Why hunt down a vault of food when this place clearly has its own? Why risk bumping into hordes of raiders when this place looks like it’s been kept up and untouched by raiders forever? They haven’t found it yet. Maybe it’s so well hidden, they never will.
“I reckon you want to stay,” Amelia says in agreement with her thoughts. “And I’d be so happy if you were to stay. You can make a great part of our family. So—that’s settled,” she says, not waiting for Sidney’s response. “We’ll take care of you--you’re now one of us! Welcome!”
The ‘we’ and the ‘you’ has Sidney stumped since Amelia’s the only person she’s seen in several hours. Other than the pictures on the walls, there is no other indication that there is even anyone else around but them.
So when she turns around to see another Amelia turn the corner, she screams.
Twenty-Four
Petra
The scream is undoubtedly from Sidney, of this Petra is sure. So she runs around the woman, turns and faces a room where Sidney stands beside a table covered with dozens of plates of food. She eyes it all, analyzes the situation, and concludes Sidney is not in immediate danger.
Still, she keeps her scanners on as she notices a woman with brown hair and a long blue dress, dark blue eyes sparkling out from under a thin fringe. She is identical to the one that Petra and Henry had met out at the front. The woman in a matching white dress who now walks into the room further, to stand beside her—clone?
“Petra!” Sidney yells as she runs up to her and stops short of hugging her. “How did you get here? What’s going on? Who are these people?” She steps back momentarily when she notices that Henry is also in the room.
“I haven’t a clue,” Petra says, keeping her eyes on the clones. “This is not a typical Allendian home.”
“Of course not,” says the woman in the white dress. “Goodness knows Gideon is not a big fan of Allendian homes. This one is built to resemble Victorian homes of old, on a planet far from here. Gaea, I believe they’d called it once.”
“Earth,” Amelia says, as she nods her head. “It was called Earth closer to its end, wasn’t it? Gideon is a big fan of their architecture there.”
Petra watches them chatter and, still sensing no immediate danger, looks over at Sidney who’s clutching her hand as if she means to crush it.
“Child,” Petra says, “why did you scream?”
Sidney points at the woman in white. “I thought that was Amelia but I knew she was already in here. Who are you—what are you people?” She points at one woman, then the other. “How can this be possible?”
Amelia smiles and holds the other woman’s hand in hers. “We’re not monsters, Sidney,” she reassures. “We’re twins. This is my sister Rinna.”
Twins. Petra has heard the term before but knows this is also not a typical Allendian phenomenon. In fact—
“You should not exist,” she states matter-of-factly as only a robot can. “Twins—the making of twins—is unheard of in Allenda. How are you possible?”
“We’re not your typical Allendians, are we?” Rinna states as she smiles knowingly at Amelia. “Allendians are made in tubes, but we were made in a more—natural—manner.”
To that, Petra frowns, an act which she’d perfected from her old programming.
“You are illegal,” she says, to which the twins turn back around and smile at her.
“Oh,” Rinna says, understanding in her eyes. “You’re one of the—sister!” She stares into Amelia’s eyes now. “She’s one of their ‘hunters’—she’s not even human at all! I wondered how you two managed to break down the front door.”
“They broke—?” Amelia says. “How dare you break anything of ours. Who gave you permission to come in here anyway? Those of—your kind—are not welcome here. You need to leave. Immediately.”
Petra scans again, feeling Sidney tug on her hand, as if to move her out of the room.
But Petra’s programming is clear. Illegal Allendians such as these two need to be brought in and let more important Allendians determine their fate.
So she recites the law.
“Amelia and Rinna, you are hereby held in contempt of Allendian Law. You will be reprimanded accordingly. Consider your home seized.”
Then she turns towards Sidney and Henry. “Kindly leave the premises, for I must conduct a thorough search and shut it all down until it’s time for their trial.”
Before Sidney can move though, the twins are already running. Amelia runs towards the north end of the room and disappears around the corner. Rinna turns in the opposite direction and jumps down what looks to be a hole in the floor that closes back to normal as soon as she’s out of sight.
With that, Petra urges Sidney and Henry to get out immediately. She has work to do, and can not be distracted by trying to keep them safe too.
Despite Sidney’s objections, she pushes her until they’re both on the steps outside the home. Then she turns to the rest of the house and begins.
Twenty-Five
Sidney
The first thing Sidney does the moment they’re out the doors is retch aloud and vomit up most of the food she’d eaten in the house. She’d fought the urge to while inside, but the queasiness does not ease up.
The raider offers a small flask of water, but she pushes him away. The last thing she wants are his raider cooties.
Still, a few minutes later, after they’ve moved far enough away from the vomit, and she feels like she can breathe again, she tests her throat out with a simple, “What is she doing in there?”
She’s not addressing the raider, but he answers anyway. She still stays far enough away from him, but he seems less—scary—somehow. He’s cleaned himself up along the way, shaved off the nasty beard. She knows that’s not an indication that he’s safe, but also knows Petra would have taken care of him by now if he’d done anything wrong.
“I don’t know, kid, but whatever it is, it ain’t good. Her kind are supposed to protect Allendians from—things like that.”
“But I don’t understand,” Sidney says. “What are twins anyway? I mean they look exactly alike. That’s not right.” She fights another bout of nausea and takes the deepest breath she can.
Nayne had always told her, all Allendians are their unique individual selves, no Allendians were ever alike. That was the Allendian way—so these two—
“It’s not,” he agrees, “and that’s why she has to hold them prisoner in the house until their trial.”
“What are they?” she asks. “What are twins? How can there be two copies of the same person?”
“I don’t know how they broke that law,” he says, “all I know is that it’s illegal in Allenda.”
Everything Sidney knows about the people of Allenda tell her that trial will not happen immediately, if ever.
The re-emergence may never happen in her lifetime, Nayne had said. It was supposed to happen already, but it hasn’t, and it won’t for as long as there are still people on Allenda’s surface who are ill—people like her, but she tells herself not to worry about that right now.
The raider steps away from the house and makes his way closer to the edge of the woods beyond. The last thing Sidney wants to do is follow a raider into the woods, but she walks further away from the front door too, while they wait for Petra to do—whatever she needs to do to keep the twins imprisoned.
“It’s amazing,” he says after a few minutes. “I mean how did they manage to hide this here for so long without anyone finding them? What sort of tech do they use, I wonder—” and he rambles on but Sidney stops listening.
She doesn’t care what they use to hide, she just cares that it’s taking Petra an awfully long time in there just to keep them put. A part of her wants to go back inside, but without her knapsack and the things in it.
“My knapsack!” she says as she stands and stares up into the windows, wondering which room she’d woken in. “I think it might still be in there! I need it.” Amelia had said they did
n’t find it on her, but Sidney’s instincts tell her it’s another lie.
He raises an eyebrow as if to question her sanity.
“Surely you don’t mean we need to go back in there, kid? Coz that’s exactly the last thing we should be doing right now.”
“It has all my—everything I own in this world,” Sidney says. Her voice is shrill now, trembling. She doesn’t care if she’s being nuts, all she knows as she runs through the hole in the door is that she needs to find that knapsack.
She doesn’t even hear him calling after her, she’s already running up the stairs, down the hallway with all the picture frames in it, meaning to get to the bedroom with the warm covers and breezy window.
She doesn’t even know if the pack is there, but there is no better place to start looking.
But it doesn’t matter, she thinks, as she runs into the room, and turns around until she sees the bag’s dirty bottom peeking out from under the bed. She reaches for it, and three things happen at the same time.
First, she confirms her instinct that Amelia had lied to her about the bag, she’d pretended there wasn’t one when they’d found her. Why did she lie? What else did she lie about?
Second, a sound behind her makes her turn so fast her neck snaps, but there’s no one there.
And third, she realizes she’s been trapped right along with the twins when a foul-smelling sheet drapes over her head and she passes out from whatever chemical it’s doused under.
Twenty-Six
Petra
Her analysis tells her the twins are the only two in the entire house, and she can hear their hearts beat strong enough to get a general idea of where they are. She decides to follow the twin in the white dress first, Rinna.
She’s under the dining room somewhere, in a spot Petra is aware she can’t reach except through the same hole Rinna had disappeared.
There’s no obvious knob or indication of how the floor shifted so she kneels down and feels for the notches around the floor where the hole had appeared. Easy enough.
She allows three nails to grow two inches each, then slots the hard enamel into a seam in the floor. Any Allendian who tries such a thing would come away with bloody fingers. Petra’s nails are built from the same thing she is—the same silver powder of which all Allendian bots are built.
She easily pulls up a portion of the floor, rips it out with hardly any effort with one hand, and throws it across the way.
The hole is barely big enough for her to fit through, and she can’t see a thing through it. Still, she can hear the heartbeat though it sounds as though it’s heading further away now. She stands up to her full height, then steps forward and drops down the hole.
The drop only lasts four seconds, and she lands easily on cold cement ground. It could be a basement but that matters not.
It’s pitch black in the hole, not even a light from a crack, nothing. Petra’s not a bot built to see in the dark, but she follows her ears. The twin is to her right, maybe twenty feet away, so she turns and walks purposefully to the right. She only stops when she slams into a cold wall of sorts, behind which the heartbeat is moving even farther away. She splays her fingers out to feel, but the wall doesn’t stop. Baring her nails again to rip a portion of it does nothing—there isn’t a seam in the wall, no crack, nothing. Just cement like the ground under her feet.
Then she turns to walk in the other direction, but is met with another slab of cold wall. Not one that was there earlier. In fact, she senses that it’s moving in closer, pushing her against the other side. The heartbeat behind the wall is drowned out by a loud cackle as the twin confirms what Petra now knows—she’s been trapped in some sort of mechanism.
When the wall doesn’t stop moving, she shimmies to the side, meaning to slip through sideways, but of course she’s met with another hard surface.
She pushes back on the wall before it crushes her torso. Though her arms are strong, she was not built to withstand this sort of pressure—she calculated it’s about thirty tonnes a second. She’s about to be pulverized, crushed into silver dust.
She keeps resisting the wall though it’s managed to push into her face.
She finds herself defeated, and the last thought in her mind is one of hope—that Sidney manages to get out of here. Because she won’t be able to help her again—she’s failed in protecting her from these twins, and now she will be trapped in here forever so the re-emergence won’t happen.
The last thing she hears is the cackling twin, somewhere in front of her, behind the cold cement wall. She’s singing something through the wall, and Petra recognizes it as the song of the Allendians, the one they sing every morning in every school before their day starts, their national anthem. Though the words are muffled, she can tell the twin’s changed them somewhat. They don’t resemble anything the Allendians have sang all this time. If anything, they’re rude, almost nonsensical in the way the words mock the original song. The twin sings louder and louder, but Petra misses the last of it as she loses consciousness and accepts that she is about to die.
Twenty-Seven
Sidney
Sidney hears a hissing before she opens her eyes and her heart trots in panic as she remembers the snake that bit her before all this happened. She opens her eyes, rubs them vigorously, and looks around her. Back in the same room she’d woken up in, what was it, yesterday? She doesn’t know, she can’t tell how long she’s been out.
Still, there’s a pause and then the hissing starts up again. She looks to the window, where she thinks it’s coming from.
Seeing neither one of the twins around, she throws the blanket off and moves to the window as fast as she can, despite still feeling faint from whatever—that chemical was.
The window’s ajar, and she peeks out to see the raider hissing in her direction, from a few meters within the trees.
If he’s trying to scare her with the hissing noise, he’s succeeded. Still she waves in the air, meaning to cut off the sound. He waves back, urging her to come out. But how? This window is several feet off the ground, too far for her to make a jump for it without breaking something. She can’t afford to break anything—she’s always been more careful than most other kids, her nayne would say. But then, Nayne also always said she was grateful for it. Sidney’s carefulness was the reason she’d never broken a thing in her life, the only reason they’d never had to worry about seeing doctors at a time when most doctors were frozen somewhere, waiting for the re-emergence.
So she watches the raider warily, not knowing how to get out of this house, but realizing it’s really her only option. The way out the bedroom door will lead to wherever the twins are. Who knows where Petra is right now, who knows what she’s up to, to lock the twins in here.
So—out the window it is.
She looks around her, eyeing the sheets and blankets. Maybe she could fashion a long enough rope out of it? She guesses it will still be too far a drop for her.
Then she sees her discarded knapsack on the ground beside the bed and pulls it over her shoulder quickly, before she leans over the window sill to look around on the outside. She fingers the ledge ahead, its concrete texture smooth against her palm. The wall outside the house is made of stone and brick—or at least it’s made to look like it. She’s not really sure. She could try to clamber down the side, the wall looks rough enough that she could find nooks and crannies to hold on to as she climbs down. She’s done enough climbing over the years to feel confident she could do it.
Then the raider whistles a harsh whistle, just once, enough to catch her attention. She looks up in time to see him shake his head as if to say, “No, that’s a horrible idea.”
But what option does she have at this point? Heading anywhere in the house will only lead her to one of those bizarre twins, wouldn’t it? There is no other choice. So she shrugs back at the raider and moves to throw her left leg over the edge of the window.
The man makes that sharp whistle again but she ignores him this time. There’s no
time like the present, she tells herself.
She straddles the sill for a moment, then pulls her other leg over as she leans forward to hold on to the other side of the window.
Then she takes her time to find a nook large enough to hold the tip of one shoe, and lowers herself down the side of the house.
The way down doesn’t take as long as she expects and when the raider says, “You can jump now,” she doesn’t hesitate. She lets go of the wall and braces herself to land on the ground below.
“What in the world happened to you in there?” he says as he looks back up at the window. “And where’s Petra?”
“I didn’t see her,” Sidney says as she looks up as well. “But someone put some smelly cloth over me before I could grab my bag and—”
“That darned bag--” the raider says. “You about got yourself killed, girl, over that bag. Why?”
She doesn’t answer right away. She doesn’t know this raider—why should she tell him anything about her possessions or desires. Still, he waits for an answer. So she goes with, “It’s the only thing I’ve ever had since I was little. It keeps me safe. I have everything I need in this world in it.”
He nods as if in understanding, and when he doesn’t insist, she says, “Petra must still be in the house but I didn’t hear anything. Where do you think she is? Why is she taking so long?”
“I’m not sure,” he says as he runs a hand through his hair. “But I don’t think it’s an answer we’d like. Those twins were—strange.”
It sounds like he was about to say something else, but she doesn’t push him on it. She gets what he means. They were more than just ‘strange’ she reckons. She knows she’d rather just head out of here but she’s compelled to wait for Petra.
“I just don’t understand why she’s taking so long. Did she tell you how long it would be?”
Petra: Allendian Post-Apocalypse Page 7
