Book: Perspecktive

by Pakari Yacer

/Get to the gate. The rising screams and the reverberating deaths pushed her onward, and still her mother's voice rang. "The gate, my love. The gate!"/ Lost in the Vex Networks. Not a fate any would choose. But Lei finds that, somehow, something in that eternity of data is guiding her. So she moves on, ever deeper. /Sea of Pyramids, Sky of Spheres, call my heart so that she hears./

2. Chapter 2

Loralei sorted her belongings.

First, there was the gun. It caught her attention whenever she looked in its direction, with its straight lines and dangerous aura. It was a small gun, but was still too big for her hands.

There was the small store of food. It would maybe last her a week, if she didn't eat it quickly.

Then the radio. Whenever she twisted its knobs, there was static with the faintest of recognizable sounds. Voices, shouting and whispering. Beeps and clicks, rhythmic and alien. And the music.

Lei had turned it off quickly after hearing the music.

Next, a small solar-powered heater. It was charging her flashlight now. A breeze pushed past her, and Lei shivered. She pulled her mother's shawl around her shoulders and tried not to look at the world around her. Focus. On what was here, now. The things she could control.

Lei had a knife. It had been her fathers, heavy and straight, with a serrated section near the grip. It would be useful for making fires, her father had told her. She slid it from its sheath and turned the blade in her hand. It shimmered and reflected. She put it back before she saw things.

Then, at the bottom, there was the book. She slid it out carefully; it had been old when her father was a child. It was a tome of fairy tales, of Queen Mara, of the Raven and the Crow, of the Arrival. She opened the blue cover, and a picture looked back at her. Her heart clenched. It was of she, between her smiling parents, on the day of their arrival on the asteroid. There was another photo; in this one her father held them a little too tightly, and her mother's eyes shone with joyful exasperation while five-year-old Lei laughed.

There were more pictures, but she closed the book. Lei didn't want her tears staining them. She shoved the book away.

She forced herself to stand up. Lei paced back and forth, arms clutched close. Stopping in front of her belongings, she huffed. With gritted teeth, she forced herself to look around. She stood on a plane of dark glass, smooth in places and rough in others. Spires of dark rock rose into the sky, and on the horizon a great pyramid lay, tilted against the horizon. There was a sun, but it was angry and large, orange instead of bright yellow. She was the only moving thing, besides the wind.

She had entered through the gate, and as soon as she had caught her breath, the metal portal had dissapeared. So, would she have to keep moving? There was nothing to be gathered here. Lei gathered her things, except the heater. It was not as cold as it had been, but it was not warm, either.

She stayed, in the shadow of one of the spires, for four days. Then on the fifth, when the second-to-last apple was eaten, she packed her heater, looked at the pictures one more time, and started walking.

The glass was not bad to walk on, if she avoided the sharp areas. After hours, she came to an edge. Not the edge of the glass, but the edge of the world. As Lei had approached it, the horizon simply vanished. She kept going. Maybe it was a way out.

She stopped about fifteen feet from the edge. Lei thought about going closer, and then suddenly she was. But she wasn't the one moving! Lei watched, eyes wide, as another Lei strode confidently towards the edge of the world. The only difference between them was a slight dullness, like the other Lei was seen through a sheet of gray glass.

Then the other Lei reached the edge. She looked back at the real Lei, with eyes deep and blank. Then she reached out to the emptiness. With a ripping, hollow scream the other Lei was shattered into lines of streaming light. The real Lei cried out, falling back on the hard glass. Nothing else happened, and after a time Lei stood up again, clutching herself tightly. She would not go that way.

Instead, she walked along the border of the world. She came to a ring of metal, much smaller than the gate she had arrived in. But at her approach, it lit up, graphs of weaving light beckoning her closer. She took a breath and waited, watching to see if another fake Lei would appear. None did, so Lei shuffled in her too-big shoes, and entered it. Cold data swallowed her.