“You . . . ,” he starts, but can’t finish. He doesn’t need to. Despite the effect of the vusabo, he knows I did this.
Manx has attacked June. They wrestle on the ground, all but one eyenu free. The birds squall with terror, the nearness of the dirixi competing with fear for their mother. One rushes to where the two women fight, bringing its long beak down on the graysuit’s shoulder with ferocious speed. Manx screams, and the beak comes away red. Two more eyenu rush to help, and Manx falls away from June, who lies shaking on the ground. Without her cloak she looks small and frail, every bit of her almost two hundred years. Rand watches this scene over his shoulder, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly, the buzzgun still trained on my chest.
I leap forward, grabbing the long muzzle and shoving it skyward. I expect it to fire, but it doesn’t; Rand merely grunts in surprise and stumbles backward toward where the third graysuit fumbles with one of their packs. Rand and I are still struggling when the other man withdraws a square black remote.
One of the gwabi immediately becomes alert as a button on the remote glows red. Its eyes, still blank, narrow into slits. It moves forward, its gait as jerky and unnatural as it had been when it had tracked me to the Vagantur’s escape pod. If it’s even the same one. With their selves stripped away, there is no differentiating between the creatures Albatur has stolen.
The roar from the dirixi rends the jungle, turning everything static; the air ripples like water. My fist connects with Rand’s face in the moment he allows fear to make him still, and the impact makes me cry out, one of the knuckles of my already injured hand cracking, the blood still moving in a slow line from my palm. When the gwabi leaps, I find myself holding the buzzgun, and when it fires, the bolt of light leaving my hands and snapping through the air into the massive airborne body is as if all my worst dreams have flowed from inside my head and gathered in a swarm before my eyes. The gwabi falls, twitching, the eyes still blank but now somehow blanker, life leaving the grand muscles and traveling elsewhere, somewhere far. I drop the gun, my hands shaking like the ground. Everything is shaking.
June is gone. Manx hauls herself from the ground, bleeding, screaming obscenities at her two comrades. Rand crawls away from me, afraid of the gun when he should be afraid of everything else. I scream too, but it doesn’t sound real: I don’t hear myself. All I hear is the echoing silence of the jungle, watching us and knowing that the noise I have brought is what will put us in the soil.
When the dirixi breaks through the tree line, it pauses. It’s smaller than the last one I had seen. I stare at it, empty. My fear is a planet—I live on it. The flaming eyes pass over the scene before it, blazing with gleeful hunger. Manx, streaming blood from the wound inflicted by the eyenu, is closest. She stumbles sideways, then backward, her escape slowed by her desperate need to keep her eyes on the thing that means her harm. Maybe she’s still screaming, maybe instinct has silenced her. It doesn’t matter because it doesn’t save her. I watch her disappear into that jagged mouth, shreds of her visible for only a moment before they are lost in the black hole of the dirixi. It rises onto its back legs, screeching victory.
Buzzguns fire and I am running. The jungle swallows me and I make my way down its green throat, even when something hot and sharp strikes my shoulder, sending me down into the dirt, the pain erupting like a scream. My suit screams too: I feel its pain, a thousand tiny fibers recoiling from the burn, trying to repair themselves against this unknown assailant. I stumble to my feet again, my breath coughing in and out, my legs wobbling as if I am not a creature made for land. Beneath me, that land shakes. There’s no way of knowing how far or how near I am to death, or how near death is to me. It is near enough. It is near enough for every roar to turn my skin into water.
Water.
The gentle sound of its movement had reached me when I’d awoken in the camp and now it reaches me again between roars. Soft. A whisper of a trickle, or the lap of a wave. In my mind, I imagine the river and its bowing plants, the noxious bubbles rising to save me from the death that hounds my heels. I can make it. I can make it there. I don’t hear the rush of other animals to this source of safety, but I tell myself they are already there, collapsing into nausea like a cool, safe bed. I force my legs onward. The river. I will make it to the river.
I think behind me I hear screams. One person. Two? I tell myself the screams don’t belong to June. Every time my foot strikes the ground I tell myself it is her foot, carrying her and her flock far up the mountain, back to the archives, underground where death can’t reach them. Every breath I take blows her toward safety. I smell the water now. It fills my nose with hope.
The pain in my shoulder screams louder and louder. The place where I cut my palm throbs. I think I can smell my own blood, mixing with the hope that drives me onward. I can still feel my suit trying to repair itself, but it’s struggling, and it can’t heal me, the hole in my body left open to the air.
Air. I almost run out into it. The ground ends. Something pulls me back, some last shred of sense that sends me scrambling backward, my butt landing hard on the rocky ground, pain lancing upward. Stones slide under my feet, pitching out into the nothing. There is no river.
I might whisper a curse, or perhaps something sadder, a groan that comes from my bones. The water I smelled was not the river. There are no clusters of bending plants here, no shaggy predators leaping from the trees to save me with their symbiosis. The air is devoid of bubbles. It’s devoid of everything except the smell of my blood, joined a moment later with the sky-shattering shriek of the dirixi. The heat rises on Faloiv, the sun’s crimson eye like a balm on my skin, but the fear clings to me like ice. I can’t move. I stare far down—far, far down, impossibly far. Water there at the bottom of the nothing. A vast blue lagoon laid like a disk across the land. Behind me there is only jungle, the smell of death creeping out like fingers over the soil, seeping through to reach my feet. The death smells familiar. It could be my own.
The dirixi hulks out of the trees on all fours, its nostrils flexing, taking in the fumes of the trail I left behind. The blood dripping from my hand is a breadcrumb compared to the soaking feeling of pain that is a red sponge on my shoulder. I wonder if the beast sees me, or if it sees only my blood, my body a mere vessel that contains what it requires. I breathe shallowly, not to be silent but because I know no other way. My breath is gone, leaking away like my blood.
“Thank you,” I say, the words falling clumsy and strange from my lips. The Artery is a wide hallway in my head: I lack the control to close it. Inside, the dirixi’s hunger and joy are unbearably bright. It’s almost beautiful, the perfection of its savagery.
Each step toward me shakes the ground, sending more stones flying out into space, where maybe they eventually fall. Or maybe they float. I’m too weak to care. When I find myself floating, my surprise is more real than the breath in my lungs. I don’t know if I jumped, if I fell. I float down. All I smell is blood. All I hear is the roar that rips the air and not my skin, and in the Artery, all the joy growing spines of rage.
Chapter 28
I’m some version of asleep when I hit the water, dreaming of the gwabi I shot, a nightmare in which all the animals of Faloiv have had their souls cut out by Albatur’s scalpel. The crash and slap of the surface wakes me, but barely. I’m tired. So tired that when I begin to sink, I don’t struggle. The water’s so cold it’s sharp, needles that prickle every patch of exposed skin. The cold of it presses on my injured shoulder and palm, tighter the deeper I go. As I sink, I notice the tickle of algae brushing my face, my chest: I descend through their gardens, an astronaut through the strangest reaches of space. But I’m not afraid of this blackness, of the soft density that crushes in around me. I’m not even afraid when I feel the creep of slime across my face, the slow crawl of something I can’t see, its grip like a gentle veil.
I’m breathing. Shallow breaths that leave me slightly dizzy, but breaths nonetheless. Not algae on my face, then, but my suit—ev
en in its weakened state it is trying to help me survive, and the guilt of that realization seems to pull me down farther still in the depthless water.
I don’t know how much time has passed when I realize that I’m not merely sinking. A current carries me, down through the tunnels that I sense were dug by the multukwu. A current of water and . . . something else. I realize, in my numb acceptance of whatever fate awaited me, I have not been listening. I look into the Artery.
The green language perceives me keenly from above and below. I’m surrounded by it. It feels like only yesterday that it had been too obscure for me to comprehend. Even now its words are beyond me, but I grasp its meaning the way I grasp communication from any species on Faloiv. Only this feels . . . larger. In constant motion. As bright and endless as the stars.
And it beckons me.
There is a trail in the Artery, and it hails me, signaling the organism of my suit as well. I have a choice, I feel. I can choose to be borne along in the current that is carrying me, following something like a scent that the green language has decided I should see. I can also choose to die.
Curiosity guides me. The suit feels my decision and allows me to be pulled along in the current, the water getting warmer and warmer as we go. I sense we are rising from a great depth, and I know I’m right when light looms larger and brighter ahead, the plants thinning into what looks like fine moss. I’m in a tunnel. It slopes upward.
Soon I lie in the shallows, staring at my fingertips, almost unrecognizable in their wrinkled state, feeling the mask my suit provided receding off my face. My shoulder, which the pressure of the water had seemed to soothe, now aches anew, as if the sunlight had reminded it that we are indeed a body and that we have lost blood. I wonder how much. I wonder what my shoulder looks like, if there’s a hole in me for the light to pass through. I glance at my palm, and the wound stares back.
I raise my head, looking first over my shoulder at the water. If I’m at the edge of a lagoon, it’s bigger than any I’ve seen so far. I can’t see the other side, its surface endless and an otherworldly green. A sea. I look ahead again, at my arms resting in black sand. Beyond is the welcome sight of jungle. It’s different, somehow, from the rest of Faloiv: the trees are tall, as tall as ever, but I don’t recognize their smell—sharper than the ogwe and the syca, almost acrid. It makes me thirsty. But greater than my thirst is the call of the green language. I force myself to stand.
The ground beyond the sand is green and springy, paler than the jungle ahead. It seems like a good place to lie down—to rest, or maybe to give up—but something pulls me onward. The trees will have answers, I tell myself. At the very least, hydration. I drag myself in their direction, imagining the smell of water.
I push through the jungle. At one point, I might have tried to classify the plant species, all new to my eyes. That person feels far away. N’Terra feels like a vestigial organ that I’ve slowly evolved out of my body. Whatever part of me it had occupied has shrunken into a memory. Something else has taken its place, the green language rushing in and planting seeds. It grows inside me. It had heard me whisper Danger. Humans. It thinks I have chosen a side. Maybe it’s right; maybe this is why the vine that had once encircled me and Rondo has seemed to wither. What pulls me toward Faloiv pulls me away from his heart.
I haven’t gone far when the smell of water trickles out of my imagination and into reality. It grows stronger as I press on, my feet finding the edge of a ravine, bordered with crags. A stream runs along its bottom, a small rush of water whose gurgle barely reaches my ears as I stand gazing down. There looks to have been a trail once, used by animals, perhaps, to reach the water when it still flowed more strongly. Now vines cross what had once been worn, stones where they shouldn’t be. My dry tongue drives me down to the ravine’s floor, slipping and sliding, showers of rocks preceding every step. Twice I catch myself with my bleeding palm, the pain shooting up my arm, reminding me that after water, I need to find medicinal flora.
But more than healing and more than water, something else calls me. The thing the green language wants me to see. When I reach the tiny stream’s edge, I let my eyes wander, searching the shallow water. I direct my eyes to the wall of the ravine, which bears traces of having once been under water: wavy lines that pattern the stone in gentle sweeps. I follow their trail with my eye, wondering what caused a river to dwindle to a stream.
And then I see it.
A boulder. Almost round, almost white. One end tapering off to prevent it from being a true sphere. Moss grows along its surface, a fine coating like green lace. Along one side grows an orange-blossomed tree, its trunk bonded with the pale surface as if the two were born intertwined. The tree may think the boulder is organic. I know better.
Yes, this, the green language seems to say.
If I could, I would run to it. The object is a glowing planet: I’m helpless, drawn in by its gravity, and I splash through the stream to reach it. When I press my palms against its surface, peeling away the moss, swiping away the layers of dirt, forty years’ worth, my heart freezes in my chest until my eyes land on the faded red letters. I need to see them, I need to know that I’m right, even though wrong is impossible.
Vagantur Capsule 2.
“Here you are,” I whisper. “Here you are.”
Just as with the capsule’s sibling, the indentation in the shape of wings is just below the red letters. Ignoring my aching shoulder, I reach for the hidden pocket within my suit and with shaking fingers withdraw Captain Williams’s pin, waiting there for me like a prophecy. It slides into the indentation with the same satisfying sound, and after what seems like an eternity, the door slowly, slowly opens, a few ragged inches at a time. The closed smell, a smell of strangeness, drifts out and over my face, a mask that shrouds me in the past. I don’t hesitate. I step inside and achingly sink down onto the single white seat, encircled by the transparent walls of the capsule.
I sit, numbed by all that has transpired. I can picture the jaws of the dirixi snatching up Manx, one gnash of its teeth turning her into nothing—but I feel empty. It is one death of many deaths. I had thought my mother’s was the first, but June’s memories tell me that the blood has been flowing for much longer than that. Not a planet swallowed by natural disaster but a place destroyed by its people. This is our legacy after all. The heritage Albatur wants to re-create is this: he wants to destroy the place we’d come for refuge and then go back to the Origin Planet and continue his path of desolation. This world, the last world . . . they both feel so heavy that I can only lean forward onto the dashboard, my fingers spread wide, and slowly lower my forehead to rest on its long-dead surface. I hear nothing but my own breath, not even the far-off sound of birds. The silence is complete.
Until it’s not.
The sound starts low, like a whisper. I don’t even sit up at first, mistaking it for the wind, for the brushing of leaves against other leaves, or maybe even the water, trickling around the base of the pod as it has been forced to do these past forty years. But the sound grows, increasing to a crackle: an unnatural sputtering that latches a microscopic hook inside my ear and tugs gently. I raise my head, looking beyond the window first to see what is making the noise outside. But it’s not outside: it’s a staticky hiss emerging from a small rectangular screen, no larger than the length of my hand. It’s trying to unscramble an image, pieces in the wrong order sparkling across the screen, breaking up and then rejoining, over and over, the rustle of audio snapping in and out, trying different formations until they make sense.
And suddenly they do. A face appears on the screen, all its pieces and parts in the correct order: the face of a woman with the same deep brown skin as me, high-arching eyebrows, her lips slightly parted as she peers out of the screen, squinting as if unsure. Above her head floats the tightly coiled shape of her Afro. Her voice drifts out of the screen slightly delayed after the movement of her lips, and I can only stare at the image of her with my mouth hanging open.
“T
his is Captain Yolanda Williams, pilot of Ship OVD 92, otherwise known as the Vagantur. If you are receiving this message, I am likely dead.” She pauses and seems to think, her eyebrows low and rigid. “But . . . that also probably means I was successful in what I am attempting to do, so I can live with that.”
Behind her on the small screen, another person appears, a woman whose face I can’t see, only her body up to her neck. Captain Williams turns to look at her.
“Ready?” the woman says in a low voice. “Now or never.”
“Just about,” the captain says, and turns back to the camera. The faceless woman remains in the frame. “My crew and I—the ones that I trust—are sabotaging the Vagantur. The crash will not be an accident. If there are casualties, we are responsible and we are so, so sorry. I will do my best to land the ship safely.”
She pauses again, bowing her head. When she raises her chin, her eyes are resolute.
“We determined this was the best option for saving lives—both human and otherwise. This ship was meant to carry families hoping to start fresh on the Planet X, where we determined we might find sympathy—the mission was infiltrated by River Corp. I repeat, we were infiltrated: Eric Albatur is a River Corp agent.”
“We need to hurry,” the woman behind her says.
“Just a minute, LaQuinta,” Captain Williams snaps, but her eyes shine with tears. She addresses the camera again: “I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If anyone gets hurt . . . I’m . . . so sorry. Please understand that we did what we thought was best.”
“LaQuinta Farrow,” I whisper.
LaQuinta Farrow is moving toward the exit and I catch a glimpse of her face as she cracks the door and peers out into a hall. Short in stature, her hair in thick plaits hanging from either side of her face. She was involved from the beginning.
An Anatomy of Beasts Page 30