by White, Gwynn
She glanced toward the seating area, eyes narrowing as she scanned for something. She returned her gaze and flower-petal softness to Emmit, lifting a smile. "Is your Mom—"
"Those cultures are ready, Dr. Vitra," the weird guy from earlier said as he approached the pair. "I didn't get a helmet trough, so these trays will have to do for now." He stepped in between her and Emmit and nodded to his right.
"This kid is more important than a million cultures," he thought he heard her think.
More than a million cultures? "What's a culture?" Emmit asked, confused.
The man glanced down at Emmit as though he were a dog who'd just crapped on his shoe, then gripped Dr. Vitra's elbow. The grip wasn't like a vice grip, but its message that she move along would have been clear to anyone.
"It was nice to meet you, Emmit," Dr. Vitra said. "We'll talk again soon."
The man gripped her arm and forced her to go with him.
"Let go of me," she said, and ripped her arm free, sloshing milk from her cup onto her tray. "What's gotten..." her hushed voice trailed off as they walked away.
Emmit strained thought muscles he wasn't sure were there, and failed to retrieve anything from their conversation. His stomach cramping forced him to stop. The world shifted at its equator and twisted opposite directions. Emmit watched as his tray fell in slow motion, the glass tipping at a distance and time he couldn't reach. His body weighed too much to stop them or himself from the inevitable crash.
The milk spilled out like a river in the desert, spreading over the white and black grouted tile without interference.
He barely managed an arm outstretched as a crucial buffer as his face pressed into his muscle, shielding him from the hard floor that jammed his hip.
A loud crack and the shattering of something hard sounded next to him. As far as he could tell, it wasn't him. His food was trashed.
What's happening to me?
"Emmit?"
He looked up to the concerned expression on his mother's face as she ran toward him.
He wanted to lift a hand to stop her, but he couldn't. Better to rest his head on his arm. He could sleep here.
Her touch on his elbow helped ground him to a place where everything might not be falling apart.
People were staring and backing away. Whispers voiced added concern. "Reject" was a word that stuck out.
Reject?
His mom looked him in the eye, then moved her hand to his forehead. Her touch jerked off his skin right away. "Oh, honey. You're hot. Someone!" she shouted. "Captain Re!"
"Is he sick?" a woman asked, though at a proximity that suggested self-preservation more than concern.
"I'm coming," Captain Re said, his words jostled by his rapid strides. "What happened?"
A second hand landed on Emmit's back, strong and assuring.
"Emmit. What's wrong?" he asked.
"He's burning up," his mom said.
Emmit wanted to brush them off and find the nearest secluded corner or hallway, but his head was all kinds of strange sensations—tingling, cold, hot, heavy, fluid, sticky, thick.... He was at the mercy of whatever was wrong to run its course and hopefully leave him alone when it was done.
A wailing noise erupted from the air around him, mechanical and cyclical.
Another hand reached under his leg, and combined forces twisted and lifted him toward the ceiling and Cullen's face. Cullen carried him in both arms. His eye contact and confidence helped soften the moment for Emmit, and then he was scanning for a path and carting him off somewhere silent and still before the up and down motion flipped his stomach inside out. Closing his eyes was his best and only defense.
* * *
Ehli tracked the paths of people running from the cafeteria, and in their place, soldiers entered with rifles ready.
"Don't move," shouted one.
Cullen stopped, turning Emmit to shield him with his back. He spotted Ehli, then cocked his head backwards. "We're guests of Ocia."
The siren shut down, leaving them in the silence between Cullen and the soldiers, and behind them the chirps of shoes making sharp steps on tile.
"We know who you are. You'll still stay right where you are. Doctors are on the way."
"Okay. Good," Cullen said. "But why the weapons? Ocia invited us inside."
Doctors in yellow plastic suits, sealed air tight with see-through visors on their hoods, pushed a stretcher on squeaky wheels into the dining area.
"The cart's for the boy," the soldier said, "but the rest of you will follow him in. We're not taking any chances."
The three doctors pushing the cart parked it behind Cullen and surrounded him. They didn't have the height or girth to evoke such confidence, but that's probably where the soldiers and their guns came in.
"Yeah, Ocia," Cullen said, after tapping his earpiece. "Three doctors are here to take Emmit and the rest of us somewhere." Cullen put his hand out, stopping one of the doctors from taking Ehli's son.
She stood one step behind Cullen, unsure if she should take her boy back, but thinking Cullen had it covered.
"Okay," Cullen said. "His skin is pretty warm." Cullen moved toward the stretcher, gently lowering Ehli's son child like she had when he was young enough to need naps. Cullen waved to the soldier. "You can put that down. We'll come. Ocia's on his way, and will meet us."
The soldier looked down, nodded, and lowered his rifle. He patted his hand down to the rest of his group. They lowered their weapons in turn. The lead soldier, a thin man with a long neck and a no foolin' around stare shared one more glance with Cullen, then led his group back to the entrance where Ehli's group had entered.
The doctors took over pushing the stretcher, while Ehli jogged to keep up.
Emmit squirmed on the bed, groaning.
Adi, Jolnes and Nassib joined them. "What's wrong with Emmit?" Adi asked Ehli.
"I'm not sure, hon. These doctors will help us find out."
They made it to the intersection and turned left. The soldiers, eleven in total, gave them a wide birth, but kept their attention on Cullen and his group. Cullen turned right, spotted something, and beckoned someone.
Ehli followed his gaze to see Ocia running down the hall toward them. His appearance softened her anxiety, if only a little. She waited for him to catch up, deciding Emmit was in okay hands if Ocia wasn't contesting. She wanted to hear his news. "What's wrong with Emmit?" she asked when he was close enough to hear.
Ocia shrugged. "I don't know. We'll find out, though."
"What's with the military escort?" Cullen asked.
"Past mishaps have led to extra security," Ocia said. They all jogged after the stretcher, passing through a double door at the other end of the hall. "They're just doing their jobs."
"They say they know who we are," Cullen said, slowing as Torek reached the door in front of him and held it open, "but they still felt the need to raise their weapons?"
On the other side of the doors was an extension of the clean, sterile environment, but with more doctors and numbered doors, mostly shut, leading off the hallway at regular intervals. Emmit had been pushed into one on the right.
The lead soldier stood outside that door, watching their approach with his rifle held across his waist, pointed at the floor.
"Sergeant Chino has lost men to some of our past... mishaps." Ocia extended his hand toward their group. "These are our new guests: Captain Re, his co-pilot Torek, Jolnes, Nassib, Adi and Ehli, mother of our sick young man."
Ehli didn't like the look lingering between Chino and herself. Finally, the wiry soldier broke their gaze and addressed Ocia, pointing to the door across from the one Emmit had entered. "We have beds ready for all of you. Lie or sit, I don't care." The last part was directed, no foolin', at Cullen.
"What's going on here, Ocia?" Cullen asked. "I'm not moving until I know why we'd need beds."
"They just want a blood sample and to check a few vital signs."
"Why?" Cullen asked. "What kind of mishaps have
you had?"
"With all the people we've rescued, we've learned to have medical evals as soon as they arrive. I was going to carry them out, but figured there'd be no harm in letting you eat first." Ocia's comment was directed first to Chino, then Ehli, and finally back to Cullen. "I'm sure that whatever is wrong with Emmit is something simple that some rest and fluids will resolve." He raised a soft hand to Ehli's arm. "They'll figure it out, whatever it is. Would you all ease Sergeant Chino's mind and accept a quick eval to show you've not brought an epidemic onto our soil?"
He said the last part with a grin that tried to make a joke out of what Ehli was in no mood to laugh over.
"You can take some blood," Ehli said, "but as soon as I'm done, I want to sit by my son's side."
"Of course." Ocia gently guided her to the open doorway, and the doctors and nurses waiting alongside the beds beyond.
Ehli didn't like their stares. It felt as though they were somehow accusing her of bringing the plague. It made her fear that somehow she had, even if she had no idea how.
8
A heavy man with faint patches of red hair on his face, a male nurse and not unusual in Cullen's experience, extended his hand toward the bed, indicating for Cullen to sit on the edge. He dipped his head at Cullen's wristcom. "Take that off, please."
Cullen turned his palm upward and pressed thumb and forefinger into the adjacent edges of the strap around his wrist, unlocking it. The faceplate on the other side of his wrist doused its screenlight as the sensors quit reading his pulse and the frequencies emitting from the chips implanted under his skin. The chips Torek had taken him to the frozen tundra of Yrie to get.
"Was I not supposed to make out with those two girls in the cafeteria?" Torek asked his nurse, who looked the right kind of pretty to be on his radar too. He winked at Cullen, while the nurse rolled her eyes in a noble attempt to ignore Torek's humor.
Cullen set his wristcom down in his lap and rolled his suit's sleeve up past his elbow. The male nurse stepped to Cullen's side and glanced across the aisle at Ehli, a subtle look, but not for the first time. Was it a crush? Ehli was attractive in a catch-you-before-you-know-it kind of way. He let his gaze hang on Patches until the nurse looked up... and as he waited, he wondered if Torek would make a comment about Cullen staring. He didn't, and Patches noticed. The man started a bit, looked down at the blood he took from Cullen's arm, and then back up.
"Are you feeling okay?"
Cullen raised a brief nod at Ehli. "You want me to introduce you?" Cullen whispered, his voice not carrying over the chatter Torek made with the pretty nurse he'd been assigned.
"What are you talking about?" Patches took the vial of Cullen's blood and stuck a label on its side. He pressed a cotton wad on Cullen's wound, then took a marker out of his pocket and bit the cap off. "What's your name?"
"Squirt," Torek said, answering for Cullen before he could, "but his friends call him 'You're Excused'."
Adi cracked up at Torek's joke. The boy's nurse leaned forward to adjust the vial on his arm.
"Thanks, Herp," Cullen told Torek, then grinned as the nurse slowly lifting her hand from Torek's arm. "That's what his friends call him."
Adi made a half honk, half laugh that faded with the lack of understanding showing on his face.
"It means Torek's more famous that he realizes," Cullen told the boy, knowing the added joke would fail to clarify the confusion.
"Okay," Adi said, pretending he got it.
"Fart jokes win again, Herp."
"No one's ever called me that," Torek said in a lower tone to his nurse, who'd turned her back on him to write on the vial of blood she'd taken from him.
"That's Herp with a capital H," Cullen said to Torek's nurse.
"Shut up, Squirt."
Patches looked at Cullen as if two more minutes of this would equal ten hours of licking concrete. "What's your name?"
"Shut up," Cullen said, pointing at Torek.
"Come on, you know he was joking," Torek said to the nurse leaving with his vial of blood. Four of the other nurses walked with Ehli out of the room—which Patches noticed. Torek's nurse didn't give him a second glance.
"You started it," Cullen said.
"His name's Cullen," Torek told Patches. "He's the best."
Patches wrote the name, eyes on the vial and thick lips a chasm away from lifting a grin. "Thanks so much." His sarcastic smile lifted his cheeks high enough to almost close his eyes, and then he walked toward the door. As he passed Torek, he said, "Later, Herp."
Cullen cracked out a loud laugh. "My man, Patches."
"Patches?" Torek said.
Cullen squeezed his two-day scruff on his chin.
"Oh, you're smart," Torek said. "Hey, blue," he said to the male nurse in blue scrubs finishing up Jolnes's vial of blood. The tall nurse did not react.
"See," Torek said. "Smarts so much it hurts."
"She knows I was kidding," Cullen said. "Don't be such a sore loser."
"I know." Torek slid off the bed and rolled his sleeve down, tossing off the cotton ball with the dab of blood. "So where to now? Think they'll stop me if I walk out?"
Adi watched without blinking. Cullen checked Jolnes and Nassib for a reaction, though neither seemed to have answers.
Until Nassib said, "We're not prisoners, but I doubt the guards are far from that door, open or not."
"So where do you come in?" Cullen asked Nassib. "Have you known Ocia long? Before Setuk?"
Nassib shook his head and rolled down his sleeve over his muscular forearm. "Nope. On Setuk. He gave me a second chance, and offered me more if I helped him while he was there."
"Help with what?" Torek asked.
Nassib shrugged. "Whatever. Making sure his ship was taken care of, keeping his stuff from getting stolen when he was gone, anything he wanted."
"How—"
"I don't want to talk about it. I may not have been a prisoner, technically, but...." Something else caught his attention, and he stood and walked toward the door, cocking his head to see an angle beyond the doorway. "Let's just all be glad we made it out alive."
He stopped before reaching the door. "Yes, sir."
Torek and Cullen shared a look, and stood. Cullen hoped it was Ocia speaking to Nassib, and....
Nassib turned and waved them on. "Ocia and Lieutenant Huls would like to see the three of us."
"What am I supposed to do?" Jolnes asked.
"Keep an eye on Adi," Cullen said, and walked into the hall with Torek and Nassib.
They walked around a bend in the hall to the other end of the floor, and entered a boardroom, in which Ocia and Lieutenant Huls were seated, at the far end of an oval wooden table. Two tablet computers lay between them, screens lit with text and images Cullen couldn't decipher.
Ocia took a sip from a cup emitting steam.
Huls extended a hand toward the seats on Cullen's side of the table. Three backpacks stuffed to the zippers stood upright on the table in front of three of the seats. Cullen guessed the packs weighed twenty kilos a piece.
Ocia lowered his cup and swallowed. "Our timetable has hit an unfortunate jump forward."
In the awkwardness of their arrival and unknown path their journey was on, the nearness of information helped settle Cullen. "Timetable for what?"
"Please." Ocia motioned for them to sit, and they followed.
"In those packs are the provisions and tools you'll need for our hike," Huls said.
"Hike?" Cullen asked.
"To the original site of your father's colony, Fel Or'an," Ocia answered. "Our monorail was knocked off the magnets by a fallen tree, and the only way to the facility is by foot. We have a crew working to repair the train and tracks, but something has come up that needs our immediate attention. As I said, our timetable has been shortened."
"My father's original site is called Fel Or'an?" The name meant 'Found hope' in Veltuk, the language of their first generation, the one given by the Ancients. It sounded vaguely familia
r.
"Originally, it was a city of the Ancients." Ocia tapped a key on his laptop and rotated in his chair as a hologram, a live image of a jungle from a bird's eye view, rose behind him. Partially hidden within thick cover of dark green foliage were a series of connected circular stone buildings that appeared many stories tall. A flock of birds took wing from one of the sharp spires that topped all the tallest buildings. In the back section, where the old-style buildings ended, was a village that formed a buffer between the Ancient architecture and a pond dotted with small boats.
Dad must have swallowed his tongue when he found that.
Ocia expanded the view to show the vast jungle surrounding the Ancient city, then scrolled north.
"Seventy kilometers north through the Jehu Jungle is Merus, our main shipping port. Jehu has an unprecedented wealth of medicinal treasures and research specimens, but is equally as difficult to travel to and from, considering the hunting prowess of some of the specimens and the natural defenses of many other species living within that environment."
Ocia tapped a section of the rail connecting to Merus. The screen zoomed in to where trees and train tracks were swallowed into a mini abyss.
"That happened a month ago," Huls said to Cullen's side of the table, "otherwise we'd have had you pull to Merus, then take that rail south to Fel Or'an. Right now, our contact and his team is cut off, and we don't have time to rebuild our infrastructure."
"We'll be coming, too," Ocia said, and tapped another key. The hologram switched to a collage of animals and plant life, ranging from a white tiger in the top corner to various smaller creatures and colorful fauna.
The memory of Torek mentioning being bitten by a tiger made him send a look at his friend. Torek shrugged it off as though saying, Yeah, I wasn't kidding.
"A large team will draw too much attention," Ocia continued, "but it will be the best we have."
"I've updated your tutorials," Huls said, "so you can read up on these during your trip. We're counting on your experience tracking bounties across various terrains."