Apocalypse Before Finals by Julie Steimle (electric book reader txt) 📕

Zormna awoke and rubbed her eyes. For a moment she didn't know where she was. She had expected to wake up in that ridiculous frilly bed she had inherited from her great aunt, but she gazed about and saw her old Zeta district quarters. Her heart rose in her chest, and she sank back on her bed. She was home.

Thinking a moment, Zormna sat up and glanced at her attire. Sweaty and dirty, she was still wearing the saggy P.M. uniform over her t-shirt and jeans. The entire image struck her as funny. Immediately she began to undress. She extracted her tennis shoes from the giant boots she had crammed her feet into, dropping both pairs of footwear on the ground. Tossing the People's Military uniform to one side, she dropped her Pennington high school t-shirt and her blue jeans onto her bed with a little more care. Zormna immediately hopped to the drawer, hoping there were still uniforms inside.

There were. And undersuits.

It had been ages since she had worn an Arrassian undersuit, but Zormna extracted it like she had found gold. Stripping off her last earthly garments, Zormna quickly slipped on her old home clothes, feeling the wonderful fabric against her skin. No more pinching elastic. No more sliding bra straps. No more uncomfortable seams in the fabric. No more poking underwires. It was just heaven...and it felt weird.

Emerging from her room, Zormna trotted happily down the old corridor, grinning from ear to ear. When she met up with the first cluster of soldiers who exclaimed their joy at having her back and more their concern about the rumor that she had come with the criminal Jafarr Zeldar, reality set in once again. Home was not the same. Zormna had forgotten everything in her delight, and now it came back to her. She was home only because she was the last Tarrn. She had come home to fight.

Zormna walked more quickly through the corridors to the map room where she hoped to find Jafarr and Alea Salvar. She heard them before she could see them.

"...And that's your plan?" Alea Salvar's voice echoed through the door. She had not time to notice it before, but Salvar's voice had gotten deeper in the past year.

"It will work," Jafarr's annoyed tenor replied. But for some reason, hearing him made her feel better.

"Yeah, right. The guards there will see right through it," Alea Salvar snapped. "No wonder you have so many scars! I'm surprised you are alive at all."

"So speaks a sheltered Surface Patrol officer. I'd like to see you endure a P.M. hot stick beating and live. These scars did not come from being caught by them. No P.M. has caught me yet."

Zormna flushed and walked into the room. She stood at the door watching the two men whom she had hoped would find some common ground once she was gone. But Alea Salvar looked tired and surly. Jafarr likewise glared with irritation at the soldier across from him, just as worn out as the former. He also was no longer wearing the P.M. uniform. That had been slung on a far table in the back of the room. He stood out in his tee shirt and jeans as a double declaration that he really didn't belong there.

"Yeah, well what about your face? You are such a liar!" Salvar snapped back.

Jafarr narrowed his eyes severely. It was glare Zormna had not seen in a long while. "The scars on my face did not come from a P.M."

Zormna flushed, marching in further. "For heaven sakes, Jafarr, I told you I was sorry."

Both boys stopped and looked at Zormna. However, she didn't look as annoyed as she sounded.

"Have you come up with a plan?" she asked the both of them, walking to the glowing map table. Illuminated on the table in digital grids was the map of the museum. It wasn't one of Jafarr's paper maps, but a file he clearly had dug up.  

Alea Salvar thumbed irritably toward Jafarr. "He has a plan, but I think it is reckless."

Zormna nodded. "I see. And what is it?"

With swelling disappointment Alea Salvar frowned. "But it is reckless. Dangerous."

She nodded. "We are at war now. Everything is dangerous."

Jafarr grinned and lifted his eyebrows as if to say I-told-you-so. Alea Salvar gritted his teeth.

"So what is your plan, Jafarr?" Zormna asked.

Smiling, Jafarr pointed to the map. "If you look at the map, the only way in is through the front doors...which I always found kind of off. The air vents are small piped-in tubes--done the old way so there is no way of crawling in there. Most of the machinery in the building is self-contained. No paneling can be shifted and it would take forever to move the machinery that does connect other buildings to it. That means we need to create a diversion to allow your soldiers to enter the museum to search for the Kevin."

"Which will probably last only five minutes tops because by then the People's Military will figure out what we are doing and attack us," Alea Salvar interjected. "Five minutes is not enough time. Reckless, I tell you."

Jafarr glared at him. "But I was saying, if we have an idea where to look that would limit our search and save time..."

"...But how are we supposed to get my father OUT? What if he is weak? What then? He'll get killed," Salvar argued back.

Sighing, Jeff shook his head. "That, I don't know. But we can figure something."

"That's what you found out this whole night?" Zormna said, dumbstruck. "Only that?"

Both boys flushed.

"We barely could get the map. The city records were sealed off and..." Alea Salvar started to mumble.

"I had to steal it," Jafarr said shrugging. "We've only been able to come up with this just the last three hours. You were out only for five."

Zormna gazed at them both, shaking her head. "You mean you have been arguing this past three hours."

Jafarr rolled his eyes and nodded. Alea Salvar looked guilty. He glared at Jafarr as if any argument was his fault.

"Let me look at the map," she said, leaning over the table.

Both boys stepped aside, perhaps the only thing they did together that entire night. Glancing at the glowing digital floorplan, Zormna gazed at each of the rooms, thinking.

"I have never been in the museum," Jafarr murmured next to her. "I couldn't tell you anything about it."

"Alea Arden has," Alea Salvar replied from her other side, "But we cannot get to him because he had locked out major portions of Alpha when the P.M.s came and took the Kevin. Though technically he is now acting Kevin, the P.M.s retaliated and cut off all com access to Alpha district. His last communication was Patrol lockdown."

Jafarr looked up over Zormna's back. "How do you shut off access to an entire district of the Surface Patrol? Don't you have backup systems?"

Alea Salvar shrugged. "Old hairlines. Easily listened to. But Alea Arden got weird three months ago and argued with my dad about something. And I have not seen him since. He sort of locked himself away on his special projects, but I think he's sulking."

"Alea Arden does not sulk," Zormna muttered, peering over the map.

"Alpha still ran though." Alea Salvar shrugged. "So we weren't suffering."

"You were sulking when we got here," Jafarr cut in.

"Shh!" Zormna hissed, which was good too since Alea Salvar clenched his fists to punch Jafarr for his wisecrack. He stopped when she cut in.

"Look at this," she said, pointing to a large hall. "What room is this?"

Jafarr leaned over the map and read it. "It says it is the arboretum--look there."

She saw the words and nodded. "That's the room with the plants, right?"

Jafarr nodded. "Yeah, I guess that's what an arboretum is. A room with plants in it."

Zormna turned her head and glared at him. He smirked back at her.

"Smart mouth," she said and looked back at the map. Then Zormna straightened up. "Alea Arden and I put an experiment in there not long before I was stuck on the moon base."

Alea Salvar's eyes widened at her. "You've been in there?"

Zormna nodded. "Twice."

Both of them waited, hoping for good news.

"I don't remember much about it though," she said. "The first time I was there, I was a kid still with my mother and my father. Jafarr, you've seen that picture, right?"

Jafarr blinked as he thought about it. "Picture?"

"The one in my bedroom, with my parents and me. That one was taken in the arboretum." Zormna pointed at the map. "Somewhere around here near the shed. I remember the shed."

Alea Salvar glanced at Jafarr who had started to nod while vaguely recalling the photograph. "What picture? I haven't seen a picture of your parents. Have you been hiding it?" Salvar looked severely hurt, but Zormna barely saw it.

"It was my great aunt's. I never saw it until I got to America," she said, shaking her head like a mother chastising a whiny child. She pointed at the map. "Alea Arden and I went around here and placed a pair of our experimental transport disks among the potted plants. You know, the emergency evacuation system we were working on."

Alea Salvar rolled his eyes with a groan. "Oh, that. Father said that experiment was dangerous,"

"What experiment?" Jafarr asked, leaning between them.

Alea Salvar smirked at him, glad for once Jafarr was out of the loop.

"Oh," Zormna chuckled at the recollection, almost with embarrassment. "It was Alea Arden's and my pet project. We wanted to eliminate the use of ships in space folding for individual transport. Instead of being in a ship to fold space, you can just stand on a folding platform, which is about the size of a hot plate. And you can fold space to another prearranged set of disks."

"Highly dangerous," Alea Salvar said again.

Zormna glared at him. "I have used it. It is safe."

But Alea Salvar looked about as skeptical as she was determined. "Well, Father did not approve of it, or of you using it. You could have gotten yourself killed."

"But it's perfect," Jafarr murmured. His eyes stared into space, thinking of the possibilities.

Zormna smiled and nodded to Salvar. "See?"

Alea Salvar glared at Jafarr. "And what's so perfect?"

"It's the perfect way out of the museum," Jafarr replied. He turned exclusively to Zormna, ignoring Salvar who swelled in protest. "Zormna, where would that pad send you to, the one in the arboretum?"

"A way out of the museum..." Following his train of thought, Zormna nodded slowly.  "Yes, uh, it currently takes you to Alpha district, but we could change the coordinates if we want."

"Could we transport into the arboretum?" Jafarr asked.

Zormna shook her head. "No. That one we haven't activated yet. Some P.M.s came by when we were there, and Alea Arden put one of the potted plants on it to hide it. I haven't looked at it since. And to be honest, I don't know if Alea Arden has gone back. Not that he wouldn't work on the project without me, but...it was sort of my baby and I know more about it than he does."

Jafarr frowned, realizing that he had to think of another way in.

"But we could activate it and send from it," she said with a hopeful grin.

"No! No! No!" Salvar finally exploded. "You are not sending my father back on that contraption. He wouldn't like it!"

"Well, what do you prefer?" she snapped back reprovingly. "That he get shot up by P.M.s? Think for a second. We can hide in the arboretum. There are plenty of places in there with all those plants, and that shed, and...." Suddenly Zormna's expression changed. She stared at the map again.

Jafarr finished her argument. "The point is, we can get him out, and that is the best way."

"Jafarr!" Zormna