Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Just inside the Rez fence was a ring of forest, an inner, concentric circle, which they reached after almost an hour of walking. Once they were inside this wooded strip, the vibration of the fence field filled the air, reminding Luck that the border would fry you in three seconds if you touched it (though it had been years since anyone had been stupid enough to do that). They would have to locate the sentries on the Rez side of the border, of course, or give up the search.

  “Keep an eye out, in case they’re throwing rocks,” Starlock muttered as they made their way through the trees.

  The illicit pleasure of their walk was forgotten now. Luck was on edge, expecting the rest of whatever trick the sentries had planned. But where the trees died out into tall grass, only yards from the Rez fence, they discovered there was no trick at all.

  “Are you calling them?” came a voice, very close, and clearly in pain.

  Starlock lifted an arm to stop Luck from walking beyond the trees. And now Luck saw it: in that tall grass between the trees and the fence, not ten feet away, was a sentry—and he was badly wounded.

  “My goodness,” she whispered as Starlock raised a finger to his lips.

  The sentry looked hardly older than Luck and Starlock. Somehow his wings had held out long enough to break his fall and keep him alive, but they were torn and lay around him in a ragged nest of enormous crimson and silver feathers. One of his wrists hung backward limply. His legs, sticking out at unnatural angles, were obviously broken, though his stretchy black suit of clothing was holding them together.

  “They’re not answering!” came a different voice, this one frightened and desperate.

  Starlock pointed and Luck followed his finger. Beyond the grass, on the other side of the smudged air of the border fence, were the two other sentries, a male and a female. The male was standing, his magnificent purple wings tucked close to his body but apparently intact. He was the one who had caught the female in midair, Luck realized, and he seemed to have landed with her outside the Rez border, while their comrade had fallen inside. The male was tapping at his chest—where the sentries kept their radios—without result. The girl was curled on the ground like an infant in her tight black suit, her wings missing entirely.

  “Keep trying,” said the sentry in the grass, who could not properly see his companions because of the tall stalks around him. “Come on!”

  “My radio’s not working at all now!” the sentry outside the fence called back, his voice rising with panic. “It’s gone completely dead.”

  “Then fly over and get me,” the nearby boy begged.

  “I can’t fly over!” the far sentry cried. “It happened to you and then Christine. What if it, like, happens to me while I’m in the air? And I fall—boom—and die?”

  “Don’t leave me in here with the Protos, man! Could Christine do it? Is she—”

  “She’s broken up like you. Wings and both ankles,” the far sentry said. “Why do you think it took me so long to find you? I had to carry her on foot. And her radio’s not working either!”

  Luck had never been so close to sentries before. Though their bodies—other than their beautiful wings—looked similar to Protos’ bodies, their skin, hair, and eye coloring were as lovely and strange a mix as Luck would have expected: golden hair, shining copper hair, jet-black hair, skin that was the perfect shade of bronze, or that graduated from light to dark beginning at the right hand and ending at the left, with a metallic sheen that glowed in the sun. Luck wondered if humans were permitted to mix with each other however they wished.

  “But I heard you reach them on the radio when we first landed.” That was the girl beyond the Rez fence, speaking for the first time, in a voice dulled by pain.

  “They told me to wait!” cried her companion beyond the fence.

  “So—they’re coming, then?” the nearest sentry asked, lifting his head hopefully, but still unable to see over the grass. “Thank Tadd! My legs are killing me….”

  “No, they—they told me to wait before they could take my report,” the far sentry explained. Luck could hear his struggle to keep his voice steady. “It sounded like, like there was an emergency on base. They didn’t even let me finish explaining!”

  “Should we do something?” whispered Luck. They had come to find the sentries, but she hadn’t expected to find them in need of help; it was unprecedented. The rules they would break by getting any closer gave her pause—being reported to the Proto Authority seldom turned out well for any Proto. And yet, if the sentries’ radios weren’t working, surely Protos would be expected to offer assistance, as they would to anyone in pain?

  “It sounds like their radios were working a few minutes ago,” Starlock whispered. He looked just as uncertain as Luck felt. “Other humans must be on their way here to help them.”

  But when the sentry in the grass muttered, “I’m so thirsty,” his misery made up the Protos’ minds for them. Luck and Starlock shared a look and then emerged from the trees.

  “Hey!” the sentry on the other side of the fence called, spotting them immediately as they waded through the waist-high grass toward his fallen companion. “Stay away from him. He’s hurt!”

  “We saw you fall,” Starlock said calmly, holding up his canteen. “I was going to give him water. Is that all right?”

  “Oh, thank Tadd,” the near sentry said.

  “Just—you know the rules!” the sentry beyond the fence said, and not kindly. “Keep your paws away from him!”

  Luck bit back an angry retort—Protos did not argue with humans—and Starlock knelt and poured water into the injured boy’s mouth. The sentry drank and drank, but his eyes, an unusual gray that contrasted starkly with his bronze skin and golden hair, stared at them defensively all the while, as if they might bite him. (Gray eyes, Luck thought. Like her friend Skylark’s grandmother. And his skin had coloring like that of her friend Riverbend and her family. Up close, in this human at least, she could see the distant relationship between their two species.)

  Where the sentry’s enormous wings had attached to his back, where his muscles for flight should have been…there was only a frothy sort of paste, like reddish whipping cream that had dried. Luck thought the paste might once have been his muscles—perhaps only an hour ago when he was flying—but now even the paste was breaking up, leaving gaping holes in his back and along his shoulders.

  When he’d finished drinking, the sentry’s eyes fell halfway closed, and he began to moan.

  “I have a radio,” Starlock said, holding up the walkie-talkie so the sentry on the other side of the fence could see it. “Can I call someone for you?”

  “How far can that thing reach?” the sentry asked dubiously. “Forty feet? You might as well send a smoke sig—”

  But he stopped speaking and started yelping as a large piece of his left wing fell off. It was followed by a cascade of flesh and feather from both wings, until, only moments later, his wings detached from his body entirely and landed on the ground with two heavy thumps.

  “What’s—what’s—” the sentry cried, hysterical as his body fell apart. He cried out incoherently, and his lower jaw opened wider and wider…and then it fell off. When he tried to keep speaking, his tongue lolled freely, horribly long without the jaw to confine it.

  “Oh, that’s bad,” whispered Luck, appalled. “It’s so bad.”

  Starlock, with his usual focused alertness, cycled briskly through channels on the walkie-talkie, but Luck couldn’t wrest her eyes from the sentry. The boy—for he truly looked like a boy now, maimed and terrified—whimpered and grabbed up his fallen jaw. Like the wings, it appeared to be disintegrating, the white teeth becoming more and more prominent. And though he was clearly experiencing pain, Luck was fascinated to note that it was not as much pain as she would have expected. It was as though humans had evolved beyond agony.

  “Shit, shit
, shit, shit,” cried the girl on the ground. “Is my face going to fall off too?”

  The sentry near Starlock and Luck croaked, “His face fell off? He had his jaw done…so he could taste things on the wind.”

  “So our mods are failing?” the girl asked.

  “Duh,” the near boy said. He had given up trying to see his companions and seemed to be curling in on himself.

  “Help is coming,” Starlock told the wounded sentries as he clicked off the walkie-talkie.

  All three looked at Starlock hopefully, which gave Luck a pang of unease. She had heard him reach the town hall, and it was the Rez medic who was coming, not a human doctor.

  “But how will we get to those two?” Luck whispered, indicating the sentries outside the border of the Rez.

  Studying the shimmering energy field, Starlock said matter-of-factly, “We have to turn off the fence.”

  2. THEY UNDRESSED BY THE LAKE

  We have to turn off the fence.

  The words filled Luck with a nervous charge. Throughout their childhood, when lying in a field, or sitting up in the branches of a tree, or wading in the river, Luck and Starlock had imagined turning off the Rez fence. That fantastic act had been the start of dozens of imagined adventures that took the two young Protos off the reservation and out into the wide world beyond.

  “Really?” Luck whispered.

  “How else are we going to get them?” Starlock asked her.

  There was no recognition in his face that they were about to enact a childhood daydream. His expression seemed to say: I’m only doing what the circumstances demand. Fence posts stood every fifty yards, tall, gray steel, and Starlock was all business as he looked up at the nearest post.

  “We’ll take you inside the Rez until someone from your base comes to get you,” he told the three humans. “Do you know how the fence works?”

  The sentry without a jaw shook his head (tongue lolling) and shrugged: Not my job.

  It took effort not to flinch from the boy’s disfigured face, but Starlock was mostly successful. “There will be power controls at intervals along the perimeter—on your side,” he explained, pointing at the line of fence posts which disappeared in both directions. He’d begun his training as a Rez engineer and had learned more than enough to understand this—though in truth, Starlock had been speculating on how the Rez fence worked since he was a small boy. “You find one of the controls and use it to turn the fence off.”

  The maimed sentry looked for support to the girl lying at his feet with two broken ankles. Luck could read the thought passing through the boy’s mind: We are not supposed to let the Protos out. But the girl roused herself enough to mutter, “Go. We need a doctor and we don’t have radios.” So the boy with no wings and no jaw walked off to the north.

  * * *

  The sentry in the grass had lapsed into a fitful sleep, and Luck and Starlock had retreated some distance from him to wait. Starlock was looking through the fence at the landscape beyond, and Luck, who had trouble guessing his thoughts these days, followed suit, gazing at the forests and mountains beyond the Rez, as she had done every day of her life.

  “Do you think we ever would have done it?” she asked.

  “Snuck off the Rez to explore?” he whispered, knowing exactly what she was talking about. He shook his head. “The fence is forty feet high; the sentries were always watching.”

  “But if we’d found a way over the fence, like we used to imagine. A human slingshot. A glider. And if we’d found a way to avoid the sentries. Would we have done it? Just to see?”

  “Probably not,” he said, considering. “I mean…what’s out there? And how long would it take the Proto Authority to find us? And what would they do to us when they found us?”

  “Yeah,” Luck agreed. Those had always been the questions. They’d asked them all the time when they were younger, but at some point they’d stopped asking, because there were no answers.

  After three quarters of an hour, no humans had shown up to rescue the wounded, but the voices of other Protos began to float out from the forest. Luck and Starlock stood, and when they did, Luck caught a fresh look at the sentries. The skin of both—the boy inside the fence and the girl outside—was beginning to wrinkle deeply.

  “Starlock, look,” she whispered. “They’re getting worse.”

  “By the minute,” he agreed, alarmed. It appeared that they might shrivel away altogether.

  The Proto voices were getting louder, and now Luck could make out a large group of people walking through the trees. Soon a crowd began to emerge into the grass near the fence. There were four hundred forty-seven Protos living on the Rez and about fifty had put down their work—planting and fishing and building and sewing and teaching—to follow Alderwoman Twinfate down to the border, responding en masse to Starlock’s urgent call. This was not surprising—fallen humans were an unheard-of occurrence.

  The crowd of Protos, which displayed all of the differentiated skin colors, eye colors, hair colors, bone structures, and facial features that made them so interesting to the humans, had gotten loud and boisterous, but once the group caught sight of the wounded sentries, everyone fell silent.

  Each person on the Rez, down to the smallest child, had gazed up at the magnificent humans flying overhead and had thought, Beautiful, but arrogant. Now two of those perfect creatures were falling apart before their eyes, and no one knew what they were supposed to feel.

  “Has anyone reached the Proto Authority yet?” Starlock asked. “Their own radios are dead.” He was gesturing at the closest sentry and took several steps away from Luck as he spoke. Luck soon saw why: there was a girl in the newly arrived group who was staring daggers at both of them. That was Moonlight, of course, the girl with whom Starlock was to be Paired.

  “The Authority isn’t answering me on the radio,” Alderwoman Twinfate said, finding her voice, which sounded flustered. The alderwoman was more than a hundred and twenty years old and nominally in charge of the Rez. “I’ve tried to reach them several times with no success, which has never happened before.”

  “There’s a third sentry,” Luck added, keeping her gaze pointedly away from Moonlight. “He’s turning off the fence, so we’ll be able to get him and the girl from outside.”

  At the words turning off the fence a murmur traveled through the Protos. Alderwoman Twinfate took a few reluctant steps toward the border. She rubbed her weathered chin, looking uncomfortable as she surveyed the injured humans. “What did you say the other one was doing?” she asked, peering at Luck.

  There was no need to answer because, at that moment, the steady hum of the fence went silent. Every set of Proto eyes—dark brown, light brown, golden brown, blue, gray, and green—turned toward the Rez border. Where there had been shimmer and heat and distortion, there was suddenly nothing. The fence was off. The tall metal posts were still in place, but the world on the other side was no longer on the other side. It was right there.

  “The Proto Authority will be here any moment,” Alderman Twinfate warned, as if her people might immediately run off, though no one showed any disposition to leave the safety of the Rez. “Probably by evening they will be back. This is a strange day, but tomorrow everything will be as it always is.”

  No one could have thought anything different. And yet when Luck stepped over the scorched line where the fence had been, to retrieve the sentry on the other side, her eyes automatically sought Starlock’s, and she discovered his eyes searching for her. She understood at once: he had been wearing a mask of indifference earlier to keep himself from becoming too hopeful about crossing over the border of the Rez. Now their eyes met and she saw that this moment meant as much to him as it did to her.

  Luck braced for loud sirens heralding the immediate arrival of Proto Authority vehicles. But the world was quiet.

  * * *

/>   The boy with no jaw came back. Once he was in sight of the gathered Protos, he fell to his knees in complete exhaustion. Luck and a few other Protos helped him onto a stretcher. She avoided the sight of his gaping jaw but couldn’t help noticing that his skin was withering, just as his companions’ was.

  All three humans were carried away on stretchers by Protos, while Alderwoman Twinfate continued to say “I don’t know what we can do for humans” over and over. Starlock didn’t walk with Luck as the crowd headed back to the center of the Rez. Moonlight had laid claim to him, as she always did when Luck was anywhere nearby, and was holding his hand at the far edge of the group.

  Moonlight was almost a year older than Starlock, and thus two years older than Luck. At nearly eighteen, she was womanly in every way it was possible to be womanly. Her breasts were large; her hips were shapely, and they tapered to a slender waist. She had full lips and small, dainty hands, but worst of all, she matched Starlock: rich brown skin; large, dark brown eyes; and tightly curled black hair that she wore longer than Starlock’s and brushed into an impressive halo around her head.

  Moonlight and Starlock would be Paired as soon as Moonlight turned eighteen, which was only a few months away. (No, not months. Five weeks, three days away, Luck thought.) Everything about Moonlight screamed that she would bear Starlock a dozen children; she would make him love her no matter what; and their children would be beautiful and faithful to their particular genetic traits, which meant they would be able to keep their babies. Of course that was ridiculous—no Protos were allowed to have twelve children. The Rez would be overrun in a few generations. But still.