Search & Recovery: A Retrieval Artist Universe Novel Read Free

staring at her.
    She shoved again.
    “Move!” she shouted at the big man, and he did, somehow, sliding toward the seat behind her.
    A tangle of people and a Disty tumbled on top of her and she kept shoving.
    “Move!” she yelled again, and this time, her voice cut through the screams. The fact that someone (she) had taken charge seemed to galvanize everyone.
    People started picking themselves up, rolling away from each other, asking questions instead of screaming.
    “Anything broken?”
    “You okay?”
    “Can you slide this way?”
    Berhane tuned out the words and managed to pull herself upright. She was now standing on the window of the car, her back against the ceiling. The train had derailed, something she hadn’t thought possible. Weren’t they built so that they couldn’t derail? She remembered hearing about that in one of her classes. Something about magnetized couplings and nanobots and—
    She wiped a hand over her face, and took another deep breath of the chemical-laden air. She was in shock, or sliding into shock, and she didn’t dare, because they were trapped in this car. Judging from the smells around her—those chemicals, the stench of burning—something had gone very wrong somewhere, and she couldn’t know if it was the train itself or if it was the dome.
    The Peyti grabbed her leg. She looked down at the thin gray fingers wrapped around her pants.
    “Please,” it said.
    She reached down, and helped it up. Its other arm dangled at its side, clearly broken. She’d always thought the twig-like Peyti looked fragile. Now she knew that they were.
    “Thank you,” it said.
    “There’s something in the air,” she said because she knew the Peyti, with its mask, couldn’t smell what had gone wrong. “Something bad.”
    The Peyti nodded and surveyed the area around them. Other survivors were moving, shuffling toward the side of the car.
    The Peyti said something in its native language and looked back at her.
    “What?” she asked.
    It shook its head, a movement that looked very unnatural. It clearly worked among humans and had learned their movements.
    “The dome sectioned,” it said.
    She frowned. “How do you know that?”
    “Do not look north,” it said.
    She didn’t even know where north was. She was completely disoriented.
    “Oh, my God.” The big guy was standing on the seat back beside her. “We got cut in half.”
    Berhane didn’t understand him at first. She was fine. Except for broken bones and bleeding, everyone else seemed fine too. She glanced at the big man, then started to turn toward the direction he was looking in, but the Peyti grabbed her arm.
    “Do not look,” it said. “The dome bisected the train.”
    Her breath caught. “It can’t do that.”
    “Not under regular circumstances, no,” the Peyti said. “The trains must stop when the dome sections, but clearly this is not a regular circumstance.”
    The dome only dropped its sections when the mayor ordered the dome to get segmented off. He had done so during the crisis surrounding the Moon marathon. He had sectioned off one part of the dome, so the disease running through the marathon didn’t infect the rest of the city.
    But that was the only time in her memory that the dome had sectioned.
    And that sectioning had been ordered . Trains had stopped in time. Cars hadn’t been able to get through the area. People had been instructed to move away from the section before it came down.
    Not this time.
    “What happened?” she whispered.
    “Something bad,” the Peyti said.
    The something bad had happened in the forward compartments.
    Then Berhane realized she was turned around. The sectioning had occurred behind her.
    Where her mother had been.
    “No,” Berhane said.
    She scrambled past the people still picking themselves up, and climbed toward the door. It was half open, something that shouldn’t have happened either, or maybe that was a fail-safe when the train derailed (only it wasn’t supposed to