Nathan Hystad - The Survivors - Books 1-3

“Two cycles of Saaranla .”

“Is that long?” Slate asked.

“I’ve had to sleep once.”

I slung the pack from my back, getting a bottle of water out. I opened it and passed it over. She looked at me dubiously, big black eyes glistening in the dim light. “It’s water. Take it. We have more.” I did have more, but only enough for a couple days, tops. When she found a way to stick her snout into the bottle top and slurp some liquid up, I passed her an energy bar, which she told me tasted like Laaran . I took that to mean something bad, judging by her reaction, but she ate most of it before tucking the last few bites into a pocket.

“Thank you, Dean,” she said through the translator.

“How far have you gone?” Slate asked her.

“Not very. I was afraid I’d get lost, or that my father would track me. But that’s foolish. The Stones don’t keep track of destinations. He wouldn’t know where I’d traveled to.”

“Boss, let’s keep moving the way we’re heading. It has to lead somewhere, and if we aren’t expecting any baddies hiding out in the shadows, we can move quickly and not worry about noise,” Slate said.

I looked at Suma, hoping we could trust her story. Every instinct was telling me we could, but I’d been wrong before.

“Let’s move.” Slate grabbed my pack, taking the burden from me, and I was grateful for the respite. We’d only left the complex that morning a few hours ago, but it already felt like days.

We moved as quickly as we could. Suma’s short legs carried her quite well, and she had no problem keeping up with us. We kept going, checking doorways as we went along. Half of the rooms were empty; the other half didn’t seem to have a purpose we understood. If the race had vanished a long time ago, maybe they’d packed up and left the world in search of somewhere else.

Eventually, we came to a large door, with nowhere to go but back or through it. Beside it a smaller slab stood, probably a maintenance closet. The large door had a viewscreen on it, but with the power out, it was blank, so we couldn’t see what was on the other side.

“This has to lead somewhere important. It’s the first entry with a viewscreen, and it’s much larger than all the others,” I said. “Suma, what do you know about these people?”

“Not much. We study the worlds in school, but I didn’t see what diagram I touched. It was all an accident. If it’s one of the outer worlds, it’s rumored they ran from something, abandoning whole worlds, traveling far away, never to be seen again.” She shifted on her large flat feet.

“Adds up. It looks like these guys left of their own volition, but why?” Slate asked, reaching for the manual lever. “Do it?”

I nodded. “Do it.”

The door opened, and we were hit with a gust of wind, sour air pouring in from outside. I walked over, trying to comprehend what I was seeing. We had to be a couple thousand feet up. Huge buildings were erected into the clouds, with intricate pedway systems between them. The city went on for miles in all the directions I could see from my vantage point. I felt nausea creep upward from my toes to my head, before settling back in my stomach. It looked like something from a nightmare. The sky was dark, electricity shifting from cloud to cloud before shooting lightning bolts down toward the ground.

Slate closed the door to shield us from the blowing wind. “What now?” he asked.

Suma’s back was against the wall, and I remembered she didn’t have an oxygen mask like us. “Suma, can you breathe?”

Her eyes were wide, and her snout frantically flailed. I slipped the mask off my face and hoped giving her oxygen wouldn’t do more harm than good. She breathed deeply through what passed as her nose but was still struggling to get enough air without a proper seal.

Slate opened the small door beside the entry. “It’s a closet. Bingo.” Slate rifled through piles of junk before he pulled out a mask, passing one to me.

“How does it work?” I asked, but Suma was already grabbing it and placing it on her face, twisting a cap on the bottom. It hissed and her panic subsided.

After twenty or so seconds, she removed the mask. “If we go outside, we will need these. The planet’s atmosphere is not stable.”

“There’s no tank on this thing. How does it work?” Slate asked.

She moved her lower arms in a gesture I took to be a shrug. “Look at your mask. Does it have a tank? Same principle.”

I hadn’t given it much thought, but it appeared a filter mask worked with a science that was beyond me. Or it was magic. Either way, I was okay not understanding it.

Slate, on the other hand, was playing with one, trying to comprehend the process.

“It’s the end of the line. Let’s mask up and go out there. The power source may be underneath us, a mile or so from the base of the building,” he said, looking at me for confirmation. When I nodded, he passed me one of the masks. “These look superior to the flimsy airline ones we have attached to us. Let’s use them.”

“What makes you think the power is under us?” I asked.

He pointed inside the closet door, where a paper blueprint hung above a shelf. It showed a few buildings, with blue lines coming from a source below that looked similar to the stones in the room we’d found earlier. It appeared to power a few square miles, each building having lines connecting to it. The image was detailed, and I ripped it off the wall, folding it up and shoving it into a pocket.

“Might come in handy. And here I thought you had some insight into alien technology,” I said, smirking at him. “How do we get down there?”

Slate started for the door. “Let’s find out.”

“Suma, do you want to stay here?” I asked the small alien female, who was already putting the mask back on. Her snout bent to the side inside the glass-encased mask, but she could still speak through her translator, though the squeaks were muffled.

“I will come. I may be of help,” she said.

The last thing I wanted to do was put her in danger, but if we didn’t power up this dead building, we’d all die here, so I didn’t argue with her.

Slate opened the door, the cool stale wind blowing against us again as we moved from the relative safety of the structure to outside. The lightning crackled, startling Suma, who grasped my arm; I patted her hand, letting her know it was okay. Even in the wind and eerily black sky, it was near silent out there, and that added to the strange feeling in my gut.

We were on a balcony that wrapped around the rectangular building. I walked around it, getting much more of the same vantage: miles of similar skyscrapers, all dark and dead, pedways connecting each of them. I pointed to a building next to us. “That has to be where we came from.” I ran a finger in the air, tracing our steps from the room we arrived in, across the pedway, and toward the door we’d met Suma at only a half hour ago. Out here, it looked like our journey so far had been nothing but a quick jaunt across a couple of city blocks. The sheer distance the city went on for, and the fact it was supposed to be abandoned, made me feel uneasy.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath of filtered air, calming myself. The only way to get back to New Spero was to power this grid up. I only hoped there was a way to do that below.

Slate was already walking in the other direction, his stride full of purpose. Suma walked along behind him, all four arms firmly at her sides.

“Dean,” Slate called, “I think I found the elevator.”

I hurried to catch up, focusing on them the whole time to forget I was so high up from the ground. I was worried vertigo would kick in and I’d be left clutching a wall, unable to help. I neared and saw the device he was talking about. It was a lift with four sides, but no visible cables. “What do we do with this?”