Jump Zone: Cleo Falls Read online

  But there was something else driving her at such a frenetic pace.

  Cleo stole another glance back at Libra. His shirt was soaked with sweat, the side of his face smeared with dirt from the back of the arm that he’d been using to wipe the moisture from his face, and his hair was plastered against his skull. He was clearly pushed to maximum output yet, like always, Cleo felt the need to outperform, be the fastest, the most capable, the last one standing. Even with an injured leg, she couldn’t let herself stop first, wouldn’t be the first to suggest she needed a rest.

  She wasn’t trying to provoke the city dweller into declaring defeat, she just simply didn’t know how to turn off her competitive spirit. Cleo thrived on being first at everything, at winning everything.

  The very thought made her stop cold.

  But it was this misplaced sense of competitiveness that ruined Jaegar.

  As guilt snuffed the fire in her heels, she slowed. “There’s a good spot to stop just ahead,” she said as Libra closed the few feet between them. “Can you manage a bit more? I can take the backpack for awhile if you’d like.”

  He narrowed his eyes and gave her a slow half-smile. “Darlin’, I can do another twelve hours if you give me a second to replenish my liquid.” He held up his canteen and shook it, letting the few remaining droplets splash hollowly against the sides. He’d misread her concern for mockery, but before she could defend herself, he asked, “And how is it you’re not drinking? You part camel?”

  “Used to it, I guess,” she said with a shrug and turned before he saw her smug grin.

  Libra didn’t mind the hike so much so long as he got to stay in the rear and watch her. This Taiga gal sure had stamina, he’d give her that. Her limp had vanished and her stride would have impressed the shit out of Taurus, who did everything in high speed.

  T, his best friend and partner in crime, had no idea where he was. Didn’t even know Libra was out of prison, let alone on a mission. He’d be all shades of green if he knew, too. That guy had been a Taiga lover for as long as he could remember.

  But he didn’t have time to think of Taurus or his bull-sized envy. Not now, not when he had the back end of Cleo to admire. She trekked on until they came to a shallow creek that branched from the main river. The crystal clear water, barely a foot deep, meandered over smooth stones and pebbles. She tilted her chin skyward, one hand over her eyes to shield the glare of the sun. She did that a lot, almost as unconsciously as she held her pendant. He looked up, too, didn’t see anything but a few wispy clouds and blue sky, but before he could ask what was so interesting up there, she did a twirl and declared the spot perfect.

  “Perfect for what?” he asked, squatting to fill his canteen.

  “Fishing.”

  “Fish? Why? I’ve got food.”

  “Nooo,” she said, pressing her lips together and shaking her head. “You have chemicals pretending to be food.” She picked up a few large stones from the banks and stacked them in a pile at the bottom of the creek. “I’ve had enough of that nasty stuff.”

  “Hey, stop knocking my Nutripacks. We’d be starving right now if we had to rely on those useless snares,” Libra said. “And in case you haven’t noticed, Princess, we left our fishing tackle back at the castle.”

  “They weren’t useless snares. You just didn’t set them properly,” she said, building up the rocks until she’d made a dam in the middle of the stream. “And we don’t need rods. Nature hath provided.”

  “NutriCorp hath provided this NutriBeef, complete with all the protein found in real beef.” He glanced down at the label. “And six other essential vitamins…which they don’t actually name.”

  “And that brook trout swimming behind me has six times as much protein as beef, real or simulated,” she said, tossing her head in the direction of the fish.

  “And you’re going to catch it with what? Your bare hands?”

  “Watch and learn,” she said, heading upstream, careful that her shadow didn’t fall across the water.

  “I’m too hungry to wait for you to tame nature, so if you don’t mind, I’ll stick to my NutriBeef.”

  “Fine. You start a fire, but I can guarantee you that I’ll have this fish caught, cooked, and eaten in less time than it will take for you to boil water and choke down yours.”

  “Sounds like a challenge,” he said.

  “Well, let’s call it one,” she said, a smile creeping across her face.

  A few feet beyond the oblivious trout, she built another rock dam, corralling the speckled fish into a tight pen. She picked up a few sticks, examined the ends, and chose the pointiest one, the corners of her mouth turned up like she was harboring a secret.

  He watched her spear that zhanging fish, watched her clean it with his zhanging knife, watched her set the zhang damn fillets on a flat rock in the middle of the flames, all before he’d poured boiling water on his dehydrated beef.

  “I’m first!” she declared when she nudged the opaque fish with the tip of his knife.

  He made a face at the simmering bubbles clinging to the edges of his pot. If the water from the stream hadn’t been so damn cold to begin with, he might have had a chance. “I refuse to concede.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “On the fact that thing was alive, probably swimming back to his poor waiting family, moments ago. How in hell can you eat that disgusting creature?”

  With a waggle of her eyebrows, Cleo popped it into her mouth. “De-licious. You have no idea what you’re missing.”

  “Barbarian.”

  “Hypocrite.”

  “How am I a hypocrite?”

  “How many NutriCows did they kill to put in that biodegradable package? Just because you didn’t meet the cow first doesn’t mean it didn’t go into the final product.”

  “I…uh…don’t think there’s real animal meat in this,” Libra said, sticking his utensil into the semi-moistened patty and holding it up for examination. He made a face, as if seeing the unappetizing texture for the first time. “Just…simulated.”

  “I will take that as your concession speech.” Cleo said, slipping another hunk of the flaky fillet into her mouth.

  During lunch, which he continued to choke down but with considerably less gusto than he had during previous meals, Cleo announced a change of route. “We need to head south for a bit, find the next rock line that’ll take us to the Cut Road.”

  “What’s a rock line?” Libra asked, licking his fingers. He looked up, hoping she’d explain but was given a look normally reserved for the stupidest beasts.

  “The big rivers of rocks that you solar scooted over to get up this far?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, bringing the canteen up to his lying lips. Of course he hadn’t seen them. The plane was flying at such a high altitude that he saw nothing but a few clouds out the cockpit window of the otherwise windowless aircraft. “I was wondering what those were.”

  Libra had led a relatively guilt-free life of crime back in Gomeda. Redistributing the wealth had never particularly bothered him, so why he had an attack of the consciences when it came to misleading Cleo, he couldn’t understand. She was nothing to him, less than nothing. Yet his lies left his mouth with a bitter tang. “I uh, didn’t realize they had a name. What’s the story?”

  “You don’t know?”

  Libra shook his head. “Why would I?”

  The corners of Cleo’s mouth turned down. “I thought everyone learned about it in history.”

  “Not in Gomeda.”

  “They don’t teach you about the President Zhang and the Polar Wars?”

  “Only that we won.”

  “That’s not true. Nobody won.”

  Libra bit his tongue. Arguing politics likely wouldn’t make this mission easier.

 
“The army blew up half the Taiga back then. They blasted through this entire region so they could bring their equipment north. Afterward, all that was left were wide swathes of nothingness running up and down, leaving an ugly looking grid of transport channels, and the survivalists who resettled here decided to fill them all in. First, they pushed in all the debris; all the garbage the war left behind from vehicles to the rubble of destruction. Then they used the rocks, sand, and boulders from the blast sites to literally bury the detritus of war. It took them many generations to complete.”

  “Why didn’t they just keep them as roads? Or why not let nature reclaim the land. Eventually, all those damaged areas would’ve just grown back in, right?”

  “Two reasons. They wanted to discourage the mass movement of anything. Especially people. We don’t need roads up here. You can see that the Taiga is one big crisscross of trails and paths for foot travel, many wide enough for a horse team and wagons, solar scooters, and sleds, so logistically, inter-tribal travel isn’t an issue.”

  It still didn’t make sense to him. Filling in thousands of miles of roads was too labor intensive a task to justify the benefits.

  “The second reason is more practical,” she said, a hint of pride in her voice. “One of our biggest natural enemies is fire. During dry spells, a lightning strike can destroy hundreds of acres of forest. The rock channels are a barrier of sorts, so that a big blaze can never really take out more than a single area.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “We have dedicated maintenance crews that check each rock line a few times a year, just to make sure it doesn’t get overgrown. And I guess, if you want to call this the third reason, they’re a great navigation tool. They provide markers, map features, helps us figure out how far we have to go or how far we’ve come.”

  Or they could have put up signposts, which made more economical sense, but he kept quiet, opting for an acquiescent nod. It all felt like a colossal waste of time and money, but what did he expect from ignorant savages? Except Cleo, of course. She was clearly on the intelligent spectrum of savage.

  “You ready?” she asked, kicking loose dirt over the remaining embers of their cooking fire.

  Libra secured his backpack to his shoulders. “When you are.”

  Cleo hopped across the creek and glanced above, scanning the sky before she re-entered the thick of the forest.

  “You keep doing that,” he said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Looking up.”

  She kept walking, but a misstep told Libra that he’d hit on something worth digging in to.

  “I’m navigating by the sun.”

  “Bullshit,” he said the moment she reached for her pendant.

  “Pardon?” Her eyes were guarded, her knuckles white against the black stone.

  “You’ve been searching the skies, obsessively, for the past few days.”

  “We’re due for a storm.”

  “Is that right, now?” he pressed. “There hasn’t been so much as a cloud up there for days.”

  “The wind shifted. I can smell rain coming.”

  “You’re lying.”

  Her nostrils flared. “I am not!” She turned her back and resumed walking. “I’m looking for rain cl—”

  “Cleo!” He shook his head and expelled his breath. It was getting to him, the lies, the deception, and mostly the suspicion in her eyes… It was eroding his psyche. “Look at me.” She turned with a harrumph, crossed her arms over her chest, and thrust her hip to the side. But she kept her eyes averted.

  “Look. At. Me.”

  When she finally turned her brown eyes on him, her mouth was pursed in challenge. And he was quite certain she was staring at his nose, not into his eyes, but it would do. Someone around here needed to start telling the truth. And it couldn’t be him.

  “Why, Cleo?”

  Her shoulders popped up in a petulant shrug. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try me.”

  She regarded him for a moment, and Libra could see a play of un-translatable emotion in her eyes. Whatever it was she had to say was beginning to make him nervous.

  “Come on, Cleo. What’s up?”

  “Have you ever seen a…” She toed the ground. “Do you know what aer-o-planes are?”

  A tendril of dread unfurled in his gut as she pronounced the three distinct syllables. Libra didn’t like where this was going. “Uh, ye-ah, of course.” He’d tried to sound casual but his intention backfired and his tone dripped with sarcasm.

  “They haven’t flown in almost a hundred years, since the Polar Wars,” she said, refolding her arms. “How am I supposed to know if you know your history? You didn’t know anything about the grid!”

  As much as he wanted to end this conversation right here, right now, he had to know. It couldn’t be a coincidence. “I’m sorry,” he offered, tempering his agitation.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  “No, go on.”

  She eyed him. Libra relaxed his facial muscles best he could. “Please.”

  “I know this sounds crazy, but… I saw one, Libra. A couple of nights ago.”

  The trees seemed to close in on him, turning his vision to green swirling specs. He looked toward his boots in hopes the ground would stop spinning. Cleo had just knocked the wind out of him.

  Fifteen

  “You what?”

  Zhang hell! Here was the part where she told him she watched him jump out of that plane and knew exactly what he was up to, then took his knife, which he stupidly—stupidly—let her hang on to after lunch, and drove it through his skull before he took another breath.

  “I know, I know what you’re thinking,” she said, reaching for…

  Libra braced.

  …her head to rap her knuckles against her skull. “You’re thinking I’m a complete nutcase. I can tell just by your look.”

  “No, it’s just…” He exhaled forcefully, unaware he’d been holding a lungful of air. “No, I don’t.”

  Her shoulders deflated with a heavy sigh as she dropped her arms. “The other night, just before I—I mean, the reason I—”

  Cleo’s head shook back and forth in a struggle to find the words to explain. It was so unlike her to stutter, to look unsure, that it gave him a paradoxical glimmer of hope.

  “Okay, look,” she finally said. “What I told you about falling in the river wasn’t exactly true.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  Her eyebrows shot up.

  “Who fishes at the top of a waterfall?” he said, his confidence recovered. “You just don’t seem that incompetent.”

  “I’m not, normally! I was kayaking down river. I’ve shot those rapids a hundred times! I know how far I can go, how close I can get to the falls, safely, before hauling out. But I was in a hurry and the sun had already dipped behind the tree line, and I pushed on a little farther than I should have. And there’s been a lot of rain lately, so the river is swollen and moving a lot faster than normal.” She hesitated, her fingers toying with the leather string around her neck.

  “Continue,” he pressed. He fought his impatience, fought the urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she spewed every detail. Heart thumping, he had to find out how much of the truth she knew.

  “I was just angling toward shore and that’s when I saw it—this weird flash in the sky. I looked up, as crazy as this sounds,” she said, meeting him with an earnest stare, “I swear to you and the deities of our forefathers, I saw the sun reflecting off a giant metal bird. It was different than the history module images, but I know what I saw. An aer-o-plane!”

  Libra’s mouth filled with moisture. He turned and spit into the bush as a tendril of dread bloomed into a thick, choking vine that wrapp
ed around his heart and lungs. He tried to relax but could feel his facial muscles tense up like a lock.

  She must have taken his silence for shock.

  “I couldn’t believe it, either,” she said, shaking her head. She became more animated, began using her hands to illustrate as she rushed to get the rest of the story out. “It was so big, I mean, so small, way up there, but it must have been so big for me to see it! And it was just a split second, but in that moment I took my eye off the river to look up, my bow slammed into a pile of rocks that I swear came out of nowhere. Before I could backpaddle, I got slammed sideways and was pinned against them. When I pushed off, I flipped the kayak, and because I was caught in an eddy, I couldn’t right the damn thing before my breath ran out. I managed to release the cockpit cord and slide out, but the current got me. It was so fast and I was so tired from paddling all day that I just couldn’t manage to swim against it. The rest, you know.”

  Yes, the rest he knew.

  Libra fought against gravity, to remain upright when he really wanted to double over in pain. He was the reason she went over the falls. He was the reason she almost drowned. He was the reason she did drown. The image of her, limp and blue in his arms, swarmed his vision until he thought he’d lose his lunch. The gash on her leg, the bruised cheek, the scraped forehead… He looked at his hands, feeling like he had beat the shit out of her.

  What are the chances that she would be out there, miles from any settlement, to witness that moment, that perfect alignment of altitude, sun, and wings. More amazing was the fact that she didn’t see him floating through the air, though it would have been difficult considering his ’chute was made to blend with the twilight sky.

  Libra reached up to wipe away a rivulet of sweat that rolled down his temple. Though Cleo stood in front of him, the picture of health, he couldn’t get the sound of the painful retching as her body fought to expel the river water from ringing in his ears.