Fourth World

by Lyssa Chiavari

  The crowd fell instantly silent. The man across from me turned his shoulder, shielding the child he’d been holding—as if I were an anguis, plotting to rip her from his grasp and devour her whole. I bit my lip. “I understand that the geroi have done much to hurt you. But they have hurt Ceilos and me, too. And all of Iamos. Our top priority should be saving this planet—for all of us. After seeing the life you all have made here… I believe Elytherios holds the key to that. So I will gladly renounce the geroi, for the good of our people.”

  Saying the words aloud felt like a release. Several people in the front row turned to one another, murmuring inaudibly. My hands shook, but I inhaled through my nose, determined to steady them. Ceilos stared up at me, eyes wide, as if he didn’t recognize me. Over his shoulder, I could see Isaak grinning at me and nodding encouragingly. I gave him a tight smile and sat back down.

  Eos stood once more, looking around at the crowd. “Very well. I think everyone has made their point very clearly. Let’s put this to a vote. All in favor of allowing Nadin and Ceilos to remain in Elytherios, in the household of Gitrin?” Then he said the words in the old language, asking the Elytherioi to stand and be counted.

  I held my breath.

  Gitrin stood, proudly and defiantly. Marin also stood without hesitation, and I smiled despite myself. Throughout the crowd, a few others rose to their feet. Near the back, I saw the woman from the day before—the mother who had been grinding the grain. She looked directly at me as she stood. I inclined my head to her, three fingers on my brow.

  Two dozen people stood. And that was all.

  Eos gazed around the courtyard fretfully. “Very well. Nadin and Ceilos shall not be allowed to remain in Elytherios.”

  The ground dropped out from under me. I could feel the cold of the outside on my skin all over again, taste the airlessness. The memories of the night of my annual, of the sandstorm, of my nightmare all swirled together until I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

  Ceilos looked at Gitrin, his eyebrows drawn. “What does that mean?” he asked. “If we can’t stay here, where are we supposed to go? Back to the geroi?”

  Gitrin didn’t respond. Her mouth just moved wordlessly. Marin leaned over her and said, “We can’t allow that. Elytherios’ location must remain an absolute secret.” She frowned, looking at her age-bleached hands. “This has never happened before.”

  The words stung worse than I thought they would. I had come all this way, fought so hard, learned so much—only to have the door slammed in my face.

  “They’re going to kill us,” I said resolutely.

  Ceilos put his hand on my shoulder firmly. “Of course not—”

  “They are, Ceilos,” I snapped. “There’s no other alternative. We know too much. If we can’t stay…” I swallowed. “We’ll have to go.”

  Ceilos didn’t reply. I knew he knew I was right.

  Eos was talking again, saying something about Isaak and his father. I tried to pay attention, but the panic in my mind was drowning everything else out.

  “Our final group of newcomers is not seeking sanctuary in Elytherious. They are instead asking for our help to return to their home—”

  I’d sworn that night—the night of my annual—that I wasn’t going to give up. I didn’t want to die. I refused to die. But I was going to die all the same.

  “I know it’s probably hard to believe, but the three of us actually are from Iamos—in our time, it’s called ‘Mars’—several thousand years in the future.”

  I wish I had never gone out that night. I had wanted to see the sunset, but for what? To prove to myself that everything really was as bad as it seemed?

  Several voices of disbelief rose up over the top of Isaak’s in a smoky cloud of noise. Gitrin stood up beside me, trying to talk over the top of them, but I couldn’t bring myself to listen. I slumped forward on the bench, staring down at the spinning ground beneath my feet. Twigs and fallen leaves and pebbles and mud blurred together before my eyes as Isaak and Gitrin tried to explain what I’d already accepted days ago.

  Gitrin had asked me, “What if there was a way to save Iamos?” And I had told her that there wasn’t, I’d told her everything the geroi had always taught me to believe. But the truth was, I didn’t believe them. I believed Gitrin. That’s what I was really looking for, that night—the answer that we had overlooked. The way to save Iamos, the one that Gitrin had hinted existed.

  I thought I’d found it in Isaak.

  Ceilos put his hand on my back, running his palm back and forth across it reassuringly.

  I wish I’d never met him.

  Even as I thought that, I knew it was a lie.

  I looked up as Isaak said the word “paradox.” That was like a word I remembered from the old language—the word for contradiction. I knew what he meant, and it turned my stomach sour all over again.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” the woman with the short brown hair—Syrin—asked. “That it doesn’t matter what we do? We’re all destined to die, and we’re supposed to just sit back and accept it?”

  “Of course not,” Gitrin snapped. “Would you quiet down long enough to let the boy finish?”

  Isaak took a deep breath. “When Gitrin and Nadin developed the time postern,” he said, “they were thinking they could use it to go back in time to change history. To undo the climate disaster. That won’t work—but there’s nothing to say you couldn’t still use it to travel forward.”

  The courtyard fell silent. I stared up at Isaak, eyes widened.

  “You think this would be possible?” Marin finally said.

  “I don’t see why not. The planet’s habitable, but the population isn’t too big—our continent Cimmeria hasn’t even been terraformed yet. The technology you have here in Elytherios would be a huge help to our scientists. And besides”—he shrugged—“it is your planet, after all.”

  “Why should we believe any of this?” a man’s voice called out. “How do we know this isn’t a geroi trick, trying to lure us out of the mountain and back into captivity? After all, this boy came here with the geroi’s blood.”

  “Teros, be sensible,” Marin said. She gestured to Isaak’s father. “That one’s been here for weeks. He can’t even speak our language!”

  “That’s what they’d want us to believe.”

  Gitrin scoffed. “Friends, listen to yourselves—”

  “That’s enough, Gitrin,” Eos broke in. “It’s a valid concern. It wouldn’t be safe for us to simply blindly evacuate our entire population when we don’t know what’s on the other side. We’d have to send an envoy ahead into what could potentially be an extremely dangerous situation. I refuse to agree to something that could harm any of our citizens. Not to mention that it would take hands and eyes away from the revivification project, which is our top prio—”

  “I’ll go.”

  My voice felt so quiet that I thought for sure no one would hear me, but Eos stopped mid-sentence and stared at me. “What?” he said.

  “I’ll go,” I repeated, louder this time. “As a way to prove myself to all of you. You didn’t know what to do with me anyway, right? So I’ll go through the time postern. I’ll learn more about the future, find out if it would be feasible for us to evacuate there. If it is, then I will return with proof. And if not… well, then, you’ll be rid of me. Your hands will be clean.”

  I could feel Isaak’s eyes boring into the side of my head, but I didn’t look at him. I kept my gaze riveted on Eos.

  Beside me, Ceilos stood. “I’ll go, too.” I looked at him in surprise. His mouth was drawn in a thin line. “I’m not letting you go alone,” he said firmly.

  “I will also go,” said Gitrin. “They are my students—my family.” She stared at Ceilos for a long moment, and something seemed to pass between them that I couldn’t quite understand.

  The crowd around us began to murmur. I saw a number of people tugging their earlobes, and a glimmer of hope began to burn in my chest.

  �
��Very well,” said Eos. “Shall we put this to a vote, then?” He called out the words in the old language once more, and this time, nearly everyone in the courtyard got to their feet.

  My skin prickled, and I rubbed my sweaty palms together. The world’s rotation seemed to be slowing back to a regular pace. It didn’t seem possible, but somehow I’d managed to evade death’s jaws again.

  “It’s decided, then,” Eos said. “Gitrin will accompany the outsiders through the time postern and report back to us. How long will it take you to build the device?”

  “Not long, now that we have the key. Maybe a week?”

  As Eos tugged his earlobe, I felt a hand on my shoulder. Isaak.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked, his brows scrunched with worry.

  I forced a smile. “Of course.”

  “Yeah, but... I can’t guarantee that everything’s going to be okay for you in my time. Our government isn’t exactly...” He trailed off, struggling to find the right word. “...super fantastic or anything.”

  I laughed humorlessly. “That’s nothing I’m not accustomed to.” Isaak didn’t laugh back. He didn’t even smile. I nudged him. “Don’t worry, Isaak. This was your idea, after all.”

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t thinking you—” He broke off, then added, barely audibly, “and Ceilos... I mean...”

  My spirits sank like a stone through water. “You don’t want me to come?”

  “I didn’t mean that! I just—”

  Before he could finish, Gitrin pushed between us. “Nadin, I’m going to need your help getting the postern prepared. Think you’re up to it?”

  My eyes didn’t move from Isaak’s. He was staring at me, brows furrowed, expression unreadable, waiting for my response.

  I turned to Gitrin. “I am. Just tell me when.”

  “So, how does this work?” I asked, staring at the jumbled pile of tools and supplies Gitrin had dumped out on the table between us. In the midst of the clutter sat Delia’s 3-D printed key. Nadin had opened it with her medallion, and I ran a finger absently over the irregular curves and corners of the unnameable shape and glanced over at her.

  She was mad at me. She still wouldn’t even look at me. I didn’t know why I’d said what I said after the forum. It wasn’t that I didn’t want her to come. After all, like she’d pointed out, this whole thing was my idea. It wasn’t even that Ceilos was coming, too—although, if I was honest with myself, that was part of it.

  It was that I didn’t know what was waiting for me when I got back. I was wanted by GSAF, and so was Emil. I’d been gone for sixteen months. And now I was going to be turning back up accompanied by three aliens and my prodigal dad, and I’d have to explain to everyone where the hell I’d been, hopefully without winding up in jail and/or some kind of mental institution. I’d promised the Iamoi a means of survival, and I had no clue how I’d be able to deliver on that.

  And then there was Tamara.

  And, yeah. That was part of it, too.

  So you couldn’t really blame me for being a little bit antsy about the whole thing. But I didn’t know how I was supposed to explain that to Nadin. I wished I’d never said anything at all.

  One of the diodes on the key sparked purple, and I yanked my hand back with a start. Gitrin laughed and made a tsking noise at the back of her throat. “It’s going to be a bit harder to program without full access to the System,” she said, strapping on a pair of goggles that looked uncannily like my Speculus headset back home, “but it’s not impossible.”

  Emil, sitting on the bench to the left of me, prodded me hard in the ribs. “Well? What’s she saying?”

  I rolled my eyes and grudgingly translated. Emil had demanded to be part of the building process, since he’d spent so long decoding the technology with Mama D, so I got roped into translating for him while they worked. Most of it was going right over my head—hacking and programming was never my strong suit. That had always been Henry’s territory.

  I wondered what he would think about all this. He’d cracked jokes about my “Little Green Men,” but I knew deep down he was dying to know what it was that GSAF had been covering up. I wished he could see this now.

  “We can’t just use Emil’s key to go back,” Nadin said. Her head was bent, rummaging through a second box of supplies that Gitrin had brought from the engineer’s longhouse, and she didn’t look up as she spoke. “Because of what he said about the paradox. His key is the one you and your friends unburied in your time, and what you used to travel back. Its counterpart is with the geroi now. Which means”—she pulled another posternkey, more tarnished than Emil’s but otherwise almost identical—“it has to stay here until we can leave it in the place where you found it. So we’ll copy the coordinates from Emil’s key onto this one.”

  Emil moved to poke me again, and I leaned away from him. “Yeah, yeah, I know.” I quickly repeated what Nadin had just said in English.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Does it have a record of the time and place that I left from?”

  “It does,” Gitrin answered after I translated. “But it is not exact. The postern that he used recorded a timestamp on the key, so we can estimate the date. But the spatial data will be harder to calculate. The planet is constantly in motion—in its orbit around the sun, and in its own daily rotation. If we had a static connection between two posterns that would make things easier. But those need to be established beforehand—the receiving postern must be programmed to the key’s frequency. Without it, we have to just make a guess. If we calculate wrong, you could rematerialize in the middle of solid rock, or the vacuum of space.”

  “So we’re talking potential death here,” I said, frowning.

  Gitrin tugged her earlobe. “The safest alternative is to direct the key to transport you to a wide open area, one where there aren’t likely to be many obstructions. Your keys were programmed to bring you to the plateau outside Hope Renewed. I’ll have to program Emil’s key with that information, too, for when you find it in the future—but that will be easier. I know the exact date and time each of you arrived here, and I know the exact spatial coordinates for the plateau on each of those dates. Your time, though, is an unknown to me. How has the planet’s surface been altered? Have there been any changes to the planet’s rotation or solar orbit? Emil’s key gives me a clue, but it’s all just guesswork.”

  “We have to make sure we arrive at a later date than when Emil left,” Nadin pointed out. She looked at me—for the first time since the end of the forum. I felt my face color under her scrutiny. “If his arrival and departure overlap with each other, that could also create a paradox.”

  “So there’s no way we can get back any earlier than sixteen months after I left,” I said glumly. “And we could wind up getting back even later than that.”

  As I spoke, Ceilos entered the courtyard carrying a large clay jug with steam coming out the top. Small earthenware cups hung from hooks on the jug’s side. “Sokol,” he said, placing it on the table. “From Marin.” He sat next to Nadin, putting a hand on her knee. She smiled tightly at him, and moved to pour some of the hot beverage into one of the cups. I put a hand on the back of my neck and looked down.

  “Once we arrive in Isaak’s time,” Gitrin said, taking a cup from Nadin’s outstretched hand, “our first priority should be to establish a stable connection between the two posterns. Once we have that connection, we can move freely between them without experiencing a time skip. That will also eliminate the concern about miscalculations.”

  “That makes sense. It’s like interplanetary travel in our time as opposed to at the turn of the century,” Emil said after I translated. “Now it’s easy for shuttles to move back and forth between Mars and Earth—there’s spaceports on both planets, a stationary place for the pilots to travel back and forth between. But in the old days, before there were humans on Mars, the space agencies just had to calculate and hope for the best. Maybe they’d land in the right place—or maybe they’d burn up on entry.
” He took a sip of the hot red liquid and winced at its bitter taste. “It’s not going to be easy, though, even if we make it back in one piece. GSAF has the caves totally sealed off. Delia bribed a guy to get me in the last time—I doubt she’d be able to manage again.”

  “But surely this Gee-Saph will listen to reason,” Ceilos said, setting his empty sokol cup down on the table. “The posterns belong to the Iamoi. This is our planet. They can’t keep it from us.”

  Emil snorted. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”

  “But we can try,” Nadin snapped back at him in English. All four of us stared at her. My mouth involuntarily pulled up into a grin. Her accent was lilting but slight—much fainter than I was sure my own Iamoan accent was. I guessed my teaching might have paid off after all.

  Emil stared at her appraisingly. Then he nodded, slowly. “You’re right. There’s nothing else we can do.”

  Nadin’s face softened slightly. “All right. Let’s get to work, then.” She pulled her medallion out from under her shirt and opened the second posternkey.

  “Isaak,” Ceilos said. I started, my face reddening as I realized I’d been staring at Nadin. I could tell by Ceilos’ expression that he had been watching me. “You should probably go tell your father what’s going on.”

  I scoffed. “I doubt he cares,” I said. He’d flounced back to the guesthouse after the forum. I was sure he wasn’t really interested in the specifics of the time postern. But I stood up anyway. I’d been dismissed.

  I smiled at Nadin as I passed, and to my surprise, she smiled back. Then her face colored and she looked down, tucking a hair behind her ear. My heart skipped for a second, followed by a wave of crushing guilt. What was I doing? I didn’t even know anymore. Everything was a torquing trainwreck.

  I trudged back to the guesthouse, still feeling Ceilos’ eyes burning into my back long after I’d left the courtyard behind.

  The week passed in a blur, with Gitrin and I spending most of our waking hours working on programming the posternkey. It was decided that the area we were going to aim for was an open space in the hills outside what Isaak called Tierra Nueva. It was close to the caves where the one working postern we knew of was located, but Emil insisted that the area had been sealed off from the public, so it should be deserted when we arrived.