In the dream, my mother is alive. I’m in my room back in N’Terra, swallowed by the darkness of our ’wam, when my door folds open. She enters the room carrying a light in her palm, a glow that illuminates the smile on the lips that look like mine.
She speaks, and her lips move, but they don’t match the words. I hear them in my head as if in Arterian but different somehow.
We used to sing, she says in her dream language. I don’t remember the words, but we used to sing.
“I’ve never heard you sing,” I tell her.
I don’t remember the words.
Whatever glowing thing she carries, she places on the desk in my N’Terran bedroom. She’s not wearing a white coat but a tunic made of yellow material. It reminds me of the yellow cloth that used to hang on our ’wam’s door in the commune. My grandmother’s cloth. Carried from far across the universe, my mother wears it in whatever universe is now her home.
We didn’t have much to bring, she says. Scraps. But songs don’t have any weight. We carried what we could.
“Sing me one,” I plead. She’s fading. I need her to stay. “Sing me one of the songs.”
I don’t remember the words.
It’s not a sound that wakes me, or light. It’s still deeply night—I can feel that in the still thickness of the air and see it from the moonlight that fades in softly through the ceiling of my qalm. But when my eyes flutter open, it’s as if someone shook me awake, a fingerless hand reaching out from nothing and plucking a string in my mind. The reverberation still travels through me as I raise my head from the floor.
I don’t remember lying down. I’d fallen asleep right here on the ground by the wall, my hip pressed slightly against it. Though the miraculous pulse of the organic wall is ever present, I must have gone on half conscious of it in my sleep, because the flowing rhythm is barely noticeable now, steady and constantly changing, a stream of unintelligible thought and knowledge, forever a mystery to the simple wood of my brain.
Until it’s not.
I bolt upright, the sudden change almost incomprehensible at first. But there it is: a shape of something emerging from the impossibly complicated stream of its consciousness. I can’t make it out: it’s like the music of Rondo’s izinusa but sped up by a machine more powerful than anything I can fathom. And yet . . . one or two notes reach me where they hadn’t before, finding me in the Artery and resonating there like spinning planets.
“What is it?” I whisper in the dark. My mind streaks back to the moment in my mother’s office, so far away in my ’wam, when she’d spoken to me in Arterian for the first time. A jolt of longing rips through me: this language of the qalm feels as unreachable as my mother.
The qalm is changing. The room is so dim I barely notice at first, but between shadows I can make out the solid green and brown and dark. A smell of soil and sky reaches my nostrils, as a shape grows from the wall, twisting and stretching like a tentacle, forming itself, reaching for me. . . .
Not a tentacle. A hand. A hand almost like mine and almost like the Faloii’s but not quite like either. One moment it has too few digits, one moment too many, but it’s trying very hard to maintain the shape, bits of soil sprinkling from it every second or two. It beckons to me, and in my head the notes of the qalm’s strange complex music are still surging, but with the hand before me, I think the one or two notes that find my inner ear mean a certain thing. I reach out for the hand and it recoils, shrinking and disappearing as I continue to extend. By the time it has gone, swallowed back up by the qalm, my palm is against the smooth dark wall and the vines are parting with their usual rapid snakiness.
The qalm is allowing me to leave.
I understand this with a certainty as solid as the ground beneath my feet. In the language I only comprehend but a breath of, this building—the very stuff of Faloiv—is making way for me to depart. Beyond my parted vine door, the corridor is dark and silent. I could be the only person on this planet, just me and the world itself.
I almost leave right then. But I pause, turning back to the small space that the qalm had arranged just for me, my scent like a wafting fingerprint I leave behind. In the pale moonlight, my eye falls upon my old skinsuit, discarded at the foot of my sleeping platform. It looks limp, lifeless, a shell of a former life that seems more and more ancient with every second. I turn away and pass through the vines.
The moon lights my way to the jungle’s edge. The silence is almost suffocating. My mind wanders back to the night out in the main dome with Rondo; the night I saw my father tranquilize Adombukar. The same moon. The same ground beneath my feet. But in N’Terra, the hum of the compound’s energy stores and the distant voices of whitecoats, the sound of Rondo’s breath in the shadows beside me . . . I didn’t feel alone. Here, I am the only one who knows where I am. What I plan to do. What do I plan to do? I tilt my head back and look up at the stars, like the eyes of the Faloii but infinitely more vast. I try to envision a path through those stars, a black map that my veins can follow like a familiar scent. But nothing up there looks like home. My ancestors had looked to the stars and seen a future . . . all I see is the end. Ahead, the stalks of a plant whose name I don’t know but whose red petals are like the faces of kin sway stiffly in a night breeze.
Behind me, the shapes of Mbekenkanush rising against the sky remind me of Dr. Albatur’s towers inside N’Terra. The feeling of my room inside the qalm being aware of me and watching me returns, and I shudder with the thought that the city itself watches me go, and I can’t quite shake the idea that Mbekenkanush will keep me from leaving. I move slowly and softly, thinking of what Joi had said earlier and cringing away from my own fear: How can you be afraid of the place where you are?
When the hand grabs me in the dark, I have every intention of screaming. But it catches at my mouth before any sound escapes.
“Shh,” comes a soft voice through the dark. “Afua, quiet.”
“Nana,” I whisper as her hand comes away. “I was just . . .”
“I already know what you were doing,” she says. “I would expect nothing less of my daughter’s child.”
“I have to do something,” I whisper, giving voice to my intentions for the first time. “We can’t just . . .”
“If you’re going to do something, you must hurry,” she says, her face shifting in and out of sight as clouds pass over the moon. “The Faloii have made a decision. We don’t have much time.”
“What decision,” I whisper. “About us? About humans?”
“They are going to the Isii,” she says, speaking quickly. “It is the brain of Faloiv. It was where Adombukar was headed when N’Terra abducted him. The Faloii are going to deploy a small group of their people there, where the greater decision may be made.”
The urgency in her voice is like a prod of electricity delivered straight to my neurons.
“What does that mean? What does the Isii do?”
“Many things,” she says. “Listen.”
My mind is widening before I’m even consciously asking it to, and my grandmother sweeps into my head. I sense that she has never seen the Isii herself—and perhaps would not be permitted to—but that it carries great power. The impressions rush over me: the essence of Faloiv swirling inside what feels like the core of the planet. My grandmother said this is where the greater decision will be made, but decision is a pale word: our human expressions lack the ability to illustrate what really happens at the Isii, so she tries her best to show me. At the Isii, planets are made. Species are born . . . and eradicated.
“Stars,” I whisper.
“Yes,” she says. “The Faloii have decided that N’Terrans have gone too far.”
Somewhere behind us in Mbekenkanush, something stirs. We both feel it: a pulse in the Artery. Someone is awake and is aware of our presence. My grandmother turns back to me in a hurry, snapping her mind shut. I follow suit, feeling suddenly guilty and panicky.
“You know where my heart lies,” she whispers. “I have no love for N’Terra. But the Faloii Elders would not take kindly to me sending you off to interrupt their plans. That is why you must be quick. It will take a few days for the Faloii to choose their group and to prepare for the trip—there are rituals involved. By then maybe you can have changed this course. It is not dangerous for us yet, but depending on what the Isii feels from the human presence, that could change very quickly. That’s why if there will be action, it must be from you.”
“Me?” I say as loudly as I dare.
“Flowers don’t just grow at other humans’ feet,” she says, her face lost in shadow.
“So?”
My mind is closed, so it is with my physical senses that I hear the approach of Faloii.
“You need to go now,” she says. “Find the one who keeps the eyenu. Her memory is deeper than ours could ever be, and the past will answer for the present.”
“The who?”
“Quickly! There is a mineral I have found. When it encounters water, it erupts with crimson smoke. If the Faloii decide there will be war with the humans, I will release the smoke. If you look to the sky and see it, you will know what is to come. Now go!”
She’s pushing me, trying to bury me in the darkness. She moves quickly, hoping to head off whoever comes our way. I step into the jungle.
It’s as if a curtain has been pulled back, the silence of Mbekenkanush’s clearing disintegrating like sand meeting water. The chorus of night surrounds me. The sound of trees swaying against each other, blurred like many deep breaths. The close and faraway calls of animals N’Terra doesn’t yet know exist, animals with skins made of shadows and stars. I open the tunnel reluctantly, afraid of what it might show me. I think of the myn in the stream of the Mammalian Compound, how Alma had said that being able to hear in the tunnel was an advantage as well as a handicap: I can hear the animals, but they can hear me too. I wonder if they hear how angry I am at my grandmother.
Even as I am surrounded by life—in the jungle and the Artery—all I can feel is my anger. This feels too familiar: everyone around me knowing something I don’t, while I blunder through the mess trying to solve the puzzle. A stream of moonlight breaks through the foliage, illuminating what appears to be a reptile with deep blue skin. It hovers with the assistance of a double set of wings, using its long prehensile tongue to grip the buds of glowing white flowers. The flowers are opening one at a time, as nocturnal as the animals around them. The reptile picks them off one by one, the wings thrumming like a chorus of insects. I wish I could ask them what the eyenu are. A plant? An animal? An object of the Faloii? The mystery of it only feeds my anger.
I am going to N’Terra. Damn the secrets. Damn the eyenu, whatever they are. Instead of adding more pieces to the puzzle, I will go back to where this puzzle began.
I step slowly and carefully over branches, sometimes climbing over trees that fell long before I was born. The suit I wear, grown by the qalm, doesn’t tear or snag. When I slide on my stomach over the rough surface of a massive trunk, the suit seems to grow smooth, helping me along. I catch glimpses of the moon as I move north—but the glimpses are farther apart, the moments in shadow longer and deeper. There is the occasional iridescent flower, but the soft glow is enough to show me my hands, and never the nonexistent path. I tell myself my feet will know it when they find it. That some unknown force will draw me to N’Terra. That is not science, a voice like Alma whispers from the back of my mind.
And neither is my decision to go back home, I think. But the similarities between my mother’s approach and my grandmother’s are too glaring to ignore: mystery. Puzzles. Secrecy. Secrecy got my mother killed, I think, and swipe a tear from my face.
I’m just starting to get angry about the irrationality of crying when a sound stops me cold. It’s different from the gentle rhythms of the trees, the ubiquitous movements of a hundred unseen animals. It is purposeful. Every step has a goal. A crackle of twigs, the hush of leaves pushed aside with urgency. I stand rooted to the spot, one hand clutching a branch in the dark. The sounds are louder, come closer, the steps quick and heavy.
It can’t be a dirixi. I would have felt the quake of its arrival. Am I bleeding? Had the smallest thorn pricked my skin through the suit, the smell of blood drawing the beast from its faraway cave? A small one, perhaps. A young one, sent out to hunt for the first time. No one would ever find my body, consumed by its fledgling jaws.
I force myself to widen the tunnel. Too late to arm myself: the branch I clutch is attached to a tree, and it’s too thick to break off. In the dark I can’t even discern a climbable perch. I inhale hurriedly, wondering if a field of rhohedron will rescue me this time, but my nostrils are empty, and the sound of the creature rushing toward me is closer than ever. When the tunnel spirals fully open, its consciousness is almost upon me.
I recognize the presence just as the dense plants part to reveal the creature. A surge of energy, purple with worry. The gwabi bursts from the greenery and closes the space between the bushes and me with a single leap.
“Oh,” I whisper.
She butts me with her massive head, intending to be gentle but sending me stumbling backward with her strength. She growls low in her throat, but I know from the signals she passes me in the Artery that she means me no harm.
“I’m okay,” I say. I run a hand along her back, still in awe of the rock-hard muscles her sable fur conceals, the sticky electric buzz it seems to leave on my fingertips.
She regards me with luminous eyes, sizing me up, searching for wounds. I assure her in the tunnel that I am unharmed, but she continues to express her worry. I don’t know how she found me. She makes it clear that I shouldn’t be alone. Not out here.
“I have to go back,” I say to her, the best way I can in Arterian. Arterian is never words, but it’s different with animals than with the Faloii. She gazes at me, understanding—I think—where I’m going but worried about why. She knows what is in N’Terra. She had been a prisoner there.
“I have to do something,” I whisper, passing her colors and shapes: my fear for my people and the Faloii, my dread for what will happen to the planet if N’Terra’s actions bring war. She gazes at me impassively, her eyes like two glowing orbs. She is angry, her disgust for N’Terra smoldering inside her. She doesn’t wonder what it is I plan to do—she merely assesses me in that motherly way, and I feel from her the same sentiment my mother would have provided. Something that strengthens my resolve.
My hand is still on her back, and she turns away, guiding me around the reaching tentacles of a skinny tree that may not be a tree at all. She warns me to stay close—I’m her blind furless cub in a jungle of thorns. I walk along beside her, comforted by the rumble in her throat. Together we walk south.
The night has thinned in the hours before dawn. Sunrise is a miracle that I have never experienced within the isolated security of the Mammalian Compound: the way the sun, still hidden below the horizon, manages to dilute night’s opacity. The jungle is no longer one jagged shadow after another: I can differentiate between ogwe and marandin trunks.
And I smell water. I have no idea how many miles I have traveled in the secure company of the gwabi, but even with the help of the qalm suit, my body is telling me hydration is necessary. When I communicate this to the gwabi, she is reluctant to deviate from the invisible path she follows, but her concern for my well-being outweighs her desire to press on. She leads me to the right, cutting through the walls of green that surround us on all sides. She moves quickly and I trot to keep up, vines whipping across my cheeks. I use my arms to shield my face as we continue on, but a few moments later I am able to lower them as we break through into what seems to be a clearing. True dawn is still an hour or so away, but its approach shows me that I was correct about the scent of water. There is a lake, shadowy in what’s left of the moonlight, but smelling perfectly drinkable.
Still, I wait until the gwabi lowers her head to drink before I dare scoop up a palmful of it. My father would have a seizure if he could see me these past few days: rubbing the fluids of strange flowers on my skin, attempting to drink water that hasn’t been properly tested. But if it’s good enough for the gwabi, it’s good enough for me. I’m just bending my neck to sip from my hands when the sound of the water stirring far out in the lake causes me to jerk my eyes up.
It’s still too dark to see well, and the forgotten water flows down my wrists as I scan the surface desperately, seeking the source of the sound. I back away from the water’s edge and find the gwabi doing the same thing, a nervous growl rumbling in her throat. I squint, the clouds over the moon playing tricks on my sight: Is that a shadowy figure there in the center of the lake? Something sinking down under the water? A massive something, slipping below the surface just as my eyes fasten on the bulk of it.
I don’t know if it’s me or the gwabi that screeches when the figure appears on the bank, not far from where we stand. We both leap back, the gwabi bristling, ready to lunge. The figure grows larger, standing from where it had been crouched at the water’s edge. I can’t move, too terrified to open the Artery and ascertain whether the creature is harmless or means to attack. The gwabi hasn’t moved, so surely this means the shadowy figure before me is an herbivore? She would know if it was a predator. Any logic that is solid and strong inside me crumbles into powder as the figure moves toward me.
And then the clouds shift. The moonlight is my friend.
The shadow is my grandfather.
“You,” I gasp, my lungs finally deciding to work again. I have a name for him—Jamyle Lemieux—but not a name of the heart, like Nana. This man whose face I know is part of my blood but is a stranger to me.
“Octavia,” he says. The first time hearing my name from his mouth and it’s accompanied by a frown. “What are you doing here? Does your nana know you’re here?”
“Y-yes,” I stammer. “She’s the one who told me I should go.”
“Go where?” he says. “In the middle of the night?”
I hesitate.
“To N’Terra,” I lie. “The Faloii are going to the . . . the Isii? They might turn the planet against the humans. If I can get back to N’Terra and make everyone see the truth, then maybe we can stop this.”
“Back to N’Terra.” He frowns. “I would have thought your nana wanted you far from that place. I don’t think logic and reason are tools that work on those people.”
“Logic and reason are what I was raised on,” I say, and when I hear it out loud, I feel stronger. The idea of going back and facing Albatur and his lies takes the shiver out of my skin. My grandfather says nothing.
“Someone said that N’Terra sent a weapon for you,” I say before he can challenge me. “Why? Why you?”
His eyes had been wandering out over the black water, but now he peers at me through the dark.
“Not just me,” he said. “Your grandmother too. Albatur blames us for the delay of his life’s work. And he’s right. About this I have no regrets.”
The words life’s work catch my ear and now I’m gazing out over the lake as well.
“Why do you come here?” I say. “Why is this what you study?”
“Study,” he repeats with a smile. “I don’t study the black lake. I protect it.”
“Protect it? Protect it from what?”
“From who,” he says. “I protect it from myself: N’Terra. There is nothing on this planet that our people would not seek to exploit. Your grandmother now protects Mbekenkanush; I protect the black lake. Like everything else on this planet, it carries something.”
I cast my eyes back out to the black waters. “What does it carry?”
“Trees carry memory. Water carries words. Kawa carry everything.”
I eye my grandfather in the pale light, his skin taking on a bluish tint beneath it. I wonder silently if he’s not a little bit . . . off. He’s older than my grandmother, and after everything he’s been through, maybe something in his mind has loosened.
“I thought I saw something sinking out there,” I say. “Something huge. Is it a specimen? An animal, I mean?”
He turns away from the lake, his eyes on me again and the smile faded from his mouth. It’s strange finding pieces of my mother in the creases of this man’s face. Her worry is a gene, passed on from this jaw.
“This entire planet is an animal,” he says. “Which is why we must be very cautious about what happens next.”
“You mean with what the Faloii are planning?”
“Yes and no. The Faloii may pass along the fact that humans have become parasitic and Faloiv remains hospitable. But the planet and its creatures will always have their own ideas. The very plants we eat could turn against us.”
Beside me, the gwabi gives a low grumble in her throat. My grandfather isn’t able to speak Arterian, but I wonder if she understands his meaning nonetheless. As I’d walked through the jungle with her, the shadows had lost their sinister quality, but now they seem ominous again as I imagine the trees growing fangs and swallowing us whole. My grandfather moves toward me, and he seems to see the fear growing in my eyes.
“Courage isn’t the only thing that will help us survive,” he says. “But it is one thing. Going back to N’Terra will take courage. Especially if you fail.”
“I won’t,” I say, setting my jaw, against my fear and against his words. “People just need to know what’s going on. Albatur is running the show and keeping everyone in the dark. If people knew . . . this wouldn’t be happening.”
He studies me for a long moment, his expression so like my mother’s I almost wince. But when he speaks, it’s his voice, not hers, and the loneliness in what lies ahead of me swoops down from the sky like a night bird.
“I hope you’re right.”