Liana nodded and turned away, walked with Quint to the wall and sat on the ground. Grath turned back to the pot, threw the cloth over his shoulder and gave the stew another stir. And Kiva, in the silence, wandered away, back to the door.
She peered outside. The doorway pointed away from the village and toward the rise. Beyond was the plain. Kiva hadn’t set foot on it since the day of her first vision.
She sensed movement behind her and glanced backward to see Grath approach. Just behind her shoulder, he stopped.
“When you were a girl,” he began, his voice low so Liana and Quint couldn’t hear, “you used to love going out there to the plain. Do you remember? Every night at sundown, I’d look around and suddenly you’d be gone.”
“I remember,” Kiva said, looking out toward the horizon. She felt an ache in her chest.
“You know, the stew won’t be ready for a while,” Grath said.
Kiva looked back. Grath was smiling.
“Go,” Grath said. “The village will still be here when you get back.”
Kiva turned back to the door. The sky was streaked with color; if she hurried, she could get to the plain in time to see the Great Mother dip below the horizon. She smiled and gave Grath one more glance. Then she put her eyes forward and darted through the door to the foot of the hill, feeling as though she was fleeing, escaping.
Kiva ran up the rise as quickly as her legs would take her. The muscles in her thighs burned but she still felt lighter with each step, felt the cares of the village dropping off her one by one, until it seemed that when she reached the top of the rise she’d fly into the air and float away into the sky.
Coming down on the other side, Kiva’s heels jarred against the ground, digging into the dirt and sliding down the hill at each footfall. She was deliberately careless with her steps, allowing herself to wobble on her feet. A few times she grabbed at the prairie grass rising up around her for balance, but the stalks gave her no purchase and she tumbled harmlessly to the bottom of the hill.
As she sprang to her feet, Kiva felt herself laughing. So this was what it was like to be alone. She’d practically forgotten, after spending the past four seasons trapped in the center of the village amidst a cacophonous storm of thoughts and feelings coming at her from every angle. But here on the prairie there were no huts, no people, no thoughts grappling for space in her head. Here, the only thing that grabbed at her were the grasses that bent in the wind, grazing her calves as she passed into the plain. Here, Kiva could be free—for a little while at least.
Kiva came into the broad expanse of the plain. She hoisted her dress to her knees, the fabric pooling in her hands like sand, and dashed to the hillock that had been her favorite spot. She threw herself down and bent an elbow, casting her wrist across her forehead. Peering from beneath her thumb, she glanced at the soft glow of the Great Mother receding on the horizon and squinted until the blotch of red went blurry.
Kiva’s eyes shut, and she listened to the sound of silence in her head. She felt herself drifting, hovering on the edge of sleep.
And it was then, as Kiva balanced on the cusp between two worlds, between wakefulness and sleep, that another vision came over her.
The vision happened much as before. It began just as the Great Mother set, with a blinding pain that gripped Kiva at the base of her torso and shot up through her spine. Lying sideways, her body convulsed, her back and legs arched in a near-semicircle, before inverting and folding her over in the other direction, head to knees.
As before, Ao passed overhead just as the vision seized her, the moon’s gravity lifting Kiva’s hair into the air as if she were floating underwater. Kiva spread her arms and let them be pulled into Ao’s distant grip.
The burst of light and fire.
The stone bird winging its way between pinprick stars that elongated like raindrops in the wind.
The three dark figures standing silhouetted against the horizon—and one of them stepping forward into the light. His face became visible.
A boy. Skin pale, eyes blue.
“Who are you?” Kiva demanded. “What do you want? Why are you coming to Gle’ah?”
The boy said nothing.
Then the vision ended as Ao passed out of reach and dropped Kiva back to the ground, her hands splayed in the dirt.
As before, Kiva came gasping back to her senses with a word on her tongue. The first time, in the vision she’d had when she was thirteen, the word had been Strangers.
This time, the word was Matthew.
She spoke it aloud, setting her fingers lightly on her lips to feel them form the strange, foreign sounds. The boy’s name? Perhaps.
Kiva pushed herself to her feet and walked back to the village, her eyes on her feet. She reflected on what she’d seen.
The vision had been exactly the same as before, with only one difference: she had seen the boy—had seen Matthew—even as the other Strangers remained black silhouettes, shrouded by darkness. For some reason, the Ancestors wanted her to see his face, to know his name.
But why?
22
matthew
Over the span of a century Matthew traveled and dreamed, dreamed and traveled—and in the dim space between dreams he often wondered how far he’d come, how close he was to his destination.
Matthew didn’t know for certain. Sometimes, it seemed as though he’d been dreaming, waiting to be awoken, forever, for centuries, millennia. And other times, it felt as though he’d gone to sleep only seconds before. That he’d wake up on the other end to find that one hundred light-years had passed by in the blink of an eye.
Then, one day, Matthew dreamed a different kind of dream—a dream of things he’d never seen, of a foreign planet that had no place in his memories.
The dream began in a haze, a cloud of luminous, white space dust. Then the planet—an orb mottled in shades of pink and orange—emerged from the haze and grew bigger and bigger until the orb blotted out everything else.
He passed through another haze as his consciousness entered the planet’s orbit, descended into its upper atmosphere. Then yet another clearing, the dissipation of the haze and his first vision of the planet’s gently undulating surface, the rounded, swelling hills like waves, like a sea of bodies sleeping one next to the other.
Closer, he saw that the waves on the planet’s surface had their own waves, a pattern within a pattern: a sea of grasses that rippled with the wind.
The colors were strange: below, the grasses were painted in vivid shades of purple and burgundy; above, the sky was pinkish orange from one horizon to the next. Embedded in the sky was a glowing orb: a sun, creeping across the sky.
The dream sped up as if on a video loop; the sun rushed across the sky and knelt to touch the land. Then the vision slowed again as the sun hit the horizon and began to dim, to turn a bright red that blended with the distant grasses. The sky exploded with shades of purple and red, mirroring the planet’s surface, until he couldn’t be sure which expanse was land and which was sky.
And then Matthew’s feet were on the ground, pressing through the prairie as the grasses bent against his knees. He came over a hill, and saw her.
A girl. She lay in the cleft place beneath a small hillock, her eyes closed, a ragged, sleeveless cloth dress covering her from her shoulders to her knees. Her skin was gray. Her hair lay pooled around her head, black but reflecting a rainbow of colors in its strands.
She was beautiful. And she was in pain.
The girl’s eyes snapped open. She sat up, propped her hand behind her, and looked at him.
“Who are you?” the girl demanded. “What do you want?”
“Don’t be afraid,” Matthew said, reaching out a hand to calm her. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
At that moment, a shock of electricity coursed white-hot through Matthew’s body. The girl disappeared as Matthew’s eyes snapped open. He sat bolt upright and gasped. At once, the real world flooded in around him, overwhelming his senses. He was
sitting in an open cryochamber, his legs submerged beneath several thawed inches of the blue liquid he’d been sleeping in for the past hundred years. To either side of him sat Sam and Dunne taking choking gulps of the air, trying to find their breath just like he was. And above their heads, through a small circular window, a planet loomed.
Matthew was awake. He had arrived.
23
kiva
Kiva woke from her vision with a gasp, the world flooding back in through her eyes, ears, and nostrils. She lifted herself from the ground, propped one hand in the dirt behind her, and put the other on her heaving chest.
Kiva was, once again, on the plain, lying in the grass just beyond the border of the village. Three weeks had come and gone since her last vision, the one in which the Ancestors had shown her the boy—had shown her Matthew, she reminded herself. After that vision, she’d realized that the best way to learn more about the Strangers must be to leave the village, escape to a quiet place where the thoughts of the Vagri didn’t crowd in her head, and wait for the Ancestors to speak. And so that was exactly what she’d done. Every morning when the Great Mother rose she left the Vagra’s hut, went out past the edge of the rise, lay down just beneath the hillock, and waited. She returned to the village in the evening only to sleep, long after darkness fell.
She’d done this every night; every night it had failed—but not this night. The Ancestors had given her another vision of the Strangers. As before, the vision began the same, then ended with one new detail. First was the explosion of light and fire—a burst of power, she’d come to assume, launching the Strangers toward Gle’ah. Then came the image of the stone bird flying between the stars. Next she saw the bird landing on the prairie, and the three Strangers standing side by side against the horizon, and the detail that her last vision had added: one of the Strangers stepping forward, a boy. Matthew.
To this, her new vision had added yet one more thing: Matthew had spoken to her.
Don’t be afraid, he’d said. I’m not going to hurt you.
This was what Kiva had been waiting for: proof that the Strangers weren’t a threat to the Vagri. They had nothing to fear. The Strangers weren’t going to hurt them.
Kiva got up and made her way back to the village. She walked quickly, eager to share what she’d learned with the Vagra. The old woman’s health had been getting worse and worse. She mostly stayed in her cot, and was increasingly hard to rouse from sleep. Kiva feared that she’d be dead soon. Still, if the Vagra could summon the strength to call one more meeting—a meeting in which Kiva could tell the Sisters what she’d learned about the Strangers—it might be all that Kiva needed. Just one meeting for Kiva to put the Sisters’ fears to rest, demonstrate her ability to communicate with the Ancestors, and prove that she was fit to lead—all before the Vagra died and passed power to her.
Kiva walked a little faster.
It was afternoon, and the village was still bustling with people. Kiva felt the eyes of the Vagri on her as she passed, but she didn’t pay them any mind. She had to talk to the Vagra.
Kiva parted the cloth hanging in the doorway and walked into the darkness of the hut. A dank, stale smell hung in the air. Kiva blinked, gave her eyes a moment to adjust, then walked to the cot. The Vagra was lying atop it, completely still.
Kiva knelt next to the cot.
“Vagra,” she said softly. “Vagra, wake up. I have to talk to you.”
The old woman didn’t move. Kiva reached toward her shoulder to give it a jostle. As soon as her hand touched the Vagra’s body she snatched it back, leapt to her feet, and staggered away. She looked at her palm, then back at the Vagra.
The Vagra’s body was completely cold. Even through the cloths that covered her Kiva could feel that all the warmth had gone from her body.
Panic flooded Kiva’s veins as she realized that she was alone in the hut—that the person she was looking at was no longer a person at all, but a lump of dead flesh. Kiva fell to her knees next to the cot again and clawed at the old woman’s body frantically, pulling at her blankets and clothes.
“Vagra!” she shouted. “Vagra, please. Not yet. I can’t do this without you.”
But it was no use. The old woman was gone.
Feeling a sudden revulsion at the dead body, Kiva scrambled backward from the cot on her heels and hands. She kept moving until her shoulders hit the wall of the hut. Breathing hard, she sat against the wall with wide eyes and a pounding heart.
The walls seemed to be closing in. Kiva was trapped. The old woman was no longer the Vagra. Kiva was the leader of the village now.
How long Kiva sat that way she couldn’t be sure. But in time her heart slowed, her breathing calmed.
She knew what she had to do next. There was no escaping it.
Kiva pushed herself to her feet. Looking purposefully away from the Vagra’s dead body, she let her eyes focus on a place in the air in front of her as she gathered herself. She brushed her hands down the front of her dress, smoothing out the wrinkles. Ran her fingers once through her hair. Then walked to the door.
Outside the hut, she scanned the landscape until she spotted a Sister walking nearby.
“Thruss!” she called.
Thruss paused, raised her head, met Kiva’s eyes. She walked over.
“Yes?”
“I need to call a meeting of the Sisters’ council. Can you spread the word?”
Thruss nodded.
“Good,” Kiva said. “We’ll meet in an hour.”
Kiva paced inside the hut as the Sisters gathered outside, all the while trying not to let her gaze pass over the Vagra’s dead body. Only when she was sure that all the women had come did she allow herself to look toward the cot where the old woman lay. She looked so lonesome lying there in the middle of the empty hut, so fragile. Kiva felt a twinge of regret as she realized that the old woman had died alone—that she’d slipped away while Kiva had been out on the plain, listening for the voice of the Ancestors.
Kiva crossed the room to the cot. Knelt by the old woman’s side. Put her hand on the Vagra’s chest.
“I’m sorry, Vagra,” she said. “I wish I could’ve been here for you. You’ve taught me so much. How to hear the voices of the Vagri. How to listen to the Ancestors. How to lead. I wish you could be with me now.”
Her hand still lying on the Vagra’s chest, she looked up through the hole in the roof. Day was fading, the deep colors of evening beginning to bleed across the sky. Kiva closed her eyes.
“I don’t know if you’re up there with the Ancestors or not. But if you are, help me now. Guide me. I can’t do this without you.”
Kiva pushed out a breath and stood up. She walked to the door. The Sisters went quiet as she came outside.
“Sisters,” she said, trying her best to make her voice firm and unwavering, “the old woman has passed on. She goes to be with the Ancestors. I am your Vagra now.”
A buzz fluttered up into the air from the crowd. The Sisters turned from Kiva and began talking and gesturing to each other, their faces full of confusion and unease. Kiva put her arms up to silence the Sisters and shouted louder.
“Sisters, please! I know you have many questions—and there will be time for those later. Tonight we must prepare the old woman’s body for burial.”
But by then the noise of the crowd had risen so high that Kiva could scarcely hear her own voice. Nobody was listening to her. Most of the Sisters seemed to be turning their attention away from Kiva toward a certain part of the crowd. The crowd thinned, moved, knotted in a different place off to Kiva’s left, like scavengers flocking to a corpse. She craned her neck to see who the Sisters had gathered round.
It was Kyne.
Kyne was silent in the middle of the chattering mob, motioning for them to calm themselves. Her mouth moved, and though Kiva couldn’t hear Kyne over the voices of the rest of the Sisters, she could clearly understand the words from the shape Kyne’s mouth made as she spoke them: “Not here.”
In
the back of Kiva’s mind, the thoughts of the Sisters roared like wind rustling through the grasses of the prairie. She opened her mind to listen to their thoughts, one at a time.
Dead.
The Vagra’s dead.
Our leader. Gone.
But Kiva’s not ready.
She can’t lead.
Too weak.
Can’t protect us.
Can’t protect us from the Strangers.
Kyne.
It has to be Kyne.
She has a plan. She’ll use the Forsaken. She’ll command them to kill the Strangers.
Kyne must be our Vagra.
Kiva’s stomach sank as she realized what was happening. She’d learned what she needed to know about the Strangers—but too late. While she’d been spending her days out on the prairie listening for the voice of the Ancestors, she’d run out of time.
The Sisters were on Kyne’s side now.
24
matthew
After Matthew woke he spent what seemed like an eternity learning to breathe again. His lungs ached. Each gasp felt like a stab in the chest—he’d have screamed at the pain, but that would have required more breath, and more breath was the one thing he didn’t have. Clamping a hand on the side of his cryochamber, he gasped over and over again, willing his lungs to thaw and let the oxygen he gulped from the air into his bloodstream.
After his fifth or sixth gulp of air, his mind began to clear, and he became aware enough of his body to realize that it wasn’t just his lungs that hurt. Every part of him was filled with a pain worse than he’d ever felt, an ache so deep and so sharp it felt as though his cells were torturing him.
Wincing, hissing air through his teeth, he swung his legs over the side of his cryochamber. Hands on knees, he panted, gazing miserably at the floor. Then a wave of nausea overtook him, his abdominal muscles clenched tight around his empty stomach, and he heaved a few small drops of bile onto the floor.
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