by Holly Hook
Either way, we had to hide.
Matt gagged and spat up some of the disgusting water. “I might be sick from this later,” he said.
“Then we'll have to deal with it,” I said. “Climb out.” I kicked again, and my foot found a rotting log. We sloshed towards the opposite shore. Could Celeste fire that heat gun this far?
I wouldn't take the chance. I pulled Matt out of the water and we slogged onto shore, brushing through red vegetation and dripping. Matt coughed again, but regained control and shook his arm out of mine.
“Run,” he said.
He was different now.
Scared.
But I did as he said, and ran.
The two of us bolted through the underbrush, jumping over more fallen logs and other remains of a forest that no longer was. Scarlet ferns formed a ceiling over our heads. At least these life forms seemed to have sucked up some of the smog because the air didn't stink quite as bad here. If Celeste was on the move, we couldn't hear.
It was terrifying.
At last, Matt and I stopped in a small clearing, where a bit of dirt and a patch of actual green grass remained. Matt panted and put his hands on his thighs, leaning over and sucking in air.
“That was close,” he managed. “I screwed up, Tess. I shouldn't have let Calvin get on board.”
“It was my idea to let him come,” I said.
“He would have lived if we had made him stay behind,” Matt said. “I agreed to it. And then we got distracted and let Marv's girlfriend sneak up on us like that. We should have heard the footsteps before she reached us or felt the vibration of the ground.”
“Those things move so fast that it wouldn't have mattered. I think these plants muffled the sound." Why was Matt beating himself up so bad? "Listen. We can't even hear that huge fire burning. These aren't normal plants."
It was so, so silent out here.
“I think you're right,” Matt said. He straightened up and managed to speak with more ease. “Those footsteps—you can't normally miss them. I think this vegetation muffled the sound or something.” Then Matt cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hello!”
Bulbs trembled, and leaves shook.
"That's weird," I said.
“They're from an underground world,” Matt said. “Maybe they feed on other forms of energy. Vibrations from earthquakes, maybe.”
“I don't want to discuss how alien plants work,” I said. “I want to figure out what we're going to do next. We're kilometers from civilization and we have no walker. Celeste is standing over ours and if she has a passenger with her, they'll steal it. Then we'll have two tripods coming after us. Next time, she might drop a smoke bomb.” I wasn't sure if Matt and I would have survived that, even underwater. I remembered her fury. She must have found Marv. Celeste had come here with the mission of stopping Matt and me. She would have gone to the park after getting all the info she wanted out of Fiona.
But Matt wasn't listening. He stalked away into the crimson plants, kicking at one. It shuddered in that strange way.
“Don't feed them more,” I said. “That's the last thing we need.”
“We failed Fiona,” Matt said. “There's no way we're going to reach the Great Council now. All that's left is to watch them ship the rest of humanity off to Mars.” He spoke like someone with his dreams dashed.
“Listen,” I said. I had an idea. “We lost our walker once, but all we have to do is wait for another cylinder to land. They're pretty visible. I still have the baton.” I realized that I had tucked it into my belt. “We can still attack any radicals who arrive before they get their walker built. We have a chance to get one back, and maybe interrogate the radicals into giving us information about Fiona. She might still be alive. She's the one with the launch codes, and I can't imagine someone like her giving them away.”
Matt faced me. More like, he glared. “You don't understand,” he said. “It took me a lot to get Fiona to trust me in the first place. It's a complicated story. Do you think I wooed her with just my drawings? It took me coming here and planting the tracking capsule to win her full trust. You didn't see how she treated me before you got there."
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“My dad's in the Identity movement,” Matt reminded me. "People do judge me by that."
“But you said he's not a radical,” I said, following him. I wasn't sure where he planned on going. We were out in an alien wilderness. “Right?”
“Right,” Matt said. “Still, that fact made her not completely trust me for a while. Sure, she was friendly, but I could tell that she didn't want to tell me everything about how this invasion would work.”
That explained why Matt didn't know all the controls or how the nanobots built the walkers and other machines. He had almost as many gaps as I did. It also partly explained why he'd been so eager to get to Base A, taking me across the surface of Mars in the process. There seemed to be more to Matt than I realized.
“Where's your mom?” I blurted. It seemed like Matt wanted Fiona to fill that role.
“She and my dad divorced when I was a baby. They couldn't stand each other by the time I was born.”
“That sucks.” I felt like I was prying.
“I know what you're about to say,” Matt said. “Fiona's like my second mom, and I'm upset because I'm worried about her. And you're right.”
“You're open,” I said. “Psychologists would love to study you.”
Matt laughed. “I don't think people would study me for my personality. In case you haven't noticed, I'm green.” He flexed his biceps as if to make a point.
“I'm getting used to it,” I said.
We walked side by side now, through the underbrush. I brushed aside red leaves and bulbs, trying not to feel sick when I felt liquid sloshing around inside of those. At least these plants hadn't attempted to hurt us, unlike the human Celeste and that heat gun. If they were like the Grounders, they didn't have DNA. Their needs would be way different than ours.
I hoped the soil was enough to supply the iron they liked because blood was a decent supply.
What freaked me out was the way these plants ate our footsteps. Well, the noise they made.
I heard my feet hit the ground, snapping twigs and other things, but the sounds didn't linger as long as they should. It was as if the plants absorbed them before they could travel very far. Our voices, too. The whole forest was silent. Even the breeze seemed subdued. We might have only heard the fire because the river was open and free of plants. It could be why we couldn't hear the walker or the flames from here.
“Matt, we're not going to know how close Celeste is until she's right on us,” I said.
“She might take a while to find out we're not dead,” Matt said. “Oil fires burn for a while. We need to find the transport tunnel before she does. If we can get on the belt, we can get closer to where we need to go. The only risk is that we might not see the next cylinder or where it lands. There's no guarantee the other scouts got to where they needed. If any of them got caught, they would have had to plant their capsules wherever they happened to be at the time. That was part of Fiona's emergency plans.”
“Let's hope they all got to where they needed to go,” I said. “Or not.”
“We still need to know how far we are from the tunnel,” Matt said.
“I think it'll be to our left,” I said. It had been, arching over the river. That was if my memory worked right with my animal brain.
“Maybe one of us should climb one of these things,” Matt said, stopping at one of the stalks. He had paused at a large one, covered in those bulbs as if it had warts or cysts. The liquid inside sloshed a bit as he spoke. It was gross. He reached out and shook the stalk. It was thick and the size of a small tree, with no leaves and no little hairs like a natural plant.
“Ladies first?” I asked.
“Ladies first,” Matt said at the same time.
I had to keep myself from rolling my eyes.
“I
'm kidding,” Matt said. “I'll go up. I'm probably lighter by a little bit. I should be able to poke my head above all of this.”
“I'm not easy to gross out, but I don't want to climb this Martian crap,” I said, thinking of the walker we had been forced to leave behind. Had we stayed and tried to take it back, Celeste would have murdered us.
"Tess," Matt said.
"What?"
"Never mind."
I watched Matt scale the stalk and the ugly cysts that stuck to it. I wanted to flinch at the sight of the liquid sloshing inside. I had never thought that Earth was already this overrun. All that was left for the Grounders to do was deport all of us, or worse. Matt kept his footing pretty well. It seemed that he was getting used to full gravity all over again.
He poked his head above the ceiling of red ferns. “We’re about a kilometer from the tube,” he said. “I can’t see the walker in all this smog.” He coughed. “She must not be too close, then. We have to be careful.”
“At least you know which direction we need to go,” I said.
Matt climbed down. More like, he slid down during the final half of the journey. I had to catch him as he landed.
“You okay?” I asked, aware that I had my hands on his torso.
Matt pulled away from me. “Yeah. Look, let’s not get close or anything. One of us could die within the next day.” His tone was hard and final.
I balked. Something about our latest near death experience had changed Matt, and not for the better. War was getting to him. Calvin might have convinced him that the two of us were next on the chopping block. Maybe it was better not to get too close, but his words still hurt.
“Fine,” I said, shocked at how I sounded. “We stay apart, we see where the next cylinder lands, and we take out the radicals there and commandeer their walker. Sounds like a plan.”
Matt walked faster. At least he knew which direction we had to go. The transport tube was long, so at least we stood little chance of missing it. But Celeste would expect us to go there.
My stomach rumbled. There was no food out here. If this life didn’t have DNA, it might not be compatible with us. I didn’t want to risk eating any of these strange plants. I had been around enough strangeness to last a lifetime.
So I followed Matt. Eventually, after pushing through more dead logs and stepping over red vegetation, I saw the glass tube again, grimy as ever. Blobs that were people zipped past, moving at incredible speeds. I knew that they couldn’t see us. It was hard to view the world outside from indoors. The Grounders must have designed it that way.
“How do we get in?” Matt asked. “There have to be emergency doors for rescuers to use in case of an emergency.”
I tried to brush away his words, but they lingered. Matt wanted nothing to do with me other than business. I would have to live with it. “There have to be,” I said. I realized that I hadn’t paid attention to the tubes much until now. I had zipped along these all my life, moving too fast to care, and I hadn’t even thought to check for emergency doors. Dad had always wanted to know where an exit was in case things got ugly, but I had brushed him off until now. He had been right to view the world through a paranoid lens.
“We’ll just have to walk along this until we find something,” I said. “Our other choice is to wander through this wilderness until we starve to death.”
So Matt and I walked along the transport tube, watching the shapes zip past. It was another world on the other side of that glass, where people were going about their business and maybe reading the news of the invasion on their contact displays. Perhaps some of them were fleeing. I couldn’t know. If we joined them, Matt would stand out. There must be word spreading that the people piloting these walkers were green. I wondered what the official story was.
But if we got inside the tube, we would never see the fourth cylinder as it fell.
“Matt,” I said. “We need to stay outside.”
“Are you crazy?” he asked, looking back. Of course, we couldn’t see the sky well from down here, thanks to all the ferns. The sky we could see was greenish-yellow, the color of vomit, and thick. “If we get into the tube, Celeste won’t see us.”
“But we also won’t see where the fourth cylinder lands,” I said. “We might not be able to in this smog, anyway.” The third had come down somewhere not far from here, and it had shown up as a green light. I hoped that even in the daytime, it would stand out.
But Grounders might get there first. The closer we got to the Great Council, though, the better chance we’d have. The cylinders were supposed to surround the general area. Even if we missed the fourth arrival, we might catch the fifth.
“You have a point,” Matt said. “We stay outside, but we walk along this thing. Celeste won’t see us down here as long as we avoid any clearings. We know that we’re not going to hear her.”
“I’m glad we agree,” I said. “I’d love to get in there, but maybe we can once we get close to the museum.”
We continued to walk. There wasn’t much we could do. My feet began to ache, and the muscle between my thigh and abdomen protested every time I lifted my leg to step over a fallen log. I wondered what type of forest this had been before this crap overran it. Trees were an endangered species unless humans managed to grow them on Mars someday. Maybe some other Earthers had seed banks, though I didn’t know how much longer our movement would last with the way things were going.
The day dragged on. I hadn’t realized how much distance was really between cities until now. Before the pollution had gotten this bad, people lived more scattered, and some even had homes in the country. Cabins, even. Today people all gathered in cities, trying to hang around parks and pockets of fresh air. No one could survive out here.
We found emergency doors every once in a while, maybe every couple kilometers or so, and they all had numbers on them. Matt and I walked past numbers four through eleven, and then we saw nothing until the mid-twenties. At last, we came to a door that was labeled SOLAR SYSTEM MUSEUM.
I stopped and pulled on Matt’s sleeve. “Look,” I said.
“Oh,” Matt said. “I’m not happy to see that place again.”
“But we’re close to where we met,” I said. “Calvin told us we’d have to walk past the museum and the spaceport to get to the Great Council. We can’t go over mountains. The problem is, we can’t swim in a large lake, either. We’ll need a walker to get past that part.” I eyed the sky but saw no changes other than the faint sun struggling to shine through the crud. “We can’t go much further than this.”
“I hate this area,” Matt said. “The Grounders deported me twice from here.”
“I know you do.” I had an urge to comfort him, even though he was now trying to push me away. “I’ll have to go and buy you a mask to cover your face. Maybe some gloves, too. The Solar System Museum might have a gift shop.” I hadn’t checked the outside of the place when my class had arrived. My heart raced at the thought of going inside. I also had no access to any money without my contact display. I had an allowance account that my parents gave me for helping out around the park. The last time I’d checked, I had four hundred units saved. Not bad, but useless without my contacts. Of course, I could get new ones if I went to a Communication Center, but that would involve having my fingerprints taken. The fact that I was supposed to be on Mars would pop up just about right away. That plan wasn’t going to work.
But neither was letting Matt walk around, greener than pea soup.
I’d have to try something, then. I had no pollution mask. I could say that I had lost one, or I could do something terrible and steal. My stomach turned at the thought. I had to laugh. I had killed Grounders and the people they had once been, but I was worried about shoplifting.
That was if the Museum was even o right now. It might be. At least, the Mars Exhibit might be open. The Grounders had to continue to funnel people into their trap, especially now that they knew that we were trying to take back the planet.
“So now wha
t?” Matt asked. “I guess we can walk around the building, but I don’t know how much longer we’ll last out here.” He took a breath and wheezed.
“We can survive, but we’ll be hungry,” I said. We were back to this all over again, even though we had left Mars. “And thirsty. And tired. And possibly crushed under metal feet. Okay. Maybe I should steal us some food.”
Before I could elaborate on the plan, Matt’s eyes widened. He grabbed my arm and pulled me to the ground. “Get down!”
I dove down to lie on the dirt, right underneath a rotting log that had bugs crawling all over it. The next second, a long, massive shape smashed into the ground only meters away. Metal shone in the yellowish light. A crash sounded and got muffled a second later by the vegetation. A second leg crashed down to our left. The sound of this one never reached us, but I spotted the red stalks trembling with the impact.
I held my breath.
Celeste was patrolling the area along the tube after all. Due to the thick canopy and the sound-eating things, she could sneak up on us every time.
The first leg rose and arched over us as the walker took another massive step. I waited for that round foot to come down on us, ending our lives, but it never came. It seemed that she hadn’t noticed us down here. I uttered silent thanks that Fiona hadn’t equipped those things with infrared detectors or anything similar. If she had, Matt and I would both be dead by now.
“That was close,” Matt muttered. “If we don’t get inside, she’s going to crush us eventually. She missed by a short distance.”
“I’m glad you’re making me feel better.”
Matt said nothing. I was getting too close again. I had to stop. Matt felt bad enough about losing the walker and disappointing Fiona. He might not understand that I wasn’t her. I didn’t get him.
I tried to listen, but silence had fallen. I dared to peek out from under the fallen tree, only to find the shape of the walker towering overhead and fading into the smog. It was like watching a Lovecraftian monster roam over a different universe.
