She and Po had never been friends. But that didn’t mean he didn’t deserve a chance at happiness.
“I’m just sorry, okay?” she said, opening her eyes again. “I’m sorry that Kyne drove you out of the village, and I’m sorry that I was too distracted with my visions of the Strangers to stop her.”
“It’s all right,” Po said. “I’m fine. I really am.”
Kiva shook her head. “No. It’s not all right. When this is all over, I want you to come back to the village. Build a hut and plant a garden. Find a mate. Have babies. Have a life.”
Po’s cheeks colored, but he didn’t say anything. He simply bowed his head and left the hut. Kiva went to the door and pulled back the doorhang—and as she stood watching him walk through the village toward the Forsaken camp, the sky beginning to lighten above him, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d done something wrong, even if she didn’t know what. That in trying to make things right with Po, she’d made them worse instead.
After a while, she went back to her hut. She lay down, webbed her fingers behind her head. Looked at the circular hole in the ceiling. And waited for dawn.
Waited for Matthew.
52
matthew
Matthew’s sleep that night was fitful, filled with uncertain dreams that fled into the dark, forgetful depths of his mind the moment he awoke. Blinking, he looked around the sleeping quarters of the Corvus and found that he was alone.
Sam and Dunne weren’t in their berths.
Matthew rubbed a hand over his eyes and got up to search the ship. First he went to the airlock, where he found the door wide open. He craned his neck outside and looked around, but the landscape was empty. In the airlock, he knelt to check the gun locker. It was still locked tight. The speeder was still in the airlock as well.
Matthew pressed a button to close the airlock and then went to the lab. As he’d expected, Dunne was there, hunched over a handheld display. She lifted her head as he walked into the room.
“Working already?” Matthew asked. “How long have you been at it?”
“Couple hours,” Dunne said, dropping the handheld to run her hands over her eyes. “I couldn’t sleep. Too many questions.”
Matthew nodded. “What about Sam? Where did he go?”
“He’s gone? He was still asleep when I got up.”
“I can’t find him anywhere. The airlock was wide open.”
Dunne’s expression grew worried, the lines on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes deepening. “Did you check the guns? The speeder?”
Matthew nodded. “The guns are still locked up. Wherever Sam is, he’s unarmed. The speeder’s still here too.”
“Good.”
“Yes, but where is he?”
Dunne shrugged. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t care. If we’re lucky, he’ll do something stupid and get himself killed out there. Good riddance. We’d be better off without him.”
Matthew flinched to hear the harshness of Dunne’s words, but he didn’t disagree with her. He found Sam’s moods puzzling, and a little frightening. When he’d first met him, Sam had simply seemed boorish, loud and full of bluster, but the way he’d turned sullen and broody when they encountered the Vagri perplexed Matthew—and the things he’d said the night before as they walked back to the ship made Matthew begin to think that Sam was slightly unhinged.
“What’s wrong with him, you think?” Matthew asked. “With Sam, I mean.”
“He’s afraid, that’s all,” Dunne said, looking Matthew square in the eyes and speaking as if the answer were obvious. “He’s afraid, and his fear makes him angry. There’s nothing difficult to understand about Sam. He’s the kind of person who thinks his hatreds are holy, that his prejudices are written into the DNA of the universe. He despises what he doesn’t understand. And he’d destroy it if he got the chance.”
As Dunne spoke, Matthew’s heart beat faster and his veins thrummed with the thrill of hearing someone say something that was so obviously true and right—of articulating something that he’d felt but couldn’t, until then, put into words.
Of course. Sam hated the Vagri because he didn’t understand them. Because he was afraid of them. Their gray skin, their society where women, not men, were in control, where sex and family and authority were so different than they were on the Earth they’d left behind—it was foreign and strange, and unnerving to Sam. To all of them, really. But only Sam thought, somehow, that his fear made him righteous, and that the Vagri’s strangeness made them evil.
“Is that what he’s doing, then? Trying to come up with a way to destroy the Vagri?” Matthew asked.
“My guess is that he’s moping somewhere, licking his wounds, feeding on his own anger.” Dunne’s focus wandered and she shook her head with disgust. “He’s powerless here. Those men with their spears and their arrows could put him down in seconds if they had to. It’s not him we have to worry about. It’s Earth. If this ends up being a planet where we can live, there are plenty more people like Sam who will flood to this place. Thousands, millions of them. What do you think happens to the Vagri then?”
Matthew took a deep, slow breath, Kiva’s face flashing before his eyes. She was powerful—the most powerful person in her village. Matthew had seen what she could do; he’d felt her power surging through his veins, so strong he felt as though it might tear him apart from the inside out. But she was vulnerable, too. Settlers from Earth wouldn’t hesitate to destroy her and the society she led if the Vagri came between them and what they wanted.
“So what do we do?” he asked.
Dunne shook her head. “I don’t know. We just need time. This is the human race’s first contact with sentient creatures from another planet. This is history. We have the opportunity to get things right this time. Maybe we can live in peace with the Vagri, if we understand them first. That’s what I’m working on today—analyzing these blood and tissue samples that I took yesterday.”
Matthew nodded. “I’m going back to the village. Kiva asked me to come.”
“Do you need company?”
Matthew shook his head. “No. She told me to come alone.”
Dunne squinted. “Be careful. Try not to get shot this time.”
Matthew chuckled and left Dunne to her work in the laboratory, making his way toward the airlock.
Making his way toward Kiva.
53
kiva
Long before Matthew’s footsteps scratched at the dirt just outside her door, Kiva felt him coming, followed his progress in her mind and looked out through his eyes as he strode across the plains of Gle’ah. She could feel what he was feeling so clearly that the closer he came, the less certain she was if the anxious feeling in her stomach was really hers, or his, or something that belonged to both of them at the same time. The feeling grew stronger with each step Matthew took across the prairie. She’d felt the feelings of others many times, of course, and heard their thoughts echo in her skull, but this was different, more intense—it felt as though Kiva was wearing Matthew’s body as a second skin. The sensation was at once delirious and painful, like a fever her body hadn’t yet mustered the strength to sweat out.
While Matthew walked through the prairie, Kiva paced her hut, but when he climbed the rise and came within sight of the village, she willed her body to be still. She sat on the ground and crossed her legs beneath her. She closed her eyes and breathed slowly through her nose.
She didn’t want to look nervous when Matthew came through the door. She wanted to look cool and calm. She wanted to look like the Vagra.
But then, when Matthew’s steps drew up just outside the hut and she felt him hesitate at the door, her eyes snapped open and she said too quickly and too loudly, “Come in!”
The cloth hanging in the doorway moved to the side, and Matthew stepped into the hut. He lingered for a moment at the edge of the room.
Kiva breathed a sigh of relief. She felt a smile curl the corners of her mouth. Now that Matthew was here
all the discomfort fled from her body, and she found herself wondering what she’d been so worried about. In spite of everything—in spite of the fact that the Vagri and the Strangers were still suspicious of one another—she felt a comfort in Matthew’s presence. It was something about the softness in his eyes and the gentle curve of his mouth. Something about his broad shoulders and his long, lanky arms. Something about the way his flesh and blood called out to hers across the electrified space between them.
There was no explaining it. But there was also no denying it.
Matthew cleared his throat and seemed to be trying to find something to say.
“Come here,” Kiva said. “Sit next to me.”
Matthew walked forward and lowered himself to the ground. Rather than sitting cross-legged like Kiva, he sat with his legs stretched out, his arm draped over one bent knee. Kiva smiled at his feigned nonchalance.
“Do you know why I asked you here today?” she asked.
Matthew squinted. “I think so.”
“Why?” Kiva asked, testing him. She waited as he searched his mind for an answer.
“Because you want to know why we came to your planet.”
Kiva smiled and closed her eyes for a brief moment as she assented with a nod. “Among other things. But let’s start there. Why are you here, on Gle’ah?”
Matthew drew a long breath through his nostrils before he spoke. “We were sent by our own planet. By our own people. Sent to find a new place to live.”
Kiva was silent, waiting for Matthew to continue. His gaze left hers and dropped to the ground. A cloudy, far-off look came across his face. He picked at the dirt with a finger.
“My planet, it’s—it’s completely ruined. What’s worse, we’re the ones who ruined it.”
“How?” Kiva asked. “How can you ruin an entire planet?”
“We just … used it up. The water and fuel are almost gone. Crops are failing. And everything’s burning up. Cancers from solar radiation and chemicals eat away at everyone’s bodies.” Matthew shrugged and looked back up at Kiva with a dark look on his face. “That was how it was when I left, anyway. But that was many years ago. Things could be even worse now. My people could be nearly extinct.”
“What is your planet called?” Kiva asked.
“Earth.”
“Earth,” Kiva said to herself, the word feeling strange on her tongue. “So, your people can’t survive on this … Earth. Is that it?”
Matthew nodded, a look of embarrassment passing across his face—as if Earth was a place he was ashamed to be from.
“And now that you’ve found Gle’ah, you’ve got a choice, don’t you? You can tell your people to come to this place. Or you can let them die on Earth—the place that you destroyed.”
“Yes,” Matthew said. His voice was tentative, and he glanced at Kiva cautiously out of the corner of his eye. “What are you asking me?”
“I’m asking what will happen if your people follow you here and make this planet their own? What will happen to the Vagri?”
Matthew looked away. “I don’t know.”
Kiva craned her neck down, trying to make Matthew meet her eyes. “But you suspect.”
“Yes.”
“And what do you suspect?”
Matthew shook his head. “It wouldn’t be good for you. For the Vagri. For this planet. My people …” Matthew trailed off and paused for a moment. Then he raised his head and met Kiva’s gaze again at last. His face held no expression, and he spoke his next words so plainly that Kiva knew they must be true.
“Everything we touch, we destroy.”
54
matthew
After Matthew told Kiva the truth about his mission and about what would happen if the people of Earth came to colonize Gle’ah, she seemed to disappear inside herself.
Then she walked to the side of the room and crouched to pick up sticks of firewood from a pile at the wall. The firewood stacked in her arms, she walked back to the center of the room and let it clatter down atop a mound of gray ashes surrounded by rocks.
“What are you doing?” Matthew asked, his back straightening.
“There’s a question you want to ask me,” Kiva said as she picked up two rocks from just beside the fire pit and began to strike them together. Sparks fell into the kindling, the dry wood lit quickly, and Kiva went to her knees to blow the embers into flame.
“I don’t understand,” Matthew said.
“But you do,” Kiva said, pausing to look back at him. “You do understand. You just haven’t learned how to trust what’s inside you.”
Matthew swallowed. Kiva’s words felt like they were cutting at him, stabbing him. They felt like an arrowhead plunging deep into his chest. Suddenly, thoughts that Matthew hadn’t allowed himself to entertain, questions he hadn’t allowed himself to ask, began to bubble to the surface. His face grew serious and he returned his gaze to the ground, where he found that he’d been absentmindedly picking a deep hole in the dirt with his finger.
“What’s happening to me?” he asked finally, his voice thin in the still air.
Kiva cocked her head as the fire began to roar beside her, filling the hut with smoke.
“You tell me,” she said.
Matthew shrugged. “I just feel … strange.”
“Since the healing,” Kiva offered. “After I healed you with my blood.”
Matthew nodded. “Yes. Before that, too, but even more after. It’s like … like I can sense things. Echoes. Echoes from all over, all at once—from Sam, from Dunne. From you.”
“You’re hearing the thoughts of others.”
Matthew closed his eyes and shook his head, a pained look flashing across his face. “What I hear I don’t understand. But I’m feeling them.”
“It hurts.”
Matthew’s eyes opened. He nodded.
Kiva bowed her head. “What you are experiencing is the same thing I went through when the Ancestors first visited me. When I was chosen to be the next Vagra.”
Kiva’s face was barely visible through the growing haze. Matthew drew shallow breaths, trying not to cough.
“How old were you?” he asked.
“I was thirteen seasons old.”
“Thirteen! God, you were so young.”
“When I had my first vision, the woman who was Vagra at the time performed a ceremony over me to tell if the Ancestors truly favored me or if I was only imagining that they were speaking to me. I want to perform this same ceremony on you now.”
Matthew touched his cheek with the tingling fingertips of one hand as he wondered what this ceremony might involve. The last time Kiva had performed a ceremony over him, she’d kept him from dying—but it had also hurt like hell.
“Fine,” he said at last. “Sure, great, let’s do it.”
Kiva nodded, stood, and advanced toward him through the smoke. She held a sheaf of dead grasses in one hand.
“Don’t be nervous,” she said. “Please stand.”
Matthew pulled himself to his feet and stood tall, pulling his shoulders back toward his spine.
Kiva brushed the sheaf of grasses against Matthew’s chest, shoulders, and back, flicking her wrist as she circled behind him and came around the other side. Then she knelt and crumbled the grass to dust into a shallow clay bowl. When she stood again and faced Matthew, she had a dagger in her right hand.
“This will hurt a little,” she said. “But only a little.”
Matthew swallowed, nodded. “Okay.”
“Give me your hand.”
Matthew hesitated for a short moment before stretching out his hand. Kiva cradled it with her empty hand, then pressed the dagger against his palm with the other. She jerked the point across his hand in a quick, straight line. Matthew hissed as the knife split his skin open and drew blood.
“Now make a fist,” Kiva said.
Matthew did as he was told and closed his hand. Kiva caught his blood in the bowl. Then she put two fingers into the bowl and daubed the
mingled blood and grass into a paste. She turned back to the fire and threw some of the paste into the flames. They sparked, leapt higher, and turned green at the root.
“Well?” Matthew asked.
“It’s as I suspected,” Kiva said. “The Ancestors are with you. They favor you. They are quickening in your blood and giving you the second sight. That’s never happened before.”
“What’s never happened before?” Matthew cradled his hand. The cut on his palm throbbed with every heartbeat.
Kiva turned to face him once more. “The Ancestors have never seen fit to quicken in the blood of a boy. Much less an outsider, like you.”
“Why is it happening, then? Why is it happening to me?”
Kiva shook her head. “I don’t know. The Ancestors obviously want you for something. They have some business with you.”
Kiva walked to the wall again and came back to Matthew with two cloths—one wet, one dry. With the wet cloth, she washed Matthew’s cut hand, then tied the dry one around the gash.
As Kiva dressed Matthew’s wound, a troubling thought bubbled up in his mind.
When Kiva had first healed him on the plain, daubing her thickened blood on his arrow wound, unbearable pain had coursed through his body—and in the midst of the pain, strange images had flashed across his eyelids. He’d dismissed them at the time as a hallucination—he’d lost a lot of blood and was close to dying, after all. But now he wondered if they might be more significant. If they might be a vision from the Ancestors.
He tried to remember what he’d seen.
There’d been a wasteland, a desert. Earth? Perhaps.
He’d also seen a space station orbiting Earth. He’d been inside it. There, he stood in a landing bay full of ships, spaceships waiting to fly to Gle’ah as soon as he told Exo Project Mission Control that it was safe.
And—oh God—his mother and sister.
The Exo Project Page 21