by Josi Russell
Reluctantly, Pavela gestured out the door of the hut. “The Avowed have established a more permanent Trisne Rooth at the Old Faithful Village, nearer to their new Vault.”
So she was alone. Truly. Even the place she’d last seen her parents was gone. Nothing was left of them.
The brief daily breaks in the school day illustrated her isolation even more. Adrik and Asvika were behind in their work, and they often had to stay inside, so Zyn’dri found herself alone as the other Stracahn children played stacking games and sang songs from Empyriad. Often she slipped off to an empty hut to practice her designs.
Zyn’dri felt a deep sadness. Her parents were gone. And though she had been pretending that Walt and Sylvia would make up for that, she realized as she glanced around at her peers that in the eyes of her people, she was truly Chantha. She also realized that any time she spent with the humans would only enlarge the gulf that had opened between herself and her species.
32
The first graffiti was found on the back of a Quickform near the North edge of the Hayden Valley Village. Walt was manning the guardhouse with Angelo when Karson came on the radio and told him to go check it out. The two Rangers exchanged glances. Angelo was one of the few Rangers sympathetic to the Stracahn, and both of them knew that vandalism in the park could get the aliens in serious trouble.
Walt walked along the path, where the grasses had died back, and the earth was beaten bare by footsteps. He ran his hand along the tops of the bristly Autumn grass along the path’s edge.
He saw it as he approached, a stark black design on the back of the fawn-colored Quickform, and he stopped to stare. This wasn't the same kind of vandalism—scratched names and carved obscenities—that still disfigured the bacterial mats and geyser cones from a hundred years ago. It was a delicate, intricate expression of something that Walt understood.
The design was nothing he'd ever seen before. Its curves, and angles were as foreign to him as the Stracahn language. For all he knew, it was the Strachan language. But somehow, on a level beyond what he could see, Walt knew it was about loss. He knew it was a mourning symbol.
He radioed in and told Karson.
“Well, I guess we’d better scrub it off. We can’t have that getting started.”
But when Walt went to work on it, he realized that it wasn’t marked on the hut. It was burned into it.
But there was no charcoal, no ash. Walt ran his fingers carefully over it. Was it acid? A chemical of some sort? Either way, it wasn’t coming off with the soapy water he had carried over here.
33
Zyn’dri caught up quickly on the basics at school, and she found that Adrik and Asvika hadn’t changed. They were Chantha, too, after all.
They didn’t seem to mind if she smiled, or hugged them in a moment of enthusiasm. They seemed glad to have some affection in their lives.
She sought them out as soon as she came to the village each morning, and the three sat together in school. They were sitting together the day that the Agent in Charge visited.
“This is Damen,” Pavela said. “He is a leader in the human’s government, and he will be assessing the progress of our class as he assists the Consolidated Terrene Leadership in studying our needs.”
Zyn’dri was fascinated by his clothes. Shiny, stretchy material with broad panels across his chest. She couldn’t help but brush her fingers against it as he walked down their row, inspecting the human writing they were practicing. He turned to fix her with his gaze.
“Did you touch me?” he asked, glancing at an aide, who brought a cloth and wiped his suit where Zyn’dri had touched it.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “Your suit is so shiny.”
Damen crouched down, inspecting her. “You speak our language well.”
“Thank you.” She said. Adrik and Asvika were keeping their eyes on their work, but everyone else was watching.
“What’s your name?” Damen asked.
“Zyn’dri.”
“Sydney?” he asked, and Zyn’dri didn’t correct him.
“Okay, Sydney,” he said, “some of these Rangers around here think you all are ready to go out into the world. What do you say?”
That was a complicated question, and Zyn’dri didn’t have an answer.
He leaned in close and spoke in an exaggerated whisper. “I think they’re just trying to get rid of you guys. I don’t believe that you know enough about this world to go out of the park just yet.”
She sat quietly.
“I have some questions here. I want you to answer them.”
Pavela spoke up. “Come to the front of the class, Zyn’dri, so that all the students can hear the questions Damen asks.”
Zyn’dri did as she was told. Damen’s aides brought several cards to him, and he put one foot on the bench of one of the tables, striking a deliberately casual pose.
“Can you tell me what this is?” He held up a picture of a strawberry.
“Strawberry!” Zyn’dri said proudly.
He nodded. “Is it safe to eat?”
“It’s delicious to eat!”
Damen smiled and laughed, taking out another card. On this one was a bison.
Zyn’dri was confident. “Bison!” she called out. She could see as soon as she said it that he was not pleased. She should have waited for him to ask.
“Is it a male or a female?” Damen asked. Zyn’dri suspected that he had changed the question to trip her up.
She looked at the photograph, then closed her eyes, trying to remember what the blind bison looked like. She knew he was male, and this one looked a bit different. She recalled the feel of his hide, the triangular shape of his head. She opened her eyes. The bison in the picture had a rectangular head. It was leaner, and it lacked the thick curls on its forehead that had entangled Zyn’dri’s fingers when she stroked the blind bison. It reminded her of the mother bison that stayed back from the village nursing their calves.
“Female.” She said boldly.
“Ha.” Damen snapped his fingers. “Good try. It’s actually a male.”
Zyn’dri leaned forward. “No, it’s not. It’s a female.”
Her contradiction seemed to annoy him. “See,” he gestured to his aides, “write this down. This is the problem. They don’t even know what they don’t know.” He pushed the card close to Zyn’dri’s face and spoke slowly, “Can you see that it has horns?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“That shows you it is a male.” He said. “Female bison have no horns.”
Zyn’dri’s mouth gaped. That was simply not true. As she opened her mouth to speak, Pavela laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Sit down, Zyn’dri. Thank you.”
“But,” she started.
“Sit down. You are not helping anymore.” Zyn’dri’s eyes burned. She could not cry now, not here in front of them all.
A voice came from the doorway of the hut.
“Have you ever actually seen a bison, Mister Damen?” It was Walt, and he strolled forward. The smooth way he advanced made Zyn’dri think of Obsidian, the Alpha wolf in the pack near their apartment.
“I saw some on the way here,” Damen said. “And you are?”
“Ranger Bradley. That’s my girl there. Zyn’dri.” He emphasized the correct pronunciation of her name, speaking to the agent in the same slow way that Damen had talked to her. Suddenly, Zyn’dri didn’t feel so much like crying. “Did you stop to check if they were male or female?” Walt went on, still addressing Damen.
“Ranger, I’m not here to play games. I’m just here to show that these,” he stumbled on the word, “people, are not ready for integration.”
“Well that may be true,” Walt said, “but your little quiz doesn’t prove that.”
“It’s a basic identification,” Damen began.
“Is it?” Walt asked. “Because if you need to pass that to leave the park, we’d better set you up a Quickform.”
Damen stood, facing off with Walt as he approached. Zy
n’dri thought of the sparring wolves. Obsidian always won. “You want to say exactly what you’re getting at, Ranger? And remember, we’re on the same team here.”
Walt didn’t answer that, but he said, “Zyn’dri’s right. That’s a female bison in your picture there.”
Damen glanced down at the image, looking, for the first time, doubtful. “It has horns.”
“All adult bison have horns,” Walt said. “Which you would know if your bosses hadn’t shut this place down two decades ago. If you’d been in here before, you would have seen baby calves nursing from their mamas, who use those horns to protect them.”
Damen had flushed red behind his beard. He held Walt’s gaze for a moment, then turned to Pavela.
“Thank you for letting us visit. I have several other stops to make,” he looked pointedly at Walt, “including Ranger headquarters. So we need to be going.”
The aides gathered his cards and followed him out of the dining hut. Walt closed one eye at Zyn’dri and smiled. She was enchanted by the gesture, which she had never seen before. She copied it back at him, and he let out a little laugh.
“Keep learning, everyone,” he said. He nodded to Pavela and left the hut.
Pavela gestured Zyn’dri to her seat. On the way there, Zyn’dri’s elation faded. The other children were looking at her even more strangely. She realized she had no idea how to impress them. And she realized that what she wanted to know was not in this place. The dates of Empyriad events, the plants they’d lost and the people who’d died there were not relevant on Earth. Damen was right about one thing. She didn’t know enough about this world. She wanted to learn from the grasslands and the mountains outside this hut. She wanted to know everything about this wild park that was their new home.
In the following days, Zyn’dri found that if she walked toward the school, Sylvia usually went to work in Malra’s hut and Zyn’dri could veer off at the last moment and slip into Hayden Valley. She spent her days at the river with the pelicans, and on particularly lucky days, she spent them lounging in the shade of the blind bison, running her fingers through his wooly coat and scratching the base of his broken horn.
She brought Laska’s journals sometimes and played the matching game. His patterns were everywhere: in the clouds, in the eddies of the river, in the roots of the grasses. She could spend hours finding them. When Walt and Sylvia asked her about school, she made up Empyriad historical events and hoped they wouldn’t check them out.
One afternoon, she found herself huddling close to the blind bison, seeking the warmest place on his sunlit side. The wind had turned bitterly cold. Before it was time for her to meet Sylvia, she saw low clouds gathering over the mountains. Zyn’dri saw new patterns in them as they moved over the valley and settled above her. Small pieces of the clouds began to fall around her.
The pieces were cold and beautiful. But soon they began to pile up around her. The bison heaved himself to his feet and chuffed at her.
“Okay. I’ll go back to the village.” She rubbed her hand across his curly forehead and watched him amble off.
She hoped he had someplace warm to go. The white stuff was already covering the valley, and she shushed through it as she returned to the village.
It was too early to meet up with Sylvia. Zyn’dri slipped into an empty hut near the edge of the village. She had been here before. Today she snapped on the little heater that sat against the wall. She sat practicing her designs.
34
The winter set in hard and Sol watched it come from the narrow window of his cell in Fruitland. After the first of the year, he stopped hoping that they would get him out of here quickly.
Late one winter night, despite his best efforts, Sol had fallen asleep against the cold cement wall behind his cot. When he awoke, the chill had seeped into his bones. The thin woolen blanket was not enough to restore his heat, so he stood and did a few jumping jacks.
"Quiet down over there, idiot." Came a rough voice from the next cell. "People are still sleeping."
Sol glanced at the light outside the window. They wouldn't be for long, he guessed. It was almost chow time. He saw a few stray snowflakes falling outside the window. He pushed back the dark bitterness that swelled in him all the time now. He had been in here for months. Six months. His friends had graduated. Trenton was probably gone now, off in the world doing better things than putting banners on people. And Sol was missing it all because these Cascadians were keeping him here.
It hadn’t mattered how many people he told the truth to. The Rangers, the police, the other inmates, not one believed him. Some of the inmates even congratulated him. And since he’d been transferred to Fruitland, no one he knew had been here to visit. The border guards wouldn’t let them this far into Cascadia. And they shouldn’t come, anyway. It had been enough of a risk when they’d come to Sunset. His mom wrote him every day, and he got seven letters at mail call once a week. He didn’t know if he’d ever see her again.
He was trembling again. Sol checked the lights on the charging station where his shocksuit was connected. All inmates were required to wear them when they were out of the cell and charge them when they were inside. There was an alarm that went off if your cell door was closed and your shocksuit wasn't fully charged or connected to the charger.
His was fully charged, so the guards wouldn't come after him if he slipped into it. It was heavy, studded with hundreds of tiny electrodes. Their circular contact points were cold on his arms and neck as he put it on, but the suit's thickness helped ward off the cold a bit. He almost wished they'd buzz him, just to beat this chill.
He immediately regretted the thought. He'd seen two men buzzed since coming here, and it was nothing to joke about.
When the guards came for him an hour later, he was standing ready at the cell door. While the other inmates took their time getting up and pulling on the shocksuits, he stood still in line and took in every detail of the long hallway. It wasn't any more interesting than the cell, but it was a change, and that was worth a lot to Sol.
He would be sentenced in a few days. Most likely, according to the prosecutor, he would be stuck here for at least two thirty-year sentences. If they dug out the bodies of the two still-missing Rangers and had proof that they had died in the explosion, it would be much worse.
Since the unification and the erasing of borders, the Consolidated Terrene Leadership had disentangled itself from local law, and sentences came fast and harsh. Murder was an Intolerable Offense, carrying with it the death penalty, and in Cascadia, there were no appeals.
Sol felt hollow. He thought briefly about the prosecutor, who insisted that if he would only confess to the bombing the sentence would be lighter.
But Sol didn’t believe that, and besides, he hadn't done it. He wouldn't say that he had. And he wouldn't sign the paper that tied nearly twenty other Libertyite people to the plot. So the prosecutor was going for the maximum time and the maximum punishment.
The inmate Sol had awakened stepped out of his cell and was suddenly uncomfortably close. He grabbed Sol’s arm and twisted. A sharp pain shot through Sol's elbow and up through his already-aching shoulder. Sol heard himself make a small, pained sound.
"Shut up." The man growled in his ear, "I'll tear your arm clear off the next time you wake me up that early."
Sol thought about calling to the guard, but he knew that would only make it worse next time. He nodded to show he understood. The man gave his arm an extra twist, then shoved him forward in the line.
Sol fell into the inmate in front of him, who turned and pushed him backward. He stopped himself just before he hit the man who had hurt him.
"That's right, kid. You watch out for me from here on; you got it?"
Sol looked down and nodded. He rubbed his elbow and rolled his shoulder, willing the throbbing pain to cease.
He had already had painful lessons about the rules of this place. Don't make eye contact. Don't stick up for yourself. Don't talk to people.
; He would have to figure out a long-term strategy. He had to find a way to escape the horror of this place, the horror of what was happening to him. Would he be able to go to the library again? Could he study here?
But did that even matter? If he was never going to get out, what was the point of studying?
Looking around him, he saw it. These people lived from day to day, thinking only of themselves. That probably was what got most of them in here. Selfish choices and stagnant lives. They didn't want to be better versions of themselves; they wanted everyone else to be like them.
Sol took the tray of sandwiches and fruit. Cold lunches, hot dinners. For the rest of his life.
He had only taken one bite when he heard his name called from the cafeteria door.
Sol stood obediently and crossed to the guard who had called him.
"Dump your tray." The guard barked, "your defender is here."
Sol didn't argue. Maybe they had found something that would get him out of here.
The corridor leading to the consultation rooms seemed longer than normal. By the time they arrived Sol was jittery with hope.
But Craig, the defender, looked dismal. Sol felt lightheaded.
"I'm sorry, Sol, but the Park Service dug out the bodies of the two Rangers today."
Sol knew that made things worse.
"This just went from a bombing to murder." The defender said.
Sol shook his head. "What does that mean?"
He saw the ghost of distrust hovering behind Craig's eyes as the man spoke.
"You’ll be charged with the murder of Allison Lamm and Xander Henley." He seemed to expect Sol to know this.
The bright smile of Ranger Allison, her blonde hair, flashed through Sol’s mind. He tried to speak, his head beginning to spin. "Is there anything we can do? Why are you here?"
"Your sentencing has been moved up," Craig said. "We'll be heading to the courthouse in a few minutes."
"What will they do?"
"Sol, you're accused of killing two TPS Rangers. Cascadia has no tolerance for murderers, and they’ve gotten pretty close with the Leadership lately. They’re not going to just let this go. They're looking for the death penalty."