Chrysalis Young (5 page)

“Oh, so now I’m feeling sorry for myself, am I?” Amanda retorted.

“Yes,” Chrysalis said.

Amanda gave a loud noise of disgust and slid down the rock to sit on the bank beside Chrysalis with her back against the boulder. “I thought about winning that stupid contest for years and now I don’t give a freaking shit about it.”

“It’s Tazzie we’ve got to think about now,” Chrysalis said. “The bonds between you and her are not as strong as they were and now they might succeed in using her to attack you.”

“What about my family? I hate going home every day because I couldn’t stand that. I’d let them kill me first. I seriously would.”

Chrysalis considered this. She consulted with the minder. “It’s likely the bonds between you and your family are unbreakable—”

“I don’t see how the minder figures that,” Amanda said. “Joanna’s not even my real mother—she’s my stepmother—and I try not to give her a hard time, because she is okay really, but I do. My little sister, Beatrice, likes her a lot but she was really young when… Doesn’t matter.”

“The minder says that the bonds between you and your stepmother, Joanna, are unbreakable.”

“I just don’t feel that strongly about her,” Amanda insisted. But she was now mightily uncertain because she had never wanted to think about how Joanna felt about her. Joanna was always real quiet and didn’t give anything away. She didn’t see how Joanna could love her after some of the things she had said to her but that seemed to be what the minder was saying.

Chrysalis went on, “It’s almost certain the aliens are not even trying to turn your family who have not attacked you, have they?”

“No. But everyone
is
giving me a hard time about falling out with Tazzie because our families have been friends since forever. And they’re really disappointed with how I’m doing on the show as well. I feel I’ve let them down. Let myself down as well.”

“So says the awesomely dangerous and lethal slayer of zombies.”

“Sometimes that feels more real to me than my real life,” Amanda said sadly.

Chrysalis returned to the topic worrying her. “What are we going to do about Tazzie?”

Amanda had been thinking about that too. She had a sickening feeling that there was only one way to deal with it. “She’s my friend. You leave that to me.” She refused to say any more and they left it there.

-oOo-

It was going to be one heck of a birthday present for Tazzie. As usual, my timing is impeccable, Amanda thought. She couldn’t do this in a txt and arranged to meet Tazzie at the main entrance to the school the next day, the final day of the semester.

The meeting was short and unpleasant.

Amanda said, “I never want to see you again. Don’t call me. Don’t txt me. Don’t anything me. I’m not in your life anymore.” She turned around and walked away but was unable to stop herself from glancing back. The look of pain and devastation on her best friend’s face broke her heart forever. Blinded by tears, she stumbled away.

It was the only way to keep Tazzie safe.

-oOo-

Despite Roman Harding’s dire predictions, Amanda did survive to sing again the following week. It did help that the minder rigged the voting. Feeling easier that Tazzie was mostly safe, or at least as safe as anyone could be with alien dragons wrapped around them, Amanda pulled out one of her best performances for the next night of the show. Her fan base piled back in and voted furiously and pushed her up a couple places, ahead of Sarah. Sarah didn’t mind so much. She was cruising along. She knew she wouldn’t win but she was having a ball anyway.

-oOo-

Amanda often cut through Fossils Park opposite her home to get to the mini mall on Jacques Street. There had been a few assaults in the park so she was always wary, especially when it was deserted as it was today. She was walking beside a belt of bushes when a skinny, half-naked, tattooed man leapt out of the bushes, arms outstretched. Without thinking, she called the sword and had already lopped off one of his arms when she realised that he was not a zombie. He lurched away from her and staggered down the path, screaming.

“Um…sorry,” she said, watching him totter out through the gates onto Jacques Road and collapse. As she resumed her walk down the paths to home, her sympathy evaporated. What was he doing jumping out of the bushes at her anyway? One thing was for sure—you don’t mess with a zombie slayer. Not on her watch.

-oOo-

It was now obvious to both Amanda and Chrysalis that sooner or later they would be caught on security cameras in a situation where they could do nothing about them. Aunt Jemima and Chrysalis picked up Amanda from home and they threaded their way into the city. The plan had been to head up onto Mt Cravat which dominated the western fringes of the city and find a quiet spot in the forest to talk. Heavy, driving rain trashed that plan. Amanda stared moodily out through the wipers thrashing feebly at the rain. The poor visibility was not adding to Aunt Jemima’s limited repertoire of driving skills.

“Why do we have to drive around in the rain?” Amanda said. “Don’t you have a shuttle little ship thingy? Can’t you zap us where we need to go?”

“Zap?” Chrysalis said.

“You know, beam me up, Scotty. Don’t you guys ever watch Star Trek?”

Chrysalis was silent as she consulted with the minder who had never explained why she had created the bus for transport. Nor was Chrysalis Young allowed to question decisions made by adults and minders. “Hmm,” she said finally. “The technology was never designed for human bodies.” She gestured at all three of them. “No zapping.”

Amanda prodded Chrysalis. “Is this a real body? I thought it was, like, a projection, or 3-D hologram only solid somehow.”

“No,” Chrysalis said. “This construct is a real human body and so is Aunt Jemima’s. My mind is put into this body before I leave the ship so it really is me inside.”

That explained something. “So if the dragons kill you here, you’re really and truly dead?” Amanda said.

“Yes. The minder believes that the dragons know this.”

“The minder hasn’t done such a good job on Aunt Jemima,” Amanda said. She had now got used to talking about Aunt Jemima as though she wasn’t there because she never said anything or acknowledged either Amanda or Chrysalis.

“The minder made Aunt Jemima and her skills aren’t as good as my mother who wanted me to be just perfect for the singing competition and made this construct before she went visiting.”

“How do you get to your ship?” Amanda said. She wrapped her knuckles on the metal window surround. “Is this really like a spaceship, a small one like a shuttle?”

“No. It’s a bus.”

“Then how do you get to your spaceship?”

“We drive there.”

Amanda nearly choked. “You drive there? Are you kidding me?”

They were now skirting the lower slopes of Mt Cravat, the upper reaches of which were lost in rain and cloud. Chrysalis pointed up at the mountain. “That’s our ship.”

“Your spaceship is under Mt Cravat?” Amanda said incredulously.

“Our spaceship
is
Mt Cravat,” Chrysalis said.

Amanda didn’t know what to make of this.

Chrysalis was silent for a moment, gathering her thoughts. “I was always going to talk about this with you, so let’s put that on the agenda for today as soon as we find somewhere we can sit and talk properly, not scrunched up like this.”

Usually Amanda sprawled out on one of the double seats on her own but sometimes she sat beside Chrysalis as she was today. She hadn’t realised that Chrysalis was bothered by this.

Amanda rubbed shoulders with her. “Don’t you like being all cosy? Only us girls here.”

“No,” Chrysalis said and Amanda could have sworn she actually shrunk away a little bit from her. “I’m not used to…touching,” Chrysalis finished with.

That was sad, Amanda thought, and resolved to give Chrysalis a few cuddles because she'd obviously missed out somewhere along the line. She peered up at Mt Cravat. “Why don’t we go there and talk? I don’t imagine it’s raining inside your spaceship.” Although that wouldn’t have surprised her because her life now consisted of surprises, most of them nasty. “Is it raining inside your spaceship?”

“No,” Chrysalis said. She consulted the minder. “She says, no visiting.”

“Why not.”

“She doesn’t say,” Chrysalis said.

Amanda decided there had been a misunderstanding about Mt Cravat because obviously it had to be underneath—where else could it be? “Run that past me again about Mt Cravat being your spaceship.”

Chrysalis was silent again before saying reluctantly, “I don’t want to talk about this here…but…” She looked up at Mt Cravat. “I know you’re going to find this difficult to believe… Six months ago, Mt Cravat didn’t exist. To the west of the city was farmland with a river running through it and then winding through the city with many bridges over it.”

This had Amanda completely floored. Eventually she said, “Mt Cravat has been there forever. When I was a kid we used to go up there all the time for picnics like…everyone did. We learnt about it in school. It has a huge history of forestry and mining and other stuff. There was even a whole town up there a hundred years ago. I have to tell you, there’s never been a river running through the city.”

“I said you would find it difficult to believe.”

“I don’t even have to think about it because I just don’t believe it,” Amanda said.

Chrysalis nodded. She had expected nothing else. “We’ll talk about this more later. In the meantime we need to get out of the rain.”

Amanda gladly turned to more practical issues and she thought about the layout of the city. “We could go to Jonestown. It’s a badass place. No one goes there. Too dangerous. I’ve never been there but I’ve seen it on TV. There are lots of abandoned buildings. We should be able to find somewhere undercover easily. It’s the sort of place they don’t call the police if crap happens.”

Aunt Jemima pointed the bus in the direction of Jonestown. Mt Cravat dropped away behind them until it was lost in drizzle and clouds.

In Jonestown, Aunt Jemima nosed the bus down a side street off the main road, picking her way between burnt out wrecks of motor vehicles and piles of rubbish until they came to an abandoned garage with the doors hanging off. Aunt Jemima drove inside and parked. As Amanda got out of the bus she said to Aunt Jemima, “Wait for us. There’ll be a good tip in it for you.” Jauntily she sashayed around the garage which mostly didn’t leak so that was good. Aunt Jemima left anyway. Maybe she didn’t need the tip.

Chrysalis found a couple of battered chairs in the shattered remains of an office and dragged out them out onto the garage floor.

“Security cameras,” Amanda said as soon as they were settled, before Chrysalis started on Mt Cravat again. She had been thinking about nothing else since Jonks—except Tazzie—but she quickly shut that thought away. And she had some ideas. “We need disguises, like a superhero costume and masks. You know, Anka, Defender of the Keep, stuff like that.” She took out her phone and started flicking through the images at her favourite fantasy art community.

“I already have a disguise,” Chrysalis said, pointing at herself.

“You need a disguise for your disguise,” Amanda said absently, concentrating on the images on her phone. “Otherwise they’ll tie you to the competition and then there’s no point in me wearing a costume.” She needed something with a mask. She showed Chrysalis a post with a breathtakingly gorgeous image of a warrior girl on a giant warrior cat and a long spear on her back that had a harpoon end just like her sword. “Did you know this was one of my favourites?” she said. Without waiting for an answer she flicked on, pausing to study another warrior girl displaying acres of flesh, thrust out boobs, and lots of leather. But she did have a mask. She showed this to Chrysalis. “I need something like this,” she said, meaning the mask. “Can the minder provide this?”

As she spoke, Amanda felt a strange swelling in her chest. At the same time she found herself dressed exactly like the warrior girl with the mask. She pulled off the mask and stared down at her body. At boobs that were suddenly enormous and thrusting out of a skimpy leather jerkin. She tried to fold her arms across her chest to stop them from growing bigger and immediately threw her arms away because she didn’t want to touch them.

“No! No! No!” she yelled. “I don’t want this.” The warrior girl body vanished and her own body returned. “That’s just crazy,” she said to Chrysalis. “How can you even do that? There should be a law against it.” When she had recovered, she went back to her phone, looking for the right image. Finally she found one. Before showing it to Chrysalis she said, “I want you to notice that this girl is wearing skimpy little shorts and her legs are bare down to her lovely iridescent boots. I do not want my legs to be bare because even the zombies will run screaming from the room. I also do not want the cloak because it’ll get in the way. Otherwise…”

Chrysalis and the minder obliged. Amanda found the bathroom for the garage, and ignoring the filthy piles of rubbish and the incredibly bad smell, admired herself in the long sliver of what was left of the mirror on the wall.

OMG, she was sooo badass. She called the sword and made a few moves, thereby completing the destruction of the bathroom.