Chapter Ten Sadie
Ten
Sadie
We loaded the slugs up in our backpacks, with Suki nestled in the hiding place she’d chosen for herself: a pouch made of black mesh on Arturo’s pack, which allowed her to see out but not be visible within.
He stored her floating disk as well, in case she needed it.
Arturo handed us all translator pins and earpieces, so we’d be able to hear the English translation quietly in our ears, instead of loudly broadcast to everyone.
“We don’t know when we might encounter people,” Arturo said, “so we should put up some illusions to blend in. Alanik, can you instruct Hoid to disguise us? You and Gilaf need illusions over your faces and hands to look human, and cover Nedd’s arm as well.
We don’t know what prosthetic technology is like here and we don’t want anyone asking questions.
If he can cover our earpieces too, we can avoid questions about those. ”
“What about my hair?” I asked. Owing to centuries of genetic engineering, blue was my natural color, but Yeongian wasn’t among the languages spoken on this planet, so I doubted there were many people here with my heritage.
“Sadie’s hair too, if possible,” Arturo said.
“Got it,” Alanik said. She must have communicated telepathically with Hoid, because a moment later my hair turned dark brown, similar to Arturo’s. Not as fun as blue, but different. Different could be fun too.
The earpieces the others wore now blended into their ears, matching the color of their skin.
Alanik’s and Gilaf’s hair had changed to a dusty blond.
Their skin tones darkened, pushing toward brown.
Their violet eyes were now bright blue, the bone protrusions gone from their cheeks, their fingernails flat and blunt instead of sharp and pointed.
They both still looked a little ethereal, but at least they weren’t instantly identifiable as aliens.
“You’re staring,” Nedd said, and at first I assumed he was talking to me, until Arturo startled and quickly glanced away from Alanik.
Nedd smirked, but then glanced down at his own arm and suddenly he was the one staring. His prosthetic was disguised to look like skin, and Nedd stretched his fingers, watching them like he’d seen a ghost.
“Is there something wrong with my appearance?” Alanik asked Arturo.
“No, nothing’s wrong!” he said, refusing to look at her. “You look great.”
“Because if the illusion isn’t perfect,” Alanik said, “I could make subtle changes. Tell me if I’ve made a mistake.”
“It’s fine,” he said.
“You’re not even looking. How would you know?”
Arturo shrugged, clearly realizing she wasn’t going to drop it. “If you’re trying to blend in, you could try looking a little more…plain, I guess?”
“Plain?” Alanik said. “What do you mean?”
“Like, ordinary.” Arturo winced, like he wished he hadn’t started this conversation. He acted like that around Alanik sometimes. They’d been circling each other since she’d joined our flight, but I could never quite tell if either one was aware of the other’s interest.
“I know what the word means,” she said. “But what would make me more plain? I need to keep all the features on my face.”
“Yes,” Arturo said. “But you could make them look…less striking. Stand out less.”
Alanik gave him a skeptical look. “How would I do that?”
“He wants you to look less pretty,” I translated.
Arturo covered his face with his hand.
“Is that what you mean?” Alanik asked.
“Yeah, I guess,” Arturo said through his fingers. He looked like he wanted to burrow into the soil at his feet and become one with the forest, disintegrate into nothing. Though he had a point. Alanik had made herself as beautiful a human as she was an UrDail, which might draw attention to her.
“Our flightsuits are probably going to stand out,” Arturo said, changing the subject. “But we don’t know yet what kind of clothes they wear here. If you see anyone, duck down in the underbrush so Alanik and Hoid can disguise our clothing before we’re spotted.”
We all climbed out of the gully, headed in the direction of the river.
It was a good thing the DDF required so much PT, because trekking across the soft, crumbly soil and climbing over branches and logs were no joke.
We used our light-lines as little as possible to avoid drawing attention as we neared the population, which only made travel slower and harder.
The forest was strangely alive, not just with trees, bushes, and moss, but also with an array of bugs.
Small snails clustered on rotting bits of wood, chewing on the decaying bark.
Beetles clung to foliage, eating even tinier beetles that looked like dots against the purple leaves.
Black flies buzzed around our heads, as if trying to identify us as friend or foe.
“Try not to let the flies bite you,” Arturo said, swatting at one on his neck. “They could be venomous.”
“Can they be, if they coexist with the human colony?” I asked.
“Old Earth had venomous snakes,” Nedd said.
“And spiders,” Arturo added.
We came to a large log, and I pulled myself on top of an old branch. “Okay, but those humans didn’t have a choice about where to live,” I said.
“I think even most interstellar travelers have to take some of the bad with the good,” Suki said, peeking out of Arturo’s backpack as he jumped off the log. “No place is perfect.”
“If much of the continent is so forested,” Alanik said, “it’s no wonder the humans haven’t spread farther across the surface.”
“I don’t know,” Arturo said. “There’s good shelter here, and plenty of wood to build with. It’s more likely they haven’t spread out because they were being harried by Superiority drones.”
“The city survived, though,” I said. “It has a stone wall around it, which might be good for ground defense, but it wouldn’t stand up to destructor fire for long.”
“She makes a good point,” Gilaf said.
A gust of wind blew overhead, though we were mostly sheltered from it. The moan of the shifting trees rose and fell, then off to our right, a scratching sound echoed through the forest, followed by a louder drawn-out creak.
Alanik turned toward the sound. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. The sound came again, accompanied this time by the rustling of leaves and underbrush.
And then one of the branches began to move—about thirty meters away and thick as my waist, it bent and shifted, climbing upward.
Oh scud. That wasn’t the wind. The branch groaned as it rose, coming to rest on a thicker branch, as if the tree had reached out a hand and laid it there for support.
“What the scud is that?” Nedd asked.
Stars, I’d assumed the trees had grown tangled up this way. They could just…reposition themselves? “Alanik?” I said. “Do the trees on your planet move their branches around?”
“Definitely not,” Alanik said, her eyes glued to the branch.
Closer to us, another branch lifted into the air, and then a whole section of the forest followed after it, like the tree had stepped forward and then shifted the rest of its body accordingly. Most of the trees remained still, but this patch appeared to be connected and—
“It’s alive,” Arturo said.
“All trees are alive,” Alanik said.
“Okay,” Arturo said. “But not like a tree is alive. Like an animal is alive.”
“Or a monster,” Gilaf said, his pin translating his words. Apparently their culture also had a concept of monsters. It seemed like a pretty universal idea.
The first branch lifted again, and this time it swayed toward us, setting down no more than five meters away.
We edged closer together instinctively, and Nedd and Arturo drew their destructor pistols.
Would a pistol shot even hurt a tree? I wasn’t sure it was threatening us, or that it even knew we were here.
“Everyone back slowly away,” Arturo said. “No sudden movements.”
We followed his instructions, though moving backward wasn’t easy through the thick underbrush, and I didn’t want to take my eyes off the branch to look behind me.
It shifted again, and this time, a mound of leaves and decaying bark lifted from the forest floor.
Desiccated vegetation flaked off a gnarled hunk of purple-brown wood nearly as big as a starship.
The knotted, burled wood contorted as two slits opened in the front of it, the outer layer of wood rolling back to reveal two black orbs with a shiny film across the surface, like… eyes.
Two low branches extended toward us—stars, were those legs?
“Oh, no,” Arturo said. “This is not happening.”
The tree leaned closer, and a musty draft wafted over us, hot and thick, like the thing’s breath.
“Spread out,” Arturo said, and we all scurried away from each other.
The tree focused on Arturo, lifting its branches one by one with its trunk suspended between them like the body of a spider. Its eyes—big as dinner plates—blinked steadily. They were glossy and pure black, which made them look kind of evil, but that didn’t mean they were evil.
Did it?
One of the branches—I couldn’t tell quite how many there were, tangled as they were with the rest of the trees—reached forward, approaching Arturo. As he stumbled back, the tip of it made contact with his shoulder, pushing him into a bush.
Arturo lost his footing and rolled off the bush onto his feet again. The tree crouched over him, emitting a rush of wind that blew his hair back.
“Run,” Arturo ordered.
And we did. Loath as I was to tear my eyes from the thing, I couldn’t guarantee that its next strike wouldn’t impale me, so I leaped over the nearest log and ran in the opposite direction.
The others darted away as well, with Gilaf out in front and Arturo lagging behind.
The sounds of groaning wood followed, joined by rattling leaves and cracking twigs as the thing paced after us.
I threw myself over another log and allowed a glance over my shoulder. We were putting distance between ourselves and it, possibly because it had to maneuver its branches around many living and dead trees to pursue us.
Arturo barreled past me, catching up to Alanik, when a shout rang out in a language I didn’t recognize.
“GOTCHA!” my earpiece helpfully translated.
Stars. Had we been spotted? I ducked behind a tree trunk and peeked around it in the direction of the voice.
The tree monster had stopped following us, and now it had a large net draped over its head, hanging from the chunk of bark like a loose veil.
More voices echoed through the woods, and my earpiece translated. “We got him! Take that!”
A human appeared—a man with brown skin wearing loose cotton clothing—grabbing at one of the creature’s leg-branches with a hook at the end of a long pole.
The rest of the flight crouched in the underbrush.
“Alanik,” Arturo whispered. He unzipped his pouch to check on Suki. I caught sight of the back of her furry head—she appeared to be furiously drawing away on her tablet, so I assumed she must be unharmed.
“Hoid is covering us with a leafy illusion,” Alanik said. “Blending us into the forest.”
“Good job, Hoid,” Arturo said.
We all watched as the humans surrounded the tree, catching it with hooks and lashing them around its body, compacting it.
They threw more nets over it, binding some of its legs to its body, and then used the hooks to drag it forward on its remaining limbs, leading it in the direction of the river. They didn’t seem to have noticed us.
“What the scud are they doing with that thing?” Nedd asked.
“I don’t know,” Arturo said. “But they’re moving toward the city, so we’re going to follow them and find out.”