“Let’s do this,” she says.
They stride on toward the forest.
“So,” he says after a moment, looking at her slyly, “you got any memory of Sixteen Questions rattling around in that mind of yours?”
The shift in tone jars Ana, but then she realizes she does remember it. A complicated back-and-forth game of nested questions. Has she always hated this game, or is that just her imagination? She narrows her eyes. “Are you trying to distract me from the bastion of evil that’s up ahead?”
Todd grins as he brushes his hair out of his face. “I’ll take that as your first Q. Since yes-and-no answers are not accepted in this round, I’m going to reply with: In addition to providing a positive distraction from the forthcoming uncertainty, does the game of Sixteen Questions activate any dormant memories of your past?”
Ana’s mind races. Maybe she hated this game once, but Todd’s right. The distraction and the challenge have her pulse racing like she’s back in the presence of that monster worm. Except this adrenaline rush is all good, and all hers.
“My mind is unfortunately empty of any and all specific memories,” she says, shaping each word carefully, seeing how she can turn this game to her advantage, “and this mind wants to know what your mind knows about the existence of that monster that was chasing us back there.”
Todd’s face darkens. “It’s not supposed to be here,” he mutters.
Ana swallows. Back on the cliff, she heard him say something similar. He’s slipping out of his Sixteen Questions persona, but she feels no need to push back. “Go on,” she says.
“None of the planet scans of Paradox showed any signs of animal life. None at all. There was evidence that millions of years ago, a giant wormlike creature used to roam the planet. But it’s long extinct. So why is it here now?”
“Planet scans?” Ana says incredulously. “How do you know about that?”
Todd grimaces. “I told you. I know stuff about this place. Physical things. I just think about it and the knowledge is there.”
Ana nods. “Well, maybe the creature is a different life form entirely? Maybe it escaped the scans that way?”
Todd’s already shaking his head. “It wasn’t here,” he insists. “And then the first thing I thought of when I saw it was Vermiletum. But no, that would be ridiculous.”
Vermi letum. Deadly worm. Apparently her former life included some Latin. “What do you mean, Vermiletum?” she asks. “You’ve seen that thing somewhere before, or heard of it?”
“Not really. I …” Todd flushes. “I just thought it triggered something, but … no.”
There he goes again. He knows something, something he’s too afraid to talk about. What could be more fearsome than a giant worm? Vermiletum. Something about that name fits. And what’s more, the word stirs her up inside and sets her pulse pounding in her ears.
She has no idea why, but it makes her want to fight.
Her left hand crosses over to her hip and strokes the handle of the dagger resting in its sheath. An image flashes through her mind and she sees a gleaming blade hurtling through the air, turning end over end to sink with a satisfying thunk into a plywood target.
She’s jerked back to the moment as Todd stops walking and turns, looking straight at her. His eyes are wide and staring, startlingly blue in his chalky face. “Forget the worm,” he says, a little hoarsely. “It’s all wrong. We just have to get to the end of the countdown, and to do that we’ve got to stay away from it, okay?”
Ana frowns. “I’m not going looking for it, but it makes sense to investigate as much as we can while we’re here. What about the letter? Experience, discover, blah blah. If it shows up again, if it attacks … Do you suppose we could kill it if we had to, if we worked together? Maybe stabbed or shot it in just the right spot?”
“No!” Todd barks. “The worm is something else.” He turns his back on her and sets off down the path again. “Just trust me, okay? It’s more than it seems. As bad as it looks, the worm is even worse. You don’t want to get anywhere near it.”
Ana closes her eyes a moment and flashes back to that slavering jaw, those rows of jagged teeth. The thing is like a tank—sixteen tanks strung end to end. What does she really think a couple of kids with pistols and knives could do against it? She was told to experience and discover, sure. She was also told to survive.
But the rush of adrenaline now coursing through her body is something else altogether. Because she’s discovered something hard inside her, something cold and strong and razor-sharp. There is solid iron at her core. She will not break, will not bend, will not deviate from whatever path she embarks upon. And right now she knows with deadly certainty that she will do whatever it takes to defeat that worm.
Or die trying.
FIVE
00:21:16:28
At the threshold of the Dead Forest, the path winds down a few hundred feet, then disappears into the solid wall of trees.
“There’s something about this place,” Ana whispers. She glances at Todd. Despite his determined stride, Ana can see tension in the set of his neck, in his rigid posture. She can almost feel the fear coursing through him.
“What is it?” she says.
“The forest?” Todd shrugs, then ruins the effect with a nervous swallow. “It’s fine. No big deal.”
“Come on, Todd,” she says, pushing past him. The barren ground makes way for little tufts of yellowish growth, and bushes claw their way up out of the ground as they near the trees. Ana is so busy studying the ground that she almost misses the moment where the shift happens—but there’s one step and then the next and suddenly it’s as if she were inside a shuttered room. She’s crossed over into the forest.
The trees loom overhead, so high she can’t see where their canopies end, and so close together that the light’s almost completely blocked out. The sunlight that does filter down is dim and watery. Each tree is nearly as wide around as the rocket she traveled here in. Six of her could probably hold hands in a circle and not reach around to the other side of just one trunk.
Stranger still, the trees aren’t brown, and they aren’t covered in bark. There are no leaves. In fact, there’s no green anywhere.
Everything in the forest, every tree trunk and branch, is ash gray.
The Dead Forest. Well, that makes sense.
Suddenly she realizes she’s alone. She looks back to see Todd standing just outside the tree line, silhouetted against the light. He’s half-leaning against a trunk, as though trying to persuade himself to keep moving forward. Ana feels a rush of sympathy for his obvious struggle. Then his jaw hardens and a steely look comes into his eyes. He marches forward, pushing into the trees at last. Ana moves aside as he walks past her and down the path.
As Ana starts to follow him, something on the ground catches her eye. She stops and squats down. At first glance the forest floor looks as if it’s covered in dirt, but up close she sees that it’s ash—a fine, gunmetal-gray powder.
She reaches toward the nearest tree and brushes its stony surface with the lightest touch. It’s cold as ice. She flattens her palm against the rough surface, which is crisscrossed with dozens of little ridges. If she closes her eyes, she could almost trick herself into thinking she’s got her hand on an Earth tree—but the moment she opens them again, it’s abundantly clear that this is not the case. Each tree in this forest is like a giant fossil, a memory of something that used to be, something that’s dead and gone and doesn’t even know it.
Sliding her hand off the tree, she looks at her soot-blackened palm. It’s thick with a dark powdery coating—like ash, but heavier—particles that cling to her skin. She rubs her hand against her jumpsuit and spreads a black ashy patch onto the cloth, but when she looks at her hand again, it shows little difference.
What is this stuff? Ana shudders.
This Dead Forest … somehow it feels undead. She looks around nervously and feels weirdly claustrophobic, as if she’d suddenly stepped inside a dark haunted
house with no exit.
Ana shakes herself. Where did that come from? Of course there’s an exit—the path is clearly visible through the gloom—and okay, yes, it gets gloomier the farther in you go, but that doesn’t mean there’s no end. The dotted line of their map will take care of that.
“Todd?” she calls, suddenly realizing that he’s no longer in sight.
Jumping up, Ana adjusts her pack and starts to run, remembering the jittery, fearful way Todd took off. What if he’s left the path? What if she can’t find him?
But then she turns a corner and runs smack into him.
Todd is standing in the middle of the trail, not moving a muscle. She comes around him, grabbing his arm, and gasps. His eyes are glazed, his mouth slightly open. Ana grabs his arm, her fear disappearing in the palpable sense of his own. “Come on, Todd. Let’s go.”
Todd shakes himself, obviously trying to break free from whatever’s got hold of him, but not quite succeeding. Could it be some kind of panic attack? Nerves?
“You didn’t tell me you had forest issues,” she continues with forced lightness, leading him along the path. “Though I probably should have guessed from all those clues you were dropping earlier. Anything you want to talk about?”
“No … issues,” he says, but every word seems to take effort, as if it’s being dragged out of him.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “We’ll just get through this and then you’ll be okay.”
“Must be … some kind of subconscious …” He’s sweating now, tiny drops barely visible above his hairline.
Ana’s still pulling him along, but it’s getting more difficult, as if his feet want to root themselves into the ground.
“ … aversion …”
His face is shiny with sweat and his eyes look glassy again. What is going on?
A twinge of panic starts somewhere in Ana’s gut, because it’s suddenly clear that Todd’s problem is much bigger than just a forest phobia. Should they turn around? No, they have to go through the forest. It’s the only way to get where they’re going.
Ana reaches over and grabs the circlet on Todd’s left wrist. With a quick stroke she pulls up the map, which gleams against their dark backdrop. There’s a flash of near-recognition in Todd’s eyes as he tries to focus on the display.
“Hey, Todd,” Ana says. “You see that? Gotta follow the directions. We’re almost there.”
They’re not almost there—not as far as she can tell from the map, anyway. She clicks it off again and they move on. She wishes she could take the time to zoom out and get an idea of how far they’re in and how far there is to go, but she’s got all her focus on keeping Todd moving forward.
More and more it’s looking like a battle she might not win.
“No!” she yells aloud at the thought. Todd jumps at the abrupt sound, then sinks back to his walk-be-dragged-shuffle. But that jump gives her an idea.
Ana stops and drops his arm, pausing for a second to catch her breath. As she does, she can see Todd’s body beginning to shift, as if his very bones were pulling toward the ground. And she could swear she sees tendrils rising from the ground, little shoots twining around his heels, curling over the rims of his boots.
“It’s so dark in here,” he whispers. His voice is weirdly hollow, almost like it’s disconnected from his body. His eyes are wide and staring and he’s craning his head from side to side, but doesn’t seem to see her.
“Todd!” she says. But he doesn’t even register her words. It’s as if he’s caught in the grip of some hallucination and isn’t able to pull out of it. She’s going to need some extreme measures.
She lifts his arms out in front of him. Todd is so gone he lets her, leaving his arms suspended in midair, like a mannequin or a zombie or whatever it is he’s turning into. She activates his circlet map again and lines it up so that it’s clear and sharp and right in front of him. Then she pulls back her arm and slaps him hard across the face. At the same time she yells, “RUN, TODD! RUN! Get out of here! You have to GO GO GO GO GO GO!”
It works like an electric shock. He vaults forward and starts tearing down the path, the roots and grasping tendrils falling away behind him. Ana stays right at his heels, giving him a shove if he slows, letting out another yell every so often, until her voice becomes a croak and her lungs are ready to explode and her feet are two leaden clumps that want to fall right off her legs.
Still they run on.
Ana’s ears are full of a dark whispering rustle as they push through the forest, a rustle in a forest with no leaves, where the only living things are the two humans crashing through branches that grasp at them from faceless trunks.
Faster and faster they push on, over fallen trunks, under low limbs, across shallow, ashy streambeds. Spiky branches lash at her and a steady warm trickle starts down the side of her face, but she doesn’t let herself stop.
If she stops, she knows she won’t be able to start again.
When Ana thinks she can’t run another step, she sees their goal up ahead. It’s barely visible through the thinning tops of the trees, but it’s there all right, bathed in the light of the double suns—the crest of a rocky slope. She can’t pull up her own map or zoom out Todd’s, which is bobbing like a carrot in front of a madly chasing donkey, but the Timor Mountain range begins just beyond the forest, and if they’re now in sight, then there’s still hope.
There’s still hope.
SIX
00:19:06:44
Ana and Todd erupt from the forest, boots outstretched, arms flung to either side, like a couple of interstellar desperadoes escaping certain death and living to tell about it, somehow, against all odds.
It’s been just a few hours since they entered the forest, but already Ana was forgetting the way the breeze could tickle and the light could tease, and forgetting, almost, the incomparable freedom of the open arc of the sky. Even the twin suns in their orbits beam down on her now like old friends. She thinks that even though she was running back in the forest, even though no roots were hooking her into the ground, still some part of her didn’t fully return to life until she came back out into the open air.
Ana drops to her hands and knees on the soft ground, her heart going like a jackhammer, pounding a double-time beat.
At first she thinks it’s just in its contrast that the planet suddenly looks so much more hospitable. But then she sees it’s more than that: on this side of the forest, there is some serious plant life—the first healthy signs of growth she’s seen on Paradox so far. Just ahead there’s a little meadow with bluish-green grass and a few flowers. Small bushes and trees dot the sloping terrain, and more grass stretches out to the edge of her vision, off to the base of the high mountain peaks.
She squints up at Todd, who stands a little ahead of her. He’s turned his map off and is hunched over, hands on his knees, taking big, gulping breaths. His eyes are full of all the right things—pain and fear and shame and anger—all those real, hard-to-bear human emotions.
“Hey,” she says, pulling herself into a sitting position on the grass.
He walks back over and drops down beside her. “What happened in there? Do I even want to know?”
Ana considers this. “Probably not. But I think it’s safe to say that you don’t like forests too much.”
Todd’s mouth turns down, and Ana adds quickly, “Okay, it’s actually more than that. Something’s not right in that forest—there’s something heavy and oppressive. I couldn’t wait to get out of there myself. But it was more for you; almost as though some force in there had it out for you in particular.”
Todd turns toward her, about to say something, and then he raises his eyebrows. “What did you do to yourself?” he says, looking at her forehead. He immediately starts burrowing in his pack.
Ana touches her right temple and discovers a warm, sticky dampness. She winces. “I’m fine,” she says. “Must have been one of those branches I ran into. It’s just a scratch.”
“Still,” he
says, turning toward her with a small tube in one hand and a white cloth in the other. She grits her teeth as he wipes at the wound; then there’s a cool pressure as he applies some gel from the tube.
“Peri-skin,” he says, replacing the cap and sliding the tube back into his pack. “It’ll set in a few seconds. You can probably tell the difference already.”
Reaching her hand back up, Ana gingerly assesses the smooth, rubbery coating.
“Thanks,” she says. She knows the peri-skin will anesthetize, disinfect, and fully repair her cut in hours, if not less.
Todd leans forward and touches a finger to her temple, and there’s something in his look that makes Ana freeze. She swallows, suddenly uncomfortable. “What about you?” she asks. “How are you feeling?”
The change of subject works. Todd drops his hand and gets to his feet. “I’m fine,” he says. “Come on. We can talk more as we walk, if you’re doing all right. There’s a plateau up here where we can take a real break.”
“There is?”
Todd nods. “I saw it on the map. It’s not far.”
He reaches into a pocket of his vest and pulls out handful of water capsules. He tosses her a couple and she catches them gratefully, punching one out and popping it in her mouth. Instantly refreshed, she revels in the feel of the water pouring down her dry throat.
She shoves the leftover tablets in her pocket, hears them rustle up against the folded letter. The letter! She runs the words over in her mind again. Our world is on the brink of disaster. Your mission must succeed. But what is the mission? And how can you succeed when you don’t have any idea what you’re supposed to be doing, much less how to do it?
Ana decides that, though they do need a break, it won’t be a long one. There’s too much ground to cover and too much that’s still unknown.
Adjusting her pack, she follows Todd up the grassy slope. Above them looms the Timor range. The mountains look huge from here, so near they seem to be carved right out of the brilliant sky.
Paradox Page 4
