Silence. Peace. That’s what it was like inside the capsule. I pulled Buddy up to my dad and we dropped hands to stand on either side of him. He gave us a quick squeeze then let his arms swing to his sides as if squealing alarms and frantic hiding were no biggies. That was comforting.
The capsule was bigger than the Galaxer’s cockpit, bigger than my bedroom back on Earth. Alex came through next followed by each and every member of the weapons assembly group and then the guards. Light came through the door, but it was getting darker with everybody taking up space. I could barely see outside anymore, but through the upper half of the transparent capsule I spotted Parallaxers shooting up vertically, one after another.
Quiet, though. No one spoke and the alarm was a distant meow. The capsule was like a basement bomb shelter. A metallic vibration traveled up through the soles of my feet. I thought of microwaves and wondered if something like that was going to melt my bone marrow. I took a chance at breaking the silence and whispered to Alex, “Did that kill your eardrums?”
“Almost. High C preceded by a low decibel whine.”
My dad cleared his throat and gave the tiniest of head shakes. No talking, he meant. I nudged Alex’s foot in silent opinion and he pressed back in answer.
First Commander Gzeter looked down his nose at us and I realized why the whole group stood stricken with silence. I turned my attention to the door and watched over the heads of the others the continuous launchings of our sole defense. I wondered how many were manned, I mean piloted, by Renzen and Makril and the other girls.
Slowly the large hangar doors rolled across the opening, thrusting us into darkness. Someone closed the capsule door and the blackness was absolute. I brought my hand to my face, felt my palm brush my nose, but saw nothing. It wasn’t an empty blackness though, it was full with movement as if the walls were closing in. The floor of the capsule was uneven, with small sharp particles that crunched underfoot. Safe, though. We were safe.
I found out later that the attack and the space battle had casualties on both sides.
CHAPTER 7
#Hitchhiker
WITH NO RELIABLE way to count days and nights, especially since there was no night on this side of Klaqin, I had to estimate that we were closing in on the thirty double-moon deadline. If you weren’t outside to witness the mistings that occurred when the pull of the crossing moons lifted the moisture from the lakes and ponds then you had to be able to tell time from the mysterious thumb rings. I could not.
I could, however, keep track of the number of attacks. Four. And these in spite of a supposed peace treaty and Marcum up there somewhere employing his talent. Each time there was an attack we took refuge in the cramped capsule. Damage was confined to large blasted holes in the front and side lawns of the main Academy building and those were quickly filled back in by the lowest level recruits. Fewer and fewer Parallaxers returned, always ones piloted by females. And people went missing, like that tall Jason kid who looked like Marcum, and a few others, though no one wanted to discuss their disappearances … or maybe they were deserters.
I had, at last, been given a place to sleep alone, a small room similar to the one Alex had, but on a different floor and right between Buddy and my dad. I learned that sleep for Klaqins, and by extension those of us with Klaqin ancestry, could be all but eliminated from our daily routine. Unfortunately also eliminated were three meals—and snacks—per day. Whatever was in those bottles kept my stomach from growling and apparently nourished me sufficiently, but did nothing to keep me or Alex from thinking and talking about real food.
Since my mom had been taken to a secure location outside of the Academy I hadn’t seen her at all. My dad wrangled permission for me, accompanied by Alex, to visit her. It was kind of cool how he used his thumb ring to program a small open-air transport—it was like a self-driving convertible box—to take us to where she was. Buddy could have come too, but he’d been promised a turn at time-bending alone during the last of the experiments with the capsule.
We left in the middle of a misting though it didn’t bother either of us to be lightly doused with the fine mist. I didn’t even care that my hair and face got wet.
“Huh,” Alex grunted. “My uniform isn’t drinking this up like it should. Must be time, at long last, for a change of clothes. They’ll go nice with these new boots.” I glanced at the flight boots and then his uniform. Most of the material wasn’t darkening up and there were several round, wet splotches. I sniffed quietly and detected a little body odor. I checked my own clothing, but all seemed fine. I scooted a little closer to Alex and he put his arm around me. That should have felt awkward, but it didn’t. We were finally going on a date, in a way.
The transport rolled along smoothly passing one other vehicle on the road out of the Academy; I swear it held that Rander kid, same green skin anyway. The misting ended and the sun and air dried us pretty well. We passed a town though it was no more than a dozen ramshackle buildings, strewn among high weeds or whatever native Klaqin growth thrived. A dozen shades of avocado and cream. Rubbish, or maybe those were weapons, sprouted from the hillside. We saw no people.
The terrain changed from open to woodsy, though Klaqin trees couldn’t compete with Earth’s oaks and pines. The road began to twist and turn as if no one had thought of cutting down trees or building bridges over the small lakes to make a straight road. The transport had to slow considerably.
I couldn’t imagine seasons here in the constant sunshine, but there were in fact leaves beginning to fall. Flappy gray leaves layered themselves beneath the wimpy trees. Breezes on this planet were limited to what was made from passing transports so occasionally a few of the leaves would find their way into our path and then scatter in plumes as we crunched over them. Several of these dying leaves spiraled over my head and I grabbed one.
“Look, Alex, you can see its lacy skeleton.”
He made another huh sound and started to quote depressing song lyrics about falling leaves, cold hearts and a lost autumn love. I held the leaf up and released it, looking back to watch it flutter onto the road behind us.
When I turned forward again I saw him. White blond hair. Tall physique. Could only be Coreg, limping toward us directly in our transport’s path.
“We’re going to hit him. Alex, do something. Stop this thing.” We couldn’t have been going much over twenty-five miles an hour but a ton’s worth of metal or purlass or whatever this was made of was going to flatten him. I waved my hands for him to get out of the way and shouted like a maniac. And, of course, I did a bit of time-bending toward a slow motion catastrophe.
Naturally that ensured that Coreg would stop dead, spread his legs and block the middle of the road, leaning left and then right and then left again. The transport zigged and zagged in choreography with him, automatically trying to avoid this human obstacle. We slowed to a crawl and braked mere inches from him. I stopped bending.
“Hitchhiking somewhere?” Alex taunted. “Lost your boots?” He snickered and folded his arms. “Get out of our way, Coreg. You haven’t got much farther to reach the Academy.”
Coreg leaned forward and rested his hands on the front of the transport. He looked strong enough to push us back if he wanted to. He stared and didn’t say a word.
“Coreg,” I said, “did you walk all the way from the farming region?” I had no idea how far that was, but we hadn’t seen him in, well, thirty double-moons, not since he chased us to the Fighter Five and we left him behind.
His uniform had the same round splotches as Alex’s. I did not want to get a whiff of a well-exercised male in a non-functioning uniform. I lifted my hand to my nose and waited for his response.
None came. He simply breathed. In. Out. Heavy. Slow. Breaths. I swear I wasn’t bending time anymore.
“Come on, dude,” Alex pleaded, “let us pass.”
Coreg’s long silver-white hair brushed his shoulders as he sluggishly moved his head back and forth.
When he spoke his voice sounded
unused and hoarse. “Where are you two off to?”
“My mom is here. On this planet. My dad and brother, too. But my mom is being protected in Plickkentrad. We’re going there to see her.”
Coreg glared at me. Perhaps he’d forgotten English and my uncharacteristically detailed explanation took time to translate. The sun shone on his face making his eyes glow amber, like a wolf’s.
“Plickkentrad,” he sighed, lowering his eyes, “I’ll go with you.”
He kept one hand on the transport and reached the other hand forward toward Alex. “Grab me.” He put one bare foot on the front of the vehicle and, with Alex’s help, swung himself up and forward and practically onto our laps. We scooched aside and he slithered into the gap between us. The transport jerked ahead immediately and resumed its programmed course. Seated side by side so closely we were like three wild alley cats, ears laid flat and backs humped, but avoiding the eye-locking stare that would lead to claws scratching and fur flying.
My nostrils flared. On purpose.
Alex hummed his usual calming melody. That helped. I relaxed, pressed myself closer to the other side and chanced a look at Coreg’s face.
He smiled at me, a savage grin that must have taken quite a bit of effort, and then he laid his right hand on mine and gripped my wrist so tightly I couldn’t have jumped out of the transport if I wanted to. And I wanted to.
Let go, I mouthed. His hold tightened and he shot me a warning look before releasing me. Alex finished his humming and engaged Coreg in a cross between an interrogation and a de-briefing. I concentrated on not time-bending as Coreg recounted his cross country trek whereby he existed on mistings and a couple of stolen bottles of nourishment. Then Alex revealed all that we’d accomplished since our Earth citizens had arrived. He told him a few things that I didn’t know such as what the weapons and defense group had devised and how the group that had to prepare the rest of the Klaqin inhabitants had brought back news of a much reduced population.
“Wait. What?” I leaned forward and looked past Coreg to eyeball Alex. “I thought the Parallaxers were successful in defending us. Where’d you get this information?”
“The last time you went to your room to sleep one of First Commander Gzeter’s aides came and updated us. But the population reduction isn’t from bombings. There’s been a plague, they think.” Alex’s face reflected a bit of regret for not telling me this before.
“They think? Can’t they examine the bodies and figure it out?”
He raised an eyebrow and I remembered what happened to bodies here. I leaned back and plucked a strand of hair out of my eyes.
“No, they can’t. Plus they also suspect there’s been a migration to the Edges.”
“I saw evidence of that,” Coreg said. “Entrances to underground cities were either locked or buried over. The few above ground villages I passed where deserted.”
“Ghost towns,” I mumbled.
“Ghosts?”
“Never mind.”
We sat in silence as the transport gained a little more speed once the road straightened out and there were far fewer trees and ponds to avoid. This was strange terrain, not entirely treeless, but not open either. Large looming formations filled the landscape. I didn’t think they were rocks and they didn’t look like man-made objects either. No way was I going to ask Coreg for an explanation. I decided to think of them as petrified dinosaur carcasses.
“Are we there yet?” That was a hint for them to do some time-pacing, but neither of them got it.
Coreg clucked his version of a harrumph and Alex answered, checking his thumb ring. Great, he’d learned to read the dumb thing and hadn’t taught me. “Not long, Selina. You’re not car sick, are you?”
I rolled my eyes and got another whiff of Coreg. “Not exactly. Just anxious to see my mom. Hey, Coreg, you got family in Plickkentrad, right? You gonna visit and, uh, freshen up?” I sniffed twice hoping he’d get my meaning.
He looked down his thin nose at me and raised one corner of his mouth. “No.” He pointed a finger toward the right and wiggled it. “Over there, behind that atra is a herd of miniature xanxes. Very fierce. Impossible to tame or train.”
“Where? I don’t see anything.”
Alex pressed forward too and said, “I thought I heard something. Are we safe?”
“Yes. I ran through this area earlier. Killed one. They can smell me and will stay away.”
“What’s an atra?” I asked.
“Those mounds. The wild xanxes feed off them.”
“But what is it?”
Coreg shook his head. “Our scientists do not know what it is, only what it is not. It is not an element; it is not a fungus or a plant; it is not an animal.”
We passed more of them, but I never saw a miniature xanx, fierce or not. We traveled for Klaqin hours through this strange area and still no one paced. Our conversations went from lame to totally annoying though I detected an effort on Coreg’s part to be friendlier. He asked about Buddy and I grudgingly told him that we’d taken him to the language cabs three times and he was now fluent in Klaqin.
At last we came to a junction. It was pretty lonely on this road with no other travelers. I wondered what it was like when the citizens decided to migrate to the Edges. There were no signs of flight. No litter. No abandoned items. And why would they flee to the Edges anyway? It would be like leaving Florida to live in Alaska. Maybe there’d be answers in Plickkentrad.
The transport slowed at the junction and the road started to descend, not like an elevator, but like a tunnel. That didn’t surprise me. I knew Plickkentrad was mostly underground.
“We’re almost there,” Coreg said. “It is unfortunate for you that we are entering from this side. You will not see the amazing beauty of my city’s above ground entrance. Plickkentrad is named after the plickken blossom, a staple food that grew in this region at one time. Trad means area.”
“Cue the tour guide,” I said. I probably said it with a mean note in my voice. Coreg stopped talking. The transport resumed its previous speed. We zipped along the last way in darkened silence. And then the transport stopped. Coreg pressed his thumb ring into the reader and twisted it. Great. He was undoubtedly locking it up so we couldn’t leave without him.
I didn’t know quite what I’d been expecting in the way of a greeting, but it wasn’t a line of glum, lethargic, red-faced Klaqins, robed in silver smocks. They had pleasantly dull faces, with crinkly eyes squinting curiously at us, as though we were rays of a stronger sun than they knew.
“This isn’t good,” Coreg said in Klaqin, followed by a lengthy explanation why. I’d brushed up on my Klaqin with Buddy and had no trouble understanding that these sluggish, blushing men were former city officials pressed into service as guards and evacuation coordinators.
“Evacuation?” A jolt of fear rushed through my heart. What if my mother wasn’t here?
“I’ve lived through an evacuation before. When I was a child. After the third treaty Plickkentrad was the logical target.”
“I don’t think you guys define treaty the way we do,” Alex said. He climbed out his side and nodded at the city guys, one of which was slowly approaching us, pulling the neck flap material of his robe up over his nose.
The ensuing discussion was handled by Coreg. The city guys wanted us to leave before we brought plague germs into the city and Coreg insisted that we had a right to be here and that we were germ free. He kept spinning his thumb ring and pointing to his bare feet. I couldn’t think of an emoji to tack onto his conversation, probably a triumphant smiley face judging by the fact that the city guy acquiesced after a glance at his ring. He signaled the other men to step aside. We walked over and entered the city through the double-sized doors they’d been blocking.
“Sheesh, that was easy,” I said in English. “Some guards. They didn’t have weapons, at least not as far as I could see.”
Coreg clucked. “They are the weapons. Those silver robes could hold back a Parallaxer or an In
timidator shooting freezer charges.”
“Huh. So why’d they let us through?”
“I needed to buy some shoes … and I’m the son of the ruler of Plickkentrad.”
CHAPTER 8
#Plague
ALEX KEPT HIS arm tight around me and whispered that everything would be all right. We asked Coreg for directions to the thotti but maybe we weren’t pronouncing it right because he said there wasn’t one in Plickkentrad. Probably he was getting back at us for dumping him at Marcum’s farm. We’d have to find someone to ask.
Coreg mumbled something about barely having enough credit on his thumb ring to buy a decent pair of boots and to meet him here in two time units.
Alex adjusted his ring to note the time. There were forty time units in a Klaqin double-moon. I knew that much, but hadn’t a clue how that related to Earth time. A few short hours, I guessed. No matter. When we found my mom I could always stretch things out even if we had to bring her topside.
Coreg took off down a colorful walking lane lined with storefronts. There were other people around, mostly men, walking like zombies. I wondered if they were here and not evacuated because they were infected with this mysterious plague.
“Do you know where the thotti is?” Alex asked the first man we passed.
He gave us an angry cluck and walked on.
“Maybe that’s a dirty word if you don’t use it correctly.” I’d heard the word used one other time when we were at Marcum’s farm and his father, Pauro, had taken Alex and me to hide. He’d said thotti repeatedly as we entered an underground enclosure. Not a pleasant place. Well, except for the romantic attention Alex paid me while we waited there … before we were captured.
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