The Excisionists: Book 1

by Rebecca Jensen

  I was fuming by the time I reached the weapons room. To my surprise, Phineas was standing next to the land crawler waiting for me.

  He pointed to my chest. “You’re different than us but that’s something I find intriguing.”

  “Thanks, I think.” My cheeks got warm with embarrassment. He didn’t seem phased by my actions in the least which gave me hope that I’d be able to get them to see things the way they really were.

  “I’ll go with you to ClokWorx if you tell me more about yourself. Deal?”

  I bit my lower lip. “Alright. Just don’t get to judgy, okay?”

  He smiled. “Let’s get this thing loaded.”

  We threw as many weapons and bombs as we could inside the back of the crawler and strapped in for the ride. I took the controls and eased it out of the ship onto the deeply fissured earth.

  Phineas started his questions as soon as the tracks hit the dirt. “What’s your real name?”

  “Uh, it’s Zuri. Zuri Dawe.”

  He tilted his head. “Really?”

  I nodded and turned the crawler in the right direction. “Yep. You?”

  “It’s just Phineas Sykora. No middle name.”

  “Hmm. Me neither.”

  “What’s your favorite color?”

  “I like pink.”

  He chuckled. “Guess I should have seen that one. Mine’s green. What did you do before you were in the game?”

  I could feel the tension building inside. “Uh, well, I was an assistant.”

  “What kind of an assistant?”

  I tried to keep it vague. “I was an intake assistant.”

  He seemed confused. “Intake for what?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck and adjusted our course once again to avoid a large boulder. “Intake for the uh, the regiment.”

  His brows furrowed. “But they’re all adults.”

  I stared straight ahead. “Yep.”

  “You’re telling me you’re an adult? No way.”

  I glanced over at him. “Yeah, I am.”

  He seemed more curious than concerned. “How old are you?”

  I briefly considered whether or not to lie. “Uh…”

  His furry spikey hand rested on my knee. “I’m not going to freak out, just tell me the truth.”

  “Thirty-four.” I watched his face closely for a reaction.

  His brows raised. “I never would have guessed. Hmmm. Well, I’m nineteen. Hope that’s not too weird for you to hang out with a kid.”

  I shook my head. “I’m around young people all the time. Are you okay with the fact that I’m an adult?”

  “Yeah, sure. So, you said you’re intake for the regiment, right?”

  I nodded and relaxed now that my secret was out and I hadn’t been disowned because of it.

  He seemed genuinely interested in the conversation. “What’s that like?”

  I sucked in a deep breath. “Um, it’s pretty cool actually. I get to figure out who’s going to make the best soldiers. And there’s some new weapons systems I get to test.”

  A wide grin lit up his face. “Awesome. What’s your favorite?”

  I shrugged. “Probably the sheath. There’s way more functionality in the real ones. Saltigue Alchemist and Saltigue Atlas developed the technology. You should be thrilled you’re being selected for this program.”

  “Saltigue what? Who are they?”

  We reached the chasm surrounding the tower. I focused on the descent into the trench and then continued my train of thought. “Um, they’re the ones who put everything together. Saltigue Atlas is my boss and Ariocha and Elio are his kids. You’ll get to meet them in real life when we pass off this planet.”

  “Whoa, check that out.” He pointed to the side of ClokWorx that had been severely damaged.

  I watched as teems of Oroans spilled out of the gaping hole. “We’ve got to pick them all off. What would you suggest?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Yeah. You’re something special with the way your mind works. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

  He swallowed hard as his eyes flicked about the structure. “Okay, um let’s destroy the tower.”

  “Can we do that? The Crypt needs the tower to regulate the weather. If we destroy it, the crystal gardens will be ruined again.”

  He shook his head. “Not destroyed, I mean just covered in water. I think we can restructure the Crypt and make it withstand the flooding too, but we need to bomb the bottom of the tower so it will fall and take the Oroans with it. It then shifts the weather back to being too cold for the Oroans, dilutes the yellow stuff in the water, and then gives us time to fix the Crypt by using the drill to drop the water deep inside Zerkola while they rebuild. That gets them ready for when the water returns.”

  I was confused. “Wait, why would the water return? And how did you know about the drill?”

  He pointed to the Oroans. “I can hear them. I know what they think, do, and want. They’re terrified of the water returning if they lose and they know that the planet will reject the water when the crust cools and contracts from the water. The Crypt better get ready for a winter they’ve never seen before.”

  I tried to connect the dots in my mind. “Are they killed by cold or by fluid?”

  “Just the cold. Water is fine, but ice isn’t. The Eydis can’t live here either until the yellow stuff gets in everything. I think it’s some kind of nutrient or something like that…stop for a second.”

  I steadied the crawler and stopped driving toward the tower. “What is it?”

  His antennae dropped and pointed to the Oroans. “That’s odd. The yellow stuff is called mantus. It seems that they are using it as a kind of drug that reduces the activity in the part of the brain responsible for fight or flight and then later works as a means for communications. I think it makes everyone follow the commands of the Eydis. It’s like a giant brain connecting substance.”

  “How could that be possible?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and focused harder. “It’s…alive. It’s a part of them too and it’s got something…there’s something it must have…”

  “What?”

  His eyes opened, and he seemed deeply changed. “This game is more than just a game.”

  I nodded. “I know, it’s supposed to help us get familiar with the sheath and then we can protect everyone from invading forces.”

  “No, you don’t understand. It’s–”

  A spiked tail crashed through the top of the crawler. I jumped up and grabbed a gun. The weight of it felt good in my hands as I started blasting the alien invaders. As I fired, I imagined being part of the armed forces that would protect this country and at some point, the entire planet. Bright red blood splattered across the windows of the crawler. I kept shooting at the oncoming horde when I finally made it out of the crawler. Phineas grabbed as many bombs as he could carry and made a manifold he disappeared into. Thousands of Oroans swarmed around me and eventually their slashing tails and claws hit their mark.

  Searing pain consumed me as one of their spiked tails carved through my back and dissected my chest. I sputtered blood out of my mouth and respawned back at the top of the plateau. I peered down at the Oroans that were now clawing their way up toward me. The tower was still standing but Phineas was nowhere to be seen. I pulled a small pistol from my hip and dropped as many as I could, but they continued their ascension toward me. The yellowish mass of bodies absorbed the few I could kill but they were unphased by my singlehanded strike against them.

  I targeted the largest and closest Oroans as I waited for my partner to do something with the tower. “Phineas! Where are you?”

  The seemingly endless trail of yellow-skinned creatures poured from ClokWorx toward me and the sulfur-colored powdered substance now floated on the wind in the direction of the Crypt. More of the Oroans dropped and split open like overripe watermelons when they lost their grip from my gun blasts and smashed into the dark soil below. I was beginning to pan
ic as they pulled themselves over the edge of the plateau. I turned and ran from them but wasn’t fast enough. I crashed to the ground and the wind was knocked out of me when another Oroan jumped on my back. White-hot pokers of agony ripped through my body as they tore through my skin and organs.

  I sucked in a sharp breath when I respawned further from the swarm. This objective was vastly different from any other I’d experienced so far. I’d never been left alone for so long or seen the fight continue without being reset from a lack of progress in the game or being returned to my vehicle. I turned and ran as I called out to Phineas.

  Suddenly, he appeared in front of me in a tunnel of blue light. “Run!”

  I ran and jumped to safety as he closed the manifold around us. I landed on my stomach and then flipped over onto my back staring up at him as I tried to catch my breath. “Thank you. I…I couldn’t stand the pain much longer.”

  He reached down and helped me to my feet. “We need the others. This planet seems to have different rules for the final objective which doesn’t mimic any other level. We can’t stop the spread of the mantus, it would only have worked if we got to it before it became airborne. We’re going to have to find some way to neutralize it.”

  I nodded and sucked in a few more deep breaths. “Why didn’t the game reset and where were you?”

  He put his arm around my shoulder. “It didn’t reset because this one is supposed to simulate a real war. The Excisionists must be trying to evaluate our ability to work together in an actual battle and see our likelihood of success. We need to get everyone to the Crypt.”

  “That’s fine, but you didn’t answer my other question.”

  He nodded. “Sorry. I was going to bomb the tower, but I realized that it didn’t matter once the mantus was released. These aliens are highly organized and controlled by the Eydis who are trying to take over Zerkola. They function like their drones in a battle, but they don’t have to be controlled by someone or something else. That’s why they’re way more effective than mechanical drones. I was gone for so long because I watched them and ended traveling to the ship the Eydis are on. They’ve got a Saltigue called Aibek who’s fighting the Gentorix too. Saltigue Vidar is a friend of Elio and they’re using us as their army against both the Oroans and the Eydis.”

  “But there’s so few of us and so many of them. How could we possibly fight them and win.”

  “You’re forgetting about the rest of the players in the game. We were supposed to get here around the same time, but the kids of the Excisionists took some shortcuts so the final objective has already been set in motion.”

  It finally clicked in my brain. “This whole thing was to unite the parties not just pass off the objectives.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I think too.”

  He made a circle with his pointed legs and opened the portal to the area just outside the Vanya. We entered the ship to find the others still who were still discussing their options.

  I took charge of the conversation. “Listen everyone, we’ve got a situation. This game was meant to bring us all together before the final objective started but none of us realized that. The shortcuts we took because we knew more than the rest of the players has made it so we can’t win the game as originally intended.”

  Mica shot up from his chair. “That’s not fair! You all told us we were supposed to be the first ones to pass of the game. And now you’re telling me that you were lying the whole time?!”

  Iolite reached over and grabbed her brother’s hand, but he pulled it away. “Don’t overreact, just listen to them.” She turned back to us. “What do we do now? We can’t just stay in the game and watch everyone deteriorate.”

  I nodded. “There’s a substance that was released that we need to neutralize. It seems to be a powdered version of the yellow droplets inside the machine. We should talk to Dr. Sothy and see if she’s got something we can use as a remedy. However, Phineas says that this stuff is actually a living thing, kind of like a spore or a germ, and we better not get it inside of us.”

  Phineas was somber. “This organism is probably something the Excisionists will inject into us if we breathe it in or drink contaminated water here in the game. It might be a drug to simulate the effects of actually encountering the organism, but it might not be either. Do not, and I repeat do not take off your sheaths.”

  The conversation was cut short with the urgency to return to the Crypt before the mantus reached it. We needed to get everyone into a sheath and then find a cure before anyone else got to Zerkola. We didn’t know what it would do to the other players and we didn’t want to lose anyone in our party to something we had no control over. We got inside quickly and searched the Crypt to find Dr. Atlas, Dr. Sothy, and the three members of our group that hadn’t been allowed to leave. We finally located Dr. Atlas’s chamber and knocked on the door. He didn’t answer immediately, so I started pounding on the door.

  I was surprised when Ariocha opened the door. She was stunning in her sapphire hooded cloak. A silver snowflake was on a snake chain both around her neck and waist. “Welcome back.”

  “Where’s Elio?”

  “Dr. Atlas is preoccupied at the moment with matters of great importance. I’ll tell him you stopped by.”

  She tried to shut the door, but Wes shoved it open with his muscular clawed hand. “Step aside.”

  She opened her mouth to protest but was pushed back by Crispin. “Your life is in danger and so is everyone who’s not an NPC on Zerkola.”

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Dr. Atlas stood up from his desk forcefully.

  “We need Dr. Sothy’s help. Mantus was released through the ClokWorx Tower by the Oroans and we need everyone to get into a sheath now. We’ve got to find a way to neutralize it since we can’t contain it.”

  “Mantus…I seem to recall hearing something about this.”

  Phineas stepped forward. “The Excisionists have manufactured some type of substance that’s either a drug or a living organism and we’re not sure which it is. We’re going to be controlled by this stuff if it gets inside us which means we lose the game and our ability to control ourselves.”

  Ariocha held her head high. “We don’t need to leave the game. Once you accept your place here, the protective injections are restored to your protocol. We can exist here as long as we wish.”

  “You don’t understand. This stuff is different from the problems we have with our bodies that the injections fix. It messes with your brain and it’s similar to the device they implanted the others with. I don’t even have access to all of the details, but I’ll find out as soon as we get out. And we don’t want to stay here. I want out. I want to become part of the regiment not just be discarded and forced to work for someone else.” I pointed to Elio. “You can get out too, live a real life again. Touch and taste like you once did. Be with Willow again.”

  His eyes softened. “Willow…does she remember me still?”

  I nodded. “She sent this message with me for you only.” I pulled a small chip from my bag and handed it to him.

  Ariocha lunged forward and knocked it from his hand. “They lie to you. Stay here with me.”

  He pushed her back and retrieved the chip from the ground. He placed it up against his temple and his eyes flickered red. Moments later, he dropped into his plush charcoal chair and his eyes darkened. He lifted the orb on the golden cord around his neck and stared into it. He then looked around at all of us. “If only I’d known sooner.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t have a chance to give it to you before. And I thought I’d be able to wait until just before we left the game to convince you to come with us. Technology has changed. You can now survive outside this game, but only if you want to.”

  He nodded. “I understand. I’ll retrieve Dr. Sothy for you. Meet me for a conference in ten minutes.”

  I turned back to the others. “Let’s go.”

  We filed out of the spacious living chambers and jogged down to corridors to get everyone
in a sheath and check for damage on those who had one already. I ended up having to replace my sheath from a small crack on the chest from battle that hadn’t repaired itself before I went to the meeting room. A few minutes remained before our scheduled meeting and time passed slowly as we waited for Dr. Atlas to return. By the time I was ready to do another search of the Crypt for him, Dr. Atlas entered the room. He and five other members walked out onto the stage wearing sheaths. They were followed by Dr. Sothy and Ariocha who were also wearing the protective garb. I only recognized three of the five as part of his elite group who were inserted into the game when he became more self-aware.