The Forsaken (11 page)

“Stay away!” I warn. I spin around and see that Rika is battling lizard boy again. David is trying to help her without making it obvious whose side he’s on. I turn back just in time to see zebra-face moving forward again. His chiseled teeth are bared like a wild dog. He’s not laughing anymore.

“You’re mine!” he spits, raising his spear. “I’m gonna take you back to my sector. Make you bow down to the blessed Monk.”

A hundred paces away, a bevy of village kids suddenly tumbles out of the trees.

“Help!” Rika screams at them, but they don’t hear. She has managed to get away from lizard boy. Her shirt is torn. We exchange a scared glance.

I know that lizard boy and zebra-face aren’t done with us yet. I look around as the pyrotechnic display continues overhead. There’s nothing to use as a weapon nearby. And even if David lunged at the drones with his spear, they’re larger and more skilled. They’d probably kill him before he could get in a blow.

Wordlessly, lizard boy leans down and picks up his cigarette lighter from the leaves. With a casual flick, he sets the short wick of the firework alight. Before I can do anything, he swings back his arm and pitches the explosive into the night sky. A moment later there’s a deafening crack, and the sky flashes with a multicolored palm-shell burst.

He and zebra-face start laughing like maniacs as embers slowly drift downward toward the treetops.

“You’re crazy!” Rika yells.

Right then I hear another sound, a high-pitched electronic squeal, like a sonic buzz saw. The boys hear it too, and they instantly stare upward. Their painted faces reflect the light from the fireworks.

Rika grabs my arm. I don’t understand what’s going on.
Is this some other form of attack? Some new kind of weapon?
David looks confused too.

My head starts feeling funny, like everything inside is vibrating. The noise increases in intensity. My eyes and teeth throb, and I clutch my face.

Right then I spot Gadya racing out of the trees ahead of us. Behind her come more hunters from the village. They’re heading in our direction, streaming toward us.

We’ve been rescued.

The fireworks cease, but the strange noise continues. Its pitch and volume make it hard to think.

“Whatever you do, don’t move!” Gadya yells at me, as I start to realize we haven’t been rescued at all.

Zebra-face turns to run, outnumbered and evidently frightened by the noise above us. David tries to rub the red paint off his face, but it just smears. And even though he has dropped his spear to show his peaceful intentions, I know that the villagers don’t realize his identity. They start racing toward him, weapons drawn, about to attack.

Unless he starts running too, someone is going to kill him by mistake. They think he’s a drone, instead of a normal kid who was forced to act like a drone in order to stay alive and reach our camp.

“It’s okay! He’s one of us!” I yell, but nobody is listening to me. “He’s on our side!”

Then, inexplicably, both lizard boy and zebra-face fall to the ground, like an invisible force has shoved them down onto the dirt. David scrambles sideways, trying to get to the safety of the forest before a stray arrow from a villager can hit him. Zebra-face manages to do the same thing, scuttling away toward the trees.

But lizard boy remains frozen. Pinned to the ground, seemingly by fear. I stand there watching in horror, pressing both hands against my ears.

“No!” lizard boy screams into the air, like he’s talking to some invisible entity. “Not me! I didn’t do anything!”

I glance back at David. Zebra-face has found him and is dragging him away into the forest. There’s no way to rescue him. My only hope is that zebra-face and the other drones don’t kill David, and he’s given another chance. Whatever is going on has brought an early end to the raid. With no more fireworks in the sky, the flames in the fire pit are the only source of illumination.

In addition to the high-pitched sound, I suddenly hear the clatter of military helicopter rotors above us. I glance up but can’t see anything.

A stark white beam of light abruptly appears. It’s a spotlight, blazing down from a point of unknown origin in the sky. It fixes itself directly on lizard boy.

“God— No! Please— I’ll go back!” the boy starts screaming loudly. “Just don’t—Just don’t take me!”

I peer at lizard boy through the beam of white light, squinting to see better. In the brightness, I can see all the holes in his tattered clothes. His emaciated arms are like sticks, and there’s dirt all over him. His hollow cheeks make him look half starved.

His green face paint glistens in the burning white spotlight. The noise of the rotors is even louder now.

As I watch, a thick black wire—almost like a tentacle—uncoils from the shaft of white light and races down toward the frozen figure. Another one follows it. Then another. And another.

Lizard boy has stopped screaming. He’s just gaping in horror at whatever he sees above him in that white light. I wonder why he doesn’t try to run, but obviously he’s panicking. I can’t tell if the tentacles are alive or mechanical. They move with terrific speed, like writhing snakes in search of prey.

The tentacles wrap themselves around the boy in one second flat, pinning his arms and legs tightly to his body, immobilizing him. He starts sobbing, words giving way to cries of pain and fear.

The tentacles tighten even more. In an instant he’s jerked upright. For a moment, he dangles a few feet above the ground, like a spider at the end of its web. He opens his mouth to scream, but he can’t get enough air.

“No,” he mouths.

Then he’s whipped straight upward into the beam of light, right toward its source.

The spotlight immediately cuts off.

The rotor noises diminish, as does the high-pitched whine. Within thirty seconds, the night sky is calm and peaceful again. I hear only a distant thrum as whatever it was moves rapidly onward.

I sink to the ground, shaking and dizzy. I don’t understand what I just saw.

What were those tentacle things?

Why did they kidnap the drone?

Gadya crouches down next to me. “You okay?”

“No.” My lips are numb, and my mouth is dry. “What the hell just happened?”

“We got attacked by the Monk’s drones. From the looks of it, three of ’em almost got you and Rika.”

“No, one of them was David. The drones made him paint his face red. Told him he had to kill someone.”

“An initiation rite. He’s lucky to still be alive.”

“But what was that other thing?” I ask. “The thing in the sky.”

Gadya doesn’t answer. She just asks, “Can you stand?”

I struggle to my feet. Two hunters are already questioning Rika. I can tell she’s explaining everything to them.

“Buck up,” Gadya tells me. “Maybe we’ll get another chance to save David.” She looks me up and down. “I’m glad you fought back. Or tried to. That means there’s a chance you’ll live longer than a week.” She sticks her spear into the earth, where it stands upright. “The passive ones? The weak ones? They’re only good for a few days.”

“But what was that noise? And those tentacles . . .” I swallow hard. “You have to tell me.”

She looks at me. “I’m sorry you had to see that on your first day. I was on the wheel for two weeks before I saw someone get taken.”

“Taken?”

“The light, the noises. The whole shebang.” She pauses. “We don’t call them tentacles, though. They’re not alive. They’re robotic filaments, attached to the bottom of some kind of helicopter, probably unmanned. We call them
feelers
.”

My hands are still shaking, so I cross my arms and bury my fists in my armpits. “Where do the feelers come from? What do they want?”

“No one knows. But once someone gets taken, we never see them again. We don’t know where they go, or what happens. They just never come back to the wheel. We figure they get killed.”

Rika walks over to us. Her glasses are askew, smeared with mud. “Scary, right? You did good.”

“Thanks,” I say, feeling empty and quavering inside.

“Look on the bright side,” Gadya declares. “Now we’ve got one less drone to worry about.” She bends down and picks something up. It’s lizard boy’s lighter. She flicks the flint, and a yellow flame appears. “Nice.” She slips it into her back pocket.

“How do I know one of those feelers won’t come after me?” I ask.

“The odds of getting taken are pretty small, if you play by the rules. It mostly happens to people when they cross from one sector to another. Our best guess is that it’s a UNA enforcement mechanism, to make us stay where we belong. We don’t know why the UNA even cares about the sectors, but if we cross over into the Monk’s sectors, or his drones cross into ours, this kind of thing tends to happen. Not all the time, and obviously not to everyone.”

“We cut off part of a feeler once,” Rika adds. “Well, I mean, Liam and some of the other hunters did, with a knife. It just looked like a piece of electrical cable with tiny wires inside.”

Gadya and Rika exchange looks. I get the sense they know some things they’re not sharing with me yet, but I don’t press them.

We start walking back to the fire pit. I’m trying to mask my total horror over the feeler attack, as well as my inability to help David. “Tell me about Liam,” I say, hoping to focus on something positive. But I don’t get a good reaction from Gadya.

“He’s the best hunter and tracker in our village,” she replies tersely, her shoulders tensing. “Let’s just leave it at that, okay?”

Rika pipes up. “Liam and Gadya dated for a while—”

“Shut up!” Gadya snaps. “Remind me to kick your butt later.”

Rika cackles. She seems a little giddy now that the battle is over. Meanwhile, I’m more frightened than ever. And because Liam is obviously a sensitive subject, I don’t know what else to say.

“Get some rest,” Gadya tells me. “The drones won’t attack us again tonight. They get tired too.”

I look around and see other members of the village already cleaning things up. They’re getting the camp together again and tending the fire. Hammering splintered cabins back together with homemade tools. It’s like they’ve just accepted the drone attacks—and the risk of getting taken—as normal parts of everyday life.
Maybe I’ll end up feeling the same way, if I live long enough.

“Come on,” Gadya says, taking my arm and pulling me toward a row of vine hammocks slung between trees. “If you can’t sleep, at least lie down. You look like you’re going into shock. We usually take turns keeping watch and doing chores, but don’t worry about it tonight. You get a free pass for being a newbie.”

Rika nods in agreement. “I can bring you something to eat. The drones trashed our stew and ruined dinner, but we’ve still got fruit. Strawberries and coconuts.”

I feel too sick to eat. Up until the feeler attack, I thought I was doing okay, given the circumstances. Now I’m not so sure.

“Listen, there’s no way I can sleep or eat,” I say. “Not after what I saw. So let me help. Give me something useful to do.”

Gadya looks surprised. “Sure. You can help gather wood for the fire. But stay inside the camp’s perimeter. Rika will go with you. I gotta go talk to Veidman about something.”

Rika nods. As we start walking, I wonder if I have what it takes to survive on the wheel. If not, I wonder if I can learn the skills I need and find the heart to keep going.

I think about David, stuck out there with zebra-face and the other drones. I’m scared for him. And I think about Liam. He was the boy I saw on the museum screen, out of all the kids on the entire wheel. I’m not hugely superstitious, but I still think there’s something significant about that. I wonder what his first night on the wheel was like, if it was anything like mine. Today he rushed off so bravely to fight the drones. Was he always like that, or did the wheel help shape him?

Rika and I start bending down, picking up branches, gathering the firewood. I make an effort to calm down and focus on the task. I try not to think about what fresh horrors the wheel might have in store for me tomorrow.

THE INTERLOPER

LATER THAT NIGHT, AFTER
gathering firewood and eating some berries with a group of other villagers, I finally lie down in one of the surviving hammocks. My body instantly succumbs to exhaustion and battle fatigue. The rest of the night passes in what feels like one second.

When I wake up early in the morning, I lie there for a moment in the heat before I sit up. It must be ninety degrees already, even in the shade. My hair is matted with sweat, and my muscles are cramped and knotted. I see slices of cloudless blue sky between the palm fronds above me. All around, I hear the noises of the village.

I was dreaming that I was home. Not at the orphanage, but back with my mom and dad when I was a little girl. Running around with other kids, when we would go on vacations to Old Florida. Back when books and computers and everything else were still allowed. Back before the UNA became something larger than the people it was meant to represent. Before Minister Harka took total control.

I wish I could crawl back into the world of my dream and turn it into reality. I want to relive those lazy days with my parents: eating good food, watching TV, reading books, and playing games with neighborhood kids. I didn’t think those things would ever come to an end.