04
Without direct access to my atomic clock, I wasn’t sure how long I’d been walking, but I could guess at least twenty beats, and already my parumauxi were struggling in the heat. They flocked to the soles of my feet, bare and blistered, responding to the alarm repeating on my vitals deck.
[Warning: surface integrity compromised.]
I stopped at a fork in the road as the shoulder seams of my t-shirt fell apart under the crust of nano-foam. Its remnants fell to the ground, leaving my skin to bake in the oven air. Though the foam was meant to eat me alive, it acted as a buffer against the volcanic heat, continuing to fizzle beneath its thick, dry crust.
A gasp, murmurs, hastened footsteps. The air was so full of halos and echoes that I could hardly focus on the bodies around me, but I intuited the open stares of people hidden within fire blankets and thermophobic scarves. I recognized others like Master and the overseer, but some species were unknown to me. Beings with thick tusks and four eyes, a flat-headed creature with patterns carved into its head and heavy, full lips. The latter leaned against a wall as if the temperature were comfortable, chewing on a skewer of blackened meat thoughtfully.
I glanced in either direction, down rows of similar metal buildings layered with quilted insulation. The human halo I’d been following had faded into the strata of vehicles overhead as if it had merged with the traffic above, somewhere I couldn’t follow. But if I looked to the left, I recognized the same signature.
How much further?The human woman’s voice, thinner and less authoritative, flittered up from the road.
Worried, sweetheart?
Both of those voices echoed along my synapses. They had been here, had walked down this street, but sols ago. Their impression wasn’t nearly as fresh as what had disappeared into the sky above.
But it was all I had. And the more I heard them, the more shape they took in my mind. I remembered them, just like I remembered snow. A human woman with a tall, muscular figure and dark skin that looked like black waters dappled with white moonlight. And the man… a devilish red venandi covered in scars, with thick hands and short spires.
I turned down the leftward path, mesmerized by their faint echoes. If I wanted to follow them, I wouldn’t have long before they were gone.
A wall of amber and silver pushed straight through my trail, and I bounced backwards with a wide-eyed gasp.
“No!”
I scrambled past the person that had interrupted my trail and tried in vain to gather the wisps that were quickly dispersing, shoveling them together like a raccoon trying to stop cotton candy from disappearing in water.
Was that a reference to something?
No time to investigate. Must gather.
“Scocite.What the hell?”
The voice of the man behind me was confusing. Guttural and growly with a piercing whimper deep in his chest. The digital noise of his holotab and language bionics floated through my hands and I paused, squinting at it.
That signature looked so familiar. I’d seen it intersect with what I’d been following many times down this road. Even now, if I looked up at a distance, I saw his echoes here and there, some stronger, some fading to nothing. I realized it was the course of many sols, traversing this same road by foot, just as he did now.
I turned to look at him as he brushed furiously at a neck and arm covered in amber-spun fur, a pair of large, rounded ears angled back in alarm as the nano-foam clung to his coat and clothing. He shook his clawed palms, trying to dislodge it.
“What are you?” I asked, cataloging his features. He wasn’t venandi, hjarna, or shilpakaari. These were the species I was coded for, and he resembled none of them.
He was tall but very thin, with a cowl of fur hanging loose from his neck. Icy blue eyes with horizontal pupils were set slightly wider than my own thanks to a flat, expressivenose. Above them was a thick forehead where the velvet of his face grew wiry and shiny, covering his head in a thick spray of short fur.
His brow creased. “What the hell does that mea—oh shit,” he breathed, freezing the moment our eyes met.
My face brightened as if I’d caught a mouse between my paws.
“You recognize me!” I gasped breathlessly, taking a step towards him. He fell back a pace.
“No.”
“But you know I’m human!”
He looked me over slowly, a crease in his brow, then shook his head. “I don’t know what that is. Excuse me.”
He gave me a wide berth, then practically ran down the road, discarding the shirt being quickly destroyed by the nano-foam. I stumbled over it, then picked it up, rushing after him.
“Wait!”
He turned around and I stopped short.
“I can’t help you, okay? I have enough shit to deal with right now. I can’t—”
“Please,” I begged, clasping my hands together. I had no way to regulate my responses anymore, and all the desperation I… felt… was visible on my features. The man swallowed hard and turned me around by the shoulder, pointing in the opposite direction.
“If you go straight for half a turn, you’ll run into a guild outpost. It’ll have a red door. Knock and ask for help there, alright? I can’t help you, so don’t follow me.”
His calloused, biting grip disappeared and left me staring in that direction with bated breath. [Analysis] I could follow his instructions. Maybe there were other humans like me in this guild outpost…
But he knew the one I wanted to find. My chances were stronger with him.
I defied his instructions and turned around. He was gone, but the digital noise of his holotab remained. I picked that ribbon out of the mess of signals and followed it around the corner, his shirt clutched in my hand.
The shadows were deep as I veered off the main road. Lightning arced across the ashy black clouds above, illuminating two men talking over a glowing pipe at the end of the alley. They watched me as I picked my way along the narrow path, following the man’s data. He didn’t want me to follow him, so I would be careful not to make noise, but I needed to. To know which of these little metal shacks was his and make sure I couldn’t lose him like the trail he’d interrupted.
Finding it wasn’t hard.
Though the alley was abandoned, the interiors of every ramshackle home along the path bustled with life. Radio feeds, murmured discussion, pots and plates being jostled around, snapping fabric, little sniffs and grunts and hums. All but one with a corrugated sliding door on oily hinges. It was nestled between homes, and though there was no light seeping from beneath the door, [thermal vision] a warm body pressed against it from the other side. Listening and still.
I slid up to it and knocked quietly, pressing my shoulders against the wall so the men at the end of the alley could no longer see me.
[Warning: unit requires hydration]
I swallowed on a dry throat and knocked again. My unit’s condition was becoming dire. And pain… It sapped my strength. Even if I turned back and walked towards the guild outpost as instructed, I would not make it.
“Please,” I whispered, remnants of the other human and her companion brushing against my senses. I angled my mouth towards the seam in the door. “You dropped your shirt. Here…” I pushed it through the open space between the track and the wall and something pulled it the rest of the way through. The man sighed and slid open the door enough to make eye contact. His eyes were beautiful and framed in such lovely lashes. Like a deer from Earth.
“I-I don’t know where to go,” I admitted.
“I can’t, I’m sorry.”
“Wait!”
Before he could close the door in my face, I put my blistered bare foot in the way, shoving at the burning metal with my shoulder. His ears flattened as my skin sizzled. I bit my lip as pain shuttled up my neck, determined to change his mind.
“Please, I saw you at the Conrad–”
“I’ve never been to the Conrad.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Not you… I saw these,” I swirled my hand through the halos. “The data. From the human and the red venandi.” I licked my dry lips, but there was no moisture left in my mouth. “Im-Imminy and Vinjis. I think I know them, and I think you can help me.”
The man’s eyes widened. He looked at me more closely, his grip on the door loosening. “You’re… one of the dolls? You saw Vin and Imani?”
Those were their names? Yes, of course they were. I nodded. The man leaned into me, his ears popping out between my face and the door to glance both ways down the alley with them perked up like satellite dishes, listening. Wrapping an arm around my shoulder, he pushed me inside.
“Come in. I can at least give you something to wear.”
I slipped into the darkened room, and the man locked the door behind me.