The Vanished Birds

by Simon Jimenez

  “For a walk,” she said. “I’ll be back soon.”

  “Would you like company?”

  “Not tonight.” She touched his shoulder. “Stay, old man. Enjoy the fire.”

  He smiled up at her.

  At the edge of the plaza, she looked back at her friend with great fondness as he regaled the table with old busser stories, his words finally returned to him. She left Sartoris where he was always meant to be, holding court over good drink, and bribed the guard at the gate to let her through. She walked down the dark and rutted road at an ambling pace, her way lit by the torch in her hand, and she journeyed past the black looming structures that were the new citizens of the fields as she searched for the reason why her heart was compelled toward these outskirt hills.

  * * *

  —

  Fumiko sensed it; the change of direction in the air. Her eyes opened against the sunlight that cut between the tops of the buildings and gilded the languid waves of the waterway. Dana’s legs were stretched out along the passenger’s bench, her eyes half-lidded like a pleased cat as her hand draped over the side and grazed the calm water. At the head of the boat the oarsman guided the vessel around a curve. He nodded at Fumiko. And Fumiko understood that her long route through the Pocket was almost ended.

  “We’re close,” she said.

  Dana followed her gaze upward. The sun was gone, and the clouds had begun to darken. The canal waters rippled with small detonations. Together they watched the breaking of the sky in silence. Both knew that nothing more needed to be said.

  It was time.

  And while in her delirium Fumiko accepted the inevitable and fast-approaching end, Nia continued her walk through the outskirts of the village, listening to the quiet of the rolling hills, and the subtle buzz and flip of night bugs. The wind that whistled through the rows of dhuba. By then she was a kilometer from the village. She spotted a nice hill from where she could get a view. It was a surprisingly steep climb up to the top. She winced against the complaints of the body, but made it undamaged over the last rise. She looked out at the dark fields, and their tough, unyielding stalks. There was something about this place. Something important.

  In the place below ancient instinct, the young man and his Kind One gazed up at the fracture in the sky. The light from which they could hear the memory of a song.

  They waited.

  * * *

  —

  Once in a rare while, there is an alignment. Moments that, to some, reveal the workings of God, and to others are simple fortune. But there is no known explanation for this communion of events.

  It only is.

  * * *

  —

  And then she remembered what this place was. The fine hairs on her neck standing on end as the memory unzipped itself.

  Below that hill and behind that rock was where she and Kaeda first embraced. She flashed the light of her torch on the grass by the rock, and she remembered how long that night felt; long, in a good way, like a walk for walk’s sake. She remembered the feel of her head lying against his chest, and the song he hummed for her—the vibration she could feel through her cheek when he sang the words.

  The notes were coming back to her; notes to a song with a name she could not remember. To her, all it was, was the song of her youth—one that was leaving, as quickly as it had come, its notes fading from memory before she pulled the flute from her back pocket and caught it.

  * * *

  —

  It was a song many years old, from the time before the harvest. The song the mother sang to her newborn son in the quiet dark of morning. The song she imbued into his flesh and bone, its melody and its lyrics, before the people of the Quiet Ship came and took her son away, on a journey of suffering that would stretch past her lifetime. The song she would hum to herself in the long years after he was gone as she held her hand up to the sky and imagined him reaching down to take it.

  It was the song that was passed down the generations of this world. The song the farmers chorused when the work was done and it was time to return to the village, wheeling behind them their purple harvest. Take my day, they sang, but give me the night. Feed the hearth and ready the brew, for I am coming home to you. It was the song he heard when he first returned to this world, as he sat with the old man on the top of the hill and witnessed the return of the farmers; the sweet pastry in his hands forgotten as he listened to this song and was captured by it; the words foreign to him yet somehow familiar, unaware that the words were in his blood, woven into him decades ago by a mother who missed him.

  It was the song that now inspired the fires along the dark shore of his ancient instinct and bloomed them into tornadoes of flame. Flames that whipped into the broken night sky of his opiated dreams and ripped through the black veil, the light let in through the open tear, along with the memory of his name. The name he had chosen for himself with the help of the Kind One, who, with the kaleidoscope of faces of all those he loved, now picked him up and lifted him toward the shattering fracture, into the widening hole of light, until,

  he opened his eyes.

  Dry eyes that needled in pain as he tried to focus beyond the drugs still coursing through his system. He was awake, but only half so; a tether on his mind, urging him back to sleep. Through half-lidded eyes he looked around, and he listened. It was quiet in his capsule. He could not hear the commotion on the other side of the door and the observation window, where the technicians on duty were frantic as the screens alerted them of his sudden consciousness; was unaware of their flurry of movement, the scroll-screens and vitality drinks tossed aside as they dialed up the dosage beyond safe levels to stop his escape. He dove back into sleep.

  Fell like a rock into the black.

  There was a rising hum in Nia’s throat, as if she were possessed by something other than herself, something greater, as she let loose from the flute this song of homecoming. She played the notes that rippled throughout the currents and pinged her coordinates.

  His skeletal hand twitched in its restraint. His eyelids fluttering while in the dark spot of his mind he swam upward against the narcotic drift, reaching for the constellation of notes above him. The drugs like a hand on his ankle, dragging him farther downward.

  “Get the needle!” the head tech cried as he keyed the code and opened the door to the capsule’s chamber.

  He clawed toward the light of her fevered music. The system pulsed in time with his quickened heart, and in sympathy the FT-capable ships throughout the galaxy leapt randomly and beyond control of the judiciary, millions of them, the bussers, vipers, and personal flyers dancing around the stars, the binary planets, the giants, the spiraling systems, the nebulae, the red dwarfs, the rainbow-stained gas columns, everywhere, no one sure what was happening, ships lost, then found, then lost again, the hundred stations warping to random points. Pelican Station, gone from its perch in the controlling sector of the galaxy—now leveling under its great weight a pinewood forest as the birds quit the canopy in its wake.

  The tech bit the cap from the narcotic pen. Raised it like a stake, aimed for Acquisition’s chest as he waited for his partner to open the capsule and the chance to deliver this finishing move.

  The lever was halfway pulled when she arrived.

  Fumiko’s schooner broke from the Sibilant Current and joined this eddy in the Pocket, at the center of which the capsule swirled, like a rubber toy dancing at the drain of a faucet. She wore neither smile nor frown as she pulled the strings of the cat’s cradle toward her chest and opened the starboard sails, and careened her ship down the eddy’s centrifuge toward her fated target. There was only the strict jaw of focus, the clarity of eyes that saw the entire route of a life and had made peace with all of it, determined now to finally meet the end of a thousand-year journey. It happened quickly. The nose of her ship accordioned against the wall of the capsule station, and her
body flung forward from her seat. Before her head met the viewport and it all went black, she could swear she heard the high, piercing note of a song—a note that gave her peace before the schooner crumpled and, between the mash of metal, the YonSefs detonated.

  Fractures ran across the capsule’s spherical hull in the space between seconds, chased by the light. A bright ball that hiccupped and swelled. Vaporized in an instant the corridors, the bunks, the mess hall, the console theater; the techs at work, and the techs at play, none of them aware of Fumiko’s arrival, or her exit, before they were swept away by her last willful shrug. And in this space between seconds, before the iridescence of the YonSefs’ light swept him away too, Acquisition’s eyes snapped open, the old instinct awakened against the approach of danger; the bow of him drawn.

  The arrow let loose through the stars.

  It was when Nia had sliced off the final note of the song that she heard it. The rumble in the clouds.

  The crack.

  The object punctured the sky. She watched as in the middle distance the object crashed with a bloom. And she ran. Ran down the hill, throwing off the sandals that slowed her progress, ran through the stalks, soles cut on fibrous shards that jutted from the dirt, and ran with lungs on fire, her hands on knees when she arrived in the charred clearing the explosion had made, stumbling past the blackened chunks of metal, the ground hot under her feet, nothing in her lungs at all when she saw, in the epicenter of this small crater, the smooth capsule the size of a coffin. Hands shaking as she reached out and touched the capsule and burned herself on its knife heat. She grabbed the capsule’s handle, her body beyond physical sensation as she gritted her teeth and forced the lever clockwise, her nostrils filled with the smell of her cooked palm skin, until the latches released and the capsule door sighed open like an oyster’s mouth. Cold mist curled past her feet as she stepped toward the opening and looked inside, her breath stopped when she saw what lay within the capsule, nested among a medusa of black cables.

  The naked body of a grown man. His limbs long and emaciated. The skin of his face taut around the skull and the skin of his body crisscrossed with scars both faint and vivid. A story of pain. She peeled away the tubes that pockmarked his body and drew out the long, clear vine that was snaked down his esophagus. Pressed two fingers to his thin throat, relieved by his turtling pulse. And she picked him up, carrying him away from the crash, trying not to think about how his body was as light as paper. The two of them crashing out of the fields, out into the road, where on the dirt she sat down, exhausted. Holding him in her lap as she wheezed. Her chest diving deep to swallow the air while he stirred in her arms, murmuring incoherently from his dry, cracked lips. “Don’t talk,” she said, smoothing the sweat from his forehead. “Save your energy.” But he disregarded his captain’s order. He lifted his head. And when he opened his eyes, she was glad that, despite the years, his eyes were still those wide, dark beauties. That time had changed nothing; not even the music in his voice, as he whispered, “I heard you.”

  For Mom and Dad, the strangest people I’ve ever loved

  Acknowledgments

  Countless people helped in some small way, but space is limited and memory unreliable, so I’ll stick with who comes to mind today. The last year of this project was hard on me. Matt Johnson and his awful dad jokes were bright spots, as was the company of the wonderful Merab Okeyo and Nouria Bah, who since high school liked to remind me of the world outside my bedroom; and of course the funny and talented Oscar Mancinas and Doug Koziol and our unending and sorely needed phone calls. Thank you to my readers, Anthony Martinez and Prof. Jessica Treadway, for their comprehensive and useful perspectives, and my main reader, Erin Jones, whom I bombarded with drafts and endless questions and general neuroses that she, in her supernaturally gracious way, accepted and addressed, and always left me feeling better than I did before. My thesis adviser, Prof. Kim McLarin, for her generosity of spirit and time, and her effortlessly insightful feedback, without which this book wouldn’t be half as good—her students are fortunate indeed, for she’s one of the best. Shout-out to my agent, Hannah Fergesen, and my editor, Sarah Peed, both of whom have given me phenomenal support through the publishing process. Thank you, Hannah, for believing in this project, and thank you, Sarah, for sharpening it. It is a privilege to have such a formidable team. And lastly, my family. Mom and Dad. My brothers, Quinn, Kane, Garth, Sebastian, and Nicholas (Farrah and Clarissa), and my sister, Sara. It is a rare and lucky thing, to not only love, but to be fond of everyone you’re related to, and to enjoy their company; rare, and lucky, and mine.

  About the Author

  SIMON JIMENEZ’S short fiction has appeared in Canyon Voices, and 100 Word Story’s anthology of flash fiction, Nothing Short Of. He received his MFA from Emerson College. This is his first novel.

  simonjimenezauthor.com

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