by Peter Telep
Across from us, over in the den, he’s switched on the TV, and Hedera’s sitting there, watching a DVR recording of his favorite show.
“Will you accept this rose?” the bachelor asks.
“Hell no, I don’t!” I shout at the TV, drawing Hedera’s attention.
She fires up her persona. The head glowing over her palm says, “Doc, this is so weird!”
I march over there, grab the remote, and change the channel. “Hedera, you had one job.”
“I know, and I’m sorry, but Keane thought I should watch this to learn about love on Earth.”
“Here,” I say, changing the channel. “Get back to watching the news, like we told you. I get that it’s depressing, but you need to tell us if you see anything about missing people.”
“Okay, but I like how they use the rose as a symbol,” she says. “And I love how the flowers here are just like Flora’s.”
“That’s awesome, but watch the news. Please.”
“Okay,” she says through a deep sigh.
I drag myself back into the living room.
Feeling even weaker, and with my attention divided between my body on Earth and fleeing in my persona on Halsparr, I collapse on the couch.
I sit there a moment, watching Steffanie and Meeka argue over where a certain cable should be attached to the engine.
And then, after long, weary breath, I shrink deeper into the couch, and my view dissolves into a valley of black grass rushing toward me.
* * *
Cypress doesn’t flinch as the chopper plunges toward the field. I shudder and imagine the bike smashing apart as we hit the ground and go tumbling.
With a quick nod from her, the grren personas acting as our tires swell to twice their size.
In three, two, one we’re thrown forward, but the tires take the brunt of the impact as Cypress grunts and adjusts her grip on the handlebars.
“Keep your head down,” she hollers.
I clutch her waist and tuck into her shoulder as we plow through grass rising as high as a cornfield.
Blades rip across us, and the grren tires begin to growl under the effort. Behind us, the grass gets flattened along three distinct paths.
“They’re still back there,” I tell her.
She looks for herself and then tucks in her elbows. The chopper accelerates.
The cut grass oozes a purplish liquid that smells like marshmallows when you open a fresh bag and stick your face in it. The stuff’s getting on my bare arms and legs and burns a little. In fact, my persona’s “skin” is full of red slashes, with more being drawn by the second.
“Cypress, the grass hurts.”
“I know, Doke. I try to slow them down.”
And with that, she cuts the wheel hard right, racing up and out of the valley and toward another felt road ahead—
And something else I didn’t recognize from a distance.
A bridge.
Technically, it’s an overpass like the ones near major highways, only this one is so overgrown with weeds and shrubs and trees that the road beneath is completely blocked. Just a few patches of light leak through from the other side.
If I blur my vision, it’s just more jungle, but as we draw closer, signs draped in creeping plants sprout from both sides of the road. They’re too faded to read. However, once we race past them and reach the top, the next valley appears, and it’s obvious what lies below… or what did.
Imagine the City of Violet, destroyed by a nuclear blast about fifteen years ago.
Now take that same city, freeze it in time, and allow nature to move in and devour it for a thousand years, maybe longer.
I can’t say this place suffered a nuclear blast. There’s nothing obvious like the massive crater we have in Violet. It could’ve been destroyed by war or something else. However, it’s definitely abandoned, with skyscrapers destroyed and covered in the greens and blues and dark reds of the jungle.
Only the rooflines and some exposed cornerstones suggest people once lived here. Most of the streets are clogged with undergrowth. Piles of rubble found everywhere on Flora are just grass-covered hills here.
In the distance, behind the crumbling humps of buildings, lies a cluster of domes. They, too, wear heavy coats of vines coiling their way around massive leaves shaped like crescent moons and triangles.
As we race down the overpass, following the winding road toward the city, Cypress glances back, gasps, and then nods.
The chopper jerks forward, nearly throwing me off.
“Ow! You need to tell me when you’re gonna do that!” I cry.
“Don’t be scared,” she snaps.
“I’m not!” I lie.
A droning sound lifts from behind us—
And here come our three assassins.
Cypress banks hard left, following a strip of road barely a foot wide. The humming of our grren tires deepens as we thump across a thick carpet of weeds.
“They want to kill us because…” I trail off, careful not to phrase it as a question.
“Because I’m woven, and they think you are, too!”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
She just growls at the question (my bad) and yanks the handlebars, steering between grassy mounds rising like cones on an obstacle course.
Behind us, the lead assassin rears back with a blue spear and throws it.
But that’s no spear—
It’s some kind of animal with black-and-blue speckles, like a snake holding itself stiff.
The snake bursts into a widening cloud of at least a hundred shimmering personas.
They arc through the air, and then level off, heading toward us, propelled by hundreds of tiny, hexagonal-shaped scales that sprout an inch from their bodies and flap so fast they disappear like a hummingbird’s wings.
I expect to hear a whoosh of air, but these things sound like bacon spitting and crackling in a frying pan.
“Cypress, he threw something!”
She looks back and shouts, “Syncarr!”
I’m not sure if that’s a curse or a name.
“They smell us,” she adds.
“The syncarr smell us,” I repeat.
“Yes,” she answers.
“We can stop them,” I say, expecting her to tell me how.
“Maybe...”
“Wrong answer.”
She elbows me in the ribs. “Tighter now!”
With a death grip on her waist, I hold my breath as she barrels straight toward the largest hill, a slope like something you’d find in a landfill with a piece of blackened and moldy stone jutting from its side. Aw, damn. I see what she’s doing now. She’ll use that hill as a ramp.
Meanwhile, behind us, the syncarr have tightened the gap to twenty feet. Their heads narrow into gleaming white spikes. Eyes bubble up from behind the tips.
Chills rush across my spine as I face forward and—bang—we hit the hill.
My stomach drops as we rumble up and, whoa, I start sliding off the back of the chopper. I’m losing my grip.
“Let me jump,” I tell Cypress.
“No jumping,” she screams. “Makes it worse!”
Not a second after the words leave her mouth, we leave the mound and soar over a street choked by jungle.
Our shadow glides across dark and curving leaves like oversized umbrellas until we bang down—
And come to skidding halt on the side of a building that toppled into the one next door, forming this crooked, lower case h. Although webs of vines conceal most of its surface, the darker corners of windows appear here and there in what is now our floor. These windows lead straight off toward a ledge, where the top of the building was shaved off.
“I do this,” Cypress says, tugging off my hands like she’s removing a belt. She climbs off the chopper. “You go!”
“What? No! What’re you doing?”
Before I can argue, the chopper takes off, and it’s all I can do to lean forward and grab the handlebars.
Howev
er, since my ride is now in the hands of, or, more precisely, in the paws of my grren tires, there’s no need to watch the road. I glance over my shoulder.
And my heart sinks.
Cypress stands there like a helpless little girl beneath a storm of glowing syncarr.
The creatures gather into a tighter cloud, zoom straight up, and then streak down—
Screaming toward her head.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Take me back!” I order the grren while sending them an invitation to connect. “We can’t leave her! Come on!”
The grren personas ignore me and speed off toward the ledge.
“Oh, yeah?” I shout. “See ya!”
I stand and throw myself off the bike, hit the vine-infested building, and go tumbling toward the edge.
As I roll within a foot of plunging off the side, I picture the spot where Cypress is standing—
And jump right next to her, arriving on my feet. “I need to get home! So I’m not leaving you!”
She looks at me and shows her teeth. “No, Doke!”
And then she points to the sky—
Where the cloud of syncarr targets me instead of her, and they’re a breath away.
My jump must’ve trigged something. Maybe they pick up trrunes the way I do, or maybe someone who’s just jumped gives off a scent that excites them, because they’ll shred me now, which will damage my wreath and probably kill me.
At the same time, the three assassins on choppers charge toward us.
Cypress drops to one knee. She closes her brown eye and bows her head for a second, like she’s meditating.
“What’re you doing?” I scream.
She ignores me, raises her arms and extends her palms. Now she gasps as a beam of golden light shoots from her cat’s eye. Balls of lightning seem to pulse through the beam with each rotation of the ring floating there.
This single beam divides in half, striking the backs of her hands, outlining them in more shimmering gold.
Her hands tremble as more beams shoot from them and grow into shields of tumbling hexagons that remind me of the sixrobe my grandmother used against the masks.
Jagged bolts of blue-green energy form links between the hexagons, and the shields themselves grow into giant, six-sided canopies that block the sun.
Before they can change course, the syncarr collide with the shields, and one after another they’re shredded as the hexagons break loose and slice through them.
As the pieces of syncarr fall, they morph into harmless vines and leaves fluttering toward the ground.
“Energy is neither created nor destroyed. But it can be changed,” my grandmother once said.
I remain there with my mouth wide open, totally oblivious to the assassins still barreling toward us—
Until I’m yanked by the wrist.
“Doke!”
We whirl around. The chopper’s waiting for us. Cypress does that flying leap into her seat, totally badass. I struggle to get behind her and nearly fall off as we rocket away so fast that my vision blurs.
Now we’re climbing high across the side of the collapsed building, rising toward a sheer drop.
Once we near the ledge, I guess we’re two hundred feet off the ground. The wind tugs hard on our shoulders. I don’t usually fear heights, but Cypress’s driving has me trembling.
With a hiss, she leans hard, pulls a fast one-eighty, and then blasts straight down at the assassins.
“We’re giving up,” I shout.
“No!” she screams, fighting for breath.
I’m not the only one confused.
The assassins draw back their heads, and one of them, the guy to my left, reaches into a quiver strapped across his back and withdraws another syncarr.
As he raises his arm, Cypress pops a wheelie. Once the front wheel has left the ground, the back one catapults us into the air for a few seconds—
And then we come crashing down, butt first, through one of the windows.
The glass, or whatever it is, shatters over us as we fall toward a wall or floor littered with debris. A shaft of bright light spreads across the floor as the chopper smacks down onto both tires, and we rebound like we’re on springs.
Cypress grunts as we skid and rattle forward—
Until the floor collapses under our weight, dropping us into the next room.
I’m not sure what this place was, maybe an office building, but the furniture is so mangled and destroyed and blackened with mold or moss that I can’t tell.
She jerks us around and steers for an opening in the wall or ceiling. Another shaft of light lies ahead, shooting up from our floor, beyond more piles of collapsed walls.
The chopper shakes so hard that it might fall apart as we scale the mounds, leaving clouds of swirling white dust behind us. Meanwhile, the ceiling rumbles.
The assassins are inside.
Cypress’s breathing gets worse. I want to ask if she’s okay, but I just hang on as she speeds up—
And we drop head-first through the opening, plunging through all these smashed out windows and straight through the entire building.
The brighter light stings my eyes for a second before I’m able to look down.
The jungle-covered street seems smaller because we’re still over a hundred feet above it.
The grren begin to expand, but we’re picking up speed. They start whimpering now because there’s no way they can absorb an impact from this height.
Behind us, one of the assassins falls toward us, still on his chopper. His arm is extended, his syncarr ready to fly.
I holler for Cypress to do something—
Because if she can’t, then I’m jumping, and if she’d just connect, then I can take her, too. I send her an invitation.
She rejects it and looks back, releases one hand from the bars, and then fires another beam that flares into a shield of hexagons.
The syncarr ignites into a flickering cloud of death.
Cypress’s shield is much smaller this time, barely larger than a kiddie pool, and it does tear through the syncarr, but not all of them. At least three slip past and zoom on.
Now the shield spreads across the assassin as he tries to project his persona.
The persona only makes it half way out of his body before both of them are caught in the web of hexagons, along with the bike. They’re converted in a flash.
As the shield vanishes, clumps of branches and more leaves scatter away.
Cypress shouts something, as though giving orders to the grren, but it all sounds garbled in the wind.
Another look over my shoulder leaves me cursing because the syncarr who slipped through are about to strike.
Seeing this, Cypress tears my hands from her waist—
And elbows me off the bike.
“What the hell?” I shout, but I’m already tumbling end over end, the jungle and back side of the building swirling into a spiral of grays and greens.
Just then, something latches onto one hand and then the other. I brake out of the spin, jerk upright, and begin floating gently down.
One of the grren has snatched me and expanded his body into a parachute filling tightly with air.
I yank around, searching for Cypress, who’s floating about twenty feet away. She releases one hand from the grren. Her cat eye flashes. A dim beam of light shoots forward through her hand. The shield of hexagons looks weak and no larger than a garbage can lid.
One syncarr gets shredded, but the other two evade, dividing course now to target each of us.
My grren tightens himself into a smaller chute, and we drop way faster than before.
Cypress’s grren does the same.
But—damn!—the syncarr catches her in the shoulder and she wails.
I reach toward her, feeling totally helpless, when the other syncarr stabs my grren. He roars and lets me go.
And now we’re both falling, our screams echoing across the building.
I widen my eyes, hold my breath, and focus on
the jungle below, on a specific spot: a dirty brown patch between two trees that looks pretty good.
Balling my hands into fists, I jump there.
Whew. Made it.
Meanwhile, the grren who saved me expands and soars in like a skydiver wearing a wingsuit.
But he’s coming in too fast and crashes into the treetops, tumbles through, and rolls to a halt in the shrubs. Dozens of broken branches and leaves fall behind him.
The chopper arrives next, smashing through the trees until it’s hung up between two limbs that bend like rubber bands but don’t snap.
Next comes Cypress, gliding down between the trees with her brown eye closed, her head hanging limply.
As her boots touch the weeds, the grren morphs into a spongy bed behind her, allowing her to fall gently back to the ground. He morphs again, back into his normal persona, and slides out from beneath her.
Hissing now, he bites the syncarr jutting from Cypress’s shoulder, clamps down, and tears it out. He shakes his head and snaps the thing in half between his teeth. The syncarr squeals as both halves drop and squirm before dying.
After growling at his dead enemy, the grren pushes his lips around her wound. He makes a slurping sound, as though he’s sucking poison from her shoulder. I guess he is because he turns and spits hard. His saliva sizzles as it hits the weeds.
Seeing this, I run over to the other grren, who’s back in his cat form. He’s lying on his side and whimpering over the syncarr sticking out of his hip. He keeps trying to reach back and rip the creature from his flesh.
Gritting my teeth, I drop to my knees and grab the thing. Those scale-like wings flare and try to pry me off. I tug hard. The grren yelps… and finally… the syncarr comes free—
But now it’s like holding a firehouse under high pressure. The creature tries to shoot off, dragging me across the jungle, and, for just a few seconds, it lifts me into the air.
The other grren leaps toward me with his fangs glistening, his inner teeth exposed.
He bites the syncarr just below my hand, tearing off a nasty piece. Watery pink blood streams from the thing before it goes limp.
I sigh, toss away the other half, and then trip and fall into the weeds.
The grren who helped me rushes to his brother, drops down on all fours, and begins sucking the poison from his brother’s hip.