Prophet's Journey, page 31
part #1 of Prophet of the Badlands Series
“Kid,” rasped Teal. “Good to see you made it.”
She crept closer, sensing no dark presence in the immediate area. “Ash?”
“No one calls me that anymore.”
Althea knelt again and brushed the woman’s hair off her face. Two fat happy tears gathered in her eyes, falling onto Teal’s chest. “You’re alive…”
“That’s a philosophical debate I’m not drunk enough to attempt. I do, however, have one complaint.”
“What?”
“Why did the people who designed the Nova 10 series synthetic bodies have to include internal pain receptors?”
“I’m sorry I can’t make you stop hurting. Your body speaks a different language than my psionics.”
Teal emitted a strange static noise somewhat like a laugh.
“I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.”
“Just a little. If I could move, I’d probably shoot myself in the head to make the pain stop.”
Althea gasped. “No… how can I help?”
Teal’s right eye twitched, then rotated toward her, the other eye still pointing straight up. “Maybe it’s not really that bad. Guess there’s some good parts about being synthetic. We are kinda tough. Never expected to survive a faceplant from 1,500 feet, though. Figured I’d go splat.”
“You shouldn’t have shoved me off.”
“When I expected to go splat, I made a slight miscalculation. Sometimes, I still think like a human. If we hit together, you wouldn’t have made it. Maybe I would have, but then I’d have to deal with killing the most obnoxiously sweet child I’ve ever seen.”
Althea wiped more blood from the woman’s cheek. “You wouldn’t have killed me. The ground would have.”
Another strange noise came from Teal.
“Okay. I’ll find a safer spot.”
Althea stuffed the blanket in the backpack, which she slung over her shoulder, then stood to look around for a suitable place. The boxy remains of a decaying large car against the side of a building a few hundred meters down the street looked promising. It reminded her a little of the one where she found the ospi, only this one appeared somewhat smaller and didn’t have any broken lights all over it. She grabbed Teal’s wrist in both hands, boosted her muscles for strength, and dragged the woman’s limp body down the road over the course of twenty some odd minutes.
After propping her up against the dead car, Althea moved around behind her and sat on the back bumper between the two open rear doors. She stooped forward to slide her arms under Teal’s and lifted, hauling the woman backward and inside, struggling not to let the body’s dead weight drag them both out onto the street. She started to slip, but braced a foot on the side by the door, grunting and pushing with all the strength she could summon. Althea lurched backward, the synthetic body abruptly feeling lighter in response to her boosted strength. Teal flew up into the open cargo space, Althea falling flat on her back with Teal on top of her. Dust rained from the ceiling, knocked loose by the shock of their landing. Following a brief pause to recover, Althea rolled to the side, scooted out from under her, and eased her to lay down.
Out of breath, she sat back on her heels and pulled her hair off her face, tucking it behind her shoulder.
“You’re pretty strong for a little thing,” rasped Teal, still not quite with a human voice.
“I’m hurting myself.” Althea stared at the dusty floor between her knees, head spinning. “My muscle shapes aren’t big enough. Sometimes they break if I put too much power in them.”
“Well, stop hurting yourself.”
Althea squirmed out of the backpack and crawled to the doors, pulling them closed. “Robots can’t see us in here.”
“Hey, you still have my pack.”
“Yeah.”
Teal’s other eye twitched a few times before it became unstuck. Both eyes focused on her. “Are there any high-density bars left?”
“What?”
“The food.”
“Oh. Yes. There are a lot.” Althea scrambled over to kneel by the backpack. “Are you hungry?”
“That’s one word for it.”
“Okay.”
Althea rummaged a food bar out of the pack, peeled the wrapper, and held it for Teal to bite.
“Heh,” said Teal after finishing it. “That’s ironic.”
“I thought it was chocolate.”
The woman emitted a digitized chuckle. “No, I mean, now it’s me that can’t move and you’re feeding me.”
Althea smiled.
“Wow. After everything I did to you, I can’t believe you actually wanted to get me out of there.”
“I’ve been kidnapped a lot. You were pretty nice about it except for the tying me up at night part.”
Teal slightly shook her head. “You are unbelievably nice.”
“She’s a little angel,” said Lieutenant Raines, while exuding out from the wall.
“No doubt,” said Teal. “Hey, keep that food coming, please.”
“I mean that rather literally.” Raines smiled.
“Yeah right, the wings thing,” said Teal. “She does kinda look like one.”
“You want another food? But you said it’s bad to eat more than one a day.” Althea plucked a second bar from the pack, not yet opening the wrapper.
“It would be bad for you to eat more than one, since you are biological. I just had my ass epically kicked. I need raw materials.”
Althea scrunched her nose. “No one hit you in the butt.”
“Ugh. Don’t make me laugh, please. Not now. It hurts too much.”
“I don’t understand.” Althea opened the wrapper and held the second bar for her to eat. “How many do you want?”
“Oh… about fifteen if there are that many left.”
“That’s too much food. You’ll get sick.”
“Do you know what nanobots are?” asked Teal.
“No.”
“Okay, umm… I have magic in me that puts me back together. It needs food to work. I’m not going to get sick.”
“All right.” Althea upended the backpack, dumping all the remaining food bars on the floor.
She opened and fed them into Teal’s mouth one at a time until only two remained.
“Stop… that’s good.”
“Okay.” Althea knelt there, expectantly watching Teal, but nothing happened. “You’re not magicing.”
“It takes a while. Not as fast as what you do with people.”
“Oh.” Althea tossed the last two bars into the pack. Smiling, she set up the warmth emitter to keep her friend comfortable, then covered her with the blanket. “There.”
Lieutenant Raines looked at her expectantly.
She peered up at him. “I remember. Thank you for helping us.”
“Least I could do. Promise me something?”
“Hmm?”
“You’re too damn little to go anywhere near that place ever again. Stay away from there. Don’t get hurt.”
Althea grinned. “I will. I don’t ever wanna go back there again.”
She closed her eyes and tried to stop thinking about everything other than helping him go where Ancestors lived, to the place where part of her had come from. Officer David called that part of her a soul. He didn’t understand exactly what happened, but said something like when the machine her mother had been next to blew up, it opened a doorway to that other place for less time than an eye blink, but enough that energy came across and somehow become part of Althea before she’d been born.
Kate thought she had a ‘Seraph’s soul in a human body.’ Officer David said she only had ‘a little bit of that energy.’ He didn’t believe a full ‘angel’ would be able to go inside her, and if it did, she wouldn’t be a child, but a tiny adult. Of course, they could both be completely wrong, too. She still struggled to think of her powers as ‘psionics’ instead of magic. Maybe her abilities simply reminded David and Kate about these angel things and both were wrong. But this Ancestor also said she reminded him of Seraphs….
A glimmer of silver appeared near the back of the van, growing into a small hole. Only bright light existed on the other side, though it radiated as much a sense of familiarity and comfort as her bed at home. She knew she would be happy on the other side, but not now, not for many years. This doorway belonged to Lieutenant Raines.
“Thank you, child.” The ghostly man bowed to her.
Unable to speak due to her concentration, Althea nodded.
Lieutenant Raines’ form condensed into a cloud of light that blurred into a smear of glowing energy, stretching thinner as a thread drawn into the portal. When the last of his essence disappeared, the opening sealed itself. Althea crossed her arms over her chest, so overcome with happiness for him that she couldn’t speak.
A faint snap came from Teal.
Althea looked up. The woman’s cheek moved as if she had a small creature crawling around under her skin. “Eep.”
“My skull cracked. It’s fine… just repairing. Do you know how much force it takes to crack plastisteel?”
“Plastisteel?”
“Of course not.” Teal smiled. “It’s an alloy of metals made from asteroid mined ore, not native to Earth. About as tough as steel but a fraction of the weight.”
“Whatever language you’re speaking, I don’t know it.” Althea settled down on her side, curling up with her head on Teal’s shoulder.
“You’re really happy out here? Not at all curious about the modern world?”
“I don’t like the big city. It’s too sad and angry there. This is my home.”
Teal’s body shook with a series of mild convulsions. “Yeah, I can see that. An off-the-charts telempath would be overwhelmed with so many people around them. And the slower pace out here could be nice if you like that sort of thing.”
“I just want to be with my family and to help whoever I can.”
“Heh. You’re way too sweet.”
Althea licked her arm. “Still kinda salty.”
“Goof.”
She giggled, snuggled close, and closed her eyes.
33
Limping Along
The whirr of a wheelbot startled Althea awake.
She held completely still, curled up against Teal’s side in the rusty van. Electric motor whine mixed with the buzz of tire treads on paving passed by, so close she pictured it mere feet away. She shivered, grateful the CRP androids had no ability to sense a runaway telempathic broadcast of fear. The wheelbot didn’t stop or slow down, the noise gradually fading back to silence.
“I’m really starting to dislike those things,” whispered Teal.
Afraid to make a sound lest the android hear her and turn around, Althea nodded.
“Been thinking. Maybe I should vid my parents. Been a while.”
“Vid?” whispered Althea.
“Talk to, from far away.”
“They’d like that, but why not hug them.”
“My arms aren’t that long. They’re on Mars.”
Althea kept quiet.
“You have no idea what that means, do you?”
“No.”
“Somewhere really far away. You need a spaceship to get there.”
“What is a spaceship?”
“Wow, okay this is going to take longer than I thought.”
Althea sat up and smiled at her. “Too long to be worth explaining?”
Teal chuckled. “Maybe. Do you know what planets are?”
She shook her head.
“Yeah. Too long to explain while we’re out here surrounded by killer androids.”
“You are a people. Maybe you’re not made from the same kind of meat, but I think you’re a real person.”
Teal sat up. “Heh. Thanks, kid. Ouch. Hey, sorry. I really should’ve been pickier about taking jobs. Someone approaching me with a job to rescue a specific kid from the Badlands should’ve set off a red flag.”
“Do you always tie people up when you ‘rescue’ them?”
“Ferals from out here? Usually, yeah. Most of the time, they don’t understand that there’s a real world still out there. They’re afraid of everything and just want to run off and get themselves hurt. Once we bring them back to civilization and they adjust, they’re happy. But you’re only the second feral rescue for me personally. And last time, just a target of opportunity.”
“What does that mean?”
Teal chuckled. “I was with a group of mercs getting paid to provide security for a remote facility out here. The operation wasn’t too big, just six of us mercs plus a couple scientists. One night, we had a pack of children about your age come out of the desert and start ransacking our supply crates. Reynolds, the guy in charge of my team, decided we needed to save the little buggers and bring them back with us to civilization. Kids kept trying to run off. But once we got them to the city and handed them off to the cops, they calmed down.”
“You probably took them away from their families.”
“We thought about that.” Teal scratched at her leg, wincing. “Ouch. But, yeah. We kept the kids there for a couple days. If they had any family looking for them, we would’ve seen someone. No one ever showed and the kids never said anything about having parents. But, you were different. They specifically wanted us to grab you from that Querq place, no contact with anyone else, fast and quiet. Looking back on it, I totally should’ve given them the finger and walked away.”
“Why would you give them one of your fingers?”
Teal laughed. “Never mind.”
“One of those too long to explain things?”
“Umm, yeah. That works.”
“If you have to kidnap someone, maybe you should just leave them where they are.”
“Ehh. Maybe. You’re a special case though. The others really are better off in the city.”
Althea shifted to sit cross-legged, brows scrunched in doubt. “I got kidnapped to the bad city once. Everyone there was sad, angry, or mean. I tried to ask people for help but they just kept walking like they didn’t see me. A place like that isn’t better than being here.”
“It’s different if you grow up there. Plenty of people enjoy being there, but apparently not the ones where you happened to be. An empath caught near commuter traffic would hate the city. And there are a lot of advantages. Medicine, school, technology, better food. Video games.”
“Do you like having one of those job things? Or having to pay tacks?”
“It’s not as bad as you think. There are nice things, too. Like comfortable clothes. Seems half the people out here run around with nothing on most of the time, or plastic scraps.”
“So? Sometimes clothes are annoying. They get wet. They rip. Get in the way when you gotta make water or mierda. Gotta take them off to go swimming, then they get dirty and you gotta wash them.”
“They also keep you warm. If you hate them so much, why are you wearing that dress?”
“I don’t hate clothes. They’re just annoying. Father says I have to wear the city clothes, not stuff like the skirt I made. He wants me to be”—she made air quotes—“civilized. I didn’t have clothes ’til I made a skirt like a year ago. No one was gonna give me anything ’cause I’m the Prophet and they were afraid to do a joining with me, and I was too small. Girls don’t get gifts from Seekers ’til they’re like as old as my sister, Karina. Well, sometimes girls are Seekers, too, but they don’t give boys gifts ’cause all the boys are also Seekers. If a Seeker gives someone a gift, it means they like them a lot and want to be with them. The raiders had extra armor scraps, so I made my own clothes. I liked it, but Anna stole it.”
Teal gasped. “Seriously? Who would take a skirt from a kid? And what the heck is a Seeker?”
“Umm. A Seeker goes out to the Lost Place and looks for scavenging.” Althea smiled. “They’re brave. Sometimes they gotta fight bugs and stuff.”
“And this woman who stole the clothes off a little kid? Seriously? What’s up with that?”
“It’s when they took me to the bad city. Anna made me go in a cleaning cage. She said it wasn’t really a cage, but it locked.”
“Cleaning cage?” Teal blinked.
“A see-through wall of glass and it filled up with water and soap and spraying.”
“Oh… an autoshower.” Teal grinned.
“When Anna let me out, my skirt was gone, but she gave me a dress like this one. Anna said she tried to wash my skirt, but it broke. Did your parents make you wear clothes?”
“Yeah. People in the city always have clothes… except for the cat cyberfreaks. They don’t care either. I guess it’s just the final evolution of fashion getting more and more shocking. When tiny outfits stop raising eyebrows, go outside wearing nothing but cat ears and a tail. You tribals are like that.”
Althea stuck out her tongue, then giggled.
“I grew up like any other normal kid in Arcadia. Never knew I was a synthetic until a few years ago. Was on my way home from work. PubTran car detected an ‘unscheduled violence event’ so it stopped and kicked me out. I was only like two blocks from home. Like an idiot, I decided to walk the rest of the way. SecSpiders and Titans were shooting at each other and I caught a stray bullet in the arm. Saw a metal bone in there and it completely messed me up. Went to a med center and they told me I was a synthetic. For a while, I felt like a monster, hated everything and everyone. At some point, I just stopped caring if I lived anymore so I decided to go from being an office worker to a mercenary. Figured, hey, I’m superhuman and tough, right?”
“That’s sad.”
“Yeah, it’s also in the past. You’re really making me reconsider the mercenary thing. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“Okay.” Althea stood.
“You need a new dress, kid. The back’s all full of holes.”
“I got exploded.”
Teal sighed. “I’m really sorry for kidnapping you.”
She hugged her. “I’m not mad at you. Just sad at not being home because Karina and Father are worried about me.”
After a long, blank stare, Teal bowed her head. “Amazing. Okay, come on.”
They slipped out of the van to a windy late morning with grey, overcast sky. A stiff wind cut down the street, howling between the decaying buildings and throwing Althea’s hair in her face. She shivered at the chilly blast passing through her dress like the fabric didn’t exist. Teal double-folded the blanket to make it short enough not to drag on the ground, and wrapped it around her.
