by Megan Crewe
“There,” he says.
We edge around the back of a house, and pause at a small wooden door in what appears to be a shed. The knob looks ordinary to me, but Win does something with it, pushes one spot and tugs another, spins it and jiggles it, and somewhere inside a bolt grates open. He shoves the door wide and lurches away from me, down the flight of stone steps on the other side.
“Close it behind you,” he mumbles. I do, bracing myself for the darkness, but the instant the door clicks into the frame, the deadbolt shoots over of its own accord, and a faint streak of artificial light flickers down the slanted ceiling.
Win’s already made it to the bottom of the stairs, where there’s another door almost identical to the one above. Only this one doesn’t even have a knob. He slides his fingernails along an indent in the middle, and flips open a thin flap in the wood to reveal a black metallic square. Clearing his throat, he presses his thumb against the square.
At the short phrase he says in his alien language, the door emits a quiet hum, followed by a sound like a sigh. Then it glides back into the wall. Win staggers on into the room on the other side.
I hurry after him. The door whispers shut behind me, so swiftly I flinch. The second it’s closed, three bright lights blaze on above our heads.
The room is smaller than my bedroom at home, and windowless, with a set of narrow bunks built into one wall, two wide cabinets on the other, and a spindly chair mounted on a large silvery cube at the opposite end from the door. Even though the place feels unlived in, there’s a fresh tang in the air and no hint of dust. Everything—the seamless mattresses on the bunks, the chair, the tiled floor—has the hard sheen of metal in muted shades of gray, peach, and brown. But the surface beneath my feet gives like linoleum, and when I set my hand on the edge of the upper bunk, the frame offers the warmer, slightly gritty texture of plastic, as if it’s some synthesis of steel and polyethylene. Which I guess it could be.
Win motions vaguely around him. “Safe house. Only for total, absolute emergencies. There’s supplies. Take anything you want.” He limps over to the chair and sinks into it with a wince, reaching behind its arm.
There must be a control there I can’t see, because a moment later a shimmering glow flows out of the block at the chair’s base, cocooning him. It seems to condense at the spot above his wound. He peels away the cloak with a shudder and tips his head back, closing his eyes.
Through the ragged gap in Win’s shirt, I can see the rough edges of broken skin, the blood seeping out around the jutting chunk of glass. His body looks so fragile. Fragile, and human. Human skin ripped back from human flesh, human blood coursing from human veins.
Colonists. Ancestors.
The memory of the conversation I overheard weighs on me. But I can’t ask him about it now.
As the glow continues to pool over the wound, the slice of glass starts to crumble and then wisp away, as if the light is somehow consuming it. Win’s blood bubbles up more quickly as the obstruction dissolves. I step toward him, afraid something’s gone wrong, but a second later the bleeding slows. His skin creeps over the exposed flesh. The glow intensifies, so bright it stings my eyes. When I look again, as the light dims, Win’s abdomen is smooth and whole again. Even the blood on his clothes has been whisked away.
Win keeps lying there, completely still and silent except for the stutter of his breath in his chest. The glow wavers and swirls, I suppose healing whatever was injured on the inside. I sit down on the lower bunk, watching. The minutes drag on.
What if he was too hurt for it to completely heal him? My fingers itch, and I reach into my purse for my bracelet, but the slick surface of the beads gives me none of their usual reassurance. To distract myself, I get up and walk over to the cabinets.
The first door opens to reveal six shelves, two stacked with bottles like the ones Win was carrying in his satchel, but tinted green instead of blue, and the others holding boxes stuffed with sandwich-size packets that feel waxy to my touch. Win said I could take anything, but who knows what’s in there?
The bottles seem safer. I pick up one and twist the lid open. The liquid fizzes lightly as I tip the bottle to my lips. I sip tentatively, then take a few deeper gulps, washing the traces of soured pecan pie from my mouth. The liquid has the same sweet taste as the blue stuff, but a prickle of some sort of spice as well—like cinnamon, but not quite.
I lower the bottle, feeling my heartbeat slow, my muscles relaxing. Maybe there’s something in there other than water and flavoring.
My newfound calm doesn’t stop me from jumping at an unexpected rustle. “Hey,” Win says softly, straightening up in the chair. The glow has dissipated. He twists at the torso, and then leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees, his body tilted a little to the left as if his right side is still tender. Then he sneezes, twice.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says. His voice is faint, but nowhere near as wretched as when he was bleeding all over himself. “You know, I think somewhere in all this Traveling, I caught a—what do you call it?—a cold.” He sniffs experimentally, and chuckles. “We’re inoculated against everything serious, but even we haven’t come up with a proper vaccine for an ever-mutating virus. The one thing the med seat can’t cure.”
“Not much good then, is it?” I say without thinking, and Win outright laughs. He pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Well, it fixed everything else.” He tips a little farther, and then pushes himself upright, his eyes suddenly intense. “You talked to your friend? Did she help you figure out Jeanant’s message?”
After what he just went through, he still cares more about the mission than anything else. He’d rather die than fail, I think with a twinge. Even though it’s my planet we’re saving. He’s risked so much more than I have, and I was ready to step away.
“There was a battle,” I say. “Between the American settlers and the Natives, near a British fort, somewhere a bunch of trees had fallen because of a storm. The name probably has something to do with that—with fallen trees.”
“That’s enough,” he says, a smile crossing his face. “And Jeanant said he’d leave the last two parts for us there?”
“He didn’t really have time to go into detail,” I say. “But when I asked him to give me everything we needed, he told me to go there.”
“That must be his plan, then. Hand me the cloth? I should be able to find the exact date easily now.”
I pick up the cloth where I left it in a heap on the bunk. When I turn, Win bends his head to cough, looking so tired despite his relief that I’m afraid he’s going to topple off the chair. So . . . vulnerable.
So human.
I stare at his face. Following the shape of his jaw, the angle of his brow, the curve of his cheeks. I never questioned it, just assumed it was a disguise. But he never looked fake, or felt it, or—in that moment, in the rain—tasted anything but real.
Win glances up at me. His forehead furrows when he catches my stare. Exactly as a human’s would.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” I say.
The furrow deepens. “What?”
“I heard your conversation with Kurra,” I say. “Most of it, anyway. About . . . colonists from Kemya coming to Earth?”
“Ah,” he says, and his head droops again. “I forgot you didn’t know.”
My fingers tense around the time cloth. “Well, I don’t,” I say. “You didn’t tell me.”
“You seemed so disoriented already, when I was explaining why we came here,” he says. “And it doesn’t really matter. When the time field’s destroyed, when Kemya has no business with Earth anymore, it may as well not be true. We’ll be two separate peoples.”
“But we’re not,” I say. “We’re— You’re—”
He nods, with a shamed curl to his lips. Every time he forms another distinctly human expression, my aware
ness of it prickles deeper.
“The story I told you before was true,” he says. “Except there wasn’t any fully sentient species on Earth when we discovered it. All the plants and animals you know, yes, some quite similar to what we had on Kemya, but . . . no people. And we needed people down here to participate in the experiments, to test our survival strategies, to make sure that even if all the tech we had stopped functioning before the rest of us landed, or if we crashed, or anything else that could go wrong, we could still survive. To try out different techniques and different situations, to see what worked best. It was going to be our only chance to do things right . . .”
“So you sent some of your people down.”
“A few hundred Kemyates volunteered. I don’t know how much they were told—it’s usually glossed over when we talk about our history; everything’s about their valiant sacrifice. You heard the way Kurra thinks about it. They were sent down with no tech, no way of communicating with the scientists above, prepared to face the worst and let their experiences guide the rest of us. But they must have assumed that after a decade or two, everyone else would follow. Once we were confident we could handle any problem the planet presented.”
He pauses, his expression miserable. I know the rest: “But then your experiments started screwing up Earth, and it wasn’t good enough for the rest of you anymore.” I should be horrified, but mostly I’m numb. The idea refuses to sink in.
“And the people we’d left down here, they had children, and their children had children, and they slowly lost the story of where they came from,” Win says. “You can see echoes of it, in some of the myths . . .”
We’re all just aliens who forgot we were aliens. I start to laugh, but it catches in my throat. No. Not aliens. Humans who didn’t know we didn’t belong on Earth.
“There are fossils,” I say. “I know archeologists have found— There are remains in our evolutionary tree, going back millions of years.”
Win shrugs. “Faked. Like I said, there was already some similarity between the species here and what we had on Kemya. The scientists planted missing links when they noticed you were looking. To see how you’d react. To erase any lingering doubt. I’m not totally sure.”
“But . . .”
What argument do I have that defeats the vast reach of Kemyate technology? These are people who can leap through time, travel across galaxies, heal a near-fatal wound with light. Why shouldn’t they be able to make a skull read as millions of years old?
“I know it’s awful,” Win says. “I can’t even explain how everyone just kept going along with it for so long . . .”
“You don’t really think we’re part of your people anymore,” I say. The way he talked to me when we first met. The way Kurra talked about us. Shadows. “Because we’ve been fading away, just like our history. Because of what you’ve done to us.”
What they did to us not as aliens looking down on some less advanced species, the way Earth scientists poke at rats, which was horrible enough. They conducted their experiments and played with our lives as one set of human beings manipulating another. The figures I’ve imagined up there, staring down into their goldfish bowl from orbit, think and feel almost the same ways I do. And somehow they could do this.
“It’s easy to see other people as hardly people at all when you’re watching them from a distance,” Win says quietly. “When they live so differently from you. When you’ve been trained since you were born to think of them as something apart. Earthlings do it all the time, to each other. How many of your wars have been fought because one group of you decided you had the right to conquer another group, to enslave them or slaughter them?”
How many of those wars were started because of Kemyate interference? I want to ask. But the question dies before I open my mouth. I watched the revolutionaries in France, the soldiers in Vietnam, the boys lording their power over Noam and Darryl in the marsh. Humans have always known how to hurt each other. Maybe we’ve been nudged in new directions from time to time, but no one forced war or oppression, genocide or terrorism, on us.
“A few of us are trying to make it right, at least,” Win adds. He rubs his face.
“Is it really going to be all right?” I ask. “You’ll blow up the time field generator, and then what—find some shiny new planet to explore while we’re left here?” I grope for a concept that could apply—restitution? Compensation?—but the scope of the injury done to this world is so immense it’s hard to comprehend. I’m scared to ask how long it’ll take for us to bounce back. Thousands more years?
Win’s lifted his gaze. “I just know that it’ll be better for you if the time field is gone. Does it make that much of a difference that we’re not as alien as I let you think? Would you have decided to stay home and not help if you’d known?”
It makes a huge difference. Just the sight of him strikes me with a jab of betrayal. Because he’s one of them, part of this setup . . . And not. It all started so long ago. He didn’t have any more choice in how his people first came to Earth than I did.
He’s right too. I’d still be here. The Traveling, the great experiment, it still needs to be stopped.
“Did you want to stay home?” Win says suddenly. “There wasn’t really a chance to ask when you came to meet me, back in your city. I can still bring you back, now that I’m . . .” He gestures at his healed side.
“No,” I say. “I decided I want to keep going. To see this through to the end, to make sure you get all the pieces of the weapon. So I know, for sure, it’s over.” I pause. “And I would still have been here, even if I’d known. I just wish you’d told me before.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I— I think it’s mostly that I didn’t want to see you look at me the way you are right now.”
I bite my lip, closing my eyes. The shock keeps reverberating through me. I’ve got nothing left to say.
The silence stretches between us. There’s a whisper of fabric as Win eases out of the chair.
“You’re hurt,” he says. “Your forehead . . .”
I reach up, finding the spot where the shattered office light hit me. A sticky line of congealing blood just below my hairline. It stings at my touch. I’d been so worried about Win as we fled that I hardly noticed it before.
“I’m sorry,” Win says again, his voice dropping. “I thought I could avoid the Enforcers completely if I moved fast enough—I didn’t mean to lead you straight to them. I would have gone back for you, if you hadn’t found the trail I left.”
“What were you thinking?” I say, abruptly angry. “They were shooting at you—you were bleeding to death—you should have gotten out of there.”
The look he gives me is bewildered, as if I’ve suggested he should have scared the Enforcers away by dancing a jig. “You were there. I didn’t know how close you were. I didn’t know how quickly they’d leave if I did. I couldn’t just abandon you there with them.”
Except he could have. It would have been easy. But his regret over my little scratch is so palpable, I can’t bring myself to say that.
“I’m fine,” I say instead. “It’s nothing.”
“I have another . . .” He bends down, lurches, and grabs his satchel. With a shaky hand, he fishes out a patch like the one he gave me for my ankle. “It’s my last one,” he says apologetically, “but there’s probably a few more here I can take, just in case.” He raises his hands toward me, and then hesitates. “Can I?”
I nod and dip my head, tugging my hair aside. My words from earlier echo in my memory: Don’t ever touch me again. I shut my eyes as his fingers brush across my temple, patting the bandage in place. The contact is actually soothing. A more recent image rises up: Win stalking through the maze of desks and dividers, trying to find me before Kurra did, so focused on my safety he didn’t even notice how deeply the glass had cut him. He didn’t even know if I’d found his answer. But he’d promi
sed to wait. He’d promised not to leave without me.
“Thank you,” I say as he lowers his hands.
He gives me a tight little smile. Then he sneezes, and stumbles, and I have to catch his shoulder to stop him from falling over.
“You’re supposed to rest, after the med seat,” he mutters. “I’ll be all right, though. But the cloth . . . If we’re going to Travel again, we should charge it.”
He takes the time cloth from me and crouches down, rocking on his feet. A tiny glinting string unhooks from a spot near the top of the arch. He pokes it into a similarly sized hole by the base of the cabinet. Then, as if he can’t help it, he leans forward so his head rests against the cabinet door, holding him up.
“It’ll take hours to charge fully. But we just need a bit. And then we can go.”
“Then you should rest,” I say. “You obviously need it. Do you think— Are we really safe here?”
“For a while,” he says. “This is a general safe house, but Thlo was able to covertly set aside a period of time, and Isis put another scrambling code on it . . . But we know now the Enforcers can break those with enough effort. I’ll just rest a little.” He wavers to his feet and makes it the few steps to the bunks before collapsing on the lower one.
“As much as you need,” I say. It took the Enforcers days to start tracing Win, after he caught their attention stopping the courthouse bombing. Surely we have at least a few hours here. I sink down on the floor beside the bed, propping myself against the side of the bunks. “You sleep. I’ll watch for . . . for anything wrong.”
He nods against the mattress. His hand shifts toward me restlessly.
“Skylar,” he mumbles. “You’re not just a tool.”
I glance over at him, but his eyes are shut. A slow breath rasps over his parted lips. He looks so deeply asleep I wonder if I just imagined him speaking. I have the urge to take that outstretched hand and squeeze it, but that might wake him up.