52Half-light has descended by the time I return, shrouding our camp in a veil of shadow. All is quiet, and aside from the sentries standing guard, everyone has gone to bed. Students curl up on the ground in groups of two and three, using whatever clothing or packs they still have as pillows, while above them sheets of canvas have been strung from the trees to form makeshift tents.
I glance up at the bone-dry sky and shake my head at the shelters. Clearly, they were strung up out of habit rather than necessity. It hasn’t rained in days.
For a long time, I stand within the gloom-ridden arms of the forest and watch the others sleep, torn between the desire to join them and the never-ending voice of duty that says I can’t. A profound exhaustion, like water drawn from the depths of a well, steals over me, trickling and flowing in heady rivulets through my veins. Out of habit, I reach into my pocket for some Iletha bark—but my fingers come up empty. That’s right, I ran out this morning. With the continuing drought, edible bark has become harder and harder to find.
I put my face in my hands and swear softly, seized by the sudden and strange urge to cry. Already the thought of being without any Iletha is enough to make my brain scream and my heart flutter and my skin ache. For a moment, I’m tempted to head straight back into the jungle and search the bush until I find more, but even I’m not lunar enough to go back in alone with full darkness about to fall. Instead, I slowly trudge into the camp. Maybe if I just lie down for a little bit, I’ll feel more like myself.
Navigating around the sleeping bodies, I find my pack set neatly beneath a stretch of canvas strung in a small niche between two trees. The jacket I’ve been using as a pillow sits beside it, already folded up in a neat square, ready for use, along with a bottle of water and a meal bar—strawberry oatmeal, my favorite. The author of those little niceties lies with her back to me, curled on her side at the other edge of the niche.
Vida.
I stare at her silent back, remembering our earlier argument and wondering if this is all a trap of some sort, but the truth is that I’m too tired to figure it out. Quietly, I lower myself to the ground, being careful not wake her, and retrieve the food and water. I weigh them in my hands, food in the left and water in the right. Just the thought of eating makes my stomach lurch. Not that that’s surprising. I haven’t felt truly hungry in days. Setting aside the meal bar, I crack open the bottle and down half the contents in three gulps. De-acking the night vision on my lenses, I lie down on my jacket pillow and try to sleep. Seconds later, a quiet voice suddenly penetrates the darkness.
“Hey.”
Briefly, I weigh the merits of speaking back. “Hey.”
Silence momentarily returns, broken only by the sound of Vida turning over onto her other side, toward me. Clearly, she’s looking for more than a two-word conversation. Again I think of our argument, and my stomach knots. Oh, God. Is she, like Zane, finally going to tell me that enough is enough? At the mere thought, bile spreads across my tongue, bitter and thick. My heart palpitates, and my brain starts racing as I try to figure out how the hell I could possibly manage without Vida, how the hell I will manage without Vida, and then—
“You know we’re with you, right? All of us, to the bitter end.”
Thirteen words, and the spark of fear that was already building into full-blown paranoia goes out like a light.
Something inside me releases, and I let out a sigh, taking one, then two, then three deep breaths before finally answering, “I know.”
Turning over onto my side, I stare silently into the dark where her face would be. Our breaths go in and out in tandem, drawing softly in before quietly sighing out, and not even the call of the jungle can interrupt our shared solicitude. Out of the black, she suddenly speaks.
“I turned eighteen today.”
I blink at the unexpected announcement, my already-stretched mind straining to comprehend what she just said. It’s her birthday? The idea seems utterly absurd, and yet the rational part of my mind tells me it’s not. Six months ago, the concept of a birthday was commonplace; now the idea is almost as alien as the enemy. Buried in the endlessness of the forest, traditional measures of time somehow lose all meaning. Days of the week and calendar dates, holidays, and even birthdays—what significance can they hold in a world that knows nothing but its revolution about the suns and the fall of its rains? That Vida would remember what day it is despite everything that’s happened . . . Well, I guess we all still have to cling to something of the old world, no matter how small.
I smile sadly. “Starry birthday,” I reply, though the traditional birthday wish feels empty on my lips. A moment passes, and I wryly add, “I’d give you your present now, but I must’ve left it in my other jacket.”
A slight pause, and then we both start chuckling. As though any of us has any clothes left at this point but the ones on our backs! The jest hits almost too close to home. Still, it feels good to laugh. Truly laugh, if only for a moment.
“You know how I know? That it’s my birthday?” Vida suddenly asks. “I received an automated notification from the Iolanthe Land Office. I inherited my claim today.”
There’s only one type of claim she could be talking about. “Your Original Settler’s Claim? I thought . . . your family was . . .”
Vida snorts. “They set it up years ago. It’s tradition in my family. A parcel of the original claim is set aside whenever a new child is born, officially registered in their name and then held in wardenship by their parents until they come of age. This claim has been deeded to me since the day I was born, and now, after all these years, I officially own a piece of Iolanthe.
“It’s messed up, isn’t it?” she continues. “A quarantined claim on a planet that’s dying. Who would want that?”
I would.
The thought hits me so strongly I almost speak it aloud, and I have to press my lips together to keep it from escaping. I never thought I would be envious of Vida, of all people, and yet I am. Though the Specs have invaded and the planet is quarantined and the Rainforest is dying, Iolanthe has become, for better or worse, my home. What I wouldn’t give to have a piece of it to call my own!
“Maybe it’s not so bad,” I offer after a minute. “To have a place to call home.”
“Home? A prison, more like!” Vida scoffs. “You don’t get it. You don’t get what it’s like to have a destiny that begins and ends in the same place, with no other options in between. To live your life knowing that you have only one fate: to live here . . . and to die here.”
“We might all die here.”
Silence. Then, to my surprise, Vida laughs. “You’re right. We probably are going to die here. But at least you got to be somewhere else first. You got to see a universe beyond one tiny rock.
“I remember when you first came to the academy, with your glamorous stories about living shipboard and stationdown and traveling all over the Expanse. Then classes started, and it was clear you were smarter than everybody else in the room put together, and I knew, I just knew that within a few years you would be off to university or officer’s candidate school or wherever! You would be off in some glorious place, and I would still be here, a dirt-poor homesteader descended from dirt-poor homesteaders.”
“Aren’t Original Settler’s Claims worth a lot?”
“Only if you sell them.”
And that she couldn’t do, not without betraying her entire family. I may be a foreigner, but even I can see that. Blood runs deep—sometimes too deep.
I shake my head. Vida’s confession explains so much: her dogged determination to hide her background from the others, certainly, but also her feelings about me. From the moment I arrived on Iolanthe, she hated me, and yet I’ve never known the roots of her dislike. Fear that I might upset her social hierarchy, I’d supposed, or maybe she was just worried the new girl might try to steal her boyfriend. It never occurred to me that it was my life, my options, my very future that she envied. How strange to find out now that while the only thing I want in the world is to stay, the only thing she’s ever wanted is to go.
“It’s not as glamorous as it seems, you know—jet-setting across the galaxy,” I admit after a moment. “You see a thousand different places, but not a single one is ever home. You meet a thousand people, but none of them ever become friends, not truly. You’re forced to spend your life following everyone else around, never knowing if today is the day you’ll be asked to pick up and move again, most likely to some cramped fleet carrier or broken-down space station. Sure, it’s exciting sometimes, but it’s also lonely.”
I pause. “Not like here. Out here, in the depths of the forest, you’re never alone, because no matter what, Iolanthe is always with you.”
“You sound exactly like my abuelo,” Vida says with a snort. “Dios mío, but he never could understand why I didn’t love Iolanthe the way he does. He used to say that anyone born on Iolanthe who hated it as much as I did must be a changeling. Maybe he was right. Maybe some strange twist of destiny switched our fates, gave me the life that was meant for you and you the life that was meant for me.”
“Maybe.”
Silence falls, unbroken but for the rustle of canvas above our heads and the distant cry of the jungle echoing through the night.
“He left right before the invasion,” Vida suddenly says. “Went to the next depot for homesteading supplies. We argued about it. I wanted to go with him—anything to get off this rock, even for a week—but he said no. I was so mad; I called him all sorts of things before he left.”
“I suppose you must feel bad about that.”
“Ha! Not hardly. El viejo deserved everything he got. Stubborn old man!”
I smile slightly, recognizing the love underlying the belligerent words. A touch of envy rolls over me. How I wish I had my own final memory with Dad to cherish! He was away at war for so long I can’t even remember when our last conversation was, let alone what we spoke of. Funny how easily we let the memories go when we have no idea they’ll be our last.
“What is he going to do, Teal?” Tears yet unshed ripple through Vida’s voice. “Abuelo always said he would live and die on Iolanthe. Now he can’t come back—not now, not ever! What will happen to him? What will happen to all of us?”
More than anything, I want to give her the answers she seeks, but words fail me. Because the truth is, Vida’s plaintive questions are also my own, her trembling fears the same terrors that keep me awake deep into the night when everyone else is sleeping. I have no answers for her because I have none to give myself, and until I do, the silence will stretch on unbroken into the dark.
“Teal? Tell me we’re going to win. Tell me we’re going to win this war.”
A lump forms in my throat. Reaching out, I slowly slide my hand across the dirt, sensing rather than seeing her hand where it rests on the ground between us. My fingers touch hers, softly brushing her knuckles, her nails, the back of her hand. Her fingers flutter slightly under mine, soft and uncertain, and then suddenly she flips her hand over and grips mine hard. I squeeze hers back, holding on for dear life, and only then, bolstered by the fleeting recognition that, at least for now, I’m not alone, do I tell her—
“We’re going to win this war.”
Her hand briefly tightens in answer, and for a few precious moments, we allow ourselves to believe it’s true.
Night drifts by in an endless haze. Perhaps I sleep, perhaps I don’t; these days I can hardly tell the difference between daylight and dreams. War stalks me wherever I go, from sunshine into slumber and even into my subconscious. Or perhaps I’m the one who’s stalking it, hunting it deep into an oblivion I can never hope to wake from.
Except I do wake, fluttering into consciousness like a solar-flit taking wing. I blink in the darkness. Something woke me, if indeed I was asleep, pulling me from one type of darkness into another. I slowly sit up, head turning in one direction and then another as I search for the source of the disturbance. Not Vida, who still sleeps in a tangle of glossy curls, or anyone else as far as I can see, but—
There! Up in the sky, something flashes.
In a moment, I’m on my feet, stepping out from under the canvas so I might better see through the thinning canopy. Points of light streak across the black, dropping like diamonds through the pure night sky. A meteor shower, perhaps, whiling away the deepest hours as the world below sleeps? I watch them fall awhile longer, then slowly shake my head.
No, not meteors. Weather equalizers.
I watch the lights, nearly a dozen in all, and my breath hitches. Though the equalizers have been falling for weeks, I’ve never seen them drop in such numbers. To see this many go down en masse is a sight both exquisite and terrifying, one made only more frightening by the knowledge that every equalizer that falls takes us one step closer to our doom.
With a final wink, the last equalizer disappears from the sky, swallowed up within the dark recesses of the jungle far below. Remembering the fallout from the last drop, I involuntarily brace myself for the impact, but nothing ever comes. It looks like the equalizers fell too far north for the effects to reach us here. Just as well. The last thing we need is more craters littering the ground. At least in the north, there isn’t too much to hit. The only things past the settlements are a broken-down bridge, an old solar field—which we already destroyed—and the hydroelectric dam.
The hydroelectric dam.
At the thought of the dam, my heart stops. I counted out the hydroelectric facility because even without the power it provides, the enemy still has enough Sinesensu to dose most of the Expanse. I never once thought about what would actually happen if we took it out—if we even could take it out. The dam is a formidable structure, nearly as formidable as the bunker itself.
Formidable—but not shielded. The entrances at each end are, but not the actual dam itself.
My eyes slowly crawl back up to the sky, the image of those equalizers still dancing in my mind, and my mouth falls open. Stars alive! Is it possible the answer has been staring me in the face this whole time?
My eyes widen in disbelief. All this time I’ve been focused solely on the spaceport, racking my brain in an attempt to figure out how to take down a shield that’s essentially impenetrable. Impenetrable to energy weapons and projectiles, to launchers and grenades, to any type of armament or explosive I might possibly get my hands on . . . but not to weather. Not air, not wind, and most importantly, not—
Water.
Vida’s words—nothing short of a force of nature—dance in my mind, and suddenly I know. I know how we’re going to take down the enemy’s operation once and for all.
I know how we’re going to win this war.