Wilson's Trailhead

The keening whir of a quadcopter sounded in the distance.

A sentinel.

Maia stood obediently, lifting the back of her wrist to her forehead in a salute that displayed the UV tattoo on her inner arm. The drone approached and scanned her. A green light flashed as her tattoo was confirmed to match her tracking chip.

“Maia Salvager. Property of Winterborne Industries. Radiation manipulation and metal detection skills” the machine intoned.

It hung a few feet from her face, uploading her credentials and her position while the drone confirmed her position remotely.

“Location within parameters” the machine continued. “Please present your findings for scanning and transport.”

Maia pulled the day’s treasures from the protective satchel on her shoulder. The non-modified dump pickers had already scoured this landfill several times, so there wasn’t a lot. However, Maia’s modifications made it so she always found something. There were two sets of iridium-coated hands from 1960s alarm clocks, three corroded AAA batteries found in the remnants of a stuffed bear and 11 lithium buttons from a collection of musical birthday cards that were left in the bottom drawer of an abandoned blue dresser.

“Thank you for your donation,” the machine continued as Maia loaded the carrying pouch at the bottom of the copter. “Please begin your journey to your holding cell soon. Daybreak is in 90 minutes. You may spend another 30 minutes collecting power source materials before you go.”

The whirring began again, and Maia watched the silhouette of the small drone as it crested the closest trash pile. The truth was, she never really needed a warning about the daylight. She could feel the sun’s radiation hours before the fiery ball crested the horizon, driving everyone indoors and underground as another day of deadly heat began.

This landfill had taken three nights to comb completely, and there was just a small patch remaining. She closed her eyes and listened for the hum of radiation; her nose twitched as it felt for the magnetic fields of nearby metals. She had to be done in an hour; there was one more site to go and she didn’t want to wait an extra night if it wasn’t here.

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Elena was the first volunteer in her neighborhood for the genomic exploration program. The recruiter had told her that her genome was ideal and that if she agreed to the process, they would not only give her family enough money to move up north, but also a dream home. He promised them a paradise-- four underground bedrooms and a subterranean family room with plenty of living space for her parents and six brothers to stay out of the daytime. Now that Canada had finished building the wall to keep them out of the cool lands, the coyotes were mainly using submarines to British Columbia. It was too expensive to consider such an option, so the recruiter was nothing short of a miracle.

In the early days, they didn’t sterilize them first. It was long before the mod owners became afraid of their creations and stopped communicating with them except through drones and devices. It was long before the modifieds lost their status as humans with rights and became trademarked as property. It was still early, when the area was still divided into states, 50 of them, and not by affliction. Before the lands became Char, Storm, Sere, Plague and Flood. It was before the world turned its back on the country and left it to go feral.

The recruiter moved Elena into a converted college dormitory with about 100 other 18-year-olds. Though the outside doors were barred closed, they were free to wander into one another’s rooms and congregate in the living areas on each floor. They told her to stop using her name. Instead, they gave her a number, 091.

Mostly, the mood was cheerful in the dormitory, even as a cohort of students was herded out of the dorm each day and into the nearby hospital for testing and gene therapy shots. They were the left-behinds-- the families who hadn’t had enough money to buy their way into Canada or who weren’t lucky enough to be chosen for serfdom in the New North corporate compounds. The recruiter had done a good job in finding the kids who both fit the profile and who were grateful. Almost.

The MyLanders were the saddest story of all when the migrations began; they honestly had believed that they were on the same side as the corporate lords. As a team, the two groups fought against the efforts to contain the scorching sun. Again and again, they voted against funding the help that they would need, trusting that it would not happen and that the corporations they protected would save the day. When the corporations moved to NewNorth and all but shuttered the country, the betrayal hurt them deepest of all.

A week into Elena’s stay, a group of the MyLander kids tried to stage an uprising when the medical aides brought the day’s patients back to the building. One of them grabbed Elena, wrapped her tight to his chest with one arm, and pressed the blade of a steak knife from the cafeteria flat against the front of her throat.

A lanky boy with green eyes and curly hair, the one who Elena had noticed had a dimple when he smiled, came to Elena’s aid. The knife-wielder was nervous, and his wrist trembled as he held the knife against her. The green-eyed boy, 211, found a moment of distraction and wrenched the arm away from her at the wrist, twisting it until her attacker dropped the knife.

The uprising did not last long once the corporate army arrived. The instigators were marched outside. A few minutes later, a quick series of booms was heard in the distance. Elena told herself it was a stray thunderclap, but she knew it wasn’t.

That night, she thanked the boy with the green eyes with the only thing she had to give.

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The holding cells were separated by modification. Maia was with the metalheads; some were mainly magnets while others could sense other fields like she could. Few could do both. The coals could walk the forest skeletons of the Char without getting burned and put out fires that got too close to the compounds. The gillies could breathe underwater; the freshies would comb the waters of Flood for abandoned treasures and do salvage in the rivers. The salties would work on coastal walls, checking them for cracks. There were a few anadromous ones, saline chameleons who could go back and forth, but they were rare and most bodies didn’t take to the splice. Pressurekins could sense atmospheric pressure, replacing the defunct satellites as early weather warning systems. Cacti could store water for weeks, and their sunproof, rough skin meant they could walk most lands, even Sere, during the day. They served as scouts, tracking the unchipped when they were vulnerable.

At night, the metalheads would update the touchmap on the wall of their cell, marking each landfill as done once they had scoured every square foot and assigning themselves a new location. Maia marked her map and placed her name on the last landfill on the paper list from her pocket. The others stared at her when she chose it; Quarry dump was rumored to be in the territory of a feral tribe of chipless mods- the ones who had revolted, escaped, and created their own nomadic tribe. She would not be welcome.

She left while the sun was still up. The transport dropped her in a mountain valley a few miles away so that she wouldn’t alert the ferals. While she tried to blanket herself from the heat as she hiked, it was a sweltering trip.

The moon was cresting on the horizon when she sensed it. Eight feet down, under a pile of appliances. No longer cautious, Maia levered a washer out of the pile, causing a landslide that almost exposed the tiny object. The crash rang out through the valley. It took another 30 minutes to make a hole big enough to reach it. At last, she felt her fist tighten around the heart-shaped surface.

They did not wear metal, so she didn’t sense them at all. All at once, hands were pulling her up and out. Her satchel was yanked away and her arms and legs were bound. A rope was attached to her waist, a concrete block at the other end. She could see the ruff of gills expand around their necks as they marched her into the water, securing her to the bottom of the quarry pond. They didn’t stay to watch.

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When Elena’s bloodwork came back with signs of pregnancy, the company put her in a special room away from the others. The father hadn’t survived his splice and she didn’t really have any other friends in the building, so that was fine. She had mastered a lot of her skills by the time her daughter was born, and the company decided to let her keep the child with her and teach her how to use her skills.

Elena’s daughter was four when the companies mandated family separation. By then they had learned that family bonds led to tribalism, escapes and violence. Her daughter was sold at auction and a departure date was scheduled. Elena attempted a midday escape, her child swaddled at her chest, but she couldn’t outrun the cacti. “Find me!” she whispered to her daughter as they pulled them apart for the last time.

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Maia’s gill slits were smaller than the gillies’ traditional ruff, so most people missed them. Plus, nobody had ever seen a double hybrid; none of the double splices from the labs had survived. She waited until there was no more splashing, no more sounds of feet on shoreline gravel, before she began to untie herself.

She swam silently to the furthest part of the pond, away from the landfill and toward a path between the hills. She pulled herself into a crevice behind a boulder slide before she dared to sit. From her sock, she pulled the locket. Inside, the radioactive fields of several elements beamed their message.

“Close your eyes and feel their positions” her mother’s voice echoed in her head. “Can you draw the shape that the elements are making here?”

Young Maia drew the dots in relation to one another. “The big dipper!” she cried triumphantly.

“Yes Maia,” said Elena. “Exactly.”

“When they take you tomorrow, my love, know that I will come back for you. I will place the path in a locket. It will be a trail that only you can understand, my little ant. When you start seeing these elements in the landfills you visit, try to map them into the shape of the big dipper. You’ll know it’s time to look for my message.”

Maia’s mother had told her about a story, called “Trailhead,” from a man named E. O. Wilson. It said the ants made trails that were invisible to people but that were used to send signals to everyone in their family. Maia and Elena’s gift allowed them to make their own trail of trace radiation, a signal to one another only.

The elements on one side of the locket made up the constellation Cassiopeia, with a north star for reference. On the other side, a bit of coal said to head toward Char. A bit of iridium told her which star to start with. It was another map.

When the sentinel drone flew by, Maia threw a rock and got it down in one shot. They would think it was the gillies; it would buy her some time to get away. She concentrated on the wireless signal emanating from the tracking chip, willing it to self-destruct. After a long minute, it complied.

“I’m coming, Mother,” Maia said. “It’s time to find you at last.”