The Survivor

by BRIDGET TYLER

  “Noble, but not helpful,” Beth says. She’s right. Raptors are circling us now. Claws and fangs flashing in absolute silence.

  Even when they were stalking us around the wreckage of our first shuttle, the phytoraptors were loud. Vicious and terrifying, but in an exuberantly gleeful way. Like hunting was a kind of game for them.

  But this isn’t hunting. This is rage.

  I frantically scan the tightening knot of furious beings, searching for Bob’s smooth, round head. I don’t know if he’ll help us, but at least I can talk to him.

  He isn’t here. He’s probably dead.

  We’re not going to make it out of here.

  Thunk.

  A long, flexible shaft buries itself in Sunflower’s eye.

  The huge raptor topples off the ramp, exposing the jagged crystal tip of a spear jutting from the back of their head.

  That’s a Sorrow weapon.

  That’s the last thought I manage before crystal shards and raptor screams fill the air around us. Everything is bright and loud and fast. Except me. My body feels slow and heavy, like I’m moving through water.

  Leela’s hand clutching at my pant leg is enough to snatch me back into the moment. I drop to the ground beside her.

  “We can make it to the ramp!” she shouts, dragging Beth along as she crab walks forward on her elbows. I throw a look back at Jay, who is crouched behind a cluster of melted parrot palms with his body wrapped around Chris like a shield. A chaos of dying phytoraptors and flying crystal boils around them.

  We might make it to the flyer, but they won’t.

  We’re going to have to leave them behind.

  As though he can hear the awful thought, Jay looks up and meets my eyes. His gaze is like a living thing. A burning cord tethering him into my soul and my mind and my memory.

  My heart thuds, echoing against my eardrums. Once. Twice.

  Then it’s quiet.

  Broken phytoraptor bodies litter the ground around us, their sticky white blood sprayed over the flyer and the charred dirt. It smells sweet, almost sugary. Blue Jell-O. Just like the solace trees. Half a dozen heavily armed Sorrow are standing in tight formation a few meters away.

  I think I’m going to scream.

  I press my lips together until the fear thins into something I can stuff back into my chest. Then I say, “Thank you.”

  One of the Sorrow strides forward, holding a massive war hammer at the ready.

  Okay, so maybe I jumped the gun on the thank-you thing.

  I shove the thought out of my head. We can’t expect them to welcome us. Not after everything that’s happened. Actually, it’s kind of a miracle they haven’t killed us yet.

  I guess that’s what we’re looking for, really. A miracle.

  This one will have to do.

  I raise my hands slowly. “We’re unarmed,” I say. “We come in hope of peace. Please. Bring us to the Followed.”

  Seventeen

  The Solace feels sour. Anxious. It’s as though the dense hum of Sorrow voices that flows through the cavern city is out of tune.

  “What is that?” Jay asks, rubbing his head.

  “A city full of beings hating us,” Chris says morosely.

  “Not hate,” I say, feeling the mass of sonar pressing against my skin. “Fear. They’re afraid.”

  “Just one of many things our species have in common,” Beth says grimly.

  “Goodie,” Leela says.

  The city reminds me of a toy Teddy had when we were kids—a building kit made of magnetic sticks you could use to build three-dimensional geometric shapes. The asymmetric scaffolding structures are crowded together in a way that seems haphazard but isn’t. If you look from the right angle, the city is a huge shadow box that paints moving images of Sorrow fighting phytoraptors on the walls of the cavern.

  The mural of light and darkness stands ten or twelve stories tall, and the ceiling is at least twice that here at the outer edges of the cavern. It slopes downward to the city’s center—low enough that the massive bioluminescent root clusters that light this hidden world almost brush the cavern floor there.

  The discordant ambient melody seems to be putting the Takers who brought us here on edge, too. None of them speak English, but until we got into the Solace, they had seemed pretty low-key about having just captured a bunch of space aliens.

  The whole flight back, they were tossing spurts of conversation back and forth between themselves that sparked and bubbled like the air was carbonated. I didn’t understand any of it, of course, but the conversation felt familiar. I could have been listening to my friends trading barbs and stupid jokes to keep from being scared.

  But now our captors are quiet. They’re keeping to the outer edges of the grand boulevard that wraps around the city, probably trying to avoid attracting too much attention. This close to the walls, the shadow figures cast by the city’s intricate buildings are warped and lopsided. I know I’m just looking at them from the wrong perspective, but it’s unsettling.

  A sharp sound pops against my skin, exploding into a froth of anxiety-barbed chatter from our escorts. They fall into two lines. At attention, I realize, as a glowing figure strides toward us.

  Ord! my brain shrieks reflexively. But the flowing robes radiate soft yellow, not Ord’s icy violet. Ord is dead. Tarn is the Followed now.

  Tarn doesn’t even slow down as he slings me over his shoulders like a sack of beans and carries me away into the shadows of the Sorrow city.

  “Tarn,” I say. “Please. Listen. We came to—”

  “Quiet!” he bellows. Then he leaps straight up, catching the cross bar of a skeletal building and swinging a long, triple-jointed leg past my head to grasp the scaffolding above us with the wide-spread digits of his foot. He crouches deeply against the beam, then pushes us up again with another great leap that leaves my guts feeling like they’re somewhere around my ears.

  The cave floor recedes with terrifying speed as he hurtles through the city, using his free arm and his legs with equal dexterity. I’ve never seen a Sorrow move like this, but only, I realize, because I wasn’t looking. Flecks of light swarm over the buildings around us. Each one is a Sorrow, their biolights gleaming as they catapult through the dark.

  The flickering swarm of biolights thins out as we climb higher and higher. Where is he taking me? How am I going to get down? Will I live long enough to try? If I do, how will I ever find my friends again? Will they be safe down there in the angry, fearful city, full of beings we’ve made our enemies?

  We’re almost as high as we can go now. The root glow is brighter here, and I can see a single building that stretches above the others. Its dull white frame is draped in stiff, opaque fabric, but multicolored light slips through the seams.

  Tarn leaps up to the highest level of the building and throws me at a long stretch of cloth. I have just enough time to scream before I hit the draped wall and roll straight through it, cracking my knees and then my chin on a hard, warm floor inside.

  Stars swim through my vision, from both the impact and the light, which seems incredibly bright in contrast to the cave outside. My cracked ribs scream as I struggle to my hands and knees.

  “Get up,” Tarn growls, grabbing me by the shoulder and yanking me to my feet.

  I blink furiously. As my eyes adjust to the light, I can see that the fabric walls and the tiled floor and ceiling are spattered with glowing sprays of every color I’ve ever imagined.

  Blood.

  The realization burns through my brain. This room is soaked in layer upon layer of Sorrow blood. Generations’ worth, it looks like. And it’s all still glowing. That’s where the intense light is coming from.

  Half a dozen naked Sorrow are moving around us. The layers of brilliance blur my vision, blending the living light of their bodies into the blood-soaked walls almost like the chameleon camouflage of the phytoraptors.

  Rows of dead bodies fill the room, resting on low slabs made of the same off-white material as the
floor and ceiling. There are least thirty in here. They aren’t all Sorrow—there’s a handful of phytoraptor bodies as well. Some have been skinned. Some have been gutted and eviscerated. Some have been stripped down to the bone. The naked Sorrow are dissecting them, I realize, fascinated and horrified at the same time.

  “Look!” Tarn snarls, dragging me to one of the skeletons. It’s missing the long bones of its legs, but the knotted joints are still lined up on the slab like it’s a puzzle with missing pieces. One of the naked Sorrow is sitting at the partially dismantled skeleton’s feet, carefully whittling at a creamy white crescent of what must be bone.

  The naked Sorrow doesn’t even look up as Tarn grabs me by the back of the neck and forces me to look closer at the carving. “Look!” he repeats. “Look!”

  My body wants to fight. Or run. I squash the instinct. If I want any hope of Tarn listening to me, I need to listen to him.

  My eyes focus on the delicate pattern the naked Sorrow is carving into the bone. It’s so familiar. It takes me a moment to realize I’ve seen it before. On the root cathedral in the heart of the Solace. At the time, I thought those pillars were made of stone, but they aren’t. Neither are the tiles of the floor under our feet, I realize, acid welling in the back of my throat. Or the scaffolding holding up this building.

  The whole city is made of bone.

  “This is how we end,” Tarn growls, releasing me so abruptly I nearly fall into the skeleton. “Our bones become the bones of this city. We live as long as it lives. That is the only comfort I can find in knowing I will soon join my pouch mate in this room.”

  “Your . . . Ord? That’s Ord?” I whisper, staring down at the bones.

  Tarn hisses something cold and horrible in Sorrow. I don’t need him to translate. This is all that’s left of the brother he killed to save my life. Ord’s death saved the phytoraptors, too, and probably Tau itself, but I bet Tarn still blames me for it.

  “Together our bones will make something beautiful out of all the ugliness and death we’ve left behind,” he says, his voice suddenly quiet. Almost a whisper. “All of the lies.”

  “We were going to leave,” I say, my own voice also a shadow of itself. “My mom was ready to take us all back to Earth when the Prairie arrived. She was trying to do the right thing. And she kept trying. I’ve seen her call log, Tarn. She’s called you every single day—”

  “Since your soldier attacked and nearly killed me!” he snarls, cutting me off.

  He’s outraged. What right does he have to be outraged?

  “She shot at you because you were strangling me, Tarn,” I say, fighting to keep the anger from my voice. “You attacked first. She was just protecting me.”

  He stares at me for a long beat. Then he raises his hands to cover his face, his palms in, in the Sorrow gesture for no, and then turns them outward so I can see the glowing yellow veins that run up his wrists and disappear into the thicker skin of his palms. That’s the gesture for yes. I’ve never seen them used together that way.

  “We will never understand each other,” Tarn says. “This is impossible.”

  “I don’t care,” I cry, letting my own anger pour out. There’s plenty to go around. I’m mad at him. At my parents. At my grandfather. At myself. “If we don’t find a way to understand each other, we’re going to keep fighting until we destroy ourselves. There has to be a better way.”

  “My brother didn’t think so,” Tarn says, looking down at the skeleton between us. “He always planned to kill your team, once he had taken as much of your technology as he could.”

  “And Ord isn’t Followed anymore,” I say. “You are. And I think you and I . . . we can find a better way. Maybe we can’t understand each other. But we can respect each other.”

  “Respect?” His mouth flexes, pulling back to reveal his blunt teeth as silent sonar pops over my skin like sparks off a fire.

  He’s laughing at me.

  “Remember where my Takers found you, before you speak of respect.” Tarn hums the words in a tone that makes my skin crawl.

  “The nest.” Just saying the word brings the remembered smell of burned phytoraptors to my nostrils.

  “Yes, the nest,” Tarn says. “Just one of a dozen my Takers found as the sun rose. Your marines are remarkably effective at destroying the Beasts.”

  A dozen nests burned. I want to scream. Everything I thought I knew about who we are and why we came here is gone. Rotting in the graveyard that is our home world.

  I have no words left. Tarn doesn’t seem to, either. We sit there, tied in a silent knot of anger and guilt and desperation over the body of a being we both admired and feared. And hated. The naked Sorrow silently continue to butcher and reshape the dead all around us as though we are not here at all.

  “What do you want from me, Joanna?” Tarn says finally.

  It’s a real question, and I thought I knew the answer. I thought I knew a dozen answers to that question. But they’re all gone. What can I possibly ask of him, knowing the things humanity is willing to do to survive on this planet?

  No. Not humanity.

  Grandpa.

  Grandpa did this.

  Bob’s babies fill my mind, their little bodies swaying as their wide white flowers stretch up to greet the sun.

  I’m going to be sick.

  I run for the cloth-draped entryway and hurl myself out of the glowing room. I just barely manage to grab onto a railing around the narrow walkway outside, stopping myself before I plunge over the edge.

  I collapse to my knees, leaning against the bone railing. Gasping for air. I stay there until the acid in the back of my throat settles, twisting into a thick knot of something that might be tears and might be rage.

  I rip the flat silver disks of my rank insignia off my collar and stare at them. I’ve worked my whole life for these, but if wearing them means being a part of this horror . . .

  My first instinct is to hurl them off the edge, but littering a dozen stories up doesn’t seem like the best way to rebuild our relationship with the Sorrow. I can’t put them back on, either. I don’t know if I ever will.

  Tears run down my cheeks as I look out over the labyrinthine city below. It all looks so small from up here. We’re practically eye level with the cavern ceiling. Higher than some of the solace tree root clusters that give the city life. The clusters are thick and wild up here, unlike the artistically shaped clusters in the garden at the center of the city.

  A root cluster at the farthest edge of the cavern starts to dim.

  Did I imagine that?

  No.

  Another fades. Another.

  What’s happening? What could make solace root clusters go dark?

  It hits me like pulling three G’s from standing still. The roots aren’t going out.

  They’re dying.

  Eighteen

  “Tarn!” I scream, my heart hammering against my ribs. “Tarn!”

  He emerges from the death room. “What’s wrong?”

  I point to the darkening roots, just as another cluster flickers and fades.

  Tarn throws his head back and lets out a deafening roar.

  My ears are ringing as he swings me to his back. “Hold on!” I feel the words snap through his elongated body more than I hear them.

  He leaps, shooting up the roots above us so fast I don’t have time to scream before we’re moving through what looked like solid cave ceiling. It’s a chimney in the rock, so dark and narrow I didn’t see it before.

  The narrow passage is choked with glowing root tendrils. Tarn uses them as a ladder, scuttling upward so fast I can’t think about anything but clinging to his back.

  Then I smell the smoke.

  I can hear the roar of flamethrowers as we explode out of the rock chimney into the most amazing forest I’ve ever seen.

  I knew the solace trees that lit Sorrow’s Solace had to be big, but these are indescribable. Ancient giants that soar over the marines in shiny black fire gear who are trying t
o burn them down.

  I roll off Tarn’s back as he catapults upward into the canopy; then I scramble to my feet and run toward the marines. Branches and leaves tear at my hair and clothes as I race through them, but I hardly feel them. I have to stop this.

  A horrifying CREAK fills the air, followed by a rustling through the branches overhead. I stumble back as a tree as wide as a cabin crashes to the ground, flames chewing at its smooth, peeling bark.

  “Yee-haw!” a rough voice cries.

  Shelby.

  I scramble over the fallen tree to see Shelby sitting in the driver’s seat of a bulldozer jeep whose massive blade is still buried in the trunk below me.

  “Are you insane, Junior?” she shouts, reversing to pull the blade free, then spinning the jeep toward the next tree, which a black-clad and hooded marine is already spraying with blue-white flame.

  “Stop!” I scream at her, throwing myself in front of the bulldozer. I spin, shouting at the marine with the flamethrower. “Stop! You don’t have to do this!”

  “Get out of my way!” Shelby growls.

  “No,” I shout back. “Never!”

  “Joanna, what the hell are you doing here?” Sarge’s voice hurtles through the smoke behind me. I turn to find him jogging toward us, fire hood pushed down and a flamethrower slung over his back.

  His familiar face feels like a stake in my heart. It’s not just Shelby and her people trying to destroy Sorrow’s Solace. It’s all of us.

  “I’m here to stop you!” I shout at him, at every one of the anonymous black helmets around me. “Please! We can’t do this. You’re destroying their home.”

  “They attacked us!” Shelby roars back at me.

  “It’s not the same!” I shout back, pointing to the exposed taproot of the tree Shelby just killed. Its dark orange glow is fading as the tree dies. “Look! That light is what makes the Sorrow’s whole ecosystem possible. Kill the trees, and you don’t just destroy their home. You destroy the Sorrow’s world. Just like ours. Just like Earth. Do you really want to do that to another species?”