by Jack Archer
“I see that,” Rystar said with raised eyebrows, leaning down to hoist the man up with Shea’s help. “I also see you got shot. Has anyone ever told you not to run after a man with a fucking shotgun?”
“I had a gun, too,” Shea pointed out, hooking a hand in the crook of their bounty’s elbow and walking back towards the fueling station.
“Then why didn’t you use it?” Rystar asked.
“Didn’t think I was allowed to,” Shea responded. Rystar blinked and looked up at him over the bounty’s head.
“Then why would I give it to you?” She chuckled. Shea said nothing, shrugging a shoulder and losing himself in thought as he usually did. The fueling station loomed in sight, and the man finally woke up from his post-caught stupor.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked. “You have no right to take me from my home.”
“You shot at not one, but two federal trackers, and have been avoiding your maintenance fees for the last several months,” Rystar explained to their quarry as they approached the parking lot with her LASSO. “We have every right to take you to the federal jail in Montgomery for further processing.”
“Montgomery?” he sputtered as Rystar opened the cargo hold and shoved the man in, pointing to a small chair in the wall with a lap seatbelt.
“Buckle up,” she said, shutting the door against the man’s protests.
“Cold,” Shea said, shaking his head and smiling at her.
“Climb in, idiot.” She gestured for him to climb into the LASSO before her and pushed herself up and in. Closing the door, she rummaged around in a locker before bringing out a small medical kit. “Take off your jacket.”
“It’s really not that bad,” Shea insisted, taking his jacket off anyway and revealing a large bicep covered in little scratches near the top.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Rystar muttered and pulled his sleeve up near his shoulder before dabbing around the tiny wounds with a rag. “Alright, it’s not that bad.”
“Told you,” he said with a smirk, hissing as she poured alcohol on the open wound.
“You still got shot,” she warned, wiping the excess liquid away before bringing out a bandage to place with care on his wounds. “Don’t run after nut jobs with shotguns, alright? I can’t believe I have to tell you that.”
“Alright,” Shea said, looking up at her with those big russet eyes, and suddenly Rystar didn’t mind having a partner to come along with her. Especially if it was him.
The ride back flew by smoothly with minimal talking, just the way Rystar liked it. Shea had long since stopped trying to converse with Rystar about friendship and unicorns and whatever the hell else he wanted to talk about. She frowned and chewed a knuckle for most of the ride, occasionally looking over at Shea from the corner of her eye, always seeing him buried in his comms tablet.
It was past dark by the time they got back to Montgomery and parked, and Shea was snoring in his seat, head thrown back and mouth wide open. Rystar turned off the ship and chuckled softly, watching him for a moment before deciding to stop being creepy and just wake him up.
“Hey, we’re back,” she said with a gentleness that was foreign to her. Shea snorted awake and looked around for a moment before settling on Rystar and giving her a sleepy grin.
“That didn’t take long,” he said.
“To the snoring giant, yeah,” Rystar said and rolled her eyes, opening the door and hopping down from the LASSO before heading around to the cargo hold. Their bounty was sleeping, and she shook him awake before hooking their arms together and lifting him up. “Come on, guy, time for your trial.”
The Federal Department of Defense Services should have been in Washington D.C., as were most federal buildings. The issue presented as a massive polar vortex that continuously stretched down to the southern states, rendering the north almost entirely uninhabitable. The federal agencies and buildings were forced to move south to escape the deadly weather patterns.
“I got this, Shea,” Rystar said as she passed him, jumping down to the ground from the LASSO. “Go home and get some proper sleep.”
He passed her a strange look as she walked by him and towards the double doors that led to the holding cells. Most of everyone in the cells was snoring away, and Rystar picked an empty one, opened it, and shoved her bounty inside before shutting and locking the cage.
Making her way to the break room, she stripped her jacket and shoes, found her favorite comfy couch, and promptly passed out.
Chapter 2
Na’gya Vasilev: Ledgorod, Bufefu, Tyurba System
One Year Ago
Being the son of the Jurat Prime of Tavantis did Na’gya no favors when it came to Terrans. To the Ya’ados, he was near god-like, towering at 6’3” with an eight-foot wingspan of golds and browns that gleamed in the Bufefu suns.
In the Tyurba system, there were three planets: one Horoth, one human, and one a mixture of the two. As Na’gya had come to learn, it didn’t exactly mean there was a high Ya’ados population just because it was a mix. So he had booked it from the entirely human continent of Xinshijie to the more neutral territory of Ledgorod, where there was more snow than humans or Horoths.
At the age of 27, Na’gya Vasilev had asked his parents to embark on a journey to the mixed systems to find himself, a pilgrimage, so to speak. It was touch and go at first, but at his father’s insistence, they eventually allowed Na’gya to journey from his homeworld of Chantakor and into the unknown.
Bufefu was the obvious choice. With such a mixture of humans and Horoths, there was bound to be more Ya’ados there than on any other planet. As it happened, there were only small pockets of Ya’ados hidden away in tiny villages in the middle of the woods or on the outskirts of town where the ordinary folk didn’t have to deal with them.
Ledgorod was his first stop. A primarily Russian settlement, Na’gya figured his obvious Russian heritage would give him the advantage. He was shunned immediately for his wanton display of wings and glorious human features and knees that pointed the right way in the first village he went to.
So, he left to find the next village of Ya’ados.
What he ended up finding was much more enchanting.
The snow had been blinding that night as Na’gya curled his wings tighter around himself, taking shelter from the blistering wind. The nearest village was fifty miles away, and without a vehicle, he was doomed to walk the entire way on foot. There was no inn to take him, no abandoned shelter he could seek refuge in.
He was unsuccessfully attempting to find a snow drift to curl into for the night but finding none. Soon, he stumbled out of a thicket of trees into a behemoth clearing. To his left and right was the treeline. In front of him was a swirling void of grey snow that blurred the line between ground and sky. He dropped to his knees, accomplishing nothing because the snow was to his midriff at this point.
After a few minutes had passed, he decided that he must have died and was in Purgatory. His wings crackled under the stress of attempting to furl them closer to his body.
Several hours later, he woke up confused. He didn't ever remember going to sleep. Wincing as he pried his eyes open, he was met with an Amur leopard sitting directly in front of him.
This was surprising, as the Amur Leopard had gone extinct at least one thousand years ago, and the only reason Na’gya knew this was because of his father’s old books he had read obsessively as a child. Na’gya pushed himself up a little to get a better look. Despite his lack of feeling in most of his extremities, he found himself incredibly curious. At his movement, the great cat stood and walked away into the blizzard, his paws barely making prints in the snow.
"Wait!" Na’gya tried to yell, his voice barely making it past the mucus in his throat. With great effort, he pulled himself out of the snow drift that had formed around him during his brief nap. Since he was probably dreaming anyway, he began to follow the leopard as it walked unhindered through the blizzard. For over an hour, Na’gya waded through the snow, the cat
occasionally looking back to see if he was still there or to sniff at something invisible.
Suddenly, the leopard disappeared, and Na’gya began to panic. In a few moments, it subsided when he realized it had only gone through a fence made of gigantic trees. The tree wall was rendered invisible in the dark, but once he had gone through it, his entire body started to thaw out.
It was pitch black outside, so Na’gya automatically assumed it would be just as dark in the thicket but was proven wrong as a faint blue light washed over him. It was still dark, but now he could just start to see the outlines of trees and bushes dotted around him.
He was too tired to try and decipher where all this blue light was coming from, so he simply let his legs drop out from underneath him next to a cozy-looking bush. He made himself think about the fact that he was now pegging bushes as ‘cozy’ and proceeded to drift into the most comforting sleep he'd had in months.
After a slumber that seemed to go on for years after the modern world had fallen, Na’gya woke up slowly when a wet nose drug itself across his ice-less face. He scrunched his eyes up and shook his head lightly, forcing the cold appendage to cease its attack.
He opened his eyes slowly and let them adjust to the new surroundings. After the blur dissipated, Na’gya could make out more of the thicket he had stumbled in the night before. It was still dark, but not at nearly the same level as it had been. Now it was more of a twilight gloom, and it still had a faint tinge of blue to it.
Trees and plants were placed sporadically around him as if they had planted themselves on their own. Na’gya could immediately identify at least three different types of plants that had either been endangered or gone extinct in the past thousand years from simply scanning the area. Some of them, to his confusion, weren't even native to Earth but to Chantakor as well, the deep blue blacks of the Sereib Glowflower winking at him in the twilight.
He sat up carefully, making sure he wasn't injured in any way, before spotting the cold-nosed perpetrator.
"You?" he mumbled, spotting the leopard from the night before. "You brought me here, didn't you?" In response, the once extinct animal dove into a pile of soft leaves, burrowing itself in them snugly and poking its head out to look at Na’gya. He giggled at it and stood up gingerly, wincing at the soreness in his legs.
The leopard quickly hopped out of its leaf fort at the movement and bounded away into the further reaches of what Na’gya now called the Sanctuary.
It was warm, perhaps maybe not as warm as Cliamond on a bright spring day, but warm enough to make Na’gya believe it was the middle of summer back on his little continent.
He strolled through the trees, in no hurry to leave and taking his time cataloging the different plants and animals he observed. When he ventured a glance skywards, he noticed the thick canopy the strange dominant trees had formed above them, miraculously keeping out the frigid weather. They had done the same thing on the sides, weaving themselves together to create a thick, impenetrable barrier against the forces of nature.
As he progressed deeper into the Sanctuary, the animals and plants were more abundant and diverse. Some species he recognized from his books, others were foreign to him. Without a doubt, however, some species residing here had been lost to the world for hundreds of years, if not longer. Eager to find the source of this wonderful mystery, Na’gya picked up his pace and followed the animals towards what he could only assume was the center of the thicket.
When a clump of almost white rocks appeared between a group of closely placed trees, Na’gya knew he was at the center. Birds chirped happily above him, making their nests warmer, more comfortable. The ground below him was carpeted in a thick, soft layer of grass that struck Na’gya as decidedly odd.
Once he had scaled the largest of them, he could see a gigantic pond, almost a small lake, just beneath him. The rocks formed a semicircle around the pond itself, creating a small enclave beneath him. He scuttled down the formation and began to make his way around the shore, gaping in awe at the natural architecture.
Fish circled each other, leaping about in the shallow depths, and lily pads dotted the calm surface. Here and there, camps of various wildlife had positioned themselves in optimal range of the pond. Though most of these animals were documented to sleep during the winter, or at least hole themselves up and shiver for the next few months, most of them seemed perfectly fine wallowing in the shallow pools and rolling around in the grass. Granted, it was a decent temperature, Na’gya thought.
The most remarkable thing about the whole place wasn't the extinct animals, nor the mysterious glowing blue trees that meshed into one to protect its inhabitants from the harsh cold. It certainly wasn't the plants from all over the world that had come to form a community here in the Sanctuary. For sure, it wasn't the blades of grass that had thrust themselves upon the forest floor despite the ice-encrusted ground outside. The strange enclave of rocks could be crossed off the list as well.
The most extraordinary thing about the place was the enormous tree that had planted itself at the pond's north edge. Its roots had splayed out from it and embedded themselves in the ground around it, spreading into the water and forming an exciting turf for turtles and ducks to play on. Its branches were wispy and completely covered in delicate light blue leaves that pedaled around it and grazed the water lightly. The gargantuan topiary was of the same species that made up the Sanctuary, and at this size, Na’gya immediately identified it.
"Chosenia," he whispered to no one. He had read, briefly, about the history of the Chosenia. They had been overlooked by botanists for many years before finally, in the 1900s, someone distinguished them as a separate species. In time, they unreasonably began to disappear. It was said that the trees were going extinct, but no one knew or cared why. They were thought to have been eradicated back on Earth, but no one had any evidence of this, and the world had more pressing matters to attend to than the passing of an unremarkable tree.
He held his hand to the tree, and at the touch, Na’gya fell in love with everything. Every plant, every rock, every living thing, every fungus, every grain of sand on every beach was suddenly the most precious thing in existence because when you broke it down, it was all there really was. Every wave that crashed against a rocky cliffside was a miracle. Every song a cricket played on its alarmingly long legs could be confused with the trumpets of heaven if there was one. Bufefu, and indeed the universe itself, was a masterpiece of epic proportions, and Na’gya intended to thoroughly thank the artist.
An overwhelming sadness shot through him after this epiphany. Na’gya looked up at the tree in shock. This was the Chosenia's last Sanctuary, and it had slowly been dying for the last few years. Its pond was drying up, and its animals were steadily leaving to fend for themselves in the wild. It was not human or Horoth doing.
The trees had found a way to cheat extinction by evolving faster than nature had intended them to. In doing so, however, the tree's existence had been spread much too thin, and they were dying out quicker than was originally planned. They were now spending the remainder of their days in peace, attempting to save what was left of their community.
For the next year, Na’gya recorded the Chosenia tree's story and the stories of life in the Sanctuary. When winter turned to spring, he took detailed notes of the flowers that bloomed and the fruits budding on the trees. He jotted down the unique markings on the baby leopards. New plants blossomed out in the open area beyond the center of the thicket.
In the summer, he dipped his feet in the pond and took notes on the fish there. There were fish that loomed in great shadows below him, coy fish whose scales glimmered in the iridescent light, tiny minnows that swam dangerously close to Na’gya’s toes and nipped at them playfully before darting back to safety. He drew the shapes of the leaves that were now covering every tree that was struggling to effloresce like it never had before the next winter came.
Summer faded into fall, and Na’gya noted how many evergreens were in the coppice. He saw the b
ears scurrying off to find places to slumber before the cold weather hit. He wrote about the cats whose coats were beginning to turn white and the sudden absence of many birds. He observed the woven canopy of Chosenia start to wither away, leaving shriveled blue flowers in their wake.
And in the winter, most of the animals had journeyed elsewhere, and the Sanctuary was little more than a sparse clump of dying trees. The pond was beginning to freeze over, and Na’gya found his eyes prickling at the thought of the fish in there. The ancient tree in the center groaned with age, some of its branches becoming frozen in the ice below it. Its beautiful blue flora lay scattered around it in piles.
On a cold morning, Na’gya stood before it solemnly. All around them were dead trees and piles of snow. Flurries swirled around them, catching in the hybrid's hair and eyelashes. His pack was full of a year's worth of new knowledge. His coat was pulled tight around him, and his wings were spread proudly, a dark contrast against the milieu.
A crack above him rang out, and Na’gya stepped back suddenly. A large branch had thrown itself at the ground in front of him, six feet long and gnarled into a perfect walking stick. He picked it up and held it with a sense of fondness. Somehow, he could feel what was left of the tree in it.
He smiled at the dying tree and turned away, walking out of the thicket and back into the unforgiving cold outside.
Present Day
The only Ya’ados village close to him had been razed several months ago, judging from the ashes and how the weeds had begun to peek their way through the burned floorboards.
He stood and scratched his beard for a while, leaning on the gnarled Chosenia branch while he studied the carnage around him. His pack weighed heavy on his shoulders, and he took a deep breath, looking down at the ground and shaking his head. His duster was worn and ragged after a year of living in the woods by himself, his shoes and socks soaked through.