by Chloe Garner
She cried.
Her body wasn’t made for crying, but it was the only way her mind knew of expressing grief. After a while, she couldn’t keep out the whispers any longer, and she got up to go to the bathroom and get another handful of berries. She could still hear them, but she could at least pretend not to understand them. When she finished eating, they had fallen silent.
As she started stretching out her wings, Troy snorted.
For the fifth morning in a row, she woke in a strangled, frantic panic, clawing at her clothes, her sheets, the wall to get away from the inevitable terrors of the day - examinations and speculation and fear. Rank fear.
Only some of it was hers.
Yesterday, some of her cells had started showing signs of changing, according to the three men. They weren’t Pixie, nor Adena Lampak, nor human. They were going through vast quantities of tissue, now, in microscopic terms. Slav had written a script to image-process her skin cells, and Troy had built a jerry-rigged digital scope to capture automated images across the tiny samples. They found hundreds of ‘strange’ cells every day, but yesterday was the first time Jesse couldn’t identify one.
And it was mid-change when they found it, far enough away from the original cell that it was impossible to tell what it had been, not close enough to the new one for anyone to be optimistic about identifying it. As the day had gone on, the cells around it had started showing signs of breaking down in that odd, transformational way, until the tissue had finally given up and died, despite Troy’s best efforts to keep it alive.
As bad as the constant attention was, the fear of what they were going to find was worse. She finally detangled herself and got up to go to the bathroom again. The refrigerator was empty. She hoped Slav remembered to bring more when he got there in a few hours. She certainly wasn’t going back to sleep again.
She found her way into the corner again without even thinking about it, finding the pressure on the backs of her shoulders comforting. Her hands were beginning to shake again. Troy snorted and she dropped to the floor, her hands curling semi-involuntarily to her chest. When the lock turned in the front door, she found her head pressed against the ceiling before she regained her senses.
Jesse was watching her.
“What’s going on, Cassie?”
“Jesse,” she gasped. She dropped to the floor with less grace than she might have managed if she were alone, but came to light on her feet nonetheless.
“Jesse,” she whispered again. He knelt and took her hands in his.
“I’m here,” he said.
“Jesse,” she said. She dropped her forehead against his shoulder, her body beginning to shake. “Jesse.”
“Cassie,” he said. “Talk to me.”
“Jesse.”
The tremors became more pronounced, to the point that she might not have stayed on her feet if he hadn’t had his palms wrapped around her wrists and his hands completely containing hers.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re okay.”
“I’m not,” she answered, shaking her head. The door opened and Slav came into the room with his normal brisk carelessness. Cassie sprung away, and Jesse let her go. Cassie was against the ceiling again, her body struggling to produce the tears that her mind demanded.
She wasn’t okay.
She was dying and she didn’t want to be here when they told her.
Jesse was watching her.
“We’re going,” he said.
“What?” Slav asked. Troy stretched in his bed, looking confused.
“What’s going on?”
“I can’t say whether it’s the nutrition or the stress, but she’s breaking down and I need to get her out of here.”
“How do you plan on doing that?” Slav asked.
“You can’t,” Troy said. “What if we find out something important? What if you need us?”
Cassie dropped, hiding behind Jesse’s back.
“It’s not as complicated as you two think,” Jesse said.
“How are you going to get her on base?” Troy asked. Slav looked intrigued.
“Why would we go on base?” Jesse asked innocently. Cassie peaked around him.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Where are you going to find a portal?” Troy asked.
“Someday I hope you come to understand how absurd that is,” Jesse said, turning around to face Cassie. “Are you ready?”
“Can we go?”
He knelt again, taking her hands.
“Close your eyes,” he said. She did. For that moment, she felt safe. The world was small and safe. She could make it, from there.
They jumped.
Trees.
There were trees.
It was impossible for her to accurately judge how big or tall they were from her new diminutive size, but they seemed huge in her eyes.
“Where are we?” Cassie asked, in awe.
“This is Yan,” Jesse said.
“What is it?”
Jesse took a step back, letting her appreciate the canopy as far as the eye could see.
“This is a nature sanctuary,” he said. “They collect flora from all over the universe and transplant it here.”
“Why?”
“So they can charge people to come see it,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Where are these from?” she asked, spinning slowly with her head tipped back.
“They’re native,” he told her. “All of the imported stuff is indoors. Environment controlled and quarantined.”
There was a slight breeze that brought her the scent of green life and that stirred the canopy above enough to let through dazzling sunlight and the glimpse of blue sky.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. He nodded.
“And no one will look at you twice, here. It’s an immigrant community. No one knows all of the species that even live here, not to mention the tourists.”
He came and took her hand again.
“Let’s go explore.”
Like flipping a switch, she felt easy and free. Nothing could be wrong in this place of life and light, she was certain, and everything was going to be just fine.
They walked for a time, taking in the air and the trees, silent.
“You can go up, if you want,” Jesse said. “Don’t have to keep me company down here.”
She had forgotten she could fly, for a moment, so taken was she with the newness of the place, but she perked at the thought of being airborne and, with a nod of encouragement from Jesse, she was gone.
The lack of voices was refreshing, but the lack of electrical hum was bliss. It was the kind of thing that you didn’t realize it was there until it was gone, and she reveled in it. Just the air and the sun and the trees.
She was too nervous and unconfident in her ability to fly to attempt the canopy, but she did make it to the lower limbs of the great trees, great boughs long deserted of foliage because of how little light reached this altitude. She could walk along them like walkways, her bare feet steady under her on the wide, near-flat surfaces. She traipsed along, wings out to support her and help her hop from branch to branch, and slowly climbed, taking the path up more often than the path down. Her view grew, acre after acre of leaf litter and trees, with Jesse just a small moving figure far below.
She spotted a ribbon of sunlight far ahead, a break in the trees that stretched along the forest in a meandering path. Without thinking, she hopped off of her branch and drifted down to Jesse.
“There’s a road up ahead,” she told him, halting her descent a few feet off the ground. Jesse looked at her feet and then the ground. Then her feet again.
“Which direction?” he asked. She pointed, and he adjusted his path slightly.
“That’s impressive,” he said after a moment.
“I’m trained to spot roads, Jesse,” she said.
“No, the hover,” he told her. “You picked that up pretty quickly.”
She fell
to the earth.
“It’s harder than it looks,” she said, “and I can only do it when I’m not thinking about it. So if you could refrain from calling attention…”
”Sorry.”
She nodded.
They continued on for a few minutes like that, but walking was a lot less satisfying than flying, now, so with a quick glance at Jesse, she took off again, flying much higher into the scaffolding of branches before landing this time, and flying through wider gaps between trees where she needed to, rather than finding alternate paths. It made her happy.
They walked for another twenty minutes, maybe, and Cassie was beginning to be able to see snatches of road between the tree trunks when she started to hear yelling. From the way Jesse was moving, he hadn’t heard it yet. Cassie sped up, trying to find the biggest gaps in the trees to see where the noise was coming from. There were multiple voices, maybe a dozen, maybe a few more, and the words were too foreign and too distant for her implant to start translating them.
She hesitated, listening harder, wondering if her implant would even work, anymore. Surly the pathways in her brain that processed oral input were different, now.
Curiosity drove her forward again, safe in the middle-reaches of the trees, until she could see individuals on a section of roadway.
There was a fight going on, that much was certain. There were winners and losers, and the tipping point of the fight was just passing - the losers looked like they were in for a bitter, painful loss over the next few minutes. They were all armed, but the losers were armed with various blunt objects that Cassie didn’t immediately recognize, while the winners were armed with much more complex foreign objects. There were myriad body types on both sides of the fight, but the losers were more diverse and had a number of individuals who were clearly not equipped for physical altercations.
Much the way Cassie wasn’t.
She fled, finding Jesse by sound and smell.
“They’re fighting,” she said, pointing.
“Who?” he asked, picking up his pace. She shook her head.
“I don’t know, but if the wrong side’s winning, you need to get there soon. It’ll be over… very soon.”
Jesse accelerated to a jog with Cassie trailing behind him slightly above head level. She was beginning to be able to hear the noise of the fight again, but now the angry noises had taken on a snarling, callous nature or a whimpering, barking nature. She wasn’t sure if Jesse could hear it yet, but the losers were getting the worst of the temper of the winning side. She could hear injuries as they happened, a shrill yelp accompanying a hard thump and a grunt. It turned her stomach.
“Hurry, Jesse,” she said. “The wrong side is winning.”
Jesse ran, now, and Cassie gained altitude, not wanting to get too close when the fight finally came into view.
And then it did.
It had gotten worse faster than Cassie had expected, with bodies laying scattered across the wide dirt path and a broken crew of mismatched fighters pressing together, surrounded by the stronger, better armed winners, while a few of the worst bullies went around the fallen and beat them again, to make sure that none of them were faking.
Jesse yelled something and ran into their midst. Belatedly, Cassie’s implant registered the word ‘stop’. It had very little impact on either side.
He yelled it again, breaking through the ring around the cowering losing side. This was enough to hold up the press against them, and Jesse held out his arms. Cassie didn’t catch enough words of what he said next to make any sense of it at all, but it was enough to end whatever had been going on. The winners withdrew, leaving Jesse with the losers. They picked through the people on the ground, finding everyone alive, it appeared, though several were in pretty bad shape. Jesse helped where he could and had several conversations with those who appeared to be leading, then he stepped off of the pathway and waved Cassie down out of the trees. She took a long path down, approaching Jesse as carefully as she could to not be seen.
“What happened?” she asked. He was scratching his head frowning.
“Strangest thing…”
“Jesse,” she said, peering around the tree. The group he had defended was picking itself up and trying to get organized to move the more injured individuals down the road to wherever they had come from, presumably.
“I would have never guessed,” he said.
“Yeah, that isn’t helping,” Cassie said. He brightened and she raised an eyebrow.
“You’re feeling better.”
“Jesse.”
He grinned.
“Sorry. No, something’s gone wrong, here.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed. Keep going.”
“There are no animals on this planet.”
She blinked.
“Clearly you’re wrong.”
“No, every non-plant lifeform on the planet is an immigrant or has been imported, depending on its level of sentience.”
“They only pick the smart ones?”
“No, sentient ones immigrate, everything else is imported,” Jesse said.
“That makes sense,” Cassie agreed.
“Obviously.”
“Has nothing to do with that fight.”
“You interrupted me.”
“Did not.”
“Did, too.”
“Focus,” Cassie said.
“Right. There are no animals on this planet.”
“We covered that.”
“So you tell me, what kind of people are going to turn up on a planet designated as a nature sanctuary where there are no other forms of civilization?”
“Vegans,” Cassie said.
“Says the one who only eats three kinds of fruit,” Jesse observed.
“You’re getting to the point,” Cassie said. “Any minute now.”
“Peace-loving, community-centered, naturalists,” he said. “They take their rules very seriously, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been to one of their council meetings, and they can drag on for weeks, but…”
He looked down the dirt road after the group he had rescued.
“Jesse, what’s going on?”
“It was a protest,” he said. Cassie was taken aback.
“Protesting what?”
“The demolition of the forest.”
She gasped, her response unexpectedly personal.
“Who would do that?”
He shook his head.
“Apparently things have changed since I was last here.”
“When was that?”
“Maybe ten years.”
He must have been just a teenager, Cassie thought, wondering if Jesse had simply misunderstood what was going on.
On the other hand, she had just witnessed some kind of beat-down on the road.
“Those were…?”
“Guards. Police. They don’t really have the same idea here as you. They’re political enforcers.”
“Usually protests are for the benefit of the people who see them,” Cassie said. “Why in the world would they be protesting out here in the middle of nowhere? I mean, could you imagine if the rest of the people here could see what just happened?”
“It doesn’t really work like that here.”
“Like what?”
“Like that people would care.”
“What? The pacifist communist vegans don’t care about police brutality?”
“I wouldn’t say it to them like that, but… they don’t consider it their business. It isn’t so much that they don’t care, but that they don’t have a mandate to do anything.”
“Against their own government,” Cassie said.
“I think it probably surprises them that they would have to do anything,” he said. “They aren’t the power-grab type. It’s the same mentality that makes them not interfere when something… like that… happens.” He motioned toward the road. “They don’t want to own anything that doesn’t actually belong to them.”
She opened her mouth to say that they had
to do something about it, but the words wouldn’t come out. Jesse frowned, then nodded.
“It isn’t your nature, is it?”
She shook her head.
“I can’t. But you have to help them.”
“Help them how? Depose a government and find a better way for people to govern themselves?”
Cassie surged with passion, then turned aside. She wanted to plead with him, to argue with him and tell him he was wrong, but there was something disingenuous about urging him to take action that they both knew she couldn’t support, and she seemed to have exhausted her store of bravery in the simple conversation. He sighed.
“We should go. I brought you here to keep you from stressing yourself to death. This isn’t going to help.”
This stirred her once more, and she shook her head.
“I want to see,” she said. “Take me to see what you brought me here for.”
She would convince him. Maybe not directly in argument, like she normally would, but she would convince him all the same. Maybe protests didn’t stir the souls of the people of Yan, but brutality against civilians stirred hers. Maybe the only person who had needed to see what happened had.
Or maybe Jesse was just teasing her.
His eyes sparkled and he nodded.
“Of course.”
The population appeared to live in tiny little villages at the intersections of multiple paths. Jesse explained to her as they walked that the population of the planet had been steadily growing over the past decades since it had been settled. When they ran out of space in one tiny community, they would pick a spot for a new one, cutting down the trees there and using them to build the buildings that the new community would live in, and then siting the new enclosures for the next set of plants from the planet that the new community agreed to import. Planning and construction could take years.
The path that they were on would have led to just such an enclosure, if they had followed it the other way, Jesse said. Instead, they were going toward the little town so that he could see if the planet that Pixies were from was represented, and get a map on how to find their gardens.