“Try harder,” Finn says. “Any information is of great value.”
“What kind of information are you hoping to find?” Daphne asks.
“We need to know if this is a coincidence, if they discovered the camp by accident, or if they
knew exactly what they were looking for and where to find us. What if they have updated their
security systems? The satellites? That would be a crucial thing to know.”
“What if there’s a traitor among us?” Nya says with a face as serious and expressionless as
always, hands tight around her bow.
Finn considers this but says nothing. He turns to Tilly again. “Is there any way you can catch
some of their conversation? I know you have been able to make out a conversation from a comparable
distance before.”
“It’s the stress that’s interfering with your abilities,” Daphne suggests. “Look at me, Tilly.
Listen.”
She takes Tilly’s hands in hers and talks slowly to her. It’s the first time I hope her magic works.
“You can do this, Tilly,” Daphne says. “You can be who you want to be. You can use your
extraordinary powers of hearing to help us get out of this mess. We trust in you.”
Tilly blinks her eyes as if she had just woken up from a nap. “I’ll need to get a bit closer,” she
says and her mind is made up. She will make this happen.
I see the guilt on Finn’s face as he assesses the situation. I have a terrible, painful thought that I can’t shake off. What if his stubbornness is somehow related to the box that he hid in the forest? Why didn’t I confront him right then? Why didn’t I dig out the box? Why didn’t I report all this to Damian?
What if this is all my fault? Then my mind wanders back to Finn. What if I’m being terribly
unfair to him? How can I even think like that when he’s the one person I trust completely?
I glance at him again and the guilt is there on his face. Maybe it’s about the fight he had with
Damian, his lack of self control. Then again, it might be about pushing Tilly when she’s obviously
nervous. Or it might be something else altogether.
Finn tells Tilly that she can move closer to the voices below. He will show her how to get
further down the hillside. Tilly says that she is willing to try.
“You have to be extremely careful,” Finn says. “The slightest mishap, and they will hear or see
you. You will have to crawl down the slope and you’ll have to go very slow, very quiet, which can
be tricky with all the dry branches and leaves on the ground. The slope is very steep, as you see, and you will find yourself hanging from a thread at times. Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes, I am sure,” Tilly says without hesitation.
“How much closer do you think you will have to get?”
“About a hundred feet, I imagine. That should do it.”
“Okay, I know you can do this, Tilly.”
“I’ll go with her,” Biscuit says.
“No. Absolutely not. One person is risky, but two is suicide. You can’t underestimate the
Sliman’s alertness or the aliens’ sensory receptor devices.”
Tilly gets on her stomach and slowly crawls to the edge of the hilltop.
“The Sliman are moving in all directions,” she says. “They’re removing our furniture and our
supplies. The aliens are supervising them.”
We all crawl to the edge after Tilly. It’s rare for the aliens to go outside the Plantations, they’d
never risk going out in the afternoon if they didn’t think it was important. No matter how they
discovered our camp, they now know about us and they don’t like it one bit.
Tilly has crawled two feet down the steep slope, she’s slower than a maimed turtle, calculating
every movement before she makes it. The minutes go by in slow anguish, our heads hang from the top
of the hill watching Tilly’s excruciating descent through bushes and their branches.
She reaches a trunk lying dead on the ground of what must have been a pine tree. It’s a big trunk
and it’s blocking Tilly’s view.
She decides to go around it and changes direction. She’s making very slow progress but she’s
patient and determined. When her head reaches the edge of the trunk, she turns back to reassure us that everything is fine. She goes back to her mission when suddenly her sleeve gets caught on the rough
edge of the trunk.
Tilly tries to free herself but the fabric is stuck to the sharp splinters on the edge of the wood
and she has to pull her sleeve out. As she does that, she accidentally pushes the trunk and it gets
loose, it slides a few inches forward, then stops. A couple seconds later, the trunk gets moving down
the steep slope again, this time more forcefully, gaining speed with every split second, carrying Tilly with it as her sleeve is still stuck to the edge.
“Tilly,” I whisper and Finn pinches my hand hard to stop me.
“Hush,” he whispers and I freeze.
Tilly rolls several feet down the hill before she manages to untangle herself from the trunk. She
lies still hoping the bushes will hide her. When she lifts her head a few inches off the ground, she sees what we all can see: a Sliman is looking at her direction, trying to see through the shrubbery.
“Move away from the edge.” Daphne urges us quietly. “We have to hide.”
We do as she says, more shocked than scared at this point, and not having had time to figure out
our options. All of this becomes irrelevant when Biscuit takes a deep breath, goes back to the edge of the cliff and starts crawling down the slope after Tilly.
18
Finn told me once that a cool head and a warm heart is all you need to make it through life. I
find myself in the exact opposite position, my head feels terribly hot and my heart is cold as ice. I
can’t think. I can’t move. I can’t process all that has just happened.
Finn and Daphne both reach the edge of the hilltop within seconds. I snap out of my stupor and
follow them, with Scout and Rabbit close behind me.
Biscuit is on his belly moving towards Tilly as fast as he can. Tilly tries to crawl back up to
Biscuit while two Sliman start climbing up the hillside.
Finn says to wait, we might be able to run once Biscuit and Tilly get close, or that we might
have to fight the two Sliman.
Tilly stands up, looks at us with panic on her face and yells: “I hear them now, they know we
are here, they’re telling the Sliman to capture us alive. Run! Just run!”
Finn turns white, Daphne retreats in shock.
“We have to run,” she says. “The Saviors are too important to get caught like mice in a trap.”
“Just how far do you think we’d get?” Finn asks standing up.
“What do you want to do?”
“There’s no other option,” Finn says. “We will surrender. At least, it will give Damian and the
others a chance to start over. They can rebuild the Saviors. We are lost, Daphne. That’s it. End of
game.”
Scout lets a sob out, my heart sinks, I can barely see anything around me. Rabbit stands next to
Finn.
“I’m with you,” he says. “I will do anything you say.”
“It wasn’t supposed to end like that,” Daphne whispers before she joins Finn and Rabbit,
resigned to fate.
Finn looks at me, Scout and Nya. “I’m sorry about this mess,” he says. “Now let’s go do this for
our friends.”
We walk down the hill with our hands up in surrender. The two Sliman are closing in on Tilly
and Biscuit who stay
frozen on their spot.
I catch up to Finn. “Tell me you have a plan,” I say.
“Sorry, Tick, no more aces up my sleeve. You were right about everything. I hope you will
forgive me one day.”
The two Sliman are now a few feet below Tilly and Biscuit. It will all be over soon. I look
around and something doesn’t feel right.
“Finn,” I say, “where’s Nya?”
Finn turns his head back and so do I. There’s no sign of her. Then, Nya appears out of nowhere
on top of the hill, tall and majestic.
“There,” Finn says, but I already see her. Even from this distance I can see that her brown eyes
have gone cold. She seems to focus on a target below.
In one quick motion she lifts her weapon, pulls back the bow string and releases an explosive
arrow into the heart of the Armory. There’s a moment when nothing happens before the building goes
up with a bang. Flames explode everywhere as a series of munitions ignite. Three injured Sliman run
out in panic.
Before the aliens have time to react, Nya fires another arrow at the simulation building. Next
come the headquarters and the lab. The whole place goes up in flames, with scattered Sliman running
wild, a few of them converging to the spot outside the kitchen to cover the two confused aliens with
their bodies.
We look to each other stunned, terrified.
“What the hell has she done?” Daphne says.
“To the observatory tower!” Finn yells and we take off at full speed down the hill. Biscuit and
Tilly have drawn out their pulse guns and aim them at the two Sliman that are closing in on them.
“Finn,” I say, pointing at Tilly and Biscuit.
A rough, hoarse voice cuts across the sky making our skin crawl. “Catch them alive!”
The Sliman that have remained standing charge at us, guns in hand. I can count fourteen of them
and each one is a ferocious machine that knows no pain or fear.
We are near the observatory, a narrow three-story building with a single window on the third
floor, it’s the last building to the west and a good hundred feet away from the rest of the buildings.
We’ve used it as a lookout place and we have weapons and food stored inside.
Nya, Tilly and Biscuit have caught up with us and we all enter the observatory just in time to
close the steel door behind us before any Sliman can sneak in.
The staircase is so narrow only one person can go up at a time. Finn stops Nya as she climbs the
stairs to get to the window. “How many more arrows?”
“Seven,” she says. “One explosive arrow and six regular ones.” Her voice is steady,
impermeable. It’s no use trying to figure out why she did what she did, but I think the answer is
simple because for Nya things are always simple. She has been preparing for this moment all her life,
silent and remote, perfecting her skills, working to achieve perfection at battle. Nya responds to
instinct more than anybody else. She is the idealized version of our line of warriors. She knows no
surrender.
“Make them count,” Finn says to her as she moves to the window.
Daphne and Finn take their place in front of the door, guns in hand. The rest of us align ourselves
behind them ready to fight for our lives when the Sliman break through the door.
Thick sweat covers my eyebrows and my upper lip. My heart beats so hard I can hear it in my
ears. Tilly’s right arm is bleeding. I wrap it up with a piece of cloth that I tear off my shirt.
The Sliman are banging on the door for a while. Then they suddenly stop. The same hoarse
voice as before speaks through a loudspeaker. “Surrender now and you will live. Keep resisting and
you shall die. You have two minutes.” The nightmarish echo of those words spoken through the
horrifying voice of an alien creature mimicking human speech is paralyzing.
“What are we going to do, Finn?” Rabbit says.
It’s an impossible question and we know it. All eyes turn to Finn. His silence is the only answer
available. We quietly acknowledge how much we care for everyone in the room, what a good fortune
it has been to have known each other and to have dreamed of a better world together.
“I don’t want to go back to the plantation,” Scout says.
Finn lifts his head to the top of the staircase.
“Nya,” he says, “show time.”
Nya nods, takes aim and fires her last explosive arrow at the two alien vehicles parked in the
combat ring.
Almost simultaneously the door is brought down and the Sliman walk in the observatory. Finn
takes the first one down with a swift blow to the neck. Daphne sinks her knife in the thigh of the
second Sliman but they are both back up seconds later.
More Sliman pour through the door, huge and expressionless. It’s clear that they have orders to
try and not kill us, not yet anyway.
We refuse to go down without a fight even if it’s hopeless. It would be a different story if
Damian, Zoe, Theo and Doc were here, especially if the fight took place in the forest. We would be in
our element then and it would be pretty hard for anyone to get us.
We fight tooth and nail as the Sliman attack us with one goal only: to promptly remove our
weapons from us, leaving us vulnerable and weak in the narrow space of the building. They know we
won’t dare to shoot in this enclosure with our companions all around us. Pulse guns can cause
indiscriminate, irreparable damage when used in such a small space.
Nya comes down from the third floor and shoots two arrows before she is disarmed. Both
arrows hit their targets in the chest and that infuriates the remaining eight Sliman. Two of them grab Nya and throw her to the floor. They kick her on the back and head several times. I feel the deadly
grip of a Sliman hand around my neck and I realize what asphyxiation feels like.
Scout is being dragged by the hair. Rabbit’s face is red with blood. Tilly can barely walk
anymore. Biscuit is on his knees with a Sliman boot on his neck. Daphne and Finn are the last two
still standing but they are quickly overpowered.
We are dragged and shoved outside and made to kneel in front of the two aliens. They look
exactly as I remember them except maybe they have shrunk a bit more. They have human features, they
are quite small and completely bald. Their voices sound as if they had swallowed a dozen razors,
their fingers don’t have nails. Their age is indeterminate, their features indistinct. Their gaze is
scrutinizing.
They whisper to each other to decide our future.
I reach out and touch Scout’s hand on my left. She’s shaking violently and there’s nothing I can
do to soothe her. I scan the destruction of the facilities that I will never see again. The fires have been put out and all that’s left is burnt walls, ashes and black soil. The only building standing is the
kitchen. I can’t help but smile at the thought that just one girl has been able to cause such devastation.
One of the aliens takes his sensory receptor device from underneath his cape. I have seen this
thing on a few occasions before, and almost always it was brought out during an emergency. Those
devices are small, no bigger than our own touchpads, but they can do some pretty amazing things.
They can move objects from a distance, they can make them levitate, they can produce huge
amounts of energy in the form of blue and purple magnetic fields and who knows what else. These<
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energy fields can make plants grow faster, they can light up entire Plantations, they can repair broken bones or they can blow things up, but all that happens at great expense to the aliens who seem to be
physically connected to the devices.
The weaker they get, the less able they are to produce the energy fields and they will avoid using
them unless absolutely necessary. It takes them several hours, even days to recover after such a use.
The devices have also been used as a means of intimidation, as they can lift you up and throw
you against a wall and there’s nothing good to be expected when they are paraded in front of you.
The sensory receptors respond only to the aliens’ touch, not even Sliman can make them work.
The aliens used to tease us with that on Plantation-8. Finn and I were present when they practically
threw one at us during inspection time. A few children reached for the device and they tried to make it work to no avail. They ended up with bad burns on their hands when the device got overheated in an
attempt to protect itself.
The alien with the receptor walks in front of us, starting with Biscuit. He puts the device on
Biscuit’s face as if scanning him for something, while the second alien watches from a distance like a hawk.
The first alien now moves the device over Daphne’s face, then Nya and Finn. My turn is coming
up. I don’t know what possesses me but the moment the cold surface of the device touches my cheek, I
reach out and grab it from the alien’s hand.
I steady myself for the blow that will surely follow, but instead I see what can only be described
as sheer terror on the alien’s face. I hear a buzz, I look at my hands and see that the sensory device is turned on and a red sparkling intermittent light beams out like some kind of signal.
Three Sliman move toward me but I spring up to my feet fast and turn the device on them. A
moment later, they are levitated five feet off the ground and are thrown with a thud against the walls behind them.
“That’s impossible,” the second alien growls. I defiantly turn the device on him. He crouches
and whimpers as I send a small electric shock at him.
Finn overcomes his initial shock and, taking advantage of the confusion, springs to his feet.
[scifan] plantation - books one to three Page 12
