by Lee Murray
‘I’ll be okay,’ said Voort.
‘Shall I make it easier and just kick you off the side?’
‘I can kill myself all on my own if I have to,’ said Voort. Vella had stopped and was staring at him. Beyond Vella, Tenzig was coming back, but was still at least a hundred metres beyond the transmitter range.
Vella glanced over her shoulder at Tenzig. ‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘If the guru sees me knocking you off, he’ll be wary when I go for him.’
‘What are you on about now?’ said Voort.
‘You’ve killed people, haven’t you?’ she asked. ‘I mean, real people. People who actually die when they’re killed.’
Voort didn’t answer, partially because of the non-stop spike of pain in his skull, partially because he didn’t want to dwell on his army days.
‘What’s it like?’
‘Screw this,’ said Voort under his breath.
‘What’s it like? Knowing that when you pulled the trigger and blew some terrorist’s head off that that person would never be coming back. That everything they were was gone, all because of you.’
‘It sucks,’ he wheezed. ‘It’s shit, it’s awful. Why do you think I’m here?’
‘It sounds amazing,’ she said.
‘Then join the fucking army,’ said Voort.
‘Nah,’ said Vella, checking over her shoulder to see how near Tenzig was. ‘I might die that way. I’ve never died. I’m not going to either.’
‘Can we stop the philosophy and just get to the fucking end?’ said Voort.
Vella shrugged, turned and started up the ridge towards Tenzig. ‘Bad luck, guru. It will be nearly ten standard years of his life. And I’m taking it away.’
‘Don’t,’ said Voort. ‘Don’t do it.’ Vella trudged away.
‘Don’t fret, I’ll be back for you. I’ll be the only one coming back from this journey.’
Voort pushed himself to one knee and his head pain flared up again. White filled his vision for a few moments, before the world swung back into view. Vella was getting closer and closer to Tenzig.
The other leg. He had to get up to his other leg. Another surge of pain. He cried out, but made it to a standing position. Once his vision cleared, he saw Vella had reached Tenzig.
She pointed back at Voort. Tenzig took a couple of steps. Vella let him pass. She reached out, grabbed Tenzig’s shoulders and tried to shove him off the ridge.
Tenzig didn’t go so easily. Somehow, he regained his balance and flipped Vella. Things escalated. Vella threw a punch. Tenzig kicked back. The two traded blows, right on the precipice of the terrifying drop, buffeted by howling winds. Vella had been right: Tenzig was definitely enhanced. But so was she.
The leader caught Vella with a backhand swipe. As she toppled, Tenzig caught her right arm and delivered a hammering kick to her side. She fell back down the ridge, leaving her arm in Tenzig’s hand. Sparks sputtered from her shoulder, the white goo of cybernetic fluid spurting out. Voort found he was not shocked.
Tenzig jumped after her, going into a slide which should have knocked her over the edge. Even though her arm had been torn off, Vella still moved with lightning speed. She rolled back from the edge and hit Tenzig with enough force to send him flying into space. He seemed to hang there for a moment, then time caught up and he plummeted from view.
Vella sprung to her feet and started walking back to Voort. The argut bounced back up to the ridge and gave Voort a wink. It bounced ahead of Vella and landed at Voort’s feet.
‘I told you, didn’t I?’ said Vella, very upbeat, and with her shoulder spitting blue sparks. ‘He must have been enhanced.’
The argut winked at Voort and nodded towards the drop. Cute hallucination. Did arguts actually look like that?
‘Don’t feel so bad,’ Vella said. ‘I came here to kill everyone on the journey. It really is nothing personal.’ She gestured to the crater. ‘How good can this star-rise be? Is this really enlightenment?’
The argut chirped at Voort and then flipped over the side and away into the clouds. The pain in Voort’s head cleared. He gave Vella the finger and stepped out into space.
‘Bastard,’ was the last transmission he heard from Vella.
*
The cloud swallowed Voort. He felt his descent slow. All was white around him and his thoughts remarkably clear. The whole experience, this plummeting to his death while his brain swelled and exploded, was actually quite calming and pleasant. If he hadn’t felt so relaxed, for the first time in forty days, he’d have felt annoyed because soon he would be waking up in a regeneration pod, light years away, and with no memory of what had happened.
The gentle descent into white came to an abrupt halt as Voort slammed into something hard and cold. His right knee exploded in pain, sending shock waves through his body. The calming white became thick, suffocating clay. The hard, hard landing didn’t stop him. Voort rolled over and over before he was suddenly falling again.
This time, the white scattered as he fell. Voort toppled through the air for another few metres before hitting another solid surface, banging his already mashed knee once again.
He passed out briefly, coming to while he was sliding off an icy slope and into a thick wad of snow.
Above him stood a series of huge blocks of ice, all jumbled on top of each other. The pile reached into the swirl of clouds just below the crater’s ridge. Off to his right, more blocks of ice formed a colossal causeway stretching down to the black circle that spanned most of the crater’s floor. Far off, the other side of the crater formed a black line against a thick ribbon of stars. His gaze settled on a V-shaped cleft in the crater wall.
The cleft where the twin stars would rise.
Not dead yet then. His head was no longer pounding, but his right leg was a white-hot rod jammed into his hip. Odd though, the pain of his shattered leg was horrendous, but it seemed like it belonged to someone else. The argut jumped down from a higher block of ice. Hallucinations were still going strong.
‘Still with us, brother?’ said Tenzig.
Voort wondered if the voice could be a hallucination, but the leader jumped down beside him. Without Vella’s arm anymore, Voort noticed.
‘How’s the head?’ asked Tenzig.
‘Fine, actually. The best I’ve felt for ages. Apart from my leg being smashed to bits.’
Tenzig nodded. ‘If your head is clear, you’re close to death. The swelling will have advanced to destroy the nerve endings, so you don’t feel the pain anymore. Are you seeing things?’
The argut gave a wink and a nod to Voort. ‘Oh yes.’
Tenzig patted Voort on the shoulder. ‘Man, oh man. You haven’t got long left, but I’ll try to get you down to the crater floor. Maybe you’ll live long enough for the shuttle to pick you up. They should be able to capture your mindstate before you finally die.’
‘I thought you were gone, Tenzig.’
Tenzig looked up. ‘Vella didn’t wait for me to tell her that we could climb down from where you had stopped. That’s why I went up the ridge, to check out the best way down.’ He pointed at the massive jumble of ice blocks. ‘When Tunga comes round to the light side of Tangaka, the bergs break off and fall in to the crater, so it’s never the same way down into the crater twice.’
Tenzig pulled Voort up, putting an arm under Voort’s arms to help him stumble along. Voort watched the argut bounce along, off their ice block and then out across the others. Tenzig, holding on to Voort, jumped the three or four metres down to the next block and then across to the next, and the next after that.
‘You’re enhanced,’ said Voort.
‘Obvious now, I suppose,’ said Tenzig as he carried Voort down another series of blocks. The drop between each block was diminishing as they progressed. ‘Just bio-stimulants. Nothing too powerful, but good enough to give a few boosts when I need it,
recover fast and not get the altitude sickness that you’re dying from.’
‘Great,’ said Voort. ‘My guru is a liar and my co-searcher for enlightenment is a psychopath.’
‘Grevill was bio-enhanced, Scoby had refitted lungs and Sorin had nano-regenerators,’ said Tenzig. ‘You though, you impress me. In the forty-one times I’ve made this trip, only three people, like you, have done this stripped back to merely human. None of them made it.’
They stumbled on, finally jumping from the last shattered remnants of the ice blocks and onto the smooth ice surface of the crater lake. Their crampons bit into the ice, making the going slow, but not slippery. Up ahead was the stubby, bare surface of a hill, poking through the ice.
‘Vella’s catching up,’ said Tenzig. ‘We’d better get to the island.’ He shuffled them along faster.
Voort looked back and saw the dark shape of Vella, bounding down the tumbled causeway of ice, moving fast.
‘You cheating bastard,’ came a cry from Vella.
Tenzig swore and swung Voort down to the ice, then shoved him hard, sliding him away. ‘Crawl as far away as you can,’ said Tenzig. Voort pushed himself backwards so he could see the coming fight. He might as well enjoy himself. Vella was clearly mad, but Tenzig, oh-so-pure Tenzig, wasn’t his favourite person either.
Tenzig pulled the gun parts from a side-pouch and snapped the steel tubes into place to form the long barrel. He clamped the firing mechanism to the end of the barrel and snapped open a chamber. Holding it under one arm, he found a pair of cartridges in another pouch, slammed them into the chamber, then snapped the thing closed. As he brought the barrel down and wrapped a hand around the firing mechanism, Vella landed right by him and kicked him in the guts.
The gun went flying, spiralling over and over to land a few metres from Voort. Tenzig didn’t skid quite so far. He lay, rolled up in a shaking ball nearer to Vella. She stepped up, reached out with her remaining arm, grabbed Tenzig by the neck and hauled him up.
‘How am I going to explain this?’ she screeched, nodding to her shoulder, still sending out showers of sparks.
Voort stopped as he reached the gun. The ice was shaking.
‘Don’t,’ moaned Tenzig, ‘don’t use your bio-electrics.’
Vella shook him. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Hardly a fair fight, though.’
The ice cracked apart.
Once again, the awesome form of a drasher burst through, accompanied by a cloud of fast freezing steam. Vella and Tenzig fell sideways. The beast swung its head round and bit into Vella.
Her legs flew off in a burst of blue sparks. The drasher shook her body around and flung it away, a plume of blood flying through the air after it.
Not all tech then, thought Voort, ever more detached from his situation.
He managed to get into a sitting position and aim the gun while the drasher dived for Tenzig.
The shot exploded out of the gun with enough recoil to knock Voort flat on the ice again. His skull cracked against the hard surface and everything went dizzy for a moment. When his head cleared and all was silent, he sat up.
To his far left, what was left of Vella lay steaming on the ice, not moving. Straight ahead, a great cloud of steam rose and fell around the drasher’s body. Tenzig crawled, painfully, towards Voort. One of Tenzig’s legs had been nearly torn off.
About a metre from Voort, Tenzig slumped to the ice. Lifting a hand, he pointed over Voort’s shoulder. ‘Star-rise,’ he gasped. His rasping breath was the only noise in Voort’s ears.
Voort looked round. The stars in the cleft faded as the sky lightened from deep black to velvety indigo. The first of the twin stars broke up from the bottom of the V. A few minutes later, the second followed it.
‘Is that it?’ said Voort.
‘Sorry,’ hissed Tenzig. His body stopped shaking. The rasping breath fell silent.
The pain in Voort’s leg had vanished. All sensation was fading. A movement in the sky caught his attention – a star getting brighter. Was it the shuttle?
A chirping beside him made him turn his head. The argut. Voort reached out and tickled the cute little critter behind the ears. It licked his face as the night sky faded to white.
BlindSight
AJ Ponder
Rosie hugs the book close, flinching as her mother rushes to her bed.
‘What did you do? What did you do!?’ she screams, ignoring Rosie’s little brother whimpering in the corner.
Wynter, his body bloody and singed, trembles as their mother tears the pages of Rosie’s book, and shreds the cover. She throws the pieces out the window. The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, the stories swirl about in the cold Wellington wind, down the cliff to the beach far below. All Rosie’s books are destroyed now. All, except the pretty red and gold-edged Bible squatting in her drawer.
‘But, Mother,’ Rosie says. ‘It was a just a book. I didn’t—’ The blow is inevitable, but Rosie can’t stop arguing. Books are something to cherish, something to throw her life away on. They tell her things she wants to know. And things she isn’t sure she should know.
‘Please. The teacher says—’
‘Listen to me. For God’s sake, just listen. It’s your sight that distracts you from the real world,’ Rosie’s mother screams, tears streaming down her face. ‘Books are not for you. Remember your brother?’
Rosie sighs. Her mother locks the door and Wynter looks up with his face that never ages beyond a cherubic three. His right shoulder is half torn apart by Wild Things – half burnt. The monsters that attacked him had erupted into flames when she’d stabbed them with a knife.
For days, she makes believe she’s a princess locked in a tower by a witch. But the game soon tires – even with her mother making appearances as the witch, muttering and sprinkling angelica around the room – and Wynter’s ghost playing the role of reluctant knight. Rosie looks across to the flowery old couch where he’s huddled. Once upon a time her mother would sit on it and read them stories from the Bible. Now, the couch reeks of burnt fabric, pain and bewilderment.
Rosie wonders if she’ll be locked in her room forever, when two truancy officers come knocking.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Mitchell,’ the lady shouts, loud enough to be heard through walls. ‘It’s against the law to keep a thirteen-year-old girl at home. Either she goes to school, or we’ll take this further.’
‘Get out of my house,’ Rosie’s mother snaps, slamming the front door.
Rosie’s mother turns from her door. Seconds later she is at the lock. ‘You can go to school today. But be very careful, young lady. No reading. And come straight back home.’
Rosie hides her grin. ‘Yes, Mother. Thank you, Mother.’ She skips out of the house to the relative freedom of school, where it’s lunchtime. She heads straight for the library, ignoring the other children’s whispers. She thinks of them as books with pretty covers, where the insides don’t reflect the outside at all.
‘I heard she burnt her brother to death, and that’s why she doesn’t come to school.’
‘I heard it was her mother.’
‘Rosie’s crazy. She came up to me last year and started talking to my mother.’
‘Your dead mother?’
‘Yeah, crazy eh?’
Rosie grimaces and walks on, ignoring the insubstantial woman trailing behind her obnoxious son. Besides, there’s a book she desperately needs. Rapunzel. It might give her clues about how to free herself from her mother.
The bell rings, and the students leave. She trails after them, empty-handed. The teacher doesn’t say anything as Rosie straggles in late, just points to a desk butted up against hers. And there, nestled in the muddle of papers and binders on the teacher’s desk, is the book she’s been looking for. On the cover, a beautiful girl looks out from a tower surrounded in gold and green ivy. Rosie has to read it, own it,
possess it. Listen to the pages as they whisper words only she hears. She reaches out, and slips it into her bag. Maybe if Wynter comes out of the shadows he, too, will enjoy this story.
‘Wynter, are you there?’ Rosie whispers. But he’s too scared to talk here in this strange place, with the teacher glaring at them, her marker pen poised in mid-air. That, or like Mother, he’s still too scared of books. Which is silly. This time she will be more careful.
After school, she runs home. White-faced, her mother opens the door and shoos her inside. There’s no food except a mostly-eaten packet of chippies. Rosie grabs it and retreats to her room.
Wynter is waiting for her. ‘You’re not going to do it, are you?’
‘I’ll be very, very careful.’ Listening for sound on the landing, and keeping her eyes on the shadows, Rosie retrieves the forbidden text from her bag, and lets the pages fall open.
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair.
The dark shadows other people call words call to her like a golden prince, enticing themselves into her head. They’re more dangerous than demons, colder than the ocean roaring at the bottom of the cliff. Wynter is crying, begging her to stop. She slams the book shut, tucks it under her pillow … and fails to fall asleep.
Rosie’s hands pick at the binding, while her eyes pick at the shadows lying in wait along the walls. The book’s pages rant and rave; sometimes falling into silence, as if begging her to begin reading again.
Sliding the book into the moonlight, she means to have just one more peek. The shadows move, pulling danger from the stories, screaming encouragement from the darkness.
More screaming comes from the door. Rosie’s mother.
Too late, Rosie shoves it back under her pillow.
Through her tears, Rosie watches the pieces fluttering like broken butterflies down to the windswept beach. One dances back into the room, the straggly hair of Rapunzel’s captor on one side. On the other, is moonlit print that blazes into Rosie’s brain … until one day Rapunzel said to her, ‘Frau Gothel, tell me why it is that you are more difficult to pull up than is the young prince…?’
