Paradox (3 page)

Long minutes tick by, uncounted except for the staccato rhythm of Ana’s breath and the pounding of her heart. Still shaking all over, she finally sits up and drags herself to her feet. Her fingers tremble as she slides the dagger back into its sheath, trying to figure out how she managed to whip out a deadly weapon with all the ease of ripping open a candy bar. She explores her vest and discovers reinforced pockets containing a short-handled serrated blade and a slim steel pistol.

She’s obviously more than ready, but for what? For that
thing
?

She stands up and puts both hands on the door handle. The continued silence outside, and the comforting bulk of her weapons, bolsters her courage. She thrusts the door open.

Nothing.

Just dust and dirt and watery sunlight, as far as her eyes can see. No slavering mouth, no nightmare monster waiting to pounce.

Ana feels a flicker of doubt. What
did
she see, exactly? She thinks of how recently she’s woken up, thinks of her broken mind, all those memories she must have had that don’t exist anymore. And now she’s seeing monsters?

She rubs the back of her head and feels the tender spot
that’s already rising into a lump where she slammed into the chair. Did she black out for a few seconds?

Squeezing her hands into fists, Ana starts down the narrow staircase as it rocks in the dust-heavy blasts of wind. She studies the landscape. It’s empty—and desolate and untamed in a way that sharpens into a raw, spare kind of beauty. The vast basin she’s in looks as if it’s been scooped out of the sky. The cliff disappears into the distance off to the edges of her vision in both directions. Flat ground all the way, and a cliff on every edge. Ana is one tiny speck in a giant bowl-shaped crater.

The emptiness is overwhelming, but it’s also reassuring. There’s nowhere a creature that big could possibly hide.

It must have been just in my head
.

The ground at the base of the stairs is firm under her feet. She bends down and presses her palm into it. Zigzag cracks run along its sun-warmed surface. Patches of thin, yellowish grass tuft up here and there. She traces one of the cracks with her finger. Is there water under the ground somewhere? The air is breathable, obviously, but how habitable is this place?
This planet
.

Ana circles the rocket and ducks underneath the staircase leading down from her door, moving toward a certain spot on the hull, moving toward something specific, though she has no idea what. She closes her eyes, and in her mind sees a spark, hears a loud
ting
of metal striking metal. When she opens her eyes, her palm rests flat on the side of the rocket at shoulder level. She slides her hand over.

A
.

A single capital letter scratched into the red paint.
A for Ana
.

Is it juvenile to autograph what has to be a multimillion-dollar spaceship? Undoubtedly. Ana wonders what kind of person she was to be comfortable defacing equipment like this, but at the same time she can’t suppress a smile. She didn’t know, didn’t remember any of this, but once again, her body did. It’s just another sign that there is still hope for her past, however deeply it might be locked inside her.

Then something catches her eye that she’d missed the first time around. On the hull under the staircase is a keypad.

She considers the display. There are letter and number buttons, and a blank screen half the size of her hand that looks just like the fingerpad that unlocked the door to her compartment. The display tickles something she can’t remember, but when she stops trying to see herself in the memory, the knowledge is suddenly there.

Ana’s fingers dart over the keypad, tapping out a ten-digit sequence of letters and numbers; then she presses her index finger against the center of the screen. She holds it there for a moment, then pulls it away, and the mechanism begins to vibrate. With a chirp and a burble, the panel around the screen begins to shake.

She scrambles out of the way. For a second she has the panicked idea that this is the start sequence, that the rocket will take off without her and leave her stranded here on the planet. But then the rocket’s base, right above the thrusters,
splits open at the middle. Two wide drawers swing out in either direction.

The drawer closest to Ana contains a giant backpack, nearly as tall as she is. When she peers inside, she finds pockets bulging with all sorts of food and expeditionary supplies. The other drawer is empty, nothing but a hole as big as a broom closet. She thinks about the empty chamber above her, the unfurled staircase. Has her mystery companion been here, too? If so, where did he or she go?

With a sigh, Ana lifts her pack out of the drawer and rolls it onto the ground. The surprise and relief of finding something is gobbled up by the understanding of what her find actually means. It’s like the notice at the end of a ride that says,
Goodbye! Come again soon!
Only far less cheerful. And without the
come again
. It’s telling her she’s going to be here on this planet for a good long time. The idea is a logical one—you don’t cross space on a day trip, after all—and yet seeing this concrete proof brings reality crashing down on her. She’s here, alone, for the foreseeable future. With no memory and no idea of what happens next.

Lifting her eyes to the horizon, Ana looks toward the distant cliff at the basin’s edge. The wind gusts, blowing dirt into her eyes. As she brings her hand up to shield them, she hears a very faint
tick, tick, tick
. It’s the same sound she noticed when she first woke up.

She slides up her sleeve. There’s a band on her right wrist, a wide strap that’s in the place where a watch would be—but
it is very clearly not a watch. It’s made of a slim, bendable pleather that’s tight but not constricting. There’s no face on the band, just a dark gummy portion that might be a screen. But the greater part of the band is taken up with a row of pale numbers that are moving and changing in time with the ticking—

The numbers are counting slowly down. Ana watches them, fascinated, registering immediately that they represent the seconds of her life, passing one by one.

She could almost swear she knows what this thing is for, but the knowledge is floating somewhere just outside her grasp. It’s obviously a countdown—but to what? What happens after the almost-twenty-seven hours are up? She thinks back to the letter from the mysterious J. R. Pritchett.
Be mindful of the countdown
, it said.

Ana groans. Putting the puzzle aside for the moment, she studies the rest of her band—
circlet, that’s what it’s called—
running her fingers over the surface. She’s not surprised when once again her fingers know just what to do.

She presses a finger into the center of the tiny screen and a pencil-thin beam of white light fountains up. The light diffuses into a prismatic rainbow stretching flat across the back of her hand. Etched in the light is a rough outline of a bare, rocky land with a cliff in the distance. She lifts her hand toward the horizon and discovers that the display exactly matches the land formations she sees ahead.

Now what?

Ana moves the fingers of her other hand into the band of light. She splays her fingers wide, then slowly draws them together in a pinching movement.
Zoom out
, she thinks.

Immediately the cliff in the display shrinks in size until she has a bird’s-eye view of an oblong crater. There’s even a label:
CRANIUM
. Right in the center is a flashing red point. Leading away from the point is a red-dotted line that crosses the Cranium and follows a path studded with labeled land formations: the
DEAD FOREST
; the high, rugged
TIMOR MOUNTAINS;
some kind of wide sandy stretch; then the banks of the
MARAQA SEA
. On the shore of the sea is a large red X.

A map. She’s looking at a map, directions for her journey.

The rocket is planted right in the middle of the Cranium. By lining up the map-screen, Ana now knows exactly which direction she has to go.

Follow the preset path
, the letter said. So here she has it.

Ana scans the land ahead of her and finds a landmark on the distant edge of the Cranium—a clump of reddish boulders that looks like a painted campfire from this distance. That will be her guidepost on this first leg of the journey.

She turns off her map display by pressing the little screen, just as smoothly as if she’s done it a million times before. The numbers on the edge of the circlet are still ticking, counting down, and the knowledge makes her chest tighten. Twenty-six hours, and then what?

Experience
, her instructions told her.
Discover. Survive
.

She doesn’t know how she’s going to do any of those things, but one thing’s no longer a mystery: she knows where she’s going, and she has a specific path to get there. For a girl with a gaping hole where her memory used to be, it feels like luxury indeed.

There’s nothing left now but to get moving.

The pack towers over Ana like a second head, but once she has it firmly in place on her back, it’s not nearly as heavy as it looked. She quickly settles into a brisk walking pace. The only tricky thing is the wind, which seems to think she’s a kite and keeps trying to blow her away. Ana imagines herself puffing up and drifting
—up, up into the purple-pink sky—
imagines a long string anchoring her to the cracked earth. She twists her head around to look at the suns. The one overhead isn’t that bright; it’s like looking up at a fluorescent lightbulb. But the other sun is blazing. She’s glad it’s rising to her back, though at last glance it does seem to have edged slightly up on the horizon.

Tiny dark specks are dotted all across the sky—reverse
stars or something, like a mismatched X-ray of the universe. She wonders if one of those pinpricks off in the millions-of-miles-away distance is her own sun. She wonders if there are other people on this planet—and if any of them have their heads back, too, studying the sky.

At the waterfront
, she reminds herself.
If there’s anyone else living on the planet, that’s where they’ll be. At the red X
.