Penny’s head ached. She’d known that the pain was coming for the last hour or so and the little squiggly lines making themselves known to her vision told her that it was going to suck. A lot. Since Father believed that any malady he couldn’t see didn’t require medication, her only solace was darkness and silence. If only she could make the rest of the settlement understand her need.
She was still a mile from home, halfway between her house and the closest outpost to the center of Highland Settlement, the human only village that had sprouted up half a century ago. Though “human only” was not the correct term. There were plenty of livestock, pets, insects, and various wild animals. The only thing they didn’t allow inside Highland Settlement was space aliens.
And she knew why. The attack at Bristol, the invasion of Goa, and what had simply been explained to her as the incident.
The universe had become a lot smaller and the planet a lot bigger in the hundred years since first contact. And if Penny’s father was to be believed, nothing good had come of the meeting. A few of the settlers had been caught in skirmishes on the edge of their territory, and another two had even fought in the far off galactic wars that were always raging.
And all of them agreed. Loyalty to humans was the most important thing. No alien was worth a human life.
Despite the harsh stance the settlement took, other information filtered its way to her. There was that cure for a disease that had been ravaging young children in Kansas, and the bridge collapse that had been halted by a tractor beam from a visiting alien’s speeder. Those two incidents had to be two of many. So Penny thought that the aliens couldn’t be all bad.
Though she wasn’t stupid enough to say something like that out loud, not when all words eventually made it back to her father.
Headlights flashed as an old truck bumbled down the road towards her. The engine was loud enough to wake the dead. It was over fifty years old and still ran on the first generation of non-combustion technology. Penny stepped further into the grass path to keep out of the gravel and her hair whirled about her face as the truck sped by. Whoever was driving couldn’t have seen her. As Kurt’s daughter, she knew that the driver would have stopped to offer her a ride in the hopes that she’d put in a good word with her dad.
Or maybe the driver knew exactly who she was and that she’d never handed out favors like that. She wasn’t a princess who could bend the king’s ear. She was just the boss’s oldest kid.
Penny put a hand up to her forehead and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to get any relief from the building pressure. Just one more mile, she told herself. One more mile until blessed peace and quiet.
Penny and her sisters officially lived with their father in the Residence at the center of Highland Settlement. But as both the leader’s official house and the hub of all activity for the town, it could get noisy and crowded and all together unpleasant. At twenty-four, Penny was more than old enough to take a small cabin for herself. Her sisters were still young, but as long as she kept them under her own roof and they stayed in line, her father didn’t care that they didn’t live with him.
So Penny had taken an out of the way cabin and set up rooms there. She kept food, clothes, and a heater and stayed over a few nights of every week. Usually when one of her sisters was ready to blow up and cause trouble.
Tonight she needed the cabin for herself. She needed dark and quiet and a place to rest until her headache dissolved into something that wasn’t about to split her head open.
She turned off the main road down a path that looked like it couldn’t accommodate a vehicle larger than a speeder bike. That was an illusion. The trees weren’t very dense and even a large truck could barrel through if it was determined enough. But only the most determined would even try. The path led to a few houses and terminated at the gorge over the river. Unless you lived down the road, there was no reason to travel it.
At dusk the forest was normally alive with the sounds of birds and bugs and all manner of life that lived around here. But on this night it was eerily quiet. Penny had made it halfway from the main road to her house before she even realized the oddity.
Penny stopped walking and looked around. Small lights were built into the side of the road to give her enough light to see by, even as dusk encroached. They’d been developed to have a minimal impact on the wildlife around them and only triggered when someone with a small remote, like the one attached to her keychain, walked or drove through the area.
She stood still, head pounding, and listened as hard as she could for any sign that she wasn’t alone. The trees rustled with the gentle breeze, but other than that, it was silent.
Penny blew out a breath and muttered, “Whatever.” Maybe the truck she’d seen had been too loud when it passed here. She didn’t care. She just wanted to sleep.
A few minutes later, she turned onto the small gravel driveway that led up to the cottage she and her sisters sometimes called home. It had three bedrooms, two main stories, and a basement. The kitchen had seen better days, but they had an old food processor and a cold box. The heater wasn’t strong enough to warm all the rooms, so in the winter they huddled together in the living room for warmth and slept on the softly carpeted ground.
But it wasn’t winter yet, and Penny didn’t need the heat. She unlocked the front door and closed it behind her, engaging the security system. As she set her cloak on a hook she realized that the system should have been engaged, but dismissed the thought. Perhaps one of her sisters was visiting and forgot to turn it on. She’d remind them both tomorrow.
It wasn’t the threat of space aliens that concerned Penny. No, Highland Settlement was made up of seventy percent men, and though most of them respected her father well enough to keep their hands off, she didn’t like the way a few eyed her or, even worse, her sisters. Nicole and Resa were still kids. Penny would shoot anyone who tried to lay a hand on them, and she wouldn’t be kind enough to use one of the ubiquitous non-lethal blasters.
She turned the lights on as she walked into the kitchen and spotted a canvas bag on the table, a handful of books spilling out of it. They were weatherworn and the images on the front cover were almost completely faded. But this was Nicole’s school bag. The Highland Settlement school had long decided to prioritize physical educational material over digital. Even so, Nicole was only one of a handful of students who could afford to use printed books for all of her classes.
If Nicole had made her way here, Resa wouldn’t be far behind. Neither of them stayed back at the Residence alone. Penny opened the cold box and saw they had plenty of food to get them through the night. Instead of going off to find her sisters, she set her bag down in the kitchen and climbed the stairs up to her room. If they needed her, they’d find her. But right now she needed sleep and to pray this headache went away.
***
A clatter woke her from a dream of fire and blood. She felt a burr buried deep in her hand, but when she squeezed it into a fist, there was nothing there. Penny sucked in a ragged breath and sat up, shaking her arm to wake it up. The clock told her it was just after midnight and thankfully her head no longer pounded.
The door downstairs clanged shut and the sound propelled Penny out of bed. It was too late for the girls to be out, and if it wasn’t her sisters making noise, she needed to be doubly worried. She grabbed her blaster from where she kept it stored in the locked drawer beside her bed. Boots slipped easily over the soft fabric of her pajamas and a thick sweater finished the ensemble. She didn’t look intimidating, but once Nicole or Resa got a look at her face, they’d be cowed.
Big sister powers came in handy.
Penny moved swiftly and silently down the stairs, careful to step over the fourth step down so she didn’t make the old wood groan. She paused on the ground floor and listened. But after a second, it was obvious that she was alone in the cabin. She grabbed a flashlight attachment and affixed it to the blaster. There was no reason for both of her hands to be full if this wasn’t her sisters getting into trouble.
Cicadas buzzed all around, the night louder now than it had been at dusk. But the hair on the back of Penny’s neck stood on edge and she just knew that something was wrong. She took off in the direction of the gorge. The main road was well patrolled at night and no one would have come up that way. If anyone wanted to cause mischief, they’d need to be sneaky. The only thing out this way was an old shed on the edge of the property that she’d claimed. It looked abandoned, but Penny stored an old speeder bike and some other things in there.
At this late hour there was no one outside. Penny quickly abandoned thoughts of stealth and took off at a run towards the shed. She thought she saw a flickering light in one of the windows and suspected that her sisters were doing things that they shouldn’t be. Resa was only twelve, but Nicole had long ago learned how to rebel and Resa was an eager pupil. They’d probably purloined some weed or cigarettes from one of the other settlers in the compound.
Penny wasn’t their warden but she considered it her duty to catch them when they broke the rules. Not to turn them in, or to punish them that much, but to teach them how to disobey better. Kurt had a temper and with the wrong word it could fall on his daughters.
As she got closer to the shed, she was sure that she saw a light from inside. Penny stuck her blaster into the pocket of her sweater and pushed the door open, expecting to see Nicole and Resa. They’d lit an old gas lantern and left it sitting on the floor where one careless kick could set the wooden structure ablaze.
Resa jumped out from behind the door holding a thick plank of wood and screaming as she swung it wildly. Penny dodged and lifted up both of her hands, trying to stay out of the danger zone. “What the hell?” she demanded. “Resa, it’s me. Calm down. Put that down before you hurt yourself.”
The plank clattered to the ground and Resa looked up, eyes wide and panicked. She was in that awkward stage between kid and teenager. She’d taken to wearing makeup recently and mascara ran down her cheeks as if she’d been crying. But her dark hair was wet too and there were still splotches of water on her dark clothes. It hadn’t rained in a week, so Resa should have been dry as a bone.
“You didn’t go swimming in the river, did you?” Smoking was one thing, but swimming in the river at night was suicide. If the current didn’t get you, the falls would.
“It’s not that! I’m not dumb.” Her teeth practically chattered and the room was chilly. The shed had no insulation and it was cold, especially for a girl barely hitting five feet and only slightly drier than soaking wet.
“If you weren’t in the river, how did you get wet?” Penny asked, calling on a well of patience that she hadn’t gotten from either of her parents.
Resa bit her lip and looked down, tracing her foot in the dust on the ground. “I wasn’t swimming.”
“I’ll lock you in your room for the next month if you tell me you were in the river.” How could her sister be so stupid? Sure, she was a kid, but she was normally smarter than this.
A high-pitched yelp followed by a low groan came from beyond the door to the back of the shed. Penny’s head whipped around, looking for the source of the noise. Resa kicked the chair in front of her and knocked over an old box of tools that had been sitting on it, trying to draw Penny’s attention back to herself.
“What was that?” Penny asked, stepping closer to the door. The shed was split into two parts, the small anteroom where she and Resa now stood, and the larger chamber that housed the bike and could fit bigger vehicles. “Is Nicole making you stand lookout?” she asked. She took another step towards the door.
“No, don’t!” Resa lunged forward and grabbed her arm, trying to pull her back. “You can’t, she’ll kill me.”
“I’m bigger, I’ll kill her first,” Penny promised, yanking her arm away.
“It’s—it’s not—I—” Resa stuttered and dogged Penny’s steps, trying to keep hold. But a twelve year old was no match for a woman twice her age.
Still, Penny could remember being sixteen. She looked back at Resa. “Who’s in there with her?” As long as Nicole was with one of the kids from her class and not one of the adults, Penny might be able to let this go. And if it was one of the adults back there, Nicole wasn’t the one who’d be in deep shit.
Though Penny was ready to show mercy, Resa somehow became more bashful. “It’s… well… I don’t know his name.” Resa was lying. She knew something and she didn’t want Penny to know.
Too bad.
Penny jerked back around and grabbed the door. Unfortunately for Nicole, it didn’t lock. Penny was already flinching, prepared to see her younger sister in a state of undress with one of the boys or girls from the Settlement. So what she saw instead took several moments for her to process, and when she did, her stomach dropped and her eyes widened as shock cascaded over her.
Shit. Shit shit shit.