Matthew was silent for a moment. He stared at the handheld screen, at the waves of light passing back and forth across the display as the Ancestors passed messages in some kind of primitive language. A pain twinged just beneath his skin, and Matthew put his hand to his chest, to the place where Kiva’s blood had entered his body. The constellation of quantum blinks on the screen was happening inside him, too.
“There’s still one question, though,” Dunne said, and Matthew lifted his head.
“What’s that?”
Dunne nodded toward him, her eyes never leaving his. “You,” she said.
Matthew swallowed. “What do you mean?”
“Your blood and tissue samples show a higher concentration of the Ancestors than either mine or Sam’s. Higher than those of the Vagri men and children. And that’s before Kiva gave you her blood. I’m guessing if I were to test your sample now, it would be off the charts.” Dunne paused. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
Matthew sighed, then nodded. “Yes. I’ve been … feeling things. It started as soon as we set foot on this planet. Something’s familiar about it. I don’t know why. It’s like this sense of déjà vu. Then we met them, and I could somehow understand Kiva. Then the whole thing with the blood …”
Matthew lifted a hand in the air, then let it drop back to the table.
“It’s been getting stronger?” Dunne asked.
Matthew nodded. “Yes. I don’t know how to control it. How to do anything with it. But yes. It’s been getting stronger. Kiva says the Ancestors favor me.”
Dunne lifted a hand and massaged the back of her neck, her head cocked to the side. “That’s an interesting way to put it. And it reminds me of a thought I had earlier. A theory. Now, this is really speculative, so take it with a grain of salt, but—”
“Go ahead,” Matthew interrupted. “Tell me your theory.”
“Well, the way the Ancestors communicate with each other? These messages passed from one to the next? It almost reminds me of synapses firing, of neural pathways.”
Matthew didn’t say anything right away, even though he knew immediately what Dunne was driving at.
“Like a brain,” he said.
Dunne nodded. “Yes. Like a brain. Individually, the Ancestors are just drones, self-replicating nanites programmed to do one thing mindlessly. But together? Communicating? We could be talking about a sentience here, an intelligence, a mind with thoughts and desires and a will of its own. And we’re all embedded in it. The planet, the grass, the Vagri, us, this ship. We’re all inside the mind of the Ancestors.”
Matthew’s skin tingled. The air seemed alive with energy. He thought of the story Kiva had told him—of the coming of the Ancestors to Gle’ah in a streak of white light coming down from the stars.
“It sounds almost … religious,” Matthew said. “I know you’re talking about science. But it sounds to me like you’re talking about a god.”
Dunne shrugged. “Maybe I am,” she said. “If so, the question now becomes—what does this god want with you?”
57
kiva
That night Kiva slept without dreaming, and woke before dawn.
She walked to the doorway of her hut and looked out over the Sisters’ encampment and the village beyond. After the events of the past two days, she knew that she should call a meeting to speak to the Sisters and the villagers. She’d been so busy dealing with Matthew and the Strangers that she barely had time to think about her own people. She could sense that the Vagri were afraid, uncertain about what the future might hold—they’d need a word from their Vagra soon.
But Kiva didn’t feel like she could face them. Now, before the Great Mother rose over the horizon, the village was silent. Soon, though, everyone would wake up, and the thoughts and worries and emotions of each of the villagers would begin to echo in Kiva’s mind, buzz in her veins. She couldn’t take it. Not yet.
I want to see Matthew.
Kiva surprised herself with the thought. She didn’t need to see Matthew because the Ancestors wanted her to; she didn’t have to see him because it was her duty as Vagra to deal with the Strangers. There was no real reason for her to see Matthew today.
But she ached to see him nonetheless—for no reason other than that she wanted to.
She began to walk toward the edge of the village, moving quickly and quietly so as not to wake anyone.
At her back, the dark sky began to glow at the horizon.
matthew
Matthew woke late that morning, and found himself alone once again in the sleeping quarters of the Corvus. Sam hadn’t returned in the night—but now Dunne was gone as well.
In the airlock, Matthew found that the speeder was gone. The gun case was still locked, but there was a note on top of it, written in a looping cursive script.
Gone out. Be back soon.
—Dunne
Matthew squinted at the note. Why would Dunne leave? Maybe she was looking for Sam, Matthew thought.
He hit the button next to the airlock door and stepped out onto the grass, yawning and stretching his arms into the air.
In the distance, he spotted a figure moving toward the ship. Squinting, he moved further into the plain.
It was Kiva.
Matthew’s mouth pulled into a smile.
“What are you doing here?” he asked when Kiva came close.
Kiva reared back, feigning hurt. “What, you don’t want me here? I’m offended!”
Matthew laughed, relieved that the chill he’d felt between them the day before seemed to have thawed this morning. “No, it’s not that. I was just … surprised to see you.”
Kiva looked over his shoulder to the Corvus. “I wanted to see inside your ship. I’ve shown you our village and the inside of my hut—I hoped you’d return the favor.”
Matthew’s stomach fluttered as he turned back to the open airlock. The prospect of letting Kiva into the Corvus felt wrong somehow, like he was disobeying some command—what would Mission Control back on Earth think if they knew?
Matthew shook his head to himself. He was being silly. He didn’t care what Mission Control thought. He and Dunne had been hiding plenty from them already. Plus, Kiva was right—she’d taken a much bigger risk by letting him come into her village. The least he could do was show her around inside their ship.
“All right,” Matthew said. “After you.”
He waved his hand toward the airlock door, and Kiva walked inside. Matthew came in behind her and hit the button to close the door. Kiva jumped with fright and looked back at the door as it closed.
“Sorry,” Matthew said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. You don’t need to be afraid.”
Kiva looked around the airlock, awed. She put her hand against one of the walls, running her palm over the smooth surface. “It’s amazing. How did you make it?”
Matthew grinned. “I didn’t—I could barely make a bird feeder in woodshop class. Other people made it. Scientists. Engineers.”
The airlock finished decontaminating the air, and the door to the inside corridor hissed open.
“It’s impossible,” Kiva said, running her hands along the doorway, trying to find where the sliding door had disappeared to.
Matthew chuckled. “Funny—when I visited the village, I was thinking the same thing about you. The things the Ancestors can do through you seem pretty impossible too.”
58
kiva
The ship was unlike anything she’d ever seen. It was all hard, gleaming surfaces, straight lines, sharp corners. So unlike the planet of Gle’ah, where nothing was hard, and nothing was straight—where the plains swelled and dipped and the grasses bent this way and that with the wind.
They went through a hallway and came into a big room with a long, gleaming table in the middle. The table was covered in strange, foreign-looking instruments.
“What’s this?” Kiva asked.
“The lab,” Matthew said. “This is where we analyzed the b
lood samples that we got from you yesterday.”
Kiva picked up a flat piece of glass. There was a picture on the glass, like the pictures artists from the village sometimes drew in the dirt or on the walls of the huts. Except that this picture was moving—a thousand tiny black dots, vibrating this way and that. Kiva felt Matthew holding his breath while she held the moving picture in her hands. She set it back on the table and he breathed again.
Kiva moved into another room with sleeping berths set into the walls. “And this?”
“Sleeping quarters,” Matthew said.
Kiva raised her eyebrows. “Which one is yours?”
Matthew nodded up. “Top bunk.”
Kiva kept walking. She went back through the laboratory and craned her neck around a corner to see a small room at the back of the ship. It was dark inside.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Oh, that … that’s nothing.”
Kiva looked at Matthew and set her jaw. “Show me.”
Matthew sighed and walked in ahead of her. He flipped a switch, and a dim light came on, revealing three long, narrow platforms, each with a clear box on top of it.
“What is this room?” Kiva asked.
“This is where … ,” Matthew began, then paused. “It’s where we stayed during our journey.”
“How long was your journey?
“One hundred years … I mean, about one hundred seasons.”
Kiva gasped. “One hundred seasons in this little room!”
Then she paused, closed her mouth, and studied the smooth skin of Matthew’s face. What he was telling her didn’t make sense.
“But you’re so young,” she said. “I thought you said you were my age.”
“I am,” Matthew said. “It doesn’t work that way. It’s like … How can I explain this?”
Matthew looked down at his feet. Kiva waited.
“We slept in here for most of the journey,” he said. “Dunne, Sam, and I. We were … we were frozen. In ice. You have ice on Gle’ah?”
Kiva nodded.
“The ice kept us from getting older. You see? So when we arrived here at Gle’ah, we woke up—”
“The same age as you were when you left,” Kiva cut in, finishing Matthew’s sentence for him.
Matthew nodded, and Kiva returned her gaze to the clear box where Matthew had spent the last one hundred seasons—frozen, unaging.
“But if you spent one hundred seasons flying from Earth to Gle’ah,” Kiva said slowly, thinking as she spoke, “then life on your planet went on without you. While you were frozen, time just kept going.”
She looked up at Matthew. His eyes were buried in a flinch, but Kiva could see that they were glistening. He didn’t say anything.
“Why did you come here?” Kiva asked.
Matthew turned away and coughed. “I told you,” he said, unable to hide the quaver in his voice even though he spoke loudly into the small room. “Our mission is to find a new—”
“That’s not what I mean,” Kiva said. “I mean, why did you come here? There are people back home, aren’t there? People you care about? People who love you? Why would you leave them behind?”
Matthew breathed out. “My mother,” he said. “She was sick, and we didn’t have the money to get her better.”
“Money?” Kiva repeated.
“It’s like, it’s a thing that you have, a sort of made-up thing, and you trade it for other things. But we didn’t have enough to buy a cure for my mother, and there was pay for anyone who agreed to go on this mission, so—”
“You mean there was a cure for your mother’s sickness, but you couldn’t get it for her because you didn’t have enough of this made-up thing? This is the way things work on your planet? Why don’t people put a stop to it?”
“I know it must sound horrible to you,” Matthew said. “And it is horrible, really, when you sit down and think about it. But I guess most people never really think about it. When it’s all you’ve ever known, you kind of get used—”
His voice caught in his throat and he stopped talking for a moment.
“Anyway, I had to do it. My mom, she’s done so much for me. I had to at least try. For her.”
Kiva nodded slowly. “I understand. I understand what it is to give your life over to other people. To make it into something else to please them.”
“Is that what being Vagra feels like? Giving your life to the Vagri? Making it into something else to please them?”
“Sometimes. When I’m in the village, I can hear their voices all the time. I’ve learned to tune them out and really listen to only one voice at a time—but they’re always there, chattering away inside my head.” Kiva paused, breathed out through her nose, and swallowed. “All their hopes, all their fears. Their expectations. They want me to be so much—so much more than I am. I can’t be the leader they want me to be.”
Kiva felt Matthew’s hand on her arm, and she jerked her gaze up with surprise to look at him. Matthew flinched, took his hand away, and took a step back, his expression chastened. Something inside Kiva wilted—he’d only startled her. She hadn’t meant for him to stop touching her. That wasn’t what she’d meant to happen at all.
“You seem like a good leader to me,” Matthew said. “If I were one of the Vagri, you’d be exactly the kind of Vagra I’d want.”
Kiva smiled.
Matthew looked once again at the empty cryochambers and gritted his teeth.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I can’t stand this place.”
59
matthew
Matthew walked back through the Corvus toward the airlock, Kiva following close behind. Together, they went out onto the grass and kept walking. Their steps took them far into the plain, into a shapeless, unmarked place where neither the Corvus nor Kiva’s village were visible—and where it seemed, for a moment, that they might be the only two people alive in the entire universe.
Matthew fell a little behind Kiva and let himself watch the way her hips moved languidly back and forth beneath her dress. Then he glanced at her hands swinging at her sides and wondered what would happen if he were to walk up beside her and lace his fingers together with hers.
He shook his head and pushed the thought out of his mind.
“Say something,” Matthew said after a few more steps.
Kiva glanced back with a smile. “You don’t like the silence?”
Matthew shook his head. “It’s not that. I just like hearing your voice more.”
Kiva took her lower lip between her teeth as she thought.
“Let’s do this,” she said. “You ask me a question. One question. Then I’ll ask you a question. Then you ask another question, and so on. But we have to be completely honest. We have to tell the whole truth, without leaving anything out.”
“Okay,” Matthew said. “Um, let’s see. Here’s one: why does this place seem so familiar to me? Why do you seem so familiar?”
“That’s two questions. You’re already cheating.”
Matthew laughed. “Humor me anyway.”
Kiva squinted and studied Matthew. The smile left her face. “You still don’t remember?”
“Remember what?”
Kiva walked a few steps without answering. She nodded toward the horizon, in the direction of the village.
“Over those hills,” she said. “Near the village, there’s a spot just beyond the rise. It’s a little … a bump in the plain. A bump with a tiny cleft in it, where a person can lie down and feel like the ground is cradling them. Like Gle’ah is holding you in the palm of its hand. That’s where we met for the first time.”
Matthew looked toward the horizon, then back at Kiva, uncomprehending.
“I loved that spot when I was younger,” Kiva continued. “I used to go there at nightfall and nestle myself right in the little crevice. Then I’d look up and wait for the sky to go dark, for the moons and stars to come out. And it was on one of those nights that I had my first vi
sion. When I first saw you and your shipmates, and knew that you were coming to this planet.”
“I was in your first vision?”
Kiva shook her head. “I didn’t know it was you. Not at first. I didn’t understand the vision fully. I needed the Ancestors to tell me more.”
“And did they?”
“They took a while, but yes. It was only a few days ago. I was lying there, in the same spot, and I dreamed that you came over the horizon.” She nodded into the distance. “You came over the hill and saw me. You looked right into my eyes.”
Matthew shook his head to himself. “But that was just a vision. A dream. Something in your mind. You don’t actually think—”
Kiva snapped her head toward Matthew, hurt and anger painted clearly across her face. He took a step back, shrinking from the accusation in her eyes.
“Kiva, I’m sorry, I—”
“You were there,” Kiva said. “You can’t remember, and that’s okay. But you were there. You were in the dream with me. That’s why Gle’ah seems so familiar to you. That’s why I seem so familiar to you. Because we’ve met before. The Ancestors wanted us to. They wanted us to be connected. All that time, ever since my first vision. All that time, they were preparing me to meet you.”
“Okay.” Matthew put his hands out and grabbed hold of Kiva’s arms just below her shoulders. “I’m sorry I can’t remember. But I believe you.”
Kiva glanced away. Matthew bent to look straight into her eyes.
“Hey,” he said. “Look at me. I believe you, okay?”
Kiva returned Matthew’s gaze for a moment, then looked away again. She shrugged Matthew’s hands off her arms and walked a few steps, her back turned.
“Ask me a question,” Matthew said.
“What?”
“Ask me a question. It’s your turn.”
Kiva was silent a moment. “I want to know what you thought when you first saw me. The first time you remember, anyway. What was the first thing that went through your mind?”
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