by Erica Rue
“Once you dry out and Canto gets back, we can press on.”
“Why did that guy call me ‘demon?’” Lithia said.
“Like I said, only demons fall from the sky. The Icon supposedly doesn’t shoot you down unless you’re bad. I don’t believe in all that, though,” he replied.
“Well, we’re not demons. We’re humans,” Dione said. This Icon sounded like the weapon that shot them down. She made a mental note to ask about it later.
“I’m more upset he called me ‘child,’” Lithia said.
“Then be glad you weren’t born an Aratian. All unmarried women are called child. Even the old spinsters.”
Lithia rolled her eyes. “Of course, they are. Welcome to life outside the Bubble, Di.” She looked back to Brian. “But let me guess, your people, they’re enlightened, right? They respect all people equally?”
Brian laughed. “I wouldn’t say enlightened, but at least better. Equality is a luxury none of us can afford. My people are called the Ficarans. Where do you come from? What do you mean by ‘bubble?’”
Before Dione could answer, Lithia said, “How did you end up here?”
Brian looked at her for a long moment. “It depends on who you ask. The Aratians believe that the Farmer created us all, and gave us everything we would need to thrive.”
“But you’re not Aratian,” Dione said. “What do you believe?”
“Ficarans believe that the Architect came to us and revealed the Farmer’s lies. She told us that he did not create us.”
Dione furrowed her brow. “But is that what you believe?”
“I think that the Farmer was a liar, but the Architect, well, my people almost worship her as another god, even though that’s exactly what she didn’t want. My father… he didn’t think she told us everything, that she wanted us to discover it for ourselves. He thought we came from somewhere else, like the southern island.”
Dione turned to Lithia, who was giving her the best “what the hell” look that she had. The Farmer? The Architect? Dione tried one more time for answers. “If the Farmer or the Architect didn’t create you, then how did you get here?”
“Good question,” Brian said, but he quickly changed the subject. “So are you from the southern island? No one has ever come from the southern island before, but no one has piloted a Flyer either, at least since the Great Divide.”
Lithia replied immediately. “Yes. The southern island.”
Dione gave her a look, but Lithia ignored her. Brian perked up a bit. “Have you met any Ficarans who reached your shores?” He sounded hopeful.
“I’m afraid not,” Lithia said. Brian’s smile faded. “We’ve come to find some medicine for our friend back home who’s very sick. There’s a building in this forest, not far. Can you take us there?”
“The temple?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. Here’s the map,” Dione said, showing him on her manumed.
“Yes, that’s the temple. I’ll take you there, though I doubt you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
“Why not?” Dione said.
“It’s been mostly cleared out. There’s not much left to go through.”
“We have to try,” she said. They didn’t have any other leads.
Brian seemed hesitant. “I have one condition. Help me start a Flyer.”
Dione wondered why he wanted one so badly, but it wasn’t that strange to want a fast method of transportation. “What do you need a Flyer for?”
At that moment, Canto bounded through the trees and stopped in front of his master. Brian scratched behind his ear, hummed a command, and the dog lowered himself so that they could mount him.
“We’ve spent enough time here. We need to move on,” he said.
As if on cue, a horn blared in the distance, farther than the first time they had heard it in the clearing. They were certainly not out of the frying pan yet, as Lithia’s grandpa liked to say.
The three climbed on top of the large, furry dog, Brian in front, Dione, mostly dry, in the back, and Lithia in the middle. Dione was pretty sure that Lithia was holding on to Brian a little too tightly, but she didn’t say anything. The mud-covered girl never got the guy, and she had bigger problems to worry about than vying for some stranger’s attention, no matter how unbelievably hot he might be.
19. DIONE
Dione was surprised how fast the maximute could move through the trees. Eventually they reached a point where the growth in the forest was so thick that it was easier for them to walk and give the maximute more freedom to maneuver. Brian sent Canto off to make another false trail. Dione had never seen such a well-trained animal before. He seemed to respond to a variety of musical commands, and even though the tunes were brief, she could tell Brian had a beautiful voice.
Dione was still trying to identify the plants she saw. This place had been terraformed, certainly, but there were some odd choices. Many of these trees were hard to grow outside of their original habitats. Like the Bolma tree over there, which usually grew in much cooler climates. Bolma sap was an efficient binding agent, and would be a useful natural resource. The Bolma she walked past had been grafted with some other hardier tree, but these types of tree grafts were notoriously fragile. The tree was old, not a recent addition. Clearly the terraformers hadn’t been here in decades. How had it lasted so long without constant maintenance?
There was something carved into the tree. A symbol. A triangle with a spiral inside that closed off into a circle. A trail marker? She would have to ask Brian.
Dione looked up to realize she had fallen behind. Lithia and Brian were several meters in front of her, laughing. Dione bit her lip. Lithia certainly knew how to make new friends. This always happened. She thought someone was cute, then Lithia met them, and there was no hope for her. Lithia was beautiful. Standing next to her was like putting a duck next to a peacock. There was nothing wrong with the duck until you saw the peacock. And Lithia was a million times better at flirting. If the roles were reversed and Lithia were mud-covered and putting off some residual squirrel stink, Brian still would have been more interested in her.
She was being ridiculous. There were a million other more important things to think about, like avoiding the trackers, or even observing the terraformed world around her.
Dione noticed an odd looking flower and decided to turn her thoughts to that. There was something off about it that she couldn’t put her finger on. It was large, nearly the size of a bush, and its leaves were thick and green with red veins. She thought it was pulsing.
“Hey, Lithia, take a look at this,” Dione said.
Lithia was not paying attention. She was still flirting with Brian. Until suddenly, she was not. She stumbled and fell, but she wasn’t getting back up.
Lithia screamed. When Dione turned, she saw only Brian. She rushed forward to see that Lithia had been pulled into the ground and was holding onto the stun rifle, which was balanced over the opening to the hole. It had been the only thing to save her from being swallowed completely.
“Something’s got my leg!” Lithia cried out.
“What is it?”
“It’s pulling me down. Help!”
Brian was already grabbing her underneath her arms, but as he pulled, Lithia screamed again.
“My leg! It’s pulling harder.”
“Brian, hold her up, but don’t pull,” Dione said.
Dione looked at the stun rifle. There was no way to grab it without disturbing Lithia. Its strap was around her shoulder and she was still using it to stay above ground. If Brian let go, it would be the only thing to save her.
“What did it look like?” she asked.
“I didn’t see it,” Lithia said.
“I’ve never heard of a creature like this,” Brian said.
Dione looked around. There had to be something. Her machete was useless. The culprit was too far down, whatever it was.
“I’m slipping,” Lithia said, true panic edging into her voice.
Dione
saw divots in the ground where Brian was being dragged forward by the creature’s pull, too. She needed to try something fast.
Dione grabbed the water bottle from her bag and poured it down the hole.
“Anything?”
Lithia shook her head quickly. “Nothing. There’s no time for the scientific method, Dione! Shoot it.”
“With what? I can’t exactly take your rifle.”
“The gun the tracker pulled on us.”
Dione had forgotten about the pistol Brian took from the man in the clearing. She grabbed it from the holster at his side and took aim.
“I can’t get a shot.”
“Do something!” Lithia said.
Dione aimed the pistol, but couldn’t bring herself to pull the trigger. Lithia was squirming, and she was just as likely to shoot her friend as she was to shoot whatever had her.
“This won’t work,” she said, returning the gun to its holster. She picked her water bottle back up and tried to think. What else did she have? How could she figure this out? She had already lost the professor, and cosmos be damned if she was going to lose Lithia, too.
Dione cursed and threw the empty water bottle. Seconds later she heard the crunching of metal and saw nothing but a hole where the bottle had been. She had been standing there a few minutes ago, looking at that weird plant. But the plant was gone. Things began to click into place.
“It’s that plant. The creepy one.”
But this wasn’t typical plant behavior. Pulling like this involved muscles. Venus fly traps used rapid growth to quickly change their shape and catch flies, but even rapid growth couldn’t be sustained for this long. Probably. Dione remembered the professor’s words. Sometimes the lizard is actually a strange bird. Could this be a new type of pseudophyta?
“Lithia, is it pulling in bursts, or steadily?”
“Steadily.” Lithia whimpered. “Dione, it hurts. I think it has teeth or thorns, or something.” If it was pulling steadily, it had to be a muscle, not cycles of rapid growth. This was no plant.
She looked at Brian who said nothing. He was completely focused on keeping Lithia out of that hole. If it wasn’t like the plants she liked to study, then maybe it was like something else. Dione glimpsed another flower with pulsing red veins. She pulled her machete from its sheath.
“Brian, Lithia, hang on.”
Dione sliced underneath the bloom with her blade parallel to the ground. When the bloom fell away, there was nothing left underneath except a hole. It screamed. No, that was Lithia. Lithia screamed.
“What happened?” Dione said.
“It pulled really hard for just a second, but she feels lighter now,” Brian said.
Lithia was crying and clenching her jaw.
Dione saw one of the flowers emerge from a hole nearby, prepared to lay its trap.
“Found another. Get ready.”
Thwack. Another bloody blossom. Another cry of agony.
“She just passed out,” Brian said to Dione’s back, “but I think I can pull her out.”
“No, wait.” Dione watched as Brian pulled and the flowering angler worm pulled back. Brian was at the edge.
This isn’t working. Why isn’t it working?
This creature didn’t need its appendages to perform vital, life-sustaining functions. It was like cutting off fingers or toes. All she was doing was torturing it. Dione needed to find its nerve center and stop the pull signals before they even started. But that nerve center was probably underground. Unless its tentacles were a necessity because it was fixed to the ground and needed large prey to survive.
She glanced around, trying to remember where the flowers had been, looking for the pattern, until she saw it. A young tree that was practically in the center of the flowers she had destroyed. The wolf among sheep. The animal parading itself as a tree.
Dione raised her machete and hacked at the tree, leaving a deep, bleeding wound in its trunk. It was tough, but not as tough as wood. Dione heard Brian grunting to hold on to Lithia who was no longer able to pull up on the rifle.
“Dione, I can’t hold her!” Brian yelled across the clearing. “It’s pulling me in, too.”
“Just a few— ” Thwack! “—more seconds.” Thwack!
The tree was still standing but its connection to its tentacles had been severed. Dione heard Brian and Lithia topple backward and rushed to help them. Brian lay on his back, panting. Dione looked at Lithia’s bare foot. The grabby tree had gotten away with her boot and left some nasty lacerations, making her ankle swell. She couldn’t tell if it was broken. The rest of her leg seemed okay.
Dione wrapped a bandage around Lithia’s ankle and splashed a little water from her reserve canteen on Lithia’s face, which was enough to wake her.
“Brian,” Dione said, as Lithia stirred, “thank you. If you hadn’t been here, she’d be gone.” Lithia yelped as Dione pulled the bandage tight.
“Don’t thank me yet. She’s not going to be able to walk,” Brian said. “I’ve seen injuries like this before. She needs to stay off it for a few days at least.”
“Is it broken?” Lithia frowned.
“No, but it’s a bad sprain,” he said.
Overhead, the sky was growing dark rather quickly. Dione could smell a storm building.
“We need to get to shelter. Now,” Brian said. “The temple’s not far, but I haven’t been around here in almost a year. I don’t know what else is out here.”
“Won’t they catch us?” Dione asked.
Brian shook his head. “A storm is coming. A bad one. I don’t know what you all have in the south, but if we don’t find shelter soon, we risk getting caught in a mudslide. With any luck, the trackers will turn back.”
***
Soon, Brian’s maximute returned and carried Lithia the rest of the way to the temple.
“We’re close now. I’m sending Canto back home. He won’t fit through the door anyway, and I don’t want him caught in the rain.” Brian flipped a colored disc on the harness and sang to him again, a tune they hadn’t heard him use yet, and the maximute ran off. Without Canto, Brian and Dione took up residence on either side of Lithia, supporting her as she limped along, in too much pain to speak.
“Why do you sing to him?” Dione asked.
“It’s how we communicate. All domesticated animals, and even a few wild ones, respond to these spells, though I’ve taught Canto quite a few new tricks,” he said.
“Spells?” she asked.
“How would you explain it? Every maximute responds to these songs from birth. We don’t teach them. Like that one. He knows that means ‘home.’ He always has. I may not believe in gods, but magic? I see that with my own eyes every day.”
It certainly seemed like magic, but Dione knew there was a scientific explanation. Science allowed for miracles, but not magic.
“There has to be some explanation,” she said.
Brian smiled. “You sound like my father. I look forward to hearing your explanation, once you figure it out.”
Dione liked that about Brian. He kept an open mind.
“There,” he said, pointing to a large structure, barely visible through the trees.
“When you said temple, this is not what I imagined,” Dione said. She had pictured statues and incense, maybe even chanting. This building was like a stack of crisp circles. Many of its windows were broken, and vines wove their way up one side. Graffiti on the walls had faded, but it looked like the building where she took her cell biology series. The space station computer had called it a research base, the Forest Base, and that was still mostly what it looked like. From the outside, at least.
“It’s been abandoned. All of its valuables have been moved to other locations in less contentious areas. This temple is too far from the Vale Temple, the Aratian settlement, for them to use it. The Vale Temple is a much more defensible location.”
They entered the building. The place had been eviscerated. The bare white walls of the vestibule were yellowing, a
nd evenly spaced holes betrayed missing artifacts like plaques and shelves. They walked further inside to find that the rooms off the main hallway were also empty.
“I’m surprised they didn’t rip the piping out of the walls,” Dione said to Lithia.
“To destroy the structure would have been a crime to Aratians and Ficarans alike,” Brian said.
“But letting it crumble is fine,” Lithia replied. She limped over to a wall so that she could lean against it. Dione was glad to see that she could put pressure on her foot, even if it hurt.
As the three prepared to take a rest, a horn blared outside.
For the first time, Brian looked worried. “They’re still coming, and they’re looking for shelter. I thought they would have turned back before now. We need to hide. If we go to the sublevels—” He stopped and pulled out his gun. It was the same gun that the man in the clearing had pulled on them, and now he was pointing it straight at them.
“What are you doing?” Dione said, hand resting on the hilt of her machete. Lithia didn’t even try to aim the stun rifle.
“Come out,” Brian said. “Now.”
20. ZANE
Zane stood up in that panic that often accompanies waking up in a strange place. He had fallen asleep on the bed next to Bel, intending on taking a brief nap. Once he could discern Bel’s shape on the bed expanding and contracting with breaths, he relaxed. His manumed said that he had been out for a few hours. He had needed it, and he wasn’t ashamed to say so. So many people pushed themselves beyond their limits, but Zane thought this was stupid. He needed to do his best work, which meant he needed to be well rested and focused.
After checking Bel’s vitals, he was satisfied that she had not gotten worse. Her fever was down a degree. In the light of the infirmary, no eerie glow emanated from her leg wound or anywhere else, but he knew it was still there.