by Cam Baity
The flowers.
A cloud of shimmering dust rolled toward Phoebe.
With a wild grab, she ripped at the facemask built into her coveralls. She affixed the breathing apparatus just as the tinkling powder rolled past her. A tacky, stale taste of nicotine still lingered in the used tubes, but watching Micah’s galloping pony dance was enough to make her fight the urge to spit it out.
He spun around in circles, his helmet rattling atop his head. Phoebe grabbed his arms to try and get him under control.
“Stop it, Micah,” she insisted, struggling to keep her balance.
“Vurbbble, vurbbble, vrrroooooooooooooom!” he sang. “That’s the sound a Hyena Turbo makes when it’s in ice cream!”
He burst into a fit of sneezing laughter, grabbed her, and twirled around and around.
“I said STOP!”
But that only made him go faster. In a clamor of body armor, they burst through the undergrowth near an embankment where the ground dropped away. Micah scrunched his nose.
“Don’t sneeze. Hey, seriously, don’t—”
They fell. Phoebe screamed. Micah yodeled.
In a sloppy tangle, they plummeted down a mudslide of ore. They tore through wire roots and jutting branches, clinging to anything to slow their drop. The ground pitched steeper, until there was nothing beneath them but air.
Splat! Phoebe landed on Micah, blasting the air out of his lungs. Even that didn’t stop him from wheezing with laughter.
She heard a series of aching metal creaks above their heads. Phoebe grabbed his armor—hauled him back in the nick of time.
SNAP.
Giant metal jaws the size of an Auto-mobile trunk crashed shut right where Micah’s head had been. She saw them in terrifying detail—firework orange with canary-yellow stipples, lined in brutal foot-long steel fangs. The massive mouth groaned and retracted in a rustling scrape of metal foliage.
“Oooooooooh,” Micah said in dazed wonder.
This was bad.
She and Micah had fallen into a sunken grotto that twinkled with the toxin from countless pinwheel flowers. There were hundreds of fanged shapes settling among the blooms, but she couldn’t make them out clearly.
Very, very bad.
“I think the playground’s this a-way, Freddy!”
She turned around just in time to see Micah stumble deeper into the glittering darkness. Snap, snap, snap! Rainbow-colored mandibles clamped shut, shearing off a panel of his armor like it was made of cardboard. She rushed after him.
“Stop!” Phoebe cried. She spun him around, and he sneezed in her face. A chorus of creaks. She hurled him to the ground.
CRASH. All around them, fanged jaws slammed shut. A wall of teeth pinned them in, every size and every magnificent color.
After a couple of seconds, the mouths retracted, creaking as they hinged back open. It went deathly quiet. Her breath came in constricted gasps. She looked around at the spongy bog as one of the snapping things flattened out, nestling into the stagnant mud so that only the tips of its magenta fangs poked out.
Phoebe was reminded of biology class when Mr. Pomeroy made her feed bugs to a Venus flytrap. She stared in horror at the hundreds of fanged rings lying in wait all around them. Some were as small as coins, others as wide as Aero-copter pads.
More like Venus beartraps, she thought with a shudder.
“Ahhhh…ahhhhh…AHHHHH—”
“Micah! No, no, no, don’t sneeze,” she hissed, shaking him.
He looked at her with glazed eyes and rubbed at his nose.
“I said cut that out, Freddy. Or I swear I’ll sock you one.” He shoved Phoebe, and she took a step back to keep her balance.
Through the sparkling gloom up ahead, she saw an elevated mound that led out of the grotto.
Micah started using a strand of metal vine as a jump rope.
“What are you…” Phoebe gaped.
“Coach said I couldn’t beat your record,” he said, huffing and puffing, “but I bet I…ahhh…AHHH—”
“Whatever you do, don’t sneeze. Don’t sneeze!” Phoebe whispered. She snatched his jump-rope vine and tugged him toward her as a couple of jaws nearly snapped shut on his butt.
While he pawed at his nose like a bear swatting a bee, Phoebe spun him around and wrapped him up with the vine.
“Wheeeeeeeeeeee!” he cried, whirling.
The jaws creaked.
“Keep it down, Micah,” she hissed. “We’re in the library.”
“Library?” he scoffed. “I don’t care about no stinkin’—”
“It’s a Moto-bike library.”
His eyes lit up.
“Really?” he whispered.
Phoebe smiled and nodded. “And if you are very quiet and you follow me…maybe the little Moto-bikes will come out to play.” She tied off the vine, leaving a strand to serve as a leash.
“Ya think we’ll see an Afterburner ZX?”
Again, she smiled and nodded. She picked up his rifle and tugged him toward the mound that would lead them out.
“It was discontinued after the recall of 2002. In a tutu. Toodleoo, tutu!” A demented smile spread across Micah’s rosy cheeks as he babbled.
Phoebe prodded at the ground with the butt of the rifle. Each time she did so, fanged traps clanged shut, and she stepped around them, guiding Micah while they creaked and reset. It was slow and tedious, and the tension was turning her knees to jelly, but they were inching toward safety.
Until they weren’t.
Phoebe faced a tunnel of traps, fangs sticking out of the mud like railway spikes and slung low in a menacing, phosphorescent ceiling. She turned around to go back, but the predatory plants had shifted and closed in behind them.
The way out was only a dozen yards ahead.
But they would be devoured if they took another step.
“I think this may be my favorite gumdrop, I…ahhh…ahhh…”
Phoebe spun to stifle his sneeze. “No, Micah! Don’t—”
Then she had an idea.
She kicked at the nearby pinwheel flowers, causing them to spurt out a gust of glitter. Micah coughed and sputtered.
“Ahhhh…ahhhhhh…AHHHHHH…”
Using the rifle, she nudged more of the blooms to raise a cloud of twinkling toxin. Micah was red-faced and huffing.
“AHHHHH…AHHHHH…AAACCHHOOOOOO!”
The splattering blast echoed through the grotto, greeted by a hundred clangs. Venus beartraps slammed shut all around.
“Micah, look!” Phoebe said, pointing to the way out. “An Afterburner ZX! And it’s got your name on it!”
His eyes lit up. She released his tether.
Micah tore off through the grotto in a clash of armor, hurdling over hungry plants. Phoebe sprinted after him, ducking around the traps that were resetting and preparing to feed.
Dry ground just ahead.
Micah tromped up the incline.
Phoebe heard the creak. She coiled and dove. There was a whoosh of wind behind her, and she retracted her legs.
SNAP.
The wall of garish fangs slammed closed and she fell to the ground with a thud. She felt a pressure on her boot—one of her laces was clamped in the plant’s teeth.
She ripped it free.
“Changed my mind,” Micah huffed. “This library’s a drag.”
I know he is there before I open my eyes. Taste him on the air, through the slime of my skin. It’s something I am learning to do.
I can tell the Greencoats apart like this, with my eyes closed. The man with the harelip scar. The woman who blinks too much. Taste them when they come with their probes and their burning wires. But I don’t mind the pain anymore.
It nourishes me.
They marvel at my recovery. I do not writhe when they inject me now. Do not sputter and scream when they touch my not-skin. They think I hurt less. Say I must be healing.
They are wrong. Pain flares as bright. Brighter. But instead of blinding me, it illu
minates. The pain is showing me the way.
I can smell color now—tangy red and rich, savory blue. I feel light. See in complex dimensions. Spatial relation, heat signature. Beginning to understand. Minute by minute, hour by hour, I feel my brain stitching itself back together.
I am changing. Turning into something new.
My body is a stranger to me. Do not recognize these hands. These horrid lumps that were once feet. I avoid polished steel and glass, anything that might reflect my face.
Do not know how long I have waited for him. Wished him to return and he is here, taste of Durall and moisturizer. Mr. Goodwin. Concerned. Leaning in. No needles in his hand, not like the Greencoats. Just his clipboard. Hear his heart beating, steady. His breath like a warm blanket. I float on the calm he brings.
My eyes are zoomed in like binoculars. Struggle to blink my vision back to normal to read his words.
“BECAUSE OF YOU, WE FOUND THE COVENANT.”
I try to answer. He does not understand my gurgle.
“BUT THE CHILDREN LIVE. THEY HELP THE ENEMY.”
I moan. Sides of my mouth tear. Skin and lips shearing, peeling, curling away from the black hole of my mouth. He tries not to react, but I feel the flutter of his pulse.
“WE WILL FIND THEM. YOU AND I.”
I strain, shake. Furious. My blood bakes me from the inside.
“THE BOARD IS TRYING TO STOP ME,” he writes.
I rasp an answer. He nods as if he understands.
“THEY KEEP ME FROM SEARCHING FOR THE CHILDREN.”
I growl. Their hateful names burn holes into my thoughts.
“YOU MUST BE IN SUCH AGONY. I AM SO SORRY.”
His words wrap the wound that is my body like bandages. The sensation is electric. A cough in the next room distracts me, feel it through the wall. The Greencoats.
They hate me. Not half as much as I hate them. Give me the chance and I will shatter them, offer their pieces to Mr. Goodwin.
Mr. Goodwin, who is so kind.
“BUT THE BOARD WILL NOT LET ME HELP YOU.”
Cannot control myself. I snap, spray spittle at Mr. Goodwin. He shields himself with his clipboard. My spit froths. Dark ulcers bubble up on the metal tablet. Mr. Goodwin stares at it curiously.
I feel ashamed. Edge away from him. He reaches out and touches my hand with his rubber-gloved one.
Emotion chokes me with joy. And pain.
“I WILL HAVE YOU BY MY SIDE. WE WILL MAKE IT RIGHT.”
My face stretches, muscles twisting, skin peeling. But Goodwin is not afraid of my grisly display. He understands.
And he smiles back.
The toxin wore off soon after Phoebe and Micah escaped the grotto, and exhaustion overcame them. She led him to a clearing away from those pinwheel flowers and let him rest.
It was getting late, and she was worried about being in this jungle after dark, but it couldn’t be helped. He needed sleep.
She wet a corner of her skirt with a squirt of water and wiped away the glitter clinging to his face—the face she had so stupidly kissed earlier that morning. Micah looked so different now. Without that smug grin, he was just an innocent ten-year-old kid. All that cockiness and bluster, those obnoxious things that made him who he was, all of it was gone as he slept.
Phoebe settled back against a tahnik to relax, but it was impossible. Too many worries pressed in. Would they find a Hearth in that nearby city? If so, they could contact the Ona and get the Aegis to take them to wherever they were supposed to go. If only Orei were here, at least Phoebe would feel safe. And Dollop too—she missed him terribly.
Dollop. What a sad, hard place this world would be without him. But what could she have done?
Phoebe couldn’t even save her own father.
The thought of him tightened the screws of her heart.
She pulled the whist over her head and retreated into its comforting silence. Phoebe attempted to purge her mind of doubt, to quiet the chattering voices inside—to feel fiercely the love of her father.
All around her, the colors of the jungle were a dazzling, noiseless dream. Her muscles relaxed. She felt herself sink deeper. Her heartbeat was a soothing drone.
Inhale. Exhale. In. Out…
Time evaporated.
Had she fallen asleep?
It was a strange, numbing sensation, like being preserved in amber. In the dark, she saw a vague point of dancing light. It slipped away each time she noticed it, so she allowed her mind to drift, to let the shape form and dissolve.
She felt a presence.
Phoebe turned her mind to focus on it, to try and grasp it.
It vanished. In a snap, she was back in her body, aware of the hardness of the ore beneath her. She sat up abruptly and pulled off the whist, welcoming back the sounds of the jungle.
Phoebe’s body tingled, thrilling with wonder.
She had come close to…something.
“What’s up with you?” Micah asked.
He was sprawled out beside her, hands behind his head. He had discarded his bulky body armor and copper helmet, perhaps finally realizing that it was more hindrance than help.
“I…” Phoebe whispered, “I don’t know.”
“I know the feeling,” Micah muttered.
“Are you okay?” she said. “You seem a little less crazy.”
“Yeah,” he huffed. “Sorry ’bout all that.” He shifted uncomfortably. “I could use a pillow right about now, though.”
“And a hot shower,” Phoebe agreed, feeling the dried sweat and ore caking her skin. “Then a bowl of fresh strawberries.”
“Even a coupla real trees and clouds would be nice,” Micah added. “I’m about ready to head back home.”
“We can’t.”
“Not now,” he explained. “After our mission, I mean.”
Phoebe looked at him, unsure. “After everything we’ve seen, knowing what we know,” she said, “how could we?”
There was a long silence.
“So what? We just stay here? Like, forever?” Micah grumbled.
She didn’t have an answer.
“Well, that’s lame. I thought we’d be heroes, y’know? But once we find this Occulyth thingie, no one’s gonna know we basically saved the world. If we don’t tell ’em, it won’t mean a thing to folks back home.”
“It will. It’ll change everything,” Phoebe replied. “Saving Mehk means no more Auto-mobiles, or Cable Bikes, or anything like that. It’s all going to stop—because of us. Do you think people in Meridian are going to thank us for that?”
Micah prodded tenderly at a blister on his hand. “Then we’ll just have to make them understand.”
She stroked the rumpled folds of her whist, pondering the sensation it had given her, of being connected…to something.
“You’re right,” she said at last.
“I am?”
Phoebe nodded.
“People will change,” she said. “They’ll have to.”
She glanced up at the rosy liquid sky glowing beyond the canopy. The ring of suns was expanding toward the horizon.
“It’s gettin’ late,” Micah noticed.
Phoebe got to her feet.
“And we’ve got work to do,” she said.
Phoebe and Micah heard the city long before they reached it. As the suns sank, a jaunty polyrhythmic clang filled the jungle, something like a cement mixer full of frozen glockenspiels.
A wall of red tahnik foliage was moving up ahead.
No, not foliage.
“Get down,” Micah whispered.
The two of them scrambled for cover. Just beyond the undergrowth, a throng of shaggy scarlet lumps milled about, bumping into one another. The musical jangle grew louder.
“What is this place?” Phoebe wondered.
They climbed a tahnik, trying to get a better view.
It looked like a bustling marketplace. Mehkans unloaded shipments from lumbering pack animals that were like giant, scaly caterpillars. There were bushels
of ruby wool, crimson foil, and rosy streamers—red material of every kind.
“Are they…decorating?” Micah asked.
“No,” she said, watching a pair of mehkans purchase a heap of leafy red covering and proceed to wrap themselves in the stuff. Phoebe looked at him with a sly smile. “Costumes.”
They shimmied along the tahnik tendrils toward the rear of the huge beasts of burden. Shooting a quick glance around the bustling market, Micah clung to the branch with his legs and dangled his body below it like a possum. He snatched a couple of bundles of red material and handed them up to Phoebe.
They retreated back into the jungle. After a few minutes of wrapping and assembling, they were ready. Phoebe was swathed in fringed red ribbon and a coat of scraggly, wine-colored feathers with eyeholes she had cut out using the Multi-Edge. Micah was draped in a coarse, musky pelt, with a frizzy pink puffball swamping his head.
“Why I gotta get the goofy lookin’ stuff?” he grumbled.
“It brings out your eyes,” she teased. “Can you see?”
“Sorta.”
“Then follow me.”
They emerged from hiding and were instantly caught in a surge of mehkans. She and Micah raced along with the horde, plunging through clouds of fragrant cook-fire smoke and passing under giant, multicolored lantern bags. The crowd poured through the marketplace, winding uphill on ground that was smooth and bone pale, streaked with gray and black like marble.
A cluster of crimson-costumed mehkans erupted into a dance in the middle of the crowd.
Phoebe cut around the disruption and trudged up another incline. She looked back through her eyeholes to ensure the pink puffball was still behind her. Then the crowd parted for a moment, and she saw the city looming ahead.
The entire metropolis was carved in a series of ripples, concentric rings that grew increasingly steep as they approached the center. Soaring facades were pocked with oval doors and windows that indicated dwellings within. The heart of the city was an explosion of pearlescent waves hundreds of feet high, ivory swells cresting like fingers that stretched toward the swirling evening sky. It looked like someone had tossed a boulder into a pool of milk, and the resulting ripples had frozen solid.
Phoebe ducked her head as the mob plunged through a tunnel that led beneath one of the sweeping waves. The winding passage buzzed with clattering echoes of music.
