––––––––
I stumbled into the corridor in a haze. Asteran was everything I’d dreamed him to be and more. We’d connected on so many levels, even if I had no idea what he was saying. He’d looked at me as if he knew me, adding more to the mystery of who he was. I longed to learn more about him, but my chances of sneaking back in were zero to nil.
Gavin. I had to speak with Gavin. He was the only linguist on the remnants of our obsolete ship, and they’d ask him to establish contact first. He was on the main viewing deck along with Tauren. Could I risk going back in there?
My locator beeped and I glanced down.
I’ve lost him again flashed on the screen.
My stomach dropped. Mom wouldn’t contact me if this wasn’t serious. Leo must have fallen back into his alternate reality. Only I could drag him out of it.
Why the heck now?
Guilt tormented me as I contemplated finding Gavin instead, pretending I hadn’t seen the message. Too bad the damn locator was embedded in my arm. Only someone in a coma wouldn’t hear the piercing message alert beep. Besides, I couldn’t leave Mom with Leo in that crazy state. I had no other choice. I had to go back to my family cell. Asteran would have to wait. I only hoped they didn’t kill him before I could figure out how to communicate with him.
Changing direction, I pressed the elevator for floor thirty-seven, the family units. Soon we’d all live in real buildings on Paradise 21, but until the construction team finished them, we had to make do with our crashed spaceship, a spaceship that could never fly again.
Engineers had designed the New Dawn to land once and only once on its colonization planet. In the descent, we shed our outer layers to enable landing. Thinking about this only reminded me getting Asteran back to his home was impossible.
Maybe he could live here with us.
Selfish guilt spread through me. Of course I wanted that. If the tables were turned, though, would I really want to live with another civilization on an alien planet?
Maybe if someone like Asteran was there.
Stop it! I shook my head. My raging hormones were another story. Those I could not control. I hadn’t even broken up with Tauren yet, and here I was crushing on another guy—an alien, at that. An alien I couldn’t even talk to. What if he was a jerk just like Tauren?
No. The way Asteran expressed concern for my safety, when I was the alleged captor, showed his compassion ran far deeper than let’s say Tauren’s, who never asked how I felt or if my wound had healed. Tauren looked away as if the scar had tainted me for life and he could hardly bear to see it.
I reached my family cell and pressed my palm on the portal panel. The chrome dematerialized in thousands of silvery, winking particles. I stepped in, not knowing what kind of craziness to expect.
Mom stood at the sink, both hands resting on the countertop. Her head sank between her thin shoulder blades, like she’d given up already. Leo sat at the kitchen table, his fingers drumming the plastic linoleum. His eyes were closed, and a pained expression contorted his face, a face that looked just like mine except with a larger nose. Thank the Guide I hadn’t gotten that. Fuzzy, dark hair covered his chin, even though he was two years younger than me. His black curls stuck up everywhere, like untended weeds.
Mom didn’t even turn around. “He’s been like this for over an hour. I tried to get him to eat dinner, but he won’t stop.”
Leo pushed one finger against the table and held it there. His head tilted as if he listened to a high-pitched sound neither Mom nor I could hear. He gently lifted his finger and rose from the table. A pleasurable smile grew as he stared at the fridge and acknowledged the audience of word magnets I’d spread over the front for inspiration for my lyrics.
A sharp pain struck my gut. I’d never seen him that happy.
Leo bowed with a grand, flourishing wave of his arm then strutted to his room.
I sighed and ran my fingers through my tangled hair. The mass of our dead ship weighed on my shoulders. Leo had traveled deep in his fantasy. It would take a long, harrowing stretch to bring him back. “I’ll fix it.”
Leaving Mom in the kitchen, I passed my messy excuse for a room and followed Leo to his.
He sat on his bed, fingers wiggling in the air in front of him. Behind him hung a holopicture of a city from Old Earth. Skyscrapers pricked a golden orange sunset as blue waves crashed on a shore with real, smooth sand, not the prickly black crystals of Paradise 21. Carnival lights illuminated the corner of the picture with red and white striped tents and a circular ride that brought people skyward to touch the clouds...what was it? Oh yes, a Ferris wheel.
Sometimes Leo acknowledged me as a rival in his altered state, and sometimes he didn’t seem to notice me. I knocked on the doorframe to get his attention and figure out which imaginary scene we had to play out.
“Leave me alone, Lila. I need to practice.”
Oh yes, this one.
I sat beside him and pretended to be Lila from his dreams. “You need a break. Just look at your fingers.” I turned his hand over and took on an admonishing tone. “They’re all swollen and sweaty.” In reality, he had the same soft, pale fingers everyone had on the New Dawn. None of us got enough true sunlight.
He shot me an accusatory look. “You’re just trying to make me stop so you can win.”
“Leo—”
He shrank back as if he didn’t know me. “My name is Lewis.”
“I’m sorry. What was I thinking? I meant Lewis.” Why couldn’t I remember all of his alternate reality identities? “You know I don’t want to win. I can’t stand performing in front of large audiences.”
“You can’t stand it, but you sing so well. It’s like your feed off the audience’s energy.”
Never in a million years would I have thought I’d sing for a profession. They just didn’t have jobs like that on the New Dawn. Way too trivial when survival was the priority. Which was why I knew these little fantasies were just figments of his confused mind. “I’m not entering the concerto competition. Not this time.”
There, that should calm him down.
“What about your ‘Queen of the Night’ aria? You sound like a goddess.”
Queen of the night? I typed it into my locator and searched the files from Old Earth. A strange language popped up and I hit translate. Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart. It was the second aria sung by the Queen of the Night, a soprano coloratura part, in Mozart’s opera, “The Magic Flute”.
How did he know antiquated junk like this?
Leo had gone back to wiggling his fingers in the air. I played along by pressing imaginary piano keys. “Mozart’s never been my favorite.” In reality, I’d never sung classical music. I sang mostly pop songs from the last century on Old Earth and a few songs I’d written.
“Yes, but you excel at the classical literature, whereas romanticism is my forte.”
He made just about as much sense as Asteran. I put my hands over his hands and stilled them. “Relax. Let me sing a song for you.”
“If you do, will you leave me alone to practice?”
I winked. “You bet.”
“You’re such a showoff.” He leaned back on his bed and waved his hand at me. “Whatever. Go ahead. Bring the house down.”
Where did he learn such outdated slang? I took a deep breath and engaged my diaphragm muscles to control the air. If I wanted him to come back to us, then I had to make this good. I imagined a techno beat and smooth, synthesized chords.
“Flying on a journey across the stars
No one knows what to expect,
Our hearts look ahead and not back
The end is near...”
He blinked quizzically and scratched his head. “I don’t recognize this.”
I used my talking voice. “Yes you do. Focus and pay attention.”
He crossed his arms impatiently. “I’m all ears.”
I brought my hand up as high as I could then spiraled it down to our carpeted floor.
“Diving through the violet clouds
Our ship breaks apart.
No one knows what we’ll find
In this land of paradise...”
“Purple Earth” was a song I had written specifically for the ceremony after we landed on Paradise 21. I sang it during the after-party for Andromeda’s lieutenant-hood crowning, after she saved the colony from the microbes found in the pod plants. I never finished it, because Nova had run in and interrupted to warn everyone about the arachnid ship. At the time, I’d wanted to rip her throat out for stealing my spotlight, but it turned out she was right. Besides, if I hadn’t gone with her on that mission, I never would have met Asteran.
“Walking on a black crystal beach
A jungle teems with alien life.
The crystals infuse our soil.
And the purple sun warms our hearts.”
Leo seemed to be listening carefully, considering each word as if I told his story through the music. Which I did.
Please remember. I launched into the chorus, closing my eyes.
“A vibrant sun, a turbulent sea,
thriving plants and wispy clouds.
Maybe this planet isn’t so different
than the home we left behind.”
“Lyra?”
I opened my eyes and recognized the familiar darkness in Leo’s gaze and the way his lips hardened into a frown. He was back.
“Yes?”
“Did I miss your medal ceremony?”
Mom must have seen the early signs and kept him home. Leo’s episodes were our family’s dirty little secret. Mental illness was like a death sentence on the New Dawn. Either they locked you up for life or forced you to do some menial task that wouldn’t hinder the colony’s progress. When so many relied on so little, all it would take was one crazy person to blast a hole in the hull or poison all the food generators. Then, adios mankind.
But Leo wouldn’t hurt a fly.
My brother waited impatiently on the edge of his bed. “Your ceremony, Lyra, did I miss it?”
“Don’t worry about it. The ceremony sucked like a black hole anyway. Too many speeches.”
“I didn’t go back, did I?” He always talked about his fantasies as if he really traveled back in time.
I considered not telling him then decided against it. Sooner or later he’d see the time and wonder where the last few hours went. “For a little bit. Don’t worry about it.”
“Dammit.” His jaw tensed, and he pounded his fist on the bed. Some of his homework disks fell on the floor.
“Hey, it’s okay. No biggie.”
“It is big, Lyra.” Leo ran his hands through his hair, making it even worse. “I’m never going to get a good job if I spaz out like that.”
“They’re not going to know. We’ve covered it for this long, haven’t we?”
“You won’t always be around to bring me back.”
I thought about the last mission and how I’d disappeared in the awful bowels of that arachnid ship for days. Thank the Guide he hadn’t had an episode then, but that was my second mission away. I’d reached my quota of field work and then some. What were the odds I’d have another outrageous escapade? Crophaven had chopped all the pod plants and scoured the arachnid ship for survivors. “Where am I gonna go, eh?”
“I don’t know.” He slumped down. “I have a feeling something big is coming, Lyra. You’re gonna have to choose whether to stay or go. You choose to go.”
A shiver crept up my back, and I wiggled my shoulders to get rid of it. Sometimes his visions gave me the creeps. I put my arm around him, reminding myself that even though he was my brother and I loved him, he was two particles short of a portal frame. “Nah. I wouldn’t choose to go and leave you here. Don’t talk like that.”
He was crazy, wasn’t he?