by Josi Russell
It was slow going, and exhausting. Duck down, crawl under, throw an arm over, pull up, climb through. The space between the crystals shifted, and after climbing until he was out of breath he found himself twenty feet above the floor, standing on a gargantuan crystal and looking down at a spectacular spherical crystal structure, which shone dazzlingly bright in the dark of the cave. A shaft of light pierced it from above, illuminating it with vibrant white light. Sunlight. Ethan scrambled down to it. Climbing on top of the translucent sphere, he looked up.
The hole was minuscule, no bigger around than Ethan’s wrist, and the sun shone directly down it.
He heard a surprised cry behind him and looked to see Brynn scurrying down the huge crystal, calling to the others as she came. “Light! Light! There’s light!”
He heard them coming, and stood for a moment with the sun on his face. He stepped back, letting it fall onto his dirty gloves, and held it for a moment, taking in its radiance. He wanted to keep it, put it in his pocket and take it out later, when the cave closed around them again, as he sensed it would. Ethan wanted to taste the sunlight, revel in it, but when Brynn climbed up, he moved to let her feel it on her face.
As he stepped sideways on the sphere, he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned to glance at the shining surface of a huge crystal several meters away. For a heartbeat, there in its surface was the reflection of a figure. He squinted, trying to make sense of who it was. He and Brynn were the only ones that it could be reflecting. But when he looked again, the figure was gone, lost in the dizzying crisscross of crystals all around them.
Ethan cleared his head as the rest of the team came. Maggie was last, breathing hard and supported by Traore and Ndaiye. The crazy angles of the crystals could catch reflections in surprising ways. He turned his attention to the team as they each spent a moment in the beam of pure sunlight. But there was no pausing the spin of Minea, and too soon the light was gone. Ethan shone his flashlight up the small hole as far as it would go. He could see no more than a few meters into the rock.
Maggie, resting on a fallen crystal beside the sphere, called out, “I’ve found something.” She pointed.
Ethan turned, half expecting to see the figure again, but she was pointing near the bottom of the sphere on which he was standing. A slender cylinder of rock as long as Ethan’s living room back home lay on the ground. Maggie hobbled over and picked up one end, peering at it and running her fingers across it.
“It’s a core sample,” she said. “The bottom of one, anyway. Sometimes, if they drill more than a hundred meters or so, the tip of the sample breaks off. We won’t get out here. We have to keep going. There’s at least a hundred meters of stone above us.” She peered at the sample, “And,” she pointed at the long, orange band that made up most of the cylinder, “looks like a lot of it’s Yynium.”
Ethan remembered Collins’s warning. Saras was coming after that Yynium. He imagined what would happen in this chamber if charges were set off to reveal the Yynium above it. The weighty, fragile crystals would fall like icicles.
“We need to get out of here,” he said.
“No!” The fevered sound of Brynn’s voice filled the chamber. “We can’t leave it. It’s outside. It leads to the surface. We have to go up. We have to get out!” She reached toward the ceiling, her hands clawing at the air.
The team stood silent, seeing their own emotions played out in front of them. But Maggie was right. There was no way they could burrow up through the rock, not if they had the tools, not if they had a month. And they didn’t have a month. They had days before Saras started blasting. There was nothing to say, no way to comfort the girl about staying down here, not when they were all feeling the same thing.
She looked around desperately. “Please?” she said. “Please? Can’t we get out here?”
Traore threw an arm around her shoulders and spoke softly. “My parents had a saying: ‘To run is not necessarily to arrive.’” He looked in her eyes. “We could use all our energy here and still be no closer to the surface. We have to keep going and find a better way out.”
Brynn calmed, but sunk into a miserable quiet. She ran her fingers nervously over her silver necklace. The team moved slowly farther down the crystal cavern. Ethan, pushing the figure out if his mind and instead holding onto the image of the sunlight, followed them. The soft clinking of the crystals in his pack was soothing, like chimes in the wind.
***
As they traveled, the crystals were fewer. They stopped at the end of the cavern where a huge fallen crystal spanned a chasm so deep, their lights didn’t reach the bottom.
Maggie turned, “Well, nothin’ here. Let’s go back.”
“Wait,” Jade said, “we can’t go back. It will take us days to get back to the Teardrop Chamber. There’s an opening right over there. This crystal’s as good as a bridge. If we can get across this, we can keep going.” Ethan was surprised again at her courage, both to suggest crossing the chasm and to challenge Maggie.
“And how will we do that?” Maggie said. She seemed surprised by the challenge, too.
“We can tie a safety line on and belay while people go across. It’s not that bad. We have plenty of rope.”
Maggie shot a look at Ethan. “All right. He’ll go first. Make sure that crystal doesn’t crack when weight gets put on it.”
Jade rigged up a safety line and climbed back onto one of the huge crystals to test it. Seeing her dangling from the crystal made Ethan feel both more assured and more terrified.
He didn’t want to go first, but his mind kept playing a scenario where he insisted someone else go and then had to watch as the shard of crystal shattered under them and they fell. He couldn’t bear to see that. He’d go.
The ropes cut into his armpits and thighs as he pulled himself up onto the end of the shard. He stood, then felt the dizzying effect of seeing the chasm beneath him. No need to show off. He crawled.
As he moved across the gorge, he tried to keep his eyes off the darkness below him. His heart hammered in his chest. He kept his eyes on the crystal. It made a long shimmering path to the other side of the chasm.
“Stop!”
Panicked shouts from behind him snapped him out of his thoughts. He looked up to see a crystal the size of a hovercab plummeting from above. Dropping to his belly, Ethan reached around the narrow bridge, grasping its sides and clenching his teeth. The falling crystal missed him, but glanced off the bridge a meter in front of him, sending a percussion through it that jarred him to his bones.
The pale chunk of crystal grew small as it fell, and he heard it shatter far below at the chasm’s bottom. Dust rose around him as he clung to the bridge. When he eased onto his hands and knees again he saw, with horror, stress fractures spider-webbing the crystal bridge.
When Ethan made it across, he belayed the line and waited. He had no idea how sound the bridge was after the blow.
Traore came across first, then Brynn. Ethan felt a ripple of relief when each of them stepped off.
Maggie’s crossing was agony to watch. She crawled on her hands and one leg. She reached and pulled, reached and pulled, the broken leg dragging behind her on the broad crystal. As she crawled along the spider-webbed central section, a horrific crack rang through the cavern and she fell onto her stomach as the crystal shifted slightly along a vertical fracture near its midpoint.
She didn’t cry out, just clung there, staring straight down into the chasm for a long moment before rising onto her hands and painstakingly crawling forward again.
When she reached the other side, she let them help her down, then barked, “Get it back over! We need to get them across before the whole thing goes down.”
Traore tied the harness to the return rope and shouted for them to pull it back.
Moments later, singing filled the cave. Ndaiye was singing himself through his fear. It was a new song, not the lullaby of the Teardrop Chamber, but a bolder, more bracing tune. He made it across.
And then came Jade. She scurried like a mouse, moving quickly and lightly, her small frame hunched.
Just as she reached the midpoint, the crystal gave way beneath her. Ethan heard her cry out, and saw her clinging to the crystal as it fell. He jerked back on the line, shouting, “Let go, Jade! Let go!” Her arms opened and the crystal fell away from her.
He felt her hit the side of the chasm with a chilling thud. Her body was limp on the line when they pulled her up, but she was breathing. She had a three-inch gash where her head had struck the rock, and her eyes were unfocused and open.
Ndaiye, whose instinctive medical knowledge had helped them many times already, slipped a pack under her head. He attached the stitching attachment to the Emedic and used the last of its batteries to stitch the gushing wound. Sliding the Emedic aside, he began to tie strips of cloth around the wound. Ethan remembered they were out of bandages and wondered briefly where they’d come from. Then he saw the ragged material peeking out near the neck of Ndaiye’s coveralls. He’d made the makeshift bandages from the soft lining of his own Everwarms.
They sat, watching Jade, for a long time. Ethan felt helpless. Her body moved slightly with her shallow breaths, then she stirred. The crew was around her when she regained consciousness. She seemed disoriented and still sleepy. As they resumed their journey into the cave, Brynn and Ethan walked with her.
Chapter 14
When Aria heard the knock on the door the next morning, she knew it would be Luis. His rich brown eyes were deeply sorrowful and under one arm he carried a small crate from which his handmade pottery peeked from dry moss like shells at the beach.
“Lo siento,” he murmured as he hugged her with his free arm. “I’m so sorry, Aria.” He rolled the ‘r’ in her name slightly.
Aria didn’t respond—couldn’t respond. She stepped back and gestured that he follow her into the kitchen. He set the crate on the table.
“Do they know what happened?” he asked gently.
Aria shook her head. “They think it could have been some kind of electrical impulse that fried the ship’s systems, or even some kind of sabotage. The other corporations are gunning for this land grant, too. The competition is pretty fierce.” She sighed heavily, then looked him in the eye. “They even think it could have been some alien ship, snatching them like the Others of Beta Alora did.” She hated saying it out loud, couldn’t come to believe that Ethan would be subjected to that twice in one lifetime. She shook the thought away. “Either way, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that they’re missing, and nobody is going to be looking for them.”
Luis cursed in his native language. “What? Why wouldn’t they look for them?”
“The search costs too much scrip. Too many resources. They say that the survey crew had beacons with them and if the beacons were completely destroyed, which they’d have to be for them to give off no signal, then there’s no way the crew could have survived the crash. And Luis, I don’t even blame them. I’ve been out there. It’s just jungle as far as you can see. There’s no trace of them.”
“Where are the children?” Luis asked, glancing around. Aria blinked. It was as if her thoughts had frozen.
“They’re with Kaia. I—I need to go out again. I need to look for him.”
Aria sat in a straight-backed kitchen chair. She felt the tears coming. “I can’t leave him out there, Luis. I can’t.”
“We won’t,” he promised. “He didn’t leave us, and we won’t leave him.”
“But I don’t even know where to look,” Aria cried. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“You come with me today,” Luis said, stepping toward the door. “I know some places we can start looking.”
“I have a ship,” she said, desperately, “but I’ve searched from the air and I haven’t found anything. The trees are so dense you can’t see the ground. I keep thinking he could be right underneath us and I still don’t know he’s there.”
Luis shook his head. “We don’t need a ship. I go out into the mountains to get my clay and sand. We will take my boat. You can see a lot more from the river.”
***
Luis’s little boat was finely crafted, made out of scrap pieces from Saras shipping crates. “You made this?” Aria said wonderingly.
Luis nodded. “With a little help from Winn the carpenter and Mr. Saras.” He tried to smile, but the usual brightness was gone from his face. Aria could see he was as worried as she was.
He helped her into the boat and positioned himself at the back with a long pole, which he used to maneuver them away from the bank and out into the river. The broad expanse of the Mirror River stretched around them, mist rising from it in the pale morning sunlight. Aria pulled her jacket more closely around her. She hated thinking of Ethan spending another night out here. He’d only had a light jacket with him and though spring was here, the nights were still cold. Every time the heat pump had come on in the cottage last night, she had felt more acutely the fear that he was somewhere freezing.
She almost wished that she hadn’t left the children at Kaia’s for the night. It had been lonely and she’d barely slept. What if they couldn’t find him? What if he didn’t come home? She pushed the thoughts from her mind. He had to come home. She would not face life on this new planet without him.
Luis poled on, content in the quiet. She didn’t feel awkward asking him to help. He and the other passengers of Ship 12-22 were their family now. This was what family did. There were others who’d shown up this morning, after the news bulletins went out. The Karthans, the Syriskis, the Alberts. Jed Albert had promised he would use his reporting skills to gather information about what had happened. It was the only way he knew to help, and Aria appreciated it, even if she felt annoyed at everyone’s focus on what had happened.
It didn’t matter what had happened. It mattered that they find him and that he come home to her. She tried to focus on the forest around them, going through a list of the landmark names she’d seen on the map: Druid Peak, The Torch, Grand Spire. The names fit the huge towers of rock they were now floating past. They soon passed the named region, though, and the vast unknown range surrounded them.
She watched as the mountains slipped by, one after another, lining up like the teeth of a comb one minute, then jagged and crowded as the thorns on a Minean chrom flower the next as her perspective on the flowing river changed.
She’d know if he was dead, wouldn’t she? Feel it somehow? Her mind flicked past that painful possibility and she wished passionately that she was linked, somehow, to his psyche. She wished she, like Kaia, could sense his mind without him speaking.
Suddenly, Aria sat up. “Turn around!” she said urgently.
Luis looked up in surprise, but didn’t hesitate to follow her command.
“We have to go get Kaia,” Aria explained. “We need to bring her with us!”
***
It took them an hour to retrace their path on the river, and it was midmorning by the time Aria knocked on Kaia’s door. She waited, fairly dancing with impatience, but the door didn’t open. She knocked again. Nothing. Where could she be? Aria pulled out her missive and called her.
When Kaia finally answered, there was the sound of power tools and Polara’s chatter in the background. She was in her shop.
“Kaia, I need you,” Aria choked out.
“I’ll be right there,” Kaia said. When she opened the door, her face was tight with worry.
“What is it?” she asked. “Is there news?”
Polara peeked around Kaia’s legs and Aria choked on the words. Her tears came again. Kaia reached out, hugging Aria fiercely.
“I thought, since you can hear his thoughts sometimes, you could come?”
“Of course.” Resolve replaced the shock in Kaia’s voice. “We’re going to find him,” she said.
It was time for Polara’s school, so they dropped her there and settled Rigel at the Karthan’s. Sonya Karthan murmured words of encouragement and sent them a packed lu
nch to take along, “to keep their strength up.”
Soon the three of them were skimming across the river. Kaia placed an arm around Aria’s shoulders.
“Now we’ll try this, but I may not be able to hear him,” she said, “especially if he is wearing his thought blocker.”
Aria nodded. If he was wearing his now, he would not be broadcasting his thoughts, and he wouldn’t be able to receive Kaia’s. Still, it was worth a try.
Kaia reached up and removed hers. Aria always felt awkward and much more conscious of their mental dialogue when she saw them remove the thought blockers.
She watched Kaia. The older woman’s short gray hair moved in the breeze as she closed her eyes. Aria consciously tried to clear her mind of thoughts so that Kaia could listen for Ethan.
They glided along the river. When Luis brought the boat to shore, they hiked through the karst forest, all in silence. Aria watched the dense woods around them and watched as Kaia listened.
Finally, after hours, Aria saw Kaia’s shoulders slump wearily. She slipped the thought blocker back on, behind her ear.
“I’m sorry,” she said, tears shining in her eyes. “I can’t hear him.”
***
Galo paced around the bottom deck of the Cliprig. There must be a clue. Some indication of how to locate the Vala on this planet. Though he knew their recuperation time meant they had to be here somewhere, they had completely disappeared. Eight times this planet had gone around as he orbited, and still his planetary scans were returning nothing. He had lost two contracts that should have been his because he simply did not have enough ships. His ships couldn’t travel fast enough without the Vala, and he wouldn’t do without his ships. He had not spent his whole life making intergalactic connections and building this fleet one ship at a time to see it all brought to nothing by a sneaky race of fleeing traitors.
Trading across galaxies was tough enough without these kinds of headaches. Between the cost of fuel, the maintenance on the ships, and the cost of tariffs and bribes, Galo was only mildly wealthy, and he wanted to be wildly so. And now half the fleet was at a standstill.