Deadzone

  "Everyone ready?" Molly asked. "We'll all stay together. Now ... run!"

  Team Killbot ran leftward in a tight cluster, loosely aiming for the trees they had spotted earlier. Anna happened to look up and notice the green moon had just peeked over the horizon.

  "Midori," Kira said, pointing out the same moon to the rest of the group.

  Midori. Go ahead and die if you ignore it.

  The pincer robots had noticed they were running and changed direction. Javi slowed long enough to raise his remote control and adjust Hercules's bearing to intercept the robots. It got right in front of one, which Anna hoped would force it to slow down. Instead, it only lowered one pincer and snapped Hercules in half, then continued rolling toward them as if Hercules had been nothing more than a sheet of tinfoil.

  Javi grimaced. "They're coming," he called over to Anna. "Is the disk ready?"

  Anna nodded, but she still hoped to outrun them. If they turned on the devices now, a column could erupt right beneath their feet.

  "Faster, Oliver!" Molly cried. "Keep up with me!"

  Oliver lowered his head and tried to give an extra burst of speed, but Anna saw how hard he was breathing. The team would have to slow down or they'd leave him behind. Neither was acceptable.

  The closest robot was very close to them now. Its pincers were raised and widening as it bore down on Akiko.

  "I'm turning on my device!" Molly called.

  "Me too!" Anna even aimed it toward the robots, in case it made a difference.

  With a huge swooshing sound, the first column of sand shot up between her and Molly, cutting them off from each other. Anna felt a bounce in her step now as gravity lessened, and she used that to widen the stride in her run. Somewhere nearby, she heard Molly shouting orders, but the swirling sand kept her from hearing the words. Another column rose between Kira and Akiko, separating them. "Keep running!" she cried at the sisters, knowing it was a useless thing to say.

  "We got one!" Javi pointed up to a column that must have arisen beneath one of the robots. It was caught up in the swirling mass, rising higher and higher into the air. Its pincers snapped wildly, trying to find anything to grasp on to.

  Yoshi suddenly ran into view with Kira at his side. He had one end of their rope in his hands and Kira had the other. Together, they ran past the nearest robot, crossed the rope behind it, and ran forward again, tightening the rope. They tried digging their heels into the sand, forcing the robot off balance, but they were outside the bounds of the low-gravity fields, and the robot was too heavy.

  Javi joined them, sneaking up behind the robot to pull at the rope where it crossed together. He yanked on it, but it still wasn't enough.

  Oliver ran over next. He stopped beside Javi, then hit the robot with a rock he must've found in the sand. It didn't make a dent in the metal, but it did get the robot's attention. It stopped pursuing Akiko and tried rotating its body around. Yoshi and Kira tightened the rope again, and this time the robot's own movement threw off its balance, and it fell forward. It flailed about in the sand, too top-heavy to regain its footing.

  "Let's take down the next one!" Yoshi yelled.

  "We just have to run!" Molly cried. "It's too chaotic out here!" Over a dozen columns of swirling sand had already risen, and more were appearing each minute.

  Yoshi wasn't giving up so easily. He pulled out his canteen, unscrewed the lid, and threw the rest of his water beneath two of the three remaining robots. They immediately sank into the sand.

  In their rippling wake, Anna saw the thrashing of a sand grabber's tail.

  That was bad news. If they kept throwing water around, they risked sinking themselves, and that sand grabber would be waiting.

  "Oliver, look out!" Yoshi yelled.

  It had happened so fast, Anna could scarcely believe it. The last remaining robot had Oliver in its pincers. All it had to do was squeeze.

  "No!" Molly cried.

  Yoshi withdrew his sword, and Kira pulled out her water.

  "No water!" Molly ordered. She waved a hand to get Kira's attention. "No! You understand? Oliver will go under, too!"

  The robot began dragging Oliver backward, deeper onto the blood sand. Team Killbot cautiously followed.

  "What do we do?" Anna looked over to Molly for an answer, and it was clear Molly didn't know.

  For his part, Oliver looked terrified. His eyes were wide, but he knew better than to cry--he knew the awful consequences of those tears dropping onto the sand as well as anyone.

  "Low tech," Yoshi said. "Just weaken it enough that I can fight it. Dial down the device a little bit."

  Anna shook her head at Molly. If there was any setting on the device between full on and off, she didn't know it, and now wasn't the time to experiment.

  The robot was moving faster now, taking Oliver with it. "Help me!" he cried.

  "Options," Molly said to her team. "I need more options!"

  They didn't have any options. None. Anna wasn't being cold to think this way; it was just a fact. Anything that stopped the robot would hurt Oliver, too.

  And then the decision was taken out of their hands.

  Mites rose from the ground, dozens of them letting the blood sand roll off their backs. They swarmed the pincer robot en masse with their whiskers extended, coiling them around the robot's legs until it couldn't move forward. Others wrapped their whiskers around the pincers, forcing them apart until Oliver was able to slide safely to the ground.

  He smiled, taking a step away from the struggle and toward his friends. But the look of joy and relief on his face flickered and was replaced with confusion. Fear.

  Pain.

  Anna saw the problem just as Oliver seemed to figure it out himself. The pincer had injured him. He was bleeding through his shirt.

  Bleeding onto the sand.

  Oliver sank up to his waist. They all lunged forward to help him, but too late. There was a flash of movement as an oily green tendril wrapped around his body and pulled.

  Before he could make a sound, Oliver had disappeared beneath the sand.

  Yoshi still had his end of the rope, and Kira still had hers. He tied it around his waist, then turned to Anna. "Give me your water!"

  She did, and Yoshi dumped it over himself, feeling his body immediately sink into the sand.

  He was blind down here, though he wasn't helpless. The sand grabber left behind an oily trail that made it easy to follow. As long as he stuck to the oily path, the sand was like what he imagined it would be to swim through syrup.

  Which was harder than Team Killbot probably imagined. Yoshi was strong but had never considered himself athletic. If he ran, it was usually to get home before his mother realized he'd been out after curfew. Once, he'd had to outrun a mall security guard. That was it.

  Saving Akiko had been relatively easy before. The sand grabber hadn't gone far with her, and once he severed one tentacle, killing the rest of it wasn't too difficult.

  But the sand grabber who took Oliver was moving fast, and Yoshi was already tired from those bursts of speed across the blood sand. The desperate need to breathe was slowing him more than before.

  He found the oily trail again and swam forward through the sand, then realized he wasn't alone. Sand mites were down here, too. He could feel them zooming past him as if completely indifferent to the need for air and the difficulty of being in sand. What had Javi called this?

  Friction.

  The sand mites weren't slowed by the friction of the sand, not like him.

  Yoshi followed in the same direction as the robots, until his lungs were about to burst. Finally, he had to push to the surface for air. He came up, startlingly close to the edge of a swirling column of sand. He knew the team couldn't normalize the gravity now, not while everyone was still on the sand, but he cursed at the realization they'd created a new hazard in defeating those robots.

  Without another thought, Yoshi drew in a new breath, but by the time he got under, the oily trail had disappeared. He search
ed, digging deeper and deeper, but the sand grew dry and dense and resisted his every movement. His muscles ached and his lungs burned, screaming at him to surface.

  When he finally heaved himself out of the sand, he lay on his side, drawing in massive gulps of air. Far behind him, he heard the cheers of Team Killbot, calling his name and shouting for joy. He wished they wouldn't.

  When Yoshi remained still, the team began to realize, one by one, that something was wrong.

  "Where is he?" Molly cried, running over to him. "Yoshi, where is Oliver?"

  "I'm going back down," he said, his voice now hoarse and cracking. "Water!"

  "You're too tired," Anna said. "Let's send someone else down."

  "Give me the water," Javi offered. "I'll do it!"

  "No," Molly said. "There are too many twisters now. Within a couple of minutes, they'll overtake this whole area. They'll get us, too."

  Yoshi pulled himself to his feet and turned, though he couldn't look at the others. No scolding from his father had ever created the shame he felt right now.

  "Where's Oliver?" Kira cried. "Yoshi, how could you lose him?"

  Yoshi glared at her. He had done his best, but it wasn't good enough. Everyone had counted on him, and he had failed.

  "I can try again," he insisted. "I'm going to try."

  "It's been too long," Molly said, clearly fighting back tears.

  Yoshi started to protest, but Javi put a hand on his shoulder, and he came up short.

  Behind him, Akiko said, "You tried. We know you tried."

  As much as Yoshi didn't want to hear the criticism for failing to recover Oliver, the sympathy was worse. He replaced his sword and turned away from the team, looking out across the desert. The light was quickly fading. They needed to get off the blood sand and find a place to camp.

  Find a place to mourn.

  Yoshi had never felt worse in his life.

  Javi tugged at him. "Let's go," he said quietly. After a long moment of silence, Yoshi gave in. They turned, heads down, and began walking in silence. No one had the strength to do anything more than put one foot in front of the other, each shuffling footfall taking them another step closer to the edge of the blood sand.

  One step farther from Oliver.

  They passed another series of boulders, the first real sign that solid ground was nearby. "Everyone get behind the rocks," Molly said. "Let's normalize the gravity again."

  The team did, though everyone leaned against the boulders, exhausted, while Molly and Anna turned off the devices. Yoshi heard the massive swoosh of collapsing sand, felt it rush against the far side of his boulder, but only closed his eyes while it happened. While everything went quiet.

  Then, in the silence, the universe whispered to him. There was a sound, far off in the distance, carried on the winds across the desert sands.

  It was a distant cry for help.

  Yoshi wasn't the only one who'd heard it. Molly stood up straight and held up a hand for the rest of the team to remain silent.

  Yoshi found a grip on the boulder, intending to climb it, but Javi grabbed his arm, pulling him down again. "Stop, Yoshi," he said sadly. "It's not Oliver." He pointed upward, where green-feathered birds were circling overhead. "It's the birds. They imitate us."

  But Yoshi shook his head. He pulled free of Javi's grip and quickly scaled the rock. It put him high enough to get a good view of the blood sand, although in the low light of the red moon, the sand was cast in deep maroon. He strained his eyes to see as far as possible.

  There was movement out there, but it could be anything. Mites. Sand grabbers. The yokaze, which was already picking up for the evening, blowing grit against his face.

  "I thought I heard him," Yoshi said.

  "You heard a bird that's trying to lure you in and bite you," Javi said. His voice broke. "This place is cruel like that."

  "We're in no state for this," Kira said. She had her arm around Akiko, who had covered her face with her hands. "Half of us are crying. All of us are sweating. Your hair is still damp from the water you poured on yourself. It's a wonder we haven't all gone under the sand."

  "You're right," he told her in Japanese. Then he told the others, "We have to get off the sand while we still can."

  Everyone looked to Molly, and more than ever before, Yoshi was glad not to be the leader. Because she was in an impossible position. Anything she said now would be wrong.

  Molly's eyes were tearing up, and despite the risk of crying on blood sand, she didn't look like she could stop herself.

  "We should vote," Javi said.

  "No," Molly said. "I don't want to make anyone else responsible for this decision. We're getting off the sand."

  Everyone erupted with an opinion, except for Yoshi. He only stared at Molly, watching her take her team's complaints like body blows.

  "The sand grabber pulled Oliver under," Molly said. "It wouldn't bring him up again. Whatever we just heard, it wasn't Oliver. He's ... Oliver is ..."

  "Oliver is dead," Yoshi said. He said it so that she wouldn't have to.

  He could do that much for her, at least.

  Molly was the last of them to leave the blood sand, and stepping off it onto solid desert ground was one of the hardest things she'd ever done. It felt to her like staring Oliver in the face and saying she intended to abandon him.

  Which was exactly what she had done, she supposed.

  Based on the way her remaining teammates looked at her, she figured they were thinking the same thing. None of them had said a word to her for the entire trek off the blood sand. Akiko was crying, Kira's arm around her in a vain attempt at comfort. Before they decided to leave the blood sand, Yoshi had seemed to agree with Molly, but he had kept his thoughts to himself since then. Anna trailed a half step behind him, stony and silent. And Javi, who always defended Molly, had looked back about a thousand times since they left, just in case Oliver might somehow have appeared behind them.

  He hadn't.

  He wouldn't.

  They made camp near the small grove of trees not far from the edge of the sand. Anna immediately set to work finding water. Javi asked Yoshi for the rope so he could build a shelter.

  "What good is a rope gonna do?" Yoshi snarled.

  "I don't know," Javi said.

  Yoshi tossed it at him. "I'm going to look for food. I'm starving."

  Molly had food in her backpack, and she intended to share it once everyone got settled down. But she wasn't sure everyone would settle down tonight. The only word to describe her team right now was brittle. The slightest jostle could break them all apart.

  Yoshi stormed off, and this time Anna went in a different direction in her search for water. Kira and Akiko gestured to Javi that they would help him with a shelter.

  Nobody asked Molly to do anything, or for her opinion on anything. Nobody was even looking at Molly. She might as well have turned invisible.

  Rather than sit and sulk, which was what she felt like doing, Molly gathered some fallen branches from beneath the trees. There wasn't much for kindling, but she had all those lawyer's papers in her backpack. She liked the idea of burning some of them to lessen the weight she was carrying. When she'd gathered what they had in the area, she wandered a little farther from camp, hoping to find more wood, or to find anything to cheer up her team. Anything at all.

  Once she was out of sight from the group, Molly lifted her shirtsleeve enough to inspect the injury to her shoulder. It wasn't glowing anymore, thankfully, but it wasn't getting better, either. A green rash was beginning to form on the skin, worse where it was closest to the bite. It didn't itch, but that actually bothered Molly more than if it did. A rash that itched would be like a giant mosquito bite, or a heat rash, a problem that usually went away if you ignored it. This didn't seem like that kind of a rash, nor was it showing any signs of going away. If anything, it was spreading.

  She stared at the horizon, feeling hollow inside, except when torturous doubts flared in her stomach.

&
nbsp; The red moon was above. Aka--that was the color. Molly liked the idea of using the Japanese words as names for the moons, to give them a way to connect with Kira and Akiko through language. It was difficult to think of everyone as one team when two of the members understood almost nothing of what was being said. Yoshi did a good job of translating most of the time, but she knew for a fact that he didn't tell them everything, and she suspected he sometimes even deliberately mistranslated.

  As soon as she had the chance, Molly would talk in private to Anna and Javi about helping the sisters learn English. Which made her think about Oliver again. He should've been part of that conversation, too. He was on her team.

  And she had made the decision to abandon him.

  "Mol?"

  Hearing Javi's voice, Molly quickly pulled her shirtsleeve back over her shoulder. "Over here," she said.

  Javi followed her voice through some desert brush and found her sitting on a rock, staring at nothing. He took a place near her, directly on the ground.

  Before today, she probably wouldn't have given a second thought to how casually he had sat down. Now she did. If it had been blood sand, he'd have had to do a five-minute self-inspection to be sure the simple act of sitting wouldn't get him swallowed up.

  As Oliver had been swallowed.

  She clamped down on the thought, steeling herself against a wave of misery.

  Javi had a stick that he used to draw in the dirt, just making circles and lines, nothing of importance. "You've got to come back to the camp."

  "Not yet."

  "Now, Molly. You're the leader. The team needs to see you acting confident, and looking like you know what you're doing."

  "I don't know what I'm doing!"

  "We understand that! Nobody expects you to have all the answers, or even to make the right decision all the time. But we need to see you stand up in front of us, telling us that everything is going to be okay, and that you know we're going to get out of this rift. Even if you're lying to us, say what we need to hear. Because if you can make us believe that we're getting out of here, then we'll help you make it happen. There's a lot of smart people on this team. Come and lead us."

  Molly wiped at her eyes. "What would you have done back there, if it was your decision?"

  Javi shrugged. "I honestly don't know. But that's why you make the big bucks. Right?"

  "Yeah, sure." Molly drew in a deep breath. "All right, let's go."