He’s already found the source of the sound by the time we catch up: two Faloii women stand near one of the orange flowers, both swaying and humming, their voices indistinguishable from one another. Their humming is many layered and is emitted from their throats, glowing as they had the day I had sat before the council of Mbekenkanush. But then I see what had drawn Rondo to this place, around which both humans and Faloii cluster.
Both the women bear an izinusa in their arms, and play its long elegant strings effortlessly, the music rising and falling like both wind and water, sunshine as much a part of the music as the strings themselves.
“How?” I breathe, the harmony sinking into my muscles like a balm.
“You have seen an izinusa before today?” Kimbullettican says, appearing behind me.
“Did one of the humans from the Vagantur bring these to Mbekenkanush?” I ask. “Rondo knows how to play one.”
“Sort of,” Rondo adds shyly, and the memory of his music slithers pleasantly through me.
“Humans bring one?” Kimbullettican says, confused. “If you have one among your people, it was brought from Mbekenkanush. It is an instrument of the Faloii.”
“What? How?” Rondo says. “It was given to me by someone in N’Terra when she died.”
“I am not sure of this. Its wood is formed from an ogwe’s inner core. There are but a few izinusa on the planet,” Kimbullettican says, looking thoughtful. “The wood is given upon the death of the tree. This happens only once every many hundred years.”
One of the Faloii women looks up at us and her eyes find Rondo’s face. She must see something there—a portrait of his longing—because she pauses her humming, allowing her partner to continue the melody alone. She moves toward where we stand and extends the instrument to him. Rondo doesn’t speak. He accepts the izinusa readily, the instrument in one hand and its slender bow in the other, and begins to play.
The music should be too soft to hear, but somehow it rises above all the chatter of the campsite, over the calling of the ikya, who seem to quiet at the sound of it. The two Faloii women continue their humming, exchanging smiles, their forehead spots rippling in time to the music, enjoying the tune he lifts from the strings. They find its rhythm with their voices, match it with the other izinusa.
The music seems to surround us all like the very air of Faloiv. The entire planet may have paused to listen. I can’t take my eyes off Rondo, and when I finally blink I’m surprised by the tears that escape onto my cheeks. The melody that he releases into the sky is both N’Terra and Faloiv, his humanness melding with the agelessness of the izinusa’s wood. It’s so beautiful but it fills me only with sadness, so deeply blue it could be the multukwu’s domain. Here is everything that I love, human and not, and none of it feels within reach.
Chapter 23
The light that wakes me is not morning. Eyes roused open, it takes me a moment to remember where I am, that the warmth to my left is Rondo and the soft snores to my right are Alma. We had all fallen asleep around the orange flower, which had cooled as night fell, eventually going dark. The light I sense now comes from the trees, but it’s not the soft pink released from the syca, which had faded hours ago.
Now the trees glow red.
My grandmother’s smoke? No, this isn’t smoke; it’s something else, something of Faloiv. I bite down on the rising alarm that floats up from my bones. The campsite is silent: no one else seems to be awake, let alone aware of the strange glow that bathes my skin and the grass.
I rise, glancing down at Rondo’s face, illuminated in the reddish light. I almost wake him, not because I don’t want to be alone, but because I want to be alone with him. Still, I know I would have nothing to say. How can I tell him that at one time the music he plays drew him closer to my heart, and now it makes me want to push him away? The day he played in the compound, it had filled my body with light. Now the shadows of uncertainty seem to loom only lower. The music calls to me, but something else calls louder.
I hear it now.
The green language. It seems to rustle through the Artery, sighing, carrying words that are just beyond the reach of my comprehension. The reddish glow seems to pulse downward from the trees. No sign of the moon: the sky is blotted out by canopy and clouds. No sign of the ikya.
No sign of Kimbullettican.
Their absence draws my alarm back to the surface of my skin, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling in sudden caution.
“Kimbullettican,” I whisper, taking a few silent steps. My feet, bare, connect with the jungle soil and my suit comes alive. Any sleep that had clung to me sheds now as the suit’s infectious vigor flows into my skin, dew that must have accumulated in the night hours soaking into me as if I’d drunk it myself. The suit is grateful that I am acting as a conduit, and it almost seems to reward me for doing so. When I first feel the prickle of information in the Artery, I barely notice it among the activity of the suit—it’s hard to keep everything in my head sorted with so much input. But the information beckons me, as if with imperceptible fingers, a steady stream of communication that I eventually notice and isolate. Where I had once stood in my qalm in Mbekenkanush and found the language unintelligible, I can now pull out the meaning, even if the words themselves are a blur.
There is something nearby, something strange. The planet is aware of it—has always been aware of it—but its presence draws a new kind of caution that I pick up on like a scab scratched open.
Kimbullettican, I call in my mind, reaching out for their presence with the hope that they might be able to explain what I am experiencing, but they are either sealed off in the Artery or too far for me to contact. Or perhaps the messages from the soil are too dense to break through, clogging my ability to hear anything else. Around me, the jungle seems to pulse with life, the red glow of the syca adding a dreamlike layer between me and the sounds of night.
That’s when the suit passes me something I can understand.
It’s not in the language that I use to communicate with the Faloii and the planet’s animals, the shapes and impressions that I had seemed born to fluency with. It’s rudimentary—even more so than my usual attempts. It’s as if whatever consciousness that passes me these fragments of meanings understands my mind’s clumsiness and has broken it down into some primary form of itself. An impression, an understanding that emerges from the tunnel almost as a scent.
It is a scent. It fills my nose while still occupying a section of my mind, an odor as real as the smell of the ogwe but with a different meaning. In a flash I remember the day of my mother’s arrest, when I’d returned to the Mammalian Compound and inhaled the smell of warning that the trees radiated into the main dome, a stark transition from the usual aroma of comfort. This is like that: not a message, exactly, but a command; the smell orders my biology to do something. . . .
Follow.
It’s a trail. It’s as if my sensory receptors have crunched through the data of an unseen formula and finally translated it into meaning I can comprehend: follow.
I glance backward, where Alma and Rondo sleep peacefully alongside the other human youth. Do the Faloii still stand guard? Will they stop me? I pick up my pack from where I’d been using it as a pillow and slip away toward the jungle’s edge.
My feet find their own path. The light of the syca is bright enough that I make my way over tree limbs and stones without much trouble, wincing only when thinner branches scratch my face. I could turn back—I’m not without agency. But my curiosity is a mighty force that keeps me placing one bare foot after another, barely noticing the occasional stone and twig.
The light pales ahead, the syca’s red fading into white: pure moonlight breaking in from the canopy. This means the trees are thinning, I think, and wonder if this means I will soon be reaching a body of water. But I would hear the water by now if a lake, the gentle lap of waves; or if a river, the muted current carrying on without sleep. It can’t be water. A clearing, then, I tell myself, slowing. But I can’t stop
now: my curiosity is a magnet swimming darkly in my blood, drawing me toward whatever lies ahead.
It’s a meadow: bright with moonlight and ringed with trees that reach up toward the stars, unveiling themselves without secret now that I have emerged from the thick kingdom of jungle. The meadow feels familiar: open and sweet smelling, an odor that rises from the expanse of short green plants bearing many round buds. I look down at them, examining them in moonlight—so familiar. My bare feet are buried in them, the softness of their blossoms a strange comfort. A delicate breeze causes a few of them to brush against my ankles. I can’t have been here before, but its familiarity is a scratch at the back of my skull that I can’t reach. A dream? A memory? I sweep my eyes over the rest of the meadow, wide and flat except for the bulk of a white boulder rising out of the ground one hundred yards ahead. Round, almost impossibly so; nothing in nature is so smooth unless found underwater. Perhaps this meadow had once been the multukwu’s domain.
I move toward the boulder, the short plants and their spherical blossoms a carpet beneath my feet. Had this place been in a photograph kept on my mother’s slate in N’Terra? A record of my grandmother’s adventures before she disappeared? The familiarity clings to me, the moonlight the only thing that tells me I’m imagining it. If I know this place, I know it in sunlight. With everything made silver and white, it’s hard to be sure of anything. Hard to be sure that the boulder ahead is a boulder at all.
A cloud passes over the moon as I arrive next to it, and it’s not until I place my hand on its surface that I realize the scent that had led me to this clearing has faded away. Whatever trail I was following has gone cold. Or perhaps this is the end of the trail, and I have followed it to its farthest point. Under my fingers, the boulder—several feet taller than me, and almost as wide as a ’wam—is, again, impossible. Too smooth. Too round.
Somewhere in the jungle that rings the meadow I hear the triumphant orchestra of ikya, their hunt successful. I wonder if this means dawn is near, and gaze up to gauge the position of the moon. It’s too high, I think. Not dawn for a while yet: more night between me and whatever comes next. While I watch, the remaining clouds masking the moon continue on their journey across the sky, and I allow my eyes to fall back to the surface of the lonely boulder.
Letters. I stare dumbly at them for a moment, shocked by their presence here. I must be imagining them—how else is it possible? But there it is. The letter N. The letter T. The rest hidden by moss. Faded by age but here nonetheless. Inside me, the green language whispers, This. This thing. Another of their things. Caution.
It takes only another breath for me to become frantic. A moment later my fingers are fast at work, tearing at the spongy layers of plant life that have made the boulder—the what?—their home. It all collects under my fingernails, blunting my hands, but I keep at it, swiping with my palms here, scratching there. The moon comes and goes, but when it shows its face, it shows me that the letters I’m uncovering are red—something more vibrant, once upon a time, than ink: at one point this word had been stark and immovable against the white of this lump of mystery.
The moon is hidden again and I stand there panting, unaware until now of how hard I’d been working, sweat gathering along my scalp before my suit quickly offers hydration and oxygen. I stand there, waiting for the light to return. But some part of me doesn’t need it. I know what I’ve found. When the moon is generous again, I read the words silently.
Vagantur Capsule 3.
“Here you are,” I whisper to the meadow and its strangely familiar blossoms. “Here you are.”
“Here you are,” rasps a voice, and I’m jerking away from the hand on my arm before I’m fully aware of its presence. I stumble backward, my voice empty with shock, falling first against the pod and then away from it, my feet instinctually seeking empty ground to run on.
It’s Kimbullettican.
“You could have said something!” I snap.
I did. You were preoccupied.
“I . . .” I’m still catching my breath, both from uncovering the text and from my sudden terror. “Still. Stars, Kimbullettican.”
“My apologies,” they say. “I was nearby and found your presence in the Artery. Needless to say, I was surprised.”
“I woke up. I heard”—I pause, trying to decide how to describe it. “Something? Something in the Artery. It reminds me of the qalm.”
Kimbullettican’s forehead spots cluster and disperse like a trail of bubbles flicked by a fin. “This too woke me,” they say. “Your listening has improved.”
“How?”
“It is a question for yourself.”
I stare at the capsule in the moonlight. The moss that coats its surface seems to obscure so much more than just the pod itself.
“I think . . . I think Faloiv knows something about me,” I say, almost to myself.
“Something.”
I meet their eyes. In the Artery, I know they see the flurry of events and emotions that swirls there. The vusabo and its attack on Rondo, how it had beckoned for me to join it. The breath that blows the green language of Faloiv into my inner ear, the way it seems to feel my anger for N’Terra and whisper to it. I try to conceal these things from Kimbullettican—I try to conceal them from myself. I fail.
Do you still wish to go to the archives? Kimbullettican asks silently. Or have you made another decision?
The archives. The red letters before me on this cast-off piece of the Vagantur have removed everything else of significance from my mind. This thing here in the middle of the meadow feels related to the archives somehow. The armed graysuits at the ship yesterday had been combing the jungle for pieces of the Vagantur, and they were looking for what Manx called the pods. My father and Albatur want the kawa, but they want these pods too.
“I wonder where the first two are,” I murmur.
“I do not understand.”
“It says Capsule three,” I say, still staring at the structure. “That means there has to be a Capsule one and two somewhere.”
Something about it itches my brain, remembering Captain Williams’s message: three pieces to return. Is the three a coincidence?
“What is this?” Kimbullettican says. They are standing nearer to the capsule now too, their sparkling black eyes studying its surface. At first I think they are asking me what the capsule itself is, but I notice one of their hands is pressed against it, one long thumb caressing the shell.
“What did you find?”
“A doorway, I believe. A seam in the shell.”
“Let me see.”
Faloii vision must be superior to human, because I don’t see anything—but when I press my fingertips where their hand indicates, there’s a seam. A slight indentation, running vertical along the capsule. I allow my fingers to follow it like a map, and find that it extends about a foot above my head before curving sideways and then down again. Yes, a doorway of some kind, sealed by moss and age.
“I wonder how it opens,” I say, my fingers still tracing the outline of its doorway. “It’s so old. It probably doesn’t open anymore.”
“All doors open,” Kimbullettican says. “It is only a matter of finding the key.”
I say nothing, running my hand over the words Vagantur Capsule 3. Part of me doesn’t even want it to open. I imagine finding another skeleton like Captain Williams’s, the remnants of someone who had died alone, perhaps while trying to flee what they believed would be the fate of the ship. I have seen enough death over the last few days: old and new, and in some cases death that has not yet occurred but is inevitable. I think if I opened this pod, whatever I would find would only make me wilt.
But then my hand wanders onto another indentation. It could have been merely a dent in the capsule, a nick taken out of its shell in what might have been a tumultuous journey to the ground from the sky. But it’s too even, too uniform. Symmetrical. A circular shape, my fingers hunting it out more frantically with each second, with an edge that extends on either side.
Like wings.
“Oh . . . ,” I whisper, a half-formed thought.
“You have found something,” Kimbullettican says, not a question.
My fingers remain on the indentation, refusing to break contact in case what I have found is then lost in shadow, adrift again in moss and mystery. My other hand goes to the hidden pocket of my suit, from which I withdraw the pin I had taken from Captain Williams. I know before I press it into the shape on the capsule that it will fit.
It makes a soft, satisfying sound that could have been a single beat of a heart, almost immediately followed by the rusty sigh of the door juddering open. At one time it might have been a smooth process. But here, so many years since the last time the doors had parted, weighed down by grit and moss and the air of a new planet, its grace is antiquated. The door can only open partway, but it reveals a tiny circular space that I can see straight through. Like the ceilings of the domes in N’Terra, what appears to be white from the outside is transparent from the inside, and I imagine that whoever had stepped into this capsule must have felt surrounded by glass as they hurtled from the ship to this lonely place.
“Interesting,” Kimbullettican says, peering in over my shoulder.
I withdraw Captain Williams’s pin from what I can only think of as a keyhole, clutching it in my palm. It feels warm, although nothing on the inside of the capsule glows to indicate a source of power. I stare at the silent space, lost for words.
“Are you not curious?” Kimbullettican says, and I think I hear humor in their voice, an amused puzzlement at my hesitancy.
“I am,” I say. “But . . .”
“But you are afraid.”
“That’s not the right word.”
“I think I understand,” they say, but they can’t. Faloiv is unequivocally their planet—their history is rooted here. There’s no part of their past that is shrouded in mystery. Not like this. I’ve always teased Alma for her vivid interest in our history, but now, the feeling of my own fear like a tense web being spun in my shoulders, I think I may have been more like Jaquot than I ever believed: using jokes to put distance between myself and uncomfortable truths. The past is no longer hidden behind the deliberate silences of N’Terra’s whitecoats—it’s right here in front of me.
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