“So where are we going?” Jenna asked.
Marcus shook his head. “I’ll tell you along the way.”
Jenna looked bemused at Marcus’s refusal rather than angry, blowing through my expectations yet again. “Is there war yet?”
He shook his head. “Almost.” He and Dianne shared a glance. “But I think it started on Fremont, and it will grow from here. Some people are still trying for a diplomatic answer, but Islas has a large fleet at the ready, and Joy Heaven has aligned with her. Paradise is with Silver’s Home.”
He didn’t say with “us.” But surely he wasn’t aligned with Islas, whose mercenaries had almost killed us on Fremont.
“And Lopali?” Tiala asked.
“Remains neutral. We need to change that.”
Alicia had told me about Lopali, where people who could barely walk flew gracefully in the air. Only a certain gravity and atmosphere allowed human flight, and Lopali had that.
Dianne asked, “So how many of us are for peace?”
Marcus looked disappointed, although the list he read sounded long to me. “The builder’s guilds and the Family, of course, and the universities and most of the groups that work on the climates. The swimmers. Two or three of the religions.”
He must have seen that we didn’t really understand what he meant, so he added, “On Silver’s Home, there are affinity groups for almost everything that needs to be done. Those who deal with money and trade and make space ships and weapons are mostly willing to fight, and they’re the primary funders of the Port Authority, which thrives on the idea of war. And Islas personally offends our way of life, which is enough for some people.” But not for him. The way he said it, I could tell he didn’t think much of intolerance, and I liked him for that. He stood. “There’s more to tell you, but for now, we have to go. Joseph will stay with you.”
So Joseph wouldn’t pilot the Migrator. His face looked calm as he watched Marcus walk away, but I could tell by the set of his shoulders that he felt worried. I dodged a flying Jherrel on my way to Joseph’s side. I put a hand on his shoulder. “So who, exactly, wants to kill you?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure if Marcus even knows. People with power and money on Silver’s Home. You can’t understand without being there. It’s so different from Fremont.”
I hated that. And I hated specific threats from faceless people. “Are you okay?”
“As long as you’re around, I’m okay.”
Deep inside I knew how true the words were, how much love and need drove us both around each other, like a planet and a sun. “I love you, brother.”
His answer was to hold me close, so we stood side by side, facing our future.
Three days after we left Jillian May Station, I used one of Marcus’s mandated exercise walks to explore the ship. I’d tried singing to cheer myself up, but my voice sounded hollow and bouncy in tight spaces. So I switched to amusing myself by trying to walk quietly. Around a corner, movement startled me. Bryan. He’d come back to Fremont on Creator, but we’d been in the thick of a battle. We’d left, and there had always been people around before Bryan was frozen. So I hadn’t really seen him alone since before we left for Little Lace Lake years ago.
He’d been designed as a strongman and a fighter; wide and tall and well-built. His dark brown hair fell just above his eyes in front and barely curled to the nape of his thick neck on the back. All of his scars seemed to have been erased, except, of course, the ones inside him. He looked both pleased and wary to have come up on me. Had he been avoiding me on purpose? I’d sent him away. But it had been the only way to save his life.
My voice sounded as stilted and unsure as I felt. “Bryan? How are you?”
“I’m . . . I’m okay.”
He was lying. “I’m glad to see you.”
“Really?”
I would have gone to find him on purpose eventually. Really, I would have. He’d always been wary and full of deep anger, and he’d always been a rock of support for me. When I was a girl, I’d expected to grow up and marry him. “Walk with me? There’s a wider corridor I just came through, and at the end there’s a little galley.”
“I’m not hungry, but I’ll walk with you.”
We walked, both going the way he had been going. In the old days, I’d have held his hand or leaned into him, and we might have laughed. “You know my story, from Fremont. Joseph told me how he worked with Marcus, but I don’t really know how Silver’s Home was for you and Alicia.”
“There were a lot more people like me there.” His voice sounded natural, but he didn’t look at me.
Surely there was more to the story than that. We made the turn into the wider corridor, and something different about the acoustics meant our footsteps echoed, slightly out of sync with our actual movements. “So it wasn’t like Fremont, where we were freaks.”
“Joseph was still a freak. But I was less of one.”
“Less of one?”
“Than almost anybody.” He flicked his hands just so and the knife edges of his fingernail implants exploded from the tips of his fingers like claws. He held them out in front of him.
I’d seen them, of course. But this time I stopped and took his palm gently, turning it so the light shone on the built-in weapons. I reached a finger toward them.
“Don’t touch,” he warned, and I drew back, a bit too late. A single bead of blood showed on the tip of the third finger of my right hand.
He flicked the nails back in, and took my hand in his, licking the drop of blood from the pad of my finger. My breath caught in my throat and I pulled my hand away and looked down.
He started walking.
I followed, and for a long time there was only the off-beat echo of our steps—his sure and heavy, mine light and almost a jog. We passed the galley I’d thought to stop in and kept going, curling up a long vertical corridor using the handholds as steps, and coming out on a level of the ship I hadn’t seen yet. “Have you been here before?” I asked.
“I walk a lot.”
Oh. Maybe he was lonely. Although I saw him with Ming often, the two of them a funny contrast of bulk and grace. “Do you miss Fremont?”
He didn’t answer until we’d walked about half the length of the ship. “I miss us all being together. Now you and Kayleen and Liam have each other, and Joseph has Alicia.”
And he felt left out. “We love you. We’re all family.”
He turned around and looked at me, his brown eyes ashy and his face white, as if tears or anger lay at bay right underneath his skin. “Easy for you to say.”
“We came back for you.”
“And I came back for you.”
And he couldn’t have known how it would be, that I would be with Liam and Kayleen and have kids. What had he expected? Why hadn’t I ever asked myself? Worse, what could I do now? I reached toward him, wanting to give him a hug.
He shook his head. “Don’t.”
We separated at the next corridor, and I stopped and watched him walk away, his rolling gait even, his head resolutely turned away from me until he got to the far end of the corridor, and before the turn, he glanced back as if checking to see if I was there or not.
I smiled at him, and he smiled back, and then went around the corner.
I walked for an hour, hoping I would find him again, and hoping I wouldn’t.
Instead of Bryan, I found Marcus, alone in a small room, staring at a viewscreen wall that showed the stars we flew through in real time, as if it were a window. I’d already learned that ships are not houses and windows are weaknesses in space. Every view to the outside is through cameras. The room looked as well-used as the rest of Migrator, with six metal chairs bolted to the floor and tattered orange cushions tied to the seats and backs of the chairs. Small tables had been stuck onto each chair like awkward afterthoughts.
Marcus turned as I came in, and once more I was struck by the humor in his incredible eyes. He seemed happy to see me, and secretly bemused as well. “Hello,
Chelo. Would you like a glass of col?”
I hadn’t learned to like the stimulant even after two years of opportunities, but it wouldn’t hurt to be polite, so I nodded and took a chair.
He left me to watch stars for a few moments, and when he returned he held a cup of steaming liquid out like an offering. “This is the way I like it best.”
It smelled different than I’d been served so far, richer. This version was a deep brown, like djuri hide. The taste was spicy and very smooth. He waited for my reaction.
“It’s good.”
“It’s dark chocolate. A taste from far back in our human past, and cultivated anew on Silver’s Home. I was hoping you’d like it.”
“I do.” I liked that it had history, too. As usual, even a few sips clarified my vision and gave me balance. Subtle things, as if I were growing younger and the world becoming brighter.
He relaxed, leaning back and letting his long legs dangle in front of him. His movements were fluid, like Ming the dancer’s. Almost feline. “So, did you come to find me?”
“Yes.” The question that had been filling my head since I first met him didn’t want out yet. “I . . . I wanted to meet Joseph’s mentor. He thinks a lot of you.”
“And you aren’t sure what to think?”
“Not yet.”
He hesitated a moment, sipping his own drink and letting me sip mine. Even though his whole being radiated power, he felt comfortable to be with. When he did speak, it was softly. “I first met your brother as a—presence. He was flying the New Making in, and he was so strong and so cocky and so—utterly alien it amazed me.” He grinned again. “Oh—he was naïve and rough, and he still is, but strong. It was like meeting myself, only you never get to see yourself as a young adult. That’s all eighty years behind me now.”
I swallowed at the reminder of his age.
“And later, when I tried to figure out how Joseph could be so strong and yet not go stark-raving crazy, the best answer seemed to be where he came from. If he’d been raised here,” he waved a hand at the screen, as if here meant all the stars in the sky, “he’d have been identified early on and isolated and taught by the best. But there—he had you and the other kids, and Jenna, and no other Wind Reader to tell him he might go crazy. And you all were in a dangerous place, so every one of you had to be smart and focused all the time.”
I bristled at that. “So did the colonists. All of us. Together.”
“Joseph told me you loved them.”
“I miss them.” I looked away from him, needing to keep control. “But I missed Joseph more. I hear I’ve got you to thank for him coming to get me.”
“It was nothing.”
Not true. Joseph and Jenna had told me what it cost to outfit a ship, and the goods from Creator’s hold wouldn’t pay off even part of our debt to Marcus. “Why did you do it?”
“Because I wanted to meet the girl who could keep someone of Joseph’s strength sane for so long. It will be good to study how you were both made, but the strength of people is more than genetics. I wanted to meet you.”
“Jenna told me once we were designed to support each other. More than just me and Joseph, but all of us.”
He nodded as if he already knew that.
The question that had been burning in me had cooled enough to rise to my lips. “So why did you call me the woman who was worth a war?”
“The sister worth a war?”
“Yeah, that.”
He took another long moment to finish his drink, setting the empty cup on the tacked-on table and staring at the stars for a bit. “Your father started the little battle on Fremont.”
“Little battle!” Tell that to the dead. My fists clenched.
He held up a hand. “Shhh . . . it was a little battle. You’ll see.” And now he was the one looking angry. “Your father started the fight because they killed you all. That’s what he thought—that Fremont’s people killed his children and so he had a revenge right to kill them.”
“No one has a revenge right to anything.”
He looked pleased. “I know. But then Joseph was hell-bent to get back and save you. I helped him because otherwise he would have gone crazy. He needs you to keep going, and if you’d been killed, Joseph would have been useless. And he needed to be away—a lot of people have had interest in him. He’s . . . more than any of us. Even more than me.”
I hated Marcus’s tone. He expected a lot from Joseph. I’d hoped being in a place where everyone was genetically engineered would mean people would treat us—well, like themselves instead of like freaks. And what did this mean for Kayleen? Already Marcus had started spending time with her at Joseph’s insistence, and she seemed calmer, though still fragile. Sometimes at night I’d wake and find her staring open-eyed at the ceiling, unresponsive to her name, lost in data or craziness or dreams. I’d try to bring her back by stroking her cheek or kissing her lips gently, and she would moan off time to my actions, staying lost to me.
If only I knew how to help Kayleen as well as I knew how to help Joseph.
I refocused on Marcus as he started talking again. “So even though the real reasons were more complex, and your father was driven by revenge and I was driven by love for Joseph, the buzz across the whole system is that your father sent the Star Mercenaries on your behalf, and I sent Joseph on your behalf, and so you see, the battle on Fremont, the first shot in this war, was fought over you.”
“But . . . I hate war.” My voice rose and the blood pounded in my veins, hot and protesting. “I want people to just stop fighting. It doesn’t make any sense to kill each other.”
“Truth doesn’t have anything to do with rumor. Myth often places beautiful women in the middle of war. You’re going down in history as the woman who started this war.”
5
CHELO: THE FIFTH WORLD
It took six months and two more rushed transfers from ship to ship before our feet touched a planet. It was midmorning when the Harbinger, the ship we now rode, turned lazily in the sky, surprising my stomach, and sank tail down to land on a shimmery flat surface on Lopali. Harbinger was a squat round cargo ship with a ramp wide enough to send small ships through. I’d never landed, of course—we’d left Fremont and gone through three docking and releasing maneuvers.
Only now did I really feel in my bones that we were somewhere. Below us a small planet hung in space barely more blue than green, its five continents rounded like very big islands. Each pole had a round ice cap. As I watched Lopali grow in the viewscreen, I stroked the uneven surface of the belt the original Sasha, the girl from Fremont, had hand-knotted for me. She’d put a prayer for safety in every knot, and as I touched the belt, I remembered how earnest her face had been when she told me about her work. I’d worn it in the battle for Fremont, and I had been safe.
Lopali bulked bigger than Fremont by a factor of at least two, maybe more. As we made a full orbit above it, the dark side glowed with strings of lights over the land, so many I couldn’t imagine a person for each light, much less many people for each light, which is what Alicia promised I’d find. We landed on the edge of a small spaceport. Green fields stretched in neat squares toward a forest.
I closed my eyes, hoping for a place I wanted to be, a home, or at least a warm, friendly town.
I didn’t care how small the big ship and the big planet and the wide ramp made me feel. As soon as Marcus gave us the all-clear, I rushed down the ramp with Jherrel and Caro beside me. There were no people nearby—just the empty landing place and the empty field, and not far off, the forest. I squinted at it, looking for trees similar to twintrees or lace-leaves or even the tall and spiky pongaberry trees. These trees had wide branches and great tufts of leaves near the ends of the branches. It made me feel like a roamer again, like I should pull out a pad and pencils and make scientific drawings and notes. Maybe soon. In the meantime, nothing looked threatening. Best of all, there was ground under me and sky above me.
It had been two and a half years sinc
e I had felt either.
I started dancing.
At first, the children looked at me as if I’d lost my mind, but they got caught up in the kicking and swaying and twisting as soon as Liam joined us, the four of us stepping in time, jumping, breathless. Dancing joy, dancing the smells of dirt and trees, of flowers and sky and wind. While Lopali didn’t smell like Fremont, it also didn’t smell like grease and metal and sweat the way a space ship did. It smelled almost like heaven.
We’d been in so many versions of gravity across all the ships and years that it took a few moments for me to realize how light I felt here, and how much our dancing was like flying. Liam took one child in each arm and began turning circles with them both held close to his chest, all three of them laughing and smiling. Paloma came down and stood at the foot of the ramp, staring. She looked younger than she had when we left Fremont, but still older by decades than any of us. She smiled, and lifted a foot, then another, taking Caro from Liam and putting her on the ground and holding her hand. Liam did the same with Jherrel, so the four of them were a line, two tall and two short people bounding in low gravity so the children jumped twice their height.
Alicia came and stood beside me, her mouth open and an expression of pure delight on her face. “I never thought I’d get here,” she whispered.
“To a planet again?”
“No. Here. To the fliers.” She scanned the sky, turning her head this way and that. She stood on tiptoe, bouncing, laughing. She turned on her mod and flickered once and nearly disappeared, becoming the color of the ground, and then Induan turned hers off and appeared and I shook my head, bemused. What had gotten into Alicia about this place?
Wings of Creation Page 4