The grasses swayed, parted—and then Quint came forward, head hanging.
“Quint!” Kiva breathed out a relieved laugh.
“I’m sorry, Vagra,” Quint said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just—it was the Sisters. They woke me when they were passing by our hut. Then I saw you, and I followed you to see where you were going.”
Kiva flinched at hearing her sister address her so formally, calling her Vagra. She felt an ache deep in her chest.
“Come here,” Kiva said. “Please.”
Quint trudged forward, head still down.
“Look at me,” Kiva said, hunching down to look at her sister eye to eye.
Quint’s gaze tilted up to meet Kiva’s. There was fear in her eyes—the fear of a child about to be scolded, punished.
“You don’t have to apologize,” Kiva said. “And you don’t have to call me Vagra.”
The fear began to melt from Quint’s face. She shook her head. “But Liana said—”
“I know what she said. I was there. But she was wrong. Yes, things have changed. I’ve changed, you’ve changed. But there are some things that will never change.”
Kiva’s voice grew thick. She felt the weight of what she was saying press against her chest. The back of her throat began to ache, but she forced herself to keep talking.
“I’ll always be your sister—that will never change. To you, I’ll always be Kiva. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Kiva glanced at the rock where the Sisters had gone, then back to Quint. It was too dangerous to send Quint back to the village alone. Kiva didn’t want her sister getting lost and running into one of the Forsaken warriors alone.
“Look, I don’t have time to bring you back to the village,” she said. “I need to see what those Sisters are up to. If I let you come with me, do you think you can stay out of sight?”
Quint smiled and nodded. Kiva put a hand on the little girl’s shoulder and they ran toward the rock. When they got close, they slowed, hunched down, and crept to the edge of the pit.
27
matthew
After they’d eaten, Dunne, Sam, and Matthew took turns showering the cryoliquid off their bodies and changing into new suits. Matthew was just walking back into the control room in fresh clothes when he heard a sound of electronic squawking and buzzing. Soon the buzzing clarified into the sound of a woman’s voice.
“Corvus. Come in, Corvus. Do you copy?”
The quantum transceiver. Matthew moved toward the control room, then grabbed the transceiver and clicked the button on the side. Sam and Dunne moved close to hear.
“Copy, Control. This is Corvus.”
“Who am I talking to, Corvus?” The voice sounded like that of a young woman not so much older, Matthew guessed, than he was.
“This is Matthew Tilson. And who’s this?”
“My name is Alison Nagita, transmitting from Exo Project Mission Control.” A pause, then Alison continued. “What’s your status? We got a reading from your transceiver that the Corvus is in orbit around H-240. Is that right?”
“It is, Mission Control.”
“And the rest of the crew came out of the freeze all right?”
Matthew winced. “A little shaken up still. But we’re all alive.”
“Good. We’re going to need you to get into your suits, prepare to initiate the entry sequence.”
Matthew glanced back at the table. Dunne’s face was stricken, ashen.
“I thought they’d give us some time,” she said, gazing at the table and speaking quietly, as if to herself. “I thought we’d have more time.”
Sam snorted. “Why? We’re going to die down there; may as well get on with it.”
He looked up at Matthew and nodded. Matthew nodded back and pushed the button on the transceiver.
“Roger that, Control. Preparing for descent now.”
Matthew gritted his teeth as the Corvus rattled and pitched, jostling him in his seat. Displays and buttons lit up in different colors reflected on the visor of his helmet like spots swimming before his eyes. Past the glare, a mist washed over the cockpit window as the ship sank deeper into the planet’s atmosphere.
There was a stomach-churning moment of free fall as the ship hit a pocket of warm air, then a bone-rattling crash as the Corvus regained stability once more. Matthew let out a breath and glanced toward Dunne and Sam, strapped in next to him. Their arms were clamped down at their sides, their helmets facing straight forward.
Matthew looked back at the window just in time to see the planet come into focus below. The land was flat as far as he could see, with low, gentle swells rising up one after the other like desert dunes. As the ship sank lower, he saw movement atop the dunes, grasses dancing this way and that.
Matthew’s breath fled his throat and buried itself in his chest.
The feeling he’d had when he first looked down at the planet from the ship returned, stronger than before. Matthew knew this place. He didn’t remember how, but he knew it nonetheless. The sight of the planet’s surface lodged like a splinter in his brain. It was an itch he couldn’t reach, a piece of grit that wouldn’t blink out of his eye.
The horizon rose up, squeezing out the dark night sky. The ship bucked and jostled as it made contact with the ground, then sank down slowly as the landing gear settled in place and gently let the ship down. The thrusters fired one last time, and in the control room the blinking displays went dark one by one.
A hand on his shoulder shook him out of his reverie. He looked to the side, to Dunne strapped into the next seat over.
“We made it,” she said, but there was no pleasure, no relief, in her voice or her face.
Matthew nodded and returned his eyes to the window.
The Corvus had landed.
28
kiva
Kiva peered down to the bottom of the stone pit. Kyne stood next to a bonfire, her face lit by dancing flames. Arrayed before her were the Sisters, standing on their feet and craning their necks to see to the front of the crowd.
Next to Kyne was Po. He was dressed like a Forsaken warrior and held a weapon in his hand—a long stick with a sharpened rock at one end. Kiva gave a soft gasp when she saw him. She’d heard the rumors that Po had joined the Forsaken, but she’d scarcely believed it was true until this moment. Why would Po have gone to the Forsaken? It didn’t make sense. The last time they’d spoken, he’d been so excited about getting a hut and a garden of his own. Kiva had also rejected him that night, told him that they could never be together—but that was no reason to do something as rash as running away from the village and starting an entirely new life with the Forsaken.
Kyne was silent for a long moment, looking back and forth between the Sisters’ faces.
Finally, she spoke.
“Sisters. You took a risk by coming here tonight. I thank you for it.”
The silence stretched out, with only the crackle of the burning wood to break the hush.
“I called you here tonight for one reason: Kiva, the girl who is to be our new Vagra, is weak.”
A murmur now, rippling through the crowd.
“But we don’t need her. Sisters, I believe the Vagra made a mistake in choosing Kiva to succeed her. The Ancestors speak to me, too. I have heard their voice—and if you follow me, I’ll be a better leader for the Vagri than Kiva ever could be.”
Kiva scanned the crowd for faces she recognized—her heart sank when she saw that Thruss and Rehal were there. How could her own friends have been sucked in by Kyne’s lies? How could they believe what she said about Kiva?
A voice rose up from the crowd. “You’re wrong, Kyne.”
The crowd parted as the women turned to face the one who’d spoken.
“Is that … ?” Quint said, but didn’t finish her question.
“It is,” Kiva said, smiling.
Liana. Their mother. Kiva’s friends might betray her, but at least she could always depend on her mother to support her. It had tak
en bravery for Liana to come tonight, to speak against Kyne in a crowd full of her supporters.
Liana stepped through the crowd until she and Kyne were face-to-face.
“This is blasphemy,” Liana said. “The Ancestors choose the Vagra, not you—and certainly not anyone else who’s come to hear your lies.” Liana turned around and faced the rest of the women. “Sisters, you should be ashamed of yourselves! My daughter was chosen by the Ancestors. They speak to her, and her alone.”
“Do they?” Kyne asked. “The Ancestors have many ways of speaking. All of us, all of the Sisters, have heard their voice. All of us have heard the thoughts of others echoing in our minds. And many of us have seen visions.”
Liana nodded. “Yes. But none so strong as the Vagra.”
“No?” Kyne let this question hang in the air. “Sisters, you know me. You know that I first heard the voice of the Ancestors when I was only eleven seasons old. They speak to me still. And they show me things. Things that the Vagra has kept hidden from us all.” She paused and added: “If Kiva even is the real Vagra.”
“But why? Why would the Ancestors choose you, when they’ve always spoken through the Vagra?” Liana demanded.
Kyne paused before answering, until Kiva could sense that the entire crowd was hanging on her silence, desperate for her to speak again.
“The Strangers,” Kyne said. “Kiva first saw them in a vision four seasons ago—but she still hasn’t told us why they’re coming here, to Gle’ah. But I know why. Sisters, I’m telling you the truth: the Strangers are a threat. They bring death with them.”
A fearful buzz rippled across the gathered crowd.
“I saw it in a vision from the Ancestors,” Kyne said. “When the Strangers get here, they’ll kill us all, burn our village to the ground.”
The fear in the crowd rose to a near panic. Kiva could feel the desperate terror bleeding from each of the Sisters—in this state, they’d believe anything Kyne told them.
“Kiva is too weak to deal with the Strangers,” Kyne shouted over the din. “That is why the Ancestors speak to me. Why they’ve chosen me—” Kyne paused and pounded at the flat of her chest with her fist “—to lead the Vagri against this threat.”
Kiva sank down and turned away from the pit, putting her back against the cool of the rock. She closed her eyes and listened to the wild chattering of the crowd, bubbling up from the pit behind her and cascading over her shoulder.
The Sisters—so uncertain, so fearful. It wasn’t their fault they’d been taken in by Kyne’s lies. They were afraid. They needed a leader. They needed their Vagra.
They needed Kiva.
She had to speak. And she had to do it quickly, before she could change her mind.
In a single fluid movement, Kiva pushed herself from the ground and whirled around to face the pit as she came to her feet.
“Kyne!” she called out with both her voice and her mind, so that her shout boomed in her hearers’ ears on two frequencies. “What is the meaning of this?”
Below, Kyne’s head snapped up, and the gathered Sisters turned as one to look at her standing at the top of the pit. There was fear in their eyes. But it was no longer the Strangers they were afraid of.
They were afraid of Kiva. Even Kyne had been shocked into silence.
The crowd was completely quiet as Kiva made her way down into the pit. When she reached the bottom, the Sisters parted to let her pass through to Kyne.
Kyne held herself straight and proud, but Kiva could tell that her presence had unsettled her.
“Kiva,” she said, a slight quaver in her voice. “I didn’t expect—”
“Save your breath, Kyne,” Kiva said. “I heard everything.”
Inside, Kiva felt as though every part of her was shaking. Could the Sisters see how afraid she was? She felt as though she was performing—pretending to be confident, to be a leader, to be the Vagra. But judging by the faces of the Sisters, and of Kyne, they believed the performance.
Kiva turned from Kyne to face the crowd.
“Sisters, I’m disappointed in you,” she said, looking directly at Thruss and Rehal. They hung their heads. “Kyne cares nothing for you, for the Vagri, for the Ancestors. All she wants is power. Can’t you see that?”
She turned back to Kyne.
“And you. I don’t know what your plan to overthrow me was, but I’m guessing it had something to do with him.” Kiva nodded toward Po, who’d been standing silent the whole time, his spear propped on the ground. “You wanted to make an alliance with the Forsaken to get rid of me by force, is that it?”
“We’ll need the Forsaken,” Kyne said. “We’ll need them to deal with the Strangers, when they come.”
“No, we won’t,” Kiva said to Kyne, then turned back to the crowd once more.
“Sisters, Kyne is lying. The Strangers aren’t a threat to us. Just today, before I discovered the Vagra dead, the Ancestors gave me another vision. In my vision, one of the Strangers spoke to me. He told me not to be afraid. He told me that he wasn’t going to hurt me.”
Kyne moved in front of Kiva. “But what about my vision?” she demanded. “I saw the village destroyed, every one of the Vagri dead. How do you explain that?”
The crowd was silent as Kiva stared at Kyne, trying to figure out if she was lying or not. She reached into Kyne’s mind with her own, but as usual Kyne’s thoughts were shielded from her. All but the echo of a single word.
… maiora …
Kiva blinked, shook her head.
“Making an alliance with the Forsaken won’t help. Their weapons are just as much a threat to us as the Strangers are. How do you know that what you saw wasn’t a warning from the Ancestors—a vision of what will happen if we bring the Forsaken into our village?”
The crowd erupted once more into chatter.
At that moment, a blinding pain stabbed a jagged line through Kiva’s brain. Her vision went dim. The noise of the crowd receded until it seemed as though Kiva was hearing it from a long distance.
Kiva lifted a hand to her temple. She wobbled on her feet. Stumbled.
And above, in the blackness, a speck of light moved untethered from the constellation of stars and arced a burning line across the sky.
Kiva teetered, listed to one side, then fell. The Sisters gasped and crowded around her.
“Kiva!” came Quint’s voice from the top of the pit. She ran around the edge of the pit and bounded down the steep grade.
“Let me through!” Quint shouted as she pushed through the sea of bodies.
Finally, she made it to where Kiva lay on the ground, her body convulsing with the force of whatever had taken hold of her. The Sisters backed away as Quint went to her knees beside her sister. She clutched Kiva’s face with both hands.
“Kiva,” Quint whispered, her voice catching.
Kiva’s body stopped shaking and her eyelids slowly slid open. Her eyes were strangely vacant, gleaming with the light of the bonfire. Her chest heaved. She looked up at Quint, but gave no sign of recognition.
And when she spoke, it was with a strange, low voice that seemed to emanate from somewhere so deep in her chest it may as well have been vibrating up from under the ground.
“They’re here.”
PART 4
CONTACT
29
matthew
“We’re stepping out, Mission Control.”
“Copy, Corvus. Keep us posted.”
Matthew, Dunne, and Sam stood in the airlock, waiting as the clean air of the Corvus leaked out of the room and the air of planet H-240 came hissing in, along with whatever noxious gases it might contain. The room looked no different through the visor of his suit as the air of one world replaced the air of another—it was odd, thought Matthew, how the things that could kill you were so often invisible.
Best not to think about it.
A light that had been flashing red turned green and the door slowly opened. It hinged down, creating a ramp from the ship to the ground.
Dunne and Sam stepped out of the ship into the moonlight, but Matthew hung back. Sam turned.
“Come on,” he said, waving an arm.
Matthew looked at his feet as he tripped down the ramp, stared at them through his visor as if they were something disconnected from his body—which, at the moment, they seemed to be. At the bottom, the ramp rested on the ground of the planet. Matthew glanced up at Dunne and Sam. Sam gazed off in the other direction, toward the horizon, while Dunne stood closer to Matthew, staring into the display screen of her sensor as she turned in a slow circle.
“Status, Corvus.”
Matthew pressed a button on the outside of his suit to patch the radio communicator in his helmet into the quantum transceiver feed. “Give us a minute, Control,” he said.
He felt dizzy—as though he had run out of breathable air and was about to fall over. He took in a sharp breath, but it seemed as if the oxygen wasn’t absorbing into his bloodstream or reaching his brain. His vision went sharp, and he suddenly felt as though he was going to topple over where he stood.
“Calm down, Matthew.” Sam had come back nearer to the ship and was staring into Matthew’s face from a few paces away. “Breathe. You don’t want to die before we’re actually supposed to, do you?”
Matthew took a deep, slow breath and laughed, even though it wasn’t really funny. He leaned over and put his hands on his knees, blinking as his vision came back into focus.
“You okay?” Dunne asked.
“He’ll be fine, doc. Just a little nerves, is all.”
“It’s just so weird,” Matthew said. “It’s weird, right?”
Sam and Dunne assented in silence—it was weird. They were on another planet, billions of miles from where they had started. Yet for all that, the landscape felt so similar to Earth, and that was the most dizzyingly strange thing of all: the fact that this place that was totally alien to Matthew could also be so strikingly, eerily familiar. Like any other place he’d ever been, this planet had land and sky, rocks, hills, and—strangest of all, stretching out in every direction as far as he could see—grass.
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