ARC: The Almost Girl

by Amalie Howard

  I look at my watch quickly, noting that I’ve only been out for a few hours. A quick check of my body, other than the welt on my neck and a cut on my lip from where I’d fallen, tells me that I’m otherwise unhurt. My pack lies off to the side, hanging drunkenly off one arm, and I hoist it onto my lap. They haven’t touched it. My blades are still snug against my back under my jacket. At least Shae hasn’t left me with nothing to protect myself, even though I wouldn’t have done the same.

  I haul myself up against the wall and stand, trying to get my bearings and ignoring the dizziness that threatens to make my knees buckle.

  “Get a grip, Riven,” I snarl to myself. “It’s not like you’ve never been on the wrong end of an electro-rod before.”

  Grabbing my pack, I remove the first-aid kit and pour some cold liquid from a slim bottle onto a piece of gauze, careful not to let it touch my fingers. I dab it onto my neck, a shiver snaking through me as an icy sensation immediately dulls the raw ache of the welt. The liquid anesthetic hardens into a thin, flexible shell over the sore area, its under-layer seeping into my skin to deaden raw nerve endings and rebuild cells. Within seconds, the pain is gone, and within an hour I know my neck will be as good as new.

  Normally, I’d just leave my wounds to heal on their own, but now I have no time to lose. The cell-regeneration remedy is yet another of my father’s inventions… and one that I’d steadfastly refused to use. Using anything of his makes me sick to my stomach, but now it’s a necessity to find Caden quickly. It’s a brutal reminder of what is at stake – I can’t let my hatred for my father affect my decisions and actions now.

  Pocketing the bottle, I try to reorient myself. I shine my flashlight down one end of the tunnel, and it’s soon swallowed up by the blackness. I do the same down the other end. Eyesight isn’t going to help me, so I close my eyes, engaging my other senses and letting the flow of the stale air in the tunnel waft around me. The changes are subtle, but they’re there – the ones that tell me which direction has more movement in the airflow.

  Without hesitation, I sprint down the tunnel on confident feet. Recalling the treacherous, veiny patchwork of the tunnel map, I know I can get lost with a single wrong turn, so I’m careful not to veer off the pathway. If I can make my way back to the place where the tunnels fork into three, I’ll be able to figure out which way they’ve gone and track them from there.

  I run past several other tunnels and alcoves that I haven’t noticed before, refusing to let any fear enter my mind. But it does, inexorably. And I know I’ve made the wrong choice.

  Just backtrack, I tell myself silently. Follow your feet, and trust your instincts.

  I can hardly help the next thought that follows that one – as my instincts had told me to trust Shae? But they hadn’t; my emotions had. I grit my teeth and press on, clearing my mind of any thought but getting to the end of the tunnel. And within minutes, I do.

  Only it’s a dead end.

  I punch my fist into the wall and a shower of pebbles scatters at my feet. How could I have missed a turn? I stayed straight, didn’t I? Could I have missed it somewhere?

  Think! I urge myself. I retrace the path in my head, then backtrack about half a mile before I see it – a barely discernable twist in the path. I had veered in the wrong direction into what was now clearly an offshoot from the main tunnel. I take a deep breath to calm my racing nerves. Things could be far worse. I could have ended up running in circles or gotten even more lost.

  Back on the right track, it’s no time at all before I am in the area with the four tunnels – the one that we’d come from, and the three we’d chosen between. Squatting down, I notice faint scuffmarks in the dirt in front of the tunnel on the far left. A slight color change in the ground suggests that this tunnel has been used more than the others. I check my watch. Shae and Caden are probably near the other end, if not out already, but the window of opportunity isn’t completely closed for me to track them. Still, I have to move, and fast.

  I’m just about to enter the leftmost tunnel when something stops me dead in my tracks – the sound of something heavy moving, something coming from behind me… something big. The hairs on the back of my neck stand at stiff attention, because I know that it can’t be Caden and Shae. They would never have gone back.

  It has to be Vectors. They’ve found us. Or more precisely, found me.

  I deliberate between making a beeline down the tunnel and facing them head-on. But I have no idea how many they are. For a second, my body feels like it is splitting down the middle with equal urges to fight and flee pulling me in opposite directions. It’s not in my nature to run, but fighting an unknown number of Vectors in such an enclosed space will not be to my advantage, despite my skills.

  I decide to wedge myself into one of the many alcoves lining the walls of the cave. I’ll get some idea of their numbers and assess potential attack options. And, at the very least, their tracking technology is far better than mine, and we are looking for the same thing.

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  Not that I’ll ever align myself with Vectors, but I will use them however I need to, and then get rid of them when I don’t. Hoisting myself up the cave wall, I find a recessed nook and crawl inside to wait, pressing my body back into the dark space until rocks are digging painfully into my flesh.

  My eyes adjust slowly to the muted dark of the outer cave. I’ve covered my scuffmarks in the dirt and sprinkled myself with anti-tracking dust from the bottom of my pack. They probably aren’t even looking for me, but I have to play it safe on the off chance that they are. My father has his own reasons for wanting me back in Neospes.

  It isn’t long before they enter the big cave: three of them, with one a familiar face, the ruthless commander from before. My teeth clench. The smell of them hits me like a rolling wave, the pungent scent of formaldehyde. Even though I’m used to it, it’s something that automatically raises the hairs on my whole body. In Neospes, we cremate our dead, except for the Vector soldiers, who are put through an unnatural rigorous embalming-like process. They carry the smell of death like armor.

  Halogen lights on their uniforms illuminate the cave. I watch the commander carefully. It was a tough fight earlier, and its ability to speak had been unnerving. I can’t help noticing that its bullet-ridden body has been completely repaired in a matter of hours. It’s nothing for our reconstructive technology – the technological differences between my world and this one are like night and day. But then my mind flashes back to the abundance of water in this world and extravagances like Caden’s waterbed. Limitless water over advanced robotics is a no-brainer. So is a world without creatures like these, without the Vectors.

  With inhuman stealth, the Vectors move purposefully, examining the ground in front of the three tunnels. The big one turns to study the rest of the cave, and I imagine his eyes slowing and stopping at my alcove. I can hear the blood rushing in my ears and the shakiness of my breath in the dead silence. I’m barely breathing, and even though I know he can’t possibly see me, for a split second, it feels like our eyes connect. Adrenaline rushes through my bloodstream, but then the moment is gone as he turns back to his subordinates, pressing a series of buttons on the wrist-pad of his suit to initiate the tracking device.

  “Two trails,” he says. His voice is guttural, and as before, it chills me to the bone.

  A red light streams from his wrist as it scans the entrances to both tunnels. Yellow markings spin through the red, more on the right than the left: heat readings. The commander moves over to that tunnel pressing another series of buttons, and the light switches to a pale laser-like blue. A long noise bleeps on his console, loud in the silence and almost making me jump.

  “The tracks return,” he growls and studies the device before stepping over to the far left tunnel to repeat the sequence. This time there are three short beeps, and he nods, satisfied. “The boy went this way. Move out,” he commands.

  The other two nod and immediately obey,
disappearing into the tunnel. For a moment, the Vector commander turns around and re-scans the room. His gaze doesn’t stop at my hiding place this time, but I can feel his suspicion, and this, too, is unlike the traditional programming of the Vectors. They operate by computer rules and programming algorithms, not instinct. Can he somehow sense me? He punches another sequence of numbers into the wrist-pad, different from the ones he used before. Unconsciously, I press myself deeper against the wall and ignore the searing slice of stone against my skin.

  My heart jumps into my throat as he flashes the same blue tracker in a slow clockwise circle. I can only hope that the anti-tracker dust will do its job. As the blue light filters into my cave, I can see the analysis data in the light discoloring its surface, and I hold my breath. These scanners are built to analyze individual scent – yet another advanced biometric profile weapon incorporated into the suits – almost like electronic sniffer dogs. Terrified, I wait for the beeps that will surely come if he’s looking for me, but there’s no sound.

  The light moves past my cave, but I don’t exhale until the Vector Commander has completed his scan and followed the other two into the tunnel. My muscles remain clenched until enough time has passed by, when I scramble out of my cramped hiding space. It takes only a couple minutes for my blood to recirculate through my body, but I am already moving, digging through the bottom of my pack and locating the infrared glasses I couldn’t find earlier. There’s no way I can see in the dark or use the penlight – they’ll see me coming from a mile away.

  I head into the tunnel, walking as quickly as I dare. I am tracking on scent alone, the unique smell of their dead flesh wafting on the stale air in the tunnel. The sharp odor of it makes me remember the first time I saw one of them.

  It’d been during a time when my whole family was still together – my father, my mother, Shae, and I – a time before betrayal and lies ripped us apart. At only six, and one of the youngest recruits, I’d been released from training early and called to my father’s underground experimental lab. At the time, he was the head scientist in the advanced robotics and genetic testing facility, and already navigating the waters of reanimating the dead with cyborg technology.

  Using my unrestricted passkey – being his daughter had its privileges – I found him on one of the lower levels in one of the test labs. Unnoticed in a corner of the outer office, I stared fascinated through the glass wall into the room beyond where my father had just finished decontaminating a corpse on a long silver table. Decontamination, my father once explained to me, meant getting rid of all internal bodily fluid and unnecessary organs, and preserving the remaining husk and heart with an electro-chemical solution.

  “It’s all biological,” he said to me. “The body is a capable host, even though it’s no longer alive. With the nanoplasm, we can use and program these shells to operate almost as well as a fully functioning live person would. And they would make even better soldiers, as there’s no emotion, just programming.” He paused then to look at me with dark, narrowed eyes. “And the beauty of them is that they’re expendable. One command, and the nanoplasm shuts down. No loss, nothing compromised. Think of it as a type of recycling.”

  “How do they go to the bathroom?” my perfectly logical, then six year-old self asked in all seriousness. My father smiled widely and lifted me onto his desk.

  “Smart question,” he answered. “The simple answer is that they don’t. We remove all the parts that we don’t need, like the kidneys or the liver or the stomach. We keep the heart because it moves the nanoplasm around the body, and we keep part of the brain and spinal cord to process the information we give it.”

  “What makes it go, then? Like how does it work? What do they eat?” I cocked my head and frowned. “It’s not a robot, is it?” Even then I couldn’t keep the trepidation out of my voice, having learned about our violent history in my civilization lessons. The Tech War had obliterated our world, leaving the sparse little we had now as a harsh lesson of the perils of artificial intelligence.

  “No, princess. They’re safe. This nanoplasm responds to programming only. It’s not self-aware.” He patted my head reassuringly, as only he could. “And they don’t eat anything; they have a special lithia core that keeps the heart pumping and the brain ticking. Once you compromise the spinal cord or the brain, it’s an automatic kill switch. Don’t worry, sweet; it’s all under control this time.”

  “What are they called?”

  “Vectors.”

  The entire process disgusted and fascinated me at the same time. I couldn’t imagine, even then, how a dead person could be used as a soldier, and watching my father at work was the first time I was able to see the process up close and personal. I remained crouched in my corner, thrilled and terrified of being caught, watching as my father and his team worked the corpse from top to bottom.

  Machines around the body beeped constantly, with long tubes of various sizes connected to the table. They were filled with metallic-colored fluids. Slowly, in succession, two of the tubes were emptied, and then combined into a larger tube before being injected into the dead man’s body. Two of my father’s assistants exited to another adjoining secure room filled with flashing computer screens. My father followed them just as the third tube with the silvery blue fluid slowly started emptying like the others into the body beneath it.

  He punched some numbers into the keypad on one of the desktops. Something was starting to happen in the room. The corpse on the table bucked and began convulsing against the metal shackles connecting it to the table. I could see the bunched muscles of its arms and legs cording as if it were in terrible pain, even though my father had said that they couldn’t feel anything. And then suddenly, it stopped moving, and the only noise was the flatline sound of a long beep.

  “Dammit!” I heard my father swear and punch the wall before stalking out of the room into his office, where I was hiding. He raked his hands through his hair as he studied some papers lining his desk, grinding his teeth in frustration. Not wanting to get caught in the crossfire of his anger – which could be nasty at times – I curled my body into as tight a ball as I could manage, pressing myself into the wall behind me, and prayed that he wouldn’t notice me.

  “We did the sequencing right. What did I miss? What did I miss?” he muttered to himself before punching a button on the intercom and hissing to his assistants, “Get me another prepped body. We go again in thirty minutes!” Without even looking in my corner, he left his office through the outer door, slamming it behind him. A shaky breath left my mouth but I stayed curled tightly for several seconds before standing very carefully.

  The area was empty… except for me and the Vector lying on the table. I couldn’t help myself, knowing that I only had a few minutes before my father or his assistants returned, and without hesitation, I punched in the code on the inner door. My birthday. In hindsight, I always wondered how my brilliant father could be so clueless or predictable as to use his daughter’s birth date as a code on one of the most dangerous areas in the facility. But the thought of it made me feel warm inside – he may not be the most demonstrative of fathers, but this was a sign, a sign that I mattered. Ignoring the warning clench of my stomach muscles, I pushed open the door.

  Inside the room, I approached the body with trepidation, even though I knew it was not operational. The test had failed. My nose wrinkled against the suffocating chemical smell that caused my eyes to sting. Still, I inched nearer. Up close, the thing was huge – a dead giant of a man. His skin was a dull gray color, bleached out by all the compounds stopping it from decaying, but the metallic fluids now inside of him still gave his body muscular definition. Clad only in a pair of medical undergarments, his bare chest and arms were sleek and hairless, his head shaved. I moved closer to the table and placed my hand carefully alongside the hand caught by the metal shackle on the table. They were ten times the size of mine!

  A long red scar on the giant’s side caught my attention and I bent closer. This was wh
ere the lithia cell my father had told me about would have been inserted to connect to the lower spine. I ran my finger along the cold line of flesh and shivered. It felt like clammy linoleum. The man also had a tattoo running along the top of his thigh that read, “Test Specimen 74.” Seventy-four of them they’d already burned through… no wonder my father had been so upset. It wasn’t like we had dozens of dead people lying around; as a society, we valued life too much.

  I was so intent on staring at the number and thinking about how little of us were left in our tiny pocket of the world, that I didn’t feel the yank on my head until it was too late, and the tears were already springing to my eyes in agony as something hauled on my braid with brute, uncompromising force.

  Panicked, I wondered whether my hair had gotten caught on the table somehow, and twisted despite the tearing sensation on my scalp to see what I was caught on. Instead, I found myself face-to-face with a milky-blue stare that was so devoid of any life that my terror made me freeze completely.

  The giant was alive! But it wasn’t possible. The experiment had failed.

  At the exact moment that I realized that the experiment hadn’t failed, the alarms in the room went off, and things galvanized into motion as the dead man broke through the steel shackle like it was butter – oblivious to the silvery-blue fluid that poured down its forearm from where the sharp steel edges had razored through flesh – and taking my head with it until I was half spread-eagled over its body. It was as if my head were on fire, my skin tearing off of my skull and my hair loosening in whole clumping handfuls.

  Close up, its eyes were even more terrifying, sucking the life out of me with their blank deadness, completely devoid of any soul. The thing opened its mouth, and I started screaming. I didn’t stop screaming, not until hands pulled me back, and I felt someone cutting away its grip on my hair. Voices fluttered in and out. I could see huge steel needles being jammed into the thing’s side as people tried to hold the giant in place, until it finally shut down. I glanced at its face once more, and even though it was completely lifeless; its colorless blue eyes still stared at me as if the creature wanted to swallow me whole.