Ice Phoenix

by Sulin Young

  “Put me down!” Already, she was trying to break free from him. It could only have been delirium that blinded her to the pain because she shouldn’t have been able to move, not with her wounds.

  Puddy wailed; a sad sound that moved even the stranger.

  Terrana went very still, her expression shocked. “No,” she whispered. “You can’t leave.”

  The wail was his last message to her. So deep was the emotional bond between the two of them, his cry had told her that this was the last time she would be seeing him. He was leaving the lagoon. The silver silhouette of her friend rose into the air like a bird springing for freedom before re-entering the water with barely a splash. Even when the water had stilled and all signs of him had disappeared, Terrana continued to stare at the spot she had last seen him until darkness swallowed her again.

  The stranger breathed a sigh of relief. He had spent a lot of energy trying to shield her from the excruciating pain of her burns, and now that she was unconscious he could concentrate on getting her to a hospital.

  6

  The first meal

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “She was dead for six minutes, sir. We can’t be sure.”

  “About what exactly?”

  “Cerebral hypoxia. Lack of oxygen to the brain. In humans, total deprivation of oxygen to the brain from anywhere between four and six minutes will result in irreversible brain damage.”

  “When will you know?”

  “We’ll know for sure once she wakes up.”

  “And what if she is … brain damaged? Can’t we re-grow her cells?”

  Pause.

  “We could, but she may not be the same person again. Her memories could be lost. Also …”

  “Also?”

  “Brain cell recovery in human intervention is not covered under the United World of the In-Between Medical Convention Act.”

  “What? You’ve got to be kidding me! Didn’t they, like, abduct several hundred humans from earth just to perform experiments on them?”

  Pause.

  “Those were the Empitithians, sir. Empitithia is not part of UWIB and as I and many other people recall, they were punished severely by the UWIB Federation Council. UWIB destroyed all the gates leading in to and out of their world.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Sir, aren’t you a member of the UWIB Federation Council?”

  “I am … umm, I see your point.”

  Two months later

  Baneyon walked quietly across the floor of his apartment, past a small fountain in the centre of his living room. It was minimally furnished, with two large reclining chairs, a white table and some plants. Not many of his visitors required furniture.

  He paused when he reached the door to the next room, which had been deliberately kept ajar. Unable to sense any movement inside, he sighed and pushed it all the way open.

  “Terrana?”

  No response. She was curled up on the window sill, staring out into the city beyond. She may have been focused in that direction, but Baneyon knew she saw nothing. She had seen nothing, said nothing and had made no effort to live since the day she had woken up.

  No brain damage. Even the doctors had been amazed. Motor functions intact. Memories intact. And that had been the problem. She had remembered everything. And she had noticed them — how different they were. Baneyon flinched, recalling the day she had woken up, afraid and in pain. How she had to relive the fire as he gently informed her of her family’s passing. But that hadn’t been the most difficult part. Explaining to her where she was and who they were had been much more difficult. The screaming, the accusations, the rage, all followed by sedation. It had continued like that for weeks.

  Give her time, Baneyon. She will eventually come to accept it.

  Why can’t we just erase her memories, Degra? She would accept us then.

  She’s the only human to have been brought to UWIB, where she will live out the rest of her life. Erasing her memories would be erasing her.

  Baneyon was forced to agree. Erasing her memories meant erasing everything human about her. And as the only human in UWIB, that would have been considered forced assimilation — a crime.

  It takes time to grieve, Baneyon. She is just a child.

  Her entire body was covered in red and green pli-gel bandages, which bubbled gently on her skin. Red worked on renewing both skin cells and flesh. Green removed the dead tissue. Her head was shaved, her hair replaced by bandages. Because of the severity of her burns, she would have to wear the bandage suit until her skin regenerated completely.

  Baneyon didn’t attempt to hide his presence as he walked over. With his towering frame and long white hair, he could not be missed. His gata, a most popular form of clothing for Pophusian men, swished gently against his thighs, stopping just short of the knees. A dark, loose fitting vest worn over a stretchy T-shirt completed the outfit.

  “Lunch is ready,” he said, kneeling next to her. It was their daily routine. He hoped she would soon opt to feed herself so that he would not have to insert the feeding tubes or force feed her with pills.

  “This time it’s really good. I roasted a kantakry bug fish with caramelised root vegetables. You would like it.”

  Of course, he had no idea whether she would like it. But it was the closest thing to Earth food, and he had faith that she would eat something on her own eventually.

  No response. Baneyon sighed, preparing to sit down with her for the next five minutes while he taught her something new about Pophusia. It didn’t hurt to educate her when he could. There was the slightest possibility that she was listening to him.

  “Earth, your planet, is in Sector Thirteen, you know. Sector Thirteen isn’t part of the United Worlds of the In-Between—”

  “Why is it I can understand you?” she whispered.

  Baneyon nearly fell over. It was the first time she had asked him anything. She was staring at him with her one good eye. The other was behind the bandage.

  “You have a language chip implanted in the Wernicke area of your brain. It helps you to analyse and put together sentences in four of the major languages spoken in UWIB.”

  “So, right now the chip is making me speak in your language?”

  That was the thing; it wasn’t — another reason why she had to be brought over. “You are speaking Kalaxtian without any help. You always could.”

  She looked confused, as she should have.

  “That night when you dreamt you were in the school speaking with Master Drummik, you were speaking Kalaxtian. We don’t know how it is possible either, but your brain is able to process the language as if it was your native tongue.”

  She didn’t say anything for a while. Baneyon wondered what thoughts rushed through her head as she processed this strange new world. He wished she would ask him more questions; he wanted her to cry like she had done that one time — it had been a relief to watch her unburden her pain.

  “The food …” she said slowly, “smells nice.”

  7

  Grief

  Ranstitha was a beautiful city. Glass domes rotated slowly against a sand-burnished background. Wacky and wonderful sculptures combined with living plants decorated the streets in a perfect union of harmony, and sleek, hi-tech vehicles zoomed by on various levels of the city. The streets were paved with a light mineral that added to its pristine beauty. Meandering throughout the city was an artificial river around twenty-metres wide. The water was clear and calm, a perfect glass for the strange and fascinating species that inhabited it.

  In the far distance, the distinct shapes of three moons cast a blue and purple haze across the sky. The sun’s white light retreated as it gave way to the encroaching dusk.

  The city heaved with life. People dressed in some of the most outrageous, elegant, and simplest costumes walked along the many bridges that crossed the river, while others glided effortlessly on the walkways at varying speeds.

  Terrana gazed bleakly at this world fro
m her bedroom window. The apartment building she was in resembled the coiled shell of a snail, and it overlooked the river. Her left eye itched from days of crying, and she tried to ease the irritation by blinking. She nestled in the wide frame of the window, staring at the ships hovering in the sky, their sails flapping idly in the wind.

  Terrana raised a thin, bony hand to the glass, running her fingers across. Through the transparent bandages, she could see that her skin was still raw. She had been told that the pigmentation would return, but she couldn’t care less. Not even the hairless brows or patchy face could distract her from the real pain inside her.

  It hurt so much — like someone had stabbed her with a knife and was twisting it. Her family was gone. She wanted nothing more than to wrap her arms around her mother and complain about some trivial thing Archie had done. Or swing on the hammock with her dad. Or … her throat tightened … to drop a crab on Archie while he was sleeping. Most of all, she wished she could tell them she loved them. But she had been robbed of that chance. Her vision clouded as a single tear leaked from her eye. She had tasted it so many times that she knew what it would taste like. It was saltier than the saltiest ocean— and it was bitter.

  The people on this planet would not allow her to return to her world to say her final goodbyes. But truth be told, she didn’t know whether she was strong enough to anyway. Returning home would be like reliving the events of that night and dealing with the harsh truth that her parents and brother were dead.

  Suicide had crossed her mind. She even attempted it, although her reasons for doing so had been different to what the people in the hospital had thought. Some little part of her had hoped that she was trapped in a nightmare, and so she held her breath to see whether she would wake up. Two minutes later, her hospital room was swarming with doctors and flying bots trying to force oxygen into her lungs.

  “I need to wake up,” she had cried. “I need to return home!” But they only carted her to the sleep-gen cylinder and sealed her in. “I HATE YOU ALL!” she had screamed. “YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO KEEP ME HERE!”

  She knew they had tried everything. They even brought in a grief counsellor to try to talk to her about her feelings, but he was an alien, and there was no way he could have understood her. It never occurred to her that, perhaps, she was the alien.

  “You’re not dreaming,” the counsellor had said, after losing patience with her. “Your mind would have to be twisted if you simply dreamtup this whole situation. Your parents are really dead and your brother— he sacrificed his life for you! Do you want to return to your world and see the remains of your house? The graves of your family? Because that’s the only thing left for you now.”

  Terrana had screamed. Unfortunately for the counsellor, a little bald man with a long chin, Baneyon had walked in at that very moment and overheard everything. He grabbed the counsellor by the collar with one hand and dragged him from the room. It was the last time she ever saw the counsellor.

  But what he had said was true. There was nothing left for her back home, and it wasn’t because she didn’t have any relatives, even though she didn’t. And it wasn’t because she couldn’t move in with family friends— she could. They would have accepted her gladly. It was because the most important companion in her life, aside from her family, had abandoned her. Puddy. No matter where she was, how far she travelled, how long she dreamed, she had always been able to feel him. He had always been there with her. Even on the night of the fire, she had felt him, anxious and afraid.

  But she couldn’t feel him anymore. And that was the knife inside her. The disorientation, the disbelief, the hurt, and the emptiness stemmed from the loss of her family. But the knife, created when Puddy had deliberately severed the connection between them, hurt her physically. It grounded her to this reality, and she knew she wasn’t dreaming.

  It took a while before she could accept it. She didn’t speak, she didn’t look at anyone, and she didn’t eat. For days she stared blankly into space, struggling silently with her grief. The aliens worried and fretted over her, trying to encourage her to speak, to eat, to react. But they were all so different that she couldn’t respond to them. In fact, their presence made her retreat into herself even more.

  And then one day Baneyon had come into her room and sat next to her. He cradled her head to his chest and whispered softly, “You can cry, you know. If it’s hurting you, just let it come out. No one person could keep all that grief in there without exploding.”

  It had started with a single tear, followed by a sob. Her shoulders shook, and suddenly she was clinging to Baneyon like a baby, wailing her soul out. It had been the first breakthrough. She hadn’t spoken for days after that but, to her annoyance, he did. She began to realise he wasn’t going to give up on her.

  He started talking about his world.

  “This planet is Pophusia. It’s one of the ten inhabited planets that exist in Sector Three. A sector is a cluster of stars and planets that exists in one part of Dartkala or the In-Between. You may know it as Space. In total there are thirteen sectors that we know of. Your planet, Earth, is part of Sector Thirteen.”

  He occasionally paused to see whether she was listening but, as usual, she kept her expression blank.

  “A very long time ago, ten sectors came together to form the United Worlds of the In-Between. Their purpose was to maintain peace throughout Dartkala and encourage understanding between the different races. Sector Thirteen, including your planet, is not part of this union, and the knowledge of our existence to any race in your sector is strictly forbidden.

  “Terrana, there is something you possess which sets you apart from the people in your world. It’s the reason you’re here. You possess something called qi.It is an energy that exists throughout the universe but to many people in UWIB, it’s like blood— a part of our bodies that gives us very special abilities.”

  He reached out and stroked the exposed part of her face.

  “It allowed you to travel to us, to see us every night in your dreams. It is an ability that does not belong in Sector Thirteen, and UWIB cannot risk your people discovering our existence through you. Not yet.”

  He didn’t have the heart to tell her that human beings were classified as BDI, a race consumed with avarice, narcissism, violence and destruction. In short, BDI stood for Body of Dangerous Individuals or by its more common universal slang, Body of Dangerous Idiots. But he did tell her something else so that she wouldn’t feel so alone.

  “There’re people in your world who possess qi. But their abilities are very limited and none of them ever crossed the spatial barrier as you did.”

  Terrana was listening, although she gave no indication of it. In a strange way, everything he had said made sense to her. A colourful bird with long tail feathers settled on the window ledge, hopping from one side to the other before stopping to stare at her through the glass. She tapped on the window in an attempt to scare it off and was surprised when it suddenly bared teeth.

  She pulled her hand back and looked up at the ships sailing in the sky with their bright, red sails. They reminded her of Chinese Junks with majestic dragon wings, while others resembled galleons, powerful and deadly.

  Puddy. Her thoughts couldn’t help but return to him. Why did he abandon her? Why did she feel he had cut out her heart? He had left her when she needed him the most. Why?

  It started as a little ball of darkness festering in the pit of her stomach, spreading and contaminating every kind thought she once possessed. She found she was suddenly infused with newfound strength and determination. For the briefest moment, her eye turned black, and a dark liquid seeped out.

  She relished her icy rage. It froze the pain inside her, made her forget about her life in Fiji and filled her with a burning desire to destroy everything in her path.

  “Lunch is ready.”

  The dark liquid retreated into her eye, and as quickly as it had appeared, the rage vanished. Baneyon knelt beside her.

  “This time it�
�s really good. I roasted a kantakry bug fish with caramelised root vegetables. You would like it.”

  Fish. That was different to the usual pills she swallowed. Its aroma drifted into the room and for the first time since leaving the hospital, Terrana felt hungry.

  She couldn’t remain a ghost forever, crying about her family and Puddy. Neither could she return home. She had to adapt, to learn about this new world and the people who lived in it. And she would start today.

  “Why is it that I can understand you?”

  8

  A new school

  “School?” Terrana said in surprise. She ignored the disapproving looks of the other customers as she waved her fork in the air, scowling at Baneyon. They were sitting in a trendy café along the river, lunching on sea conch and salad.

  A month had passed since she had eaten her first meal of fish with Baneyon, and every day that followed had been a hurdle as she struggled to overcome her misery and despair. Move on, she told herself. Archie saved me because he wanted me to live. Don’t insult him or he’s gonna throw me in the lovo pit when I reach the afterlife.

  A lovo pit was a traditional Fijian oven that was simply a hole in the ground, filled halfway with hot lava rocks. Food such as fish, pork, and root crops was lovingly wrapped in coconut leaves, laid over the rocks and then covered with earth. It took anywhere between two and three hours for the food to cook, before it was dug up and eaten.

  So, as the days went by, Terrana learned to bury her emotions and focused on learning everything Baneyon was trying to teach her. Finally she began to settle in. Her burns had almost healed and she no longer had to wear the bandages, which was a relief. A light scar shaded the right side of her face, but even that would disappear within the next few weeks. The only thing left was to grow her hair. It stood no more than two centimetres off her scalp, making her look like a little cadet.

  “Yes, school,” Baneyon told her patiently. “No doubt you know what it means.”

  Terrana glared at him. “I know what school is, but why do I have to go to Pa Gumpina? Why can’t I just stay here on Pophusia?”