by Kali Wallace
“Jaswinder,” my aunt said calmly, the corners of her lips rising. “Please don’t interrupt me. I was saying the Councils will never agree to that, but we don’t have to ask their permission.”
“Oh.” I slumped back into my pillow. “No. We don’t.”
“I won’t be able to shield you as I did before,” my aunt said. “You’re not a child anymore. You’ll have to testify before the Councils. You’ll be asked to tell your story over and over again. They won’t allow you silence, not this time.”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t want to be silent this time.”
“If it is what you want . . .”
“It is.”
My aunt hesitated for just a second, then she nodded and stood up. “Very well. I will take care of it. But for now, you are going to rest.” She leaned over to kiss my forehead. “I love you, Jas. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
Only when she was gone did I think that was, perhaps, the first time she had said the words aloud—or perhaps the first time I had been able to hear them.
I wiped the tears from my eyes and watched the news for a while longer with the sound turned down low, but the dizzying blur of images and faces became overwhelming. They kept showing Zahra’s picture: as she had been in her false SPEC identification, and as she had been as a child in a Councils school in Presidio Bay. So happy in the latter, so grim in the former. Ten years, a government’s cowardly lies, the mesmerizing control of a narcissistic criminal, that’s all it had taken to transform a smiling teenage girl into a notorious terrorist. And now she was gone. The damage could not be undone.
I shut off the wallscreen, and at once, without the distraction, a cold fear twisted through me. I felt like a person split in two, one who spoke the words of confidence and reassurance to my aunt, and another who curled up inside a raw wound of grief and fear and guilt. There were tears blurring my eyes and a dull pain throbbing in my chest.
I had meant what I said to Aunt Padmavati: People needed to know. I was not going to sink into silence again.
But in that moment, in that sterile room in the domed gray city, I was glad she had preserved the delicate peace around me for a short while longer. Eventually I fell asleep watching the clouds drift over Armstrong City.
* * *
• • •
The soft noise of the door sliding open woke me. The room was dark, as was the city outside. The mist had thickened, and the silver buildings were muted and gray. Local night again. I had slept through the day.
The chair beside my bed scraped. A hand touched mine.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Not a doctor or my aunt, but Baqir. He looked so much better than when I had last seen him. He was clean, rested, clear-eyed, with his brown hair falling over his face, dressed in a plain blue hospital robe and shuffling slippers. His left shoulder was encased in a healing brace; his prosthetic arm had been removed. The brace and bandages looked stiff and uncomfortable, but he did not seem to be in pain.
“Hi,” he said. He wasn’t smiling. I wanted to reach up to touch his face, trace my fingers along his jaw to his lips, to reassure myself that he was real, alive, here, but I did not move.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He shrugged his good shoulder. “I’m fine. They’re building me a new arm. Last one was unsalvageable.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I didn’t say anything and we fell into an awkward silence. But we didn’t have awkward silences, the two of us; that had never been our way. Baqir was fiddling with the belt of his hospital robe, and I could not stop looking at him.
“You know,” he said, “I thought that smashing two fucking huge spaceships together was going to be the most insane thing your family did this week, but I think your aunt has outdone you.”
“What? What did she . . .” Then I understood. I struggled to sit up. “She released the data from House of Wisdom.”
“You knew she was going to?”
“It was my idea.”
“I . . . don’t think I am exactly surprised by that,” he said. “For fuck’s sake, Jas. They’re going to be all over you. The investigators and journalists and—everybody. They’re never going to leave you alone.”
“I know,” I said.
And I did. I did know, but even so, the prospect of having to tell the story—everything I would have to reveal—every accusation I would have to face—every warning I would have to give—it all began to drum at the medicated haze of my mind like the first dangerous rain of the monsoon. My breath was short, my heart fast, my thoughts suddenly racing.
“Hey, hey, don’t do that,” Baqir said. “Jas, come on, breathe. It’ll be all right.”
He took my hand and held on tight. I closed my eyes and focused on the touch of his hand, imagined that warmth spreading through me, melting an invisible frost that coated my veins and clung to my bones. He moved his hand and I thought he was leaving—already tired of my company, and I didn’t have the energy to blame him—but he did not stand. He lifted my hand and kissed the palm softly. My eyes snapped open, and he pressed a second kiss to my hand, right where the fingers met the palm, then lowered our joined hands to the bed again.
He said, “If I hadn’t been so fucked up, I would have realized what you were doing when you put us on that ship. I should have realized you never meant to follow us.”
I held my breath for a moment—forced myself to let it out. My eyes felt hot but I did not look away. “I didn’t want you to know.”
“Yeah, I got that, but I should have anyway. I know you. I know everything about you.” A pause. “Well. Almost everything.”
I couldn’t figure out what that tone meant, somewhere between sad and frustrated, amused and relieved. “I didn’t want you to know,” I said again.
“I know,” Baqir said. “Because I know you’re an idiot. And I’m really fucking angry about—about all of this. Everything. All of them, for what they did. And pretty angry at you too. But I’m also so fucking grateful that she didn’t let you kill yourself.”
I’m sorry, she had said. I’ll finish it. I had assumed we would both die aboard House of Wisdom, Zahra with her guilt and I with mine. I had never been able to explain how it felt to be an empty shell of memory where a son ought to be, and how many times I had returned to House of Wisdom in my dreams, in my fears, in my nightmares. I had never been able to tell anybody how often I wished my mother had never sent me away at the end. Ten years I had been a ghost among the living. I didn’t know how to be anything else.
I reached up to touch Baqir’s face then, to brush his hair back from his forehead and feel the warmth as he leaned into my hand, but the motion made something pull in my side, and I gasped in pain.
“Okay, stop,” Baqir said, sitting back. “You’re hurt. Just—just rest.”
“I’m not hurt. You sound like my aunt.”
“I don’t sound anything like your aunt and you know it.”
“No. You don’t.” I settled for running my hand down his arm, grasping his hand again, feeling a small thrill when he didn’t pull away. “What are they going to do to the survivors from Homestead? Not the kids. The adults.”
“Who the fuck knows?” he said. “Turns out one of them is a Councils citizen, and she’s sort of taken the lead in speaking for them. Probably because she’s the only one anybody would listen to. You can ignore a bunch of desert-rat criminals, but you can’t ignore a nice Councils grandmother who also happens to be a former professor of political science. If anything’s been decided, they aren’t saying.”
“That doesn’t seem good enough,” I said, “just waiting for the Councils to decide.”
Not for Zahra, who had only ever wanted a safe place to live. For her brother and sister. For the memory of their parents, whom the Councils had treated so cruelly. For the pilot who had tried to
rescue the doomed crew of the Breton. For the young SPEC agent with the brown eyes and curly hair who had been sent on a mission doomed for failure.
Baqir did that awkward one-shouldered shrug again. “I doubt anybody’s bothered to ask them what they want. Or need. Or even why they were there in the first place. The Councils don’t tend to like the answers, so they don’t ask.”
The bitterness in his voice had probably always been there, I thought, but I had always tried not to hear it.
“That’s what Ariana wanted me to do, you know,” he said. “For the project she was going to premiere at the Second Council. She was interviewing a bunch of people about—well, everything, people living all over the world and off it, but she wanted to talk to me about moving from the deserts to the Councils. I told her I’d think about it. It seemed like such a massive pain in the ass when she asked, and I didn’t want my parents to see and think . . .” He smiled sadly. “Xiomara’s going to try to get the project shown anyway, even unfinished. I think I might help her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Why? What for?”
“Everything. For . . . I don’t know. Everything.” My voice cracked on the last word, and there were tears stinging my eyes again. “I’m sorry we couldn’t save Ariana. I’m sorry I never asked . . . I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, Jas,” Baqir said. Then, his voice little more than a whisper: “We’ll be okay.”
It overwhelmed me, how very much I yearned to believe him, to trust in the warmth of his hand holding tight to mine, his brown eyes warm and sad and knowing, and the reassurance that he was staying, staying beside me, staying close, and not leaving.
After a while he fell asleep with his head resting on the bed, a position that could not possibly be comfortable, but then Baqir had always been able to sleep anywhere. I watched him for a while, brushing my fingers gently through his dark hair, afraid to move too much lest I wake him. It seemed impossible that I could still be so tired, after doing almost nothing but sleeping for a couple of days, but my eyes kept slipping closed. Every time, every time, House of Wisdom was there, burning, and from the wounds in its side the dead drifted, alight as candles, and silver worms curled and crackled and whipped, and I could not grasp anything in the darkness. I had brought back an entirely new style of nightmare from House of Wisdom.
Eventually I gave up on sleep and turned on the wallscreen, without any sound, only to have something to stare at besides the gray city.
I was still staring blankly sometime later when the door opened. A nurse leaned into the room, and when he saw Baqir he rolled his eyes.
“There he is,” the nurse said quietly. “Should’ve known. He’s been asking about you nonstop for three days.”
I didn’t say anything, but whatever crossed my face made the man laugh softly. He came in to look over the medical monitors beside my bed. He had the tall, thin frame of somebody who had spent his life in low gravity, and he moved with the ease of a longtime Moon resident. When he saw the news on the wallscreen—they were showing images of the man called Adam Light and his top followers—he let out a breath and shook his head.
“Those people,” he said, and I tensed, not wanting to hear what he was about to say. But he went on, “It’s so heartbreaking. I can’t imagine being so desperate that devoting myself to a monster like that seems like the only way out. But I suppose that’s the problem, isn’t it? I live in a great bloody bubble on the Moon. I’ve never had to imagine it.”
The nurse caught me looking at him, and he smiled sheepishly.
“Sorry. You try to get some sleep too.”
Then he was gone, and the room was silent again. I didn’t sleep, but neither did the creeping nightmares return. I watched the news, and I watched Baqir sleep, and without shying away from where my mind wandered, without succumbing to despair or guilt or hopelessness, I let myself think. My aunt and I had a lot to talk about.
* * *
• • •
The Councils building in Armstrong City was a tall white structure of metal and glass, narrow as a blade, at the center of a broad plaza dotted by manicured spots of greenery. The lunar night was over, and Armstrong was once again welcoming the sunlight. The filtered light transformed the city, drawing people outside to fill the public spaces, casting rainbow prisms of color where there had been only white and gray before. Parks and gardens opened their roofs to reveal the life that was protected so carefully within.
Aunt Padmavati and I were waiting in a room on a high floor. Aside from a Councils page who peeked her head in every half hour to ask if we needed anything, we were alone. It was the first day of the Councils’ preliminary meetings on the House of Wisdom incident. My aunt, due to her part in releasing the data from the ship, was to be questioned by her fellow Councilors. She seemed unconcerned. Though we had spent more time together and spoken more frankly to each other in the past fortnight than ever before, I still could not tell if her nonchalance was an act.
The page returned. “They’ve just finished hearing Dr. Sepulveda’s statement now. You’ll be called after a ten-minute break.”
Over the page’s shoulder, a quick glimpse down the hall revealed a woman with long steel-gray hair wound into plaits emerging from the meeting room. Dr. Rosalinda Sepulveda, one of the Homestead survivors, the Councils citizen and former professor who had emerged as their spokesperson. She had moved to the desert to be with her daughter and grandchildren when they joined Adam Light’s family. The daughter had died aboard Homestead, after refusing to evacuate, but the three grandchildren had escaped.
The door closed again, and I tried to decide if what I had seen on Dr. Sepulveda’s face in that instant was calm or fear. My palms were sweaty. I could not sit still. I could not stop thinking of Zahra’s farewell, and how badly she had wanted a better life for her siblings, and how frightened and alone they must be at the center of so much attention. I knew my aunt had spoken to them while I was in the hospital, but for them, and for all the other survivors, nothing had been decided.
“What’s going to happen to them?” I asked.
Aunt Padmavati put her hand on my knee to stop it from bouncing. It was not the first time she had done so. “I don’t know any more than you do.”
“Most of them didn’t even do anything. Not much more than board a ship under knowingly false pretenses, and that’s barely even a crime.”
“I know, Jas. But the Councilors are also concerned with what the group as a whole attempted to do.”
“None of them would have been there if they thought they had any other choice,” I said. “They were desperate and afraid, and to them that man seemed like a better option than staying desperate and afraid.”
“As I’m sure Dr. Sepulveda said to the investigation committee, in her own words, and will say again when they question her more thoroughly. Is this what you’re worried about? It’s unlikely they’ll ask you about the survivors. I imagine they’re rather more concerned with the parasite.”
“Maybe they should ask me,” I said. “Maybe they should ask everyone what they would do if given the choice between spending years and years trying to prove themselves worthy of the most basic fucking human decency or leaving it all behind.”
“Jas,” my aunt said gently, “it’s not that simple.”
“It’s supposed to be,” I countered. “The whole purpose of the Councils is supposed to be a way to stop using it’s not that simple as an excuse to protect our own comfort while others suffer. That’s what the Councils are trying to do, isn’t it? They’re trying to make it look like they’re so fucking magnanimous for not blaming children for being raised in a poisoned wasteland, and hoping nobody will notice that they’re ignoring all the people still there. All the people who are going to follow the next monster who comes along offering them something better. The Councils are supposed to be that something better. That was their whole fu
cking point, from the start. But it’s like everybody’s forgotten that.”
My aunt gave me an assessing look. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
I turned away, suddenly embarrassed, because the truth was I hadn’t, not until I was forced to. I had spent my entire life not thinking about it. Not thinking about why Baqir banked his anger with deliberate calm when he talked about his childhood. Not thinking about how absurd it was that a world capable of building research outposts on moons hundreds of millions of kilometers away claimed it couldn’t protect children from sickness if those children happened to be in the wrong place on the map. Not thinking about how insidiously easy it was to convince oneself that the burden of proving one’s humanity rested entirely on the shoulders of those in need of help, and not on those who could help but chose not to.
“I’m thinking about it now,” I said. “They’re going to make me sit in there and justify trying to save humanity so, yes, I’ve been thinking about why it’s worth saving.”
Aunt Padmavati was smiling.
“What?” I said. “Do you think I’ll just piss them off if I say something?”
She shook her head slightly. “I’m thinking about something Amita told me once, a long time ago,” she said. “This was long before you were born, before she met Vinod. I had just returned home after a year in North America. I had been volunteering at an application processing camp. She was so excited about the work she was doing at university. Her mind was overflowing with ideas, so many brilliant thoughts she couldn’t stop talking about them. They were only ideas then, before they became her Almora engine, but even then she knew she was going to put humanity back into deep space. She knew it. She had always been confident, but this was different. She knew she was going to build the engines that pushed humankind farther than it had ever traveled.”
