The Lying Planet

by Carol Riggs

  “Don’t be so twitchy,” Blake says with a smirk. “It’s just a German Shepherd. His name is Ajax. Go ahead, pet him. He likes to be scratched on his neck.”

  I trail my fingers across the dog’s head. The fur is softer than a cow’s hide, yet coarser than chicken feathers. The dog twists to give me a slobbery lick. I snatch my hand away from his pointed teeth.

  Blake laughs a little too hard.

  Marnica’s gaze flicks from me to Blake as she takes the canteen. “We need Daniel to look at Jay’s leg. We can finish our salvage run later.”

  “No,” Blake says. “We need to keep going. Daniel said we need to finish foraging this end of the colony before the teams start coming every day.”

  “Stop being such a mindless newbie. We have a good enough haul. Jay needs to clean and cover that wound before it gets infected. And he stinks.” Marnica twirls a finger at my shirt. “What is that nasty black gunk, anyway?”

  “I bashed the Machine with the branding iron. This stuff came out of one of its arms.”

  Marnica’s eyes grow round. “You funning us?”

  “Nope.”

  Blake stuffs the laundry cylinder into his pack while he follows Marnica and me toward the entrance. “Why’d you wreck the Machine?”

  “I was trying to get banished and my score was too high. That worked to lower it.”

  “I must be dreaming,” he says. “You, of all people—”

  The dog, Ajax, gives a rumbling woof. He aims his snout at the open doors, his fur rising across his shoulder blades. Out the entrance, Sadie is twitching and gnashing the air. Manic growls come from her jaws. My blood chills. Do dogs usually act this way?

  Marnica swears and whips the pistol from her utility belt. “Sadie, hide! Get in here, now.”

  “Thirty seconds,” Blake says, grabbing his own laser pistol.

  “Less,” Marnica snaps. “Get behind me, Jay. Stay back from Sadie.”

  I glance from Marnica to the dogs. What’s going on? Sadie careens into the center with her teeth bared and eyes rolling. With a deep growl, she lunges toward Marnica and me. I yelp, falling backward.

  Marnica takes rapid aim and fires. The shot pings out.

  Less than a meter in front of us, Sadie staggers and slumps into a motionless pile of fur and bones.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I scramble away from Sadie’s body on the floor and gawk up at Marnica. Did she really just kill her dog right in front of me? And why did Sadie suddenly go crazy? As I get to my feet, Ajax paws at his ears, gives a wild growl, and swings toward me. Without hesitating, Blake shoots his dog in the shoulder. Ajax jerks and slides across the floor, scattering broken glass.

  I take a gulping breath. Both Blake and Marnica killed their dogs?

  Hold it—those shots pinged instead of hummed like lasers.

  “You tranquilized them?” I wheeze.

  “Yeah. A scavenger team must be around.” Blake hides by a window frame and peers out. “Dogs and other carnivores have great noses, so they go berserk when the team is around. They don’t attack when they’re wild in nature, like I told you at the Nebula. Daniel says it’s from the flamers the team uses—the sulfur smell.”

  “Let’s go,” Marnica says. “We gotta hide somewhere the team won’t check for supplies.” She drags Sadie’s body behind a counter and covers it with a hunk of plastiboard.

  “The dogs—” I start to say.

  “No time to carry them anywhere.” Blake whisks Ajax out of sight and waves Marnica and me to the door. “Clear. Run for the licensing center three units down.”

  Marnica and I dash along with him down the permawalk and into a small building. We swerve around a service counter to a hall with two rooms on each side.

  Blake slips into a room, hurdles a desk, and then vanishes behind it.

  “Don’t come out until they’re gone,” Marnica tells me. She takes the next room.

  I run into a third room and crouch behind a desk, not caring the floor is littered with rodent droppings. I’m just glad the place is free of human skeletons. For a while I hear nothing except metallic creaks and the pounding of my heart. What will the scavenger team do if they find Sadie and Ajax? Will they suspect we’re nearby?

  Distant voices reach my ears. They grow louder, then fade. My nose tickles from the thick dust on the desk and the chair beside it. I ease into a less cramped position, but I don’t dare leave the room. The team might be foraging close by, only temporarily silent. I’ll let Blake or Marnica make the first move.

  Minutes pass. I lean my head against the desk. So…Blake must’ve been meeting Marnica in the woods after she got banished a year ago—although it’s a head-scratcher how she traveled from here to the safe zone and back. But are they together, as a pair? It’s hard to tell.

  Aubrie will be devastated if they are.

  More time drags on. My muscles grow stiff, and my right calf throbs with pain, like a knife is stabbing it. A faint rotten-egg odor of sulfur rises up from the wound. Nasty. No wonder the dogs don’t like it. Weird that it makes them go mad and attack humans, though, like the vermal at the perimeter fence, I guess. But wait…Mr. Redmond wasn’t carrying a flamer, and if Sadie and Ajax go berserk from smelling sulfur from a distance, they’d react to what’s on my leg. Sadie actually sniffed my leg while I lay on the bench—with no rabid reaction.

  A chill crawls down my spine. No. That Daniel guy has it all wrong. What makes the dogs crazy isn’t the sulfur. It has to be something about the aliens themselves. Ajax pawed his ears right before Blake shot him. I’ve read dogs are supposed to have better hearing than humans, which means the trigger might be a sound—like those gravelly slushings I heard when Mom and Dad spoke. Maybe dogs can hear those gross noises even when aliens speak in their human forms.

  No wonder the aliens don’t have dogs for pets in Sanctuary. We raise cows, pigs, chickens, worrels, and a few ducks and goats. We keep small herds of sheep and viyyas for weaving fabrics. No dogs or cats. That’s logical. The aliens can’t keep carnivores around that would attack their human food every time someone from their horde was nearby.

  A faint rustling down the hall turns into footsteps.

  “Let’s head out, guys.” Marnica sounds cautious, her voice holding a hard edge. “The dogs will be waking up soon.”

  I limp out to join Blake in the hall and peer out the broken window of the center. A gathering of fledgers peck in the weedy UHV docking lot. “Looks safe.”

  Marnica gives a crooked smile. “Yeah, the scavenger teams never stick around later than four o’clock. They don’t like to miss their tasty hot dinners back in the safe zones.”

  We find Sadie snuffling around the food center on wobbly legs. Ajax rouses himself into a clumsy stand.

  “Easy, boy, you’re okay.” Blake pats Ajax’s haunches. Ajax yawns and shows a scary set of jagged teeth.

  I keep my hands close to my body. “What’s with the thirty seconds for the dogs? Is that the time from when they first go nuts to when they attack?”

  Marnica nods. “It’s our warning system. When they start growling and twitching like they have bugs crawling in their heads, you grab a tranq pistol. You don’t go anywhere without a dog or without someone who has a dog.”

  I start to tell them my idea about the dogs and aliens, but Blake speaks first.

  “Years ago, when Daniel was raising a dog and foraging, he found out the hard way. He managed to get away with a minor bite on his arm, but the team found and flamed his dog.” Without waiting for me to respond, Blake whistles for Ajax and heads into the docking lot. Ajax trails him in an unsteady trot.

  Marnica and I leave with Sadie, skirting vehicles on the broken pavement.

  I point at a charred UHV. “Is that the work of a scavenger team?”

  “Nope.” Marnica shakes her head, the long side of her hair swinging by her jawline. “That’s from the rioting and looting when the War broke out. People went all brainvoid. They stole food and broke w
indows and set things on fire.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “They panicked. Daniel said they wanted to grab everything they could—they were trying to get out of the colony with supplies, fast. It was chaos. They didn’t know whether they’d die the next minute or the next day. All the big colonies got hit with genomide dust. Rochester on the coast. Wild Range down south, New Paradise here up north. Plus a whole bunch of other colonies I can’t remember.”

  “So it was the colonists who dropped dust on each other and started the War.”

  “Naw,” she says with scorn. “That’s a bull-flamin’ lie that the Board told us to sound less scary or something. They argued, but the colonists didn’t go to war with each other. What destroyed most of Liberty was an alien invasion. Daniel saw it with his own eyes, on the planetary media hub when it was connected. One day a fleet of huge silver spaceships whizzed into the sky. They dropped genomide dust and went around blowing and burning things up for extra confusion. Most of the people who breathed in the dust died in two or three days. By the time the military protectors blasted the aliens from the sky, there weren’t many humans left. The War was definitely real. But it wasn’t the humans fighting against themselves.”

  The theory I had in the database hub was right, then. I struggle to speak. “Then…you guys already know they’re aliens.”

  “Uh, who?”

  “Sanctuary. All the adults. The scavenger teams.”

  She eyes me with amusement. “No, weirdbrain, you’re not soaking this in right. I don’t mean the aliens are in the zones. All the aliens were killed. The military found two injured ones and some dead ones that weren’t incinerated when their ships went down. Daniel says the creatures looked like giant lobsters with furry snouts and big fangs. Anyway, after that the media hub went down and Daniel has no idea—”

  “Hey,” Blake yells at us, already fifty meters ahead. “Are you two going to jaw all day, or actually get moving?”

  “Shut it!” Marnica yells back. “You’re too loud. You want a scavenger team to find us?”

  I dart a look over my shoulder. Man, I hope the team really left the area. Shouting in the middle of the street seems beyond reckless, even if it is past 4:00 when the members usually leave.

  “Daniel adopts the strays,” Marnica continues, as though she didn’t bellow the second before. “He takes in banished kids, and he’s really fused about how the safe zones treat us.”

  “Why doesn’t he go live on the other side of the Corveiras, in Promise City?”

  “It got destroyed in the War along with the airships. None of it was built afterward like our parents told us. All those holoscreens, recorded music, and advanced-tech stuff really did exist, but Daniel says Promise City looks just like this colony—at least seven years ago when he last checked. Bombed to bits. Shredded and broken. He can’t figure out where the graduates really go, unless they’re over there helping fix things up.”

  Her words are a turbo-punch to my mind. No bustling colony on the other side of the Corveira Mountains? Then we’re truly isolated. The destination I worked toward for most of my life is another alien lie. I start to tell her that the aliens weren’t all exterminated, but a prolonged, enraged shout comes from down the street. Blake.

  Marnica grabs her pistol. She breaks into a swift run, with Sadie right behind her.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I limp after Marnica and Sadie as fast as I can. Blake’s roar turns into a fit of strangled swear words.

  Marnica’s pack flaps against her side as she runs. “Blake, are you okay?”

  I turn the corner after her. Blake stands with his hands clenched, his face red.

  “They found the hovercarts and played target practice with them.” He glares at a pair of motorized carts that lie blackened and tipped over. The carts have short hauling beds, topped by solar-paneled roofs. Tools, lud-lights, bowls, and charred plastiboard boxes are scattered in the street. Sulfur hangs in the air, but the dogs aren’t reacting. It has to be a sound that causes them to go mad.

  Blake kicks a metal bowl across the permawalk, where it smacks into the side of a building. “The lud cells are gone—the team must’ve taken them. What an astral waste of my time.”

  Marnica huffs. “Don’t be an infant. I worked hard to collect this stuff, too. Is any of it worth saving, and are both carts ruined?”

  “Hanged if I know.” Grumbling, Blake heaves the less charred hovercart upright and begins to inspect it.

  Marnica paws through the clutter, collecting tools and devices and nudging boxes with her boots. Blake flips a switch, and the hovercart whirs to life. I hobble over to help Marnica. When I bend to grab a canister, my head reels and fuzziness explodes inside my skull. My hand trembles.

  “Stop that,” Marnica says. “You just went all white. Blake, is that cart working?”

  “Seems okay. The solar cells aren’t melted. The other one’s trashed, though.”

  “We’ll cram into the good one to get back to Daniel’s. I hope all of us and both dogs aren’t too heavy for one trip.”

  Blake kicks another bowl. “Should be fine.”

  Marnica waves me toward the hovercart. “You can ride in the back with Sadie and Ajax.” She takes a swig from her canteen, then hands it to me. “Here, drink something before you pass out.”

  Too shaky to argue, I take a long guzzle and manage to climb into the cart. Sadie and Ajax jump in beside me. After gathering the usable items from the street, Marnica takes the driver’s seat, and Blake sits beside her. We hover off down the road. The power system grinds a bit from the weight. With my eyes half closed, I watch damaged buildings flash by, interspersed with the blank faces of dead electronic street signs.

  The cart swerves onto a broader hovertrack and increases speed. The wind whips across my face and wiggles the dogs’ fur. I keep my hands to myself, not trusting their teeth. Sadie’s tongue hangs out as she pants. It’s a curiously flat tongue, not rounded like a cow’s. Near her on the cart’s sides, char marks discolor the metal, which I assume is the handiwork of flamers.

  Marnica drives on. She whistles a tune that trails back in the wind, a thin, cheery sound that makes me crack a lopsided smile. My smile vanishes as I imagine her a year ago in the woods, dodging her father or a Board member as he chased her with a flamer. She was lucky to escape. Blake and Shelly, too.

  We turn onto a ghost street, a dwelling compound lined with broken-windowed units and weed-choked plushgrass. Doors hang crooked. Rooflines are broken. Exterior surfaces are scorched and warped. We pass grassy fields to an area with units spread farther apart. Marnica hovers up to a two-level unit that actually has glass in its windows. The huge yard is a shaggy mess, but the front pavement is clear of debris.

  After Marnica docks, she switches off the cart. “This is Daniel’s unit. We live here with Shelly and a couple of guys from Refuge.”

  The dogs leap out in streaks of brown fur. I climb down, glimpsing the corner of a garden out back. A goat bleats. Blake grabs the packs while I limp to the front door behind Marnica. Inside, she crosses a sparsely furnished lounge room that adjoins an open kitchen area. Sadie lopes to a retracting glass door and sniffs another German Shepherd lying there.

  Marnica opens an interior door leading to a staircase and yells, “Daniel! Hate to interrupt your basement fun, but we found ourselves a newbie and his leg is burned.”

  Heated curse words come from down below, along with voices and an abrupt thump.

  “Another safe zone stray?” a man yells. “You’re pushing my limits, girl.”

  I tense up. At the colony center, Marnica made it sound like Daniel welcomed banished graduates with open arms and a tenderhearted smile.

  “Get over yourself, old man!” Marnica yells back down, then gives me a wink.

  A lean, bearded man stomps up the stairs, wiping his hands on a rag. What little hair he has grows in a fringe above his ears. His tanned face is oddly creased, especially around the mout
h and eyes. It’s as though his skin is tired, bunched in some places and saggy in others. I haven’t a clue what horrible thing happened to make him look this way.

  Marnica motions at me. “This is Jay, the new banished dude.”

  “Welcome to our puny outpost, where freedom is a questionable commodity,” Daniel says in a dry voice. He drops his gaze to my leg. “What in astral colonies have you been doing to that wound, boy? Running through pollen fields and rolling in dirt like a dog? Looks like you got yourself a second-degree burn. Good thing you have fast reflexes and your pants took the bulk of the damage.”

  “I, uh—”

  “Well, come on,” he says, as if I’m keeping him waiting. “Let’s take care of that mess. Marnica, nab the autocutters while I get the boiled water.”

  He grabs a lidded bucket from the kitchen floor. Muttering, he lugs it down the hall, and I follow him into a bathroom with four open buckets of water lined up along one wall. I perch on the tub’s edge and kick off my damp boots and socks. Two scruffy guys poke their heads in to mumble greetings.

  “There’s Jeff and Vic, my longtime trusty slaves,” Daniel says. “Guys, meet Jay, our latest safe zone casualty.” He sprays beige goo from a can onto the places where my pants are fused to my wound. “This should loosen things up, slick as snot on a permawalk.”

  I nod a greeting to Jeff and Vic, then eye Daniel as he works. He’s gruff and unpredictable, although he doesn’t seem mean. I’m not sure how to take this guy.

  Marnica enters the room with autocutters, elbowing past Jeff and Vic.

  “Buzz off his pants above the knee,” Daniel tells her. “Where’s Blake?”

  “He’s unloading and sorting.” Marnica activates the autocutters and starts clipping. “We didn’t get a good haul since a team scattered our stuff and fried one of our carts. The other cart is singed but okay.”

  Daniel swears. “Give him a hand after you’re done cutting, then. Guys, I don’t need an audience for this. Get back to work on the charger. I’ll be downstairs in a few minutes. Tell Shelly to fetch the turmroot antiseptic and come finish patching up Jay before you three start dinner.”