked Kiera.
“In the summer, most of the village spends the daylight
hours in the lake. We often sleep outside on the back porch so the wind is on us. You aren’t used to it, but we manage.” Mala smiled.
The strong black pepper flavor on the beans made Kiera cough on her first mouthful. She eyed the bowl of it on the table. It had been such a normal thing to see, it didn’t strike her as unusual until that moment. “Where’d you get pepper? I thought all the plants died.”
“Norven spends his numbers for things from the Citadel he then trades to us,” said Mala.
“Probably synthetic.” Pet glided over and landed next to the bowl. “Or from the hydroponics farms.”
Kiera nodded, shoveling beans into her mouth.
Dad limped in, grinning. “Good morning, sweetie.”
She looked up. His chest, shiny with sweat, rose and fell with rapid breathing. He braced a hand on the table and eased himself around to stand by her, not putting any weight on his right leg. Mala gave him a disapproving look and shook her head. Kiera stood and managed an awkward sweaty hug before sitting again.
“Don’t sit down so fast.” Dad winked. “I brought you something.”
Kiera got up again.
Dad took his left arm out from behind his back, and let a bundle of pale beige fabric drape into the form of a child-sized dress. The garment had a plain design, but appeared to be the same thin material as Mala’s dress. A few microchips as well as tiny, peanut shaped resistors banded with stripes of blue, red, orange, and green decorated the area around the neck and along either side of a short slit down the front.
“This is a lot lighter than the poncho.” Dad held it out to her. “Bela makes them, but it takes her quite a while. I’d asked her to make it for you weeks ago. Seeing you overheat this morning reminded me of it.”
Kiera wriggled into it and fluffed her hair out from under the fabric. It breathed a lot more than the dog hide poncho, and weighed almost nothing. The hem stopped a hand’s width above her knees. She admired it for a few seconds before flinging herself into a firmer hug than before, overcome by a sudden upwelling of emotion, more than when Bio-Dad had given her the Supernova 2 for her eleventh birthday. She’d asked for it, and he’d gotten it. Her reaction had been excitement, but nowhere near as emotional as what hit her over a simple dress. Six hundred dollar console and I’m a wreck over a dress that makes Walmart clothes seem expensive. This is so weird! She wiped happy tears. “I love it! Thank you so much!”
Citadel: The Concordant Sequence Page 22