Empire of Sky

by Gabrielle S Awe

  “Fight it, Alinya,” Alexsi grits out. He’s standing. “It’s lying to you; it’s lying to all of us. Fight it.”

  I don’t want to. I want to make more of the pretty red paint in the sand and then I want to find the masters and give myself up to them.

  “Zair! Zair, snap out of it,” Alexsi shouts, and he grabs Zair by the shoulder and shakes him. Zair has his knife out too and he’s making pretty red designs on his skin. It’s not red enough though; Princes really are useless.

  Alexsi slaps Kell and he blinks slowly. “Kell, can you pick up Freyja?” Kell nods and walks over to the Winter Queen.

  “Alinya, put the knives away,” Alexsi tells me, but he’s not the boss. I crawl over to Kjiersten, crying in the sand. I want to show her the pretty paint.

  “Gods-dammit,” Alexsi cries in anguish. He’s the prettiest prince but he’s Zair’s. Zair needs him. Zair gets Alexsi and I get no one; I’m so lonely, the lowly lonely assassin.

  Alexi has taken Zair’s knife away and Zair is staring at the red designs on his arms. They are swirling and lovely, like the markings on the Priestess.

  Kell is carrying the Queen away. “Where am I going?” he asks. Alexsi points to the dune on the other side of the valley. “I don’t think I can.” He starts to put the Queen back down in the sand and then Alexsi is there, yelling at him again. Kell sighs and starts walking across the valley with the Queen in his arms. She’s so pretty. I want to follow them but it seems so far so I sit in the sand and try to show Kjiersten the red.

  But Alexsi, tricky Alexsi, he is taking the knives out of my hands and he is shaking Kjiersten now, telling her to wake up. She’s already awake, you stupid Prince, I try to say it but I can’t make words. It’s just so hard. Kjiersten looks at the red on me and her eyes go wide. Alexsi talks to her some more but I’ve stopped listening. I’m looking in my belt for more sharp things instead. I normally have all the sharp things.

  I find some and start to pull them out, the sharp things I bought at the Night Market, but then there are hands on mine and I’m putting the sharp things away.

  Kjiersten is there and she’s looking in my eyes. “Come back to me, Alinya, come back,” she says, and she’s holding my hands and singing. “Walk with me,” she says, and I do. I follow her out of the Valley and she holds my hand and sings the whole way, while Alexsi stumbles along behind us, half-carrying Zair.

  We make it to the next dune and the fog starts to clear from my head. Kell sets Freyja down and she uncurls, stretches, and looks at him like she’s never seen him before.

  I hold Kjiersten’s hands and she doesn’t pull away. I touch my forehead to hers. “Thank you,” I say, breathing with her breath. “Thank you for saving me.”

  She kisses me on the cheek and hugs me, holding me for a minute and then she lets me go.

  Zair and I are dripping blood from our arms. “What was that?” he asks. “What just happened to us?”

  Freyja rubs her eyes. “The Valley of Despair,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting it so soon.”

  “It’s my fault,” Kjiersten says. “I knew we couldn’t stay long but when you all started to doze off, I thought it was better to let you rest.” She looks at the designs I carved into my arms and shivers. “I didn’t know how bad it would be.”

  Alexsi tells Zair and me to sit. He looks at our arms and hands, and then he inspects the cut in Zair’s side. “This isn’t working,” he says.

  “Alexsi, how come you came out of it before we did, back in the Valley? Why didn’t it affect you the way it did us?”

  He pours water from his canteen onto Zair’s cuts, and then he rinses mine. The water is cool and it burns in the deep wounds.

  “I carry the Forest with me,” he tells us. “My mother says it is part of the gift. We make life, and so life is strong within us. I felt the despair at first, and then the life within me opened and it pushed out the darkness.”

  There is so much we don’t know about in this world. There are so many things we barely understand.

  “I think you can do more than you think you can, Alexsi.” I’m staring at the angry wound in Zair’s side. “I think you might be able to heal that.”

  Alexsi shakes his head and then Kjiersten is there. She still doesn’t like Alexsi, I see it on her face, but she doesn’t hate him anymore. “Alinya is right, Alexsi. My father told me about your ancestor, the one who chose the Forest. She changed all of the Five Families; she was a biologist, someone who studies life, and she was a healer. If you can grow a tree from nothing you should be able to knit flesh back together.”

  Zair holds still while Alexsi holds his hands just over the cut. Alexsi has that look again, but this time it’s different. He doesn’t just look like he’s concentrating, he also looks like he’s listening, and thinking. His eyes unfocus and his lips move; he’s singing and he passes his hand back and forth over the wound, back and forth again and again.

  Kjiersten starts to hum one of the songs of the Forest and I feel a cool wind in my hair, and smell the warm smell of the plants of the Forest, rising up in the air. We are all watching as the flesh of the wound moves together, joining back up, healing. The skin closes over it, everything coming back together as it should be, as Alexsi’s healing reminds the skin and the cells of the body how they should be and they obey him.

  We all sit there staring at Zair’s side; it’s as clean and smooth as if he’d never been cut. I’ve seen so much magic but this is the first thing I’ve seen that truly is a miracle.

  Freyja is watching all of us, an unreadable expression on her face.

  “We all hated each other by the end,” she says to all of us and no one. “That’s why it all went so very wrong.”

  I wonder if we will ever heal the darkness that Freyja carries inside her.

  CHAPTER 29

  The desert will never end. Kjiersten still walks in front, guiding us. Kell walks with Freyja now. He doesn’t actively hate me or Zair anymore, but he’s never really warmed up to us either. Alexsi, Zair, and I do a little shuffle, walking in pairs and one taking up the rear, rotating who takes which position. I’m currently walking alone.

  I scratch at my bandages, although Kjiersten would fuss if she saw me. She wraps them tight so the sand won’t get in but it only partially works. When we saw how much it took out of Alexsi to heal Zair’s side, Zair and I both decided to let our arms heal naturally. My stomach is starting to scar over at last but the arms are in that itchy stage and they’re driving me mad. Kjiersten puts ointment on them and fresh bandages every morning. I see Zair, up ahead, scratching at his too and trying to hide it and I grin.

  We’ve been in the desert almost a full week. Every day there is a new threat, more sandstorms, snakes, even a storm of locusts. We’ve weathered everything the desert has thrown at us. We all have scratches on our hands, new scars on our hearts, more years in our eyes. Our skin is darker and our bodies are leaner and we can walk forever if we have to - except Freyja warns us that we are running low on water. We haven’t seen a drop of water other than what we brought with us and Freyja is worried. Kjiersten isn’t worried about the water so I’m not either; she must know something.

  We also haven’t seen any sign of the Masters, the Flaming Man, or the new Priestess. I asked Freyja if she knows anything and she just tells me that we don’t need to worry about them anymore. “This isn’t their place,” she says. “This is meant only for us.”

  Nothing has attacked us today but instead of relaxing, we are all more and more tense as we walk through the unbroken miles of sand. We haven’t seen any dunes all day. I take a sip of my remaining water and keep checking behind us but there is nowhere an attacker could hide in this flat wasteland.

  The sand starts to change; instead of the fawn color we’ve been seeing all week there are amber patches. I kneel down and touch it, wondering if it’s wet but it’s not water; the sand is dry but harder, brittle. Like it’s burned.

  As we walk I see more patches tha
t look dark and shiny, like glass. Nothing grows here; a day ago we stopped seeing even the dry scrub brush that grew in the outer portions of the desert. These truly are the Arid Lands.

  Since I’m in the rear I’m the last to see it; I’m busy scanning the ground and the horizon behind us but I hear Kjiersten and Freyja talking and the princes are exclaiming and pointing ahead. There’s a massive shadow stretching across the desert. My eyes can’t make sense of it, I can’t figure out what I’m seeing. There’s a shadow where the desert meets the sky, and there’s another shadow across the sand below it.

  I catch up to Kjiersten and Freyja. “What is that?” I shade my eyes with my hands, hoping that will help me see better.

  Freyja sighs. “That’s our ship. That’s how we got here.”

  All the hairs on my body stand up and my skin suddenly feels cold.

  “Can we go around it?” I ask stupidly. The ship takes up the entire horizon; there is no around.

  Kjiersten gives me a look. “Our way is that way.” She points at the ship. “Also, there’s water in there.”

  “How can there be water?” I don’t know much about machines but that ship has been sitting there for thousands of years. Alexsi walks up and joins us.

  “The ship’s systems still work,” he says. Freyja looks at him in surprise and he shrugs. “I can feel them.” I remember how easily he figured out the Night Train.

  Kell will be happy; he’s been the most miserable of all of us in the desert, having lived in water his entire life. Maybe there will even be enough to bathe in.

  We start walking toward the ship but Freyja keeps hanging back. “What’s wrong?” I ask her.

  “Bad memories,” she says, and sighs. I feel bad for taking her out of the Winter City but I’ve also started to realize that she needs this as much as we do. She may be immortal but she’s been dying inside for years. I put my arm around her and she leans into me and we walk together for a time.

  ◆◆◆

  The sand turns to glass as we approach the ship. There are small particles that blow across it but the ground is entirely glass, sand that fused together from exposure to extreme heat. Freyja looks sick and her steps get smaller and slower. She doesn’t want to be anywhere near here.

  The ship looms over us. I can’t get my head around how big it must be. It goes on for miles on either side of us and in front of us it just looks like a giant wall with no top. It’s made of the same matte black material as the Night Train. I touch it and it’s neither cool nor hot.

  “The only way forward is through,” Kjiersten says, eyes on Freyja. Freyja shudders. The princes are touching the ship too, feeling the lack of temperature.

  “It’s so smooth,” Zair says, surprised. “It’s even smoother than a diamond.”

  “Frictionless,” Freyja tells us. “It’s nearly impossible to get something this big into and out of a planet’s atmosphere. The frictionless coating helps.”

  Alexi nods like he understands her but I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  “There’s no other way to get the colonists to the surface,” Freyja goes on. She’s staring at the ship. She’s the only one who hasn’t touched it. “Shuttles can’t carry enough people.” Her face twists when she says that. I start to feel like something is very, very wrong. “So many people,” she says, voice dying down to a whisper.

  “What did you do?” I ask. “Freyja, what happened?”

  She turns to me, an agonized expression in her eyes. Her mouth opens and closes, and then she looks away and walks to the left, trailing her hand on the wall of the ship. She gets to a section that looks like any other but clearly isn’t, because she sets her palm on the ship and a door opens and cool air blows out, disturbing the dust on the fused glass ground under our feet. With a lingering look at me Freyja walks inside.

  We hurry after her.

  It’s like stepping into another world. The Night Train was like this, all mechanical and metal with railings and straps but this is so much more. There are panels everywhere and the room is vast and nothing looks like anything I recognize. Freyja opens another door and leads us into a hallway. The door to the outside closes, sealing us in.

  There are doors off the hallways. Freyja sees us looking at them. “Crew quarters,” she says. We walk down the hallway and then she goes through a set of double doors that open as she gets near them. We follow her into a kitchen; it’s smaller than we expected. “The ship was built for only the crew to be awake,” she explains. “Colonists stay asleep and there are three sets of crew, rotating sleep and waking shifts.”

  “Why does everything still work?” Zair asks, puzzled.

  “The ships were built for the worst case scenario. It could take hundreds, maybe even thousands of years to find a compatible planet. The ship works by taking energy from the light of any sun it passes, any ambient electrical fields, and storing it. There are subsystems that run different components of the ship, and they can repair themselves and each other if need be. Multiple backup systems as well.” She shrugs. “That’s about the extent of my knowledge of the ship. I was the communications officer. The others knew much more about the inner workings of the ship than I did.”

  She shows us how to fill our canteens from the filtered water faucet and then we all take a minute to wash our hands and splash water on our faces. Kell spends the longest at the sink, running the water over his hands and then eventually dunking his whole head.

  “Come,” Freyja says and takes a deep breath. “I need to show you something.”

  We follow her out a different door and into a hallway that looks less finished somehow, as if the other one was meant for walking every day and this one isn’t. We walk for ten minutes or so. Alexsi is fascinated by the ship. We find a room filled with crates that look almost identical to the crates on the Night Train. They have symbols written on them too. I ask Freyja about them.

  “We brought machines with us but the Gods forbid us from using them. They didn’t want us ruining their world like we did ours. The only thing they let us set up was the train, and I think they only did that because they found the idea fascinating. They made the tunnel and modified the train to run on magic and then they played with it for a while until they got bored.”

  She looks at Alexsi and points to some of the crates. “These machines are for moving earth, building large buildings.” She points to more crates. “Those are for farming and harvesting.” More crates. “Seeds - all sorts of crops. Those over there contain the genetic material of various animals from Earth, but this planet doesn’t need them. It has its own ecosystem - Earth animals would be dangerous here. But the crops, the crops might be useful.”

  She takes us back to the hallway again and we walk for a while longer until we get to a door, a very large door with more symbols, different ones, in red and yellow paint. Freyja’s eyes linger on the doors and then she looks at me. “I hope you can forgive me, Alinya,” she says, and then she opens the doors.

  This room is vast, bigger than the dining hall in the Winter City, bigger than Hinshalla. I can’t see the sides or the end of it and it is freezing and there is no warming spell in here. I wrap my cloak around me and immediately start shivering. The princes and Kjiersten hang back while I step in, looking around, trying to understand what I’m looking at.

  “I’m so sorry,” Freyja says, and she’s weeping. I don’t know why until I walk up to one of the machines and I see the body inside. I walk and walk and look up and down and as far as I can see there are coffin-like tubes with people inside them. They look dead. The ship is a mausoleum.

  “What is this, Freyja?” There’s a hysterical note in my voice; it doesn’t sound like me. “Are they all dead?”

  “No, no,” she walks up to me and puts her hand on my arm. “Not dead; sleeping.”

  “Who are they?” I demand, although I know the answer, there can only be one answer.

  “The colonists,” she whispers.

  I feel like I’m losing
my mind. “How can they be the colonists? Freyja? How can they be the colonists? I thought the colonists live on the surface - who am I, Freyja? Why are the colonists still on the ship?”

  She starts crying. “I knew you’d hate me. I’m so sorry, Alinya, I’m so sorry.” She stands there, crying, and I clench my fists and I feel like I’m back in the Valley of Despair.

  ◆◆◆

  Alexsi and Kjiersten drag me out of the room. I’m shouting, I’m inconsolable, and I don’t know why. Nothing I’m saying makes sense. My friends hug me and try to calm me down and I keep swinging from rage to despair to rage again. I don’t even know Freyja; she tricked me into her bed. She tricked me into thinking she was a person. She made me think she was my friend. I’m howling and beating my fists on the floor and I wonder if they all knew, all of my friends, the descendants of the Five fucking Families. How could they be so evil?

  “We didn’t know, Alinya, we didn’t,” Alexsi is saying to me, so I guess some of what I’m screaming makes sense after all.

  “I only knew as we got closer to the ship,” Kjiersten says and she’s stroking my hair, trying to soothe me. “We got closer and I saw it but Freyja had to be the one to tell you.”

  I disagree.

  “We have to kill her,” I say. “Let me go so I can kill her.”

  Alexsi shakes his head. “No, Alinya, no more killing.”

  “That isn’t the way,” Kjiersten says. “I know it’s hard but we need her to break the bargain with the gods.”

  I lift my head and stare at Freyja. Kell and Zair are trying to console her and I suddenly hate them too. Traitors.

  “Alinya, listen to me,” Kjiersten says. “You have to hear the rest of it. You have to let her tell you what happened. If you hear her out, and if, after we meet with the Gods - if we all survive, you two can settle what’s between you then. But we have to keep going.”

  Alexi holds my hands and looks in my eyes. “The only way out is through.”

  Fucking friends.