Chapter 11

"So, what'd she want?" Colson asked, giving a curious look to Zoe.

"Yea, she was just saying goodbye," Zoe said quickly.

"Alright, then, let's hurry up," he said, looking at Ivy, who had zoned out and stared into the distance.

"First, the quest master."

"Oh yea," Colson grumbled as he jammed his hands in his pockets and trudged forward.

The quest master was a tall, serious-looking man; his suit was spotless, with not a single crease to be seen.

His dark eyes studied them as they filed in through the door. The office was clean, almost to the point of sterile.

"So," he started when they were paying attention. "According to this here, this will be your first time having an out-of-wall assignment. So it's my job to brief you on what to expect and tell you what Crater's expectations of you will be."

"Okay," Ivy said.

"Are you aware of the concept of community optics?"

Colson and Ivy shook their heads.

"When you are moving through the world, you are a representation of Crater and its people. We don't want you to act like the people outside; we expect you to act better. Because you are better. We need you to be an example. This includes how you look and how you act."

He explained the different travel methods and emergency numbers to call, specifying that the mission would be considered a failure if they were to contact them for emergency purposes. "For this, we've estimated that it will take a maximum of one week to complete. If we don't hear from you in four weeks, we will consider it a catastrophic failure on your part."

Before leaving, the quest master handed them a letter. General warnings and dangers to look out for beyond the walls of Crater. "Don't embarrass us," was the last thing said before shutting and locking the door behind them.

Outside, Colson ripped open the envelope, skimming it with his eyes, holding it out so everyone else could read it.

"Certain groups of people, poisonous plants…"

"Magic?" Ivy said inquisitively. Pointing to a line on the page.

"Yeah," Colson assured, "Particularly insidious. You weren't around when Crater taught this to us a year or so back. Things the outsiders use to control and influence others."

"They taught you how to use it?"

"No, they told us how to defend against it and what to watch out for."

"They think they'll try and trick us?"

"Maybe," he shrugged, "It'll be diff-occult to say the least," he smirked.

"Alright, so I was researching this stuff last night..." Zoe took out a large map from her backpack, "The closest town is about forty miles west from the bottom of the mountain. Once we get there, there's a train station that can get us to the coast of Montana. We can either take a taxi across the St.Peter's bridge to Oregon and take another train to LA or take a ferry directly to Las Angeles. The money they gave us should be enough for tickets there and back."

"Okay, so how do we get to the town?"

"We can just run!" Ivy said.

"Ehh, no," Colson said. His backpack was custom-made to hold the wooden sword called the bokken he had with him, which was customized to look like a hockey stick.

"I ran all the way here; it wasn't too bad of a run."

"I just don't wanna run that far. It'd be easier to get a taxi somewhere."

Walking out of the front gates, Zoe took one last look at the cluster of houses, the dorms, the fields of wheat, and the forest in the distance.

As they exited, Mason entered, carrying a large basket. "You guys are leaving?"

"Yea," Ivy grinned, "going on an awesome mission!"

"Cool, right on!" He high-fived Ivy, "well, good luck then," he smiled at Zoe; she glanced away—her face was bright red as usual—and shook Colson's hand. He walked off back into the colony.

"What?" Zoe said, noticing Colson giving her a funny look that she couldn't decipher.

A large grin crossed his face, "nothing, it's just funny."

"Whatever," Zoe huffed and stomped ahead down the mountain.

"I don't get it. What's funny?" Ivy looked back and forth from Colson, Zoe, and Mason, almost out of sight.

Colson just shrugged and walked after Zoe.

An hour later, they reached the bottom and found a road nearby. Finally getting a minivan to stop for them, Colson had made up a story about how they were on their way to his lacrosse game and somehow got lost and needed to get to the closest town. The man driving didn't look very impressed, but he let the trio inside, stating that's the town he was headed to, and if they tried any "funny business," he wouldn't hesitate to leave them on the side of the road.

They were dropped off at the edge of town, a mile from the train station. As the trio jogged to their destination, both Colson and Zoe looked around in awe. It was nothing they had ever seen before; the houses around them looked like they had come out of a dusty old-western movie. The town itself seemed to be more of a small neighborhood. A few people in rusty pickup trucks flew by, not stopping at any stop signs or the flickering street lights.

Across the station was an abandoned grain mill.

The train station was closer to a bus stop with rails. There was a bench and a small kiosk where an older woman sat reading something on her phone. She gave a suspicious look to the trio as they walked toward her.

"Can I help y'all with somethin'?" Her voice was raspy as if she had chain-smoked one hundred cigarettes a day since she was five.

"We're going to California Island," Ivy said.

"California, huh? I shouldn't be surprised." She rummaged around in the tiny kiosk. After a minute, she produced a computer in the shape of a box. Blowing dust off the top of it and using a handkerchief to wipe the screen, the dim glow reflected onto her bifocal glasses.

"What is that?"

"You're tellin' me you've never seen a computer before?" She let out a laugh that sounded more like a wet hack. "Well, from here to California Island will be one hundred forty-seven dollars each."

They each handed her their Colony ID cards, she looked at them skeptically, but they were accepted by the ancient card reading machine. "I should've known that y'all were Crater kids.

"You'll get on the next train here, and once you hit Bend, Oregon, you'll transfer over to another train, and that train will take you straight to Las Angeles."

"Thank you, miss!" Ivy said as they walked to sit on the bench.

"You look like a serial killer in that picture," Colson noted, looking at Ivy's ID card. "Like it's a mugshot or something."

Ivy laughed, "Yea, pretty cool, huh? That was the look I was going for."

Zoe took out her deck of cards and started practicing with Colson; Ivy was restless and started doing cartwheels around the bench until she got so dizzy she fell. Zoe and Colson tried to see if she was okay, but they were too busy cracking up.

"All that research just for us to be able to go directly to California Island," Zoe sighed.

"Starting off with a bang, apparently."

Eventually, Ivy bounced to her feet and looked down the track, "It's coming."

When it finally arrived, they piled into one of the cabins and found a place to sit. They found a room near the back of the train in the shape of a semicircle; the inside had an oversized white fluffy couch that matched the room's form. In front of the sofa was a round table with a quartz center and smooth wood edges. From what they could tell, only a few other people were on the train.

"Well," Zoe sighed, looking at the tickets, "We'll arrive in Las Angeles in one day, six hours, and thirty minutes."

Colson groaned and flopped face-first onto the couch, "We should've done the terrorist mission," he grumbled.

A few hours in, Colson had fallen asleep in the same position he had flopped down on. Zoe was sitting near Ivy; she had a large science textbook on the table and was furiously writing in a notebook. Ivy had made it her mission to see how fast she could run from the front to the back of the train. After the third pass, she was yelled at by an annoyed attendant.

The train arrived in a coastal town at the edge of Bend. Waking up both Zoe and Ivy, who had fallen asleep leaning against each other, the trio had made it out of the train just before the doors closed.

The room was full of people, mostly in business suits and briefcases.

"I've got a proposition," Zoe said, she'd practiced these words in her head for the past hour, prepping for all rebuttals. "I don't want to be on another train, and I think we'd all want to be there as fast as possible—the train is too loud for me anyway. Would you be opposed to spending more CCs on getting there faster?"

"Sure," Ivy shrugged.

"Eh," Colson said, "I mean, by the way you're phrasing this, it seems like it's gonna be a lot."

"It's gonna be a bit, but we will get there twelve hours sooner. But I should say, we've got a little under ten minutes until the window is gone."

Colson glanced behind her, seeing a massive screen displaying an ad for a ferry to California island. A large red countdown clock on the side said they had nine minutes and thirty seconds left until it departed. "Zoe waited to tell us. She knew that I'd have to make a split second decision, warping my thought process." He looked back to her, "Okay, how much is the ferry?"

On the boat ride, Colson and Ivy got into a push-up competition that went on so long that Zoe lost count. Ivy tried to open the hatch to the roof to stand on top of the ferry, but Zoe was able to convince her otherwise; to Colson's disappointment, Zoe had shown off some new card tricks to Ivy and attempted to help her with her homework.

"Hey Ivy?" Zoe asked hesitantly.

"Yea?"

"Do you ever think about how we basically stole this mission from someone?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I was thinking, right. How the paper was already signed and whatnot. So that must've meant that Neph was going to give it to someone, and they just hadn't signed it yet. But we stole it from them. They probably deserved it a lot more than us."

Ivy shrugged, "Well, finders keepers, I guess."

"Not always."

They arrived at a port in Long Beach. The air was warm, and the sky was dark. A few stars speckled the black sky.

Zoe let out a big yawn, looking at her watch, "eleven-thirty two. We either walk to Cassius and probably get there very early or sleep somewhere and go in the morning. I don't really care which one we do."

"An actual bed does sound nice…." Colson said wistfully, looking at the motels and apartments around them.