The Exo Project

by Andrew DeYoung

  Kiva let out a slow breath and opened her eyes. She nodded to herself, nodded at the wisdom of the feeling that had come to her from the Ancestors. Then she spoke.

  “Don’t be afraid, Sisters,” she said. “Whatever happens next, we are in the care of the Ancestors. Whatever happens next, we must let it come and meet it without fear.”

  The door touched the ground as she finished speaking, and the loud thrum ceased.

  There came a silence in which nothing could be heard but the breeze whispering in Kiva’s ears.

  Then a figure stepped into the opening in the bird’s side.

  The light of the Great Mother didn’t reach the figure where it stood. Its face was shrouded in darkness.

  For a moment, nothing moved. Even the wind, the grasses were still.

  Then the figure stepped forward, and the breath left Kiva’s body as she saw the broad shoulders and long, lanky limbs, the dark hair, the smooth cheeks, and the blue eyes of a boy—the same boy she’d seen in her visions.

  “Matthew,” she said aloud.

  37

  matthew

  Matthew stepped from the airlock onto the planet as if into a dream. His feet and limbs felt heavy, slow-moving, as though he were pulling them through water.

  It was the girl who made each step seem like such an effort—the one who stood in the center, grasping the hands of the girls on either side. She watched him, unblinking, as he came down the ramp to put his feet on the grass. Matthew felt pinned back by her eyes; walking deeper into her gaze felt like walking into a stiff wind. Her presence seemed to thicken the air around him, heighten everything—the lines of the horizon, the swell of the hills, the weak, red light of the sun, the blades of grass: each felt sharper, somehow hyperreal.

  And the sound she’d made. Was it his name that she’d said?

  Matthew shook his head.

  Impossible.

  He wanted to look away, but for some reason he couldn’t break the girl’s gaze. Looking into her eyes, the feeling he’d had when he first looked out on the planet—the feeling of familiarity, of déjà vu, of a dim dream-memory lodged like a grain of sand somewhere deep in his mind—this feeling returned. But stronger.

  His feet firmly planted on the ground at the end of the ramp, Matthew walked forward a few steps more, then stopped.

  For a long moment nobody moved or spoke. Matthew licked his lips. His fingers fluttered at his sides. The girl went on looking straight at him, as if waiting for him to make the first move, and the feeling that washed over Matthew next was one, absurdly, of embarrassment.

  What was the right thing to say at a time like this—when meeting an alien race for the first time? The only thing Matthew could think of was the line he’d heard in movies, Greetings, we come in peace, but as soon as it came to his mind Matthew dismissed it as silly, far too clichéd and familiar for a moment as powerfully strange as this one.

  The girl rescued him by speaking first.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Why have you come here?”

  “We … ,” Matthew began, his voice cracking on the word. He cleared his throat and went on. “We call ourselves humans. We come from far away. From a different planet.”

  Matthew waved an arm in the air, toward the stars.

  Matthew heard a rustling behind him and glanced halfway back to see Dunne move into his peripheral vision. She moved up just behind his shoulder and spoke into his ear.

  “You can understand them?” she asked.

  “I … I don’t know,” Matthew stammered. “Yes. Can’t you?”

  He glanced back at the girl, realizing for the first time that though he’d perceived and understood the words she had spoken to him, the language she spoke wasn’t his own. Matthew had heard her words as a meaningless babble, but somewhere between his ears and his brain the alien language had mysteriously blossomed into sense.

  What the hell is going on here?

  One of the other girls leaned over the shoulder of the girl who’d spoken and said something in a low voice. Matthew dimly heard the same meaningless babble, and this time he could make no sense of the sounds. The first girl, the leader, nodded as she listened to what the other girl was saying in her ear.

  Then she spoke to Matthew once more, the words again beginning in his ears as nonsense and ending in his mind as meaning: “We want to know if you mean us harm. If you came to kill us.”

  “No,” Matthew said.

  “Then why did you attack our children?”

  “That was a mistake. A miscommunication. We were …” Matthew paused, struggling to explain. “We were scared. Surprised. One of us attacked without thinking. It won’t happen again.”

  The girl dropped her gaze to the ground for a moment, then raised it again, and Matthew was surprised anew by how deep and piercing her brown eyes were. On top of everything—on top of the powerful strangeness of this moment and his inexplicable ability to understand her words—the girl was beautiful, almost unbearably so. Matthew felt strange in her presence, exposed. Across the space that separated them, he became intensely aware of her body, of the lithe but unbendable way she held herself—and in his awareness of her, he became aware of himself as well, of his body as an awkward and clumsy thing, of the pervasive wrongness of his being in that place, the alien air rushing in and out of his chest.

  We shouldn’t be here, he thought to himself. This isn’t our place. It’s theirs. Hers.

  “How do we know you’re telling the truth?” the girl asked. “How do we know you won’t attack again?”

  Matthew splayed out his palms in a gesture of helpless empty-handedness. “You’ll just have to trust us. You’ll have to trust me.”

  The girl’s lips curled into an angry smile. “I’d like to. But it’s difficult. How can I trust what you say, when the one who attacked our children is hiding with a weapon?”

  38

  kiva

  Matthew exchanged some whispered words with the darker-skinned woman standing behind him. Then he shouted back toward the stone bird where Kiva had sensed another Stranger hiding. After a few moments, a figure came out: another boy, taller and broader than Matthew but with the same pale skin. He crept out cautiously, one step at a time.

  He held a weapon, the fire-breathing stick Kiva had seen in her vision.

  Matthew and the woman began to yell at the boy. Kiva couldn’t understand the woman’s words, but Matthew’s echoed loudly in her ears.

  “Sam, put it down!”

  The boy grunted something back and moved slowly forward. The weapon was cradled in his arms, one end propped against his shoulder, the other searching the landscape for a target.

  “Vagra,” said a fearful voice. It was Thruss.

  Kiva raised her arm.

  po

  Shouts echoed through the air. The words were in an alien language, but even without knowing their meaning, Po could hear the tone of fear and anger.

  His fingers clenched around the place where he’d notched the arrow in his bow.

  “What’s happening?” he demanded.

  Quint squinted, peering over the low rise of the hill, her lips pulled into a thin line.

  “There’s a third. Another boy. He has a weapon. Kiva’s about to give the signal.”

  “Which one?” Po demanded. “Which signal?”

  Quint shook her head. “Wait. Just wait.”

  The shouting got louder. Po recognized Kiva’s voice, though he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He imagined that the next sound he heard would be of Kiva wailing as she died. Still lying on the ground, he began to pull back the bow, the notched arrow wedged tightly between his two knuckles.

  He looked to the two Forsaken men at his side.

  “Follow my lead,” he said. “Don’t attack until I do.”

  “What are you doing?” Quint asked over the sound of more shouting. “She hasn’t given the signal yet.”

  Po pushed himself to a crouch, then rose to his feet, his legs unbending ben
eath him as he raised his taut bow, the arrow’s fletching brushing against his cheek, his eyes finding at once the boy whose own weapon was tracking across the hill to aim toward where Po stood.

  matthew

  “Sam, put it down! Don’t be a fool!”

  Matthew had turned completely away from the three girls and was moving toward Sam, his arm outstretched as if approaching a spooked animal.

  “Not on your life,” Sam growled.

  “This isn’t making things better,” Dunne said, her voice firm but not shouting. “Matthew had found a way to communicate. We were getting somewhere.”

  “Oh, really?” Sam shouted, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “What did they say?”

  Matthew lowered his voice, tried to speak calmly. “They understand that the thing with the kids was just a mistake. A misunderstanding. They want to trust us. But first you’ll have to put the gun down.”

  “Yeah? And what if it’s a trap?” Sam’s eyes darted back and forth, scanning the empty hilltops.

  The voice of the girl, pitched to a shout, echoed foreign again in Matthew’s ears and exploded into meaning in his mind.

  “You have to control him!” she yelled. “If he doesn’t put down his weapon, I can’t protect you!”

  “Sam, it’s not a trap!” Matthew shouted. “There’s no one there!”

  But at that moment, Sam’s gun stopped, moved up to aim at a single spot on the horizon. Matthew glanced up and saw a figure rising over the swell of the hill. His arms were raised and he appeared to have something in his hands.

  “Sam, don’t,” Matthew growled, but he knew that his words were of no use anymore.

  His feet began to move.

  The gun yelped, and a ball of ionized energy screamed out of the barrel. Sam’s aim, again, was wide, and the energy hurtled harmlessly over the figure’s head.

  Moments after Sam fired, Matthew ran at him and rammed him with his shoulder. Sam staggered but kept his feet.

  Matthew’s hands closed around the hot metal of the gun, and he clenched them tight. Sam’s eyes, inches from Matthew’s own, flashed with fury. He grunted as he tried to wrest the gun back from Matthew’s grip. Matthew felt Sam’s breath hot and foul against his face.

  Then, suddenly, Matthew felt a small, sharp twinge of pain low in his rib cage. He opened his mouth to gasp but found that he couldn’t draw a breath. The pain bloomed red, spreading fire through his torso. Across the gun barrel, Sam’s eyes fluttered down and grew wide.

  Matthew looked down.

  There was an arrow buried in his chest.

  39

  kiva

  It all happened so quickly that later, back in the safety of her hut, it would seem to Kiva that she’d seen it twice: once as it really happened, and then a second time in the brief quiet that followed as she played it back more slowly in her mind, subdividing the blur into a sequence of events that could be analyzed and understood, one following the other in a chain of action and reaction.

  Po rising over the hillside. The boy with the weapon aiming and letting loose a white orb of light over Po’s shoulder. Matthew running to wrest the weapon from the boy’s hands, just in time to place himself in the path of the whizzing arrow Po had loosed from his bow.

  For a moment afterward everything was still, and in that brief space Kiva wondered if perhaps time had stopped, and that now they were all frozen on the cusp before everything fell apart. There was comfort in the thought—in the notion that they could stay here forever, looking over the edge but never going over.

  Then Rehal let loose a piercing scream, and the illusion was broken.

  Matthew spun to the ground, still gripping the weapon tight in his hands. It slipped loose from the other boy’s fingers and went arcing through the air, the gleaming metal glistening in the Great Mother’s red light before it landed in the grass.

  At the top of the hill, the two Forsaken men rose up beside Po and came thundering down, spears in hand. Po came over the swell a few steps behind them, notching another arrow in his bow as his feet moved down the incline.

  “Stop!” Kiva yelled. “Don’t hurt them!”

  Po and the Forsaken drew up at the bottom of the hill, their steps faltering to a stop. They stood only a few paces from the boy who’d shot at Po. They brandished their weapons at him, Po training his bow at the boy’s chest, but they didn’t attack.

  From where she stood, Kiva could see the boy’s head angle toward the spot where the weapon had gone into the grass.

  “Get the weapon!” Kiva shouted, coming forward.

  The boy made a move for it, but the Forsaken leapt forward with their spears and the boy stepped back, his arms raised. Quint, who’d come down the hill after Po, went for the weapon and picked it up.

  The dark-skinned woman rushed toward where Matthew lay on the ground and sank to her knees next to his body. Kiva and the Sisters converged on the spot.

  Matthew’s face was pale, but he was still alive. The woman spoke some words to him, her voice low, and Matthew muttered back something Kiva couldn’t hear.

  Kiva turned to Po.

  “What happened?” she demanded.

  “I, I thought—,” he stammered. “The signal.”

  “I didn’t give the signal,” Kiva said. She looked to Quint.

  The girl shook her head. “It wasn’t me. He got up and shot the arrow before I said anything.”

  “But all the shouting,” Po said. “I heard the shouting and thought you were in danger.”

  On the ground, the woman spoke softly to Matthew as she wrapped her fingers around the arrow’s shaft. Matthew shook his head, pleading, trying to lift his shoulders off the ground—but the woman held him down with the other hand as she yanked the arrow out of his chest.

  Kiva winced as Matthew’s screams pierced the air.

  “I’m sorry, Vagra,” Po said. “Forgive me.”

  Kiva shook her head. “What’s done is done. Now we have to deal with the consequences.”

  On the ground, blood was pouring from Matthew’s wound. The woman ripped the sleeve off her shirt to stanch the bleeding.

  Thruss stepped forward. “We should kill them.”

  Kiva looked up at Thruss. “What did you say?”

  “It’s like you said. What’s done is done. The boy is going to die anyway. We should just kill them all and be done with it.”

  Kiva’s gaze wandered. She looked at Matthew’s face. It was growing pale. His eyes were glassy, and his lips moved without making a sound.

  Kiva thought back to her visions of the Strangers, her visions of Matthew. Everything the Ancestors had shown her had come true.

  But she’d never foreseen this.

  This was the moment she’d been waiting for, preparing for. Waiting and preparing—for what? To let Matthew die? To kill the Strangers and be done with it, as Thruss said?

  Kiva shook her head.

  “No,” she said.

  “But Vagra … ,” came Po’s voice at her side.

  “No,” she said, more firmly now. “We have to save him.”

  40

  matthew

  “Stay with me, Matthew.”

  Dunne’s face had doubled into twin seas of eyes, of noses, of mouths. The two faces floated in the air like binary stars, orbited each other, then floated back together and merged.

  Her face was kind. Dunne was kind. She reminded Matthew of his mother.

  His mother.

  It was a fine thought. A fine last thought—the memory of his mother.

  Matthew smiled. He sighed. His body felt distant. The pain was there, but he didn’t mind it anymore. His eyes slid slowly closed.

  “No!” Dunne shouted.

  Matthew felt her hand cup his chin and shake his head. He felt a jangling deep in his skull.

  “Keep your eyes open,” she demanded. “Whatever you do, don’t close your eyes.”

  “But I’m so tired,” Matthew said. His words came out slow and slurred, as if he were d
runk.

  Dunne nodded. “I know. But you can’t. I need to go in the ship for my medical supplies, okay? You’re going to be all right. I just need you to hold this while I’m gone.” She grabbed his hands and moved them up to the cloth on his chest.

  Matthew shook his head. “They won’t let you. They won’t let you go.”

  “They will. Just let them try and stop me.”

  Before Dunne could leave, another floating face entered Matthew’s vision. It was the girl—the beautiful girl, the girl whose alien words he could somehow understand.

  Matthew’s smile grew larger.

  “You,” he said. “It’s you.”

  “I’m sorry that Po shot you,” she said. “But we’re going to help you.”

  “What did she say?” Dunne asked.

  “They’re going to help,” Matthew said.

  Dunne shook her head. “No. I’m not going to let them touch you.”

  “It’s fine,” Matthew said. “I trust them. I trust her.”

  The girl continued. “I need a bowl.”

  “In our ship,” Matthew said. “Can she go inside?”

  “Yes,” the girl said. “Only if you promise that she won’t come out with another weapon.”

  “You can send one of your men with her,” Matthew suggested.

  “No.” The girl shook her head. “I trust you.”

  Matthew told Dunne what the girl needed. Dunne still looked suspicious. The girl knelt beside Matthew and moved closer to his body, her hands inching toward the place where Dunne still held the torn cloth tight against Matthew’s wound. She looked to Dunne and nodded for her to take her hands away.

  Dunne hesitated a few moments more, then withdrew her hands and let the girl place hers tight against Matthew’s chest. Then she left.

  The girl’s eyes were fixed on the place where her hands held the cloth against Matthew’s wound, but Matthew kept his eyes on her face. He no longer felt like closing them.

  “Do you have names?” he asked.

  “What?” the girl asked.

  “Names,” he said. “Do you call yourselves anything?”