Her eyebrows lower for an instant, maybe because she can’t understand me, or maybe because she doesn’t like what I have to say.
“For who?” she says. “Not for us. Haven’t you learned anything from your daddy?”
It’s like a slap. June cringes in the Artery. The graysuits turn their attention to her.
“So who are you, exactly?” Rand says, using his gun like a finger, pointing. “And why do you have so many of the egg things?”
“More importantly,” Manx interrupts, “do you have ours? Albatur has had us looking for the Vagantur’s forever. You’d save us a lot of trouble if you gave it up now.”
“If I kept track of everything that fell from the sky,” June says, “I would have a lot of rain.”
“You know that the storm last night wasn’t normal, right?” I break in. “You know that the planet is starting to change? Because of you. Because of us.”
Manx’s eyebrows lower again, but they spring back quickly, arched with annoyance. “All the more reason we need to get the hell out of here,” she snaps. “Now, what did you do with our egg, lady?”
I’ve twisted away from her, but behind me, June hums to herself. I imagine her eyes closed, hiding the century that shines out from them. The heat is rising. Dawn is passing into day.
“What about your birds?” Rand says. “We were watching. We saw them give the eggs. How does it work? He’s going to want to know.”
“It’s not work at all,” June says, then resumes her humming.
“You know you’re human, don’t you?” Rand insists, using the gun to point again. I keep my eyes trained on the empty black mouth of it, hoping it doesn’t speak. “Who do you really think you’re helping?”
Behind him, the eyenu make stifled sounds beneath their gags. They’re watching the human proceedings with fear-filled eyes. I wonder if they think June is their mother, if they feel as helpless as June had on Earth, watching her mother be dragged away. The thought fills my heart with grief, but I’m too cowardly to look into the Artery and feel what they feel. It might overwhelm me, sodden my reflexes with sadness, and I need to be sharp.
“There are other ways to do this,” I say. “Don’t you know there are a hundred or more people living in the city with the Faloii? Perfectly happy? Everything was fine until Albatur started messing everything up.”
“Don’t you know anything?” Manx snaps now, crouching down before me. “He’s right: you are just like your mother. Think you have it all figured out, don’t you?”
Rand laughs, an ugly sound, small under the eye of the jungle. Manx rocks back on her heels, still eyeing me. “You think it’s about working things out here. It’s about working things out here so that we can leave,” she says. “If Albatur has his way, we can keep Faloiv for its resources but finally go home. Why don’t you understand that?”
“But this is our home,” I whisper.
She rolls her eyes skyward, as if my ignorance is a bird that she follows to the treetops. “It doesn’t have to be. You’re a kid: you don’t know. Before Williams died, they got what they needed from her: the ship will only run on the kawa it was built with. We need that egg.”
Only one will make it run, I think, the words etched on the captain’s cell wall glowing behind my eyes.
They must only be allowed what they were given, June says.
“Don’t do that,” the one called Rand says. “You’re doing the talking thing, aren’t you? Albatur said you probably could. Don’t. Whatever you want to say, say it out loud.”
“You found all those kawa,” I say, almost laughing. “But he still can’t get what he wants.”
Manx looks like she wants to hit me. “N’Terrans have been searching for years,” she says. “We know the aliens have the Vagantur’s power cell. If they just give it up, we can go.”
My heart begins to pound. June somehow has a piece of the Vagantur’s kawa in the archives. They must not know it’s there, or this conversation would be moot. I have to keep it that way.
“Go back where?” I say, diverting the conversation. “To Earth? It’s probably a shell by now.”
“That’s why we need the eggs,” she says, smiling as if she finally found a way to get through to me. “The eggs will not only fix the ship, they will fix the planet. All the power we need.”
“That’s what he says,” I say.
“Yes, that’s what he says,” she snaps back, angry again.
“And what if he’s wrong?” I say. “What if he’s wrong?”
“Don’t bother,” Rand says to her. He lets the buzzgun fall now, its mouth shouting silently at the ground. He turns back to what’s left of the fire. “Waste of time. Let her die in a cell like Williams.”
“At least we have her,” Manx says, shrugging carelessly in my direction. She too goes back to the embers, to the smoking bodies of dead animals. “She’s wearing the suit he was talking about. It will be good to make a few of those before we leave this shit planet.”
Are you all right? I say to June.
I’m tired, she says. I thought I was finished being tired.
I don’t know what to do, I say, and my eyes fill with tears, because it feels like I’m talking to my mother and at the same time it feels like I never had one.
She doesn’t answer, and this makes the tears burn even hotter. To keep them at bay, I focus on the gwabi and the eyenu, the vast space between what each of them is feeling. I wonder if, under all the modifications Albatur and the others have made, the animals still retain anything of their own, or if they’ve been changed beyond recognition, all that they used to be weeded out by the force of violence. I think of the metal world I’d seen in June’s memory and wonder the same about myself and my fellow humans. Have we retained anything that isn’t destructive?
Was it ever good? I ask June in the silent tunnel. Was there anything worth saving?
She doesn’t answer right away. I can feel her attention focused on the remaining eyenu of her flock, her heart aching for them, her anger stronger than her body. When she finally turns her energy toward me, it’s purple and heavy with grief and memory.
Of course, she says. There is always something to save. But what was good, we made ourselves. My mother’s pin. Such a small thing. She wanted to remember the place she came from, before she started working for the River’s factories. I remember now. I remember there were no jobs, except with them: two companies owned everything. She had to feed me. She worked for them. They cut off her locs. They erased her tattoos. What is there to pass on from a world that has been flattened?
They started doing the same thing in N’Terra, I tell her. I have to work hard not to let her grief sink into me from the Artery. It’s as strong as last night’s storm, threatening to saturate me. People had banners from the Origin Planet. From Earth. Flags. They started replacing them with N’Terran banners.
This man, this Albatur, she says. He wants a metal world. If there is good, it’s made ourselves.
The three graysuits are sitting and eating. It might be meat. I can almost hear them chewing, can hear their low laughter, keeping their conversation quiet enough to remain secret from me and June. I stare blankly, trying to envision the world they imagine going back to. A flat world. Is that where my father longs to return? A colorless world. What besides blood makes us family? The vivid colors of Faloiv surround the graysuits, and I decide to stare at those instead. Crimson. Aquamarine. Violet.
Violet.
My eye passed over the tall purple flower the first time, just one more bright thing in the jungle. But as it seems to rise, I lock my gaze onto it. It does rise, inch by inch, its stalk emerging from the brush. A vusabo.
There is no breeze, but it sways. So friendly. So harmless. One more flower of Faloiv . . . at least that’s what it would like passersby to think. But I know better.
The first time I noticed the green language of Faloiv, far away in Mbekenkanush—or was it earlier? In N’Terra? The ogwe and their messages of f
irst calm and then warning?—it wasn’t a language I could fully understand. But something has shifted—maybe inside me or maybe inside the planet. I hear it more clearly now. The vusabo almost makes sense to me, and I can feel it hunting.
Rand and the other graysuits continue their conversation, oblivious to the threat. The almost threat. The vusabo hasn’t yet decided what it will do: the slight shift I sense in Faloiv isn’t complete; it’s a process, a message that spreads slowly through the planet’s veins. Maybe it flows from the Isii. I can’t tell. But the plant that normally hunts birds is making up its mind, sizing up the humans, weighing whether they are predators, and therefore prey.
I know immediately what I must do. If there is good, it’s made ourselves.
The green language doesn’t come naturally to me the way Arterian does. I know I will never speak it as the Faloii do. But I can feel some cave of my brain grinding open as I force what feels like a forest of vines apart to make room for the words.
Humans, I say. Danger.
It’s as if the vusabo was waiting for permission. Two quills fly like wasps from the stalk, burying themselves in Rand’s neck. The vines spring from the bush a moment later.
“Holy hell,” he cries, leaping up. I stare, unmoved, knowing the venom is spreading through his veins. I know there is no voice in the Artery telling him where he will find the antidote. I have just helped the vusabo kill this man, but the only thing I feel is the green language thrumming through me.
Manx screams, leaping up, using the stick she’d used on the fire as a weapon against the vines, which are wrapping around Rand’s legs like two snakes.
Hurry, we need to move now, I tell June. She stares at me in bafflement, and I can’t tell if she’s impressed or horrified by what I’ve done, what I have decided to be. Now!
I remember a graysuit cuffing Rondo’s wrists, and Rondo wriggling out of them. I begin to do the same, urging June to follow my lead. The graysuits ignore us, their cries rising as they battle the vusabo, which shoots another set of quills but misses. My bonds have begun to loosen, but not quickly enough. One of the graysuits has freed Rand, ripping one of the vines clean off the vusabo’s stalk. I yank at my wrists, my pulse climbing. Captain Williams’s pin jabs me through my suit, spurring me on.
Manx raises her buzzgun, aims at the flower of the vusabo, and fires. The sound echoes through the jungle and bright violet petals and plant matter scatter to the ground. The stalk will likely survive, but it is too damaged to attack further, dashing my hopes.
Rand, however, remains panting, dizzy. He will be gone soon, I think, fighting a flood of remorse. Instead I feel sorry for the vusabo. It had been too small a predator against too dangerous an adversary. The small fangs of the stalk were not enough to do what I needed them to do. I needed a bigger beast.
A bigger beast.
Do not, June says in the Artery, seeing my plan before it has fully hatched in my mind, but I know already that I’m going to.
My wrists are not free, but my fingers can reach the place on my hip where Captain Williams’s pin is concealed within the flesh of my suit. The suit opens for me, revealing the hard edge, the point of the wings which, long ago, the woman who flew our ship had used to carve her words into the wall. I grip it hard. I will not let it fall.
I take a deep breath, the wings in my hand, the wings that had come so far across the universe. I press the edge against my left palm, wincing already. I press. I press until my mouth opens, releasing a small breath. I press until I feel the blood release from my skin, a small river, a signal. I imagine it as the reddest thing on the planet as it drips down my wrist into the soil. I imagine it as a siren, a beacon shining into the sky, demanding the jungle to part like water.
Nothing happens.
Rand is still clutching his buzzgun, but it hangs limply to his side. His mouth moves, rambling an endless stream of nonsense as his fellow graysuits cluster around him, trying to figure out how to help.
“Poison?” one says. “Check the packs on the gwabi. There has to be some kind of antidote that the whitecoats sent out!”
“Rand, what’s happening? Where does it hurt?”
Please, I think. Please. Come on. We’re right here.
Manx aims her buzzgun at me and June.
“Don’t even think about moving,” she says. “As soon as we deal with this, I’m retightening those bindings!”
Please, I pray to the sky. Albatur can’t have June. He can’t have the eyenu. Please. Please.
And then I notice the quiet.
It spreads across the jungle like wind, everything becoming still, the very trees listening. The graysuits barely notice. They are accustomed to not noticing, and their attention is elsewhere.
The first time the ground shakes, it’s a mere tremor.
Oh, child, June says, her fear growing large.
Get ready to move, I tell her.
The ground shakes again, this time enough to make the grass around me tremble just slightly, as if shuddering in a mysterious breeze.
“Did you feel that?” the third graysuit says, looking away from Rand for the first time. Rand is still on his feet. I think it must take longer for the venom to travel through someone his size.
“Feel what?” Manx says.
The rumble in the ground answers. My heart matches it, thundering in my ears. I begin scrambling at my bonds again, not caring if they notice.
“I felt it that time,” Manx says. She’s standing now, her eyes fixed on the jungle. “Leftover from the storm maybe?”
How can they not know?
“It’s so quiet,” the third graysuit says, and these three words float out into the air between them, a seed. I can almost see it being planted, the way it grows roots in their minds.
“Oh god,” Manx says, and suddenly the buzzgun is a metric of her fear: alert, erect. She aims it at the jungle, at nothing, at everything. She clings to it like it might offer something besides noise when the time comes.
“Be quiet,” she says, her voice as soft as the soil against my cheek. “Be quiet now. Don’t move. Don’t speak.”
They obey. Silence consumes the small clearing. The fire has long faded, its embers cracking only occasionally and so softly I don’t think even a dirixi would notice. I work blindly, madly at the material that ties my wrists, imagining that I feel the fibers stretching, that freedom is only a few twists away. June is motionless behind me, as still as the jungle and as silent. I wonder if her wrists move, if she is struggling to free herself, or if she has resigned herself to whatever happens next.
“Did it stop?” Rand whispers. Only the shape of his words reaches me.
“Quiet,” Manx hisses.
My wrists burn. The jungle is still silent.
“I don’t hear it,” Rand whispers again, fear and poison making him stupid.
“Quiet!”
The ground does not shake. Perhaps the beast is listening. Perhaps it has chosen other prey. Perhaps it raises its monstrous tongue to the air, scenting other beasts that might earn its wrath. I remember its scales. The way it had approached the Vagantur without fear, despite the ship’s size, confident in its fangs. The way its only concern was blood, leveling the jungle in pursuit of its needs, and the way the jungle had gone silent before it, within and without.
I am alone in the Artery when I open it wide inside my head.
Come, I say into the void. We’re here.
A long moment of stillness, of silence.
Then the ground begins to tremble.
Chapter 27
June is already free. I don’t know how she did it, but as the graysuits get lost in their panic, their fear rising to replace the flames of their dead fire, I catch sight of her slipping across the small campsite, dodging between the streams of light the breaking sun provides. She is fast and agile, the weight of her many years lifted by urgency. Even with the Artery closed, her purpose eclipses all else: she is going to save her babies.
“The
walls are yellow and blue,” Rand cries, as if behind the delirium of the venom he still understands the fear. “The doors are falling!”
The third graysuit scrambles for a buzzgun. It’s the only thing they know to do. The Albaturean gwabi have risen from where they lay resting. Their blank eyes show no fear, but I wonder if threads of it are still sewn into their muscles, if inside they are twitching to run but are held in place by the Zoo’s bonds.
I struggle at my own. I’d risen to my knees at some point, shoving Captain Williams’s pin back into the fold of my suit with my grandfather’s map, the soil still clinging to my face and finding its way into my mouth. My hand throbs, wet with blood. What I’ve done seems to spiral down from the sky like a wide-winged oscree, down and down until it lands on my shoulder and whispers in my ear: It’s coming for you. You called it with your blood; now the dirixi will answer.
The graysuits are shouting and they shouldn’t be, but they’ve realized June is trying to free the eyenu and they can’t decide whether killing her is more important than saving their own skins. The dirixi could be a mile away, it could be five miles away. All we know is that it will be here soon.
One of my wrists feels loose. I stumble to my feet, unbalanced without my arms to help, and use all my strength to pull my hands in opposite directions. The bonds, whatever they’re made of, cut into my skin, and perhaps more blood emerges into the thick jungle air, but it doesn’t matter. One drop. A hundred. It’s enough.
The bonds snap just as June frees another eyenu. I start to move toward her across the clearing, but Rand whirls on me, his buzzgun aimed at my chest.
“The comet is too big!” he shrieks, delirious. His eyes are wild but as empty as the gwabi’s. The beasts don’t move. The third graysuit appears to be searching frantically for their remotes, hoping the gwabi will defend against the coming threat. He has no idea that what he’s hoping for is smoke. That the gwabi, if they had their own minds, would already be fleeing. Only humans think this is something that can be fought.
Frozen, my eyes move toward my hand, the blood wandering down from my palm to my wrist. Bloodshot with venom, Rand’s eyes follow mine, and when they settle on the red ribbon running from my skin, he stares blankly for a moment.
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