Zenn Scarlett

by Christian Schoon

  A pencil-thin thread of blue-green light leapt from the head of the figure. The beam swept across the room, turned to a blue dot as it hit the wall, slid down to shine into her fixed, open eyes. The light blinked off then, as if it had taken all it needed from her. The black shape hobbled closer. Zenn strained to make herself stand, to push herself away, to hide, to escape, but it was no use.

  The dark figure clutched a small object in one hand. It passed the device near her head. A sensation of heat caressed her forehead and swept down across her face. Some kind of scan?

  “Yes. It is there!” The figure’s voice was a grating, guttural whisper. The voice wasn’t human, but Zenn couldn’t tell more than that, other than a vague, nagging hint of familiarity, as if she’d heard it, or something like it, before. The creature put the device away and went to her desk, pulled out the file box that held her computer shards. It turned, looked around the room, saw what it wanted and grabbed up her leather field kit. Opening the pack, it dumped the shards into it and slung it up onto its back.

  Shambling to where Zenn lay, the intruder reached underneath her with both arms and lifted her easily from the bed. It gave off a strong scent, a pungent, herbal smell, like sage, or tumeric. It turned and moved back toward the window, carrying her limp body.

  But before they’d gone halfway across the room, there was a high, shrill and very angry shriek. It could only come from one source: an enraged rikkaset. The thing carrying her barked out a low grunt of surprised pain – and then the familiar-yet-foreign sensation was there again, the molten surge of heat and dizziness, the vortex whirling somewhere deep inside, her mind somehow opening, receiving. She felt pain – this time, on her forehead, hot blades cutting her flesh. And then there was more. Images again, like with Liam’s injured cat. Colors and shapes cascading over her, flooding her mind. She was seeing… through other eyes. Whose eyes?

  Scenes rushed at her, a hallway, a corridor, the images shifting, moving too fast to comprehend. Voices, garbled words, some she could almost understand, but none that quite made sense. And, again like with Zeus, she knew with absolute certainty she was experiencing the past, not the present. Whose past?

  Next, the view of a door opening, an office, more garbled words. A person in the office, behind a desk. A human face... copper hair, a beard – her father! Yes, her father’s face. She was seeing through the eyes of someone, something, that was looking, had once looked, at her father.

  Warra Scarlett shouted at whoever had entered the room; he was mad, rising from the desk. An arm rose into Zenn-not-Zenn’s line of sight. There was a bulge at the end of the arm, on the wrist, something alive, like a shell of some sort. The shell opened, a long, fleshy tendril shot out from it and touched her father on his neck. He collapsed at once, knocking papers and computer shards from the desk as he toppled to the floor.

  A voice croaked, harsh, inhuman. It was the voice of the being whose eyes she was looking out of. It was the voice of the creature that had come into her room.

  “Get him up,” the voice said. Gloved hands reached in to take hold of her father, dragging him. The same voice again, “Take the shards. Take them all. Then seal this room. We are done here.”

  A momentary flashing like static interrupted, and then: a different room, her father’s body, stretched out on a low table or hospital gurney. He was breathing, but unconscious. Around him, devices, machinery – medical equipment, biosensors, cabinets, medicines. Like a hospital room, but smaller. Different. What was this place?

  And then a totally new sensation engulfed her. No, not a sensation – a rapid cascade of emotions: stunned disbelief, then shock, then anger. It was the mind of the creature who held her, in the present again, at this very instant. Her abductor was sensing Zenn as she sensed its thoughts, its memories. It was realizing for the first time that they were linked, that it was not alone inside its own head. Like a whisper, distant but distinct, a single word rose up in the creature’s mind:

  …nexus.

  A new sound cut through her, snapped the link, threw her back into her own body. The sound of growling, hissing. Katie. Zenn was back in her darkened room, where only a second seemed to have passed.

  Still held in the intruder’s arms, Zenn could tell from the sound that Katie was close, just above her – on the creature? The intruder reeled backwards, turned and tossed Zenn roughly down on her bed. From where she lay, Zenn saw a mass of red-purple fur covering the top of the creature – Katie had attached herself to the head of the shadowy figure, clawing, biting as the intruder flailed with his arms, trying to knock the furious animal from him. That’s what she’d felt when she entered the creature’s mind – Katie’s claws tearing at the creature’s face.

  The intruder managed to grab Katie by the neck. Pulling her off, it threw the rikkaset hard, out of Zenn’s line of sight. Something crashed loudly to the floor. Bookshelf? Zenn couldn’t see where Katie landed. Was she injured? Dead?

  The intruder snorted in anger, came to the bed, hefted Zenn’s body up across his shoulder. He went to the window and climbed through it, lowering itself down the wall. A moment later, they were out in the dark of the cloister yard, running across the ground, Zenn bumping up and down painfully on the creature’s shoulder as it ran.

  They were almost to the north wall when Zenn caught sight of a bulbous shape on the ground to one side of the path. As the creature carried her past, she saw what it was: Hamish. Dead? No – his antennae twitched lightly as they hurried by. Paralyzed, like her? Again, she willed her body to act, to do something, anything. But it was as if she had no body at all. And now, as the creature made its way onto a barrel top, and from there up and over the wall, she could tell the substance that flowed through her veins was about to make her lose consciousness. And then… darkness.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Zenn came to with her cheek pressed to a cold, packed clay floor. There was a corrugated metal wall several feet from her face. Her hands and legs were bound tightly, tape sealed her mouth. Her body ached as if it was one big, girl-sized bruise. The skin on her neck burned fiercely; she assumed from whatever had been used to paralyze her last night. Was it last night? She had no idea how much time had passed. She was about to attempt sitting up when she heard someone speaking. She froze.

  “…no, no. I was forced to act. I told you, the plan to use the goat-woman failed.” It was the guttural croak of the creature that had taken her. She forced herself to breathe carefully, slowly, so it wouldn’t notice she was awake.

  The creature’s voice paused now, and Zenn could hear the tinny, electronic sound of another voice, too faint to make out any of the words. Her abductor was talking to someone on a communicator of some kind.

  “Yes,” the creature croaked. “The Ciscan healers will now keep their lands. And the human girl would be kept from us behind their walls. The presence of the girl’s bug-guard prevented my taking her at the goat-woman’s residence. If we were to seize her, this was our only chance. You said the bug-guard within the Ciscan grounds could not be evaded. And I say the whip-whelk dealt with him as it did the girl. I have succeeded, where your overcaution has failed.”

  The other voice spoke again, a little louder. Zenn could tell it was angry.

  “Yes, failed, that is the word I use,” her abductor said. “I have the girl, and I will have the credit.”

  The other voice, the tone even more upset.

  Then, the creature’s voice. “Yes, yes, yes, I will conceal her in a place I know of and smuggle her onto the Helen. But I ask as I have asked before: will she do as we wish, when the time comes?” A pause as the other spoke. “Yes, I understand the value of having her father, I am not a fool. My question remains: is that enough? Sufficient to make her comply?” A longer pause. “Then the outcome rests upon you. Any failure will not fall on Pokt or my kind…. I will contact you when I have her aboard.”

  At the sound of steps approaching, Zenn shut her eyes and held very still, her heart pounding so hard she wa
s sure the creature could hear it thump. The binding on her hands was grabbed roughly and shaken. Then the bindings on her feet. It was testing to see if they were tight. Apparently satisfied, the creature’s footsteps retreated. There was the sound of a chain rattling, the metallic sound of a lock being secured, more footsteps, a more distant door opening and slamming, then silence.

  After a few seconds more, she rolled and, gasping from the pain it caused, forced herself into a sitting position.

  Her father! Had she really heard that? That they had him? She had to get out. She had to get free. They had her father, he was being held captive. She had to help him.

  She surveyed her surroundings. She was in storage area, behind a woven wire fence that reached from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, in some larger metal building. Beyond the fence that confined her was a small, outer space with shelves filled with boxes reaching to the ceiling and a single door. On pegs next to the door hung several battered hard-hats and three or four pairs of dingy workmen’s coveralls. There were no windows, just a few skylights in the roof.

  She saw the creature had left her field kit backpack on one of the shelves outside the fence. As she was looking at it, trying to think what she could possibly do next, the backpack moved, and the flap lifted up as if by an invisible string. A blurred swirl of purple-and-cream appeared, and then the face of a rikkaset materialized, gold-amber eyes blinking at her.

  Katie! Katie is here. My Katie.

  She must have hidden in the pack back in her dorm room.

  Katie scampered up to the chain link fence, sat, and signed: “Friend-Zenn. Come out now. Katie hungry. Katie eat right now?”

  Zenn tried to speak, but the tape over her mouth was firmly adhered. Pushing clumsily with her bound legs, she maneuvered her body over to the fence, turned and pushed herself back-first against the wire barrier.

  Her tied hands had just enough leeway to sign.

  “Katie, Friend-Zenn needs help. Katie help?”

  She craned her head around to see the rikkaset’s reply.

  “Katie hungry. Hungry. Hungry Katie. Katie eat?”

  Zenn breathed deeply, trying not to panic. Her abductor could return any second. And her only hope was a food-obsessed rikkaset.

  Zenn signed again. “Katie eats soon. But first, help Friend-Zenn. Help now.”

  “But Katie hungry, and very.”

  In desperation, Zenn pulled hard with her arms, sawing the bindings into her wrists, feeling friction burn of the rope. The rope. If it was same material that bound her feet, the binding on her hands was hemp-weave rope. Hemp was edible.

  “Katie, bite the rope,” she signed. “Eat. Eat the rope on Friend-Zenn’s hands.”

  “Rope good for hungry Katie?”

  “Delicious rope, yes. Good for hungry Katie.”

  A second later, there was the tickle of a furry head next to her hands, and then tiny, sharp teeth gnawing at the binding on her wrists. The rope, it turned out, was in fact good for a hungry Katie.

  Once her hands were free, she ripped the tape from her mouth and untied her feet. She went to the fence, shook it, and found it quite solid, the gate secured with a thick chain held in place by a large, metal padlock.

  “Friend-Zenn come out now?” Katie signed.

  “I’m trying!” Zenn cried.

  She pulled on the chain. It was much too heavy to break. She reared back and kicked at the door with all her strength. No visible effect. She rattled the fence again, making her wounded knuckles bleed, not caring. She looked around the cage that held her, searching frantically for another way out, any way out. There was none.

  “Katie wants home,” the little rikkaset signed. “Go home now and eats?”

  The sound of shattering glass came from the roof, and Zenn saw a pair of legs descend from the broken skylight. The legs thrashed briefly in the air, then a body lowered into sight, then a face, one eye in the face puffy and ringed by a halo of black and blue.

  “Liam?” Zenn was afraid she might be hallucinating, still under the influence of the paralyzing drug.

  “Who else?” he said, hanging by his fingertips from the edge of the skylight. He let go, dropped the eight or nine feet onto the top of the shelf below him, and jumped down to the floor. “Come on, we gotta get you outta here before that skirni comes back.”

  Zenn watched, too amazed to say anything further, as he pulled with both hands at the door between them. It didn’t budge, and he ran back to the shelves, searching.

  “I need something to pry with…” he said, but he found nothing. He saw Zenn’s vet kit, tore it open and rummaged inside. “Anything in here we can use?”

  Zenn’s mind was blank. Then it was filled with all the reasons Liam shouldn’t be here.

  Why isn’t he running, hiding someplace? Why is he pretending to care what happens to me?

  “Scarlett,” he said. “Is there anything in here?”

  She stared dully at him.

  After a few seconds, she seemed to finally come fully awake. “Yes. The kit, bring it here.”

  He brought the pack, and held it up so she could reach into it through the fencing.

  After a few moments she pulled out the items she wanted: a small spray vial and a pair of heavy metal forceps.

  “Stand back.”

  Liam gathered Katie in his arms and moved back.

  “What’s that stuff?”

  “Super-cooled nitrogen, for freezing dermal growths.”

  “What good will that do?”

  She didn’t answer, but sprayed the freezing nitrogen onto the lock securing the chain, shielded her eyes with one hand, and swung the forceps. The lock shattered like a china plate. She stepped through the door, free.

  “Whoa,” Liam said. “Nice work.”

  She picked up her vet kit and signed to Katie. The rikkaset hopped out of Liam’s grasp and into the pack.

  It was at this point Zenn noticed her teeth were chattering. She was freezing. Looking down at herself, she realized the reason: she was barefoot, and dressed in the faded, yellow cotton pajamas she’d had on when the intruder took her.

  She went to the wall where the workmen’s coveralls hung, grabbed what appeared to be the smallest pair, and pulled them on over her pajamas.

  “Liam, what are you doing here?” she said, as she rolled up the coverall pant legs.

  “Uh… it isn’t obvious?” He gestured at the broken skylight. “Rescuing?”

  “No,” she said, slinging one of the vet pack straps over her shoulder. “How did you find me?”

  “I was watching your room last night, alright?” he said sheepishly. “I needed to talk to you. Anyway, I saw the skirni go in through the window, then he came out, carrying you. I followed him here.”

  “The skirni? The same one who was out at Vic’s?”

  “Yeah, same one. Listen, Scarlett, can we have this talk later?”

  A skirni. Of course. In her room, the intruder’s shuffling gait, but not moving on three legs; walking with two legs and a tail.

  “We’ll never reach the skylight,” Liam said, looking at the ceiling. He went to the door in the far wall. “We’ll have to leave this way.”

  Slowly, carefully, he eased the door open and peeked out, then signaled for Zenn to follow.

  Was Liam telling the truth? Was this a trick of some kind? Should she trust him? It really didn’t matter. There were no other options.

  The room beyond was cavernous and filled with shipping containers, barrels and boxes, all piled one on top of the other. There was a door at the far end of the building, and they started for it.

  As they passed one of the biggest shipping containers, something alive roared loudly and threw its body against the container’s inner wall.

  “What is that?” Liam said.

  “Sandhog…” Zenn said, peering at the container. A bright yellow label read: “Caution. Live Animal.”

  “It’s Gil Bodine’s,” she said, reading the label. “He said he was goin
g to ship it back to the seller on Sigmund’s Parch. That means we’re in a warehouse at the launch port in Pavonis.”

  “I coulda told you that,” Liam said.

  With Liam’s hand poised to open the door to the outside, they heard the sound of shuffling footsteps approaching.

  “Damn.” Liam whispered. “He’s coming back. He’s wearing a weapon, and it’s alive – some kinda shell thing on his wrist. I saw him take down Hamish with it. We can’t let him spot us.”

  Zenn whirled around, took a few steps back into the room, eyes darting. They had to hide. Now. Where? Where?

  Zenn’s gaze settled on the sandhog’s shipping container. She dashed to the dumpster-sized crate, tossed her vet kit up onto its flat topside. A muffled squeak came from her pack.

  “Sorry, Katie,” she said softly, then pulled herself onto the crate. A second later, Liam was next to her. They both lay flat on the cold metal, and waited. The sandhog snorted and rumbled beneath them.

  The sound of the building’s door creaking open was followed by shuffling footsteps going quickly to the room where she’d been kept. She heard the inner door being opened, followed immediately by an inhuman howl of rage.

  “No! Gone? No. No no no. The nexus. The nexus, gone. How? Devilry. Sorcery.”

  The skirni’s anguished wailing continued, first from nearby, then farther off, as the sound of his footsteps retreated and advanced from one part of the building to another. At last, he was silent, and she heard only the footsteps running, then slowing to a walk and, finally, the sound of something electronic being switched on. The skirni began to talk, using the com device again.

  “…it is not Pokt’s fault,” he barked. “I was outside for seconds, mere seconds. When I returned, the human was gone. I searched the building. The gate-lock was broken. And there is a hole in the roof-glass, as if the girl flew away. As if by witchery.” A pause, the other, unintelligible voice, then the skirni again. “Oh? A superstitious savage? I am not. I told you before. The nexus is awake, inside the human. I know this.”