Volare (Part 1) Page 2

  I stand up slowly and feel a small branch break beneath my foot. The cat, jaws still clamped around the deer’s throat, looks up at me. What I feel in this moment cannot be explained by fear.

  Once, when I was much younger, I stole my mother’s pod in an attempt to go to friends house. As the vehicle took off, it quickly rose several hundred yards in the air, out of my control. It was in that moment I was afraid, but then the power for the cut out from the excessive height and it quickly fell from the sky. My stomach sank as the vehicle headed for the street below. Fear was replaced by the idea that I was now going to die, all because I was doing something I was not supposed to be doing. Just before the pod crashed, the backup power kicked in. Years later I can still remember what it felt like to think I was going to die.

  As I watch the cat fear escapes me. The first thought that runs through my mind is how I should probably not be here. This is followed by the thought that, my mother is going to be very angry with me for this. I barely notice my grip loosening on the rifle, the only thing between me and death.

  The cat releases its grip from the dead deer, eyes locked on me. It slowly walks over the carcass, moving as smooth as water. The rifle is now shaking in my hand. I know that running won’t help, the rifle is the only chance that I have. My hands shake as I struggle to take aim. The cat seems to notices this and begins to sprint in my direction. Without thinking, I aim the rifle at the cat’s head and press the trigger. Nothing happens. I forgot to make sure the gun was loaded. I close my eyes and await the end.

  “Stop!” says a voice from behind me. I open my eyes. The cat stops right in front of me. I can feel its breath on my face as it stares past me.

  “You got what you wanted. Now it’s time for you to go away,” says the voice from behind me. My eyes stay frozen on the cat’s gaze, then suddenly, it turns and walks away. The cat picks up the deer carcass and drags it. I watch as it glides into the foliage, disappearing deep into the forest.

  I stay frozen several seconds before I remember the voice behind me. By the sound it, I can tell that it was a girl. Not counting my mother, I haven’t heard a girl’s voice in years. As this thought crosses my mind, I realize it still fails to explain why the cat actually obeyed her.

  “Well, you aren’t going to just stand there, are you?” She says.

  I turn around to see her.

  The girl, at least a head shorter than me, is draped in an old fashioned nightgown- the kind that I have only seen in holographs from hundreds of years ago. Locks of curly red hair, that appeared far too heavy for her head, seem to drown her. Time continues to pass and I realize that I’m staring at her, but in the shock, I forget to care. Her hazel eyes appear to pop out next to her porcelain skin. She stares back at me with a faint smile and I finally break the silence.

  “Who are you?” I ask her.

  “The appropriate response would be thank you,” she says. I can tell by her attitude that even though she’s smaller than me, she can’t be much younger.

  “Thank you,” I say. I feel myself smile and the sinking feeling I had in my stomach starts to go away.

  “What are you doing in the woods?” she says. “It can be quite dangerous out here.”

  The coldness of the rifle in my hands reminds me that I was just saved by an unarmed girl, standing alone in her nightgown. “I could say the same to you,” I say. “You’re walking around in the woods by yourself. You look like you just rolled out of bed. Where are your parents?” As the words come out of my mouth, I hear how ungrateful I must sound. I should care, but nothing about this situation makes sense.

  “Is that really all you can say to me? You would think that saving a person’s life would solicit more gratitude.”

  It isn’t until this moment that I notice her distinct accent.

  “Where do you live? I mean where are you from?” I ask.

  “I’m not going to tell you where I live! I don’t even know you,” she says.

  By her face I can’t tell if she’s actually offended. “I’m sorry,” I say, unsure of myself.

  She smiles. “I’m from London,” she says.

  “Ok, so you’re saying that you’re a time traveler,” I say. I know that London was one of the first cities to be reestablished as a floater colony. It hasn’t been referred to by that name in hundreds of years. She’s lying.

  “No need to be rude. You asked me where I’m from, so I answered you,” she says.

  “Yeah...” I say.

  “You know that she never wanted to attack you,” she says. “The cat. She was just looking for dinner. I’m sure you can relate.”

  The fact that I had this exact thought before the encounter startles me. I remain calm and not let on that she was practically reading my thoughts. “Yeah, maybe I should just go find her and say, hey, I understand why you were gonna eat me, but let’s be best friends.”

  The girl laughs. Even though I am still tense, her laugh makes me smile again.

  “My name is, Adam,” I say. I exhale and force myself to extend my arm to shake her hand.

  The girl stops smiling and stares at my hand. A moment passes before I repeat myself.

  “My name is, Adam,” I say, this time using my hand to gesture toward myself.

  “I speak English, you fool,” she says. “I’m from Lon-don. We’ve been talking this whole time. No need to use sign language.”

  “Well, I was confused as to why you just stared at my hand.”

  “Well, I was confused as to why you extended your hand to me,” she says.

  I study her face and can tell that she is serious. “Have you really never shaken hands with anyone?” I ask.

  She continues to stare at me, confused. “Why would I want to shake another person’s hand?”

  “Where I am from, it is a way that we greet each other,” I say. How does she not know what I’m talking about?

  “That’s... odd,” she says. Her eyes study my body language. I can tell that she is wondering if I am attempting to trick her somehow. “My name is Winter,” she says, without extending her hand.

  I smile at her. “Well Winter, thank you for saving my life.”

  She smiles back. “Well, aren’t you also going to thank me for the deer?”

  “What are you talking about?” I say.

  She nods back toward the clearing behind me. I turn around and see a young deer standing in the middle of the clearing. The deer walks around, slowly, oblivious to us standing nearby. “How did you…” I say. I turn around to finish my question, but the girl is gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Months go by without any sign of the Volare. Every day that passes, anxiety builds in the cottage because my mother and I know that the Council should have sent them by now. A few weeks ago, my mother’s hidden tech at the headquarters went dark, a sign that they probably discovered they were being spied on.

  Ever since I brought back the deer on the day after my sixteenth birthday, my mother has sped up my training. Almost half a year has passed and I still don’t tell her about the help that I needed to acquire the deer. Despite the tense situation we now live in, I like the new pace that I am learning at. Now when we spar, I dodge her punches with ease. Even when she kicks, I can see every move coming.

  I have completed several projects in the study. With my mother’s guidance, I have replicated the system that keeps the city afloat. The smaller replica is not nearly as powerful, but the technology is identical. Everyday I get better at engineering. With a few items I can create a make-shift tracking device and I’ve even learned the code behind my mother’s translation program.

  Somedays, when we go hunting in the woods or head to the stream, I hope that we run into Winter. I know my mother would want to know just as much as I, how someone could survive out here without any form of shelter for miles.

  Every couple weeks or so, just when I convince myself that meeting Winter was only a dream, I’ll see a flicker of red hair flying through the woods. She only appears
when I am alone and she is always in the distance. When I try to chase her down, she disappears into the forest. The only evidence ever left behind, will be a bundle of berries or an apple placed perfectly at the base of a tree. When she leaves these little gifts, I always make it a point to leave behind a wildflower or two. I know the odds are that there really isn’t a girl named Winter and that I’m likely going crazy from the isolation, but I really don’t care. The days that I catch a glimpse of her, are the days that I love the most.

  ***

  Inside the kitchen, I prepare a rabbit for dinner. I enjoy cooking and at this point, just about all of the duties around the cottage are now shared. Most of the time, I feel more like her side-kick than her son.

  After cleaning and seasoning the rabbit, I place it in the oven and sit outside while I wait for it to cook. I attempt to not think about the food for a moment. Recently, eating occupies my mind many times during the day. My mother says it’s because I’m growing. I wouldn’t have believed her, except somehow, one day, I became taller than her. How and when this occurred, I have no clue. The process of me growing must have been overshadowed by the looming threat over our heads.

  In the living room, my mother sits in a chair next to an unlit fireplace we use as sparingly as possible. She is reading the same book that she has read over and over again. The silver cover of the thick book makes it look less old than it is. Sometimes I wonder why a person would want to read the same material so many times, but I can understand the value in printed material. I know that there are only a few of those things in the city and that that single book is probably worth more than everything we currently own. Because of this, I try to stay away from it; with my luck I’d probably accidentally damage it.

  “Adam, would you mind grabbing the blackberries for me?” She says. I start to go back in the house and remember that I ate most of the blackberries before I went to go check the traps for rabbits. I felt safe about doing this because she usually only eats them for breakfast and I thought we had more than enough time to replace them.

  I walk inside the living room and stand in front of her. “I ate them all,” I say.

  “All of them?” She sets the book on a small table, next to her chair.

  “Yea…I don’t know what happened. I was just hungry,” I say.

  She stares at me for a moment and then to my surprise, she laughs.

  “It’s okay, we’ve been just focusing on surviving for so long. We need to start thinking about ways to get more food because you are only going to need more of it.” Her voice cracks as she speaks.

  “Mom, I can replace them. I’ll run. I can go right now.”

  “No, it’ll be dark soon... and it’s not the berries, I just really wish that your father was here for you as you grow up. There are some things I won’t be able to teach you.”

  She pats me on my shoulder and sits back down. I walk to the kitchen and turn the oven on low. I know I can make it to the stream where the blackberry bushes are and come back within twenty minutes. At that time, the rabbit will ready. If I am fast enough, my mother won’t even notice that I’m gone.

  I slip out of the house and run past the tree line, moving deeper into the forest. I head to the right, passing tree after tree, before I reach the gradual upward slope that will lead me to the stream. I make it to the top of the hill and begin to hear the water.

  As I run, I notice that the distance between our cottage and the top of the hill now feels much shorter. I know this the distance hasn’t changed; it is me. I am getting faster. After a few more rows of trees and bushes, I make it to the stream. I cross a fallen tree to get to the other side of the narrow waterway and continue running upstream.

  Finally, I get to the blackberry bushes. The bushes are too dense to see through and at least a few feet taller that me. Here, the stream runs faster and if I hadn’t seen true rivers in holograms, I would think that this was as big as one. I pull the bag out of my pocket and start to carefully remove some of the berries. There are less blackberries than before, so I have to go further into the bush to find the good ones. The bushes stretch for as far as I can see upstream, so I decide to follow them up to see if there are more that are easier to grab. After about ten yards or so, I stop and find a good spot to collect some more. Behind the bushes is the base of a cliff. I look at the ninety degree slope of the cliff wall in front of me and wonder what is on the other side. My mother says that it’s the beginning of a mountain range, but I can’t remember ever seeing mountains when we lived in the city.

  After the bag is full, I start to head back and notice that there is a small gap in between the blackberry bushes, barely big enough for me to fit through. I look closer and see that the gap seems to have been cut there. I should head back soon, but if this gap is man-made, I need to know why.

  I slide through the narrow opening and behind the bushes. There is a small walkway on the other side, in front of the cliff wall. I touch the base of the cliff. I look up and notice that there is an opening in the rock wall, about ten feet up. I couldn’t see it before with the bushes in front. I set the bag of blackberries down and examine the wall. There’s a few foot holds and protruding rocks jutting out, so I know that I can scale it fairly easy. I should pick up the blackberries, head back home and tell my mother about it, so we can check it out together. I know that I am on a tight time scale; I could burn dinner or worse, my mother will notice that I left against her wishes, but something inside me wants to go take a look. I reach for the first rock and start to pull my body weight up. The rock feels solid and I slide my foot on top of one nearby. The rocks are so perfectly placed, it almost seems as if they were some sort of a ladder.

  A few years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to pull myself up the tight wall. I think again to what my mother said about me growing up and how I am faster and stronger. Part of me wonders if it is the training or if I would have gotten just as strong without it. In what seems like no time at all, I reach my hand on the floor of the cave above me. I slowly pull myself eye level with the floor so that I can see in.

  Because the sun is setting opposite the cave, I can see all the way to the back wall. The small cave is completely empty. I pull myself up and sit on the edge of the cave. The rocky walls seem pretty dry to be near a stream and the space is about as big as my room in the cottage. I look down and notice that the ten foot drop seems much higher from the top than it did before I made the climb.

  I push myself away from the edge and stand up, the view is amazing. From standing in the cave, I am able to see through the tops of nearby trees and down the incline that leads to the cottage. The little house seems so far away from up here.

  I sit back down and look at the horizon. The colors start to mix as the sun slowly begins its descent. I know I need to hurry back now, but I take a moment to observe my surroundings further.

  As I sit there on the cave floor, the large cat and Winter cross my mind. Since I know that cats can climb trees and swim if they need to, this is probably the only place nearby where it can’t reach. It makes me wonder if Winter knows about this spot and uses it for shelter or storage. I bet most animals would have a hard time getting food if it were stored up here. Thought after thought floods through my mind and without me noticing it, I grow tired as the sky becomes darker. I resolve to shut my eyes for just one second and I am gone.

  “You’re going to get in trouble,” says the voice.

  I slowly open my eyes and try to gather my senses.

  “You’re going to get in trouble,” says the voice again.

  Suddenly I remember where I am. I sit up and standing over me is Winter. She mostly looks the same as when I saw her last- red hair, pale skin and nightgown. However, now she appears taller and notably older. Only six months have gone by, but she looks as if a year or two have passed. Had I not seen her before, I would now guess that she is older than me.

  I know to her I must look confused by the situation, but I am happy to finally see her so close ag
ain. Maybe I’m not going crazy. She smiles. For the first time, I realize that she is pretty. Really pretty.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “What am I doing,” she says. “What are you doing, I don’t come into your house and ask you what you’re doing.”

  I laugh. She may look different now, but she still has the same attitude and the same accent. “I am sorry, I didn’t know that anyone lived here.”

  “Well, that’s because you are rude. The polite thing would have been to ask,” she says. She smiles again and I know that she isn’t really mad at me.

  “Okay, well just to be clear…Do you live here?” I say.

  “No,” she says.

  “Then why would you…never mind.”

  She laughs. “Aren’t you glad I woke you up? Your mother is probably worried about you.”

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  “Morning. I believe you would say that it is 7:32am.”

  I study her face to see if she is joking. That’s when I remember that, as I was getting sleepy, the sun was starting to set. I cannot see the sun in the horizon anymore and it’s light out already, so I know that it must be rising again somewhere behind the cliff. She’s right. I have been gone the whole night; my mother is going to kill me. I go closer to the edge of the cave and start to lower myself over. I look at Winter one more time, before I make my way down. She stares at me as I leave. I get to the bottom and grab the bag of blackberries. I glance up and she is still watching me from the cave.

  “Okay, nice talk,” she says.

  I look at her one last time and start to run back to the cottage.

  “Thanks for the flowers!” I hear her yell, as I sprint home.

  When I get to the cottage I notice my mother in the living room, asleep with the book in her lap. The first thing that crosses my mind after seeing her, is the rabbit I left in the oven. I go in the kitchen and open the oven, but the rabbit is gone. My hands go numb as I realize the only way it could have been moved.