Out of Cryo | A Horizon: Zero Dawn Fanfiction

Chapter 15: Practice

"So, you're just going to keep your elbow like I showed you."

"This is hard."

Aloy took a step back and gave me an unamused glance. "It takes practice, Becks."

"Then you do it."

Aloy sighed. "No, because I've been doing it for years and you're going to have to learn eventually."

I blew a strand of stray hair out of my face as I tried to adjust my stance to mimic how she had shown me earlier. "Like this?"

"I-no, Becks. That's not even close." Aloy approached me from the side and adjusted my arms again. "There. Stay like that."

"I look stupid." I thought learning archery was going to be badass – I'd get to help Aloy and Erend hunt and not feel completely useless (despite Aloy's objections, I still wanted to do more to help since Heph had taken over much of the role of talking to the other subsystems). Instead I was just discovering that I had terrible posture and that my aim was shit.

"No, you look like you're in a good position to take a shot," Aloy said. "Now, hit the target."

I looked ahead. Several paces directly in front of us stood a prop made of packed straw. On the ground nearby were the fallen arrows that represented my failed attempts to hit the target.

"Come on, you've got this, Becks."

That put a small smile on my face. Would be nice to impress her. It was such a payoff seeing the look on Aloy's face when I had figured out the code for the interface with HEPHAESTUS, or when she had listened to music from my Focus for the first time. If I could impress her at a skill that she was an expert at...well, that was definitely a good thing.

I released the arrow, the tension in my arm coming undone. It soared through the air so fast that tracking it was nearly impossible. We watched as it grazed the top of the dummy target and landed in the dirt just beyond.

I couldn't help but let out a frustrated groan. I lowered the bow. "Well, that was fucking fantastic."

Aloy didn't seem to be as bothered as I was. "That was actually much better than before. Probably your best attempt so far."

"But I missed," I pointed out.

The redhead gave me a disbelieving look. "If you think you're going to master the bow in a day, Becks, you're wrong. Now, again?"

I pretended to pout. "I'm hungry. Let's eat instead."

Aloy laughed, the sound of it melodious and addicting. I love her laugh. If all I had to do was say nonsensical stuff to get her to do that, then maybe life here wouldn't be so shitty after all.

I had recovered well enough from my ordeal in Maker's End – my ribs had finally healed and all I had was a small scar beneath my bottom lip from accidentally cutting it. There had been no word from Jenna or Ted and we weren't attacked by Eclipse on our trip to Meridian or to the subsystem locations afterward. In the days that followed we had visited DEMETER and POSEIDON, the systems responsible for restoring the flora and oceans on Earth. Both were located deep within the jungle south of Meridian, which meant another "fun" trip in the fucking humidity but it ended up being worth it. Neither system was equipped for vocal interface but Heph was able to communicate with them in its own way and we had retrieved the subcores without any problem. No Eclipse, no death-defying tricks, no kidnappings – it was almost as though things were going right.

All that was left was to find AETHER, stop by MINERVA and pick up its subcore at the Spire outside the city, and finally ELEUTHIA. Easy, right?

No. Of course it's never that fucking simple. HADES was not in the list of coordinates Heph had and APOLLO was in the hands of a psychopathic maniac. We didn't even know if GAIA could be rebooted after its repairs were complete without all of the subcores. Aloy didn't seem to want to focus on that little hiccup, though. I think she figured the less distractions we had right now, the easier it would be to get the subcores were knew about and then go back for APOLLO. Or maybe she just didn't want to deal with it. It was a conversation that didn't come up often.