Danger's Race

by Amanda Carlson

  From the backseat, Maisie spouted, “Females and males are fundamentally different. Females have mammary glands necessary for the production of milk, and sexual organs to facilitate—”

  “Stop, Maisie,” I commanded, thankful she immediately ceased speaking. “No need for a male-versus-female discussion at the moment. We’ll let you know if and when we need to be educated on that front.” I needed a topic change, and fast, preferably one that Maisie couldn’t participate in. I asked Case, “Do you think Tandor’s father is still alive? Or do you think we’ll hit a dead end?”

  “Hard to know,” Case answered as he began our descent out of the clouds, much to my relief. “Tandor was definitely not all there, but he was educated. I’ve heard tales over the years about the tribe down there. When I was in my early teens, we heard a rumor that it was made up of scientists and mathematicians on the run from the government. We never encountered them, as I said, but it would make sense, given what Tandor was in possession of. As for his father being alive? I have no idea.”

  Daze piped in, “My dad was a scientist. At least I think he was. My mom said he was good at math. And he worked for the government for a while.” His tone was more than glum. Poor kid. I understood how bad it sucked not to know your dad.

  I turned. Daze’s father being a scientist was interesting information. “What else do you know about him?” I asked.

  “Not much,” Daze replied, fiddling with the ends of the cloth separating his body from Maisie—who was thankfully quiet. “My mom never wanted to talk about it. The only information I ever got was when she was talking to somebody else and she didn’t think I was listening.” He sounded a little defeated. I’m sure he regretted not pressing his mother more before she died. “She was mad at him for leaving.”

  “Did she think the government did something to him?” I asked. That happened often enough. “Or did he go on his own?”

  Daze shrugged. “I don’t know. But he left one day and never came back.”

  My eyebrows rose. I didn’t want to upset the kid by informing him a scientist would have likely taken his supercomputer with him if he’d gone on the run. My guess was the government had interfered. Maybe Daze’s dad had uncovered some corruption or found out something he shouldn’t have. It was impossible to know. Gently, I asked, “Why do you think he left his pico behind?”

  Daze picked up a cup and turned it over in his hands. “I think, maybe…he wanted to give me and my mom a chance.”

  “I’m sure he did,” I said. “I’ll tell you what, when we get back to the city, I’ll look into it. You met Claire already. I bet she can help us figure out which department your dad worked for. You said you were named Robert, after your dad. Do you remember your surname?”

  Before Daze could answer, and just as Case cleared the clouds fully, Maisie erupted, “The barometer is dropping, precipitation is imminent. The temperature is fifteen degrees Celsius.”

  “Any crafts in the area?” Case asked.

  Maisie replied, “I detect no crafts in the area.”

  Case turned the power back on, and everything sprang to life. The readout on the dash said that we were heading straight east.

  “Are you heading to the sea?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Case answered. “That’s the easiest way. If there’s a tribe down there, they’re likely going to be located close to the ocean. If Tandor’s father was working on a cure for Plush, based on the formula we saw, and sodium alginate was necessary, it would be located by saltwater.”

  I turned to the kid once again. “While you were being held against your will, did Tandor ever mention his dad? Did you overhear anything?”

  He shook his head. “No. Tandor acted like he was a god. I didn’t even know he had a dad.” The kid looked thoughtful. “But one time he did say something about the ‘hovel’ he was forced to grow up in. He sounded angry about it, but I didn’t know what a hovel was. I’d never heard that word before.”

  Before I could elaborate, Maisie said, “A hovel is a simply constructed dwelling, often small, squalid, and unpleasant. Can be humble, dirty, and disorganized. Not recommended as a residence.”

  “There you have it,” I said, chuckling. It was nice to have a dictionary handy. “So he mentioned living in a hovel? Anything else?”

  “He kind of made it sound like it was underground.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “I don’t remember much else,” Daze said. “I wish I did. He just said he was done living in a hovel and he’d be damned if he had to live underground like a hibernating rat again.”

  “Rats do not hibernate,” Maisie explained. “Hibernating animals include bears—”

  “Stop, Maisie,” I said. She complied, and just to ensure a little Maisie-free time, I ordered in an unnecessarily firm tone, “You will remain quiet for the next ten minutes, unless an emergency arises. If a craft or a UAC enters the area, you can alert us. Otherwise, remain silent.” Her lights dimmed, and I shrugged, not knowing if the request would take or not, but glad I’d tried. I focused my attention back on Daze. “Keep thinking about it. Maybe something will come to you.”

  “Okay, I will,” he said.

  I glanced out the window. In the distance, the ocean consumed all the available horizon. The sea was dark green, almost black. The waves were roiling, whitecaps crashing down everywhere my eyes tracked. Before I’d met Case, I’d been to the ocean only one other time, when I was young. Bender had taken me there to see its wrath. It had been a terrifying sight. But this time, I felt more in control of myself. “It seems my body is trying to make peace with the ocean,” I mumbled.

  “Maisie could prove that,” Case joked. “All we have to do is ask her.”

  “Very funny,” I said. “But it’s true. It still scares me, but I’m less worried.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I plan on hugging the coast, not going over open water,” Case said. “There are no crafts around, and we need to be on the lookout for any human structures. We can’t see those if we’re over the sea.”

  Even better.

  “Anything is fine with me.” I shrugged. “I mean it. Pulse rate is steady.”

  Case gave a full-throated laugh. “We’ll see about that.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  My brain worked overtime trying to figure out how we were going to achieve our goals, so when the craft dropped altitude abruptly, I was startled. We’d been flying for almost two hours. I glanced over at Case. I couldn’t see his eyes, so I didn’t know if he was fatigued, but he seemed to be in control.

  I leaned forward in my seat, glancing at the dash, combing the ground below for any signs of life, like I’d been doing for hours, seeing only sand and sea. “Helena said that this tribe favors sonic blasters and bombs,” I said. “Do you think they have rocket launchers? Or will they only be an issue on land?”

  “I’m sure they have launchers,” he said, his voice raspy from not speaking much over the last hour. “My plan is to stick to the sand. As we get closer, we should see signs of human habitation. Flying directly over the town wouldn’t be advisable, but might not be avoidable. I’ll land at the first signs of life, preferably beforehand.”

  “Does anything look familiar?” I asked. “I mean, since you were here all those years ago?”

  “Not yet, but if memory serves,” he answered, “there will be several large sand dunes, along with the wreckage of what might’ve been some sort of resort.”

  I scanned below as far as I could see, targeting my eyes in a grid, like I’d been trained to do. We were looking for any hints that humans were currently living down there. If people were around, the topography should go from random to organized. That’s what people did, even when they weren’t trying to—they organized their space.

  We flew for a while in silence, my eyes working overtime. I knew Case was doing the same. Daze scooted to the side right behind me and peered out the passenger window.

  After what seemed like an hour, but was li
kely only twenty minutes, I spotted something. “There,” I said, jabbing my finger ahead of us. “I think I see something. It doesn’t look like more than a few lumps, but that area definitely looks different than everything around it. It almost looks like a dome. It might be nothing, but we should check.”

  Case immediately took us down, slowing our speed as he flew us over half sand and half-dead vegetation. The beach was wide, the sea crashing three hundred meters to our left as we neared the definite manmade objects.

  “What’s the plan?” I asked. “Are we going to land?”

  Case eased Seven straight down. “Yes. We should check it out. But we have to be on high alert. We don’t know how much firepower they have.” The craft made a soft landing on the spongy ground. The landscape was nothing but gently rolling dunes dotted with scrubby, dead bushes. We were approximately a half kilometer away from the strange domes. I could see the tops of two, which were partially hidden by the short rises. “On foot will be the safest.”

  “Agreed,” I said, lofting my door. “Those domes could very well be empty, but my guess is there’s something beneath them worth investigating. We’ve been in the craft for the right amount of time. We should be in the vicinity of the tribe, depending on how close they are to the sea.”

  We all piled out.

  I stretched my cramped legs. I’d never sat for this long in a craft before. In the city, I was always on the move. Without glancing behind me, where I knew Daze was, I asked, “Maisie, do you detect any human signatures? Feel free to skip the three of us.”

  Daze came up beside me as Maisie replied, “I detect three humans within three meters and one human within one hundred meters.”

  My eyebrows shot upward. There was someone here, but an individual only, rather than a tribe.

  “What do you think that means? Only one person,” I said to Case, who was busy covering Seven with the reflective cloth he’d brought with us. It was windy here, and he was doing his best to secure it with small clamps he’d had in the back.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “People need tribes to survive. Life is too brutal to live out here alone. So, even though the status reader’s only picking up one signature now, it could be that the rest of the tribe is just out of her reach, or they’re out on a mission.”

  Once he was done, we began to move.

  I withdrew my Gem. We had no idea what we were in for, and it was better to be prepared. “Maisie, which direction is the human within one hundred meters?”

  “South by southwest,” she answered.

  The dead scrub popped and crackled underneath our boots as we walked. It was slow-going, the roots intermixed with sand making the ground bumpy and brittle, like a burn that’d never healed. “I wonder why someone would choose to live so close to the sea. If there was another cataclysmic event, certainly a tsunami could reach those domes.”

  “People are creatures of habit,” Case replied, shrugging. “They stick to what they know, and these were likely built long ago. Change is hard.”

  “Even though humans are resistant to change”—which I knew to be true based on my own experiences—“our survival instinct overrides everything else—or it should.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “We won’t know until we get there and find out.” Case had his Pulse out, too. Neither of us were willing to take any chances.

  We trudged over a particularly large patch of black, crunchy, strawlike grass as the sea crashed behind us at regular intervals, shooting its dense, salty air up our nostrils. “If Tandor was raised here, in order to get up north to your old tribe and then on to the city, he had to have access to multiple crafts. So maybe the tribe is spread out.”

  “That’s my guess,” Case conceded. “We’re going to have to be extremely careful moving forward. If luck is on our side, we landed at the very edge of habitation in these parts.”

  We crested a short hill, and the tops of the domes we’d seen from the sky came crisply into view. They were perfect ovals. They weren’t very tall, no more than three meters at the crest.

  One was positioned closer to the sea, the other directly behind it.

  As we approached, we could see they’d been meticulously smoothed over and cared for. With the weather being what it was, keeping something like that looking good would take maintenance.

  “Maisie, how close is the human signature now?” I asked my new best friend.

  “I detect three humans within three meters.” Okay, not best. She had a ways to go to earn that title. “I detect one human within ten meters.”

  “Is the human underground?” Case asked, his tone quiet, his Pulse aimed forward. His steps were cautious, as were mine.

  I glanced behind me when the status reader didn’t respond. The kid held Maisie out in his hand. I repeated Case’s question.

  Within moments, Maisie lit up and replied, “The human I detect has a barrier made of carbon, earth, and human matter.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what the human matter was. I snickered at Case. “I don’t think Maisie likes you. She totally ignored your question.” He probably hadn’t spoken loud enough for her to hear. I addressed Daze. “You need to take cover while we approach whoever this is. If something happens, get back to the craft. I haven’t given you flying lessons yet, but I know you can figure it out. Are we clear?” He had Maisie, after all.

  “Clear.” His voice was thin, but confident. When we got home, after laser-gun training, I was going to teach the kid how to pilot a craft. I’d learned at age ten. Piloting was tricky at first, but once you learned the basics, it all came together. It was something he’d have to know. It could be the difference between living and dying.

  Flying out of a bad situation was often the best chance of survival.

  Daze made his way toward a small hill that he could crouch behind. I was impressed with the fact that he understood that these kinds of situations called for caution and that if we were trying to protect him, we’d have a hard time protecting ourselves.

  As Case and I crept closer, he went left, while I circled right.

  We headed toward the dome that was farther inland. That would be about ten meters, according to what Maisie had told us. We met up around the front, where a single titanium door was set into the structure, smartly facing away from the sea.

  Maybe they did have precautions in place in case of another surge. Now that I could accurately see the distance, the sea was fairly far away, and the domes were up a small incline.

  The door was set at an angle, following the curve of the dome. It looked a little surreal. There were no windows or any remnants of anything artificial or human-made lying around, just earth and scrub.

  “Well, are we just going to knock?” I asked. “I have a feeling that door has got a thick layer of graphene behind it. I’m sure whoever is inside has protected themselves.” It was a little odd to stand out here exposed, but what else were we going to do? If a bomb went off, it would become a very bad day.

  Instead of answering, Case moved forward, settling his hand on the lever. It was a crazy move, because it could be rigged. I felt like telling him that, but I kept my mouth shut.

  Nothing happened. He rattled it, but it was locked. He turned to me. “I’ll knock while you circle around back. There’s no reason both of us should be in the line of fire.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I’m around back or not. We could both be blown to hell in seconds,” I countered. “I’ll stay. You knock, and I’ll aim my gun. If anybody comes through that door with harmful intent, they’ll be down before they know what happened.” I scanned the dome again. “I don’t see any tech.” There were no radio antennas, cameras, or monitors attached to the walls. “Whoever exists here lives a crude existence.”

  Case nodded, then took the butt of his Pulse and rammed it against the metal door a few times. Hollow sounds echoed out. Whoever was down there had to have heard that. He took a step back, his arms out in front of him, barrel aimed. His gun was dis
gusting. It liquefied your insides. Totally effective, but a horrible way to go.

  We waited for what seemed like an hour, but in reality, only two minutes passed. I was just about to nod to Case to try again when a loud thunk sounded from somewhere inside. A lock being retracted. The door began to swing outward.

  I stopped breathing for a second.

  Being here wasn’t anything like in the city, where there were places to hide and protect yourself. We were standing out in the open. Anything could happen. I was glad the kid wasn’t around.

  A shock of white hair was the first indication that someone was coming through the door. “No need to aim your guns at me. I’m unarmed.” His voice sounded weary and frail, a grizzled hand curling around the doorframe as he took his time guiding it open.

  Once I glimpsed his face, I started breathing again, my mouth tumbling open.

  If I’d thought Cozzi was old, this guy was ancient. He had to be at least twenty years older. I’d never seen anyone reach that age before. Life-spans in the city were much shorter. People just didn’t live to see their doddering years. Unlike our ancestors, who’d lived well into their hundreds. When you could print new organs, longevity took on new meaning.

  He finally stepped over the threshold and drew himself up, looking us straight in the eyes. But he wasn’t able to get fully erect. His back was hunched, a padded mass visible over his left shoulder. His clothing hung off of his thin frame, several sizes too big. It didn’t look like this environment had done him any favors, although he was still alive, so that was something. “I said there’s no need to aim your weapons at me,” he wheezed, taking another shuffling step forward.

  My gaze slipped to Case as I lowered my Gem. Case’s arms went down as well. Even if this guy decided to pull a weapon on us, we’d see him telegraph it with enough time to retaliate.

  “Are you alone here, old man?” Case asked with genuine curiosity.

  “Yes. This is my home,” he said quietly. I had to strain to hear him.

  “Your tribe can’t be too far away,” I countered. “You can’t live out here alone.”