I sit on the beach for a long time, staring out at the water.
Someone found me clothes. A threadbare collared shirt made of a stiff, blue material. Black pants. There’s even a pair of shoes, scabbed with dirt. The clothes come from someone much larger than me. I don’t know who they belong to, but at least they’re dry.
I’m dimly aware of the activity on the beach. Harlan is arguing with Eric, saying that they need to bring the workers with them. Eric is saying that they’ll never fit them all in the plane, and Harlan responds by telling him that they’ll make multiple trips if they have to. He sounds almost jubilant–not surprising. He survived Anchorage.
The workers are talking in a big group. One of them protests loudly, saying that they should retake the ship, that all the guards are dead.
I let it wash over me. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. It’s too big a task, too many people to find homes for, too many loose ends to tie up. I can’t even do anything for Prakesh–he’s stable now, but unconscious, bundled up inside the plane and being tended to by the man with the grey hair. So I just sit.
It’s all I can do.
Someone crouches down next to me. Koji. There’s dried blood on his face, crusted under his right eye. His hair hangs in lanky strands on his face, and his overalls are patchy with seawater.
“I can go,” he says, “if you’d rather be alone.”
I shake my head. I feel like I should want to be by myself right now, but I find I don’t care very much.
Koji sits cross-legged on the sand, wincing as he does so. “They don’t like me very much,” he says, nodding to a group of workers. One of them scowls back at him. “I was hoping you could tell them… I mean, if…”
He trails off, looking embarrassed.
“I think I’d like to hear that story now,” I say.
“Story?”
“About my dad.”
Koji looks out at the horizon. He’s silent for so long that I’m on the verge of prompting him, and then he says, “The Akua Maru didn’t make it through the atmosphere. There was… an explosion. Something in the reactor went wrong.”
“I know,” I say.
Koji continues as if I hadn’t spoken. “There’s no way we should have made it down. We were going thousands of miles an hour. But your dad did it. He pulled it off. Two of us died during the descent, but there were still eight of us who made it down.”
He looks at me. “Your dad saved my life.”
“What happened? After you landed?”
He shrugs. “The ship was a wreck. Fusion reactor was still intact, just about, but it wasn’t working. Everything else was done for. And Kamchatka… we couldn’t have come down in a worse area. It was cold. Cold enough to freeze your bones inside you.”
He attempts a smile. “Your dad kept us going. He organised us. He made sure we got enough to eat, that we stayed warm enough. We wouldn’t have lasted a week without him.”
When I speak, my voice is as brittle as thin glass. “But you came here.”
He continues as if I hadn’t spoken. “Your dad was a hero, but he wasn’t a miracle worker. We were running out of supplies, so three of us decided to head east, see if there was anything out there. Your father and four others stayed behind. He kept trying to contact Outer Earth. He said they’d send another ship–that it was just a matter of time. Did they? Did Outer Earth ever send a rescue?”
I don’t know what to tell him. He sees my dad as a hero, as the man who saved him. How do I tell him that he went insane? That he killed the rest of the crew? He was down there for seven years, and after he finally got the ship going again, he set it on a collision course for Outer Earth, determined to destroy the station he thought had left him there to rot. Even thinking about it is like touching a wound that’s only just started to scab over.
“No,” I say. “They didn’t send anybody.”
Koji shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. Two of us made it across the Bering Strait, turned south. We were half dead when the people on the Ramona found us. Dominguez died on the way, but they brought me on board. Made me into a slave, like all the others. Until…”
He trails off, as if not sure how to say it.
“Until what?” I say.
“They didn’t call it the Sacred Engine at first,” he says. “When they took us, it was broken. They had plenty of fuel stored in the ship, and a working fusion reactor, but they couldn’t get the Engine working again.”
“I don’t see how—”
“Don’t you understand? I was the Akua Maru’s terraforming specialist. Our mission was to make the Earth habitable again. Or to start making it habitable, anyway. Our terraforming equipment was destroyed in the crash. The equipment we had on the Akua was a more advanced version of what the Engine was: something called a HAARP unit.
“They developed the HAARP over a hundred years ago. It was supposed to fix the climate by effecting changes in the ionosphere, but they didn’t get it off the ground before the nukes came raining down. The one on the Ramona was a much smaller version of it. I guess the plan was to deploy a bunch of them around the planet.”
I stare at him, my mouth open.
“I knew how to fix it,” Koji says. “Took me a long time to convince them to let me try, but I did it. I got the HAARP working again. Even then, Prophet made out like it was all his doing.”
He shrugs. “Still, they made me one of them. Problem was, the ship’s fusion reactor was dead, so I had to figure out how to run the HAARP using the fuel supplies–that took a lot of work. Almost couldn’t do it. It wasn’t nearly as efficient, and if it had gone on much longer… Where are you going?”
I’m on my feet, arms tightly folded, walking away from him. I can’t stop shaking, and this time it has nothing to do with the cold.
When I was in the Outer Earth control room, pleading with my father not to destroy the station, he told me that he had to finish the mission. He spent seven years in Kamchatka, freezing, desperately trying to stay alive so he could reunite with his family. When Janice Okwembu reached him, told him that my mom and I were dead, the only thing he wanted was to take revenge.
But it doesn’t matter what he became. He landed his crew safely, and he made it possible for the Earth to recover. The chain of events led Koji here, to the one place where he could make a difference. What Okwembu did set in motion everything that happened to me, and what my father did–bringing that ship down intact–ended up saving the world.
I can never see my dad again. But I’m standing here, on a planet everybody thought was dead and gone, because of what he did.
He finished his mission.
“Dad,” I say, and then I feel another wrench of emotion so powerful it doubles me over. My tears fall to the sand.
I walk away, leaving everyone behind. I walk until their voices have faded to a dull murmur over the wind. After a while I stop, looking out at the ocean, at the horizon beyond it. I stand for a long time, doing nothing. My mind is as clear as an empty sky.
Strangely, it’s a good feeling–like I can fill my body up with whatever I want. Like I’m finally free to choose what goes inside me.
There’s a sound, off to my left. It takes me a second to realise what I’m seeing.
Janice Okwembu is crawling up the beach. Her clothes are sodden, streams of water cascading off her. She’s coughing, her fingers clawing the dirt.
And the empty space inside me fills with white-hot rage, expanding outwards at the speed of light.