by Josi Russell
Sol was disappointed. He’d been hoping to strike out against the Rangers immediately.
“Don’t worry,” Juice said. “Now it’s time for the fun part. I’ll take you over to the training exercise they’ve got going.”
For the first time, Sol heard the low thump-thump-thump of artillery on the other side of the ridge behind the armory. He felt a slow surge of apprehension that stayed with him all the way through the spider ride to the practice range.
Low clouds were gathering as they drove, and the percussions were growing louder. Sol was glad for the thick armor. He glanced at Juice, who was whistling. He didn’t want Juice to know that he was nervous, so he didn’t say anything.
Juice pulled the spider to a stop behind an embankment. When the friends climbed down, Sol tried not to gag on the hot, thick air. It was filled with an acrid flavor.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Exhaust from the convulsion guns.” Juice said, reaching for his helmet. “These filter it out pretty good. Although you’ll taste it for days anyway.”
Sol pulled his helmet out of the spider.
Juice paused before putting on his helmet. He laid a hand on Sol’s shoulder, and Sol sensed, suddenly, an unusual protectiveness in his friend. Juice’s cheery exterior vanished. “Sol, listen,” he said, leaning close. “You don’t have to do this. I’ll totally take you home right now. You don’t have to be here.”
There was an intensity in his eyes and a nearly pleading tone in his voice. It reminded Sol of what his mom had said this morning. He felt a wrenching fear. Maybe he should go home.
But before he could say anything, Briian came scrambling over the embankment.
“Whoo! It’s hot out there!” His uniform was steaming, and Sol reached up to help him down.
“No!” Juice said, too late.
Sol felt a jolt as his suit absorbed the shock of Briian’s convulsion gun, aimed at his belly. He was only immobilized for a breath, but it was enough time for Briian to step in close and jam the barrel of the gun against the back of his neck, just above his collar, and fire.
Sol screamed. Pain knifed through him, crackling from his neck to his heels and exploding into his head. His body arched backward, and he fell into the dirt at Briian’s feet. He dully registered a scuffle; then Juice was leaning over him, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder.
Sol’s body was beyond his control, the muscles in his back and sides seizing, his arms jerking, his legs twitching. For the first time since those long, quiet days in prison, Sol was aware of his own heartbeat. Only it wasn’t a heartbeat. It was a branch against a window, a chain dragging the ground, a fast, irregular rattling in his chest. His breath wasn’t coming, either, and he felt himself panicking.
Dimly, he registered Juice’s voice, “Hold on.”
Darkness began to creep in around Sol’s vision. Mercifully, he was blacking out. He felt a sharp pinch in his shoulder, then a warmth that began to spread across his chest. As the wave of heat engulfed him, his muscles relaxed. He took a ragged, gasping breath. Then another. His heart slowed, then its beating evened out.
He closed his eyes, feeling heavy and weak. Juice was talking, his words coming incessantly and fast.
“ . . . goner. I’ve never had to use that stuff before. Whew!”
Sol’s words were slurred. “What stuff?” he tried to say.
“It’s an injection,” Juice said, “that counteracts the convulsions. We all have three vials in our chest pockets. It looks like it works pretty well.”
Sol didn’t try to speak. He was exhausted as if he’d run all the way up Wildcat Peak. But he asked the question with his eyes, glancing toward the last place he’d seen Briian.
“He’s on the other team,” Juice explained, “in the training exercise. But he wasn’t supposed to do that.”
Sol tried to sit up, and Juice steadied him.
“Should we tell someone?” Sol asked weakly.
Juice shook his head quickly. “That’s probably just going to be more trouble.”
The incessant booms of the training grenades rattled the windows of the spider. They were growing closer.
Juice noticed, too. “We’d better get out of here. Can you walk?”
Sol tried pushing himself up. His muscles felt loose, but he could stand. “I think so.”
“Okay.” Juice drew a rough rectangle in the dirt. “We’re here,” he said, pointing to the middle of the bottom side of the rectangle, “and we need to meet Tavish at the goldmine.” He marked an X near the top right corner, “to pick up some armbands which show we got there. Then, we have to make it back here,” he put a circle in the middle of the rectangle’s left side.
It didn’t look like much of a challenge, but Sol soon found he was wrong. As soon as they left the shelter of the little hill, he and Juice were engulfed by chaos.
Acrid smoke drifted across the training field, making it difficult to see. Every few seconds, an explosion took Sol’s breath away. The explosions around him shook him worse than surfing the skimmer ever had. He tried to keep the thought of the gate explosion out of his mind. He gritted his teeth and followed Juice.
Fifty paces in, Sol felt a thud and his armor began to heat up.
“They’re on us!” Juice shouted. “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
Sol had never heard Juice’s voice so commanding, so confident. He ran after his friend, through a storm of convulsion fire. The armor did its job, though, and he felt little more than the heat.
The two dived into the open mouth of what Sol soon realized was the goldmine.
“Nicely done,” Tavish praised them, strapping on their armbands. “You made good time. Now, though, you’re going to find that the red team has some serious surprises for you. Stay alert.”
Sol’s head was still throbbing from the explosions. He took off his helmet and rubbed his temples.
Tavish was suddenly shouting in his face. “What’s the matter with you? Get that helmet back on! You stay armored up until you’re back home safe in bed, you got it?”
“Yeah.” Sol stammered.
“What?”
“Yes, sir!” Sol realized, with a sickening feeling, that he had traded one kind of powerlessness for another. He strapped the helmet back on and followed Juice back into the smoke.
The explosions had stopped, and the field seemed to be waiting. Before Sol could process what might be coming, he heard the high whine of a spinner engine.
“Juice, look out!” He grabbed his friend’s arm just as the shining blades of the spinner cut the air in front of them. Sol scrambled backward and ran.
“Drop down!” Juice called, and his voice crackled in Sol’s helmet. “Drop down!”
Sol looked ahead just as the ground fell away and he realized they were running for a canyon. His boots slid over the edge, and his arms shot forward as if he were trying to swim. He dropped his weapon, and it snapped its tether and disappeared below. From the corner of his eye, Sol saw a rope and grasped frantically for it.
His gloves smoked from friction as the line slowed his descent. Above him, Juice was letting himself down quickly and carefully, feet on the rock wall and rope wrapped around his waist.
Sol struggled to his feet and let himself down to the muddy floor of the canyon. He and Juice crept along it, next to a rolling river swollen with spring runoff. They flattened against the stone walls whenever a spinner passed overhead. At the end of the canyon, the stone walls narrowed and they were forced to splash into the river and then swim fifty yards before the canyon widened again.
As they pulled themselves out of the water, Sol remembered his gun. “We gotta go back.”
Juice shook his head. “We can’t. We only have fifteen minutes to check in, and we’ll need every minute to get through that.” He pointed.
Ahead of them was a massive ropes course, spanning the canyon like a giant spider web. Juice pulled Sol’s helmet close to his. “Blue’s safe. Red’s hot. If you listen close,
you can hear the hot ones humming. But don’t wait too long on one because they switch.”
“Hot?”
“Yeah. They’ll give you an awful shock.”
Sol didn’t need another of those today. He followed Juice with a growing apprehension.
From the ground, it didn’t look too bad. Sol easily scaled the side of the course and worked his way toward the middle. But his arms were aching by the time he made it there. He had been in a cell too long and hadn’t built up any muscles for a while. Even Juice was sliding along with more ease.
Sol stopped to rest on a crisscrossed pair of blue ropes, but before he could move, the course changed, and a painful shock cut through him. Sol cried out and let go, falling ten feet before hitting another hot rope that numbed his arm. He caught the last blue line at the bottom and heaved himself up and over as quickly as he could. It was then that he noticed his friends.
Briian and Connor stood below the ropes course. Their weapons were pointed directly at him. Sol scrambled upward, feeling the heat as their shots grazed his shoulders and calves. He remembered Briian’s fire, and he couldn’t bear the thought of it again, even though his suit should protect him better this time.
Hand over hand he climbed, scanning the vast web for Juice. He saw his friend reach the top and disappear into a cave high on the canyon wall.
Sol had to reach it. Briian and Connor were climbing now, and they had obviously had more practice at this. He wouldn’t make it in time.
Just then, the line of blue ropes in front of him switched abruptly to red. The one he was standing on and the one he was grasping were the only two left blue.
He glanced back. Briian and Connor were gaining fast. Sol began to panic. He would do almost anything to stay away from the tip of Briian’s gun. He thought about letting go, about letting himself fall and crash into them, taking all three of them down, but it would take perfect aim and would almost guarantee a shock somewhere on the way down.
How did these things work? They must have current flowing through them to produce that kind of shock. He eyed the nearest red.
Sol felt a hand on his ankle. Briian’s eyes were gleeful as he raised his weapon. Sol was out of time. He had to try it.
Sol grasped the blue line above him with both hands and kicked free of Briian’s grip, throwing his whole body weight sideways. The blue line arced out with him. He stepped, hard, onto Briian’s shoulder and boosted himself and the blue line up just enough to cross it with a red one.
A blinding spark shot from the intersection and the humming of the maze stopped. The lines flickered and went gray. Sol didn’t stop to celebrate. He scrambled up, not looking back until he was hauling himself over the ledge and into the congratulations of his teammates.
“How the heck did you know to do that?”
As the victory washed over Sol, he started to laugh. “My old truck.” He said. Maybe Uncle Carl had been right to insist they have engines they could get their hands on. He wouldn’t have known what to do if he hadn’t had to jump that thing so many times.
With the whole unit celebrating, Sol forgot, for a moment, the intensity of the situation. He even took his scolding for losing his gun, which Tavish gave back to him with a stern lecture, without feeling the earlier resentment.
The whole unit loaded into a crawler to head back to the armory. It was then, during the ride, that Sol started feeling uneasy. The others kept looking sideways at him as if they were sizing him up.
Sol tapped his fingers against his knee as the crawler made its way through the slick mud. Everyone was jubilant over the victory. But Sol was still jittery from the convulsion incident and the explosions, and he could sense something worse was coming.
40
Zyn’dri traced the design absentmindedly on the wall of the empty hut. The best wall was in the kitchen: a big blank space where she could try the patterns large and small. She was getting skilled at the curves and angles of the most common patterns, and she barely had to look at Laska’s books anymore.
Zyn’dri froze as she heard voices coming down the path outside. Since the fence had gone up, more people came walking by her little hut. She recognized Walt’s voice and the one belonging to the village supervisor, Nichols.
“We can check this one,” Walt was saying, “but the only thing I know wrong with it is the graffiti.”
Zyn’dri tasted that word: graffiti. It sounded nice. But then the door was opening, and she scrambled to duck behind the table.
Walt froze as he came in. Nichols bumped into him. “Walt! Keep going.”
“I think someone’s in here.” Walt said, then called out, “Hello?”
Zyn’dri’s heart felt like bison were thundering through her. She couldn’t move. If he saw her, he would know that she was skipping school.
But Walt left her no choice. He walked to the table and peered underneath. “Zyn’dri?” he said, and confusion showed in his eyes.
Zyn’dri stood slowly.
“What are you doing here?” Walt asked.
Zyn’dri didn’t say anything, just looked at the floor of the hut.
Nichols broke in. “Who are you? Why aren’t you in school?”
Zyn’dri glanced at him, but she couldn’t find any words.
Walt stepped in. There was annoyance in his voice. “You should know her by now, Nichols. This is my girl, Zyn’dri. Let me talk to her a minute, will you?”
Nichols grunted. “I need to go back to the office anyway. Check this place over. If it’s sound, we need to get more of those kids in here this week.”
When he had gone, Walt turned to her. “Zyn, what’s going on?”
She looked up, begging him to understand. “I’m sorry, Walt. I can’t go there. I don’t fit in, and I don’t care about what we’re learning, and the kids don’t like me, and I just want to be with you!” It had all come out in a rush. She stood waiting for him to chastise her.
But he didn’t. Walt was simply nodding slowly. “Well, what have you been doing here?”
“Just thinking, mostly. And I sometimes practice designs.”
Walt’s eyes narrowed. “Designs?”
She laid a finger on the wall. “Like this.” She started to trace a pattern she had seen in the clouds this morning.
“Zyn’dri, stop!” Walt’s voice was alarmed. “Don’t do that.”
She lowered her hand. “Why not?”
Walt looked at her for a long moment. “You don’t know?” when she shook her head, he said, “come with me.”
He led her outside. The valley smelled wet and fresh around them. Walt led her toward the fence, around the back of the hut, to the other side of the wall she’d been tracing on. Zyn’dri gasped.
The whole wall was covered with her designs. Large and small, individual and overlapping, they were burned into the side of the hut.
Walt was looking at her in a new way. A frightened way. “How are you doing that?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve just been tracing these patterns.”
“What patterns?” he asked.
“Patterns from the natural things. I found them in the notebooks of a human who was doing research on Empyriad. Once I saw them, I couldn’t stop finding them. They’re everywhere.”
Walt shifted uncomfortably. “Don’t mention this to anyone.” He said. “You could get in some trouble for defacing a park structure. But I see it was an accident.”
Zyn’dri looked down. “Are you going to make me go back to school? Because I hate it there.”
Walt sighed. “We’ll have to talk to Sylvia about that.” He said, but his eyes brightened when he added, “I’m sure we can work something out.”
Hand in hand, the two walked up to the Ranger hut, where Sylvia was working. Before they entered, Walt stopped.
“You’d better let me go in and work on this a minute.” He said. “I’ll come get you when I’ve filled her in a little.”
“Okay.” Zyn’dri sat down on a rock at the edge of
the path, facing the village’s open center field. The other kids were leaving school, coming from the dining hall, and she ducked her head in embarrassment. She stared at the mud in the village center. Slowly, she reached down and began to trace the time-stopping pattern.
As she completed the second arc, Zyn’dri felt the world around her grow sluggish. She looked up to see the children on the path slow. The colorful arcs of their hair froze on the suddenly still wind. Their laughter moved past her in deep, slow waves, as if they were underwater.
Zyn’dri’s hand paused in the pattern, and the world resumed its normal speed. Zyn’dri’s hand trembled as she reached for the mud again and froze her classmates in their steps. A slow, deep sound from behind her caught her attention, and she turned to see Walt, frozen in his approach. The heavy sound of his voice rolled past her, and she realized he had been speaking her name. Zyn’dri stopped the pattern and watched him resume his normal speed. He didn’t seem to know that he had slowed at all.
“She’s busy,” Walt said, “but I got enough of her time to explain things. We think it 'd be nice if you spent some time outside the village. I’m on thermal checks the next few days, so you’ll just come with me.”
***
The next day, Zyn’dri found herself walking along a creaky boardwalk in a place Walt called Sulphur Cauldron. Neither of those words meant anything to her, but she soon learned what to expect when she heard the word Sulphur.
Walt laughed as she wrinkled her nose and covered her face with her hands. It smelled terrible.
“So tell me more about these patterns,” Walt said nonchalantly as they moved toward a large circular depression in the otherwise drab landscape. She could tell he was trying not to let her know he was concerned.
“They’re everywhere,” Zyn’dri said. “In the clouds and in the flowers and in the bison’s coats. I can’t stop seeing them.”