Earth and Air

by Janet Edwards

  “It’s all right,” I told them. “We’re ...”

  “Nuke it!” snapped a female voice. “Incident Control is routing another incoming group to us.”

  The man glanced at her. “Tell Incident Control that we need to finish processing these four before they send us another group.”

  “They’ve no choice,” said the woman. “The other triage points are all swamped.”

  “Incoming now!” yelled another man.

  I looked over my shoulder, and saw an impact-suited figure shoot through the portal behind me and go sprawling on the floor, shouting the same thing I’d done. “Hot team!”

  “Get into decontamination now!” The woman shoved me towards an area of grey wall that turned out not to be a real wall at all but a mass of grey, flexiplas ribbons.

  I held back for a moment, gesturing at my trainees to go ahead of me, and then herded them on through the curtain of grey ribbons into a corridor. As we moved forward, jets of hot liquid seemed to come from nowhere, hitting us with stinging force.

  I gasped, and there was a despairing wail from someone. It sounded like one of the boys, but I couldn’t tell which one.

  The distinctive odour of decontamination spray was chokingly strong in the air.

  This was usually used to deal with chemical contamination, so I didn’t know if it would be any help with radiation exposure. I groped my way past the others, and on down the corridor. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to stay in the spray or keep moving on, but then I collided with a closed door. We must be supposed to stay here then.

  I turned to check on my trainees, and found the three of them clustered close behind me, looking pathetically helpless in their drenched skintights and with their hair plastered to their scalps. Wren seemed to be asking me something, but I had decontamination fluid in my ears and couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  “Don’t worry,” I yelled. “This is decontamination fluid.”

  As I said the words, a klaxon sounded, and I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. The sealed door was opening!

  I grabbed Landon’s arm, and pushed him on through the door. Alund and Wren stumbled after him. I followed them, and found myself in another corridor like the last one, but this time the jets were spraying something unpleasantly slimy and red in colour.

  The kids froze to the spot, and there was a burst of hysterical laughter from Alund. “I don’t want to be sprayed with blood.”

  “This isn’t blood,” I said sharply.

  “So what is it?” asked Wren.

  I’d no idea what this liquid was. “It’s just a different sort of decontamination fluid. Come on!”

  I led them on into the red spray. As we moved on down the corridor, I saw there was another closed door ahead of us and stopped. The kids stopped too. Alund kept trying to dodge the jets of liquid, but I shoved him directly under one.

  “We have to stay under the jets until they let us move on.”

  We must have been waiting there, being covered in red, slimy fluid for at least another minute before the klaxon sounded again. The door ahead of us opened, and we hurried through.

  I was prepared for yet another corridor filled with jets spraying mysterious liquid, but this time I saw a room piled high with crates. A white-suited figure beckoned us forward, and handed us each a foil sachet.

  “Snap the top off the feeder tube and drink the liquid inside,” said a woman’s voice.

  I usually tried to avoid taking meds, but I meekly obeyed orders this time. I expected the liquid to taste disgusting, but it was just like very strong Fizzup. I glanced round to check my trainees were drinking theirs.

  The woman waved a scanner at us. “What was your precise location on New York Fringe when the radiation alarm sounded, and which evac portal did you use?”

  I swallowed my last mouthful of stuff that wasn’t Fizzup. “We were all at training area 6G when the alarm sounded. We used the evac portal in training area 6C.”

  She tapped at a lookup, nodded, grabbed my right forearm with her clumsy, white-gloved hands, and used something to write on it. When she let my arm go, I twisted it round, and saw ominously glowing red lettering saying “EXP 31B/31D”.

  Wren, Alund, and Landon got identical labels on their arms, and then the woman reached into a crate and handed us each a set of pale blue overalls. I found it wasn’t easy putting mine on, because the fabric kept sticking to my wet skin, but Wren had extra problems. My overalls were generously sized for me, and Landon’s and Alund’s were too big, but Wren’s were ludicrously large, so she was struggling to roll up the arms and legs.

  I turned to the woman. “Do you have any smaller overalls?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve had a lot of school parties come through ahead of you, so we’ve run out of smaller sizes.”

  The woman opened another crate, handed us paper-thin, adjustable sandals, and then started gabbling instructions. “Listen closely to all announcements and follow the instructions exactly. Any symptoms such as hair loss, nausea, diarrhoea, bleeding, or fever should be reported to the medical team.”

  She gestured at a door next to her. “You can move on to the main treatment hall now.”

  I put on my sandals. “Don’t you want our names?”

  “Our current priority is triage and first stage treatment,” she said. “Planetary Incident Control will work out everyone’s identity from the admissions scans and ...”

  Her words were drowned out by the familiar klaxon sound. “The next party is arriving now,” she said. “You need to move on.”

  I opened the door, and led the way out into a vast, cream-walled hall, full of figures in pale blue overalls like ours. The three kids drew defensively closer to me, unnerved by the sight of so many people, but I felt like cheering.

  Emergency evac portals usually dumped you in a random casualty unit, so I’d expected the people from New York Fringe to be scattered across America, but we all seemed to have been routed into an especially huge casualty centre. I didn’t know if that was because there were so many of us, or because radiation was involved, but Crozier and the rest of the school history club must be somewhere in this hall.

  “Follow me,” I said.

  There were school parties all around us, each one a huddled group centred on their teacher. I was hurrying forward, looking eagerly for familiar faces, when I heard a wail from behind me.

  “Wait! Please wait for me.”

  That was Wren’s voice. I turned round to look for her. Landon and Alund were scurrying after me, but one leg of Wren’s overalls had come unrolled and tripped her up, so she was lying on the floor.

  I guiltily sprinted back and stooped to help roll up the leg of her overalls again. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have gone so fast.”

  I straightened up, and held out a hand to help her to her feet. Wren grabbed my hand, scrambled up, but didn’t let go of me. Of course she wouldn’t let go of me. She was 12 years old, barely a week into her first trip with the school history club, caught in a radiation incident and utterly terrified. The nuking incompetent who she was depending on to take care of her had just run off and left her once, so she was going to cling on tight to make sure that couldn’t happen again.

  Landon and Alund were staring at where Wren’s hand was holding mine. I hastily tried to ward off any cruel remarks from Landon. “We’re a team. Wren is right to hold on to me. A team takes care of each other and makes sure that nobody gets left behind.”

  I’d misunderstood the situation. The others hadn’t been tempted to tease Wren, but wishing they could hold on to me as well, and they took my words as an invitation to do that. Alund grabbed my free hand, and Landon tagged on to him. Chaos knew what the other people here were thinking, seeing us linked together like a line of kids in Nursery, but I was beyond caring about appearances.

  I’d just started our group moving forward again, when a magnified voice spoke from somewhere above my head. “Attention everyone, we’re implementing a precauti
onary medical air treatment, so things may get a little foggy.”

  I’d instinctively looked up at the sound of the voice, and saw what looked like thick white mist coming out of vents in the ceiling. It was rapidly reaching down towards us, so there was only one thing I could do.

  “Everyone hold on tight,” I said. “We’re going to find a space by the wall and sit down.”

  Their hands gripped mine even harder. I headed for a large gap between two school parties. Whatever was coming through the vents was cold and seemed heavier than normal air. The mist was thickening around our feet and building up in layers. By the time we reached the wall, the seated school parties were invisible under the white fog.

  I hesitated. A few seconds ago, I’d been overheated from the hot sprays in decontamination. Now I was far too cold. I hated the idea of sitting down, letting that sinister, arctic mist go over my head, but it was going to do that within a couple of minutes anyway.

  “Landon and Wren should link hands now so we form a circle,” I said. “We’re going to sit down, and we’ll do that very slowly so we don’t lose hold of each other. Don’t worry about breathing the mist. We’re supposed to do that so it can help us.”

  “We’ve washed any radioactive contamination from our hair and skin,” said Alund, “and we drank something to deal with anything we swallowed. Is the mist going to neutralize any particles we inhaled into our lungs?”

  That sounded a good theory to me. “Yes, that’s exactly right. We’ll sit down on a count of three. One, two, three, now!”

  We submerged ourselves in the fog. The air smelled and tasted faintly musty, and I was shivering with cold. The kids were invisible now, but I could feel Wren and Alund still clinging tightly to my hands.

  I tried to make my voice calm and reassuring. “Chilly, isn’t it? Is everyone all right? Wren?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alund?”

  “Yes.”

  “Landon?”

  There was a third shaky response from somewhere in the fog. I remembered my impatience at Crozier repeatedly counting the members of the history club on our journeys between school and dig sites. I swore I’d never complain about him counting people again.

  “My ears are freezing,” muttered Landon.

  “All of me is freezing,” said Alund.

  I was frozen too, and every breath I took seemed to leach more warmth from me. Wren wasn’t saying anything, but I could feel her hand was icy cold. I heard the murmur of voices from the nearby school parties, and then a woman calling a name.

  “Nico, where are you?”

  “I don’t know,” wailed a boy’s voice in response. “My sandal fell off. I stopped to put it back on, and now I can’t see anything.”

  “Stay where you are for now,” said the woman, who I guessed was Nico’s teacher. “The fog is starting to clear, so you’ll soon be able to find us.”

  I realized the woman was right. I could see the dim outlines of Wren, Alund, and Landon now. As the fog kept thinning, their faces gradually came into view. All three of them looked scared and were visibly shivering, but Wren had an extra, exhausted air about her that worried me.

  We needed to find Crozier and the rest of the history club quickly. The problem was that my three trainees were in no state to either be dragged round the hall with me, or left behind while I went looking for Crozier.

  That was when the obvious point finally occurred to me. If Crozier was here, then we wouldn’t need to go looking for him because he’d be looking for us. If the younger ones in the history club were panicking so much that he daren’t leave them, then he’d send Milo to find us.

  The last remnants of the fog had vanished now. I turned my head, staring methodically round the hall. There was no sign of either Crozier or Milo. It was possible they were right over the other side of the hall, or hidden behind a pillar, but I noticed a disturbing detail. There were a chaos lot of people here, but I could only see school parties. Where were all the groups of hobby archaeologists? Where were all the people who worked at the New York Fringe Command Centre?

  Now I thought about it, there weren’t enough school parties here either. New York Fringe was a popular dig site, so every school party accommodation dome was booked months ahead for their summer season. I made a rough estimate of the huddled groups of school parties, and compared them to the number of domes. It looked as if nearly half the school parties were missing.

  That had to be because people had been sent to several different treatment centres. I pictured the sprawling expanse of New York Fringe as I’d seen it from the air during my flying lessons. The New York Fringe Command Centre was near the central point. The accommodation domes for hobby archaeologists were mostly along the eastern side, near the boundary with New York Main Dig Site, where the ruins were taller and there were more dangerous water hazards. The accommodation domes for school parties were scattered across the rest of the dig site.

  The fact that there were no hobby archaeologists here must mean that people had been portalled to different destinations depending on their position on the dig site. Crozier and the rest of the history club hadn’t been working far from training ground 6, but they must have been on the other side of some crucial dividing line.

  I was stuck here with three terrified kids depending on me to take care of them when I was just as terrified as they were. We could be here for days or even weeks, and I’d no idea what type of radiation we’d been exposed to, or what sort of treatment we’d need. If we started melting ...

  No, I wasn’t going to start obsessing about the melting people again. That wasn’t going to happen to us. I just had to stop myself from panicking and comfort the others. I could do that. I had to do that.

  Wren had clearly noticed me looking round the hall, because she gave me one of her piercing stares. “Crozier and the rest of the history club aren’t here, are they?”

  “They’re perfectly safe,” I said, “but it looks as if they’ve been portalled to a different centre from us.”

  Alund gave a squeak of alarm. “So it’s just the four of us here?”

  “There’s no need to worry,” said Wren. “Jarra will take care of us. She’s been coming to dig sites since she was 11 years old, so she knows all about everything.”

  Landon frowned at me. “Have you been evacuated like this before, Jarra?”

  The kids were on the verge of panicking, so I gave them the answer they wanted to hear. “Yes. I was a lot younger then. The first big rush of evacuating was very confusing and scary, but then things got calm and organized, and everything was fine in the end.”

  It wasn’t entirely a lie. When I was 9 years old and living in Home E161/8822, everyone was evacuated because a forest fire was heading towards our settlement. There was a big difference between fire and radiation though. You could see fire coming, you knew if you’d been burned, but radiation killed by stealth.

  The kids took a moment to absorb what I’d said. This had happened to Jarra before. Everything was fine that time. I could see they were grabbing at the comforting idea that everything would be fine this time too.

  “We were told to listen to announcements,” said Landon. “Why aren’t they giving us more information?”

  “Jarra just explained that,” said Wren impatiently. “Everything is confusing during the first rush of evacuation. Then it gets organized.”

  She turned to me. “We were sprayed with liquid. We were given special stuff to drink. Something has been added to the air that we’re breathing. What happens next, Jarra?”

  I ran my fingers through the sticky, tangled mess of my hair. I’d no idea what to say. “That varies depending on several factors.”

  “What factors?” asked Landon.

  There was an odd clicking sound from the ceiling followed by a hum. I looked up in alarm, and was deeply thankful to hear a woman’s voice speak.

  “Can I have your attention please, everyone?”

  I gasped. The voice was magnified
and distorted by the loudspeaker system, but still instantly recognizable. “That’s Valeska Orlova talking!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Your first stage medical treatment has now been completed.” Valeska’s calm, reassuring voice boomed out across the hall. “Medical staff will move to giving you second stage treatment as soon as we have exact information on the types of radiation involved and probable exposure levels. Bathroom facilities are available at both sides of the hall, but the dried fluid on your skin has important protective properties, so please don’t use the showers until you’ve had your second stage treatment.”

  “When will we get that second stage treatment?” called a male voice.

  I turned to see who was speaking, and spotted a familiar figure standing and shouting up at the ceiling. Amaz! I’d been wrong about all the Command Centre staff being missing. Felipe was here. Presumably he’d been away from the Command Centre, doing some repair work at an accommodation dome, when the radiation alert sounded.

  I’d been feeling horribly isolated without my lookup or any other way to contact Crozier, but seeing Felipe made me sigh in relief. I could ask him for help and advice. Felipe had finished his pre-history degree and been working at the New York Fringe Command Centre for months. He’d understand exactly what was happening, and be much better than me at comforting my trainees.

  Valeska obviously had some way to hear Felipe’s question. “We’ve contacted the cross-sector Military to ask for assistance,” she said. “They’re readying a remote-controlled probe, which will be sent in to take sensor readings of the affected area. We should have full information in just over an hour.”

  “An hour!” Felipe repeated, his voice rising in fear and anger. “You can’t wait that long to treat us. The doctors have to ...”

  A nearby teacher interrupted Felipe. “Quiet!”

  “Your first stage medical treatment included a wide spectrum of protective measures,” said Valeska. “The doctors have to wait for exact information before deciding on appropriate second stage treatment.”