by Natalie Reid
* * *
It was early in the morning when Tom trudged slowly into Tag’s lab. The older scientist had his eyes narrowed at his computer screen, and did not notice his assistant come in.
“Thought so,” Tag muttered to himself.
“You thought what?” Tom asked, running a tired hand through the hair on the back of his head.
“Hmm? Oh, nothing,” Tag responded absent-mindedly. He pushed a few buttons on his keyboard, and a new screen popped up before Tom could look at the old one. “Couldn’t sleep either?” he asked, shifting in his chair.
Tom took off his glasses and stared up at the ceiling, giving him a tired grunt in response.
Tag opened his mouth as if he was about to say something, but then stopped and hesitated. Finally he remarked with a casual swipe of his hand, “You know our pilot? I did a little digging, called some people, pulled some strings, that sort of thing. Anyway, I found out who her mother is. A lady called Sarah Forty-one-Thirty-seven. Apparently she used to work for the government, one of their most brilliant minds. Had an amazing capacity to remember the slightest details in everything she saw.” He waved his hand in dismissal, quickly adding, “But that’s not even the interesting bit. When I asked about her father, I found out that nobody knows who he is, not even our pilot. When she went in for her numbers on her Evolution Day and got her blood tested, no one showed up as a match.”
“Resistance do you think?” Tom mumbled, disinterested.
“I don’t think so,” he said, looking at the floor in deep thought. “Everyone’s gotta have numbers. What’s really puzzling is why they even let this government woman have a child in the first place. From what I understand, it’s illegal.” He looked up from the floor and noticed the weary expression on his assistant’s face. “Is something wrong?”
Tom let out a low breath. “I still can’t believe we did what we did. That girl should be in the ground right now.”
Suddenly Tag’s eyes flashed in anger. “You’re not ashamed, are you? You helped make a great advancement in science!”
He slowly shook his head. “No. That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what is it?” Tag asked more gently.
Tom stood up and placed his glasses on top of his head. Tufts of light brown hair poked out through the lenses. “I just feel really weak is all.”
“Of course,” Tag nodded. “It’s understandable. You’ve worked hard.”
Tom gave out a tired hmm in resigned agreement. His eyes scanned his boss’s lab in the dim light it always seemed to be covered in. Yet, even in this darkened state he could see that Tag had not bothered to clean up. Tom had tried to get someone in to sterilize the room from when they had operated on the pilot, but aside from clearing away the blood on the bed and on the floor, Tag had not allowed them to do anything else.
In the corner, a dark mass slumped against the wall. Tom walked over to it and gave out a tired moan as he bent down to pick it up. His fingers were met with the coarse surface of thick fabric. Raising it up to his face to get a better look, he nearly let it fall back to the floor.
It was her uniform. The pilot’s. The one she had asked for. He had thought that it would have already been discarded—taken to a furnace to be burned. But here it was, hiding amongst the clutter of Tag’s lab.
He looked over to his boss and found him engrossed in his computer once more.
Tom carefully turned the uniform over in his hands, trying to avoid the blood in the center. As he did this, he heard something light fall to the floor and land at his feet. Setting the uniform back down, he retrieved the small object. In the dark he couldn’t quite tell what it was, but his gut told him that it was the paper fish that the pilot had been asking about.
He glanced to Tag again, who was happily clicking his finger against a key to enlarge a cellular structure he was studying.
Walking over to the desk in the corner, Tom took out his tablet and turned it on for some light. The paper fish in his hands looked tattered and worn, as if it had been folded and refolded many times over. At the front of the fish, where the eye would have been, someone had drawn a star. But it was drawn in such a way that he had never seen before, with two long lines intersecting perpendicularly, and two smaller lines crisscrossing in between so that they all met up in the center.
One of the edges of the fish that should have been folded down was sticking up, probably having been jostled about in the crash. It was unbelievable that it was unharmed from the Bandit’s bullet. Tom guessed that she must have stuffed it in her pants pocket by some lucky mistake, and thought that it was still in her top pocket.
Taking one last look behind him, he made sure Tag was not watching before he pried the lose edge of the paper fish a little further. With that one motion, the fish seemed to unravel by itself and open up to display its secrets.
In the center of the paper, written by hand, was the message: The secret of the Aero Complex lies in your Father’s Book. Find it on the day I first loved you. Then, on the bottom of the paper, written in tiny letters as if it had been scrawled in as a mental reminder, was the question: Which night?
Suddenly his tablet beeped, and a red warning flashed on the screen. He turned back to Tag to see that he had received the same message.
“Would you mind Tom?” he asked distractedly, still concentrating on his computer.
Tom ran a rough hand through his hair and winced before pocketing the paper fish and making for the door.
Chapter 3
Visitors and Scoured Wood
Jessie awoke with a gasp, the horrors of a nightmare still flashing in her eyes. The sharp flow of air into her throat burned, and the contraction of her newly formed lung filled her with a strange sensation of panic. Around her the room was dark. There were no windows, and the only light fixture, which was embedded into the ceiling, had been turned off. To her right, something was beeping. She wondered if it was her heartbeat in the monitor, but she realized that it did not match the rapid pounding of her heart.
The incessant beeping did not slow down when her heart finally did, and the irritating noise grated her sensitive head. She turned to the monitor to see if there was any way she could shut it off, when the door to her room opened. From the light outside, she recognized the face of the young scientist that had helped bring her back to life.
Tom ignored Jessie as he strode over to the monitor and pressed several buttons. When he was done, the beeping stopped.
She let out a relieved sigh. “Thanks. That was going to drive me crazy.”
He cleared his throat and fiddled with the glasses in his hands. His eyes flicked back to the door and he made sure to keep a safe distance away from her bed.
“Maybe I shouldn’t joke about being crazy right now,” she said, trying to offer him a smile so that he would relax around her. It was clear by his avoidance of looking her in the eye that he was still afraid she might be a Bandit. Though most Bandits were delirious and out of control, there were those that were surprisingly calm and intelligent, making proving her humanity all the more difficult.
“What was that beeping?” she asked, hoping to finally get a response out of him.
Tom cleared his throat once more and slid his glasses over the bridge of his nose. “An alarm went off when your heart began beating too quickly.”
“Oh, sorry.” She lifted a hand up to her forehead to try and soothe the headache that had started. “It was just a nightmare.”
There was silence. For a moment she thought that she might have dreamt Tom up, that maybe she was just talking to herself in that room. Jessie gulped and cleared her throat. She searched her head for a question that Tom could easily answer, and decided on, “What time is it?”
The light from his tablet lit up the room for a moment before he answered, “Five in the morning. Your Lieutenant will be here in a few hours to assess your condition.”
She nodded. The stern face of Lieutenant Carver flashed in her mind. Ever since she had me
t that man as a three-day-old human, confined up in a military holding room, he had never seemed to like her. Even as a child she could sense it. He had been rigid and terse, and he went as far as to disobey the orders of his superior officer by getting someone else to watch her instead of staying himself. It was as if he didn’t like being in the same room with her, and she never understood it. Later, when she started her military training to become a pilot, Carver had only gotten worse towards her. Nothing she did was ever good enough. He had never said as much, but she felt that, deep down, he didn’t want her in the military, no matter how many Bandits she killed.
Dread started to form in the pit of her stomach, realizing that, if Lieutenant Carver was the one evaluating her, the outcome couldn’t be good.
“Do you live here?” she suddenly asked, drawing her attention back to Tom.
He took a step closer to the door and looked down at his feet.
“Never mind,” she quickly added, realizing how that question could have come across as threatening from someone like her. “Well, thanks for shutting the, uh, the thing off.”
She thought he was going to turn to leave, when instead his head popped up to face her, and he asked, “Does the Aero Complex mean anything to you?”
Her face stilled.
He took something out of his pocket and walked back over to her bed. He extended his arm out as far as it could reach so that he didn’t have to get too close to her, and deposited a creased piece of paper on the blankets of her bed. Taking one glance at it, she knew what it was.
“Turns out it wasn’t burned,” he explained, backing up to the door.
Jessie gently scooped it up in her hands and stared down at her mother’s handwriting. “My mother gave this to me.”
Tom had his hand on the door knob, but took it off and turned around.
“She left it with a friend,” she continued. “Told him to give it to me after I evolved because she knew what would happen to her when we went in to get my numbers.” She shook her head at the memory of it. “I had no idea. I hadn’t even known we had been in hiding all my life. But that whole time she knew, she knew that when she took me in on my Evolution Day, they would take her away.”
She smiled sadly down at the paper and started to fold it back up. “Anyway, it’s called a Sakana. The man that gave it to me explained that the name came from some place far away, a place called Japan. In our language it means fish. It’s supposed to symbolize courage and determination because of a fish’s ability to swim upstream.” She cleared her throat sheepishly and added, “In case you were wondering.”
Tom lowered his head and buried a hand into his hair. “You should get some rest,” he said, before slipping out the door and leaving her in the dark once more.
* * *
The sound of the Task Force bike grew louder and louder in Ritter’s ears, and he silently cursed as he watched the growing paranoia spread on the faces of the three men before him. When the bike raced down the road and stopped across the street from them, the three men took off, scattering in different directions.
Sergeant Ritter glanced around to see his boss, Commander Vin, sliding off his bike and walking towards him. He shook his head, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and looked up to the early morning sky. A cold wind blew and ruffled the collar of his jacket and the ends of his short, black hair. He set his jaw in a rigid line as he waited for his boss to cross the street.
“Your timing is racking impeccable!” he told Vin once he was near enough. “That just shot a week’s hard work. Those guys were gonna be my ticket into the Resistance.”
“We’ve got bigger problems than the Resistance,” Vin said impatiently.
“Yeah, like what?”
He took a quick glance around them before speaking. “You remember about ten years back we received orders from Ward to capture a girl of theirs that went missing. Then three days later she showed up on the military air-base out of nowhere. Military were playing the innocent, saying they didn’t know how she got up there.”
Ritter leaned against the dirty wall behind him and shook his head at the memory of it. “Yeah. Racking nightmare. I still don’t know how you got outta that one with Ward.”
Vin smiled. “I have my ways.”
He huffed. “Mind sharing the secret?”
“Don’t ask for secrets, Ritter; learn them.”
“Right, of course.” He squinted up to where the sun was barely poking over the horizon. “So what about this girl?”
“She became a pilot for the military.”
Ritter took a harsh sniff of air. “Yeah, I know. They call her Chance up there.”
“They might not be calling her much of anything anymore. A few days ago her plane was shot down. A bullet tore through her chest, and she breathed in enough Bandit smoke to turn even the strongest person. She managed to eject herself from her plane, but she died before hitting the ground.”
Ritter regarded his boss before asking, “So what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that she’s awake inside a recovery room in BLES right now.”
The sergeant lifted his back from the wall behind him. “She’s human?”
Vin tweaked his mouth and gave a shrug. “Claims to be.”
Ritter grabbed the bridge of his nose and scrunched his brow. “You’re right,” he muttered, shaking his head. “That is a racking problem.” He faced his boss before asking, “What are you thinking we should do?”
A silver rental car drove past them on the street. Vin watched it go with calculating eyes before turning back to his sergeant. “Ward’s being careful with who sees her right now. He wants to play it cautious in case she can still be of use to him.”
“Then Ward’s a racking idiot!” he exclaimed, running a hand through his short hair and taking a few paces back and forth on the sidewalk. “The second someone claims to have a solution for bringing a person back from the Bandit, he can kiss his Task Force goodbye! People will want us to bring them all back from the racking grave now! We’ll lose everything!”
“Calm down,” Vin said, as if bored by his behavior. “The general public’s got no clue as to what’s happening with Chance. All we have to do is give Ward a couple months before he changes his mind, which he’ll inevitably do. When that happens, it’s just a simple matter of finding the right pressure point. She’ll probably be dead before the end of winter.”
Ritter took in a breath and nodded. A patrolling Task Force helicopter flew by overhead, causing the stray bits of trash on the street to scatter. He closed his eyes to the cold wind and blew out a puff of air that crystalized in the autumn sky.
“Right, well,” Vin said, clapping a hand on Ritter’s shoulder. “Since I blew your little sting operation, what’s say we go get a drink down at Mercury’s?”
He shook his head. “It’s a bit early for me. Besides, I have some things I need to do.”
Vin gave him a curt nod and crossed back over the street to where he parked his hover bike. Ritter waited for him to disappear out of sight before sticking his hand in his jacket pocket and pulling something out.
In his palm was a small corked vial of blue flowers floating in liquid. He turned it over in his hands and watched as tiny bubbles formed around the petals.
Above him the sky was beginning to brighten. He looked up and could just make out the tiny far off lights of the Bandit ships and the dark silhouette of the black cloud that they guarded. Soon it would be light, and the cloud would be even more visible, standing out as a reigning spot of night amidst the daylight sky. Despite all the death and madness that it brought, he saw The Black as no more than his employer. Without it, his job wouldn’t be necessary.
Closing his hand into a fist, Ritter smothered the vial of blue flowers, gripping it tightly before stuffing it back in his pocket and walking down the street.
* * *
Daylight, it seemed to Jessie, took forever to arrive. She found that she couldn’t go back to sleep after Tom’s v
isit, dreading Lieutenant Carver’s arrival. And, though she knew she needed to rest, just the fact that she had been lying in bed for over two days made her that much more restless. By the time Carver finally did show up, briefly knocking on her door before promptly striding in with Sergeant Denneck in tow, she was all the more anxious and on edge.
Lieutenant Carver Forty-Twenty-two was a solid, tall man with broad shoulders and tree-bark brown hair that hung just over his eyes. In many ways he looked like a young man. Age deprivation pills and rigorous athletic training had accomplished that, but they couldn’t mask the harsh tone that pervaded his voice, the hardened, weathered hue of his eyes, or the experienced, veteran way in which he held himself.
However, despite Lieutenant Carver’s apparent dislike of her, the meeting went by relatively smoothly in her mind. He asked her a few general questions, how she was feeling, what she remembered of the crash, if she could recite past instances of her time in the military. He didn’t say anything after each of her responses, and she took that as a good sign. She figured that he must have come to the conclusion that she was still human, for he called in Doctor Tag after his questionings.
Tag brought with him a man from the government, who explained that he was also there to assess whether she was human or not. He took out a tablet and stated that he would ask her a series of questions, and her answers would determine her “apparent humanity.” Jessie wasn’t quite sure what “apparent humanity” was, or if it was even possible that a series of questions could hold the key to their race, but it wasn’t like the government gave her a choice.
Most of the questions he asked were strange. Why is the sound of a squeaking wheel annoying? If you cut your hand, what is the first thing you would do? If the clock read half past two, is it more likely to be a.m. or p.m.?
