Chapter 3

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As she sat in the wet orange dust staring at her wounded foot, Sarah looked across the river at Willy. He was watching her with a sad expression.

She'd seen that expression before. In her nightmares. On her mother's face.

As before, she was going to lose her home because of her own carelessness. She reached up with a shivering hand and felt the silver cross around her neck.

No! Sarah resolved. I won't be the first to be kicked off the ranch. I will finish this race!

She dragged herself to her feet and resumed running at the best pace she could manage. Her left foot hurt too much to take the impact of a sprint, and the weight of her water-logged clothes slowed her as well. Instead of running normally, she lurched forward in a lopsided jog, each step with her left leg shorter and faster than the ones she took with her right leg.

After a minute of dragging herself along like this, she saw the first candidates reaching the fence, two hundred yards ahead of her. Then she noticed that instead of turning around and running back, they leaned against the chain links in exhaustion. It was several seconds before one of them – she thought it was Michael – turned around and began making his way back towards Willy. In those seconds, Sarah had made up fifty yards.

She pressed on. More and more of the candidates recovered and turned to make the journey back. But none of them were running anymore. Some were walking with their hands on their hips and their heads pointed up at the sky as if they were trying to drink in as much air as possible, and others were moving at a plodding pace, staring at their feet as they shuffled along.

Michael came jogging past her. His face was flushed and he was almost hyperventilating. He looked up at her and asked "Are... you... OK?" between huge gulps of air.

Sarah's breaths were rapid, but measured. "Yeah, I'm fine," Sarah responded as she flashed a thumbs-up sign.

She pressed forward, step by bloody step, and finally reached the fence right by where Rad stood. She placed her hand firmly on the metal and looked into his narrow grey eyes, waiting for acknowledgement from him that she had touched it. He held her gaze and motioned back in the direction of Willy with his chin.

With her leg muscles burning from exhaustion and the pain from her left foot now steadily crawling up her calf, Sarah reached up to the cross her dying mother had given her and smiled to herself. Surely her efforts would be enough to impress Willy. Maybe she would be allowed to stay.

The slowest candidates were only forty yards ahead of her. She pushed herself forward by focusing on the closest one and pretending she had lassoed him with a rope. Every time she pumped her arms, she was pulling herself along the rope, just a little bit closer. She used the rhythm of pumping her arms, punctuated with the pain that shot from her left foot every time it struck the ground, to modulate her breathing. The sense of rhythm made the motions seem a little easier than they really were, almost like they were all part of a crazy hip hop dance.

Sarah overtook several more candidates before she reached the stream again. Seeing several more figures ahead of her, foundering as they waded across the stream, she steeled herself and stepped in to the frigid waters.

This time, she ensured her footing was firm before each step. She didn't lose her balance, and she carefully felt the ground under her left foot before putting her weight on it. While crossing the stream, she passed three more of her exhausted competitors.

As she pulled herself out of the stream for the second time, she noticed Brian, the stocky boy that had arrived with Michael, sitting in the red dust near the edge of the stream, his clothes barely wet, with an ashamed look on his face. Despite her exhaustion and pain, she couldn't help giving him a quizzical look. Brian felt her eyes on him and looked up. "It was too cold," he murmured before looking away again.

She looked away from him without another thought. The finish line was about 200 yards away, and between her and it there were about six candidates struggling along at various speeds. She saw Michael stagger across the line in first place, and receive a pat on the back from Willy before falling down into a heap of grey in the orange dust.

She wanted a pat on the back, too.

Ignoring her injury, she leaned forward into a sprint. The pain was excruciating, but using the same rhythmic breathing and imaginary rope as before, just at a much faster tempo, she was able to overcome it. Her mind went blank, except to focus on the rhythm of sprinting. She passed other candidates without counting how many, or noticing who they were.

She saw someone else cross the finish line. "Good job, Bob!" called Willy.

The line was finally coming up to her. There were other runners on her right and left, all leaning in to cross the line first. She was wrong footed. The only way she could beat them would be to put all of her weight on her bad foot and push off hard.

She dove forward in a blaze of white hot agony.

As she sank to the ground, she felt a broad hand patting her on the back.


***

The Aeon paused as she surveyed the digital world she had entered. She floated in orbit over a small planetoid. The server she planned to penetrate was hidden deep under the planet's sandy surface, in a subterranean chamber.

What defenses had the Tactical Dynamics Incorporated weapons research laboratory built into this world, and what holes existed in those defenses? There was only one way to find out – to go in and confront them directly.

She descended to the surface of the planet and immediately felt a new sense of heaviness fill her body. She took a few steps forward, and realized with dismay that the soft sandy ground was yielding under her feet. She was leaving deep footprints as she walked. Even if whatever guardians existed here could not see her now, they would be able to follow her progress later.

Could she fly? She tried. No, she could only jump about one foot into the air before being pulled back to the surface by the planetoid's powerful gravity.

Gravity. An immutable physical law. Unless you knew how to cheat.

She dropped her heavy sword and shield, and shed her breastplate and helm into the sand. She stepped out of her long linen gown. And then she closed her eyes for a moment, reorganizing the makeup of her body. In a moment, she pulled most of the atoms out of it. Now she only weighed a few grams, and was almost invisible. The remaining 120 pounds stood next to her, a grayish, lifeless version of herself.

She moved away from the discarded possessions and atoms. She was delighted to see that her newly light steps now left no footprints. The security experts who had put together this server's defenses had failed to foresee her tactic. But they could not be blamed. They were merely humans, and she was an Aeon.

She turned around and focused on the pile of lifeless atoms in front of her. Under her control, it moved forward step by ungainly step. The body moved methodically, leaving deep footprints in the ground.

She flinched as the ground to her right exploded outwards in a shower of fine grained sand. A giant centipede had burst out of its underground lair.

The Aeon ducked as the centipede arced over her. She could see the sun glinting off of its shiny carapace, its razor like jaws trembling in anticipation of a kill.

The bug landed on top of the heavy body that the Aeon had left behind and bit deeply into its neck. A shower of red blood stained the yellow sand.

"You're so dumb I don't even need to fight you," the Aeon muttered to herself.

The centipede's long tail flicked, its innumerable legs searching for purchase in the shifting sands as it continued to feed.

The Aeon turned away from the grisly sight, and walked towards the hole in the sand the centipede had created as it burst out of the ground.

In a few moments of crawling, the Aeon was at the edge of the central chamber, her naked, nearly transparent body now visible because it was dusted with a layer of sand from squeezing through the centipede's tunnels. She peered towards the center of the dimly lit chamber and saw the object she had come to steal.

To fulfill her destiny of saving humanity, she would need an army. Her forces would be victorious not through weight of numbers but because of the advanced technology she would provide. She could develop weapons herself from nothing, of course, yet even she could work more quickly if she could reap the benefits of existing science.

Tactical Dynamics had built cutting edge designs for all manner of offensive and defensive systems. Weapons like high energy beams. Defensive measures like ceramic-metal composite armor. And multi-use technologies like directional electro-magnetic fields and artificial intelligence subroutines. And all of that valuable technology now sat in the filing cabinet one hundred feet away from her.

The only thing between her and the filing cabinet was... nothing. Just an empty chamber. She raised her foot to step forward and then paused, her foot wavering over the sandy ground.

It was a bit too easy. A trap meant to lure overconfident infiltrators into dropping their guard and celebrating victory too soon. She recalled the empty surface of the planet, where pressure-sensitive centipedes lay in wait to pounce on anyone walking past.

The tunnel through which she'd entered this chamber was made of the loosely packed sand she'd seen on the surface above. With a wave of her hand, she summoned three long streams of sand out of the tunnel. In moments, each stream had created a sand likeness of herself.

She blew on the three likenesses in turn, sealing the sand particles that comprised each into a single living organism. And then she sent the three warriors ahead of her into the chamber.

Dozens of human-sized ants emerged from the sandy walls and floor of the chamber and swarmed over her minions, tearing at them with claws and pincers.

As the melee proceeded in front of her, she formed more sand into a spherical shape and tossed it into the chamber. As soon as it impacted the sand, two ants ripped at it with their mandibles until it was completely destroyed.

Still within the tunnel, she carefully extended her arm well into the chamber and waved it around. The swarming ants ignored it, and continued their attack on the sand warriors she had created.

The Aeon shook her head at the foolishness of the security system's designers. Did they really think this could stop me? She could go back to the surface and retrieve her weapons and cut a path to the filing cabinet herself. She could stay here and form more sand warriors until she overwhelmed the ants. But there was no need to tax herself with so much effort. She just needed her existing three warriors to capture two small trophies before they were destroyed.

Several minutes later, she had used sand from the tunnel to bond her legs to the two ant legs her three warriors had torn from the attacking insects before being overwhelmed and shredded. Then she took a careful measure of sand and added it to her ephemeral body, so that her weight increased from several grams to several dozens of pounds.

She pulled herself up and took careful steps forward into the chamber. It took a few strides to learn how to balance on the narrow ant legs that protruded below her feet. They were awkward, but they would protect her from attack.

The ants attacked anything that hit the chamber floor. They had attacked her warriors, and they had attacked the ball she'd thrown among them. But clearly, there was an exception to the rule: they didn't attack each other. Now that she was walking on ant feet, and weighed the same as an ant, the Aeon could safely reach the filing cabinet.


***

After the other candidates had crossed the finish line and gone to showers, Willy extended his hand to Sarah and pulled her up with a surprisingly strong grip. He let her use his shoulder for support as they hobbled to a building to the right of the dorm. He used his hip to softly butt the metal push plate of a wooden door with a small red cross, and the word "Infirmary" stenciled on it. The sunlight streamed in behind them as he helped her sit on the edge of an examination table.

"Our medic is busy sourcing some special supplies so you'll have to trust me to look at your foot," he said as he stretched on a pair of pale yellow disposable rubber gloves that he got from one of the many wooden cabinets lining the room.

She gingerly lifted up her foot, which was now throbbing with every beat of her heart. Willy raised his eyebrows. "I'd love to tell you that what I'm going to do is not going to hurt, but that would be a lie."

He walked over to a sink and filled a shallow plastic bucket with warm water, and then went to another wooden cabinet and took out cotton swabs, alcohol, and what looked like a turkey baster.

Meanwhile, Sarah looked around the drab, dimly lit room and wondered why it looked like something out of the previous century.

Willy gave her a sidelong glance from where he stood. "Sarah, why did you refuse to admit you needed to retie your shoes before competing in a foot race?"

Sarah opted not to answer. Principal Kim at the Lal Orphanage had given her similar lectures on a number of occasions. With Ms. Kim, the best strategy to end the conversation quickly had been to listen quietly, but look angry.

Willy turned around to face her. She saw that the front of his suit and shirt were covered in orange mud that had rubbed off of her as he helped her to the infirmary. She felt a stab of sympathy and softened her expression.

He walked over and sat himself on a stool in front of her and put the bucket of warm water in his lap. "Stick your foot in here. You have so much of this orange muck caked onto your foot, I can barely see the wound underneath."

She did as she was instructed, and he bent over and used his hands to flush away the mud on her injured foot. She could see the salt and pepper of his wiry hair, and the wrinkles on his forehead.

He pulled her foot out of the warm water and placed the bucket on the ground. He opened the bottle of alcohol and suctioned some of it into the turkey baster. "Brace yourself," he warned.

Sarah winced, but made no noise.

While he was cleaning her foot, Willy glanced up at her. "I can't believe you ran the better part of a mile with such a big hole in your foot. What motivated you?"

Sarah paused. She didn't want to talk about her mother. "I didn't want to get kicked out of here on my first day."

Willy pulled away the skin around her wound as he cleaned it, and Sarah winced with pain again. "Sorry. I have to be thorough, Sarah," he said and looked up at her, this time appraisingly. "There was more to it than not wanting to get kicked out. You were hurt, ready to quit, then our eyes met, and you were full of new strength."

Sarah remained silent.

Willy put down the baster and jabbed a cotton swab into her wound, and she reflexively pulled away her foot. He held on. "I know I'm a handsome guy, Sarah, but I think I'm a little old for you. Did I remind you of someone else?"

Sarah was starting to fear Willy would never be done cleaning her wound until she answered his question truthfully. She stared at the wooden cabinets set into the wall across the small clinic. "You reminded me of my mother."

Willy looked at the dark skin of his hand, which stood in stark contrast to the whiteness of her foot. Then he glanced up at her. "I doubt I look like your mother."

Sarah bit her lip. She needed to explain, so he would stop asking her and she could stop thinking about it. "Not your face. Your expression. It's how she looked when she knew she was dying and I would be on my own."

"I'm sorry for asking such a personal question."

She forced her eyes back to his. "No big deal. I'm an orphan. You already know my parents died."

"Why would that memory motivate you to run on an injured foot in some crazy competition you don't understand?"

Sarah looked back at the cabinets. Her vision was blurry. Damn you for asking, Willy. She just needed to get the words out and maybe he would leave her alone. "My mother died because I was careless, and I hurt my foot because I was careless. I was angry at myself, and I wanted to prove I could be better."

"Prove it to yourself?"

"Yes." She blinked and clenched her teeth and raised a hand to the necklace she wore.

Willy nodded thoughtfully and peered at her injury. "Well, you're going to be all right, Sarah."

Sarah thought for a moment. Willy was not someone she could trust. He had taken her from her safe orphanage and brought her to this bizarre ranch without offering an explanation. And he insisted on asking personal questions about her past while she was suffering from a painful wound.

But he seemed to feel bad about all that. Sometimes he even looked guilty. Maybe he wasn't such a bad guy. Maybe he could at least field some questions in trade for the ones she'd answered for him.

"Willy, I thought you were taking me to join some government program. But what is up with this place? Why does everything look like it's two hundred years old? This clinic is practically medieval."

Willy was silent until he was done wiping healing cream across her wound and then sat back thoughtfully. "Appearances can be deceiving, Sarah. You need to look under the surface to see the real truth."

Sarah looked back at him through narrowed eyes. Willy was blowing her off with aphorisms. She'd try again.

"I know you can't tell me exactly what this secret program is. But I know sometimes government agents have to do evil things like spying on grandmas or bombing children. What I want to know is, are we going to have to do evil stuff? I don't want to do evil, Willy."

"Don't worry, I'm a good guy," said Willy, with a quick wink. He reached for a roll of waterproof bandages lying on the counter.

"Are you? Sometimes you look guilty, like when you were signing me out of the orphanage and when you saw us freezing in the cold this morning."

Willy looked down at her foot for a moment, and then raised his eyes to meet her gaze again. "Sometimes I wonder if the ends justify the means."

Sarah shook her head in exasperation. "Whatever, Willy. Just don't make me do anything evil." She slid off the table gingerly, testing her foot. The injury still hurt, but she could already feel the tickling sensation of the flesh knitting itself together. The healing cream would make her good as new by lunchtime.

Sarah ignored Willy's offer to support her, limped across the room, pulled open the door and stepped outside. The sun was casting long shadows across the ranch. She blinked as the morning light reflected off of a shiny surface in front of the dormitory. She used her cupped hand to shield her eyes and looked again.

The sun was reflecting off of the glass and trim of a minivan that was parked in front of the dorm. It was white, with heavily tinted windows. Both the white paint and the dark glass were covered in a thin layer of orange dust. Its door was open and she saw Brian, the boy who had failed to cross the river, stooping to get in.

Sarah looked back at Willy, a questioning expression on

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