by Abby J. Reed
“He’s not yours to kill,” she hissed. She cupped her spare hand around LuLu, who was fussing. “Look around. Think, Luka.”
I stared at her, willing the cold rage in my veins to calm. My gaze shifted to behind her. The survivors were all watching me, waiting.
Whispers spread. The ship is real? Breaker wasn’t lying then? Did Malvyn truly leave us to die?
If I didn’t kill Malvyn now, he might slip through my fingers again. The survivors were already so terrified, so exhausted, they needed someone to blame. The way they stared wide eyed at the ship, the daggers they glared at Chief Malvyn . . .
This was my chance. The moment thrummed with meaning. If I wanted power, the time was now. I wasn’t khaim enough to pass it up.
I growled and Yana stepped away from me, blending into the crowd. I pointed at Malvyn’s form. He was awake now and stirring. “The rumors are true. This man led you into a war you could not win. He lied to you about the existence of the ship. Then he let in the Extrats and tried to use the ship for himself and abandoned you to die in the underground.” I turned and spat on him. “He is no chief. He is not worthy of you.”
Malani helped Breaker up while whispering translations of my words into Elik and Heron, then joined the crowd as Cal continued to fuss over her. The delayed murmurs only enhanced my message as it sunk in.
“We can’t stay here,” I said. “When we have another attack like that—when, not if—the underground won’t hold. We can make the repairs to buy us some time, but they will attack again. And the compound will fall. Our only viable option is for all of us to get out.”
“All of us?” someone said.
I pointed to the Herons, the Elik, the Humans. “All of us.” I raised my hand as though in supplication. “I move to dispose of this man as chief and elect another. Someone who can lead us to safety.”
Malani again whispered the translation, and the Herons and Elik now clustered around her nodded.
Chief Malvyn cackled. He rolled onto his back, his laughter turning into a groan. He brought a hand out from under him. It was stained red. “Nice play to take over. Did you rehearse that speech for the entire duration of the return flight?”
I wanted nothing more than to send another kick into his skull.
“Why should they want you?” he continued. “You, who killed so many Herons while on patrol. You, who blew up Houtiri and killed so many of the very blue-bloods who could have made a difference now. You, who abandoned the compound as you claim I did.”
My smile was slick. “I don’t mean me.” I pointed to the one face in the crowd who I knew would never abandon them, no matter the cost. “I mean Cal.”
The crowd parted to reveal Cal, looking nothing less than horrorstruck. He still held a rag soaked with Malani’s blood. He shook his head, crisscrossing his hands in refusal. “No, no, not me. I’m a doctor, not a leader.”
“Maybe that’s exactly what we need to survive,” I said. “A healer.”
Murmurs of agreement spread. Cal, Cal for chief. Cal was the one person who continued to fight for them. Who stayed through the night serving all their needs at his personal cost. If we put the decision to a vote, I knew it’d be nearly unanimous.
Cal looked between me, Malvyn, Breaker, and the rest of the compound. He bit his bottom lip. It was like he watched a tablet vid in his head. All the things he could’ve changed if he’d been put in charge earlier. I played that same vid myself.
He shook his head. “No. We need someone who has experience with Extrats. Someone who is good at strategy. Someone who can get us out.” He looked straight into my eye. “We need you.”
The me before my little trip to space would’ve accepted the position with no problem. When power was offered, you took it. Working with a team showed me something different. I glanced at Breaker. Sometimes power was better left distributed. Sometimes working with others meant you could change more than if you worked by yourself. “Piece of hell, Cal. I’m trying to throw you a lifeline.”
Cal stepped forward, shoulders square, face heated. “And I’m trying to throw a lifeline to everyone here.”
I glanced to the orchards, where the mist still coagulated. Cal followed my gaze. We needed to wrap this up and head back inside. “That’s exactly why you should be in charge, because you are already trying to save everyone’s life.”
Cal was in my face. Even his curls flared with frustration. “So then I accept the nomination. And if I win, my first act as chief will be to charge you as my second and give you the job of getting us out of here so I can focus on my work.”
Chief Malvyn cackled again. But it was the dying bravado of a man who knew he was on the losing side. “You two finished comparing sizes?”
Cal snarled and almost launched a kick. His foot halted two centis from Malvyn’s face. Then Cal sighed, suddenly limp, and gently set down his foot. “Bring him down to my lab so I can bandage him before you lock him up. We all need to head back, now.” He turned in the direction of the underground hatch. The crowd parted for him, clapping him on the back as he passed, already congratulating him.
Yana caught my eye before following the crowd back into the coverage of the underground. Her eyes gleamed and her nod was one of approval. Making me wonder just how much of this, and for how long, she had been planning.
Chapter 17
BREAKER
Cal laid the dead in rows in an out-of-the-way hallway like the little toy boats I created with Brandon. Malani and I were recruited to help catalogue the bodies and take it off Cal’s plate. I needed help shaking out the image of my crashed Hope from my head. This would do the trick.
“Thank stars you’re here.” Cal handed Malani a tablet. Her wing and top part of her torso had been wrapped in bandages. “I need you to identify the bodies.”
Most of them had scratches near their temples as though the Extrats had been specifically aiming for their eyes. Seven had the eyes gouged out. Three had the smooth, unlined skin of missing faces who couldn’t be saved. Others were torn apart in different areas. These were the dead who no longer had family to claim them.
“How many?” I said.
“Twenty.”
Twenty dead was twenty too many, especially when we were down to a fraction of the compound’s, Elik’a, and Heron’s original number.
Malani took my hand and squeezed. “Mamiotte, that’s Mamiotte.” She knelt next to the first body. A young woman. Knotted hair plastered to the skull with blue blood. “She was part of one of the foster families that took me in.”
“I’m sorry,” Cal said. “Would you . . . would you note down what was in her pockets?” He gestured toward a pile along the wall. It was interesting, what filled people’s pockets. Buttons, a crust of food, red hair ribbons, a nail, pics. These were the things they grabbed as they fled to the underground. What were we gonna do afterward with these fragments of life? It seemed wrong to throw these mementos away. Cal turned. “Breaker.” The regret and despair in his voice snagged my attention. “There’s something you should know, man.”
A hollowness opened inside. A black hole of my own making, sucking everything in.
“Who?” Oh stars, who? I thought I’d seen my parents alive but maybe I was wrong. Oh stars.
He pointed to a body, three rows back.
I scrambled toward it, not breathing, not breathing, not—
Lewis.
Lewis . . . Was dead.
His glasses had cracked, one lens gone completely. An arm torn off. Nose broken, a trail of dried blood from his nostrils. In his remaining hand he gripped the remains of an Elik spear, stained onyx.
His body seemed so fragile laid out like this. Not the jolly man who refilled my To-Fix table every dia for cycles. Not the man who believed in me, who gave me a pupal seed and sent me on my adventure.
I stared and stared and stared.
Lewis was gone. Brandon was gone. Brody was gone. Hell, the compound was gone. My old life—all its horrible comforts, all the stupid-ass strawberry pies and the too-bright morning light, all my imagined dreams of taking over the workshop, all the satisfaction of fixing a broke heater and going to bed content—was gone.
There was no going back.
Even if I had claimed Scarlatti as home and wanted to return, I couldn’t.
Home was gone.
Stiff, I patted down Lewis’s pockets. Screws and bolts, a pot of grease, the usual. And then, in his biggest pocket—my lucky screwdriver.
The black hole roared inside. My knuckles turned white with the force of my grip on the screwdriver. The air in the room was tight. If my cap rippled into a dagger, I swear I could’ve cut the air in two.
I must’ve made a sound because Malani was suddenly next to me, holding out the tablet. I wasn’t sure how I grabbed it. I wasn’t sure how I managed to write the words, following the set format:
Lewis, son of Jaseth and Yolinda.
Head mechanic.
Apprentice: Breaker, son of Gershom and Sarantee.
Four siblings. No wife, no children.
Notes:
My fingers froze. There was no possible way to sum up the dirty aprons, the mess, the smoke and oil smell, the horas spent listening to a one-legged boy ramble on about his life, the kindness and selflessness and wisdom and brilliance into a tiny notes section.
Somehow, I managed to type:
Beloved mentor and friend.
It wasn’t enough. Stars, it wasn’t enough.
Cal cleared his throat. “I know you’re not done, but I need to show you how to punch the trachea before I leave.” He removed a bunch of cut up rubber tubing from his pocket.
“What?” My voice came out breathy.
He placed tubing in each of our hands. “Keep a piece on you at all times.” Cal gestured toward the first row of corpses. “We have to practice on the dead. If someone gets their face taken, you have to know how to save them to help them breathe. The Herons showed me the technique, and I made everyone learn. Even the kids.” A pause. “There were a lot of bodies to practice on.” He unsheathed a knife and demonstrated the technique on a young girl. He showed how to place the fingers, find the spot, and punch the knife in. “Now you do it.” He handed the knife to me.
I took it, put the tube piece into my pocket, but all I could see was the girl. Her family worked in the bakery, along the side of the square. She baked rolls and decorated them with leaves. My mother bought them for dinner several times.
Cal nudged me. “It could save somebody’s life. You need to learn.” He handed me a used piece of tubing. “Use this for practice.”
“On people we know?”
Cal seemed so weary, strained to the point of cracking. “On people we knew.” His voice was thin, like a rag scrubbed through the wash so many times the threads barely held it together.
I found someone I didn’t recognize. My soul dislodged from my body, observing from above as I measured the distance and punched in the knife. Slid the tube into dead flesh. Before I left Scarlatti, I wouldn’t have been able to do this.
Cal made me do it three times.
As I practiced, my thoughts spun, desperate to cling to anything except what was in front of me.
Here’s what I didn’t understand: Cal was right in asking why King Oma didn’t tell any of the valley leaders about fighting the Extrats. I knew the relationship between the three tribes wasn’t pupal sweet. Even if he had told them, would anybody have believed him? Or, worse, would they have seen his distraction as an opportunity to remove the Herons from the valley once and for all?
I knew what Malvyn would’ve done.
But then, why did King Oma want the ship to destroy the Elik?
My knee buckled. The knife in my grip skidded across the last corpse’s throat.
Oh stars.
Did he? He never actually said he was going to use the ship on the Elik. He only asked me if I knew about their war. I was the one who suggested the Elik. And, when he opened that door to show me the swords, dynamite, bombs, grenades—didn’t he say they were supposed to be on reserve?
What if he didn’t mean the Elik at all?
What if the war he spoke of was his war with the Extrats?
Oh stars.
I was the one who thought he meant journey as in journey his ass over to the east side of the mountains. Those islands. . . What if there were more? What if he meant a different type of journey? A journey to safety?
Oh, bloody, banging stars.
Nausea filled my stomach and I almost dropped the knife. King Oma never wanted to use the ship to destroy the Elik. He wanted the ship to save his people. If he’d been fighting the Extrats, no wonder he was interested in Malani. She had a weapon strapped to her back, which turned out to be the one weapon that could truly fight back.
Not only did I free Malani, I stole the ship and his one chance to save his people. Would he have extended the invitation to the rest of the tribes? We’d never know.
The realization was acid on my soul. I doomed the Herons. And by dooming the Herons, I opened the valley to the Extrats. I doomed Scarlatti.
I pressed my cap against the back of my neck. I caused this. By jumping to stupid conclusions. I’d gotten everything wrong. The mystical planet full of our ancestors. King Oma. And I’d hurt so many people in the process.
These bodies? They were my fault too.
My hand shook so bad I could barely hand the knife back.
Cal offered the knife to Malani, but she had already done it twice with her wings.
Finally, the question broke free. “How can you stand it, Cal?”
“Stand it?” he said. “How can I stand to use their bodies like this?”
Took me a sec for my thoughts to spin ‘round. “No, I meant—” How can you stand seeing all these people get hurt when it could’ve been fixed?
Cal yanked on a curl. It bounced back into place. His body was as rigid as these corpses. “You don’t stand it, man, you don’t—” He sucked in, trying to calm his breathing, but the frustration and anger flared like a furnace. “You weren’t here, Breaker. You. Weren’t. Here.” Cal’s face flushed and his voice thinned into an edge. His gaze snapped to mine. “You weren’t here when I buried the children. You weren’t here when the Elik soldiers, the Elik soldiers, came begging to be let in. You weren’t here when the Herons burned their king. You weren’t here to listen to their funeral song. You weren’t here when I shot Kili. She was eleven and she couldn’t breathe and I didn’t know until later you could pierce the trachea. She could’ve lived. And I shot her. To spare her pain. So of course I stand it.”
I shifted onto Circuit, stunned. “I didn’t—”
Cal’s hands fisted. “Shut up and listen, man. When you come back and ask how we can stand it, as though there were any other choice? When you come back and start raving about what’s out there? About how there’s more, about how we can escape, about how there’s new friends who can swoop in and magically solve our problems . . .” His face twisted into such grief. Such terrible grief.
A long silence. “I thought you wanted me to go.” My voice was small and flat.
“I did. Then. That was before. And I didn’t know.” His fists neared his temple as though he could pull the pain right out of him. “I didn’t know.” His hands trembled as he lowered them to his side. His fingers clenched the edge of his pocket like mine did on the interface before a panic attack. “In basic, they teach you how to survive out there in the neutral ground. But they never taught us how to survive in here.” He thumped his heart. “We will never know if that ship could’ve made a difference. We�
��ll never know because you weren’t here. And it might’ve. It might’ve made a difference to Kili.”
I grew sick. Bile filled the back of my throat. But I couldn’t turn away. I couldn’t turn and leave him like this even though I was gonna be sick all over the floor.
Deep down inside, I knew he was right.
I wasn’t here. I had left.
I wasn’t sure what else I should say if not sorry. Wasn’t sure if a strong enough sorry existed.
I picked up a button from the pile of personal objects and hurled it at the wall.
Malani didn’t even twitch as I swiped another scattered button and hurled it again.
I thought I was the hero. The hero who dreamed and never gave up and defied all the odds. Like Brandon and his stories. But I was no hero.
Turns out, this entire time, I was the villain.
A shard of dark matter lay abandoned and unlabeled in the pile of objects. I exchanged my blaster for it, snapping the shard into place in Circuit. Seemed like everywhere I went, I liked to collect objects of my shame. First, a boat, then a seed, now, a mined lump of dark matter.
“I’m sorry.” Cal’s voice cut through my thoughts. I turned back to him. He stood there, all limp-like, staring at the ground. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean . . . It just came out, man. And I knew you could take it. You always take it. You always take everything that isn’t yours and carry it.”
My heart just about broke. I came over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder.
Cal pushed me away. His voice quivered like a chord. “I’m just so banging tired. So banging tired and empty. I can’t . . . I can’t do this. I don’t know how to keep going. I just don’t know how.”
“Cal—”
Cal shook his head, backing away. “You guys finish up here. I’ve got other patients to see.”
