12

Lila Easterlin

July 17, 2029. Savannah, Georgia.

As rooftops came into view below them, Lila had second thoughts about the plan. She watched her father, a bead of sweat dangling from his nose, his fingers squeezing the throttle. The plane had automatic stabilizers, but still, it was not exactly safe for someone who’d never flown one to just take off and go.

The breeze kicked up and the plane wobbled, the stabilizers on the wings whirring, trying to compensate. They were above the tall pine trees, the highway visible on Lila’s right, a long strip shrinking in the distance.

“You’re doing great!” Lila said, having to shout over the wind.

Dad only nodded, his attention glued to the task. He kept going up, up; Lila had imagined clearing the trees and then staying as low as possible.

“How high are you going?” she asked.

“High enough that we’re out of range of Luyten weapons. There’s no hiding the fact we’re up here. If any Luyten on the ground can just point a heater or lightning rod and cook us, we won’t make it far.”

Lila hadn’t thought of that. Being in the air—away from all the Luyten on the ground—made her feel safe from them, but every Luyten they passed would know they were there.

“How high can we go?” she asked.

“I don’t know. How high can you go and still breathe?”

Lila thought about mountain climbers. At the top of tall peaks, climbers could barely breathe, but how high was that? She missed her feed; whenever teachers had wanted her to remember some esoteric detail like the heights of mountains, Lila had rolled her eyes and ignored them. “Like, I don’t know, maybe twelve or thirteen thousand feet?”

Dad nodded. “I guess if we’re getting too high, we’ll know.”

When the altimeter read thirteen thousand feet, they were still breathing fine, although Lila felt slightly out of breath, and inhaling deeply didn’t make the feeling go away. The cold was worse. Lila was wearing a thin short-sleeved tunic, and she was trembling. Their emergency packs, which included warm clothes, were back in their fried car.

The ground below was a patchwork of black-and-white towns, brown fields, green forest.

“How do we find Atlanta?” Lila asked. The ultralight had a built-in GPS system, but with satellites down it was useless.

“I’m just heading due west.”

Was Atlanta due west? It must be, more or less. Certainly they’d spot the downtown skyscrapers if they were anywhere close.

Dad glanced at her. “I can’t believe you were able to assemble this. It would’ve taken me a week.”

“You told me to find something productive to do.”

“I did. And you did.”

Lila studied the airspeed indicator. They were going just over sixty miles per hour, which meant maybe a two-hour trip. She turned to look over her shoulder at Savannah.

Smoke was rising from a thousand places. Some of the larger buildings were visibly on fire, the flames licking the sky. A container ship was sinking on the river.

“Oh, shit.”

The words jolted Lila awake, set her heart pounding. She looked around and immediately spotted what had caused her father to cry out: seven or eight Luyten were in the air, heading toward them.

They were in modified human Harriers, their massive bodies hanging in harnesses below the craft. Dad was descending, the nose of the ultralight pointed at a steep angle that sent uneasy butterflies through Lila’s gut.

It was hard to tell if the Luyten were dropping to intercept them. If they were, Lila and her father were going to die.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” her father was chanting, clearly in shock. Lila gripped the dash, afraid to look for the Luyten. The ground below was a checker of farmland broken by roads and occasionally buildings.

Lila ventured a look up: The Luyten craft were much closer. They were flying in a circular formation, as Luyten always did, closing on them.

“They’re coming after us!” Lila screamed.

“I’m gonna ditch us,” Dad said, his chin pressed into his neck, his mouth stretched in a grimace. “Find the—”

Suddenly, Lila was burning. She screamed in pain, the worst of it coming from her fingers, where her rings were searing her skin.

Dad was screaming, too, his fingers sizzling where they gripped the controls. “We lost the engine.” He held fast to the controls, as the ultralight plunged and his fingers burned.

The heat was getting intolerable as the Luyten closed on them. Lila scanned the dash, frantically seeking the crash suit indicator. There was nothing she could see that looked like an emergency icon. Surely all aircraft, no matter how small, were equipped with crash suits.

Then she saw it, down by her dad’s right foot: a square yellow icon with a fold-up ring. She struggled to read the simple, red-ringed instructions: Pull ring out, turn clockwise.

“Wait until we’re close to the ground,” Dad said. “As close as possible.”

“I know!” Lila screamed, trying to concentrate. Her shoes were burning her feet. She kicked them off.

Suddenly the heat let up.

Crying with relief, Lila looked up and back, and spotted the Luyten pulling away.

It was deadly silent save for the whistle of the wind. They were close to the ground, quickly growing closer. Pine trees hurtled by just below. Lila realized they were moving much faster than they seemed.

Her skin was throbbing all over. They’d been just on the edge of the heater’s range. Besides her ring finger and feet, she felt like she had a very bad sunburn.

They cleared the line of trees; Dad tried to bank so they would drop along the length of a cornfield. Lila hadn’t known you could grow corn in Georgia. For some reason the thought made her laugh hysterically. She tried to stifle the laugh, but that only made it worse. They were going down, about to crash, and she couldn’t stop laughing.

The ultralight was canted, the left wing lower than the right. When the left wing was about a dozen feet above the corn, Lila twisted the ring to activate the crash suits.

She had the barest instant to see the ultralight burst apart, then the suit inflated around her, pushing her flat, pinning her arms at her sides. She was turning in the air, head over heels, the blue sky framed inside the tight rectangle of vision the suit afforded, then trees, then the startlingly green cornfield, and blue sky again.

Hitting the ground was much worse than Lila had anticipated. It felt like she was being beaten with a steel bar as she slammed into the ground again and again. Then she rolled and skidded, her momentum carrying her farther than she thought possible.

Finally, she stopped rolling and lay still. She stared up at the sky, the clouds drifting by.

High above, a lone Luyten flew by. Although it was high, it was surely not eight miles high, so it was reading her thoughts at this very moment, perhaps considering whether it was worth the trouble to land and finish them.

It continued on, maybe because they were only civilians, weaponless, lying in a field scattered with wreckage.

“Lila?”

She had no idea how to deactivate a crash suit. When she’d seen them on the news, the people inside were always surrounded by concerned medical personnel who knew how to deflate them.

Lila felt around with her fingers, the only part of her body she could move. They came in contact with a bulb. She squeezed it three or four times, and suddenly the suit hissed and settled around her in a plastic puddle. She pushed it off and struggled to her knees.

Dad was heading toward her, limping deeply, a purple bruise rising on his cheek. “Holy shit,” he said. “Holy shit, Lila.” He looked at his hands: His palms were covered with angry red sores. “Holy shit.”

“Do you know how far we are from Atlanta?” Lila asked.

Dad nodded. “It was in sight when the Luyten showed. Maybe ten or fifteen miles to the suburbs?” He pointed to the right. “The interstate is that way. Maybe we can hitch a ride with some of the refugees.”

Lila struggled to her feet. She expected to feel lancing pain in one limb or another, but besides her burning skin and a lot of soreness and a few bumps and bruises, she was all right.