They march us all night, through rain that renders every tree uniform. The deluge conceals the scents I’m accustomed to, the darkness disguising everything familiar. But the graysuits seem to know where they’re going, or perhaps it’s the Albaturean gwabi that lead our tense procession. It is only June, the eyenu, and me. When they had eventually paused our march near daybreak, they lit a fire and lounged around it, their captives bound and set to the side like rubbish.
“If it’s not cooked, I don’t want it,” a man’s voice says says.
“Why would I offer you food if it wasn’t cooked?” says another.
“I don’t know why you do the things you do.”
“Oh, shut up. At least we’re finally drying out.”
“Barely. The humidity is murder.”
I can’t see them, only hear them. My face is pressed into the damp soil. Inside my suit, the sharp edge that I know to be Captain Williams’s pin stabs me, undiscovered with my grandfather’s map.
“Watch the sparks,” one voice says, a woman. I recognize it: Manx. “You’re going to char my meat.”
“A little char makes it taste better.”
Meat. I force myself not to inhale—I know I will be sick if I do. Meat. After everything that has happened—that’s still happening—N’Terrans are eating dead animals. Anger and revulsion flood through me, and I breathe out hard through my nostrils.
“It’s too hot for a fire, honestly,” one of the male voices says.
“Almost,” says the other. “But as long as it keeps the beasts away, I don’t mind a fire.”
“You mean besides our beasts,” Manx says, chuckling.
“Is that what he likes to call them? His beasts?”
“No, that’s just what Dr. Jain calls them. Albatur probably calls them something more sophisticated than that.”
I struggle against my bonds, but June’s voice is immediately in my head.
Be still, June tells me, and I almost jerk at her nearness. She doesn’t feel like Kimbullettican and the other Faloii in the Artery. Her Arterian feels softer, weaker. Like my mother’s. Like Dr. Espada’s. Human.
Where are you? I ask, trying to keep from wriggling.
Behind you.
Do you know if my friends . . . ?
I don’t know if they survived, she says.
I squeeze my eyes shut. Alma had carried on past me up the mountain, toward the cave, where Rondo had been waiting. Had they made it? Had they managed to hide themselves? What about Kimbullettican and Hamankush? I remember the gwabi’s jaws flashing in the swirl of dark and storm, fangs that had seemed to float. Had those fangs found flesh? This all feels so much like the night my mother died: the blur of noise, the uncertainty about what had befallen whom. Separated from my loved ones. Again.
Three of my children dead, June says, her grief thrumming in the Artery thick and blue. I remember now, her wail breaking through the storm like its own shrill thunder. The comfort I offer her is weak: my mother’s death is too near for me to comfort her now; all the condolences I give seem aimed, at least in part, at myself. I focus instead on the stretching ache of my arms’ tendons, bound uncomfortably behind my back.
Why are they doing this? I think, not to June but to the entire Artery, as if the world might answer, as if the stars themselves might offer something solid.
Someone told them it’s right, June says.
Nearby I hear a scuffle of movement, a faint whine reaching my ears. I stiffen, my eyes cracking open.
“They’re moving again,” one of the people by the fire says. I wonder if they’re still wearing masks, the reflective shields that had rendered them inhuman there on the mountain. Are we still on the mountain? The sun has risen now, but I can’t tell where we are.
“Let them move,” Manx says. “They’re not going anywhere.”
This time I roll slightly sideways, an inch at a time, my cheek still pressed into the soil, but my eyes taking in the people sitting around the fire. They wear the predictable gray suits, darkened by the crush of rain. They turn from where they sit on stones and wood, looking over their shoulders at the eyenu, almost in a pile, their legs and beaks bound with what I can only guess is the same fibrous material that binds my wrists against my lower back. Some sort of chariot is parked nearby, a wide flat bed at its rear. I can only assume this is how the eyenu were transported. The three Albaturean gwabi crouch nearby, on guard.
“I don’t know what he’s going to do with them,” Manx says, turning back to the fire.
“I heard it’s like the bones,” one of them says. “Something that will give energy.”
“I thought they got the bone machine to work?”
“They did, but you need the bones to do it, don’t you?” Manx snaps.
“We were so close to getting the Faloii on the mountain. That would have been something.”
They’re silent for a moment and I merely watch them through the slits of my eyelids, a feeling like hate roiling within me.
“Something would be finding our egg,” Manx says. She pokes at the fire with a stick, sending sparks up into the canopy. “That would be something. He won’t be happy when he hears we found one of the pods but nothing inside.”
They found one of the pods. Was it the same one I found with Kimbullettican?
“It has to be in the aliens’ city,” one of the men says. “The humans who turned sides had to have taken it with them. He’ll find it when we finally go in.”
Aliens, I repeat mentally, trying to make sense of it.
They mean the Faloii, June says.
That doesn’t make sense. How can they be aliens on land that’s theirs?
This . . . this is something I remember.
Her energy in the Artery seems to swell with something, something that swims as it looks for its name.
What are you talking about?
The rats in the ship. The man who now leads your people and makes these monsters—he was a rat, a young man at one time. This has begun to feel like Earth. He brought it from there.
What do you remember?
There is nothing to remember. They killed my mother for loving who she was. She was from a place called Trinidad. She wanted to remember and they hated her for it. When the Faloii came, I couldn’t wait to leave.
And they took you with them, I say. They wanted you.
I was special, she says. Somehow. My genes were made for the stars. But now Earth has followed me through them, and I wonder what it was all for.
“The lady doesn’t look so good,” a voice says.
I dart my gaze back to them. The three people around the dwindling fire are all standing, moving toward us.
Manx and one of the men clutch strips of meat, tearing at them with their teeth. The image of knocking those teeth out of their mouths flashes across my mind unbidden. The other man carries a buzzgun.
“They’re tied up, Rand,” his compatriot sneers. “It’s a tiny woman and a kid.”
“The lady bit me when I grabbed her before,” the one called Rand says. “Look, I have a mark.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Manx reaches us first. “Hey, kid,” she says. “We know who you are.”
I stare back at her from my twisted position on the ground, glaring at the meat in her hand. She takes a bite, chews hard, looking me in the eye.
“Do you know where your friends went?” she says.
I can’t help it—my chin quivers. If the graysuits don’t know where Alma and Rondo are, then that at least means they aren’t dead. These three people didn’t find Kimbullettican or Hamankush, and they didn’t personally shoot my friends. If they’re not here tied up, they’re free. For now.
“Brave, huh?” Manx says. She looks almost sorry. Maybe just disappointed. “Well, it would be better if we had you all. Their parents are worried, Octavia. Doesn’t that bother you?”
I grit my teeth. It does bother me. But that’s not what’s important here. My voice finds itself at the back of my throat, and when I open my mouth I sound like I’m croaking.
“You’re making things worse,” I say.
Her eyebrows lower for an instant, maybe because she can’t understand me, or maybe because she doesn’t like what I have to say.
“For who?” she says. “Not for us. Haven’t you learned anything from your daddy?”
It’s like a slap. June cringes in the Artery. The graysuits turn their attention to her.
“So who are you, exactly?” Rand says, using his gun like a finger, pointing. “And why do you have so many of the egg things?”
“More importantly,” Manx interrupts, “do you have ours? Albatur has had us looking for the Vagantur’s forever. You’d save us a lot of trouble if you gave it up now.”
“If I kept track of everything that fell from the sky,” June says, “I would have a lot of rain.”
“You know that the storm last night wasn’t normal, right?” I break in. “You know that the planet is starting to change? Because of you. Because of us.”
Manx’s eyebrows lower again, but they spring back quickly, arched with annoyance. “All the more reason we need to get the hell out of here,” she snaps. “Now, what did you do with our egg, lady?”
I’ve twisted away from her, but behind me, June hums to herself. I imagine her eyes closed, hiding the century that shines out from them. The heat is rising. Dawn is passing into day.
“What about your birds?” Rand says. “We were watching. We saw them give the eggs. How does it work? He’s going to want to know.”
“It’s not work at all,” June says, then resumes her humming.
“You know you’re human, don’t you?” Rand insists, using the gun to point again. I keep my eyes trained on the empty black mouth of it, hoping it doesn’t speak. “Who do you really think you’re helping?”
Behind him, the eyenu make stifled sounds beneath their gags. They’re watching the human proceedings with fear-filled eyes. I wonder if they think June is their mother, if they feel as helpless as June had on Earth, watching her mother be dragged away. The thought fills my heart with grief, but I’m too cowardly to look into the Artery and feel what they feel. It might overwhelm me, sodden my reflexes with sadness, and I need to be sharp.
“There are other ways to do this,” I say. “Don’t you know there are a hundred or more people living in the city with the Faloii? Perfectly happy? Everything was fine until Albatur started messing everything up.”
“Don’t you know anything?” Manx snaps now, crouching down before me. “He’s right: you are just like your mother. Think you have it all figured out, don’t you?”
Rand laughs, an ugly sound, small under the eye of the jungle. Manx rocks back on her heels, still eyeing me. “You think it’s about working things out here. It’s about working things out here so that we can leave,” she says. “If Albatur has his way, we can keep Faloiv for its resources but finally go home. Why don’t you understand that?”
“But this is our home,” I whisper.
She rolls her eyes skyward, as if my ignorance is a bird that she follows to the treetops. “It doesn’t have to be. You’re a kid: you don’t know. Before Williams died, they got what they needed from her: the ship will only run on the kawa it was built with. We need that egg.”
Only one will make it run, I think, the words etched on the captain’s cell wall glowing behind my eyes.
They must only be allowed what they were given, June says.
“Don’t do that,” the one called Rand says. “You’re doing the talking thing, aren’t you? Albatur said you probably could. Don’t. Whatever you want to say, say it out loud.”
“You found all those kawa,” I say, almost laughing. “But he still can’t get what he wants.”
Manx looks like she wants to hit me. “N’Terrans have been searching for years,” she says. “We know the aliens have the Vagantur’s power cell. If they just give it up, we can go.”
My heart begins to pound. June somehow has a piece of the Vagantur’s kawa in the archives. They must not know it’s there, or this conversation would be moot. I have to keep it that way.
“Go back where?” I say, diverting the conversation. “To Earth? It’s probably a shell by now.”
“That’s why we need the eggs,” she says, smiling as if she finally found a way to get through to me. “The eggs will not only fix the ship, they will fix the planet. All the power we need.”
“That’s what he says,” I say.
“Yes, that’s what he says,” she snaps back, angry again.
“And what if he’s wrong?” I say. “What if he’s wrong?”
“Don’t bother,” Rand says to her. He lets the buzzgun fall now, its mouth shouting silently at the ground. He turns back to what’s left of the fire. “Waste of time. Let her die in a cell like Williams.”
“At least we have her,” Manx says, shrugging carelessly in my direction. She too goes back to the embers, to the smoking bodies of dead animals. “She’s wearing the suit he was talking about. It will be good to make a few of those before we leave this shit planet.”
Are you all right? I say to June.
I’m tired, she says. I thought I was finished being tired.
I don’t know what to do, I say, and my eyes fill with tears, because it feels like I’m talking to my mother and at the same time it feels like I never had one.
She doesn’t answer, and this makes the tears burn even hotter. To keep them at bay, I focus on the gwabi and the eyenu, the vast space between what each of them is feeling. I wonder if, under all the modifications Albatur and the others have made, the animals still retain anything of their own, or if they’ve been changed beyond recognition, all that they used to be weeded out by the force of violence. I think of the metal world I’d seen in June’s memory and wonder the same about myself and my fellow humans. Have we retained anything that isn’t destructive?
Was it ever good? I ask June in the silent tunnel. Was there anything worth saving?
She doesn’t answer right away. I can feel her attention focused on the remaining eyenu of her flock, her heart aching for them, her anger stronger than her body. When she finally turns her energy toward me, it’s purple and heavy with grief and memory.
Of course, she says. There is always something to save. But what was good, we made ourselves. My mother’s pin. Such a small thing. She wanted to remember the place she came from, before she started working for the River’s factories. I remember now. I remember there were no jobs, except with them: two companies owned everything. She had to feed me. She worked for them. They cut off her locs. They erased her tattoos. What is there to pass on from a world that has been flattened?
They started doing the same thing in N’Terra, I tell her. I have to work hard not to let her grief sink into me from the Artery. It’s as strong as last night’s storm, threatening to saturate me. People had banners from the Origin Planet. From Earth. Flags. They started replacing them with N’Terran banners.
This man, this Albatur, she says. He wants a metal world. If there is good, it’s made ourselves.
The three graysuits are sitting and eating. It might be meat. I can almost hear them chewing, can hear their low laughter, keeping their conversation quiet enough to remain secret from me and June. I stare blankly, trying to envision the world they imagine going back to. A flat world. Is that where my father longs to return? A colorless world. What besides blood makes us family? The vivid colors of Faloiv surround the graysuits, and I decide to stare at those instead. Crimson. Aquamarine. Violet.
Violet.
My eye passed over the tall purple flower the first time, just one more bright thing in the jungle. But as it seems to rise, I lock my gaze onto it. It does rise, inch by inch, its stalk emerging from the brush. A vusabo.
There is no breeze, but it sways. So friendly. So harmless. One more flower of Faloiv . . . at least that’s what it would like passersby to think. But I know better.
The first time I noticed the green language of Faloiv, far away in Mbekenkanush—or was it earlier? In N’Terra? The ogwe and their messages of first calm and then warning?—it wasn’t a language I could fully understand. But something has shifted—maybe inside me or maybe inside the planet. I hear it more clearly now. The vusabo almost makes sense to me, and I can feel it hunting.
Rand and the other graysuits continue their conversation, oblivious to the threat. The almost threat. The vusabo hasn’t yet decided what it will do: the slight shift I sense in Faloiv isn’t complete; it’s a process, a message that spreads slowly through the planet’s veins. Maybe it flows from the Isii. I can’t tell. But the plant that normally hunts birds is making up its mind, sizing up the humans, weighing whether they are predators, and therefore prey.
I know immediately what I must do. If there is good, it’s made ourselves.
The green language doesn’t come naturally to me the way Arterian does. I know I will never speak it as the Faloii do. But I can feel some cave of my brain grinding open as I force what feels like a forest of vines apart to make room for the words.
Humans, I say. Danger.
It’s as if the vusabo was waiting for permission. Two quills fly like wasps from the stalk, burying themselves in Rand’s neck. The vines spring from the bush a moment later.
“Holy hell,” he cries, leaping up. I stare, unmoved, knowing the venom is spreading through his veins. I know there is no voice in the Artery telling him where he will find the antidote. I have just helped the vusabo kill this man, but the only thing I feel is the green language thrumming through me.
Manx screams, leaping up, using the stick she’d used on the fire as a weapon against the vines, which are wrapping around Rand’s legs like two snakes.
Hurry, we need to move now, I tell June. She stares at me in bafflement, and I can’t tell if she’s impressed or horrified by what I’ve done, what I have decided to be. Now!
I remember a graysuit cuffing Rondo’s wrists, and Rondo wriggling out of them. I begin to do the same, urging June to follow my lead. The graysuits ignore us, their cries rising as they battle the vusabo, which shoots another set of quills but misses. My bonds have begun to loosen, but not quickly enough. One of the graysuits has freed Rand, ripping one of the vines clean off the vusabo’s stalk. I yank at my wrists, my pulse climbing. Captain Williams’s pin jabs me through my suit, spurring me on.
Manx raises her buzzgun, aims at the flower of the vusabo, and fires. The sound echoes through the jungle and bright violet petals and plant matter scatter to the ground. The stalk will likely survive, but it is too damaged to attack further, dashing my hopes.
Rand, however, remains panting, dizzy. He will be gone soon, I think, fighting a flood of remorse. Instead I feel sorry for the vusabo. It had been too small a predator against too dangerous an adversary. The small fangs of the stalk were not enough to do what I needed them to do. I needed a bigger beast.
A bigger beast.
Do not, June says in the Artery, seeing my plan before it has fully hatched in my mind, but I know already that I’m going to.
My wrists are not free, but my fingers can reach the place on my hip where Captain Williams’s pin is concealed within the flesh of my suit. The suit opens for me, revealing the hard edge, the point of the wings which, long ago, the woman who flew our ship had used to carve her words into the wall. I grip it hard. I will not let it fall.
I take a deep breath, the wings in my hand, the wings that had come so far across the universe. I press the edge against my left palm, wincing already. I press. I press until my mouth opens, releasing a small breath. I press until I feel the blood release from my skin, a small river, a signal. I imagine it as the reddest thing on the planet as it drips down my wrist into the soil. I imagine it as a siren, a beacon shining into the sky, demanding the jungle to part like water.
Nothing happens.
Rand is still clutching his buzzgun, but it hangs limply to his side. His mouth moves, rambling an endless stream of nonsense as his fellow graysuits cluster around him, trying to figure out how to help.
“Poison?” one says. “Check the packs on the gwabi. There has to be some kind of antidote that the whitecoats sent out!”
“Rand, what’s happening? Where does it hurt?”
Please, I think. Please. Come on. We’re right here.
Manx aims her buzzgun at me and June.
“Don’t even think about moving,” she says. “As soon as we deal with this, I’m retightening those bindings!”
Please, I pray to the sky. Albatur can’t have June. He can’t have the eyenu. Please. Please.
And then I notice the quiet.
It spreads across the jungle like wind, everything becoming still, the very trees listening. The graysuits barely notice. They are accustomed to not noticing, and their attention is elsewhere.
The first time the ground shakes, it’s a mere tremor.
Oh, child, June says, her fear growing large.
Get ready to move, I tell her.
The ground shakes again, this time enough to make the grass around me tremble just slightly, as if shuddering in a mysterious breeze.
“Did you feel that?” the third graysuit says, looking away from Rand for the first time. Rand is still on his feet. I think it must take longer for the venom to travel through someone his size.
“Feel what?” Manx says.
The rumble in the ground answers. My heart matches it, thundering in my ears. I begin scrambling at my bonds again, not caring if they notice.
“I felt it that time,” Manx says. She’s standing now, her eyes fixed on the jungle. “Leftover from the storm maybe?”
How can they not know?
“It’s so quiet,” the third graysuit says, and these three words float out into the air between them, a seed. I can almost see it being planted, the way it grows roots in their minds.
“Oh god,” Manx says, and suddenly the buzzgun is a metric of her fear: alert, erect. She aims it at the jungle, at nothing, at everything. She clings to it like it might offer something besides noise when the time comes.
“Be quiet,” she says, her voice as soft as the soil against my cheek. “Be quiet now. Don’t move. Don’t speak.”
They obey. Silence consumes the small clearing. The fire has long faded, its embers cracking only occasionally and so softly I don’t think even a dirixi would notice. I work blindly, madly at the material that ties my wrists, imagining that I feel the fibers stretching, that freedom is only a few twists away. June is motionless behind me, as still as the jungle and as silent. I wonder if her wrists move, if she is struggling to free herself, or if she has resigned herself to whatever happens next.
“Did it stop?” Rand whispers. Only the shape of his words reaches me.
“Quiet,” Manx hisses.
My wrists burn. The jungle is still silent.
“I don’t hear it,” Rand whispers again, fear and poison making him stupid.
“Quiet!”
The ground does not shake. Perhaps the beast is listening. Perhaps it has chosen other prey. Perhaps it raises its monstrous tongue to the air, scenting other beasts that might earn its wrath. I remember its scales. The way it had approached the Vagantur without fear, despite the ship’s size, confident in its fangs. The way its only concern was blood, leveling the jungle in pursuit of its needs, and the way the jungle had gone silent before it, within and without.
I am alone in the Artery when I open it wide inside my head.
Come, I say into the void. We’re here.
A long moment of stillness, of silence.
Then the ground begins to tremble.