"One!" Hilde shakes me awake. In her hands is the small hammer from my Inheritance, along with a fabric black case of assorted needlelike crystals. I thought we were done with this whole waking up-to-an-earthquake bullshit!
I'm on my stomach before I even have a chance to register Hilde's hands. She lifts up my shirt, presses a crystal into my lower spine, and gently taps the hammer to hold the needle in place. We've been doing this acupuncture training since the kelp roll got too short, and it still hurts like a motherfucker every time.
My fists clutch the sheets, willing the quake to subside so I can remove the needle from my back. It takes only a few seconds before the tremor is gone entirely.
"You good?" asks Hilde.
"I'm fine, bad dream," I reply. "Can I take this shit out of my back now?"
"As long as you're sure you won't start shaking again."
I pull the crystal out with a grunt and safely return it to the fabric case, which I gently place back into the Chest. Hilde places the hammer beside it and closes the lid. I hold up my hands. "Already shaking."
"You know what I—" she starts coughing before she can finish the sentence. "...We need to get out of town."
"It's like ten feet of snow in every direction once we step off the road."
"And if we stay here, we're just sitting around until the Mogadorians track us to Jasper."
"Well, at least we'd have a town to back us."
"What?"
"I'm just saying," I explain, "if we weren't always living on the outskirts of towns we'd probably know there were Mogs around before they were at our door."
"The Mogs are hunting us, not the other way around," she replies sternly. "We are here to train, to assimilate with Earth, and return home."
"I get that. But you have to admit that we don't know shit about them, either. Those Mogs we saw in Alder weren't like the ones in the erkōsa visions. I was expecting a band of starved guerrilla soldiers, not a team of giant fucking knights."
"Are you insinuating that my training hasn't prepared you to face them?"
"Hilde, that's not what I'm...," I give up. No point in trying to argue this with her. "Look, I'm sorry I suggested we stay. I'll gather my shit and we can leave at noon."
It's seven-thirty in the morning. We grab breakfast in the lodge lobby and get back on the trail by nine o'clock. Always the fucking early birds. The blizzard did a goddamn decent job on blocking the mountain trails. Most of them I have to unclog by inducing avalanches, but our trek isn't exactly delayed. Hilde views it as extra practice. I think of it as child labor, but whatever.
We endure the winter winds and snowstorms until we make it to the border. Hilde's got connections everywhere, so we cross with ease. Two hours at a bank and an internet café in Spokane, Washington results in wallets brimming with hundreds and newly forged documents. I am now Odette Lager, a name that fits like glove-in-hand with my Keeper's permanent alias Hilde. I'm sixteen now, so Hilde also made me a driver's license, only to be used in emergencies.
The news reports about the United States didn't exaggerate.
It's a mess here. We mostly stay in the mountains, but that barely does anything to subdue the putrid air. Conditions must be far worse down along the west coast and the farther we hike the worst the smell gets. Hilde is coughing more than she's sleeping, vomiting more than she's eating. I tend to her every night with damp cloths, herbs I find around our camps. She needs real medicine, and while she's too afraid of checking into a hospital, I'm not gonna let her die out here while I sit around on my ass.
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The Quest of One
Fanfiction"First blessed, first to die." Those were some of the last words I remember being said in my own language, before setting foot on Earth. That defined who I was, and who I would need to be in order to survive on this planet. My defiance of that calli...
