Vanishing Into Thin Air
A special project from Manticore....
DISCLAIMERS: Look, this is a fan fiction site!! Of course I don't own the characters or profit off of them!!!
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I might warn those with queasy stomachs...nah, that'd give away part of the story. Anyway, please R & R!
***
LYDECKER: The experiments continued successfully for almost four years. Too successfully, it turned out. For while the Z-3s excelled in their spy training, with extraordinary stealth and memorization skills, we believed that they were unable to become invisible without the electromagnets. Then, in early 2014, we discovered that the Z-3s had learned to control the invisibility on their own. Some of them were more adept than others--I recall that Z-3218 could remain invisible for the longest amount of time--but they all hid their skills from the Manticore staff. In fact, it took a security camera to show us what they had learned. The Board was angry and concerned that the Z-3s would escape like the X-5s had five years earlier. The implanted chips were removed, the experiments discontinued, and the Z-3s were put in solitary confinement, under strict observation.
The damage was done, though. On March 2, 2014, fourteen Z-3s escaped from Manticore.
When Lyra stopped running five minutes later, she found herself near a small street market, one of many across impoverished Seattle. Vendors, yelling over the general chaos of cars, trucks, and Sector Police, sold everything from live chickens to TVs to fake jewelry. The girl headed to a market stall, evidently one that sold food from the steam and greasy odors. Lyra ordered a bowl of noodles and paid for it. She was going to eat at a stool under the stall's plastic roof, but saw two Sector Police hovering a few feet away and thought better of it. The police, clad in heavy riot gear, never needed an excuse to arrest someone.
Instead, the girl took her Styrofoam bowl and fork to a narrow street halfway between the marketplace and Abe's shop. She ate quickly, leaning in the doorway of an abandoned building. The noodles were limp and flavorless, but she had learned long ago to swallow down anything edible, no matter how it tasted.
LYRA: I still remember that awful time, a few days after the escape, when I was sick and hungry and lost. My shoulder wasn't bleeding anymore, but it hurt like hell and I was having problems controlling the invisibility. Every so often, I'd look down and realize I couldn't see my feet or hands, and I couldn't do anything to stop it. I was so scared that I would freeze and Lydecker would find me, take me back.
So I was starving and weak. I had to find food somewhere, but in the mountains of Wyoming in March, there isn't much to eat. I came into this clearing and saw a dead tree lying in the middle, under a blanket of snow. Rotting wood--in survival training, they said all sorts of bugs and insects lived in rotting wood. Bugs that you could eat if you had to. At Manticore, I never planned on eating bugs; they gave us food, even if it was tasteless and there wasn't much of it. But at that moment, I could've eaten anything. So I turned the log over and grabbed a handful of grubs. The slimy, yellow things made my stomach squirm. There was nothing else to do, though....
I guess eating grubs wasn't all that bad. I didn't really taste them anyway, just choked them down. Regular food, even if it looks or smells nasty, is a piece of cake after that (no pun intended) .
As she finished the last of her noodles, Lyra glanced across the street. A man was walking toward his car, an old grey Aztek. He looked familiar...she gasped. It was Logan Cale, the guy from the store! She swiftly made herself invisible, and watched as he got into the car. He probably wouldn't look in her direction, but there was no reason to take chances. The Aztek drove off down the street, and Lyra breathed a sigh of relief, slowly becoming visible again. She also fixed his license plate number in her mind: GPB-555.
The girl deposited her trash in a nearby dumpster and headed the opposite way that Logan's car had gone, to the alley where Abe's Antiques was. It was time to get back to work.
LOGAN: When I saw her appear out of thin air, from the corner of my eye, I didn't really believe it. I thought I was, as she put it, hallucinating. But then I'd seen Max and her siblings scale walls and take out armed guards without a sweat. After seeing that, one is inclined to believe some unbelievable stuff--like a girl vanishing and reappearing. Besides, the look on Lyra's face when I asked her about it was identical to Max's the night she broke into my apartment, when I mentioned Manticore. Max....it's been two months since she died, and I still can't get over it. Sometimes I think she's coming back, that she's going to walk through that door one day and ask, What's for dinner? But I know she's not coming back. I held her in my arms that night and watched her die. God, I felt like dying after that. I would have killed myself if Original Cindy hadn't come in looking for Max and slapped some sense into me.
Maybe I'm finally losing it, after two months of hell. Maybe I didn't really see that girl appear out of empty space. Or maybe she's from Manticore.
***
AUTHOR'S NOTE: If anybody's wondering about Logan's license plate, I made it up. The letters stand for Gimpy Boy, my nickname for Logan before he got his robot legz. Hee hee!