Alone

  Bishop drops to one knee—he’s too weak to stand. He slowly tilts forward, then falls out of the open door and hits the deck headfirst. He rolls once, doesn’t move. I see cracks in his visor.

  Aramovsky sprints to him. Bishop is larger, but with the lighter gravity Aramovsky scoops him up and carries him with little more effort than he used to carry me.

  “Victor,” Aramovsky says, “put Zubiri in with Em.”

  Victor looks at me, at this tiny space.

  Through his visor, I see his head shake. “There isn’t room!”

  “Then make room,” Aramovsky says. “Just stuff her in there!”

  I don’t understand what’s happening. This fighter is too small for all of us.

  Victor dumps Zubiri on top of me. There are frozen bloodstains on his chest and shoulders, the holes filled with sealant foam. His every motion is pure agony.

  The boy with the crush, the one who would do anything for me. Right to the bitter end, he is brave and loyal, willing to sacrifice himself for others. My heart swells with respect for what this boy—no, this man—has done for our people.

  “Thirty,” Zubiri says.

  Victor grabs me, rolls me on my side. Then he grabs Zubiri, shoves her legs to her chest, puts her in front of me—I am the big spoon, she is the little.

  Victor looks down at me; our eyes meet.

  “I told you I’d follow you anywhere. It’s too late to say it, but I’m in love with you.”

  He takes a step back.

  “Twenty-five.” Zubiri can barely speak the words.

  Aramovsky is there, shoving Bishop into the pilot seat. There’s blood all over Bishop’s pressure suit. He isn’t moving.

  Aramovsky grabs Victor, lifts him and sets him in the pilot seat next to Bishop. The move is fast, definitive—I think Victor is in the cockpit before he realizes what just happened. The younger boy adjusts, tries to make two men fit into a space meant for one.

  “Twenty,” Zubiri says.

  Aramovsky grabs Victor’s hand, places it on a black joystick studded with controls.

  “Move the stick which way you want to go,” Aramovsky says. “Thumb button is thrust. Just get out of here, Kalle will help you the rest of the way.”

  “Affirmative,” comes Kalle’s voice, tinny and scratchy from the distance.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Zubiri says.

  Aramovsky reaches into the cockpit and presses a button. The canopy starts to slide forward. He steps back.

  No…no, what is he doing?

  “Get in,” I say. “Get in here, I’m ordering you!”

  He smiles at me. “No room.”

  The canopy closes.

  In my helmet, I hear his last words.

  “Find our people a home, Mattie. Victor…push the button.”

  The fighter shudders and shoots forward. The hangar doors rush toward us—we’re going to shatter against them—and then we’re through the ragged hole, swallowed up by the blackness of space.

  Kalle’s fighter banks in on our right.

  “Seven seconds,” Zubiri says.

  “Full throttle,” Kalle says. “Now!”

  Zubiri and I are pulled backward as the Macana shoots forward.

  “Three seconds,” Zubiri says. And then, a last, energetic burst of hate: “I hope you burn in hell.”

  There is no fireball. There is no roar, no explosion that I can hear. A brief blast of static on the comm, then silence. For a moment, I see light reflected off parts of the fighter.

  Then the light fades.

  “Victor,” Kalle says. “Bank right. Just keep me at your ten o’clock and I’ll get you home, okay?”

  Our fighter banks right.

  I’m crammed tight in here, but there’s just enough room for me to look out at the Dragon.

  Or, more accurately, where the Dragon used to be.

  Now that space is nothing but a cloud of debris, huge chunks and small bits alike spreading out in an ever-expanding, ever-thinning sphere. The massive cylinder is in a thousand pieces. Spinning copper shards the size of Uchmal’s buildings reflect the red sun’s light.

  It is a horrid sight.

  It is a spectacular sight.

  We’ve done it.

  We have killed our enemy. We are forever free.

  “Victor,” Kalle says, “you still with me?”

  I feel cold, so cold.

  Zubiri twists a little. My arm is over her. She pulls my hand to her chest, clutches it, needing any comfort I can give. I ignore the pain in my shoulder and I hold her tight.

  “Yes,” Victor grunts. “Still…here.”

  “Stick with me, kid,” Kalle says. “Stay conscious for fifteen minutes and we’re home free.”

  He says something else, but I don’t really hear what it is.

  Zubiri in my arms, I finally give in to the cold.

  The darkness finally drags me down.

  I hear people talking.

  The words lull me from a deep sleep.

  “I think she’s coming to.”

  Theresa’s voice. She always seems to be there when I awake.

  My eyes flutter open. I’m in a white coffin. I’m tired of waking up in these things. I’m in a small medical bay. It’s warm in here. I feel soft blankets against my skin.

  “Welcome back,” Theresa says.

  She sits by my side, her left hand resting on her round belly. Love in her eyes. A soft smile on her face. She looks tired.

  In my mind, there are two Theresa Spingates. The beautiful girl I see before me now, the mother, the wife, the person who sacrificed so much for our people.

  And the other Theresa.

  The one who gave up her lovely face and perfect body to become a blackened, withered creature. The one who became selfish and bitter.

  The one who betrayed me.

  The one I ordered Bishop to kill.

  No…Matilda gave that order, centuries ago. That wasn’t me. I am something new.

  I try to sit up. My body fails me.

  “Take it easy,” she says. “You lost a lot of blood. You were under for two days.”

  Maybe staying in the coffin a little while longer isn’t so bad after all.

  I nod toward her belly.

  “How’s the little one?”

  Theresa’s smile widens.

  “Doing great. Kenzie tells me we’re having a girl.”

  The baby…

  Being pregnant…

  Matilda had a child. I know only faint wisps of that moment. I wonder if those memories will return, or if they’re gone forever.

  My daughter…her name was Celeste. She had five kids of her own. Celeste didn’t want to become Cherished. She wanted nothing to do with it, poisoned my grandchildren against it, against me. I watched her grow old. I watched her die. Then my grandchildren, all dying from old age while my wrinkled, transformed body carried on.

  “We, um.” Theresa looks down, uncomfortable. “We have a name for the baby. If you think it’s acceptable.”

  I’m not sure why I would have any say in it, and…

  Ah. I think I know.

  “Korrynn. You want to name her Korrynn.”

  Theresa still can’t look at me. She nods.

  “That’s beautiful,” I say. “The name and the sentiment both.”

  Ramses Bishop steps into view. He looks horrible. Crutches under his arms. Dark circles under his eyes. His skin, paler than normal. There are burns on his face and hands, only partially healed.

  “You look like hell,” I say.

  He smiles. “Speak for yourself.”

  Even all that damage can’t make him ugly. Ramses is a vision: strong, brave, loyal, dedicated. And yet I remember the other Bishop, the one Matilda knew. I remember the arguments. I remember the fighting. I remember love, then love dying, becoming hate, then even worse than hate—ambivalence.

  Looking at his face, at his expression, I can see he doesn’t understand yet. He’s playing along, respecting me as Matt
ie, but he thinks that deep down, I’m still Em. He thinks he’ll be patient, that he’ll wait for me. He thinks I’ll “get better.”

  He thinks we’ll have a family.

  I’ll have to deal with that soon.

  The pain is creeping in. My meds are wearing off. The bruises, the bumps, the stitches…I think a rib is broken. It’s starting to feel like someone is pouring jagged gravel straight into my brain.

  “Some bad news,” Ramses says. “The incoming ship, the Eel, it has sped up. It will be here in six months. And we’ve detected two new ships heading to Omeyocan. The first will be here in about ten months, the second not long after that.”

  I close my eyes, rest my head on my pillow. Three ships are coming to this planet of endless war.

  “Are we still in orbit?”

  “The Xolotl took extensive missile damage,” he says. “It barely survived. Gaston and Borjigin think we’ll be ready to depart in another day or two, on your order.”

  Gaston. He means Young Gaston. Old Gaston—my friend of twelve centuries—is gone forever.

  The first incoming ship is six months out. That gives us a little time, but we can’t wait long. It could come after us just like the Dragon did. We need to be long gone before it arrives.

  “Any word on the Wasps?”

  Theresa nods. “Once you killed the Grub, that signal interference went away. Kalle and Opkick have been using the Xolotl’s instruments to observe the planet. Kalle thinks most of the Wasps were killed. Any that survived the explosion are likely dying of radiation poisoning. Uchmal—what’s left of it—will be a no-man’s-land for decades. Maybe centuries.”

  The interference is gone. The Grub produced it. Or maybe the Echo did. I don’t think it makes a difference. One or the other or both wanted the races to fight up close and personal, where the hate could breed, where the rage could swell. I imagine in any war, you can launch bombs as long as you like, but sooner or later, if you want to take and hold territory, you have to put boots on the ground. Maybe the interference was meant to stop orbital ships from using high-tech targeting to take out small units, even single soldiers one at a time. Maybe it was meant to cause greater confusion, deprive armies of effective communication so chaos would rule and the strongest and most resourceful—not the most technologically developed—would win the day.

  The interference persisted until we dropped that nuke.

  I knew full well dropping the bomb meant I was poisoning the planet. Still, it’s hard to hear that it actually occurred.

  “And the Springers we left behind?”

  “No sign of them,” Ramses says. “Some small smoke trails from campfires far outside the ruins. Barkah thinks any survivors are long gone from the area, faded away into the jungle. He doesn’t know where they went. Neither does Kalle or Opkick. Barkah is asking if we can go back for more, but Borjigin says he needs two weeks to synthesize enough fuel for a return trip to the surface.”

  Theresa leans closer. “Before you consider Barkah’s request, I’ll remind you the troopship is alien tech that we don’t yet know how to maintain. If anything goes wrong, if anything malfunctions, whoever we send will be stuck on Omeyocan—we have no other ships to send. Borjigin and Gaston think it will take us at least a year to build another atmospheric-capable craft.”

  Two weeks for one trip back to the surface to rescue more Springers, and that’s if we could even find them. Theresa makes the primary point painfully clear, though—if anything goes wrong, we lose the only ship we have that can take people from the Xolotl to the surface of any new planet we find.

  I can’t risk that. Not for the Springers, not for any of our people who might still be alive down there.

  And we can’t wait the time it takes to build another ship. The Xolotl is a wreck. Our missiles are depleted. We have no ship-killing cannon. All we have is a pair of Macanas, and those don’t amount to much of a defense.

  Which means if we’re still in orbit when the Eel arrives, and it’s hostile, we’re dead.

  The situation here is untenable.

  Everything points in one direction—away.

  “What about the Grub eggs? Did we destroy them?”

  Theresa shrugs. “Kalle says there’s no way of knowing, unless people start having nightmares.”

  “Or we start killing each other,” Ramses adds.

  I don’t think we’ll wait to find out.

  Omeyocan has eaten up twelve centuries of my life, the lives of my friends, of our ancestors. Is it our job to make sure those eggs are destroyed?

  No. It is not.

  The Birthday Children have sacrificed enough. So have the Springers. And the Cherished, for that matter.

  We’ve all known war. It’s time to let something else run our lives.

  “Tell Gaston to set a course for open space,” I say. “Any direction that gives us the clearest path away from the three incoming ships. We are leaving, and we’re never coming back.”

  Theresa glances at Ramses. He looks back at her. He nods. So does she.

  It is done.

  I ask Bishop to meet me in the Crystal Ball.

  My body has healed. Mostly. The Xolotl has been repaired. Mostly. We are four days into our journey into the great unknown.

  Our search for a new home has begun.

  I will soon give up my leadership role, but not quite yet. Being the leader carries many burdens. It also carries a few privileges. One such privilege is taking the Crystal Ball as my own. This will be my personal space, my “office,” if you will, for years to come.

  When I was first here, there was a long-dead body on the metal grate floor, stabbed in the back by the spear that became our symbol of leadership. Quite fitting, when you think about it.

  The spear is gone, of course. So is the body. People removed it, cleaned up the stains left by decomposition.

  Most of the stains, anyway. In a few spots, the metal is permanently discolored. I think that’s good—we should never forget the evil we’ve done to each other.

  Em didn’t know who that corpse was.

  Matilda did—she set up that murder, watched it happen.

  This place was where Bishop, Em, Gaston, Aramovsky and El-Saffani discovered we weren’t in some endless dungeon, that we were in a starship, far above the land promised to us.

  This was where Em first met Matilda.

  Those two women are no more. I remain, a combination of them both.

  I sit at a desk Borjigin crafted for me. It’s made of gray stone, with the top polished flat as glass. He also found me a lovely chair.

  My desktop is clean, uncluttered. The New People made me gifts: a glass inkwell, a quill made from a black chicken feather, and a thick, leather-bound book. The cover is branded with the null-set symbol. The pages are blank, save for the first one, where Barkah drew a beautiful image of Lahfah for me to remember her by.

  The only other thing on my desk is a white porcelain cup sitting on a white saucer. Curls of steam slowly rise up from the tea inside.

  I pick up the delicate cup and take a sip. I think of Korrynn Bello. She was right about one thing, at least—tea is much better than sholtag.

  I wish she was here to have a cup with me. I lost her twice: once as Em’s Bello, once as Matilda’s Korrynn.

  Losing friends once is hard enough. It’s not fair I have to lose everyone a second time.

  I stare out the Crystal Ball’s clear walls at an endless sea of stars. In the direction of our current heading, there is nothing but empty space.

  Behind us, a fist-sized crescent of yellow, brown and blue. Omeyocan, in shadow because we’re heading away from it. I can also see tiny crescents of the planet’s two moons, one bluish, one maroon.

  Every minute we travel, Omeyocan appears smaller and smaller. Soon I won’t see it as color, only as a point of light. Not long after that, I’m told, the Xolotl’s physics-altering engines—built from schematics provided by a five-hundred-million-year-old race of spacefaring aliens—
will activate, and we will leave this area of the galaxy behind forever.

  I hear feet on the ladder that leads down from our ship. I look up. The ladder seems to float there in space, connecting the Ball to a small hole in the Xolotl’s copper hull.

  Bishop descends.

  The hull looks a mess. The Dragon’s missile fire left huge craters, forever-frozen splashes in a metal pond. Some of the rings overlap each other.

  I feel fortunate those strikes didn’t take out the Crystal Ball.

  I think of the people we lost on that desperate mission. Lahfah. The Admiral. Peura. Yong. Aeschelman and Abrantes. Yilmaz. Bawden. Marcus and Benga. Shumalk. McWhite, Goldberg and Dibaba.

  Aramovsky.

  He wanted redemption. He got it. I will make sure future generations know of him. Not just as a hero, but not just as a villain, either. My people need to understand that all of us are capable of change.

  We don’t have to be bad forever. We can fight our urges. We can choose to be good.

  Zubiri has “retired” at the tender age of thirteen. She wants nothing to do with engineering or science, and definitely nothing to do with weapons and war. Maybe she’ll change as she grows older. For now, she’s chosen to raise pigs. The New People are teaching her their ways.

  Victor is still in a med-chamber, kept unconscious by Kenzie. She says he should have died from his injuries. She’s at a loss to explain how he was even conscious, let alone able to pilot that fighter back to the Xolotl. A bullet through his liver. Lacerated stomach. Punctured lung. And more. Kenzie tells me it could be months before he’s out.

  I’ve made sure Old Victor can’t get anywhere near him.

  Aside from myself, Zubiri, Victor and Kalle—who is as annoying as she ever was—there is only one other survivor of that mission: Ramses Bishop.

  He reaches the bottom of the ladder. I stand to meet him. I take in his blond curls, his dark-yellow eyes. He is all smiles and scabs and scars.

  “You look well, Mattie. Beautiful as ever.”

  I, too, am all scabs and scars, but I have no smile to offer. Even for a woman as old as I, this kind of thing never gets easier.