Ice Phoenix

That night, Terrana went to bed early. As she lay there fiddling with the pearl around her neck, she wondered whether she would have the same dream again. She hoped so! Like a giant TV in her head, she would get to see strange people in weird worlds doing different things.

The pearl gleamed in the candlelight, distracting Terrana from her thoughts. A memory came to her. Black pearls were pretty common on her part of the island, and the women from the nearby village would gather and sell them at the market every week. They weren’t very expensive because most of these pearls were tarnished in some way or another, marked by a ridge, hole, or bump.

Terrana didn’t particularly care for them either, but the one around her neck was special. Puddy had given it to her. It was quite large, covering her thumbnail easily. The dolphin had dropped it into her hand one day and, without knowing why, she had asked her father to make a clasp for it. She liked the way it had formed into a teardrop and no matter which way she turned it, it always caught the light. Because it was from Puddy, it was especially sentimental.

Even as she admired the pearl in the candlelight, she was already falling asleep. Eventually, her head fell to one side and drool trickled down the corner of her mouth and onto her pillow.

Images flashed by, one after the other. A beautiful, alien woman sitting astride a strange, winged animal. A city where colourful and outrageously designed buildings reached the clouds. There were trains that were sleek and white, running on different levels above the ground. Footpaths moved on their own so people didn’t have to walk, and tiny islands floated in the sky.

Terrana studied the people with something akin to awe; never in her life could she have imagined such a melting pot of alien races. She was looking at large insects wearing helmets, dodging air traffic. A frog twice her height whirred by, a jetpack strapped to its shoulders. She could have also sworn she saw a jellyfish drive by in a car without wheels on the road below her.

A strange feeling dogged her — something didn’t feel right about the dream on this occasion. She didn’t feel like an outsider as she usually did, looking in from another world. This time she felt included in the dream, and as she dangled high above the city watching everything go by, she experienced another strange sensation. She could feel the wind. She could feel the exhaust coming from the flying cars. Her heart clenched. Suddenly, she didn’t feel very safe.

“It’s just a dream, you won’t really fall,” she told herself. She inhaled deeply to quell her rising panic. A sound, unlike any she had heard before, almost withered her insides to jelly.

“Get off the tracks you !”

Terrana nearly dropped to the ground then. Wobbling around like a beginner on skates, she spun around and saw a train bearing down on her. Even though it was far away, it was travelling really fast. Terrana felt her heart flee her body, most likely to search for her stomach.

In her head, she could imagine the horrified faces of the train drivers who were frantically depressing the horn in a desperate attempt to alert her to the danger. They didn’t just alert her, however, but probably everyone else in the entire city.

Cars and their startled drivers came to a screeching halt on all levels of the city as the alarm sounded. Train passengers on the surrounding tracks pressed their faces up against the glass, hoping to catch a fleeting glimpse of the perpetrator; some even pulled their cameras out, hoping to record something.

A few bystanders spotted her and pointed.

“Move, stupid girl, move!” they yelled.

It was all too much for Terrana. She closed her eyes, trying to force herself to wake up, but it wasn’t any good. She could hear the screaming, the blaring horn, and she opened her eyes again. The train was almost upon her. Desperately, she tried to lurch out of the way. As her limbs flailed wildly in the air, she realised with a sinking heart that it wasn’t helping. She was stuck.

Dinz and Bob, the two train drivers of the M71 bullet train, had been laughing over something when Bob noticed the early detection signal. He stood up and walked over to the main control panel, pulling up the track screen. His eyes widened when he spotted the girl hovering beneath the fluorescent lit tracks.

“Ey, Dinz — we got a hoverer! Better flash her to the cops. They’ll soon be on her.”

“Yer have it. Initiating scan of the soon-to-be jailbird.” Dinz pressed a bright yellow button on a smaller control panel next to him.

A three dimensional image of Terrana popped up in front of them and as Bob leaned in for a closer look, he noticed something wasn’t right. The girl lacked shoes; her attire was strange and out of place, and she seem terrified.

“Hey Dinz, is it me or is she missing a hover-board?”

His partner took a closer look and his eyes widened. “She ain’t got no stizmo either! Dunt say she’s caught in an anti-grav bub!”

By stizmo, Dinz meant a flight-pack capable of carrying a single person over short distances. However, teenagers tended to fit them with additional boosters that allowed them to fly through the many levels of the city. This was illegal and caused endless headaches for the city’s transport department and, as such, heavy fines and even jail terms were levied on all offenders.

The colour drained from the conductors’ faces as they realised the girl on the track was helpless and incapable of moving.

Bob was sweating. “Dinz,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper, “We gotta deploy the bot.”

“De-deploy the bot?” Dinz looked scared. “But we ain’t dun that before! Will it work?”

“We don’t have a choice. It’s either that or splat!”

“Yer right, Bob. We gotta do it now.” Dinz flipped over the glass cover on the emergency panel where a line of coloured switches blinked rapidly. Then swallowing nervously, he depressed a grey switch. A whole second went by before the train shuddered and a panel on the outside slid out of position to reveal a chute.

Something shot out of the chute and sped for the helpless girl. At the same time, the entire alarm system went off and the conductors were forced to cover their ears.

“Get off the tracks you ! What do you think this is? A frigging cleaning service?”

“They should really change the message,” said Bob, flinching.

“Bob, it ain’t gonna make it!” Dinz could hardly hear himself over the alarm as he watched the rescue bot veer off course. “And we ain’t gonna stop in time either. Bob, this is gonna be our first rail kill in the history of this city!”

They could only watch in horror as their train bore down on the girl.