ARC: The Almost Girl

by Amalie Howard

  “How’s she doing?” I whisper with a nod at Shae.

  “I’m fine, little sister.” Her voice is barely a wheeze, but her grip is strong as she grabs my hand. “It’s time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “You know what: to go,” Shae says. “We can’t last in here. They’re already out there. There’s too many, and the only way is to evert. Now.”

  “But we can’t. We need an eversion point.”

  Shae wheezes again. “Hand me my bag.” She pulls out the silver case I’d given her. There’s one injector dose left. She stabs it into her leg, wincing, and places the empty cartridge next to her on the ground. She pulls out a white bag and removes two more injectors. The liquid is a deep jewel blue color. “It’s the serum we’ve been working on.”

  “What if it doesn’t work?”

  “It does. I’ve used it,” Shae says with a smile. “To get away from you. We were trying to refine it. The aftereffects were bad on the nervous system.” Her smile turns sad, and something inside of me crumples. “As you can clearly see. Someone had to be the test rabbit. I’m just glad it was me.”

  “Shae–”

  “Riv, you promised, remember?” A thin dribble of blood leaks out of the corner of her mouth. Her voice is urgent. “When you inject it, evert right away. Run as fast as you can on the other side, because you’ll be in the Outers. You have thirty minutes to evert back before the serum becomes compromised. That should be enough time to get you away from them in any direction. After thirty minutes, you’ll need to find an eversion point to get back here. Whatever you decide, keep Caden safe.” Her fingers clutch mine, and I feel her knuckles slide against my face. “I believed in you, you know. I never stopped.”

  And then before I can say anything, she shoves her backpack and an eversion device into my hands and pushes past us, jumping down to the clearing below. I’m already twisting to leap after her when Caden’s hands haul me back. I can feel the tears on my face, hot and violent. I want to hurt them, the Vectors – him – for ripping us apart again. My rage is all-consuming until I’m nothing but fury.

  “Riven, no,” Caden says, grasping my shoulders. “Don’t make her sacrifice be in vain. We have to go.”

  “She’s my family,” I growl.

  “She’s mine, too. It’s what she wanted. Please, I can’t do this without you. There’s nothing for me here anymore. My life is in your hands now.”

  His words are like a bucket of cold water. Inside I know he’s right, but still, the agony is scalding my insides like acid. Going out there would be suicide, just as she’d known it would be. But she’d done it for him… and for me. Caden is the priority. He’d always been the priority, even if the rules had shifted and the playing fields flipped. I nod once and pick up the syringes.

  “For Shae,” Caden says.

  “For Shae,” I agree, swallowing past the grapefruit-sized knot in my throat. “On the count of three,” I say. “One, two, three.”

  We stick the injectors into our legs at the same time. Caden’s eyes are wide, and I smile reassuringly at him, even though I’m falling apart inside.

  “I’m scared,” he whispers. “Will it hurt?”

  “Just hold on to me,” I say dully, my voice breaking. Truth is, I don’t know if it will hurt. But at the moment, it feels like nothing could hurt as much as the gaping hole inside of me. “It’ll be OK. Shae said we’ll be OK. And she’s never steered us wrong before.”

  And then I pull Caden close, and we’re both crying against each other for the sister we’re leaving behind… the one who had surrendered herself to save us. I hit enter on the eversion device.

  Hot white light glows around us in the small cave, and within seconds, we are gone.

  PART TWO

  NEOSPES

  OVER THERE

  We’re on a training ground, running back to back, the wind in our hair and glee on our faces. Our enemies fall gracefully to our weapons, because together we are invincible. I turn to Shae, the wind lifting her braids off her face, and laugh out loud. We are breathless with victory. But suddenly, something in her face shifts, and she backs away, her hands outstretched, warding off something horrible.

  I call her name over and over, but my feet are leaden and stuck to the ground, and she doesn’t stop moving. In a few seconds, I am alone and the orange sunshine has disappeared behind a dark, ominous cloud. The ground crumbles beneath my feet, and I’m lying in a desert with a mouth full of sand. Something crawls into my eye and I can feel it moving inside me, feeding off me. I can’t stop screaming, but no one hears me.

  My mouth tastes like metal, dirty, sour metal. I spit and it’s an odd blue color, dead Vector’s blood. The caked, parched ground sucks it up greedily, like it’s something precious. There’s some kind of creature crawling toward me. It looks like a black scorpion, only it’s shiny and metallic, and its eyes are glowing white orbs. It crawls up onto my arm and then digs its sharp forward claws deep into my flesh and starts to feed on me. I am disappearing into this thing’s mouth until it’s gigantic and sated on my flesh, and I am nothing but a speck.

  It has eaten me, absorbed me. I have become the monster. And I feel drunk with it, exhilarated. Alive.

  And that’s when I see Shae, running toward me and throwing herself into my arms as if she hadn’t seen me in weeks. She smells so good that I can’t help myself. She is sunlight in a world of darkness. My mouth opens and I take her into me without a second thought. She must die to feed the monstrosity I have become.

  I can’t stop screaming.

  “Shae, no. I’m sorry.” The words feel like knives, tearing into the roof of my mouth, and I gag reflexively. Everything hurts. I don’t know if I’m awake or asleep, or if I’m dead or alive. Wetness soaks my cheeks.

  “Riven, wake up.” A hand is shaking me. “It’s OK, it’s OK. We’re OK.”

  I pry open my sticky eyelids, and Caden’s worried face swims into focus. I’m shivering so hard I can almost feel my bones rattling. “Whererewe?” I mumble unintelligently.

  “Neospes, I think,” Caden says. “But it’s so desolate. I can’t see a city. There’s nothing for miles.”

  “How long have we been here?” I try to sit up. I’ve never blacked out during eversion before. I don’t even want to think about what that means. My blood feels hot, like it’s on fire, but when I touch my skin it’s icy cold. I rub my hands up and down my arms. The movement hurts.

  “I don’t know. A half hour, maybe more. I tried to wake you, but you weren’t even blinking. Your eyelids were moving, so I knew you were alive, but your heartbeat was so slow. I wasn’t sure whether you’d had some kind of reaction to the serum. But I felt OK,” Caden rushes out. “Then you started murmuring, and a couple minutes after, you woke up. Where are we?”

  I look around quickly. We’re in a barren stretch of land. There’s not a tree in sight, but I know it’s all an illusion. The scavengers would smell us. “We’re in the Outers.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “It’s not.”

  “So should we run a bit and then evert back?” Caden asks. I shake my head and check my watch.

  “We couldn’t do it and be safe. If I’ve been out as long as you say, we’re way past the thirty-minute mark that Shae was talking about. It’d be too risky. Plus, my blood feels like it’s on fire; I don’t think I’d survive another jump.” I pause, staring at my skin. “Maybe you’re right and I did have some weird reaction to the serum.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We make our way back to the city, but first I need to figure out exactly where we are.” I open my backpack and pull out two of the Vectors’ uniforms I’d stuffed in there. I toss one to Caden. “Get undressed and put this on.” I glance up at the sky that’s still covered in a reddish haze. “It gets really hot here during the day. We’re going to have to find a spot to rest, quickly.”

  Caden looks confused as he shrugs out of his clothes and into the Vecto
r’s uniform. “Wouldn’t it be safer to travel by day?” His face reddens as he notices me stripping out of my clothes at the same time, and he turns away. I shrug. There’s no room for propriety.

  My reply is short. “Not here.”

  I zip up the second uniform, thankful that it doesn’t smell, and throw Sadie’s dress into my pack – cotton is rare here, and it would be unwise to leave it. My ninjata harness I slip on over the uniform, tightening the straps across my chest. I roll the leather jacket and tuck it in the top. The red power button on the suit’s computer is blinking, indicating that it’s already charging. Nearly all of the suit’s power comes from solar energy. I tap the keypad on the forearm of the suit and type in a sequence of numbers, wincing at the pinch at the back of my neck. I repeat the same on Caden’s. “What are you doing?”

  “Resetting the suit to calibrate to our bodies. Hang on a sec; this may hurt a bit.” His eyes widen at the sting.

  “What was that?” Caden hisses, jerking away.

  “It’s OK. It won’t hurt anymore. It’s a wire that the suit connects to your nervous system. Works in tune with your biometrics.”

  “Oh.”

  “It may look like a piece of nylon, but it’s really pretty advanced technology. This computer controls the whole suit; it records your heart rate, the amount of fluid in your body, and basically makes sure you stay alive. It’s thermo-responsive, too.”

  “Oh.” I smile this time at Caden’s dazed response. “What’s thermo-responsive?”

  “Our daytime temperatures are very different from yours. It’s boiling hot during the day, upward of a hundred and fifty degrees, and very cold at night, like negative sixty. The suit adjusts to each, keeping your body at a constant temp.”

  “It can do that?” Caden’s voice is still full of amazement. “Wow, no wonder you wanted to take them off the Vectors.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “That’s just the beginning of what they can do, but let’s get moving. I’ll fill you in later. The Outers isn’t exactly the most friendly place, and we need to find somewhere safe to rest for the day before we fry,” I say.

  Off to the right, there’s nothing but more flat land, but on my left I can see the vague outline of some mountains. I type in a command on the suit keypad, and a hologram of a compass hovers in the air. Underneath the 3-D rendition is a map. Neospes is to the north. The map says that it’s over sixty miles away. That’s three days of hard hiking in very unfriendly terrain… extremely unfriendly terrain.

  I glance at Caden. He’s poking through all the pockets on his suit.

  “Here, take this,” I tell him, handing over one of the two handheld crossbows from Shae’s bag. I strap the other to a special hitch on my suit that has a retractable lead. “Your sabre isn’t any good against flying things. And they come from all sides here.”

  I haven’t gone through everything she has in there yet. I’m a little terrified of what I may find or not find. I have never been this unprepared for an eversion – no food, no supplies, no medical gear… nothing. All I have are the weapons – better than nothing! – and half-used supplies in the bottom of my backpack. But Shae was always prepared for any eventuality, and I can’t help hoping that she somehow planned for this. I’ll wait until I’ve found us somewhere safe to hide before doing a full tally of what we had, and pray that it will be enough.

  “If anything moves, shoot it. Don’t think, just shoot,” I say to Caden. “OK?”

  Caden’s eyes are dark, but there’s no fear in them. It lifts me up a tiny bit. “Are there Vectors out here?”

  “No, they don’t come out this far, unless it’s a raid or a search party. Out here” – I gesture to the barren landscape around us – “there are worse things than Vectors.” I glance upward. “And the worst thing of all is that sun, so let’s move.”

  We jog in silence for a while, tracking north on the compass. Our pace is hard and it’s already sweltering. The ground is covered in an oily red haze that makes it look as if it’s shimmering, and I can feel the sweat slicking across my forehead. Glancing at Caden, his face is determined. I check the computer on the suit. The temperature gauge reads one hundred and ten degrees. The worst part is that it’s not even 7 in the morning.

  I quicken my pace, and Caden follows without complaint. By my calculation we have about two hours before we get to the base of the hills on the map, and hopefully some cover.

  If we make it…

  A noise overhead has me twisting around with my crossbow in hand. It looks like some kind of bird, but I know instinctively that it’s not a bird. Sunlight glints off its wings as it drops lower, making a beeline in our direction. I wonder if it’s some kind of tracking spy, and I toy between killing it midflight or figuring out exactly what it is. The things that exist out here live by no rules – they live to survive any which way they can.

  “Caden, drop!” I shout and Caden rolls to the ground just as the thing dives past his head, talons outstretched. It’s far bigger than it looked at first, smaller now as it climbs into the sky. It’s not going to attack again, I notice, but there’s no way I can let it attract any more attention to us. I place the bolt and shoot. My aim is true and the thing drops like lead to the ground.

  My crossbow remains at the ready, although blue sparks from my first arrow ripple across the bird’s body, rendering it powerless. Up close, the bird’s wingspan is about three feet across, and it reeks of rotten flesh. Metal wires crisscrossing and woven into bands of tissue make up the bird-thing’s body. I can see the faint outline of a skeleton underneath between the gaping holes. Where the eyes should be are only two glowing white orbs. I feel the bile rising.

  “Stay back,” I warn Caden, but he ignores my words of caution.

  “I want to see what I’m up against out here,” he says pushing past me, and then freezes, his body like rock. “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s a hybroid. Half-android, half-something alive.” I shrug. “It’s just one of the many things out here.”

  “Android?” Caden repeats. “Like a robot?”

  I shoot him a glare. “You know, like the Vectors? Only, they take whatever parts they can get out here. It’s slim pickings in the Outers, and we are like Mecca, so let’s go. I have no idea if there are any more of these floating around.”

  I grind the heel of my boot into the thing’s head, and it makes a sizzling sound. The eyes dull, but I’m not taking any chance. Sliding the short knife from my boot, I sever the wires connecting the head, cringing from the rot of decay.

  “Come on,” I tell Caden. “We wasted ten minutes on this. Here, this will be better.” I click a button on the neck of his suit and a hood with a thin transparent mesh unravels. I tuck it over his head, and the suit seals the closure. I do the same on mine, and at his look, I say, “It’s so your skin doesn’t burn off. Let’s run.”

  By the time we get to the base of the hill – which is more like a rock cliff than a hill – the sun has climbed high into the sky and is beating down on top of us with the force of a hammer. The edge of the hill is shrouded in pale shadow, but with every passing second, the line of sun moves inexorably toward it. If the sun catches us climbing that face, it will be a struggle.

  I’m wheezing, and I can hear Caden’s labored breath behind me. My legs are burning and my heart is pounding. My mouth is so dry that every time I swallow, my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth and I have to peel them apart. One of the side pockets on my pack holds a thin root, and I break it in half, offering part to Caden.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “A root; chew it.”

  The root provides some reprieve, filling my mouth with spit. The more you chew it, the more saliva it releases. I look upward along the cliff face, shielding my eyes from the unrelenting sun, searching. And then I spot what I’m looking for, a dark dot under a ledge. “Up there. You see it?” Caden nods, and then we are climbing faster than we’ve ever climbed. We’re racing against the line of sun burning
a fiery path up the rock beneath us.

  “Won’t the suits protect us?” Caden grunts.

  I don’t answer because I’m not really sure. I haven’t been back to Neospes in three years, and these suits are newer than the ones I’m used to. The earlier prototypes used to become unstable in really hot temperatures. I glance at the heat reading on my forearm: one hundred and nineteen degrees and mounting. I can’t take the chance of any malfunctions, especially when the suit is directly connected to our bodies.

  As we get nearer to the small cave mouth, I pause, signaling Caden to wait before grabbing a flare from my pack and throwing it inside. Other things would be looking for shelter, too. The flare hits the back wall and flames brightly for a second. Nothing happens, and then some kind of huge lizard-like creature shuffles out. My long blade is embedded in its head before it could even spit venom in our direction.

  “Is that a hybroid?” Caden whispers.

  “No, it’s like a komodo dragon,” I say, kicking the carcass to the edge of the ledge. “Only–”

  Caden interrupts me with a wry look. “I know, worse.”

  I grin. “You’re getting it. This one’s pure. No metal. They’re survivors through and through. And they’re carnivores, so keep your eyes open for any others.” I nudge its mouth, shuddering at the jagged shark-like, rust-colored teeth. “They’re poisonous and can spit their venom to paralyze their prey.”

  “Sick!” We share a laugh that quickly evaporates to silence. Levity is a luxury right now. I squeeze his shoulder and shine a flashlight into the shallow cave. It’s not bad for shelter, with the top ledge dipping down like a lip. The komodo must have just been resting there, because there’s no sign of a nest or excrement. We should be safe enough from the sun or other predators.

  The dead komodo is already starting to stink. Leaving it visible would be like putting up a “free buffet dinner” sign. I don’t say anything to Caden, but if we run into a bind on the food front, it would be foolish to waste such a windfall, especially if Shae hasn’t been as prepared as I hope. But I can’t even look at it and think about eating it without gagging.