[scifan] plantation 01 - plantation

by Stella Samiotou Fitzsimons

  It shouldn’t upset me that he’s willing to take risks. We are all in danger as long as we breathe. There’s no escape from that. My reaction is a little hypocritical, because of what we are, but also because Finn has protected me all my life and I’ve never complained about that. Finn is the only reason I belong with the Saviors at all. Where he is, I should be. This may be the only thing I know for sure.

  We come from the same breeding village and the same plantation, Finn and I. Plantation-8. We were transferred to the plantation separately when we turned seven years old like all other children, Finn a year ahead of me, leaving our mothers and younger siblings behind in the breeding village. Ever since, Finn has been my only family and comfort. He has protected and cared for me, has given me part of his food ration when I felt weak or sick, has tucked me in and stroked my hair when I couldn’t sleep.

  And he came back for me. He didn’t have to but he did.

  Finn escaped from the plantation when he was fourteen, trusting that the rumors about the rebel bands of teens were true. It took him a year and a half before he came back for me and by that time I had lost all hope that he would return, or that he was even alive. I missed him and I had to fight back tears as I was under surveillance all day. At night, I unleashed my fury on my pillow, punching it, biting it, screaming into it. Being trapped was bad enough, but without Finn it was nearly impossible to endure. Yet, I was happy for him. I hoped he had found what he was looking for.

  During daytime, I performed my duties and my training along with the rest of the kids. Under the watchful eyes of the Sliman guards, we trained in martial arts and combat, we were instructed how to use our mental skills to strengthen our bodies, we cleaned and cooked, we received booster shots of who knows what substances and gulped down a handful of pills daily.

  We went through numerous tests, exams and presentations of our progress. We learned to read and write. We were disciplined for the smallest failures. Our guards and masters used electricity and invasive lasers on us through some handheld devices called sensory receptors, strong enough to cause terrible pain and fear without permanently harming us or killing us.

  But Finn came back for me. He came back to the plantation when I started to believe I’d never see him again. I was almost fifteen at the time and had lost all traces of my childhood.

  Finn waited for me in the dorm room I shared with four more girls. He grabbed me from behind as I stepped inside at bedtime and put his hand over my mouth. I was not very social so Finn hoped I would be the first one to rush to bed while the others socialized in the common area. It was the only socializing time we were allowed.

  “It’s Finn,” he said. “Don’t scream.”

  “Who?” I asked as soon as he released the pressure on my mouth.

  He turned me around to show me his face. I knew the face but not the name. I almost let a cry out despite his warning.

  “Ace!” I whispered. “Why do you call yourself Finn?”

  I used to call him Ace and he called me Tick when we were out of earshot. Not fair at all, I know, but it was short for ticklish which I was and am.

  He surveyed me from head to toe as if trying to determine whether it was truly little Tick he had in front of him.

  “No time for explanations,” he said at last. “We have to get out of here.”

  “Out of here? You mean the plantation? It’s impossible. They’re using rotating scanning cameras now. A lot of things have changed since you left.” I paused before I added, “Because you left.”

  “Everything is possible, Tick. Just tell me one thing. Do you trust me?”

  I looked straight into his green eyes. He had changed. He was taller, more muscular, sunburned. He seemed determined and confident. And he had come back for me.

  “I do,” I said. “Show me the way.”

  We got out through the back window and crawled for about a hundred feet. What we were attempting to do seemed so preposterous, so impossible that I felt my heart was going to jump out of my chest. I expected the Sliman to pounce on us at any moment.

  Finn took out a small touchpad device and keyed in a few numbers. The scanning cameras above us stopped rotating and came to a complete standstill.

  “How did you do that?”

  “A little magic,” he said with satisfaction on his muddied face.

  Since the new scanning cameras were put in place, the Sliman patrols on the perimeter had lessened. The rotating cameras covered every square inch of the camp within seconds and could sense movement, as well as light and sound. Anything remotely out of the ordinary would be immediately reported to the Director’s office.

  “With change comes opportunity,” Finn would later say of that night. When the plantations beefed up their scanning technology, they relaxed on their physical security measures.

  Finn and I stood up and started running towards the electric, twenty-foot fence. I saw an opening that was oddly just big enough for us to fit through. Standing on the other side, I saw what appeared to be the most severe and beautiful girl I had ever seen. Daphne held the wire in her hand. Her long blonde hair shimmered in the night wind. The first time you see Daphne, you never forget it. Her eyes are bright even in the night like a nocturnal creature.

  “Quick,” she said. “The electricity will come back at any moment.”

  We hurried through the opening and I almost bumped into Damian who was standing on the other side. He didn’t even bother to look at me. He and Daphne put the missing piece in its place and fused it back into the fence with lasers. Damian quickly restarted the electric field.

  The distant plantation lights began to spin then as I became lightheaded. Damian threw me over his shoulder and began to run into the dark forest. He managed somehow to run and stabilize me against his massive shoulder at the same time. I felt like I was floating down a river of trees. The sweat on his neck smelled almost like an exotic fruit. Tangerines, maybe, and then I must have faded off to sleep, calmed more with each stride away from the plantation.

  The next thing I remember is entering the camp of the Saviors. They told me I had slept for hours. That’s when I realized Damian’s incredible strength. He had carried me through rough terrain half the night.

  I now know that Daphne had hypnotized me but at the time I thought it was being in Damian’s arms that relaxed me enough to fall asleep.

  They introduced me to the others but I was overwhelmed. I fell asleep again as the sun came up and slept all day. It was my first freedom sleep and it felt like nothing I had ever dreamed.

  When I woke in the evening, the moon shined so brightly down through the tree tops that Finn cast a shadow on the outside of my tent when he approached to check on me. We discussed everything that was on my mind, beginning with his escape and ending with my rescue.

  Finn would not answer my final question. He would not tell me how he came to be known as Finn. He said he would show me the next morning.

  He took me to an old, half-destroyed building in Lost Town just after dawn. A battle between human and alien forces must have taken place here with every human either dying or being enslaved. For whatever reason, Lost Town was left in its spot to be swallowed up by surrounding woods.

  Finn guided me inside the building through the half-open door. Books were scattered everywhere. This place was a library, he explained. He pointed at the numerous volumes on the damaged shelves and he made me be careful not to step on the books piled up on the floor. There were a few books placed on tables he said not to touch. As we walked, I noticed a few books here and there on shelves that stood out. They were cleaner than the rest which were all shrouded in dust and loneliness.

  He told me that I could choose any book from the shelves and pick the name I liked the best in it. If I didn’t find anything to my liking, I could move on to the next book and so on.

  That would be the start of my new life as a free person.

  “We’re reborn when we leave the plantations,” he said, “and every birth require
s a new name.”

  His name had come from a book called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He found his book and handed it to me. I asked him why he chose to leave the book in the library, why he hadn’t taken it with him to his tent.

  “Everything has to remain as it is here,” he said. “There can be no sign of change. We can never be too careful.”

  I did not have the heart to tell him that even I had spotted the cleaner books—even his little Tick could spot where the hands of the Saviors had touched.

  In theory, he was right. I know now that Sliman scouts can pick up the smallest details. The Saviors had been lucky and had never seen any Sliman in Lost Town and so they returned again and again.

  I scanned the shelves for several minutes and ended up with a five-hundred-page book. Mythology, it said on the cover. Finn wasn’t happy with the size of that book but he took me back to the library every day until I finished reading and picked my new name.

  I would be Freya, queen of Valkyries and warrior goddess. I had no idea what it all meant. We had no access to history or mythology books at the plantation, but I got hooked immediately, traveling back into worlds long gone, worlds of complete wonder and imagination.

  It’s hard to think of Finn and not recall the breeding village as well as my mother, my brother and my two sisters. I can barely remember their features but I carry them with me. We do not know our fathers. The men were housed at the far end of the village and most of them were field laborers.

  My brother was three years older than me and so he was harvested when I was four. All of the children got harvested when we reached the age of seven. My two younger sisters must have both been harvested by now, too. My mother would be by herself. Her health was already failing when I was harvested ten years ago and the aliens allow only the fittest to become part of the breeding lab procedures. It’s doubtful they’d let her have more children.

  Her face was completely blank when they came to the hut to pick my brother. She planted a kiss on his forehead and told him to be a good boy. Then she returned to her usual business. She mentioned my brother, her son, a couple of times the next morning and then seemed to have moved on.

  Her reaction was not a surprise. That’s how adults reacted at the breeding village. They were passive, they didn’t comprehend initiative. They talked only when absolutely necessary in short and simple sentences. They had no care in the world other than performing their daily tasks. The women raised the children they gave birth to after the infants were treated in the labs.

  In the library I found a book about zombies once and I immediately thought of the mothers at the breeding village. They had been turned into zombies through some process I wasn’t aware of, doomed to a life devoid of meaning and hope.

  We have many theories about this here at the camp. Doc used to participate in lab experiments back at his plantation, Plantation-4. That’s why we call him Doc even though he’s only seventeen like me. He has seen firsthand what the aliens are capable of and how far they are willing to take their experimentations. How they can manipulate genes and DNA to create a new species, like the Sliman mutants, or how they can control minds and desires.

  Finn has a theory of his own and it’s called lobotomy. He read it in a medical book at the library. Rabbit asked Finn to stop talking about this in his presence. Deep down Rabbit hopes that he will be able to cure his mother some day of whatever it is that they have done to her and that he will make her a whole person again. He doesn’t want any pieces of her brain missing.

  There are so many thoughts going through my head right now to stop me from thinking about the one thing that terrifies me most. Finn’s disappearance.

  I reach the Armory with shaking limbs. It is the room where we keep most of our weaponry and our limited ammunition supply, but it is also the place where we hold meetings, both scheduled and unscheduled. We’ve been using the abandoned facilities for the past two years. Our best guess is the place was abandoned because the thick vegetation all around the clearing, where the facilities were built, gets in the way of certain alien frequencies, making communication with the plantations shaky at times.

  The aliens picked up and moved about a hundred miles to the south to a newly built and far better equipped headquarters. The bonus is double for us—we can use all the technology that we were able to repair, thanks to the ingenuity of Theo and Zoe, plus we are shielded from the alien radar and other tracking devices which allows us to go about our business unnoticed.

  I open the door and enter the meeting. Late of course. My heart soars, then sinks. I think I might be hallucinating. Finn sits on a chair. His face is covered in scratches and dry blood. His shirt is filthy and tattered and his hair messy.

  Doc is cutting bandages to wrap Finn’s hands.

  “Nobody touch him!” Doc orders when he sees me. “He just got back and I haven’t determined the extent of his injuries yet.”

  I stay at a safe distance, afraid I won’t be able to control myself and end up hurting Finn more with my affection. “Finn, you stupid boy, what did you get yourself into?” I ask him.

  Finn ignores my concern and chuckles, causing himself a sudden pain. “Just that, Tick. Something stupid. I was trying to get to a rare flower and fell down a rock face and into a deep ravine. I lost my touchpad on the way. It took me an eternity to climb back out.”

  “A rare flower?” I ask, dumbfounded.

  Finn pulls away from Doc and shoves his mangled hand into his pocket. He pulls out a dying and somewhat smashed purple flower. The color is glorious even in its reduced state.

  Tilly, one of the younger Saviors, walks to Finn to take a better look at the flower. “It’s beautiful,” she says. “Have you ever seen such color?”

  “I got it for you, Freya,” Finn says, locking his eyes on mine.

  “Oh,” I say. “A rare flower from a rare idiot.”

  Damian looks like he wants to say something, but he and Daphne just leave the meeting. Rabbit and Biscuit hurry to join Tilly and me by Finn’s side. It’s hard to yell at him any more while his little admirers surround him.

  Tilly forces me to take the flower into my hands. The fact that it’s beautiful and mangled just reminds me of beautiful and mangled Finn. My anger increases. He’ll get himself killed protecting everyone and trying to be thoughtful every second of the day.

  “What do you think?” Finn asks.

  I glare into his bright eyes and resist the urge to slap him. “You know what I think,” I say and storm out of the Armory, still holding his flower.

  Chapter 3

  Evening is approaching fast and I haven’t had a chance to speak to Finn alone yet. His account of yesterday’s events during the morning meeting still rings in my ears. Finn didn’t quite slip down that ravine after he discovered the purple flower he gave me. He got startled by voices in the trees behind him—Sliman voices. That’s the closest Sliman have ever been to our camp and facilities. This piece of news is as serious as it gets.

  It’s getting dark and the heat hasn’t broken yet. The only place that offers relief is the shade of the gigantic red trees behind my tent where the thick part of the forest begins. I sit by the root of one of the older trees, taking in the evening scents and sounds.

  Doc startles me a little as he emerges from the shadows.“Finn’s fine,” he says with a smile. He looks around aimlessly before he adds, “He will be just fine.”

  I nod and start picking at my fingernails. “I heard you the first time you said it, you know,” I say just to tease him.

  “You’re right, I’m sorry,” he says as he sits down next to me. His dark eyes are as benevolent as ever. Doc is one of the kindest, gentlest people that ever lived. He apologizes even when he hasn’t done anything wrong.

  “Don’t be sorry, Doc. I’m just teasing you.”

  “Well, you’ll be glad to know that we’re having a training session in a few minutes,” he says, looking at my fingernails. “You should probably stop biting them. It
’s not very hygienic.”

  “Back up,” I say. “A training session? This late in the day and in this heat?”

  “Don’t shoot the messenger,” Doc says, raising his arms in surrender. “It wasn’t my idea.”

  “Let me guess. Daphne?”

  Doc gets up dusting off his pants. “Just come to the combat ring, Freya. It’ll be fun.”

  Training with everyone around is never fun for me as I seem to be the only one with no special skills. I take out my knife and start carving on a piece of wood. I’ve become good at that. I always get good at pointless things.

  Not ten minutes go by when I’m startled again by the sound of footsteps on the fallen leaves. I know it can’t be Finn because no one can ever hear Finn coming. He moves like a cat and he’s more flexible than a rubber band. I still wish it could be him somehow, though.

  Soon afterward, Damian shows up. “Why are you still here?” he says, taking a quick glance at the carved wood in my hands that is shaped like a boat.

  Yep, this was a bad idea. I should have gone to the training session and just got through it. Instead, I have to explain myself to Damian.

  “I was about to come and find you,” I say, putting the knife in my pocket.

  I walk past him, hoping he didn’t come prepared to give me a lecture.

  “What about your boat?” he says.

  “What?” I turn and see my little carved boat in his hand. “I don’t want it,” I say. “I make one every day.”

  Damian shrugs. “Maybe I’ll keep this one.”

  “Suit yourself,” I say, rather bewildered that he would care for a badly made toy.

  At the combat ring, the Saviors sit down in a circle. Damian plops down right next to Daphne. I quickly check out Finn before I sit next to Zoe. His head and hands are bandaged but he seems to be doing fine otherwise.