Fourth World

by Lyssa Chiavari

  I knew Ceilos often said that. But I still didn’t think I would be able to laugh if Melusin or Antos had nearly died.

  “You’re not ready.”

  I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. “Do they know what could have caused the System’s early warning protocol to malfunction?”

  Ceilos glanced over at the boy. He sat sullenly in his chair, not looking at us.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “The System hasn’t decoded his thought patterns yet. He can’t understand us.” I hoped.

  Ceilos stared a second longer, then turned back to me. “The System was hacked.”

  My eyes widened. “What? But how?”

  “They’re not sure. They’re still tracing the source of the breach. But all signs seem to point to”—he lowered his voice—“the ‘Liberator’ and his little band of anarchists.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. This could not have come at a worse time. The planet was on the brink of destruction, and these terrorists were hell-bent on bringing us there even faster. Right now, all of Iamos needed to work together. All lives are one—couldn’t they see that?

  “Listen, Nadin,” Ceilos said. “There’s something else I need to talk to you about. Tibros… he’s petitioned the gerotus for a repartnership.”

  I looked at him in confusion. “But Clodin isn’t dead. I thought you said she was expected to survive.”

  He didn’t meet my eyes. “Not for himself. For me.”

  The floor dropped out from under me. There it was again, that horrible, airless feeling. “But why?” I could barely find my voice. “Because I failed my evaluation? Because—” I couldn’t say it.

  Because of Gitrin.

  “He said that they need a new geroi partnership on Hamos, and he wants it to be me. But, Nadin, I told him no. I—”

  I wasn’t listening. My mind was whirling around, drowning in too many circumstances beyond my control. I couldn’t lose Ceilos, too.

  “Wait,” I said, my voice cracking. “There’s another way. The geroi…”

  “Nadin, it doesn’t matter,” Ceilos interrupted. “I already told him—”

  “No!” I grasped his hands in mine. He stopped talking, staring down at them. “Listen,” I said. “I can fix this. I know how…”

  I trailed off as I noticed the boy’s reflection in the window over Ceilos’ shoulder. He was watching us again, his eyes focused intently. The expression on his face was not one of confusion—it was one of comprehension.

  I pressed my lips together. I knew it.

  Folding my arms to match his, I whirled on the boy. “All right, that’s enough pretending. You can understand me, can’t you?”

  He didn’t say anything for a long, agonizing moment. I almost thought I’d been wrong. Almost turned away.

  Then he swallowed and said, “Yes.”

  Ceilos’ jaw dropped. I inhaled sharply, trying to keep my temper. “How long have you been eavesdropping on us?”

  He lifted his shoulders again, not meeting my eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. His accent was heavy, his words strange, but I could understand him. What my own ears didn’t pick up, the System provided for me. “An hour or two? Around when I figured out that your language was some kind of weird mix of Greek and Egyptian overlaid with half the Mesoamerican languages I know.”

  “What does that mean? Greek? Meso…?”

  The boy sighed. “Never mind. I don’t think you’d get it. Are you guys going to take this stupid earpod off me now?” He tapped the side of his head with his index finger.

  I blinked. “You mean your earpiece?”

  “I guess.”

  “No.” I instinctively put a hand on my own, horrified at the thought of removing it. “You need it. We all need it. We can’t communicate with the System without it.”

  He pulled a face. “What is the System, anyway? You people go on about it every other word. The most I can figure is that it’s some kind of mind-reader. Which is not creepy at all.”

  I looked at Ceilos for a moment, uncertain of what to say. How does one explain the System? The collective mind of the entire world?

  “Never mind that,” said Ceilos. “We still have questions for you. Who are you, anyway?”

  He slouched forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “I’m just a guy.”

  I closed my eyes, taking a deep, soothing breath. Don’t snap, I warned myself. “A ‘guy’ named…?”

  “Isaak.”

  “Isaak,” I repeated. I had never heard a name like that before. But of course I wouldn’t have. Even if the coordinates the System had shown me were wrong, whoever he was, he was clearly not of Iamos. I smiled hollowly. “And I am Nadin.”

  “Yeah, I caught that. You’re Nadin”—he gestured—“and Ceilos. And the doctor’s called Heros, right?”

  My face flushed. I did not know the medic’s name. It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask.

  “You seem to know everything about us,” Ceilos said. “But we know absolutely nothing about you. How did you come to be here?”

  Isaak sighed. “I don’t know. It’s a long story. I was looking for my dad, but obviously he isn’t here.” He added, barely audibly, “And now I’m stuck here. Alone.”

  The sadness in his voice made my chest clench. There were no parents on Iamos except the geroi. Ceilos and I had been raised in the households of our biological parents, since we were geroi-born. But all other children were raised by the collective until they were old enough for an apprenticeship. It had always been that way, since the Progression.

  “Isaak,” I said, sitting across from him on one of the hospital beds. “I would like to help you, but I can’t do that unless you tell me what happened. Where did you come from? Simos?”

  “No, I’m not from Simos,” he said, his expression wary. “I’m from Iamos.”

  “You can’t be from Iamos. If you were, you’d know about the System. The System would recognize you.”

  “I didn’t say I was from Iamos, I said I was from Iamos,” Isaak snapped.

  I jumped up. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  He stood as well. “Listen… stop listening with that thing”—he gestured to my earpiece—“and listen with your ears. I am not from Iamos. I am from Mars.”

  I stared at him. “But what is Mars?”

  Isaak began to pace, running a hand through his dark hair. “The planet I was born on. The fourth planet from the sun.”

  “Iamos is the fourth planet from the sun.”

  He stopped short. He stared at nothing, at his reflection in the glass. Then, slowly, he said, “What?”

  Ceilos pulled his earlobe. “Iamos is the fourth world. Ia, four. Mos, world. Wi, si, ha, ia. Each of the eight planets in the solar system are named this way.”

  “The solar system,” he repeated. “Can you show me? On your… System thing?”

  I pulled open the visual indicator again and commanded it to display the eight planets. I gestured to the fourth one, cringing at how red the image had become. The blue of the seas had dwindled down to nearly nothing; the green of the ground was a distant memory.

  “That’s it,” Isaak said, his voice shaking. “That’s Mars.” He sat down heavily, his shoulders hunched.

  I knew it. I knew I recognized the coordinates on the posternkey. It seemed impossible, but I knew I couldn’t be wrong.

  Ceilos snapped, “Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to prove by lying—”

  “Wait, Ceilos,” I interrupted. I crouched in front of Isaak, looking up into his worry-creased face. “Isaak,” I said. “When you left Mars… did you pass through a door?”

  He bobbed his head up and down. “It was an archway made of stone.”

  “A postern,” I said. “And you were holding something?”

  “Emil called it the key,” he said. “It was metal, ancient. So, so old. But we opened it with a coin.”

  I frowned. “I don’t know what a coin is,” I said. “But did it look like this?” I pulled
my medallion out from beneath my collar and held it out to him.

  He snatched it from my hands. For a moment, I wanted to rip it away from his grasp—my birthright. Something no plivos had a right to hold. But Isaak wasn’t a plivos, he was something else entirely. And I needed answers more just now.

  “It was just like this,” he said. “Just like it. But it was old, like the key. It looked like if you buried this in the ground and forgot about it for a couple millennia.”

  I swallowed. “The time postern.”

  Ceilos gaped at me. “That’s impossible!”

  “Excuse me?” Isaak said. “Are you telling me I traveled through time?”

  “You must have,” I said, my heart starting to pound faster. “Ordinarily, posternkeys are programmed with three sets of coordinates—dimensional data. But the key they took from you, it had four.”

  “Four dimensions?”

  I tugged my earlobe. “The fourth dimension is time.”

  Isaak slumped forward, his head between his knees. “I think I’m going to throw up,” he said.

  I barely heard him. My mind was reeling. I needed to tell the geroi. Surely this would change everything. This was the answer. We could save Iamos. It didn’t matter, now, whether colonization on Hamos or Simos was viable. We wouldn’t need that anymore.

  “Nadin, wait,” Ceilos said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Be sensible. If that posternkey really had four sets of coordinates, wouldn’t the geroi have noticed?”

  “It was encrypted. It didn’t show the true coordinates until it recognized my DNA signature.”

  “That’s ridiculous! Why would it only show you the data?”

  “I don’t know.” I rubbed my temple with my right hand. “Maybe Gitrin programmed it that way. I was the one who worked on it with her the most. Maybe she’s trying to tell me something.”

  “But why, Nadin?”

  Isaak cleared his throat. His face was a sickly pale color, making him look more alien than ever. “Would you guys mind explaining some of this to me?” he asked. “Did I time travel or not?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “No,” Ceilos said over the top of me. “The time postern is just a theory. It doesn’t exist.”

  “Yet,” I snapped. “But it must exist at some future date, otherwise Isaak would not be here. This proves that Gitrin’s theory is workable.”

  Ceilos grabbed my arm, pulled me aside. “How do you know this isn’t a trick? Maybe this boy,” he whispered, his voice barely audible, “is with the Liberator.”

  I brushed him off. “You’re being ridiculous. I know what I saw on that posternkey, Ceilos. I spent over a year working on the plans for the time postern with Gitrin. I know those coordinates better than my own face. How would the Liberator know about that? He’s a terrorist, not a scientist. And besides.” I gestured to Isaak. “Look at him. Have you ever seen an Iamoi that looked like him?”

  Ceilos locked eyes with Isaak for a long moment. Isaak’s defiance seemed to have eroded as much as the surface outside the dome. Now he looked despondent. Harmless.

  Ceilos sighed. “Fine. But what do you propose we do about it?”

  I reached up to my earpiece, pressing the comm button. “I need to talk to Gitrin.”

  “Gitrin? Are you sure that’s a good idea, after last week?”

  “Well, what else can I do?” The thought of seeing Gitrin again tore at me from the inside like the talons of a gamada, but I needed answers, and she was the only one who could possibly have them.

  “Subject Gitrin unavailable,” the System said in my ear.

  “Try again,” I said.

  Ceilos leaned against one of the empty hospital beds. “What’s wrong?”

  “She’s not answering,” I said. I pulled open a System panel. “Show subject coordinates.”

  “Coordinates not found.”

  I stared at the blank map of the citidome, mouth moving soundlessly. “Ceilos, did you modify her earpiece?”

  “Of course not. You’re the only one who knows about my cloaking program.”

  “But look at this,” I said, swiveling the panel around for him to see. “It says she’s not here.”

  He stood, gesturing for the map of the citidome to expand. There was no record of Gitrin’s presence anywhere in the dome.

  “Did she transfer to another city?” Ceilos asked.

  “She couldn’t have,” I said. “That medic…” I glanced over at Isaak and quickly added, “Uh, Heros—he said he’d spoken to her earlier today.”

  Ceilos said nothing. He scrolled silently across the map, looking for anything we might have missed.

  “Would it be the hackers?” Isaak said. His voice was gravelly, and he cleared his throat. “You know, the Liberator or whoever?”

  “Of course not,” I said defensively. “What would a terrorist group want with my tutor?”

  “The time postern,” Ceilos answered.

  I swallowed. “All right, then. We’ll just have to tell the geroi. I’ll show them the plans again, and the posternkey.” I opened another System panel.

  “Wait, Nadin!” Ceilos grabbed my wrist. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. If Gitrin is the one who programmed the posternkey, then she didn’t want the geroi to know about it. That’s why it was encrypted to your DNA.”

  I pulled my hand away. “Well, what am I supposed to do about that? I am not a gerouin yet. And that was Gitrin’s own doing. I don’t have any authority to act on my own.”

  Isaak stood up, looking at the map of Hope Renewed over Ceilos’ shoulder. “Okay, wait. Who are these geroi, and why do you need their permission?”

  “The geroi are the rulers of the citidome,” said Ceilos. “And… they’re also our parents.”

  Isaak’s brows furrowed. “You guys are siblings? I thought you were—” He broke off, not seeming to know how to phrase it. Finally, he said two words in his own language. The System did not translate these, but something about Isaak’s tone as he spoke them made my face grow hot.

  “Ceilos is my assigned partner,” I snapped. My fingers fumbled over the panel’s input, and I restarted it in frustration.

  “My parents are the former geroi of Bright Horizon citidome,” Ceilos said in a calmer voice. “They relocated to the Hamos colony three years ago, and I came to live here, with Nadin and the geroi of Hope Renewed. Nadin and I were supposed to finish our education together, and then…” He trailed off.

  And then we were supposed to form a geroi partnership of our own. But I had to go and ruin everything by failing my evaluation.

  “Dataset not found,” the System told me. I clenched my teeth and restarted it again.

  “But if the geroi are your parents,” Isaak said, “why don’t you want them to know about the time-door thing?”

  “They already know about it,” I said, inputting the command slowly and deliberately this time. “My tutor and I designed it as an alternative evacuation mode. I’m sure you noticed that there’s not a lot of air out there right now.”

  Isaak moved his head up and down. “The atmosphere is depleting. Our scientists knew that it happened, but we weren’t sure what caused it. And we definitely didn’t know that there were humans here when it happened.”

  Ceilos snorted. “The humans are what caused it. Before the Progression, people were a bit less… careful about the impact our industries had on the environment. By the time we realized it, it was too late. The gerotus was established to help implement policies that would offset the atmospheric degradation, but it was too late by that time. So now the primary objective is evacuation.”

  “The time postern would have changed all that,” I said. “If we could go back in time, warn the Iamoi of what was to come—we could change history. If the people knew what was going to happen, surely they would stop. Find new methods of harvesting energy, ones that wouldn’t have such a drastic impact on the atmosphere.”

  Isaak burst out laughing. I looked up from the System panel,
folding my arms. “What’s so funny?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s not funny. It’s just… it’s kind of ironic. Never mind. So I’m guessing the geroi nixed the time postern idea?”

  “‘Nixed’ is not a word I’m familiar with,” I muttered. I don’t know why I was letting this alien boy get under my skin so much. I needed to focus.

  Ceilos said, “Nadin and her tutor presented their design to the gerotus, but they rejected the proposal. They said it would be too much of a drain on our resources.”

  “They didn’t believe it would work,” I said. “But now we have proof that it does. I just need to show them the plans—and you.”

  “What do I have to do with it?” Isaak asked.

  “You say you were born on Iamos.” I pressed the panel’s submit key. “Which means the atmosphere returns. Which means Gitrin’s theory works.”

  Isaak frowned. “Actually—”

  “Dataset not found.”

  I made a noise of aggravation. “What is wrong with this thing?”

  Ceilos came to stand beside me, looking at the panel. “The data isn’t here,” he said.

  “But it has to be here. We spent over a year working on it. It should be right here.”

  “But it’s not.”

  The full meaning of his words washed over me, bringing a wave of nausea with it. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find it. It was that it was gone. “It’s been deleted? But who would delete it?”

  “The geroi?” Isaak suggested.

  I glared at him. “Of course not. What purpose would that serve? The geroi have more important things to do with their time than whimsically manipulate the System. It must have been Gitrin.”

  Ceilos looked unconvinced. “But why would Gitrin—”

  I waved the panel away, turning on my heel. “She must have. She is up to something, and I have had enough of her deceit.”

  “Wait, Nadin! Where are you going?” Isaak cried as I reached for the door handle.

  His voice brought me back to reality. The geroi had given me an assignment. I couldn’t just leave him. I couldn’t disobey a directive, not after last night. I needed to prove myself to them. This was my last chance, or I’d lose Ceilos—I’d lose everything.