Dunne kept walking and didn’t look back. Matthew knew that she’d go on whether he and Sam followed her or not.
He fell in step behind her. After a moment, so did Sam.
They walked the rest of the way in complete silence.
By the time they reached the Corvus night had fallen, the sky gone black. A broad swath of stars was painted across the sky, and the two distant moons of Gle’ah glowed side by side. Once, in the distance, Matthew could see the nearer moon pass overhead, its path far enough away that he could see, but not feel, the effect of its gravitation—the grasses near the horizon, glistening white in the moonlight, rising up as the orb passed, like tiny hairs raised to the soft touch of fingertips.
Matthew smiled and thought—not for the first time—that if they could figure out what was going on in this place, if the radiation or the Vagri didn’t kill them first, that he wouldn’t mind living out the rest of his days on Gle’ah.
At the Corvus, Matthew knelt to put away the gun in the metal chest as Sam made his way toward his berth.
“Lock it,” Dunne said when Sam had gone. “And give me the key.”
Matthew locked the chest and, still perched on his haunches, turned to put the key in Dunne’s fingers. She turned and went a few steps outside the ship, cocked her arm, and threw it away. Matthew could hear the rasp of the key sliding into the grass somewhere distant.
“There,” Dunne said. She clapped her hands together, brushing the palms back and forth.
Matthew rose and prepared to leave the airlock with Dunne, but he was stopped by a small sound.
Static. White noise. And beneath that—the thin sound of a young woman’s voice.
Matthew reached his hand into a small crevice between the gun locker and the airlock wall. His fingers fumbled for a few seconds, then found the transceiver. Of course—he’d thrown it into the airlock hours ago, frustrated with Control’s constant badgering. It must have fallen behind the gun locker. He’d completely forgotten about it.
“Corvus. Corvus, do you copy? This is Mission Control. Corvus, are you there?”
Matthew clicked the button on the side of the transceiver and spoke into the microphone.
“I’m here, Control.”
“Is that you, Matthew? We thought we’d lost you. We thought you were dead.”
“It’s me, Alison. We’re alive and well.”
“What’s going on over there?”
Matthew pressed down on the button again and drew in a breath to speak, but stopped short when he saw Dunne. She was shaking her head fiercely and drawing the flat of her hand across her neck. When she’d caught his eye, she silently mouthed the word no.
Matthew took his finger off the button.
“What is it?”
“What are you going to tell them?” Dunne whispered.
Matthew shrugged. “I don’t know. The truth?”
“Don’t. Not everything. Not yet.”
“Why?”
“You know your history, Matthew? As a species, we don’t have such a great track record when we encounter beings that aren’t like us.”
Matthew thought about that, then nodded slowly. “So what do you want me to tell them?”
“Stall. Tell them about the radiation. Tell them I still have more tests to run. Just don’t tell them about the Vagri, the village—any of that.”
The transceiver buzzed. “Waiting on your response, Corvus. Do you have good news for us?”
Matthew cleared his throat and spoke once more into the microphone. “Don’t break out the champagne just yet, Control. We need a bit more time on this end …”
50
alison
“… just a few more days to figure out what’s going on over here,” Matthew’s voice buzzed on the transceiver.
Alison Nagita pressed the red button in front of her and leaned into the microphone.
“Roger that, Corvus. Take your time. We’ll check back in soon.”
“Thanks, Control. Corvus out.”
The transceiver crackled and went dark. Alison sat back from the microphone and let her eyes wander from the quantum transceiver to the other displays in front of her—readout screens showing the levels of oxygen and CO2 in the air, reserve energy, food and water supplies, and a map showing the trajectory of their orbit. Higher in her line of sight was a video screen of the view outside; it showed the surface of planet Earth sliding by silently below as the Ark 1 space station—the station where she lived and worked—orbited above. At the moment, though, Earth’s surface wasn’t actually visible—the ground was covered by a massive dust cloud, flashing here and there with lightning.
The view would be the same on the other side of the planet, Alison knew—no matter what part of Earth Ark 1 orbited over, no matter where the camera was pointed, all the video screen ever showed was dust and electrical storms in every direction. Conditions on the planet had continued to worsen in the century since the Exo Project participants had gone into the freeze and been launched across the galaxy. Battered by extreme heat and solar radiation, Earth had become a desert from pole to pole. Winds whipped across the continents, picking up dust clouds that reached into the middle of the oceans, and the static in the air from the blowing sand created dry electrical storms the size of massive hurricanes.
Alison stared at the screen and wondered, once again, if anyone was alive down there.
If her family was alive—her mother, father, and younger brothers.
Over her shoulder, someone cleared their throat, and Alison swiveled in her chair to face the control room. It was arranged in tiered rows of workstations much like hers, and on a normal day there would be techs at each chair, speaking softly into headsets as they monitored the space station’s life-support systems.
But today was not a normal day. By order of the OmniCore leadership board, the room had been cleared, the techs replaced with a retinue of senior leaders, mostly men. Alison sat in the lowest tier, the men arrayed behind and above her, staring down at her intently. She recognized some of them—men who’d scarcely noticed her or acknowledged her existence as she passed them in the hallway between her sleeping quarters and the control room every morning.
There was one man, though, whom she didn’t recognize—a man in the back of the room, sitting in the top tier in a chair with a view of the entire control room. Everyone in the room turned to this man and waited for him to speak.
Alison hadn’t seen him before, but she’d heard the whispers. Rumor had it that he was the legendary Charles Keane, the powerful and brilliant OmniCore officer who’d masterminded the Exo Project one hundred years ago. He was in his forties when the exoplanet expeditions had been launched, and should have been long dead by now—but he’d gone into the freeze with the rest of the Exo Project participants, with instructions to wake him if any of the expeditions found a habitable world. So far, the Corvus was the only ship that had landed on a planet that might be habitable, the only crew who hadn’t had to take the suicide pills. OmniCore had taken an active interest in what was happening on the surface of planet H-240 in the Iota Draconis system one hundred light-years away.
“What’s your name, miss?” Keane asked.
“My name’s Alison, sir. Alison Nagita.”
“Ms. Nagita,” Keane said, nodding toward her with a smile as he sat forward in his chair. “Tell me about yourself.”
Alison’s eyes narrowed. “Sir?”
“I like to know something about the people I work with,” Keane said.
“What do you want to know?”
“How did you come to enlist in OmniCore? You seem a bit … young.”
“I’m seventeen, sir,” Alison said. “I applied through the internship program.”
“Ah,” Keane said. “A trainee. And you’ve been with us … ?”
“For a year,” Alison said. “Ever since …”
She trailed off and swallowed. Keane nodded.
“I know,” Keane said. “I’ve been briefed.”
Alison let out a breath. If Keane had been briefed, then what he knew was that it had been just under a year ago when the storms began, when what was left of the OmniCore government fled to the skies and the rest of humanity went underground, seeking shelter with the only world powers that could still protect them: corporations. The world’s largest corporations had been secretly preparing for the complete collapse of civilization for years, and when it finally happened, they were ready—ready to survive, and ready to help others survive, too. For a price.
Communications with the underground compounds on the surface were spotty at best, and Alison—who’d been living on the space station for only a couple of weeks when things fell apart on Earth—still didn’t know if her family was alive or not, if they’d managed to pay their way into one of the corporate compounds or if they’d died with billions of others when the planet’s food supply finally gave out, when the last of the fresh water finally dried up.
“May I ask why you enlisted with OmniCore?” Keane asked.
“I wanted to go to space, sir,” Alison said. “I wanted to help find a new place for humanity to live. Earth is—well, you know what’s happening on Earth. And my family …”
Alison’s voice stopped. She couldn’t go on. She dropped her gaze to her lap.
“I understand. They’re on the surface?”
“Yes, sir,” Alison croaked. “If we find a planet, I want to find them and—”
“When we find a planet, Ms. Nagita,” Keane cut in, lifting a finger in the air. “When, not if. And when it happens, mark my words—we’ll find your family, and together you’ll be among the first to settle there. You have my word on that.”
Alison smiled, squinting slightly as she studied Keane’s face, his inscrutable brown eyes behind his black-rimmed glasses, and wondered if he was telling the truth. She hoped so.
“Now then,” Keane said. “You’ve been the one to speak to the crew of the Corvus, yes?”
Alison nodded, glad to be moving on to another topic. “Yes, that’s right.”
“And what is your assessment of what’s going on down there?”
Alison pondered for a moment. “It sounds promising, sir. The radiation levels they’re reading are troubling. But it’s still the first exoplanet expedition that hasn’t died in the first—”
“Yes, I know,” Keane interrupted with a wave of his hand. “As I said—I’ve been briefed. But what about this young man you’ve been speaking to, this …”
“Matthew Tilson, sir,” Alison offered.
“Yes. Matthew. What’s your opinion of him?”
“Meaning, sir?”
“Meaning, is he trustworthy? Are his assessments of the situation solid? Is he telling us what we need to know to determine if this planet is habitable?”
“He didn’t communicate with us for a while, sir. There was a space of about eighteen hours where the comm just went dark. But when I’ve spoken with him, he seems to be forthcoming. I think they’re doing the best they can out there.”
“I see,” Keane said. He lifted himself from his chair and strode forward, standing on the edge of the top tier, the tips of his shoes right up against the edge as he towered over everyone else—the other men and, at the bottom of the room, Alison.
“You’re right about one thing, Ms. Nagita,” Keane said. “It’s a promising situation out there. H-240 may be the planet we’ve been waiting for. But you’re also wrong about one thing.”
“And what’s that, sir?”
Keane tilted his head down at her. “That boy is lying.”
“But why? Why would he lie? And how can you tell?”
Keane shrugged. “It’s a hunch. Nothing more. But I’ve learned to trust my hunches over the years. They’ve never led me wrong. As for why he’s lying, though—that, I can only guess.”
“So what do we do about it?” Alison asked. “They’re light-years away. We can’t control what they do or what they tell us.”
Keane lifted a finger in the air. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
Alison squinted. “How, then?”
“It’s called leverage, Ms. Nagita,” Keane said.
His mouth stretched into a grin that revealed a row of perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth.
“You didn’t think I’d send them halfway across the galaxy without leverage, did you?”
PART 5
THE VOICE OF THE ANCESTORS
51
kiva
Kiva woke the next morning when it was still dark outside, yanked from deep sleep by the dim sense of a foreign presence at the edge of her hut—someone who didn’t belong there.
She sat up in her cot and looked to the door. Her skin tingled.
“Who’s there?” Kiva called out.
The cloth parted and Po’s face appeared in the doorway.
“Po,” Kiva said. “What are you doing here?”
“Forgive me, Vagra,” he said, hanging back. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“You didn’t,” Kiva said, though he had. “I mean, it’s all right. What is it?”
Po hesitated. “May I come in?”
Kiva nodded, setting her blanket aside and swinging her legs over the side of the cot. “Yes, of course.”
Po walked inside but didn’t come far into the hut. He lingered a few steps past the door. Kiva went to the center of the room and put some dry logs on the glowing embers from the fire of the night before and banked them into flame. She turned back to Po, seeing now that he was unarmed—he’d come without his spear or his bow and arrows.
“Now,” she said. “Tell me what this is all about.”
Po nodded, then grimaced, his hands fidgeting as they hung at his sides.
“I honestly don’t know where to begin,” he said.
Kiva’s eyes narrowed. “What is it?”
Po sighed. “Something’s happened. In the Forsaken camp.”
Kiva waited for Po to go on.
“Have you heard of maiora?”
Kiva tensed. That word. She’d heard it before, in an echo from Kyne’s mind during their confrontation at the pit. “What is it?” Kiva asked.
“It’s a … I don’t know what to call it. It’s a food, a special kind of food that changes the person who eats it. Xendr Chathe found it on a scouting mission.”
“What does it do?”
“It gives visions to whoever eats it. Or hallucinations, I don’t know. Nobody knows what it does, not really.” Po, his head angled down and away, glanced at Kiva out of the corner of his eye. “Some say it gives the person who uses it the power of the Ancestors.”
Kiva was silent for a long moment. A substance that gave people the power of the Ancestors. Her power. If what Po was saying was true, it would change everything. She just didn’t know how. Would it be good or bad for everyone—women and men, Vagri and Forsaken—to have the power of the Vagra any time they wanted it? Would such a substance bind her people even closer together? Or tear them apart?
“Who knows about it?” Kiva asked finally. “About the—what do you call it?”
“Maiora. All the Forsaken know about it. It’s taken over the village.” Po paused. “And Kyne. She knows too.”
Kiva began to understand. She took a step closer to Po.
“Po, where did you disappear to yesterday?” she asked.
Po’s face was stricken.
“I’m sorry, Vagra.”
“It’s okay,” Kiva said. “You don’t have to apologize. Just tell me what happened.”
“She made me take her to Xendr Chathe. Kyne. She wants to lead the Forsaken against you. She offered to unite the villages, and to rule together with Xendr.”
Kiva’s heart pounded. “And what did he say to that?”
Po shook his head. “He said no. He’s loyal to you. He won’t join Kyne’s rebellion. But he needs your help. He needs to know what the maiora is. Whether it’s good or bad.”
Kiva nodded slowly. “How can I help?”
“Just come with me,” Po pleaded. “Come to the Forsaken camp. Now, before Kyne wakes up and senses that I’m here. See the maiora for yourself. Then ask the Ancestors for guidance.”
Kiva’s gaze drifted and she turned her back to Po, thinking. Matthew’s face flashed before her eyes. Yesterday evening, she’d told him to come to the village in the morning—and she’d told him to come alone. She couldn’t go with Po. Not now.
“I can’t leave the village,” she said, still facing away from Po. “I have things to attend to here.”
“What things?”
“That’s none of your concern.”
“Then what shall I tell Xendr?”
Kiva turned around as an idea sprung to her mind. “Go to the Strangers.”
Po’s eyes narrowed to slits. “The Strangers? Why?”
“The woman. Dunne. She knows things. She can use her machines. She’ll help you.”
Po breathed heavily, color rising to his cheeks, his head shaking almost imperceptibly. Kiva set a hand on his shoulder and watched as his eyes cleared, the agitation passing from his body.
“Tell Xendr Chathe that I am glad to have his loyalty,” she said. “And yours. I mean it, Po.”
Po held her gaze for a long moment, then nodded and turned to leave.
“You’ll let me know what happens?” Kiva asked. “With Dunne and the maiora?”
Po simply nodded and kept moving toward the door, but for some reason Kiva didn’t feel ready to let him leave.
“Po,” she called out.
He paused with his hand on the doorhang, and Kiva suddenly realized that she didn’t know why she’d stopped him from going. For a moment, she struggled to find what it was she wanted to say.
“Po, when this is over … ,” she began.
In the space between them, she felt something grow, some strong feeling emanating from the Forsaken boy standing before her: hope mingled with desire, both emotions shot through with fear—fear that his hopes would be dashed, that his desire would never be satisfied.
Kiva closed her eyes, inwardly cursing her own stupidity. She could never be what Po wanted. She was the Vagra—even if she wanted to, she could never be mated to Po. But even so, she felt a pain in him that she wanted to heal, a deep wrongness that she wanted to set right.
The Exo Project Page 20