Chapter 29 Sem
Poking my head out of our hut, I watched Elanie stomp down the path, an angry plume of dust billowing toward the terradome in her wake. Grover followed right behind her, making outraged burking chicken noises.
Since Elanie was thundering west, I went east.
Something was rotten in Thura. I felt it in my bones. I just had to find out what it was so she’d at least know this wasn’t the paradise it seemed to be. There was a reason I’d been going on afternoon walks, and it wasn’t just to stretch my legs. I’d been performing recon.
This was strange enough for a supposedly free commune.
But even stranger was the fact that no matter where I walked or how hard I searched, I still hadn’t found a kitchen or a laundry facility.
I hadn’t found any type of sewer system, even though the toilets flushed and the water ran.
Not to mention there wasn’t a single refuse compactor or flash incinerator in the entire village.
We all lived in a dream world where everything we could ever want or need simply appeared out of thin air, then vanished without a trace when it was no longer desired.
“Bullshit,” I grumbled, hiding behind a tree bearing what I thought might be rola fruit.
While Elanie was off doing Saints knew what, hopefully cooling down, I waited, watching the market like a hawk.
Thurans came and went, taking melons, carrots, heads of some vegetable that looked like broccoli but was a vivid neon yellow—a color of food, in my medical opinion, no being should ever eat.
They never brought anything back to the market, and they never left payment of any kind.
Anticipation crackled over my skin the same way it had when I’d stepped onto the pod with Elanie, then again when I’d pulled apart the pod’s electronics, trying to salvage our comms. I remember hunting this sensation when I was a kid, stealing parts from the ship graveyards to build homemade radios and power generators, hiding from the blood-thirsty hydrosharks that prowled through the ship’s rusty hulls.
Swimming back to the surface like my life depended on it, because if one of those glowing gray monsters caught my wrist or ankle between its teeth, it would have.
I was going to figure this place out, pop its artificial tropical bubble so Elanie could see it for the scam that it was.
I didn’t know exactly what we’d do after that, but between the terradome and Thura’s sound system, there were plenty of parts I could scavenge to try and fix the comms back in the pod.
I just had to be smart and stealthy and—
“What the hell was that?” I shrieked. Because I’d seen something. I knew I had. There were only three bunches of the toxic neon broccoli on the market counter the last time I looked. And now there were six.
Blocking the sun with a hand over my brow, I leaned out as far as I dared from the safety of my tree and waited, barely breathing.
There! A hand reaching up from below the table to replenish the happles. And there! Another hand adding a fistful of spikey gwarfs to the pile some Thuran had pillaged ten minutes ago.
Surging to my feet, I sprinted toward the market.
I was so close, almost there, when my steps faltered, my breath catching and my head filling as thoughts and feelings and emotions blasted through me like solar radiation.
I’d spent so long in silence since we’d landed here that the sheer volume of emotional noise doubled me over.
Fear, boredom, resignation, and, oddly, something like pride?
I raised my head just as the hand disappeared again. And when it returned holding a cluster of tiny bananas, bringing a dull sense of tedium with it, my empathy and I knew one thing for certain. Whoever that had belonged to, they were not a bionic.
Regaining my bearings, I jumped, soaring over a table of linen pants and rolling to my knees in the sand. Reaching out just as they dropped the bananas onto the table, I grasped the non-bionic’s hand and held on for dear life.
The owner of the hand cried out, trying to yank it out of my grip.
But I held on tight. And when the dust cleared, I found myself kneeling above a trap door.
The hand was one of four, the male from Gorbulon-7’s other three hands struggling to keep the fruit and vegetables clutched against his chest from toppling to the floor.
“Who are you?” I demanded while terror speared out from the Gorbie in sharp, penetrating bursts. “What in hells are you doing down there?”
“What’s going on, Lars?” a reedy and warbling voice asked from somewhere below me.
A second set of emotions roared through my mind like floodwater—annoyance, admiration, familiarity.
“Is it Gol?” the voice said. “Did you forget the gwarfs again? You’re such a knucklehead sometimes, you know that?”
“Let me go,” the Gorbie named Lars pleaded with me. “You don’t know what you’re doing, you stupid blue man. You’re going to get all of us into so much trouble.”
“All of you?” I flattened onto my belly, peering past Lars down into the hole. “How many of you are down there?”
A shadow passed over my head. I’d tried to be optimistic that it was just a cloud, but Lars’s golden eyes flaring under his halo of frizzy hair set me straight.
I turned my head slowly, the hairs on my neck flicking up one by one as my stomach caved in on itself. Because directly above me, tall as a mountain, stood Gol, grinning from ear to ear.
“You want to know about the underground, Portisan?” he asked, his massive head tilting while he made a disapproving, tsking sound. Like I was a dog who’d just pissed on his favorite carpet. “Well, then. Be my guest.”
Before I could even manage a, huh? Gol’s gargantuan hand grabbed me by the scruff and hurled me headfirst into the hole, straight into Lars’s arms, sending all the produce the Gorbie was trying to protect flying into the air.
“Cell thirty-two is open. I can stick him in there,” Lars suggested with undiluted adulation while I struggled in his iron-clad, four-armed grasp.
“That will do, Lars,” Gol replied, his voice dripping with satisfaction. Like he’d been waiting for this. Waiting for me to trip up so he could get rid of me. How could I have been so stupid? “Extra rations will be provided for you and Mina tonight.”
Lars bowed his head. “Thank you, Lord Gol the Merciful. Lord Gol the Kind.”
“Lord Gol?” I scoffed, then grunted when Lars squeezed the wind from my lungs and carried me down a narrow hallway carved into rock.
“And don’t you forget it,” Lars snapped, hurling me unceremoniously into a dank and musty cell, its gate screeching closed on old, rusty hinges. “Welcome to the underground, Portisan. Many enter.” He shot me four sets of finger guns. “But none leave.”