Shades of Earth

Page 52

  I swallow dryly. I can do nothing about the past. But I won’t let this sort of thing ever happen again on my planet, my home.

  73: AMY

  The peace negotiations go surprisingly well. Zane has a team of his own scientists read over the Inhibitor formula that Bartie gives him, and they seem confident that the meds will work.

  Even so, negotiations take hours. Mostly because I insist that everything be written down, witnessed, and signed by all present. I leave nothing to chance or spoken promises.

  “And one thing I want to make clear,” I say as we near the end. “My people are independent from yours. We are not merging colonies. We are our own. We will elect our own leaders, have our own laws. ”

  Zane starts to speak, but Bartie cuts him off—one of the few times Bartie has spoken at all. He and the other people from Godspeed are still recovering from their journey. “Elder would want that,” he says.

  I raise my eyebrow at Zane, waiting for him to object to my demand. But he doesn’t. He just nods, adds it to the contract, and signs his name.

  The worst part was the first night. When I really came to realize that I’m here, and he’s not. That I’m alive and he’s . . .

  I let myself cry that night. Alone, in one of the stone buildings not destroyed by the hybrids, I weep until I have no more tears left, ever.

  I have the whole world now, but I don’t have him.

  Zane is true to his word. On the first day after our peace treaty, he sends half his group of rogue hybrids to help clear away the damage of the battle at the building. None of my people—Earthborn or shipborn—want to work with them.

  “They killed our people,” one of the shipborns, a man named Tiernan, says. He has a gun, a weapon he plucked from one of the dead military, in his hand, pointed at the trucks arriving from the rogue hybrids. “They killed Elder!”

  “They did kill our people. And my parents,” I say, looking evenly into his eyes until he flinches, unable to keep staring at my oval irises. “But they didn’t kill Elder. Elder chose to die. And he did it so we could have a life here. With them. ”

  A crowd of shipborns gathers around. The sky is cloudy, the air humid. It’ll storm later. But they know what a storm is now and how to survive it. One of the women drops her hand protectively over her stomach, and I’m reminded that most of the female population is pregnant. In a few months, there will be babies born in our little village who will never know Godspeed. Their parents will tell them stories about metal walls and a painted sky, and they won’t understand, not really. They’ll never know a cage for a home.

  They’ll never truly be able to comprehend how much was lost for their limitless sky.

  “We can’t trust them . . . ” Tiernan says, lowering his gun but not releasing it.

  “We have to,” I say, putting a hand on his arm. “We will not survive in this world without help. Look around you. We have almost nothing. The supplies brought from Godspeed helped, but we need more. We need knowledge and help and training. ”

  “I don’t like it,” Tiernan growls.

  “Neither do I. ” I cast another look behind me—and then look past Tiernan, to the other shipborns that are crowding around him, their wide-open eyes, the fear they wear on their faces. “But it’s time for us to work together,” I say, more loudly so the others can hear. “It’s what Elder would have wanted. ”

  And this is the true legacy of Elder: his people are willing to accept peace.

  A few days after the peace treaty is drafted, Zane comes to the colony in one of his big trucks. “I wanted you to see the first treatment,” he says. “We couldn’t have done this without you. ”

  Bartie and I both go on behalf of the colony. Zane and Chris sit across from us. The tension is palpable—not just between us and them, but also in the way Bartie is afraid to sit too close to me. He keeps peeking up at me when he thinks I’m not looking, comparing who I am now to the girl he used to know.

  He thinks me even more of a freak than before, I can tell that much.

  Zane’s set up his base in the old tunnels used by the first colonists for their mining operations—an extension of the same tunnels Elder discovered when he helped dig for the latrines. The entrance is blocked off by a high-tech door that reminds me of the one at the compound. Zane scans his thumb at the keypad, and HYBRID flashes across the screen. I look down at my hands. They don’t feel different, not now that whatever transformation I underwent is over, but I know if I pressed my finger against the lock, it would flash HYBRID too. Not human. Never human again.

  I wonder what Elder would think of me if he were still alive. My eyes are blue now, not green, with oval irises. I can see so much clearer now, so much farther. I can sense from which direction the wind blows before it touches my face; I can shut my eyes and still tell where everyone is based on their scent alone.

  Elder is a clone; he must know what it feels like to wonder if your DNA even belongs to you anymore.

  And then I remember: Elder’s gone.

  Something inside my soul snaps like a string pulled too tight, but I put one foot in front of the other and stare straight ahead.

  Zane strides off to the laboratories—despite the fact that his headquarters are in abandoned mine tunnels, he’s been stealing from the FRX for long enough to make this base camp just as high tech as anything we had on the shuttle. Rogue hybrids pop out of rooms built into the walls of the tunnel, greeting him as he walks by them.

  He is truly their leader. In his late twenties or early thirties, it can’t have been easy for him to assume control of the entire rogue hybrid population. I wonder what it was like for him, realizing that he had control of his own mind but his parents did not. Hiding when the FRX came to inspect the glass factories. Wanting to save his people, a people that, for the most part, aren’t even aware they are enslaved.

  He reminds me very much of Elder.

  I chew on the inside of my cheeks until I taste blood. I will not cry. I will not show emotion. Not now. Not here.

  Chris sidles close. His presence makes me uncomfortable, but I’m not willing to let him know that. I turn my back to him, but that doesn’t stop him from talking to me.

  “Look at the way Bartie flinches from you,” Chris says in a whisper so low that no one else can hear. I wouldn’t be able to hear it if it weren’t for the fact that my ears have betrayed me, becoming bat-like in their hybrid clarity.

  I ignore him.

  “I saw the way they treated you before. You lived with them for how long? Months? And they were still scared of your perfectly normal skin color. What will they think of you now?”

  I stare straight ahead.

  “They’ll never accept you. ”

  I whirl around and grab Chris’s collar, all in one swift motion that startles Bartie so much he curses in surprise, jumping back to the far wall so there’s plenty of space between us and him.

  “If you have something to say,” I growl, “say it to my face, you coward. ”

  Chris jerks free, and for a moment he looks angry. But as he smooths down his shirt, he says, almost as if it is an excuse for me, “A violent temper. Side effect of hybridization. Your adrenal glands are more likely to make you fight than run away, in other words. ”

  What I don’t tell him is that I was always more likely to fight.

  “There’s a difference between you and me,” I say. “I know that one day, my people will accept me again. They’ve done it before. They’ll forget about how I look because they’ll remember who I am and how I act. But they won’t forget about what you’ve done. You’re the one who’ll never be accepted. Not me. ”

  Chris’s eyes slide away from mine.

  I can feel my muscles flexing, still shifting, growing stronger as my body comes to terms with the fact that I’m no longer just human. And I can smell the fear radiating from Chris.

  Chris doesn’t whisper any more cruel words to me. But the fact remains: a part
of me got angry because I know what he’s said is true.

  75: AMY

  Zane finally takes us to the laboratories and, just as I suspected, they’re far more advanced than the simple tunnels would imply.

  A man stands in the center of the lab. He stares blankly ahead.

  “Sit,” Zane says, and the man sits immediately, almost missing the chair Chris rushes to put behind him.

  I wave my hand in front of the young man’s face. Nothing. He’s as empty as a blank sheet of paper.

  “We’re experimenting with methods of mass distribution,” Zane says, “so I’ve been giving this subject a diluted version of the Inhibitor drug through the water supply. ”

  I grin at Bartie, who—despite hesitating initially—grins back in response. This was our idea, inspired by the water pumps that distributed Phydus on Godspeed.

  Zane hands the young man a tall glass of water. “Drink,” he adds when the man does nothing but stare at it.

  The man guzzles the water.

  Zane and Chris monitor the man’s vital signs on their computers, but Bartie and I know where to look when the Phydus wears off, and so we’re the first to notice as life returns to his eyes.

  “What’s happening?” the man asks, his voice cracking from disuse.

  “You’ve been drugged—all your life,” Chris explains in a kinder tone than I’ve ever heard him use before. “And now you’re regaining your autonomy. ”

  The young man’s eyes are wide and fearful, darting around the lab.

  “Have some water,” I say, handing him another glass. “It’ll make you feel better. ”

  While Zane and Bartie discuss ways to distribute the Inhibitor meds more broadly, Chris motions for me to follow him out of the lab.

  “There’s something I want to show you,” he says.

  I hesitate.

  “Come on, Amy,” Chris says, a touch exasperated. “We’re friends. ”

  “We are not friends,” I say. “We will never be friends. ”

  “But—” Chris’s face looks devastated. His oval irises stand out in his watery eyes, but all this does is remind me that he’s not entirely human and neither am I, not anymore. “I did what I thought I had to do,” he says.

  “Like killing both of my parents. ”

  “I want you to know . . . ” he says, “I need you to know—I’m sorry. ”

  Sorry means nothing coming from his lips.

  Chris heads down the tunnel, and I follow—not to hear any more apologies, but so that I can understand just why he did what he did. We walk in uncomfortable silence.

  I sniff the air. Something’s different.

  “You noticed,” Chris says.

  I smell . . . copper, and something . . . something animal. It’s nothing I recognize, but it’s still familiar, like the memory of a scent I’ve never noticed before. The little hairs on my arms rise and my skin prickles with gooseflesh.

  It can’t be. Not here. We’re underground. This is the one place on all of Centauri-Earth that there cannot be . . .

  “Pteros!” I scream as Chris leads me around the corner and I see them, all clustered at the end of the tunnel. I’m about to run when I notice the glass between the monsters and me.