I STARE AT THE SUERONESE girl, watching her face quiver and fade as my lungs grow ice cold from whatever gas they’ve given us.
I blink and she’s gone. Every pain I was feeling is gone too.
Something soft presses against my shoulder, warm and wet. A giggle escapes from my throat. It surprises me. I haven’t giggled since I was ten years old. Spiced smoke tickles my nose—incense, sharp and thick. I open my eyes and expect to see the girl; instead I see Fayard staring up at me, his hair cut low, scars across his cheeks. They look tribal. Fayard’s nose grazes mine as he presses my forehead against his. He moves his lips to my ear and kisses the upper lobe, whispering something.
“Hmm?” I ask.
He pulls back, his face switching from delighted to serious.
“Open. Your. Eyes.”
I draw in a deep, centering breath and shake the vision from my mind. It’s not real. Even if it feels like a distant memory, it’s not real.
I am a prisoner. I am a soldier in the New Republic Army. I am eighteen Earth revolutions old. I am the daughter of Morana and Sincere. I am an orphan. These things are true. But the wind in my braids as I watch myself ride my favorite horse, Fay’s smile as he gallops ahead of me on his, feels real.
Truth: I have been poisoned and all these so-called memories could be a nasty side effect of the psychedelic drugs. Except they don’t feel like a lie. They feel as real as my own heartbeat. I’m back in the cave again; I look over to my left and see Fayard, eyes closed and unmoving, save for the subtle rise and fall of his chest. At least he’s breathing.
The younger of the two Sueronese women picks up the translator; she adjusts some of the settings and then drops it at my feet. The room is small, with no windows. The earthen walls are inorganically smooth and curved like they’ve been hollowed out by an ice cream scoop, pockmarked with shimmering bits of stone shot through with veins of precious metal, some as small as a child’s hand and others as large and wide as a man’s torso. There’s no way that our transmitter can be detected here.
“We have adjusted the oxygen levels to accommodate you. The gravity levels have been modified for your benefit as well,” she says.
I take a look around the room, which is little more than a hollow dirt cave, and nothing makes sense. How they are able to adjust gravity and oxygen levels is problematic. The Sueronese are supposed to be a level-three society with little technology and little interest in the modern tech trade, and Alpha 9 is classified as an energy desert with next to no means of electricity. The ability to adjust anything means our intel is either wrong or has been purposefully obscured. I do not know who I’m dealing with.
“Are you impressed?” the older woman asks as she walks over to a wall and pushes the surface back with her hand. In seconds, small vines begin to burst through the rock face, twisting and blooming into glowing vials and platters. Table legs form from roots, and flowers sweat a liquid that instantly hardens into a glasslike tabletop. Luminescent berries descend from the ceiling and cast the entire room in a warm glow. I’m momentarily stunned as she plucks one and eats it, her cheeks flaring for just a second before she swallows. She pulls a small ovule from her apron and drops it into a hole in the table. She smiles as a 3D rendering of Earth appears just above the table’s center. None of this is supposed to be possible. Plants can’t be manipulated to form furniture. Vines don’t grow into lab equipment. I must be hallucinating, but I can’t deny what I’m seeing with my own eyes.
“Earth is a young planet. Much younger than Alpha 9, just as humans are much younger than the Sueronese. We reached out to your people early on, worked with you on architecture so that you could form your pyramids, and we occasionally visited to monitor your progress. But there is a fundamental flaw in relationships with humans. You seek to dominate, to conquer, and eventually to destroy. After all this time, you cannot help yourselves. Born thieves, like this one here.”
Her eyes fall to Fayard, and I’m hoping she doesn’t inject him with anything else as punishment.
“We have hidden ourselves to prevent unnecessary bloodshed. It is not our custom to fight mindlessly, but there is a limit to what we will allow to be done to us, and the Republic has crossed that line. The destruction of our surface cities, the biosphere, and now thieves sent to pilfer our most sacred artifacts.”
She tears a thorn from a vine, and what looks like a glass vial from a dripping spiked flower. A few twists and splices with a small knife and she holds up a syringe. I swallow hard, willing my body to cool down so they can’t see me sweat. The girl waves her hand at the older woman and kneels down before me.
“I am Shulat,” the girl says. “Now you will tell us your name.”
I don’t dignify her demand with an answer. The older woman smiles and turns back to her bench to work steadily on something I can’t see from my vantage point. “He has not told you,” she says as she works. “Maybe he does not know himself.”
Shulat walks over to Fayard and lifts up the gold chain peeking out of his suit. She runs her thumb over the emblem, a bird reaching behind itself. It’s one of those ancient religious symbols some of the older colonies use: a sankofa bird. She shakes her head. “The goddess is mysterious in her ways.”
I don’t know what she’s talking about, but I’m getting worried about Fay. A thin coat of sweat has broken out on his face and neck, and he seems to be shivering even though it’s sweltering in here.
“The soul that sits there, resolute in his mission, is not a priest or a soldier or any of the things that he may have told you. He is far more dangerous than that,” the older woman says in a sinister tone.
Shulat whispers something to the older woman—her commander, maybe? She takes her eyes off me to lean down to listen, and I use the distraction to inch closer to Fayard.
Fayard? Fay, are you okay? I push my thoughts into his, but it’s like he’s put up a mental block.
Shulat’s eyes flick over to us; her piercing stare forces me to look away.
“Shulat tells me our time runs short,” the commander says. “Not all of my people believe in the old tales like I do, and the storm is raging. Prophecies are wasted on those committed to war, but I have faith that this will change their minds.” She turns around to reveal twin syringes glowing with a golden liquid that moves inside the chamber on its own.
I call on my training and remain still—I don’t so much as flinch—but my heart can’t help but race at the sight of it. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, but I know that our window for rescue is closing. Even with rested bodies, we had a ways to go. Badly injured we might never make it. I pull at my wrist tie again, and though it bites, I feel the smallest bit of give. I struggle, but I’m able to slip one hand free and then the other. My mind scrambles with scenarios. Disarm the commander. Plunge the syringe into her eye, drive my boot into her large gut, use the leverage to twist my body, somersault, and grab the girl’s chin in my right hand and her ear in the other, then jerk on my way down, snapping the two thin spines in her neck. My eyes flick to Fayard. He’s in no position to move and I can’t carry him.
I could leave him.
The thought slips into my mind and falls away just as quickly. Every soldier in the army knows there are situations where it is most advantageous to leave a comrade behind. It was one of my favorite debates in Military Strategy 101, but that was a place where sims on a commscreen represented real people and all the blood and death was digital. This is real life, and I’d rather die than leave Fayard behind. The certainty of that revelation surprises me, but the feeling is sincere and concrete and scary as hell.
The commander walks gracefully toward us. She stands directly in front of me before she squats down, crossing one ankle over the other as she sits. Shulat shakes her head and tries to whisper something into her ear, but the older woman raises her fist in silence. Shulat stiffens and presses her lips into a straight line, then takes a few steps back.
“I want to tell you a story,” the woman begins. “You are so ignorant it seems unfair to keep you this way. Especially if my test confirms what I am almost sure it will. I am three and forty summers old. Young for command. Younger still for high command, by almost ten summers.”
“Congratulations,” I say bitterly.
“Unlike me, you are not high command. You have no knowledge of whom you kill or why, yet we are called barbarians. You have little knowledge of the planet from whence your people come, and even less desire to acquire that knowledge. You have no idea who you are and what your purpose is.
“I am my brother’s companion,” I say, seeing if I can keep Fayard’s act going. But I am a terrible actress. I can tell by the cough the commander gives that covers up her laugh.
“So, you are a follower of the Path, then? Tell me, young sister, what are the seven pillars of the faith?” the older woman asks.
“I am unworthy to speak on such matters. My brother is the evangelist,” I reply.
“Your brother is a thief and a criminal who came here to find Sueronese artifacts and then sell them on the black market,” Shulat spits. She walks over and pulls off one of Fayard’s gloves, revealing a thin red line of broken skin. He’s been handcuffed—recently, if the angry, not-yet-healing scars are any indication.
“He was brought in to decode one of our sacred cave texts, and I watched him lie about the translation. He deliberately obscured the coordinates so that he could return to find the artifact himself,” Shulat says. She turns her head, eyes pinned on mine, waiting for some change or confession.
“You must be mistaken,” is all I can think to say.
“You should be grateful that we found you. The penalty for violating treaty law is death for your people, is it not?” she asks, not looking at me anymore.
“You must be mistaken,” I utter again.
“Do you know the story of how the world began? It is a love story, after all,” the commander says as she hands the syringes to Shulat.
I shake my head.
“In the beginning, the great sky goddess became pregnant with an idea and birthed the world. She had many ideas after the first, and together they became the known universe. She gathered them into her hands and blew on them with a breath of fire, and they burned bright for her. When they began to cool, she cried over them to create oceans. She plucked out her teeth to form the mountains, and the land became lush, but there was little drama on the face of these planets. It was then that the great sky goddess decided to entertain herself, so she made human beings out of the finest mud at the bottom of the deepest ocean. Of course, her earlier projects had used finer materials—stone for the Sueronese, silica for the Camians, and so on—but Earth and her human beings were unique.
“She created the allfather first. She gave him laughing eyes and a trickster spirit, the ability to find the most interesting way out of any situation. She spent a millennium watching him age and die, resurrecting him after each death, perfecting her design until—”
She stops and sniffs, breathing in deep. I smell it too: a sharp, mineral odor, like spilled blood. I look over to the now-overgrown wall of foliage and watch as small green buds grow and burst from cobalt vines that snake along the ceiling. The commander stands quickly and rushes out of the room. As soon as we’re alone, I check on Fayard. He’s shivering. Sweat is beaded on his face and neck, and while the gash on his forehead is no longer bleeding, I can tell it is very deep.
The light in the room is dim, but my eyes have adjusted, and it’s not as small or as sparse as I once assessed. What I thought was a flat wall is really a stack of large cubes. I crawl over to it and find one stuffed with our helmets and go bags. I’m sure they’ve already searched the bags and confiscated anything useful. It’s the first thing I would have done. I’m still searching when I feel someone behind me.
“Find what you were looking for?” Shulat asks, and I freeze.