Battle of Earth

by Chloe Garner

  “Cage them,” Breath of Air said. “Up in the trees, away from the water until they die.”

  “That’s cruel,” Olivia said.

  “They’re taking something that belongs to us,” Still Water said.

  “By what right?” Olivia said. “It comes out of the ocean. You didn’t plant it or grow it or tend it. They’re just getting to it before you do. It isn’t yours.”

  Both of them turned to look at her, and Olivia put her hand over her mouth. She should know better. She did know better.

  “Who are they?” Still Water asked.

  “They’re different,” Breath of Air said. “Her friend is a gap walker, and her other friend is light.”

  “So?” Still Water asked after a moment. Breath of Air put his hand out into the sunlight coming in through the window, moving his fingers in it.

  “Actual light,” he said.

  “You’re friends with light?” Still Water asked skeptically.

  Olivia paused at how to describe this.

  “My friend is…” apparently “… made of energy like light.”

  “Wind and light?” Still Water asked.

  Olivia looked over at the box.

  A universe away. A whole universe.

  “He’s missing,” Breath of Air said. “They’re looking for him, but they want to help us.”

  “Why?” Still Water asked.

  They both looked at Olivia again.

  “It’s kind of what Beautiful Wanderer does,” she said. The name came out like that without her even translating it. She hated Cassie for that. “She finds things that don’t work the way she thinks they should, and she… fixes them. I guess.”

  “Why are you here?” Still Water asked.

  “Because she told me she needed my help to find our friend.”

  They glanced at each other.

  “It’s no wonder Light of Dawn wanted to teach them to fly.”

  “I believe them,” Breath of Air said. “And even if they aren’t here to help… Her friend is a gap-walker. I saw it myself.”

  “I want to understand your trees,” Olivia said, regathering herself. There was a threat, there. She could feel it. He was still willing to turn them over to his mother to throw them out a window, if he decided that they were lying. Maybe even if they didn’t come through like he wanted them to. “I study plants, back home, and I think that I might be able to help.”

  “We know what’s wrong with them,” Still Water said. “They need more crystals.”

  “She thinks that she can fix them without crystals,” Breath of Air said.

  “They need crystals,” Still Water said again. Olivia opened and closed her mouth. She didn’t want to make promises she couldn’t keep, and she didn’t want to say things that she didn’t know were true.

  “I just want to understand,” she finally said. “In case there is another way. And also because it’s just… very interesting.”

  “You shouldn’t be letting them do this,” Still Water said. “They are our trees. What if they are spies?”

  “They know that we want the crystals,” Breath of Air said. “What more do you think they’re finding out?”

  “We can’t know what they need to know,” Still Water said. “Maybe your mother is right.”

  “They want to start a war,” Breath of Air said. “When there is already fighting all around us. We don’t understand enough of what’s going on to be ready.”

  “What do the side-walkers do with the crystals?” Olivia asked.

  “A very good question,” Cassie said. Olivia turned her head to look at the Palta woman with a heavy sigh of relief.

  “Gap walker,” Still Water breathed.

  Cassie held out a saline crystal block the size of a softball and Still Water stood up and walked across the room to take it.

  “That’s my sample,” Olivia warned. “We aren’t going to take any from your supply, but I need to study that.”

  “Where did you get it?” Still Water asked.

  “Ocean,” Cassie said. “I’m a great swimmer.”

  “Thief,” Still Water said thoughtfully, going to sit on her hammock again.

  “This is Moonlight on Still Water,” Olivia said. “She’s the daughter of one of the elders.”

  “Sound of Ocean Waves at Midnight,” she said, looking up. “What is it you’re planning on doing?”

  “Stopping your species from driving itself into extinction through an incredibly-poorly planned attempt to change what you are,” Cassie said.

  Olivia looked over at her with an eyebrow up.

  “You couldn’t be any more direct than that?” she asked.

  “Tell me about the war,” Cassie said.

  Breath of Air and Still Water looked at each other.

  “We don’t know much,” Breath of Air said slowly. “The side-walkers and the sand-walkers wash up on our shores dead, torn to…”

  “Torn to pieces,” Still Water said when Breath of Air stopped. “The wind-walkers won’t fly over our island, because the air is bad, but they are involved. We…”

  “We don’t know how,” Breath of Air said.

  “We need to go,” Cassie said. “Right now.”

  “Why?” Olivia asked.

  “They know where we are,” Cassie said.

  “How?” Breath of Air asked.

  Cassie glanced at Olivia, who twisted her mouth to the side.

  “How long have you two been in love?” Olivia asked, standing. She turned her attention to Cassie again. “He said we’re supposed to go to the lost rooms.”

  “The ones down below the city,” Cassie said. “Where it’s too far from the top to get light down that far.” She nodded, going to get her crate. “That will work. How do we get there?”

  “I’m not going out there again,” Olivia said and Cassie nodded.

  “I see. I can jump us but I need an exact count of the number of levels between here and there.”

  “Jumping,” Breath of Air said.

  “Gap-walking,” Olivia supplied, and he and Still Water turned in toward each other. Cassie tipped her head back and glanced at Olivia out of the corner of her eye.

  “Don’t leave me again,” Olivia said.

  “I will,” Cassie said. “I’m going to have to. I need to figure out what’s going on around here, so that I can… put a dent in it, I don’t know. I actually don’t think the crystals are at the middle of it. There isn’t anything remarkable about them. They’re just getting swept up in a resource grab, and…”

  “Do you know something?” Olivia asked. Cassie shook her head, her eyes trained on the Band Rung pair.

  “No. I have a feeling, which means I’m probably right, but I don’t know anything. I did find a body, while I was down there. They aren’t kidding about violent death.”

  “You’re going to leave me again,” Olivia said.

  “I’ll leave the box with you,” Cassie said. “You really are going to get to do your lab-nerd thing and look at slides of tree leaves and whatever to your heart’s content. I can’t do any better than that.”

  “What about Troy?” Olivia asked.

  “Wars are interesting,” Cassie said. “It may be that we stopped too early, coming straight here. I am still looking for him.”

  Olivia frowned and sighed, then turned her attention back to the Band Rung.

  “Eighteen,” Breath of Air said. “One is twice as tall as the others.”

  Cassie nodded.

  “All right. I don’t have infinite energy to power this thing, so I’m taking your word on it.”

  “What?” Olivia asked as Cassie stood, grabbing the box, then taking hold of Olivia’s elbow. She jerked her chin at the Band Rung, and Olivia reached out an arm toward Breath of Air.

  “My turn to carry you,” Olivia said. “Will you hold on to her?”

  Breath of Air and Still Water twined their arms together, and Olivia turned her head to indicate to Cassie that they were ready, but even as sh
e moved, the room disappeared and she found herself in musty, humid, cool darkness.

  “Gap-walking,” Still Water said into the quiet.

  “You weren’t kidding about not being able to get light this far,” Cassie said.

  “You’re the one who said that,” Olivia pointed out.

  “They didn’t need to tell me,” Cassie said. There was a click and a thump and then a bright white light lit. Olivia squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then blinked quickly, getting used to the intensity of the work lamp and looking around.

  The floor was dusty underneath her feet, and the walls felt distant. The room they were in might have been thirty or forty feet in both directions.

  “No one ever comes down here?” Olivia asked.

  “There’s never any light,” Still Water said, tipping her head to look at the lamp. “The trees are way over our head, right now, and there were never any windows.”

  Olivia didn’t think that strictly made sense, but she went to look into Cassie’s box of goodies, anyway.

  She didn’t recognize much, but metal and glass glinted at her, and her fingers itched to unpack it all.

  “I didn’t bring a table,” Cassie said.

  “I’m comfortable on the floor,” Olivia answered.

  “We can bring you a sling,” Breath of Air said.

  “You shouldn’t come and go from here too much, or else someone will guess she’s down here,” Cassie said. “How many of you are there?”

  “Enough,” Breath of Air said. “We’ll visit her one at a time, and I’ll make sure that no one comes and goes too often.”

  “You’re going to go?” Olivia asked.

  “I’m going straight back up and then toward the main landmass,” Cassie said. “Too many questions. Still Water, she needs that crystal to help her figure out what’s going on. Anything else she needs, I’d get it, but I’ll leave it up to you whether or not to indulge her. I hope to be back soon, but she needs meals at least twice a suncycle, preferably three. Fruit and roots should both be fine.”

  The Band Rung looked at each other.

  “Are we really doing this?” Still Water asked. “Rebelling?”

  Breath of Air shifted.

  “They’re going to start a war,” he said. “Is there another option? They may be able to help us and prevent the war.”

  She spread her hands, palms arched.

  “Very well.”

  Cassie looked at Olivia.

  “I will find you,” she said. “If anything goes wrong, I will come and I will find you.”

  “I came to help you find Troy,” Olivia said. She switched to English. “I feel for them. I do. But I’m not going to be helping you at all, down here. I’m just doing lab work as a prisoner.”

  Cassie nodded.

  “It’s your choice. I can take you with me if you want me to, but they may start attacking aggressive species while we’re gone. There may be no going back, by then. I’m asking you to put off looking for Troy and save a species, instead. For now. And I know it’s a risk. One you don’t like taking, and one you didn’t volunteer for. Yet.”

  Olivia tipped her head to the side, feeling a bit betrayed.

  “Of course,” she said. “You know I can’t just leave them. It’s just…”

  Cassie nodded.

  “I’m glad you’re here. And I’m glad you’re good at what you do. Because I couldn’t trust most of the people I’ve known in my life with this. They wouldn’t make any progress, and by the time I got back, it would already be too late for them, either way.”

  “You could do it faster than I could,” Olivia said, nearly choking on unexpected ego.

  “I could,” Cassie said. “But you can get it done in time, and I’m still looking for Troy. And I’m trying to figure out what the hell is going on, on this planet.”

  Olivia paused, then bit her lip.

  “Get to work,” Cassie said, switching back to the Band Rung language. It didn’t sound any different to her brain, but the rhythm and syncopation of it titched at Olivia’s ears. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  She disappeared and the two Band Rung looked at her. Olivia wondered, for the first time, how old they were. She came from a place of more advanced technology, but Breath of Air had had such a feeling of maturity to him, before Cassie’s bells and whistles had dazzled him. They were waiting for her to do something. To tell them what to do. Olivia glanced at the box, again itching to empty it out, but feeling an overpowering sense of incapability. That was Palta technology, in there.

  “Samples,” she said. She wanted to be alone, going through that box. Where no one could watch her cluelessness. Where she’d be the only one she was embarrassed about. The idea of Cassie coming back and discovering her using a high-tech measuring device as a pair of tongs or a spatula… It made her sick to her stomach. She shook her head, forcing herself to move on. “Samples,” she said again. “Trees. I need cuttings from leaves, from bark, from live tissue, from wood. I need samples of anything that grows on the tree that isn’t a part of it. Soil samples. Both right from the root of the tree and as far away from the trees as you can get while still being a part of the same forest.” She paused, feeling a tinge of excitement. Everything. She could get anything she wanted, not just the scraps that some jumper had sent back to her. It would all be fresh, unjumped, and immediate.

  “Water,” she said. “If there’s any standing water anywhere, I want a sample of that. The stones that exist in the soil, small ones if you can, large ones if you have to. I’m looking for a selection of the different types. Look close at the texture and color of it, and if it’s similar, don’t bring it, but if they’re very different, bring me one of each.” She closed her eyes, watching rain fall out of the sky and land on the ground. What would it go past? What would it touch? “Do you have… animals? Other than the… not-living things we saw?”

  “The Golwaith were out?” Still Water asked.

  “Many of them,” Breath of Air said. She made a noise that Olivia’s interpreter was mostly sure was exasperation.

  “We should drive them back,” she said.

  “They balance the dark,” Breath if Air said.

  “They cause the rot,” Still Water said.

  “Samples of the rot,” Olivia said. “Do you have animals?”

  “No,” Breath of Air said. “Llargon formed the forest. There are birds, but no animals.”

  “How many birds?” Olivia asked. There was a helpless silence, and Olivia nodded. “Do they come in flocks of thousands and thousands, or are they just individuals, here and there?”

  “We get flocks sometimes,” Breath of Air said. “But…”

  “Not usually,” Still Water said. Olivia nodded.

  “Then don’t worry about it. Let’s start with that.”

  They hesitated, then turned their hands down toward her, and Still Water twined her arm around Breath of Air’s.

  “I’ll go first,” she said. “You follow.”

  He put his hand to her chest, just under her neck, then she slipped away like ribbons in breeze. He watched after her, and Olivia forced herself to go ahead and look in the box. He wasn’t paying that much attention to her.

  The box was packed meticulously. It had a native feel to it, as Olivia pulled things out and set them gently on the ground. A clean white sheet sat at the bottom, and she pulled this out, laying it across the dust for a working surface. There was a small metal canister that, when she put it to her eye, she found that the world zoomed in and out at whatever level of resolution she wanted, as her brain figured out how to work it. She could look at Breath of Air’s cellular structure, if she could figure out how to sit still enough. She set that aside and pulled out a single glass slide, flipping it over with her fingers. It glimmered with a strange iridescence that bespoke qualities she didn’t immediately see, but she would plan on using it for samples until she learned better.

  A small, electronic square, flat and perhaps an inch on
a side. She put it in her palm and looked at it for a long time, but she couldn’t puzzle it out, either. When she picked it up out of her palm, though, it stretched slightly, and she gave it a gentle pull at opposing corners, discovering with some glee that it slid like a high-quality telescope, wider and taller, as far as she asked it to go. She shrunk it back to a size that she could fit in her lap and she touched the surface. Nothing happened.

  “Well,” she said quietly.

  Well it wrote.

  Her mouth dropped open.

  She resized it once more to the size of her lab notebook, setting it gently aside and turning back to the crate.

  Everything was small. Delicate. Intricate. Mysterious.

  And yet.

  A lab materialized on the sheet in front of her.

  Cassie had never worked in one of the labs. She’d been an analyst, and a great one, but she wasn’t a scientist the way the lab workers were. Even so, Olivia had had more than one opportunity to read Cassie’s reports, both from before she stopped jumping and during her years as an analyst, and Olivia had always felt at home with how Cassie thought, as a human. It was familiar and native, like Cassie could speak directly to Olivia’s mind without the language in the middle getting in the way.

  Others in the labs had teased at how dry and verbose Cassie’s reports were, but Olivia had always loved how detailed and precise they were. They were pages and pages of solid blocks of text, rather than a rapidly scratched-together list of internally-contradictory ideas and notes, and they were like magic to read. Olivia had always come away from them understanding things in a new way, and not just the ones Cassie had been writing about.

  Cassie had been a legend.

  And then she’d been gone.

  And now, Olivia was unpacking her science kit.

  And it was the same feeling.

  That sense that, if she paid attention, she was going to learn a lot more than just tree secrets.

  She’d scarcely emptied a quarter of the box when she started getting to things that she couldn’t fathom what they did, things that blinked, things with displays she couldn’t read, things with no signs at all what they were - the matte silver box the size of her palm that looked like the prize in a video game concerned her, because it was slightly warm and didn’t do anything - and she turned back to the lab kit she’d assembled.