by Nirina Stone
Chapter Fifteen
Sidney
HER CHANCE COMES JUST half an hour later, after it looks like Gideon’s about done collecting what they’ll need for the trip. She has her knapsack by her side, carrying all her usual things, and a couple more new goodies she expects he won’t miss too much—and she watches him closely.
When he heads towards the metal doors to the lift, opens them and putters inside for a moment then heads back out again, she knows this is her chance. She runs towards the now open doors slamming into his side by accident. He falls to the ground and she instinctively stops, meaning to help him back to his feet, but knowing that it would only delay her, she fights the bubbles in her stomach again and eyes the inside of the lift quickly. With only three buttons to choose from, she quickly determines that the arrow pointing up is the one she needs and she depresses it until the doors shut and her stomach drops, indicating that the lift’s heading up.
If Gideon somehow stops it from below, she knows she’s a sitting duck but she can’t worry about that right now. For now, she’s heading back up to the surface, she’ll run north towards the city, and she’ll find a spot to wait for Petra to come back together again. If Petra doesn’t, due to the rains, Sidney will collect all the silver dust she can get her hands on and set up a camp somewhere in the forest, away from the acid rains. Surely, Petra would come back together again.
She should have thought of this sooner, really—but in her grief for Petra, she wasn’t thinking clearly—just like when she’d lost Nayne.
By the time she reaches the surface, the doors open, and she’s running North, she’s almost convinced herself this new plan would work, she’s almost convinced this is a far better plan than staying with Gideon and Henry. He was fine. The fall wasn’t that far and he’s fine. Henry’s fine too. Everyone’s fine, really. The only one who’s not fine is Petra, and Sidney will help her. Whatever it takes to put her back together again, whatever it takes to fix her.
Chapter Sixteen
Henry
HE KNEW SIDNEY’S ATTEMPT to escape was coming soon, but seeing her flinch and turn away from Gideon as he fell takes Henry back for a moment. Still, the fall wasn’t too bad from the looks of it. Gideon huffs as he gets back to his feet and stares at the now-closed doors to the lift as if he’s trying to figure out what just happened. Then he laughs out so hard, Henry wonders if the fall managed to dislodge something in his brain.
“That kid!” Gideon guffaws as he turns towards Henry. “Not sugar and spice, is she?”
Henry’s not sure what he’s referring to but nods his head and laughs along. “No, can’t say that she’s any of that,” he agrees. “Though maybe she’s more spice than anything.”
Gideon chuckles as he rubs on a sore spot on his elbow. Then he mutters, “Reminds me of Thea, that one....” He presses on the one button by the side of the lift’s doors and waits, but Henry says, “Just let her go, mate.”
He thinks of every time he’s tried to stop Sidney from doing something she’s set her mind to. He can’t think of one moment where she’d complied to him or Petra just because they were the adults in the situation. The kid was not brought up like most Allendian kids, to respect an adult’s wishes no matter what. “Trust me,” he says decidedly. “If Sid decides she needs to go, you’re not doing yourself any favors by stopping her.” He remembers trying to ‘save’ her from Petra when he was convinced the bot was dangerous. He’d learnt the hard way that Sidney takes care of herself. A ghostly hint of pain stretches across his torso, making him rub his metallic chest automatically as he speaks and Gideon doesn’t miss the action. “Did she do that to you?” the old man asks, with a hint of awe in his voice.
“Well,” Henry says. “She did manage to blow a hole in me, yes—though I don’t think it was her intent to. It was really an accident. I was in the way....” He thinks back on the moment he’d decided to rush at Petra, meaning to bring her down so that the kid could run off, save herself. His intent was to physically stop the bot with his own body. Little did he know at the time just how dangerous Sidney could be too.
“Petra is the one who fixed me,” he says. “It’s complicated.”
Right, so Gideon definitely knows about the metal now, he thinks. Still, the old man’s reaction to it is oddly calm.
“Isn’t it always?” Gideon says. “All right, if you believe she can handle herself out there, who am I to argue? Huh....” He looks towards the lift doors again as he makes himself comfortable beside Henry. “That is one stubborn child. Just like—”
“Like?” Henry urges.
“Like Thea,” Henry says. “My wife, Terrion.” His eyes water as he finishes his sentence with a slight cough, and Henry’s instincts tell him it’s a story for another time.
“Sure, a stubborn child,” Henry says as his eyes rise to the ceiling. “Or a ‘child’ who’s survived on her own because of her gut instincts for the better part of a year.”
Gideon nods, again in awe. “Okay, mate,” he says, eyeing the lift doors again. “I still think it’s unsafe for her out there, more so than before but if what you say is true, we should see her back here soon.”
“If it’s unsafe as you say,” Henry agrees, “she’ll come around.”
Chapter Seventeen
Petra
SHE PAUSES, SENSING a change in the air. Much has happened here since she’d lost her complete form in the city. She still can’t tell how much time has passed since then, but she continues walking south, towards where memory tells her Sidney and Henry would have traveled. They were traveling with someone else—the old man, she remembers, as visions of him and Henry being held beside a bonfire come clear. They were nearly thrown into the fire, she recalls. She had to stop the men who were about to do the killing. All of them are gone now. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any real threat for miles. Yet she wonders why the re-emergence has not happened yet. What could have caused the delay?
She pauses, tilting her head as a repetitive sound reaches her ears—a steady beep-beep-pause-beep-beep-beep-pause. Definitely not a common sound in the Blue Dome. She follows it.
Chapter Eighteen
Sidney
SHE ONLY PAUSES AFTER a good fifteen minutes of running. She wonders if that Gideon would even bother coming after her, just to get his goggles back. Or would he even notice they’re gone? She’s certain that Henry won’t come after her, not while he’s still injured. No matter how fast he’s healing, she thinks it will still be hours before he could make it up to the surface to look for her, if he’s inclined to. She thinks he would, but she’ll be long gone by then, his efforts won’t work.
She slows to a walk, keeping her ears and eyes peeled. She realizes she’s hungry, despite having eaten a decent meal at Gideon’s. She hears hundreds of chirps in the trees and knows a meal is imminent, but another sound, a heavy step to her right makes her stop. She turns slowly to face another robotic cat. It was unusual to see one this far away from the city already, she thinks as she remembers the one that attacked Henry. But two—?
She stills as she watches the thing crawl forward, its eyes on her. She looks quickly behind her, then back at the thing. They must be broken, she decides—because these things never, ever harmed humans as far as she knows. In fact, unlike the bots like Petra, these things were not programmed for anything more complicated than finding rodents. That is, until they’d helped Petra hunt her down. So as the thing continues to move forward, she inches further and further away. If it’s broken, she thinks, and if that other one attacked Henry, this one—
She doesn’t think anymore, instead she rushes back towards one of the trees where the hundreds of chirping birds have now stopped singing. She’s fast, she always has been, but her heart constricts in a panic anyway as she climbs up the tree faster than she can think. She hears the cat move behind her, knowing that it’s about to jump at any moment. She fights the rising scream in her chest. If she slips on any of the branches or makes any mistake out
of fear, she knows she’s done for, so she rushes around the other side of the tree, just as the cat launches itself at her. Not a moment too soon. She’s still climbing, climbing, as its massive body slams into the opposite trunk of the tree she’d just been on. She thinks of its massive teeth, not as sharp as a real cat’s would have been, but still sharp enough to make Henry bleed.
As the cat falls back to the ground and jumps again, she finally thanks her lucky stars. It doesn’t have real claws, she thinks. Of course it doesn’t. Being used as a pet by most Allendians, the cat’s creators made sure they were more cuddly than sharp. That doesn’t explain the teeth, but at the very least, this one thing works in her favor. Without claws, the animal won’t be able to climb up this tree after her.
Without the need for food, it can wait for her for a while under the tree as it’s doing now.
She finds a decent enough branch to sit on but realizes a bit too late that she picked a smaller tree than she needs. It must still be young. Where she sits is only twelve or so feet off the ground, not nearly tall enough for her to comfortably sit out of the cat’s reach. The branches are also smaller than she’d like. There’s no way she can camp out here overnight if needed, when the thing will need to recharge come morning and she can make her way away. She eyes the other trees around her. Five or six more smaller trees like this one, all of which won’t be able to hold her for long.
There is one, several trees away, that looks like a decent size—over eight feet tall, thick branches, sturdy enough. Now, how to get there? She can’t tell if she’d be able to leap there from here.
When she hears the trunk below her creak then lean backwards, the decision is made for her and she climbs as high up the sapling as she can, managing to break off a sharpish branch. At first she moves to throw it away but, eyeing the cat below, she instinctively throws the branch at it, then grabs at more breaking twigs and branches, throwing everything she can at the thing as it leans back on its haunches. Frustrated, panicked, she desperately grabs at a thicker branching, wrestling it off the tree. It snaps off with a promising crack and a perfectly sharp three inches at the end. Sidney leans back as far as she can and throws the branch, not breathing, until it lodges with a sickening thud in the cat’s wide open throat. It’s enough to make the bot sit back with a groan as the branch lodges in—something important—Sidney hopes. Then she leaps as far as she can to the next tree, which also starts to bend. She doesn’t think, just throws herself forward again until she’s as close to the larger tree as possible.
She stops though, holding on to this last sapling with all her might. There’s a small meadow between this one and the tree she needs to get to. She’s confident in her abilities to jump from tree to tree but knows this one is just too far away. She’ll have to run across the meadow. How? Another cat’s followed her as she leapt from one tree to the next. It’s already waiting on the ground below this one, and when she looks down at it again, she realizes this tree’s even smaller, even shorter than the first one she’d started from. This tree’s limbs are smoother than the last one’s, refusing to break despite her efforts.
She climbs as high as she can though. There’s no way she could outrun this cat, right? She realizes she’s never actually seen the things run—but why take her chances? So she breathes shallow breaths so as to keep the branch she’s on from swaying too much. She looks around again—the only way to the larger tree is across that meadow. She’s stuck. She doesn’t even need to look through her knapsack’s inventory; she remembers everything she owns in there. The small book, pencil, goggles from Gideon. Her small knife. She doesn’t even have a blaster handy, not since she realized what the silver dust in the city was made of and stopped collecting it.
Looking around her, she knows she’s good and stuck—and no amount of looking around her or breaking her mind on what to do will help her here. The cat watches her and finally leans back into its haunches like what she imagines a real cat would do—and it waits.
Chapter Nineteen
Henry
HE HEARS GIDEON RUMMAGING about around the corner, and wonders what the little old man is up to. They’d decided to wait out the night and one more day before heading out to look for Sidney. It will give Henry more time to heal. Besides, he’s certain she’s fine and wouldn’t want them coming for her anyway. Still, he just wants to know she’s okay even if she doesn’t want to leave the dome any more.
If Sid stays, there’s no reason for him to head to the Red Dome so he’s already told Gideon, after he heals, he’ll stay right here in the Blue, come what may once the re-emergence happens.
The old man offered his home to him. “It’s just going to be empty, anyway,” he’d said. “You might as well take it over. Besides, I don’t have anything left for me here. I need to go back to the Red Dome.”
Henry was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he simply said, “I’ll take excellent care of it Gideon, and, whenever you come back around this way on your travels, the doors are always open to you.”
It’s the least he can do. He’d have to hide away from Allendians once they start taking over the dome again. He’s illegal now—his only option is to hide, precisely the way Gideon did all these years to keep his family safe. Henry’s fine with that. He’s never been one for large crowds anyway, not since he’d lost his family.
Gideon turns the corner again, carrying a small black slate which he places on the table in front of Henry’s makeshift hospital bed. He depresses the middle of the slate and it throws up a cartoonish impression of the Blue Dome into the air, the city to the North, and nothing but trees and lakes for miles all around it.
“This is a screener,” Gideon explains as he pinches the air and the images show up even clearer, as though they are flying through the sky in the dome. “Thought you’d like to see what the girl is up to since she left here.”
Henry leans in closer, wondering just who this man is. He knows Gideon’s a scientist, but he’s never seen anything like this before. What else has this fellow built, what else can he find in this crazy cavern?
Then his eyes land on a small form in one of the trees they’re flying over. Sidney! She’s sitting, or more like hanging on tight to a small tree while below her, a cat sits back, its eyes unblinking as it waits for her.
“What in the world is it doing?” Henry wonders. He’s still in shock at what happened with the cat from the lift; they’d never acted like that before. In fact, all they ever did was ignore him as they went about hunting for rodents but today’s attack was something else. Still he’d attributed it to the cat being damaged somehow. It has been years since the things went roaming.
This one sitting in wait for Sidney tells him there’s something more going on. “Were they programmed like the other bots?” he asks Gideon. “Were they programmed to hunt down flu-ridden Allendians?”
“No,” Gideon says as he shakes his head. “They were only ever to be pets. Their programming was never more complicated than that.”
“So what is that thing doing?” Henry says as he raises a hand to it.
Gideon sighs out and leans back. “I really don’t know, but she doesn’t look like she’s doing too well on her own, now. Shall we go help her?”
Henry wants to jump to his feet. Of course they should go help her. What are they still doing sitting here talking about it? But when he moves, his chest and insides burn so much he has to lean back into the cushions again. If Sidney needs help today, it won’t be from him. He’s still not healed. He stares at Gideon who looks back with understanding in his eyes.
“It’s alright mate,” Gideon says as he taps Henry’s knee once. “I’ll head out there. It’s not a problem.”
“Wait,” Henry says as his eyes go back to Sidney. He spies another robotic cat walk through the trees and sit next to the first one, then when Gideon pulls at the air, making their view zoom out, he sees another and another. A total of sixteen cats stroll towards the tree from various spots in the ci
ty.
Gideon leans back again. “Well, shit.”
Chapter Twenty
Sidney
SHE WATCHES THE CATS as they silently walk through the clearing, all eyes on her, and they circle around her tree, some sitting as far as twenty feet away. This—she thinks—is not ideal. Rolling shakes up and down her spine mock the way she urges her brain not to panic. If Nayne were here, she’d probably figure something out fast—even Petra would—but Sidney’s stumped.
Her tree leans forward slightly and she tries to keep her breaths shallow again so as not to make it sway much more than it has. Oh what I would do for some blasters right now, she thinks, though she realizes blasters will only do so much. She wouldn't make much of a dent in the number of cats sitting around her.
Okay, think Sidney, think. What do you know about these things? Not much, she decides. They were largely harmless—up until today when one of them bit into Henry’s shoulder. They don’t have claws, as far as she knows. They hunt rodents and have kept the Blue Dome’s streets clean for the past several years. Nayne always thought they were the best symbol of what she’d called “Allendian ego and elitism.” When Sidney had asked her what she meant, she said, “They’re just a way for Allendians to prove to other Allendians they have enough status, enough money to throw away at nothing. They have too many possessions, so what’s one more superfluous thing?”
Nayne had explained that the cats were supposed to be in stasis somewhere until the Allendians were awake again. Something woke them up too early, but Nayne didn’t know what.
None of it made much sense to Sidney, and up until now, she pretty much viewed these beasts like they were air. Well not up until now, she realizes. She remembers the ones that had found her in the building the first day she’d met Petra. One had pounced up at her in her hiding spot in the floating ceiling, and she tried to take it out—as well as Petra—with a blaster. So there is something in their programming, she thinks, but it was something to do with Petra. The other bots had never bothered with these cats either.