Children of a Different Sky

by Jane Yolen

  Wainwright and Garcia are just one of twelve patrols that make up this local division of the United Nations Peacekeeper Force, an international group of soldiers stationed a few miles inland off the coast of northern France. Why France? Garcia has no clue, except that it’s close to the QZ—quarantine zone. Lately the teams have been showing up with three or four of the creatures every couple of hours. Depending on what time you return to camp with your capture you can count on about an hour turnaround to eat and rest, then it’s back out again.

  It was Garcia who spotted the shimmer hanging in the air while out with Wainwright that morning—the guys like to call it an airhole, which is easier and crasser than saying what it really is: a portal between the real world and some other dimension where, apparently, actual mythical fairies live. Nobody spots airholes like Garcia does—he’s always been No. 1 in the platoon for that, which is why they only kept him desked as long as was minimally necessary.

  The portals are what the creatures keep slipping through, these random shimmers that cough out completely unwelcome visitors ready to make magic. Or trouble. Or both. The portal isn’t open to humans though, far as Garcia knows—he never heard of anyone slipping through. ‘Course, the locals inside the QZ on the other side of the English Channel claim to have gone back and forth for centuries, but that’s what’s called a fairy tale and nobody believes that shit.

  Except Garcia has seen the “other side”—for about thirty seconds, and that’s where his trouble began. About ten weeks ago, while out with a larger patrol, he spotted a working portal and no visitors in sight. Peering inside, he froze in place at the sight of her while the scent of fresh-baked bread with rosemary wafted through the portal. She spoke to him. Then the shimmer closed up and he was left standing, alone and hungry, when the rest of his squad jogged up and asked why the hell he was talking to the air.

  Explanations got laughs. Insistence on his story got people worried, and landed him in a long debriefing. Maybe they believed him, maybe they didn’t. Either way, Garcia was yanked out of the field and slammed behind a desk writing press releases while having twice-daily convos with Peacekeeper shrinks and intel officers. When he realized no one was paying attention to what he was telling them, he shifted gears and told them what they wanted to hear: that it was a hallucination. So they sent him back to his unit. But the whole experience was humiliating for a field soldier, and worse—the black mark on his record meant he might never rise in rank again.

  So earlier this morning when he spotted the airhole with Wainwright, he didn’t go near—just pointed. “Over there,” he told the Lieutenant. “Two o’clock.”

  Wainwright turned around but before he’d even stopped moving the creature came through the hole like he was folding himself through a crack in reality. He stumbled to the ground, bumped into a fence pole, spotted Wainwright and Garcia and took off. Or tried to.

  D78 was clearly a solo, but usually more came through at a time. They emerged in clumps of four, six and even twelve, stumbling out and gazing around for a second before they just began walking. Originally, patrols were told to follow discreetly at a distance, to see if visitors would lead to houses where they’d be given sanctuary, but in the end it seemed that the fey who came over had no plans at all. They walked, and when they found clothes hanging on a line they stole them and dressed like natives to blend in.

  But until they did that they were easy to track: wherever bare fey feet touched earth the grass sprouted wild, sometimes with little patches of bluebells and primroses to boot. It was something that went unnoticed in June, July, August. Not in March. Their footprints—at least until they could purloin some human shoes—were small and green and smelled of pastries.

  ~*~

  D78 says nothing. He has no expression, no recognition that it’s probably only a couple degrees above freezing and all he’s wearing is a blanket. He just walks. Might as well be a horse or a cow or a dog, thinks Garcia, though at least a dog would be company.

  Eventually, Wainwright takes a faster pace and walks some distance ahead, consulting his Blacktooth chat device to let base know they’re bringing one in. Garcia gives the kid a good look-over; this is his first up close fey encounter since the Incident.

  “She wishes to know if you have had success,” the creature tells Garcia in a voice so low it’s as if it’s on a sub-frequency.

  Garcia slows his steps. “You know me?”

  D78 glowers. “I was tasked with seeking you out. Clíodhna wishes to know why you are not helping. Why you hurt us instead.”

  Garcia’s gut turns to stone. This is not a conversation he plans on having with anyone, much less a minion sent from the banshee queen. But just the thought of her again gets his heart racing. “They thought I was nuts when I told them what she said,” he growls. “Everyone still thinks I’m a sandwich short of a picnic. Tell her thanks—for nothing.”

  D78 sighs. “So you have abandoned your promise.”

  “Yeah, well,” says Garcia. “Looks like she picked the wrong hero.”

  ~*~

  Ten weeks ago, the aperture shimmered out of nowhere—Garcia spotted it while stepping off the main road and taking a whiz in the trees. He took a few steps toward it and spotted a face on the other side. Not someone coming through, just a face. And what a face, what a woman. Sculpted cheekbones, green sparkling eyes, long auburn hair. She took a step back so he could see the unbelievable world behind her: verdant grass, a soft cloudless sky, a massive oak. Things that were ordinary, yet surreal. A perfect world, and at the center a shimmering, glorious queen who begged a boon of him—just like in a fairy tale.

  Her name was Clíodhna and she required his assistance. Our world is dying, and we know not why. Our lands and our powers recede daily—leaving only your world behind. Some of our folk have panicked and departed; others are vowing to start a true war with humans if the assaults on those of us who flee continue. Speak to your leaders. Tell them to speak with me. Most of us do not want a battle; that course does not turn out well.

  Then she blew him a kiss, and the scent of fresh-baked bread was replaced with a subtle aroma of roses that wrapped around him like a silken cocoon. “I’ll try,” he whispered, so in love with her that his insides were on fire. “For you, I’ll try.”

  It should have been easy: he assumed everyone wanted an end to the war, the constant patrolling of the border and processing of creatures. Wouldn’t everyone want to know how to stop the fey streaming across the borders, the ones who were making magic and upsetting the locals? They could work together to stop that other world from vanishing. It seemed simple.

  It was not.

  ~*~

  Garcia thinks about the shimmering airhole he spotted earlier this morning. How it called to him in the seconds before he turned in time to see D78 arriving into his world. He thinks about the kind of guts it takes to dive headlong into a strange land unarmed, and face a world of scared hostiles.

  I could have said nothing, thinks Garcia. Instead, he’d done his duty and called out to Wainwright. I could have let him go.

  “I still want to help,” he tells the kid as they walk through the winter-scarred fields. Moist green plants shoot beneath the creature’s footsteps, leaving a fragrant trail of spring in his wake. “But I got no idea where to start anymore.”

  “You may begin by not firing on us,” says D78. “That would be most appreciated.”

  “I have orders,” says Garcia, miserably.

  “They are not helping,” says the creature, and does not speak again.

  ~*~

  They put D78 in the truck with all the others rounded up that morning and Garcia watches as it drives off, kicking up dust from the grooves worn in the ground. The covered vehicle bounces back and forth between just two destinations all day, every day: base camp and the holding facility. After that, Garcia has no idea what happens to the creatures.

  “Chow?” Wainwright thumbs at the kitchen tent.

  “In a couple,” say
s Garcia. “Gonna clear my head.”

  The lieutenant gives him a narrow-eyed look. “You were having quite a chat with it on the way in here.”

  Garcia shrugs. Before the Incident being in the field was different: they ran in units of twelve or fifteen, fanning out every morning to mark the grids as cleared and made maps where holes in the air appeared. It was more about surveillance. If they ran into a fey they turned it right around and marched it back to the hole. But D78 hadn’t given them any trouble, and they hadn’t even tried to find it a hole to go back through.

  Back home in Tennessee, Garcia grew up with a rifle in his hands, hunting in the woods for the family supper with his redbone coonhound. Once grown he never thought about doing anything other than soldiering—it’s what the men in the family did. But the Peacekeepers didn’t feel like soldiering. Their enemy didn’t shoot back, rarely even put up a fight. Mostly the creatures were running away from something, and happened to run into you. Now apparently the response was to cart them off to a holding facility and regular EMP pulses until … until…

  Until what? Garcia wonders.

  He catches a glimpse of Wainwright going not into the mess, but rather the officers’ organizational tent. His hands make fists and his mouth twists.

  Where do they send them?

  “Douglas,” he calls out to a private passing by, gesturing at the truck in the distance. “They got a hole over there to stuff them back in or what?”

  “They certainly do,” says the soldier.

  That surprises Garcia. “Really? A stable portal?”

  “Naw,” says Douglas. “Ain’t no such thing. That way’s the pits.”

  A cool bubble encases Garcia. There’s a ring of history to this moment, something from long before even his granddaddy’s time. The pits, as far as he’s aware, are where you put the bodies—the fey who don’t behave. The ones that lob off spells that drive men mad, or turn them into animals, or make them dance until their feet break. Those ones are trouble, and the plasma deals with them fast. You have to put the bodies somewhere, so—pits. But those ones in the truck are like D78. They aren’t troublemakers. They’re not even dead.

  “Sergeant Garcia.” Wainwright is calling him, beckoning toward the officer’s tent. “You’re wanted.”

  He pulls away from his last thought and summons up the soldier in him. Wainwright, that prick, up to no good.

  Inside the officer’s tent Colonel Wu is busily signing digital papers that slide across her smartdesk one by one. After a moment she takes a sip of coffee and squints up at Wainwright and Garcia. She nods, and Garcia drops the salute.

  “Dismissed, Wainwright.”

  The lieutenant scurries off, but Garcia imagines him standing just outside the tent flap, listening in.

  “Hear you had a conversation with the capture today,” says Wu, leaning back and clasping her hands over her chest. She speaks in Mandarin but the Goo-Lexa device next to him spits out the translation almost immediately.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Garcia nods. It’s best not to get into the whys; that’s what desked him in the first place.

  “You’ve been out of the field for a while, officer,” says Wu. “Seems to me you forgot a few points of order.”

  Garcia waits, swallowing a number of retorts. “Ma’am?”

  “We’re reassigning you.”

  His heart plummets. “Don’t take me out of the field, ma’am,” he blurts. “I know how to find the airholes.”

  Wu holds up a hand. “No longer the priority. Too many of them, too many visitors. Now it’s triage.” She taps on her smartdesk and swipes up Garcia’s file. “Right. I thought as much. Time you got a little better education, sergeant. We’re done making nice. Unless you want these things striding through your hometown in a couple of months.”

  Garcia’s fingernails dig into the soft meat of his palms. “Ma’am.”

  “Wainwright will show you where you’ll go next. Make the best of it, Sergeant Garcia. We’re watching you.”

  ~*~

  The acrid, burning scent in the air hits Garcia a full klick away, and his eyes are watering by the time the truck comes to a complete stop. Once he disembarks, he can even make out a subtle, curiously pleasant odor of dark chocolate and equally dark beer.

  Now that he’s at the pitside camp he’s outfitted with a shoulder pack, which he slips over his head the way he once did the XL-PEP and goes where he’s led mutely. There’s a twitch in his gut he’s trying not to focus on.

  His guide shows him the cages first, portable metal-bar structures pounded into the earth. There are five cells and each is pretty full of fey standing shoulder-to-shoulder. They follow him with their eyes, and he feels the weight of their collective stare as if they are physically on top of him.

  Garcia wonders where he went wrong. Then he wonders where people went wrong. One at a time, two at a time in the field is one thing. Caging them like animals is—beyond imagining. What are they collecting them for?

  A low hum rises in his ears as he nears one particular cage, pulling on him like a divining rod. A hand reaches out and clamps on his wrist.

  His guide pulls out a Taser and zaps the owner of the arm, but the grip doesn’t lessen. Garcia realizes who it is: D78. “Wait, it’s OK,” he tells his guide. “Brought this one in earlier.”

  The guide puts away the Taser. “No touching,” he barks at the caged fey, and the fingers release.

  D78 stares at Garcia. Help us, he hears instead of the hum.

  “Get real,” he growls under his breath, but there’s no heat in it. He can’t get over how crowded they are. “Get yourselves out, you’re so magic.”

  More staring. They fire upon us every hour, says D78. There is one we protect from the blasts who can release the lock—but we are weak. And once free we have nowhere to go. Not without assistance.

  “Hey, man, I got things to do,” interrupts the guard. “What gives?” A second fey, with bright eyes and a furred face steps forward, brushing its fingers against its lips. The guide’s eyes glaze, and he wanders away.

  Help us, comes D78’s voice. You are able to find the worn-up places.

  “The airholes?” Garcia swallows. He’s oddly tempted by the notion that he could send every one of them back at once—it might put him in the queen’s good graces. But he would risk everything by doing it. Anyway, it can’t be done. “You’ll just come back. And they’ll catch you again.”

  Try, Anthony Garcia. For her. For your promise.

  He swallows. “Why can’t you just come over here and make nice? Don’t do magic?”

  Imagine the world if you close your eyes. That is a fraction of what it is like for us when we—blend in. Your kind would ask us to walk in this world blinded and slowly suffocating. And for what?

  “I’m not the hero she wants,” he says. “I can’t fix the world. She wants to make changes, she has to send some help.”

  D78 looks at him for a beat, long lashes flickering. “What makes you believe she hasn’t?” he says out loud, as though to make sure that he’s been heard.

  ~*~

  Mists rise high and thick the next morning, but they march him to the pits anyway, these vast dugouts in the earth. Steam and heat rise from the interiors like thermal pools, only there’s no water at the bottom—just bodies. Garcia raids his satchel and fits on the noseplugs; the stench of death and delightful food odors is a sensory dissonance he can’t ignore. He’s got a set of noise-blocking earbuds, too, but holds off a moment, listening.

  Standing near the lip of one pit, he tunes into atonal, unearthly melodies that float from its interior, sounds both eerily beautiful and like nails dragged across his heart. His stomach roils. A soldier gestures to the far side, where a cageful of the fey stagger up to the lip of the pit.

  “The … music,” says Garcia, feeling a tickle in his ears. “What is that?”

  The soldier, empty-eyed like most of the others Garcia has seen since arriving, gestures at the pit. “Them,” h
e says. “Not all of ‘em die right away. But they can’t heal and they can’t lob spells at us, so—they sing.”

  Garcia peers into the pit, squinting—the stacked bodies of the creatures bend and twist over one another, arms akimbo, legs sticking up. None of them rise, but there is a persistent … movement among them. A squirming. He swipes at his right ear, comes away with a trickle of blood.

  “They sing at us until there’s nothing left,” the soldier goes on in a flat voice. “Once the song stops, we start filling the holes in.”

  “Why wait?” asks Garcia, faintly sarcastic.

  “Wouldn’t,” says the soldier. “But we can’t keep up.” He tilts his head. The mists have now cleared and Garcia can take in what he missed before: row upon row of dirt circles, most still open to the air, stretching into the distance.

  Garcia’s legs buckle and he collapses.

  They let him rest in his barracks through lunch, but afterward it’s back to the pits—even though he hasn’t rested at all. Still dazed and desperate not to be where he is right now, Garcia sticks on the plugs and pops in the earbuds, which filter gentle classical tunes to blot out the discordant music of the dying. It has a calming effect until he realizes it’s like being in the world’s worst holo-video, with this as his soundtrack.

  “Over here,” he’s told so he listens to the music and goes over there. Other soldiers lead out a fresh queue of prisoners, who make no sound and offer no resistance; Garcia assumes if he’d been hit with that PEP every hour all night he’d be something of a zombie, too.

  Remember your promise, comes the voice from the night before and Garcia snaps alive again. He frantically scans the fey, which are now lined up three deep in front of him on the edge of the pit. We trust you.