The Survivor

by BRIDGET TYLER

  Mom walks from crate to crate, studying each face intently.

  I should get out of here before she bothers to wonder what I’m doing. I watch her instead.

  I’m starting to think she forgot I’m here when she straightens and looks me right in the eye. “Your grandfather tried to stop me from marrying your father.”

  The non sequitur is surprisingly urgent. Like she’s trying to tell me something. Or maybe like she’s trying to tell herself something.

  “Why?” I ask cautiously.

  Mom looks down at the inso crates holding our dead marines again. “He thought your father was frivolous. Idealistic. Ridiculous. Dreaming of other worlds while ours was collapsing.”

  She quirks a tiny smile. The kind that isn’t meant for anyone else to see. “But that’s why I married Nick. He had . . . ideas. Hope. He thought that humanity needed to do more than just survive. He thought we needed to strive for something bigger.”

  “‘Unrealistic goals are what makes us human’?” I say, quoting one of Dad’s favorite self-made clichés.

  She nods. “Without his unrealistic goals, we wouldn’t have discovered Tau. And without Tau . . .”

  “We’d already be gone.”

  She shoves a hand through her hair and straightens her shoulders, pulling her body upright and square. “But we’re not gone,” she says. “We’re here.” Her eyes drift back to the dead marines. “And we can do better than this.”

  Her voice is different. But familiar, for the first time in weeks. She sounds like herself again. She sounds like the commander.

  “What are you going to do, Mom?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she says. Then she throws a pointed look at the medical kit slung across my shoulder. “Whatever it is you’re going to do, bring a second kit. You might not need it, but if you do . . .”

  “Mom—”

  “Yes?”

  I want to tell her everything. I want her to help. Or at least tell me I’m doing the right thing. But if she could do that, we wouldn’t be in this situation. This is a choice I have to make for myself.

  “I love you,” I say instead.

  “I love you, too,” she says. Then she leaves the morgue.

  I take her advice and grab a second medical kit.

  First light is just staining the edges of the sky as I walk back to the greenhouse. I feel strange, after that conversation with Mom. Better, sort of. Worse, too.

  She told me that she needed me, two months ago, when we still thought we had a home to go back to. She needs me still. Not as a cadet, following her orders, but as . . . I don’t know what I am now.

  I push the greenhouse door open and walk into a tangle of angry voices.

  Chris is saying something about how we’ll get caught before we even leave, if everyone doesn’t shut up, but I can hardly hear him over Leela and Jay yelling at each other.

  “Oh, so you just decided to get wasted for kicks, then?” Leela demands, talking over Jay as he bellows, “This isn’t about me!”

  “Yes, it is,” I say, raising my voice to cut into the argument.

  Jay pivots to glare at me. “Well, save it, then, because I don’t need your pity. And I won’t let you put the whole species in danger just because I felt sorry for myself for a minute.”

  “It isn’t pity, Jay,” I say. “It’s love. I love you. And I can’t just stand here and watch them break you when there might be a better way.”

  Color blasts into his face. He stares at me. I grit my teeth against the qualifiers and retractions in my head. I’m about to put my life on the line. Why not put my heart out there, while I’m at it?

  “Nobody’s asking anything of me that isn’t being asked of everyone else,” he says, very quietly this time.

  “This shouldn’t be asked of anyone,” Beth says.

  Jay shakes his head. “Shouldn’t has nothing to do with this. The IntGov shouldn’t have wrecked Earth with an operating system update, either. But they did. So here we are. And I have to get over myself and deal. Not ignore my orders and run away to try to . . . what the hell do you all think you’re going to accomplish, anyway? Talk Tarn into being nice to us?”

  It sounds so stupid when he puts it that way. Ridiculous. Dangerous. Naive.

  Panic tugs at my throat, clinging to the words I’m trying to slap together into an argument. But the fear doesn’t make me want to run away. Not anymore. It makes me angry.

  “No,” I snap. “I’m going to ask Tarn to give us asylum on his planet. He might say no. He might kill me just for asking. But if last night is the other alternative, then I have to try.”

  “Jo.” Jay is almost whispering now. “I can’t let you do this for me.”

  “You aren’t letting me do anything,” I say. “I don’t need your permission. I need your help.”

  He shakes his head, turning away from me to look out through the glass wall.

  It gets painfully quiet. I don’t know what else to say.

  “Which flyer are we taking?” Beth asks.

  “Beta,” I say. My eyes still on Jay’s back.

  “Fine,” she says, striding to the door. “Don’t waste too much time talking him into it.”

  Chris and Leela follow her.

  Now it’s just Jay and me. I know Beth is right. We need to go. I don’t know how to convince him. Maybe I can’t. But I can’t just walk away either. If I do that, I have the worst feeling I’ll never see him again.

  “Come with us,” I say. “Don’t do this for yourself. Do it for me. Do it for all of us. You won’t be the only one who gets ruined by this.”

  All of a sudden, I know why Mom told me that story about how Grandpa didn’t want her marrying Dad. I know what she was trying to tell me.

  “War might be our best hope for survival,” I say, the words coming together faster now. “But surviving isn’t enough. To be human, we have to be more than that. So I’m going to try to convince Tarn to help us. I have no idea how, but . . . I know I need your help.”

  I walk out of the greenhouse without waiting for him to reply. My heart is pounding. I don’t realize that I’m holding my breath until I hear the wheezing whisper of his braces behind me as he jogs to catch up.

  Sixteen

  By the time I reach the flyer, Leela has finished preflight. She’s sitting in the copilot seat, leaving the pilot seat for me. The others are already tethered in. Fear prickles over my skin as I make my way to the front. But it feels different from the negative emotions that have been choking me for the last three weeks. Cleaner. I’d be delusional if I weren’t afraid right now. This mission is unauthorized and wildly dangerous. It probably won’t work.

  But it’s the right thing to do.

  I know that, on a level that’s more physical than intellectual. It’s like that feeling I get when I’m lining a shuttle up for docking. I’m in the right place at the right time.

  I hear the rear hatch sealing behind me as I attach my stiffened flex to the arm of my chair and bring up the navigation app.

  “All present and accounted for,” Jay says. The mundane words tense with emotion.

  I pivot my chair to look back at him as he tethers into the back row.

  “Last chance for regrets.”

  “Been there,” Jay says. “Bought the T-shirt. And the postcards.”

  “I didn’t know you were such a souvenir guy,” Chris says, relief in his light tone.

  Beth rolls her eyes. “Must we engage in witty banter at this hour of the morning?”

  “Yes,” Leela and Chris say, simultaneously.

  Jay chokes on a tight laugh.

  I feel lighter as I twist my chair back to face the wall screens and press my hands gently up the nav app.

  The flyer leaps into the air.

  I breathe out. It feels good. Like I’ve been holding my breath for weeks and didn’t notice until just now. I drag air into my lungs again, letting my body soak in the oxygen. I don’t know what’s going to happen when we get to the S
olace. We might not live to see another sunrise. But at least I can breathe now.

  Walk in the present, Joey. That’s the only way we get to see the future.

  Miguel’s voice runs through my brain, his laughter ghosting under the words. He was dead less than an hour after he said them. But, impossibly, that doesn’t seem to sour the memory. The ghost of his laughter twists into a different remembered scene. Different words, spoken in the minutes before another untimely death.

  This new world is going to be ours. Not a hand-me-down that’s held together with solar paneling and wishful thinking.

  Teddy never got to see Tau. And it isn’t ours, not by a long shot. But we still have a responsibility to it. And to our species. There has to be a way to protect them both.

  The prismatic crystal peaks of the Diamond Range spike out of the softer hills up ahead. Tendrils of morning light twist between the crystal crags, and their fragmented rainbows catch in the exterior camera lenses, splashing color across our 360-degree view.

  “I forgot,” Chris says, quietly. “I’ve been locked in the 3D lab for so long, so . . .”

  “Scared,” Beth says.

  He nods. “Yeah. That, too. I was busy and scared and I just . . . forgot.”

  Walk in the present, Joey.

  I feel a little smile spreading over my lips as I raise my fingers, giving us the lift we need to rear up over the Maze Plateau. Then I pour on the speed, letting myself enjoy the rush as we hurtle through the thin air, just at the edge of the sky.

  “We’ve got company,” Leela says, swiping quickly at her flex as we wheel out over Angel Valley. “Flyer, twelve klicks out.”

  “They already sent someone after us?” I say, disbelieving.

  “No,” Leela says. “Can’t be. They’re ahead of us on a northeast trajectory. Looks like they’re headed back to base.”

  “What were they doing out there?” Chris asks.

  Jay makes a little noise, somewhere between a gasp and a groan. I’m not sure anyone else notices, but it fills in the last gaps between several things I already know.

  “Take over, okay?” I ask Leela.

  She nods.

  I pivot my chair again to look back at Jay.

  “You know, don’t you?”

  The misery in his eyes is so intense, it makes me want to take the question back. Tell him he doesn’t have to talk about it. Ever.

  But he does.

  “No point in following orders now, is there?” he says, almost choking on the words. “Shelby’s been sending a handful of her squaddies on a special duty they weren’t supposed to talk about. Since their second week here. I didn’t know why, until—”

  Black smoke abruptly chokes the three-sixty view around us.

  “What the hell?” Leela mutters as she shoves her hands upward on her nav app, pulling us up and forward above the blinding smoke.

  “Ten o’clock,” Chris says, pointing ahead of us on the clearing screens. “Forest fire, maybe?”

  “Wood smoke wouldn’t be so black,” Beth says. “The crystal in the rocks is burning.”

  “That’s impossible,” Chris says. “The temperatures required—”

  “Can be easily attained with a simple flamethrower,” Beth says.

  “That flyer . . .” Leela can’t force herself to finish the thought.

  “Yeah,” Jay says. “I was getting to that.”

  “What?” I say, nausea rolling over me with every heartbeat. “What are they doing?”

  “Just . . . take us to the source of the smoke, okay?” he says. “You’ll see.”

  I take control back from Leela and swing our flyer wide, heading for the column of smoke, which I can now see is pouring from a familiar deep ravine that would be almost invisible below the tree canopy if it weren’t on fire.

  “They burned Bob’s nest,” Chris says, his voice thick with horror.

  “Why?” Leela demands. “Why would they go after the raptors? They’re not the ones who attacked us.”

  “No, but they are one of the Sorrow’s most dangerous weapons,” Jay says. “The last time the Givers called raptors down on us, we lost half the E&P team. When he demoted me, the admiral said we had to know how to take the raptors out of the equation if that became necessary. I guess, after yesterday, he thinks it’s necessary.”

  There are no words left, after that. Silence fills the flyer as I flip the rotors horizontal and maneuver us between the cliffs, into the billowing black haze.

  “Put on your breathers, everyone,” Beth says grimly. “We don’t know what’s in that smoke.”

  “What’s a few unknown toxic chemicals at this point?” Leela rasps, pulling the membrane from her utility harness and spreading it over her nose and mouth.

  “Little help?” Chris asks her, fumbling to get his on one handed. As she reaches over to help him, Jay snaps out of his chair and marches to the rear doors, without bothering to put on a breather.

  “Jay!” I call to him, but he’s already opening the hatch. “Jay, you need a—”

  The ramp unfolds and he’s gone, storming out into the smoke.

  I smack awkwardly at my autoconnect button while trying to fold my flex and get my breather out at the same time. I end up dropping everything instead.

  Beth crouches to pick my flex up as I slap my breather over my face.

  “You can’t help him unless he wants to be helped,” she says, her voice pitched low so only I can hear her.

  I grab my flex from her. She squeezes my hand. I squeeze it back. Then I slap my flex over my wrist and hurry out of the flyer after Jay.

  Beth was right. The crystal burned. The ravine walls are clouded and dark, their jagged edges melted away. Charred forms stagger across the ravine, sprawling and twisting together like cooling lava flow. I can just see the outlines of arms and big-clawed hands in the nearly unrecognizable ash. Phytoraptors. Dozens. The whole nest, burned while they slept.

  “How hot do you have to make it to melt that crystal?” Leela says, looking up at the cliffs.

  “Seven hundred Celsius,” Chris says. “But a nitrogen flamethrower can do that, easy. And Shelby ordered two dozen of them. First priority.”

  “When?” My mouth feels so dry, the word crumbles on my lips.

  “Two weeks ago,” Chris says. “Chief Ganeshalingam said they were going to be used to clear land.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Leela says, bitter humor in her voice.

  Jay is standing knee deep in the river, staring down at the charred remains of the juvenile phytoraptors. Bob’s babies. They’re all dead.

  I can feel tears running down my cheeks as I wade into the water to stand beside him. I can’t tell if they’re tears of grief or outrage. I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

  Jay doesn’t look up as I approach.

  “This . . . this is why you think you’re weak?” My voice rises of its own accord. “Because you wouldn’t burn phytoraptors alive in their nests?”

  “They hadn’t actually tried it. Yet,” he says. “They were still experimenting.” He sucks in a shaky breath. “They had captured a couple of raptors. Small ones. They had them in an empty canyon, somewhere south of here. They’d already tried fire, I guess, and it hadn’t worked. But Shelby wanted to see if it would work better while they were . . .” He chokes on the word.

  “Sleeping,” I supply, faintly.

  He nods.

  “I didn’t stop them, the first time they flamed the raptors. Or the second. The raptors didn’t even seem to notice the fire. But Preakness just kept telling Hernandez to turn the heat up, and when they finally got to the highest setting and the raptors started screaming, I just . . . couldn’t.”

  “Of course, you couldn’t let them keep tormenting captive—”

  “Hernandez got mauled because I stopped them,” he says. “The raptor charged and . . . she lost so much blood. I really thought she was going to die. Because of me.”

  He crouches in the water,
trailing his fingers over the blackened remains of one of the baby raptors.

  “Preakness hustled me straight to Shelby when we got back,” he continues. “I don’t think I heard a word she said while she was chewing me out. I just kept demanding to see the admiral.”

  “But my grandfather knew exactly what Shelby was doing,” I say, my heart sinking. I already knew that, but standing in the carnage of my grandfather’s decisions . . . it’s different from just knowing.

  I can see my heartbreak reflected in Jay’s eyes.

  “It isn’t . . .” He trails off, then tries again. “The admiral knows this is . . . terrible. He said when you’re young, you think that sacrifices mean stuff like going hungry or dying to protect people. He said surviving and being able to live with yourself aren’t always the same thing. That it’s our job, as leaders and soldiers, to take on that burden for the rest of our people.”

  I can hear Grandpa’s voice in the words.

  “Do you think he’s right?” Jay asks.

  I turn and look at the devastation behind me, then down at the crumbling remains of Bob’s children. For just a moment my brain replaces the ruined nest with the deep-sleep center on the Prairie. Thousands of humans, helpless. Maybe dying soon, if we can’t make this world safe for them.

  I blink, and it’s gone. I’m surrounded by destruction again.

  What if this is what it takes for them to survive?

  “Uh-oh.”

  My whole body goes light at the dread in Chris’s voice. I turn to look back at him. He’s staring up at the cliffs. I follow his gaze and see phytoraptors silently dropping down the melted ravine walls all around us. They’re only visible because of the soot streaking their skin, breaking the effect of their chameleon-like camouflage.

  “Everybody back to the flyer,” Leela shouts, but it’s too late. Sunflower leaps onto the ramp, blocking our path to safety. Their mane of yellow petals is a charred, stubby mess oozing thick white blood, but there’s no mistaking the deadly being.

  Sunflower hisses, and claws flash out of their huge hands.

  “Get behind me!” Jay shouts as we slosh through the stream and race back to the others.