by Tina Chan
Kristi’s jaw dropped open. “What?” she asked, thinking, Am I seriously hearing Chelsa confess murder?
Jaiden pulled them behind a gardening shed for some privacy. Chelsa swiped away at her wet eyes.
“You heard right. I killed my boyfriend.” She swallowed and continued on. “And I live with the guilt everyday. Ghost is all I have left of him. Alex gave me Ghost when he was just a cub. He snuck Ghost out of the lab where he volunteered because they were going to exterminate him.”
Neither Jaiden nor Kristi could come up with a reply. One of the droid-horses nickered, reminding them that they were still around and getting edgy.
“Come on, let’s check in at an inn for tonight. We also need to find a stable for the horses,” Kristi finally said.
Chelsa numbly followed Jaiden and Kristi, allowing them to lead her to Quick Wink Inn. The innkeeper, a bored looking girl in her early twenties, showed them to their room then left.
“Jaiden, will you go find a place for our three droid-horses to spend the night? I’ll ask around for a droid-pet buyer and purchase some supplies as well.” Kristi turned around and pushed Chelsa back onto the bed when she tried to get up. “And you’re staying in this room for now.”
She picked up the electro-slate and went outside. Kristi untied the four horses to be sold from the hitching post. Looking up at the public news-screen, a picture of Jaiden and her declared to be wanted persons flashed by.
Even though the pictures displayed were taken before their haircuts, Kristi reminded herself to buy some hair dye as soon as possible. The newscaster appeared on news-screen. She displayed her pearly whites—Kristi supposed it was the reporter’s attempt at a smile—then said:
“Two sailors were found dead this morning behind a warehouse. The police aren’t sure how they died, but wounds suggest they were stabbed to death. Citizens should report to the authorities right away if they see any suspicious activity or know of any information regarding the two murders.”
The pictures of the murder victims appeared on the screen. Kristi stifled a small gasp; they were the same two travelers she had been eavesdropping at Troll’s Tavern.
Chelsa has killed another person before. And she saw those two sailors at the Troll’s Tavern as well. Kristi whipped her head back and forth, clearing her thoughts. I refuse to believe Chelsa murdered those two people. I bet it was that shady merchant who committed the crime. Yeah, that must be it.
She checked the time scrolling across the bottom of the news-screen. It was 5:47 p.m.; she still had a decent amount of time left before curfew. Spotting a sign advertising “Drake’s Droids”, she pushed open the door and entered the shop.
Droid-dogs barked in cages, droid-parrots recited the alphabet from their perches and droid-cats sauntered around the store. Schools of droid-guppies zipped around in the Plexiglas tank being displayed in the center of the shop, their neon light pulsing beneath their opaque scales.
“How may I help you?” asked the man standing behind the register.
“Do you buy droid-horses?” Kristi said. “I have a few that I am looking to sell.”
“I don’t deal with large droid-pets. However, George down the street deals with droid-horses.”
Kristi thanked the shop owner and left. She looked down the street and made out a sign with the words “Oxfield Stables” written on it. She grasped the droid-horses’ reins and guided them over to the stable.
A broad shouldered man was brushing a droid-horse. He didn’t look up when Kristi entered the barn; the grooming job absorbed his complete attention. She cleared her throat. He still didn’t notice her.
“Are you George?” she asked.
“That’s me. Is there anything I can do for you?” He stopped his cleaning and looked up.
“I have four droid-horses I need to sell. The owner of the droid-pet shop up the street said you deal with droid-horses.”
“I’ll buy droid-horses if the price is reasonable.”
“The horses are outside,” Kristi said.
“Alright, I’ll come take a look.” He led the droid-horse he was grooming into a stall then came outside where Kristi had tied the horses to the sign. “Nice droids. They all seem fairly new.”
He fondly scratched a brown horse beneath the jaw. Next, he gave each droid a quick look-over. “I’ll give you 1,000 points for the lot.”
Kristi wasn’t sure if 1,000 points was a good deal or not, but figured 1,000 seemed like a nice, even number.
She stuck out her hand. “Deal.”
He shook her hand then transferred the points onto Chelsa’s account. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
Her next stop was the general store, where she planned on picking up more food, camping supplies and hair dye. The general store’s glass door was heavier than it looked, and Kristi grunted with effort pushing it open. Inside, there were shelves filled with a wide assortment of items, ranging from edible gum to DIY solar-car kits.
Kristi obtained a hover-cart and started shoving dehydrated food into it, not paying attention to what was going into the cart. The hover-cart levitated a few inches above the floor, suspended by repelling magnets stuck on the bottom of the cart and magnetic tracks running beneath the linoleum floor.
“Are you cooking for an army or what?” asked a store employee with a nametag reading: Hello, my name is SAMMY.
Kristi checked out the contents of the overflowing cart. Indeed, she could probably feed a small army with all the food she’d tossed in there. She started replacing some of the packages back onto the shelves. Sammy reached over and helped her.
“I’m going on a droid-horse trail ride that requires me to camp over night for a few days,” Kristi explained.
“You’ll probably be interested in this then,” Sammy said. She snitched a bottle off a shelf. “It’s a water bottle with built in ultraviolet filters that will make contaminated waters safe to drink. Saves you a lot of time from boiling water if you run out of purifying tablets.”
“How much for a water bottle?”
“Twenty points.”
That’ll be sixty points for three water bottles, Kristi thought. It’s not cheap, but hey, I have 1,000 points to spend. “I’ll take three of them.”
Sammy placed the bottles in Kristi’s cart. “Let me know if you need any more help.”
Kristi wandered to the hair section of the store and picked up a black dye, blonde dye and light red-brown dye. She couldn’t decide which color to choose for Jaiden and her, so she ended up placing all three dyes into the hover-cart.
Moving on, Kristi entered the outdoors section of the general store. She snagged a second-hand tent, two backpacks and three more sleeping bags since the bandits had stolen theirs.
Something round and shiny being displayed behind a glass counter grabbed her eyes. She walked closer to the object, still not sure what it was. The thing was made of two circular pieces of metal hinged together. One of the circles contained a cross-like symbol.
“That’s a compass,” Sammy said, seeing Kristi’s interest with the object. “I think it still works. It’s usually antique collectors who purchase old artifacts like this.”
“What does a compass do?”
“Tells you which way the direction east lies…or maybe it was north. Nobody uses compasses anymore though, when you can just use UnivMaps.”
“I’ll take the compass.” Kristi’s tongue blundered through the unfamiliar word.
Sammy unlocked the glass counter and took the object off the black velvet cushion it rested upon. The chain attached to the compass clinked against the glass when she laid the compass on top of the counter.
Kristi picked the compass up and snapped it closed with a click. There was a detailed etching of a dove carrying an olive branch in its beak on the outside of the metal disk. If the electro-slate ever fails, at least she would still be able to find east/north, provided she figured out how to work the compass.
Krist
i looked over all the items in her cart and did a rough calculation of how many points this cartload of supplies was going to cost. After paying for everything, there would be a bit more than two hundred points left in Chelsa’s account. It wasn’t a terribly low amount of points, but it wasn’t a lot either. They would have to ration their spending in the days to come.
Somehow, Kristi managed to stagger back to Quick Wink Inn with a week’s worth of food and camping gear.
“Oh good, you can help me carry some of the stuff up the stairs,” she said, spotting Jaiden by the inn’s entrance. “Did you find a place to stable the droid-horses?”
“Yeah. There’s a barn right at the back of the inn. The innkeeper said she’d just add an additional charge of twenty-five points to our bill for keeping the horses there.” He grunted as he picked up some of the bags of purchased goods Kristi had set on the ground beside his feet. “What the heck did you buy? An elephant?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but the bags aren’t heavy at all.”
Then Jaiden noticed she had given him the heaviest bags and chased her up the stairs. Kristi pounded on the door of their room. Chelsa opened it and Kristi flung her bags onto the bed.
Chelsa looked better; she had stopped crying and her trademark mischievous glint had returned to her eyes. Jaiden thundered into the room and dumped his load onto the tiny bed. The cot creaked in protest.
“Everything go smoothly?” Chelsa asked. “Nobody recognized you?”
“All’s good,” Kristi replied. “Can you help me organize the supplies for tomorrow?”
Chelsa came over and sorted the items from the bags into three groups: food, camping gear and others. She picked up the compass, running her fingers over the engraved decorations. Then she popped it open.
“Where did you find this?” Chelsa asked. “I haven’t used one in years.”
“General store,” Kristi replied.
She peered over Chelsa’s shoulder, watching her twist a thin layer of glass so that the needle was lined up with the arrow painted on the moveable glass piece. Jaiden, who was absorbed with taking the packaging off the ultraviolet water bottles, didn’t notice Kristi and Chelsa playing with the compass.
“What else is in that bag?” he asked.
Chelsa threw the pouches of dried mango strips at his head as her answer. Yep, Chelsa is definitely back to normal if she’s throwing packaged food at Jaiden, Kristi concluded.
“Okay, okay! I get it.” Jaiden dove behind the bed for cover. “No need to be aggressive. You could’ve just told me what else Kristi bought.”
Chelsa produced more items from the bag and threw them at Jaiden. Some instant oatmeal. A box of dehydrated fries. A couple protein bars.
“Ow—wait, was that a compass?” Jaiden said and popped up from behind the bed.
“Yeah, what else do you expect us to use when we get lost?” Chelsa asked.
“How does an electro-slate sound like to you? And they hurt a lot less than a huge hunk of metal being thrown at you.”
“Have you ever thought about what you would do if your electro-slate suddenly starts to malfunction? Then what would you do? At least you can rely on a compass to always point you north.”
“Touché,” Jaiden said. He dusted himself off and picked up the items scattered around him. “Don’t throw any more stuff at me,” he warned Chelsa with a teasing edge to his voice.
The streetlamps outside all went out at once, signaling the start of curfew. They wouldn’t be able to leave the inn until tomorrow morning at 5 a.m. without breaking the laws. Not that following the laws mattered much anymore; Kristi had transgressed the laws more times than she could count on her fingers within the past few days.
She hauled two of the newly purchased backpacks off the mattress and dropped them by the door where they could seize them in a matter of seconds. She was tempted to press Chelsa for more answers regarding Alex, but looking at her finally happy after two breakdowns in a day, Kristi couldn’t bring herself to harass Chelsa.
They couldn’t travel the next day. A freak snowstorm that was supposed to last from morning until evening blew in. The wind howled and rattled the window shutters, banging them against the outside wall. The snow was coming down so thick Kristi couldn’t see her hand in front of her face when she stuck her head out the bathroom window.
“Who’s ever heard of a blizzard in the middle of September?” she mumbled.
“Blame it on global warming,” Jaiden said.
“Global warming?” Chelsa asked. “Isn’t global warming supposed to make the earth warmer, not colder?”
“Overall, yes. But it can also seriously mess up the weather.”
“Well, at least we can dye your hair now. Who’s first?” Chelsa went into the bathroom and filled a bucket with water.
“I guess I’ll go first,” Kristi said. “Can you prepare the red-brown hair dye for me?”
“On it.”
Kristi took two towels off the rack in the bathroom and brushed out her hair. She returned to Chelsa and allowed her head to be dunked into the bucket of dye. Once Chelsa was satisfied every bit of her hair was covered in the dye, she allowed her to towel dry.
“How’s the color?” Kristi asked.
“I like it,” Jaiden said. “I never imagined you would look good with a lighter hair color.”
“The color matches your hazel eyes.” Chelsa motioned for Jaiden to come over. “You’re next. Choose which color you want.”
Chelsa and Kristi went to the bathroom. Kristi examined her new look while Chelsa dumped out the bucket and refilled it with fresh water and mixed in the dye Jaiden had chosen.
Dying Jaiden’s hair was much faster and he was soon finished. Kristi had to do a double take to reassure herself Jaiden was still, in fact, her brother; he looked like a new person.
“Anyone want to play cards on the electro-slate?” Kristi asked. “We have plenty of time to kill.”
“Count me in,” said Jaiden.
Chelsa poured the bucket of liquid down the sink. “Me too.”
chapter eighteen
[ Troop ]