by K. Makansi
My team made it here last night at around one in the morning, a long blurry trek that is already fading from memory. The tunnels were funereal and empty. The second home I’ve had to put behind me was easier than the first. We were dogged for a while by the black ops, but we lost them in the maze of underground tunnels. Jahnu and Kenzie led us up above ground, to our emergency escape vehicle hidden in some old garage. It was a small thing, a modified hovercar that was nearly impossible to cram eight people in. Bear had to ride stuffed on the floor, clutching nervously to the seat as Firestone zipped us out of the city, swearing at every shadow and cloud.
I didn’t look at Vale, and though I felt his eyes on me a few times, he never tried to speak to me, to my great relief. Just kept quiet. I know he didn’t bring the airships down on us. It wasn’t his fault. Soren and I should have guessed we would be tracked back to base—but we didn’t have much choice. I still don’t trust Vale, but Eli told me not to worry about him now.
I keep thinking of Dad, whether he’s okay, whether they’ll make it to the rendezvous point. Soren told me not to think about those things. “They’ll be here,” he said last night, when I was trying to sleep. “They’ll come.” He showed me how to practice breathing, calming exercises that he said would help me sleep. “Count your breaths and watch as you breathe in and out. Count them one to ten. And then do it again. If you start to think about your parents, or Tai, or anything else that’s bothering you, that’s okay. Just let the thought happen, and then let it go and return to your breathing.” And then he held my hand while I closed my eyes and tried for a few minutes. It helped, but not much.
At the rendezvous point, everyone except Eli was surprised to find a well-stocked little house, ready for visitors. Ten sleeping bags with extra blankets. Dried fruit, meat, and purified water. A little communications station and even a two-dimensional computing display. Eli either knew all this was waiting for us at the rendezvous or was too dazed to know what was going on. We couldn’t quite figure it out. Kenzie thinks he got a concussion when the soldiers in the tunnel first started firing at them. “He dived to dodge a Bolt, and I think he hit his head on the tunnel wall,” she said. Once he heard that, Vale stepped in and took over. Apparently part of his training in military command was basic first aid and medical knowledge, so he volunteered to keep watch over Eli and make sure he didn’t fall asleep and drank plenty of water. I didn’t like the idea of placing Eli’s life in Vale’s hands, but when Soren and I protested, Kenzie said Eli wanted us to work with him. “For now,” she said, her voice at a whisper.
Jeremiah, I barely remember from the Academy. He was Vale and Soren’s year, so I didn’t interact with him much. I don’t like the fact that he came here with Vale. He and Soren spent a lot of time talking—or maybe it would be better said that they spent a lot of time eating. The two of them wolfed down more food than the rest of us combined. It was only at Soren’s encouragement that Jeremiah would touch it, but once he started, he couldn’t stop.
“Man, this cheese is great,” Jeremiah kept saying. He speared something on the plate and his eyes went wide. “What is this?”
Soren grinned at him. “It’s a tomato. A real one.”
“Where do you get this stuff?”
“We make it or grow it,” he said, to which Jeremiah nearly spat out his food.
“You make it? Why? That’s what the Farms are for!” Bear, nearby, took offense at that.
“Maybe if more people grew their own food, I coulda lived in the capital, too. Maybe I coulda gone to the Academy.”
“You’re from one of the Farms?” Jermiah asked, eyebrows arched in surprise.
“Yeah,” Bear said, puffing his chest out. “I found Remy and Soren out … in the Wilds,” he says. His next words are quieter. “Maybe if more people grew their own food, Sam would still be here.” Soren’s smile slipped off his face at the memory and I turned away, the numbness seeping back through my limbs. So many dead these last few days.
When it was finally time to sleep, Vale said he’d take the first watch so he could keep Eli awake at the same time. But all I could think about was how easy it would be for Vale to murder Eli while the rest of us were sleeping, so I said I would do it. I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping much anyway.
“Are you sure?” Vale said, as though doubting my ability to stay awake the whole night. “Shouldn’t you—”
“Fuck off,” I told him. He shut up after that.
Soren offered to stay awake with me and Eli, but I told him I’d be fine. I made him go to bed. But he wouldn’t before he gave me his knife and a kiss on the forehead.
“Use it to kill Vale if you need to. Or anyone. Who knows who’s out there?” So I tucked the knife into my belt and sat next to Eli outside in the starry darkness. Jahnu came and sat next to us, putting his arms around me, claiming he couldn’t sleep either.
“Where’s Kenzie?” I whispered, making sure she wouldn’t miss him.
“Sound asleep,” he responded kindly. “But I couldn’t. I thought, if I’m going to be awake all night, I might as well keep watch with you. And I know neither of you should be alone right now.” We didn’t say much after that, none of us. The three of us pulled blankets around our shoulders and sat outside for the rest of the night, watching for Team Blue, my dad’s team, or Corine’s black ops, or airships raining fire from above, Eli’s head in my lap as I played with his curly hair to keep him awake. And when Soren’s breathing exercises didn’t work and I couldn’t stop remembering my mother and sister and I couldn’t stop worrying about my father, Eli held my head against his chest while I cried.
Eventually, towards the creeping dawn, Eli fell asleep, and Jahnu said it was okay. I told him I needed to take a walk, so I left them there and wandered off, which is how I came upon this boulder in a little copse in the woods where I am sitting now. Counting from one to ten over and over and over again. Losing count and losing myself. Finding myself again. Finding my breath again. Counting from one to ten.
“Remy.” The voice startles me and I whirl, Soren’s knife drawn and ready in the span of a hummingbird’s wing beat. It’s Vale. His hands are up, defensively. A quick scan tells me he’s unarmed. Well at least he doesn’t have anything in his hands. I exhale. His presence is comforting, in a way. With him, I can let my grief give way to anger.
“Go away.” I don’t trust him enough to turn my back on him.
“No,” he says, which surprises me. I raise my eyebrows at him, and his face is haggard, his eyes tired with dark circles under them, his sea-green irises dimmed to a hollow grey. He hasn’t slept either.
“What do you want?”
“I know you wish it were me instead of your mother.” He takes a step closer, but I recoil, and he stops. “You wish it had been me.”
“Yes,” I respond savagely.
“Two lives I owe you now.” I glare at him. “What do you want from me?” he asks.
“Nothing. Go.”
“No. I owe you a debt and I won’t—”
“What you owe me you can never pay back!” I shout at him, and the outburst surprises me, though Vale’s expression never changes. As though he was expecting my hatred. I close my eyes and calm myself. “You’re right. It should have been you and not my mother. Not Tai.” Vale looks down at the knife in my trembling hand.
“You could settle the debt right now.” I consider this. I try to imagine, to contemplate the physical possibility of putting a knife in Vale’s heart, or across his throat. I feel the weight of the knife in my palm, its balance and length. His eyes going glassy, his body limp, falling to the mossy carpet of the forest floor. Just like Sam, I realize, and the memory of Sam falling to the deck of the boat with a knife hilt sticking from his throat chills me. I don’t want that.
“You owe me two lives. Yours won’t satisfy that debt,” I say and stick the knife back in my belt.
Vale nods and lets his glance slink away to the ground.
“Here,” he says, pullin
g something out of his pocket. “You gave this to me a long time ago. I think you should have it back.” He holds out his hand, and I recognize my grandfather’s old compass, the K.A.L. engraved in fine, elegant script on the bottom. Granddad used to take it with him when he went out exploring, and he gave it to Tai before he died. A compass, he said, is more than a navigational tool; it’s a symbol of finding true north. A symbol of truth. I stare at it in Vale’s palm, remembering the day I gave it to him, remembering that he and Tai had been friends once, and that he, too, had been devastated by her death. I reach out and take it wordlessly, my fingers lightly brushing his. In my hand, the metal is warm from his skin.
“I’m sorry, Remy.”
“I don’t want your apology.” I turn away from him, staring back towards the east where the sun is flickering over the leafless skeleton trees, turning the worn, old compass over again and again in my hand. When Tai died, everyone told me how sorry they were, but words of pity and apology are useless. Words won’t bring her back. They won’t bring Mom back. I want justice. I want vengeance.
Behind me, I hear his slight footfalls in the crunching leaves, and I know he’s gone. I sigh and let my muscles relax, feeling the jagged rock from the boulder digging into my skin uncomfortably, keeping me awake despite dogged exhaustion. I squeeze my eyes shut, my hand clenching involuntarily around the heirloom, a bitter reminder of all the members of my family I will never see again. I lean my head back, skyward, letting the wind and the rising sun keep me company where humans cannot.
****
The rendezvous is silent and peaceful—too peaceful. There’s still no sign of Team Blue, and Soren keeps squeezing my hand, telling me that it’ll be all right; we’ll hear from them eventually. We’re instructed to stay here for at least three days while we wait for everyone to regroup. There are no more airships hovering overhead, no more soldiers sneaking up on us in the darkness. When Eli wakes up he’s fine, back to normal, and now he insists that Soren and I tell our story.
“How did this happen?” he keeps demanding. “How did you end up in Vale’s airship over the Resistance base with a renegade from the Farms and Outsider gear?”
He’s already heard Vale’s story, apparently, which he relays to me and Soren quickly. He says that’s why he trusts Vale. That and the fact that he shot a Sector airship out of the sky. I’m still not sure I trust Vale, but his offering from this morning makes me more inclined to believe him. I haven’t told anyone about our conversation, and I assume he hasn’t either.
When I tell Eli about my drugged, hallucinogenic vision of the lotus flower, his eyes darken.
“That’s what Vale meant. He said yesterday that Corine was after you because you had valuable information. I thought it had to do with the DNA. She must have realized you knew the transcription key, and she couldn’t let you get back to base with it.”
“We need to try it,” I say. “To see if I’m right. If it really is the key.” Eli nods. It takes him, Kenzie, and Firestone about a half an hour to get the computer station up and running.
“What’s this DNA thing?” Firestone asks, once everything is connected, sounding bored. If you can’t fix it or fly it, Firestone’s not interested.
“You’ll see,” Eli responds shortly.
When Eli gets his hard drive connected to the UMIT, the information transfer module, he pulls up the DNA with pictures of all the chromosomes and the endless strings of base pairs.
“I’ve seen that before,” Vale interrupts, suddenly hovering over my shoulder. I shrink back from him and he looks down at me, apologetic, but doesn’t back away. “That’s the DNA project Professor Hawthorne was working on.” His expression is grim and dark. Eli glances at me, worried.
“How do you know this, Vale?” he asks.
“I hacked into my mother’s computer a few days ago. I was looking into Tai’s death,” he nods at me, “and trying to find out what happened. Corine…” he hesitates at her name, “and Hawthorne exchanged a series of emails where she insisted he give her the DNA, and he refused. It’s why…” He pauses. “It’s why she had him killed.”
“I knew it,” Eli growls.
“That’s where I saw those images,” Vale says. “On her computer.”
“So she has it,” Jahnu muses. “It doesn’t matter. Even if she knows the key, it doesn’t matter. We have the key, too. We can unlock whatever information is stored in the DNA.”
Jogged into action by that thought, Eli loads up a decryption program he wrote when we first started working on the code. He instructs the program to decrypt the first chromosome using the cipher L-O-T-U-S. Jeremiah and Bear have by this point joined the gathering crowd and are watching over Eli’s shoulder as everyone waits. The air is tense.
“We’ll see what happens if we use it on just this first chromosome,” he says, and after a few minutes, the program responds that the decryption is finished, and would Elijah Tawfiq like to view the results? Eli enters yes, he would, and when he pulls it up, the DNA from that first chromosome has been perfectly translated into a file system with a listing that says GENETIC CODES FOR VARIETIES OF ONION. After staring dumbly at the screen for several seconds as we realize what we’ve done, Jahnu grins, and Kenzie and Eli break out into hesitant smiles.
“Fuck me,” Eli whispers. “It’s a seed database.” He starts navigating through the files. There’s a complete genome map for every seed varietal listed.
“If Rhinehouse finds out about this, we’ll be eating onion soup for the next twenty years,” Jahnu laughs.
Eli sets up the decoding program for the rest of the chromosomes, and we all watch in silence as hundreds of file directories pop up across the screen with names like POTATO, APPLE, NUT TREE, CITRUS TREE.
“Spiraling towers hide sacred flowers,” Eli mutters, awed. “Think of what we can do with these seeds!” Jahnu, Kenzie, and Soren are talking animatedly about how the Resistance can use these codes to make old world seeds, untainted by the OAC’s modifications, and Eli is navigating through the whole database, checking to make sure the information is complete. “Remy, your grandfather was a genius,” he sighs happily.
But tears are dripping down my cheeks, salty and reminiscent of the sea like Vale’s eyes, decorating my face with tokens to the dead. Vale, at my side, puts his hand on my shoulder. This time, I don’t pull away.
END OF BOOK ONE
~ Coming Next: The Reaping ~
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Copyright © 2014 by Amira K. Makansi
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Published in the United States by Layla Dog Press.
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Cover by K. Makansi
Spring 8, SA 102, 10h45
Gregorian Calendar: March 27
I.
My hand hovers over the keys. I hesitate. Close my eyes and visualize the music, black ink scattered in elegant lines across the page. I find the first note instinctively. When I press the ivory key and the hammer strikes, I feel it reverberate in my chest. The sound hangs in the air like a drop of honey on the tongue.
The first four stanzas are fluid like water. They wash over me in waves as they echo from the instrument. When my right hand joins in, I feel as though I have leapt into a cool, clean pond on the hottest day in summer. I am drowning in relief. I can almost feel the water rushing through my hair and across my skin, buoying and caressing me. It’s peace and contentment. It’s power, energy, motion. It’s falling and floating. I revel in the force of the music, the control I exert over this instrument. It feels like twisting and rolling in lapping waves.
I sail through the first quarter, relishing as always the simple beginning, the first, major key arpeggio. There is nothing so climactic, so tremendous, as the build and emotion in this piece. I know it so well I don’t have to think to play it. I feel the music flowing around me, and I allow my body to respond in kind. My only focus is channeling the music, pushing myself through it and allowing it to cleanse me.
I dance down the keyboard, through the final arpeggio, and come to rest on the last notes, three lonely chimes that might as well be a death knell. It occurs to me that I need to breathe. I become aware of my surroundings. The audience, hushed, tense. My shoulders and back, slouched over the keys as though I had died along with the music. The geometric precision of the arching auditorium above me. The blue sky shining through the glass ceiling. The bleak, hollow pulses of the dying song.