SWAB (A Young Adult Dystopian Novel) (11 page)

I blushed. But it made me sad to think that none of the others would come back: Officer May. The water runners. Even Cassandra. They didn’t deserve to die.

“I found a dry creek bed just a little ways up here,” Derrick said suddenly, drawing me back to why we were there. “Well, ‘dry’ is a relative term, but there should be some good rocks we can use.”

I followed him through the brush to the place he was talking about. I picked up a few small stones with flat edges I thought might be good and showed them to him. “This one is the best.” He picked out a gray-blue one. “Now, take some of this bamboo thread and fasten it onto a good straight stick.” He gave me some of the bamboo and left me to find a stick.

I found a good one and sat down on a damp log. Holding the stone with one hand, I tried to twist the twine around it the way Derrick had, but the blasted thing kept slipping off. I tried several times, but couldn’t get it to stay. Apparently, I was a lot better at using weapons than making them. I groaned and threw the stick into the trees.

“Here,” Derrick said from behind me. He set his stick on the ground and leaned over my shoulder so that his neck touched mine. “Like this,” his breath tickled my skin. His arms were on either side of me, and with calloused fingers, he gingerly showed me how to move my hand so that I wrapped the twine in a figure eight around the rock and stick. “If you have to jab this into the belly of a scarb, it should hold.”My cheek tingled from his words. He let my hands go and sat next to me. For some reason, he felt kind of far away.

Part of me really liked the feel of his arms around me. I felt driven to be close to his touch. I wondered what it would be like to set my head on his strong shoulder and feel him stroke my hair.
What are you thinking, Cat?
I shook my head like I might be able to shake the weird feelings out of me.
What about Ray?
Suddenly, I felt sick with myself. I barely knew Derrick. But he had also stood by me when no one else in the community would. But alive or not, my heart was with Ray. Derrick may have been there this past week, but Ray had been there for years. He was mine.

Suddenly, I didn’t trust myself around Derrick. “I’d better get back and check on Nathan,” I said, standing and feeling a little woozy.

“Oh, okay,” Derrick answered strangely, like he didn’t understand my sudden switch.

“Thanks for showing me how to make a stone knife,” I told him. I hoped it was the last kind thing he’d do for me, so I wouldn’t feel like I owed him. I hate owing people. Especially exceptionally considerate, attractive people.

Chapter Eleven

Beetle

By the time Derrick and I got back from making our stone weapons, Nathan and Gray had a fire going at the camp. Mrs. Weatherstone was using one of Derrick’s sharp stones to peel an odd orange fruit that I took to be a papaya. Sliced bananas were set on the stone table.

“Catherine,” she called and waved me over. “Help me take these bananas over to the fire, will you?”

I grabbed the large leaf that held the slices of banana and brought them over to the campfire. “Wrap them like this.”She showed me how to fold the sides of the leaf over the fruit and tie it shut. Then she set the packet onto some hot coals.

“What are we making?” I asked, letting the heat from the fire warm my cheeks.

“Baked bananas,” she explained. Officer Reynolds sat down on a tree stump next to her, a leaf of bananas on his lap. He plopped one into his mouth and said with bulging cheeks, “Good thing we have you here, Carla. We probably would’ve starved even with all this food around.”

Mrs. Weatherstone brushed back her salt-and-pepper braid and pretended not to mind him, but I saw a smile creep onto her lips. She poked the fire with a stick and winked at me. I had to fight to keep the smile off my face. I was happy for her. Mrs. Weatherstone was a good woman, calm and kind. She would bring a softer side to Officer Reynolds’s life.
If we have a life after this,
I thought.

“Why so grim?” Nathan asked, kneeling next to me.

I thought about this as I watched the moisture escape from the leaf pocket in the fire. How I wished I was like that steam, free to fly up into the air. “I don’t mean to be grim,” I tried to keep my voice down so I didn’t disturb the others. Mrs. Weatherstone and Officer Reynolds actually seemed kind of happy here. The others were at least they were making the best of it. Nathan was right, it could be worse. We could be dead. Our mission to attack the colony had failed. There had been way more scarb than we anticipated. We never could’ve fought them. By all accounts, we all should’ve died. Instead, the fliers had spared us and put us in this dome. “I just don’t know how long I can sit here,” my voice started to rise. “Hunting for rocks and eating cooked bananas.”

Nathan twisted his lips to the side, unsure. “I know. But what can we do?”

“We’ve got to do something,” I growled.

“I know what you can do,” Mrs. Weatherstone cut in, clearly eavesdropping on us. “You two can go get us some more firewood. I’ll watch the food.”

Nathan and I got up and went off in search of some dry timber, which proved next to impossible. I don’t know how they got a fire started in the first place.

“Why is everything so blasted wet here?” I complained as I threw down a soaked tree limb. “How’d you even get that fire started?”

“Ask the goddess of this place,” Nathan suggested mysteriously.

“The goddess?” My eyebrows rose up into my hair line.

“Yes,” he said, picking up a branch.

“And who would that be?” I laughed coldly. “The goddess of misery?”

Nathan put wood into my arms. “No, the creator of this dome, of all scarb-topia. The Queen.” He turned his back to me to get more timber.

“You feeling okay, Nate?” I called after him. “I think this place is starting to get to your head.”
How can he be so calm about all of this? We’re being held prisoner here, and all anyone seems to care about is bananas and fire wood. It’s like they’ve already surrendered. I can’t stand it.
I kicked a wet and rotten tree trunk, and it splintered into a million pieces. Moths and insects flew into the air. I coughed as the white powder of the trunk’s insides filled my nostrils. I looked down into the belly of that putrid tree. Worms and ants crawled for cover, but one bug—a single red beetle—didn’t move. Bending down, I peered closer at it. It wasn’t much larger than your average ladybug, but it was a deep, solid red. Like wet blood. Black rimmed its shell, and its legs and head were dark as shadow. Two protruding antenna sniffed the ground.

Something was strange about the beetle—familiar almost—but as I bent my head to look closer, a scream ripped the air. I turned toward the sound. Nathan was twenty feet from me, crumpled on the ground, his spine showing through his thin shirt.

“My eyes!” he screamed. “My eyes!”

I ran over to him. His fingers were clawing so frantically at his eyes that he was practically gouging them out of their sockets. “Nathan, what’s wrong? Did you get something in your eyes?” I thought about the flower that had puked pink liquid on me the day before. Maybe something like that got into his eyes. But then his body started shaking violently. “What’s happening?” I grabbed his shoulders to still him, but he was convulsing so much I couldn’t stop it.

“Mrs. Weatherstone!” I yelled. “Help!”

“My eyes,” Nathan cried, white foam oozing out of his mouth.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, trying to see his face, but he kept it shielded with his hands. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

He dropped his hands and turned toward me, opening his eyes. I screamed. Those beautiful deep green eyes of his were splintered into four irises, each a darker shade than the first.

I dropped him and backed away. “You’re—you’re scarb.”

The word fell like a bomb. More shrieks came from the camp. More mouth-blasting screams. I half-dragged Nathan back to the fire. Officer Reynolds, Jorge, and Gray arched their backs in pain. Mrs. Weatherstone writhed on the ground, clawing at the dirt. Travis was crumpled beside her. Derrick was closest to me, his blond hair glowing orange against the campfire.

“Please,” he cried up to me. “Help!” His fingernails clawed at his arms. Large chunks of his skin fell to the ground.

All I could do was blink. As I did, thick liquid dripped down my cheeks. I touched the liquid with my fingers and held them up to the firelight. Red. Blood. Blood was streaming from my eyes. Through a red film, I watched in horror as the humans around me were deformed and tortured.

This is it.
I thought.
This is the moment I’ve been waiting for. Now I know why the scarb brought us here.

A sharp tingling hit my spine, and a scream clawed its way out of my throat. The sound of my own terror was the last thing I heard before I lost consciousness.

*****

Early morning light made me open my eyes, but I must have been dreaming still because the world looked wrong—splintered and fragmented, like looking through a kaleidoscope. There was a giant pink flower above me, but I saw it two times with each eye. I blinked to try and clear the double vision, but it didn’t fix it. I looked up from the flower to the trees. I saw each trunk twice, and each at a slightly different angle.

What on earth?
It was like the world was reflected back to me in two broken pieces of glass.

“The New Sight is strange at first, but you will get used to it,” a clear, female voice said behind me. I turned my head, and as I did, the muscles, tendons, and bones of my neck felt different. Harder. And segmented, as if plates just under my skin were sliding against one another. The sharp, pixie-like face of a female scarb stared down at me. Her violet eyes were broken into three irises, and when mine made contact with hers, she gasped. Or at least that’s what I took the brittle click of her tongue to be.

“You only have two irises,” she said again in her ringing voice. But then I was sure I must be dreaming, because her mouth didn’t move when she spoke. “That is
…
very unusual,” she said. Again, her lips stayed still. She looked at me almost awestruck, but I could hardly care.

“How are you doing that?” I meant to ask, but only a long hiss and a gargled cough came out of my mouth. I ran my tongue along my teeth, but instead of the usual stumps of bone, I felt soft fibers interspersed with bits of poky cartilage in my mouth. Reflexively, I shrieked, and my vocal chords responded with a high-pitched call.

The female scarb laughed, the sound like a lark. “There’s a lot to get used to,” she said, but this time I swore, her words were in my mind.
Maybe that’s where they’ve always been.
It was the only explanation for why I could hear her words though her mouth didn’t move.
Get away, Cat! Get away
! The only thing to do was run, to get away from this scarb who had found her way into my brain, and this nightmare. I pulled myself up to a sitting position with my hands my bones sliding and cracking as I did. I meant to push myself to standing, but my legs responded by leaping five feet into the air. I flailed from the launch to catch my fall, but I landed smoothly on my toes.

What has happened to me?

Stretching my hands out in front of me, I tried to understand it. My palms glimmered in the sunlight. Tiny beads of gold dew ran from the tips of my fingernails up to my elbows. A drop of blue was on each knuckle. I flexed my hand and long, pointed barbs came out of each blue dot. I’d seen those kinds of barbs before. And then I remembered Nathan’s fragmented eyes, the blood running down my face, the crack in my spine. I thought about my double vision, and then I understood—

My breathing came fast in my lungs, but the oxygen felt more liquid than air.
I’m scarb. This isn’t a dream. I’m scarb.
The truth repeated itself over and over in my mind. I was too afraid of myself to speak, to even move. I’d become my greatest enemy.
But inside, I still feel like me.

“Yes, you’re still you, Catherine,” the female scarb said as if she knew my thoughts.
Maybe she does,
I thought with horror. She had moved directly in front of me. Blue streaks ran through her short black hair, and her purple eyes were slanted by three yellow spikes.
I’m like you now. How can this be?

“You are scarb,” she confirmed and stepped closer. She smelled like fresh lemons. She raised her arms, thin bands of cobalt fibers stretching from the skin of her triceps to her ribs. “You have been reborn, Catherine. You can choose a new name for yourself as well. My name is Saki, meaning ‘One Who Laughs Much.’ I can help you choose a name if you like.”

Reborn? It feels more like I’ve been murdered. My life, everything I knew before, is gone.
I thought about her suggestion to give myself a new name. I looked back into her quadrisected violet eyes: each lens a slightly darker shade of purple than the first. “I think I’ll stick with ‘Cat,’” I thought back to her.

Saki smiled slyly. “I thought that’s what you would do.”I didn’t like this scarb who thought she knew so much about me already.

Oh, yeah? And did you think I would do this
?
I swung my barbed fist back and prepared to hit her in the jaw. The barbs were as long as dinner knives. They would make a good weapon. I was fast. Faster than I’d ever been before. But somehow Saki was a fraction of a second faster. She grabbed my arm, twisted it back, and threw me onto the ground. I landed hard on my stomach. She pinned me on my back with the point of her knee.

“Yes, actually I did,” she huffed. “Are we done playing games now? You may be a scarb with The Memory, but I’m a lot stronger and more experienced than you. I can’t help you understand what’s going on until you let me.”