by Nick Ryder
Cara was powerful. She was good at killing invaders, but it turned out diplomacy wasn’t her strongest suit.
Secretly, she almost hoped for another attack. Just something small, where she could show her power once more and get people to rally around it. She could crush a small enemy force and prove her worth as the leader.
As it stood, travelling further afield so she could stay away from the village, and her responsibilities, was the only way she could breathe nowadays. Her father was in charge in her stead. Most people appreciated a leader that was willing to get down and dirty with the rest of the tribe at least. Especially since she brought back food for the whole village when she ventured out.
Victor, the previous leader, had sat on his throne and done nothing but issue commands.
Her style was new even if it wasn’t perfect.
She had her allies, and Victor still had his. They might not be wearing the tartans anymore, but that didn’t mean divides didn’t still exist.
She’d taken a mixture of ex-reds and ex-blues out with her on this mission. She figured it was an important step for them to go together, to sit around the same campfire, and to fight together. Technically putting her life in their hands, even though she was by far the most powerful of all of them.
Wilbur, one of her closest friends in the village, stopped suddenly. Cara almost walked into him. “What’s up?” she asked.
Everyone else stopped too. There were six of them in total. Three reds and three blues. Cara and Wilbur had been blues.
“Look,” Wilbur pointed. Cara hadn’t noticed what he was pointing at because it wasn’t moving. It was dead, a half-eaten, half-rotten corpse beneath a rocky outcrop in the sheer cliffs they were following across the desert.
The same cliffs that held the military facility Cara had been inside just a couple of times. She wondered if the half-human, half-animal women were watching her now. They’d saved her village with their help, but Cara hadn’t seen them since then.
They were a point of contention in the village. Those opposing her used her alliance with the freakish creatures as reason to distrust her. She’d been acting alone, making alliances without consulting the village.
Just less than half of the village held that viewpoint—held it openly, anyway; she didn’t know how many secretly distrusted her showing up with an army at an opportune moment.
More than half were of the view that the military facility was how the village would protect itself in future.
“What about it?” Cara asked, peering at the dead thing Wilbur had pointed at to make sure it wasn’t still moving somehow.
“I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
She frowned. “I guess.” She hadn’t seen that mutant creature before, but the desert—the world—was full of mutants now. “But what about it?”
“We always see the same things. We’ve been here a bunch of times before. Don’t you think it’s strange that something completely new is here?”
A murmur went through the three reds and Cara fought the urge to snap at them that they should tell everyone what they were thinking.
“It’s strange,” she allowed. “We’ll keep an eye out and see if we see anything else strange.”
This was why Wilbur was one of the people she allied herself so closely with—beyond the fact that she enjoyed his company. He had an eye for things she’d have never considered.
If new things were moving into the desert, it might be a sign of a change.
The last time the world had changed, Cara had gained superpowers and everything had gone to shit.
No one was fond of change anymore.
They walked a little closer to the creature, but the smell kept them from getting too close. It had the body of a lizard, thick scaly skin with stumpy powerful legs. But the head was that of a cat, stuck awkwardly on the top with sharp, elongated canines. Meager wings that didn’t look like it could have lifted it off the ground were on the top.
It reminded Cara of the army Sol had sent to help her defeat the intruders. Crudely combined elements from different animals. Why would they have developed those wings on their own if they couldn’t even lift it off the ground?
She kept her thoughts to herself. Bringing that up would only lead to an argument she couldn’t be bothered with.
The sun was setting low in the sky and a chill was starting to crawl up Cara’s arms. This expedition would take another two days at least. This was the furthest she’d been from the village in a long time.
“We should set up camp,” she said, looking around. The desert was barren and empty. She couldn’t see the village anymore.
They didn’t speak to each other as they set up two small tents. Cara insisted that they not be separated into reds and blues. She slept with two of the reds. They were a man and a woman. Both in their early twenties, like her. They seemed close, but didn’t seem to have a strong opinion either way on her leadership. They appreciated that she asked them to come on the scavenging mission with her.
She lay on the edge, wrapped in a thin blanket that kept just enough chill from her bones. It took her forever to fall asleep when she was outside the village. Paranoia kept her away, ears straining to hear every sound.
That was why it was so surprising when the wooden poles holding up the tent were both removed in tandem, making the canvas collapse over them.
Cara couldn’t breathe for a moment. She froze, then scrambled to get out of the material prison. She snatched her halberd, her weapon of choice, from beside her and slashed wildly at the canvas. “Who’s there?” she shouted. Power surged through her veins, but she was too close to her comrades to use it right now.
An animal wouldn’t have removed the poles like that. This was something else.
“What’s going on?” Wilbur shouted, and then he cried out in pain.
The two reds in her tent were struggling too.
Cara pointed her halberd up above her head and blasted heat above her in a straight line.
The tent above her evaporated and she was free. Something slammed into the side of her head, knocking her to the ground. Through blurred vision she saw at least a dozen figures surrounding their campsite. They were human, like she’d suspected.
“What—” She struggled to speak through the disorientation, but her words were slurred. Power hummed through her body, but there were too many friendly people to risk an attack. Not when she couldn’t think straight.
“Who?” a man standing over her barked. He had a club in his right hand, and she was sure it was what had whacked her in the head.
“What? Who are you?” she demanded, getting control back. They were men and women, wrapped in various layers of mismatched clothes. Poorly fitting pants with logos she didn’t recognize. They were definitely scavengers too. All were armed.
The rest of her team were either on the ground or stood surrounded by people. The minute she tried to use her powers, she would throw her team to the wolves unless she took them all out at once.
The man pointing his club at her didn’t falter as she got to her feet. He didn’t look scared even though she’d just blasted her way out of the tent. She hadn’t even considered that this tribe might have plenty of powers of their own.
“Why here?” the man barked at her. He was speaking her language, but it was rough around the edges. It sounded like it wasn’t his mother tongue, though he hadn’t tried to speak to her in anything foreign first.
“I’m looking for food,” she said, because it was true. Scouting the surrounding area was important, but food was the main reason they went scavenging. “Why are you here?”
The man didn’t answer. He looked over his shoulder at his people again, and a round of nods went around them.
“Shit,” Cara said.
They were going to attack. And they didn’t look like they were going to hold anything back; that human glint in an enemy’s eyes that told Cara they would naturally hold off on that finishing blow? She searched for tha
t in a foe every time, and she very often caught it. But these strange men with strangely shaped heads compared to hers—like they had interbred for a couple of generations far away from here—had nothing in their eyes but cold, glassy darkness. Two wet pebbles stuck in to each of their sloped heads.
They clutched their weapons, and then they came for them. Cara clutched hers too, heart pounding in her ears.
“Wait,” the male red from her tent screamed, cowering against the ground where he had a sword pointed in his face. All of them turned to look at hm. “We have information. Loads of information. We can tell you stuff, if … if you let us live. You want things? There’s a … a facility up there—” He gestured up the cliffs. “It’s—it’s got much more than we have with us here. It has everything you could … it has loads of—”
“Shut up,” Cara hissed at the man, feeling that he would have kept babbling for hours if they’d let him.
And then she took the initiative, because the man with the club ready to bash her head in was listening intently to her teammate. She clapped her hands together in front of her, blasting the same laser of light that had destroyed the tent in front of her in a cone shape. It took out three of the dozen people, evaporating the man in front of her and turning the rest to charred remains.
It was still a difficult fight. They were obviously well trained, and some of them revealed their own powers without hesitation.
One of the women’s arms grew so muscly that they looked ready to pop. She fought just with her fists, almost killing the one of Cara’s comrades with a single punch aimed at the head. Her comrade only just dodged out of the way.
Another woman turned bright red and moved so quickly Cara blinked and missed where she’d gone.
This was a fight they weren’t going to make it to the other side of.
But she wasn’t about to go down fighting. Using her powers in combination with her weapon was still a somewhat new experience. She’d spent so much time hiding what she was capable of that she didn’t use them in tandem regularly enough.
It was a clunky transition between stabbing her long weapon through the heart of a man to pointing her palm at a woman and unleashing a blast of pure heat.
She had tunnel vision for whatever was in front of her. Taking out person after person as they tried and failed to floor her. She couldn’t look around and see how her team was doing. She closed her ears to the sounds that echoed off the cliff face.
There were too many of them though, and they’d immediately targeted her as the most dangerous of the bunch. The fast woman was beside Cara too quickly for her to react. She was punched in the side of the head and fell back to the floor, weapon clattering from her hands and out of reach.
Vision blurred, she was on the edge of consciousness. Blackness started to ascend, and she fought it back. Her fingers scraped against the dry earth of the desert, searching for her halberd. A boot kicked her stomach and she coughed, hearing her own groan echoing around her pounding head.
This was it.
She was going to die.
Her dad was going to be devastated.
Then something changed. She could barely see now, was only just hanging onto her alertness. Figures moved away from her though, interested in something new. She saw one fall, their head hanging brutally from their neck, almost decapitated.
New figures appeared. They were quick and decisive, joining the fight on Cara’s side. They were long-limbed, long-haired, a muted technicolor dancing easily beside the uniform mud and dust that all human skin crept toward, from wherever they’d started on the color chart. These new fighters were different from them.
She didn’t identify them before she finally succumbed to unconsciousness, but she was sure it must be Marie, Elaine and Lisa. Her friends. They were the only ones who could not only kick ass as much as she could, but they were also the only ones she could think of that would have been willing to step in and help her.
Chapter Five
I sat for hours at the camera near the solar panels, waiting for the return of my girls. Lisa had been bugging me for a long time to let them stay out later, to travel further, but I’d resisted.
I didn’t want them putting themselves at more risk than they had to, not without me there beside them. It was so soon now that I’d have a body that they didn’t need to push their luck just yet.
It was dark, though, and I’d expected them home hours ago.
“I can alert you of their return,” Ego said.
The AI had been hovering around all day, making meaningless comments. I felt like I was going insane. Had he always been that annoying? Or was it just because every time Ego spoke I was reminded that we shared a consciousness; that I was stuck as part of the system, just like him?
“That’s okay. It’s not like I have anything better to do,” I replied. “I’m worried anyway. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.”
Ego didn’t speak again. Nearly an hour later, the girls returned. I knew immediately something was wrong. Elaine had a long gash along one of her arms, and Lisa’s face was scratched up. Elaine’s lizard was limping slightly.
“What happened?” I asked.
Marie jumped. “We got into a fight.”
“I can see. What kind of creature was it? Did you get a specimen, so I can add it to the computer?”
Elaine looked mildly offended that was the first thing I’d asked. “No. It was Cara. She was in danger, we helped.”
“Oh.” My girls had put themselves in danger to help Cara, which was kind, but … it just wasn’t what I’d wanted to hear. I knew that Elaine was attached to her, but Cara wasn’t any use to me right now. I cared much more that my girls stayed safe. Team Facility. “What happened?”
Lisa stepped forward and had something cradled in her arms. “What’s that?” I asked.
“On the way back here, I … it’s a nest. It has eggs in. I found it pretty nearby. I thought we could see what hatched out of it.”
I would have frowned if I had eyebrows. “You want to raise some birds?”
“The nest looked abandoned. I thought we could at least see what came out of them. You’re interested in winged things.”
“Good point,” I said, “but it looks like you all got pretty banged up. You risked yourself to get those eggs?”
Lisa smirked up at the ceiling, not even where the camera was. It was endearing; as if in a way the girls felt as though I was the entire secure building that housed them.
“I wouldn’t say risked myself. I climbed a tree. OK, a very tall tree. Shimmied all the way to the top. Fell and caught myself at the last second. Fought off a mongoose and four bears…”
Elaine rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t that tall.”
“You didn’t bring the bears back?” I joked along with her. Lisa grinned wider, flashing teeth, and led the girls onward through the facility, dodging traps on their way back to the main laboratory. “OK. With Cara. Tell me what happened.”
They relayed the story. The girls could move much quicker than pure humans thanks to their augmentations, and it turned out they could cover much more ground than I’d anticipated. They’d been keeping tabs on Cara during her week-long expedition along the cliffside when they’d seen what had happened.
“There must be a different village around here somewhere,” Lisa said. “We should keep exploring around that area and see if we can find it.”
“They’re very good,” Marie said. “Neither us or Cara had any idea they were there until the moment they attacked.”
“And their English was weird,” Elaine said. “They talked kind of like cavemen.”
“But they don’t seem to know anything about us yet?” I asked. “They’re still quite a journey away from us, by human walking standards.”
“I think we’re safe for now,” Elaine said.
Marie and Lisa both made noises of protest.
“We need to find out where they are and exactly what they know,” Lisa said. “We need to be ou
t there following them.”
“We need to stay here and make sure that when they inevitably find us, we’re ready,” Marie retaliated. “We didn’t kill all of them. There were twelve, and they retreated when we’d got them down to about half. Some of them had powers. They’re dangerous.”
“And it doesn’t seem like Cara is having an easy time leading the village,” Elaine said, diverting the conversation away from the brewing argument. “People aren’t completely behind her as leader. I think we should try and help her keep control, since she’s our ally.”
I didn’t care about the internal politics of the village. I wanted to know more about these newcomers, and how much of a threat they really posed to us. It meant that getting into my body was all the more important. I knew that when I was able to be out there, away from Ego and on the front lines, we would stand a much greater chance of winning any battle. Any fight.
I was about to go over and check my blueprint in progress once again, when an alarm began to blare through the facility. I could see Elaine’s fur standing on end, and Marie winced and rested her hands over her ears.
“Intruder?” Lisa asked, carefully setting down the nest and extending her claws.
“Burst pipe,” I replied, flicking through cameras to find the source. “In the rabbit room.”
The girls hurried through the facility. Water was flooding the room rapidly, and it was sparking, electricity dancing over the surface from the electric pressure sensors beneath the floor. Rabbits were floating, dead from electrocution. Just a couple had managed to find higher ground, and were sat on top of kennels the girls had built for them, looking at their dead kin. I had no idea whether the bots were amphibious or not, and I didn’t want to risk it if I didn’t have to.
“Don’t open the door,” I said, just before Lisa pulled it open. “There’s too much water, and it’s electrified. Shit, I don’t know how we’re going to fix this.”
“What can I do?” Lisa asked.