Sooner Dead

by Mel Odom

  Before Hella could respond, Scatter lifted her arms and placed one of her hands on Ocastya's forehead and the other on the fractoid's stomach. Hella felt the buzz of the connection immediately. She felt as if she were rubbing her hands over electrified knife blades.

  "You will have to go deep into her mind." Scatter spoke calmly, almost hypnotically. "Although you think maintaining the contact with her as you are now is the hardest part, the most difficult task lies ahead of you."

  "What?"

  "Keeping the skeins of yourself from getting tangled up in the skeins of Ocastya. You will have to pay attention to your individuality as well as hers. If you are not careful, you will lose your memories to her and find her memories lodged inside your head."

  "I don't want that to happen."

  "No. Both of you have to remain whole."

  For the first time, Hella realized that Scatter was speaking through her as well. She heard her voice in her ears even though she knew it was him talking. He had already slid into her thoughts and into her mind.

  "Are you ready?"

  "No."

  "It is time."

  "I'm afraid."

  "I know. I will be with you. Just concentrate on remaining yourself."

  Not in control of her own body, Hella leaned forward and increased the pressure and contact with Ocastya. The cold, metallic body beneath her palms suddenly heated up. Scatter tried to draw her inside his mate. Hella felt the pull and instinctively resisted. She didn't know if she held back or if Ocastya—even in her unconscious state—was keeping them at bay.

  Then, without warning, the world around Hella opened up, and she fell through the cave floor. She screamed but she didn't know if the sound ever made it past her lips.

  When Hella opened her eyes again, she wasn't in the cave, the Redblight, or even her world anymore. Around her, a room filled with squared, metallic furniture rendered in pastel purples and greens stood out against a gold flake floor.

  Hella reached down to touch a metallic chair and caught sight of her reflection. She wasn't herself and she wasn't Ocastya. At least, she wasn't the Ocastya lying in the cave. The woman reflected in the bright surface had dark hair and pale skin. Hella wished she could see herself.

  Almost instantly the chair covered over in a mirror surface. The woman had black hair, alabaster skin, and pale lavender eyes. She was beautiful.

  "No. That is not what I wanted."

  Hella knew she spoke the words, but she also knew they were the woman's words, not hers. She was looking through the woman's eyes.

  Ocastya touched the chair again, and it turned a light green and burned with light from within. "There. Much better." She turned, walked over to one of the walls, and touched it.

  Immediately a vid feed pumped through the surface. The images were of a city like nothing Hella had ever seen. Tall spires reached for the sky, and small aircraft flitted between the metallic canyons. All of the buildings looked as if they'd been made from seamless metallic glass. As she watched, a few of them changed colors, and the transition briefly turned them into prisms. Beyond them, in a golden sky, two suns—one nearer and one farther—shone down.

  "Ocastya."

  Hella recognized the name even though the nuance of it was different. She turned to face a doorway that suddenly came into being.

  Scatter stepped into the room. He didn't look human. He looked exactly as Hella had first seen him. He smiled but Ocastya pulled away. She blinked and Scatter was suddenly human in appearance. He was tall and thin and blond, handsome.

  "Hella? Are you there?" The Scatter in front of her didn't speak, but she heard him inside her head.

  "Yes." Panic welled up in Hella, and she tried to control it. She closed her eyes, and it was strange to realize she didn't know if Ocastya closed hers as well. When she opened her eyes again, Scatter was metallic.

  "You will have to control Ocastya at this point. We are in her subconscious mind, in her memories. She will fight against you and your perception of me. She sees me now as you see me, and that... is not easy. This is from a time before we had to give up our flesh-and-blood bodies. She is every bit as frightened as you are. Do you feel her fear?"

  "Yes."

  Regret flashed across Scatter's face. "I would not wish this for either of you."

  "I understand." Hella made Ocastya stand when all she wanted was to run. "It's hard to keep her here."

  "I know but you have to do it." Scatter placed a hand against Ocastya/Hella's head. The metal palm felt cold and hard. "Together we have to remember all that we can in order to save her."

  And to save you. Scatter had stated that his continued existence depended on Ocastya's.

  The world opened up again, and Hella fell through, going deeper than before.

  When she opened her eyes again, Hella thought the perspective was all wrong. The world looked huge. Then she caught a glimpse of herself/Ocastya reflected in a nearby window and realized she was just a little girl of six or seven.

  Scatter's face formed in the window reflection. "I did not meet Ocastya as a child, but I got to know her as a child through her memories when we shared them."

  Hella stared at the stranger in the mirror, at the metallic dress she wore, and knew that Ocastya was younger in the memory than Hella could remember from her own life. How could Ocastya remember those things so well when Hella didn't have the first clue?

  "You must be patient, Hella. Your memories of your parents will come back to you when they are ready. They are there waiting for you. When the time is right, you will have them again."

  Hella swiftly quelled the tremor of hope that quivered inside her, focusing instead on the task she had ahead of her. When danger was around, you paid attention to that first. Stampede had drilled that into her.

  "Ocastya?" A male voice called from behind Hella. She turned toward it and saw a tall man with a generous face and a smile looking at her.

  "This is her father."

  Hella could have guessed that. She wanted to fight as the big man reached down and took her up into his arms, but Ocastya embraced him instead. The man's scent and his cologne filled Hella's nose and made one of them sneeze.

  "He was a good man, a good father." Scatter sounded sad. "Ocastya lost him when we made the transitions to our new bodies. She lost her mother too. She also lost two brothers and a sister."

  A wave of sadness—whether from Ocastya or just from a sympathetic reaction, Hella didn't know—pierced her. She started to relax and share the feeling of protection Ocastya was experiencing.

  Then the bottom dropped out of the world again.

  Afterward Hella couldn't even guess at how many memories she had gone through. The emotions had been the roughest part up until the time when Scatter separated her from Ocastya. That separation was the hardest thing of all. By the time she'd finished spending years in Ocastya's memories, Hella felt as if she were being ripped out of her own body.

  She blinked her eyes and discovered she was still in the same position, leaning over Ocastya's body. Sweat dripped from her, and her arms and back were knots of agony. Her legs were numb, and for one insane moment, she thought the paralysis that held Ocastya had somehow spread to her.

  "Red?" Stampede sat across the cave. The cook fire flickered between them, the foot-high flames licking the breeze and caressing the pot that hung to one side.

  "Yeah." Hella felt tears on her face and grew embarrassed. She wiped them away with trembling hands.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Sure." Hella was parched and her voice came out as a croak.

  Stampede stood and crossed the cave to give her a canteen.

  Uncapping the canteen, Hella drank thirstily. After a moment, Stampede gently pulled the canteen away. "Go slow. You'll make yourself sick. You probably don't want that."

  "No." Hella wiped her lips with the back of her hand. She looked around then down at her unmarred palm. "Where's Scatter?"

  "I don't know." Stampede shrugged his broad
shoulders. "I haven't seen him since he wrapped around your face and put you in that trance."

  Hella felt for the fractoid but couldn't sense him. She glanced down at her palm and saw his face there. Despite her efforts, she couldn't elicit a response.

  For the first time, she noticed that it was dark outside the cave mouth. Stampede had evidently dragged brush over the opening to hide the mouth to mask the presence of the fire. He'd left bare centimeters at the top for the smoke to stream out. "How long was I gone?"

  "Hours." Stampede's ears twitched. "I was getting worried, but the last thing Scatter told me was to leave you alone and let you come out of it on your own. Otherwise you might not make it back." He smiled. "I'm glad you did."

  "Yeah. Me too."

  "Want something to eat?"

  Hella nodded. "I'm starving."

  "Figured you would be." Returning to the fire, Stampede spooned up a plate of stew and handed it over. "Go slow."

  As she ate, Hella told Stampede everything she could remember about the worlds she'd just visited. She had to share it. She couldn't keep something like that to herself. If she did, she felt certain she'd explode.

  Only a few meters away, Ocastya lay inert. But the burned and twisted parts of her body glowed and shifted.

  By morning, Scatter still hadn't returned. Hella's worry grew. She'd slept a little in the wee hours of the morning, and her dreams had been a constant, uncoiling and blending of her memories with Ocastya's. She'd been gone hours from the cave, but she'd traipsed through years, decades, of Ocastya's life. She believed she remembered less of those times than she had the day before, but there was still enough to be confusing. She had to concentrate to remember her own history, which had already been cored with holes.

  Without a word, Stampede handed her a venison steak wrapped inside fried bread he'd made in a pan over the open fire.

  "Thank you."

  "Eat all you want. I took a deer this morning." Stampede waved to the silver, insulated bag in the back of the cave. "We can eat well for two or three days. Even feeding that black hole." He jerked a thumb at Daisy, who slept on her side. Miraculously a small pile of deer carcass remained beside her. The blood on the rock was dark brown with age.

  The meat was warm and tender, seasoned with some of the herbs they'd packed. Hella ate hungrily and stared out at the cotton white morning fog lying over the lowlands. "Did you see Pardot or Trazall while you were taking the deer?"

  "No."

  "There can't be many places around here that would have the laboratory Scatter said he was taken to."

  "I know. I've been thinking." Scatter took out a map. "We haven't strayed too far off the trade roads here in the mountains."

  "There are no raw materials or salvage areas out here worth having, and it's dangerous because of the land as well as the creatures that live here. And that's not mentioning the two-legged predators."

  Stampede nodded and tapped a section of the map to the northeast. "Before the collider exploded and the world changed, there was a large city up here."

  "Tulsa. I know." Tulsa had been one of the largest cities in Oklahoma before the collider destroyed everything. Hella had never heard what happened to the city, but when the physical world had ruptured and changed, something had destroyed the city.

  Some of the local legends talked about a massive star cruiser that got pulled out of orbit in one of the alternate worlds and crashed into Tulsa. The resulting series of detonations had ripped through the city and rendered it into a toxic wasteland. Seriously twisted and mutated things were pretty much all that remained of the populace.

  "The city has a lot of research and development places there." Stampede tapped the map. "If Scatter is correct, that Colleen Trammell is looking for facilities like that, she might head here."

  "Doesn't mean she's going to be there."

  "True. But if she has joined up with Trazall for the moment, I don't see that as a long-lasting arrangement."

  Hella snorted derisively. "When Trazall is sure he's milked Colleen for everything that he can, he'll either sell her or kill her. And the profit he can get isn't going to be worth much aggravation or effort on his part."

  "Yeah. I know. But if he's going to play along with her to get all the information she has, he'll have to deal with her a while longer. That gives us time."

  Hella's palm with Scatter's face on it itched. She scratched the flesh but couldn't satisfy the irritation.

  "You can't reach Scatter?"

  "No. I've tried." Hella stood and approached Ocastya.

  New metallic flesh had replaced the burned areas, and the twisted lines had straightened out.

  "She looks new, like she should just open her eyes and wake up."

  Hella knelt and hesitantly reached out toward the fractoid.

  "You sure you should do that?"

  "No. But you can't feel a pulse in her."

  "I already tried. If she's alive, in any form or fashion, I can't tell it."

  "And if she's dead, we need to know. If she's dead, Scatter is too. Doesn't matter if he's already dead; he will be. Then we don't have any involvement in what Pardot and Trammell do to each other."

  "Trazall's still got some pain coming for jacking our expedition."

  "He didn't exactly jack it if Trammell approached him."

  "He could have turned away." Stampede's ears twitched and he snorted. "Any self-respecting scout would have."

  Working through the vibrating fear that filled her, Hella placed her hand on Ocastya's forehead. All she felt was the cool metal.

  Then Ocastya's eyes opened. "We need to go. My mate is dying."

  CHAPTER 30

  Hella drew back her hand and watched in astonishment as Ocastya "flowed" to her feet, shifting from a prone position to a standing one. The fractoid peered around the cave anxiously.

  Stampede took a wary step back. "Can you speak to Scatter?"

  "Scatter?"

  Gingerly, moving slowly, aware that Ocastya flowed to face her more directly, Hella got to her feet. "Scatter is what we call your mate. We can't say his name."

  "I see. And how am I to call myself?"

  "Ocastya."

  "All right."

  Stampede shifted impatiently. Hella knew the past day or so had been hard on him. Stampede wasn't used to taking an inactive role. His voice when he spoke sounded almost surly, though she knew he took care not to have it sound like that. "Can you speak to your mate?"

  "No." Ocastya frowned and shook her head. "He's very... far from me right now."

  "How far?"

  In the back of the cave, Daisy snorted and woke, obviously alerted by the new voice.

  "Not so much distance. Perhaps twenty kilometers, if I understand the measurement conversion correctly." Ocastya held a hand up in front of her, flowed it from open to a fist to a mallet then back to hand. "But he feels far. I can't sense his thoughts, only that he is there."

  "That's good, right?"

  "It means he still yet lives. But only just." Ocastya shifted her gaze to Hella. "My mate shifted most of his energy to me through you. I did not know such a thing was possible. Normally, if we were together, that energy would reciprocate. One of us would never drain the other. Things are not what they were in our world."

  "No." Hella saw the metallic woman standing before her, but she remembered the child Ocastya had been. That same innocence resonated in her.

  Ocastya surveyed her body. "I have never been injured like that before." She paused. "In fact, I have never been injured before. Not in this body."

  "I'm sorry."

  Ocastya glanced at Hella curiously. "My arrival here had nothing to do with you, did it?"

  "No."

  "I did not think so. My mate—Scatter—told me many things while I convalesced, but most of what he told me did not make sense. I have no reference." Ocastya looked at Hella's damaged wrist. Most of the burn scarring was gone there, and she finally had full range of movement. "I damaged you."
<
br />   "You did."

  "I am sorry. I did not wish to."

  "I know." Hella put out a hand. "I can help you with information about our world. I helped Scatter."

  Ocastya made no move to accept Hella's offer. "You were inside my mind. I remember that."

  "Scatter asked me to help. He said if I didn't, that you would die."

  Ocastya's lips firmed. "My mate knows more about these bodies than I do. I trust his judgment." She frowned. "However, the idea of you there—among my personal remembrances—is distasteful."

  "I know. I agree." Hella took back her hand.

  "But I need knowledge if I am to help my mate. If you are willing, I will accept your offer." Ocastya held out her hand.

  Hella put out her hand and pressed her palm to the fractoid's. Almost immediately, dizziness swept through her, and her knees almost buckled as fire blazed through her skull.

  "I beg your pardon. That was my mistake."

  Thankfully the pain subsided. Hella stood and controlled the sour nausea that sloshed inside her stomach. She managed to stay focused and caught occasional glimpses of the information Ocastya acquired from her.

  "You sure you're up to traveling?" Stampede stared at Hella with his liquid brown eyes.

  Hella didn't pause as she threw her saddle across Daisy. "I'm fine."

  "You didn't look fine when Ocastya finally let you go."

  Self-consciously, Hella nodded at the fractoid, who stood in the cave mouth. "She can hear you."

  "I don't care. I'll hurt her feelings every time if it means protecting you."

  "I'm fine." Hella reached for one of the saddle straps and missed.

  Stampede snorted and twitched his ears.

  "I'll be fine." Hella shot a glare at Stampede. "We don't have a lot of time."

  "We don't have any time to get this wrong. If we end up dead, there's not going to be anybody riding to Scatter's rescue. There's no guarantee we can get him out of the situation he's in now."

  Hella secured the strap, positioned the saddle, and cinched it tight. "Somebody once told me that sometimes you have to ride a trail through before you make any decisions about it. Better to go see for yourself than to blindly guess. Sound familiar?"