presentations of our progress. We were disciplined for the smallest failure. They used electricity and invasive lasers on us strong enough to cause terrible pain and fear without permanently harming us or
killing us.
But Finn came back for me. He came back for me when I started to believe I’d never see him
again. I was almost fifteen and had lost all the traces of my childhood. He waited for me in the dorm
room I shared with four more girls. He grabbed me from behind as I stepped inside at bedtime and put
his hand over my mouth. I was not very social so Finn hoped I would be the first one to rush to bed
while the others socialized in the common area. It was the only socializing time we were allowed.
“It’s Finn,” he said. “Don’t scream.”
“Who?” I asked as soon as he released the pressure on my mouth.
He turned me around to show me his face. I knew the face but not the name. I almost let a cry out
despite his warning.
“Ace!” I whispered. “Why do you call yourself Finn?”
I used to call him Ace, he called me Tick when we were out of earshot. Not fair at all, I know,
but it was short for ticklish which I was and am.
He surveyed me from head to toe as if trying to determine whether it was truly little Tick he had
in front of him.
“No time for explanations,” he said at last. “We have to get out of here.”
“Out of here? You mean the plantation? It’s impossible. They’re using rotating scanning cameras
now, a lot of things have changed since you left. Because you left.”
“Everything is possible. Just tell me one thing: Do you trust me?”
I looked straight into his green eyes. He had changed. He was taller, more muscular, sunburned.
He seemed determined and confident. And he had come back for me.
“I do,” I said. “Show me the way.”
We got out through the back window and crawled for about a hundred feet. What we did seemed
so preposterous, so impossible to me that I felt my heart was going to jump out of my chest. I expected the Sliman to pounce on us at any moment. Finn took out a small touchpad device and keyed in a few
numbers. The scanning cameras above us stopped rotating and came to a complete standstill.
“How did you do that?”
“A little magic,” he said with satisfaction on his muddied face.
Since the new scanning cameras were put in place, the Sliman patrols on the perimeter had
lessened. The rotating cameras covered every square inch of the camp and could sense movement as
well as light and sound. Anything remotely out of the ordinary would be immediately reported to the
Alien Director’s office.
“With change comes opportunity,” Finn would later say of that night. When the plantation beefed
up their scanning technology, they relaxed on their physical security measures.
Finn and I stood up and started running towards the electric, twenty-foot fence. I saw an opening
that was oddly just big enough for us to fit through. Standing on the other side I saw what appeared to be the most severe and beautiful girl I had ever seen. Daphne held the wire in her hand. Her long
blond hair shimmered in the night wind. The first time you see Daphne, you never forget it. Her eyes
are bright even in the night like a nocturnal creature.
“Quick,” she said. “The electricity will come back any moment.”
We hurried through the opening and I almost bumped into Damian who was standing on the other
side. He didn’t even bother to look at me. He and Daphne put the missing piece in its place and fused
it back into the fence with lasers. Damian quickly restarted the electric field.
The distant plantation lights began to spin then as I became lightheaded. Damian threw me over
his shoulder and began to run into the dark forest. He managed somehow to run and stabilize me
against his massive shoulder at the same time. I felt like I was floating down a river of trees. The
sweat on his neck smelled almost like an exotic fruit. Tangerines, maybe, and then I must have faded
off to sleep, calmed more with each stride away from the plantation.
The next thing I remember was entering the camp of the Saviors. They told me I had slept for
hours. That’s when I realized Damian’s incredible strength. He had carried me through rough terrain
half the night.
They introduced me to the others but I was overwhelmed. I fell asleep again as the sun came up
and slept all day. It was my first freedom sleep and it felt like nothing I had ever dreamed.
When I woke in the evening the moon shined so brightly down through the tree tops that Finn cast
a shadow on the outside of my tent when he approached to check on me. We discussed everything that
was on my mind beginning with his escape and ending with my rescue.
Finn would not answer my final question. He would not tell me how he came to be known as
Finn. He said he would show me the next morning.
He took me to an old, half-destroyed building in Lost Town just after dawn. A battle between
humans and aliens must have taken place here with every human either dying or being enslaved. For
whatever reason, Lost Town was left in its spot to be swallowed up by surrounding woods.
Finn guided me inside the building through the half-open door. Books were scattered
everywhere. This place was a library. He pointed at the numerous volumes on the damaged shelves
and he made me be careful not to step on the books piled up on the floor. There were a few books
placed on tables he said not to touch. As we walked, I noticed a few books here and there on shelves
that stood out. They were cleaner than the rest which were all shrouded in dust and loneliness.
He told me that I could choose any book from the shelves and pick the name I liked the best in it.
If I didn’t find anything to my liking, I could move on to the next book and so on.
That would be the start of my new life as a free person.
“We’re reborn when we leave the plantations,” he said, “and every birth requires a new name.”
His name had come from a book called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He found his
book, one of the clean ones, and handed it to me. I asked him why he chose to leave the book in the
library, why he hadn’t taken it with him to his tent.
“Everything has to remain as it is here,” he said. “There can be no sign of change. We can never
be too careful.”
I did not have the heart to tell him that even I had spotted the clean books, even his little Tick
could spot where their hands had touched.
In theory he was right. I know now that Sliman scouts can pick up the smallest details. The
Saviors had been lucky and had never seen any Sliman in Lost Town. And so they returned again and
again.
I scanned the shelves for several minutes and ended up with a five-hundred page book.
Mythology, it said on the cover. Finn wasn’t happy with the size of that book but he took me back to the library every day until I finished reading and picked my new name.
I would be Freya, queen of Valkyries and warrior goddess. I had no idea what it all meant. We
had no access to history or mythology books at the plantation, but I got hooked immediately, traveling back into worlds long gone, worlds of complete wonder and imagination.
It’s hard to think of Finn and not recall the breeding village as well as my mother, my brother
and my two sisters. I can barely remember their features but I carry them with me. We do not know
/> our fathers. The men were housed at the far end of the village and were field laborers.
My brother was three years older than me and so he was harvested when I was four. All of us
get harvested when we reach the age of seven. My two little sisters must have both been harvested by
now. My mother would be by herself. Her health was already failing when I was harvested ten years
ago and the aliens allow only the fittest to become part of the breeding lab procedures.
Her face was completely blank when they came to the hut to pick my brother. She planted a kiss
on his forehead and told him to be a good boy. Then she returned to her usual business. She mentioned
my brother, her son, a couple times the next morning and then seemed to have moved on.
Her reaction was not a surprise. That’s how adults reacted at the breeding village. They were
passive, they didn’t comprehend initiative. They talked only when absolutely necessary in short and
simple sentences. They had no care in the world other than performing their daily tasks. The women
raised the children they gave birth to after the infants were treated in the labs.
In the library I found a book about zombies and I immediately thought of the mothers at the
breeding village. They had been turned into zombies through some process I wasn’t aware of,
doomed to a life devoid of meaning and hope.
We have many theories about this here at the camp. Doc used to participate in lab experiments
back on his plantation, Plantation-4. That’s why we call him Doc even though he’s seventeen like me.
He has seen firsthand what the aliens are capable of, how far they are willing to go. How they can
manipulate genes and DNA to create a new species, like the Sliman. How they can control minds and
desires.
Finn has a theory of his own and it’s called lobotomy. He read it in a medical book at the
library. Rabbit asked Finn to stop talking about this in his presence. Deep down Rabbit hopes that he
will be able to cure his mother some day of whatever it is that they have done to her, that he will
make her a whole person again. He doesn’t want any pieces of her brain missing.
The Armory is the room where we keep most of our weaponry and our limited ammunition
supply, but it is also the place where we hold meetings both scheduled and unscheduled. We’ve been
using the abandoned facilities for the past two years. Our best guess is the place was abandoned
because the thick vegetation all around the clearing, where the facilities were built, gets in the way of certain alien frequencies making communication with the plantations shaky at times.
The aliens picked up and moved about a hundred miles to the south to a newly built and far
better equipped headquarters. The bonus is double for us: we can use all the technology that we were
able to repair, thanks to the ingenuity of Theo and Zoe, plus we are shielded from their radar and
other tracking devices allowing us to go about our business unnoticed.
I open the door and enter the meeting. Late of course. My heart soars, then sinks. I think I might
be hallucinating. Finn sits on a chair. His face is covered in scratches and dry blood. His shirt is
filthy and tattered.
Doc is cutting bandages and wrapping Finn’s hands. “Nobody touch him!” Doc orders when he
sees me. “I haven’t determined the extent of his injuries.”
“Finn, you stupid boy, what did you get yourself into?” I ask.
He ignores my concern and chuckles causing himself a sudden pain. “Just that, Tick. Something
stupid. I was trying to get to a rare flower and fell down a rock face and into a deep ravine. I lost my touchpad on the way. It took me an eternity to climb back out.”
“A rare flower?” I ask dumbfounded.
He pulls away from Doc and shoves his mangled hand into his pocket. He pulls out a dying and
somewhat smashed purple flower. The color is glorious even in its reduced state.
“It’s beautiful,” Tilly says. “Have you ever seen such color?”
“I got it for you, Freya,” Finn says.
“Oh,” I say. “A rare flower from a rare idiot.”
Damian looks like he wants to say something, but he and Daphne just leave the meeting. It’s a
good thing, too. I was about to give Damian a piece of my mind. He should have been out there or
Daphne. And Damian’s rule that we have to have a meeting to vote before we decide to search for a
lost Savior is total crap. He has rules upon rules and I hate them.
Rabbit and Biscuit hurry to join Tilly and me by Finn’s side. It’s hard to yell at him any more
while his little admirers surround him.
Tilly forces me to take the flower into my hands. The fact that it’s beautiful and mangled just
reminds me of beautiful and mangled Finn. My anger increases. He’ll get himself killed protecting
everyone and trying to be thoughtful every second of the day.
“What do you think?” Finn asks.
I glare into his bright eyes and resist the urge to slap him. “You know what I think,” I say and
storm out of the armory still holding his flower.
3
Among the Saviors, I’m the only one who had to be saved. Everybody else found a way to
escape on their own from the plantations. They had the courage to believe and act upon that faith.
I don’t know how or when the rumors started, I doubt anybody does, but the plantations had been
swarming for a long time with whispers about secret bands of fugitives who lived free in the woods
and the mountains.
Finn believed it with all his heart and made a run for it as soon as he could. He was the first one
to escape from Plantation-8 and up to then security measures had been on the loose side. It’s probable that the aliens on Plantation-8 didn’t believe that human children could escape and survive.
Where would they go? What did they know about the outside world? How would they survive
alone in the wild? It’s also more than probable that the plantations didn’t report escapes. They all
wanted to present a perfect front to the alien high command.
After Finn’s escape, things changed fast on Plantation-8. It took the aliens a while before they
figured out he was gone, and when they did, they didn’t bother looking for him. They must have
presumed he’d be dead soon. I doubt they think the same now that I’m gone as well.
As far as I know, we’re the only fugitive band in the whole district. There might be others
elsewhere. I hope there are. But we’ve never met them or heard of them. We’re always on the lookout
for more fugitives, more children, more allies. The last one we located was Scout and it’s been ten
months since then.
I haven’t spoken to Finn all day. I’m mad at him still but I’m mostly mad at myself for not
noticing his absence earlier. It’s not like him to be late. I should have known better.
It’s getting dark and the heat hasn’t broken at all. It’s been above 100 degrees for ten straight
days and there’s no sign of any change anytime soon. The only place that offers some relief is the
shade of the gigantic red trees a few feet behind my tent where the thick part of the forest starts. This is where I go and this is where Rabbit finds me moments later.
“Finn’s fine, he will be just fine,” he says with a smile.
I nod and start picking at my fingernails. Finn knows where I am, he can come and find me
whenever he wants.
“We’re having a meeting,” Rabbit interrupts my thoughts.
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“Again? What on earth for? Finn’s back,” I protest. I want to be free. I want to be left unjudged.
I want my voice to matter. All of Damian’s precious meetings do none of that for me.
“Come on, Freya, don’t be cross.”
“If they want us to participate in their non-stop meetings, they should bring them out here. I’m
done. I’m not moving an inch in this heat.”
Rabbit leaves reluctantly. He knows there’s nothing he can do when I get in this mood. I take out
my knife and start carving on a piece of wood I find on the ground. I’ve become good at that. I always get good at pointless things.
Not ten minutes go by when I’m startled by the sound of heavy footsteps on the fallen leaves.
Soon afterwards, the Saviors stand in front of me although only a couple of them seem to be happy
about it. This was a bad idea. I should have gone to the meeting.
“You have Finn to thank for this,” Daphne snarls at me and only then do I notice him at the end
of the procession. His head and hands are bandaged but he seems unharmed otherwise.
The Saviors sit down in a circle. There’s Damian with Daphne right next to him, Finn, Rabbit
and Scout. Scout is fifteen and she didn’t quite pick her name all by herself, it was a collective
decision after having located the book To Kill a Mockingbird at the library and it was for obvious reasons. Scout can track like a hound. If there’s any mark or scent or print to be found, she’ll find it.
She has incredible orientation skills and she can read the stars in the sky like a map. Her name fits her like a glove and she’s proud of it.
Biscuit is the only one who has skills comparable to Scout’s. He’s fifteen as well and he can
sense smells from miles away, much farther than even Scout. Doc says his olfactory nerve is a thing
of wonder. Hounds would kill to have it. The only problem with Biscuit’s nose is that the first thing it senses always, always, is food. If there’s food around, he’ll find it. And eat it. Which is not particularly good news for the rest of us.
Doc was trained in medical sciences and biology on Plantation-4. We don’t know what we
would have done without him as we get ourselves in trouble a lot. He’s also one of the kindest,
[scifan] plantation - books one to three Page 2
