And then it happened.
I’d been at one of the council’s airstrips working on improving navigational systems in the newest ship models when I found out. An LDC higher-up I’d never met before was the one who told me. I remember seeing his tan robes as he stepped out of his transport and knowing something bad had happened. That he was there to see me.
“It was an accident,” he said. “Zane was performing long-distance training. He was flying at incredible speeds—far faster than should have been allowed. There was a Kabarak supply ship coming into the city. We don’t think Zane saw it until it was too late.”
At first I didn’t understand, until the man started telling me something about how Zane’s training band—the one that tracked his speed and location—went dead, and that something had to have brought down that ship. They were still trying to excavate the site where it crashed, but they wanted me to know as soon as possible. They wanted to tell me that my brother was dead.
“Again,” the man said. “We’re sorry for your loss. It was a terrible accident.”
The minutes that followed were a blur. I just kept thinking that there had been some kind of mistake. Zane wasn’t gone—he’d just ditched his training band and was hiding in the clouds somewhere. It was a joke. My beautiful, smart, talented, loving baby brother was still floating up there in the sky somewhere.
Zophie had been at the airstrip—she’d been there for some other LDA matter—and tried to calm me down, but I don’t remember what she said. I couldn’t hear anything but my own thoughts, shouting at me over and over again.
You just have to find him.
I wanted to run and scream and fight and cry. What I ended up doing was climbing into the cockpit of a ship I had no permission being in and taking off. It was the first time I’d flown alone, but the system was advanced and did most of the work for me. I knew how to take off and engage the autopilot because I’d helped design updates for the navigation system. And before I knew it I was soaring through the air, looking for Zane. I had no idea where he’d been training, but it didn’t matter. I just couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to find him.
Eventually, exhausted, I landed somewhere out in the country. LDA officials tracked the stolen ship and brought me back to campus. By that time, they’d finally located Zane’s training band at the crash site. And his remains. I wanted to see Dalus—to tear into him—but they wouldn’t let me near him. Eventually he was shipped off to a remote Kabarak—no one would tell me where. He must have gone completely off the Grid; I never found him.
I tried to stick it out at the academy, but it just seemed so pointless now. People kept using that word—“accident”—as if it was supposed to make things better. Then, for the first time, I started thinking about how truly messed up Lorien was. How tenuous our freedoms were and how our leaders were never held accountable for anything, not really. What if Zane hadn’t been forced to go to the LDA? To be trained to fight and protect. What if he’d just been allowed to be a normal kid? What if he’d had any choice of his own in the matter? Or if the LDA had listened to me when I’d told them Dalus wasn’t a good match for him?
“Accident.” That word hit me like a sucker punch every time it was spoken. Because what happened to my brother wasn’t an accident. There were people to blame. Dalus being the most obvious. But the LDA, as well. And I couldn’t forget the Elders, who had ruled that our society’s most gifted children must be trained as soldiers based on a prophecy that I didn’t even believe was true. Not then.
And me too. I was to blame for buying into all this—into the idea that the LDA and LDC would keep Zane safe. That they had our individual interests in mind instead of their own.
I couldn’t handle hearing the word “accident” anymore. I left the academy. I never returned.
In my tiny little room on the ship, I can’t get Zane out of my head. It’s been five years since he flew too fast through the sky, and even though I know he’s gone, there’s still a part of me that expects him to randomly show up and reenter my life.
Losing Zane left a hole in me. It’s for this reason above all others that I tried to stay free of too many responsibilities these past few years. People included. I couldn’t get close to anyone—couldn’t even say good-bye to our grandfather. I refused to be hurt again like I was by Zane’s death. If that meant I’d be alone for the rest of my life, so be it.
Only now do I realize that some of my assumptions about Lorien and the way it was run were wrong. The prophecy was real. We needed soldiers—some of the Garde even saved my life. But at what cost? Lorien is most likely gone. Burned away. And if Zophie’s intel is right, the Elders only saved eighteen citizens. Nineteen if you count Janus.
Why them? What makes them so special?
What makes them more worthy of saving than me? Or Zophie and Crayton and Ella?
Or Zane?
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE WEEKS WEAR ON.
The Chimærae adapt faster than we do. I suppose that’s the story of their lives, though, changing to fit the present situation. They are mostly small, furry animals now. Rodents hibernating in storage bins. They seem to know that there’s not enough food on board for both us and them to survive and so they sleep away the days. Crayton spends too much time watching over them, stroking their backs when Ella is napping. Every few days he wakes them up one by one and goads them into drinking a bit of protein-based slurry pressed out of a little gold pouch. I hope that we make it to Earth before I have to know what the gray globs that fall out of that package taste like.
At first, we talk a lot about Lorien, positing theories and asking the same unanswerable questions we’d had when we could still see the planet’s scorched surface through the portholes. We spend hours trying to come up with answers we can’t confirm. Everything is hypothesis, conjecture. We don’t even know the status of the planet itself. It doesn’t take long for us to realize that we’re having the same conversation over and over again, and without any of us having to say it, we make a conscious effort to keep our focus on the future. The time for answers will come when we’re on Earth, when we can track down Janus and the evacuated Garde and Cêpans. They’d be taking a different course than us, given their ship’s capabilities. They’ll be on Earth months before we are.
Zophie won’t entertain the idea that anything will happen to Janus’s ship on its journey or that the Mogadorians tracked or intercepted it. Crayton seems just as determined to believe that the others will be on Earth too. I think he feels unprepared to raise Ella, which is something I can’t blame him for. If she ends up a Garde like her parents, she’ll need a Mentor Cêpan to train her, and there are likely only nine of those left in the universe.
I try to remain optimistic that the other ship successfully escaped the Mogs and will make it to Earth unharmed. There are so many questions I have that only the chosen survivors can answer. Maybe Loridas himself is with them, and I can pin him down and ask him why. Why after all our training we weren’t ready. Why the Mogs came for us.
Why so many had to be sacrificed.
Finding the others once we’re on Earth, though . . . that’s going to be the real challenge. Zophie had enough foresight to bring a data pad from the museum with her, and so over the course of our months in space she gives us a crash course on Earth, trying to acclimate us so that when we get there we don’t stand out too much. The planet hasn’t made contact with any extraterrestrial life—at least not that they know of—and Zophie is unsure of how they might react to the discovery that they’re not alone in the universe. Perhaps with hostility. But blending in ends up sounding much more difficult than I had expected it would be. On Lorien, the customs and cultures didn’t really change much whether you were in the middle of Capital City or shoveling Chimæra dung at a Kabarak. But Earth appears to be nothing like that. It’s so much bigger and split up into different sections that are all so different from one another. There’s no ruling body directing all the planet’s people, or
“humans,” as Zophie calls them. That sort of diversity sounds great in theory—it sounds like the kind of world I always imagined Lorien might turn into if we just opened our eyes—but as someone from another planet, it makes trying to get a grip on humans pretty damned difficult. Fortunately, we have a lot of free time, so learning about Earth is at least a distraction from the monotony of our journey.
Not to mention the anxiety of watching our food stores slowly dwindle. By Zophie’s calculations we should make it to Earth just fine, but we all start eating smaller and smaller amounts of food as the months progress. We survive on dried Karo fruit and protein chews.
Zophie insists we try to have a rudimentary knowledge of several languages before we land—enough to ask simple questions and sound like tourists or travelers from other Earth realms instead of three people who can’t speak a single Earth dialect. Again, I’m astounded by how different the people who all inhabit the same planet could be. How strange that these billions of people can’t even all communicate with each other. We start with a language called French, as its vowels are most like our native Loric tongue, then switch to others I’ve never heard of: Spanish, then English and then Mandarin. Crayton and Zophie excel at the languages, and before long they are laughing at jokes in one known as German while I’m still stumbling over “Ich heiße Lexa.” This is probably because I spend most of my free time writing down everything I remember from my days working on Earth’s communications systems instead of studying new languages. I am more at home with the vocabulary of electronics—ones and zeros and carefully formatted lines of code. Based on my time at the LDA, I assume Earth has reached a point in its technological evolution that means it’s interconnected by machines and relying on them in the same way we were on Lorien. The internet was one of the many gifts that the Loric brought to humans over the centuries. Not that they know it or that any of the other treasures we bestowed on them actually came from us. Or even that some of their brightest minds were not of their planet at all but Loric. I used to wonder why we’d spent any resources helping a planet so far away when there was nothing in it for us. Not even recognition of our contributions. But now I’m beginning to wonder how long the Elders knew about the Mogadorians. How much of the “secret war” was real.
Had they been preparing for a Loric migration to this new world this whole time?
Six months into the trek, I find Crayton hyperventilating, sitting on the ground beside the makeshift crib we’ve put together for Ella—an oversize plastic bin fastened to a side table and filled with blankets. Crayton’s face is white, and his forehead is shiny with sweat.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, taking a few quick strides to the baby’s side. But she’s fine, sleeping without a care in the universe.
“What am I supposed to do with her?” he asks. “I watch over animals. That’s it. I just make sure they have food and water and aren’t sick. I don’t know how to raise a child.”
I stare down at him. I’m not sure if he really wants an answer or if he’s just talking to himself. He continues.
“Even after all our studies, I feel like I hardly know anything about Earth. How am I supposed to make sure she’s okay? What language am I even supposed to speak to her in? Loric? And what if she asks about her parents? What am I supposed to tell her?”
I glance towards the cockpit, where Zophie’s lost among the stars, staring at everything and nothing at once. I guess this is something I’ll have to handle on my own.
“You’ll tell her whatever you want,” I say.
“That’s a great bedtime story,” he scoffs. “That her mom and dad are most likely dead and that they sent me with her on a ship with a bunch of animals to make sure she was safe. How do you explain that to a little girl?”
I don’t know what to tell him. What I’d tell Ella. What would I tell Zane? My first instinct is the truth, without question. But what if the truth is terrifying? How do you find the middle ground? What if the truth puts her in danger?
“Maybe you don’t explain it,” I suggest. “Maybe you tell her something that will help to keep her alive and safe. Even if that means lying to her. You’ll have to ask yourself if her knowing the truth is more important than her being able to fall asleep without the fear of everyone she knows being destroyed in a hail of fire in the middle of the night.”
Crayton looks up at me. His eyes are bloodshot.
“I’m not going to lie to her,” he says.
Ella starts to wake up, stretching and cooing. Crayton is on his feet in an instant, bent over her. I shake my head.
“When the time comes,” I say, “you’ll do what you have to in order to protect her.”
I leave him with the baby and retreat to my room.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BY THE TIME WE HAVE A VISUAL ON EARTH, Ella has a full head of auburn hair. The rest of us are looking unkempt.
Crayton sports a bushy dark beard that hangs almost to the middle of his chest. There’s a puff of black hair an inch thick on my own head. Zophie keeps her long, red locks tied back with a piece of cloth.
Actually seeing our destination is reassuring, as we’re starting to run out of supplies. Without ever talking about it, we’ve all been doubling down on rationing, and the result is three gaunt Loric with dark circles under their eyes. Ella is the outlier. She’s practically chubby, which leads me to believe that Crayton has been giving her some of his own food. Not that I mind. The girl can stand now, and will run a little if we’re not careful—the ship wasn’t really made with children in mind and is full of sharp corners. She can even say a few words. Maybe more than a few. It’s hard to keep track of whether she’s making gibberish noises or trying to form words in one of the languages we practice.
She definitely knows our names at least, even if she does struggle with some of the consonants. We have become “Ex,” “Zoey” and “Ray-un” to her, the last of which is the strangest to hear coming out of her mouth since it could just as easily be her trying to pronounce her father’s name. But there’s no denying that it’s Crayton she’s calling for when she wakes; her eyes light up whenever she sees him.
And for his part, the way he looks at her has begun to change. No longer is it only with worry, like she’s a fragile bubble he has been tasked with protecting. That’s still there, but under a thick layer of affection.
When I call everyone to the cockpit to see Earth, even though it’s only a blue pinhead in the distance, Crayton brings Ella with him.
“You see that?” he asks her, pointing into space. “That’s our new home. That’s where you’re going to grow up.”
She just coos and pulls on his beard with chubby little fists.
It’s a few more days before Earth looms large ahead of us and we can discuss where and how we’re going to land. We don’t exactly have the luxury of time or travel, as we’re coasting on the fumes of synthetic fossil fuels by this time. Based on our angle of approach and the rotation of the planet, we have a very narrow window of where, geographically, we might land. We’re so low on power reserves that we’ll be relying on the force of Earth’s gravitational pull to bring us down to the ground as it is.
Zophie pores over scans from Earth’s surface, seated in the copilot’s chair. Finally, she points to a spot on the digital map she’s pulled up on one of the cockpit monitors.
“There,” she says. “It’s a desert.”
“So, lots of sand?” I ask. It takes a few seconds for me to understand what this means since deserts weren’t exactly abundant on Lorien.
“Right. And more importantly, it’s largely uninhabited, so we won’t have to explain where we came from to a bunch of bystanders. We’d be able to set the ship down and journey a day or so to a major metropolitan area—a city called Cairo.”
I bring up the coordinates on a navigational panel.
“It looks like that’s doable,” I say. “Tell Crayton he needs to strap down with Ella. When we enter Earth’s atmosphere, things will start to get bumpy
.”
The three of us remain quiet as we start our final approach to the planet. Even Ella is silent, as if she realizes that this is important. I keep my eyes locked on the instrument panels, monitoring the increasing heat outside as we shoot through the atmospheric bubble.
“This isn’t so bad,” Crayton finally whispers. “At least there’s not a fleet of ships hovering around—”
The ship begins to shake violently, shutting him up.
“Is everything—,” Zophie starts.
“We’re fine.” I keep my eyes moving back and forth between the instruments and the quickly approaching surface of the planet in front of us. The ship continues to jostle back and forth, as if it’s trying to tear itself apart in the sky. But it holds together as we sail headfirst towards a golden expanse of land.
A readout from one of the monitors beeps. It’s time to deploy our reentry measures: a dozen outboard thrusters that will rapidly slow our descent until we’re hovering above the sand.
“Hold on!” I shout, and flip the switch.
Only, nothing happens.
I hit the switch again. And then again. Still, there’s no response.
“Shit!” I mutter. My heart and brain begin to race. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“What is it?” Crayton asks.
“The reentry thrusters aren’t working.”