17I stand at the vine-encrusted gates, still miraculously standing after all these years, and look out across the crumbling shelters. An eerie stillness lies over the grounds, the foliage unmoving and the leaves silent. Not even the flicker of an animal scurries across the dirt to meet my eye. Everything about this place reeks of loneliness, from the brush-enshrouded walls to the leaf-covered roofs—a hymn to the sad, slow decay that plays in counterpoint to the melody of long neglect. My eyes skim along the trees, their bent forms twisted into a misshapen dome above the village, and on impulse, I reach my hand out to the gate.
My palm smacks into an invisible wall a hairsbreadth from the fence. An aura of energy sings through my skin, and I jerk my hand back, involuntarily recoiling from the bite of an energy shield that has no business working, not in this place so far out in the jungle, so far away from everyone and everything. Uneasiness winds through my gut, an instinctive feeling that something here isn’t what it seems, though I can’t say exactly what. I’m not the only one feeling it. Uneasy murmurs ripple through the group at my back, their words low and subdued.
What’s going on? Why have we stopped?
There’s something up there.
Something?
Oh God, we don’t have to run again, do we?
Near the top of the gate hangs a sign. I carefully rise up on my tiptoes, drawing as close as I can to it without touching the shield, but the plaque is so grime-encrusted I can’t make out a thing. Lowering myself back to the ground, I extend my right hand.
“Zane.”
The passkey is in my hand in an instant. I raise the metal card to the gatepost, then pause. My hand hovers in the air just below the scanner, held in place by a last-minute hesitation that has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with instinct. Do we really want to disturb whatever is on the other side of this gate? The rational part of me says there’s nothing to disturb—clearly, the place is long deserted—but the other part, the one that doesn’t think but feels, points out that just because a place is deserted doesn’t mean there’s nothing to find.
My fingers tighten around the key, the edges of the card biting into my palm as I hover on the edge of decision. This gate is decades old. It probably won’t even work anyway.
The rational side wins out. I slide the card across the scanner.
The shield drops open with a shiver.
Before I can even think to reconsider my actions, Jovan pushes past me with a muttered, “It’s about time.” He bashes his machete against the padlock a few times, grunting in satisfaction as the rusted metal falls from the fence with a quiet thump, and throws open the gates. I press myself back against the post as everyone else charges into the village behind him. Zane is the last one in. He pauses beside me as if to speak, but I only shake my head. It’s not worth it.
Mindful of any squatters that might yet be lurking outside, I let the shield close behind us. A hush drops over the village like a blanket, muting the world beyond. I stand stock-still by the gate and listen to the quiet. Birds still call and insects hum, primates’ screams echo through the rustling trees, but it all sounds so distant now, so far away. It’s unsettling, this pervasive quietude, as though this village has been frozen in space, paused indefinitely while all around it the rest of the world continues on without missing a beat.
A chill slithers over me. My eyes flick to the sign on the gate again, and reaching up, I rub my sleeve across the begrimed metal. Dirt rains down around my boots, and letters begin to emerge. Though I still can’t make out most of the text, one word jumps off the plaque at me:
Quarantine.
Something catches in my chest, and though I know it was written in another time, for another plague from another era, still it makes my blood run cold and my knees go weak. The others wander through the grounds before me, completely oblivious to the ghosts that haunt this place—to the ghost that is this place—
Where are we?
I don’t know, but wherever this is, it totally gives me the creeps.
The entire Rainforest gives me the creeps.
—but I know the secrets this place keeps, tucked away deep within the forest while outside the trees bend and fold around it in an ever-tightening noose. Secrets I would, perhaps, have been better to remain ignorant of. But then, ignorance was never destined to be my lot, any more than the bliss that comes with it.
Leaving the gate, I follow the others through the “village.” Though the shield has done its job and protected this place from the forest without, it’s done nothing about the forest within. Vines and shrubs shoot up around the duro-steel walks, snaking across tiles and along buildings. Ceilings have collapsed, and walls have cracked, the narrow shelters crushed to death under the heavy branches forced down into the buildings by the shield above. Not that I would’ve wanted to stay in any of these things anyway, even if they weren’t transitory shelters on the verge of collapse. Even the jungle would be better than here.
Dismissing the shelters, I turn my attention to what lies beyond, surreptitiously craning my neck to peer down alleyways and over debris. I keep my search brisk but unexceptional, my methodical steps driven by quiet purpose while the others are moved only by curiosity.
I know what I’ll find.
It’s not a question of if, only where, and though my eventual destination fills me with dread, I still feel compelled to continue. My search takes me past the others, along the main drag and then up a small hill at the end of town. There I stop, standing between two trees as I stare down at the shallow valley before me, unable to do anything but listen as the others slowly catch up to me.
Find anything useful in there?
Nah, it’s empty. All the buildings are empty, at least the few that haven’t collapsed.
What about over here?
Checked it already—nothing.
Figures. We finally run across a settlement, and it’s vacant and falling apart.
Something stirs inside me then, distant and unremarked.
“This isn’t a settlement.”
The chatter falls away at my words, though my back is to them and my eyes are fixed upon the space before me. The sudden silence is unusually potent, holding us all hostage within this frozen domain. It’s Jovan who breaks the impasse, a slight scoff in his voice as he asks, “What is it, then?”
“It’s the lazaretto,” I say, pointing to the cemetery stretched out at my feet. “This is where they sent the plague victims to die.”
Everyone knows that while the Rainforest started the exodus from Iolanthe, it was the plague that truly finished off the colony. It swept over the planet in force during the early days of colonization, one of those rare terraforming side effects you read about in history books but never actually expect to see. Within hours, whole chunks of Iolanthe’s small population were infected; within days, they were dying. The military mobilized their pandemic units, tried to quarantine the sick and devise a vaccine for the rest, but by the time they arrived at anything workable, it was too late. Almost everyone was infected. You were either resistant and lived, or you were susceptible and died.
Eventually, the sickness ran its course, as plagues do, and those who survived passed on their immunity to their descendants. But while the death knells for the people had ended, the ones for the colonization effort had just begun. Colonists abandoned the planet in droves, done in by the relentless press of the forest and the savage slash of the plague. The few settlers who remained, too stubborn or perhaps just too poor to leave, gathered in the main settlements to eke out what living they could, leaving the lazarettos—and the cemeteries that sprang up around them—to rot away in the jungle, forgotten.
My fingers play across a darkened headstone sitting within the shade of a tree. It’s blank, the duro-steel smooth and featureless, like all the other headstones I’ve seen so far in this shadowy graveyard. Blank headstones buried in a forgotten forest; a more ignominious end I couldn’t imagine. And yet, that’s more than Lia ever got, consigned to a death among the stars without even a gravesite to mark her passing.
It’s more than Dad ever got.
A lump forms in my throat. Dad is gone, and yet no matter how many times I remind myself of that fact, it never seems to take. Maybe it’s because I have yet to see the evidence of his passing with my own eyes, or maybe it’s just that I haven’t had two minutes to sit down and think of anything but my own survival since the night Iolanthe fell. Either excuse seems like a perfectly rational answer, and yet I can’t help wondering:
Maybe it’s because I’m so used to him being away that him being dead feels no different than him being alive.
Again, I feel that awful lurch deep within, as though I’ve somehow betrayed him by not missing him more. I don’t even know what happened to mark Dad’s passing. Did Gran hold a memorial service? Could Mom get leave to attend? How did Michael react when he found out? A bitter laugh huffs from my throat as I imagine Gran linking me with the details of Dad’s final resting only to find out—
I’m lost too.
How ironic. All this time I’ve been thinking—or rather, trying not to think—about losing Dad, and it never once occurred to me to wonder what everyone else was thinking about me. The questions come now, one after the next. Who found out first? Did Gran cry when she was told? Does Mom blame herself for sending me to Iolanthe? Will Michael finally forgive me now that the war has stolen me away as surely as it did Lia?
Again comes the laugh. Do the dead really need forgiveness?
The thoughts are too morbid even for me. I guess I’m not used to thinking of myself as dead yet.
I stop in a rare sunny patch and crouch down at the foot of a grave marker. Unlike the others, this one isn’t blank. Names flicker over the digitized metal, their scripted forms holding silently under the noonday sun for several seconds before dissolving away to make room for the next set. Masses of names for a mass grave, without even a eulogy to mark their passing. But at least this marker has names, unlike its shadowy brethren crouching within the dark recesses of the trees nearby.
Dark. Light.
They’re solar, I realize suddenly with a glance at the skylight above. That’s why this one shows names while the others do not. They aren’t blank, just powerless. I let out a rueful laugh. Powerless. Exactly like us.
“Can we please get out of here already? This place is giving me the creeps.”
I lift my head as Divya’s plaintive mewl breaks the hush. Little has been said during our foray into the graveyard, everyone strangely cowed by the sheer presence of this place, but my roommate’s quiet plea seems to break whatever power it held over us.
“What, you don’t like walking over dead people?” Jovan smirks.
Vida scowls at him. “It would help if we had some idea of where to go.”
“As if there’s anywhere to go.”
“Hey, just because you can’t figure anything out . . .”
The argument starts without fail, yet another battle of wills in a long succession of such battles, carried on by two people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. I sigh in exasperation, surprised, not by the argument’s eruption, but only in how long it took. A few others join in, not even taking sides so much as adding to the chaos, but most everyone else just looks exhausted and fed up. Fed up with the running, fed up with the forest, fed up with the arguments going round and round in resolutionless circles.
My eyes fall on Divya, tears trickling down her face as she hunches over herself within the shadow of a grave marker, and a chill ghosts through me.
This isn’t just some macabre monument to the past, I realize as my eyes scan over the tombstones and the lazaretto and the mass graves. This is our future! The enemy is all around us, and if we keep going on like we are, it will be our graves wasting away alone and forgotten in the middle of the jungle. Unless we do something.
Unless I do something.
Raising my head again, I slowly look out over the others. Mario collapsed on the ground, and Djen drying her lesion-covered feet. Megumi, a med-kit in one hand and a scowl on her face as she alternates between doctoring Kieran’s rash and watching Jovan and Vida bicker. Zane rubbing his head, Mercury staring mournfully at an empty meal wrapper, and Divya, still hunched and silently crying. And this is what we’ve been reduced to?
Divya gulps, a quavering sob rising in her voice as she whimpers, “I’m just so tired of being afraid.”
My heart lurches at the words, and just like that, something in me snaps.
“She’s right.” The words tumble from my mouth unbidden, driven by a rising anger days, months, even years in the making. “We’ve fled long enough. It’s time to stop running. It’s time to stop living in fear.”
The words boom from my lungs with a force I didn’t know I possessed. Heads turn and bodies spin, drawn by the last words anyone expected to hear. Stepping up on an old stump, I stare the others down, waiting as their movements slowly still and their voices die out. No one seems to know quite how to answer, their eyes flicking quizzically to each other and then back to me. It’s Djen who finally speaks, clearing her throat a couple of times before stammering, “I—I suppose you have an idea?”
“Not an idea,” I negate with a shake of my head. “A plan.”
Murmurs break out at my bold assertion, and suddenly all my ruminations about shelters and supplies, land surveys and squatters, come rippling together in my head. Maps flash in my mind’s eye, images from drone feeds and GPS readings, and when I open my mouth to speak, I suddenly know exactly what I want to say.
“First, we establish a base. Somewhere near a fresh water source and deep in the forest where no one can find us. We raid the shelters for supplies—food, weapons, everything we’ll need for a protracted stay in the Rainforest—and erect defenses against the enemy. Only then, after we’ve fortified our position, do we make our move.”
“Our move?” Jovan scoffs. “And just what exactly are we going to do?”
A feral smile curls my lips. “We’re going to make the Spectres wish they’d never set foot on this planet.”