Guardians (Caretaker Chronicles Book 2)

by Josi Russell

  Ethan realized their mistake. Without breezes to blow the smoke away, they were condemned to sit enshrouded in it. Collins, choking, stood too and stomped out the brick, grinding it under his boot until it was nothing more than glowing red powder. The smoke continued to hang in the cavern, reaching out toward the little group they’d left and continuing lazily around the edges of the room.

  Suddenly, Ndaiye’s voice rang through the cavern. “Look! Look!” he called, pointing excitedly. Ethan followed his gesture and saw, with wonder, the cloud of smoke moving. It drifted toward a wide vertical crack about fifteen meters ahead of them. Lazily, the smoke nosed into the crack like a living thing and slipped out of sight. Overcome with excitement, Ethan ran toward the crack and inside. The passage behind it was wide enough for the three of them to walk side by side. All three members of the forward team made their way along it. Collins shone his light up and Ethan could see the smoke creeping along, rolling down the passage in front of them.

  The passage itself rose gradually. It was nothing like the steep incline they’d navigated before.

  “Maybe it’s finding a way out,” Ndaiye said, his voice higher-pitched than usual. “Maybe we can follow it right out.”

  Ethan loved his optimism. Here, in the dark, when anyone could feel hopeless, Ndaiye always had a bright word. The promise of it shone in front of them. They walked faster.

  Later, Ethan would look back on that moment and wonder how he could have missed it. He would wonder why he was in the middle instead of on the left, why Collins had been the one to swing his light up at just the moment that the cave opened underneath him.

  Ethan saw the light swing crazily to the side, was blinded by it for a moment, and heard a heart-stopping cry of surprise. He turned fast, just in time to catch one last glimpse of Collins as he plummeted down a narrow vertical shaft.

  Two breaths later, Ethan heard a sound that would haunt him. He lay on his stomach and shone the light down the shaft. Pressing the button that kicked extra light out, he could see that Collins would not be coming back out.

  Ethan pulled back from the edge and sat up, gasping. It had been so fast. How could he not have seen it? How could he not have warned Collins?

  The bleakness of this place again washed over him. Ndaiye stood against the far wall of the passage, his optimism silent. Ethan didn’t look at him, didn’t say anything for a long time.

  Ethan had never seen so much human death in such a short time. And this cave gave no second chances. People were here one moment and gone the next. There was no going back, no doing it over, no doing it better.

  ***

  The tunnel led to a drab gray chamber, where the smoke leaked out of a cleft in the rock directly above them and no wider than one of Luis’s soup bowls. There was, however, a level, smooth passage that exited on the opposite side of the chamber, and Ethan and Ndaiye thought it may connect back somehow to the passage the smoke escaped from. They retrieved the others and brought them to the chamber.

  They filed in quiet respect past the shaft that would be Collins’s final resting place. Jade had tears glistening on her lashes as she stepped carefully to the other side of the tunnel. She was wearing Collins’s pack, and Ethan sensed there was more to her grief than losing a coworker. When they were all safely past the pit, Ethan switched off the light and made his way up the slope behind them, leaving Collins to his rest.

  ***

  Ethan felt empty as they settled in for sleep. When he came to Coriol he had been cheered as a savior of thousands. They had chanted his name and elected him as a Governor of the Colony Offices. He was lauded as brave and gifted.

  But one moment, one thoughtless, distracted moment, had cost a man his life, and Ethan had neither predicted it nor prevented it. How could he be a hero with such blindness?

  He was blind here, in every way. As the team switched their shoulder lights off one by one, he felt the darkness closing in around him. He lay back, his own lights still on, seeking comfort in their glow. The usual chatter was absent and the team stilled quickly.

  Finally, knowing that every second of light he indulged in now was a second of darkness later, maybe in some far more dangerous circumstance than this, Ethan tapped the shoulder lights of his vest to quell them.

  His eyes burned with their afterglow for a heartbeat, two. He shifted his head on his pack, waiting for the pressing, complete darkness that he knew would come.

  Instead, emerging from his light-blindness, Ethan saw tiny, bright jewels of light, seemingly suspended in chains from the cave ceiling, like the most delicate of chandeliers. Ethan looked closely and saw tiny worms suspended from the ceiling, weaving straight strings of phosphorescent silk, with hanging jewels of sticky fluid that they used to catch their food.

  Their beauty caught Ethan off guard, and the soft sounds of awe from the rest of the team told him they saw them, too. Somehow the gracefulness of the tiny droplets of light soothed. He let the tears come silently, feeling them slip out of the corners of his eyes and race down his temples.

  He heard, softly filling the chamber, Ndaiye’s deep baritone voice, beginning as a hum, then a gentle ripple of syllables, like falling water: “yangu mtoto, mtoto, ndoto. Itakuwa utulivu mtoto wangu, yangu mtoto, mtoto, ndoto.”

  A lullaby, in a language Ethan had never heard before. Though the words were unfamiliar, the feeling behind them was not. It was gentle, calming. It was love and comfort.

  Somehow, Ethan let Collins go. He let the pilot and Carlisle and Espinoza and Baker go. And he hoped, when it was time, that Aria and the children could let him go.

  ***

  Aria slid down an embankment, following the sound of the river. She had brought the children with her today, and they had loved the ride in the little ship. They’d set down in the clearing and left the ship and its pilot to wait for them while they searched. She’d just completed her second concentric circle around the survey site and was beginning on the third. Because her search had taken her far beyond the usual areas of the Karst Mountains, beyond the edges of the neatly trimmed Tiger Mountain Park, to the valleys and peaks of the inner karst range, she wondered if anyone on Minea knew the mountains better than she did.

  Still, Aria had to be continually watchful of the children. Polara was a strong hiker and often in front of Aria, challenging her mother to keep up with her—until the child got distracted by one of the million things that the karst forest had to offer: a butterfly, a flower, a steep peak rising fast from the valley floor.

  She took Polara’s hand now as the little girl struggled to push through the tall grass. It was becoming thicker, taller, here at the bottom of the embankment. Aria guided Polara behind her, working to stomp the grasses down as best she could to smooth the way for her.

  “Come on, Lara, we’re going to go this way.”

  “And find Daddy?” Polara asked directly.

  “I hope so.” Aria pushed back the sharp sensation of knowing how big this wilderness was and how small, in it, were the three of them.

  Rigel rode silently on his mother’s back, observing. If she turned her head sharply, she could see his bright blue eyes peering down at her with the aching wisdom he’d seemed to have since he was born. Aria quieted her mind, listening for anything that could be Rigel’s thoughts. She’d been listening ever since Kaia had told her of his gift. But she heard nothing that wasn’t her own.

  “Mama! Mama! Look!” Aria followed Polara’s pointing finger and saw, fleeing off to the left in front of them, a white deer-like creature. Its curly fur and sweeping horns made it look strangely cuddly and regal at the same time, like polar bears back home on Earth.

  It bounded forward through the long grass, stopping several dozen meters away and turning its head to watch them.

  Aria had no name for it, but its majesty took her breath away. There were so many species on this planet, and most of them remained a mystery to humans. On a world where people had come to gather all the Yynium they could as quickly as
possible, there was little time for interesting animals. If it wouldn’t help make RST more accessible, nobody was interested. Add to their apathy the fact that the karst range remained largely unexplored, and it was likely that she and the children were the first humans ever to see this species.

  “What should we call it?” she asked Polara, running through some possibilities in her own head: Snow Deer, Bryant’s Deer, Imperial.

  “Is it a boy one or a girl one?” Polara asked thoughtfully.

  “Well, it’s hard to tell with some animals here. I’m not sure.”

  “I think it’s a boy and we should call it Chester,” Polara responded immediately, then, reconsidering, “or Curly.”

  Aria laughed for the first time in days. She loved that her children, who lived every moment separately from the next or the last, had the ability to traverse life unburdened by what was to come. Polara was particularly good at that, and Aria found it freeing to be with her, even in the midst of this nightmare. Maybe especially in the midst of it.

  She would have liked to observe the new species a while, sit down on a rock and see if it was aggressive or shy, if it had a mate in the area or even a herd. But their course would not lead them near it, and she had too little time and too important a task to bother with wildlife now.

  They fought through an especially thick stand of fibrous grass. In fact, Aria noticed, here the usual flexible grass seemed to be interspersed with a dark green, curved-leaf grass as rigid as bamboo. Within a few meters she was unable to push through at all.

  She glanced up. The white deer still stood, his large black eyes on them. Poised there, in a beam of sunlight between two karst peaks, he seemed to be waiting for them. Aria altered their course slightly, angling towards the animal. She still held Polara’s hand, though her arm was getting weary from being held behind her. She guided Polara in her own footsteps, around stones shrouded in the grass and carefully over the lumps made by bulging roots.

  Roughly six meters from where she’d changed course, Aria broke onto a trail. The deer stood on it directly in front of them. The sharp hooves of countless animals had cut out the grasses here and the trail wound in front of them like a ribbon through the sea of green.

  Polara pulled her hand free and edged around her mother, skipping ahead down the trail calling, “I’m going to catch Curly!” Aria followed her.

  The stag stayed just out of reach, bounding ahead along the trail, which now wound along among a field of the tall curved grass so dense that even Polara wouldn’t fit between the stalks. When Aria heard the river turning and rushing away, she tried to leave the trail, to push through the grasses and follow the river as she had planned, but it was futile. Here the stalks of grass grew so unyielding that she couldn’t move them. If she wanted to go that way they’d have to be cut. She only had a pocketknife along and the day was going quickly. They’d have to start back in a few hours, and she imagined that she wouldn’t make much progress through the field in that amount of time.

  So they followed Curly down the trail. It was relatively easy going, and she felt strangely relieved whenever she caught a glimpse of the big animal ahead of them. Above, from their nests on the edges of the karst peaks, Minean parrots and songbirds filled the air with their music, but Aria’s encompassing fear for Ethan blocked them out. She found herself watching for any sign of the craft, willing a broken windscreen or strip of fuselage to appear in the jungle of green. But all she saw were the green and growing things of Minea.

  They’d been walking about an hour on the path, and Polara’s enthusiasm had waned. She was hungry and her feet hurt and she wanted to stop for a rest. Aria peered down the path. Just ahead, two huge karst towers stood like castle gates. The path wound through the only gap between them.

  “Let’s get to those rocks,” she told Polara, “and then we’ll take our rest.” Polara drooped further, hanging her arms down below her knees and trudging. Aria broke out the secret weapon: “And we’ll have some chei when we get there!”

  Polara brightened, straightened, and quickened her step. She loved the sweet, gummy candy her mother made from the red chei fruits. Aria kept some handy for occasions such as this.

  As the stag reached the gap between the mountains, he bounded up a ridge on the right tower, his climbing impossibly sure and impossibly fast for such a big animal on such a narrow ledge. With one last glance in their direction, he bounded along the ridge and away, his white coat becoming a dot, then a speck, then disappearing altogether by the time they’d reached the towers.

  Polara started up the little ridge, fearlessly following him, but Aria called to her, “No, Lara! We’re not going up there.”

  The child obediently, if sullenly, climbed back down.

  “Bye, Curly!” Polara’s voice was startling in the sudden calm of the forest. Aria noticed, for the first time, that the birds had quieted. An eerie stillness pervaded the trail leading to the towers.

  Aria gathered Polara to her and checked the sonic stunner that Ethan liked her to carry when she was in the woods. Silence in wild places was unusual. It often meant the presence of a predator. There were, Aria knew, big cats on Minea. The path suddenly felt constricting. Knowing they could only go forward or back along this narrow strip of cleared ground made her nervous. She hurried along the path, hoping it would open up on the other side of the facing karst formations.

  They entered the gap between the towers slowly, walking from the brightness of dappled sunlight into the shadow of the formations. It was cool and damp there, and a relief from hiking through the hot field of grass. The formations were thick, and Aria couldn’t see where they ended. She kept a watchful eye on the limestone above them, searching every ridge for signs of a predator waiting to drop down on them.

  When the path widened and golden sun caught them again in its beams, Aria gasped. They were standing in a sheltered cove, ringed around by karst peaks. In its center stood a forest of huge pale maroon plants. They were, Aria supposed, trees, because they had single, woody trunks and clear apical dominance. But they weren’t typical. Their long, slender trunks were topped by crowns of soft fluff, like giant dandelion seeds. Long, trailing branches wept down from them, covered in luxurious white flowers.

  Their scent was sweet and light, like apple blossoms and vanilla. Aria sunk to the ground, pulling the pack with Rigel in it off her back and getting him out to hold him close. There was no danger, she realized. The creatures were silent because of her and the children. She felt the fear slide from her mind as she breathed the fragrant air and looked up at the tall trees.

  For Aria, there was something special, almost holy, about plants. The way they sprung from such small seeds, the way they delighted every sense, and the way they offered their myriad gifts to mankind, filled her with awe. She felt it now, more than she ever had, and as she sat on the ground, marveling at the grove of giants, she pulled her children to her and felt tears sting her eyes.

  Polara sat beside her mother, and Aria guessed she sensed the solemnity of the place as well. Aria felt Polara’s little hand wriggling into her mother’s jacket pocket, discovering and extracting the packet of chei and looking up for permission. Aria smiled down at her. The little girl tore it open and sat contentedly, eating, slipping one of the prized candies into her little brother’s mouth as well.

  The trees, which had stood still and calm casting a steady pattern of dappled light on Aria’s family, began to sway gently in unison. Aria watched, mesmerized, as the trees arched back and forth with increasing intensity, moving in an unseen wind.

  And as they moved, Aria saw they released tiny bits of fluff—their seeds—which arced up and over the sides of the karst peaks, on their way to grow for themselves.

  She looked at her children. It had always struck her how similar humans and plants were. They needed protection and nurturing when they were small. They needed a safe beginning to grow to their full potential. She and Ethan had worked hard together to give Polara and Rigel that be
ginning. She didn’t want to continue that process without him.

  ***

  Polara and Rigel were exhausted by the time the little family hiked back to the ship. Dark was coming on, and the pilot made a comment about leaving without them, but Aria was too tired herself to respond.

  She watched the clearing shrink below them as the little craft rose and spun back toward Coriol. He wasn’t near here. The crews had searched the first day, and she had searched the last two. There was no sign of him, the ship, or the crew.

  Polara cuddled against her, lost in sleep, and Rigel’s head was heavy on her shoulder as he drooped in his safeseat on her other side. As she watched the ship move between the towers, she saw, in the fading light, the vast tangled jungle of stone and vegetation below her. At first, she had looked for him behind every stone, sure that she would find him and this nightmare, so much like her stasis dreams, would end. But now she saw this place for what it was: an alien planet with reaches yet unknown to anyone. Ethan was out there somewhere, spending another night away from his home, maybe hurt. Maybe worse.

  Though she tried not to cry when she was with the children, Aria didn’t stop the tears running down her face. Ethan’s absence these long days and nights was growing more real to her, and there was no sign of him in this wild place. What if he didn’t return? What if she was left alone to raise their children and to send them into the world? It was not something she thought she could do alone.

  She held them tighter, pulling Ethan’s image closer in her memory as she did so. She didn’t know how to let him go.

  Chapter 12

  Marcos skimmed the messages list when it showed up. Every message was marked as viewed.

  But something wasn’t right. He looked more carefully. The first one that caught his eye was from Serena. “Craters of the Untek backcountry.” But she hadn’t sent a message about that trip. He remembered distinctly being disappointed when he’d come to the ICS expecting that message and it hadn’t been there.