Jillian vs Parasite Planet

by Nicole Kornher-Stace

  SABRINA saluted. “Easy peasy.” A tiny gob of matter detached from Jillian’s right boot. It turned into another of the little fireflies, shook its wings, and zipped off ahead.

  Jillian cracked her knuckles, bent her back to the water container, and started pushing.

  Five minutes. Ten. Jillian was going on fifteen, which felt like about three hours, when her boots spoke to her. “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

  She groaned.

  “Just kidding, it’s all good news this time. Another few minutes at the rate you’re going, and you’ll be at the base of the hills.”

  “There’s no grass there?”

  She could hear the shrug in SABRINA’s voice. “Just lots of sandy dirt, blowing down from the hills.”

  “As long as it’s not more of this grass, I love it already,” Jillian said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I only think Earth is normal because I’m used to it. But this place is weird.”

  “You think so? You should see some of the other planets we’ve gone to. This is nothing. Come along sometime when we go back to Tau Ceti e, if you want truly bizarre.”

  Jillian opened her mouth to ask What’s so weird about it there?, but she never got the chance.

  One moment the ground was there, beneath her feet. The next moment it wasn’t. For one split second she stood on nothing, both boots’ worth of SABRINA trying to hold her aloft as she grabbed with both hands at the air. She heard the water container slip down into the nothing and crash to the ground some unknowable distance below.

  Some stray wild thought took her back to cartoons, cartoon logic: she would only fall when she looked down. So she wouldn’t look down.

  She didn’t look down. She fell anyway.

  Down there was dark. Deep enough to be dark. Dirt rattled down from above. Leaves and bits of twigs and branches. Jillian ducked her head and shut her eyes tight until it was over, then opened her eyes back up to inspect her situation.

  The pit she’d fallen into was narrow, just wide enough for her to lie full length on her back if she wanted to, which she did not. The walls were sheer and high. It was like someone had dug a cylinder out of the ground.

  There was a circle of green sky high above, much too high to reach. She jumped and scrabbled at the wall a couple times as if to prove this to herself. No chance of getting out of here alone.

  At least she wasn’t injured. SABRINA hadn’t been strong enough to lift her clear of the fall, but it had slowed her descent a little, enough to keep her from doing herself damage when she landed at the bottom.

  Nothing had slowed the descent of the water container, though. She was standing in mud that had been dry dirt when she’d landed, and she could hear more water chugging out in the dark as she stood there. She dropped to her knees and tried to feel around for the break, get the container set back upright in a way that kept the rest of the water in. She tipped and tilted and got it balanced on one corner, wedged between her legs and the wall of the pit she’d fallen into. How much water was left in it? Hard to tell. A few cups, maybe. She felt sick.

  SABRINA hovered up, a cloud of fireflies in the dark. “Are you hurt?”

  Jillian patted herself down. Her hands were shaking. “No. I don’t think so. I’m okay.” Then she realized something. “I thought you were scouting ahead for trouble!”

  “I was. I guess I wasn’t heavy enough to trigger the sinkhole.” SABRINA laughed weakly. “Every day an adventure?”

  “It’s not that far,” Jillian said, eyeing the circle of sky. “Can you make something that gets me up there?”

  “Hmm. You didn’t happen to bring a rope?”

  “. . . No, SABRINA, I didn’t.”

  “That complicates matters. I had a very elegant solution just now involving a rope. It—”

  Under SABRINA’s chatter, a tiny noise reached Jillian’s ears. “Shhh.”

  “Honestly, I think you really would have admired—”

  “I order you to shush.” SABRINA shut up, and Jillian strained her ears against the silence. Something nearby, the faintest possible rustling. So soft she wasn’t sure whether she was imagining it. She pitched her voice to a whisper. “Do you hear that?”

  “Oh yes. Now that you mention it. It’s very close. Yes, I’m picking it up loud and clear.”

  “Can you see what it is?”

  The tiniest pause. “I’ll take a look around.”

  It didn’t sound like anything Jillian recognized. She couldn’t even tell whether it was above her, below, or to the side. It might have been loose dirt rattling down. But she had a nasty feeling it wasn’t.

  A thought was poking her in the back of her mind. Something about the crash the water container had made when it landed. Something about the crash she’d made when she’d landed. But another part of her mind was pushing that thought away before it could develop fully. Don’t think about that, the other part of her mind was shouting. Just get out. Get out now and run.

  “SABRINA?” she tried to whisper, but no sound came out. Her voice had gone. Her palms were sweating in the podsuit gloves, and her legs felt suddenly, dangerously weak. Because all at once, she knew exactly what that distant, nearing, muffled rustling sound was, what it had to be, and what it was headed toward out of the dark. Below her, around her, to all sides. She hadn’t been able to pinpoint it because it had been coming from everywhere at once. Eating its way through the dirt toward her.

  Stay still, she told herself, no matter what, stay perfectly, completely still. They might not notice you if you stay still. Though this was based on nothing, on monsters and dinosaurs in movies that were fake anyway. Not like this. Nothing at all like this.

  Mom, she thought. Dad. Somebody. Help.

  And then the worms came.

  Chapter 12

  They spilled out of the walls of the pit in all directions. Out of the dirt, out of the dark, and then she was surrounded. Stay still, she yelled at herself in her mind, not even knowing why or whether it would help, just knowing she was out of other options. But then the first of the worms were on her, nothing but a layer of podsuit and a layer of jumpsuit between them and her skin.

  She thought of the bite marks on her parents. She thought of the swamp full of worms. She thought of the drowned alien deer, parasites crawling out of its face. She thought of one of those growing inside her, tunneling around her guts with those centipede legs, feeding—and right there, just like that, she lost it. She screamed and slapped worms off her arms and shoulders and legs, mashed at them with her rock, jumping on them as they fell, crushing and recrushing them beneath her boots.

  More came. More kept coming. Dropping down onto her shoulders. Surging up over her ankles. Out of nowhere. Out of everywhere. Faster than her. Much faster.

  But not quite as fast as SABRINA.

  Quick as an eyeblink, Jillian’s boots dissolved. The swarm of glowing fireflies vaporized into glowing mist. Then all of it—boots, fireflies—swirled around Jillian like a tornado, attaching particle by particle to her whole self in the thinnest possible layer of armor. It stuck to her like a second skin and kept on glowing. It looked like she’d been dipped in light.

  Living, moving, shifting light. It sensed where the worms were on Jillian and grew spikes to skewer them or flick them aside. They landed in the mud at Jillian’s feet, and she stomped them flat.

  After what felt like forever, worms stopped falling out of the walls. There were dozens at a time, then just a few, then one by one, trickling to a halt. Only then did she notice that at least half of the worms weren’t even trying to attack her. They were going after the water Jillian had spilled. They mounded around her feet, but not to bite her. She was just between them and the water. They shoved their heads into the mud, crawled up over her boots to get at the water still in the container. She could just see them in the glow of her armor, light ca
tching on their wetness.

  Danger momentarily averted, she bent down, hands on knees, and pulled in breath after breath. It smelled bizarrely like a garden. Like fresh-turned dirt. Like what she imagined the woods must smell like after it rained. It was weirdly nice.

  “Hey,” she gasped. “Thanks.”

  The light gave a single pulse in acknowledgment. “Anytime.”

  “But we’re stuck.” Jillian squinted at the disc of green sky above her. “How do we get out?”

  “You I’m not immediately sure about,” SABRINA said. “I can demonstrate how I’d get out, if you like.”

  “No no no. Stay exactly where you are. Please.”

  “Okeydokey.”

  “I need to think.” Jillian patted herself down again. She knew she hadn’t been hurt in the fall, but she wanted to be extra sure about the worms. She didn’t feel bitten. From the look of the bites on her parents, she thought she’d have noticed if the worms had gotten her.

  “Need more light?” SABRINA asked.

  “That’d be great.”

  Jillian—the paper-thin shell of her SABRINA armor—flared to sudden brightness. She inspected her body, trying not to look down at the worms. It was hard to ignore them, massing and wriggling over her feet as they were, and only the thinnest possible layer of SABRINA between herself and them to block the sensation of their movement as they planted themselves headfirst in the remains of her water supply.

  Focus, she told herself. One thing at a time.

  The worms hadn’t bitten through her podsuit, thank goodness. At least, not for the most part. There was some superficial damage in a few places—the cuff of one wrist, the top of one shoulder, in two places near one knee—but the acid must have just grazed the fabric, because she didn’t feel any burns.

  Everything else was intact. It didn’t escape her notice that this was entirely thanks to SABRINA. She shuddered to imagine what would have happened without that armor to protect her.

  She still had the spare jumpsuit tied around her waist, and the broken roll of duct tape in her pocket.

  “SABRINA,” she said delicately, like the idea was so fragile that if she spoke too fast, too loud, she’d accidentally crush it. “I know you can’t lift me out of here, but if I made a rope, could you fly it up and tie it onto something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay.” Carefully, Jillian untied the spare jumpsuit. She hated to sacrifice it. It had been cold last night even sleeping between her parents, even with both jumpsuits and the podsuit on. She held it up, sighed, and tied it back around her waist. She took out the roll of tape instead.

  Trying to make that into a rope proved frustrating in the extreme. Maybe if the roll hadn’t been partially dissolved, it might have worked better. After all, the tape was very, very strong—or would have been, if it had all been of one piece. But it wasn’t. It was in a zillion pieces. She stripped off the outmost layer. It was about six inches long. She folded it in half lengthwise and then stuck it to the next layer, which she folded lengthwise also. Now she had a double-thickness piece of tape about a foot long.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” SABRINA said.

  “Soon,” Jillian said. Then, under her breath: “I hope.”

  If she could make a single piece long enough—no, a few single pieces long enough, she might be able to braid them together. One piece alone probably wouldn’t hold her weight, but a braid of three pieces might stand a chance.

  While Jillian worked, SABRINA hummed a long, long string of songs it apparently had stuck in its robotic head. When it got bored of that, it started layering the songs over and through one another, humming four or five different songs at a time, weaving the music together like a very strange tapestry. But it was easier background noise to think by than SABRINA’s jokes.

  Meanwhile, Jillian stripped tape and connected it until she ran out, wrapping the growing length of the makeshift rope around one forearm so it wouldn’t touch the ground where the worms were. It took—she didn’t know how long it took. She could have asked SABRINA, but she didn’t really want to know. Long enough that when she was done, her hands were achy and cramping. Long enough that when she finally stopped to stretch her shoulders, the color of the sky above had changed. Long enough that SABRINA had finally stopped humming.

  And it wasn’t enough. At a glance she knew there wasn’t enough tape there to braid.

  But there might be enough to make two strands and twist them together. It wouldn’t be as strong as a braid, but it was absolutely better than trying to climb a single strand.

  So she shook out her hands and tried to unwrap the full length of the homemade rope. With the help of SABRINA—another octopus, tiny this time, no bigger than a baby’s hand, anchored to the wall of the pit—she got the tape folded more or less in half. Then SABRINA held the folded end up, and Jillian twisted and twisted until she ran out of tape. Rope. Whatever.

  “Go tie this around a tree or something,” she told SABRINA.

  “On it,” SABRINA said, and the miniature octopus scuttled up the wall and out of sight, taking Jillian’s homemade rope with it. She stared after the disappearing length of it, frantically trying to measure it with her eyes. Was there enough to reach a tree and tie around it securely? Would it bear her weight? If she had to jump to grab her end, would the sudden strain snap the rope entirely? Were there even trees nearby?

  The rope vanished above.

  Many minutes passed. Or maybe it just felt that way. Then there was a rustling sound above, and Jillian’s SABRINA-armor said, “Alley-oop!” and made a kind of obnoxious fanfare noise, and then, at long last, down came the rope.

  It was too short. It was obviously too short. She’d have to jump. She’d have to stand on the water container and jump and grab it and hope it didn’t break with the sudden addition of many dozens of pounds of eleven-year-old girl.

  She knew that on Earth, a person’s weight was multiplied by—something. Two times? Three?—under impact. Like when your foot struck down while running, or when you landed a jump. Jillian wasn’t a hundred percent sure how that would work for jumping and hanging from a rope on an alien planet, but she was all out of tape. She couldn’t make the rope any longer. She had one chance to do this right.

  She looked down at her glowing armor. Then farther down, at the worms. They were ignoring her for the moment. What would happen if she missed her jump and landed hard among them? She’d squash some in her fall, but the others—

  What-if, what-if, what-if. Enough. It’s like Mom always says. Analyze your situation. Do what you can with what you have.

  “SABRINA? I have an idea. But we have to be really, really fast.”

  “Well, it’s your lucky day! I love ideas, and I love being really, really fast.”

  “Then listen up. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  “On three,” Jillian said. “One. Two. Three!”

  She crouched down, gathered all her strength in her legs, and exploded upward. As her feet cleared the ground, the worms surged up toward the tremor of her leaving, and her armor scattered into sparks. SABRINA gathered under Jillian’s feet in the gelatinous cloud-form that had slightly slowed her fall before.

  Except this time it wasn’t there to slow her fall. It was there to soften her lift. It cupped her leading foot and stabilized her for a fraction of a second so she could grab the rope, digging both feet—now with SABRINA-made spikes on the toes—into the dirt wall of the pit, mere inches above the questing mouths of the worms.

  And nearly fell back down. Holding herself up on that sorry excuse for a rope was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. She dug in hard with her foot-spikes, trying to transfer more of her weight to her legs. Even with SABRINA nudging her upward, she was too heavy, the rope too thin, her grip too weak, her position too weird. Her feet stayed put, anchored to the wall, but her hands�
�and the rest of her—slid down an inch, then another.

  Maybe if I’d tied knots in the rope, she thought. And: If I’d tied knots in the rope, I’d have run out of rope.

  “Do me a favor?” SABRINA said. “Don’t look down.”

  Of course, before she could stop herself, Jillian looked down. The worms were all piled in a mound now, just as they had been the first time the water container had spilled, way back by the pod. Most of them were busy with the water, but others were climbing up over those. Stretching their heads upward. Brushing the soles of her boots.

  The parasite is at different stages of development in the worms, her brain supplied helpfully. Some of them are ready to go to the water. Some of them are still trying to find a larger host. That, in case you hadn’t noticed, would be you.

  It was all she could do not to dissolve into mindless screaming panic.

  “Come on,” she gritted out at her gloves, her hands, her feet, the rope. “Come on, you stupid—”

  “Hang on, hang on,” SABRINA said. “I gotcha.”

  Bits of SABRINA detached from the gelatinous cloud at Jillian’s feet and swirled up around her hands, inserting itself particle by particle into the gaps between her fingers. Another layer of grip. It only helped a tiny bit.

  But a tiny bit was all she needed. Her grip caught, and she climbed. Slowly, gracelessly, fighting her way up that rope with everything she had. Her hands cramped, worse than before, and her shoulders felt like they were going to detach from her body, and the tension was giving her a pounding headache. On two separate occasions, she heard her podsuit rip as she stretched the fabric where it had already been torn by the grass.

  But after what felt like hours, she hauled herself up to the surface and collapsed. The razory grass slashed rents in her podsuit arms, and she barely even noticed. She was out. She was alive. She—

  —had left the water container in the pit.

  She rolled onto her side and peered down into the dark. The container was almost completely hidden under the risen tide of worms. No way to reach it now. Even if she could, the container was plastic, like the pod. They’d probably already eaten it.