Athel

by E. E. Giorgi

  “I can’t see a thing. Where do you think I’d be going?”

  “You can’t see a thing and yet you jumped from a damned window.”

  “That’s because I was worried about my stupid brother,” she hisses.

  I’m glad she can’t see my face because I’m kind of touched by that. But only a little. I’ve got other stuff on my mind. I clamber around the boulder and reach a tall aspen sapling sprouting off the wall of rock to the left. It’s tall and flexible, the narrow trunk easily yielding as I grab its girth and shake it.

  This will do.

  I take another piece of wire, bend the two ends into an arc, and toss it up until it hooks around one of the top branches of the sapling. Once the tree is hooked, I pull down, making it bend all the way to the boulder where Akaela is sitting. She hears the rustling of the leaves and jumps to her feet, probably glimpsing the silvery movements of the leaves moving toward her.

  “Pass me the sticks,” I say.

  “The what?”

  “The two sticks in my backpack.”

  She gropes, finds them, and hands them to me. I’m close enough that she can glimpse my movements now.

  I peg the two sticks into the earth and fasten the wire around them so the sapling almost touches the ground. I take the noose from my sister’s hands and slide the knot along the long end of the wire until I get a loop about fifteen feet in diameter. Satisfied with its width, I lay it on the ground alongside the sapling and cover it with dirt and dry leaves.

  “Scavenger droids have highly focused vision,” I explain, still whispering. “Lukas told me. They use pattern recognition software that peaks on the stuff they look for: raw metals. Moving things will also catch their attention because they can be potential enemies. As long as the sapling is hidden behind the boulder, the droid won’t suspect a thing.”

  I loop the end of the wire around the boulder and tuck it underneath. “There. It all blends nicely with the landscape.”

  Dottie flashes a skeptical face. “What makes you think they’ll come all the way here and fall for it?”

  I grin. “That’s where part two of my plan comes in.” I carefully step inside the loop and set my bait: a kinked metal spoon scavenged from the landfill. “This is where the droid’s vision will zoom in—right on the spoon, missing everything else.”

  I peg two more sticks into the ground and position them so the droid will knock them down when it comes to collect the spoon. Once displaced, these last two sticks will set the trap in motion, releasing the sapling and closing the noose around the robot.

  “All done,” I say. “Happy now?”

  She presses her lips together and gives me a weary look.

  “You’ll see tomorrow.” I grab her arm, guide her a few steps down the slope, and then give her a small push without letting go of her. “Watch out! You almost stepped on it and ruined the trap.”

  She elbows me in the stomach, but the joke steals a smile from her lips.

  Once we’re back down, the yellow haze shrouding the horizon makes enough light for Akaela to walk without me guiding her steps. She wriggles away from my grasp and asks, “What if you come back tomorrow and the trap didn’t work?”

  “I’ll make a new one. I’m not giving up until we capture a droid.”

  Taeh sees us approaching and bobs her head impatiently. Dottie pats her nose to soothe her while I unknot her reins. We both climb onto the saddle and start a fast gallop back to the Tower. The solar fields appear on the other side of the river, a grid of tilted panes that extends all the way to the forest. We wade through tall grass, the long strands silver under the dim light of the stars. I yawn. The gentle rocking of Taeh’s canter, combined with the boring lilt of the crickets, is making me sleepy.

  I nudge my sister. “Ok, that’s it, Dottie. You’ve been fussing about me sneaking out without telling you anything, but you haven’t spilled a word about what you did yesterday. Metal Jaw has been steering away from us for the past couple of weeks, and now, suddenly, he’s pissed off at you. What did you do?”

  She stirs and lets out a long sigh. “I already knew that Hennessy had concocted some kind of weapon,” she says, blurting it all out as though she can’t keep it inside any longer.

  “How? Who told you?”

  “Cal did. He said Yuri has some new weapon their dad installed. They go to the forest every day to practice shooting.”

  “You’ve seen them?”

  She nods.

  “And how come you talk to Cal now?”

  I turn, and even in the milky light of 4 a.m. I can tell that her face is blushed. “I don’t,” she replies firmly. “I eavesdropped on them.”

  I’m about to reply that what she’s just told me doesn’t make any sense, when a flash of light coming from the forest catches my attention. Akaela opens her mouth but I press a hand to her face and signal her to keep quiet.

  She shoves my hand away and whispers, “What is it?”

  I pull Taeh’s reins and point toward the edge of the forest. Two figures are moving near the trees. Their flashlights bob in the darkness until they vanish into the woods.

  Akaela bites her lip. “It’s them! I told you! They practice shooting with that weapon Yuri has.”

  “It’s laser beams. Yuri reduced a big boulder to crumbs to show everyone how they work. But it doesn’t make any sense to practice in the middle of the night.”

  “It does if you’re hiding something,” Akaela retorts. “Cal said they almost killed somebody by accident. That’s how I know they’ve been shooting in the forest.”

  I inhale. If Akaela’s telling the truth, Hennessy and his sons have decided to win this war on their own. I think of Uli and how he killed three men to fulfill his own ambitions. There was a time when I thought the Mayakes were peaceful and stuck up for one another. I was naïve. I no longer believe in that crap anymore.

  “Let’s go find out what they’re up to.”

  We both dismount and squat in the tall grass. The stable isn’t far away from the solar field, and Taeh knows how to get herself inside the paddock. I click my tongue and our smart mare understands immediately. She bobs her head and sprints away, trotting quietly back home.

  Back on our feet, Dottie and I hike between the solar panels all the way to the forest. It’s too dark for my sister to see underneath the thick canopy of trees, so I take her arm and help her avoid rocks and bulging roots. We wander aimlessly for a few minutes until I spot the bobbing flashlights again. I motion for Akaela to keep low as we wade through the thick growth of ferns.

  We reach a clearing, where we find the two figures crouched over something I can’t see. Their flashlights create a halo around their black silhouettes, but their faces remain disguised. All I can see is that one holds the light while the other, down on his knees, digs the ground with a shovel.

  Akeala snuggles closer to me. “They look too old to be Yuri and Cal, don’t they?” she whispers.

  That’s when one of the two men turns ever so slightly, and, to my surprise, I finally recognize his distinctive aquiline profile.

  “Definitely,” I reply. “That’s Tahari, right there.”

  Tahari, our Kiva leader.

  Chapter Four

  Akaela

  The forest smells humid and damp, despite our land not having seen rain for the past ten years. The river feeds the trees from underground, and the trees return the moisture to the air through their leaves and their long shawls of moss.

  “And who was the second man?” Lukas asks as Athel recounts what we saw last night.

  Athel ducks under a low tree branch and shrugs. “Neither Dottie nor I could recognize him.”

  We’ve been walking for about twenty minutes into the forest along the same trail Athel and I followed before dawn. The place looks so different in broad daylight. Between the trees, yellow and purple wildflowers sprout out of the cracks of Astraca’s old walls. Bright blue jays screech from the treetops, and spotted doves coo from underneath the
ferns.

  “Might be the same man Cal and Yuri found out here looking for something,” I chime in.

  They all stop and look at me. Wes rocks on his titanium blades and Lukas holds the data feeder between his palms with his thumbs poised to tap.

  “Can you tell us, once and for all, what the heck you heard them say and why?” Athel says, and this time his voice is no longer mellow.

  “Fine,” I snap. “I followed them out here in the forest and eavesdropped on them. They’ve been coming often, which is why I thought it was the two of them last night. I overheard them talking about this man who walked in on them as they were shooting. He was looking for something, and Hennessy said they should be searching too.”

  “And they never said what it was?” Lukas asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Guys,” Athel calls. “This is the place—the clearing where Tahari and the other man were digging this morning.”

  Wes runs ahead. “There’s nothing here,” he says.

  Lukas thumbs his data feeder. “What do you mean nothing? There’s trees—oaks and birches and—”

  I give him a push. “Oh, shut up, Lukas!”

  “It was a joke!” he protests. “You guys never laugh at my jokes.”

  “That’s because they aren’t funny.”

  It’s late morning, and the sun blinks through the treetops. A light summer breeze blows through the branches, rustling the leaves.

  I realize I’ve never been to this part of the forest before. The trees stand farther apart, exposing an unusual amount of ruins from the buried city of Astraca. A tall arch looms in the middle of nowhere, covered in bearded moss and crawling ivy. The thick roots of an oak choke a broken pillar. Up higher, old graffiti peek through leaves and the wear of time. I crouch, brush the dirt off the scratched stone, and examine the relief etched on its surface.

  “That’s the symbol of Astraca,” Lukas says, looking over my shoulder and pointing to the embossing. “Five triangles joined at one vertex to form a pentagon. Each triangle contains a key to one of the five doors of the city: Wisdom, Foresight, Knowledge, Prudence, and Ingenuity. If you look closely, the key heads are all different, as each door has its own symbol: the sun for wisdom, the moon for prudence, a star for foresight, a wheel for ingenuity, and an open book for knowledge.”

  “They had a name for each door?” Wes asks.

  Lukas nods. “They were called the five powers of Astraca, and each door was named after one of them.”

  “Why five doors, though?” Wes wonders. “Don’t most cities have four, one for each cardinal point?”

  Athel grins. “Astraca has always been special.”

  “Exactly,” Lukas replies. “The doors were actually distributed like the five main stars of Cassiopeia.” He sighs. “Too bad the doors burnt down during the fire in 2065. The keys—chavis, as our fathers called them—were never found again.”

  Wes spins on his heels and stares at the clearing we’ve come to. “Wow. This place is a relic! I mean, the whole forest is, but this spot even more.”

  He takes in the pillar lying on the ground, the big arch, and the slanted walls jutting out of the ground like lost teeth. In some spots, past the layer of lichen and the cracks of time, you can still see frescos and fragments of architectural décor.

  “Right here!” Athel shouts. He crouches near a small grove of young saplings and brushes away leaves from the ground. “Tahari and the other man were digging right here. You saw them too, Dottie.”

  Lukas and Wes squat next to my brother.

  “There’s fresh dirt scattered all over,” Lukas says. “They dug a hole and then covered it back up.”

  The boys bend over and scoop out dirt. I inhale the scent of damp earth and soil, while my eyes stray back to the ruins around us. Five doors of Astraca, five keys, all burnt to ashes during the siege of 2065, the beginning of the end for the Mayake people.

  “Wasn’t there a legend about the five keys of Astraca?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Lukas replies, watching over Wes’s and Athel’s shoulders as they rasp the ground with their bare fingers. “They say the keys were saved from the fire, but they were never found. People still look for them.”

  The light fanning from an old oak sprawls over the fallen pillar and twinkles in my eyes. I walk around the large trunk of an oak and brush a finger along the rugged bark, its nooks and crannies rough against my finger pads. It all seems strangely familiar to me, a déjà vu of some sort, maybe a dream, or maybe…

  Wes throws his hands in the air, his fingertips blackened with dirt. “Guys. There’s nothing here. It’s all gone.”

  “Hard to tell,” Lukas replies in his usual condescending tone, “since there was nothing in there to begin with.”

  Wes shakes his head. “Whatever they were looking for, they found it and took it.”

  I turn and catch Athel staring at me, frowning. “You don’t think—” he says. “They were looking for the keys of Astraca?”

  “It’s just a legend,” Lukas interjects.

  “Whatever they were looking for,” I say, my hand flat on the trunk of the old oak, “it had to do with Astraca, or else they wouldn’t be looking for it here.”

  Lukas bends over the hole Wes and Athel just uncovered and takes a picture with his data feeder. “The hole is pretty deep,” he says. “Tahari and his companion had to dig for a while, breaking roots and removing rocks, in order to retrieve the object.” He taps on his screen and squints. “The hole is eight inches deep. According to the measures I’m reading here, they dug out about five hundred cubic inches of dirt.”

  “Great,” Athel mutters. “Now all we have to do is go back to the Tower and look for anything that fits inside a five hundred cubic inch hole.’”

  Wes gets back to his feet and starts pacing, his bendy titanium blades digging into the bed of leaves. “Look, guys. I don’t know why you’re obsessed with this. We don’t even know what it is we’re looking for!”

  “Whatever it is,” Athel snaps, “if both Tahari and Hennessy are after it, it must be important.”

  Lukas pinches his chin. “That’s entirely possible, especially after what happened yesterday. Hennessy begged people to pitch in the little technology they have left to make weapons.”

  “What if we’ve had that technology all along,” Athel says, “buried underground inside the ruins of Astraca?”

  “Astraca burned down to its foundations,” Wes interjects. “They say the fire lasted a whole year. Not much was left after that, and whatever did survive it’s probablye gone by now.”

  A dragonfly buzzes near his face and he shoos it away.

  “Not a full year, no,” Lukas replies. “Probably some hyperbole as the story got passed from one generation to the next. But the city did burn to the ground. The fire probably lasted a few weeks. Must have been devastating to watch. At the time, Astraca was in full bloom. The city offered patronage to artists and musicians. The economy flourished and the technology Dr. Prado had developed boosted a new renaissance for our people.”

  “They didn’t have weapons, though,” Athel says bitterly. “The Mayakes have always been peaceful people.”

  “They had better stuff than weapons,” Lukas replies. “They had AIs.”

  AIs, I think. Artificial intelligence, the bots that caused the rise and fall of Astraca, and the very reason why today every Mayake has a deactivation button: to prevent humanoids from causing the same death and destruction as they did in 2065, when they rebelled against a law that prevented them from voting. The stories of what happened that night and in the days that followed are grisly. The streets turned red with blood. Panic spread. Flames devoured everything, buildings and bodies alike.

  Something twinkles at the corner of my eye, making me turn and squint. I gaze back at the oak tree looming over me, its golden trunk caressed by fanning rays of light.

  The boys keep talking about AIs and how they could still possibly be hidden deep underground. I get
up and examine the old oak, its trunk bathed in the golden light. I tilt my head and follow the branches as they twist and knot, and somehow I can predict every bend, every fork, every nook.

  I’ve seen you before. I don’t know where, but I’ve seen you before.

  I walk around its impressive girth and find myself searching for something, though I don’t know what.

  “Whatever object Tahari removed from the ground last night…” Lukas starts saying, but I get distracted and stop following the conversation.

  Not this tree. It’s farther down, I think, without knowing where the thought came from or what it is that’s supposed to be farther down. I follow the fanning light down a path studded by twisted roots.

  Twenty steps after the bend. Touch the egg-shaped rock.

  The path bends and the egg-shaped rock appears on my left, braced by the overgrown roots of a sequoia. The same déjà vu feeling I had before in front of the oak tree resurfaces. The rock, the tree that grows over it, the dash of purple wild flowers sprinkled along the trail… I’ve already seen it all.

  Touch the egg-shaped rock.

  I step forward and rest a hand on the rock, its right side stained by green and yellow lichens. My fingers slide to the top, where the sequoia roots arch around it in a frozen embrace. I push below the root, my nails rasping underneath. Something clicks, and the root snaps open. I jump and pull my hand away, watching, as a cylindrical object sprouts out of the root in small bursts, sending splinters of wood flying into the air.

  “We still don’t know what Tahari was looking for!” Wes is saying out of frustration as I walk back to the clearing.

  “Could it be this?” I say, extending my open palm to show them what I’ve just found.

  Chapter Five

  Athel

  Day Number: 1,584

  Event: Akaela found a cylinder that dates back to Astraca

  Number of Mayakes left: 430