There were many Proto search parties, each one of which had been assigned a slightly different route to the city, to raise the chances of encountering humans along the way who could help them contact the Proto Authority or perhaps explain why the Authority wasn’t answering. By chance (or, more likely, by request of Starlock’s mother) Starlock and Moonlight had been assigned together to another group, on some other path. Even though Luck had pushed Starlock away, her mind strayed again and again to the two of them hiking together for hours—
She was jerked out of these thoughts by Rocky, who was pulling at her arm. “Luck, there’s an air transpo down there! Just up ahead!”
She suspected her mother had arranged for Rocky’s inclusion in her own search party as part of a campaign to wear down Luck’s aversion to him. With a show of annoyance, she removed her arm from Rocky’s grasp, but she still followed him eagerly. They emerged from the trees to a valley spread out below them. In the center of this valley was a crashed air transpo, its insect-eye windows shattered, its propellers bent, its cabin partially crushed. It was the first sign of civilization they’d yet seen.
“Is that the transpo that comes to the Rez each month?” Luck asked.
“Looks like it,” said Rocky. “Let’s catch up!”
The two other members of their party were halfway down the hill. Rocky made a grab for Luck’s hand, which she quickly drew out of reach. He didn’t seem to mind or even notice this rebuff, because his hand was already straying to his crotch. Luck stopped herself from slapping it. She wondered if she would be resisting the urge to slap him for the rest of her life…while Starlock would lose all sense of resistance to Moonlight.
“Come on, Luck!” Rocky urged as he trotted down the valley’s slope.
Luck followed suit, trying to retrieve her thoughts. Why did she care so much about Moonlight? She’d come to terms with Starlock being Paired with her—mostly—ages ago. Yet she did care. Very much. And Starlock—why had he brought her to that pool by the river, a place she avoided going even in her mind?
“Stop,” Luck said aloud.
“What?” asked Rocky.
“Not you,” she said. “I was talking to myself.”
“Why are you talking to yourself?” Rocky asked.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” she snapped.
“Let’s not argue,” he said magnanimously, as though they’d been Paired for years and he were used to her moods.
As they neared the others, the leader of their search party, a man in his forties called Larkspur, peered through the transpo’s broken windows. He called out to them, “It’s Mizter Caldwell! And he looks dead.”
Luck and Rocky ran the last distance to join them. The transpo’s passenger door was partially crushed, but working together, they managed to wrench it upward. Inside, limp against the straps of the passenger seat, was the blue-skinned Proto Liaison Officer. Mizter Caldwell was hardly recognizable. His beautiful skin had shriveled everywhere, though in some places it had expanded into a loose sort of foam, so that there were patches of what looked like fluffy, sparkling mold. His long arms were no more than ropy strands. His mouth was open in a skull-like smile, all of his white teeth prominent. He appeared mummified, and a sweet, chemical smell wafted up from his body.
He was obviously dead, and yet Larkspur, out of a sense of duty, touched the man’s neck to feel for a pulse, and then he shook his head. The Protos were not sure how to react to the circumstance of this man’s death—this man who had had the power to remove Protos from the Rez, who had frequently inspected Protos’ private sleeping quarters to check that nothing inappropriate was happening, this man who had taken DNA samples of Proto children to double-check their parentage…
“He came to our classroom once,” Rocky said. “He wasn’t very nice.”
“I remember,” said Luck.
That day Mizter Caldwell had told the teacher that he wanted to “observe the Rez’s curiosities at play.” When the teacher had politely asked him what that meant, since the students were not playing but studying, he’d explained that he was referring to the children learning. Protos were, of course, a library, he said, and each Proto child was a book in that library. But their minds were simply curiosities—quaint side effects. As much as Luck loved library books, she hadn’t liked the idea of being one.
A shuddering breath from the other seat startled all of them.
“The pilot’s alive!” said Larkspur.
Pulling the opposite door open, they found a woman slumped over the controls. She drew long, rasping breaths as her half-closed eyes studied the Protos standing in front of her. Luck could not be sure, but it seemed as if the woman was not at all happy to see them. There was something malevolent in her stare.
“Did you get…what you wanted…then?” the woman croaked.
No one knew what to make of this question.
“What happened?” Larkspur asked her. “Are you sick? Is this a sickness?”
“You would know…,” the woman said venomously.
Along her upper chest, a necklacelike ring of skin and muscle had dissolved to her rib cage. Luck caught a glimpse of light pink lung tissue, inflating and deflating as she spoke. The rest of the woman wasn’t mummified like Mizter Caldwell; quite the opposite: her skin gave the impression of a solid mass of motion. On closer examination, Luck saw paintings, like living tattoos, wriggling and leaping and slithering across the woman’s flesh. They looked obscenely alive on the skin of this dying person.
“Look!” whispered Cloud, the young woman who was the fourth member of their search party. She was pointing at the pilot’s arms. The woman’s muscles were disintegrating inch by inch, as if a burning fuse were eating her up. In the wake of this “fuse,” her tattoos were frozen and blurred over bones that stood out in stark relief. As they watched, the decay spread to the scalp beneath her multicolored hair.
“Should we move her out onto the ground?” asked Cloud.
“Don’t…touch…me,” the woman rasped. She tried to reach a golden pendant, some sort of good-luck charm that was hanging from the controls, but she had no strength left.
Luck untangled the gold chain to put it into the woman’s hand, and for a moment she herself was transfixed by the image on the pendant. It was a delicately rendered holograph of a human with flowing black hair falling over his forehead on one side, and curly brown hair on the other. This man had one black eye and one green eye in a face mottled by different skin textures and colors. A beautiful golden light radiated from his head as he lifted his many-colored arms toward her and smiled.
The pilot murmured, “You Naturalists…standing there…watching me go…” She drew in a long, wet breath. “This is his world, not yours….”
These last words were hardly audible. The woman’s mouth fell open, and her eyes sank back into her skull as she died.
Rocky retched and turned away. All of the Protos stepped back from the transpo in disgust.
“Why does she think we did this?” Luck asked, feeling ill. She’d never seen this particular human before, and yet she felt the woman’s intense hatred. Was it the mere fact that they were Protos?
“Are they all dying?” Cloud asked.
“There are too many of them,” Luck said. “They can’t all die.”
“But, Luck, every human we’ve encountered has been affected,” Larkspur pointed out. “And doesn’t Mizter Caldwell live in the city? If he was flying from there, people in the city must have it—whatever it is.”
“Or if they don’t, they will soon,” Cloud agreed. “It must be everywhere.”
Luck could see where this discussion was heading. The others wanted to go back. Trying to sound logical and not eager, she said, “We should still go to the city. Think about it. We need to find out for sure what’s happened to the Proto Au
thority. We’ll never know unless we keep going.”
Larkspur hesitated, weighing her argument, but he shook his head. “It’s true. We need to find out about the Proto Authority. But we’ve seen enough to know that the humans are in trouble and we’ll have to figure out how to feed ourselves, at least for a while. We should go back to the Rez and tell them that.”
* * *
That evening, before the sun went down, they set up camp on the ridge above the valley, from where they would walk back to the Rez the following morning. As Luck collected wood for the fire, she had a clear view to the north, where she spotted Starlock’s search party, setting up their own camp.
Hours later, after a simple dinner and another argument about pressing on to the city—which Luck lost—she lay awake in the tent she shared with Cloud, staring up at the tent fabric, thinking first about Starlock and then about the humans. They had always presented themselves as perfect and invincible. Benign, mostly, except for the occasional practical joke by a sentry or a cutting remark by Mizter Caldwell. Benign strength—that was their nature. Luck could scarcely imagine that anything, even a plague, could overcome them.
When the others had fallen asleep and her camp was quiet, Luck pulled on her jacket and boots, scooped up her sleeping bag and the small bundle of provisions she’d stashed away after dinner, and quietly let herself out of the tent.
She saw the wisdom in Larkspur’s plan to go home, and if she hadn’t been the one to see the sentries fall or the one who had found them, and if she hadn’t set her mind on reaching the city, or at least seeing and understanding a larger piece of the world, she would have accepted his decision. But as it was, Luck was not ready to turn home yet.
The night air was perfectly still and, though the moon had not yet risen, she could see a long distance by the light of the stars. She began walking north, toward the faint glow of a dying campfire.
By the time she reached Starlock’s camp, more than an hour later, Luck was tired and cold, and the new camp’s fire had long since gone out. She crept quietly between the two tents and listened, thinking she would find the one that belonged to the girls and sneak in for the night. In the morning, she would have another chance at convincing her fellow Protos to keep going to the city—or she could tag along with them if that was already their plan. She was sure that Starlock, at least, would not want to turn back.
Hearing nothing from either tent, Luck quietly unzipped the flap of the closest one and peeked inside. Her eyes had long since adjusted to the night and she could make out the interior quite easily. Two shadowed figures lay inside. One figure opened its eyes, saw her, and sat up. In the dimness, its features resolved into Starlock’s face.
“Luck,” he whispered. “How—how did you get here?”
“Starlock—” she began. But the rest of the sentence died in her mouth. She had recognized the other figure in the tent, who was still fast asleep, an arm thrown across Starlock’s midsection, a leg draped over his legs: Moonlight.
Luck was dimly aware that she was acting out a scene from countless novels as she stood outside the tent, her mouth forming an O of surprise while she watched Starlock hastily remove Moonlight’s arm and get to his knees.
“We’re only—she wanted—” he began, continuing to follow the script Luck had read before. “Luck, I couldn’t say no when—”
She didn’t need to hear any more. Luck shut her mouth, let go of the tent’s open flap, and dashed away from the campsite.
She ran until she was quite out of breath, and then she walked as fast as she could. Her heart was pounding, and yet it seemed to communicate no warmth to the rest of her.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered.
It would have happened eventually. They were going to be Paired in five weeks, and Luck had told him no. And yet…and yet the world had been unbalanced for days. She’d begun to think these last weeks might be…she didn’t know what she had thought they might be. Different. But Starlock had given himself to Moonlight—or Moonlight had taken him. It was done.
Luck stumbled on until she was too tired to go any farther, and then, feeling as desolate as the countryside, she unrolled her sleeping bag beneath the wide canopy of an oak tree and slept alone.
5. THEY WHISPERED IN THE DARK
When she woke at first light, Luck found that her emotions had clarified into a grim determination. She decided to press on to the east alone. If the Proto Authority found her and punished her, so be it. What exactly was left for her on the Rez anyway?
At midday, Rocky caught up with her. Luck had known she was heading toward the main path, where all of the search parties would eventually converge, but she’d thought she was far ahead of everyone else and so was entirely surprised when he came puffing along the trail to join her as she sat on a rock eating jerky and looking out to the horizon.
Rocky dropped to the ground, sunburned, winded, his sleeping bag and pack of provisions bouncing against each other as he dumped them onto the dirt. After he’d caught his breath, he ran a hand through his sweaty hair and smiled up at Luck as though nothing could have been more natural than him following her.
“You’re going to the city anyway,” he said. He took a long drink from his canteen.
Luck nodded. “You read my note?” She’d left a note in the tent for the others to find so they wouldn’t waste time looking for her.
“Note? No. I—I woke up really early and I saw you were gone. But I guessed where you were headed.” His tone suggested that this was the cleverest conclusion imaginable. “I had to go so fast to catch you! I’m glad you stopped for lunch.”
“I wasn’t really looking for company, Rocky.”
Rocky smiled as though he could see right through her. “Course you were. No one would want to be out here alone. It’s practically my job to protect you, Luck. And I’m dying to see what a city looks like.”
“There might be a lot of dying people in the city,” Luck told him, turning his words around in an attempt to discourage him from coming along. “It’s not going to be fun.”
Rocky shrugged and wrinkled his nose and said, “So what if they’re dying? They’re just humans, Luck. We don’t have to be sad for them. There’s thousands of them. Or millions. And I don’t think they care about us as much as the teacher in school said they do.”
She had no intention of overtly agreeing with Rocky about anything, but privately Luck thought this last idea might be true. And it seemed, to her irritation, that she’d now inadvertently agreed to him coming with her. Though she would never have admitted it to herself, she was relieved to have a companion.
“Do you think there will be horses?” Rocky asked.
“In the city? I don’t think so. Not for hundreds of years.”
“Cars, then?”
Luck shrugged. “Maybe.”
They walked through hilly, forested country all that long spring afternoon and stopped to eat dinner when the sun was going down. They had built a fire, over which Luck was heating a can of soup, when branches were pushed aside and Starlock walked into the clearing. Luck felt a surge of happiness when she saw him (he had come for her!), which quickly died when Moonlight appeared a few moments later, looking slightly disheveled but generally beautiful.
There was a pause that lasted for what felt like half an hour. During this time, three things took place: Moonlight realized where and to whom Starlock had been leading them; Luck digested the fact that Starlock had brought his lover with him; and even Rocky participated with visible disappointment in Starlock’s arrival—because of course every young person on the Rez was aware of what Luck and Starlock had once felt for each other.
“Where’s the rest of your group?” Luck finally asked, breaking the silence. She turned back to the fire and her soup, which was nearly boiling.
“They’re coming
,” Starlock answered. Luck was pleased to note that his temper sounded frayed. “We found some dead humans this morning, and the others in our group stayed to bury them.”
“More dead,” Rocky said with a knowing sigh.
“The ones we found were teenagers who’d been climbing a cliff,” Moonlight explained. She seated herself right next to Luck, as though the two of them were the best of friends. “It was kind of a mess.” She produced a piece of jerky from a pocket and took a bite. Somehow even eating jerky was a feminine activity when done by Moonlight.
“They fell when their limbs began to wither,” Starlock told them in a more subdued fashion. He was still standing, as though paralyzed, at the edge of the clearing. “Only one was still alive, because he hadn’t started climbing yet. His legs just sort of crumbled beneath him.”
“But he died while we were there,” Moonlight said, taking back the narrative. “He talked to us for a little while, but then—” She mimed a dead face, mouth sagging, eyes closed.
“His heart finally went,” Starlock explained. “Whatever makes them wither happens pretty quickly, but it seems to take longer to get to the internal organs.”
“Why did you guys come on ahead?” Luck asked indifferently. “Are you both so eager to see the city?” She put a slight emphasis on the word both, hoping that Starlock would contradict her and protest that he hadn’t wanted Moonlight along, but of course he didn’t.
Nodding at Starlock, Moonlight said, “This silly boy made up his mind that sooner was better. He wanted to get to the city immediately.” Moonlight patted the spot next to her, calling Starlock over to the fire. He approached but didn’t sit. Luck saw all this without removing her gaze from the soup. She had no intention of meeting Starlock’s eyes. “It didn’t make any sense for him to go alone—that’s so dangerous!” Moonlight continued. “So I came too.” She warmed her quick-moving, nimble hands over the fire and the image came to Luck’s mind, unbidden, of that right hand draped across Starlock’s chest. She could imagine the girl’s fingers sliding beneath his clothing….
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