by S. M. Wilson
But the truth was, in the heat of the moment, she’d forgotten about those closest to her, about Dell and about Leif too – even though he’d been right next to her. She’d saved Lincoln’s sister but not Leif’s family, even though Lincoln had betrayed them. It was unthinkable. Even to her.
But it was too late now. The moment had passed. She couldn’t take it back.
In quiet moments like this, she tried to rationalize things. She tried to tell herself it was impossible. How many brothers and sisters could she actually pretend to have?
“Sorry, Dell,” she said quietly.
He didn’t answer. He just stared out across the loch. They’d had this angry conversation on more than one occasion. It was old now.
She started to trace patterns in the shingle with her fingers.
“Has Milo come back?”
She shook her head. “I still haven’t seen him,” she murmured, her eyes scanning the surface of the rippling loch.
Everyone on Earthasia was terrified of dinosaurs in all their forms. Even the quiet plesiosaurs that lived in this loch. But Storm wasn’t. She didn’t believe the propaganda they were fed by the Stipulators. Not all of the creatures were mindless beasts. Milo wasn’t. He’d saved her life when she’d nearly drowned in the loch a few years ago.
Dell shook his head. “I don’t get it. How can a creature that’s lived in this loch for as long as you can remember appear in the sea at your final Trial? It just doesn’t make sense.”
She licked her lips, winding her hair around the fingers of her other hand. “I have no idea. I always suspected there was a link from this loch to the sea. I know where the caves are that Milo nests in – maybe they connect to the ocean. But” – she picked up a piece of the shingle and tossed it into the loch – “I can’t give you a reasonable explanation for any of it.”
“You mean there’s no reasonable explanation why one plesiosaur helped save your life, and another helped you win a contest?”
He couldn’t keep the mocking tone from his voice and she tried not to cringe. They’d had this conversation too, at least a dozen times. There was no love lost with Dell. He hated all dinosaurs. Always had. Always would. He believed everything that the Stipulators had ever told them. Piloria was a continent of monsters, a continent that the humans needed in order to try and survive. The place she’d been sent with the other Finalists to try and steal dinosaur DNA from. It hadn’t helped that she’d told him some of the stories from Piloria. She’d been so overwhelmed when she’d got back that she’d just offloaded, telling him about the raptors, the terrifying T-rexes and the deinosuchus that had dispensed with Rune in one bite. The wonder of the land, the scents and the colours, and the gentler, quieter dinosaurs had still been in her head, but had kind of got lost among the more dramatic tales.
She held up her hands. “I never said it was the same plesiosaur in the sea—”
“But you think it was Milo,” he cut in.
Storm shrugged. She was too tired for this. Too tired to go home to the house of a hundred children, who were so excited by not being hungry any more that food seemed to litter the house. The Stipulators had already visited on a few occasions. It was clear they didn’t believe the family story in the first place, although luckily they were too focused on the dinosaur DNA to investigate any further yet. But several times the Stipulators had pushed their way inside and started making threats about being “wasteful”.
Storm understood. Food wasn’t in plentiful supply. Being wasteful was shameful and shocking. Old habits died hard – she couldn’t leave her plate unfinished. She’d spoken to Rune’s and Kronar’s brothers and sisters about it almost every day since they’d arrived, but the leadership skills she’d shown on Piloria didn’t seem to translate back to her new home.
She’d never had a brother or sister. She didn’t feel designed to be part of a family.
Dell put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s your last day tomorrow. You should be happy.”
She looked up and tried to smile. Tomorrow was her sixteenth birthday. The last day she had to attend her one day a week of school. No more tedious classes where everyone was taught that the dinosaurs were a threat to human survival. No more whitewashing of the facts. No more propaganda that they should wipe out the dinosaurs and take Piloria for human occupation. She was tired of all that now. After tomorrow, she’d work full-time, like all other adults on Earthasia.
“I know. I should be. And you’re only a few weeks behind me. We’ll both be free.”
Would full-time work really be more freeing than school? She wanted to think so. The idea should have made her feel more hopeful.
But it didn’t.
Nothing felt the way it should right now.
She should be happier than most. She’d won food, housing, health care and more energy rations. Other people would be celebrating.
So why wasn’t she?
The last trip to school felt monumental.
One form. That’s all she needed signed to release her from school and throw her into constant work. The same job in the same city, day after day, for the rest of her life.
She filed into class with the other students. Dell was right next to her. But their eyes were fixed on one spot. Cala’s desk. The young girl who’d been sick before Storm had gone to Piloria.
She’d still been here for a couple of weeks when Storm had come back, with the rattle in her chest becoming worse day by day. Then she’d vanished. Storm’s stomach gave a flip as she saw that the seat remained empty. She knew that Cala wouldn’t be taking her seat again. They’d seen it over and over.
The instructor glared at them all. “Sit down,” he growled. He started issuing instructions, walking up and down the rows, but he slowed as he reached Storm’s desk.
“Stormchaser Knux.”
She smiled. She could smile in school today – she didn’t need to come back. “Yes?”
He reached out for her form and gave her a smile of his own. It felt like a giant insect was creeping down her spine. “You finish today.”
She wasn’t quite sure if it was a question or a statement. “Yes?”
His smile spread across his face. “You’ve been reassigned.”
Her heart dropped like a stone. “What?”
The instructor raised his eyebrows. “It appears that a test you did for the Trials showed there are a few skills you’ve been concealing in your school assessments.”
Her breath caught in her throat. She’d forgotten about the written test. It hadn’t even felt like a test. It had been a map, with routes to calculate to the dinosaur nests on Piloria. She’d found it easy, but a huge number of candidates had been sent home after it.
Storm felt sick. The instructor had always known she was deliberately underperforming. He just hadn’t been able to prove it – until now.
He scribbled on a slip, scoring through her current work assignment and writing something else. “It seems the Stipulators have taken an interest in you. You’re to report to the parliament building tomorrow.”
Now she really couldn’t breathe. “What?”
She stared at the form in front of her. The instructor started to walk away, and she noticed all the wide-mouthed gapes from her classmates. Then he threw one last comment over his shoulder: “What they’ll actually find for you to do there, who knows?”
He couldn’t help with the disparaging words. He’d never liked Storm. Never encouraged her. Barely tolerated her. And she’d almost enjoyed duping him.
Now, it seemed he had the perfect revenge.
She’d been found out.
He’d never seen chaos like it. The temperature in the lab had reached an all-time high. He was too far down the pecking order to know what was really going on, but tempers seemed to be fraying at an alarming rate.
The DNA work to create a virus to kill the dinosaurs was being given top priority across the continent. The rumours were that samples from the velociraptor, T-rex and pterosaur eggs had bee
n shared out between the main labs in each of the four hundred zones on Earthasia, to allow work to be completed more quickly. Plus there were extra bodies working in every lab, twenty-four hours a day.
And the commotion in Lincoln’s lab was even worse.
His lab was part of T-rex central. It was all anyone talked about – the genetic make-up of the terrifying T-rex. But they talked about it as scientists. Not as people who’d actually seen the creature in the flesh. Not as someone who’d shared the same land and walked through the same grass as the predatory beast. Someone who’d got close enough to smell the stench of the rotting breath from its mouth, and seen the blood drip from its teeth.
The memories still woke Lincoln up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, his heart thudding against his chest.
No one actually knew what that was like. No one except Storm, Leif and the few other survivors. But Storm wouldn’t look at him, Leif had disappeared back to Norden and he’d no idea what had happened to the others. There wasn’t anyone to talk to about it. There wasn’t anyone to understand what the T-rex egg had felt like when it was clutched to his chest, the shell rough under his fingertips – the ripples on its surface, the weight of the stolen treasure. The people in this lab had weird and fanciful ideas about what a T-rex really was. They spoke with excitement about the treacherous beasts. They knew they were dangerous and deadly. But they didn’t truly understand the terror. Not the way he did.
Lincoln glanced around the noisy lab. He was surrounded by a sea of grey overalls – the standard laboratory uniform. It was scratchy and uncomfortable, and in this crowd, unbearably hot. The heat was beginning to remind him of the temperature on Piloria. He shrugged off the thought. It seemed that everything right now was reminding him of the other continent.
All these people…all these people were trying to unravel the mysteries of dinosaur DNA, when they could be searching for a cure to the plague – the disease that had crippled his sister and had already killed his father. The disease he desperately wanted to cure.
The trouble was, the Stipulators had no intention of curing the plague right now, because it was the one thing that helped keep the ever-increasing population under control. Arguing that they should be working to cure it would earn Lincoln a one-way ticket to the mines. How would that help Arta?
He pushed aside his frustration as he tried not to think about how useful the collective minds in this room could actually be in finding a cure. Then he elbowed his way through the crowds to a machine and typed in the figures he’d been given. His tasks were simple. Prepare a few slides. Put some data in a machine. Note the numbers that came out and take them to head scientist Lorcan Field’s office.
A few minutes later the machine spat out a thin strip of paper that he ripped off. Lorcan’s office was already littered with so many of these strips that it looked as if there had been a paper explosion. On a continent with virtually no space, and no trees, paper was something of value. The waste annoyed Lincoln more than he expected.
He juggled his way through the lab workers towards Lorcan’s office. Boxes were piled everywhere in the room, some of them open, spilling their contents onto the floor. There was hardly any space. Lorcan had his back to him, his white coat and shoulder-length wild grey hair on display. One of his hands was frantically chalking figures on a board which was already covered in letters and numbers that Lincoln couldn’t begin to connect together or understand. Lincoln lifted his hand, then hesitated. Lorcan Field always seemed a little crazy to him – always absorbed in a world of his own. Maybe science did that to people.
Lincoln finally knocked on the door. “Dr Field?”
Lorcan spun round, sending more papers flying across the floor.
He barely acknowledged Lincoln – just reached over and grabbed the strip from Lincoln’s hand, as he continued to mutter.
Lincoln sighed and turned to leave. “Oof!” He’d walked straight into something.
The firm, broad chest and black cloak of a Stipulator.
He raised his head and stared into a pair of familiar violet eyes.
“What are you doing here?” sneered Reban Don, the Chief Stipulator for their zone.
The Stipulators were used to ruling by intimidation. They were almost revered. But Lincoln had seen a whole new side to things in the last month. He wasn’t so afraid any more. He wasn’t so intimidated. Last time he’d been nose to nose with Reban Don had been after the first set of Trials, when Reban had nearly “forgotten” to name him as a Finalist. Lincoln had challenged Reban that day. But then it had been out of frustration, and desperation to get to Piloria and win health care for his sister. Now, he was tired of it all.
He knew who Reban Don was: Storm’s father. Even though, as a Stipulator, he’d obviously never admitted it. It was the First Law – Stipulators weren’t supposed to have families. They were supposed to focus solely on their role and devote all their time and energy to keeping order and governing the zones. There were stories. Of the families of Stipulators who broke the law disappearing, quickly followed by the Stipulators themselves. At first he’d thought it might all be rumours, but then Lincoln had met Blaine, a Stipulator who’d been abandoned on the dinosaur continent – his punishment for having a family. Left to die with the dinosaurs. It made a change from the usual fate for criminals – being sent to the mines.
But even though he now knew there was some truth in the rumours of punishments for Stipulators, when it came to Reban Don, Lincoln simply had no love for the man.
Lincoln met the steely violet gaze with a glare of his own. “I work here. Didn’t you know?”
Reban’s nostrils flared in anger at Lincoln’s impertinence, then he pushed past him. “Lorcan, you’re needed at the care centre.”
Lorcan had gone back to the chalkboard but he turned quickly, this time with full focus. “What?”
Reban gave a brief nod of his head. “It’s Tarin. She’s been taken in.”
Lincoln hadn’t made his way completely out the door. He felt a sharp push as Lorcan Field rushed past him, his white coat flapping as he ran down the corridor.
Lincoln kept his head and his pace steady as he returned to the main lab. Tarin? Wasn’t that the name of Lorcan Field’s daughter? Had she been struck down by the plague too? It seemed odd that the Chief Stipulator had chosen to come and deliver the news. Any of the Stipulators could have done that.
But it felt as if things were changing around here. The fields of power were shifting. Lorcan Field and the other head scientists were the people who could solve their problems now. They were the ones who could find the key to the dinosaur DNA, so the cramped and starving people of Earthasia could find a new home on Piloria. The Stipulators were no longer the ones with all the power.
Maybe Reban Don had a reason to try and keep Lorcan Field onside…
And more importantly, if Lorcan’s daughter was ill, maybe Lincoln had finally found an ally in his fight for a cure.
Arta smiled as Storm pushed the door open gently. “Hey, two days in a row. What’s up?”
Storm tried to find a suitable excuse, but nothing sprang to mind, so she just smiled and sat down at the edge of the bed. She visited Arta regularly to keep up the pretence that they were sisters and stop the Stipulators getting any more suspicious. But that wasn’t the only reason she came here. For some odd reason, she liked Arta Kreft. Lincoln’s sister was kind and smart, with a wicked sense of humour. Storm had never really had a female friend before.
Sometimes Arta said or did things that reminded Storm so much of her brother Lincoln that it actually made her flinch. Now Arta’s green eyes sparkled. They were just like her brother’s too. “Are the Nordens driving you crazy again?”
Storm groaned and sagged her head down on Arta’s bed. “You have no idea.” She looked up again and put her hand on her chest. “I had no idea. I had no idea how much these kids really need a parent.” Her voice changed as she finished the sentence, as the irony gripped her.
Arta patted Storm’s hand gently. Her own fingers were still red and swollen. “They need rules. They need boundaries. They must have had them in Norden. Right now they just can’t believe their luck!” She leaned forward a little. “Are you regretting your decision?”
The obvious answer was no. But it took Storm a moment to form the word.
Arta looked hurt. “Are you sorry that you said we were your family?”
If Storm could punch herself right now, she would. She shook her head fiercely. “No, of course not. But it’s hard. I’ve been alone for so long that I guess I’ve forgotten what family means for some folks.” Her voice grew quieter. “Or maybe I’ve never really known.” She held up her hands. “Even here, in Ambulus City, there aren’t that many big families. I guess in Norden it must be…different.”
Arta gave her an understanding smile.
Storm ran her fingers through her tangled hair. “You’re the one person I actually think I could share a house with without going crazy, and you’re not there, you’re…” She looked around at the bright white walls, then sighed. “You’re here.”
Arta nodded. “And you’ve no idea how much I wish I wasn’t.” She winced in pain as she adjusted position on the bed.
Storm cringed. “I know. I’m sorry, I’m being selfish. I’m just tired and frustrated, I guess.” She took a deep breath. “I got bad news at school today.”
“What kind of news? I thought today was your last day?”
Storm licked her lips. She was still trying to get her head around it. “It was. It is. But I’ve been reassigned.”
“From the hay bales? Isn’t that good?” Arta’s voice sounded bright.
Storm shifted in her chair. Arta didn’t know that Storm had deliberately flunked her assessments so she’d be assigned such a lowly job. For most people it would be a nightmare.