A FEW MILES FROM PROXIMA CITY
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 3:12 P.M.
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So much grit and perspiration had turned her hair into a mess, matted and with no volume.
With her arm, Malin wiped up the sweat that slipped down her red cheeks. She carried back the bangs and half-closed her crystalline eyes. The image that her head was a pressure cooker throwing jets of steam from her ears fluttered through her thoughts. No wonder. They had been out in the open for almost three hours in the middle of the desert and far from people’s eyes, under a dazzling clear sky and the hot midday sun, shrouded in a temperature that didn’t drop below ninety degrees.
Fortunately, she had followed Adam’s advice, and had put on a sun shield protective lotion before leaving the apartment; she would have been red as a shrimp, if not.
Focus on the tan you’re getting, dear, and you’ll see that the rest is—
That miniskirt, though… Damn!
When she wanted to cheer herself up or do something as simple as moving her legs, there was her miniskirt to remind her that imitating other women’s fashion sense had never worked for her. She was so used to wearing pants that walking around with one of those things made her feel naked and pretty ridiculous. That had been a recommendation she should have dismissed the moment Adam had suggested it to her, since he certainly hadn’t given it with her comfort in mind. Men, ugh!
It’d have been better to bring the shorts she’d worn the previous afternoon. Who cares if it was dirty?! In the desert, there weren’t clothes that would escape intact from dust and sweat. It was enough to see the deplorable state in which her shirt was to realize it was a true dirtiness certificate. With so much perspiration, the fabric attached to her body; and she had to shake it now and then so that her breasts wouldn’t stand out so much, and to get some air there in the process.
With so much perspiration, the cloth clung to her body; and the elastic straps that crossed over her chest—holding the Daedalus thruster that she carried folded on her back—didn’t help make her feel more comfortable, either.
“Why don’t you take it off?” Adam prompted; he was bare-chested, about sixty-five feet from her.
“Because I’ll need them to fly, you dummy.”
“I wasn’t talking about the thruster, you dummy,” he said and pointed to his own shirt, which he was wearing as a skirt, held up by the elastic of his short pants.
Malin answered with a thumb gesture he interpreted as a Markabian variant of the popular middle-fingered sign.
“Maybe I will when you grow boobs!” she said. Then, she took a deep breath and stored in her lungs all the air she could steal from the poor blowing blizzard. She got into an attack position; the soles of her sneakers made the dry floor creak. It was time to resume the game.
Adam smelled his armpits and found that the deodorant had worn off. He shrugged. What difference did it make if he smelled bad? He needed to keep burning calories and oxygenating his brain; he needed to forget his experience with the Satellite Agency, in the infuriating White Box of Surprises; and the only way was to deplete his last reserves of energy. Nothing else mattered now.
He wiped the perspiration from his eyes and, just like Malin, brushed away the strands of hair that fell on his forehead. His hair was so damp with sweat that it was easy to push it up. That was better. His view had to be clear; enough bothering he had with the sun facing him and the deceptive mirages the heat drew on the horizon to add one more thing to his list of annoyances. He’d forgotten his dark glasses and cap in the car, and he was not coming back for them.
“Ready?” Malin asked, raising her arm to reveal a ball of energy in her hand.
Just as a baseball hitter prepares for the pitcher’s shot, Adam tapped on the heels of his sneakers and spread his legs. Then Malin threw her Photia as if it were the ball.
“Go!”
Adam spotted the radiant blue sphere coming toward him, despite having the sun on his face. He made a cone of white flames in his hands, turning it into a kind of bat, and rejected the ball, disintegrating it in a burst of sparks that splashed across the desert.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Ha! In your face!” he shouted and celebrated the triumph with a ridiculous dance.
“I’m glad to see you got over the rough patch from a few hours ago.”
“Not at all,” he said and mimicked the batting motion. “I just imagine that every Photia is Hemdell’s face or the face of that Gabor character. You don’t know how sweet it feels to see them pop!”
“That is when you hit them,” she said and threw two more bombs.
Adam countered them with the hand-bat technique.
“Ha! My Kappa radiation eats your—what was it called? Powered Fluctuating Discharge? Yes! Remember it, little girl!”
The wind lifted a curtain of dirt that camouflaged the arrival of a third Photia; he didn’t see it in time and received it full in the chest. The discharge threw him with his back to the ground, wrapped in a shower of blue lights.
“I don’t get why you rejoice.” Malin walked toward him. “Out of fifteen shots, you’ve only knocked down three. Your aim is horrendous.”
It was true. And the worst part: he was getting used to the electric tingling of the bombs and the rudeness of the falls.
“And be thankful you’re immune to my Photias and you only get their impulse, or right now we’d be running to the hospital,” she added.
Adam lay there and let the hot wind cover him with desert dust; he was so dirty that a little more dirt on him didn’t make much difference.
“I have an idea,” he said; discovered he had dirt in his mouth, spat, and stood up. He wiped the grime off his face and shielded himself from the sun with his arms. “Let’s drop this and go see a movie or something. What do you say, huh?”
Malin backed into position.
“We’re not going anywhere until you try to fly again. Today is the last day we have left to test your skills. Who knows if, after tomorrow, we’ll see each other again.”
“Phew, dear! Fatalistic much?”
Malin prepared a Photia and threw it at him to force him to react.
Adam disintegrated it with a punch, jumped into the sky, and stopped about fifteen feet above the ground—a little higher than he had originally intended. He still didn’t regulate the force he had to apply to propel himself in the air, and that annoyed the hell out of him, although he wasn’t doing it badly either.
Eager to continue defying gravity, he did some backflips in the air, and this time he didn’t lose his balance as it had happened the previous times. Hovering, filthy, and with his hair tousled with dirt and sweat, he felt powerful and reckless. Pointed his middle finger at the blue vault of the sky and let out a rude laugh.
“This is for you, Gabor!” he yelled at nothing and patted his abdomen. “My abs will peek through this belly once again! You’ll see them shine in all their glory!”
“What are you talking about, you crazy buffoon?”
“And you! Take me down if you can, little girl!” Adam challenged her. When he looked down, though, he found that Malin had disappeared, and that there was a small shadow casting now along with his own on the surface of the desert.
The girl was behind him. Was she fast! He hadn’t even seen her deploy the thrusters.
Adam licked his lips with a taste of dirt and blood and turned to find her hovering about thirty feet above him with the thruster deployed behind her back; two small chrome wings. He looked into her eyes and guessed what her intentions were and immediately left the almost euphoric state he’d gotten into.
“Hey! You know what happens if you get too close to me!” he said. “We tried it yesterday, and it wasn’t fun!”
“It will be if you manage to stay away from me this time.”
“That’s the problem, Malin. I don’t think I can fly faster than you if—”
“You will!” she said and swooped at him.
Adam moved away, putting several feet of distance between them. Malin halted in midair and lunged in his direction again. He flew the other way, but she followed him. And that way, they traced a dizzying zigzag across the sky, one after the other.
“Remember,” Malin said. “The secret is keeping your distance from me!”
“I know that!” he said and made an effort to do so.
“Six feet!” she shouted. “Keep that distance between you and me, and everything will be fine!”
Adam increased his speed. His T-shirt ended up coming off the elastic of his short pants and went off straight at Malin as a cloth rocket—she pushed it aside with a smack.
“Six feet!” she insisted. “Six feet!”
The hiss of the Daedalus thrusters grew louder behind Adam.
Faster! Faster!
Even being away from him, Malin stretched out her hands as if at any moment she would catch him by the ankles.
“C’mon, soldier! I must not go into your control zone!”
“Well, then stay away!”
“That won’t happen!” Malin said. “Fly faster!”
Adam looked back over his shoulder: she was still there. She was making it pretty hard.
“Faster!” she shouted.
“I’m trying!”
“Faster!”
“I’m trying, damn it!”
But she was faster and burst into that bubble—intangible, but as real as the wind itself—that surrounded Adam. Malin entered the invisible space covered by the Kappa radiation he emitted, and the hiss the Daedalus made as they glided through the air got silenced. The chrome wings continued to glow silver, though they were only lights; the antigravity engines were still running, but for some reason, they no longer generated momentum.
Malin managed to project herself a few more feet thanks to the speed she had gained, but even though she had already moved away from the radius occupied by Adam’s radiation, she couldn’t reactivate her thrusters and started losing height like a downed glider. When she completely lost her drive, she fell from the sky like a circus acrobat who had just lost her grip on the flying trapeze.