“I didn’t touch it,” said Parker, using the tray to push the puddle of red drink onto the floor.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Whatever. Go ahead, blame me. Washrooms are over there, klutz.”
Shaking his head, Chase skirted through the tables and slipped into a small room in the back, closing the door behind him. He tried to prop his knee against a sink, but something dug into his thigh and he pulled Parker’s knife from his pocket, placing it on the only available space, a shelf above the sink.
He had just splashed a handful of water onto his pants when something dropped down from above and crashed into him, knocking to the floor with a surprised shout.
Someone small—a girl—was on top of him, her tiny hands grabbing at his throat as he tried to twist out from under her. A hard, cold edge pressed against his neck.
“Stop!” she demanded in a high, thin voice. “Unless you want this to end right now.”
Chase froze. The girl, no older than ten, was perched on his chest, her skinny bare knees digging into his ribs. She wore a light blue smock—a hospital gown?—and her pale hair stuck out in a spiky halo. Violet half-moon bruises were slashed under her wide, unstable eyes.
She was holding Parker’s knife to his throat.
“What are you doing?” Adrenaline snapped through his body.
She leaned forward, examining his face with a scowl. “What are you?”
“What?”
“I saw you standing next to Dornan. She didn’t see your face, but I did. You’re a perfect copy. Who made you?” She pressed down harder on the knife.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he choked, pushing his cheek against the washroom floor and away from the blade’s edge.
“Of course you wouldn’t, not if they made you to be perfect,” she spat. “But that doesn’t make you innocent. I won’t be tricked into thinking you’re something you’re not!” The words poured out of her in a hysterical jumble. “Something you never could be! I won’t let them do this! They wrecked everything! They ruined us! I won’t let them use—violate my—my—”
With a savage cry she slashed the blade across his throat and plunged it into the side of his neck. Chase jerked back against the floor, and his body began to tremble. He locked eyes with the girl. She stared back, her face a mask of horrified shock.
He rolled his eyes over to look at the hilt of the knife, pressed against his skin. His neck felt numb. The girl followed his eyes, and suddenly recoiled, pulling the knife out with a start. It clattered to the floor, and she slid off his chest.
Heart pounding, Chase cupped his hands around his neck, trying to stop the blood that would be pouring out, taking his life with it. But he felt no wetness, and when he tentatively probed his skin, it was warm and whole, all his blood contained within the furiously throbbing veins.
The girl’s pale eyebrows bunched together in a bewildered expression. “What are you?”
He looked up at her, dazed. “I don’t know. I woke up a week ago at someone’s home with no memory of anything before that. They told me my name is Chase. Do you know who I am?”
Her mouth dropped open. “If…”
“If what?”
She shook her head. “No. This is a trap. You can’t be Chase!”
“Why not?”
She shook her head again.
“Why not?” he repeated impatiently.
“Because he’s dead!”
It felt like someone had knocked all the wind out of his lungs. “What?”
“Chase is dead.” She looked away, her voice breaking on the words. “I saw it happen.”
The room spun and compressed, narrowing in to one tiny little point on the girl’s face. He couldn’t speak—every thought process had short-circuited. She glanced over her shoulder and looked back at him. Her eyes were turbulent, full of a wild mix of fear and hope and anger.
“Someone’s coming. If you have any of Chase’s memories, then you have to know the safe place. Please remember it, they told us so many times. Go there! Tell them I’m alive and that I’m being held by the one who led the end. Tell them to come and get me!” Her face crumpled, and for a moment she looked like nothing more than a frightened little girl.
“Tell who?” Chase grabbed her narrow shoulders. “Asa Kaplan?”
“Who? No…” She paused, and her eyes seemed to lose focus. “Guide the star!”
And then she vanished.
Chase stared in shock at the empty space where the girl had been. His hands hung in midair, holding nothing. “Come back!”
The washroom door opened and Parker’s head poked inside. “Hey, are you taking a bath in here or something?” He frowned down at Chase sitting on the floor. “I’m not going to ask what you’re doing down there. Get up. We need to go.”
“What? Parker, I just—”
“Shut up, I don’t care. Let’s go.”
Chase froze. “Is something wrong? Did they find us?”
Parker’s mouth twisted up in a crooked smile. “No. But I know where we can find Maurus.”
CHAPTER TEN
Chase’s mind spun as Parker led him back through the café. Nothing the girl had said made sense. Perfect copy. Can’t be Chase. He’s dead. Her wild eyes were burned into his mind. She’d known who he was—or at least, she knew another Chase who she believed was dead. But she was wrong about that. Wasn’t she?
They stepped out onto the street, and Chase finally found his voice. “Parker. There was a girl. In the bathroom.”
“Um, what?” Parker cut him a sideways glance before starting down the sidewalk. “You were alone in the bathroom, Chase.”
“No, I wasn’t. She vanished right before you opened the door.”
“Uh-huh.”
Chase rushed around Parker and stood in front of him, blocking his way. “I’m serious! She tried to stab me with your knife, but it didn’t work, and then she said I was a perfect copy, and that Chase was dead.”
“Dead,” repeated Parker. He squinted at Chase, inspecting him. “And the knife ‘didn’t work.’ Buddy, did you fall and hit your head in there? Because this sounds crazy.”
“I’m not crazy! She even said ‘guide the star.’” Surely that would convince Parker she was real.
Parker gazed down the street for a moment, looking thoughtful. “Maybe you’re having a weird reaction to the food.” He stepped around Chase and started walking again. “Now which way is the Shank?”
Chase grabbed at Parker’s sleeve, yanking it with such force it nearly tore at the shoulder. “Will you listen to me?” he shouted. “It happened! She was really there, and then she just disappeared. I’m not making it up!”
Parker looked down at Chase’s hand. “Okay,” he said slowly. “I believe you.” His expression said otherwise.
Chase released Parker’s shirt. “Whatever. You’re not listening to me. Someone recognized me. Someone who knows who I am.” Or was. A knot had formed in his chest.
Parker squeezed his eyes shut for several seconds and snapped them back open. “Alright. I’m sorry. I get that this could be huge. But whatever happened to you back there is not going to help us get Mina back, and we don’t have much time left. Once Maurus splits from this planet, he’ll disappear forever. While you were in the bathroom, you missed the breaking news flash. The Fleet’s already discovered that Maurus is alive and made it here to Qesaris.”
Parker’s chatter flowed past Chase’s ears, not sinking in. If only he’d had enough time to ask the girl what “guide the star” meant.
“Hey!” said Parker. “Did you hear me? The Fleet found out where Maurus went.”
“Yeah. What?” Chase forced himself to absorb what Parker was saying. Maurus. Mina. Girl or no girl, they still needed to find Asa Kaplan. “How do they know he’s here?”
“Because there’s surveillance footage of him heading into the Shank with a ‘mysterious bundle’ over his shoulder.”
“Heading into the what?”<
br />
“The Shank. It’s some sort of district—I’m guessing fairly nearby.”
“So how does that mean—” Chase began to ask, but a sudden roar drowned him out.
A fleet of hoverbikes, at least thirty or forty, zoomed overhead, with gray-uniformed soldiers atop. Every person on the street stopped to stare as they roared past and vanished around a corner.
“What was that?” Chase asked.
“That would be the Fleet, heading to the Shank to look for our friend, the saboteur.” Parker headed down the street in the same direction the bikes had gone. “We just have to follow them and we’ll find him.”
Chase grabbed his shoulder. “Wait. If they’re looking for Maurus, that place is going to be crawling with Fleet soldiers. This isn’t a good plan.”
“It’s the only plan!” said Parker, jerking his shoulder away. “We know this is where he took Mina—how else are we supposed to find her?”
“We’ll get caught!”
“We’ll be careful.”
Chase rolled his eyes. When was Parker ever careful? “How do you expect to find Mina?”
Parker didn’t answer. He stopped a woman in a blue dress who was walking in the opposite direction and asked her, “Is this the right way to the Shank?”
The woman made a face and hurried away.
“Rude,” muttered Parker.
“Do you even have a plan for how to look for her?” Chase asked. They knew Mina was in a particular district, but what was that? A few streets? A few blocks? A quarter of the planet?
“Mina’s a very sophisticated android,” said Parker. “You saw those andies at the registration, right? Plastic skin, glass eyes, brainpower of a calculator? Most of them are like that.”
“So?”
“Head down.” Parker stuck out his arm to stop Chase. A moment later, another flock of hoverbikes rushed past, turning left in the distance. “Mina’s very special,” he continued. “I don’t know why Maurus took her to this district—maybe to fix her, maybe to sell her. Either way, someone there is going to have heard about her. We just have to ask around.”
Chase waited for the rest of Parker’s plan, but he seemed to have said everything he was going to say. “Ask around? That’s the best you’ve got?”
Parker ignored him, cupping his hands to his mouth as he shouted to a man across the street. “Hey, mister, is this the way to the Shank?” He pointed down a street that led to their left.
The man squinted at them and shook his head. “You boys trying to get yourselves killed? Stay outta the Shank!”
Uneasiness crept into Chase’s stomach. “What is this place we’re heading into, Parker?”
Parker grimaced. “My guess is that it’s a gray sector.”
“What’s a gray sector?”
“You’ll see. Hey, check that guy out.”
It was easy to see who Parker was talking about. The people walking on the street around them looked fairly normal to Chase, but one extremely tall man in a wide-brimmed hat stood out, weaving through the crowd with his collar turned up and his hands in his pockets.
“What about him?”
“He doesn’t belong here—Epsilons aren’t supposed to be in an area like this. Let’s follow him. I bet he’ll lead us to the Shank.”
“Epsilons?”
“Epsilon-level species, one grade down from Alphas, like us.”
“Why aren’t they supposed to be here?”
“Because this is a blue sector—Alpha only. Don’t you see the blue lights on the street corners?”
The more Parker explained, the less sense it made, so Chase stopped asking questions. The man turned onto a narrow side street, and they followed him for several blocks, when suddenly he ducked into a narrow space between the buildings, an alley so dark that it looked like they were stepping into nighttime. Chase’s pulse quickened as they followed the man into the black corridor, but after a few meters it widened into a dirty street.
The people on these back streets were a world apart from those they had left behind. From the corner of his eye Chase caught glimpses of strange features—a pair of pointed, hairy ears, a shimmer of translucent skin. The man they were following stopped to join a group clustered outside a doorway, and the boys kept walking. A few steps away, a figure wrapped in a dirty blanket lay huddled on the ground.
“What is this place?” Chase whispered. A hulking creature with a wide, vicious mouth burst through a door beside them. Chase jumped away with a gasp.
“Calm down,” muttered Parker.
They squeezed through a narrow alley and came out into a small, busy plaza ringed with vendor stalls. A strange variety of people did business here—some looked almost human, but others were too tall, too wide, their features placed wrongly on their faces.
“This is a gray sector,” Parker finally said. “There are no restrictions on which species can come here.”
“Why would there be restrictions?” asked Chase.
Parker pressed his lips together. “Because not everybody gets along very well.” He headed for a stall in the back corner of the plaza. A small, battered yellow sign that read Mama T: Lyolli Nodel hung from the top of the stall, and beneath it was an open counter with a few stools.
“More food?” asked Chase, frowning. Parker shook his head.
A squat little woman worked at a stovetop behind the counter. Her round face was dominated by a long, pointy nose that stretched down toward her equally long, pointy chin, and Chase wondered if it was the dim lighting of her stall that made her skin appear to be such a strange, dusky green-gold hue. As she cooked, a long, bronze limb unfolded from behind her shoulders and reached up to take another pot down from its hook on the ceiling.
Chase stopped and took a step backward.
“What’s wrong?” asked Parker, following his gaze to the multitasking cook. He looked back at Chase and shook his head with a sigh.
Chase could not take his eyes off the strange woman as another long, bony limb extended from her back to keep stirring the pot. With human-like arms at the front of her body, the woman began chopping a pile of nubby black vegetables.
Parker leaned over the counter. “Excuse me, I have a question.”
The woman stayed bent over her chopping and ignored him. She wore a loose sort of pants, but instead of human-type legs, her saggy, bulbous midsection rested on a pair of folded haunches.
“Just one question,” Parker repeated.
“No food, no answer,” the woman snapped.
Parker sighed and sat on one of the stools.
“We’ll take two of whatever you’ve got,” said Chase. He didn’t expect a food-stall cook to know much, but at least it was a start. “Can you tell us if you’ve heard anything about a very special android that’s shown up in your district today? A broken android?”
Parker looked at Chase in disgust and rolled his eyes. “Way to be subtle.”
The woman still didn’t look up, and Chase racked his brain for something that would catch her attention. “She was brought here by the guy that’s on the news, the Fleet soldier who helped the Karsha Ven destroy Trucon.”
Parker jumped off his stool and punched Chase in the arm, hard. “How stupid are you? We need to get out of here now.”
With a juicy slap, two packages landed in front of the boys, thick rolls wrapped in brown paper already blooming with grease spots. “Pay now!” screeched the woman behind the counter.
Parker tossed a handful of currency chips on the counter and pulled Chase away, leaving the greasy packages behind.
“What?” asked Chase.
“Don’t you ever mention Maurus or the Karsha Ven again in this district, not unless you want to get killed.”
“But people must know he’s here!” In fact, Chase realized, it was more likely that people would be able to answer questions about Maurus than about Mina.
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Excuse me, boys?” A strange man with bone-white skin and an od
dly flat face had walked up behind them. “I couldn’t help overhearing your questions at the noodle bar.”
“It was nothing,” said Parker quickly. “My friend’s an idiot.”
“Of course, nothing, I understand,” said the man with a gracious nod. “I just, you know, may have heard a thing or two about a very special android. If, you know…” He coughed and lowered his beady eyes, set so far apart they were almost on the sides of his head.
Parker paused and reached into his pocket. “This is all I’ve got.” He opened his palm to show four plastic chips.
The man stared at the money and sniffed. “Well. I guess it’s a good day to be charitable.” He swept up the chips with one smooth gesture. How many fingers were there on his hand? “There’s word going around that a certain, um, gentleman has been trying to sell a high-ticket item on the black market.”
“Did someone buy her?” asked Chase. Parker jabbed him in the side with an elbow.
“That part isn’t known,” said the pale man, looking over his shoulder. “But word is that the item in question is broken and will need to be fixed. You’ll probably learn more if you check with a local electrostruct.”
“Where’s the best electrostruct in the district?” asked Parker.
The man paused and coughed gently. He looked back and forth at each boy.
“I don’t have any more money!” Parker said, patting his pockets.
The man shrugged. “And I don’t have any more answers.” He turned and walked away.
“Great, thank you!” Parker called after him. “Thanks a lot!”
“So all we have to do now is ask around until we find—” began Chase.
“If you open your mouth here again, I swear to God I will strangle you. You can’t just say anything to anyone. Not here in the gray sector.”
“What is it with the gray sector?” Chase asked. “I don’t get it.”
Parker pulled him back against a wall, looking around. “This is an alien ghetto,” he said softly. “You have to know which species you can talk to, and which ones would rather tear your limbs off. You clearly don’t.”
Lost Planet 01 - The Lost Planet Page 9
