ARC: The Almost Girl

by Amalie Howard

  In Neospes, most of our food is powdered or in gel form and engineered. We don’t grow crops or have farms. Our food is processed in factories underground in one of the sectors responsible for food production. Half the time, we don’t even know what we’re eating; all we know is that it has exactly the right combination of calories and nutrition to keep our bodies at top functioning capacity. The only time I’ve ever had the luxury of organic food is during the Solstice Games.

  Occasionally when we were younger, on raids to the Outers, Shae and I would trap some of the animals. For some of the poorer people on the outskirts of the city, that’s all they had to eat. I remember one old Artok woman telling Shae and me that some of the Outers komodos used to be delicacies in the old days. She’d offered us some, and while Shae had gamely eaten the roasted beast, I hadn’t been able to even stomach the abnormal, charred flesh. I’d thrown up immediately afterward.

  A smile twists my lips. My revulsion for cooked animals had shifted pretty quickly when I everted to the Otherworld. It was either eat or starve, or become what they called a vegetarian. In Neospes, food was not a pleasure; it was a means of survival. But that didn’t mean anything in Caden’s world. Food was celebrated and revered to the point of excess. It shocked me.

  I stare at the carcass and kick it with all the force I can manage off the ledge. It makes a wet thud near the bottom, and from where I am, I can see a thin line of black ant-like creatures mobbing it in seconds. Only thing is… they’re not ants, and they’re not small. I duck back into the cave and almost crash into Caden standing beside me.

  “Was it poisonous?” Caden asks me. “You know, to eat? I mean, we have to eat, right?”

  “No. I just couldn’t…” But I have no explanation other than my own stupid disgust. I sigh. Caden’s right.

  “It’s just meat, Riven.” I stare at him, and after a couple seconds, Caden makes to leave the cave. “I’ll go get it. We don’t know how long we’re going to be out here.”

  But I stop him. “You can’t go down there. It’s already gone.”

  Sure enough, the carcass has all but disappeared, picked clean to the bones, and even half of those, too, are gone.

  “What the… ” Caden’s voice is small.

  “They’re carrion eaters, scavengers. Those” – I jerk my head to the ground below – “are hand-sized burying beetles. They’ll scavenge anything. Dead or alive. They can smell dead things from miles away.” I turn to him. “Which is why we’re probably better off with the komodo down there.”

  It’s boiling now. The temperature reading is a hundred and thirty-two, and the sun’s arms are about halfway down the rock face. Soon, nothing will be out in the noon sun, not even the metals. The shade of the rock doesn’t provide much relief from the heat, but it’s a lot cooler and the suits do the rest. I unroll a flat black shade from my pack and run it along the cave’s mouth. The powerful magnetic edges curve and seal to the rock.

  “What’s that? More fancy cloth?”

  “Yep, a holo-tube,” I agree. “Sort of. It’s like a body tent. If I couldn’t find any shelter, as an emergency, I could roll up in this, but it can’t hold two people.” For some reason, I’m blushing. The tube could hold two people but they’d be literally sandwiched together. Shae and I had done it once, and we’d been much smaller than Caden and I would be. I shake the unnerving image out of my head. “It blocks out all UV light and heat. And it’s holographic.” I point to a tiny control pad on one of the edges. “The outer side mimics the surrounding area. Like camouflage. So anything out there would just see rock face.”

  “Cool.” Caden inspects the edges of the material and rubs it carefully between his fingers, frowning at the evenly spaced bars beneath it. “What are these? Magnets?”

  “Yes. They stick to the lodestone.” I raise an eyebrow. “How’s your geology?”

  “Naturally occurring magnetite in igneous rock,” Caden says primly. “Supposedly magnetized by lightning.”

  I grin, impressed. “Well, here it’s from all the electrical fields during the War.”

  “Wait, what about our gear?" Caden asks. “Wouldn’t the fields affect them, too?”

  “Nope, shielded.” I say, leaving Caden to ponder the geological and technological wonders of my world, and head to the back of the cave where I empty out both Shae’s pack and mine.

  I sort everything into three piles: food, medicine, and gear. Shae was prepared. There’s a lot of food from the other world, including dried strips of some kind of meat and packets of dried fruit and grain, but Shae must have stockpiled a ton of our powdered food whenever she’d everted back here. There are a few dozen thin tubes, more of the water-root, and both water bladders on the inside of each of the packs are full.

  The water we’ll have to use sparingly, more so than the food. The suits will keep us from losing too much of our body water, but we will die faster without water than food. My guess is that the komodo would have had a water source not too far away. If we’re lucky, maybe it will be on the way to the city.

  Most of Shae’s bag contains more food than anything, but I still have my med-kit from before, so that will have to do. I remove all of the various weapons I stole from each of the Vectors and line them up in a row. Three night-vision goggles, two coiled electro-whips, one rod, my ninjata swords, the two crossbows with bolts, Caden’s sabre, and a handful of throwing stars and knives. On top of that, I also have two communications headsets and the eversion device that brought us here.

  All in all, we aren’t in terrible shape. My fingers catch against something in the front pocket, and I pull out a tiny device that looks like an electronic thumb drive. I frown. There’s a piece of paper on it that reads “For Riven.” I shove it back into the pack. I’m not ready to process whatever it is that Shae has prerecorded on there. I’m also not ready to admit to myself that she’s really gone or to hear her voice and see her face.

  “You OK?” Caden says, watching me from where he’s still sitting near the front of the cave. “Need any help with anything?”

  “No, I’m OK. Just doing inventory.”

  “Then we should add my stuff in there, too.” Caden crawls over and tosses the contents of his backpack into the mix, and I frown.

  “What’s that?” I ask, pointing to a slim leather-bound case the size of a watch box that had fallen out next to June’s gun, and a pile of miscellaneous junk looking vaguely like random Eagle Scout supplies. I don’t say anything about the gun, because it could come in handy, but the box looks elegant and out of place.

  “Something my mother left me.”

  “Your mother?” I ask, startled. “May I?”

  Caden smiles sadly. “Go ahead. It’s some kind of chip. We couldn’t read it, no matter what we did. I put it in there just in case.”

  I open the box carefully. Inside, there’s a silver-colored ring with a dark blue circular stone. The Neospes royal crest is emblazoned on it. The chip Caden’s talking about is a pill-sized silver cylinder. I stare at Caden. “Shae didn’t tell you what’s on it?” I ask.

  “No, she said she didn’t know.”

  But Shae did know. We all did. She must have had some reason for not wanting to tell Caden what the chip meant. I slide it and his ring into an inside pocket on my vest. Caden doesn’t object, and together we repack everything, including Caden’s thermal blankets, fire-sticks, water packets, emergency food bars, flashlights, and snare wire.

  “Where’d you get all this stuff?” I ask, fingering an odd-looking multi-tool that will undoubtedly come in handy. I’m unwillingly impressed by his foresight.

  “Online,” Caden says with a grin. “All I had to look up was survival gear for the zombie apocalypse.”

  “The zombie apocalypse?”

  “What can I say? We like to be prepared. Hurricanes, tornados, and zombies.”

  I can’t help the laugh that rolls its way out of my stomach, and I’m laughing until my sides feel like they’re about to split. Go fig
ure for a world that has instructions on how to survive a zombie apocalypse. Thinking about it sets me off again. I don’t stop laughing, not even when Caden throws a water packet at my head.

  We eat a couple strips of meat and dried fruit, saving the longer-life food items for later, and lie alongside each other on the rocky floor of our little cave. I haven’t forgotten about the chip sitting inside my vest pocket. It’s almost burning a hole into my skin.

  It’s time for Caden to tell me everything he knows.

  IN THE OUTERS

  When I awake, my throat feels gritty like I’ve chewed on sandpaper. Despite the hard ground, we’ve managed to both get some sleep. Caden is curled up on his side, something on a silver chain curled in his fist. He showed me the locket last night when he recounted everything he knew from his childhood. It was tarnished platinum with a photo of his mother inside wearing one of the flowing dresses that she’d loved. On the other side was a photo of Caden as a baby. Caden said that he never took the locket off.

  It’s boiling in the cave, but the temperature is already changing, lowering. Sometime during the day, I shrugged out of the suit and just slept under one of the thermal blankets. I stretch as quietly as I can, soothing the aches out of my muscles, and get dressed after taking care of minor bodily functions in a back corner of the cave. I smile, remembering that Caden asked whether the suit also took care of those kinds of needs.

  “The human ones can inhibit waste,” I told him, “but these are designed for the Vectors. They don’t need to use the bathroom,” I explained. He stared at me like I’d grown two heads.

  “They can do that?” His eyes were wide. “Do they process your pee so it’s drinkable, you know, like in Dune?”

  Then it was my turn to stare at him. I shook my head. “That’s gross. No, our suits are designed to inhibit those needs, at least until we take the suits off.” I pointed to the neuron connector at the back of the neck. “Remember? They’re not designed for long-term use, although I’m sure they’ve probably figured that out by now. As you can probably guess.”

  “How do you know all this stuff? Like how it works?”

  My answer was a toss-up, but I chose the least complicated answer. “My father designed them.”

  I glance over at Caden as he turns in his sleep. He, for his part, had told me everything that he could remember, but it still wasn’t a lot. His memories were sporadic, mostly centered around his life in the other world. His mother rarely smiled, Caden said, and when she did, it was always short-lived. It was as if a part of her had been missing, like she was living lost in a daydream somewhere else half the time.

  Caden hadn’t known about Cale. Neither his mother nor Shae had told him anything of Neospes or where he was truly from. And yet, he faced the Vectors that had come in search of him, with innate courage and bravery. He accepted the near-impossible that I was from a parallel universe, just as Shae was. And I know he has more questions, but it seems like he is waiting… waiting for me to tell him the truth of who he is.

  My mouth twists. I wouldn’t even know where to start.

  Hey, Caden, you’re the son of a king in this world. Your father was murdered by his brother, your uncle, by the way, who now wants to kill the brother you never knew you had, and kill you before you can somehow save him so that he can assume the throne. Oh, and we live in a giant glass dome of a city, because everywhere else is contaminated because of an android war that pretty much killed off everything in the process.

  And by the way, I’m somehow falling for you.

  Maybe I’ll leave out that last part. Love is the seed of weakness, as my father had always said. I’d be better off burying any feelings I have for Caden, and he’d be wise to do the same. I touch my fingers to my suddenly warm lips, thinking of our unexpected kiss in the bathroom at Horrow. It seems like eons ago instead of mere days. For a brief second, I allow myself to savor the feelings blooming inside my chest, if just for that moment.

  “Why are you staring at me?” Caden murmurs sleepily. An embarrassed flush invades my face and neck.

  “I wasn’t. I mean, I was but I was looking through you,” I mumble.

  “You were smiling.”

  “Yeah, well I was thinking of ice cream and donuts,” I snap, irritated. “Come on, we have to get moving. The sun’s just setting and I want to get a head start.”

  We gather up what we’ve used, and tuck them into the packs. Caden has Shae’s pack, since it’s more lightweight and durable like mine. His sabre is in its sheath lying along his back underneath the pack. Caden stares at me and grins.

  “We look like ninjas.”

  My mouth twitches. The description is appropriate. “We’ll need to fight like ninjas to get through the next two days.”

  “What about the wrappers and garbage?” Caden asks looking around. “Shouldn’t we…”

  “Forget it. It’s extra weight. Just leave it,” I say over my shoulder as I’m repacking the holo-tube at the entrance. “Don’t worry; it’ll get used by something out here. The things that live here use everything they can get their hands on. Think of it as natural recycling.”

  The landscape is still red, but a different kind of red with tinges of gray along its edges. It’s seventy-nine on the temperature monitor. Here and there, we spot movement. I try not to let my tension show, but it’s a guarantee that we’ll run into some kind of trouble. Predators in the Outers are vicious. I wasn’t kidding when I told Caden earlier that the creatures out here use everything they could get their hands on. I meant it – they’d slaughter each other for hair, teeth, and bone. They’d rip us apart for less. A shiver races across my back.

  “Here, let’s put these to work,” I say, grabbing Caden’s wrist and pressing one of the buttons on the keypad. “It’s a security protocol that identifies any metal, I mean, hybroids. You’ll feel a vibration and this console will flash.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Sound waves.”

  We climb down the mountain quickly, moving across the terrain at a good pace. We keep our hoods off, as the warmth of the open air is comfortable for the moment. The sky is an odd mixture of crimson and gray and black. There’s no blue in the Neospes sky, but it has its own unique beauty. I realize that I’ve missed it, but a part of me misses the blue, too.

  Our pace is grueling, but I’m relishing the chance to push my muscles hard, to run so that my heart is pumping like a piston in my chest. Caden keeps pace with me easily, and the realization that he’s fitter and stronger than I thought is a delayed one. He’s not as lean as Cale, even with their identical build, but I misjudged him. I wonder if he fights as easily as he runs… just as Shae boasted. She said that he could take me. I doubt that, but it doesn’t mean I’m not curious. Cale was good, but he could never take me in a one-on-one fight, not even with all his years of training.

  I’ve always had a good sense of where people are going to be before they strike, like a fighting sixth sense. It gave me that extra edge that I put to good use in my unprecedented rise to the rank of general. No, Caden wouldn’t be able to best me, especially not having been trained in our ways from the beginning.

  The landscape starts to change as the sun disappears and the moon rises into the night sky, covering everything in an oily silver veil. Normally, moonlight is beautiful, but out here it has different implications. Moonlight is ominous, insidious. It means hunters are on the prowl and predators out for prey. And so we have to be extra vigilant.

  “What is that?” Caden huffs, his gaze drawn by something off to our right. I don’t want to stop, but I look over and my breath hitches just as the console of my wrist-pad vibrates and the light flashes red.

  “Stop,” I hiss, and drop to the ground. Caden follows unbidden. Removing the infrared goggles from my pack, I stare silently at the group of six or seven raptor-sized creatures pawing and shoving into each other. They’re about a mile away from where we are.

  “What are they? More hybroids or real things?�
�� Caden whispers.

  “Definitely hybroids. They’re pack hunters. Reptiles.” I’m hoping that they haven’t seen us… or smelled us. They’re machines that have taken on the most savage aspects of territorial beasts, and have fused themselves with horns and tusks, teeth and scales. Reptiles are notoriously hard to kill and even harder to outrun.

  I turn the goggles to the left of where we are crouched. There’s a dip where the landscape shifts, a gorge of some sort. I hadn’t planned on going in that direction – as much as the inhabitants of the Outers live aboveground, the worst of them prefer the underground. Or so it’s rumored.

  In the city, scary tales of the Outers filled our ears from birth. They were the stories that people whispered into children’s ears: “the monsters from the Outers will get you!” or “break the law and risk exile to the Outers.” That one had been the worst one – to be banished from the city and forced to survive was a fate worse than death. Many traitors had killed themselves to avoid the outcome of the Outers. No one exiled there had ever returned.

  “Follow me,” I say to Caden, making a decision. “We’re going to crawl over there to where that drop is, got it?” Caden nods. “Just try to move slowly, without any jerky movements.”

  Commando-style, we inch our way across the dusty ground. I can feel the dirt like grit against my teeth, clogging my windpipe. The fine dust is everywhere. I cough softly and spit to the side, and my saliva is rust-colored. My elbows and knees are burning from the scraping against the hard earth, but we’re almost there. I can see that the cracks along the ground are starting to widen. Soon they’ll be big enough for us to drop into and at least be safe if the hybroids do see us. Once we’re out of sight, we’ll be out of mind.

  I look back triumphantly to Caden, and he’s a few feet away, his face screwed up and frozen. He looks as if he’s just stuffed an entire lemon into his mouth.