Twisted Metal Heart - Eve Langlais Page 0,42

leap with her racer because if she remembered correctly—

She shot out of the rock face covered in spiders, sticky with webs, and silently screaming because she didn’t dare open her mouth. Hitting the water, she sank hard and fast, mostly because she still held her racer. The spiders floated free from her, squirming and freaking. Despite all those legs, they couldn’t swim. When she hit the bottom, her goggles took a second to adjust to the underwater environment, and she looked around as she rummaged in a pocket for a device she popped into her mouth just in time to give her lungs a reprieve.

The lake appeared murkier than the last time she’d landed in it. Mind, that was at least five years ago, before she’d begun to use the more direct tunnel to the Marsh City. She enjoyed the marketplace and conducted many a deal over hot pastries and toasted amphibian legs. The purple-skinned ones being her favorite for their sweet and salty crunch.

Something passed close enough behind her to cause a wake, and she realized she’d overstayed her welcome.

The racer didn’t like water, but it still chugged for her, sloughing across the silted bottom until the sides began to incline and she emerged from the water. Hitting the open air as evening fell wasn’t her idea of a good time, especially since she appeared to have lost one of her travel bags, the one with her blanket. However, her other sack remained waterproof and intact. She soon had a fire going to warm her and planted four stakes in the ground to provide a secured line that would warn her if anyone crossed it. Only then did she take out a rag and begin to dry the parts of the racer that didn’t like being wet.

Beep.

The faint sound took her by surprise. She glanced at her bag.

Beep.

She put down her rag, reached for the sack, and pulled out the tablet. According to the notice on the screen, Alfred’s signal was broadcasting. The sun had set, night had fallen, and the barren stretch she found herself on far from the dangerous marsh. Still, she shouldn’t be complacent. Even the flattest of places had creatures that liked to eat flesh.

It was hard to believe there used to be a time when the Earth didn’t try to kill everyone on it. Now, when it wasn’t the land itself, changing and treacherous, it was the things that lived on it.

One thing that didn’t change was the need for companionship, even the artificial kind. She sent Alfred’s signal to her watch, pulled out a pistol, and set off along the riverbank. The pinging indicated he wasn’t too far.

Still she almost didn’t see him. She’d walked past before she realized the signal came from behind her, and she turned around. Her goggles didn’t do much to illuminate the darkness, and the lack of starlight in the cloudy sky didn’t help.

“Alfred?” she whispered.

She didn’t even know if he could answer. What could just a head do? She hoped there was enough left of it to download his memories to a new body because that was the part she missed most.

“Over here.” Faint but she heard it.

“Where?” She shuffled forward, nearing the edge of a drop-off. The river flowed past it. Dropping to her knees, she looked down and noticed the freshness of the bluff, the earth still raw and crumbling, the tree roots still tangled with dirt. Erosion for sure, and a lucky thing because, caught in the remnants of those trees, a glint.

“I think I see you!” Excited, she climbed down, her toes digging into the softened dirt. The roots were sturdy enough to hold her weight. She reached the lump and paused, hooking one arm through a loop of root. “I’m going to have to put you in my shirt.”

“Under normal circumstances, I’d refuse, but I am not in that position right now.”

“Still prim and proper,” she muttered, grabbing him and stuffing him past the neckline of her top. He felt cold on her skin, but she welcomed it.

She’d found Alfred. She wasn’t alone.

Climbing back up proved more difficult, as in the roots finally snapped and dumped her in the moving current. Luckily a bend allowed her to hit shallow land and heave herself back onto ground.

“Urskwshingme.”

“What?” she said, rolling to her back.

“I said you were squishing me.”

“You could have said thank you.”

“That’s what I said to Titan all the times I kept us out of trouble,” Alfred exclaimed. “And he never once