by R H Nolan
Just as he’d finished gingerly placing the last pear inside his pack, Zryk stepped up beside him with his skates. “Here you are.”
“Wow, when you said fast, you really meant fast,” Max said as he took them back.
When he flipped them over, he found himself staring at what looked like the bark of a tree, only it was clear.
“An insulator,” Zryk said. “The magnetism will not be affected, and you will not experience overheating by an electrical current.”
“Thanks.” He leaned back against the computer to strap them on again one at a time, then he stood fully and slowly tightened the straps of his pack. “I guess I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Correct.”
Nodding, Max turned and made his way back out of the Qirinian starship towards the tunnel to the surface.
His mom and Kier ate the fruit and cucumbers with as much glee as they had the day before.
Max thought about tomorrow. If he had to go back into Neo Angeles, he might as well try to grab something else from the garden to bring back to Zryk. Eating was the main concern, but if they could have some variety, why not give it to them?
With thick, orange-tinted juice running down his chin, Kier looked up at Max.
“You’re gonna have some too, right?” he asked as he lifted half a peeled orange towards Max.
Max just shook his head. “I already had enough.”
“Max,” his mom said in a mild rebuke.
He sighed, took the orange from his brother, and popped it into his mouth.
“But the rest is for you,” he said.
“Did you get this from the city too?” his mother asked.
Max glanced at his mom again, surprised that she wanted to know more about where he’d been and how he’d done any of this.
“Not exactly,” he said, then turned to wink at Kier. If he didn’t play this off like everything was fine, she’d be worrying a lot more than she was right now.
Everything was fine, honestly, just not in the way he knew she would have preferred. Max could never tell her what he was doing with Zryk. Not until it was over and he’d repaid his debt.
“Will there be more of this tomorrow?” his mom asked.
“Probably, yeah.” To avoid looking her in the eye, he made a funny face at his brother.
“Stop!” Kier cried out, dribbling juice from his mouth as he fought not to laugh.
“And you’re sure you can—”
“Everything’s okay, Mom,” Max interrupted. “I’ve got it covered, all right?”
Of course he didn’t want her to worry, but if he stopped now, they’d go back to being hungry and desperate and terrified. And he needed Zryk’s help, at least until he had a better handle on what he was doing.
“Just be careful,” she said.
“I will. I’m always careful,” he lied.
16
Max rose with the sun again that morning and headed out first thing to Zryk’s ship. His mom and Kier were still sleeping when he left, which was probably for the best. He didn’t want to see the concern in her eyes again or hear her begging him to be careful.
Zryk had fully repaired the chest plate by the time Max joined him in the Qirinian ship. When Max put the black armor suit back on and attached both pieces of the himirini armor, everything seemed to fit him a lot better. Or maybe it was just the fact that he now had both a chest plate and a back piece sealed together.
Today he was headed out to retrieve something Zryk called ‘the emergent,’ which was the best Zryk could translate it. The Bug told him it was used to power the Qirinian energy chambers and that it had to be restored to his ship in order for any of the most crucial functions to become active again.
He’d pulled up an image of a long, thin rod about the size of Max’s forearm, made from the same material as everything else in the starship, but with patterns Max had never seen etched all along its surface. Then Max received an updated map of Neo Angeles, which made him incredibly excited.
“I have programmed the schematics to reflect physical barriers, as you requested,” Zryk told him. “However, it does not portray an accurate, second-to-second representation of every human inside the city and their whereabouts.”
“No problem,” Max said. “All I need to know is where I’m going, and for you to make sure I don’t stumble into a bunch of guards. I can outrun the rest of them again any day.”
With his pack strapped over the armor on his back and his goggles pulled up over his eyes, Max skated away from the tunneled entrance to Zryk’s ship and set off for Neo Angeles’ ventilation tubes in the desert.
When he pulled up the map of the city, he was definitely pleased to see this really was the only entrance accessible to those who “didn’t belong” in the city. He hadn’t needed a map to find the entrance, but it was nice to have that little bit of validation.
He studied the map a bit more as he moved through the ventilation system. Apparently he was looking for one of the Neo Angeles laboratories, which was actually three levels below the surface. But he could only access the lower levels through what looked like more elevators, and those didn’t connect to the tunnels he was in now.
The closest lower elevator was about a mile from the store room he’d found so long ago, so he headed that way.
Just as he’d expected, there wasn’t anyone in the storage room, and he wound his way through the pallets of stacked and discarded items. It baffled him that the Dwellers would choose to just leave what they didn’t need in a room no one ever entered when there were so many Scavengers in the Wastelands who would find a way to put all this to good use. Not only that, but there had to be a lot more rooms just like this one, full of stuff nobody used anymore.
Max pressed himself against the door, listening to the bustle of the inner city just on the other side. A few heavy footsteps passed, then they faded.
Max slowly pushed open the door and slipped through it before kicking it shut again with his skate.
Then he was off, following the yellow flashing light in his vision and occasionally checking the larger city schematics. Having a literal guiding light was cool, but he didn’t want to get too used to depending on it all the time.
He made it to what looked like a marketplace sector, which initially filled him with awed anticipation until he realized nobody at this marketplace was selling anything remotely like food. Of course they weren’t. The Dwellers ate food grown in labs; there probably wasn’t enough fertile land left anywhere on this planet to naturally farm enough food for even Neo Angeles. At least he’d had the experience of picking real fruit from real bushes and trees.
The streets were filled with people and incredibly busy. Even then, a few Dwellers glanced his way with confused frowns or wide eyes. None of them raised the alarm, though, because Max definitely didn’t look like a Scavenger with the black armor suit and the himirini chest and back pieces on top of it.
That meant he didn’t exactly look like a Dweller, either, but if people took enough time trying to figure out what he was, he’d have enough time to get to the lower-level elevators.
At the end of the marketplace, he turned left down the first alleyway and nearly bumped into a Dweller guard’s back. The man turned away from his conversation with another guard, the open smile fading a little when he took in the sight of Max.
“Where’d you get that?” the guard asked, nodding at Max’s armor with a frown.
“That’s him!” the second guard suddenly shouted in surprise. “That kid from the other day, the one who jumped off the wall!”
Great.
Too bad his powers couldn’t control for bad luck.
Max activated his skates before the guards could act, then he turned and raced back out of the alley.
The men shouted for him to stop, and he heard their pounding footsteps behind him. Just like last time, they weren’t anywhere near as fast as Max on his skates. That didn’t keep them from shooting at him.
The red blaze
of an energy blaster shot streaked just past his head, and he reached out to wrap his hand around the corner of the closest building. It changed his momentum with the skates to turn the corner, and he disintegrated some of the building as he touched it.
He didn’t want to fight any people today unless he had to, but he didn’t want to be unprepared if it came to that.
He darted around another corner within the rows of buildings, ducking behind a hovering, driverless trailer whizzing across the next thoroughfare.
It was easy to reach out and grab the access handle on the trailer, which kept up its swift course even as it dragged him along with it. Max glanced back to see the two guards’ confusion when they saw he’d disappeared. He hoped they wouldn’t turn around again until the trailer made it past the giant crowd up ahead, but they did.
Another blaster shot zipped through the air and blew a hole in the trailer right beside Max’s hand.
The Dwellers in the crowd closest to him let out a few shouts of surprise, and the crowd scattered as much as they could with so little space between the buildings.
Max honestly hadn’t thought the guards would even consider firing a weapon so close to the crowd—or that they’d destroy one of their trailers just to get him. They had no idea who he was or what he wanted; all they knew was that he wasn’t a City Dweller of Neo Angeles. Apparently, that meant they would do whatever it took to get rid of him.
More angry now than anything else, Max kicked his skates against the metal streets of the city and moved on, trying to avoid the crowds now that he knew it wouldn’t stop the guards. What kind of people fired on their own just to get to an outsider?
When he rounded the next corner, he found himself being stared down by a third guard on a hovering skiff. The new man looked just as confused as his fellow guards to see Max wearing alien armor.
“Surrender!” the guard shouted.
Max put an energy blast through the skiff, which sparked and hissed and immediately crashed to the ground, which freaked the guard out.
Max took off again, hoping to either find another trailer or some unexpected hiding place to lose the guards. He had no desire to ride the elevators along the outer wall and skate back down into the desert again.
Another energy blaster shot at him, but it went wide and left a dent in the building Max had already skated past.
He thought he saw the arched entryway into the garden just beyond a group of Dwellers standing aside to let him through, though they did it with confused stares and murmurs of surprise.
The garden wasn’t an option. He didn’t think he could get back to the grate in the grass and into the tunnels again before the guards took their shots at him. And if they found out about the tunnels, he’d never get into the city again.
“I believe you are headed in the wrong direction.”
Max reeled at hearing Zryk’s voice in his head, which he’d completely forgotten about at this point.
“I know. Not a good time, Zryk.”
Whether or not the Bug could hear him didn’t really matter.
He ducked under a swinging beam of a machine stacking crates, then found himself back at the outer wall right beside those glass elevators again. If he didn’t find somewhere to hide soon, he’d be going back over the wall again with nothing to show for it. It was better than getting killed, and even though the himirini armor could take substantial damage, Max had no desire to start killing guards just so he could get to Zryk’s emergent device.
He had to slow down when he reached a group of Dwellers standing in wait for one of the descending elevators.
So far he’d outskated the guards. Wrestling with himself as to whether it was smarter to disintegrate something now and be prepared—or dumber to get the other Dwellers’ attention with his glowing hands—he never expected to hear the voice calling out his name.
“Max?”
He turned to see Ayla, the girl from the garden, standing in a recessed doorway just beyond the elevator.
Max glanced behind him and saw three more guards jogging down the larger street beside the wall. They hadn’t seen him yet.
“Max, what are you doing here?” Ayla called.
He darted toward her on his skates, then spun around and eyed the street.
“Right now, I’m looking for a place to hide. Can you help me? Please?”
When she didn’t answer, he pressed himself against the wall beside the open doorway and disintegrated part of the metal, sticking his glowing hand behind his back so people didn’t start shouting and pointing him out to the guards.
“Whoa,” Ayla whispered in awe as she stared at his glowing hand. “Yeah—follow me.”
Max thought he’d misheard her until she grabbed his non-glowing wrist and pulled him into the doorway. Then she all but dragged him down a short flight of stairs, turned left, and opened a door.
Max didn’t argue when she pulled him into a room and closed the door behind her. Small, narrow windows revealed a bit of the city streets above, including the Dwellers’ shoes as they hustled back and forth.
For a few seconds, Max and Ayla stood there in silence. He focused on the window until he saw three pairs of black boots and the gray uniform pants of the guards move swiftly past.
Then he took a deep breath and turned toward Ayla. “Thank you.”
She grinned at him, instantly reminding him how beautiful she was and how much he hadn’t wanted to leave her in the garden the other day.
“Well, at least I could help you this time around,” Ayla replied. “So now you have to tell me what that is.”
She pointed at Max’s still-glowing fist.
He stared down at it, shrugged, and folded his arms. His attempt to hide the yellow energy didn’t work at all.
“Just… something I can do.”
“Really,” she said sarcastically. “Your hands just glow like that for no reason?”
Max grinned, then uncrossed his arms and lifted his hand again. “There’s a reason.”
It was probably a good idea to get rid of all the energy crackling around his hands right now. The last thing he needed was to go too long without firing it and end up blasting something to pieces when he least expected it. Or hurting someone. But he didn’t quite know how to explain that to Ayla right now.
“For one, I can make a really bright light.”
He aimed his hand away from her and let off a lightwave. The room around them flared into strobing brightness. Ayla squeaked in surprise and covered her eyes. Then it was over.
“What is that?” Ayla asked, blinking at him in surprise.
“Just a lightwave. Most of the other things I can do are more for fighting.”
Ayla shook her head and grinned at him with wide eyes like he was the greatest thing she’d ever seen. Max definitely didn’t mind that part, only it made him a little nervous imagining what Ayla might think if he told her the entire truth about his powers and where he’d got them.
“You’re like a mage,” she said.
“A what?”
Ayla tucked a string of her golden hair behind her ear. “A few years ago, I found these old books down in the city’s storage rooms. Real books, Max. Printed on paper, if you can believe it. They’re from centuries before the war, about people with magical powers. Merlin, Harry Potter, Gandalf…”
“Those are some weird names,” Max said, both curious and a little skeptical.
“I know,” Ayla said. “But they were from a much different time. I don’t think the names were weird for them. But the point is that they had powers like yours. They called them wizards and mages. You’re like them.”
Max snorted. “Right. I’m a mage from the future who got his powers from a Bug living underground.”
He realized too late what he’d said out loud.
Ayla’s eyes were wide now, frightened-looking, and the color had drained from her face.
“A Bug?”
Max tried to play it off.
“Uhhhh… no
… that was just a joke. Haha!” he said, forcing a fake laugh. “Ha…”
He was a terrible, terrible liar.
Ayla’s eyes got even bigger. “You DID see a Bug!”
“…yeah.” Max sighed and scratched the back of his neck.
“And it gave you powers?!”
“Well, it put me in this—”
“I can’t believe this!” Ayla whirled away from him to pace across the room, then spun back toward him. “Was it awful? Did it try to eat you? You should be dead now! I mean, Bugs don’t—”
“Whoa, slow down a second.” Max chuckled. “He didn’t try to eat me, and I didn’t even—”
“Wait—‘him’ ?” Ayla asked with a frown of complete confusion.
“Yeah. His name’s Zryk. He’s really friendly.”
“That is nice of you to say, Max,” Zryk’s voice echoed in his head.
Max clenched his eyes shut and tried to ignore Zryk. He wanted to tell the Qirinian to butt out for a minute, but he didn’t want Ayla to think he was crazy by talking to himself.
Well, it would look like he was talking to himself as far as she could tell.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“What? Nothing.”
She folded her arms and squinted at him. “So you’re telling me there’s a Bug out there, still alive, and you’re friends with it?”
“Him. And yeah, I am. He gave me these…” He paused, then smiled. “…mage powers when he put me in a Qirinian energy chamber—”
“What’s that?”
“It’s just this little chamber where—oh. You mean ‘Qirinian.’”
Ayla nodded.
“We’ve been calling them Bugs because we never knew what they actually were, right? But they’re called Qirinians.”
Max paused, realizing what it meant to be telling another human these things about the alien race Earth had called its enemy for decades.
