The Survivor

by BRIDGET TYLER

  Sunflower doesn’t wait for them. They rip themselves from the soil, streaks of white blood spraying out behind them as they hurl themselves up the cliff toward the Takers.

  The two Sorrow bolt, disappearing into the thick trees. Sunflower is right behind them, leaving Bob to care for the babies down below.

  “Get back to the flyer!” Shelby bellows, tearing after Sunflower and the Takers.

  “What are you—”

  I don’t get all the way through the mostly rhetorical question before Beth bolts after Shelby. I don’t know what Shelby thinks this is going to accomplish, but there’s no way I’m letting my sister run into a mess of angry raptors and Sorrow on her own.

  My boots slip-slide over the rocky soil, my feet almost shooting out from under me every few steps as I follow Beth up a steep wash between a pair of gently rounded hills. Shelby is out of sight, but I can hear her ahead of us, crashing through the underbrush. We crest the wash and half slide down the other side.

  The rocky ground gets softer the farther downhill we get. The trees are thinning out and getting scraggly, too.

  The ground climbs again, so steeply we have to scramble on our hands and feet for a few meters. Then we explode over a ridge, and bright turquoise water fills the horizon.

  This is the beach where we found the Ranger team’s abandoned hot spot. The sugary white dunes are framed by crumbling gray-white cliffs. Shelby’s dark silhouette, clambering across the white expanse, wavers as light refracts off the sand around her.

  There are no Takers or raptors anywhere to be seen.

  “Where—”

  “Shhhh!”

  Beth widens her eyes pointedly, then looks up and to the left.

  I follow her gaze to one of the scrubby trees huddled where the dirt fades into the sand. Its branches are moving restlessly, shifting under the weight of what has to be a camouflaged raptor.

  “Sunflower won’t follow us onto the beach,” Beth says, quietly, “as long as we don’t run or display fear.”

  “Oh sure,” I say, digging my nails into my palms. “Why would we do that?”

  But the huge raptor makes no move to follow as we trudge across the sand to Shelby. The fine white dunes suck at my boots with every step, their heat burning through my soles despite the biting chill of the air.

  “You two are distinctly lacking in survival skills,” Shelby snaps as we catch up with her.

  “We’re not the ones who decided to chase a phytoraptor and two armed Sorrow,” I point out.

  “Yeah, well, takes one to know one,” Shelby growls, hitching her rifle over her shoulder and shaking out her flex.

  “I don’t see any evidence of your quarry,” Beth points out.

  Shelby snorts. “If you’re using that ten-dollar word to describe the black-robed dudes, they disappeared into those cliffs with a buncha gray-robed assholes who were makin’ off with our equipment.”

  “Equipment? What . . . oh. The hot spot?” My eyes dart to a rock formation just offshore that used to have an antenna jutting from its highest point. “What would the Sorrow want with the old Ranger hot spot?”

  “They’re trying to cripple us,” Shelby says, pulling up her camera app and increasing magnification to 100 percent so that she can see the cliff face in detail. “Keep us out of network up here.”

  “Doubtful,” Beth says as Shelby pans the cliffs. “Tarn has a satellite phone—he knows that hot spots are simply conveniences.”

  “Guess they’re just being jerks, then,” Shelby snarls, her eyes still on her flex.

  “No. The Sorrow don’t leave their caves unless it’s absolutely necessary,” I say, information sliding in and out of focus in my head. “And they don’t just have sat phones. They have recyclers and 3D printers. They could definitely build their own hot spots if they wanted to.”

  “Jee-zus wept,” Shelby breathes, leaping over my train of thought to a new one. “Those things are recycling our gear to print guns.”

  “You don’t have any reason to assume that,” I protest.

  She arches an eyebrow at me. “Oh yeah? So what exactly do you think they’re doing with that equipment?”

  Possibilities yawn out like an airless vacuum around me, crushing the last of the hope from my bones. Every single one leads to the same conclusion.

  War.

  “Beings,” Beth says, breaking the tense quiet.

  “Excuse me?” Shelby tosses the words over her shoulder as she paces up the beach, still panning her zoomed-in camera over the cliffs.

  “The Sorrow aren’t things,” Beth says, “even less so than the phytoraptors are beasties. They’re a highly sophisticated culture of sentient beings.”

  “Who are stealing our shit so they can recycle it into weapons and kill us all,” Shelby retorts.

  “All the more reason not to underestimate—”

  “Gotcha!”

  Shelby bolts for the cliffs. By the time we catch up, she’s already hauling herself up the soft cliff face toward a narrow tunnel entrance five or six meters overhead.

  “That tunnel appears to be artificial,” Beth says.

  “It’d have to be,” Shelby huffs, deliberately sending a shower of dirt clumps down on us as she kicks out a new toehold in the cliff. “No natural cave system is going to last for long in ground like this. Too soft.”

  “And yet you’re planning to go inside?” Beth calls after her.

  “Yup,” she says. “I’d tell y’all to stay down there, but I know how you feel about following instructions.”

  Beth throws me a questioning look.

  “Yeah,” I say, responding to the unspoken query. “But I want to see.”

  “Me too,” she says.

  I’m a stronger climber, so I go first. I can feel the cliff crumbling under my boots as I scramble upward, but I keep going, ignoring the sparks of fear and adrenaline dancing up my spine.

  I drag myself over the lip of the tunnel. The white bubble of Shelby’s flex light is already a few meters ahead of us in the darkness.

  “There’s Danger Twin one,” Shelby says, impatience dancing in her voice. “And . . . Danger Twin two.”

  Ignoring Shelby, I grab my sister’s hand as she scrambles over the lip of the tunnel and haul her the rest of the way up.

  “They must be printing laser drills,” Shelby says as we activate the flashlight settings on our flexes and catch up with her. “Walls are smooth.”

  “Not necessarily,” Beth says. “They may be able to tunnel like this without any technology at all. Remember, the Sorrow have biological abilities that far exceed our own.”

  “Yeah, well, I have a bigger gun,” Shelby drawls. But the bravado doesn’t quite hide the fear in her voice.

  She points into the darkness ahead. “What the hell is that?”

  I peer past her to see a distant glimmer of bright pink and burnt orange.

  “Solace tree roots,” I say. “I think.”

  “Looks more like Vegas,” she mutters, continuing up the tunnel.

  “The Ranger team classified them as Chorulux neon,” Beth says. “Presumably because they shared your sentiment.”

  We emerge into a high-ceilinged cavern filled with tangled root clusters that drip color and light from the darkness above.

  “Just when you think you’ve seen weird,” Shelby mutters, craning so hard to look at them that she turns a lopsided circle through the clusters. “What good does it do a tree to have glowing roots?”

  “They’re predators,” I say. “They feed on invertebrates that live in these caves.”

  Shelby snorts. “So they’re giant bug zappers?”

  “You have an interesting way with words,” Beth observes.

  “Thanks, Mendel.”

  “Not a compliment,” Beth says.

  Shelby barks a belly laugh. “I like you too, kid.” Then she turns to me. “But you called them something else, right? Solace?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “That’s what the Sorrow call th
ese trees.”

  “Same as their city, huh?” Shelby says, twisting to look up at the root clusters again. “Because it gets light from a grove like this, right?”

  “Right,” I say.

  “Do we know what that grove looks like? Up top?” she asks, her eyes still on the tangles of light overhead.

  A horrible certainty creeps up my spine, carrying Shelby’s words with it: I’ve always been more interested in ending life than multiplying it.

  Shelby isn’t curious about Sorrow culture. She’s looking for weaknesses. She’s trying to figure out how to attack the Solace.

  My hand goes to the ensign pips on my collar. When Grandpa gave them to me, I thought I was going to be helping him understand the Sorrow so he could negotiate peace. But he and Shelby need to understand them just as badly if we’re going to war. Maybe even more so. How can I refuse to help them? To help us?

  “It’s a yes-or-no question, Junior,” Shelby snarks. “Shouldn’t require deliberation.”

  I wish that was true.

  “No,” I say, finally. “No one’s seen it, but the grove is supposed to be ancient. The root clusters in the Solace are way bigger than these. The trees must be enormous. Much bigger than the ones we saw at the raptor nest. The ones you said reminded you of Mississippi.”

  “Is that so?”

  I can’t really see her face in the neon-painted dark, but there’s something weird about her tone. She sounds satisfied. And kind of smug. What is she planning? How can knowing what the grove that lights Sorrow’s Solace might look like help her attack the city below?

  Abruptly, Shelby pushes ahead, darting through the root clusters so quickly that she disappears between the glowing tangles. When we catch up, she’s standing at the farthest edge of the grove’s light, where the rich darkness of the cavern takes hold.

  Shelby doesn’t acknowledge us as we approach. Her eyes, and her mind, are drilling out into the dark as though she could see Sorrow’s Solace, if only she looked hard enough.

  Then she turns and starts back the way we came without another word.

  Ten

  The sun is setting as I shift our rotors into upright position for landing. Shelby insisted on collapsing the Sorrow tunnel before we left. Then she spent hours in the Solace grove on the cliffs above it, taking pictures of the trees and gathering fallen branches. She’s sprawled in the back row now. Beth is sitting next to me, quietly looking out at Tau.

  She’s calm.

  I feel like I want to climb out of my skin.

  My stomach is churning, like I’m really nervous about something. Or I’ve made a horrible mistake. Logically, I know that’s not true. If the Sorrow are arming themselves to attack us, then helping Shelby understand them is more than my job. It’s the best thing I can do to protect the human species.

  So why do I feel like a traitor?

  Shelby’s flex buzzes. She checks it and then kicks the seat in front of her. “Goddamn it.”

  I throw a look at Beth. She ignores me, but I can tell she’s listening to Shelby’s muttered curses as the lieutenant texts her reply, fingers flying at an irritated clip.

  “Idiot,” Shelby growls under her breath, flopping back in her chair.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask cautiously.

  Shelby hurls a glare at me across the flyer’s cabin. “What isn’t?” She looks to Beth. “I need access to that footage, Mendel. Yesterday.”

  With that Shelby untethers, staggering to the rear doors before the flyer has even touched down. The second we’re on the ground, she smacks the door controls and storms down the ramp while it’s still unfolding.

  “What are you going to tell her?” I ask Beth once Shelby is gone.

  “Equipment failure,” Beth says. “I don’t expect she’ll believe me, but she can’t prove otherwise.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  Beth untethers and gathers up her sample bag. “I didn’t think you would.”

  “Really?”

  “I know you, Jo,” Beth says. “Apparently better than you do.”

  She leaves.

  I take my time shutting the flyer down.

  I’m so incredibly confused. Helping Beth hide her data, lying to everyone, maybe endangering our whole species, feels right. And helping Shelby understand the solace trees, doing my job, feels so wrong. Logically, it should be the other way around. But that’s not what my gut is telling me.

  I’ve always trusted my instincts. But my instincts told me to let Tarn through the shield and he almost killed me. If Shelby hadn’t come along . . .

  What would have happened if Shelby hadn’t come along?

  Glow worms.

  The anxious tapping of Shelby’s long fingers on the butt of her rifle this afternoon accompanies the ugly words through my brain. Shelby might be a battle-tested marine who survived the flu, but she’s also a xenophobe who never dreamed of ending up on another planet. She said Tarn was about to snap my neck when she saw us. But looking back on it now, Tarn had his hand locked around my throat for what felt like a long time before Shelby showed up. If he was trying to kill me, why spend all that time singing to me first?

  Glow worms.

  That was the first time Shelby had ever seen an extraterrestrial. How much did fear influence what she saw? How much did my own fear influence how I reacted? How much did it influence my memory of what had happened after it was over?

  How much did my memory of what happened influence everything that’s happened since?

  Glow worms.

  I half run to Ground Control.

  Grandpa’s office door is closed. I can hear voices inside. Shelby. Grandpa. And another, so quiet I can’t make it out. Probably whoever was responsible for the text that made Shelby so furious. I can hear the outrage in her voice through the door. Whatever is going on, I can’t just burst in there. I have to wait.

  It’s physically impossible to stand still, so I pace. Up the hall. Down the hall.

  That’s when I notice that Mom’s office door is open.

  Mom is in there. Of course. She always is these days.

  Her new office is the smallest room in the building. Basically everyone offered to let her take their rooms after Grandpa took over the command office, but she didn’t want to displace anyone. Grandpa insisted that she cram a desk and chair into the tiny space, even though Mom has never liked sitting while she works. She’s sitting now, with her back to the mountain of flexes on her desk, watching the live feed from the central square that’s playing on her wall screens.

  I hesitate in the open doorway. I want to go inside. I want to tell her . . . what do I want to tell her? What do I really want to say to Grandpa? That Shelby is a xenophobe? They both know that. That war with the Sorrow is a bad idea? They know that too. We all do.

  “What’s up, kiddo?” Mom asks, without turning to look at me.

  “The Sorrow are salvaging old Ranger gear,” I blurt out. “Lieutenant Shelby thinks they’re printing guns.”

  Mom sighs, slumping in her chair. “I suppose it was only a matter of time.”

  “No!” The word bursts out of my mouth of its own accord.

  “No, what?” Mom snarls, her voice rising in volume with every word. “No, the Sorrow can’t attack us for settling on their planet against their wishes? No, we can’t just decide this world is ours, even though it belongs to another species? No, Earth can’t be dead because of a ridiculous coding error? What exactly are you objecting to, Joanna?”

  I feel a tear slip down my cheek.

  “There must be something we can do,” I whisper. “Something you can do.”

  Mom yanks a satellite phone from her harness and hurls it across the desk at me.

  “Check the call list,” she snaps.

  I do.

  Fifteen outgoing calls. All to Tarn.

  “I tried,” she says. “I tried, and tried. And your Grandfather won’t risk lives sending a delegation to the Solace. Not after Tarn tried to kill you. It�
�s out of my hands.”

  I stare down at the list of uncompleted calls. My heart is pounding and I feel like I can’t get enough oxygen. It’s like I’m standing in front of a phytoraptor, not in my mom’s cramped, uncomfortable office.

  I look up at Mom.

  “It can’t be out of your hands.”

  “That isn’t fair, Joanna.” She chews each word out individually. “What do you expect me to do?”

  “I don’t know!” The words tumble out so fast I couldn’t stop them if I wanted to. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I want you to do. Everything is so . . . wrong. And we can’t just sit here and be wrong with it. There has to be a better way.”

  Mom meets my eyes. “I don’t know what it is. If I did, I’d . . .” She trails off, slumping down in the chair again. Her eyes drift to the stacks of flexes on the desk I know she must hate.

  My stomach hurts.

  I want to leave. I want to hug her. I want to scream at her. I want her to be, I don’t know, not this. No. That’s wrong. I know exactly who I want her to be.

  The commander.

  Without warning, she smacks the flexes off her desk, sending them crashing into the wall screen.

  When her eyes meet mine again, there’s anger in them along with the misery.

  “There has to be another way, doesn’t there?”

  It isn’t a question. It’s an answer. It’s why Mom has been hiding in here, bathing in a misery of paperwork. It’s why I’ve been bolting for space every chance I get. We’re both so afraid that there isn’t another way that we’re literally hiding from the world.

  From each other.

  Before I can figure out how to say that out loud, voices burst in from the hall.

  “I’m sorry, Private.” Grandpa’s voice is grim.

  “So am I, sir.” That’s Jay’s voice. And he sounds like he’s about to cry.

  I dart into the hallway and almost run into Jay, who is hurrying toward the exit. He sucks in a sharp breath when he sees me, then quickly looks away.

  “Jay—”

  But he just steps around me and keeps going.

  I spin back to Grandpa. “What’s going on? Jay isn’t a private.”