by Hugh Howey
I DID NOT DO THIS.
“I know,” Anlyn whispered. She saw, down in the lower part of her vision, that her spoken words did no more than frost the inner coat of her mask. She reached up and pulled it to the side, then let her hand drop to her chest.
“I know,” she said again. She closed her eyes and tried to summon back her voice. “Thank you.”
She couldn’t tell if the Bel-Tra could hear her, didn’t know if it even understood Drenard. She opened her eyes to see more words flitting across the screen:
I MEANT TO SAY: I DID NOT RESCUE YOU.
Anlyn read the words several times, but they made little sense. They disappeared before she was ready for them to.
WE ARE ONLY SUPPOSED TO WATCH.
These new words came fast. They seemed to pulse with extra light, giving them an urgency of some sort. Anlyn realized the device was something like her people’s bands, but different. She lifted her arm and reached for the Tra. “I won’t tell anyone,” Anlyn said, finally understanding.
The Bel-Tra clasped Anlyn’s hand. The slim creature’s large eyes blinked, pale lids snapping down over Anlyn’s reflection. When they reopened, Anlyn saw thick tears welling up at the base of them. They ran out over the lower lids and dashed down the Tra’s long and narrow face, past a small mouth, pursed with thin lips. The alien squeezed her hand, then pulled the device up in front of her, blocking her view of it crying. New words slowly worked their way across the screen, the light behind them dim, each one coming hesitantly, as if wary of being seen:
I AM SORRY.
Before Anlyn could ask what the Tra meant, or even begin to puzzle it out herself, the alien took hold of her mask and put it back in place. Anlyn tried to shrug it away, no longer needing it, but it was pressed down too tight for her to resist.
She caught a whiff of the gas that had replaced the flow of oxygen, and the apology began to make sense. As the darkness gathered, squeezing down around Anlyn’s vision, the last thing she saw was the face of the Tra, tears dripping off its chin, and the bloom of her own complaints frosting the mask in the tightening edges of her consciousness.
19 · Drenard
The winds howling out of the Wadi canyons were deafening. Anlyn and Coril had begun their march by angling away from the Rite shelter, and once they were out of the building’s lee, the flap of their Wadi suits in the stiff breeze had begun to erode their hearing. They soon pulled back their thin and shimmery hoods, tucking them into their collars to keep the fabric quiet. Walking side-by-side, they let the gusts push at their backs, driving them toward the deepening canyons while they discussed the looming Rite.
“I’m pretty sure Aunt Ralei meant for us not to go there,” Anlyn complained, still trying to convince her cousin that revealing the scars had been a warning of sorts.
“You can go wherever you like,” Coril shouted. “I’m going to catch the Wadi that scratched her.”
Anlyn turned and looked back over her shoulder. Even squinting into the wind, she could feel it desiccating her eyes. Off in the distance and laboring to catch up to them, she saw Gil’s bulky form standing out on the horizon. The poor kid had followed along after the other two boys for a thousand paces before finally breaking off in the girls’ direction. Anlyn felt a hollow tugging in her chest. All she should’ve been thinking about was the completion of her own Rite and getting back to her studies, and now she found herself dealing with a frightened relative on the one side and a zealous and overeager one on the other. It was like the hot and cold sides of Drenard hemming her in.
“If you’re gonna insist on hunting Wadi, you might want to wait for Gil. He’s at least got a proper lance.”
Coril looked back at their larger cousin, still quite a distance behind them. She didn’t slow her pace. “He’ll catch us before we get to the dayline.” She looked down at the egg graspers and sunshields the two of them had been given. “You make a good point, though.”
Sure enough, Gil caught up to them a dozen or so paces from the dayline. He arrived huffing, his eyes wide.
“Thanks for waiting up!” he said, his sarcasm nearly lost between his pants for air.
“Aren’t you supposed to be doing your Rite alone?” Coril asked with a mocking tone.
Gil looked back and forth between his female cousins. “Well, why do you two get to hunt together?”
Anlyn shrugged. “That’s the rules, Gil.”
“Well, I don’t like the rules. Besides, what’re they gonna do to me if I come back with an egg? Tell me I’m not a Drenard? So what?”
Coril shook her head and turned away from the two of them, seemingly disgusted by her cousin’s attitude. She walked toward a near section of the dayline that stretched across the wide and deepening canyon. Anlyn patted Gil on the back and hurried to catch up.
As she joined Coril, Anlyn saw her cousin had her map out and folded in thirds to keep the ends from flapping. Ahead of them, the canyon split off in two, a sharp wedge of a cliff rising up in the center and bisecting the dayline. Coril stopped and surveyed the tall feature. She looked back down at her map, then rotated it to match the direction she was looking.
“I think we’re at the edge of the egg canyon,” Anlyn told Coril. She pointed off to one side where a shadowpath hugged the base of a cliff, the first smattering of Wadi holes visible along its smooth face.
“You can go down there if you like,” Coril said. She looked up and pointed around the other side of the narrow wedge. “But that’s where Aunt Ralei was telling us to go.”
“I still think she was warning us to not go there,” Anlyn shouted above a ferocious gust of wind.
Gil lumbered up beside them, still short of breath from the long and hurried hike. “Who warned you of what?” he asked.
“You should go with Anlyn,” Coril said. She folded her map and tucked it into her supply belt, right behind her thermos. Reaching up to her shoulder, she unstrapped her sunshield and brought it around in front of herself. Her egg graspers were attached to the back of it. She pulled the device out of its clips and held it out toward Gil.
“Take this.”
Gil looked at the graspers, which were just a long set of telescoping rods with a trigger on one end and a padded set of clamps on the other. He reached out and accepted the graspers, then glanced at his Wadi lance. Coril held her hands out for it.
“I’ll need it back,” Gil said, so quietly they could barely hear him over the wind and the howling of the canyons.
“I’ll even clean the blood off it for you,” Coril said snidely. She took the large weapon from him and pulled it toward herself. Anlyn couldn’t help but notice how it dipped down and nearly touched the canyon floor, the heft of the thing taking Coril by surprise.
“What about the sunshield?” Gil asked.
Coril looked to the path leading off toward the egg canyon. “Do you really think you’ll need it?”
Gil peeked down the canyon as well. He shrugged. “Maybe.”
Coril sighed. “Alright then.” She handed over the shield.
The three of them stood still for a moment, and Anlyn’s mind raced as she tried to sort out what was about to take place. This was not how she had imagined her Rite going. Gil turned away from Coril’s glare, pulling on Anlyn as he went.
“Hold on a second,” Anlyn told him.
“C’mon,” said Gil, urging her toward the egg canyon.
Anlyn pulled her sunshield off her back and rested its edge on the ground. The top came up to her waist, and the thing was only two hands wide with its panels retracted. She kept one hand on it and reached around to unclip her thermos.
“Take this,” she told Coril, holding out her full vessel of water.
Coril glanced down at it, then back up to Anlyn. “Are you really not coming with me?” She didn’t move to accept the thermos.
Anlyn felt her shoulders sag as her cousin’s disappointment swirled around her on an eddy of wind.
“Who do you think you’re gonna impress
?” Anlyn asked. “Do you really think this will change anything? Do you think a single door will crack for you if you do this? Because they won’t. What few paths you do have will just slam shut.”
Coril frowned. Gil tried once more to tug Anlyn away.
“I don’t give a flying Wadi about any of that,” Coril finally said. She stepped closer to Anlyn and pushed away the thermos. “I don’t care how they measure me by this. I really don’t. I simply mean to measure myself.”
She clasped Anlyn’s arm. Her face flashed a glimpse of seriousness before her famous smile came back to wash it away. “Good luck on your Rite, Cousin,” she said.
With that, Coril lifted the heavy lance in both hands and trotted away, aiming for the shadowpath on the other side of the tall wedge.
Anlyn watched her go, fearing it would be the last time she ever saw her dear cousin alive.
“C’mon,” Gil said. He pulled Anlyn toward the egg canyon. “Don’t worry about her,” he shouted into the wind. “Nothing bad ever happens to Princess Coril!”
Anlyn reluctantly turned away. She followed after Gil as her large cousin strode toward the dayline and the wide path of shade snaking along the base of the canyon wall. She unclipped her egg graspers from her sunshield and tried to remember where she was—what she was supposed to be doing. Looking back, she saw Coril had already rounded the wedge of rock, disappearing up the canyon her aunt had shown them. She felt a powerful urge to run after her, to either bring her back or to join her, but not knowing which was the right action somehow paralyzed Anlyn into doing neither.
So instead, she simply followed Gil down the dark path ahead, past that line in the rock where eternal day abutted an endless night.
20 · ???
The pitch black of Anlyn’s unconsciousness was shattered by a brilliant flash of light. She awoke to find herself lying flat on her back, the same tumultuous war from earlier roiling above as darting ships and blooming explosions popped in the distance. Nearby, the gleaming and curvy ship that had rescued her from the vacuum of space began to rise up, pulling away from some sort of a landing pad that Anlyn had been left to one side of. The Bel-Tra’s ship lifted in complete and eerie silence, and noticeably without the flare of chemicals belching from any sort of thruster. It just floated higher and higher, departing as mysteriously as it had appeared.
The stomping of heavy boots thundered all around Anlyn, chasing away the quietude. Figures appeared in her peripheral. A group of men—Humans!—garbed in dark suits formed up around her. One of them shouldered a large weapon of some sort; he raised it up toward the departing ship and Anlyn heard something click.
There was a swoosh and a spit of fire before a lozenge of metal popped out of the weapon. The projectile paused, seeming to struggle against gravity, then took off in a flash, spiraling up after the Bel-Tra’s ship. Beyond the craft, Anlyn could just barely make out the shimmering curve of a dome of some sort, whatever material was holding in the atmosphere around the landing pad. Even in her dazed and confused state, she felt a pang of fear for the Tra as the craft seemed to be pinned between a hard barrier on the one side and a dangerous projectile on the other.
And then, with what was either a miraculous display or a desperate and suicidal leap, the Tra’s ship disappeared. It winked out with all the suddenness of a hyperspace jump, despite the threat of matter and gravity all around.
One of the men above Anlyn shouted something—something in a tongue that was alien and yet familiar. The rocket continued to chase after the missing ship, finally slamming into the dome and erupting in a ball of orange hellfire.
“Gotammeet,” one of the men said, as phonetically as Anlyn could place it. As the fire drained away and the smoke cleared, she could see the dome itself hadn’t been scratched. The men in the strange cloaks—with clinging bottoms fitted to each leg and tops that met in vertical seams left open—turned from the dissipating fire and looked down at her.
Their reactions were sharp and immediate. All four men jumped back, eyes wide. What were obviously weapons became trained on her, and the men began shouting back and forth. Anlyn couldn’t tell if it was her they were shouting at, or each other.
She tried her best to sit up, but her stomach felt like one giant bruise. She raised her hand. “Sheesti Looo,” she said in Drenard, knowing it would be ineffectual.
One of the figures pushed the others back. He fiddled with something on his belt, and suddenly the fabric of his suit began to shimmer like a tunic made of honeycloth. He came forward with his arm out, his palm reaching for Anlyn’s outstretched and much smaller hand.
“Sheesti Looo,” she said again, this time with more relief than fear as the weapons were returned to the folds of the strange and open cloaks. She sat up further and pressed her hand into the Human’s—
Something electric jolted through her body with the contact. A burning fire shivered up her arm, into her chest, and down through her thighs. It filled her with a trembling power, a surge of agony higher and harder than any pain she’d ever known. Her body became paralyzed, her muscles seizing up.
It wasn’t until the jolt rattled her brain, knocking Anlyn unconscious once again, that she found some sort of escape from the pain.
•• DRENARD ••
“I can’t feel anything.”
“That’s because there’s nothing there.”
“Let me try one more.”
Anlyn blew out her breath, but the gesture was lost among the stiff wind and the shrill howl of the Wadi canyon. She watched as Gil removed his egg graspers from the small hole and inserted them into one further down.
“Gil, I’m telling you, no Wadi in its right mind would lay its eggs in there.”
Gil reached in as far as his thick boyish arms would allow and fiddled with the trigger. It was obvious he’d never practiced with a set of graspers.
“How do you know where they’d lay them?” he asked.
Anlyn leaned away from the canyon wall and looked back to the dayline. It was still visible in the distance. “Because it’s too close to the nighttime,” she said. “This would all be in the shade during the slightest of cycles.”
Gil ran his tongue across his lower lip, concentrating. After a pause, he pulled the graspers out and shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “You’re in charge.”
Anlyn pulled out her map. “Our best bet is to go to the end of this canyon. It terminates in a pocket several thousand paces from here, and that’s where the females would most likely go to lay their eggs. There’s plenty of shade on this side.”
Gil moved to her side and peered at her map. Anlyn pointed to the spot where their canyon dead-ended.
“See? The rock on the other side gets a full blast of heat from both Hori’s, which means plenty of condensation inside for the eggs. There’s probably a lot of convection currents and watering holes in there.”
Gil scratched his neck and wiped his hands off on his shimmering Wadi suit.
“Alright,” he said. “Lead the way.”
••••
They walked in silence. Anlyn left her graspers clipped to her sunshield and strolled along by the edge of the shade, marveling at how hot the air blowing through the canyons felt. The high-pitched wails on all sides seemed to resonate with the deeper groans echoing from further ahead—the sounds of larger Wadi holes.
The noise gave her chills, even as she reminded herself that male Wadi would be rare in an egg-laying canyon; supposedly, the smells and pheromones were enough to keep them at bay. Anlyn tried to picture all those scents traveling up and down the dayside on the heavy winds. She wondered what the world must look like to a Wadi. It must be so different from how she saw it, mostly through sights and sounds. She wondered if the Wadi ever pondered in kind just how the world appeared to these silly Drenards stumbling through their canyons in their silvery suits.
As she walked along and pondered these things, Gil lagged a dozen paces behind, despite his longer legs. Her cousin seemed wary o
f their journey into the deepening canyon, preferring to hang back and to stick close to the canyon side of the shadowpath. Anlyn glanced back periodically to make sure he was still with her. They’d walked a few thousand paces already, and Anlyn had consumed roughly half her water. Then again, if she read the last bend in the canyon correctly, the map showed them almost to the dead-end. Once they rounded the next curve, they should be able to see it.
The next curve, unfortunately, proved to be one they couldn’t just walk around. On the other side of the bend, the canyon wall arched back the other way, putting its face in the full sunlight of the two Horis. There was a shade bridge crossing to the other side, so Anlyn waited for Gil, testing her sunshield while he caught up.
“You didn’t say we’d have to cross a bridge!” Gil said.
Anlyn turned to see him resting by the wall, one hand clinging to a hole in the rock. He still had his graspers out, his fingers working the trigger over and over without seeming to realize he was doing it.
“I think we’re almost there,” Anlyn told him. She looked to the bridge. “Besides, it’s a wide one. Just stay low and keep your shield ready.” She turned back to see him probing a Wadi hole with his graspers.
“Gil, seriously, we need to keep moving.”
“Fine,” he said.
Anlyn shook her head. She wished—and not for the first time—that she’d gone with Coril. She held her shield out and pushed the deploy switch a quarter of the way down its glideline. The top and sides of the shield immediately grew, the overlapped panels sliding away from one another. She adjusted the switch until the shield was wide enough to cover her in a crouch but not too big to catch excess wind. Once she was satisfied, she stooped down and crept out onto the bridge.