29 - REMY

Winter 2, Sector Annum 106, 21h37
Gregorian Calendar: December 22

Soren tries to get the constantly repeating message to shut off, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to disable it or even to turn the volume down.

“What do we do?” I ask nervously. “Do you think Vale is out here?”

“Did they finally catch up to us?” Soren asks, fear in his voice.

“Why is the ship ordering him to check in? Was this his ship?” There are a million unanswered questions racing through my mind right now, and I can tell by the way Soren’s fingers are flying across the glass panel that he’s in a similar state.

“Why would this ship just be here, though?” Soren asks, and that seems to be the most perplexing question of them all. Why was this ship here? “Did they plant it as a trap?” We discovered this miraculous, beautiful airship, left mysteriously out in the woods as though for us to find. It’s almost like one of the Outsiders planted it for us, just like the Zephyr. But then why is it calling Vale’s name? Why is it demanding he report in?

“What’s going on?” Bear asks. “Why would Valerian Orleán be setting a trap for you?”

Soren and I look at each other, trying to figure out what to tell him and what to do next. We haven’t fully explained to Bear what we’re doing out here. He’s figured out we’re with the Resistance, but he might not realize how much attention he’s drawing to himself by tagging along with us. And furthermore, after all that effort, all that time spent breaking into the airship, getting everything ready—have we walked into a trap? Can we continue in this ship?

I take a deep breath and turn around, locking eyes with the young man behind me.

“Bear, there’s something we haven’t told you. You said earlier there was a bounty on your head. Well, there’s a lot more than a bounty on our heads.” I wait for him to ask, to inquire further, but he doesn’t, and the ship interrupts us again.

 “Valerian Orleán , please report, Valerian Orleán.…”

“We’re running from the Sector. We just escaped from the capital a few days ago. They were going to kill us,” I say, looking hard at Bear, trying to impress upon him the gravity of the situation. “Valerian Orleán was the one who captured us in the first place.”

“Whoa,” he says.

“Jackass,” Soren mutters. I can’t agree or disagree either way. I still can’t get over the look in Vale’s eyes when I was shouting at him about Tai. I want to believe he knew something was wrong, but I just don’t know.

“Do we at least have enough fuel to get home?” I ask.

“Looks like we’re at full capacity,” Soren says. “It’s partially solar-powered, and the panels are fully charged.”

 “Well, listen,” Bear says practically, “‘less you two want to head back to the river or go by foot, I say we don’t have much choice but to fly this ship out of here.”

He’s got a point.

“Do you think they’ll track us?” I ask Soren nervously.

“We’re taking a calculated risk either way,” he responds. “We could wander out in the Wilds for days, starving and cold, or we can take the ship now. This will save us days of travel time.”

“Maybe …” I start. “Maybe we could land it a ways outside of base. Then even if the Sector is tracking us, they still won’t know exactly where the base is.”

Soren nods. “If we stay out in the Wilds, we could get lost or the drones might find us. But if we take the ship, we could lead them directly to us. If we land outside the city, though, I think we’ll be okay. We might even draw their attention away from main base.”

“Better that than going by foot for another few days,” Bear offers.

Soren seems to acknowledge this and moves a few dials on the control pad. We are pressed ever so slightly into the ground as the ship lifts into the air, carrying us above the treetops and forward. We’ve made our decision.

 “Wait,” I interrupt, though we’re already flying. “Do we know where we’re going?”

Soren shakes his head. “If we can at least get to the outpost we were originally instructed to walk to, then from there I think we can figure out how to get back home. We still have Osprey’s map. Pull it out. That should help us get to the first outpost.”

“Shouldn’t a ship like this have a navigation system?” I ask, as I rummage around for the map. Not that I don’t trust Soren. I just don’t want to take any chances flying around in the middle of nowhere.

“We can’t activate it without alerting the entire Sector to our presence.”

I sigh. I guess Soren’s navigational skills and a rough map on a v-scroll will have to be enough to go by.

“Besides, once we find the lake, we’ll be fine,” Soren points out. That’s true. If we follow the lakeshore, we’ll make it home. But if we over- or under-shoot, we could end up deep in the Wilds, completely lost, without any way of communicating with the Resistance. I close my eyes and hope like hell we can find our way.

 

****

 

As it turns out, though, Soren’s navigational skills are less useful than my visual skills when it comes to following the map on the v-scroll. Because it’s now dark out, we’re viewing everything on the ship’s infrared and deep-radar sensors. Soren keeps getting confused about the markers, wondering where we are along the path, but for me, matching the images on the ship’s sensors to the images in the map is easy. It’s just like drawing. So I’m appointed the unofficial navigator, and surprisingly, I manage to track us to the lake in less than an hour. 

Once Soren and I had managed to get the control panels up and running, everything was intuitive. In fact, the computer guides us through almost the whole process of flight. There’s a diagram of the airship that can be expanded into a hologram if necessary, showing exactly where and how to turn, ascend, descend, and lift up or down. The computer makes recommendations based on the objects, wind, and air pressure in the immediate area, and all we have to do is follow those recommendations by doing simple things on the control panel.

Now the one thing we all agree on is that flying is an adrenalin blast. It’s beyond exhilarating. None of us have ever been so thoroughly in control of an object capable of moving at such high speeds, and if it weren’t for the trauma we’ve all gone through in the last few days, it would be downright fun. Even though it’s dark out, the swooping feeling I get in my stomach when we take her up high and then drop her down, plummeting back to earth, is delightful. We fly high up over the trees and swoop down low, cooing over the beautiful motions the airship makes and the way we always seem to pull out of the dive right before a deadly crash. We head south first, to the trail Osprey originally marked on our map for us to follow by foot. We follow that path for a while, until we feel confident swerving west to try to find the lake. Once we hit the lake, we track the shoreline instead of flying over water so we don’t miss the city by going either too far north or south.

But all the while, in the background, the communications feed is barking, “Valerian Orleán, Valerian Orleán …” and I can’t get it out of my mind that danger lurks, that we’re being followed, that something threatening is looming over us like a storm cloud, pregnant with thunder.

Finally, after an hour of following the lakeshore, the distant grey hulking shells of ruined buildings tell us that the city is approaching. Home, I think, so happy I could cry. I envision Eli’s crooked grin and try to picture the life-or-death hug coming my way. I wonder if my parents have been recalled from their mission because I was taken hostage; maybe I’ll get to see them again, for the first time in a year. And Jahnu, his broad, irrepressible smile; Kenzie, her eagerness, excitement, and innocence. I’m even looking forward to seeing Rhinehouse again. He’ll probably scold us for not coming home sooner, or not bringing onions with us, or something similarly ridiculous.

And, I realize, something I haven’t thought of in a long time: the DNA. Have they cracked the code in our absence? Unlikely. Even though it feels like a lifetime, it’s only been five days. We’ll bring the solution with us. I smile, thinking of how pleased Rhinehouse and Eli will be.  Of course, we don’t know for sure, yet, if Lotus is the correct keyword. We still have to test it to see if I’m right. But I’m positive I am.

“There’s a good clearing over there,” I say, pointing to a relatively flat spot ahead. “We can land there and hike in. You should slow the ship down.”

“That’s a beautiful spot, Remy,” Soren says, a note of desperation in his voice, “but I can’t figure out how to land the airship. I can’t even figure out how to get the landing gear out.”

“Oh,” I say. “Shit.” Visions of the ship tumbling nose-over-tail through a copse of trees until we burst into a fiery inferno, or screeching along pavement, tearing into the reactor and causing an explosion suddenly fill my mind. That would not be optimal, as Eli would say. 

“I can’t even figure out how to hover, Remy. I can go forward, backwards, and sideways, but how do I bring the airship to a full stop without powering down completely? We’ll drop out of the fucking sky.” 

“Well,” I say, too confidently, as we blow past the spot I had originally sighted, “we’ll figure it out.” I give him a reassuring smile. “We can loop around and come back to that spot.” Soren starts to angle the ship in a wide circle over the lake, but his face is tense and worried. He’s trying every combination of slides, buttons, and flashing lights, but nothing seems to be happening.

“Soren,” I reprimand, “punching every button on the panel isn’t going to help.”

“Let me know when you have a better idea!” he snaps as we pass the landing spot a second time. He starts to loop back around again.

I start searching around on the panels for any indication of the landing gear that was out when we first found the plane. Nothing obvious stands out at me. I can’t even remember pulling the tripods in let alone trying to get them back out.

“Maybe the ship does it automatically?” I ask, perplexed. “When you descend?”

“We can’t take that chance,” Soren responds. “I don’t think we can land in a clearing,” he says, as we pass our intended spot a third time. “We need a runway of some sort.”

“Shit.” I check around the area on the ship’s sensors, but there’s nowhere long and clear enough to land the old-fashioned way. “Should we head to the city, then?”

“It’s that or a crash landing. Damn it,” Soren swears. “If there are drones on our tail, we’ll bring them with us.”

Bear hasn’t piped up for a while, and when I check behind us, I find him passed out in the tiny lounge area. Small wonder. The kid’s probably exhausted, physically and emotionally.

“At least if we all die, he’ll go peacefully,” I mumble.

“What?” Soren’s still screwing with the controls.

“Nothing.” I pull up a model of the airship’s hull and scan it, trying to figure out if I can instruct the computer to pull out the landing gear that way. I peer at the hologram, looking under the ship’s belly where I know the tripods to be, but there’s nothing that indicates a way to release them. “We could just land without the gear. What do we need landing gear for?”

“I still haven’t figured out how to hover!” Soren snaps.

“Just cut the velocity to zero and keep the upwards lift on,” I say, reaching over him to try to demonstrate. He slaps my hand away.

“What are you doing? We’re going a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour! You can’t cut our speed when we’re not even into the city yet!”

“Oh,” I mutter, cowed, my hand shrinking back to my side of the cockpit. “Right.”

“This is the problem with modern computing,” Soren mutters. “If everything were controlled by levers and dials, we’d have figured it out in a second.”

“Really?” I challenge. “Yeah, we’d have just stepped into this ship and instantly known which levers and dials did what, is that it?”

But as we fly in and over the city, it quickly becomes apparent that the ship isn’t going to let us cut our velocity to zero. We try a few test runs, cutting our speed and declining in altitude, but each time we get close to a landing a voice beeps at us that parts of the ship are not functioning at full capacity. Neither of us has a clue what that means, except that we can’t hover down to the ground and we can’t figure out how to get the landing gear out. We’re getting closer and closer to base, and it’s obvious that our original plan has been shot to hell. It’s my screeching at Soren as we come within twenty meters of the pavement that finally wakes Bear up behind us.

“Slow the ship down!” I’m shouting wildly as we press every button in sight, trying to figure out how to get the landing gear out as we careen past crumbling high-rises and abandoned factories. I can see where our base is—we’re so close to home!—but we blow past it, still unable to bring the craft to a hover and too afraid to descend to the ground for fear of tearing the whole thing to pieces.

“I’m trying!” Soren shouts back at me. “We better hope they don’t shoot us down.”

“What’s going on?” Bear pops up behind us.

I’m panicking. I’m pressing every button I can see. None of them are helping.

“What do we do?” Soren shouts helplessly. Just as flustered as I am, he goes to hit a button and accidentally slides the elevation control down by about ten meters.

“ENGAGE THE FUCKING LANDING GEAR!” I scream at the top of my lungs.

“Landing gear engaging.” The ship’s computerized voice is complacent. On the status hologram, three tripods emerge from the airship’s belly, and our velocity drops almost instantly from the air resistance. “Landing gear engaged,” the peaceful female voice confirms for me. Soren looks at me, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide.

“How’d you do that?”

I stare at the glass panel, at a loss for an answer.

“I guess I just told it what to do,” I shrug. “I didn’t know we could do that.”

“Shit.”

Soren kills the velocity further, drops the airship to the ground, and we settle in rather nicely, almost as if we actually knew what we were doing.

“Phew,” Soren says. It’s an absurd thing to say, considering that we were seconds away from death. I close my eyes, let my breath out, and sink deep into the pilot’s chair. My mind has gone blank. I stare at the green and black behind my eyelids for several seconds before Bear pipes up behind me.

“Great save, Remy. You guys wanna get out now?”

I can’t bring myself to move quite yet. Even after that miraculous save, something feels wrong. I sit up and open my eyes, but it takes a minute to realize what it is. The ship’s comm feed isn’t asking about Valerian Orleán anymore. The message is gone.

I nod in response to Bear, trying to pretend that wasn’t the most harrowing thing we’ve experienced throughout this whole disaster. I still haven’t gotten my breath back, and my heart is pounding in my chest.

Soren pops open the hatch and Bear glances out and around.

“Kind of a dump,” he says. “You guys live here?” Soren and I exchange rueful looks. If Bear wants to join the Resistance, he’s going to have to get used to living in a ruin.

“We don’t live in it. We live underground,” Soren corrects. Bear wrinkles his nose and glares down at the streets. He hops out and disappears from view.

“Well, Remy Alexander,” Soren says, smiling at me. “It’s been a pleasure.” I laugh.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I respond, and suddenly I want nothing more than to be in his arms again. He leans into me, like he did this morning, only this time I don’t recoil. Hesitantly at first, he stretches his hand behind my head and leans in to kiss me. I can feel my face flushing and warmth spreading up through my body. A smile paints itself across my face, and I can hardly breathe. I want to kiss him back, to wrap myself inside of him and bury everything that’s happened in his tender blue-eyed smile. But instead he pulls back and grins at me.

“There will be time,” he whispers in a voice full of promise. He stands up. I sigh, somewhat dismayed despite everything, but allow him to pull me to my feet and lead me, hand in hand, out the hatch. I hop down onto the pavement and scan the dark streets. We’re about three blocks past the southernmost entrance to the Resistance tunnels. Bear’s looking at us expectantly, and Soren and I turn and start walking towards the tunnels. But out of the shadows figures materialize, and I abruptly find myself staring into the lidless eyes of about ten Bolts, a phalanx of Resistance members running towards us in formation. I freeze. This is the exact opposite thing I was hoping for.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting a parade, but this is a little much,” Soren whispers, at my side.

Suddenly I find myself knocked backwards, arms around me tightly in what feels like a death grip. I yelp in surprise and try to wrestle free, unsure who’s hugging me.

“Remy, you dumb shit, it’s me!” I know that voice. The arms pull back for a second. I look up to see narrow, offended green eyes staring at me through a haze of brown hair. Eli.

“What’s with the warm reception?” I demand, though the guns have been lowered and everyone is looking at us, confused.

“You’re the ones who flew a damn Sector airship here!” Eli shouts, but he’s smiling, almost as if the whole thing is a joke. He grabs me and wraps his arms around me protectively. This time I reciprocate the hug. I allow myself to relax into his arms and take a deep breath, and the exhaustion finally hits me. The feeling of being back among friendly faces is overwhelming. “You okay, little bird?” he asks, and I nod. I try to shake off the shock of almost being attacked by my friends. It’s okay, I tell myself, but when Eli lets me go I find my hand reaching out for Soren’s, a grounding point. He laces his fingers into mine and squeezes.

“Remy!” I hear another familiar voice shout dimly, as though from a great distance, or underwater. I peer past Eli and see my mother and father running up behind him, and in an instant I’m drowning in more bodies. I start shaking, sobs catching in my throat as I am buried in my parents’ embrace. “Oh, Remy, thank the fates you’re alive, we were so worried.” I can hear my mother’s voice more through her rib cage than through the air.

“Tried to send a squad out to rescue you—” my father’s operatic voice is trembling with emotion. I’m suffocating slightly under the weight of the limbs and torsos around me.

“Yeah,” I say, my voice catching in my throat, “But right now I can’t really breathe, so can you stop hugging me for just a second?” They pull back, their faces bright and shining with tears and happiness. I offer them a pathetic, floppy smile, and my father leans over and kisses me on the forehead. He wipes the tears from his cheeks, and I wonder if there’s even a word for the combination of confusion, relief, and fatigue that I’m feeling right now. Soren is embracing Jahnu, Kenzie, and Eli, and Bear is standing at Soren’s side, unsure of his place in the crowd.

With my parents, we break through the ranks of the Resistance soldiers, who stare at us as though we are some sort of returning heroes. Behind me, I can hear Soren introducing Bear to the rest of our friends, and once again I’m glad Soren’s with me so that I don’t have to explain, don’t have to talk. We start to walk down the streets, and I’m so tired I’m stumbling, though my father holds me up and supports me at the elbow. I glance around at the buildings and realize it’s still a few blocks back to the entrance to our base, and the blocks seem to grow and stretch into kilometers of distance. I tremble and cling to my parents’ arms. I glance behind me and realize that the soldiers who were prepared to shoot us just minutes ago have now formed up as a sort of honor guard around us.

A vague humming, as though from a bee buzzing around my ear, suddenly strikes me as wrong, somehow incorrect, and I look up and around for the source of the noise.

“We should go,” I say. What is that noise? The buzzing continues, growing in intensity. “Now.” 

The distant hum turns into a much more persistent thrum as airships come into view over the treetops and buildings, and my world explodes into fireworks of blue light. Bolts, firing with abandon around us, from the airships overhead, drown the streets in electricity. I hear a dull thump behind me, the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the pavement. I turn numbly. A man I didn’t know well, whose name I cannot recall, has collapsed on the ground. Soren locks eyes with me and I can tell he’s thinking the same thing that’s blazing through my mind at a thousand kilometers a second.

We brought them here.

“Run!” Soren shouts behind me, and with my parents at my elbows, none of us armed, we need no further urging.