CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

 “Hold on!” I exclaim, and then I sing the sequence to increase speed, followed by variations to keep the board away from various obstacles in our low-hanging path.

The hoverboard under us lurches onward, and I feel the increased wind-drag against the skin of my face and all of my upper body. Since I am the lead anchor, the wind tears into me first.

That’s another thing I didn’t think of—when you’re flying fast, it’s impossible to look straight ahead without squinting, and your eyes dry out. What you really need is protective eyewear such as goggles or sunglasses. Bike and motorcycle riders know this. I bet Atlantean hoverboard riders know this.

It is also really hard to sing. Hard to open your mouth even, as the wind fills your lungs immediately.

So I keep my face half-turned and try to sing the notes that way.

“Can someone look around and tell me who’s behind us?” I cry out.

“Two guys on boards—no, make it three. The third’s a girl. They’re all Blues.”

“Damn these Blues and their craptastic firearms!”

We move along Arrow Highway then turn off north on some side street, because two hoverboards are coming fast from both sides behind us, to cut us off from the south, while the third begins to rise to treetop level, so that it ends up tracking us while coming down from overhead. The guys balanced on the boards are holding automatic assault rifles. So is the girl overhead.

They are now only about fifty feet away, and coming hard and fast.

The two marathon-style runners on the street with us take note and pick up the pace, then wisely disappear into the nearest side alley.

Volleys of shots ring out behind us.

I make the board swerve as we are flying too fast now, way too fast for safety and my ability to navigate it properly.

“Go up! Up!” Jared cries. “Go faster!” He’s the one in the back, so if anyone gets hit, he’s first in line.

Coming up directly before me is the 605 Freeway overpass. I direct the board to fly right underneath the wide concrete slab and then we turn a corner behind giant support posts and freeze in place, levitating right below the ceiling that happens to be the freeway underbelly. It’s not really a hiding place, but at least it’s out of direct line of fire.

“What now?” Sarah says softly.

“We’re trapped,” Zoe mutters.

I am breathing fast. At least there’s no onrushing wind and I can breathe and think straight, if only for a moment. “We’ll wait them out . . .” I say.

“How long?” Jared whispers. “They’ll just take us out the moment we show ourselves. And we have no weapons that can take them on. My knife-throwing skills are crap and besides, I’ve only got one.”

“Besides, what’s stopping them from coming in under here and just executing us all? They can guess we don’t have firearms,” Sarah says.

“Would it be too much to hope that they just leave us the hell alone and go on their own way?” I grumble.

“Hey,” Jared says. “Can you do something again to take over their boards?”

“What, me?” I say.

“Yeah, who else? You, Gwen. Do that weird singing command thing that you did before.”

I frown, thinking.

Just as I consider whether or not I am capable of doing high-speed, directed, remote keying of not just one but two orichalcum objects at once, while being fired upon, the Blue girl Candidate on the hoverboard appears, floating from behind the concrete support slab.  She is balanced easily on her board that’s levitating forward in slo-mo at about two miles an hour, and she holds her automatic with practiced ease.

We’re basically sittings ducks for her.

I think of Blayne Dubois practicing his LM Forms. And then I sing a sequence that creates an Aural Block and then raises the board underneath the Blue girl nose up, at a near vertical angle.

It all takes a few seconds. The Blue girl screams in surprise as she starts sliding off her suddenly-upright board, tries to hold on, then inadvertently starts firing. . . .

Her rifle goes off, and the splatter-volley hits the concrete right behind our heads, so that the wall is riddled with holes.

Behind me, Zoe cries out, and then Sarah slumps over.

The Blue girl loses her hold and falls, about twenty feet onto the concrete and asphalt sidewalk of the street level below.

Her board remains hovering nose-up in the air before me.

I look down, and see her grey-uniformed body and blue armband, as she lies broken on the asphalt.

I just killed another human being.

I did it . . . I, I did it.

. . . Killed another human being.

And then, as a wave of utter numbing cold washes over me at the realization, as I sit frozen, I feel a stinging pain in my left arm. And I see a red stain.

At the same time, behind me Zoe is screaming, while Jared holds on to Sarah’s lifeless slumped body in his arms.

All it took was less than three seconds.

To change everything.

* * *

I start “awake” and suddenly tears are gushing down my face, while the two people still alive behind me are yelling, saying something that I can hardly understand.

“Go! Go! Go!”

In that same instant the two remaining Blues on hoverboards appear. They see the other empty board hovering, and the body on the ground below.

And instead of firing at us, they suddenly take off.

Had they stayed, I would not have been able to sing a single note in time to fend them off, because I am very slow right now, like molasses . . . slow and numb and thick. . . .

“Gwen!” Jared yells my name and Zoe shakes me. Zoe is bleeding from a light wound on her cheek where a bullet barely grazed her. Jared is apparently unharmed, but Sarah—she is dead.

“We need to go, Gwen! Land us, for a moment, please, just set us down right here,” Zoe says. “We need to—we need—”

I take a deep shuddering breath to stop the tears, and the wound in my arm is really hurting now. Good.

It’ll give me enough focus to regain control over my voice. Because I have to sing us down.

I start the note sequence, and my voice starts out breathy, powerless, so I repeat, forcing my lungs to cooperate. This time we begin moving, descending slowly, and hover a foot over the ground.

“We can put her down here . . .” Jared mutters, resting his dangling feet on the ground, wiping his forehead and smearing Sarah’s blood that’s all over him and Zoe, and me. He holds up the girl’s body with a kind of horrible quiet awe for which there are no words.

“No,” I say. “Not here. Not on this horrible ugly concrete, under a freeway.”

And then I look up and the other board is still hovering near the ceiling of the freeway overpass.

I make a sound and it comes down to me, floating softly, and then I make it right itself so that it is once more horizontal. “Put Sarah on top of the board,” I say. “We’ll take her somewhere else—more decent.”

“You’re bleeding too,” Zoe says awkwardly. “You need to press down on the wound or something. Or—or you’ll bleed to death.”

I look at my arm, and there are rivulets of red liquid running down my uniform. Zoe’s right, it’s not a bad wound but I need to stop the bleeding or I’ll go weak eventually.

I point to Jared’s knife. “Let me borrow it for a moment.”

He hands me the knife and I use it to cut off a length of my cord weapon lasso. I then bind my arm above the wound and just below the armband. Funny—it looks now, it occurs to me, that I have a yellow and a red armband. . . .What a mess.

And then I think, I have a bullet lodged inside my arm.

After Sarah is laid flat, her thin body stretched out along the second board, I use the rest of my lasso cord to tie her in place. I look over her face with its stringy hair and freckles.

Sarah’s eyes are still open. Someone—someone needs to close her eyes.

And then I walk over to the fallen body of the Blue girl. I try not to look at her face. But I do anyway. I pick up her automatic assault rifle, the same thing that killed Sarah and wounded Zoe and me. I set the safety on and sling it over my other shoulder. And then I get back on the first hoverboard.

I start singing in somebody else’s alien voice, and the two boards rise simultaneously, three of us straddling one, and Sarah’s body on the other.

We float just above street level but not high enough to engage any of the hot zone firepower that gets activated whenever we rise too high in the air.

“Where to now?” Jared asks, while Zoe just holds on to my back with one hand and the board with the other. I can feel her shaking.

I know just the place.  A few miles northwest of here, beautiful and appropriate, in San Marino.

I suppose I could just set Sarah down on the first decent suburb lawn somewhere in the next block. In fact, I probably should do it, the smart thing to do.

And San Marino is a little out of the way.

But something crazy inside me makes me proceed. Because I can see the body of the Blue girl lying on the ground, short brown hair, ordinary features, and yet, unforgettable, fixed in my mind’s eye, permanently.

I killed her. She was going to kill us all. And she killed Sarah.

It happened because I tipped her board. Had I not done that—

The thought goes around in my mind in an endless circle.

At least I can make this one other thing right—for Sarah—as right as it can be.

“We’re going to the Huntington,” I say through my teeth. “They have beautiful botanical gardens and rose gardens and a Japanese garden and a library.”

“Wait, that’s too far north!” Jared says. “That’s out of our way, and crazy! Why?  Let’s just put the poor girl down over there, in that grass, it’s decent enough—”

“Shut up,” I say in a hard voice. “We’re going to the Huntington.”

* * *

We start flying just above street level along smaller streets of suburbia in a direction that vaguely follows the 210 Freeway as it’s moving west in the direction of Pasadena—it’s the only way I know to approach the Huntington.

To be honest, I have no clear sense of what I’m doing, where we’re going. The last time I was here at the Huntington Library, Gallery, and Botanical Gardens, I was a little girl with my parents and George. I remember running through the amazing structured gardens, with manicured lawns, sudden twists and turns framed by artful plants and trees among Grecian statuary, roses and cactus gardens and natural wonder. . . . I remember looking at stern, dark-brown, faded portraits in the Gallery.

It was all so long ago. . . .

My insides are numb, starting from my gut and outward, and my circulation seems sluggish, while my extremities are cold.

“We’re wasting time, this is all wrong,” Jared says periodically. “We should just leave her body somewhere and go on our way. There’s nothing we can do, it’s not like it would make any difference for her.”

Stubbornly I say nothing, looking straight ahead, with the dry wind in my face. The automatic firearm that I got from the Blue girl’s body slaps against my side whenever I make an abrupt motion.

“Look, I get it,” Jared says. “She seemed—no, she was cool. A good person. Too bad we didn’t get to know her any better. I wish I did. I’m really sorry, okay. I am sorry she died. This sucks. But we have no time! We need to just leave her and go.”

“Ten minutes,” I say, turning my head around to glare at him fiercely. “Give me just ten minutes. We’re almost there. Okay? If not, we’ll turn back, I promise.”

“Okay,” he grumbles.

All the while, Zoe remains silent behind me.

I sing to keep us moving forward at a quick but more even pace, hoping that as we get through this neighborhood—El Monte? Temple City?—wherever we are, we’ll eventually hit San Marino and Huntington Drive where the landmark gardens and art gallery are located.

There I will leave Sarah lying, on one of the green lawns maybe, or near the glorious rose garden ached walkway. . . .

I am insane.

Jared is right, we have no time for this. And I have no right to force them to go along with me on a selfish sentimental whim. This is just me being nuts, unable to deal, to let go . . . to just let this person whom I barely know, go in peace. . . . Because I’m feeling guilt about the other dead person. . . .

Up ahead is some large intersection.

As I consider whether to make our two hoverboards rise another ten feet higher so that we can safely clear the busy traffic intersection, or to turn along a smaller street—or maybe to just turn around altogether and give up on this—there’s a rumbling noise. It is both deep and high-pitched at the same time, like a hurricane rising. Or a tornado.

It’s coming from the south, from behind us in the distance of what seems like many miles.

I turn around quickly, and so do Zoe and Jared. We stare at what appears to be a dark flock of birds approaching rapidly, filling the sky behind us. There is also a hollow advance sound of rushing high wind that precedes them.

“What the hell is that?” Jared raises one hand to shield his eyes as he looks intently.

“How weird. . . . Are those birds? Okay, no, that can’t be just wind. Even I know the Santa Anas are not that bad,” Zoe mutters.

And then we see them closer up, and it’s definitely not birds.

It’s Candidates riding hoverboards, dozens of them, flying crazy-fast.

They are being pursued.

And what’s behind them is not a flock of black birds either but an array of shuttles.

They are small, compact, near-black, the smallest Atlantean aircraft I’ve seen yet. There are so many that they appear as a dark speckle of dots, enough to black out the sky from a distance. They fly soundlessly but because they are moving so fast through the atmosphere, they cut the air around them, rending it apart so that a dull hurricane roar is produced. . . .

Meanwhile, the vanguard of the Candidates on hoverboards reaches us. As we hover on our two boards, levitating in place before the intersection, the boards and riders go whooshing by, some at street level like us, others higher up, and many others yet riding above the trees, and causing the hot zone firing systems to activate as they go by.

“Drones behind us! Move! Get away!” one Candidate on a board yells at us as she passes by, going too fast for us to see her face.

My heartbeat goes into overdrive. I sing the forward hover sequence and immediately our two boards lurch forward, picking up speed.

Zoe grabs my belt from behind silently, so as not to fall, and Jared cusses, taking hold of the board on his end, the best he can. The board carrying Sarah’s body moves silently alongside us. I sing us ten feet higher, so that we can safely cross the intersection where the cross-traffic is fortunately stopped due to a red light.

We plunge forward and become one with the speeding army of hoverboard riders.

I don’t dare look around too much, since I am concentrating on the way ahead and any street-level obstacles that might pop up, such as stop signs and light poles. But I can see enough with my peripheral vision. . . .

Most of the other Candidates are riding standing up, balancing on two feet the way the Atlanteans taught us. However, there are quite a few who are also straddling the boards while seated, or even lying flat on their bellies and hugging the boards so as not to fall off. However we’re the only “crew” of more than one person riding a single board. So, others give us looks—or is it, they’re looking at Sarah’s body on the other board? Whatever it is, most people are going faster, so eventually they pass us.

“Hey, dude, what are these drone things after us? How come we’re all running away?” Jared yells out to the nearest boy atop a board, who’s balancing in a loosely hunched snowboarder stance.

“You wanna stay back and find out?” the boy yells back.

“Killer drones!” a girl cries, gasping from the force of wind resistance, somewhere several feet above our heads. “They come from the south . . . as soon as you get close to the inner end of this hot zone, the boundary fence activates them. . . .”

“How do you know they’re dangerous?” Zoe cries out.

“Because I saw them fry at least three people!” the same girl answers. “They fire these flaming lasers or something, just trust me, they are bad!”

“Yeah, they incinerate you completely, so only the board remains and eventually it drops down with your ashes,” the boy adds.

“All I know is, we need to get out of this hot zone,” the girl says. “And since they cut us off from the south, we have to backtrack.”

“Hey,” I yell out to the girl. “When did the drones first appear?”

“No idea.”

“Does anyone know? I mean, at what point specifically? Where do you have to be inside the zone to activate those drones?”

But the girl shrugs, and the boy is already many feet ahead of us.

And so we keep going.

Whether we like it or not, we are now going the wrong way, away from our destination downtown and north toward San Marino.

Toward the Huntington.

* * *