Fourth World

by Lyssa Chiavari

  “Yes, Ceilos.” He frowned when he said his name, and his eyes seemed to darken for just a moment. I wondered what that was about. Eos wasn’t the one who got busted with Ceilos’ girlfriend. My face flushed again at the thought. What the heck was wrong with me?

  “He will be staying with you tonight as well. The weekly forum is going to be held in the courtyard in the morning—try to be there if you can, because we’re going to be discussing your living situation.” He smiled and shut the door, and I turned to Emil, who looked like he was going to positively bust.

  “Incredible,” he said in his gruff voice. “I knew that the ancient Martian settlers were advanced, but this is beyond even my wildest dreams. And believe me—they were pretty wild.”

  “You figured it out, then? About the arch being a time machine?” I asked. On the opposite side of the room, Gios and Corin were pulling back the coverlet on their bed, talking quietly to each other and tossing uneasy glances in our direction.

  “Well, obviously. I’d already started to suspect as much, when Delia and I were studying the plans from her 3-D scanner. But it’s obvious as soon as you take a look outside. The atmospheric degradation, the red oxidation of the rocks—the presence of the Elysium mountains—it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out.”

  My dad bristled at the jab. He opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off. “Wait a minute, Delia?” I said, my voice rising in a panic. I noticed Corin and Gios had stopped talking and were staring at us with interest. I smiled tightly at them and whispered, “She’s not here, too, is she?”

  “Oh, no, no. She didn’t dare take the risk. Things back home—they’ve gotten kind of crazy since you disappeared, kid. GSAF has been watching her family like a hawk. But that friend of yours, the Pakistani kid—”

  “He’s Indian, Emil,” I interrupted.

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever. He told me that you’d given the key to Delia Randall-Torres to scan, and that it had her maker mark on it. Once again, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that she must have a copy of it. Well, she didn’t have one made. But between the two of us, we were able to put one together. And let me tell you—it wasn’t easy, getting past GSAF to the arch. They have guards everywhere. But I made a promise to Delia that I’d try to find you, see if I could bring you back.” He put his hands in his pockets, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot. “And besides… if I have to say it, I was sorry I’d gotten you mixed up in all this. Raymond here may be a dumbass, but you didn’t deserve it.”

  My dad flipped him off, and offered a choice expletive to go along with it.

  “Wait a minute, Emil,” I said. I was almost afraid to ask what was weighing on my mind, but I had to know. “How long have I been gone, anyway?”

  “At the time I left, I’d say it had been about sixteen months.”

  “Sixteen… months?!” It felt like the floor had dropped straight out from under me. “As in almost an annum and a half?”

  He nodded grimly.

  “Oh my God,” I said. It was all I could say. Sixteen months gone. Celeste would almost be in second grade now. And Mom—Mom would kill me! Being gone for two weeks was bad enough, but almost a whole Martian year?!

  “Now you know how it feels,” Dad said, his voice bitter. He crossed his arms, leaning against one of the trees growing out of the longhouse’s walls.

  “Am I missing something here?” Emil asked, his bushy dark eyebrows furrowing.

  “Time passes differently here,” I croaked. “I’ve only been here, like, two weeks. Dad was here less than a month before that.”

  Emil’s eyes widened, but then he nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose that makes sense. Our timelines aren’t synced—the only thing determining our arrival date is the coordinates programmed into this.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bright, silver key—brand new and untarnished. Freshly printed in Mama D’s basement workshop.

  I stared at it blankly for a moment, then something clicked in my brain. “Emil,” I hissed. “You’re a genius.”

  “Obviously.”

  “No, you don’t get it! We can go home with this.” I snatched the posternkey out of his hands. “We can fix everything! Gitrin can just program it to take us back to the moment I left—”

  “Are you mad, boy?” Emil ripped the key away from me, clutching it protectively to his chest. “Think! If you return to a time before the date when I left, you’ll be opening an alternate timeline!”

  “What does that mean?” my dad asked.

  Emil rolled his eyes. “The best-case scenario is that we’ll be existing in a reality different from our own. The worst case—and the most likely one, if you’ve done any research on the subject—is that you’ll create a paradox with the power to destroy the entire known universe.”

  “So?”

  “So?!” Emil roared. “So I’m saying that you cannot change history, Contreras! Under absolutely no circumstances!”

  “But if we can’t change history,” I said, “then the Iamoi…”

  “Who are the Iamoi?” Dad interrupted.

  “The people here. The ones who brought you here. The ancient Martians.”

  “Well, what about them?”

  “They wanted to use the time postern to fix their planet,” I said. “So that the atmosphere wouldn’t… you know.”

  “That’s impossible,” Emil said firmly. “They cannot be allowed to alter history any more than the three of us. The stability of the universe depends on it.”

  “But Emil, we can’t just leave them here to die!”

  “Look, kid. I don’t like it any more than you do.” Emil’s voice softened, almost imperceptibly. “But that doesn’t change the fact that this planet was a barren wasteland when we got here. History says they died, so they have to die.”

  I stared down at my feet, my ears ringing. I couldn’t let them die. All the people I’d met here, everyone in the citidomes—everyone here in Elytherios. Eos and Marin, Eliin, Corin and Gios, who just escaped from the geroi, were just starting a new life. The people and the plants and the animals—the gurzas—everyone…

  …Nadin.

  “We don’t really know what history says, Emil,” I said slowly.

  He stared at me. “What are you talking about? Of course we do. My team found the evidence here back in the thirties. Relics from their civilization were everywhere. But the planet was dead, and they were gone.”

  “Gone,” I repeated. I looked across the longhouse to Corin and Gios, curled up together in the small guest bed, seemingly asleep. “But where did they go? Maybe they didn’t die. Maybe they just… left.”

  “Yeah, but where would they have gone?” my dad scoffed. “Venus?”

  “He’s right, as much as I hate to admit it,” said Emil. “There’s no evidence of life anywhere else in the solar system besides Earth, Isaak.”

  “And Mars in our time,” I said.

  “Exactly. In our time…” Emil trailed off as the meaning of my words hit him.

  “Maybe it’s not a question of where the Iamoi went,” I said, folding my arms. “Maybe it’s when. What if they came forward?”

  Emil nodded his head slowly.

  To our time.

  I found Isaak on the edge of the village, where the gurza pens were located. The morning air was chilly and damp—water droplets from last night’s rain beaded on leaves, and small puddles dotted the worn-dirt track.

  I leaned against the wooden fence, watching him quietly for a moment. He reached into a trough, pulling out a large kela steak and tossing it to Tuupa. The gurza reared up on its strong legs, catching the meat in midair and noisily tearing into it. Isaak laughed, then turned his head slightly and caught sight of me. I thought his smile wavered, just for a moment, but then it passed and he came over to stand beside me.

  “Hey,” he said. “How are you feeling? Better?”

  My cheeks burned with embarrassment. “Yes. I’m sorry about… you know, last night.”


  He looked at me. “Why are you sorry? You didn’t do anything that needs apologizing for.” When I didn’t respond, he said, “How’s Ceilos? I must have already been asleep by the time he came in last night. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him.”

  I ran a finger along the knotty wood of the fence. “About as well as can be expected.” I told him what Ceilos had said about the man who called himself the Liberator.

  Isaak frowned, climbing up on top of the waist-high fence and staring thoughtfully at the gurzas. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would this guy target Ceilos, but then let him go?”

  “I’ve been wondering that myself.” The two of us glanced up to see Ceilos approaching us down the dirt path. He came up beside me, putting a hand on my shoulder and looking at Isaak. Isaak didn’t react, but I squirmed internally. It felt like Ceilos was trying to mark me. He obviously still didn’t trust me. I shrugged his hand off, moving several paces away from both of them, not meeting his eyes.

  “So?” Isaak said. “Do you have any theories?”

  Ceilos stared unblinkingly at me. “One. But I don’t like it.” He folded his arms and sighed. “What if I wasn’t the real target? What if it was…” He thrust his chin in my direction.

  My eyebrows furrowed. “Me? But why?”

  “I don’t know. But that comm he sent you seems to indicate that he was more interested in you than me.”

  I looked down at my feet. It didn’t make any sense. I was a nobody. True, I was the daughter of geroi, but there were two others here on Iamos and a third on one of the two colonies on Hamos. They were all younger than me, though—I was next in line for the gerotus before I failed my evaluation. But what did that have to do with anything?

  “What if it’s because of the time postern?” Isaak interrupted. I looked up at him. He’d swiveled on the fence, looking down at me seriously. “I mean, all of this started right after the people from my time started turning up. And you and Gitrin were the only ones who knew about it.”

  Ceilos made a noise in the back of his throat, gravelly and thoughtful. “That’s a possibility.”

  “The time postern is a dead end, though,” I said. “Without the plans, without a key—there’s nothing we can do.”

  Isaak shifted uneasily. “Well, actually, Nadin, there’s something I wanted to tell you.”

  Before he could say anything else, the air around us filled with a metallic sound, like the knell of a gong.

  “What’s that?” Isaak asked.

  “The call to the weekly forum,” Ceilos said. “Gitrin said that we needed to be there today.” He looked at Isaak. “Can what you were going to say wait?”

  Isaak shrugged. “No point, really. You’ll hear it at the meeting.”

  He had a fretful look about him, but before I could ask him what was wrong, Ceilos took my hand in his. “Come on, Nadin,” he said. “Let’s go together.”

  “Right.” I glanced over my shoulder at Isaak. “Together.”

  ◦ • ◦

  The central courtyard was filled with people—more than had even been at mealtime the night before. They crammed together at the long tables and milled around the edges, some men and women carrying tiny children. This had to be the entire population of Elytherios, or close to it. I’d never have imagined that so many people lived here. I saw traits I recognized from the various citidomes around Iamos, but they weren’t uniform. One man near me had the hair of one region and the eyes of a second. Another had a skin tone nearly as light as Isaak’s, and a hair color I’d never seen before—a rich reddish-brown like the oxidized dirt outside. The people here were a patchwork of different traits, a stark contrast from the uniformity of the citidomes. I swallowed, realizing that this is what Iamos would look like without the eugenics committees. What the world was like before the Progression.

  Elimination of differences was supposed to bring unity. But Hope Renewed never felt as unified as Elytherios did just now.

  In the middle of the courtyard, a group of people stood with Eos and Marin. I realized with a start that I recognized some of them: the plivoi couple from the citidome, and the Ferre smuggler. I couldn’t begin to guess how they had gotten away from the Enforcers. Gitrin was also with them, and two men that I had not seen before.

  Isaak saw them and started to move away from Ceilos and me, but I stayed him. “The man with the dark hair is your father?” I asked.

  He nodded. “And the other one is a… friend of his, I guess. He’s also from my time. And that’s what I wanted to tell you—he has a copy of the time posternkey.”

  My eyes widened. “That means you can go home! But what about…” I trailed off, glancing at Ceilos. His fingers were still laced tightly through mine. “What about all the rest of us?”

  Isaak smiled tightly. “I have an idea about that.”

  Before he could elaborate, Gitrin hurried over to us. “Good, good, you’re here. You’ll have to sit by me—I’m sponsoring the two of you for citizenship.”

  “What, already?” I asked.

  She tugged her earlobe. “Every week we vote at the forum on where to place the new refugees. Everyone is taken into a household, where they learn about Elytherios and how we live here. It’s just a formality. The other members of my household agreed to allow you and Ceilos to stay with us, so we’ll be voting on that.”

  I glanced over at the two strangers. Isaak was talking to them in English—I caught snatches of their conversation, but they were far away, and the language was too new to me to understand much. “Isaak’s father has been staying in the guesthouse all this time?”

  Gitrin frowned, following my gaze. “Yes. He was here before I arrived. They hadn’t placed him yet, though, because no one knew what to do with him. It’s irrelevant now, I suppose. Now that we have the posternkey, we’ll be able to send them home soon enough. With the data stored on there, you and I can make the modifications to one of our shipping posterns.”

  I started to nod, then caught myself and tugged my earlobe instead. The chatter around us was starting to die down, and Gitrin ushered Ceilos and me over to a crowded bench near the courtyard’s center. The woman I recognized as the smuggler from Hope Renewed stayed standing, and she cleared her throat, looking out over the crowd. When her eyes ran over mine, I shrank into myself, remembering the way the rioters had shouted, “Death to the geroi!” I could already tell that that reflex would be difficult to overcome.

  “Degiim, friends,” she said in a much gentler voice than that she had used the first time I’d seen her. “N’elytherios tou shenos. We have much to discuss at this week’s forum, so thank you all in advance for your time.” The crowd murmured agreeably, and she went on, “We’ll start with our first pair of new refugees, Corin and Gios. These two are a husband and wife from Hope Renewed who were attempting to have a family. After being declined by the”—her voice hardened—“eugenics committee multiple times, they attempted to use Ferre to have a child extralegally. I was running a shipment to them when we got caught by the Enforcers, so Syrin and I ran an emergency evacuation.”

  Another woman with short, light-brown hair and amber eyes—traits I recognized from Radiant Tomorrow citidome, on the far side of Iamos—stepped forward. This, I assumed, was Syrin. “We’d be happy for them to enter our household, if the citizens are amenable.”

  Eos tugged his earlobe and stood. He called something out in the old language. I couldn’t quite translate it, but I remembered it from my studies with Gitrin—a phrase from one of the old regional republics, before the Progression. At his words, the people around us all stood. Apart from the other outsiders, I didn’t see anyone who remained seated.

  Ceilos leaned over to me. “Stand to be counted,” he whispered. I tugged my earlobe. Like Gitrin said—it was a vote.

  The Ferre smuggler smiled. “Wonderful. Thank you, friends.” She turned to the plivoi couple and said softly, just barely loud enough for me to hear, “Welcome. After the forum, Syrin and I will get you settl
ed in our household.”

  As they took their seats again, Gitrin rose beside me. Like the smuggler, she began, “Degiim, friends. Our next refugee pair also comes from Hope Renewed. They are two youths, raised in the underground, who are in desperate need of sanctuary.” I noticed that she didn’t name us, nor did she mention just who we were. I wondered if that was deliberate. “Like most of us, they have been persecuted by the geroi. They have escaped from a very dangerous situation, and risked much to come here. I would like to request they be allowed to stay in my household, if the citizens are amenable.”

  The crowd before us had fallen silent. Unfamiliar eyes stared at me, their expressions wary. The smiles and pleasant murmurings that the plivoi couple had received were nowhere to be found. I shifted awkwardly in my seat, and Ceilos put a hand on my knee.

  Finally, a woman near the back stood. She glanced at me, then said, “Gitrin, you cannot conceal it from us. We all know that these children are geroi’s blood.”

  Marin stood up. “Come now, Giulin,” she said, a smile pulling at the corner of her lips. “We are not the geroi, with their sects and castes. The doors of Elytherios are open to all who wish to embrace a life of liberty and equality. Remember who I was. Everyone can change, and they deserve that chance.”

  A man rose from the bench across from us, holding a sleeping child against his chest. “But you were not geroi’s blood. These two will not be permitted to simply disappear. The geroi will be looking for them—they probably already are. If they find them here, we’ll lose everything.” His arms tightened protectively around the child. “Every moment we allow them to stay here, our families are in danger.”

  The crowd began to whisper among themselves. The eyes boring into the back of my neck burned with suspicion. My pulse raced, and I kept hearing the rioters screaming in my ear. Death to the geroi.

  “Friends, please,” Gitrin implored. “They are children. They cannot help their parentage any more than the rest of us can.”

  Before I could think twice, I had leapt to my feet. “Stop calling me a child, Gitrin,” I snapped. “I am enilin and I am old enough to take responsibility for my own actions.”