The light that wakes me is not morning. Eyes roused open, it takes me a moment to remember where I am, that the warmth to my left is Rondo and the soft snores to my right are Alma. We had all fallen asleep around the orange flower, which had cooled as night fell, eventually going dark. The light I sense now comes from the trees, but it’s not the soft pink released from the syca, which had faded hours ago.
Now the trees glow red.
My grandmother’s smoke? No, this isn’t smoke; it’s something else, something of Faloiv. I bite down on the rising alarm that floats up from my bones. The campsite is silent: no one else seems to be awake, let alone aware of the strange glow that bathes my skin and the grass.
I rise, glancing down at Rondo’s face, illuminated in the reddish light. I almost wake him, not because I don’t want to be alone, but because I want to be alone with him. Still, I know I would have nothing to say. How can I tell him that at one time the music he plays drew him closer to my heart, and now it makes me want to push him away? The day he played in the compound, it had filled my body with light. Now the shadows of uncertainty seem to loom only lower. The music calls to me, but something else calls louder.
I hear it now.
The green language. It seems to rustle through the Artery, sighing, carrying words that are just beyond the reach of my comprehension. The reddish glow seems to pulse downward from the trees. No sign of the moon: the sky is blotted out by canopy and clouds. No sign of the ikya.
No sign of Kimbullettican.
Their absence draws my alarm back to the surface of my skin, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling in sudden caution.
“Kimbullettican,” I whisper, taking a few silent steps. My feet, bare, connect with the jungle soil and my suit comes alive. Any sleep that had clung to me sheds now as the suit’s infectious vigor flows into my skin, dew that must have accumulated in the night hours soaking into me as if I’d drunk it myself. The suit is grateful that I am acting as a conduit, and it almost seems to reward me for doing so. When I first feel the prickle of information in the Artery, I barely notice it among the activity of the suit—it’s hard to keep everything in my head sorted with so much input. But the information beckons me, as if with imperceptible fingers, a steady stream of communication that I eventually notice and isolate. Where I had once stood in my qalm in Mbekenkanush and found the language unintelligible, I can now pull out the meaning, even if the words themselves are a blur.
There is something nearby, something strange. The planet is aware of it—has always been aware of it—but its presence draws a new kind of caution that I pick up on like a scab scratched open.
Kimbullettican, I call in my mind, reaching out for their presence with the hope that they might be able to explain what I am experiencing, but they are either sealed off in the Artery or too far for me to contact. Or perhaps the messages from the soil are too dense to break through, clogging my ability to hear anything else. Around me, the jungle seems to pulse with life, the red glow of the syca adding a dreamlike layer between me and the sounds of night.
That’s when the suit passes me something I can understand.
It’s not in the language that I use to communicate with the Faloii and the planet’s animals, the shapes and impressions that I had seemed born to fluency with. It’s rudimentary—even more so than my usual attempts. It’s as if whatever consciousness that passes me these fragments of meanings understands my mind’s clumsiness and has broken it down into some primary form of itself. An impression, an understanding that emerges from the tunnel almost as a scent.
It is a scent. It fills my nose while still occupying a section of my mind, an odor as real as the smell of the ogwe but with a different meaning. In a flash I remember the day of my mother’s arrest, when I’d returned to the Mammalian Compound and inhaled the smell of warning that the trees radiated into the main dome, a stark transition from the usual aroma of comfort. This is like that: not a message, exactly, but a command; the smell orders my biology to do something. . . .
Follow.
It’s a trail. It’s as if my sensory receptors have crunched through the data of an unseen formula and finally translated it into meaning I can comprehend: follow.
I glance backward, where Alma and Rondo sleep peacefully alongside the other human youth. Do the Faloii still stand guard? Will they stop me? I pick up my pack from where I’d been using it as a pillow and slip away toward the jungle’s edge.
My feet find their own path. The light of the syca is bright enough that I make my way over tree limbs and stones without much trouble, wincing only when thinner branches scratch my face. I could turn back—I’m not without agency. But my curiosity is a mighty force that keeps me placing one bare foot after another, barely noticing the occasional stone and twig.
The light pales ahead, the syca’s red fading into white: pure moonlight breaking in from the canopy. This means the trees are thinning, I think, and wonder if this means I will soon be reaching a body of water. But I would hear the water by now if a lake, the gentle lap of waves; or if a river, the muted current carrying on without sleep. It can’t be water. A clearing, then, I tell myself, slowing. But I can’t stop now: my curiosity is a magnet swimming darkly in my blood, drawing me toward whatever lies ahead.
It’s a meadow: bright with moonlight and ringed with trees that reach up toward the stars, unveiling themselves without secret now that I have emerged from the thick kingdom of jungle. The meadow feels familiar: open and sweet smelling, an odor that rises from the expanse of short green plants bearing many round buds. I look down at them, examining them in moonlight—so familiar. My bare feet are buried in them, the softness of their blossoms a strange comfort. A delicate breeze causes a few of them to brush against my ankles. I can’t have been here before, but its familiarity is a scratch at the back of my skull that I can’t reach. A dream? A memory? I sweep my eyes over the rest of the meadow, wide and flat except for the bulk of a white boulder rising out of the ground one hundred yards ahead. Round, almost impossibly so; nothing in nature is so smooth unless found underwater. Perhaps this meadow had once been the multukwu’s domain.
I move toward the boulder, the short plants and their spherical blossoms a carpet beneath my feet. Had this place been in a photograph kept on my mother’s slate in N’Terra? A record of my grandmother’s adventures before she disappeared? The familiarity clings to me, the moonlight the only thing that tells me I’m imagining it. If I know this place, I know it in sunlight. With everything made silver and white, it’s hard to be sure of anything. Hard to be sure that the boulder ahead is a boulder at all.
A cloud passes over the moon as I arrive next to it, and it’s not until I place my hand on its surface that I realize the scent that had led me to this clearing has faded away. Whatever trail I was following has gone cold. Or perhaps this is the end of the trail, and I have followed it to its farthest point. Under my fingers, the boulder—several feet taller than me, and almost as wide as a ’wam—is, again, impossible. Too smooth. Too round.
Somewhere in the jungle that rings the meadow I hear the triumphant orchestra of ikya, their hunt successful. I wonder if this means dawn is near, and gaze up to gauge the position of the moon. It’s too high, I think. Not dawn for a while yet: more night between me and whatever comes next. While I watch, the remaining clouds masking the moon continue on their journey across the sky, and I allow my eyes to fall back to the surface of the lonely boulder.
Letters. I stare dumbly at them for a moment, shocked by their presence here. I must be imagining them—how else is it possible? But there it is. The letter N. The letter T. The rest hidden by moss. Faded by age but here nonetheless. Inside me, the green language whispers, This. This thing. Another of their things. Caution.
It takes only another breath for me to become frantic. A moment later my fingers are fast at work, tearing at the spongy layers of plant life that have made the boulder—the what?—their home. It all collects under my fingernails, blunting my hands, but I keep at it, swiping with my palms here, scratching there. The moon comes and goes, but when it shows its face, it shows me that the letters I’m uncovering are red—something more vibrant, once upon a time, than ink: at one point this word had been stark and immovable against the white of this lump of mystery.
The moon is hidden again and I stand there panting, unaware until now of how hard I’d been working, sweat gathering along my scalp before my suit quickly offers hydration and oxygen. I stand there, waiting for the light to return. But some part of me doesn’t need it. I know what I’ve found. When the moon is generous again, I read the words silently.
Vagantur Capsule 3.
“Here you are,” I whisper to the meadow and its strangely familiar blossoms. “Here you are.”
“Here you are,” rasps a voice, and I’m jerking away from the hand on my arm before I’m fully aware of its presence. I stumble backward, my voice empty with shock, falling first against the pod and then away from it, my feet instinctually seeking empty ground to run on.
It’s Kimbullettican.
“You could have said something!” I snap.
I did. You were preoccupied.
“I . . .” I’m still catching my breath, both from uncovering the text and from my sudden terror. “Still. Stars, Kimbullettican.”
“My apologies,” they say. “I was nearby and found your presence in the Artery. Needless to say, I was surprised.”
“I woke up. I heard”—I pause, trying to decide how to describe it. “Something? Something in the Artery. It reminds me of the qalm.”
Kimbullettican’s forehead spots cluster and disperse like a trail of bubbles flicked by a fin. “This too woke me,” they say. “Your listening has improved.”
“How?”
“It is a question for yourself.”
I stare at the capsule in the moonlight. The moss that coats its surface seems to obscure so much more than just the pod itself.
“I think . . . I think Faloiv knows something about me,” I say, almost to myself.
“Something.”
I meet their eyes. In the Artery, I know they see the flurry of events and emotions that swirls there. The vusabo and its attack on Rondo, how it had beckoned for me to join it. The breath that blows the green language of Faloiv into my inner ear, the way it seems to feel my anger for N’Terra and whisper to it. I try to conceal these things from Kimbullettican—I try to conceal them from myself. I fail.
Do you still wish to go to the archives? Kimbullettican asks silently. Or have you made another decision?
The archives. The red letters before me on this cast-off piece of the Vagantur have removed everything else of significance from my mind. This thing here in the middle of the meadow feels related to the archives somehow. The armed graysuits at the ship yesterday had been combing the jungle for pieces of the Vagantur, and they were looking for what Manx called the pods. My father and Albatur want the kawa, but they want these pods too.
“I wonder where the first two are,” I murmur.
“I do not understand.”
“It says Capsule three,” I say, still staring at the structure. “That means there has to be a Capsule one and two somewhere.”
Something about it itches my brain, remembering Captain Williams’s message: three pieces to return. Is the three a coincidence?
“What is this?” Kimbullettican says. They are standing nearer to the capsule now too, their sparkling black eyes studying its surface. At first I think they are asking me what the capsule itself is, but I notice one of their hands is pressed against it, one long thumb caressing the shell.
“What did you find?”
“A doorway, I believe. A seam in the shell.”
“Let me see.”
Faloii vision must be superior to human, because I don’t see anything—but when I press my fingertips where their hand indicates, there’s a seam. A slight indentation, running vertical along the capsule. I allow my fingers to follow it like a map, and find that it extends about a foot above my head before curving sideways and then down again. Yes, a doorway of some kind, sealed by moss and age.
“I wonder how it opens,” I say, my fingers still tracing the outline of its doorway. “It’s so old. It probably doesn’t open anymore.”
“All doors open,” Kimbullettican says. “It is only a matter of finding the key.”
I say nothing, running my hand over the words Vagantur Capsule 3. Part of me doesn’t even want it to open. I imagine finding another skeleton like Captain Williams’s, the remnants of someone who had died alone, perhaps while trying to flee what they believed would be the fate of the ship. I have seen enough death over the last few days: old and new, and in some cases death that has not yet occurred but is inevitable. I think if I opened this pod, whatever I would find would only make me wilt.
But then my hand wanders onto another indentation. It could have been merely a dent in the capsule, a nick taken out of its shell in what might have been a tumultuous journey to the ground from the sky. But it’s too even, too uniform. Symmetrical. A circular shape, my fingers hunting it out more frantically with each second, with an edge that extends on either side. Like wings.
“Oh . . . ,” I whisper, a half-formed thought.
“You have found something,” Kimbullettican says, not a question.
My fingers remain on the indentation, refusing to break contact in case what I have found is then lost in shadow, adrift again in moss and mystery. My other hand goes to the hidden pocket of my suit, from which I withdraw the pin I had taken from Captain Williams. I know before I press it into the shape on the capsule that it will fit.
It makes a soft, satisfying sound that could have been a single beat of a heart, almost immediately followed by the rusty sigh of the door juddering open. At one time it might have been a smooth process. But here, so many years since the last time the doors had parted, weighed down by grit and moss and the air of a new planet, its grace is antiquated. The door can only open partway, but it reveals a tiny circular space that I can see straight through. Like the ceilings of the domes in N’Terra, what appears to be white from the outside is transparent from the inside, and I imagine that whoever had stepped into this capsule must have felt surrounded by glass as they hurtled from the ship to this lonely place.
“Interesting,” Kimbullettican says, peering in over my shoulder.
I withdraw Captain Williams’s pin from what I can only think of as a keyhole, clutching it in my palm. It feels warm, although nothing on the inside of the capsule glows to indicate a source of power. I stare at the silent space, lost for words.
“Are you not curious?” Kimbullettican says, and I think I hear humor in their voice, an amused puzzlement at my hesitancy.
“I am,” I say. “But . . .”
“But you are afraid.”
“That’s not the right word.”
“I think I understand,” they say, but they can’t. Faloiv is unequivocally their planet—their history is rooted here. There’s no part of their past that is shrouded in mystery. Not like this. I’ve always teased Alma for her vivid interest in our history, but now, the feeling of my own fear like a tense web being spun in my shoulders, I think I may have been more like Jaquot than I ever believed: using jokes to put distance between myself and uncomfortable truths. The past is no longer hidden behind the deliberate silences of N’Terra’s whitecoats—it’s right here in front of me.
“Strange that it is empty,” Kimbullettican says, still peering in over my shoulder.
Yes, it is. I had fully anticipated the light of the moon sliding in through the half-open door and illuminating what was left of the capsule’s lone escapee. All I see from where I stand is an array of simple controls, presumably all one would need to jettison the pod from the Vagantur. I take a step forward, leaning my head into the doorway. The air is stale, even as Faloiv’s oxygen seeps in and makes it new. There’s a single seat, empty, the restraint belts dangling, purposeless.
I can’t help it . . . all the fear is no match for my curiosity. I step through the doorway into Vagantur Capsule 3, ducking to avoid the few drooping vines that opening the door had disturbed. Kimbullettican leans in after me. It would be too crowded if we both stood inside, so they get as close as they can, head and shoulders inside the door, eyes sweeping this place of unknown. I can feel their excitement in the Artery, the first time they’ve actually felt my age: their fascination is bare and bright, eager to discover some bit of truth.
“It does not feel as old as it looks,” they observe.
They’re right. The dust and growths on the outside of the capsule give an impression of the ancient, but inside, apart from dust, the pod feels like it could be any unused room of the Zoo. The round transparent space is so similar to the domes of the commune . . . it’s like being in a shrunken version of N’Terra.
“I wonder if it was ejected from the Vagantur by mistake,” I ponder. “Since there’s no one inside, I don’t see the point.”
“A consequence of the crash, perhaps,” Kimbullettican says. “A malfunction. What is that? A compartment?”
There’s the faint rectangular outline of a compartment, a drawer of some kind.
Suddenly Kimbullettican’s shoulder is crushed up against mine. I cry out in surprise, moved roughly sideways by their presence in the pod. My backpack crunches against my spine.
“Close the capsule,” they say. “Quickly!”
I fumble with Captain Williams’s pin, still clutched in my left hand.
“Close it? I don’t know how!”
“Here,” Kimbullettican says, snatching the pin from my grasp. Their skin has taken on a mottled color, trying to blend with the silvers and whites of the capsule’s interior. They sweep a hand-paw over the slim bit of wall near the doorway.
“What’s going on?” I demand, moving farther away from the door, as far as I can before running into the dashboard.
“Listen,” they say, still searching for a place to press the pin.
I turn my eyes to the simple dashboard of the capsule, nothing labeled with instructions or clues of what the few buttons and levers might do. In my head, the Artery fills with something like static—a presence that isn’t fully a presence, choppy and unstable, a feeling like sickness permeating its aura. When I finally recognize the presence of one of Albatur’s creations, I turn to the dashboard, urgency pumping through me.
There are ten buttons. Two levers. I decide to press them all. None of the buttons do anything at all—whatever power source they rely upon is long dead. One lever makes a grating sound when I yank it, but nothing happens.
“Hurry,” Kimbullettican says, and I’m not sure if they’re talking to me or themselves, crouching now, looking for an indentation for the pin.
I pull the other lever downward, and the door that had opened only partially before now opens entirely. Kimbullettican jumps back, slamming into me.
“Again,” they order, and I shove the lever upward this time, a metallic clang echoing within the small space of the capsule.
The door stiffly, reluctantly, slides shut. There’s a hiss as whatever air between it and the world beyond is squeezed out.
“Be still,” Kimbullettican says, but I already am, frozen against the dashboard, my eyes prying at the moonlight beyond the transparent hull of the capsule.
“It’s from N’Terra,” I whisper.
“Yes. A similar creature to what harmed my sibling.”
The clouds drift over the moon once more, blanketing the meadow in shadow. The crush of jungle that borders the clearing isn’t visible as anything but a dense black barrier and I glimpse only snatches of the round blossoms that line the ground. Whatever the thing is that I sense in the Artery—its consciousness butchered by the work of Albatur—it is not visible from where we hide in the capsule.
There, Kimbullettican says, and I feel their energy pricked toward a place near the trees where I had first emerged, a dark shape that might have been the trunk of a long-fallen tree. I stare at it so hard my eyes water, hoping it doesn’t move, praying it remains a dead stump.
It doesn’t.
When it moves, every muscle in my body jerks; if it weren’t for my hands gripping the dashboard of the capsule, my body would have fled. But fled where? Kimbullettican and I are pressed shoulder to shoulder in the small space of the Vagantur pod, with no escape possible without going out into the meadow where whatever it is skulks. The transparency of the capsule is terrifying until I remind myself that from the outside, it is a smooth white shell.
It won’t be able to see us, I say in the Artery.
No, not see, Kimbullettican replies, and I shiver. I imagine my scent drifting through the meadow, a trail that the N’Terran beast follows with its nose to the ground. How much air is inside this capsule? How long will we be able to hide here if it discovers where we are and decides to wait us out?
It’s a gwabi. I sense Kimbullettican’s dread immediately, a gray cloud that enters the tunnel and swells like a bruise. A single vasana we might have been able to overpower if forced. A gwabi weighs five hundred pounds, and the teeth wouldn’t require implantation of dirixi fangs—they are born predators, but its biological laws have always prohibited it from hunting herbivores as prey. Until now.
It smells us, Kimbullettican says, but they didn’t need to: I know. The creature weaves a wandering path across the meadow, following exactly the trail I had walked when I had entered the meadow and seen what I thought was a boulder.
It is not here by coincidence, Kimbullettican says. It has followed you here from N’Terra.
How?
I do not know. How did you escape? Were you seen?
No, we weren’t seen, I say, racking my brains. It was dark: the middle of the night. My father helped us. . . .
My father had helped us escape. Every muscle in my body goes rigid, the pack on my back suddenly a thousand pounds weighing me down.
What is it? Kimbullettican says.
“My father . . .”
Crushing against them even more, I turn and rip the backpack off my shoulders, jerking open its top and shoving my arm inside. A canteen. The extra suit from Mbekenkanush. Loose strips of zarum. I slide my hands along every inch of the inside of the pack, searching for anything strange. My fingers freeze when they find it.
A tiny knot. So small it could be a stray stone stuck inside the fabric. But it’s not. I can feel it; round and perfect. Ignoring Kimbullettican’s discomfort, I turn the bag inside out, dumping everything onto the floor. The moonlight provides just enough light for me to find the tiny metallic bug, adhered to the very bottom of the inside of the pack.
“A tracker,” I whisper. “My father has been tracking us.”
“To what end?” Kimbullettican says, their eyes darting from the bug in my hand to the gwabi that prowls ever closer outside the pod.
“I don’t know,” I say. “He wanted me to go find kawa to bring back to N’Terra. He must have known I wouldn’t do it. He wanted to be able to track me so that he could come get it himself!”
Kimbullettican stares at me hard, their forehead spots congested in a knot near the center.
“Crush it,” they say.
I drop it onto the dashboard and with one slam of my fist send its delicate inner mechanisms scattering around the pod.
“I do not know how much good this will do us,” Kimbullettican says, their spots still clustered. “We have already been followed to this place.”
The gwabi is fully visible now, slinking closer to the pod. Its blank eyes sweep over us, confirming that even if my scent is in its nostrils, the capsule is indeed still opaque from the outside. The creature’s mouth is slightly open, moonlight catching on the blaze of saliva coating its mouth. I think of the gwabi that had accompanied me from N’Terra after my mother’s death, my occasional companion. She never salivates this way. Another aspect of this animal’s nature that Albatur has made ugly and vicious.
The pod shudders as the gwabi’s shoulder butts up against it, and I grip the dashboard even more tightly. This capsule had fallen from the sky and landed here without so much as a crack; there is no way that this creature alone can smash it open like an egg. But that doesn’t mean it won’t try.
Being in the capsule, transparent from the inside, is like being in a bubble: I would almost rather the gwabi’s movements be invisible to me. Instead, my eyes are glued to it as it stalks slowly, jerkily, around the pod, circling. Even its languid grace has been stolen from its nature. It doesn’t move like what it is but as what N’Terra has made it.
Everything is changing, Kimbullettican says, but they don’t mean it for me. I feel rude for having heard them, as if I’d eavesdropped on some private prayer.
Time passes. My muscles cramp, crammed in the capsule and trying not to bump Kimbullettican with my movements. The dashboard digs painfully into my hip. And around the capsule, the gwabi circles. Around and around. Tirelessly, ceaselessly.
“Why does it not leave,” Kimbullettican mutters, and I almost jump at the sound of their voice, despite its quiet.
“The signal died when I broke the tracker,” I say. “It’s probably stuck here until it does what it’s programmed to do.”
“What is it programmed to do?”
I don’t answer.
“It is strange to fear a creature besides the dirixi,” Kimbullettican says quietly. “It is strange to not be able to reach her.”
The gwabi passes by the part of the shell closest to me and I flinch, as I do every time its slow, mechanical gait brings it past me. I avert my eyes, as if looking at it will pass some signal to the creature holding us hostage.
“I’m sorry” is all I can say to Kimbullettican. There are much bigger things they need than an apology.
I flinch as the gwabi passes by my shoulder, close enough to touch if the transparent barrier of the capsule were not between us. I shrink away as I had before, but this time it doesn’t continue on its endless circular path. It pauses.
Silence, Kimbullettican says.
I look into the Artery to see what the gwabi might be experiencing, but of course the connection is broken. I can only stare at its frozen form with wide eyes, waiting for those blank, fanged features to turn on the capsule and attempt to get inside.
But its eyes are on the tree line, its ears pricked forward, its nostrils quivering. It crouches almost imperceptibly. Despite its prime directive of tracking me, the creature does seem to maintain its instincts. Its lips pull back in a silent snarl.
“Rondo,” I whisper.
I see him first, and then Alma. They are two shadows, but I know him by the set of his shoulders and her by the shape of her hair, high and proud even in the near dark.
“Oh no,” I cry. “No! They can’t be here!”
I reach for the Artery reflexively before I remember they can’t be reached within it. Panic floods through me. Whatever barrier I have built between myself and them since we’ve been on this journey, it disappears in this moment. I can’t let my friends be killed. I reach for the lever, but Kimbullettican’s hand encircles my wrist.
“You cannot,” they say.
“I have to!” I say. “It sees them!”
It does. It has altered its course, the tracker leaving it listless. I imagine its prime directive glowing red in its mechanical brain: destroy. Alma and Rondo have stepped into the meadow, oblivious to what awaits them.
“Kimbullettican, move!” I say, trying to jerk free, but their strength is breathtaking, their grip unbroken.
“I will not,” they say. “It would mean my death, and yours, and possibly the death of the gwabi.”
“It’s not a gwabi anymore! Kimbullettican, move!”
Alma and Rondo have begun to make their way across the meadow. I don’t know how they found me: my footsteps, perhaps, or maybe they had seen me leave and trailed me like two shadows. I can tell by the way they move that they are afraid, but their fear doesn’t stop them from searching for me, and guilt and love throb inside me in tandem.
“They shouldn’t have come,” I cry. “They shouldn’t be here!”
Alma spots the gwabi. In the moonlight, the silhouette of her shoots out and grabs Rondo’s arm. It’s too late to run. The gwabi is faster than they could ever be. But there is another presence joining us in the meadow. Close and fast, glowing blue in the Artery. It appears suddenly, a blaze emerging from the jungle, heading straight toward my friends. My heart seizes: another predator. A faster death. But then the moonlight shifts.
Hamankush, Kimbullettican says at the same time that I see her.
She’s tall and straight-backed, carrying something in her hand as she crosses the meadow. Kimbullettican and I both sense her intention.
Do not, Kimbullettican says to her. The gwabi is ill.
I know this.
I can’t make out what she’s carrying in her hands, but it’s long and slim, like a cane or a walking stick. She grasps it in her right hand, holding it slightly out to the side of her body as she moves directly across the meadow toward Rondo and Alma. The gwabi sees her now and has turned fully toward her, its muscles twitching. The capsule shell is too thick to hear anything through, but I can almost feel the rumble of the beast’s growls in my own rib cage.
Caution, Kimbullettican warns.
Not feasible, Hamankush says.
When she’s close enough for me to make out her face, the gwabi leaps. An instant of fear pulses through the Artery from Hamankush, orange and almost dizzying, but it’s a mere flash that fades as she sidesteps the gwabi’s attack. I hold my breath, and Kimbullettican moves quickly forward inside the pod, both palms pressed against the shell that protects us.
You must not kill her, Kimbullettican says, their desperation a web of blue tendrils exploding from their words inside the Artery.
I will not.
When the gwabi leaps again, Hamankush sidesteps again, and then swings the long walking stick in a swooping arc. It connects with the beast’s skull, sending it stumbling sideways, discombobulated. It’s strange watching this in silence, the capsule deadening all noise. It feels like a dream. Kimbullettican’s fists are balled against the capsule, their breaths shallow.
The gwabi leaps a third time, and Hamankush’s walking stick cracks against its skull again. It’s enough. The animal stumbles sideways, then falls. It has only just slumped to the ground when Hamankush is upon it, withdrawing what looks like thin rope from the pack she carries over her shoulder and using it to bind the gwabi’s feet. Rondo and Alma stand frozen, as if unsure of what has just transpired.
Out, she says to us, and I merely stare for a moment until Kimbullettican nudges me, nodding at the lever. I pull it, and the air from the meadow whooshes in, a breeze that feels like love after the hour in the small cramped capsule. My friends come running the remaining distance of the meadow, their breath loud and shaking.
“Octavia,” Alma says, almost a shout. “What in the stars are you doing out here? What happened? You left us!”
“I know,” I say, and I try to follow up with I’m sorry, but I can’t. “I—I know.”
Kimbullettican rushes to the side of the gwabi.
“Unconscious,” Hamankush reassures them.
“These bonds will not hold her,” they say.
“No. Which is why we must continue on our way before it wakes.”
“Which is where?” I say, turning to her so I can avoid the eyes of my friends, who are staring at me like I have grown a new face, like they don’t recognize who I am. “What are you doing here? I thought you were supposed to stay at the archives?”
“I will escort you back to the encampment,” she says, nodding toward the part of the jungle I had come from. “I was summoned here to assist with human relocation. The Elders of Mbekenkanush have decided I am not responsible for the death of the igua. The igua that had been altered by the N’Terrans.”
I freeze, staring at her.
“So that means . . . they hold N’Terra responsible.”
“N’Terra is responsible,” she says, and I think again of the memory she had shown me in the jungle outside Mbekenkanush: war, brought by N’Terrans all those years ago. Drones. Death. And now here we are again.
“Yes,” I say. “I know. They . . . have made their decision.”
“Yes,” she says, and stares hard at me for a moment before she casts her gaze over the rest of the group. “Come, back to the encampment. I will explain to those who have been assigned to relocation.”
“No,” I say quickly. “No. We’re not going back to the camp.”
Her eyes snap back to me, her forehead spots clustering near the center.
“What?”
“I’m not going to let the Faloii deal with this while I go hide in the mountains,” I say. I wonder if my voice shakes or if it just feels that way.
“Octavia . . . ,” Alma starts.
“Stop it, Alma,” I snap. “You can go back if you want. I know you don’t understand. None of you do. You don’t hear what I hear. You don’t—” I pause, a lifetime of my father’s teachings like a dam in my mouth keeping me from speaking the words. “You don’t . . . feel what I feel. We were all born here, but I don’t know if you have chosen Faloiv as your home. N’Terra isn’t home. It’s just . . . a place.”
They all regard me silently. I don’t dare look into the Artery: I’m afraid of what silent judgment Kimbullettican and Hamankush exchange.
“If not the encampment,” Hamankush says slowly, “then where?”
“To the archives.”