She hates tears, never had much time for them. When they come, they leave her vision blurry and she can’t have any of that, so she wipes them until her cheeks are sore.
“What are you sad for, Sidney?” the lady says. “Is there—someone that you miss in the world?”
“My nayne,” she says. “I lost her a year ago. She died—”
“Oh poor child. I lost my nayne years ago, too! Have you been by yourself since then?”
“Most of it,” she says, though something holds her back from talking about Petra or the raider. She’s reluctant to. Not until she’s actually seen this ‘feast’, and not until she’s eaten some of it.
They’re already out the door and heading down a small white hallway, with a layer of dark blue carpeting like they’re walking through the night sky.
The woman’s hand, though cool at first, warms to Sidney’s touch and the latter grips it tighter, not remembering the last time she’d felt the touch of another person.
Not since Nayne—she pushes the thought away. She doesn’t know why she keeps thinking of her nayne now but she doesn’t want to cry again, so she takes in her surroundings and tries to focus on everything she walks by as they head to the end of the hallway.
It’s empty, except for a line of pictures across one side.
She had pictures once, on her tablet, until she dropped it and cracked it and couldn’t see anything on it any more. These pictures don’t move though, and they’re framed in some sort of old-looking white stuff, as if they’re from an ancient time. “Antique” is the word that comes to mind, though she doesn’t know where she’d heard it from.
“Who are all these?” she asks. Some are pictures of little kids, some of old people unlike any others she’d met. No two pictures are the same, from what she can see. They’re all featuring different Allendians from who knows how long ago.
“This is our family,” the woman says. “These are part of our heritage, for it is a deep heritage of several dozens of people. This is our way to commemorate them all as they pass.”
Then she points at each one. “This was Sylvia,” she says, pointing to a picture of a heart-shaped face and pretty green eyes, deep and full of secrets. “She was our second cousin from another dome, she passed three years past.
“This one,” she says, pointing to the picture of a bespectacled man with a small brown mustache, “was Ben the baker. Oh what a great baker he was, too. I sorely miss his cakes. He passed not four months ago.”
She continues with her stories of all the other people, all the way down the hall until they finally reach the top of a stairwell and Sidney remembers to ask.
“What is your name?” Better than calling her ‘lady in blue’ in her head, she reckons.
“I’m Amelia, dear girl,” she says with a soft smile. Then she tucks a small section of her silky brown curls behind her left ear. “But you can call me Mother.”
Twenty-Two
Petra
They walk up the stairs, Petra’s tazer-hand ready, Henry to her side.
At the top of the stairs, they’re met with the front of the door, which appears less like a door and more like a trap, the closer they come to it.
“What now?” Henry says.
Petra continues her analysis and things don’t appear as they did at first. “I’m—not certain,” she claims as her brows furrow. He stares at her, then at the door.
“You said that there’s someone in there with the flu, didn’t you? Don’t you need to go in and—I don’t know—get them?”
“That is my role,” she agrees, though she still does not move forward.
Her analysis tells her now that things are not what she had initially thought and she steps back from the door again, doing an internal scan.
“Something’s—my systems require debugging,” she concludes. “Now my scanners tell me that Sidney is in this house after all. I can not find the being with the flu...that’s not right. I need debugging.”
“And what exactly does that mean?” Henry watches her confused face. “I mean, where do you need to go to have that done? Is that something you can do here? Or—”
“I need to go to the southern dome,” she replies as her forehead clears and she stares back up at him. “But for now, I am certain Sidney is in this house. We must go in to find her.”
She turns to the door. Seeing no bell or button, she grabs hold of the heavy brass handle—shaped as an over-sized bird of prey, and she brings it down to bang on the door.
Something shows up in her scans quickly as the sound reverberates and carries all around them, but the scan goes away as quickly as it showed up. She doesn’t have the opportunity to analyze it thoroughly.
They wait.
A minute later, she brings the handle down again, and again, and again.
No one comes.
“Do we break in?” Henry asks as he places his hand on the door, as if to feel its heft under his palm. “I mean what do you need to do now? You protect the girl, right?”
Petra’s head tilts to the left, then she pauses. Her training tells her to protect Allendians, unless they have the flu, to keep them safe and secure until the re-emergence happens. Her training does not indicate she has to keep all Allendians in her keep until the re-emergence, long as she knows they’re safe.
However, this much is clear to Petra—her current task is to bring the girl to the vault of food, and then bring her to the southern dome to have her blood tested.
So, go into the house, they must, she decides.
All this happens in a span of a few seconds. Petra steps as far back from the door as possible, then speeds forward faster than Henry can see.
She’s already through the door before he knows what she’s done. The wooden slab that looked near-impenetrable to him crashes to the floor beyond with a loud bang and shudders dust into the air as Petra steps over it into the room beyond.
It only takes Henry a moment before he follows her footsteps, and walks into the vast entry hall of the house.
“Woah,” Henry says, as he takes in the fifteen foot ceilings, chandeliers, and—twenty feet ahead—a staircase that takes up the entire east wall, leading up to who knows how many bedrooms beyond.
“How does a place like this belong—here?” Henry asks.
Petra doesn’t respond, but knows his meaning. This massive home doesn’t fit with the overall look of Allenda. In fact, in all her years living on the planet, she’d never come across anything so vast or full of older furnishings.
“The build,” Petra says, “Is illegal and unusual. It does not make sense.”
“How long do you reckon it’s been here?” Henry says as he turns, his eyes roaming over the walls of the place.
Petra analyzes the materials in the wall, the timber floors, and the paint. “Inconclusive,” she replies. “They are not made as they appear. This is—some illusion of sorts I haven’t seen before.”
She sees that some of it is made of the same metallic powder she is, an Allendian creation of microscopic nanites, silicon, and mimetic poly-alloy compounds unique to the planet. She doesn’t understand why it was combined in this manner. “This isn’t something the Allendians do,” she states.
No matter how much she analyzes the stuff, it doesn’t register what it is or what its purpose is, other than to appear as an old-style home unlike any she’s seen in Allenda.
“How old are you anyway?” Henry blurts, taking her momentarily out of her analysis of the walls. Clearly, she’s built to look like a twenty-something woman, but his meaning is clear—how long ago was she built?
“Two hundred and three,” she replies.
Before Henry can respond, someone coughs just three meters away and they both turn.
Twenty-Three
Sidney
Nayne always told Sidney to eat all her food right away, try not to keep too much of it around, else it would turn bad before she gets to it.
However, when they walk into a new room and s
ee a table full of food, she knows that’s not about to happen this time. Because the thing is filled with so much food, it would take her a whole year, she reckons, maybe two, to finish it all.
Even then—why is there so much food on the table? There’s only her and the other lady. Are they gonna eat all this up?
The table is one long piece of solid wood, it could seat over thirty people. Its entire surface is covered under so many full platters, she looks for indentations in the ground, under the mere weight of the thing. But the floor is solid, all wood and stone in some portions.
“Who else is coming?” Sidney asks. She ignores the fact that the lady told her to call her “Mother” because that’s not likely to happen. She had a nayne, there’s no one else. Why would she ever call someone else Nayne when Nayne was the best mother the world ever did see?
“What do you mean?” Amelia says.
“I mean there’s too much food on this table for just you and me. So who else is coming to eat with us?”
Amelia tilts her head again and offers a bigger smile. “No, no one else is coming. Not right away, but please, help yourself.”
Sidney takes a deep breath and relishes in the smells she’s never experienced before. She can’t quite describe any of it. It’s too much for her senses and she wants to leave the room and come back in several times just to smell it for the first time over and over again.
“Are you wondering where you should start?” Amelia says.
No, she thinks. She was wondering how something like this could exist anywhere in the Blue Dome, just hours from where she’s been scrounging for food along with her nayne for the last several years. They didn’t always stay in the same place. Where was this back then? Why did they never find it and why did they have to suffer for so long when they didn’t have to?
“I suggest you start down one side of the table,” Amelia says, “then move your way across. That way you get to have a taste of absolutely everything we have to offer.”
Sidney’s belly growls in agreement, but for some reason she can’t make her legs move.
What is it that makes her hesitate? She tries to push back the growing discomfort in the back of her head, like a niggling voice that warns her to be careful. She has no reason not to trust this lady, after all. She’s kind, she’s offered nothing but comfort and friendship and food.
So—what is that?
Then Sidney remembers where she was before she woke up in this bizarre home, remembers a baby in a structure, the snake.
“What happened to that baby?” she blurts as her feet stay put. “And the thing that bit me? The snake—”
“Snake!” Amelia says. “There are no snakes around these parts!” Her eyes flash, like it’s the most amusing thing in the world, but Sidney catches when she answers, her eyes dart left then up to the right, so Sidney decides not to believe her. Why would she lie?
“But—”
“We found you ill in the forest, faint probably from hunger, from thirst. Then we brought you here. Looks like you’ve traveled a ways. Maybe that was a hallucination—”
She’s never heard such a word before, but it makes her wonder if it’s something to do with howling, or maybe someone being loose somewhere—?
“What’s that?” Sidney says.
“You know, like a—like a dream. You saw things that weren’t there. Maybe your body was tired from the travels.”
That gives Sidney pause, and she swallows her words. The structure seemed real enough, she thought. She had been hungry before, thirsty, tired. She’d never had a hallucination a day in her life. What if Amelia’s right, though? Then, did she also dream of Petra? The raider?
Sidney never dreams—or at least if she does, she never remembers the dreams the moment she wakes up. When she was younger, she’d wake from a scary dream some times. Nayne used to tell her to look for certain colors around her in the world. She told her if there was never any hint of red, she was probably in a dream. Her dreams when she was a child were usually creamy, in pastels and light shades she rarely saw in the real world of Allenda. She’d noticed there wasn’t ever any red.
She looks around the room now—there’s a red lamp shade, small hints of red in the tablecloth. This is definitely not a dream, she decides.
Now, she tries to recall her time with Petra. There were reds around them then.
But what about the structure? The baby she saw was in a cotton sky-blue onesie, with tiny white ruffles on the edge of its sleeves. Not that she was keeping an eye out for it then, but she doesn’t recall having seen anything red in there.
So—maybe—
Or could this also be a lie, she wonders? She’s sure Amelia lied about the snake, what else?
Something simply doesn’t feel right.
Her nayne always told her to trust her instincts. When she’d asked what those are, Nayne had placed her hand on Sidney’s sternum and said, “What does it feel like in here? Does it tell you to turn left or right? Does it tell you to run? Does it tell you to stay put? Listen to what this tells you, over anything or anyone else. Trust your instincts.”
Right now, her sternum tells her she needs to find a way out of here, that the food is well and good but she needs to go, to continue on her journey, to find Petra. Maybe not the raider, but definitely Petra.
So when she takes a step back, she’s surprised when she’s blocked by a solid form in her path—maybe a wall. Amelia’s eyes narrow slightly, though the smile on her face stays.
“What are you so afraid of, child?” Amelia asks Sidney’s retreating form. “Don’t you want to have a family—again. Didn’t you have a family before?”
Of course she did, but this—
“I need to go,” she says to Amelia. “I need to make my way—somewhere else. But—” She recalls Nayne’s words that it always pays to be polite, “even in this world where there are far less people than ever intended, even if you only ever come across one other person for the rest of your life, be kind.”
“I thank you for your generosity,” Sidney says, “for offering me a bed and food. It was very—nice of you.”
Amelia’s head tilts to the left as she takes in Sidney’s words. “I should find offense,” she says, “that you seem so keen on leaving. I mean—what is out there? Savages and dust. You’d prefer that to what we have to offer you here? What’s the matter with you?”
Sidney doesn’t know, and hardly has the right words. Still, she wants to leave and it doesn’t look like Amelia will allow her to. Why?
She turns to the table of food again, as Amelia picks up a plate and places chunks of meat and berries and vines of heavy green grapes on it until the grapes cascade over its side. Sidney gulps, imagining how fresh and juicy and filling those would be.
Amelia walks up to her, pulls up a chair and leaves it out, waiting for Sidney to sit in it. She places the full plate in the spot in front of the chair.
“Well,” she says, “I won’t insist on you staying if you’re so keen to leave, but it would be irresponsible of me to allow you to go without enough food. Look at you,” she says as she points at Sidney’s figure.
“Why you’re nothing but skin and bones. We can’t allow you to go on your journey without some food in you, now can we? That’s not the Allendian way.”
That much Sidney knows. Allendians welcome travelers into their homes “like Bedouins of old,” her nayne would say. Though the words never made sense to Sidney, the sentiment was clear. Allendians take care of each other, feed each other, keep each other healthy.
Which is why her instincts right now make little sense.
Still, she doesn’t want to be rude—the lady seems nice enough. She’d feel better if she’d had her knapsack though.
“Where’s my—what I mean to say is, may I please have my knapsack?”
“What is that now?”
“My knapsack? I’ve had it since I was three years old. It contains all my worldly possessions.” Nayne’s words again, making the
bag sound like it was this big important thing, which in a way it was—it still is.
“We did not find such a thing,” Amelia says as she points to the table again, indicating that Sidney should sit.
She frowns, knowing she’d had it on her back when she was bitten. She wouldn’t have left it behind. Still—
Finally, she reaches the chair and plops herself down on it. There’s no harm, she reckons, in having a few things on the plate. Though she’s famished, she knows from experience to not just gorge on anything. It wouldn’t take long for it all to come right back up again if she were to do that.
So she reaches for a grape, plops it into her mouth and relishes in the taste of the thing. Within minutes though—sensibilities be damned—she’s shoveling more food into her gullet than she knows she can handle.
She thought she was famished—this is an entirely different type of hunger, one where she knows she’s never eaten a feast like this, and suspects this might be the one and only time it will ever happen in her lifetime.
So she keeps chewing and gulping down food, more and more until there’s hardly a scrap left on the plate.
Amelia stays quiet the entire time until she’s done. Then, a slight giggle from her has Sidney turn around sheepishly.
“You’re a tornado of a child, aren’t you little Sidney?”
Sid doesn’t know what a tornado is, she’s never seen one—it’s not like Allenda has storms within the domes, but she’s seen her share of sandstorms outside the dome’s protective glass, over the years. She wonders if tornadoes are anything like that.
When she replies to Amelia’s quip with a loud burp that echoes and resonates in the room, Amelia laughs out loud and takes a seat next to her.
“Now that you’ve eaten. Now that you know this can be your every day for the rest of your life, do you still wish to leave?”
Sidney’s stomach gurgles as if to say nay. She wonders why she was reticent at first. Now she knows, there’s no way she wants to head out there again.
Petra: Allendian Post-Apocalypse Page 6
