“Al, we’re leaving. NOW.”

Bec folded the blanket from the bed and stuffed the Timelet into it. She jammed it into the main compartment of the backpack that she finally found a reason to use. The random useless crap in there was cleared out of the bag and Bec had only room for a spare shirt, underwear, and a tiny drawstring for her toothbrush and glass. Bec found the note left by Lauds on the floor, splatter with blood. She ripped off the header and shredded the words “Lauds” angrily. She kept the rest of the note in her back pocket because paper was not something to be totally wasted. Her backup club was wedged in a side pocket of the bag, head-side down. While she had no complaints about the effectiveness of the club, the glass all over the floor presented a new opportunity. Bec held a glass shard from the vanity mirror and wrapped it in a strap and clip from the trashed bra. It made a surprisingly good handle for the blade. Bec carefully cracked the door open to check if the wolf had a pack around, holding the improvised dagger in her hand tightly, but not too tightly. The fact she couldn’t see anything didn’t ease her sense of worry, but she needed to leave. Now. Fuck this trailer and fuck the wilderness. The City called to her. Bec checked the pile of ash from last night’s fire and pocketed the nails and screws that were left from the furniture. She grabbed the scorched panel and jammed it between the crack of the door and broke the hinges. More screws. Now that she didn’t give a shit about the trailer, she was happy to rip it to pieces.

Bec lugged the door down to the river, jammed it into the mud, and laid it down on top of the boulders like a ramp. Holding her breath, she ran as fast as she could, jumped on the door, and jumped off. The door slid into the river but not before Bec had leaped the last two meters or so and landed on the other side of the river. “Fuck you, river.” Bec gestured vulgarly at the stream.

She stormed off into the direction that Al told her to go. This was the end of the hell she’d been dropped in. She just needed to survive the night and she’d be free. She’d get to the City. She’d be free from maulings. She’d be done with this whole mess that her life had become. Bec was absolutely pissed and risking her life because, she knew, if she survived the walk, she’d be done with this whole garbage day. It was just that simple. Bec was making it hard when she was within two days walk of civilization. Bec wanted to explore cities her whole life and she was dropped in the middle of nowhere? Talk about a joke. Bec marched for hours without seeing anything too remarkable. ‘Remarkable’ being her word for horrible death animals. She did, however, see a squirrel that floated on the breeze from treetop to treetop, a bird that just phased through trees like they weren’t there, and heard howls that came from every direction at once. Was that the same type of wolf that I fought? The one Bec fought was frighteningly silent.

Bec shuddered. It was horrible. So fucking horrible. What could she do against a forest full of animals that defy the laws of physics? Nothing. I just have to keep my head down and hope to get lucky. There is no “playing it safe” on Dust. Bec only really understood that she was on an alien world after that wolf attack. She was acting like this was a fancy Earth but no, this was its own thing with its own rules and Bec was either going to find the City or risk staying stuck like a sardine.

~~~

Al was annoyed. He thought Bec’s behavior was hugely rash and completely not like the woman that was constantly planning and thinking. This was distinctly thoughtless. When she got like this, Al had difficulty parsing anything but her most surface thoughts. He knew that she was planning on keeping him. This pissed him off. It made him so upset that, honestly, he was forced to admit to himself that feeling upset was possible. This made him more upset, to the point that Al felt fine with Bec risking her life. This fact also upset him because his objectives clearly said that he should prioritize her life before prioritizing getting to the core. He just didn’t care. The merge was everything he wanted. He wanted to become part of something great! The hub of all knowledge on Dust was something he couldn’t bear not to live inside.

~~~

Bec made it far. Nearly reaching the base of the mountain before nightfall, she just kept walking, using her Word to see in the dark until she couldn’t keep a pace that let her see.

Calling it a night, she climbed a tree and hung her bag from one of the branches. With her Timelet in hand and a blanket over her, she fell asleep a couple of feet from her bag tree, at the base of a thick tree with much more enticing, exposed roots that made for a rough, but passable pillow. Not as bad as a fish, so she fell asleep quickly, tired from her hike. When she woke up, she excitedly looked at the Timelet to see if it had updated. The checkpoint just elapsed, and the clock was ticking down from a little less than 6 days. Bec looked to see any new additions. “Nothing?” Bec bit her lip. That either means nothing happened to her, she’s the first Bec, or she’s gonna die in the next few instants. Bec was really on edge when she left the Timelet and blanket wadded at the base of her bed tree and went to retrieve her bag from the nearby tree.

She climbed the tree and got the bag in her hand before she froze. She heard a twig snap. A sound she would have missed if she hadn’t been so paranoid for the last day. Maybe she was hearing better because of her Word as well? It was a bit away and she heard a cough. She pulled the glass knife from her pocket more to ease her heart rate than to fight. Grabbing the branch that she was sprawled on, Bec braced herself. It was a person. Her first human contact since forever and she was arming herself. What happened? Oh, that’s right. Her Timelet didn’t update and that means she might have died before she could learn anything new to send back. That distrust was confirmed, for better or for worse, when she heard their conversation.

“Did you say it was around here?” A gruff man asked aloud.

“Yeah, I was told to patrol the area after we detected a major blip on our radars last evening. I found some human tracks and called you guys for backup.”

“Wise choice. Not often do we find people willing to sneak into our territory, and even fewer have the balls to come alone. They’re obviously some sorta high-class Hunter or Gatherer… or an idiot.” Bec heard a few chuckles from the group and the gruff-sounding man reassured someone. “We’ll fuck ‘em up, that’s for sure.”

Why do I understand them, Al? Are you translating?

“Yes. They’ll understand you, too.”

Any idea what they’re doing out here?

“Looking for you.”

Can you buy some info on them?

“Maybe.”

Can you put their descriptions and my situation into the Timelet?

“No. You’re too far from it."

There’s a range? Al, why the fu— Bec’s line of thought was interrupted when they entered her line of sight.

“The tracks were made 6 hours ago. This person, a young woman, I think? She walked for a while in the dark. She was… angry? She took no effort to conceal her tracks,” said a slender guy, maybe 17, dressed in head to toe in olive drab. This was the guy who found my tracks. He knew a lot.

“Confidence. That worries me.” Said a tall man in a billowing, pink, button-down shirt, sort of like a blouse, and black pants. The three other men wore similar, airy clothes with solid colors. Orange, Yellow, and Purple. Bec noticed they all carried pouches of some sort and Purple guy had a baseball bat and… was that a golf club? Was the guy in pink the leader?

“Heeey, do you see that?” The boy in the olive green pointed at the pile of the blanket and the Timelet.

“Shit.” Bec sucked air in between her teeth.

The boy took one step before the man in pink stopped him. “Never carelessly approach where a human has been. Do you know why?” The boy nodded. “Because she’s hiding in the tree.” He nonchalantly pointed at Bec and all three of them took defensive postures.

Bec was thrown off by his casual tone and everyone staring at her. “Uh… Hello!” Bec leaned over to drop from the tree branch. My cover was blown but they seem sorta—

The man in the yellow threw a strap, lightning-fast at her. Bec flinched, eyes closed, hands up. She dropped but her leg stayed where it was. A sickening crack filled the air and she cried out. Her leg was affixed to the branch by the strap that the man tossed, and her ankle took the whole weight of her fall. She was dangling by the broken ankle, causing her extreme pain. She cried.

“WRAP HER!” the man in pink barked. The strap man threw three straps and Beck was cocooned in some tough woven straps. Bec could barely breathe, the straps were so tight.

“GET HER ON THE GROUND.” The other men in colors ran to her and the strap man waved his hand. The strap around her ankle relaxed and the men lower her, gently to the ground. Bec was surprised how gentle they were.

“Looks like we caught ourselves an idiot.” The man in pink walked up to her and placed something on her temple. With a tap, her mind fuzzed. She floated through the forest in a blur of motion. Her body hung over the shoulder of the purple man, as he carried her through streaking green and brown, the mountain closing in on them. “What are—” The mountain, in what felt like an instant, turned to the indoors of some cement walled building, and Bec was placed in a chair in a room with nothing in it. The room blurred with motion until everything focused and Bec saw a man in a similar button-down, but black this time, pulled his finger from the thing on her temple. “—you doing?” Bec’s mouth was so dry that she coughed.

The man in the black shirt looked at her with sharp, green eyes that demanded attention. “Who are you?” He asked bluntly.

“I’m Bec… and who might you be?” She was being condescending on purpose. The dryness of her mouth made the way she shaped the words in her mouth feel odd. Didn’t matter, this guy kidnapped her, and she was pissed off enough without the inconvenience.

The man chuckled. “That’s funny. I didn’t think you’d tell me that.” He paced around the chair like some damn Bond villain, monologuing. “See, I asked the shop about you and it wouldn’t even give me your name… Bec.” He clicked his tongue when he said her name. “You see, Bec…” He walked around to face her. “You are a woman just full of contradictions, aren’t you? I can’t make heads or tails of you.”

“I assure you; I don’t have a tail.” Bec gave her remarks sweetly.

“Not anymore, maybe.” He pulled out Bec’s phone and Timelet. Bec didn’t know how they got the phone out of her pocket without her noticing but seeing the Timelet made her sigh with relief. “You were carrying this.” He gestured to the phone, turning it on and started scrolling through her photos. He unlocked it. Bec gritted her teeth. “Bec, I wonder why a woman, so frighteningly brazen as to walk into my territory, would be equipped with a phone running on a spectacularly archaic infrastructure. So old, dare I say, I don’t think I’ve seen one in my lifetime. But that’s not all she’s carrying.” He grabs the Timelet. “Frankly, Bec, this thing eludes me. I can tell that you interact with it using the chip in your head, but I can’t seem to get it to work, knowing all of that. I… tend not to be stumped by tech.” His eyebrows raised on his last word.

“Yeah. Sucks to be you.”

“No no no, Bec. It sucks to be you. You don’t seem to understand. This is only the tip of the iceberg, Bec.” His eyebrows raised. “Your person was just full of interesting things.” He reached into his pocket and fished out the drawstring bag. He opened it and poured screws into his hand.

“Yeah, guess you could say I have a few screws loose.”

“Your goading proves that very well, Bec. You know there aren’t many people who aren’t in the Shop. Usually frontier folk, and they tend not to be walking around with state-of-the-art technology,” He pulls out Bec’s glass from the bag. “They ALSO tend not to use a Lauds cup as a damn toothbrush holder. You had PAPER, in your pocket. What does a person with a SensoLink need with paper?” His tone turned manic and desperate as he spat his words in Bec’s face.

“I dunno, paper has got some uses.” Bec tried to shrug but she couldn’t really move an inch.

The man chuckled again. “Your scan showed us that you’re actually 18, and don’t just look it. But you’re healing like a fucking toddler and you dress like a fucking grandma. What the fuck is up with that, Bec?”

“Aw, I thought this shirt was cool. Did you fix my ankle so nicely? Thank you sooo much.” Bec batted her eyes at him.

“Cool. Rad. Totally gnarly, my dude.” The man laughed. He lunged forward and grabbed Bec’s face, “We found your little shack. You know you should take better care of your things, Bec.” He kept saying her name like he didn’t believe her. “The photos on your phone, the family you have, the places you’ve been. They tell a story, Bec. They aren’t from this planet. You lived on Earth. Do you think I’m so stupid not to see you’re a Founder? So why!? Why are you so fucking pathetic?”

“Pafthwetic?” Bec was hurt, partially from his grip on her face but mostly from that comment. She thought she was doing well until… well, she maybe was a little pathetic.

“Yes, I can see the big picture. You work for Lauds, you’re using technology by them to hide that you’re a Founder, I know it! I can see it clearly. You came here to sabotage our work even though we’ve not done anything to the City. You are here as an unregistered agent, I don’t know how you’ve tricked the Intel Shop, but you have! AND,” He raised his hand like he was making a shocking point. “You’ve been caught so we’d bring you to our base. I think you’ve got a Word that specializes in interference. Our radios haven’t worked since we’ve brought you here and, well, you think we haven’t noticed that you’ve been bathing us in every type of radiation known to man.” He let go and punched her in the face sending her glasses skittering across the floor.

What? Bec’s face streaked with shock and a little blood. She put on a brave face. “I’m just a poor city girl ended up on a big scawy planet with big scawy monstows.” The man looked past Bec for a moment.

“You’re lying to my face because you know you can fool our detectors. All you’re doing is proving to me that you have some sort of interference power.”

Bec sighed. “Just kill me, spare me the diatribe you cartoonishly, villainous man.” Bec loved to see how mad he was. And he was just a font of information! Bec hoped that begging for death would make him want to do anything but kill her. People like him hate being told what to do. The more he blabbed, the better.

“But what about the bombs, Bec? You haven’t told us where the bombs are.”

“The bombs? I didn’t plant any bombs!” Bec really was shocked.

“We’ve disarmed two of them already! They’ve been planted all over our hard work and, suddenly, we find a brat with advanced technology wandering around our land? Don’t fuck with me, Bec; I can see you.” He stared into her eyes.

“I didn’t plant any bombs! Why would I let myself get caught after they were already planted?”

“Well then, why are you here?”

“YOU BROUGHT ME!” Bec laughed.

“I. Meant. My. Land.” He gritted his teeth.

“Just passing through?” Bec smiled innocently.

He punched her again.

“You will tell me!” He punched once again.

“Why aren’t you running!” Bec pleaded as her mouth filled with blood. “What’s so important about this facility that you’d rather sit here and die!”

“It’s too late. The bombs we found were set for…” He looked back behind Bec. “a minute from now.”

“Oh fuck, you’re so screwed!” Bec spat blood all over herself.

“You’re screwed, Bec. You’re gonna die. I’m going to my bunker.”

“I don’t wanna die, man!” Bec shouted, hoping this was her out. He glanced past her.

"A lie? Now I know you’re fucking with me. You expect me to believe that you want to die? Your story isn’t adding up, ‘Bec’. Why would an innocent girl like you want to die? Unless... you’re a Founder and lived long enough to go on a suicide mission? I’m done with you. Die for your damn company, like a damn stooge.”

Bec’s eyes followed him as he walked to the door and walked out, slamming it behind him. “Didja get all that, Al?”

“All of it, and he brought the Timelet close enough for an upload.”

Bec laughed a gurgling, bloody laugh. “This one’s for you, Bec!” A pregnant pause filled the room. “Damn, that would have been so cool if the bomb wen—” Bec’s thought was interrupted by a swift and percussive death.