Alight

by Scott Sigler

  I just can’t get it out of my head. I wish I could deny it, but O’Malley’s information opened up just enough of Matilda’s memories for me to know the truth. She was born a slave. Is that why she led the rebellion on the Xolotl? To free herself, to free her kind? But if so, then why did all the dead people we saw have the same symbol as her? The same symbol as me?

  The setting sun casts a warm light on Farrar and the thirty-odd young circle-stars that aren’t exploring. They are arranged in formation, Farrar facing them. He squats, yells and punches a big fist straight out into the air while tucking his other tight against his body. He yells again, the fists change position, over and over. The children match his sounds and motions.

  While the slaves cut and haul, while the halves organize and the gears study, the soldiers drill. Something tells me this is the way things were for a long time, even before the Xolotl left whatever planet it came from.

  All the buildings cast lengthening shadows, but one shadow stretches farther and faster, gobbling up the buildings before it—the big ziggurat blocks out the light long before night completely falls. Bishop is somewhere in that shadow. Is he injured? Is he dead? My chest hurts when I think about that. What if he needs help?

  Omeyocan’s two moons slowly reveal themselves. The explorer teams stop searching. Cabral and Okereke smile and wave at me as they return to the shuttle with their young circle-star helpers. Aramovsky completely ignores me, as do the kids on his team. Coyotl sends his kids into the shuttle, then sits down next to me. He’s filthy. In addition to his thighbone, he carries a crowbar he got from the storeroom.

  “We didn’t find anything,” he says. “We searched twenty buildings, total. A few were open, but most”—he wiggles the crowbar—“we had to break into. Nothing in any of them. No people, no furniture, no power…nothing. Sorry, Em.”

  “Why are you apologizing? You looked, and now we know more than we did before.”

  He thinks on this, shrugs.

  “We should at least go back to the ramp,” he says. “I’ll sit with you if you want.”

  I would like that. The landing pad was full of activity; now it is empty, the newly cleared metal dully reflecting the light of two moons. We climb the ramp, then sit on the metal platform, our legs dangling off the edge.

  Together, Coyotl and I watch darkness claim the city. The smell of mint is strong from all the cut vines. We watch the stars come out. I wonder if one of them is the Xolotl.

  I notice him looking at me.

  Oh, no, not him, too.

  “Coyotl, you’re not going to try to kiss me, are you?”

  The redhead gives me a wry smile. “You’re very nice, Em, but you’re not really my type. I was looking at your spear.”

  My grip tightens on my weapon. “Why?”

  “Because it looks dull.”

  He reaches into one of his coveralls’ many pockets and pulls out a rectangular gray stone. He raises it up to show me, then draws his knife from its sheath and holds it flat against his thigh. He slides the stone against the blade, slowly, methodically, again and again.

  After a time, he holds the knife up so I can see it; moonlight plays brightly along the silvery edge.

  “Feel how sharp this is, but don’t slide your hand down it,” he says. “Drag your thumb against it, like this.” He gently pulls the pad of his thumb perpendicular against the blade, then offers the knife to me, hilt-first.

  I use my thumb as he did. The blade feels very sharp. I hand him back the knife. He reaches into his bag and produces a second stone, which he passes to me.

  It takes me a few tries to position the long spear in a way where I can slide the stone against the blade. It makes a small grinding noise when I do.

  Coyotl smiles and nods. “That’s it.”

  He didn’t want to kiss me, he didn’t want my spear—he just wanted my spear to be sharp. Together, we slide stones across steel. Ten strokes. A hundred. Slow and steady. My world narrows to the stone, the metal.

  He stops. “I know you and Aramovsky are fighting.”

  His words pull me out of it. I realize that when I sharpen the spear, I’m not thinking of anything else. In a way, I guess doing this gave my mind a break. I feel more relaxed now.

  “We’re not fighting,” I say. “We have different ideas. We’re trying to figure out the best way to take care of everyone.”

  Coyotl thinks on this for a minute. He nods, goes back to sharpening.

  “That’s good,” he says. “Because this place…I love Omeyocan, but it’s—” he stops and looks at me “—it’s scary.”

  It is at that. I nod.

  He smiles wide, like I have just helped him with a big problem.

  “Aramovsky helps me not be afraid,” he says. “There’s a lot of us who are afraid. He talks to us, tells us that the gods will protect us.”

  I again put the stone to my spear. I sharpen. I think.

  Aramovsky is helping people? He’s trying to turn people against me. Could it be both things at once? I think of what he said to me in the pilothouse. He seemed so genuine, so sincere. Maybe he’s talking nonsense, but he believes that nonsense.

  The scrape of stone on metal chases away my thoughts. I lose myself in the task. I don’t know how much time has gone by when Coyotl stands suddenly, staring out toward the vine wall.

  I look and see nothing. The only light comes from the shuttle behind us. My imagination turns the city’s deep shadows into creeping spiders.

  “What is it?” I ask quietly. “Do you see—”

  “Shhh.”

  He leans forward slightly, peering—he smiles.

  “They’ve returned.”

  The shadows move, take shape: Bishop, Visca, Bawden. Long vines are wrapped around their black coveralls. They look like part of the landscape, even though they’re running. Standing still, they would be invisible. As they draw closer, I see their faces: covered in plant juice and dirt.

  Coyotl runs down the ramp, feet hammering on the metal. Bishop is right—he is noisy.

  Coyotl meets them halfway. His left hand goes to Bishop’s right shoulder, Bishop’s left hand goes to Coyotl’s right. Coyotl repeats the greeting with the other circle-stars. There is something formal about the motion, and also something deeply emotional. None of the other symbols do that. In many ways, the circle-stars are a people unto themselves.

  Coyotl and Bawden enter the shuttle, leaving me with Bishop and Visca.

  “Welcome back,” I say to them.

  I was so worried about Bishop. Now that he’s back, I feel exhausted. I just want to sleep.

  “We saw spiders,” he says. “They stay still and hidden, mostly. We couldn’t get a good look at them. We saw some lurking around a strange building near the Observatory. I think it’s their nest. We had to go all the way around so the spiders couldn’t see us, and approach the Observatory from the far side.”

  Visca shifts from foot to foot, so excited he can’t stand still. Even with the coating of dirt and gunk, his skin is so much paler than Bishop’s.

  “Some of my training came back to me,” Visca says. “I know tracking, even better than Bishop does.”

  I remember how Bishop tracked the pig back on the Xolotl.

  “I don’t think the spiders hear very well,” Visca says. “When we decided to take the long way around, we didn’t see any sign of them. No tracks, no broken vines—nothing. We can take that same path tomorrow and avoid the spiders completely, I bet.”

  I look at Bishop. He nods in agreement.

  “The Observatory is big,” he says. “It’s cold at the top. We could see the entire city. The landing pad, the shuttle, the city wall, the jungle and the ruins…everything looked so small.”

  “What about other people? Anything moving?”

  “No,” Bishop says. “We saw maybe four different spiders inside the city limits. When we got up high on the Observatory, we could see over the city walls. We saw more spiders moving through the ruins.”
<
br />   Four of them inside the walls? And more in the jungle? I had held out hope there was just one spider. So many…we could never stand up to that many.

  “Gaston thinks the wall goes all around the city,” I say. “Does it?”

  Bishop nods. “Except for the river that leads to the waterfall. There is a gap in the wall where the river flows in from the jungle. Past the wall, there’s nothing but ruins and jungle. In all directions.”

  I’m not sure what I was hoping for. Valleys and fields? Forests? Maybe another city like ours, far off, a city that wasn’t abandoned?

  Bishop seems uncomfortable. He has more bad news.

  “Tell me,” I say. “What else did you see?”

  Visca stops shuffling. He looks down. Whatever he saw disturbed him.

  Bishop takes in a slow breath, lets it out even slower.

  “There were pictures carved into the Observatory walls,” he says. “They showed people who looked so real I would have thought they could talk to us. Some of the carvings were of people killing each other. It reminded me of all the bodies on the Xolotl.”

  If the images disturb Bishop this much, they must be awful.

  “You didn’t get inside, though?”

  He shakes his head.

  “At the very top, there were lights,” he says. “Small lights, so small you can’t see them from here. Gaston is right—the building has power.”

  It’s not Gaston who is right, it’s O’Malley. No use in explaining that now.

  “I don’t know what good that does us,” I say. “If we can’t get in, what’s the point?”

  Bishop’s jaw muscles twitch. “I think we can. There’s a pillar at the top, with all the symbols on it. Each symbol is big, taller than I am. The gear symbol is at the bottom. In the empty space inside the gear, there’s a handprint—and on the palm, a golden double-circle.”

  Damn.

  If we want to enter the Observatory, we’ll need Aramovsky to get us in.

  The Observatory is massive.

  The vine-covered ziggurat rises into the afternoon sky, enormous layers of stacked stone, one on top of the next. If a giant hand turned it upside down, I bet most of the city could fit inside it as if the other buildings were nothing more than a collection of pebbles. The Xolotl was huge, so large I couldn’t really process it, but this is different. That was in space. That was…well, it wasn’t real. The Observatory sits on solid ground.

  If this is a testimony to what the Grownups can do, I am so grateful they are not here.

  Bishop, O’Malley, Aramovsky, Spingate, Visca and I made good time. We left at sunrise. It is now a few hours past midday. Visca’s roundabout path took us south, then west, then south again, then west again, adding several hours to the trip—but we saw no sign of spiders. We’ll follow that same path back, which means we’ll get home well after sunset. Once we enter the Observatory—if we can enter—every minute we spend inside is another minute of darkness on our return.

  I brought O’Malley because I need him. Manipulator or not, the shuttle recognizes him as a “Chancellor.” Any systems still working in the Observatory might do the same.

  Spingate insisted on coming, saying she had exhausted the capabilities of the shuttle’s tiny lab. Either she gets more information somewhere else, or she won’t be able to stop the red mold. We think we need Aramovsky to get in. As for Bishop, I wouldn’t even consider making this trip without him. That left Gaston as the main person I could trust. He’s in charge of the shuttle while we’re gone. Borjigin and Opkick are helping him.

  The towering Observatory is so big it hurts to think about it. We count thirty layers, one on top of the other. The base layer itself is taller than most of the city’s buildings, and so wide and long a hundred smaller pyramids could easily fit on it. There is something solemn about this monument that touches the sky, something…frightening.

  I wonder if Aramovsky can comfort me and take away my fears the way he comforts Coyotl.

  If this place doesn’t have answers, we have no choice but to go beyond the wall. Somewhere on this planet there is food for my people—I will find it. If I have to track down the fire-builders and take food away from them, I will.

  Wide steps run up the ziggurat’s south face. At the top, faint and faded at this distance, I see the last layer and its pillar of six symbols glimmering in the sunlight. Twenty-five layers up, I can just make out that big vine-covered statue we saw on the pilothouse map.

  Spingate’s head is tilted so far back she seems to be staring straight up.

  “I can’t believe this,” she says. “To build such a thing…the Grownups are amazing.”

  Aramovsky nods. Before he can mutter some nonsense about gods, I speak.

  “We can believe it, because it’s right there in front of us,” I say. “Save your disbelief for things we can’t see.”

  I meant that as a dig on Aramovsky. He doesn’t seem to notice.

  So many vine-choked steps. My legs ache just looking at them. It will take us hours to reach the top.

  “We’re wasting daylight,” Aramovsky says.

  He’s right. I take a last, deep breath, resigning myself to the work that lies before us.

  “Bishop,” I say, “take us up.”

  He and Visca lead the way. With vines wrapped around their black uniforms, they look like shadows moving across the yellow leaves that blanket the ziggurat’s orange-brown stone. Spingate, O’Malley, Aramovsky and I stand out more. We should wrap ourselves in vines, too. Maybe later—vines would add weight, and this damn spear will be heavy enough by the time we’re done.

  The steps are wide but thin, and painfully steep. I have to raise my knee almost parallel to the ground to move from one to the next. I’m careful, as more often than not my foot lands on leaves and vines that want to squish out from under when I put my weight on them. The stone beneath is unforgiving—even a short fall could break bones.

  I count as I climb: the ziggurat’s bottom layer has one hundred steps. By the time I reach the first plateau, my legs are already screaming.

  Twenty-nine layers to go.

  My eyes trace the steps that lead to the second plateau—yep, another hundred. At the ninety-fifth, Bishop stops and turns to me.

  “Em, don’t be afraid of what you’ll see next—the woman is just a carving.”

  We take the last five steps side by side.

  I reach the second plateau and am grateful for his warning. A snarling woman in red robes is carved into the wall at the base of the ziggurat’s third layer, vines on either side of her held apart like drawn curtains. Bishop must have tied them off. A vine-covered block of stone sits in front of her. She’s plunging a knife down. She looks so real.

  Bishop nods toward the woman. “When we came up, we thought we saw something behind the vines. It was her.”

  Some of her color has chipped or flaked away, but if I had just glanced I would have thought she was moving, thought she was alive.

  The woman has a double-ring on her forehead.

  I walk to the block. Through the vines covering it, I see a carved man, on his back, hands chained to the block’s sides. The two images are meant to be viewed together—the red-robed woman driving a knife into his chest. The man’s face is forever frozen into a twisted mask of pain and terror.

  A vine covers his forehead. I push it aside. His symbol is a half-circle.

  “There’s more carvings,” Bishop says. “All the way up, on every plateau. We didn’t look at many. After the first few, well…we stopped looking at anything but our feet.”

  Aramovsky walks to the carving. He runs his fingers down the woman’s robes, as if they were cloth instead of stone.

  “This is important,” he says.

  He closes his eyes. His brow furrows. I think back to when O’Malley told me I was a slave, how it felt to have blocked memories suddenly flare to life.

  Aramovsky’s eyes open wide.

  “Ritual,” he says. “The God of Blood dema
nds ritual.”

  That is Aramovsky’s important word, his cloud cover, his microorganisms.

  I feel O’Malley looking at me. He stares hard, his message clear: I told you Aramovsky is a problem—now he’s going to be even worse.

  “Let’s go,” I say. “We don’t have time to look at stupid art. Let’s climb.”

  —

  At the tenth plateau, we are already exhausted. We’re higher than most of the surrounding buildings, yet there are still twenty plateaus before we reach the top. And we thought walking “uphill” on the Xolotl was bad.

  Every level has more images, all somehow worse than the level below:

  …red-robed, double-ring priests cutting hearts from the chests of living people, throwing the bodies down the Observatory steps…

  …severed limbs arranged into patterns, like the pinwheel of arms we saw up on the Xolotl…

  …people with their hands chained above their heads, shot repeatedly with arrows, their blood draining into troughs that channel it to stone bowls carved into the terrace. Those images alone are disturbing enough, then I notice actual stone bowls beneath the vines at our feet, waiting to be filled with blood…

  …scenes of two people fighting, one armed with a sword and protected by brightly colored armor, while the other is naked, holding only a small knife—or sometimes just a pointed stick…

  …people pinned on their backs by bars like the ones that held me in my birth-coffin, one robed priest holding their jaws open, another pouring liquid down their throat…

  …people being burned alive…

  …people being skinned…

  Every level holds images of torture, terror and death.