After the pain subsided, he lifted his head to look at how his shipmates were doing. Dunne looked even worse than he did—her face was dazed and stricken, a dribble of clear vomit smeared down her chin. Sam’s face was gray and sunken, but he was smiling a crooked grin.
“Goddamn hangovers,” he said. “Am I right?”
Matthew didn’t laugh.
“Our bodies are in shock from the unfreezing process,” Dunne said.
“Like I said, a hundred-year hangover,” Sam said. “Hair of the dog is the only thing for it.”
Matthew shook his head. “No way,” he croaked. “You want a drink at a time like this?”
“Why not?” Sam said. “I snuck a flask into my personals.” He rummaged in the cabinet at his cryochamber’s head, then came out with a glinting aluminum flask. He unscrewed the top and took a long pull. “If I’m going to die down there, no way in hell I’m doing it sober.”
Watching Sam, Matthew remembered how sick he’d been after a night of drinking with Silas and Adam, and another wave of nausea rose up in his throat. He choked it back.
Silas and Adam. It seemed like only yesterday that he’d been with them. And yet it was a century ago. Matthew felt with a dizzy wave the vastness of space just outside the ship’s hull, the huge emptiness that lay between him and the tiny corner of the universe he knew as home. He thought of his mother, of Sophie. All of them—his friends, his family, everyone he’d ever known—were dead. The realization hit him like a punch to the gut, and all at once he felt breathless again. He closed his eyes and hoped that his mother’s cancer had been cured, that Sophie had lived a long life, that Silas and Adam had married and had children and grandchildren.
Dunne coughed, bringing Matthew out of his thoughts. “What we need is food.”
Matthew climbed out of his cryochamber and put his feet on the ground. Their bodies still covered in slimy cryoliquid, the three of them stumbled from the stasis room into a narrow corridor. At a window Matthew paused and glanced outside at the planet below. The orb was covered in a pinkish-orange haze, and here and there where the haze was thin enough he could see to the surface: rust red, the color of dried blood.
The sight of the planet stirred something in him, but he didn’t know what. Ghostly afterimages lingered in the back of his mind, airy and insubstantial as mist; Matthew couldn’t be sure what the images were of or if they were even there at all. Had he been dreaming before he’d been woken up? He thought so, but he couldn’t remember. He gazed at the planet a moment more, then gave his head a little shake and turned away from the window.
It was probably nothing. Just his imagination.
Matthew turned down the corridor and hurried to catch up with Dunne and Sam as they came into the body of the ship.
The ship was called the Corvus, and though this was technically the first time Matthew had ever set foot in it, he’d learned its layout and how to work its systems in virtual reality simulations during training. Dunne and Sam, who’d been through the same training, walked confidently ahead of Matthew. Together the three of them walked past the airlock, the room through which they’d later pass onto the planet’s surface. The airlock also housed a speeder, a hovering vehicle designed to carry one or two people, which they could use to explore the planet.
They passed a laboratory, a small sleeping quarters, and the ship’s control room, then found their way to a room with the ship’s food supplies and a small metal table. As Matthew and Sam sat at the table, Dunne prepared them a meal: a synthetic sludge packed with proteins and carbohydrates, which was supposed to help their bodies recover from the freeze. The stuff was gray and tasteless, but Matthew devoured it anyway, hunched over his bowl as he shoveled it into his mouth.
“Jesus. You’d think it was your last meal or something,” Sam said.
Matthew lifted his head from his bowl but couldn’t think of a retort. It probably was his last meal. Matthew looked past Sam and glanced once more out the windows of the control room to the thick atmosphere of the planet below, and nearly threw up all over again at the cold certainty that washed over him and brought a sweat to his forehead.
He was going to die here.
25
kyne
It’s time, my daughter.
Kyne walked slowly through the dark hills, feeling the stiff blades of grass bend beneath her feet, her way lit by the three moons of Gle’ah. She looked up into the sky and closed her eyes for a moment, let her face be bathed in silver moonlight.
Time for you to take your rightful place among your people.
The words rippled through her mind with every step—the only words her mother had ever spoken to her. She’d spoken them to Kyne in a vision, her first visitation from the Ancestors when she was eleven seasons old.
The vision had been simple, but powerful—the most significant moment of Kyne’s life. She’d been lying in bed, trying and failing to sleep, when the vision came to her. A figure walked up and knelt at her bedside. She looked, saw that it wasn’t her father—the figure was, rather, a beautiful woman who looked at Kyne tenderly. Kyne knew immediately that it must be her mother.
“Mama,” she’d said in the vision, absurdly, as if her mother had never died, “I can’t sleep.”
Her mother smiled, teeth flashing white in the darkness. The smile was like a warm flower that bloomed in Kyne’s chest and spread across her whole body, opening up parts of her she’d never realized were closed.
“It’s all right, my girl,” her mother had said. “You’ve spent enough time wasting away in darkness. It’s time, my daughter. Time for you to take your rightful place among your people.”
Now, Kyne opened up her eyes once more and looked to the horizon.
What was her rightful place? Her mother hadn’t said. At the time, Kyne had believed what the other Sisters had said of her—that a girl who heard the voice of the Ancestors so young must be destined to be Vagra. Then Kiva came along, and Kyne didn’t know anymore. But now, it seemed again like leading her people might be Kyne’s destiny, after all. Perhaps this was what the Ancestors were preparing her for all along. Maybe everything, her whole miserable life—her mother’s death, her awful childhood, and her uncertain status among the Sisters—had always been leading to this: Kyne seizing power from Kiva, and saving her people from the Strangers.
Maybe.
Kyne trudged on through the prairie, thinking of the events of the past three weeks.
It had been surprisingly easy to divide the loyalty of the Sisters, to bring them under her sway. Kyne was still shocked by how easy it had been. She’d known that there were some in the village who thought the Vagra had made a mistake in choosing Kiva to be her successor, when it had been Kyne who was the youngest girl to ever hear the voice of the Ancestors, Kyne who had a plan to deal with the Strangers.
But Kyne still hadn’t expected them to be so eager to join her secret rebellion. She’d thought that most of the Sisters would be hesitant to support her plan of defying Kiva and the Vagra by going directly to the Forsaken for protection against the Strangers. What she found instead, every time she snuck into one of the women’s huts to tell her about it, was that their eyes lit up with conspiratorial glee. They were just as uncertain about Kiva’s leadership as Kyne was.
Kyne couldn’t have done it without Kiva, though. That was the most delicious part of the whole thing—that Kiva’s actions were undermining her authority more than anything Kyne could have done on her own. The night Kyne talked with Thruss and Rehal and laid the foundations for her plan to grab power, Kiva began disappearing from the village. No one knew why she slipped away into the plains for hours at a time, but Kiva’s absence helped Kyne’s rebellion in two ways: it gave Kyne the opportunity to talk about her plans with the Sisters freely, without fear of having her thoughts overheard by Kiva, and it added to the Sisters’ belief that Kiva wasn’t ready to lead. The rumor was that Kiva left every day because she was afraid. Kyne didn’t know if that was true—she sus
pected that Kiva was trying to get to a quiet place to hear the voice of the Ancestors more clearly. But she wasn’t about to contradict the rumor.
There was only one problem: Kyne wasn’t very strong with the Ancestors. She could only occasionally hear the thoughts of others and hadn’t had a single vision since that first night when she was eleven. It was her deepest secret, one she couldn’t allow herself to think of when she was in the village and the other Sisters could hear her. Everyone thought that she was specially blessed by the Ancestors. But she wasn’t.
When I’m Vagra, though, she thought. When I’m Vagra—then the Ancestors will come back to me. They’re waiting for me to prove myself.
Just then, Kyne came to her destination: a large rock the size of one of the huts in the village. She put a hand on it, let her fingers trail against the rough stone as she circled around to the far side. There beneath the rock was a deep hollow, a stony pit cut out of the smooth sameness of the prairie.
The rock and the pit marked the border between the Vagri’s land and the wilderness where the Forsaken roamed. Vagri children were warned never to pass it, and the Forsaken, for their part, had agreed to stay on their side. The pit, however, was an in-between place—a place for the leaders of the Vagri and the Forsaken to meet together when there was something for them to discuss. The last time the pit was used as a meeting place was fifty seasons ago. Tales of violence were discouraged in the village, so nobody talked much about what had happened, but occasionally the men would whisper the story to each other over cookfires: an army of marauders, a secret meeting between the Vagra and the Forsaken, and a daring Forsaken boy named Xendr Chathe who drove the enemy from the village and then pursued them all the way to the foot of the mountains.
Now, as Kyne picked her way down into the pit, steadying herself here and there with a hand on the rocks, she wondered if future generations of Vagri would tell stories about her. If what happened here tonight would one day be the stuff of legend.
At the bottom, Po waited next to a bonfire. The flames glinted in his eyes and in the pointed tip of his spear, which he held propped on the ground next to him. As Kyne came closer to her brother, she saw a long gash sliced across one cheek, from his ear to his chin.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“It’s nothing,” Po said. He made a show of glancing past Kyne’s shoulder. “Where are the rest of the Sisters?”
“They’ll be here. Kiva is holding the death ceremony for the Vagra in the village. They’ll come after that’s done and Kiva’s gone to bed.”
Po lifted an eyebrow. “You skipped out on the death ceremony? Won’t Kiva notice you’re gone?”
Kyne sneered. “Let her notice. I don’t care anymore. She can’t stop what’s happening.”
Kyne let her gaze wander around the pit. “Where’s Xendr Chathe?” she asked. Kyne wanted him there to demonstrate to the Sisters that she could get the leader of the Forsaken on her side.
“He’s not here,” Po said. “He won’t see you. He doesn’t want to get involved.”
Kyne looked daggers at her brother. “No Xendr? Remember our agreement, Po—if you help me, then maybe I’ll let you come back to the village once I’m Vagra. But if you can’t get me what I need …” Kyne trailed off, leaving the threat unspoken, implicit.
Po licked his lips. “Xendr’s waiting. Biding his time, to see which way the Sisters go. If you get their support, then he’ll join you. I know he will. Besides, I convinced him to give you permission to use this place for your meeting, didn’t I? Kiva will never find you way out here.”
Kyne looked away. Her brother had done well to find her a place where she and the Sisters who were loyal to her could talk openly of rebellion, far from the reach of Kiva’s telepathic mind. But Kyne couldn’t allow herself to show appreciation. She needed to keep Po on his toes, keep him working, keep him scrambling and desperate to please her. Po had done much for her since she sent him away to the Forsaken. But he needed to do so much more.
“I also brought you something,” Po said.
Po reached into a leather pouch hanging around his waist and came out with a bit of something Kyne couldn’t quite make out. She moved closer to him and strained to see what he was holding in the orange glow of the firelight. He reached out his hand. It was a substance she’d never seen before, a delicate interwoven clump of tiny white strands that stuck to Kyne’s fingers when Po handed it to her.
“They call it maiora,” Po said. “You’re supposed to eat it.”
She put the maiora on her tongue. It melted at once. Then, after a few moments, a strange tingling sensation spread across her body, and foreign images stabbed their way into her mind.
A bird made of stone, flung across the stars.
Three dark figures stepping out onto the grass.
Death and blood. Vagri bodies slumped on the wet ground, stacked atop each other like firewood as the village burned.
Kyne came to with a gasp and found that she’d fallen to her knees during the vision.
The images were familiar. Kiva’s vision. The one she’d told to the Sisters seasons ago, when she’d been named the next Vagra.
But then Kyne shook her head. No—this vision was different. Kiva’s vision hadn’t shown dead Vagri, hadn’t shown the village burning to the ground. Could this be a vision of what the Strangers would do to the Vagri if they weren’t stopped?
Kyne looked at her hands and saw remnants of the maiora, tiny strings of it still sticking to her fingertips. She lifted her fingers to her mouth and licked them off, hungry for more, desperate for one more image from the vision.
None came. Still, the maiora hummed in her veins as she took her feet once more. Her body felt like a glowing ember, her senses heightened to everything around her—every sound, every rustling of the wind.
“How long does it last?” she asked.
“Not long,” Po said. “A few minutes.”
Kyne looked at her brother and pushed a long, quivering breath out through her nose.
“I need more,” she said.
“I don’t have any more,” Po said. “But I can get some.”
Kyne nodded. “Good.”
She turned her head. Her perception still heightened for the moment by the maiora, she felt something. Women. Coming this way.
The Sisters.
“Quiet!” she hissed at Po, though he hadn’t been speaking. “They’re coming.”
She turned her body toward the place where they would come down into the pit. She wanted to be completely calm and collected when they first saw her. She wanted to look like a leader.
She wanted to look like the Vagra.
26
kiva
Every death contains within it the seeds of a rebirth. Every end is a beginning.
These were the words of the Vagri death ritual, the words Kiva had spoken over the Vagra’s body before two men from the village laid her in a grave and covered her body with dirt.
Now, Kiva sat in her hut and wondered about the words she’d said. The Vagra’s death would be a beginning—that much was certain. But the beginning of what?
She closed her eyes and listened to the voices again—the thoughts of the Sisters buzzing in her ears like a swarm of gnats.
Tonight.
Kyne said to meet her tonight.
The stone pit on the edge of the Forsaken’s land.
It’s almost time.
I’m afraid. It’s no small thing Kyne’s asking of us.
What about Kiva? Does she know? Can she hear me right now?
Kiva’s eyes slid back open. The silver light of the moons spilled through the hole in the roof, lighting up her eyelashes and gilding the edges of her vision.
Every thought echoed powerfully in her mind. She might have heard these voices earlier—the voices of rebellion—if she hadn’t been spending so much time on the prairie, trying to summon the Ancestors to reveal more about the Strangers. But no matter. She was listening no
w.
It was time for Kiva to do something. It was time for her to take a stand.
Kiva pushed herself to her feet and tiptoed to the door of the Vagra’s hut. She pulled aside the split cloth hanging in the doorway and peered out into the night.
Outside, the Sisters were on the move, slipping from their huts, steam from their breath puffing in front of their mouths in the cool night air. Then—quickly, silently—they began to move off together.
Kiva guessed that there must be at least twenty of them, maybe as many as thirty, nearly a third of the Sisters. Thirty women who’d listened to Kyne. Thirty women who were ready to turn against Kiva.
She crept from her hut and followed the Sisters through the village at a safe distance, careful to remain hidden, careful to conceal her thoughts. Near the edge of the village she paused, crouching behind a half-crumbled fence, as the Sisters filed one-by-one over the rise and into the prairie beyond.
Kiva tensed her muscles and sprang after them, hiked up the rise and pursued the Sisters into the plain. She chased them for what seemed like hours, keeping far enough away that she wouldn’t be spotted but close enough that the band of women didn’t disappear over the horizon. Staying low to the ground, she’d run ahead, then dive behind the grass at the crest of the next hill and lift her head to peer over it.
Kiva pushed against the ground, lifting her chest like a coiled snake. Through swaying blades of grass, Kiva spotted them: a distant line of figures receding into dots. The Sisters were making their way toward an outcropping of rock. Walking in a long line, they snaked their way toward the rock and then disappeared behind it.
Kiva stood and made to run after them—but then something stopped her.
There was a rustling in the grasses some dozen paces behind her.
Kiva’s heart beat faster, a feeling of alarm flooding her veins.
“Who’s there?” she said, unable to hide the fear in her voice. She looked at the spot the rustling had come from and advanced toward it, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “I know you’re there. Come out!”
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