After, they drifted apart—Dunne wandered off through the hills, as Grath and Liana walked down into the valley. Matthew paced slowly away from the tree, skirting the ridge, then sat on the ground, his arms resting on his bent legs as he looked down into the valley.
Kiva walked up behind him, the grasses rustling underneath her feet.
Matthew half-turned but didn’t say anything.
“May I?” Kiva asked.
“Of course,” Matthew said.
Kiva sat beside him and studied his face. He looked intently in front of him, his eyes fixed on the empty prairie as if some apparition, some vision, were appearing to him there.
“What do you see?” Kiva asked.
“Hmm?” Matthew asked, coming out of his daydream. “Oh. Nothing.”
“Tell me,” Kiva said.
Matthew let out a sigh.
“I was just thinking about what you were saying over your sister’s grave. What was it?”
“Every death contains within it the seeds of a rebirth,” Kiva recited. “Every end is a beginning.”
Matthew nodded. “Yeah, that’s it. Do you really believe that? Do you think it’s true?”
Kiva looked out and shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope it is.”
“Me too,” Matthew said. “I was also thinking about that story you told me, about First Mother and First Father.”
Kiva squinted. “Yeah? What about it?”
“Well,” Matthew began, angling his eyes into the space between them, “they made a life out of chaos, didn’t they? Out of death. Together, they started something new.”
Kiva didn’t say anything.
“And I’m thinking—well, maybe we can do that too. Start something new. Our own village. Our own tribe. One where things are different.”
Kiva looked down into the valley where Grath and Liana wandered shoulder to shoulder, speaking softly to one another—and immediately she felt the rightness of what Matthew was saying.
She was sad, still, about what had been, and afraid of what might come—but Kiva was hopeful, too: hopeful that this place might be better than the places that she and Matthew had left behind.
She looped her arm through Matthew’s elbow and pulled him close. She set her head on his shoulder and looked out with him on the vast, empty plains of Gle’ah.
“Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, I think that’s exactly what we’ll do.”
PART 6
THE FLIGHT OF THE CORVUS
77
kiva
She woke that morning before the dawn.
Normally Kiva was a late sleeper, Matthew an early riser—and in the months since they’d begun sharing a bed, Matthew had learned how to get up in the morning and slip out of their hut without waking her.
But on this particular day, as Matthew rose quietly from the bed, Kiva was already awake, lying on her side with her face toward the wall. She closed her eyes and listened to Matthew’s movements as he slipped his clothes on in the darkness and splashed his cheeks with tepid water from the clay bowl in the corner. When the sound of splashing water had stopped, Kiva turned over onto her other side and watched him mop his face with a dry cloth, then sat up when he walked to the doorway.
“You aren’t even going to say good-bye?”
Matthew looked back toward the bed.
“I thought you were asleep,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“You didn’t,” Kiva answered. “My back hurts.”
Kiva stretched forward, wincing into the pain. Then she sighed and set her hands on the shelf made by the curve of her pregnant belly, her body aching and swollen with the weight of the life that grew inside it.
Matthew crossed the hut and, still standing, leaned over the bed, propping himself up with one hand while he hooked a finger under Kiva’s chin with the other.
“I’m sorry your back hurts,” he said.
He gave her a long, slow kiss. Kiva closed her eyes, then tucked her lower lip between her teeth as Matthew rested his forehead against hers.
“You’re going to the ship?” she asked.
“Yes.”
Kiva opened her eyes and put her hands on Matthew’s cheeks, tilting his head to look directly into his eyes.
“Be careful,” she said.
Matthew nodded. “I will.”
He went to the door, then paused again with his hand on the frame. “I’ll be back soon.”
Then he was gone.
matthew
The sun hadn’t crested the horizon yet, but its glow was already beginning to warm the dark edge of the sky as Matthew walked quickly through the camp toward Dunne’s hut.
She was waiting for him just outside her door.
“You’re up early,” Matthew said.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Today’s the day, right?”
Matthew nodded. “It is. Everything’s ready.”
“You want company?”
Matthew shook his head. “No. This is something I need to do alone.”
“Take the shotgun.”
Matthew grimaced. “I don’t want to.”
“Well, I’m going to insist, and you need to respect your elders,” Dunne said.
Matthew laughed and nodded his assent.
He grabbed the ion shotgun from where it leaned against the outer wall of Dunne’s hut, then climbed on the speeder. He and Dunne had managed to fix the damage done during the battle with Sam, but the speeder had never been quite the same. Now the steering was, in Dunne’s word, persnickety, and the thrusters couldn’t push the speeder as fast as it had gone before. Still, it was the best and quickest way to travel across the plains of Gle’ah.
Matthew hit the throttle and shot out across the grass. He leaned left, then right, feeling the way the speeder responded to his shifting weight. Then he glanced at the navigation display under his nose and corrected course, pointing the vehicle’s nose toward the Corvus.
kiva
Kiva lay in bed for a while after Matthew left, but when the Great Mother rose and began to curl her golden tendrils across the floor, Kiva rose and padded to the door.
She leaned against the doorframe and surveyed the small village before her. There were only a handful of huts scattered here and there, but more were built with each passing month, as more and more Vagri left the old village to join the new settlement.
Grath and Liana had been among the first to settle in the valley. They’d never gone back to the old village; instead, they built a new hut in the valley shortly after Kiva told them that she and Matthew had decided to stay there. Thruss and Rehal joined them some time after that, along with half a dozen other young Sisters and young men—ones who hadn’t yet chosen mates or borne children. They came bearing news of how bad life in the village had become. Kyne’s promise of a community made equal by the maiora hadn’t come to pass—if anything, power and influence were even more concentrated among a lucky few. Kyne was technically the new Vagra. But she was just a figurehead, Thruss said. Xendr Chathe was the one who really ruled. He had weapons, he commanded the Forsaken—and he also knew how to find the maiora, which had become a kind of currency among the Vagri.
In the new village Kiva and Matthew had founded, life was different—and, for the time being, better. From the doorway, Kiva looked to Dunne’s hut at the edge of the village. Nearby, most of the villagers were busy tending a vegetable garden. Grath bent over the dirt with his hoe, then paused and pointed as he gave some instructions to Liana and Rehal, who were working a few rows over.
Kiva smiled. Though they all worked the soil now—women and men toiling side by side, with no official leaders—Grath was effectively in charge of the garden. Perhaps, one day, he’d teach the new children of the village to bring life out of the dirt as well.
Kiva walked through the village. She ambled slowly past the garden, smiling and nodding to the workers as she went by. Beyond Dunne’s hut, at the foot of the ridge marking the unofficial border of their new villa
ge, Kiva paused for a moment, ambling around the bottom of the hill with her eyes on the ground. Soon, she paused and crouched, picked up a rock the size of her fist. She stood and weighed the rock in her hand for a moment. Then she began to hike up the ridge to the tree, the place where they’d buried Quint’s body.
The tree, dead when they’d first arrived, had begun to bloom. Tiny white flowers and a smattering of red leaves quivered in the wind at the tips of the jagged branches. Below, Kiva stepped into the tree’s paltry shade and looked at the place where her sister’s body lay.
There was a small pile of rocks on the grave, a cairn heaped to Kiva’s knees. Each morning since they’d buried Quint, Kiva had returned to this place with a rock in her hands to mark the spot. She’d built the cairn day by day, stone by stone. And now, she leaned forward and placed the rock she’d picked from the bottom of the hill on the top of the pile. The capstone.
Kiva knelt and put her hand on the cairn. She closed her eyes. Sighed deeply.
And thought of the dead.
78
matthew
Matthew moved quickly when he reached the Corvus, wanting to finish what he’d come to do and leave again as soon as possible. Though Kyne and Xendr Chathe hadn’t technically claimed any of the prairie as their territory, Matthew felt as though he was treading on contested ground whenever he neared the ship. The Corvus wasn’t far from the old village, and he didn’t know what would happen if he encountered one of the Forsaken out on patrol.
He opened the airlock and went inside, making straight for the control room. He sat in front of the computer and with a few taps at the keys brought the system online and called up the navigational program that he and Dunne had written.
The two of them had been coming here together every few days, experimenting with the ship’s various systems and trying to figure out how they could program it to fly back to Earth. For a long time, they didn’t get anywhere, but then they found some ship manuals on the computer’s hard drive—though even then, Matthew couldn’t understand most of what he was reading, especially when it came to the complex physics of the lightspeed drive. But Dunne, though she protested ignorance, was a quick study, and she’d soon devised a way to send the Corvus home.
Matthew knelt and checked the wires connecting the computer to the missile on the floor. It was one of Soran Thantos’s, taken from his laboratory bunker under the streets of Ilia. Though Dunne and Matthew couldn’t decipher the missile’s controls, understanding its detonation mechanism was easy enough once they’d cracked open the casing and taken a look inside. Then they’d managed to rig the warhead to explode when the Corvus entered Earth’s atmosphere and the computer initiated the landing sequence—spreading the Ancestors across the sky. If there was any life left on Earth when they arrived, the Ancestors would help it to live and thrive and grow into something new.
Something better.
Matthew moved back to the computer. His forefinger paused above the control panel. His heart thundered in his chest. He pressed a button and started the program.
“Initiating takeoff in two minutes,” a computerized female voice echoed throughout the ship.
Matthew walked from the control room to the airlock, then stepped outside and closed the door behind him. He ran clear of the Corvus and turned back to watch from beside the speeder.
The thrusters fired. Smoke billowed out from the base of the Corvus. The sound was deafening. The grass surrounding the ship burst into flames. Soon, the ship lifted off the ground and accelerated into the sky with a ground-shaking roar.
Matthew lifted his arm to block the sun from his eyes as he watched the Corvus shrink to a dot in the sky. For a moment, it disappeared entirely. Then, there was a bright flash of thunderless lightning as the lightspeed drive fired.
Matthew breathed a sigh.
He’d done his part. The rest was up to the Ancestors.
He climbed on the speeder and pointed it home.
kiva
Kiva lay on the hill below her sister’s cairn, her fingers laced behind her head as she gazed up at the sky.
She listened.
This was how it had all started. Lying in the grass and listening.
Kiva was no longer the Vagra, but she still had the power of the Ancestors. She could still sense the minds of others. She could still feel their emotions and hear their thoughts.
But she hadn’t had a vision for a long time. She had no sense of what the future might hold. Perhaps not even the Ancestors knew.
She and Matthew talked about the future often, worried deep into the night about what might be waiting for them and their new people.
Would the Vagri and the Forsaken allow them to live in peace? Or would those who lived in the old village come to regard the new settlement as a threat?
And Earth—did they believe Matthew when he said that they shouldn’t come to Gle’ah? Would they stay away, or were they planning a new expedition even now?
Kiva couldn’t say.
She took her hands out from behind her head and set them on her belly, thinking of the life—half-Vagri, half-human—growing inside her.
She’d name the baby Quint. That much Kiva could say with certainty: that whether her child, the firstborn of a new world, was a boy or a girl, she’d name it after the one who’d died so that world could be born.
The rest was unknowable.
Kiva sat up and looked toward the horizon, waiting for Matthew to return.
It wouldn’t be long now.
acknowledgments
Thank you to …
Mary Colgan, my wonderful editor, for seeing the potential in this story and knowing exactly what had to be done to realize it,
John Rudolph, my agent, for being a tireless advocate for this book and for me throughout the process,
Jaime Zollars for her beautiful cover illustration, and Barbara Grzeslo for the fine book design,
Kerry McManus, Toni Willis, Sue Cole, and all the good people at Boyds Mills Press who touched this book in some way,
Christian Dahlager, Alison Nowak, Jenny Lock, Larina Alton, Eric Jensen, and Christopher Zumski Finke for being so generous with their time and insight as they read early versions of this story,
My teachers throughout the years, but especially James C. Schaap, for mentoring me and providing words of encouragement exactly when I needed to hear them, and Luanne Goslinga, for urging me, when I was a high school freshman, to name aloud my dream of writing a novel someday,
My parents, Jim and Sue DeYoung, for reading to me when I was young,
And to Sarah, of course, for being my toughest critic, my biggest fan, and my partner in life and love and parenthood.
ANDREW DEYOUNG is a writer and editor who has dreamed of being an author ever since his ninth-grade English teacher made him write down his biggest life goal for a class assignment. He studied literature in college and graduate school, getting a degree in the history of Victorian detective fiction before making the jump from academia to publishing. These days, he lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he edits children’s books and lives with his wife, daughter, and feline companion, June Carter Cat. Andrew’s taste in science fiction leans more Star Trek than Star Wars—though only barely. The Exo Project is his debut novel. andrewdeyoung.com.
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