by Mel Odom
“You must be patient, Hella. Your memories of your parents will come back to you when they are ready. They are there waiting for you. When the time is right, you will have them again.”
Hella swiftly quelled the tremor of hope that quivered inside her, focusing instead on the task she had ahead of her. When danger was around, you paid attention to that first. Stampede had drilled that into her.
“Ocastya?” A male voice called from behind Hella. She turned toward it and saw a tall man with a generous face and a smile looking at her.
“This is her father.”
Hella could have guessed that. She wanted to fight as the big man reached down and took her up into his arms, but Ocastya embraced him instead. The man’s scent and his cologne filled Hella’s nose and made one of them sneeze.
“He was a good man, a good father.” Scatter sounded sad. “Ocastya lost him when we made the transitions to our new bodies. She lost her mother too. She also lost two brothers and a sister.”
A wave of sadness—whether from Ocastya or just from a sympathetic reaction, Hella didn’t know—pierced her. She started to relax and share the feeling of protection Ocastya was experiencing.
Then the bottom dropped out of the world again.
Afterward Hella couldn’t even guess at how many memories she had gone through. The emotions had been the roughest part up until the time when Scatter separated her from Ocastya. That separation was the hardest thing of all. By the time she’d finished spending years in Ocastya’s memories, Hella felt as if she were being ripped out of her own body.
She blinked her eyes and discovered she was still in the same position, leaning over Ocastya’s body. Sweat dripped from her, and her arms and back were knots of agony. Her legs were numb, and for one insane moment, she thought the paralysis that held Ocastya had somehow spread to her.
“Red?” Stampede sat across the cave. The cook fire flickered between them, the foot-high flames licking the breeze and caressing the pot that hung to one side.
“Yeah.” Hella felt tears on her face and grew embarrassed. She wiped them away with trembling hands.
“Are you okay?”
“Sure.” Hella was parched and her voice came out as a croak.
Stampede stood and crossed the cave to give her a canteen.
Uncapping the canteen, Hella drank thirstily. After a moment, Stampede gently pulled the canteen away. “Go slow. You’ll make yourself sick. You probably don’t want that.”
“No.” Hella wiped her lips with the back of her hand. She looked around then down at her unmarred palm. “Where’s Scatter?”
“I don’t know.” Stampede shrugged his broad shoulders. “I haven’t seen him since he wrapped around your face and put you in that trance.”
Hella felt for the fractoid but couldn’t sense him. She glanced down at her palm and saw his face there. Despite her efforts, she couldn’t elicit a response.
For the first time, she noticed that it was dark outside the cave mouth. Stampede had evidently dragged brush over the opening to hide the mouth to mask the presence of the fire. He’d left bare centimeters at the top for the smoke to stream out. “How long was I gone?”
“Hours.” Stampede’s ears twitched. “I was getting worried, but the last thing Scatter told me was to leave you alone and let you come out of it on your own. Otherwise you might not make it back.” He smiled. “I’m glad you did.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Want something to eat?”
Hella nodded. “I’m starving.”
“Figured you would be.” Returning to the fire, Stampede spooned up a plate of stew and handed it over. “Go slow.”
As she ate, Hella told Stampede everything she could remember about the worlds she’d just visited. She had to share it. She couldn’t keep something like that to herself. If she did, she felt certain she’d explode.
Only a few meters away, Ocastya lay inert. But the burned and twisted parts of her body glowed and shifted.
By morning, Scatter still hadn’t returned. Hella’s worry grew. She’d slept a little in the wee hours of the morning, and her dreams had been a constant, uncoiling and blending of her memories with Ocastya’s. She’d been gone hours from the cave, but she’d traipsed through years, decades, of Ocastya’s life. She believed she remembered less of those times than she had the day before, but there was still enough to be confusing. She had to concentrate to remember her own history, which had already been cored with holes.
Without a word, Stampede handed her a venison steak wrapped inside fried bread he’d made in a pan over the open fire.
“Thank you.”
“Eat all you want. I took a deer this morning.” Stampede waved to the silver, insulated bag in the back of the cave. “We can eat well for two or three days. Even feeding that black hole.” He jerked a thumb at Daisy, who slept on her side. Miraculously a small pile of deer carcass remained beside her. The blood on the rock was dark brown with age.
The meat was warm and tender, seasoned with some of the herbs they’d packed. Hella ate hungrily and stared out at the cotton white morning fog lying over the lowlands. “Did you see Pardot or Trazall while you were taking the deer?”
“No.”
“There can’t be many places around here that would have the laboratory Scatter said he was taken to.”
“I know. I’ve been thinking.” Scatter took out a map. “We haven’t strayed too far off the trade roads here in the mountains.”
“There are no raw materials or salvage areas out here worth having, and it’s dangerous because of the land as well as the creatures that live here. And that’s not mentioning the two-legged predators.”
Stampede nodded and tapped a section of the map to the northeast. “Before the collider exploded and the world changed, there was a large city up here.”
“Tulsa. I know.” Tulsa had been one of the largest cities in Oklahoma before the collider destroyed everything. Hella had never heard what happened to the city, but when the physical world had ruptured and changed, something had destroyed the city.
Some of the local legends talked about a massive star cruiser that got pulled out of orbit in one of the alternate worlds and crashed into Tulsa. The resulting series of detonations had ripped through the city and rendered it into a toxic wasteland. Seriously twisted and mutated things were pretty much all that remained of the populace.
“The city has a lot of research and development places there.” Stampede tapped the map. “If Scatter is correct, that Colleen Trammell is looking for facilities like that, she might head here.”
“Doesn’t mean she’s going to be there.”
“True. But if she has joined up with Trazall for the moment, I don’t see that as a long-lasting arrangement.”
Hella snorted derisively. “When Trazall is sure he’s milked Colleen for everything that he can, he’ll either sell her or kill her. And the profit he can get isn’t going to be worth much aggravation or effort on his part.”
“Yeah. I know. But if he’s going to play along with her to get all the information she has, he’ll have to deal with her a while longer. That gives us time.”
Hella’s palm with Scatter’s face on it itched. She scratched the flesh but couldn’t satisfy the irritation.
“You can’t reach Scatter?”
“No. I’ve tried.” Hella stood and approached Ocastya.
New metallic flesh had replaced the burned areas, and the twisted lines had straightened out.
“She looks new, like she should just open her eyes and wake up.”
Hella knelt and hesitantly reached out toward the fractoid.
“You sure you should do that?”
“No. But you can’t feel a pulse in her.”
“I already tried. If she’s alive, in any form or fashion, I can’t tell it.”
“And if she’s dead, we need to know. If she’s dead, Scatter is too. Doesn’t matter if he’s already dead; he will be. Then we don’t have any involveme
nt in what Pardot and Trammell do to each other.”
“Trazall’s still got some pain coming for jacking our expedition.”
“He didn’t exactly jack it if Trammell approached him.”
“He could have turned away.” Stampede’s ears twitched and he snorted. “Any self-respecting scout would have.”
Working through the vibrating fear that filled her, Hella placed her hand on Ocastya’s forehead. All she felt was the cool metal.
Then Ocastya’s eyes opened. “We need to go. My mate is dying.”
CHAPTER 30
Hella drew back her hand and watched in astonishment as Ocastya “flowed” to her feet, shifting from a prone position to a standing one. The fractoid peered around the cave anxiously.
Stampede took a wary step back. “Can you speak to Scatter?”
“Scatter?”
Gingerly, moving slowly, aware that Ocastya flowed to face her more directly, Hella got to her feet. “Scatter is what we call your mate. We can’t say his name.”
“I see. And how am I to call myself?”
“Ocastya.”
“All right.”
Stampede shifted impatiently. Hella knew the past day or so had been hard on him. Stampede wasn’t used to taking an inactive role. His voice when he spoke sounded almost surly, though she knew he took care not to have it sound like that. “Can you speak to your mate?”
“No.” Ocastya frowned and shook her head. “He’s very … far from me right now.”
“How far?”
In the back of the cave, Daisy snorted and woke, obviously alerted by the new voice.
“Not so much distance. Perhaps twenty kilometers, if I understand the measurement conversion correctly.” Ocastya held a hand up in front of her, flowed it from open to a fist to a mallet then back to hand. “But he feels far. I can’t sense his thoughts, only that he is there.”
“That’s good, right?”
“It means he still yet lives. But only just.” Ocastya shifted her gaze to Hella. “My mate shifted most of his energy to me through you. I did not know such a thing was possible. Normally, if we were together, that energy would reciprocate. One of us would never drain the other. Things are not what they were in our world.”
“No.” Hella saw the metallic woman standing before her, but she remembered the child Ocastya had been. That same innocence resonated in her.
Ocastya surveyed her body. “I have never been injured like that before.” She paused. “In fact, I have never been injured before. Not in this body.”
“I’m sorry.”
Ocastya glanced at Hella curiously. “My arrival here had nothing to do with you, did it?”
“No.”
“I did not think so. My mate—Scatter—told me many things while I convalesced, but most of what he told me did not make sense. I have no reference.” Ocastya looked at Hella’s damaged wrist. Most of the burn scarring was gone there, and she finally had full range of movement. “I damaged you.”
“You did.”
“I am sorry. I did not wish to.”
“I know.” Hella put out a hand. “I can help you with information about our world. I helped Scatter.”
Ocastya made no move to accept Hella’s offer. “You were inside my mind. I remember that.”
“Scatter asked me to help. He said if I didn’t, that you would die.”
Ocastya’s lips firmed. “My mate knows more about these bodies than I do. I trust his judgment.” She frowned. “However, the idea of you there—among my personal remembrances—is distasteful.”
“I know. I agree.” Hella took back her hand.
“But I need knowledge if I am to help my mate. If you are willing, I will accept your offer.” Ocastya held out her hand.
Hella put out her hand and pressed her palm to the fractoid’s. Almost immediately, dizziness swept through her, and her knees almost buckled as fire blazed through her skull.
“I beg your pardon. That was my mistake.”
Thankfully the pain subsided. Hella stood and controlled the sour nausea that sloshed inside her stomach. She managed to stay focused and caught occasional glimpses of the information Ocastya acquired from her.
“You sure you’re up to traveling?” Stampede stared at Hella with his liquid brown eyes.
Hella didn’t pause as she threw her saddle across Daisy. “I’m fine.”
“You didn’t look fine when Ocastya finally let you go.”
Self-consciously, Hella nodded at the fractoid, who stood in the cave mouth. “She can hear you.”
“I don’t care. I’ll hurt her feelings every time if it means protecting you.”
“I’m fine.” Hella reached for one of the saddle straps and missed.
Stampede snorted and twitched his ears.
“I’ll be fine.” Hella shot a glare at Stampede. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
“We don’t have any time to get this wrong. If we end up dead, there’s not going to be anybody riding to Scatter’s rescue. There’s no guarantee we can get him out of the situation he’s in now.”
Hella secured the strap, positioned the saddle, and cinched it tight. “Somebody once told me that sometimes you have to ride a trail through before you make any decisions about it. Better to go see for yourself than to blindly guess. Sound familiar?”
“Yeah, but I recall something about always making sure your risk didn’t outweigh the gain.”
“Pardot is menace enough. There’s no telling what he can do with any technology he can learn about from Scatter and possibly use. He’s already learned enough to track the fractoids when they came into our world. And someone like Pardot?” Hella shook her head. “We can’t allow that.”
“Who told you we were supposed to save the world?”
“Nobody. But somebody did tell me a scout travels through the land, respects it, and tries to leave it as unchanged and better for others as possible.”
Stampede sighed and nodded. He clapped Daisy on the side, startling the mountain boomer into a honked protest. “All right. Let’s go see what we can see. But if it looks back, we cut our losses and save ourselves.” He walked away before Hella could reply.
Mounted on Daisy, Hella took point and rode in the direction Ocastya indicated. Riding helped sort her thoughts, but she still caught a stray memory every now and then that belonged in Ocastya’s head, not hers.
They moved on through the day, stopping only to water Daisy, eating on the go, and paying attention to the wilderness around them. The unforgiving sun burned down, and the humidity from the swamplands and the plant life made the air thick and fragrant. Down in the bottoms where they were, everything smelled of death. The occasional traces of a mineral spring tainted with sulfur reminded Hella of the stories she’d heard about the Christian hell.
And they traveled, going as fast as they dared.
As soon as the sun rose the next morning, they were on the move again. Daisy was recalcitrant at first, objecting to the hard ride only because it was boring and she wasn’t getting to explore as much as she wanted to or to hunt, but she finally settled into the distance-eating gait that made her a smooth ride.
At midmorning, they cut a fresh trail.
Senses alert to everything around her, Hella reined Daisy in and dropped down to the ground. The mountain boomer nuzzled Hella, seeking a treat or a scratching session, doubtless bored again. “Watch.”
Daisy instantly abandoned her attempts and focused on the world around them. She snorted, stomped her feet, and set herself in the ready position.
Stampede spoke over the comm link. “You’ve stopped.”
“I’ve cut sign.” Hella knelt, brushed loose dirt and grass from the tire impression cut into the ground, then stuck her fingers into it. The dirt was still moist enough to stick to her fingertips.
“Who?”
“Looks like one of the ATVs. Must be Pardot’s group, so some of them survived.”
“Could be Trazall.”
�
��His group didn’t have any vehicles.”
“None that we saw.”
“He doesn’t like vehicles any more than you do.”
“Trazall doesn’t like them because they cut into his bottom line. Too expensive to operate and maintain. I don’t like them because you become too dependent.”
Hella brushed the wet earth from her fingertips onto her jeans and stood. “Ground’s still damp and the impression is sharp, not worn down. They didn’t pass this way too long ago.”
“Headed in the same direction we are?”
“Yeah.”
“Break off the trail. Find a new path that’s just ours.”
Hella didn’t like that. “We’re going to lose time doing that.”
“Better to find our own way than to get too close to Riley’s hardshells and get discovered.”
“I know.” Hella peered up into the mountains. “We still have forest up to the ridgeline. I’d rather go up than down into the swamps.”
“Agreed.”
Hella remounted Daisy then cut off the trail and climbed the incline. Soft ground peeled away under the mountain boomer’s claws, but she gained purchase and smoothly headed up.
While she waited for the rabbits to cook in the coals of the fire they’d burned till sundown then allowed to burn down so the flames wouldn’t be seen at night, Hella stared at Scatter’s image on her palm. It seemed as though he were right there, just out of her reach.
“You’re thinking too much.”
Hella closed her hand and looked up at Stampede. She hadn’t even heard him come up to her. “I guess so.”
Stampede knelt with his rifle across his thighs and warmed his hands above the coals. “We’ll know more tomorrow.”
“Yeah.” According to Ocastya, they were within only a few klicks of wherever Scatter was being held.
“I spotted Pardot’s expedition. Thought maybe you and I would go take a look at them tonight. See what we’re dealing with.” Stampede grinned. “Gonna have to be sneaky, though. Out here in the woods, away from everything they know, they’re gonna be extra paranoid.”