The Stars Now Unclaimed

by Drew Williams

  She had actually thought about this. She’d applied typical teenage logic, convoluted and self-serving, but at least it hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment decision to hop on board Schaz and take a joyride to what would soon be the middle of a war zone. She glared up at me, having worked herself up into a fit of anger, like she was daring me to bundle her back on Schaz and send her back to her minders on Sanctum with a sign taped to her back: “Found wandering the warzone. Please be sure to latch her gate tighter from now on.”

  I sighed. I’d wondered often in the last century, especially in moments like this: of all the Justified agents Criat could have picked, why had he chosen me to mind teenagers? What about me said that was a good idea? “Maternal” was never a word that had been used to describe me, ever.

  Still, with Esa glaring up at me, simultaneously begging and daring me to send her away from the fight, I couldn’t help but see something in the tilt of her chin, in the furious glint in her eyes: something very much like myself.

  “Fine.” I sighed. “But if you get yourself killed, you’re not allowed to blame me.”

  CHAPTER 24

  No,” the Preacher said flatly. I hadn’t even heard her approach; she was surprisingly stealthy for a person made entirely out of metal. “Esa, you need to get back to Sanctum. Now.”

  Esa shrugged, holding fast in the face of the Preacher’s wrath. “Die here, die in Sanctum, become a slave to the Pax. One’s much the same as the other, isn’t it?”

  “This isn’t funny; this isn’t a game, and you’ve been through too much to act this childish.”

  “Childish?” Esa’s anger had returned, far stronger. “I’m about to die—everyone in this system is about to die—and you think wanting to fight to stop that is childish?”

  “You can’t help.”

  “I can, actually. She taught me how to work Scheherazade’s gunnery station.” She thrust a finger at me, dragging me back into the middle of this fight. “I can help plenty. Even on the ground, I’ve got my powers.”

  “That’s not enough, and you—”

  “Then what is? What the hell is, Preacher? Ever since the Pax attacked I’ve been dragged around by my ears into one shit situation after another. Is it so goddamned wrong for me to want some control over my own life? Just a little? The Pax want to kill me, the Pax want to make me a slave? Fine. Fucking fine. Just let them try. I’ll rip their goddamned tits off when they do, and I’m not waiting for them to get close. I’m not cowering in some bunker back in Sanctum, not when I can fight back here, now, not when I can stop them before they get to those other kids, the ones who are too scared to fight.” She was actually shuddering with the weight of her own labored breathing now that her shouted speech was out of her. I doubt, if someone had just asked her before that moment, if she could have even vocalized how she felt about some of that. Sometimes it takes pressure to show us how we really feel, who we really are.

  I’d always had Esa’s measure, from the moment I saw her saving children from a collapsing building; now she did too.

  “I think that’s settled, Preacher,” I stepped in. “She says she wants to stay, she stays. She says she wants to fight—”

  “You are in no condition to make decisions for her.” The Preacher glared at me. “You’ve known her for all of, what, two weeks? Beyond that, you’re injured, you’re a zealot, and you’re half-delirious from lack of sleep.”

  It had been two days since I’d slept; that was true enough. The rest I took a fair amount of offense to. “I’m twice the fighter injured than most people you’ve ever known,” I replied, drawing myself up to my full height, which was not inconsiderable. “As far as my being a zealot is concerned, maybe I am—maybe believing that something good can come out of all the shit in the galaxy makes me one—but zealots are the ones standing between her and the Pax right now; zealots are the ones fighting to protect you, too. And as far as the other thing is concerned—”

  “She’s actually pretty right about that,” Javier added mildly. “The sleep thing, I mean.”

  “Stay the fuck out of this,” I growled at him.

  “I’m not agreeing with her—if Esa wants to fight, she should fight; it’s her decision—I’m just saying she’s not wrong about the sleep bit.”

  “Thank you, Javier,” Esa said quietly, not taking her eyes off the Preacher.

  “No problem. I’m all about free will.”

  “You can’t risk taking her into a battle in the void.” The Preacher shook her head. “You won’t. You know how much she means to the Justified, how rare her gift is. You know—”

  “What the hell is this about?” I asked her, breaking into her argument. I wasn’t trying to disrupt her; I was actually curious. Too many things were starting to line up not to make me wonder what the missing variable in the equation was. “You traveled halfway across the galaxy with her, with us, and it wasn’t just to get off her homeworld—I have a feeling you could have done that any time you wanted. You faced down a death sentence from the Justified to stay close to her, agreed to come with me to clear the Reint. It all has to do with her, I’m guessing: it sure as hell wasn’t for me. So what the hell is this about?”

  “She’s important.”

  “She’s a person.” Javier again.

  “She’s a child who can’t be trusted with—”

  “You were always there.” Esa, watching the Preacher carefully now. “Watching over the orphanage, watching over me. The other kids—the older kids, the ones who were my age then when I was just little—said you hadn’t always done that, that you just showed up one day, founded your church. Shortly after I was left at the orphanage. But you were always around, always—”

  “Oh, fuck,” I sighed. It came together with an almost audible “click” in my mind. “You dropped her off, didn’t you? At the orphanage, hell, maybe even on that world. You’ve been trying to keep her safe, not just for the last couple weeks, but for the last decade and a half. You’ve been guarding her.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Did you know my parents?” The question was small, and tremulous, and heartbreaking. Esa just watched the Preacher, suddenly aware that answers to questions she’d had all her life might have been just a few streets down from the orphanage entrance doors, all that time. “Did you—”

  “I did,” the Preacher sighed, all the fight running out of her in the face of that one question. “I did.”

  CHAPTER 25

  We all just stared at the Barious for a moment. In truth, it shouldn’t have mattered much—the Pax were still coming, the guns still needed to be brought back online, and somewhere out beyond the edges of the galaxy, the pulse was preparing for its return, ready to render everything we did moot, to push every single world even further backward in time, a hunger that wouldn’t be satisfied until we were all huddled in caves and desperately sharpening sticks to fend off our neighbors who wanted to kill us for having the temerity to be huddled in a better cave than they were. In that moment, though, it all felt very far away.

  I’d felt bad for keeping secrets from Esa—who the Justified were, what my name was, what Sanctum really was—and I’d only known her for a few weeks. The Preacher had been around her entire life, had held the answers to the questions that helped define her, and had kept silent.

  For a second, I thought Esa was going to charge the Barious, to flail at her with her fists. The pain that passed across her face was a desperate kind, almost a purity to it, it was so raw. As much anguish as anger. I knew what she was feeling, what she was thinking: that everyone betrayed her. That everyone lied.

  “Tell me,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “Tell me everything.”

  “It’s not—”

  “It matters!” the girl shouted, almost screamed, the words echoing in the clear mountain air as if someone had rung a bell. “It matters.”

  The Preacher sighed, and sat on a low rock wall, her back to the sweeping vista of the mountains, staring at Esa
, yes, but also beyond her, staring into the past. “Your parents were scientists,” she said. “They were . . . helping us. They were my friends. They—”

  “Us?” Javier asked quietly.

  “A Barious sect,” I filled in, the pieces slowly coming together in my mind. “Studying the pulse. Doing the same work we’ve been doing, just without as many of the pieces. Trying to figure out how to reverse it, so that they—”

  “You did this to us,” the Preacher said to me. “Don’t think I’ll forget.”

  “Not important right now,” Esa reminded her, her gaze still fixed on the Preacher, pinning her in place. “My parents. Talk.”

  “I never would have . . . I didn’t know that your mother was pregnant,” the Preacher told her, trying to explain, trying to make her side clear. “If I had . . . I was in charge of the facility, of the laboratory. Not a scientist myself, not really, but an . . . administrator. We were studying pulse radiation, trying to figure out how it did what it did, the selections it made—”

  “And why it affected children in the womb,” I added.

  “And that,” she agreed. “There was . . . an experiment proposed. By your parents. It doesn’t . . . it’s not important why, what they were trying to achieve. Something went wrong. The radiation multiplied exponentially. Swept through the facility, the lab, half of the station, in incredibly concentrated doses—passed through every safeguard we had like they weren’t even there.”

  “You’re saying it was their fault.” Esa sounded like she was choking as she spoke.

  “That’s not—it could have been a thousand things that went wrong. Any thousand things. Believe me. I’ve been over that day . . . so many times. Reviewing it in my memory banks. Asking if there was something I could have done, if there was anything . . . anything anyone could have done, to change the outcome. In hindsight, there was, of course, a hundred different decisions, a thousand, that if anyone had acted just slightly differently, had known what was coming, could have prevented it.”

  “But you can’t change the past,” Javier said.

  “No. You can’t. You can only go forward.” The Preacher looked at Esa—really looked at her, for the first time since starting her story. “Pulse radiation can be lethal. It’s benign in smaller doses, when spread across entire worlds, but concentrated like that . . . the Barious in the facility were unaffected, of course. We always are. But the others, many of those who were helping us, those that . . . those like your parents.”

  “It killed them.” Esa said the words flatly, her voice empty of anything.

  “Not right away.”

  “She doesn’t need to hear this,” Javier warned the Preacher.

  “I do.” Esa turned to glare at him.

  “You need to hear what happened.” Javier shook his head. “You don’t . . . there are some things you don’t want to learn. Trust me.”

  The Preacher sighed, looking away again. “We found out that your mother was pregnant while we were treating her and your father for their exposure. She wasn’t able . . . she begged us. To keep her alive, long enough to . . . long enough. She didn’t manage to carry you to term, but she managed long enough that we could . . . that we . . .”

  “Javier’s right,” I said. “We all understand what happened next. Move on.” Esa didn’t need to hear that she’d been cut out from her mother’s dying body, kept alive by machines. Maybe she understood that much anyway, maybe she didn’t, but she didn’t need to hear it said.

  “We knew she—you—would be affected by the radiation, just like all the other children conceived or carried when the radiation hit natural spikes. We theorized that, because the radiation had been so much more concentrated, she would . . .”

  “That’s why her gifts are so strong,” I murmured, mostly to myself. “All the other children are exposed during flare-ups that happen naturally. She was at the heart of an artificial storm, a concentration a thousand times more than that which leads to other gifted children.”

  “Yes.” The Preacher nodded.

  “And then?” Esa asked, willing herself to hear all of it, now, right now, to understand that which had been kept from her for so long. “You . . . kept me alive. Why the orphanage? Why that world?”

  “You must have had other facilities, other places you could take her to,” Javier said. “Why not raise her there? You must have wanted to—”

  “Because I didn’t want to,” the Preacher told him. “I didn’t want her raised to be . . . I didn’t want her to be a lab rat for her whole childhood, studied, tested. I know what I am, what the Barious are. Our programming is dictated first and foremost by logic. Regardless of the circumstances that made her . . . special, regardless of the guilt I felt for the accident that claimed her parents, if I allowed the other Barious in my group to choose the best possible action, they would choose one that would sentence her to a life as a . . . specimen, to be studied. I owed her more than that. I owed her parents more than that.”

  “So you took her. And you ran.”

  She nodded. “I did.”

  “Someplace you didn’t think the other Barious would follow you,” Javier continued. “A world they’d never consider looking twice at, because they’d never expect you to be willing to forego the tools and technology you’d had at your disposal at your own facility.”

  “The accident . . . changed me. Not the radiation, I mean, not that, but . . . my guilt. My grief. My culpability, in what had happened. For the other Barious in my . . . group—”

  “Sect,” I interrupted. “You can say it was a sect. They all are.”

  “We don’t use that word.” She glared at me.

  I shrugged. “You can pretend you’re better, but you’re not,” I replied. “That’s what it was.”

  “They wouldn’t have understood.” She kept staring at me for a moment, even as she returned to her tale of Esa’s childhood. “So, yes. I took her, as soon as she was old enough to . . . but still just an infant. I found a world that had been pushed far back enough on the technology tree that the rest of my . . . sect . . . wouldn’t come looking, but was relatively peaceful, relatively secure.”

  “But why the orphanage?” Esa whispered.

  “You weren’t unhappy there,” the Preacher said, less a statement, almost a question. “You weren’t—”

  “I was desperate to know the things you knew,” Esa told her, the sadness in her voice like a living thing, a wounded animal locked in her breast like a cage. “I was desperate for a . . . family. Like other people had. You could have been my family. You could have been—”

  “I couldn’t.” She shook her head. “Even if the people of that world wouldn’t have thought it strange to see a Barious raising a human child, I couldn’t . . .” She looked up again. “Every time I look in your face I see your mother’s eyes. I see your father’s smile. I am reminded of my great failure, of my . . . crimes.”

  “So you left her at the orphanage,” I nodded, “and you kept an eye on her, from a distance. Close enough that you would know if she was in trouble, close enough that you would know when her powers manifested, but far enough away that you didn’t have to suffer much yourself.” I couldn’t help it—a thread of contempt wound its way through my words.

  The Preacher glared at me again. “Judge me all you like—”

  “I am. Believe me—”

  “I did all I could. Threw my old life away, made myself a . . . a street-corner preacher for the people of that world, all so I had an excuse to visit the orphanage. Charitable works.” Something of a sneer in her own voice. “Assuaging my own guilt, yes. But also because I knew what I owed her.”

  “Which is why you invited yourself along when I turned up. You knew she wouldn’t turn away a chance to get off that world, to see more of the galaxy, to find some meaning in the gifts she’d been given.”

  “She has her parents’ curiosity,” the Preacher said dully. “She always did.”

  “And you wanted to know what the Justi
fied knew,” Javier added. “Deep down, you were still a scientist. Still looking for answers.”

  “And that. Yes. Can you blame me? Can you really—”

  “What were their names?” Esa didn’t care about the Preacher’s moral weight, about her guilt or her shame; she didn’t care about the wrestling match between the metaphorical demons and angels in her core code. She cared about the parents she’d always known she had, parents she’d always thought had abandoned her. Now she learned that there had never been a choice, that her mother hadn’t left her in a bundle on the orphanage steps, that she had been dead long before. I didn’t know if that was better, or not.

  “Janah,” the Preacher whispered. “Janah and Paul.”

  Esa closed her eyes; I couldn’t hear it, but I could see her lips move, her throat work, as she repeated the names to herself, several times over. Committing them to her memory, locking them away in her heart.

  Then she reached out, and touched the Preacher. The Barious almost flinched away, but held still. I had a feeling that even if Esa had reached out with her gifts, used her prodigious talent to rip the Preacher’s head from her shoulders, the Barious wouldn’t have resisted.

  “You changed the course of my life, several times over,” Esa told her. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know if what you did was right, or wrong, good or bad. I don’t know if I should hate you for it, or thank you, or try . . . try to forgive you. But you told me the truth, now, when I asked. So thank you. Thank you for that.”

  Then she turned, and walked away, as the rest of us pretended like we couldn’t see the tears streaming down her face.

  CHAPTER 26

  I sighed, and rummaged through my pockets until I produced another cigarette. Staring out at the mountains, I lit it.