Paradox (7 page)

“It’s so dark in here,” he whispers. His voice is weirdly hollow, almost like it’s disconnected from his body. His eyes are
wide and staring and he’s craning his head from side to side, but he doesn’t seem to see her.

“Todd!” she says. But he doesn’t even register her words. It’s as if he’s caught in the grip of some hallucination and isn’t able to pull out of it. She’s going to need some extreme measures.

She lifts his arms out in front of him. Todd is so gone he lets her, leaving his arms suspended in midair, like a mannequin or a zombie or whatever it is he’s turning into. She activates his circlet map again and lines it up so that it’s clear and sharp and right in front of him. Then she pulls back her arm and slaps him hard across the face. At the same time she yells, “RUN, TODD! RUN! Get out of here! You have to GO GO GO GO GO GO!”

It works like an electric shock. He vaults forward and starts tearing down the path, the roots and grasping tendrils falling away behind him. Ana stays right at his heels, giving him a shove if he slows, letting out another yell every so often, until her voice becomes a croak and her lungs are ready to explode and her feet are two leaden clumps that want to fall right off her legs.

Still they run on.

Ana’s ears are full of a dark whispering rustle as they push through the forest, a rustle in a forest with no leaves, where the only living things are the two humans crashing through branches that grasp at them from faceless trunks.

Faster and faster they push on, over fallen trunks, under low limbs, across shallow, ashy streambeds. Spiky branches
lash at her and a steady warm trickle starts down the side of her face, but she doesn’t let herself stop.

If she stops, she knows she won’t be able to start again.

When Ana thinks she can’t run another step, she sees their goal up ahead. It’s barely visible through the thinning tops of the trees, but it’s there all right, bathed in the light of the double suns—the crest of a rocky slope. She can’t pull up her own map or zoom out Todd’s, which is bobbing like a carrot in front of a madly chasing donkey, but the Timor Mountain range begins just beyond the forest, and if they’re now in sight, then there’s still hope.

There’s still hope.

Ana and Todd erupt from the forest, boots outstretched, arms flung to either side, like a couple of interstellar desperadoes escaping certain death and living to tell about it, somehow, against all odds.

It’s been just a few hours since they entered the forest, but already Ana was forgetting the way the breeze could tickle and the light could tease, and forgetting, almost, the incomparable freedom of the open arc of the sky. Even the twin suns in their orbits beam down on her now like old friends. She thinks that even though she was running back in the forest, even though no roots were hooking her into the ground, still some part of her didn’t fully return to life until she came back out into the open air.

Ana drops to her hands and knees on the soft ground, her heart going like a jackhammer, pounding a double-time beat.

At first she thinks it’s just in its contrast that the planet suddenly looks so much more hospitable. But then she sees it’s more than that: on this side of the forest, there is some serious plant life—the first healthy signs of growth she’s seen on Paradox so far. Just ahead there’s a little meadow with bluish-green grass and a few flowers. Small bushes and trees dot the sloping terrain, and more grass stretches out to the edge of her vision, off to the base of the high mountain peaks.

She squints up at Todd, who stands a little ahead of her. He’s turned his map off and is hunched over, hands on his knees, taking big, gulping breaths. His eyes are full of all the right things—pain and fear and shame and anger—all those real, hard-to-bear human emotions.

“Hey,” she says, pulling herself into a sitting position on the grass.

He walks back over and drops down beside her. “What happened in there? Do I even want to know?”

Ana considers this. “Probably not. But I think it’s safe to say that you don’t like forests too much.”

Todd’s mouth turns down, and Ana adds quickly, “Okay, it’s actually more than that. Something’s not right in that forest—there’s something heavy and oppressive. I couldn’t wait to get out of there myself. But it was more for you; almost as though some force in there had it out for you in particular.”

Todd turns toward her, about to say something, and then he raises his eyebrows. “What did you do to yourself?” he says, looking at her forehead. He immediately starts burrowing in his pack.

Ana touches her right temple and discovers a warm, sticky dampness. She winces. “I’m fine,” she says. “Must have been one of those branches I ran into. It’s just a scratch.”

“Still,” he says, turning toward her with a small tube in one hand and a white cloth in the other. She grits her teeth as he wipes at the wound; then there’s a cool pressure as he applies some gel from the tube.

“Peri-skin,” he says, replacing the cap and sliding the tube back into his pack. “It’ll set in a few seconds. You can probably tell the difference already.”

Reaching her hand back up, Ana gingerly assesses the smooth, rubbery coating.

“Thanks,” she says. She knows the peri-skin will anesthetize, disinfect, and fully repair her cut in hours, if not less.

Todd leans forward and touches a finger to her temple, and there’s something in his look that makes Ana freeze. She swallows, suddenly uncomfortable. “What about you?” she asks. “How are you feeling?”

The change of subject works. Todd drops his hand and gets to his feet. “I’m fine,” he says. “Come on. We can talk more as we walk, if you’re doing all right. There’s a plateau up here where we can take a real break.”

“There is?”

Todd nods. “I saw it on the map. It’s not far.”

He reaches into a pocket of his vest and pulls out a handful of water capsules. He tosses her a couple and she catches them gratefully, punching one out and popping it in her mouth. Instantly refreshed, she revels in the feel of the water pouring down her dry throat.

She shoves the leftover tablets in her pocket, hears them rustle up against the folded letter. The letter! She runs the words over in her mind again.
Our world is on the brink of disaster. Your mission must succeed
. But what
is
the mission? And how can you succeed when you don’t have any idea what you’re supposed to be doing, much less how to do it?

Ana decides that, though they do need a break, it won’t be a long one. There’s too much ground to cover and too much that’s still unknown.

Adjusting her pack, she follows Todd up the grassy slope. Above them looms the Timor range. The mountains look huge from here, so near they seem to be carved right out of the brilliant sky.

Ana looks sideways at Todd as they walk. He’s definitely back in the land of the living, but something has changed between them. She feels a new strength as she strides next to him, shoulder to shoulder. She has no idea if they knew each other in a former life before their memories were scrubbed like a couple of old dinner plates. But this feels right, pushing forward together, following the map. Heading for the plateau, then on to the mountains.

Even as she thinks this, her stance is shifting and her gaze is narrowing and a flutter starts in her chest. She thinks back to the rush she got from her brief scale up the cliff face, and she suddenly knows that mountains are part of some love affair from her past. Maybe somewhere in her lost memory is an experience that will guide her. But for now she just knows this: she can’t wait to get started climbing.

“That one’s a volcano,” Todd says, motioning to the peak directly in their path. “Mount Fahr.”

Ana sniffs the air. That explains the faint sulfurous smell. Now that she’s looking for it, she can see tendrils of steam curling from the peak. It looks steep for a volcano, at least by Earth standards. It’s all rough hew and harsh angles. “Is it active?” she asks.

Todd shakes his head. “It’s on a slow burn pattern. Should be safe enough.”

Ana activates her circlet and lines up the map. The Timor range carves a long wedge across the face of the planet, guarding the way to the sea. There’s no way to go around it. And the peaks on either side of Mount Fahr glower down like hulking giants. The volcano suddenly looks very climbable. It’s the obvious choice.

“Okay,” she says, but inwardly she’s all smiles.
Bring on the climb!

They reach the plateau a few minutes later, the wide-open space dotted with a couple of flat boulders. Ana lets her pack slide off her back and drops it near the closest stone. After
carrying her pack all this time, taking it off is like ripping away some part of her, but it’s no pain and all pleasure, a shot of pure joy. For a second, she feels so light she might float away.

Then tiredness sweeps over her and she collapses onto the boulder. It’s long and flat and warm from the sunslight, with enough room for Ana to stretch out on her back with her knees steepled up and her boots propped on the edge. She folds her arms across her eyes and sinks onto the surface of the rock, her muscles loosening and settling on the stone. She lies there for long minutes, soaking up the quiet.

After a while she moves her arms and looks up at the sky and the pale sun, Anum. She imagines it meeting with Torus in a cataclysmic burst at zero hour.
Sunsmeet
, Todd called it. For now, at least, there are huge swaths of pink sky between the suns, though they are closer than when she first left the rocket. There are seventeen hours’ worth of distance left between them, apparently.
And then what, exactly?

Ana shivers and sits up.

Todd is standing with his back to her, looking back at the Dead Forest. His broad back is set and his feet are planted wide apart on the rocky ledge. Only his hair tosses up and down in the breeze.

“Hey,” Ana says.

Todd lets out a sigh, his whole posture drooping a little, as if he’s resigning himself to something he can’t quite escape. “It happened the summer I was eight,” he says.

His voice is barely more than a whisper. Ana pushes herself up the rest of the way, straining to make out his words.

“I was on a Boy Scout trip,” he goes on. “We were camping in the woods a day’s drive from home. I was so excited, a city kid on my first overnight trip, out in the wild.” He shudders. “I don’t know how I got separated from the group, but I was alone in the forest for four days before they found me. Everyone thought I was a goner. I can’t remember much about it, just …” He flexes his hands and looks down at his fingers as if he’s surprised to see them still there, attached to his hands. “I don’t much like forests.”

“So being in this creepy dead forest brought that old memory back,” Ana says. “No wonder you panicked, suddenly getting hit with something like that.” But even as she’s reassuring him, she can’t shake the feeling that the trance Todd fell into was more than just some remembered trauma.

Todd makes a noise in his throat, like he’s trying to shrug off the incident but not quite succeeding. For one crazy second Ana wants to throw her arms around him, wants to hold him and say everything’s going to be okay. Instead she meets his gaze as he turns to face her.

“We’re gonna make it,” she says, wishing she could say more, wishing she
knew
more. “We’re making good time, and once we get to the sea, we’ll find out what’s going on.”

“I guess.” Todd walks over to sit next to her on the long, flat stone.

“So much for amnesia, huh?” Ana says. “What’s the use of
having no memory if the first thing to come back is all the crap that you actually
want
to be rid of? And at the worst possible time, too.”

He frowns at this, and Ana could kick herself for making a bad thing worse. She doesn’t know what to say to fix it, but then Todd clears his throat, like he’s ready to put all that behind him. “I don’t know about you,” he says, “but I’m starving.”

“Oh, definitely,” she says. “Right now, I could eat a giant worm.”

Todd looks at her with such a shocked expression that she bursts out laughing, surprised at how easily it bubbles up, how it makes everything else seem insignificant—even if just for this moment. She opens her pack and roots around inside. “Mac-and-cheese? Beef stew? Sweet-and-sour chicken?”