Morning leads us into wilderness. At first she walks up front. But a few minutes in, she falls back so that she’s walking with me. She wears her hair in a dark braid over one shoulder. I can tell her mind is racing: the creased forehead, the restless hands, the clenched jaw.
She’s so tough, but the weight of all of this is threatening to bury her.
We walk together, shoulders touching, like we’re walking home from school on a normal day. But that’s not reality. Reality is a new world. Reality is two moons hanging in the sky, bright and beckoning. Reality is what we’re leaving behind as we move through an empty forest and out into a world that feels full of ghosts.
As we walk, Morning slips each of us a food ration and a new gadget from Babel. She wasn’t supposed to give them to us until we reached our first supply station, but she’s smart enough to see that we need them. Too much time alone with our thoughts could be a bad thing right now. It helps that the scouters are a choice piece of tech.
Black nanoplastic suctions to the skin just above our nyxian language converters. The piece extends over a cheekbone and in front of one eye, ending in a tinted, transparent rectangle. I’ve only ever seen stuff like this in old anime shows. But there’s nothing old about the scouters. A thought from my brain cycles the screen through different settings: night vision, satellite maps, even a point-and-click database for identifying random objects in the environment around us.
Our first taste of something alien comes from the surrounding forest. Azima points out that every tree has a slight lean to it. We realize it’s because every single leaf is reaching out, curling in the air, grasping for the nearest moon.
“That happened to mi abuelita’s houseplant,” Morning says. “But with sunlight.”
It gives the trees an imbalanced look, like they’re being blown off course by a permanent western wind. Our surroundings have been so quiet that the first snap of branches sounds like a gunshot. Morning signals for our formation to tighten as the distant sounds draw closer. Her eyes look dark and serious above her nyxian mask. A huge section of the forest on our right fills with shadowed movement.
“Weapons out,” Morning commands. “Be ready for anything.”
Manipulations fracture the air. I pull my nyxian knuckles on. It takes about thirty seconds for the shaking branches to close on our location. I’m expecting something straight Jurassic, but the movement’s coming from above.
We catch glimpses of flocking, winged creatures. Their swinging limbs aren’t birdlike, though. They’re more like feathered monkeys, sharp-clawed and strangely limber.
My scouter lands on one of them, and the word clipper pings into the corner of my vision. A thought will bring up a prepared description of them, but I’m a little busy staring as an entire pack swings overhead. Morning’s the first to snap into motion.
“Let’s keep moving.”
“Are you sure they’re not a threat?” Jaime asks through gritted teeth.
I glance over. Morning’s eyes are unfocused. She’s clearly reading the description I decided to skip. “It says they like shiny objects, but thankfully, they don’t eat meat.”
As one we start to move. We keep our formation tight as the clippers swing overhead, clearly curious but keeping their distance too. I watch as Morning fishes something out of one pocket. She holds up a quarter, pinched between her thumb and forefinger.
“Should I give them my lucky coin?”
Anton smirks. “Didn’t you read the sign back there? It said no feeding the ducks.”
Morning waves the coin. “But I always ignore those signs.”
Before I can even make fun of her for having a lucky coin, one of the clippers comes sweeping down. I know how quick Morning is—her reactions were godlike in our duels—but the creature’s even faster. She stumbles back empty-handed as the thing bounds off with its prize. Half the pack gives chase, but the rest of them stick to following us.
“Great,” Anton says. “Now the other ducks are hungry.”
A few of the clippers grow bolder. They swing into plain sight, baring filed teeth and beating chests and flashing bright wings. We’re never in actual danger, but Azima has to hide her bracelet, and one clipper makes a swipe for Anton’s watch. We’re actually enjoying the distraction when one of the lead clippers lets out a hiss. The rest of the pack pauses, all dangling from branches, waiting for an order.
We’ve reached the edge of the forest, I realize.
An empty plain waits ahead. And as one the clippers start to vanish. We watch them move back through the forest. Their departure is so quiet I almost feel like we imagined them.
“Right,” Anton whispers. “That’s not scary as hell.”
We all pause on the threshold. The waiting landscape looks just like what we saw in the mining simulations. An oppressive wall of mist in every direction. Grass-knobbed hillsides rising like graves. Little creeks darting this way and that, snake-tonguing through it all.
Morning nods. “Well, we can’t go over it….”
Azima looks up excitedly, like she always does when she’s in on a joke.
“Can’t go under it!” she exclaims.
“Have to go through it,” Jaime finishes.
I smack his shoulder. “You skipped a part.”
He shrugs. “The last part is the only part that matters.”
Anton stares at us in confusion. “What is this? What are you talking about?”
“Going on a Bear Hunt,” Morning answers. “You never read that book?”
Anton shakes his head. “We had more knives than books.”
Morning rolls her eyes. “Great. We’ll let the one with the knives go first.”
“With pleasure,” Anton replies.
He starts into the mist and we follow. The deeper we go, the more otherworldly Eden becomes. Even on the rare trip to Lake Michigan, I’ve never seen a place so empty of anything human. The grass crunches stiffly beneath our feet. Every now and again, ash from our heavier steps puffs out like smoke. The hills boast only a few plants, and all of them have the same skyward reach as the forest, like hands folded in prayer to the distant moons.
It looks like the moons have shifted in the sky, like they’re on the verge of collision. I watch them for a while before realizing that quiet has snaked its way back through the group. I glance back and find Morning trailing the group silently.
“Hey, you want in on a little bet?” I ask. “Just to keep things interesting.”
She cocks her head curiously. “What’s the bet?”
“Our first alien sighting.”
Anton laughs from up front. “Alien sighting? We’re the aliens.”
Morning notices what I notice. No one in the group has their head bowed now. Even Azima and Jaime are glancing over, wondering about the Adamites and when we’ll see them and what they’ll be like. It won’t erase what Babel did to us, but it’s a step in the right direction.
She nods at me. “I’ll take that bet. But you remember I don’t lose, right?”
“She really doesn’t,” Anton says grumpily.
I look around, trying to involve everyone. “Any takers?”
Everyone’s in. Azima goes long shot, guessing it will be a full week before we see an Adamite. Anton throws his dart down on three days, and Jaime snags the hour window after his. Everyone laughs when I take the hour right before Anton’s choice, squeezing the timing of his guess airtight. The Russian laughs loudest. “You’re a pair of pisspots.”
Morning goes last. “A day and a half from now,” she says. “Early. A few hours after dawn.”
The way she says the words makes them sound like prophecy. Anton reaches over and taps her scouter. “You have a captain setting, don’t you? Some kind of radar for Adamites?”
“I don’t cheat. I just win.”
Anton shakes his
head. My mind flashes back to Morning’s score, nearly double what Longwei posted aboard Genesis 11. All we knew about their crew in the beginning was what we saw on those scoreboards. It’s easy sometimes to forget that they came through space on an entirely different spaceship, manned by different astronauts, with different highs and lows. Did Morning ever get put into the med unit like me? Did Anton ever feel like an outcast? How did they become such a tight-knit family? It all has me curious.
“You didn’t really win every competition,” I say. “That’s not possible.”
Morning throws me a raised eyebrow. “I lost a handful of times in the Rabbit Room. Omar beat me twice in the pit. Oh, and one time this punk tackled me off a boat and into the water.”
Azima glances back. “Emmett’s leap! That was amazing.”
Morning winks. “Doesn’t make him less of a punk.”
We keep walking. Whatever spooked the clippers hasn’t made an appearance. Our maps show we’re halfway across a basin that’s marked by crooked creeks. I’m still not sure I could sleep, but Morning’s plan is working. I’m getting tired, body-worn. If I can reach a point of complete physical exhaustion, maybe my body will turn my brain off for me.
I want to file the whole day under N for Never Again.
Anton clears his throat. “Azima, I hope you won’t think me forward, but you have a great deal of distracting black marks on your…suit.”
Azima glances back, cursing. “It’s from my landing. One of the tanks busted.”
Anton’s mask hides his grin, but I can still hear it in his voice.
“Just let me know if you need my assistance.”
She strides off to the nearest creek and turns back to throw a rude gesture at Anton before leaning down to wash the grime away. We all hear the faint, agitated moan. Before I can figure out what it is or where it’s coming from, everything around Azima distorts.
The air looks like a corrupted file, a ring of broken pixels. The water splashes upward and four birds take flight. They’re sleek things, no bigger than hawks, and their wings shiver black to white and back again. They were cloaking, I realize. Floating invisibly on the water.
Azima looks back, eyes wide and bright above her nyxian mask.
We all start to laugh at her, but the laughter dies when a grating shriek sounds above us. Our eyes swing up to the birds. Their formation breaks. But before they can scatter, it comes spiraling out of the mist. A pair of massive black wings snaps wide. A grotesquely human-looking body contorts, and the creature somehow snatches all four fleeing birds midflight. My scouter throws the name eradakan into the corner of my vision.
Wingbeats stir the hip-high grass. The eradakan hovers above, opening a gigantic beak and letting loose another deep-throated screech. I shiver as it looks down at us with all four of its eyes. Two set into an arrow-shaped head and two center-set in the rippling muscles of its chest. Eyes wide, the creature slams the first bird down its gullet and we hear the bones crunch.
“Let’s go,” Morning hisses. “Nyxia at the ready. Azima with Jaime.”
We’re all still backpedaling when the eradakan lands. The creature’s attention dances between us and its current meal, like it’s considering whether or not we’re worth the chase.
Before we can fully turn, the landscape behind it starts to move.
Dark shoulders slouch and roll. I stumble as what I thought was a hill glides with deadly grace over the plain. The name century pings in my scouter. Moonlight avoids the creature’s scaled back. It prowls behind the distracted eradakan. I’ve never seen anything so big move with such terrifying silence. In old movies, creatures that size shake the ground to announce their coming. Buildings and cars get destroyed; cities burn.
The silence defies some natural law. We all watch the century rise to its full height and descend on the distracted eradakan. I catch a moonlit glimpse of rows and rows of teeth before the predator drags its new meal back into shadow.
Dying shrieks chase us through the hills. We don’t need Morning to sound the command. Basic instinct creates as much distance as possible between us and the feeding ground. I shake my head at Babel’s name for this world: Eden. If this is the same mythical garden, I don’t think Adam and Eve were cast out. More likely they were eaten first.
Distance eases my nerves. Morning keeps us moving at a good clip for about thirty minutes. No one tells jokes. Sweat runs down our faces, but we all know this is nothing compared to the Rabbit Room. In the lighter gravity, I could run for days.
When Morning finally pauses, it isn’t for rest; it’s to listen.
We each hunch down onto a knee, breathing quietly. I glance over at Jaime. He’s wheezing, and his wound’s ripped open a little. The blood’s soaking through his uniform. Azima holds a rag to the thing, trying to stop it. This isn’t exactly the welcome we expected on Eden.
No one speaks as Morning listens for a few minutes, then gets us moving again. We run together. We should have known Eden would be dangerous after Babel’s training. The Rabbit Room and the pit should have prepared us. Running and fighting and fending off the wild—those weren’t random tests. But I don’t remember anything this big and deadly-looking in the simulators.
It’s almost dawn. One of the two moons is starting to fade. The other one—with its bright red scars—still hangs stubbornly in the sky. Morning orders us to walk. Our pace has left us just a few kilometers south of the rendezvous point. It’s hard to tell through the fog, but either a forest or a swamp separates us from the marked location.
Jaime’s the first one to break the silence of our heavy breathing. I think it’s a good sign he’s able to speak at all. “Are we really not going to talk about what happened back there? That was like live footage of a Planet Eden episode.”
“I have a feeling we’re not at the top of this food chain,” Anton adds.
Jaime nods. “That first thing looked like a dragon.”
“No scales,” Morning says, like she’s a dragon expert. I shoot her a funny look, and she shrugs into laughter. “I don’t know. I’m just saying, it didn’t have scales.”
“It didn’t breathe fire, either,” I say. “Dead giveaway.”
Morning laughs. Jaime looks back long enough to make himself wince.
“The other one,” he grunts. “The century. That was the biggest animal I’ve ever seen.”
Anton smirks back at him. “Where are you from?”
“Switzerland.”
The Russian wags a knowing finger. “In Russia we’re accustomed to monsters. The seas are full of leviathans. They’re all twice the size of that thing, and they eat the children who behave badly.”
That has Azima raising one eyebrow. “How are you still here, then?”
Anton slides a knife up from his hip. Light flashes across nyxian black before he tucks it back in. “A sharp knife is a boy’s best friend.”
I think about the century’s massive, rolling shoulders.
“You’re going to need a bigger knife.”
Ahead, sunrise breaks over the plains. Just an orange streak that blossoms and scatters the mist. I was expecting something dramatic, but it looks like any sunrise over any forest on earth.
As the fog clears, we get our first glimpse of the next valley. There’s another forest on our left. The trees are thick, wide trunks pressed together at chaotic angles. Moss hangs between them like party lights. Our eyes are drawn beyond, though. Sunlight catches metal and glass.
Buildings.
“We’re here,” Morning says. “Foundry.”
It’s like Babel didn’t want to be outdone. It’s not enough to show us the miracle of another world, not enough to let us witness dueling moons and deadly creatures. Babel’s compound is a reminder: they intend to carve their initials on this world one way or another.
A pair of towers command the roll
ing hills. Diamond-shaped windows spiral up the nearest and tallest building. The panes are checkered, a pattern that exchanges glass for moss all the way up. The tower has to be at least four stories tall. I notice that the top of it sheers diagonally. The effect makes the building look unfinished, like a false and majestic ruin.
The second building is a more proper silo. It reminds me of the solar stacks on the outskirts of Detroit. A basic gray cylinder with the top carved like a massive funnel.
There’s clearly an underground too. I see reinforced doors plugged into hillsides and half-buried greenhouses flanking the natural creeks. Morning’s title for the place is confirmed on my scouter as the word Foundry blinks into one corner.
“Hell of a supply center,” I say.
Azima points. “Look how extensive the gardens are. It reminds me of Nairobi. Before I left, they’d started major conversions of all the skyscrapers, sustainable gardens in every nook and cranny. Politicians wanted it to be the next landscape city.”
“Well,” Anton says, “I am very proud of our employers for being so conscientious about their role in sustaining Eden’s plant life. I’ve no doubt their intentions in making this a better world are entirely selfless.”
Morning rises from a crouch. “Who’s running the place?”
“That would be me.”
The proximity of the voice makes our whole group jump. Jaime stumbles back into Azima. Anton’s knife just about teleports into his right hand. Morning is even quicker, both hatchets out as she places herself between us and the interloper. A response catches in her throat, though. She looks as shocked as we do, because the speaker is our age.
A year or two older, maybe, but young. He has blond hair, pale skin, and a few centimeters on me. The height’s deceptive, though, because he looks thin enough that a good breeze might take him with it. The dark suit he’s wearing displays the Babel towers on one sleeve. He has both slender hands held up innocently, but the effect isn’t helped by the pistol holstered at his hip.
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