by John Daulton
She didn’t even know if Altin was up there.
She pushed her way through the wind, fighting toward the examination table. It was hard to believe she was actually moving back toward that thing. She knew it would be easier to climb it if she went around to the far side and got some help from the wind again. So she did. With the Higgs prism adjusted down, she let the wind hold her to the surface as she made her way up.
Her hands didn’t hurt as bad as she feared they would. Maybe there really was a chance.
She glanced over her shoulder to make sure the other alien wasn’t coming back. It wasn’t. She saw it pull itself up a level and get blown away. She thought she might have seen it suddenly shoot upward after, but she couldn’t be sure. Too much steam, too much dimness, and it was barely a phantom smear of gray from that far away.
At least it was gone. She turned back and finished climbing. She peered over the edge of the machine.
There was Altin. Right where he had been when last she saw him, trapped in the ochre goo.
His back was to her, and it was all she could do not to run to him and shout through the jelly that she was okay. That she was going to get them out of there right away.
Somehow.
Instead she crept along the edge of the machine until she could take advantage of shadows cast by the alien working the controls.
She crawled up on top of the machine and snuck up behind Altin’s gelatinous enclosure. The alien was still working on the controls beneath the eye-shaped viewing screen above.
Orli got out her utility tool with its little folding knife. She didn’t know what the hell she was going to do with it. Something. Maybe the jelly could be cut through or scraped away.
She got to the lump of jelly. She touched it with her hand. It was hot—big surprise—but not so hot she couldn’t leave her hand there.
And there he was. So helpless. Unmoving. From the back she couldn’t even tell if he was alive.
She wanted to see him, to look into his eyes.
That would be stupid. The alien would see her. If it bothered to look.
She took the knife and attempted a cut, knowing full well it wasn’t going to work.
She carved away a slice. The stuff was tougher than it seemed, like a chunk of semisoft plastic. But it could be done.
She set herself to carving.
The damn knife was small, and it wasn’t shaped well for gripping, at least not for work like this. But she cut anyway. Her scalded hands shook as she worked. She looked around the jelly blob and up to the alien.
She could see Altin in the eye-shaped monitor the alien itself glanced into from time to time. She saw herself in the image on it, just the shadowy shape of her head along the edge of the encapsulating gel. She ducked back. Damn, she’d looked enormous on that alien monitor.
Scrape, scrape, scrape. She hollowed out a bowl-shaped indent that was almost a foot around, maybe six inches deep. She had another two feet to go to get to him. It was going to take her at least an hour to cut him out.
She wondered if she had that much time.
As she worked, the ring clip on the knife rattled against the handle. She tried to pin it to the body of the knife with her palm, but it gouged into her hand, making the work a misery. She had to hope the sound was lost in the wind.
Two feet wide, maybe eight inches until she got to him. She hoped he could feel her coming for him.
Or maybe not. Maybe he would feel something terrible eating its way into his back?
She scraped and carved some more. Twenty minutes. Still the alien worked. It was looking at pictures of a human brain. Orli recognized the mythothalamus on the model depicted on the screen. It was Altin’s brain. She’d seen it often enough on the Aspect’s computer, modeled by Doctor Singh.
She carved some more. She had to switch to her left hand. Her right hand was a bloody mess. So was her thigh. Most of the cuts on her leg had stopped bleeding, but every time she shifted her weight, crouching as she was, she broke the fresh scabs open here and there, and the blood ran freely again.
She hoped nothing could smell it on the wind. That would be bad. But then again, she’d been working for a half hour at least, and the alien hadn’t looked for her even once, despite its being downwind. Maybe they couldn’t smell. She didn’t think she had that much luck.
She dug some more. Two and a half feet long, two feet wide. Barely a quarter inch and she would be able to touch the back of his spacesuit.
She pressed into the jelly with her hand. It was soft enough she thought he might be able to feel it now, if he hadn’t felt it before. She wanted him to know she was coming. She wanted to feel him herself.
She dug some more.
The shadows she was crouched in grew darker. She looked up. The machine was off. The alien turned around.
Why? Had it heard the goddamn clip rattle?
The alien snaked down a tentacle for Altin, winding it around his jelly cage in the same moment it sent more tentacles forward to grab the grate. It sent others to grab the grate above. The long reach of those tentacles went taut, and the alien began moving into the wind, just as the other one had done. Altin was snatched up and hauled right over Orli’s head.
The alien hauled itself against the rush of air to the edge of the grate. Orli tried to follow, but only as far as the edge of the machine. She was helpless to give chase. It moved away so quickly, like some mangled spider climbing up parallel webs. When it got to the edge, it hauled itself up to the level above. Orli watched in horror as it blew its billow out then, up into the wind. The arc of that strange parachuting appendage inflated in an instant and carried the alien away. And Altin.
Orli screamed and reached for her Higgs prism, intent on jumping into the wind anyway, but she stopped. That would only make it worse. If that was possible. How could it be worse than him being totally lost? She watched the alien dim to nothingness, heading toward … somewhere Orli couldn’t possibly hope to know.
She screamed Altin’s name. Calling to him. Reaching for him with her bloody hands. Then she collapsed to her knees and wept.
Chapter 32
“Well, did it work?” Jeremy asked when Pernie got off the bus. “Did you get the seam in that wall paneling to blend all the way up like I said?”
“Yes,” she said. “It worked just like you said. And it did smell really terrible. That might be the worst smell ever.”
“Yeah, that resin is nasty stuff, and the catalyst is even worse. Put the two of them together and it’s like burning barf.”
Pernie laughed at that as they walked together toward the front steps of the school. She saw that the boy she’d beaten at the video game was standing at the top of the stairs with his friend Ritchie. They were watching her as she came up.
“Hi,” said the tall boy, smiling.
“Hi,” said Pernie as she walked past.
“Hey, wait up,” he said, falling in beside her.
Jeremy glared across her to the boy who had joined them. “She doesn’t want to play games, Kyle. She’s got better things to do.”
“Look whose nuts have dropped,” the boy named Kyle said to his friend Ritchie. He turned back to Pernie. “Hey, so maybe at lunch you want to come hang out with us? I want a rematch. You owe me one.”
Pernie tilted her head and turned to look at him, frowning. “No, I don’t.”
It was his turn to frown. “No, I mean, well, yeah, you don’t owe me one. But, I mean, you could give me one anyway. It would be fun. Or I think it would be fun.” His cheeks started turning very red. “Anyway, we hang out at the picnic table by the swings.” He practically ran away.
Pernie watched him and thought he was kind of weird. Ritchie paused before going after him, long enough to get close to her ear. “He thinks you are pretty,” he said. “He wanted me to tell you he likes you.” Then he melted into the herd of kids staring down into their tablets or up into their visors as they shuffled along.
Pernie looked to Jeremy, who w
as staring straight ahead. “Those boys are weird,” she said.
“What did Ritchie say?”
“He said his friend thinks I’m pretty and he likes me.”
“So do you like him?”
“I think he’s weird. I can’t say if I like him or not, though. I don’t really know him very well.”
“Are you going to play with him at lunch?”
Pernie could tell Jeremy hoped that she would not. That seemed weird too. But she didn’t want to play video games with Kyle and Ritchie anyway. “No,” she said. “We should work on your robotic arm.”
Jeremy smiled then, looking more than just a little relieved.
After they’d eaten, Pernie and Jeremy worked on his robot. Jeremy had completely rebuilt the wrist unit over the weekend and was ready to get it reattached. “So was Sophia still super mad today?” he asked as he slipped the new parts in. “Did she say if you were going to have to go home or not?”
“I can stay,” Pernie said. “But she made me promise not to sneak out at night anymore and that I wouldn’t try to go downtown alone.” Thinking of that made her shake her head. “They both say there aren’t any Hostile bodies in the wreckage downtown either. They say the NTA cleaned them all up. Do you think that’s really true?”
Jeremy frowned as he worked, thinking on it. Finally he shook his head. “No,” he said, “I doubt they got it all. There’s probably no big pieces left, at least not where you can get to them without backhoes and cranes, but there’s probably smaller parts. You know, the little bits of shell or the glowy stuff that came out of them when they died. I’ll bet we could find that kind of stuff if we tried.”
“We? You mean you would come with me?”
“Sure. We could be like paleontologists digging for dinosaur bones.”
“I don’t know what that is,” she said.
“Well, it doesn’t matter. But yes, we could go look sometime.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. When do you want to go? How are you going to get out?”
“Well, I don’t know. Sophia had some man come and put in a prock-see-me alarm. She said I can’t leave the house now without it seeing me and going off.”
“Proximity alarm,” he corrected her. “It’s tuned to your chip.”
“What chip?”
“The chip in your arm. Everyone has a chip. I’m sure they made you get one too. It’s how they know who you are if you are dead and all chopped up. Or burned up real bad and stuff. It’s also how they find you if you are a criminal.”
“Well, I’m not a criminal,” she said. “I don’t think I have one. They never gave me anything.”
“Did they give you any shots before you came? You know, with the long needles?”
“Yes. They said it was so I wouldn’t get Earth disease.”
“Well, then you got chipped.” He put down his tools and reached across the table, tapping her on the forearm right above her wrist. “Did you get a shot right there?”
She nodded.
“Then that’s your chip. That’s where they put them. That way when you reach for the screen on kiosks or public consoles, they can track where you are without even having to activate the city scans. Those they’re supposed to have a warrant for, but Gabby says they scan for people all the time anyway. The NTA doesn’t care too much about warrants and stuff.”
Pernie didn’t know anything about warrants or scans. But she didn’t like having something in her arm. “So now I can’t go anywhere without Sophia seeing me?” she asked.
“Oh, no, she wouldn’t have access to that. She’ll just know if your chip gets out of range of the monitor in your house. She’ll get notified.”
“How do I get it out?”
“You can’t get it out without cutting it out, and it’s in deep. But you can just cover it with tinfoil. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Technically it’s illegal to knowingly blind your chip, but it’s not like anyone is watching if you do. Not unless you are a known criminal.”
Pernie harrumphed. People who used their magic wrong could blind their mythothalamus, the organ of magic. Then they could never cast spells again. She thought it was interesting that someone could do the same to technology. “What is tinfoil?”
“It’s like paper made out of metal. Shiny paper. There’s some in the second drawer over there by the other workbench.”
Pernie got up and went to it. She opened the drawer and right away found a long roll of shiny, thin “tinfoil.” It looked just like the stuff the pet-on-file had tried to wrap around her arms that night in the van. She wondered if that was what he was trying to do, to blind her chip. The Reno PD people had certainly said that he was a criminal, so it seemed fitting that he would try to blind chips to hide from them.
Pernie closed the drawer and went back to Jeremy. She would cut hers out instead. She didn’t want to be a criminal.
“I think we should go look for Hostile guts after school,” she said.
“But how? You have to go home on the bus.”
“I don’t have to. I can walk home from downtown. I know the way now. We can just leave from here.”
“The bus driver will know if you don’t get on. He’ll call Sophia. They’ll come look for you right away.”
Pernie shrugged. “Can you go or not?”
“Gabby won’t mind. I just have to tell him is all. But you’re still going to get caught.”
“Nope,” she said, taking up a laser cutter from his tool kit. “I won’t.” She cut right into her arm, right where she remembered the needle went. She opened it up wider than she needed to, and gave herself room to fish around with her fingers. It took a few seconds for the blood to flow.
“Whoa,” muttered Jeremy. He leaned forward and stared into the hole. “Is that your bone?”
“Yes,” she said. Her grimace was partly from pain, but mostly for concentrating on feeling around for the chip. “How big is it? I can’t feel anything, and I don’t really know what I’m looking for.”
“Pretty small,” he said. “But I’ve never actually seen one, so I don’t know either.”
She felt something then, right against the bone. Something hard. She tried to pinch it, but the blood was running freely now and her fingers were slick. She had to keep pinching at it, trying to grasp it. “It’s stuck on there,” she said, grimacing in frustration now.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” Jeremy said, looking up at her, then down at the blood that was beginning to pool on the tabletop.
“Not really,” she said. “Maybe a little, but I’ve had worse. I had a sargosagantis horn right through my guts. It was as big around as your whole leg, bigger even. Getting stabbed through the guts hurts really bad.” She used her fingernail to scratch at the thing. She was squishing more and more blood out over her arm, which ran over her wrist and off the back of her hand, droplets spotting the metal tabletop like rain, which in turn began to pool together as she worked.
“Wow, that’s a lot of blood,” Jeremy said. “I’ve never seen that much before.”
Pernie glanced briefly to the puddle forming there. She shrugged. “It’s not that much.” She pointed toward a pair of slender, needle-nosed pliers near the robot arm. “Can I have that?”
He handed it to her reverently. She took it and pushed the nose in, smearing the handles with blood. She rubbed the tip of it across the chip stuck to her bone. She could feel the bump as the tool slid over it. But it wouldn’t scrape off.
“Can you hit it?” Pernie asked. “Tap the back of the pliers. Just a little bit. I don’t have enough hands.”
His eyes widened, as if she’d just asked him to shoot her in the face.
“Hurry,” she said. “The bell is going to ring.”
Hands trembling, he looked about for something to use. There was a wrench closest to him, so he took that from the toolbox. “You’re serious?”
“Yes. Just do it. Not too hard, though. I don’t want to break it.”
He lean
ed over her and placed the wrench across the grip ends of the pliers. He gave a gentle tap.
“Harder,” she said. “Just a little bit more than that.” He struck again.
She felt the chip break free. She set the pliers aside and fished around in the cut some more. She found the chip right away and pulled it out, holding it up to the light. It looked like a little black ant.
“That’s it?” she said.
Jeremy was staring at all the blood. Pernie saw him and looked at the table. It was something of a mess.
Pernie went to the drawer where they kept the shop towels. She wiped away most of the blood, then bound up the wound. She really wanted to use her daffodil healing spell, but Djoveeve’s stupid promise made that impossible. Keeping promises made making them seem dumb. She was definitely going to be more careful about making them in the future.
Jeremy came over and grabbed a bunch of shop towels and went to work cleaning up the table. Pernie took a few more and worked on the floor. They needed to hurry before the science teacher came in from lunch. He would be mad and make Pernie go see the nurse, who would in turn call Sophia Hayworth, and Pernie would once more be in trouble, she just knew.
Soon enough, however, they had it all clean. The table, the floor and the tools. Pernie got the bleeding stopped. She swapped out the first towel for a strip of a clean one, which she wrapped tightly enough to close the wound. Djoveeve had shown her how to do it right.
She went to where she’d hung her backpack and her sweater upon entering the room. Even though the weather was pretty warm, she pulled the sweater on. The long sleeves would cover up the binding on her wound. She pulled her ponytail out from beneath the collar and gave it a flick before turning to Jeremy. She lifted her arms out to her sides. “How do I look? Can you tell?”
He shook his head, but he was looking at her in a funny way.
“What?” she said. “Do I have blood on me?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Kyle was right. You are pretty.”
Chapter 33
Altin stared out over the edge of the examining table for a long time after the alien threw Orli away. He yelled himself hoarse. He wept himself dry. Still he stared. He didn’t know what he was expecting. Some miracle. Some reappearance somehow. He waited and watched, and she was just gone.