The Almost Girl – ebook edition

by The Almost Girl (retail) (epub)

  Caden laughs out loud. “As I was saying, just don’t mention her riding skills or ask her about anything personal; she gets a little touchy about that. And she’s not interested in making friends, so forget I introduced her and move along.”

  I shoot him a withering glare just in time to see a willowy blonde swing her arms around Caden from the back. Her demeanor is not friendly, nor is the acid warning look she launches in my direction. My body tenses immediately, and already my brain is calculating the distance to exits and casualty ratios of the dozens of kids swirling around me. I force myself to relax.

  She’s a kid, not a threat.

  The adrenaline seeps from my system as the girl tosses an icy smile in my direction, her designer white pants like a second skin and a pink shirt unbuttoned enough to show a lacy pink bra, leaving little to the imagination.

  “Who’s your friend?” the blonde says to Caden, her tone dripping venom. My hand hovers over the blade wedged into my belt. No metal detectors in this school makes it a hell of a lot easier to deal with threats, unlike the public schools in New York, which had been an eye-opening experience. I’d received detention for a week because of a concealed knife in my boot. Forcing my hand to my side, I try to act normal.

  “Hey Sadie, this is Riven. She’s new,” Caden says and turns to embrace Sadie, who jumps up to wrap her very long cheerleader legs around his waist. I want to laugh at her overt territorial display, but something inside tells me that this will probably not be the best thing to do. Still, I can’t quite help myself, and the side of my lips twitches into a smirk. Sadie’s eyes narrow and I bend my head, biting my lip to stifle my amusement.

  “Nice name,” she drawls after a minute, her tone indicating that my name is anything but nice. A cutting response rises to my lips, but provoking this girl won’t accomplish much, other than to serve my own ego. And I need to keep a low profile.

  “Thanks,” I say instead and quicken my step. “Catch you later, Caden.”

  “It’s just Cade, remember?”

  I shoot a hand in the air and keep walking. Cade, Caden, it makes no difference to me.

  “Where’d that one get dragged in from, juvie rehab?”

  Sadie’s scornful words reach me as I walk into the classroom, but I don’t hear Caden’s response. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if he said that I was a foreign transfer. This time, I can’t hold back my laugh, and it comes until I feel tears running down my cheeks and the sides of my stomach ache from it. They couldn’t imagine just how foreign I actually am. I am still snorting even when class begins and Mrs Taylor’s eyes laser me with a quelling look.

  “Class, please sit in your designated project groups. We will be working on them during the second half of class today.”

  Groans mix in with the noisy screech of chairs as students move around, shuffling to other tables, and for the first time I look around the classroom, staring at faces with interest instead of my usual detached assessment of potential danger. I see them as people instead of targets or threats, and I am surprised by how young they all are. Not that I am much older, but truth is, I feel older.

  Harder.

  Half of these kids haven’t felt the sharp edge of hunger or had to fight for anything in their lives. They are plump, satisfied, and ignorant. Where I’m from, our training begins the minute we are born, and we face survival tests far worse than a quiz on Shakespeare before the age of five. Education is mandatory, but so are other things – physical education, weapons education, life education.

  I realize that I’m judging once more and give myself a shake. Be fair, I think. It’s not their fault that they are the way they are, and have evolved in a different world under a different set of rules and circumstances. They are people, the same flesh and blood as I am.

  Well, maybe not Sadie, I think with a grin, she’s pure venomous angst.

  The ones in my group seem likable enough: a girl, Charisma, who is quiet but friendly; Caden, of course; and another jumpy thin boy, Philip, with an overbite and fingernails bitten to the quick. His head is already buried in his physics textbook. Leafing mentally through my slang file, he is what most in this world would call a nerd or a geek, but where I’m from, Philip would be a coveted asset. Someone with his skills would be selected in a heartbeat. My father would have loved him.

  Caden opens his books on the table and leans back in his chair, grinning at me. “Hey, Crutches, let me know if you need any help.” He’s joking, of course, knowing what my response will be. I shoot him a look communicating exactly what I will do with my crutches if he offers to help me again. His grin widens and I can’t help smiling back at him, the acid thought of my father melting away.

  I feel eyes lasering into my back, but I refuse to give their owner the satisfaction of a response. Sadie is a nuisance, nothing more, and truth be told, I’d rather pass the next few weeks in anonymity instead of some full-on teenage feud with a hormonally-challenged seventeen year-old who thinks I’m after her boyfriend.

  At seventeen, where I come from, you’re a full grown contributor, responsible for a heck of a lot more than picking out a prom dress or fighting over a boy. If you have disagreements with another, you duel it out. It’s that simple. If you need intervention for bigger disputes or feuds, you get it in front of the Royal Tribunal. Here, in the capricious world of high school, it’s an entirely different story. I sigh. Needless to say, I’ve had enough of this version of high school to last me a lifetime.

  “So what’s the verdict?” a low voice says. Caden is staring at me with a raised eyebrow and a half-smile.

  “What?”

  “Your analysis of us? Of me? Come on, be honest, what do you really think?”

  It is one of my few unguarded moments, and for a second, I see a flash of Cale’s perceptiveness in him. My face composes itself into its normal emotionless mask, but Caden’s knowing expression is so hauntingly familiar that it throws me. I feel an uncomfortable warmth seeping up into my neck and across my ear lobes. I don’t like this feeling. It makes my response far sharper than it should be.

  “You like being the center of attention, you’re smart but lazy, you want to get out of this town as soon as you graduate, and your girlfriend is a bitch. How’s that?” The words snap like rubber bands to my lips, but as soon as I say them, I find myself wanting to take them back. My anger is directed at myself, not anyone else.

  Charisma is staring at me slack-jawed, and geek-boy has even raised his head from his book, looking nervously from Caden to me and back again as if expecting a full-on brawl right there in the middle of physics. But Caden’s expression is measured, and he holds my challenging stare easily.

  A slow smile. “Three out of four, so not bad.”

  Again, spoken so much like Cale. I know I shouldn’t be surprised at the similarities, but nonetheless, I am. My teeth are ground together so tightly that my jaw aches. I don’t want to feel anything for Caden other than as a means to an end. He isn’t Cale.

  “Your girlfriend isn’t a bitch?”

  A laugh. “No, she is, but Sadie’s harmless. Remind me to tell you about it later,” Caden says just as Mrs Taylor raps on her desk. There won’t be a “later” if I have anything to say about it. If our brief exchange is any indication of what the next few days will bring, I’ll watch over him from a distance. I can’t risk any rapport with him – my loyalty is to Cale, and this boy is nothing more than a target. I look away, pretending to listen to Mrs Taylor.

  Newton’s laws of motion are a familiar subject, and while it’s something that I learned long ago, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have to pay attention. I learned that lesson the hard way in Boston when I carelessly answered a question with an analysis worthy of a doctorate-level dissertation. They treated me like some kind of second-coming prodigy. Needless to say, I didn’t stay at that school too much longer. Drawing attention tended to draw other bad things… way worse things.

  Like Vectors.

  I suppress an automatic
shudder, and not even the workbook equations of motion can distract me. The Vectors are one of the most-feared and worst creations of my world. They are engineered creatures, made from human corpses… reanimated dead beings with one purpose. To hunt and to kill.

  Our technology is advanced, but we learned a hard lesson with artificial intelligence centuries before. While this world was embroiled in the French Revolution, my world was facing its worst crisis in history – the Tech War – a war that had devastated us to the point that topographical boundaries had been unrecognizable and continents reshaped. Whole oceans were destroyed. What had once been lush forests were now dusty plains of gray acid ash. Parts of my world are still black and oozing with toxic matter. But people survived, eventually reclaiming and rebuilding what they could.

  The Vectors were a new kind of soldier, created after the laws were put in place against any kind of self-evolving robotic intelligence. Nanogen technology became the perfect combination of programmable robotics and human genetics, and the Vectors were bred to supplement human loss, to protect and defend those who survived. They had been the brilliantly sick creation of a madman.

  My father.

  “You OK?” Caden whispers, distracting me. “You look ill.”

  “I’m fine.”

  But I’m not fine. Everything inside of me feels like it’s on fire. My ribs are splintering with alternating bands of hot and cold surging like rotating tides. There’s a strange buzzing sensation in my head, and I can feel myself becoming light-headed and fuzzy with each passing second. What the hell is happening to me?

  “Riven, can you hear me? Riven!”

  Caden’s face swims blurrily into my vision. And then it’s Cale’s. I reach toward him but he fades away, and I am left alone, terrified. There is nothing but darkness and the faces of the Vectors, inexorably closing in.

  When I awaken this time, I am lying in a sterile room with metal leads stuck to my chest and plastic tubing stretching across my face. White light stabs into my eyes and I lurch upright. Panicked, I pull against the tubes and wiring only to cause a frantic beeping. Someone in a white coat rushes into the room, and I shrink back, hands protectively curled in front of my chest.

  “It’s OK, Riven, it’s OK. Calm down, you’re safe. It’s me, June.” Caden’s aunt is standing next to me, a soft smile on her face. “We really need to stop meeting like this,” she says as she checks the monitor and replaces the oxygen tubing under my nose.

  “Where am I? What happened?”

  “You went into circulatory shock and you fainted.” I eye the wires and she smiles again. “They’re just monitoring your heart rate. I took a look at your foot, and it’s healing quickly, faster than I expected.”

  “I can’t be here,” I choke out as June uncaps a syringe and deftly injects it into my arm. “What’s that? I don’t want any drugs!”

  “It’s just a sedative. Riven–”

  “No! You don’t understand. I need to leave. They’ll find me. They’ll find all of you.” My heart rate escalates with every breath, and concern crosses June’s face.

  “Calm down. You’re not making any sense. Who’ll find you? Your parents? Well, that’s good. I meant to ask you. For some reason, none of the numbers listed on your file at school seem to work. We need to get in contact with them and let them know you’ve been admitted to the clinic.”

  “My dad is out of town.” It’s a programmed response.

  “Cell phone?”

  “No. He calls me, remember?” My mind is racing trying to assess the situation. Somehow, my body is failing. I know that something isn’t right – I can feel it inside of me, the holes, and I clutch my chest. I need to get out of there. “June, hospitals… I can’t be here.” I’m gasping for air with each word. “Please. My mother… she died in a room just like this one… please!”

  I am not even pretending at this point. White spots are exploding like clouds of mist behind my eyelids. All I can see are the memories I do have of my mother tied down in a white room with tubes embedded in every part of her, screaming her head off.

  Waiting to die.

  It’s all I can do not to rip out the ones attached to me, and then tears are running down my face, and I can’t stop them, there’s so much pain like everything is dying inside of me. Where did it all come from? What’s happening? What is wrong with me?

  And then I am screaming, staring at the red dot on my arm. “What did you do? What did you do to me? What kind of poison did you put in me? Get it out, get it out!”

  “Help me restrain her arms,” I hear June say. “Gentle with her.”

  I fight like I have never fought before, as if I am fighting to keep my very last breath, scratching and scraping, kicking and punching. The full weight of a body collapses against me, and my arms thud, pinned to my sides against the bed. I am drowning in a sea of my tears, the salt of them covering my cheeks and my lips. My body stills and the world grows unnaturally quiet. Now I’m the one waiting to die.

  In my mind, I see the Vectors. They’re coming.

  “Please,” I whisper. “Please, June. Don’t let me die here.”

  “Don’t worry, darling. You’re safe now.”

  Something cool swirls around my veins, and then the world goes dark once more.

  Voices and colors fade in and out.

  “Is she going to be OK?” That one I recognize. It’s Caden’s. I want to tell him that I’m fine, but my lips won’t cooperate. My bones feel like syrup, like there’s nothing inside of the skin that’s holding my body together. Darkness takes me again.

  “… no consent for testing… can’t draw blood…”

  “… levels stabilized…”

  “… take her home… haven’t been able to locate her father…” That last one is June’s lilting voice.

  I sleep again.

  Images move along in an endless collage, bits of white and gray intermingling. Later on, there are bits of sky and swatches of green. The sound disappears. There’s only the quiet of gentle voices murmuring around me, like the sound of rain.

  My mind is quieter now, no longer so manic, allowing me to think and feel and process. A soft voice tells me that everything is going to be OK. Is it June or is it Caden? But I listen, and once more feel that sense of safety, of trust. And again, I know that I am breaking one of my own hard and fast rules.

  Never trust anyone. Especially the Otherworlders.

  But do I really have a choice? Other than Caden and June, I’ve thought of them as nothing but a means to an end. Did I think of them as people? They aren’t real to me. They’re a parallel species that has nothing to do with me. But if trusting them means that maybe I can stay alive, then I’ll have a sliver of a chance to get back home. A full-body internal scan will detect anything that is wrong with me in seconds.

  If I can make it back.

  Strong arms are carrying me. My eyelids hurt but they open and close like heavy drapes. Within moments, I am back in a familiar room… the airy one with the fan and gauzy white curtains.

  “Caden, don’t stay too long. She needs to get some rest,” June says as she props the pillows behind my head. I manage a weak smile. I can’t even begin to express my gratitude, but something in her eyes tells me that she knows more than she’s saying. Or is it just my constant sense of paranoia?

  Caden brushes the hair out of my face. His green eyes are soft and comforting.

  “You’re awake. How are you feeling?” he asks.

  “I’ve been better.” My voice feels like I haven’t used it in years and rubs against the inside of my throat like gritty sandpaper. Caden pours me a glass of water from the pitcher, and I sip gratefully.

  “Has this ever happened to you before?”

  “No.” Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I’ve never been sick or fainted a day in my life. I wonder if it has to do with the pills or the injector or being here this long. I stare at Caden and then say the words that are playing on the tip of my tongue. “T
hanks, by the way. That’s twice now you’ve saved me. I don’t know if I like it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like owing people.”

  “You don’t owe me anything, Riven. You needed help and I was in the right place at the right time, that’s all.”

  We are quiet for a moment. The edge of the bed dips under Caden’s weight as he sits next to me and rests his head on his hands propped on his knees. A silky lock of hair curls into his face.

  “I like your hair long,” I murmur. “I mean, I like it short, too.”

  “You’ve never seen me with short hair.” Caden’s voice is quiet, but I can see his eyes narrow. I want to kick myself. In the next moment, I decide that I am done with conversation. All it will lead to is confusion, and questions and doubt when the time comes. Caden is staring at me, waiting for an explanation. I shrug and take a big gulp of water.

  “You look like someone I know. He has short hair.”

  “You mean Cale?”

  I choke and almost spit water all over the room as a wave of shocked coughing overcomes me. “What did you say?” I whisper after several painful seconds.

  “Cale. You said his name while you were unconscious in the hospital. I think you thought I was him.” He pauses, watching me carefully. “Now it all makes sense.”

  I am overwhelmed by my own stupid carelessness. What else did I say? Did I talk about what I was doing here? About who Caden really was? I can’t process the questions fast enough as ten more pop up in their place. What have I done? I should have just risked it and everted the minute I’d found Caden, and dealt with the consequences later. He was the important one, and he was healthy enough. That was all that mattered.

  You’re thinking crazy, Riven, I tell myself. If you everted from here, without you Caden wouldn’t have half a chance in the Outers before he got to the city. The Outers would have swallowed him whole.

  Caden’s voice interrupts the ominous chaos of my thoughts. “So, who is he?”

  “A friend,” I say.