by Eliza Green
Stephen. Why had the alien given itself a human name? Was it the easiest way to blend in?
He scooted his chair over to the window and used a pair of magnification glasses to watch. Was it luck that the ITF had rented this very apartment that overlooked Belgrave Square Gardens? But even with the glasses, he couldn’t see past the trees to the bench and the location of the meeting.
He’d sent his team out a second time to monitor events on the ground. Caldwell and Page were under strict instructions to stay put. As was he. The recording device inside the bear would act as his eyes and ears that day. Surely the Indigene would not suspect an innocent toy?
He checked in with his team, who remained on standby near the bench where the meeting was due occur. With moments to go, the images changed from grainy to clear. He hit the record button on his DPad and leaned forward, staring at the screen.
14
From behind a cluster of large trees, Stephen watched Ben skip to the bench where they’d arranged to meet. A bout of empathy for the loner boy hit him out of nowhere. He shook it off and evoked images of his dead parents, to remind him of why he hated the Surface Creatures. Last night Pierre had told him to keep an open mind about this invading race, and that not all were bad.
Easier said than done.
His doubt had led him to question his leader. ‘How can you be so sure?’
Pierre had smiled. ‘Someone told me once to look past the exterior.’
Stephen shifted his body on the spot to give the appearance of invisibility. The Surface Creatures could not process images at certain speeds. Nobody seemed to notice him when he performed this action.
Two military figures lingered close to their meeting place. Their musky scents settled in his nose. But he didn’t fear them, knowing he could outrun them.
Stephen’s covered skin prickled with heat as the rising sun warmed the cool morning air. Anton had reduced the thickness of the skin, but not by much. The protective lenses shifted against his eyes. His air filtration device felt bulky in his nose and throat. With a deep breath, Stephen tried to calm down. He could do with some of Elise’s ability right now.
‘Everything will be fine if you stick to the time limit.’ Those had been Anton’s last words to him before he surfaced.
The area close to the bench where Ben sat was too crowded. Maybe he’d made a mistake picking this spot. He waited for the area to empty a little. While maintaining his invisibility, he recalled the Surface Creatures’ earliest attack on Exilon 5, thirty years ago. The attack had altered the way the Indigenes lived forever. The tunnels, colder than the surface, had protected his race from the severity of the blasts, but living underground was only supposed to be temporary until the worst of the airborne chemicals had dissipated.
At age six, he’d observed the changes that followed through the actions of others. The explosions had tainted the surface air, but with those changes came a hope that the air would soon be breathable again. He had watched the first of the exploratory groups swap the air-controlled environment for the surface, but their venture had been short lived.
‘The air is still poisonous. Nothing remains,’ one reported with a raspy cough.
‘Everything is covered in a thick dust,’ said another.
Their cities, their homes—the places where they once socially gathered, discussed, meditated—no longer existed. The atmosphere, polluted with harsh chemicals, burned their throats. Most adapted, some did not. But they’d created a new home underground. Those with a heightened spatial awareness sped up the excavation by analysing the rock’s composition and finding its weak spots.
Throughout the years, Stephen kept his own notes about the conditions of the surface as seen through others’ eyes. If the scientists’ and his own calculations were correct, then the last of the chemicals should have been absorbed by the land. Excitement and expectation followed, but what happened next shocked them.
From the chemical haze, a new atmosphere emerged. This one contained high levels of oxygen and some nitrogen—a mix too corrosive for them to breathe. Pierre and Elise followed this news with an order to hermetically seal all entrance points to District Three. The elders of other districts followed that same plan. Scientists rushed to design a synthetic protein for long-term use, to replace their main food source.
Then, strange patterns started to appear in the weather. Yellow and orange hues filtered through light shafts in the district. Pierre ordered the shafts to be sealed when the tunnels began to heat up. Soon after, the Surface Creatures arrived.
It was yet another sunny day in the city called New London, so different to those times. The trees gave Stephen a reprieve from the harsh temperatures. He missed the atmosphere of old: cool air and grey skies with only glints of sunlight peeking through.
But what he missed most was hunting. It was in his blood.
His chest heaved with the memories of better days. But his attention drew to the boy who had removed an object from his bag and placed it beside him. With the area quieter than before, Stephen released his body from its invisibility. Gasps from the military followed his run to the bench, where he sat down.
The black-haired boy jumped with fright. His eyes were wide. ‘You scared me. Where did you come from?’
Stephen vaguely pointed somewhere. ‘Just over there.’
‘Well, don’t scare me like that again. I’m not supposed to be here. If my mum finds out...’
‘I forgot you don’t move at the same speed. That was a natural pace for me.’
Ben narrowed his gaze. ‘How fast can you move?’
‘Five, six times as fast as you.’ He wanted the military to know he was a threat.
‘Cool.’
Stephen looked at the object between them. ‘What’s that?’
Ben’s face lit up. He held the bear up high. ‘It’s a teddy bear. You can’t get them anymore, but this one was a present. His name is Snuffles, because his nose looks funny. Kinda upturned. Do you like him?’
‘Present from whom?’
The boy hesitated. ‘My Dad.’
Stephen looked into the reflective black eyes of the toy. He brushed his hand lightly across the furry exterior, surprised at how soft it felt.
Ben sat the bear on his lap, angling it so it looked at Stephen. ‘How long have you been here for? Were you waiting for me by the trees?’
‘No, I arrived moments before you did,’ Stephen lied.
‘This is really early,’ said Ben. ‘Why are we meeting in these gardens instead of at the bus stop? Why did you want to meet at seven in the morning? I know why I’m out this early. It’s so my mum doesn’t know where I’ve been. She doesn’t like me going out. I don’t know why. She barely knows I exist—’
Stephen sat rigidly as the boy chattered on. He fixed his gaze on a statue of a woman holding a child and used his peripheral vision to scan his surroundings. When it seemed like there was no end to the boy’s chatter, Stephen forced himself to relax.
Ben looked up at him. ‘I asked you why you wanted to meet this early.’
‘I prefer this time as there are fewer of you about. Also, we met at the same time last week, if you remember.’ He delivered the line smoothly. Speaking at their slower pace was getting easier.
Ben laughed. ‘Oh, yeah. I forgot.’
A silence lingered between them. The boy narrowed his eyes at Stephen.
‘Why’s the skin on your face a different colour to your arm?’
‘I told you, I’m wearing a special covering to protect my skin from the sun, and to blend in.’
‘Why? What’s wrong with it? Why would you need to blend in?’
Stephen answered only one of those questions. ‘There is nothing wrong with it.’
‘Why do you need to protect your skin? It’s not even ten degrees yet. It’s not warm.’
‘I prefer a cooler climate and little to no sun.’
Ben’s eyes flicked from Stephen’s covered face and neck to his patchy arm, where t
he artificial skin had lost its pigmentation. ‘Your skin looks weird. In parts it looks see-through, like on your arm.’
‘My skin looks translucent, but it is not.’
The boy’s eyes widened. ‘If you ate something, would I be able to see it go into your stomach?’
Stephen shook his head. ‘It’s an illusion, that’s all.’
The boy sighed. ‘That would be much cooler if you could.’
Stephen wondered about the differences between their species. How breakable was the boy’s skin? ‘Your skin appears to be thinner than mine. Is it waterproof?’
Ben shrugged and squeezed the bear’s stomach with his fingers. ‘I don’t know.’
Stephen reached into a waste-bin at his end of the bench and fished out a half-empty bottle of water. He unscrewed the cap with one hand and extended the other to Ben.
‘May I?’
Ben shrugged again and held out his arm.
Stephen limited his contact with the child. The tips of his fingers tingled when they brushed off Ben’s warm skin. He tipped the water over the child’s arm; it beaded and rolled off.
‘That’s interesting,’ he said releasing Ben’s wrist. Then he nicked him.
‘Ow!’
A drop of red blood leaked onto the boy’s trousers from where he’d scratched him.
‘Apologies.’
Ben huffed out a breath. ‘S’okay.’ He rubbed away the bleed that had already stopped. With a yawn he said, ‘Do you live in a house?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Well where do you live, then?’
‘Near the Maglev train station.’
He screwed up his face. ‘Really? You live underground where it’s dark and cold? Why don’t you live up here with everyone else?’
‘Because we cannot survive in this atmosphere.’
‘Which station? New Charing Cross or New Waterloo? Because I’ve been to both, and I guess I could visit you there sometimes.’
‘I don’t live in the station itself.’
An all-female group entered the park and performed warm-up exercises against a nearby tree. As they began their walk, the oldest female’s gaze lingered on Stephen and Ben. Stephen tugged on his hat, pulling it down over his eyes. The female gasped when his partly covered arm fell into her view. She looked ahead and increased her pace to catch up with the group. He readied himself to leave, in case they doubled back. But to his relief, they disappeared into the trees.
A movement under his left elbow broke his concentration. Ben had opened his backpack and was pulling out a sandwich wrapped in plastic. He placed it on his lap and tore at the packaging. The smell made Stephen gag.
Ben picked up one half and took a bite. He held out the part he had slobbered over. ‘Want some?’
Stephen covered his mouth. ‘No, please, take it away.’
‘You don’t like jam?’ He took another bite.
‘I can’t... eat that.’
‘My mum says I can’t drink milk because I’m allergic. Is it the same as that?’
‘My stomach cannot process a lot of the foods you easily consume.’ A breeze caught the smell and swept it away. His stomach settled.
‘What do you eat, then?’ Ben licked off a blob of jam that had dropped on his thumb.
Stephen averted his eyes and stared at the nearby sculpture. ‘We survive mostly on the blood, and sometimes meat, of animals. We need large amounts of iron in our diets.’
‘Are you a vampire?’ he whispered. ‘They drink human blood, though, not animals. I don’t want you to eat me, please. My mum would kill me if I got myself killed.’
Stephen was vaguely familiar with the stories from the Surface Creatures’ literature. The images of the sharp fangs amused him. ‘No, I am not a vampire. We eat animals as your species did during early civilisation periods. We just don’t alter the meat’s composition with heat, as your stomachs prefer. We hunt without tools. Our physical strength can overpower any animal.’ Stephen hoped the military were listening. And that they wouldn’t test out his hunting skills today.
‘Oh. My mum buys meat pies sometimes. There’s animal in those. I could bring you one if you’d like. Then you wouldn’t have to kill any.’
The beginning of a laugh bubbled up into his throat. ‘That won’t be necessary.’ He suppressed it, reminding himself as to why he’d risked his life a second time: to get answers.
Ben finished his sandwich and pulled out a container filled with an orange liquid. He drank some and pulled up his legs onto the bench.
‘Why do you eat iron? Is it like the stuff you get in a scrap yard? I wouldn’t think that tastes nice.’
‘My body does not produce many red blood cells because I don’t live in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. We require less oxygen to breathe and because of our bodies’ low levels of haemoglobin, we are naturally deficient in iron. Our stomachs absorb the iron directly from the blood. It gives us strength.’
The boy seemed to relax. Soon, it would be Stephen’s turn to ask his questions.
‘We breathe a different composition of gases. That’s why it’s difficult for us to stay up here. Where we live, we can control the air we breathe.’ He waited for Ben to digest the information.
‘If you can’t survive here, then how are you breathing the air?’
Stephen smiled at the boy’s intelligence. ‘I use a device that helps me to breathe. Naturally, to all appearances.’ With the disappearance of one of their young Evolvers a year ago, he was sure the military knew all about their air filtration devices.
He had broken many rules, not least his plan to keep an emotional distance from the boy. He’d shared a wealth of information with the military who were probably listening. But this mission would be the last one. From this moment on, he was certain the military would set traps for the Indigenes, possibly tagging the food source to uncover the location of their districts. He had to make this meeting count.
Stephen asked Ben about the Surface Creatures’ physiology, the foods and drinks they enjoyed. He moved on to forms of entertainment: what they liked to do, where they liked to go. A pattern emerged that showed alarming similarities between the two races. Stephen would never accept their similarities.
He still had one question left, the one reason he’d risked his life to come to the surface: Who were the Surface Creatures?
‘I asked you last week what you call yourselves. Do you remember what you said?’
‘I told you, I’m English.’
Stephen shook his head. ‘Perhaps I need to be clearer with my question. What does your species call itself? We only know you as Surface Creatures.’
He waited, acutely aware of his depleting air supply. Suddenly, the child smiled. ‘Oh, you mean human?’
‘Ah, human,’ said Stephen, nodding. ‘Thank you.’
A cold fear ran through him. His heart fluttered in his chest. Every part of him strained against the temptation to flee.
Human. It was the last thing he’d expected the boy to say. Philosophers, dreamers, people—that was how Pierre’s books described them.
He sensed the military’s murderous eyes on him again, preparing to track him as they’d attempted to the week before. They’d seen how fast he could move. But he hadn’t even scratched the surface of his top speed.
Human.
The boy’s eyes grew large when Stephen stood. This time he offered no explanation for his leaving. This time he ignored the boy’s pleas for him to stay. He raced towards the exit, close to where the military had stationed themselves.
‘Where are you going?’ the boy shouted after him. ‘What did I say wrong?’
Everything.
You are human.
Stephen’s mind raced faster than he ran. This changed everything.
The time for gentle talks was over. The elders needed a better plan than to do nothing. And it involved the Indigenes fighting back.
15
‘We’re going after the target,’ said Caldwell into hi
s earpiece.
Bill growled into the comms device that connected all of his team. ‘No, stay put!’ The audio and visual inside the teddy bear was still operational. ‘That goes for all of you.’
‘Bullshit, Taggart. Sitting around isn’t going to help.’
‘You have your orders, Caldwell.’
Bill clicked off and strode to the window. A flash of something exiting the left side of Belgrave Square Gardens caught his eye.
‘To hell with it.’ He defied his own orders and left his apartment, taking the stairs two at a time to the ground floor. One of his neighbours was coming in the entrance. Bill pushed past him.
‘Excuse you!’
Bill didn’t stop to apologise. He couldn’t. The New Victoria station wasn’t far. It was also rush hour, and he prayed a dense crowd there would slow his target down.
Adrenaline pumped through his body. His beating heart roared in his ear. Someone spoke through the comms device, but he couldn’t hear what they said.
His focus narrowed in on the path ahead as Bill searched for signs of the Indigene. He caught a figure dressed in brown making his way through the crowds, slower than Bill knew he could travel. Bill injected new pace into his pursuit.
Caldwell came through his earpiece. ‘I thought you said no pursuit, Taggart.’ He sounded out of breath, like he was running.
‘I changed my mind. Keep off this channel and out of sight.’
Speed was working to the alien’s advantage, but not the unfamiliar terrain in New Westminster. The alien stumbled where the crowds had forced him to slow down.
Bill heard the rumble of the Maglev train beneath his feet, heading towards New Victoria station. He had to reach the alien before he made it inside. Despite the blaze in his lungs willing him to stop, he pushed on.
One turn brought the station into sight and the rush-hour traffic Bill had hoped for. Up ahead, the dense crowds had slowed the Indigene’s pace down to a walk.