The Druid Gene

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Raub hadn’t stirred. He was still breathing with the same deep cadence. She should have asked Nembrotha more questions. Prime Chemist…biochemical markers of deception…a lot of their statements made more sense now. They were practically a walking, talking mass spectrometer if they could detect the chemicals people made that way. She wondered what they knew about her that they weren’t saying.

  But then her mind turned to the other things they’d said, the point of the furtive conversation: What was Raub turning her into?

  She felt cold and hollow inside. As a medical student she’d pledged her life to ease the suffering of others. Since arriving on the Vermachten, she’d killed three people…at least. There were also the ships he’d ordered her to fire on when they were escaping. She’d done it. She’d been desperate enough to survive that she’d executed his commands.

  It did not sit well with her.

  There were too many unanswered questions. Too much she didn’t know.

  She didn’t want this to be her life. The truth was she didn’t like the person she was becoming. Something had to change. But all of her options were bad. There didn’t seem to be any good choices when you were faced with being a prisoner or fighting your way to freedom.

  She didn’t sleep any more that night.

  32

  They were still about a day out of Ulream and Raub wanted to pass the time in the VR game. Darcy floated untethered in the rear compartment and shoved the virtual-reality gear over her head. It was a huge monstrosity, and under Earth’s gravity it would probably weigh thirty to forty pounds. It took a few minutes to adjust to her brainwaves. She’d already put on the thin, haptic, formfitting suit over her clothes.

  Before her vision switched over to play mode, she watched Raub insert a comparatively small corded contraption into a port on his neck. It wasn’t even visible within his dense hair most of the time. Apparently he played these kinds of games often enough that he’d had an elegantly small version of the gear implanted surgically. All he had to do to play was plug in.

  And they were there. Every time she played it was a different kind of landscape. Sometimes desert, other times mountains, occasionally a swamp, or even strange cityscapes filled with different species of people. It was interesting because it gave her a glimpse into what other planets might look like, and it was reassuring to know that a lot of them resembled Earth, even if only in some passing way.

  This place was foggy and dark. Everything was in shades of grey, like during twilight, nothing colorful at all. She shivered. The haptic suit was chilling her. It was cold here. She gave herself a minute to really absorb the environment. There were crunchy low plants underneath her feet, and as she walked, she stepped into a slushy puddle. Instantly her foot tingled and began to feel numb. Mist flowed over her skin, wetting her hair and her clothes, which seemed inadequate protection. She wondered if this was a moor like in Scotland, or possibly something a bit more northern, like tundra.

  “I think I need a coat,” she said aloud.

  “Nonsense.”

  “Yeah, I don’t have fur,” she said wryly.

  She turned and he was right behind her. He cuffed her. Her head whipped back. “Do not insult me if you know what’s good for you.”

  “Good grief! I didn’t know that was an insult.” She rubbed her jaw and swallowed resentment. She’d get some licks in before this was over. “Touchy. Why is it so dark? We usually play during the day.”

  “This is day. See? There is the sun.” He pointed at the sky, where there was a fuzzy pinprick of yellow light that she had already dismissed as a small moon.

  “Yikes. That’s the sun? It’s so small.” She didn’t even have to shield her eyes to look in its direction. It reminded her of pictures she’d seen taken by the Curiosity Rover on Mars.

  “This is a reproduction of my homeworld.”

  “Oh.” She jogged in place, already forgetting that she was weightless inside the tern. It felt so real that it practically was. “I’m cold. Can we get started?”

  He grinned a feral grin with menace lurking behind his eyes. She could tell he was going to be brutal this time. “That’s the kind of talk I like to hear. The cold is good for you. It makes you remember you’re alive.”

  She rubbed her hands together and blew on them. “I haven’t forgotten. Who’s what?”

  “You are the gildrut. I am the kappyr.”

  She rolled her eyes. He preferred to play this way, which wasn’t really a surprise. He was practically the living embodiment of a predator. “Fine. Give me a good head start. There isn’t anywhere to go. It’s all open.”

  He bowed at the waist, his arms falling forward with a flourish. She jounced a cursory bow in return and took off running. She looked back once before he was obscured by the mist. He’d remained in that position with his face turned away.

  She zigzagged frequently over the uneven terrain, trying to throw him off her scent. She couldn’t see far, so she ended up crashing through some marshy ground, each footfall breaking a thin crust of ice into a spongy layer below. Soon her feet were so cold she could barely feel them, and there were sharp stinging sensations on her lower calves making her think there might be small cuts there. She didn’t stop to find out. She hadn’t completely forgotten it was a simulation.

  She came to a sudden halt when she glimpsed a large rock in her peripheral vision. She edged over to it, trying to calm her breathing—she was noisily blowing clouds of steam into the air. She needed to pace herself and try to find a place to hunker down and rest until he found her.

  It wasn’t just a rock. It was a strangely shaped boulder, jutting up into the fog. A cold breeze kicked up, blowing some of the mist away, and she noticed there was another one nearby. She walked over to it. Then she saw another, and another. She walked past each one until she was back at the first. There were six irregularly shaped stones, standing on end, arranged in a ring.

  She shivered violently. What would happen if she stepped inside the circle?

  She thought she heard a faint footfall and froze, then put her back against the stone, breathing as shallowly as possible.

  Another sound. Definitely a footfall. Damn. He’d caught up with her so quickly. She shouldn’t have lollygagged around the stupid rocks for so long.

  He was coming. He was damn quiet, but she had learned to listen for him. She held her breath and eased down into a fighting crouch.

  Crap. Her feet were so cold.

  She wished she could use her camouflage ability, but it didn’t register with the simulation gear and therefore was useless. She’d tried it before and she just ended up turning the dull grey and white of the inside of the tern.

  She heard him sniffing the air. He was inside the circle. Her scent would be all around it, but he’d be able to home in on her soon.

  She was ready.

  He burst around the corner with his two fists clasped together, hurling his body around to provide thrust. She ducked the blow intended to smash her head into the stone and kicked, pushing him back. He lost his balance and she followed, kicking again, squarely on his chest, to knock him down.

  He rolled to his feet in a fluid, practiced movement and came at her again. They began to spar. He threw punches. She blocked them and tried to dart in for a jab or a kick, but it was a losing battle. He was fighting dirty, not holding back at all. She’d never seen him so ferocious, so out of control.

  It was hard to land good kicks when your feet were numb from cold. It wasn’t a fair fight. He was more suited to this environment.

  Soon she was taking a beating, barely keeping him off her.

  He was snarling with glee, the skin under his downy hair flushed purple.

  “Okay. I’m done. Enough,” she said, spitting blood onto the colorless ground as she swayed with fatigue.

  But he didn’t stop.

  He pummeled her some more. She halfheartedly fought back. She was ready for it to be over.

  “Fight, damn you!” he roared
in her face.

  “No! I’m done!” she yelled back.

  He threw her onto the ground and began to pace, muttering to himself.

  Something was really weird about this session. It had never been like this before.

  “I’m out,” she called to him. It was lucky this was just a simulation. If this fight had been real she probably would have lost teeth.

  She reached for the button on the headgear.

  “No!” he bellowed.

  But she was already disengaging. The dark, dismal planet faded away. She lifted the helmet from her head and was dizzy for a few seconds as her eyes readjusted to the lighting in the tern. She started peeling off the haptic suit. No bruises or cuts. Nothing bleeding. She always had to see it to believe it after a rough session. She was already starting to warm.

  She looked up in time to see Raub jerk the cord out of the port in his neck. He was actually purple in the real world too.

  He pushed off toward her.

  It took everything she had to meet his eyes and not cringe away.

  “Don’t,” he said quietly, although spittle flew into her face with the enunciation of it. “Ever. Do that. Again.”

  She kept her mouth shut, though she desperately wanted to sass him. He was not in a good frame of mind. It could get bad if she antagonized him further. She didn’t want to know how bad it could get.

  He stared at her, his whole body trembling.

  She stared back.

  Finally he punched the bulkhead next to her head, leaving a deep dent, then turned away and pushed off to buckle himself into the pilot’s seat.

  He didn’t sleep that night. He stayed up, poring over something on his console, the purple cast in his skin fading, replaced with a sallow yellow-green undertone.

  She didn’t sleep that night either. She hunkered down next to Selpis and watched and waited.

  No fight with him was a fair fight. Ever. And all he wanted from her was a fight. Things had been slowly ratcheting up to this confrontation, until all pretense of teacher and master had disappeared.

  He’d never turned that shade of purple during a session before. The only time he’d done that was when they were struggling to get off the Vermachten—when he was up against people he considered his enemy. She shivered.

  He had wanted from that scenario that she had thwarted.

  She was afraid to wonder what that was.

  Nembrotha was right. There was something going on that involved her. Maybe he did have a buyer lined up for her. Or maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

  As soon as they landed on Ulream, she needed to get away from him. She had a terrible feeling that like a bad penny, or a bad boyfriend, he would keep turning up. She chewed on her lip. She might have to fight him or hide from him or something.

  Except she couldn’t best him hand to hand. That would never work.

  She’d have to be wilier than that. He knew what he’d taught her, how she fought, the way she thought. No, there was no chance of escaping him that way.

  If it came down to it, she’d have to dig deep into all the things she was. She’d use her humanity against him—her medical knowledge, her life experience. If necessary, she’d use her druid side against him too—she’d stun him or shock him into cardiac arrest.

  Nembrotha waved their sensory stalks at her sleepily. She felt a surge of protectiveness of her friends. All of them. She’d accepted that personhood was not the same as having an anthropomorphic body. She was something other than human, and she had to stop thinking about that as a bad or scary thing. She couldn’t go on as a house divided. She had to be something more like an alloy, two metals, that when combined, made the finished product stronger.

  Once again she went through the list of things that Elorpha had cataloged in that Sectilius Science Moment about the druids. Which of those abilities would work against him in a meaningful way?

  She got up and slipped into the lavatory. Once inside she worked a loose and broken bolt out of an inconspicuous corner and held it in her hand. She called up her light and concentrated. After many frustrated attempts to move it, she banked her light next to her heart and stared at the bolt. She wasn’t sure if it was ferromagnetic.

  But maybe manipulating magnetism didn’t require the light. She didn’t know how that ability worked.

  She thought about her body’s energy like it was water and visualized that part of herself pouring into and around the bolt to lift it. After some time, it rose from her hand. She toyed with it, lifting it, twirling it, and moving it around before her eyes carefully. She was careful not to drop it and make noise.

  She resorbed the field, caught the bolt, and created a tiny pocket inside her jumpsuit to secrete it away. She wished she had more time and space to practice with it, but she couldn’t risk being discovered. She’d come back later to try other things. It would be prudent to do as much as she could before they got to Ulream.

  She focused on the metal latch on the door of the latrine, pushing a field around it, then sliding it ever so slowly to the right. The door swung open.

  She was beginning to see what she could do.

  She’d think outside of the box he thought he had her in.

  33

  Darcy wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn’t. She clutched the armrests of the copilot’s seat, watching as the ground came up to meet them at an insane rate.

  She’d watched the planet grow larger day by day, anticipation rising steadily, until they were finally close enough to punch through the atmosphere. Ulream was the third planet in a binary system. When they got near enough, she could see the second star except during eclipses. It was essentially one big star with a second, smaller star, orbiting it.

  When they transitioned from space to atmosphere and passed through the clouds, it felt exciting, a lot like traveling in an airplane. But at that point Raub became inseparable from the pilot console and his mood was worse than surly. It only degenerated the closer they got.

  Apparently the tern had been damaged in the fight to leave the Vermachten, and that made it hard to steer during landing. The tern swayed like a swing as Raub fought with the controls. They surged above the treetops, tilted to one side, then swung back down to skim the canopy, the tips of branches scraping noisily over the bottom of the tern. Raub cursed violently in a language the dummy chip couldn’t translate as he pulled the craft up again, but only to one side. She had no idea what might be technically wrong, but it seemed bad to her.

  When they started crashing through treetops, she wondered whether they’d have been better off on the Vermachten.

  “Isn’t there somewhere safer we can land, like a desert or a meadow or something?” she yelled as her body canted again on her left side and the tern veered in a crazy arc, foliage brushing the side of the craft from time to time.. She’d seen some wide swathes of blackened areas as they’d descended, probably from recent forest fires. That would be preferable to this.

  He didn’t spare her a glance as he grappled with the controls.

  She pushed up to glance back into the cargo area. Her friends were snugged into the cargo nets again. She hoped they’d be safe there.

  They dipped lower. Raub seemed to have given up on gaining altitude to get back above the treetops. The screen of his console showed a red line that cut a jagged path through the terrain below.

  Branches buffeted the craft, drowning out all other sound.

  And then they were lurching and dodging around trunks. Too fast. Limbs and small trees broke off as they crashed through them. Winged creatures took flight in a blur. The ship was going so fast she could barely process what she was seeing. She pressed herself back in her seat.

  Narrow miss after narrow miss. She found herself moving her body from one side to the other as if that would help the tern avoid the trees, and the whole time her right foot stomped on an imaginary brake pedal on the floor under the console.

  Then they were just feet above the ground.
They struck a sapling but it didn’t slow them down. Raub continued his brutish litany in another language.

  Contact. They spun. They hit green and brown things, hard. Clods of dirt and shrubs with intact roots flew up over the windshield. She slammed forward and jerked to one side painfully. But they stopped.

  Raub leapt up immediately and crossed into the cargo area. He was opening compartments, rummaging around, slamming things.

  Darcy took a little longer to regain her senses. She called to the back as she reached for the latch on her harness and eased forward. “Everyone okay back there?”

  No one answered.

  The seat swiveled. Gravity pulled on her hard. The strength of it surprised her. She felt disoriented and lightheaded.

  Raub was stuffing supplies into a knapsack. Selpis looked to be sprawled unconscious in the cargo netting with Nembrotha’s sensory stalks peeping up from underneath her. Tesserae71 was curled up with his legs tucked close to his body, his mandibles working silently, one pincer clinging to the net.

  She got to her feet and swayed. “Anyone hurt?” she asked. Her heart pounded in a slow dull thud and there was a loud rushing in her ears. She took a ponderous step toward Selpis. Raub brushed by her, ignoring her, and nearly knocked her off her feet.

  She staggered, caught herself, then continued forward, gaining more stability as she went. She tried to kneel next to Selpis, but she ended up falling to her knees with bruising force.

  “Hey.” She reached through the mesh, assessing Selpis’s vitals. She slipped her hands over the reptile’s cool skin, seeking her pulse. It took longer than it would with a human, but she found it and it seemed strong and steady. Selpis was breathing evenly. Darcy looked for injuries, but found none. Selpis didn’t seem to be bleeding anywhere and Darcy couldn’t find any obviously broken bones.

  Nembrotha slid silently up onto Selpis’s abdomen. “Just knocked out. She’s in good condition. Don’t forget what I told you,” they said quietly.