“What else would they be looking for?”
“The ship’s power cell,” he offers. “They always said it had been damaged in the crash, but your dad said it was lost.”
“Well, to be fair, based on what her dad said, the power cell is a kawa. But that makes no sense, so . . .”
“We need to go to Mbekenkanush,” Rondo says, pulling me again when I try to continue down the path.
“He’s right, O,” Alma says. “We can see what your grandmother meant about the eyenu, and then think of a strategy from there.”
“No,” I say, pulling away. The half plan solidifies in my mind, and it doesn’t include going back to the city. “No. Don’t you see? I was in the Zoo for days. My nana said it may take a few days for the Faloii to gather the group that’s going to the Isii. That means they could already be on their way! Or worse. If we go back to Mbekenkanush, we may not be allowed to leave.”
I turn to move again, but Rondo catches at me once more.
“So we’re doing what? Going to the Vagantur? A shipwreck?”
I jerk away one more time, fixing him with an angry glare. Something inside me feels like it’s being drawn into two halves: the half that is attached to N’Terra and the half that is part of Faloiv. Something about being immersed in the jungle again makes the latter half grow and pulse. This isn’t the time for N’Terran indecision and inaction. The jungle is making moves and we need to do the same thing. Rondo seems to feel my resolution and takes a step back, letting his hand drop. It makes my heart squeeze but I look away.
“My dad said that if we had questions about the kawa, to ask Captain Williams,” I say.
“Octavia,” Alma says, exasperated. “No offense, but your father was being a sarcastic ass. How are we supposed to ask a dead woman anything?”
“I don’t know,” I say, finally moving back down the path without being stopped. “Maybe she’s not even dead? We thought the hundred were dead, and they’re all living in Mbekenkanush. Either way, there are too many things pointing me toward the ship right now, so that’s where I’m going.”
“At least get off the path.” Rondo sighs. “If Manx and her goons were on this trail, then anybody else could be too.”
His logic is a needle through the thick skin of my insistence, but I pause briefly before diving into the jungle once more, ducking under limbs and mossy branches, leaving Alma and Rondo to scramble after me. The only sound I hear is our own breathing and the noises of the jungle, birds calling far above in the trees that seem to have no tops. And, of course, beneath it all, the pulse of Faloiv in the Artery. Has it always been this loud? Has it always been this . . . on edge?
“It gets thinner up ahead,” Alma says from just behind me. Despite her protestations, I can sense the eagerness in her voice. Alma, who had always been the one obsessing over the past, cataloging old words from the Origin Planet, will finally get to see the ship that had brought our parents and grandparents here. Her curiosity, contained only by the insistent ignorance of the whitecoats she was asking, is blooming into hope. I feel it too, but it’s a different hope, the hope of the syca and the ogwe: I hope to find the answer that will take the plague out of the parasite.
She and I reach the edge of the clearing at the same time, the sound of Rondo’s feet in the leaves drawing up behind.
“Stars,” Alma whispers, her voice quivering. “Wow.”
Why do I feel so nervous? As if laying eyes on the ship will confirm something, or contradict it. As if my brain doesn’t quite trust that what I’m about to see is a ship; as if what might be revealed is in fact one of Albatur’s beasts, the thing that carried us here just one more organism capable of murder.
But it is a ship.
“It’s . . . ,” I say.
“It’s real,” Rondo says. Maybe we’ve been carrying the doubt all our lives; the inability to fathom a time before Faloiv, a past that actually existed somewhere else. But this is proof.
The Vagantur is long, easily longer than the span of the Mammalian Compound, excluding the commune. It rears up high from the ground, white-gray but nearly buried under the embrace of many green and brown vines and mosses, struggling to remain separate from the planet that it had made its final landing upon. It tapers closer to the hull, a rounded nose that saw most of the damage from the crash, scorch marks still apparent even under the wear of four decades. Toward the tail of the ship it widens, wedge shaped, its massive body streaked brown from the rains of Faloiv, perhaps trying to wash this stubborn lump of space matter away. But here it sits. I stare at it, openmouthed, wondering where in its shell the power cell existed: Is its cell as enormous as the ship itself, or would it be a small thing to behold, a surprise for the person sent in to repair it? And where had it gone? Where is the part of this machine that makes the whole organism tick, the thing that is causing bloodshed on the planet that’s my home?
Then I see the guards.
“See, this is what I’m talking about,” Rondo hisses, seeing them at the same time. “There’s two dozen people out there, Octavia! This is such a bad place to be right now.”
I can’t disagree.
The people that roam around the clearing aren’t exactly guards, or even finders like Manx and her cronies. They wear the gray suits I’m used to seeing in N’Terra, but they’re not patrolling, despite the buzzguns slung down each of their backs. There are white tents set up all over the area, long like the Worms of N’Terra with transparent flaps on all sides. The people in gray suits comb the clearing, baskets and tools in hand, peering down at the ground, which is still mostly rock and soil since the Vagantur plowed through. The place where humans landed on Faloiv is a scar on the planet’s face.
“What are they looking for?” I whisper.
“The pods?” Alma says. We’re all crouching. “Surely in the years since the crash people have already searched this area for them.”
“Maybe,” Rondo says quietly, and even though he doesn’t offer any other words, I can tell his brain is ticking away, weighing new theories. “Manx said salvaging. To repair the ship. They must need more than power: the shell itself needs to be fixed. I mean, look at it.”
He’s right: the nose of the vessel gapes with various holes. Daylight shines through several from the other side.
“There are so many people out here,” Alma says. “I wonder if this is what most of the finders do. Come out here and fiddle with the ship instead of looking for new specimens.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” I nod. “Especially now that it seems Albatur isn’t pretending to care about anything except his goal of leaving Faloiv. They probably don’t even care about discovering new species now. They have what they need to exploit the ones they do know about.”
Rondo makes a sound of disgust. No words necessary. But then he points.
“That’s the guy that put me on house arrest,” he says, gesturing at a tall graysuit with a square jaw and reddish hair. He stands near what looks like an entrance to the ship, talking on his comm and looking at his slate.
“I know him,” I whisper. “He was the one who arrested my mother and Dr. Espada. I think he’s in charge. He seemed like it that day.”
“He looks so young,” Alma says.
“Impressionable,” Rondo mutters.
The young man is oblivious to our presence, eyeing his slate, shielding its screen from the glare of sun. Then he’s slipping it into his belt and speaking into the comm, squinting.
“We should try to get his slate,” I whisper.
“His slate?”
“Yeah,” I say, staring at the graysuit so hard my eyes burn. “What we need is information. If we know more about the kawa, or the power cell or whatever, then maybe we can go back to Mbekenkanush with something worth offering them. So if they are about to turn Faloiv against humans, we can give them a reason to protect . . . you know . . . some of us.”
“Bold,” Alma says, pursing her lips. “Very bold.”
I expect Rondo to
argue, but when I glance at him, he’s staring at the graysuit with his jaw set, saying nothing. He agrees but he doesn’t want to admit it. It gives me a rush of brassy courage.
“Okay,” I say. “Alma, let’s do it. I’ll create a diversion, and you snatch it from his belt. Rondo, you stay here.”
I’m punishing him and I don’t know why. Maybe I’m punishing N’Terra, that place I had once loved so fiercely. Rondo is the last person to blame for my loss of it, but my grief is so cold it feels hot. I don’t give myself any more time to think about it. I grab Alma’s wrist and tow her out into the clearing.
Our path is laid out clearly ahead. Between the Vagantur and us is a boulder—or maybe a piece of wreckage from the ship—that will be large enough to hide us until we make our next move. Dragging Alma with me, I dash toward it and as soon as its shadow touches my toes, dive down behind it. Alma collapses next to me, panting.
“Not your best plan,” she says. From the trees at our back, I can make out the sound of Rondo’s curses, under his breath and barely reaching our ears.
By the ship, the graysuit has put his comm away. The slate remains on his belt, but for how long? No time to come up with a better plan. The time is now.
“Go,” I whisper.
All my muscles are clenched as if synced with Alma’s, so when she sprints, my whole body jerks. I realize too late that I’ve already messed it up. I’m supposed to be the diversion.
I step out from behind the boulder, ready to let the graysuit see me, to allow Alma some time to either get the slate or get away. But he’s turned away, facing the tail of the ship, eyeing the progress of the many graysuits working in the clearing. Alma approaches him from behind, miraculously unnoticed.
I throw myself back behind the boulder before I draw the attention of anyone else I hadn’t included in our plan. I peep my head around the edge of my hiding place, watching as Alma creeps up behind our target, her hand outstretched for his waistband.
My heart has either stopped or it’s beating so fast that its rhythm is undetectable. The graysuit stands, hands on hips, unaware of Alma at his back. Her hand pauses midair, unsure if she should take the slate or not. I know she’s thinking the same thing as I am: Could our luck possibly be this good?
She slides the slate from its holster on his hip, an inch at a time. I taste the tiniest tinge of blood—I’m gnawing the side of my tongue, my jaws a vise.
And then she has it. It’s in her hand, black and sleek in the bright sun, the graysuit oblivious. She flashes her teeth in a self-congratulatory smile, and she’s moving to slide the slate inside her skinsuit’s inner pocket when the graysuit moves to turn around.
Alma’s reflexes are superhuman. She doesn’t pause or falter. His muscles have barely twitched when she’s diving into the open space of the Vagantur, which from my vantage point behind the boulder I can now see is a door. When the graysuit has turned around, Alma is gone, a phantom.
But two more graysuits are approaching. They are ducking under the half-repaired body of the ship, hailing the graysuit we’d made our target. They hadn’t seen Alma, but if they go inside the Vagantur right now, they will.
Don’t go in, I chant silently. Don’t go in.
“Nothing to see on the other side,” one of them says, his voice carrying over to where I hide. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say we have too many buzzguns.”
“Never too many buzzguns,” the graysuit with the square jaw says with a smile. He still hasn’t noticed he’s missing his slate.
“Still,” the first one says, “I’m going to grab an MX instead of an MZ. The MZs are so damn heavy to be hauling around for no reason.”
And then he’s angling his body toward the door. His partner moves to follow, and a breath later they’re disappearing inside the ship. The slateless captain shouts something obscene at their backs that makes them laugh and then he strides away, down toward the tail.
And then I’m running. I can’t be as fast as I feel right now—it must be adrenaline lying to me, assuring me of escape. But maybe I am this fast, urgency adding wings to my feet as I sprint toward the ship, the artifact that brought my family to this place so many years ago. My mother had huddled inside this ship as a child, trying to decide if she was excited or afraid. And now she’s dead, her wonder snuffed out by Dr. Albatur’s dreams of dominance. No time to think about the past. I reach the door and throw myself inside.
Chapter 15
It’s familiar and I’m surprised. Inside the mossy husk of the Vagantur, a seemingly ancient bone, I’d expected something rudimentary: a wooden version of the facilities we have in N’Terra. But I realize some of it seems to be the same material; much of what I know back home was built with parts of the ship we’ve salvaged to accomplish what we need to survive.
I stand in what appears to be a sanitation room; the doors, to what might have been an airlock at one point, open on either side to allow traffic in and out of the ship. The walls are smooth, and here the light is good; but beyond, deeper in the ship, there are dim tunnels, shadows where the sunlight can’t reach. I imagine the interior filled with holes, broken gaps that we’ve emptied to excavate the past and drag it up to where we stand in the present. Inside, protected from the eyes of the scavengers in the clearing, I take a moment to gently lay my fingertips on the wall, knowing this material was made on the Origin Planet; and something in my skin calls to it, like my atoms and its atoms recognize each other.
“I saw the bushes moving, but there was nothing there. Hell. There could be an army of them for all we know.”
More graysuits. The voices snap me back to reality and I look frantically around me, searching for a place to hide. I don’t see Alma, but there’s another short hallway connecting to this sanitation room and I dive through its entryway, shoving myself into the first crevice I find, a sort of open closet housing the gray suits the guards wear. I sink backward into the flexible material, willing myself to be invisible.
“Their camouflage gives me the chills,” another voice says, closer now, coming from outside. “You don’t know if it’s animal or one of the people. When you can’t see them, it could be anything.”
“That’s why we needed more time to study the one Dr. Albatur captured. If we could have had more time, we could have figured out how to get through his skin.”
They’re talking about Adombukar. The knowledge sends heat rushing up to my head, filling me like liquid flame. I feel my qalm suit perceive me, and it does something in its biology, cooling me, trying to keep me alive. It doesn’t understand that the heat is rage, that the thing endangering me isn’t my heat but the two guards whose footsteps draw nearer and nearer. Or does it? The suit is tickling my throat, a creeping sensation like the legs of many insects making their way across my skin. Higher. Up to my ears, enveloping them. I freeze, not daring to claw at the expanding suit lest I attract the guards.
“We don’t need their camouflage. We just need them to ante up with the power cells. We should have known they stole it from us.”
My lips are covered.
“I don’t know why they want anything we have: they have everything.”
“Greedy,” his companion says.
My nose. The space around my eyes. I can still breathe, but the air smells like soil, the warm earthy scent of the qalm. I feel every coil of my hair being flattened by the creep of the suit. I am utterly encased. My hands, which I had left bare, are hidden from me. Their shape is all that defines them: my skin has become gray, bluish white—the colors of the guard suits that hang around me, the shadows of the slim closet.
Then the guards are there before me, removing their masks, placing them inside one of the compartments in the closet wall. They stare right at me, continuing their conversation like I am one of the suits.
“We have to be close, with or without it, right?” one says. I can almost count his eyelashes.
“We wouldn’t be out here working on the ship if we weren’t.”
&nb
sp; His hand nearly brushes my face as he reaches in, withdrawing another suit. I close my eyes, breathing shallowly. I search for the smell of ogwe trees and it’s obscured by metal and sweat, but I find fragments of it, try to inhale the comfort of the pieces as softly as I can.
“Wait, who the hell is that?” one says suddenly, and I can’t help it: my eyes snap open, ready to find one of those gloved hands reaching for my throat. But he’s squinting down the hall.
“Who?” says the other.
“That girl. Did you see her? She just . . . she was just there.”
Stars. They’ve seen Alma. They’re turning away, there’s nothing to be done. The sound of them moving down the hall.
“Hey,” says one. “Hey!”
I rush out of the closet, clawing past the suits. Back out in the short hallway, I catch the last snatch of gray as the two of them disappear around the corner, deeper into the ship. Just two, I think, giving chase, but what I plan to do to subdue them isn’t a calculation that exists in my head yet. I just know Alma’s getting captured is not an option.
I see her as soon as I turn the corner, her Afro bobbing back and forth as she dashes down the hall. The corridors are wider than I expected but dim. Solar panels have been affixed to the walls—the Vagantur still has no power. The guards stampede after her, yelling curses, tripping on the occasional vine that has found its way through the cracks in the hull. She trips too: the slate she’d had clutched in her hand falls and shatters on the floor. My heart sinks, but Alma keeps running, and I dash after them, all of us moving closer to the nose of the ship where crash damage lets in sporadic beams of light.
“There she goes,” one of the guards shouts. I put on a last burst of speed, desperate to catch them as they round another corner, veering still closer to the nose of the ship. I can read Alma’s logic like a map: she is hoping she can clamber out one of the many gaping holes here toward the front of the Vagantur.
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