Three Sides of a Heart

by Natalie C. Parker

  Juliet was unfazed by all of it. Every so often she would cock her head to the side, listening for some far-off sound and then stepping out smartly once again.

  They walked for hours, making their way out of the city’s north gates, thrown open wide to allow folks to escape, and onto the main road to Charleston with all of the other refugees. After a while on the road, Dessa saw a few of her kin, and a teary reunion stopped all traffic for a moment. She and her girls parted ways with Louisa and Juliet, Dessa taking a penny from around her neck and pressing it into Juliet’s hand despite her refusal. In resignation Juliet fastened the penny around her neck, and Louisa watched them go, a hollowness opening up in her middle. Now that the immediate danger was gone, a dark despair settled over her.

  Juliet caught sight of Louisa and frowned. “Hey now, what’s the matter?”

  “I’ve got no one,” Louisa said, the words catching on a sob. “Landsfall is gone. Everett . . .” Louisa trailed off, Everett’s last moments flashing before her eyes. “I’m all alone and wholly unprepared for this.”

  Juliet sighed and patted Louisa’s hand awkwardly. “Aww, let’s hush that fuss. You’ve got me. I’ll make sure you get settled up nice in Charleston. And then we’ll find a way to see if your family home is still standing.”

  Louisa hiccuped one last time. “What about California?”

  Juliet stopped and crossed her arms. “What about California?”

  “I heard you talking about it last week when Dessa asked you what you were planning to do now, once your contract was over.” Louisa looked at the other refugees from Savannah walking on either side of the road and lowered her voice. “I want to go with you. I want to be with you.” Louisa tried to put all of her feelings into her voice, to express how she hated the idea of being apart from Juliet, no matter whether it was right or not.

  Juliet’s expression quickly cycled through shock to anger and finally sadness. “You don’t deserve to be with me,” she said, and continued walking.

  Louisa watched her go, her desperation draining away. Juliet was right. Louisa didn’t deserve her. Not yet. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t change.

  Running to catch up, Louisa followed after Juliet, down the road to Charleston.

  Omega Ship

  RAE CARSON

  The first thing I know is that I’m curled up on my side, suspended in loving warmth. My body sways, adrift in a tropical ocean of blue water. No, blue gel. It coats my eyeballs—there’s no need to blink—and my vision is a bluish haze. Beyond the haze is glass, the glass of my . . . window? Ceiling?

  Stasis pod.

  My mind snaps awake. Warm comfort flees.

  I shouldn’t be awake. Not while inside my pod. I try to lift my hand, but it doesn’t respond. I try again. My heart pounds once, hard, as if springing to life. Then again. Then regularly.

  My hand twitches. Gradually I push through the gel until my fingers reach the glass. I splay them across the undersurface. It’s convex, and icy cold.

  I push against it, but it won’t budge.

  The gel oxygenates me, protects my skin. I know this, but I’m trapped and my lungs yearn to gasp for air and I can’t stop my diaphragm from contracting.

  Gel floods my chest. I choke and heave, lurching against the suspension. The pod lists left like a sinking ship. I pound at the glass—bang, bang, bang—as my mind shouts wrong, wrong, wrong.

  A great lurch, and the pod and I are freefalling, spinning into a void, my hands still pressed against the glass as my diaphragm convulses helplessly with the need to scream.

  We crash. Metal groans and glass shatters. My left hip is numb for a split second before agony explodes in my bones.

  Too late, emergency protocols kick in and my pod releases, shooting icy stimulant through bluish goo that already drains away, free of its prison. I vomit mucus and gel, choke hard as acid burns my throat, and then finally, finally, I inhale cold air, real air, my first breath in years or decades or maybe even centuries.

  “Hey! Can you hear me?” A male voice, coming from a throat as raw as mine. “Can you walk? We have to get out of here.”

  A shadow looms, extends an arm. I blink to clear my eyes, and the shape becomes a person. A beautiful young man. Broad shouldered, naked. Pale skin and blond hair slick with gel.

  I reach for his offered hand, and he clasps my forearm. My left hip screams anguish as he yanks me upward.

  “You took a beating when your pod fell,” he says. He assesses my own naked body. His eyes are bright blue, intelligent but on the edge of panic. “Nothing broken, thanks to the stasis gel. C’mon.”

  The floor heaves. My hip doesn’t want to support my weight, but the young man’s grip on my forearm is a vise, and I keep my feet.

  “The Omega hit atmo,” he says. “We find the escape capsules, or we die.”

  As I stumble after him, my hip loosens, and my feet remember they’re feet and begin to bear my weight without aching. We’re in the starship’s central hold, a massive cylindrical tower stretching so high that the ceiling is lost in shadow. The walls are full of stasis pods, thousands of them, held in brackets at a sloping angle in overlapping rows, like glass shingles. Many of the brackets are empty, their pods crashed to the floor.

  As the boy leads me through the wreckage of bent steel and shattered glass and wobbly bluish gel, I catch glimpses of pale skin. Gel-wet hair. A limp hand.

  “Wait!” My first word in who knows how many years. I yank my arm from his grasp. “The others! We have to help—”

  “Everyone’s dead,” he says. His jaw clenches for a moment, and then he adds, “Everyone but us.”

  No. I can’t be the only girl left in the universe. I can’t be. “How do you know? Look at all those pods. Thousands of them. They might—”

  “Something went wrong,” he says. “The Omega went into conservation mode, cutting power to the pods one by one. Only a fraction were still powered on when she found a suitable planet—”

  The ship jerks. I watch in horror as a pod six stories up slips from its brackets and missiles to the floor, explodes into glittering glass and crunching metal. Before I can turn to run, we both rise into the air a meter, float for a moment, then crash back to the glass-strewn floor, collapsing to our knees.

  “Ship’s grav is in and out. We have to move now.”

  I gain my feet and hobble after him. The glass is in tiny crumbles, like thick sand, and it feels odd on my feet but does not cut as we wade through bent metal and pale limbs toward a darkness in the far wall. A doorway, I hope, but it’s hard to tell in the dim emergency lighting.

  My knees collide with a pod. I thrust out my hand to steady myself and realize pod number 4289 is intact, the body inside still encased in blue gel. The light indicator near the control panel blinks green.

  “This one’s alive,” I call out.

  He yanks at my arm. “There’s no time! Please . . .”

  I don’t hear what else he says, and I don’t care. I push the release button, but the lid doesn’t unlock. The emergency protocols didn’t kick in for this one, and I have a minute, maybe seconds, before the stasis pod becomes a coffin.

  “I’ll leave without you!” the blond boy says.

  “Then go.”

  The air fills with chemical smoke. Smoke means we’ll be out of oxygen soon. I run my fingers along the pod’s edge for the emergency lever. Each pod has one, fail-safe after fail-safe, designed to protect stasis humans in every circumstance except unforeseen planetfall. I find the latch with my middle finger, hook it, pull. The lock releases, and something hisses as stimulant is injected into the gel. The top unseals, folds away on a hinge.

  Damn. It’s another boy. Dark haired, Asian features. He blinks up at me, his black lashes thick with gel.

  A flood of bile pours from his mouth as he chokes and coughs.

  I don’t know if he’s fully awake, or if he’ll be able to stand without absorbing the stimulant for at least a few seconds more, but the
blond boy was right and we have no time, so I reach for his armpits and pull him upward.

  He is slender but tall, too heavy for me to lift alone.

  I turn, saying, “Hey, I need your help . . .”

  But the first boy is gone. We are abandoned, and I don’t blame him.

  The dark-haired boy tries to speak, chokes instead.

  “The ship’s going down,” I explain, fast and loud over the sound of atmosphere screaming against the hull. “We have to find the escape capsules. Keep an eye out for survivors on the way.”

  He nods and gathers his feet and supports enough of his own weight that I can half carry, half drag him to the darkness in the wall that might be a door. I glance at each shattered pod as we go, and I wish I didn’t have to, because all I see are broken bodies. A very few, the ones who were alive before falling, bleed freely onto the floor. Blood coats the shattered pod glass. In the ship’s emergency lighting, it seems as though we wade through a sea of shimmering rubies.

  The darkness in the wall is indeed a doorway, and I almost cry from relief. I drag us left into the hallway, curve around the pod tower, open the first access hatch I see. The hatch slides easily aside, revealing a round capsule with six jump seats, face guards dangling before each seat, and the blond boy, already belted in.

  “Oh, thank god,” he says. “A few more seconds and I would have had to launch.”

  I strap the dark-haired boy into his seat and make sure his belt and harness are fastened tight, then I grab a seat of my own and buckle in.

  “Ready?” the blond boy says.

  I stare at the three empty seats.

  “Ready,” I whisper, and my voice is lost in some kind of explosion as the capsule shudders and the blond boy slams the release button.

  My back presses into the seat as we are jettisoned with incredible, bone-numbing force. The two small windows grow bright with fire, then my sight goes black as we spin through it.

  And suddenly we’re free. My vision returns as a bright point, but gradually expands to reveal the faces of my companions. Tears stream down the blond boy’s face, and I’m not sure if it’s fear, relief, or too many Gs that are making him cry.

  The dark-haired boy’s eyes are wide, as if he’s finally, truly waking up, and it’s to a horror beyond his imagination.

  “Look!” says the blond, wiping at his wet cheeks. “More escape capsules. We’re not alone.”

  He’s looking out one of the tiny round windows. Three other capsules fall through the mesosphere alongside us. They look like small comets, their hulls shiny with friction, heat streaming behind.

  “No.”

  It’s the dark-haired boy. The first word he’s spoken since I yanked him from his pod.

  “They’re supply capsules only,” he adds. “No windows, see?”

  My heart sinks, but the blond says, “Isn’t that good news? I mean, the Omega would only release supply capsules if it found a habitable planet, right?”

  “Right,” the dark-haired boy says flatly. He catches my eye, and I know exactly what he’s thinking. He’d give up all those supplies for just one more person. Another girl.

  The capsule begins to shudder. “Grab your face guards,” I say, reaching for mine. I yank it down and place it over my nose, making sure the mouthpiece fits snug. A variant on the stasis gel coats my teeth and gums, and my head clouds with drowsiness.

  Fire erupts along our hull again as the strange planet’s gravity grabs our capsule and drags us into oblivion.

  In spite of the parachute, the air jets, the gel sedative, and walls designed to absorb crushing shock, we land so hard it feels as though my tailbone lodges in my sternum. We spin at impossible speed. The atmosphere roars around us as we cannonball across the planet’s surface. Gradually, we decelerate and come to a neck-wrenching stop.

  I sit stunned for a minute, maybe longer. Our capsule came to rest so that I dangle from the ceiling, staring down at the two boys seated across from me.

  “You okay up there?” says the dark-haired boy.

  “Think so.” I unbuckle the lap belt and reach for the chest harness.

  “Wait,” he says.

  The blond watches mutely as the other boy extracts himself from his own harness and moves into position to help me down.

  “Unbuckle now. I’ll brace you.” His hands wrap my waist in readiness.

  I press the release and slide neatly against him. He holds me a moment, making sure I’m steady on my feet. We are skin to skin, his breath warm on my scalp, both of us still slick with stasis gel.

  “Hey,” says the blond boy, too sharp and loud. “Let’s check out this planet the Omega found for us.” Without waiting for a response, he punches a code into the console. My ears pop as our capsule matches the outside atmosphere and pressure. The air fills with moisture and organic sweetness, reminding me of hot summer nights on Abuela’s porch, drinking her tamarind-rum punch.

  The hatch slides open, and I put up a forearm against the brightness. We step gingerly on bare feet into a humid world of white sunlight and waxy, wide-leafed foliage. Jeweled insects larger than butterflies flit from plant to plant, sending proboscises into thistly red flowers. Warm mud squishes between my toes.

  The dark-haired boy says, “Welcome home.”

  We’ve set up camp using our crashed capsule as a focal point. A smoking ground scar stretches for miles behind it, but the rest of the world is pristine and lush. Using the capsule’s limited supplies, we’ve erected a tent and a space heater, but I’m doubtful we’ll need either. We sit around the heater for its comforting familiarity though, eating ration bars. We have no chairs, not even the equivalent of Earth stumps to sit on, so we’ve stripped giant leaves from nearby plants to lay on the ground as a barrier to the mud.

  Every few seconds, the sky flashes as a chunk of starship debris meteors through the atmosphere. I watched them at first; they were so beautiful, the brightest shooting stars I’ve ever seen. But then I realized I was watching a funeral for humanity’s legacy. The greatest thing we ever built, still dead and gone, no matter how brilliant its pyre.

  “We have enough food and water for two months,” the dark-haired boy says.

  “We need to find those supply pods,” says the blond boy around a mouthful of ration bar. “That’s what we should do first. Then we’ll—”

  “Hey, I have a crazy idea,” I interrupt. “We could start with names. I’m Eva Gonzales-Aldana, eighteen years old, from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.”

  The dark-haired boy’s smile hits me in the gut. “Nice to meet you, Eva,” he says. “I’m Jesse Niyamoto. Also eighteen. Los Angeles, California.”

  I smile back. “Hi, Jesse.”

  The blond boy swallows quickly, says, “Dirk Haas. Nineteen. Amsterdam.”

  “Hi, Dirk,” Jesse and I say in unison. I take a bite of ration bar and chew. Another shooting star streaks the sky.

  “I guess it’s just the three of us,” Dirk says. A muscle in his jaw twitches. “In all the galaxy.”

  “Guess so,” says Jesse.

  “Dirk?” I say. “You lost someone on that ship, didn’t you?”

  “My sister.”

  Only one per family, that was the rule, and we all said our forever good-byes before climbing into our stasis pods. But multiple births were expected to be a fundamental part of the culture of the new world, so they made a few exceptions.

  “Your twin?” Jesse says.

  Dirk’s lips twitch as if he’s trying not to cry. “Hers was the first pod I found. She was . . . the Omega cut her power long ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “She was in love with the adventure of it,” he says. “Couldn’t wait to have children. Always wanted to be a mom.”

  Suddenly they’re both staring at me. All of me. My breasts, my belly, the mound of hair between my legs. I pull my knees to my chest and wrap my arms around them.

  I thought I had lost my shame over nudity. We’re used to being naked. We train
ed naked, entered our stasis pods naked. Two years prior to launch, when we realized Asteroid Holly-Krause’s impact would destroy the Earth nine months sooner than originally calculated, we had to speed up our manufacturing timetable. That meant steel-frame stasis pods instead of titanium, bulky freeze-dried rations instead of food paste, and many other shortcuts. It made the Omega too heavy.

  Some bright-eyed engineer realized we could lose fifteen thousand pounds of launch weight simply by eliminating our clothing. Humanity didn’t need clothing, she argued. Not in the right environment. In the end, it was either lose the clothes, or eliminate the arts and culture track. We voted to get naked.

  “Okay,” Dirk says, wiping his eyes. “Someone needs to address the elephant on the alien planet.”

  Jesse frowns, wrenching his gaze from my skin.

  Dirk presses on. “So I’ll just go ahead and say it: we need to start making babies.”

  The ration bar is dirt in my mouth.

  Within me is enough genetic diversity to restart the human race. My ovaries contain several hundred thousand oocytes, transplanted from women all around the world. I signed a contract saying I would bear at least two children on the new planet. All of us girls who won the New Hope Lottery did, whether we wanted children or not.

  But now that I’m the only human woman left in the universe, my two contracted children won’t be enough. I’ll have to get pregnant and stay pregnant until I die.

  “Eva should have children by both of us,” Dirk says. “Just to be safe.”

  “She doesn’t need to,” Jesse points out. “She could restart humanity with just one of us.” Dirk is about to protest when Jesse puts up a hand and adds, “But you’re right. Having children by both of us would be best.”

  I force myself to swallow my bite of ration bar.

  “I know this is awkward and inconvenient to talk about,” Dirk says, “but it’s important to establish right away that she shouldn’t mate with both of us at the same time. We need to keep the bloodlines clear. Make sure our offspring doesn’t mate with each other. There’ll be no way to determine the father by looking at the kids. We’ll have to keep track.”