The Pioneer

by BRIDGET TYLER

  My brain is racing. Ord called this a challenge. I think it’s a coup. What happens if Ord loses? Pel obviously isn’t a fan of humanity. What if she decides to just kill us all? Then the team will initiate Stage Three, and Tau will be ripped apart.

  I swing on Dr. Brown. “We need to get out of here while there’s still time.”

  “Ord has been challenged before,” she says without taking her eyes off the fight. “And he knew it might happen again if he brought you here. He chose to fight for us. I won’t abandon him now.”

  “What if he loses? What happens to us? What happens to Tau, if we don’t get back to the Landing and stop Stage Three?”

  “Ord won’t lose.”

  A trio of Takers emerges from the root garden behind us, dragging Tarn between them. As they march him under the dome of roots, he trips one of his captors, tackling them into a roll. They grapple. For a moment, I think Tarn’s winning. But then the Taker flips their positions, grabs him by the back of the head, and smacks him face-first into the rocky cave floor.

  Tarn collapses.

  Ord sees it happen.

  He shouts something so hot it feels like the sound is burning my skin. Pel takes advantage of his distraction, swinging her hammer like she’s hitting a home run with Ord’s skull.

  Ord flies into one of the carved white pillars and slides to the floor in a heap.

  Is he dead?

  No. I can see his chest heaving. He’s alive, but not for long. Pel is stalking toward him, ready to deliver a killing blow.

  A bright, tangy sound blasts past me. I twist to see Tarn pushing himself up to hands and knees.

  He shouts the battle cry again. It’s still reverberating as Ord rolls to his feet, knife low, already charging. Pel throws herself backward, but Ord’s knife catches her hip, tearing through armor and flesh. She screams, stumbling as Ord hurls himself into an airborne roll that drops him behind her. Before Pel can turn to meet him, Ord drives his knife into her shoulder.

  Pel reaches back and grabs Ord’s wrist. She spins, sending him sliding across the courtyard. This time, Ord rolls back to his feet and charges Pel again without hesitation.

  As the fight surges on, Tarn’s captors drag him to his feet and march him to the corner where the other Takers have us contained.

  “Tarn!” I whisper. “Are you all right?”

  “I will heal,” he says. “If my brother wins this challenge.”

  “What if he doesn’t?” Jay says.

  “Then Pel will be leader of our people,” Tarn says. “It is then likely that she will kill me before I have the chance to recover.”

  Crap. I was right.

  “So this is a mutiny?” Chris says.

  “This is a rightful challenge,” Tarn says. “Any one of the Sorrow may challenge our leader, if they believe he or she is taking us in the wrong direction. The one who survives the challenge is Followed thereafter.”

  “We have to get out of here,” Leela says.

  “And go where?” Jay says. “This cave system must go on for kilometers. We’ll never find our way out alone.”

  “Dr. Brown knows the way,” I say.

  “That’d be super useful, if she was still here,” Miguel points out.

  “What?” My head snaps back to where I left the Ranger, but she’s nowhere. I can hardly believe the words, even as they slip out of my mouth. “She left us.”

  Ord roars, pulling our attention back to the fight. He’s got Pel pinned against the dais at the center of the dome. She’s lost her knife and hammer. He looms over her, spiked staff high. But before he can strike, Pel swings her legs in a roundhouse kick, knocking the knife from Ord’s hands and locking her thighs around his throat. With a piercing scream she flips herself up and over his head, using her momentum to slam him backward into the stone steps.

  Pel scrambles to her feet again and dives for her hammer.

  Ord doesn’t move.

  “We have to get out of here,” Jay says.

  “They aren’t just going to let us leave,” Chris says.

  Jay nods in grim agreement. “I’m not planning to ask for permission.”

  Ord finally staggers to his feet, but he’s leaning hard on his staff. He’s hurt. Badly. Pel circles him, tossing her hammer from hand to hand. Taking her time, like a cat entertaining itself with a mouse. Ord stumbles again, collapsing to his knees before painfully pulling himself back up.

  He isn’t going to last much longer.

  I’m not the only one who thinks this is almost over. The Sorrow around us are breathless with anticipation, our guards included. If we’re going to go, now is the time.

  Jay points to Leela, then to the blue Taker. Leela nods.

  He looks at me. I read the silent question in his face: Ready?

  I nod.

  “Okay then.” Jay throws a hard elbow into Green’s torso, then grabs their staff and slams it into the blue Taker’s chest, sending them flying. Before the acid-green Taker can react, Leela drives her fist into their face. Green reels backward. Leela grabs their knife hand and twists, snapping their wrist. The green Taker roars in pain as she flips their knife away into the root garden.

  Green staggers back, clutching their arm and moaning. The sound boils over my skin. The red Sorrow rushes Leela, but Jay swings his stolen staff again, knocking Red’s feet out from under them. Red’s head slams against the stone, and they slump back, motionless.

  “Move!” Jay shouts. “Go, go!”

  The others follow him as he plunges into the garden. I twist, searching the crowd for Dr. Brown one more time. We need her if we’re going to have any hope of finding our way out of the caves.

  “Come on!” Leela shouts, grabbing my hand and pulling me after Jay. I yank her backward as a black-robed body stumbles across our path.

  It’s one of Tarn’s guards. Tarn is locked in combat with the other two. And he’s losing.

  I have an idea.

  I shake Leela off and hurl myself back through the roots.

  “Jo! What the hell?” Leela shouts, but there’s no time to explain.

  She darts after me anyway as I race back to the red Sorrow, who is curled in a ball on the cavern floor, moaning. I search the root clusters behind it, but I don’t see what I’m looking for. Come on! Where is it?

  There!

  I snatch the Taker’s staff and charge back toward Tarn. The staff is even heavier than it looked, but I ignore my screaming muscles and pull it up over my shoulder.

  “Tarn! Duck!”

  Tarn hits the floor as I swing the staff, the same way I saw Pel attack Ord minutes ago. The barbed end cracks into the skull of one of Tarn’s attackers. Tarn rolls with the other, flipping them over his head into a cluster of roots that close around them like a net.

  “Come with us, Tarn!” I shout. “Please!”

  He’s about to answer when Pel bellows. We both look up just in time to see Pel swing her hammer into the small of Ord’s back. It connects with a wet thud. He falls. He doesn’t get up.

  Tarn keens a hum that makes me want to weep.

  “Please, Tarn,” I say. “You can’t help Ord now!” I ache for him. I know the weight of abandoning a brother to die. “You can’t help him, but you can help us. And we can help you,” I say. “Ord wouldn’t want you to die here too.”

  A Sorrow shrieks behind me. I spin just in time to see the Taker I hit staggering toward us, knife flashing. I freeze just a fraction of a second too long. Leela steps between us and grabs their swinging knife with her bare left hand.

  “Leela!” I scream.

  Leela doesn’t flinch as her blood wells over the blade. She also doesn’t let go. She shoves the knife back into the startled warrior’s face and throws a punch with her other hand, sending the Taker stumbling.

  I swing the staff again. It slams into the Sorrow’s back with a crackling thud I can feel all the way up my arms. The Taker collapses.

  “Can we go now?” Leela groans, clutching her wounded ha
nd to her chest.

  I stop waiting for Tarn to decide. I grab his arm and drag him along as we plunge into the writhing glow of the root garden, leaving the fight, the Sorrow, and Dr. Brown behind.

  Eleven

  Tarn leads us through the back streets of the cavern city. Sorrow peer at us from the skeletal buildings, but nobody gets in our way or tries to help. I’m guessing they’ll stay neutral until word spreads that Pel won the fight. We need to be gone before that happens.

  Leela is keeping up, but she’s pale and sweaty. I’m pretty sure she’s going into shock. We bandaged her hand in some strips I tore from the hem of my T-shirt, but she refuses to let Miguel do anything else until we’re safe.

  Tarn takes us to a crevasse in the cavern wall that leads into a low, narrow tunnel. It’s another of the massive geode formations. It’s less than half a klick long, but by the time we reach the end, my whole body aches from walking in a tense crouch, and my arms and scalp are bleeding from brushes with the clusters of crystal that jag out of the walls and ceiling.

  The tunnel ends in expansive blackness.

  “Even the smallest light will give us away now,” Tarn whispers, taking my hand. “Do not let go.”

  Then he pulls up his blackout hood and disappears.

  “Hold on to each other,” I whisper to the others, grabbing Chris’s hand as Tarn tugs me forward.

  We follow Tarn through the dark, holding hands like little kids on a school field trip. There’s no way to judge the passage of time, but my aching feet tell me that we’ve been walking for at least an hour when I finally see light up ahead. It’s faint and far away. I probably wouldn’t even be able to see the whispers of green and blue and white if I had my flex on flashlight mode.

  I want to ask Tarn what it is, but I have to stay quiet. Light isn’t the only thing that could give us away if Pel’s Takers are out there looking for us.

  After a few more agonizing minutes, the pale, distant lights come into focus. It’s another grove of solace tree roots. The glowing clusters aren’t artistically shaped like they are in the root garden. They drip down from the cave ceiling in wild, ropy tangles of all different lengths. Only a few of them make it all the way to the floor.

  Tarn walks a little faster now, leading us through the forest of roots to a lime-green cluster that’s at least three times wider than I am. Its outer branches have been braided into loops that run up the length of the thick taproot at its center.

  It’s a ladder.

  Tarn drops my hand and momentarily disappears; then the light of the root ladder picks his silhouette out of the dark. He starts to climb. Clearly, we’re meant to follow. I tug experimentally on a loop of root. It seems sturdy enough, so I swing myself up after him. Suddenly, I want to be in the open air so badly, I can hardly stand it.

  The starlight is coming from a triangular hole in the cave ceiling. Tough, woody surface roots frame its edges. I hook my hands over the nearest one and pull myself through.

  Tarn is waiting to help me up. He’s got a strip of gray cloth tied over his eyes, like the Takers did when we first encountered Ord in the caves. It’s thin—I can see his round black eyes through the cloth. This must be how the Sorrow protect their eyes from excessive light. It’s the middle of the night, but with my eyes still adjusted to the caves, the light of the twin moons seems bright. I can only imagine how glaring it looks to Tarn.

  Chris is right behind me, but Beth is taking her time coming up the root ladder.

  I look around while we wait for her to reach the surface. We’re back in the woods near the crash site. The fan-shaped leaves of the solace trees are stiff and still in the night shadows. They smell sweet and sharp, like the blue Jell-O they always served with dinner in the rehab center.

  I half expect to see work lights dancing through the trees. Actually, expect is the wrong word. It’s more like I was hoping that Chief Penny managed to call in their location to Mom before she was attacked. But it’s been almost 27 hours since the Wagon fell out of the sky. The valley is dark. If Mom and the others knew where the crash site was, they’d be here. That means we’re on our own.

  Beth reaches the top of the root ladder, and Chris and I help her up. Then I climb halfway back down to help Miguel and Jay get Leela to the surface without using her wounded hand, which is swollen and black with bruises. She’s breathing hard, and her bangs are matted with sweat by the time we get her out.

  “You’re a little green around the gills there, boo,” Miguel says as he rewraps her makeshift bandage. The torn strips are crusted with blood.

  “I’m fine,” she insists. “Let’s just get to the flyer and get out of here.”

  With that, she starts toward the crash site. She makes it only a few steps before her legs buckle. She grabs a low branch to steady herself. Miguel wraps an arm around her waist to support her. She doesn’t argue with him.

  We follow them through the trees.

  “I should return to Sorrow’s Solace,” Tarn says quietly, so that only I can hear him.

  “But you said Pel would kill you,” I say.

  “She may,” he says, covering his face with his hands, palms out, for a few seconds. The yellow glow of the bioluminescent blood pumping under his skin is faint in the moonlight. “But now that Pel is Followed, she chooses the way for all Sorrow. Including me.”

  “Even if it leads to your death?” I say.

  Tarn walks in silence for a while. Thinking. Then he says, “This is why the Sorrow follow. It helps us to make the right choices, despite personal consequences.”

  “Dr. Brown said you struggled with following Ord,” I say.

  “Lucille knows us well,” Tarn says. “But she is still human. She will never truly understand us. I followed Ord long before our people did. He kept me alive after our father was taken by the Beasts. I trusted him completely. If I questioned his choices, it was only in the service of clarifying his vision. Pel will look to others for such clarity. Perhaps that is why I am reluctant to return now. Perhaps my selfish desire to have influence over our direction is misleading me.”

  “How can wanting to stay alive be selfish?” I say.

  “Very easily,” he says. “Our Growers and Gatherers risk their lives every day when they go to the surface to retrieve food for our people. If they all chose to preserve their lives rather than following, would that not be selfish?”

  “I guess so,” I say. “But this is different. Nobody’s going to starve if you stay with us.”

  “That may be so,” he says. “But if one Sorrow chooses not to follow, then another may do so, and another. Then all will be lost.”

  I understand what he’s saying. The Sorrow follow for the same reasons that ISA officers obey orders. Nothing would get done if everyone argued with Mom every time she made a decision. But Mom always taught us that we shouldn’t follow an order if we know it’s wrong.

  That makes me wonder all over again what we’re doing on this planet. Mom has access to the classified parts of the survey report. She knew about the Sorrow. There’s no way she thought that coming here was the right thing to do. So why did she go along with it? And why did she keep the classified sections of the report secret? She might not have anticipated the problems with Stage Three, but she had to have known that keeping the Sorrow and the phytoraptors secret would put us all in danger. And she did it anyway.

  “What if Pel is leading the Sorrow in the wrong direction?” I say. “Following someone just because you’re supposed to doesn’t help anyone.”

  “Perhaps,” Tarn says. “But is it my place to say whether she is right or wrong?” Tarn raises his hands in clenched fists in front of his face, then drops them. “I should return. I have no reason to stay here. You are safe, and your vehicle is ahead. You do not need me.”

  “Maybe we don’t need you,” I say. “But you didn’t need Dr. Brown, either. You and Ord protected her because she needed you. It’s our turn now. Come back to Pioneer’s Landing with us. Let us protect yo
u from Pel.”

  Tarn doesn’t respond, but he stays with me as we cross out of the trees into the high grass. From here I can see the silhouette of the flyer against the starry sky. For some reason, Jay and Chris are walking on the wings. What are they doing up there? Why isn’t Jay inside doing the preflight sequence?

  It takes me another few steps to realize that the flyer’s skinny wings now end in bare stumps. The rotors are gone. Without rotors the flyer can’t take off.

  We’re stuck here.

  “What happened?” I shout, running the last few meters through the waist-high grass.

  “Someone cut off the rotors,” Chris calls back. “They cut a lot of the solar paneling off the wings too.”

  “Cut?” I say, confused.

  “Yeah,” Jay says, swinging himself down to hang from the wing by his hands and then dropping to the ground. “Real carefully. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was a pro-salvage job.”

  For an irrational half second, I wonder if Mom and the others already found the crash site, salvaged the wreckage, and left us for dead. But I dismiss that paranoid fantasy immediately. I can see the burned-out hulk of the Wagon’s engine fuselage from here. There’s no way they’d leave that much recyclable material behind. Not to mention the fact that this was a perfectly good flyer. They would have taken it, not salvaged it for parts.

  “Tarn,” I say, “would Pel know our flyers can’t take off without their rotors?”

  “I doubt she would bother with sabotage,” Tarn says. “If the Followed wished to stop you from leaving, she would be here waiting for us with Takers.”

  “It doesn’t matter what happened to the flyer,” Beth says. “We need to retrieve the Wagon’s satellite phone and use it to call for help.”

  “The chief had it,” Leela says. “She pulled it from the emergency kit and stowed it in her harness first thing. She didn’t want to risk losing it if we couldn’t get the engine fire out and something happened to the cargo pod.”

  “Are you sure?” I say.

  “Of course I’m sure,” Leela snaps. “I watched her do it.”

  My heart sinks.

  “She didn’t have it when we found her,” I say. “Her harness was shredded. It must have fallen out during the attack.”