She stared at me and began babbling crazily. I barely understood what she was saying. Her eyes were wild, clouded. It was almost like she wasn’t seeing me—like my elixir was giving her some hallucination, some vision.
I backed away from her. She stood and grabbed at my suit. Her voice got even louder. Fearing that the gangs would hear her and come to kill us both, I tried to silence her, to calm her down, but it was no use. She went on babbling, louder and louder. Hearing footsteps echoing in the streets behind us, I fumbled with my gun and fired. The blast blew a hole in her chest, but her body stayed on its feet for a few nauseating seconds. Then she fell to her knees and crumpled to the ground.
I ran back here as quickly as I could. I hope no one followed me. A couple times I thought I heard footsteps on the cobblestones behind me. But every time I looked back, there was no one. I think I’m safe.
But I can’t stop thinking about that old woman. The things that she was saying. They keep coming back to me. She seemed to know me, somehow—“It’s you,” that’s what she said, “the one who destroyed everything!”
How could she have known that? Perhaps the elixir I’ve created does more than just heal—perhaps it brings powers of heightened perception as well.
The important thing is that my elixir worked. Now I just need to find a way to spread it across the planet, to vaporize the healing particles so they can spread and heal Gle’ah.
Fifth entry, dated the seventh day of the fifth month of the season P.I. 3748.
I’m going to die.
The gangs on the surface have discovered my hiding place. They know I’m here. They’re attacking my door with a battering ram, and once they come in, they’ll almost certainly kill me.
It doesn’t matter. I’ve taken steps to make sure that my creation will get out into the world.
Before I designed the pulse beam, I invented a powerful missile that could fly through the air and kill enemies far away. The Chancellor ultimately rejected it as not being powerful enough to defeat the Bakarai, so I kept on with my research. But I still have prototypes of the missile stocked here in the lab, as well as a prototype of the launching mechanism. I’ve laced each of the missiles with my healing elixir. From here, I’ll launch the missiles into the air one by one, all over Gle’ah. When they land, the explosion will vaporize the elixir and send the healing particles into the air, where they will replicate themselves. From there, what happens next is in the hands of the gods.
I’ve loaded one of the rockets into the launch chamber. I’ll launch it right after I sign off here. This will be my last recording.
I hope that this helps to undo some of the damage I’ve done. I hope … I hope that the gods will forgive me for the death I’ve brought upon this planet.
69
matthew
On the screen, Soran Thantos reached toward the control panel and pressed a series of buttons. The recording flickered, then ended. The screen went black.
Matthew turned to Dunne, who’d been listening to his halting translations as the recording played.
“I can’t believe it,” Dunne said. “All this. The radiation, the Ancestors, the Vagra. All because of one man.”
Matthew nodded, his vision sliding out of focus as he tumbled headlong into his own thoughts.
“You know … ,” he said absently, then trailed off.
“What?” Dunne asked.
“Something Kiva told me,” Matthew said. “A story.”
“A story?”
Matthew nodded. “Yes. It was sort of a … a creation myth, I guess. A story that explained how the Ancestors and the Vagri came to be.”
“Tell me,” Dunne said.
Matthew sighed and scratched softly at his cheek with one hand, trying to remember what Kiva had told him.
“Well, it began with chaos,” he said. “That’s what Kiva told me. That in the beginning there was chaos, and there was death in the air.”
“That’s what Gle’ah must have been like after the weapon went off,” Dunne said. “Chaos. And the radiation in the air was killing everyone.”
“Then she said there were these two people,” Matthew went on. “First Mother and First Father. And First Mother wanted to have a family, but she couldn’t because she was barren. Because of the radiation, I guess.”
“Yes,” Dunne said. “That could be one of the effects, yes.”
“But then they saw a bright light in the air. And it hit the ground exactly where the Vagri village is now. And when First Mother went to check it out, suddenly she was healed. She could hear voices, and she could have children—and those children became the Vagri.”
“That’s where Soran Thantos’s missile must have hit,” Dunne offered. “And they must live in the blast site. In the crater made by the explosion. The place where the Ancestors are strongest.”
“But what about everyone else?” Matthew asked. “When the Ancestors spread across the planet, they must have healed everyone else, too. Not just First Mother and First Father.”
“True,” Dunne said. “But I’m sure most people were dead by then. And society had completely collapsed, so even with the Ancestors, probably not everyone could figure out how to survive. Some of them would have become raiders, thieves—cannibals, even, to stay alive. I imagine the Vagri had to repel a lot of attacks, in those early days.”
“Which is probably why they formed that warrior band. Even with the Ancestors, even though the society they made was peaceful, they still needed someone to protect them.”
“Yes,” Dunne said. “You know, there are probably more tribes on other parts of the planet, cultures that adapted to the Ancestors in different ways. The Vagri might not be aware of them, but I’m sure they’re out there.”
“So, how long ago do you think all this happened?” Matthew asked.
“Hard to say. The radiation from Soran Thantos’s weapon will linger for a while. Could’ve been a hundred years ago, could’ve been a thousand. But based on the fact that the Forsaken haven’t disbanded yet, there were probably still enemies around not that long ago. And judging by the size of the Vagri village, I’d guess at least five hundred years. That’s enough time for the Vagri to grow to the size they are now—and for the other survivors in the area to band together into their own tribes and either get killed by the Forsaken, or retreat to their own part of the planet where they could be alone, like the Vagri.”
“Five hundred years,” Matthew marveled. “And they only just discovered the maiora now? Why?”
Dunne tilted her head back, toward the corridor they’d come from. “The door to that room with the weapons looked like it had been freshly torn off its hinges. The Forsaken don’t have any more enemies to fight. Maybe they’ve started exploring places they used to ignore. Maybe they’ve just gotten bored.”
“All those missiles,” Matthew muttered, half to Dunne, half to himself.
“What about them?” Dunne asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just, Soran Thantos only got to launch the one. That we know of. But the rest are just sitting there, loaded up with the Ancestors. All that life, all that healing. Just waiting to be let loose.”
Dunne put her hand on his shoulder. He looked back at her.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “It must be getting dark by now. Besides, I don’t like this place.”
She paused and looked around the room, then met Matthew’s eyes again. She shook her head, less a deliberate movement than a shudder. “Too many ghosts.”
They ran silently through the streets, their feet padding lightly on the cobblestones as the sun set at their backs. The shadows of the buildings grew long, and as they hurried together toward the outer gate, Matthew felt that they were running to beat the sun—that somehow, if they were still inside Ilia when night fell, they’d become part of the city, the two of them numbered among its voiceless, forgotten dead. A shudder trembled through Matthew’s neck, and he ran faster.
They reached the speeder just as
night came on. The sun sank below the horizon, and the stars began to blink on in the sky. As they climbed on the speeder and rocketed away from the city, the moons of Gle’ah lit their way, their glow falling silver on the gently rolling hills.
Holding tight to Dunne’s back, Matthew looked out over the plain. It had looked so beautiful before. But something about it had changed, now that Matthew knew about what had happened there centuries before, knew about the billions of lives that had been snuffed out in a single instant. Gle’ah was still beautiful—but now there was a harshness to its beauty. An indifference.
He and Dunne and Sam, Kiva, his mother and sister, the Vagri, the humans back home—they were all so small. So insignificant. Gle’ah didn’t care whether they lived or died. Neither did Earth. The universe would go on being beautiful and harsh in equal measure long after every living thing in it had died away—long after there was no one left to lament its harshness, no one left to appreciate its beauty.
Matthew buried his head against Dunne’s back and cried quietly. He shed only a few tears into the fabric of her suit, but even that was enough. Those few paltry tears seemed to contain something that had been building up inside him for a long time.
They arrived back at the Corvus and left the speeder hovering just outside the airlock.
“What happens now?” Matthew said as he climbed off the speeder and set his feet on the grass. “We have to tell Earth the truth, right?”
“I don’t know,” Dunne said. “On that recording, Soran Thantos said we should take his story as a cautionary tale. Do you really think the human race is ready to learn from the history of the Ilians? From its own history, for that matter? Or will we just make the same mistakes in a new place?”
“We’ll probably screw up this planet just as bad as we did the old one,” Matthew said. “But the Exo Project has my mother and sister. Your grandson. Don’t you want them to live? If they stay on Earth, they’ll die. The whole human race will go extinct.”
“The Ilians faced extinction too,” Dunne answered. “They destroyed their planet, just like we did. But life found a way to go on. Maybe the same can happen on Earth. Besides, Soran said that to let his own family die instead of destroying the planet would’ve been the courageous choice. Maybe that’s true now, too. Maybe calling the human race here and saving the ones we love is the cowardly thing to do.”
Matthew gritted his teeth. “You have an answer for everything.”
Dunne sighed. “Come on, let’s talk about it inside.”
Matthew nodded after a moment, and they walked together to the airlock. Matthew stepped inside, then Dunne.
“Matthew,” Dunne said over his shoulder. It was just a single word, but the shock in her voice was palpable.
“What is it?”
“The gun locker. Look.”
The locker stood open. The metal lid was bent and scuffed. On the floor next to it sat a rock the size of Matthew’s head.
Matthew ran to the locker and went to his knees next to it.
The guns were gone. All of them. The locker was completely empty.
“Oh my God.”
“What is it?” Dunne asked.
“Sam.” Matthew whirled around. “We have to stop him.”
70
sam
“Don’t think of them as people. Think of them as targets.”
Sam muttered under his breath as he strode across the prairie with a small arsenal strapped to his body: half a dozen grenades hanging from his waist, an automatic rifle slung from his shoulder, and the ion shotgun cradled in his hands. He flexed and unflexed his hands on the stock of the shotgun, then pictured the Vagri village with its gray-skinned occupants ambling unarmed from hut to hut—the men, the children, and above all the women.
“They’re not people. They’re targets.”
The air was still. Sam’s words resonated small but clear on the open plain. And yet, when the words came from his mouth and reached his ears, it wasn’t his own voice he heard.
It was his father’s.
Sam’s father had been the one to raise him. They lived together in a decaying house in the forest. His father feared the city, feared the OmniCore government—and so they hadn’t left, not even after the sun grew hot in the sky and the forest withered around them. Instead, his father blacked out the windows and made radiation suits for them out of old scraps of cloth and rubber tubes and pieces of plastic from the barn. They survived on canned food Sam’s father had been stockpiling since before Sam was born. And during the long days they spent trapped together in the cramped house, Sam’s father taught him.
Taught Sam about the city: “It’s an evil place, Sam. Full of greed and depravity. It’s a monster that eats men whole.”
Taught Sam about the government: “OmniCore turns citizens into slaves. It’s a bunch of tyrants. And the tree of liberty must be watered by the blood of tyrants.”
Taught Sam about people of other races: “Birds of a feather flock together. Stay with your own kind, Sam. Remember that.”
And taught Sam about women: “Don’t be ensnared by their beauty, son. They’re evil at heart. A whorish woman brings a man to ruin.”
Sam’s father seemed to have a saying for everything—and when he delivered them, he was usually sitting at their kitchen table, pointing at Sam with his other three fingers wrapped around a whiskey bottle. On the table next to him sat a black leather book. Sam had the idea that much of what his father said came from the book, but he couldn’t be sure, because his father never opened it, never read from it.
Sam once asked his father where his mother was, and his father had an answer for that too: “Ran off to the city with another man. But good riddance. Better to live in the wilderness than with a nagging wife. You remember that, Sam. When some woman tries to bewitch you—and they will, they always will—you remember it was your daddy who raised you, your mother who abandoned you. Don’t you ever forget it.”
One day, Sam’s father also taught him how to shoot a gun. Packed Sam up in one of their homemade radiation suits and brought him to the barn, where he put a target on the far wall and a rifle in Sam’s hands.
“They’ll come for me one day, Sam. That’s why you need to learn how to shoot. Because they’re coming for me—and when they do, we’ll need to protect ourselves.”
Sam looked at the rifle in his hands and swallowed. He liked shooting at the target, but he couldn’t imagine shooting at a person.
“Don’t think of them as people,” his father said, as if reading his mind. “Think of them as targets.”
Sam’s father had been right—one day men from the government did come for him. But they came at night, bursting into the house while both Sam and his father were asleep, and Sam couldn’t get to his gun in time. They’d dragged Sam away screaming and crying; the last he saw of his father, he was being marched to a prisoner transport with his hands cuffed behind his back.
Sam was eight at the time.
“Your father did something bad, something against the law,” the social worker said. “He got mixed up with some dangerous people, some anti-OmniCore terrorists. Do you know what that means?”
Sam nodded. The social worker was a woman; the skin around her eyes was soft, wrinkled.
“He’s going to go to jail for a while. And you’re going to live with a nice family.”
Sam nodded again, but in his heart he hated the social worker. She was lying. His father wasn’t bad. She was bad.
Sam visited his father in prison over the years. Each time he saw him, the old man seemed to grow weaker, smaller. And with every visit, Sam’s anger grew—anger at the world that had broken a man he’d once thought unbreakable, the man who’d taught him everything he knew about the world.
Then, one day, his father had a request.
“The Exo Project,” he said. “You should volunteer.”
Sam was confused. “You hate the government. Why would you want me to help them now?”
“
The reward.”
Sam squinted. “One million units? What are you going to do with that in this place?”
“They’ve got a special reward for people with family in prison,” his father answered. “The winners get a pardon, for anyone they choose. You could get me out of this place if you won. You don’t want me to die locked up, do you?”
And then he’d started crying. It was a horrible thing, seeing your own father cry.
Sam had agreed.
He hadn’t wanted to come. But he’d done it for his father. And now he was here.
This horrible planet, ruled over by women who saw visions, and healed with their black blood, and kept the men as their slaves.
The others were blinded. They couldn’t see what was in front of them. Dunne thought she could figure everything out with her tests, and her theories, and her pointless bustling around the laboratory. And Matthew …
Matthew had been enchanted. Sam had seen them together. Him and the witch. She was clouding his judgment. Blinding him to everything but his own desire.
It was up to Sam. Only he could save them.
They’d see. They’d all see. Soon, they’d know that he and his father had been right all along.
“They’re not people. They’re targets. They’re not people. They’re targets. Not people. Targets.”
Sam tightened his grip on the shotgun and walked a little faster.
po
Po waited for nightfall in queasy anticipation. He stood just outside his tent, clenching and unclenching his hand around the handle of his spear, staring intently at the door to Xendr Chathe’s hut.
Waiting. He hated waiting. He’d been waiting his whole life, it seemed—waiting to grow up, waiting to make his own life, waiting for Kiva to notice him the way he noticed her. Waiting for things that never came.
Now, when he closed his eyes, he saw them. Kiva and Matthew. Together. He couldn’t get the image out of his mind.
The Exo Project Page 28