War.
Raw.
The words seem to be about the same to me. Both strip you to the very center and leave nothing but hurt and pain. In the end, if you’re very lucky, there will be scars, scars that itch and pull and tear but never fit as good as what was there before. You can never be the same. You can never be as good.
I stand at the window. Chips crack the whitewashed frame. I run my finger along it and look beyond the glass, towards a field that lays at the edge of the farmhouse in which I stand. It’s empty now, even though planting season has just started. Brown furrows should be lining that field, ready for the hard kernels of oats and barley, but I can only see grass, hardened by a too long winter.
Even though humans and the Lothari had been fighting for decades—ever since humans first settled on what the Lothari considered their land, but we consider New America, land given to us by the council after the War of Galactic Extermination—this last winter has crippled the humans. A dangerous disease called Endtre has decimated half of City-Settlement and even more in the countryside, where few can afford medicine.
I turn away from a world painted in dead winter grays towards Amber, my kid sister. She plays behind me with a doll, one Mama gave her the birthday before the government issued the banishing. Amber is absorbed by her doll’s peach skin and red lips. She wraps her black-brown fingers around the doll’s arm, steadying it gently to help it walk. I feel overwhelmed by my sister’s gentleness.
Where does a seven-year-old learn that? I wonder. Since the banishing it’s been nothing but barely surviving, and yet here she shows more grace to a doll than I have shown her all day.
“Amber, we need to check out the kitchen, grab a few more things before we leave,” I say to her, brushing away my emotions. But my voice is gentler than normal.
As she stands up, she asks, “Is it much longer to City-Settlement? We’ve been walking for so long.”
“Not much longer. Less than a day. We’ll be there tonight.”
“And will Mama be there?” she asks.
I look away from her coal-black eyes. “She’ll be there.”
“Good. I have so much to tell her. She’ll be so proud of me.”
“Very proud. I bet if we look hard enough in the kitchen we might find some special treats.”
“Really?” Amber says. She walks over to me and catches my blistered hand in her own. I feel myself choking up over this little girl’s trust in me.
We walk into the kitchen, a small space with a table and a coal stove, which sits empty in the corner. There are no windows in the room, just a difficult-to-see hatch along the wall, probably leading to the root cellar, and a taller door leading to the farmyard.
“Sarah, my favorite cookies are the ones with chocolate on top. They are my extra favorites. Do you see any of those?”
I open the closest cupboard. “No, I don’t. There’s not too much of anything in here, is there?” I say, looking around the sparse room. The former owners must have taken everything with them when the government banished people from living in the countryside surrounding the capital. An emerald beam catches my eye as a burst of sunlight streams from the parlor window and passes through a hidden glass jar.
“Strayberry preserves!” I say excitedly. “You love strayberries, Amber.”
“I do?”
“Don’t you remember? Mama made chortle cake and covered it with strayberries the two of you had picked from the hedges.”
“No. But it sounds good,” Amber said. “Not as good as chocolate cookies, though.”
I reach up to the preserves, pulling them down to the splintery counter. It takes all my might, and I practically bend my fingernails in half, but I still manage to open the jar’s band and lid. It releases with a satisfying snap.
“Look, a spoon,” Amber says, finding a bent utensil in a drawer. We take turns licking the sticky, green jam.
“I really like this,” Amber says. I smile and lean in, kissing the dark jam ringing her pink cheeks. I feel happy, something I haven’t felt in a long time.
We finish the strayberry jam and rest the jar and spoon in the sink as if it were our house to keep clean and tidy, as if Mama and I would wash them together. Just as we load the last of the supplies—a few more jars of jam and pickled vegetables—into my pack, I turn to see the empty things in the sink, praying to whoever listens, that life could be as normal as dirty dishes and sweet jam again.
“Ready, Miss Amber?”
Amber rushes through the farmhouse door and down the wooden steps, turning back to wave at me. I smile at her sugared energy and return the happy wave. I bend my knees to hoist the heavy pack a few inches higher on my hips.
I look up, terrified, at the sound of a bird call, a very specific bird call.
Lothari, I think.
My heart pounds. As calmly as I can, I turn to my sister. “Amber, I need you to come with me right now.”
Amber must have heard the birdsong, too, because she turns to me, her eyes wide and shoulders small, already too thin from not getting enough to eat, not wanting to eat. With the pack, my movements are jerky, but we manage to get to the kitchen and down to the dark root cellar below.
Within minutes, heavy footsteps pound against the kitchen floor. The guttural sounds of the Lothari language roar across the room as I hear several natives hunt through the cupboards. It must be Lothari boundary guards raiding homesteads. Occasionally they could be kind and gentle, but often they were cruel. I didn’t want to take a chance.
I hold Amber against me. I can feel every bit of her, bones and flesh, all tight with fear. I try to calm my heart and breathing, hoping that it comforts her. We both listen in the black-dark as footsteps hunt through the house.
The door to the cellar opens. The cellar is deep, unusual for a house this size. Amber and I are pushed as far back as the room allows. The light from above can’t find us, and neither can the Lothari who is peering in. He eventually leaves. Silence invades the rest of the house.
I don’t know how long I wait before peering out the cellar door, but it is dark outside. Quietly, carefully, I walk out of the root cellar and away from the house, Amber clasped tightly to my body. She is asleep, exhausted.
Constantly looking around, I make it to the edge of the barn and then the edge of the tall grass and then, finally, to the middle of the field. The moons are not out tonight, and so I walk in complete darkness. Each step is tentative and slow as I try to find my footing in the uneven soil.
I feel something slam against me, and I fall over, almost landing on Amber. She wakes up, crying, and I gently release her on the ground, throwing my pack behind her while reaching for the weapon strapped to my leg. It is a gun, probably from the War of Extermination, the only weapon I could find when we left our village.
In the dark I can’t see anything, and Amber’s crying makes it impossible to hear clearly. I take a few steps to my right when I am tackled again. This time, my head lands hard against a rock. My last thought before I lose consciousness is a memory of Amber and a kiss that tastes like strayberry jam.
I awake suddenly as though I had stopped breathing in my sleep. “Amber,” I call out, remembering, though my vision is blurry.
“Sarah?” Amber says. She is at my side. It’s now daytime, and we are hidden among the tall grasses, still in the middle of the field where we’d been attacked last night.
“You are all right?” I say, almost incredulous.
“Yes,” she says, “All right.” There are rocks in her hand.
“What happened?” I ask, shaking my head as I sit up. “Sinar and I are playing a game.”
“Sinar?” I ask. Then I see her. Symmetrical black dots pock gray-green skin. The aliens—natives as the settlers call them, Lothari as they call themselves—bear a strong resemblance to humans, but the colors are all wrong. They wear white, sleeveless robes and each has a small, black bird that sings eerie songs as a companion. It is that birdsong that alerted me to danger yesterday.
I see a yellow stripe down the front of the sleeveless robe, running all the way to the Lotharian girl’s feet. Capture, slave, I think.
Sinar, as Amber calls her, must have followed my eyes because she says, “I ran away.” Her chin rises defiantly.
Surprise widens my eyes and mouth, surprise and fear. Any Lothari capture caught running away is flayed alive, their body stretched as wide as a doorway. I have heard rumors that the death of a runaway is only slightly worse than the life.
The alien sits in front of a small mound of stacked rocks, her elbows on her knees. “You were going to run right off that cliff,” she says, her voice low. She points. To my horror, I see the telltale outline of jagged rocks, blue sky, and nothing else. It’s a ravine with a river far below that would have killed Amber and me long before we landed. A broken fence slat swings in the wind.
“Sinar did not mean to hurt you, Sarah,” said Amber. “She was trying to help.”
“Thanks,” I say, begrudgingly.
“Your sister was scared in the night. So I stayed.”
“Thanks,” I say again. I touch my head to my eyes, trying to rub away the blurriness.
“Can Sinar come with us to City-Settlement?” Amber asks, her hand against my knee as she pushes herself to stand. We are face to face as I sit on the ground, my head still aching from the fall. We are covered in the dry dust of this desert planet, our dresses more dun than any other color, and yet the Lothari capture looks as though she just walked away from a bathhouse.
“I’m sure the Lothari would find life in City-Settlement …,” I say, not sure how to finish.
“Are you running from the banishing?” Sinar asks in the silence.
“Our village was destroyed by the Endtre virus,” I say.
“And it will be sprayed, and you go to your capital?” she asks. Her all-black eyes watch mine.
To rid our land of the disease, the government created a spray that was extremely poisonous. It causes immediate deformations and death. But it is the only known way to destroy the virus, which is even deadlier. It takes three years for the spray to disappear from the land completely. The government banished everyone in the villages, for our safety, they said. My sister and I, like all the others were headed to City-Settlement to live.
Everyone who lives in the city, even the refugees, commit themselves to isolation for twenty-one days, long enough to prove they’re not contagious. But once inside the capital, life is cramped in the refugee camps, very uncomfortable. Many are poor, and there is little work. Those that had always lived in City-Settlement resent the newcomers, and the strain of so many on resources already destroyed by famine, disease, and years of war with the Lothari make tensions extremely fraught. Living in the capital for the three years it would take to make our village liveable is an overwhelming prospect, but it’s the only one my sister and I have.
Even worse, I had told Amber that Mama was waiting for us in City-Settlement, but Mama had seen the signs in herself, signs she’d seen from our father—fever, headache, red eyes. She had immediately fled in hopes Amber and I might be safe. Only five days had passed since we left Montesa, our village, another seventeen days before I’d know for sure if we were safe.
“Are you sick?” the Lothari asks.
For some reason, the virus doesn’t affect the Lothari, not like it does humans. They get sick but rarely die. For humans, Endtre has an almost 100% fatality rate. There are rumors that the Lothari developed the virus and then passed it to humans by sharing contaminated blankets with those seeking aid.
“No,” I say.
“They won’t let you into your capital if you are,” Sinar says.
“I know,” I say. I wish she wouldn’t talk about serious things in front of Amber. “Was that hunting party after you?”
“No. No one is after me,” Sinar says.
We know then that the other lied. The Lothari’s bird, smaller than my thumb and with black feathers of iridescent green, lands on her shoulder, returning from an overhead flight. Sinar whistles to it, and the bird flies to Amber, dancing around her. She laughs happily.
The two small ones continue their play. Looking at the bird, Sinar says softly, so Amber can’t hear, “I can help you.”
“I can help you get to your capital, avoid the hunting parties. I know this land. You do not. You still have three days ahead of you.”
“Three? It can’t be more than half a day to City-Settlement.”
“If you had followed the road. But you have gotten yourself lost.”
I had avoided the roads because Lothari hunting parties, looking to raid refugees on their way to City-Settlement, had greatly increased since the banishing. Amber and I only had another ten days before the government sent skyships filled with spray. I couldn’t afford to get lost.
“And what do you get out of this?” I ask. I look down at a brown blade of grass. It’s flat and as wide as my thumb with blue stripes down its front.
“I want to go home. You will pretend that I am your capture for any Triora that cross us,” she says, using the Lothari word for humans, “and I’ll help you avoid hunting parties as well as guide you.”
Where Lothari captured each other and humans in battle and used them as slaves, humans used captured Lothari as servants, giving them freedom after seven years of work. It wasn’t unbelievable that a refugee would bring a Lothari still serving a sentence to the capital.
I look to Sinar. Does she realize selling a Lothari capture in City-Settlement would set up Amber and me for much longer than the three years we’d need to wait out the spray? It would buy us wooden walls instead of a tent shared jealously with four other families, food instead of supplements, medicine, safety, certainty—even enough to rebuild our small farm in Montesa, I think.
“If you can avoid hunting parties, you can avoid humans,” I say.
“Your people do not smell the same, do not move the same. Only skilled warriors find them. I am not skilled in such a way. There will be many Triora the closer I am to your capital.”
“You found me. You could have avoided me.”
“You ran barely two feet away from me while I was sleeping in the grass. That I couldn’t see you shows I am vulnerable,” she say.
“You want to go to the capital?” I asked.
“No, I want to go home. But I need you to travel safely through your lands, which I will be entering very soon. My village is only a few hours’ walk from the capital.”
I know it is a good plan—or at least better than what I had. “I don’t trust you,” I say.
Sinar smiles to herself, her lips a darkish green. There is little humor in her expression. “I don’t trust you.”
We spend the rest of the day walking through the dusty land, a hot sky overhead, and sand below. Sinar stops us to make camp at a small, brown creek, just beyond the border between human and Lothari land. She talks little throughout the day, though I occasionally catch her smiling softly to Amber, who seems fascinated by the Lothari. It is rare that anyone from our village had seen a native, unless of course they were sent by the government to a neverending battlefield. But then, it’s even rarer to come back from the war to tell of what a Lothari was like.
As night drapes over us and Amber is tucked into our bedroll, ready to drift into sleep, I spy the purple smoke of fire in the distance from other banished villagers.
I look over to Amber, her eyes drooping softly. “They must be burning yuclo vines,” I say to Amber. “Do you remember when we burned those on last Shabatz Day?”
“Mama would set off fireworks and make special treats. They must be celebrating,” Amber says smiling. “Do you have yuclo vines, Sinar?”
“Yes, they are also quite special to us. We often use them for wedding ceremonies,” Sinar says.
“What are Lothari weddings like?” Amber asks.
“Quiet, soulful,” she says, her eyes downcast.
“Have you ever been to a ceremony?”
“Yes,” she says. “My own ceremony.”
“You were married?” I ask. She is older than me but doesn’t look it.
“Yes. Milu. My husband. He watches over our son. It is them that I return to.”
“We lost our Mama, too,” says Amber. “But she is waiting for us in the capital.”
I see tears in Sinar’s eyes as she looks at first Amber, then me. I look back to the purple smoke in the sky.
The next day passes the same, walking and then stopping to make camp. Sinar stops us this time, not at a creek, but at a small monument, little more than a pillar of rocks and a metal plaque cemented to the ground.
“We will stop here at Bett-Shay. Do you know what Bett-Shay is?” Sinar says.
I look at her face, but her expression is closed.
Amber holds my hand and studies the monument. I look closely and see, engraved on the plaque, images of Captains Bett and Shay, who had piloted the first ships from Earth sixty years ago. Beyond the miniscule memorial is a wide, flat land of high desert. In the distance jagged cliffs stretch across the sky, where I can see the very tops of the crystal domes that protect City-Settlement from disease and war.
“Here is where humans first landed on this planet,” I say. “During the Wars of Extermination, Earth was destroyed, our people held prisoner … and worse. After, the Galactic Council gave us this planet to make a new home.”
Sinar looks at me over the monument. “When humans first landed in Lothari, we were cautious. Could we find friends here? But then you started digging the wells miles below the earth that destroyed the water that had existed since there were Lothari. My people went thirsty and died while yours went swimming. This place is not a good place for my people. Is it for yours?”
“We wanted a home,” I say.
“So you took ours?”
I don’t have an answer. I turn back to the camp and prepare the fire for dinner.
“Only another day until you are where you want to be,” Sinar says.
The next day we prepare for our last walk until we reach the capital. Amber is again playing with the Lothari’s bird when the native comes to my side. “Your mother, does she really wait at the capital?”
I continue stuffing my pack with our bedrolls and supplies, not looking up.
“What makes you think she isn’t?”
“Your sister talks about your mother, and you look away from her.”
“No, she is not at the capital. My mother has the virus.”
“So she is dead, or soon will be.”
“Yes.” It is hard to say this word, harder than it has ever been to say a word.
“You will have to tell your sister,” Sinar says. “The wound you delay giving her is made worse when she learns her sister deceived her.”
A sound behind me draws my attention, and I know before I see that Amber is behind me. Her black skin is dark against her ragged pink sweater. “You are talking about Mama,” Amber says. “Tell me.”
“Amber, now is not the time.” My voice is gruff. I am terrified of this moment, of what I have to do.
“Tell me. I know something is wrong. But you won’t say it. Just say it!”
I remain motionless, frozen by her pain and mine.
Amber turns back, runs away, towards the bluff, towards the crystal-dome.
I throw down my pack and run after her. Sinar stands back. From far away, I see Amber trip and fall. She rolls frantically down a massive, scrubby hill.
“Amber!” I shout.
At the top of the hill, I can see Amber’s small body below, unnaturally still. I can also, in the far, far distance, see a sandy valley made white by the robes of a massive army. What looks like the whole of Lothari waits just beyond the sight of the sparkling domes of City-Settlement. Blood-rage fills the air as the warriors wait to crash their weapons against bodies.
They will destroy us, I realize. They will wait at our borders, shoot down any aid ships from the Galactic Council, and let us starve from within. It is hopeless. It has always been hopeless.
I rush to Amber’s side. She is breathing steadily but is not awake. Keeping her still, I gently touch her head for wounds. Her eyes flutter lightly at my touch, and she wakes.
“Sarah?” she says.
I cry, relieved and even more terrified, now that I can be. I lean down to kiss her cheek and stroke hair from her forehead. “What hurts? What can I do?”
She lifts herself up, slowly, painfully. “I don’t know what happened. I ….”
I see the exact moment she remembers. She looks at me. “Is it true, Sarah?” Her voice seems tinier than she is. I nod, tears threatening my eyes. She reaches for me, as she did when she was very little and had fallen, certain her sister could make the hurt go away. Great sobs tear my heart open.
“We must leave this place,” Sinar says, leaning down next to us in the sand. There is fear in her voice but not surprise.
I stand up. “You knew about this,” I say, pointing to the army below. Black dots swarm in the sky above the military camp, the Lothari birds.
“The spray will destroy our land as well as yours. I can take you to the doors of the capital. I know another way,” Sinar says.
Rage rips through me. I stand up and away from Amber and pull the gun secured at my leg, pointing it at Sinar. “You knew about this! You knew that your people were going to attack mine, completely wiping us from memory. What was the point of helping Amber and me? Easing your conscious by putting a pause on our death sentence? Do you know how much I could get for selling you in the Capture-Market. Enough to outwait any seige you Lothari would throw at us!”
“Don’t do this, Sarah. Don’t let this be the price you pay for Amber’s safety,” Sinar says, her hands in the air.
“I am tired of fighting, of being right. I miss Mama. I want to be safe. Amber deserves that. She deserves so much more than a life spent at the edges. I left Montesa so she could have more, have that. What happens when you have a child and you can’t be wrong?”
“This is not the way,” Sinar said. I see fear in her eyes. Amber is at my feet, whimpering. “Please, Sarah, don’t do this,” Sinar says, “I have a child. Don’t make him motherless.”
I look down at Amber. I can’t keep her from destruction, I think, not when we hide in a cellar, not when I bring her to the capital that is supposed to save us, nothing. I can’t protect her. I drop the gun and collapse in tears. I am only fourteen. I know too much of death. My whole life is a scar. I fall to my knees, defeated.
Sinar comes to me, puts her hand on my shoulder. “We cannot undo the war between our people. But we can undo the war between ourselves. Come home with me. I cannot promise you safety, but I can give you a home.”
Amber leans close and snuggles her cheek against mine. “I love you, Sarah.” She stays close, her body warm and small and fragile. “You are my home.”
I cry harder. It is the first time I have cried since we left Montesa and Mama.
“Let hope anchor you, Sarah, not sorrow,” Sinar says. She kneels next to me. Heavier than it has ever been, my body rises from the sand as Amber and Sinar help me stand. I follow them into the desert. I am done with hoping. I am done with war.
Bethany Marcello loves puns, pugs and playing pretend. She has held many jobs, including popcorn popper, bubble salesman and, most illogical of all, middle school teacher. She currently lives in a 100-year-old farmhouse in the hills of Pennsylvania with her high school sweetheart of a husband and young daughter. You can probably find her in the garden growing orange watermelons, in the kitchen baking organic rustic bread or lost in a good story.