by Kurt Johnson
I moved slowly.
“Raystar, what the...” Cri whispered frantically.
“Shssshshshsh!”
Chunks glared at me. And, after a moment of insanity during which I wondered whether my hand would stay connected to my body, he ever so gently reached out his tongue and removed the other half of the cake.
“Thanks, Chunks.” I breathed, leaned in, and patted his muzzle. He snuffed, glared at me, and trotted back to his herd. He could have eaten my skinny, kid arm. I whooshed out the breath I’d been holding.
“Are you out of your flipping mind?”
I walked past her, calling, “We’re going to be late. C’mon.”
And yes. I was out of my flipping mind.
I had just flushed my best friend down the toilet.
11
Cri landed at the school’s Vehicle Containment Pad—the VCP—a moment before me. Her dart’s red-environmental shields created a teardrop envelope around the blue fuselage—an engine, a two-person seat, and a glowing-blue control console. She pulled her helmet off and tossed her silky, long hair out of her face. Her anger from last night forgotten, she grinned at me.
“YEAH!” She pumped four fists in the air, and her eyes glowed on the down motion. “YEAH! Raystar! Are you kidding? That was NOVA!”
I wasn’t Twig anymore? I settled my dart, my own shield melting into air. When my helmet came off, my hair exploded, all purple and spiky. Yesterday’s encounter with the NPD was on continuous replay, interrupted only by commercials of me flushing AI down the waste chute of my life.
Still, the ride to school had been a needed distraction. We’d covered the twenty green, ’natchy kilometers from our farm to our school (on the outskirts of Blue River) in two blinks. At one point, I’d flown so low and so fast that the compressed air in front of my dart had parted the ’natch around me and sucked it back and out of the ground, creating a fountain-like trail of twirling leaves.
AI never let me go flat out on my dart.
Raystar, you’ll have your entire life to destroy yourself horribly. Slow down and start tomorrow! he’d say. And then he’d keep muttering as he took control of our dart’s speed. And let me know so I can be somewhere else.
But I’d flushed him. He was alone with the poop now.
“Finally got the old grumper to relax?” she said, leaning in to fist-bump my two hands with her upper two.
I stepped out of the way.
“Shut up, Cri,” I said as she stumbled past me. She turned, confusion in her golden eyes.
“What?” she frowned.
I gritted my teeth and pushed past her down the path to the Blue River Educational Facility.
“You shut up!” she called after me.
Pfft.
On the way from the VCP to the Blue River Education Facility, our ears filled with the low roar you hear when approaching a stadium. The muted volume becomes sharper and louder as each detail of sound competed with another. Standard Galactic came through our nanotranslators, but our ears heard low voices, high chirps, laughter, people’s names. Just regular conversations in kids’ lives.
The cacophony of the thousand or so of my classmates corralled together in the courtyard sounded more like a mob of ten thousand.
The Facility was a series of tall, grey octagonal slabs stacked into an inverted pyramid. It was dark enough at the base so that no grass grew, and the building glared disapprovingly at the students from its towering height. A grass play field flowed out from school’s giant doors. Play equipment stretched upward, maybe three stories tall. The jungle gym was a forest of multicolored beams and various levels of platforms that grew just by the schoolyard entrance.
The Facility’s perimeter shimmered with a force fence similar to the one that guarded my home. After yesterday’s incident with the NPD, I wasn’t so sure the fence was to keep strangers out.
The Facility was positioned at the far eastern end of the city of Blue River. The metropolis rose skyward, a wall of Galactic-blue optimism extending into the heavens. A glittering crystalline collection of reflective spires pierced the clouds, and in the afternoon, they cast multi-kilometer-long shadows over the school and back toward our farm.
Cri caught up to me at the playground. I didn’t give her a chance to talk as I shoved and navigated through the chaotic throng of students. I was headed over to a dense section of pipes, beams, blocks, tubes, and swings. Its geometric tangle was, as always, doing its job of pulling delighted cackles and screams from the kids.
Our destination was one particular tree-like climbing structure that was set apart from the mass of yelling, wheezing, and whistling children. It was our usual before-school meeting place.
I felt a series of rapid thuds underfoot and a Crynit, large for his age, thrummed up to us on fifty blood-red, grasping claws. His mottled, navy blue, segmented chitin hadn’t yet taken on the pure black of a grownup, and he was only a bit under three meters long. He’d tied red, blue, green and orange sashes to each of his legs, and they flowed like colored water as he moved. Nonch was his name.
“Human,” Nonch said, bobbing his head. Nanotranslators smoothly ensured all Galactics understood each other. Four black eyes underneath two even larger orange eyes regarded me with a predatory lack of expression. Two feathered sensor stalks dipped slightly toward me. As he spoke, sword-like mandibles as long as my forearm and an inner, fang-lined mouth pulsed slightly. Suddenly, his six larger serrated arms extended, cage-like, around me. Their incredibly sensitive manipulator claws reached out simultaneously, the colored cloth tied to them fluttering less like decorations and more like hunting trophies, or scalps of a rainbow.
He was being so formal.
“Shells!” I laughed and stepped into his cage of arms, encircling him in a careful hug. My friend was not soft. Blood—mine—would be spilled if either of us hugged a nudge harder. While my arms didn’t wrap fully around his smooth carapace, he was warm to the touch. I called him “Shells.” Not all Galactics were into nicknames. I think he called me “Juice-bag.”
“Nonch! Nice colors!” Cri said. Nonch bobbed his head at the compliment, glancing sideways at me before turning his head to my sister.
“Thank you, Cri, Sister-of-Raystar. Broodmother has created many eggs. We celebrate.” I peered closely at his sashes. He, or some other Crynit, had actually created the silk scarves. The patterns were beautiful. It was heartening to see such a fearsome individual take an interest in, well, beauty. While many species came to Nem’, Crynits had settled on the planet after the War. They’d fought us. We were gone.
They were here.
I remember meeting Nonch in class for the first time, when I was five. He must have been a little over a meter long. He raced around me, darting close to touch me with his sensor stalks. I giggled uncontrollably, and then, as five-year-olds will do when spinning, fell on my butt. He climbed over my knees and touched my hair. I can still feel his claws poking through my clothes, but with his immature weight, they only tickled. I laughed and grabbed him, and felt his cool, hard carapace. It felt like a shell, except smoother. “Shells,” I had giggled, and lo, the name had stuck.
“Good health,” I said, squeezing my friend once more. He bopped me on the head with his sensor stalks, two big feather dusters as long as my arm, that sat above his array of eyes. It was our secret high-five.
I released Nonch, who’d frozen in a J-like shape (probably not wanting to accidentally spill my “juice” with a sudden movement.) Cri fist-bumped two of his claws, and her two other fists touched Jenna’s.
“Cri!” Jenna and my sister grabbed each other in a four-armed Glean hug. “I am sooo unstarred to be here!” Releasing Cri, she turned to me and rolled her eyes. “Raystar.”
Her black hair was dyed green and cut short. The multicolored beads she’d woven through her jade strands clinked as she moved. She was wearing blue pants with rips above the knees and thighs and a faded shirt that matched her hair and exposed her belly button. It wasn’t t
hat she was some sort of fashionista—it was that she was the loudest, the flashiest, the first to laugh, the first to criticize, and the first to draw attention to herself with everything she did.
I’m sure I’m not being nice thinking all this, but then, Jenna hadn’t been very nice to me. What I wore, what I ate, and even my hair was a constant source of sarcasm and slights. “Ew, Human food! How do your parents stand it?” The worst was her nickname for me. “Hey Purps!” she’d call. Yeah.
Cri would sometimes tell her to stop, I think mostly because she wanted to talk about something else. I hadn’t told either Mom or Dad about the slights or the nicknames. Maybe some of that was fear that there was truth to them—that it was a burden making special Human food, or that maybe, they didn’t like the color purple. I wasn’t feeling like a champion right now, after what I’d done to AI. Maybe I deserved the ridicule.
My hands clenched as I thought about all of the things I wasn’t, and what I was doing wrong.
“Jenna,” I smiled. “Hope the classes aren’t as hard for you THIS year as they were last year. I mostly didn’t enjoy seeing you struggle.”
She frowned back at me. Cri moved between us.
“Don’t mind Raystar, Jenna, she’s universally angry.” I glanced at my sister. Last time I checked, her house had JUST BEEN INVADED TOO! A retort pointed at my sister was just about to explode from me when a hand closed around my arm, pulling me gently to the side.
“Friend, mine,” Nonch said. “You insult?” I stared into Nonch’s two orange eyes. He lowered his voice and cocked his head to the side. “School has not even started and you are troubled?”
Cri and Jenna had moved on and were laughing and pointing at someone else.
“Shells,” I leaned in and he obligingly dipped a sensor stalk toward me. “I’m up the gravity well. REALLY.”
He was about to reply when Jenna exclaimed, “You see that new kid? An Elio—uh, yeah, an Elion! What a freak. I mean, that fur, and those huge nova-craxy eyes.” Jenna leaned in, a hand covering her mouth, and whispered to us, “They drool when they’re hot!”
Nonch twisted the upper part of his “J,” bending around me to see our new classmate. We all looked over, as out-of-the-corner-of-our-eyes as possible. Which was silly, given how the thousands of kids around us pretty much ignored the thousands of kids around them.
The Elion was covered in long, thick, white, puffy fur. His eight stubby, blue legs—each the circumference of my thighs—supported his meter-round torso. Two huge, wide, verdant eyes glanced around, nervously. His arm claws weren’t visible. Our gaze met for an instant, and I grinned at him. All my troubles were forgotten in a blink. I mean, look at him!
“I wonder if all that fur is clean?” Jenna sniggered.
“School hasn’t begun and you’re starting in on people? Seriously, Jen.” I frowned at Jenna. I glanced back at the Elion.
He was walking toward us in a spidery manner and growing, well, fluffier with each step. Like a pillow—a big, comfortable pillow with blue legs. That you wanted to crush to you, and wrap your arms and legs around, and just roll around in before you fall of the cliff of consciousness and into the canyon of sleep. Pillows…good.
I snorted, thinking about my summer. “We all drool, Jenna.”
“I—,” she started.
“Jenna knows what freaks are,” a voice chimed behind us. “And the Elion is a small freak-star next to your freak-nova Human. Except, perhaps, for the hypocrisy of the false sister of the Human.”
We turned toward the voice to face three Lethian boys who had just come to a stop behind us. I knew two of them—T’jarl and Fell. I’d met them both the same time as I’d met Nonch.
T’jarl had been my friend for a while, until he realized he wasn’t Human or that I wasn’t Lethian. I blame that on the growth spurt. His, that is. Galactic records show that comparatively, Humans don’t have growth spurts. We’re small, and then as everyone gets larger, we get comparatively smaller. T’jarl and I had never been great friends, but as kids usually do, we would throw balls to each other with the expectation of catching and receiving.
Fell was different. His expectation was mostly to have you catch what he threw with your face. Perma-jerk. Found something unexpectedly slimy in your lunch? Got a nudge that rebounded you off a corner of the hallway as you were rushing to class? Felt a toe at the back of your ankle as you’re taking a step over the spring playground mud? Yeah. I’d had foodless lunches, bruises, mud on my new clothes, you name it—pretty much since I could remember—because of HIM. He was the stereotypical bully.
But the third boy. My. He was tall. Serene. Galaxy knows how he could feel so comfortable dressed in midnight robes cut with a deep red sash and trimmed with gold. It was a level of detail most farmers on Nem’ simply had never thought of, let alone had been able to afford. It certainly wasn’t what I had grown up with. He glided a step past his entourage and half-turned toward Nonch.
The two shared a heartbeat’s glance, and I swear, NONCH DIPPED A SENSOR STALK AND HE NODDED. What in the great galaxy’s gravity wells was that about? Auuuuggh!
The morning had been going so well. My heart thudded, and I forced myself to breathe. When Mom had told me to “act normal,” I’m sure she didn’t mean through unusual levels of bullying. And yet, here we were, in the first twenty minutes of school. WITH THIS! My normal.
“Mieant, don’t you have someone else to bother?” Cri said, folding her hands across her chest and propping her lower hands on her hips. Few kids messed with Cri. She was big. And craxy, too. She wasn’t used to being picked on. Jenna, in contrast, looked pleased that someone had complimented her.
Mieant, who stood taller than Cri, returned her gaze and smiled haughtily. “Bother?” he retorted. “It is my race that unites the Convergence. It is your races that are being united.” His parents were part of the Convergence hierarchy, or something like that. What they were doing in Blue River was beyond me. But two years ago, they’d arrived.
And Mieant had immediately sought me out and introduced me to actual antagonism. I don’t know why he hated me. I got along with other Lethians, Gleans, Crynits—in fact, there really wasn’t any species I didn’t get along with, now that I think about it. If it was just straight bullying, I’m not sure I’d have felt so affected. But he was one of the cool kids, one of the popular ones. In fact, we should have just called him The Most. He was always the most athletic, the most fashionable, the one with the best grades. It seemed the only thing he was bad at was being nice to me.
“Freak!” Mieant turned his attention back to me, disgust turning his already downward-pointing mouth into a snarl. “What say you? Rumor is that the attacks are because of you.”
Seriously. I had not done anything to him. Yet his gaze was so intense, so filled with anger that seemed to show up only for me, that I unconsciously took a step backward. I had done nothing wrong. This was my school. My world. I had as much right to be here as anyone else.
In fact, I had been here first.
I sucked in a breath and took one and a half steps toward him. This was not stressful at all. No. Not at all.
“Broodmother says the attacks are because of old machines. Human machines,” Nonch nodded and looked between us, his colored sashes flowing with his movements.
Attacks? I eyed at Shells and he LOOKED AWAY.
Mieant laughed at my bewilderment, and his black hair waved in slow motion. He’d be awesome if he wasn’t such a jerk. But wasn’t that most peoples’ problem?
After a moment’s silence, my entertainment value was spent. Without a backward glance, Mieant strode away toward a group of Lethians as his “troops” followed him. Jenna’s big golden eyes got bigger as she watched him leave.
“Pllllthhhsssssppbbbbb!” I wheezed, leaning over with my hands on my knees as my breath exploded from the container of my chest.
“He’s sooo nova!” Jenna sighed. Cri nudged her shoulder, sending her hair beads in a clinking frenzy
as they tumbled around her face.
“He is rude. Ignore him, Raystar,” Nonch said, taking my arm with his larger arms and flowing beside me. He looked at me intently and then at Jenna and Cri. “I am sorry. Silent I was going to be, but silent I was not. About the attacks and correlation to your kind.”
“Well, I still think he’s cute,” said Jenna, straightening her clothes.
I squinted at her. She did not think in straight lines. But Nonch’s comment…
“Nonch, what about the attacks? And the machines?” I asked, turning to him. “And what’s between you and HIM?” I might have said it a bit imperiously.
“I….”
“Nonch?” I gaped at his hesitation.
“I was to be silent on this matter.” As Nonch spoke, he bobbed his head. His feathery sensor stalks made him look like a giant, dangerous flower assortment. He peered from under a stalk (much as I did with my strand of hair when I wanted no one to notice my glance) first at Cri and then back to me.
“The matter of him?” I asked, frowning. I pointed at flipping Mieant to let him know that I knew they’d had a private moment! I was completely unstarred by not understanding whatever-the-flip that was about.
“Raystar—ally! I have not chosen him as my mate!”
“WHAT?”
My friend looked at me, his sensor stalks flopped back against his head. “I am without things to say. My feeling is I am communicating poorly. Or, as you Humans say, ‘uh.’”
“What?” I sputtered, “We don’t say ‘uh’ for things like that.” I frowned. “Mostly.”
He eyed me, skeptical.
“So what WAS that?” I pressed.
Nonch glanced at his scarves. With that, the morning chime, a deep, belly-vibrating note that held for two breaths, gonged, and the giant navy blue metal doors, large and thick enough to repel an invasion, slid open. A swarm of kids pushed us toward the entrance, and my friend and I were separated in the rush.
“At lunch, Nonch!” I shouted over the crowd. “Don’t hold out on me!”
I turned and smashed into the soft, fluffy fur of the Elion who’d sidled right up beside me. I take that back—it was, in fact, the softest, fluffiest fur I’d ever smashed into. He was about my height, and my face had bumped into him right between his wide, emerald eyes, each of which rolled toward me.