Under Zenith Read online

  “You look like a murderer,” he pointed out, nodding to my blood-stained white dress.

  I didn’t say anything to his accusation, but shrugged my shoulders noncommittally. It didn’t matter what my dress looked like now, it would miraculously clean itself before the start of the next cycle anyway.

  Hayden joined me and stood up from the floor as well, but quickly brought his hand to the back of his head.

  “What did you do to me?” he asked, touching the bump gingerly then wincing at the sensation.

  “I might have accidentally dropped you once or twice,” I admitted sheepishly.

  “Once or twice?” he repeated incredulously.

  “It’s not my fault,” I protested. “If you didn’t weigh so much, it wouldn’t have been so hard to drag you through that stupid tulip field!”

  “I thought you love tulips,” he pointed out, pulling from another one of my memories no doubt.

  It really wasn’t fair that he knew so much about me when I didn’t know a thing about him.

  “I loved tulips,” I corrected. “After dragging a mean, unconscious man through them for so long, they kind of lose their appeal. Besides, I still have a bump on my head from that awful zombie from the first task, so you can’t really complain about your one small bump.”

  “Wait,” Hayden said, looking like he was actually concerned. “You still have a bump on your head?”

  I was taken aback by his reaction. Surely Hayden didn’t care if I had a small bump on my head. Heck, he had almost given me worse injuries than that just for fun.

  “Yeah…is that important?” I asked.

  “You should be…how do I put this? You should be ‘resetting’ after every cycle,” he explained.

  “Is that why my dress is never dirty when I wake up?” I asked.

  “Leave it to a woman to care more about her dress than her actual health,” he scoffed, walking behind me. “Let me see.”

  Hayden gathered my long hair around my neck and moved it over one shoulder, lacing his fingers through the wavy strands at my scalp gently.

  “I’m sure it’s not too serious,” he said quietly, startlingly close to me with his chest pressed against my back.

  His fingers searched over my scalp, finding the bump and sending a stinging pain through my head.

  “Ouch!”

  “Now who’s being the baby?” he teased.

  He pressed around the bump a few times before untangling his hands from my hair and sliding them from my scalp, down my neck, and finally resting them on my bare shoulders for a moment. I hadn’t realized how cold my skin was until Hayden’s warm hands pointed out the difference in our temperatures.

  Now I know I said he was awful and rude and had a temper and I couldn’t stand him…but I’d be lying if I didn’t become instantly aware of the fact that Hayden and I were standing very close together, and he was extremely attractive (when he didn’t open his mouth to speak). Really though, who could blame me for wishing he was the boy in my daydream, who liked to joke around and compliment me?

  Neither of us spoke and I had to wonder why he kept his hands on my shoulders. I wished I could see his face to read his expression, but if I turned around now, I knew our little moment would be broken; and it was the first nice moment we’d had since meeting each other. I had to take full advantage of that. It wasn’t like I got a lot of time at the end of the day to sit and think about my experiences with him.

  The snow fell and I slept.

  It may have been the most effective sleep aide ever, but it also left me no time to recuperate at the end of each cycle.

  His thumb ran across my collar bone just for a moment before he pulled away all together, clearing his throat and breaking whatever spell had fallen over us.

  “The bump isn’t that bad,” he said, sounding odd. “I’m not sure why it isn’t healing, but if you stop whining about it I’m sure it’ll go away.”

  I turned to face him, still distractingly close. He looked down at me in a way that was meant to be strong and intimidating, but somewhere in his scowl, I could see that he was hiding behind his sarcasm and insults.

  “What, are you a doctor now?” I asked him with a small laugh, lightening the mood.

  “Personal question,” he said simply, turning away from me and sitting in the rocking chair; his self-proclaimed spot.

  I went to lie down on the bed just as I always did, ready for the snow to fall and sleep to take me.

  “I almost forgot about your aversion to mixing business with real life,” I said, feeling quite put out by the lack of balance in our knowledge.

  Even though he was completely crazy and had random outbursts of rage, I had grown to trust Hayden (as much as I could trust a crazy person). It didn’t seem fair that I’d had to build that trust without knowing anything about him, yet he didn’t trust me one bit and he knew everything he could ever want to know about me. All he had to do was somehow pull the knowledge from my memory that he had full access to; without my permission might I add.

  “I don’t suppose you’re ever going to tell me who you are?” I pressed, hoping I could get something out of him.

  “I’m your Guide,” he said stiffly.

  I’d lost him.

  We’d had a nice moment and now he was back to being closed off and keeping me safely at bay. Still, it was nice to not be alone. No matter how stiff the company was.

  “Sorry you had to get shot for me to complete my task,” I said after a moment.

  Hayden let out a little laugh, still staring into the fire and not looking at me.

  “Yeah, I don’t know how that ended up being fair, but I guess if it motivated you then it was worth it,” he replied, still laughing softly.

  “It was weird,” I began. “I didn’t see anyone out in that field who could have shot you. I swear we were completely alone.”

  “Of all the odd things that little imagination of yours has come up with, I think that is the least of your worries.”

  I nodded in agreement. I still wasn’t convinced that I was responsible for these odd and breathtaking landscapes we found ourselves in every morning, but I’d take credit for it if Hayden really wanted to give it to me.

  “Any idea what we’ll be facing tomorrow?” I asked, closing my eyes as a few cold white flakes fell on my cheek bones, tickling my skin.

  “No, but I can only hope it doesn’t involve me getting shot again. Thanks for that, by the way.”

  “Anything for you, Hayden,” I joked. “Still, as unpleasant as you are, I am sad to see you go.”

  I wasn’t sure where these words were coming from and honestly, I wished I could stop them, but the snow was making me tired and my roommate Monica could attest to the fact that I said some crazy things when I was tired.

  “Thank you for that backhanded compliment,” he answered, sounding much closer to me than he had been before.

  I opened my eyes to see him standing over the bed looking at me with a bemused expression.

  “You know, I think ‘tired Isla’ is my favorite. She doesn’t whine as much.”

  “You’re the worst,” I informed him with a smile, just as my lids drooped closed one final time.

  Chapter 13

  I seemed to wake to a new sensation at the beginning of every cycle. For the ill named ‘motor skills’ task it had been the sun on my face. With the ‘reasoning under pressure’ task it had been the smell of wet earth. Today, however, the first thing I noticed was slightly unpleasant and more than a little panic inducing.

  As with the beginning of every cycle, it was sunny outside, for just a moment. Of course, in the time it took me to notice that the sun was streaming in between the slats of the window, it had already disappeared behind the thick fog. But today, a loud metallic screeching could be heard outside of the cottage.

  I wasn’t sure I really wanted to investigate something that sounded actively sinister since my last few tasks had proven difficult enough without the added pressure of so
me deadly machine. I could only imagine what that sound meant for me.

  “Isla? You’d better not be sleeping still,” Hayden called through the door, not even bothering to knock before he opened it.

  I would have been more offended, but I guessed there wasn’t much for him to walk in on. It wasn’t like I needed to change my clothes every morning, or even bathe. The perks of being dead definitely included clean clothes, a clean start every morning, and no need to eat or drink. It was kind of like being indestructible, though the bump on the back of my head did quite a bit to overturn that comparison.

  Still, it was nice going through a task where you had to scale the side of a floating island when you didn’t have to worry about taking a bathroom break halfway through.

  Talk about added pressure.

  “Morning,” I said, trying to look over Hayden’s shoulder to see what might be in store for me.

  “Are you ready to begin the task?” he asked, sounding like any progress I might have made the night before in getting through his tough exterior, was wasted. He was all business again, as usual.

  “You know, just because I’m technically sleeping in between tasks doesn’t mean I get much of a mental break from all of this. It isn’t really fair that I get just a few minutes at the end of every task to unwind. It’s exhausting,” I told him.

  “You were just sleeping. You’re fine,” he answered simply, not having any sympathy for me apparently.

  “Not physically, Hayden,” I said with a sigh. “It’s mentally exhausting. It’s like I do a task, blink my eyes, and suddenly it’s time for the next task with no cool down time in between.”

  “I’m glad we’ve started today off with you whining already. I was worried we wouldn’t have time to fit that into this task.”

  “You try constantly performing without any rest,” I mumbled, mad that he wasn’t giving me the sympathy I wanted.

  “Trust me, what I do is worse,” he replied, making me wonder, not for the first time, what he did when I was ‘sleeping’.

  Of course I didn’t bother asking him since I knew it was completely useless to try to get any information out of him that didn’t have to do with whatever task I’d be performing that day.

  “Let’s go then,” I said, lifting my shoulder then dropping it heavily in defeat.

  “You’re chipper.”

  I didn’t say anything to his remark, knowing he was just trying to get under my skin. Instead, I left the cabin to survey the surroundings of my next task. I could only hope it would be as pretty as the ones before it since the scenery was a small compensation for how awful each task turned out to be.

  If I was expecting tulip fields and beautiful floating islands I was sorely disappointed when I walked straight into a pile of trash and scrap metal.

  The metallic screeching grew louder though I still couldn’t locate its source.

  “What is this place?” I asked in disgust.

  Hayden smiled over at me.

  “Don’t look at me, you’re the one with the dirty mind,” he answered with a laugh, apparently very proud of his joke.

  I guessed when you made one joke every year or two you’d have to really enjoy it.

  I rolled my eyes at his attempted humor and picked my way through the endless piles of garbage. It didn’t seem possible that it could keep going, but from what I could tell, the refuse went on forever.

  It piled up high above me and sprawled out endlessly. More than anything it resembled a big city full of sky scrapers that all happened to be made from discarded car parts and old toasters. The foggy air looked brown and dirty, and there wasn’t one spec of greenery to be found.

  “I can’t believe this really came out of my mind,” I said, curling my lip up at the rust that surrounded me. Already, my white lace dress had a few crimson rust streaks along the sides where I’d brushed against piles of scrap.

  “Not one of your best inventions,” Hayden agreed. “Which reminds me, Task four: Ingenuity.”

  “Ingenuity?” I repeated, looking at my surroundings and feeling like I understood where this was going. “So I need to build something?”

  “Two somethings,” Hayden corrected. “One something to get you to the safe house up there,” he began, pointing to a little office building at the top of one of the trash piles.

  “And the other?” I asked, thinking I probably didn’t want the answer to this inquiry.

  “The other is up to you. But you’ll probably want to make sure it can stop that,” he said with a nod over my shoulder.

  I didn’t really want to turn around to see what he was talking about. I was sure it was the source of the screeching noise and probably something I’d have to face. Instead I continued to look at Hayden.

  “And I suppose you won’t be helping me at all?”

  “Have I helped you in any of the other tasks?” he asked rhetorically.

  “Point taken.”

  “Well then, if you don’t have any questions I’ll just leave you to it then.”

  And with that, I blinked my eyes and he was gone.

  I wasn’t quite sure where he’d gone or how he’d left, but I supposed it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that I was alone and there was something behind me that I’d need to defeat.

  Mustering what little courage I had, I turned around to properly survey my task.

  A ways away was something that looked like a large metallic spider. Its long spindly legs bent in odd places that made it walk with a bit of a limp, but it still moved quickly, looking lethal. Its body looked like a rusty yellow bumper car from a carnival I had visited when I was little, and I had to wonder if this was a mix of different memories all merging together into one big, rusty mess.

  Though this creature was troubling, the most alarming thing about it was the two ‘pinchers’ it held in front of its body. Like its legs, they were made from long metal pieces, but on the end of both poles rested two circular saws, whirring quickly and cutting through the piles of metal that blocked the spider’s path with a loud screech.

  At least that explained the noise.

  “Fantastic,” I breathed sarcastically.

  I guess compared to zombies, death by saw would be a lot quicker and less painful, right? Like I said, I could be logical.

  “Okay Tuck, what would you do?” I asked, wishing my big brother was there to help me out.

  He was nothing if not an inventor and I was sure he’d be able to look around and create something amazing in a matter of minutes. As it was, I was on my own and completely hopeless as the spider came closer and closer to me.

  I wasn’t really sure if it had seen me yet, but since its sole purpose in life was to motivate me to build something so that it couldn’t kill me, I didn’t doubt it knew I was there. Maybe it was biding its time to give me a fair start.

  “The only way to get rid of it would be to smash it,” I reasoned, acting like it was a real spider and not a huge metallic death machine. “But anything heavy enough to smash it would be too heavy for me to pick up, so that doesn’t really work.”

  I twirled my white-blonde hair around my finger absent-mindedly, actually being very calm in the face of almost certain second death. Panicking wouldn’t really get me anywhere; I knew that, and so I kept my breathing even as I surveyed the area for any possible parts I could use to kill the machine.

  A few trash piles away I could see a car suspended in midair by some sort of giant magnet. If I could somehow manage to cut the chain holding the car while the spider was underneath it, I could easily destroy it. Cutting through a thick chain didn’t really seem possible though, and I wouldn’t really have to invent anything to do it.

  I thought back on Hayden’s instructions and wondered if it was really necessary to invent something, or if simply being innovative with the materials around me would be enough to show my ingenuity. I didn’t want to risk failing the task just because I’d bent the rules a bit, but at the same time, I wasn’t an inventor. My broth
er, Tuck had always been good with building things and creating new machines out of parts from old ones, but that was a talent I sadly hadn’t inherited.

  “Are you trying to fail on purpose or do you just want to bug me?” Hayden asked, right next to my ear, causing me to jump about a mile in the air.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, slightly breathless from his unexpected ambush.

  He smirked at me, his full lips tugging up in one corner.

  “I got bored,” was his simple reply. “Plus you were just standing here and I thought maybe you’d been scared stiff.”

  “Oddly enough, I’m very calm right now,” I told him smugly.

  Of course I didn’t bring up the fact that I was slightly resigned to my death at this point since I couldn’t think of a single way to stop the spider from cutting me in half.

  “So brave,” he mocked playfully.

  It was odd to hear him joking around with me rather than berating me for being weak or slow. Maybe I had broken down his walls at least a little. Fat lot of good it did me though since I was about to die again.

  “Let’s say I don’t invent something, per se,” I began tentatively, watching his reaction. “What if I just utilize what I have around me…but in a clever way?”

  “I don’t think I’d be relying on your cleverness or cunning if I were you,” he said, sounding like the Hayden I knew and…not loved…maybe tolerated.

  “Did you come here to make my job more difficult?” I asked.

  “I came down here to ensure that you didn’t fail and give me a losing track record.”

  “But you can’t help me,” I pointed out.

  “Glad you listened to at least one thing I’ve told you,” he said sounding very put out. “And no, I can’t help you. But I can offer some moral support and very subtly inform you that the crane holding up that car you were eyeing, is still in working order.”

  “Well, Hayden Smith,” I said in surprise, making up a last name for him. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say you were offering your help.”