imperfect (25 page)

They were packing up their belongings and
preparing to leave the Rex Hotel. She was going to miss this plush
lodging.

“
Already thought of that,”
Chelsa replied. “I ordered new cards for you and Jaiden last night.
They should have already arrived. We’ll pick them up when we head
out.”

They hoisted up their backpacks and took the
elevator down to the lobby. Chelsa spoke with the receptionist and
returned clutching a slim package. After making sure there weren’t
any prying eyes around, Chelsa discreetly handed Jaiden and Kristi
their new ID cards.

Kristi’s card name was still Kelly Harrison,
but the girl’s picture resembled her this time. They shared the
same red-brown hair color, at any rate.

“
Let’s go get the
droid-horses,” Jaiden said.

The stable, like the rest
of the hotel, was grand and extravagant. The stable walls were made
out of marble
bricks
and livery dressed stable-hands patrolled the grounds. They
entered through the stable doors, which could’ve fit twenty horses
abreast with no problem. Rows upon rows of droid-horses peered at
them over their stall doors.

Kristi scanned the horses until she found
the one she was looking for. White fur gleaming and intelligent
eyes gazing back at her stood Flurry. A little bubble of happiness
rose inside her. Tiffany had kept her word and tracked down
Flurry.

Kristi walked as fast as she could without
looking conspicuous to Flurry’s stall. Flurry nickered
affectionately at Kristi and she buried her face into Flurry’s
mane, stroking her powerful shoulders.

“
I missed you so
much.”

Flurry’s warm, chocolate-brown eyes
appraised Kristi as if to say, “And I you.”

Tiffany was even nice enough to purchase
quality tack for Flurry.

“
Troop, you can ride
Mist,” said Jaiden. “Mist is the gray droid-horse beside the
appaloosa.”

Kristi felt bad for Mist for having to be
ridden by a jerk. Troop seemed like the type of person who yanked
on the reins too hard or dug his heels into the horse too sharply.
She finished tacking up Flurry and waited for Jaiden, Troop and
Chelsa to meet her outside.

Oppidum, the town that
Finn
should be in, was roughly four
hundred miles from Charleston if they took Route 56. However, they
couldn’t take Route 56 due to landslides. They had to detour around
the stretch of Route 56 buried underneath tons of earth and rock.
As a result, traveling on South Lane—which added a good fifty
miles—was the fastest route to Oppidum.

Jaiden and Chelsa rode in the front, side by
side. Troop and Kristi trailed behind them, an awkward wall of
silence between them.

Kristi concealed her astonishment; Troop was
actually a good rider. He had a gentle but firm hand—not that it
would’ve mattered since Mist was a droid and didn’t have feelings.
Nevertheless, Kristi always acted as if droid-horses were real
horses.

Despite the fact that three days had passed
by uneventfully, there was still tangible tension taut between
Troop and Kristi. Not that Troop didn’t attempt to relieve some of
the tension. Several times. All in vain.

“
How did Chelsa get a hold
of a real leopard?” Troop asked.

Another attempt to stir up some
conversation.

“
A friend gave it to
her.”

The only travelers they ever saw on the road
were merchants with their truckloads of goods, and they always
traveled in groups of five or more. Bandit activity was
skyrocketing and most people chose to travel by train or plane
rather than risk their lives; taking the roads was becoming riskier
every day.

So far, their luck had held and they hadn’t
encountered any more bandits. Still, that didn’t mean they allowed
their guard to drop.

The sun started to sink below the horizon.
Within an hour, it would be dark.

“
We should stop soon,”
Kristi said, projecting her voice loud enough for Chelsa and Jaiden
to hear.

“
Let’s set the camp at the
next patch of clearing we find,” replied Chelsa.

In less than ten minutes, a small field
overgrown with prairie grass came into view. It was the ideal place
to spend the night. They had a clear view from all four sides of
the camp so bandits couldn’t sneak up on them. Of course, that also
meant they could be spotted from the road, but they would have
enough time to mount the droid-horses and escape if the need
came.

Kristi dismounted and allowed Flurry to
charge her solar cells with what little sunlight was left in the
day.

“
Jaiden, want to come with
me to find water for tonight’s instant noodle?” Chelsa
asked.

He nodded and the two of them left in search
of the stream they had passed earlier.

“
Do you want to start the
fire or put up the tent?” Troop asked Kristi.

“
Don’t care.”

He started to gather sticks and stones to
make a campfire, so Kristi unceremoniously dumped the tent out from
its bag. She had never set up the tent by herself before; either
Jaiden or Chelsa had always been beside her to help with the
assembling. She now regretted not paying more attention to how to
assemble the tent.

The jumbled mess of metal poles and fabric
lay on the ground dauntingly.

“
Here goes nothing,”
Kristi mumbled.

She picked up the longest
metal pole she could find and pushed it into a connecter. It locked
in with a click.
Maybe this isn’t so hard
after all.
Kristi attached the rest of the
tent parts in no particular order.

She surveyed the tent she
had put together. To be honest, it wasn’t so much a tent as it was
a compilation of metal and fabric.
So
maybe the tent was harder to put together than I thought.
With a groan, Kristi started to disassemble
everything. Troop noticed her plight and made a move to take apart
the “tent” without a word.

She checked the time. Fifteen minutes had
passed and Jaiden and Chelsa still hadn’t returned. A sliver of
worry embedded itself in her, but she decided to wait for another
ten minutes before looking for them. All of the parts of the tent
lay neatly on the ground, sorted into different piles.

“
Thanks,” Kristi said to
Troop when he began to put together the tent. “But I can do this
myself.”

He ignored her and went right on
constructing the tent skillfully. She snatched the pole he was
sliding through the sleeve of a piece of fabric out of desperation.
She wanted to prove she was perfectly capable of completing this
task on her own,

“
I don’t need or want your
help with this. Anyways, aren’t you supposed to be making the
fire?”

“
I already
did.”

A quick look to where Troop gestured towards
showed a good-sized campfire blazing away with a pile of twigs and
branches to fuel the fire as needed. Kristi watched the flames
dance up and down, twisting and writhing. Even though she had seen
many campfires ever since she started traveling with Chelsa, she
was still mesmerized by the dance of the flames. When Kristi
finally tore her gaze away from the fire, Troop was almost done
with setting up the tent.

She was ticked off. “I already told you I
don’t want help from a jerk.”

“
Oh, really?” Troop
pounded in the last peg anchoring the tent to the ground and arched
an eyebrow. “It sure didn’t seem like it.”

“
Don’t always believe what
your eyes see.”

“
Speak for yourself. You
saw me do something I wouldn’t normally do and you decide to judge
me by that one action,” he retorted.

“
I don’t know how you do
it, but everything you say just makes me dislike you even
more.”

Troop looked like he was about to argue
back, but chose not to do so at the last second. The sound of
laughter reached Kristi’s ears. Two figures emerged from the
shadows. It was Jaiden and Chelsa.

“
Sorry it took so long,”
Chelsa said, “but here’s the water.”

The sun had set completely now and the moon
and stars hung in the night sky. It was a cloudless night and after
dinner, Kristi chose to admire the stars awhile instead going to
sleep. Nightmares seemed to be constantly plaguing her the past few
nights. She almost always woke up with her heart rate sky-high and
covered in a thin sheen of sweat.

Kristi rested on her back and observed the
stars. The doused fire only had a few embers pulsing from beneath
the ash; they would soon be extinguished when they ran out of fuel
and oxygen.

She located the Big Dipper and the North
Star, then traced out Orion and Pegasus with her eyes. Next, she
located Cygnus, the swan. Cygnus was her favorite constellation,
probably because she loved the myth of Cygnus.

A long time ago, two heavenly friends,
Cygnus and Phaeton, challenged each other to a race around the
world. The two friends ran too close to the sun, burned, and fell
to the Earth. Phaeton was trapped underneath the roots of a tree at
the bottom of a deep river. Knowing Phaeton would drown if he
weren’t rescued soon, Cygnus pleaded with Zeus to help him save
Phaeton. Zeus offered to transform Cygnus into a swan so that he
could save Phaeton; however, if Cygnus was turned into a swan, he
would lose his immortality. Cygnus agreed to this bargain and Zeus
placed Cygnus the swan in the night sky as a reward for his
selfless act.

Ever so slowly, Kristi’s eyelids began to
droop from exhaustion and she pushed herself up to go inside the
tent when something moved out of the corner of her eye.

She froze, unsure whether an animal or a
person caused the movement. Then she heard something rustle among
the tall prairie grass and scanned the surrounding area with the
eyes of a hawk. She saw nothing. After waiting for another ten
minutes with no threat presenting itself, Kristi finally allowed
herself to believe that she had imagined the sound and
movement.

She quietly slipped into her sleeping bag
and prepared for another bout of nightmares.

Teeth ripped into her
arm
. An animal was attacking Kristi. She
was in a jungle and had been ambushed by a lion, which didn’t make
sense since lions don’t live in jungles.

“
This is just a dream,”
she said.

The pain in her arm convinced her
otherwise.

Huge moths swarmed around her, attracted to
the blood spurting from her wound. They landed on Kristi’s arm and
started licking her blood with fuzzy feelers. She squirmed, but the
paw of the lion pinned her in place. Then, before her eyes, the
moths started morphing into bats with golden eyes. They chittered
and clicked.

“
Wake up, Kristi!” she
commanded herself.

She closed her eyes, counted to ten and
reopened them. She was still in a jungle surrounded by a swarm of
bloodthirsty bats and a lion.

A nearby plant reached out its tendrils
towards her. The tendrils caressed her so lightly she didn’t even
feel them until they suddenly tightened around her body. Kristi
felt woozy from blood loss and her pathetic attempts to free
herself from the vines were next to useless.

Other plants extended their roots and vines
from overhead dropped and started to cocoon her. Soon, she became
enveloped in a layer of plants. Each breath she took was a struggle
and she had to fight for the shallowest gasp. She was
suffocating.

Spots danced in her vision.

She was falling,

falling,

falling.

“
Ah!” Kristi jolted
awake.

She trembled all over and couldn’t stop the
shivers that racked her body. That was one of the worst nightmares
she’d had so far. She could usually wake herself up from a
nightmare if she was aware of it, but for some reason, she hadn’t
been able to do so this time.

“
Are you alright?” Troop
poked his head inside the tent. “I thought I heard you
yell.”

“
Yeah,” she said. “Just a
nightmare.”

Kristi let out an involuntary shudder and
massaged her right arm, which was feeling sore. “Where are Jaiden
and Chelsa?”

“
They went to get more
water. Hopefully it won’t take them as long as last
time.”

Kristi yanked a brush
through her tangled hair and tied it back into a ponytail. Then she
swirled some liquid toothpaste around in her mouth, cringing at the
artificially minty flavor and spat it out behind a shrub. Morning
rituals taken care of, Kristi disassembled the tent, which was
something she
could
do.

Taking the tent apart is a
heck of a lot easier than putting it together,
she thought.

They ate a hasty breakfast and were back in
the saddle again. Jaiden instinctively steered his mount beside
Chelsa and the two intertwined their hands between them; Kristi
swallowed down a small lump in her throat. She couldn’t help but
feel a bit cast aside from the original trio.

Ghost, as if sensing her
distress, turned around from his perch behind Chelsa and gave
Kristi a look that read,
“What did you
expect? Hot guy meets badass girl. It’s a recipe for
romance.”

“
Your hair is dark brown,”
Troop said, breaking Kristi out of her thoughts.

“
What did you just say?”
She wasn’t sure if she heard Troop right.

Troop motioned towards her hair. “Your hair
is dark brown, not chestnut.”