Half Lives

by Sara Grant

  She curls into him ever so slightly. ‘I can’t believe I was Out There once, but . . .’

  ‘You’ve remembered something, haven’t you?’

  She nods, too afraid to put these new memories into words.

  She keeps staring straight ahead, even though she can feel his gaze upon her. ‘Last night, the lights in the Man-Made Mountains triggered something. I’ve been seeing flashes of images, nothing that makes sense. It’s like fragments of a story.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just a dream,’ Beckett says, and draws her in.

  She closes her eyes so she can concentrate on his touch, but the visions start again. Something is emerging from the darkness. It’s coming after her. Her eyes spring open and search the landscape. It’s not real, she tells herself, but it feels as if she’s being watched.

  ‘I think I’m remembering things from before,’ she says as the images come into focus. She’s dreaming and remembering at the same time. ‘There are three bodies lying on the floor. There’s blood everywhere. My ears ring with the most horrible bangs.’ She covers her ears because the sounds seem to ricochet inside her.

  ‘You are safe,’ Beckett says. ‘The Great I AM will protect you.’ He pauses and places a kiss on her forehead. ‘I’ll protect you.’

  She wants him to hold her and make everything else go away.

  ‘Beckett,’ Harper says, ‘about those lights last night.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he murmurs, and scoops Lucky into his arms. The cat’s fur looks chocolate brown in the bright sunlight.

  ‘Beckett, I’ve been thinking . . .’ Her voice trails off. Lucky squirms in Beckett’s arms and Beckett releases her.

  ‘Dangerous thing to do.’ He playfully knocks his shoulder into Harper’s.

  ‘I, well, it’s just . . .’ She glances at him out of the corner of her eye. He said those lights last night formed a heart. Maybe it is a sign. Maybe it’s time for her to confess that her feelings for him have changed, deepened. Maybe he feels it too.

  Suddenly Lucky crouches as if preparing to pounce. Her black pointy ears flatten against her head.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ he whispers.

  Harper sweeps Beckett behind her. Adrenaline erases everything except her need to protect him. Lucky races off.

  ‘I thought I heard something,’ Beckett says calmly. He never panics, because he believes the Great I AM watches over him.

  Harper hears it now. The faintest shuffle as foot displaces dirt. It could be Finch patrolling the Mountain, but his strides are usually swift and uneven.

  There it is again. She triangulates the sound. It’s coming from somewhere below. ‘Wait here while I check it out,’ she says and heads down the Mountain. He doesn’t obey; instead he follows her.

  Harper notices swirls of dust dancing low to the ground. The path dead-ends at a nearly sheer wall of rock. A Forreal-shaped figure is scrambling up the rock. Its long, golden curls are pasted with sweat to its neck and shoulders. Its hair is the colour of Harper’s when she bothers to wash it in the Mountain spring. It’s wearing clothes like the others in Forreal do, salvaged from the Time Before, more holes than material. Its pale legs are scratched and bloody. When it reaches the highest point, it turns around and locks sparkling green eyes on Harper.

  It transforms into a girl about the same age as Harper. Harper can’t believe what she’s seeing. It’s almost like looking at her reflection in still water, but Harper is lean and fit and this girl is curvy and soft. Is she dreaming again?

  Beckett is at Harper’s side. A ray of sun illuminates the girl, casting a halo around her. He raises his hands to show he means her no harm. Her eyes scan him from his bare feet to his loincloth. Harper thinks the girl lingers on his nearly naked torso before focusing on the white streak in his jet-black hair.

  The girl’s lips twitch in a slight smile and then she disappears down the other side. Beckett scales the rock but Harper can’t move. All these disparate images are falling into place. A picture is forming in her head. In this vision, she’s no bigger than a rockstar. Shadows claim everything but the image of a girl so much like the one she’s just seen. The girls – the one now and the one then – have the same features and colouring as Harper. But in the dream, the girl’s face is contorted in anger. She’s pointing something at Harper. It’s a weapon of some sort. The air explodes with a flash and smoke and the most deafening bang.

  ‘Beckett!’ she screams, and climbs up after him. Her voice echoes among the hard surfaces. He doesn’t know the girl is dangerous. She grabs his ankle.

  ‘Harper, what are you doing?’ He shakes free and pulls himself up on top of the rock. Harper catapults herself upward. She wraps her arms around him and anchors him to the spot. Her panic makes her stronger.

  She buries her face in his back. ‘Thank the Great I AM.’

  ‘I have to go after her.’ He tries to wriggle out of Harper’s grasp.

  ‘It’s not safe,’ she says. ‘Not with Terrorists Out There.’

  ‘She’s not safe,’ he says, but stops fighting.

  His eyes are trained on the blonde figure moving at a steady speed down the Mountain. They watch her until she disappears into the desert.

  Beckett closes his eyes. His lips are moving. Harper knows he’s sharing his secret hopes and fears with the Great I AM instead of with her.

  ‘Beckett,’ she says, because she can’t take the silence.

  ‘The Great I AM has led another Survivor to the Mountain,’ he says. ‘You shouldn’t have stopped me.’

  Part of her is jealous of this spirit that will always come first with him. The only thing she truly worships and trusts and believes in is Beckett.

  ‘She looks . . .’ Beckett doesn’t finish his sentence. She knows what he was going to say: the girl looks just like you. She couldn’t be the girl in Harper’s vision but Harper knows there’s some connection.

  ‘Let’s continue our patrol,’ Beckett says, and heads up the Mountain, away from the girl and Harper.

  ‘What should we do?’ Harper asks, struggling to catch up with him.

  ‘Nothing,’ Beckett says. ‘We can’t tell anyone else about the girl or the lights until we understand the significance of these events.’

  It’s not like Beckett to keep secrets. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ve seen how paranoid Finch and the other Cheerleaders have become. The Great I AM will reveal everything when it’s time,’ Beckett says with an assurance that she suddenly finds irritating. The lights. These new images. The girl. Beckett can wait for the Great I AM’s pronouncement, but Harper already knows. She can feel it. These are bad signs.

  Chapter Five

  My parents never showed up. I waited as long as I could to board the plane. I’d kept my head down, afraid that the police, airport-rent-a-cops, FBI, Secret Service, CIA or some black op commandos that were too top-secret for a name might come after me. Once I was on the plane, I’d scanned every row for my mum’s blonde bob and my dad’s crazy hairdo. I’d even asked for a glass of water in the back galley and tried to infiltrate the first class-toilets to get a second and third look at all the passengers.

  I wouldn’t let myself believe that this meant forever. I’d meet them in Vegas or see them at the bunker-thingy. I’d held it together for as long as I could. I didn’t cry until the wheels on Flight 868 to Las Vegas left solid ground. I curled towards the porthole and watched Washington, DC transform into a grid of twinkle lights. I cried for what I was leaving behind and for what might lie ahead. My life had become a jigsaw puzzle dumped from an imageless box. I didn’t know how I was ever going to be able to put it back together again. Tears dripped down my chin. I wasn’t strong or smart enough for this bizarre treasure hunt my parents had concocted.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  ‘You mind if I sit here?’ The voice was young and female.

  ‘Whatever.’ I scooted closer to the window.

  ‘The guy next to me had eye-watering BO,’ she said, and dropped into
the seat beside me. ‘You OK?’

  I sniffed and then I did that thing, which I hadn’t done since I was little, where your face seems possessed; you gasp in tiny breaths and your lower lip quivers.

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ I said, in a pseudo-normal voice.

  ‘Let me know if you’d like to talk to a total stranger about whatever is bugging you.’

  I sniffed back a ginormous wad of snot. ‘Thanks.’

  Inside I turned as black as the world outside my window. I cried until my body felt gooey. Somewhere over the Midwest, sleep hijacked my brain.

  After what could have been minutes or hours, I felt another tap on my shoulder. ‘Something to drink?’

  It took a moment for me to register where I was. My reality felt more like a dream.

  It was a simple question, but I had no answer. I shook my head.

  ‘Come on. You’ve got to have something. It’s a long flight,’ my seatmate said. ‘Two Diet Cokes,’ she told the flight attendant.

  I tried to pull myself from the darkness that was threatening to overwhelm me. I shifted in my seat so my tray table could be lowered. I lifted my shirt collar to my forehead and wiped my face on the backside of the smiley logo on my T-shirt. I loosened a few dreadlocks by each temple and wrapped them around my spindly mass of hair, knotting them so air cooled my neck.

  The flight attendant placed a plastic cup of ice and a can of Diet Coke in front of me. I poured some Diet Coke into the cup and watched the fizz bubble up. I took a sip and felt a smidge of relief at this normal behaviour.

  Two snack-sized bags were thrust into my field of vision. ‘I always bring my own snacks. Cheesy or salty?’ my seatmate said and rattled the contents. ‘Or we could share.’ She ripped open both and set them on my tray table.

  How could I be so hungry, yet feel as if I couldn’t eat a thing? The last morsel of food to cross my lips was a bag of Cheetos at lunch.

  ‘I usually like the sour cream and onion but that makes my breath reek,’ the girl said. ‘The last thing you need is someone polluting your air space. Am I right?’

  I looked at her for the first time. She was bald, which for some strange reason made me avert my gaze. I tried not to stare but I had seen zero bald-headed girls in real life. I wanted to reach out and touch her smooth scalp.

  ‘Want one?’ She pulled an orange squiggle from the bag marked Cheesoodles. The word made me think of my and Lola’s Ripples. Would I ever see Lola again? Tears threatened.

  ‘It’s not cheese and it’s not a noodle, yet it’s called a Cheesoodle,’ the girl said with a laugh. ‘Who comes up with this?’ A solitary tear leaked from the corner of my eye. She must have noticed because she said, ‘Hey, hey. Don’t get upset. It’s only cheese – well, kind of sort of a cheese product.’ She popped it in her mouth. The powdery orange from the Cheesoodle coated her lips and fingers. ‘Not so bad,’ she said, shoving a few more in her mouth. ‘Good for whatever’s bringing you down and, if not, you’ll die a year earlier from all the preservatives. That’s win–win?’

  Win–win. My mum said that all the time. I would see my mum again. Mum and Dad would meet me at the mountain. They just had to. I wiped away one tear, only to have another one replace it. ‘Sorry about . . .’ I indicated the blubbering mess which used to be a normal face.

  ‘No problem,’ she said, stuffing a few more Cheesoodles in her mouth.

  She was Asian American and had the most amazing deep brown, almond-shaped eyes rimmed with jet-black eyeliner that drew to a point at the corner. Her lashes were thick and matted together, giving her eyes a weight that made you forget her bare scalp. Countless earrings dotted each lobe as if providing a message in Braille. She wore a long-sleeved, button-down pink shirt that seemed out of place with her faded, ripped jeans. The words ‘Cheer Captain’ were embroidered on the breast pocket of the shirt. She didn’t look or act like the wannabe-model-cheerleader types at Capital Academy. Maybe she’d beaten up a cheerleader and stolen her shirt.

  I forced myself to eat a potato chip. I ate another and then another. Before I knew it, the bag was empty. ‘Um, sorry. I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘No problem. Food is the best medicine.’ She looked up as if there were something immensely fascinating about the ceiling. ‘Or, wait, is that laughter? Laughter is the best medicine, right after these.’ She nudged the Cheesoodles closer to me. ‘You need them more than I do.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I was a real conversationalist. ‘Beyond horrendous day,’ I offered in way of explanation. I finished the rest of the Cheesoodles. ‘Are you from Vegas?’ I asked when the carbs and artificial colourings had kicked in.

  ‘Nope. I live with my dad in La La Land, you know, LA. Los Angeles,’ she said. She fidgeted with the abnormally large pink watch on her wrist. The band was hot-pink rubber, and the square watch face was rimmed with diamonds. I could hear the seconds tick, tick, ticking away. ‘But my mom lives near DC. I was supposed to meet my cheer squad at a national competition there,’ she said finally. ‘State champs two years running. I got a message from the coach that the competition has been cancelled.’

  ‘Weird.’

  ‘Mom and Dad had some fight over the phone about what to do with me. Mom was supposed to be dropping me off at the cheer competition hotel and then she was going to some convention. Dad wasn’t expecting me home. I think he was having a slumber party with his new girlfriend. Mom bought me a ticket on the next plane – but she couldn’t get a direct flight. I’ve got a two-hour layover before I get to ruin my dad’s weekend. Fantastic, huh?’ She gulped the rest of her Diet Coke. ‘I’m Marissa,’ she said, a cheerleader perkiness springing into her voice. I almost expected her to spell it with a double clap between each letter.

  ‘I’m Isis, but everyone calls me Icie,’ I said, realizing for the bazillionth time how ridiculous both sounded.

  ‘Suits you. The white hair. Dreadlocks. Blue eyes. I get it.’ She nodded her approval. ‘Or is it because you’re like a mega-bitch from hell?’

  ‘Not a mega-bitch,’ I joked.

  We kept our conversation light and I almost forgot that something huge and horrible might be about to happen. I told her about being dumped after I’d already found the perfect dress for the prom. Shimmering, silky lavender – sexy but not slutty. She shared her string of bad boyfriends. She caught one kissing another cheerleader. The next only had one thing on his mind: it was the traditional male preoccupation but with quite a pervy twist. The final in her string of break-ups was the guy she thought was ‘the one’, until she’d found out that he already had not one but two kids by different ‘ones’.

  ‘That’s when I shaved my head.’ She raked her fist across her scalp as if she had the electric razor in her hand. ‘I thought it was getting in the way. All guys saw was the long black hair and these.’ She gestured to what must have been size quadruple G breasts. ‘Can’t do much about the rack, so I decided to simplify my life. Now I focus on my sport.’

  I liked this girl who was all gang diva on the outside but cheerleader on the inside.

  The captain’s voice came over the plane’s intercom. Our flight was being diverted to Phoenix. The rest of his message was lost in the excited utterances of my fellow passengers.

  The gods were giving me a cosmic smack-down. I’d almost begun to believe that my parents had been mistaken, but diverting planes couldn’t be good. Mum had said attacks were planned for big cities and Vegas was one of the biggest. All the panic from earlier came flooding back. I looked out of my window. It was pitch black. Anything could be happening down there. I gripped the armrests because now real, raw fear took hold. The other passengers weren’t happy but they weren’t terrified like I was. Knowledge can definitely suck. Oh, to still be blissfully ignorant about what was really happening.

  If it was a virus, then any of these people could be infected. What if Mum was wrong about the timing? What if some deadly virus was being re-circulated right now in the plane’s stale air? I held my breath like that might
actually do some good. I held it for as long as I could before exhaling in one burst.

  ‘You OK?’ Marissa looked at me as if I were an escaped mental patient.

  ‘Yeah’ was all I could say. I moved as far away from her as my seatbelt would allow. I decided right then that I wanted as little contact with other people as possible, not only because they might be infecting me but also because I had a secret and I wasn’t sure how long I could keep it.

  Marissa was clueless. Maybe I should warn her, tell everybody, but who would believe me? I didn’t want to be carted away in a straitjacket. My parents had risked everything to give me a fighting chance of survival. I didn’t want to blow it. I also couldn’t risk getting them into more trouble.

  ‘What are you going to do when we land?’ Marissa asked.

  I shrugged. I had no idea but I couldn’t have her tagging along or asking any more questions.

  ‘They’re probably re-booking everyone on flights to Vegas. Maybe we could try to get the same flight,’ she said.

  On any other day, I would have ‘friended’ Marissa on Facebook and probably made us squeeze together for a photo that I could post and tag.

  ‘They can probably get you a direct flight to LA and I don’t want to hold you up.’ I was speaking to the headrest in front of me more than to her.

  She gave me this hurt-puppy look and twisted away from me. ‘Yeah, whatever.’

  As soon as we landed and the seatbelt light dinged, she bolted down the aisle. I waited for everyone to exit the aircraft. The more distance between me and all potential virus carriers the better.

  I followed the signs to check-in. I struggled under the weight of whatever was in my backpack. I didn’t have the time, energy or privacy to find out what my parents had packed in there now. All I needed was another flight to Vegas.

  I decided to pretend I was in some teen version of The Amazing Race. If I thought of it as reality TV, instead of just plain reality, then my head and gut wouldn’t go all supernova.