Paradox (15 page)

“How long have you been here?” Ana says softly.

“Way too long,” Ysa snaps.

After a while the sameness of the landscape starts to wear on Ana, and it’s increasingly hard to keep from getting disoriented. Pulling up the map, she finds a point in the distance, a hilly outcropping, and fixes her eyes on that spot. She should probably leave the map up, but the texture of the sand alone is making her a little nauseated. A jostling electronic display would push her all the way over the edge.

She sneaks a glance at Todd, but all his attention is on the sand as he moves into the lead with smooth, easy strides. He’s obviously not worried, or at least he isn’t showing it.

Ana picks up her pace, speeding up even as Ysa seems to be slowing down.

“Good technique,” Todd says, half glancing over his shoulder to flash Ana a grin. “You’re as smooth as butter.”

For some reason this makes her heartbeat quicken, and she
feels her cheeks heat up.
Focus, Ana
. She keeps her eyes on the midnight-colored sand. Swish, lean, step. Swish, lean, step.

“This isn’t so bad,” she says.

Glancing down, something catches her eye. Her boots’ soles have softened and expanded, even curling up around her feet a little, like tiny surfboards. She had expected the climbing spikes, but this adaptation catches her by surprise.

“Sandshoes,” she says. She wonders if the boots can adapt themselves to any surface, or if the shoe designers anticipated these obstacles in particular. For some reason, a cold shiver runs down her spine.

Todd is way ahead by now. Glancing back, Ana sees that Ysa is a full twenty feet behind and standing completely still. She can’t quite tell from this distance, but it looks as if the other girl is crying.

“Hey!” Ana calls to her. “Are you all right?”

Ysa nods and moves forward in increasingly jerky steps. “Go on, I’m fine.”

“I can wait,” Ana says, shifting to balance her body weight as she faces backward.

“What’s up?” Todd calls out.

Ysa’s face is a mask. She looks like a person hanging at the edge of a precipice, fighting with everything she has just to hold on for another second. Then something in her eyes changes.

She goes over the edge.

Ana sees it happen, watches Ysa’s eyes glaze all the way
over, and with a horrible certainty Ana knows what’s going to happen next. Ysa’s breath starts coming in quick gasps, and a light beading of sweat starts on her face. She stumbles, takes a jerky step, and the toe of her boot plunges down into the sand. Almost instantly, Ysa starts to sink.

Moving smoothly and steadily, Ana heads back for the other girl, practicing at speed the motions she was inching through only moments ago. “Hold on!” She pants. “Don’t move!”

Ysa’s not moving. Her eyes are wide and staring, still unfocused.
Just like Chen’s, just like Todd’s in the Dead Forest, but why here? What’s going on?
As Ana watches, still moving back toward her as quickly as she can, Ysa sinks several more inches. The sand is now trickling into the tops of her boots, and still she’s going down. The sand around her body begins whirlpooling in on itself, sucking inexorably downward.

Ana hears shuffling behind her and knows that Todd has started working his way back to them as well.

“Ysa,” Ana says as she reaches her. “Look at me.”

Ysa’s eyes are rolling wildly in her head now, but Ana can see her making an effort to focus. The sand is nearly up to Ysa’s knees, and she seems to be sinking faster. Todd said the basin ended a couple feet down … how much longer until Ysa reaches the foundation? When she hits bottom, maybe she can just push off and propel herself back out.

Ana takes Ysa’s hands, and Ysa responds with a squeeze of her own. She starts whispering, and Ana leans in closer. “They told me not to jog alone after dark.” Ysa’s voice is electric with
fear. “But the field by the high school always seemed so safe. It was just … the one time.”

The fear is real, but this isn’t some hallucination. This is something real she’s remembering.

“The bleachers …,” Ysa whimpers. The sand is traveling up her thighs now.
Where is that rock bottom?
“He isn’t there and then suddenly he is … he … holds me down … my face is in the dirt….”

Something real she’s … 
reliving
.

The sand seeps past Ysa’s waist. Where is Todd?

“Lean into me,” Ana says, bending at the waist and holding on to Ysa’s arms. “Try to stay still. That way you’ll stop sinking, and Todd and I can lever you out. This place isn’t dangerous, do you remember that? You know that.”

Ysa barks out a laugh, her eyes clearing for a moment as she focuses on Ana. “
You know?
You don’t know anything, Ana Ortez.”

Ortez
. “Is that my name?” Ana asks. “Ysa, is that my last name?”

“We weren’t supposed to tell you anything,” Ysa moans, “but now it’s all—” She jerks suddenly and thrashes her head violently to the side. “Dirt … in my mouth … so much pain … and the weight crushing me. I can’t stand it!”

“Don’t move a muscle,” Todd whispers in Ana’s ear, and Ana relaxes just a bit. Todd circles around and takes one of Ysa’s arms as the sand begins pooling around her chest. Ana takes the girl’s other arm, and they tug, once and then again, pulling at Ysa, who has stopped struggling altogether.

But who has not stopped sinking.

“Todd, what the hell is going on?” Ana says. “I thought you said the basin wasn’t deeper than two feet!”

Todd is shaking his head. “It’s not, Ana, I swear to you. I don’t know what’s going on, but this isn’t right. This shouldn’t be happening.”

“Well, what do
we
know?” Ana says, feeling the frantic edge of hysteria as the sand approaches Ysa’s neck. “We know nothing, Todd, because we have freaking amnesia! Ysa, come on—look at me.”

But Ysa is sunk deep into her nightmare, raving, lost. She lets out one last cry, then jerks back, yanking her fingers out of their grasp.

Her wide, staring eyes are the last thing Ana sees as Ysa disappears into a dark purple whirlpool.

For a long time neither Ana nor Todd can move. It all went wrong so quickly, it’s almost too much to comprehend. Chen’s death, and now Ysa’s … Ana feels as if something inside her has shattered beyond all repair. She keeps running over the scene in her mind, trying to figure out what she should have done differently. Surely there’s something,
something
she could have done to change the outcome.

Ysa!

The palpable fear in Ysa’s eyes still chills Ana’s blood. Ysa’s death was too eerily similar to Chen’s to be written off as chance. Yet there’s no obvious connection that she can see.

And something else … is it only a matter of time before she and Todd share the same fate as the others?

Ana realizes that Todd is shifting cautiously on the sand next to her. He extends his hand to her, but she brushes it aside. She doesn’t need help, not his and not anyone’s. All she needs right now is to keep moving. But no matter how fast she moves, no matter how far she goes, the one thing she can’t get away from is herself.

It’s so easy to look at the broken pieces of her life and assess who she is when there’s so little of it to review. And the more she looks, the more she hates what she sees: cheap muscle and a rabid need for control, a broken mind and a body constantly in motion. What good is any of that to her or to anyone else? What good did it do when she couldn’t save the people nearest her?

What kind of person
was
she, once upon a time, before everything went so wrong?

It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now except reaching inside herself and gluing those broken pieces back together into whatever
she wants to make herself
. She can’t waste any tears, not inside or out. Rage will be her glue, rage at this planet and at whoever messed with her mind.

There are less than three hours left on the countdown, and as anticlimactic as meeting that deadline might be after Ysa’s and Chen’s deaths, it’s something concrete, something she can turn her mind toward.

The mission must continue.

She sets off across the dunes and Todd shuffles next to her. Above them, the stretch of bruised sky between the suns is
shrinking steadily as Torus approaches Anum on its preset collision course. Well, not collision, exactly—though somehow, even that wouldn’t surprise her. Is there anything on this alien world that
isn’t
set to self-destruct?

Ana keeps to shallow, jerky movements, half daring herself to trigger the sinking mechanism, half believing she deserves the same fate as Ysa because she just stood there
—stood there and wasn’t able to save her
—while she died. Just like she couldn’t save Chen.

There’s some deep core of darkness on this planet, that much is clear. Again she pictures the terror in Ysa’s eyes, her whispered words. It was as if she was trapped in some horrible memory of her past.

As if she was being forced to relive the worst moment of her life.

Ana frowns and slows to a standstill. Chen’s face flashes into her mind again. What if what he was experiencing wasn’t just a hallucination—but a
memory
? He kept talking about—talking
to
—someone called Alex.
Not the fire
, he’d said. Just like Ysa kept raving about being trapped under the bleachers by some psycho.

It’s as if they really were back inside those experiences. Inside their memories. Is that even possible?

And …

“Todd,” she gasps in dawning realization. “Do you remember the story you told me from your past … something to do with a forest?” She can remember his words exactly, of
course. That’s the thing about starting fresh; everything you put in the memory stores stays perfectly well preserved. But she wants to hear him say it. She has a horrible feeling that what Todd encountered in the forest was not just a random hallucination triggered by a deep-seated fear of the forest, but rather some kind of internal replay of
his
worst memory, too—just like Chen’s. And just like Ysa’s. Only he’d managed to survive it.
She’d
helped him survive it. Could that really be it?

But Todd is turning toward her, a strange glint in his eye. “Do you hear something?”

She pauses to listen. “Oh, no!”

The grinding is not close, but there’s no mistaking the sound drifting across the dunes.

“It’s different this time,” Todd says, and his face is a new shade of pale. “Do you hear that? It sounds like the wind, or …”

Ana hears the difference, too, but he’s completely wrong about what it sounds like. It’s more like glass … breaking glass? But there’s no time for listening or analysis. They need to keep moving.

And so they start off again, trying for haste even though their lives depend on keeping their movements smooth and easy. Swish, lean, step. Swish, lean, step. Any urges Ana had toward self-recrimination are long gone; now it’s just a focused fast-forward, slippery fear fueling their steps.

They make swift progress, the only sound their labored breathing and the gentle
swish
of their feet across the sand.

Wait … the
only
sound?

Ana stops and cocks her head. “Hey,” she whispers.

“It’s gone,” Todd says, slowing alongside her. “But who knows for how long? We should make as much progress as we can. There’s only two hours left to go.”

He turns and resumes his shuffle across the sand, toward the splash of ocean that is growing ever more visible up ahead.

Ana follows him, but in the quiet her mind worries at the problem of the worm. Why can’t they get away from it? “First the crater, then the mountain, then the sand dunes,” she says. “It’s always right on us. It doesn’t seem to be able to get through extreme land formations—maybe the dunes stopped it this time. But then it just goes and finds another way around. Todd, it’s just going to keep coming.”

“I have no idea what that thing is capable of,” Todd says. “I do know it’s getting more terrifying every time we meet it.”

“More terrifying,” Ana repeats. Because he’s right—this last time, there was something new about the worm that she hadn’t noticed before. “Todd, what does the worm sound like to you? What do you hear?”