Unity (2 page)

“You’re not a puker, are you?” I ask.

Daniel swallows and shrinks back from the view.
Great.

Then his eyes widen as though we’re in one of those old timey action movies where poignant moments are slowed down so the audience doesn’t miss all the on-screen awesomeness. In the reflection of his wide eyes, I see a flickering orange sprite. Then another. And another.

I nearly fall from my seat as I spin around. Fireballs cut through the storm clouds, trailed by steam and then smoke. Voices rise up from the front of the transport as the others see what’s happening. Some of the kids unbuckle for a better look. To my surprise, it’s me who asks Daniel the obvious question, “What is it, a satellite?”

“Too big,” he whispers, and he’s right. The fireball at the center looks far bigger than any satellite.

“Meteor?”

“Too slow,” he says, leaning forward, face nearly pressed against the glass. “I think... It looks like...”

The ball of fire erupts, the blinding light forcing us back, hands to our eyes. Shouts fill the cabin. When the light subsides, tendrils of smoke and fire drop straight down. Above the explosion, the storm clouds bend upward, propelled by the invisible shockwave.

Things are about to get rough.

I shove Daniel back across the aisle. He slams hard into his seat and looks a little wounded—emotionally—until I shout, “Everyone buckle up! Now!”

I slip back into my harness, clipping it quickly in place. Daniel tries to stow his Featherlight back in his go-pack, but his fingers slip off the magnetic strip twice, and he gives up, holding the device while he struggles with his buckles. His shaking fingers are all but useless. When I see tears squeeze from the sides of his eyes, I unbuckle and jump across the aisle.

He tries to resist for a moment, offering a brave, “I can do it!” but I quickly overpower him and fasten his harness. Not waiting for, or needing any thanks, I turn back toward my seat, but stop. What I see through the window freezes me in place. Transport 38 goes dark and drops from the sky.

Hutch...

I place my hand on the glass and say, “Sig,” just before 37 loses power and falls. I dive for my seat, looping an arm beneath one of the shoulder straps, but then the transport shakes, like it’s been backhanded by God. I’m thrown to the floor as we lose power and plummet downward.

The silence that follows the transport’s loss of power feels like pressure on the sides of my head. Then I realize the compression is an actual pressure change, brought on by the fact that we’re plummeting from the sky. The repulse discs mounted to the bottom of the transport have lost power. I glance at the Featherlight clutched in Daniel’s hands. The screen is black, which means nothing, but the small LED light indicating a charge has also gone out.

As I wrestle against the shaking floor, crawling back to my seat, I run through scenarios and come to a quick conclusion. That explosion, whatever it was, generated an electromagnetic pulse that fried everything electronic inside its blast radius. Part of me wants to tell the pilots that their efforts are futile. There’ll be no avoiding our fate. But I also know we weren’t very high when we lost power. We’re going to pancake into the ocean in just a few seconds.

“Twenty seconds!” Daniel shouts, putting a number to my fear.

But it seems wrong. The transports will fall like stones, slowed by drag perhaps, but their weight will more than make up for it.

“Hold on!” Daniel shouts, and my muscles react to his warning—fingers clutching the harness straps—before my mind decides he knows what he’s talking about.

Several loud clunks boom inside the cylindrical cabin. They’re followed by a hard tug on my arm, as our rate of our descent suddenly slows.

“Drag wings,” Daniel shouts, over the shrill voices of our fellow freaked-out passengers. “This model of transport has several crash countermeasures. Some of them don’t require power. Fifteen seconds.”

With both hands wrapped around my seat’s shoulder straps, I pull myself up while giving Daniel a dubious look.

“This is what I do,” he says. “Trust—” His voice is cut off by a shrill whistle. His eyes go wide, and I barely hear him shout, “Hold on!” again.

This time, my muscles and mind work in tandem. Daniel seems to know a lot about the transport’s systems. He’s part of Unity for a reason, and he’s a Base—like Sig—which means he’s probably got an uncanny amount of knowledge crammed into that cute head.

The transport kicks into a high velocity spin. I’m pinned against the bottom of my seat, unable to move. The air is pushed from my lungs. Pinpoints of light spiral in my vision, like silent fireworks. There’s a jarring snap and a clang that silences the whistle, but it changes our spin into a tumble. For a moment, I’m able to hold on, but the combined forces of motion and gravity conspire against me. I’m lifted from the floor and slung against the ceiling, my hands still clutching my seat straps.

I see Daniel’s wide eyes looking up at me. He shouts over the roar of the wind outside and the blood surging behind my ears. “Effie!”

I’m slammed back to the floor, eliciting a rare shout of pain. I can take a lot of abuse. I’ve
taken
a lot—from bullies, from bad foster-parents and from foster-siblings. But the impacts wracking my body are unrestrained by the fear of being caught. One hand falls free of the strap, and I think I hear Daniel scream, “Three seconds.”

There is no way I’m getting back in the chair and buckled up inside three jarring seconds. I’m surprised that my instinct, instead of fighting to the end, is to look in Daniel’s eyes and see a little bit of kindness before I’m erased from the world. And sent where? Heaven? Hell? Infinite oblivion? I don’t know much about the first option, but I’ve been told to visit the second option many times. And option three? That doesn’t sound all that different from hell to me. So fingers crossed that God is as merciful as they say.

A high pitched voice cuts through the chaos and prevents me from reaching out to a higher power in my last moments. It’s Daniel’s voice. Repeating something. I focus past the roar, and the words work their way into my ears. “Let go!”

My fingers snap open as I’m thrashed back up to the ceiling. Held in place, I look down at Daniel, and he’s still shouting at me. “Hold your breath!”

As my lungs fill to capacity, Daniel’s words run through my mind. ‘
This model of transport has several crash countermeasures. Some of them don’t require power.’

What do you know, Daniel?

A hiss fills the cabin, building to a sudden intensity. As I’m tossed back toward the floor, I catch sight of gray, liquid streaks jutting from every side of the cabin. There’s a fraction of a moment when I think the liquid is expanding, but then it and the rest of the world is consumed. I feel nothing but tightness all around me.

I hear nothing.

See nothing.

I can’t breathe.

And then my insides shift downward. I can feel my guts push on my bladder. My head aches, as my brain bounces against my skull. My compressed lungs try to cough out air, but there’s no escape—

Something is in my nose!

A second impact pushes everything in the other direction. The force is less intense, but the pain is absolute. And then, it gets worse. I need to exhale. The pressure around me builds, pushing on my lungs, as if they were too-full balloons.

Stillness surrounds me. I can feel my heart struggling to beat inside a confined chest. People weren’t meant to feel their own heartbeats. It’s a clear sign of wrongness. And it only gets worse as the world compresses itself into my very pores, pushing past my clenched eyelids.

I’ve been trapped inside a human-sized blood-pressure cuff.

And then, like at the doctor’s, it releases.

Blood flows first, reaching my brain and clearing the lights from my vision.

My body decompresses, lungs expanding to a more natural position.

But the air still needs a release.

I still need to breathe!

The material clogging my nostrils turns to a warm, pungent liquid and drools out. I feel warmth all around me, and then nothing. I’m released.

And dropped.

The air in my lungs coughs out, as I hit the floor. I’m wracked by heaving gasps, my body curling in on itself like a terrified pill bug. Pain screams through my body, and I swear I feel an organ slip back into place. The image of my twisted insides fills me with nausea. Or is that the concussion, which I definitely have?

As confusion subsides, I’m struck by the realization that I’m alive.

And trapped in a fetid, infinite darkness. This can’t be oblivion. It smells horrible. Chemical. And while I’m in pain, I don’t think it’s quite bad enough to be hell.

Alive,
I decide.
Now, think.

“Daniel?” I ask, my voice sounding flat, like the sound is being absorbed. I move a hand across the floor—which is covered in several inches of goo—trying to find my bearings. But in the center aisle, where there should be a straight, flat surface, I find a lump.

A light.

We’re upside down. I’m on the
ceiling.

“Daniel. Are you alive?”

A gentle coughing replies, and I know it’s Daniel because the sound is close, and above me. “Effie?”

“I’m here.”

“My head...”

“You’re upside down.”

“Oh.”

“What was that stuff?”

“It’s an REF safety system. Rapid Expanding Foam. Most new military aircraft have it for when ejecting isn’t possible. The whole system is mechanical, relying on air pressure. A sudden decrease in external pressure opens the valves, and air pressure moves the foam. When it contacts open air, well, you saw what happened. Or at least you felt it.”

“It nearly killed me.”

“Thirty-seven percent of the people it’s supposed to save are killed by it. That’s why it’s not in civilian vehicles. Even though sixty-three percent of people are saved, the manufacturer would be held responsible for the thirty-seven percent it didn’t save, because the REF would be the official cause of death, not the crash.”

That Daniel can not only assemble multiple sentences right now, but can also recall this kind of detailed information, is impressive. But it’s also a distraction. There were ten kids on board our transport. According to Daniel’s numbers, at least three of them are dead. Likely four.

“I need light,” I say, as groans and coughing from the front end make the hairs on my arms stand on end.

“Above my—below my head. There’s a cabinet.”

I find the small door, but I can’t find a handle.

“Push it in,” Daniel says. “There should be a first aid kit. Inside that you’ll find four chemical glowsticks.”

I push on the door, and it pops open. A plastic box the size of a small briefcase slides out. “How do you know all this?”

“I was on the design team. Two years ago. I was working for a private firm until Unity recruited me.”

I open the first aid kit and feel around. The case is full of unidentifiable packages, bottles and tools. “Recruited you?”

“I couldn’t turn them down when they doubled my fee.”

“Your
what?
You’re being paid?” Between crunchy packages that must be bandages, I find four plastic-wrapped cylinders.

“You’re not?”

“I wasn’t given a choice. It was this or a life wallowing in self-pity.”

“That’s still a choice,” he points out.

“Yeah, well, it’s not much of one.” I bend one of the glowsticks without unwrapping it. There’s a moment of resistance before the small glass cylinder inside it breaks. A dull green light emerges as the two chemical liquids inside make contact. The light grows even brighter when I shake the tube.

Daniel’s face is lit in green light. He looks far more strained than his voice let on. There are wet streaks from his eyes to his hairline.

“Hey,” someone from the front says. The voice is feminine and terrified. “Help us!”

I put the glowstick on top of the first aid kit, which is resting on the gelatinous bed of what was, just moments ago, a cabin full of rock-hard foam. It’s slippery beneath my feet, but I manage to stand and get a shoulder underneath Daniel’s legs. “Hold on to my waist.”

He wraps his small arms around my waist, while I support his body with one hand and fumble with his seatbelt clip with the other. When I find the triangular button and push it, his weight is transferred to me. We nearly topple over together, but we both release in time to shift the momentum to Daniel’s body. He flops over my arms and lands on his feet.

“That was surprisingly graceful,” I say, and I bend down to the first aid kit, recovering the three unused glowsticks. “You know how to get out of here?”

“The rear hatch can operate manually,” he says.

“Get it open,” I say, cracking a fresh glowstick and heading for the front of the transport, where several small, whimpering voices, and at least a few dead bodies, await.

I wince as the smell of blood mingles with the chemical odor left behind by the foam. The ceiling-turned-floor is slick beneath my feet, the sludge congealing to something resembling kid’s gooey gunk. I cling to the seats above my head and notice our go-packs, which had been stored beneath us, are now stowed in a more traditional location.

When we were shoved on board, we were given simple instructions. Put your go-pack beneath your seat. Buckle up. And do not unbuckle until you are on the ground. The words were shouted at us. Rushed and angry. Then the hatch closed, and the transport lifted off.

There’s no one here to tell us what to do now. If the pilots survived the crash, they’re probably still trying to recover. For now, we’re on our own.

“Hurry up,” a girl I can’t see says, sounding a little more pushy than I appreciate. Given the circumstances, I can’t blame her, so I refrain from commenting. What I don’t do is hurry. I’m one misplaced slippery step from toppling over, and the way my head feels, another good clunk to my melon might undo me.

A pair of dangling arms glow green in the light as I approach. I freeze for a moment, unsettled by the limbs’ stillness.
There are eight people hanging upside down,
I tell myself.
And you’re the only one who can get them down.
Move!

I reach out and take hold of the wrist, below which is a Support brand. The temperature of the skin is the first sign of something wrong. Then the lack of a pulse. And then, I turn my head up to the face of a young girl, her eyes locked open, staring down at nothing.

“Is she dead?” someone asks. A boy, I think.

“I think Nick is, too,” says the more impatient feminine voice.

The arm swings slowly when I let go, moving in the slow circles of a pendulum before coming to a stop. Gasping in a quick breath and setting my compartmentalization ability to full power, I move across the upside-down aisle and encounter my second ever corpse. As I reel back from the sight of a body whose ribs have been compressed from the foam’s pressure, I bump into a hand that fumbles across my head and through my hair like a scurrying mouse. Without thinking, I duck and spin. My feet squeak against the slick metal ceiling and then seem to launch out like there are little rockets attached to my heels.

My breath catches as I reach out, finding a hand, and I catch hold. My fall turns into a slide, stopping beneath the upside down person who caught me. Only she didn’t catch me. She had nothing to do with it. In the dull light provided by the glowstick now embedded in the slime beneath me, I see a dead girl’s eyes looking down at me.

A second hand reaches out of the gloom. “Here.” It’s the impatient one.

I take her hand, noting another Support brand, and I manage to not topple over. The girl is strong and hoists me to my feet so that our eyes—mine dark brown, her’s light blue—are inches apart, though rotated 180 degrees. Her long wavy hair hangs like a golden curtain. “Get. Me. Down.”

Without a word, I comply with the girl’s request. Working together, she’s on her feet beside me in seconds. “I’ll check the front,” she says. “Help Gizmo.”

Gizmo?
A nickname
, I decide, and I look for the person whose mousey hand ran through my hair. I find the boy behind me, his face bloodied, his chest rising and falling in quick but labored breaths. Kid’s not doing well.

“Gizmo,” I say, taking his warm hand.

He says nothing. Just stares at me with crazy wide eyes, the white orbs accentuated by his dark skin. He’s terrified. A dying animal. Perhaps literally. But his silence might not be from fear. Unity, like Brook Meadow, is comprised mostly of kids whose minds are unique. Like Sig, Gizmo might just not talk.

“I’m going to get you down now, okay?” When he doesn’t offer a reply or show any sign of apprehension, I reach up and unbuckle him. He slides into my arms, and I have no trouble spinning the boy’s skin-and-bones frame right-side-up. To my relief, Gizmo shakes his head gently and remains standing. I crack a fresh light stick and crouch beside him.

“Do you know Daniel?”

He nods.

I point to the rear end of the transport, some twenty feet away, where Daniel’s silhouette can be seen in the light of his glowstick, which he’s wedged into something on the wall. I can hear him grunting with exertion. The hatch’s manual operation is giving him some trouble.

“That’s him. He’s getting the door open.” I bend down and pick up Gizmo’s go-pack. He takes the pack and nods when I say, “See if you can help Daniel.” Then he’s off, pack over his shoulder like it’s the first day of school.

I turn toward the front of the transport and take a few steps before coming across another set of dangling arms.
That’s four, Daniel,
I think. An even 40%, which is close enough to 37%.

I nearly scream when the blonde Support girl steps into the dull sphere of light around the glowstick still embedded in the floor behind me. She’s got another girl, unconscious, in her arms. The girl’s body is as limp as the dead, but her small chest is rising and falling.

“Let’s go,” the Support girl says.

I shake my head. “There should be one more.”

“That would be Owen,” she says, and I think the tone of her voice is meant to remind me that while I don’t really know anyone on this transport, she considers them friends, whom she would never leave behind unless there was no choice. Owen, it would seem, is dead, too.

Fifty percent, Daniel.
My anger is squelched by the knowledge that it could have been one hundred percent.

I’m about to lead the way to the back of the transport when the blonde says, “Get our go-packs.”

“We don’t even know what’s in them,” I say, my reaction born from a strong sense of don’t-tell-me-what-to-do.

“Rations, survival gear, clothing.” Before I can ask, she lifts the girl up so I can see her Support brand, like it’s supposed to mean something. Then she squints at me. “How long have you been with Unity?”

“Three weeks.”

She deflates a little.

“How long have you been with Unity?” I ask.

“Three months.” She motions to the girl in her arms. “This is Mandi. She’s been with Unity for a year. My name is Gwen, and if you need my assistance, I’ll be—”

“I got this,” I say. I step around her and pull a go-pack out, my rapid action fueled by my embarrassment over being kept in the dark. When I turn for the next bag, I see that Gwen hasn’t left my side.

“That they put you in the field after three weeks says a lot for your strength of will. It means they think you can handle this.” Her confidence wavers a little. “Whatever
this
is.”

At least she doesn’t know everything.

“I’ll meet you at the back,” I say. She nods and leaves, and I go back to collecting go-packs. They’re a little smaller than standard school backpacks—jet black, and packed tight. Each weighs about three pounds. With my left arm loaded with four packs, I work up the nerve to steal two more from the dead, but that’s all I can manage. I head toward the back, pausing for a moment to recover my own mystery go-pack, which I notice weighs three times as much as the others.

“C’mon,” Gwen says, as I approach the still-closed back hatch. I’m about to lose my patience again, when I realize she’s not talking to me. She’s talking to Daniel, who is straining to turn the handle of a lock, high above his head. It looks like something he might struggle to do normally, but with the transport upside down, the mechanism is nearly out of his reach. He doesn’t have the leverage to turn it.

I approach the scene, lit in dull green, and I hand two of the go-packs to Gizmo. When he takes them, I hand over another two to Daniel. He already has his around his shoulders, but he has no trouble with another two. I put the last two by my feet and mine on my back. “We’re upside down, so the hatch is going to open up, not down, and there’s a chance it won’t stay open, once it’s up. Don’t hang around to have a conversation.”

I take their lack of audible replies to be compliance, and then I take hold of the lever Daniel couldn’t move. I give it a tug, and when it doesn’t budge, I pull myself up, clinging to the handle like a monkey bar. I place my feet against one of two metal rails stretching down the hatch. Pushing with my legs and pulling with my torso and arms, the lever slides ten inches and then clunks into place.

When I release the handle and drop to my feet, there are three sets of glowing green and impressed eyes looking at me. “It’s called leverage,” I say, uncomfortable with their attention.

“We understand the concept,” Daniel explains. “We just couldn’t do it.”

I’m not sure about Gwen. She seems pretty capable. But Daniel is right. He and Gizmo would be trapped in here without help. I put my shoulder into the door and shove. There’s a slight give, but the door isn’t budging for me. “Going to need help.”

The moment the words leave my mouth, Daniel and Gizmo throw their feeble weight into the door. After turning her back to the door, even Gwen adds her body to the effort. The hatch moves, but it’s like there’s someone on the other side, pushing back. When the door budges a little and water surges in, I understand why. We might not be adrift at sea, but we’re not totally out of the water yet, either.

“We need to get it above the water line!” I shout, before grinding my teeth and shoving harder. Daniel shouts beside me, putting every ounce of muscle his little body has into the effort.

Water surges past my ankles as the hatch lifts higher. The warm liquid rushes to the back of the cabin, sloshing against the far end and the door leading to the cockpit.

The pilots.

The hatch is freed from the water, and it rises up. The sudden rush of water sweeps the go-packs at my feet away, and Gizmo along with them. Hand striking out like a snake, I catch Gizmo’s flight suit before he’s pulled back inside the cabin. With one hand supporting the hatch, I toss Gizmo outside, into two feet of water. It’s going to fill the cabin until it’s even with the water outside. The pilots will be trapped. I crack my last glowstick and toss it outside, just beyond the water. A sandy beach is revealed.

“Can you hold this up?” I ask Daniel and Gwen.

“What? Why?” Daniel’s indignant. Afraid.

“The pilots,” I say. “They’re—”

“There
are
no pilots,” Daniel says. “It’s a drone.”

A drone?

A drone!
A litany of three-, four- and five-letter words flows through my mind as a series of phrases that I think are something like poetry, an ode to obscenities. I keep it all inside, though. But I’m seriously going to punch someone in the face when I find out whose idea it was to send a bunch of kids across the ocean aboard drones.

“Go,” I say to Gwen. When she ducks her shoulders down to leave with Mandi, the weight of the hatch becomes almost unbearable. Daniel grunts from the sudden strain.

When my arms start to shake, I glance down at Daniel. “Get ready, Danny-boy.”

“Dan...iel,” he says through gritted teeth. Then he pulls his hands away and dives into the water. The dive is graceful, but he’s forgotten about the go-packs around his arms and on his back. He slaps into the water, but quickly shoves up out of it, sputtering and gasping. It would be funny if I wasn’t now losing the battle with the hatch.

“C’mon!” Gwen shouts. “Jump!”

And I do. My feet push off, but there’s no traction. The foam-gel beneath my feet, mixed with the oncoming rush of water, has become something like soap. Instead of diving forward, I belly-flop out, my legs from the knees down landing inside the transport. I flip over and shove up from the water in time to see the hatch fall down like some kind of medieval execution device. I yank my legs back, but it’s not enough.

My eyes scrunch shut as I wait for the explosive pain. Instead there’s a loud clang, and then pressure on my shoulders. As I’m dragged back, I see a piece of metal debris shoved into the door. Daniel is backing away from it. Kid saved my life. But he had help. I look up and see Gizmo straining to pull me. If not for the water taking some of my weight, I doubt he could move me an inch, though the look in his eyes says he would try.

There’s a loud shriek as the shard of metal slips sideways and falls. The hatch slams shut, the gong of its impact sounding like the start of some ancient challenge. I half expect a video game announcer to shout, ‘Fight!’

Instead, I hear more crushing silence.

It’s followed by the gentle lapping of waves.

And then Gizmo’s small voice for the first time. “What the
hell
is going on?”