Lotus and Thorn

by Sara Wilson Etienne

  “Then, at least we should answer it.”

  Suji rolled her eyes, but she played along anyway. We took turns pushing glowing buttons and twisting knobs and shouting “Hello? Hello?” into the microphone.

  Suji gave up first. “No one’s gonna answer. Not after all this time.” She turned away and I could hear the bitterness in her voice. “They probably think we’re all dead.”

  But I kept trying. It was impossible not to.

  Suji went into the back and I remembered hearing the pop of the brackets on the orange case. And an explosive hiss of air. I was just about to ask Suji what she’d found when the message cut out and a real voice blared across the radio.

  “Ad Astra? Is that you?”

  I stared at the flashing dashboard light in shock.

  The shaken, high-pitched voice spoke again. “Hello? Is someone alive out there?”

  There was a sudden crunch of glass and muttered swearing as Suji hurried to the front of the shuttle to join me. “Was that a real person? Was that Earth?”

  I grabbed the microphone. “Hello? This is Ad Astra. We’re alive!”

  Static poured through the speakers. But no voice. I twisted the knob and repeated myself. More static.

  “Put it back where it was!” Suji ordered, and as I turned the knob, a man’s voice emerged from the noise. “Identify yourself. What is your location and stat—”

  That voice cut off as well, and the recorded message started repeating again.

  Suji grabbed the microphone. “Hello? Hello?” She started mashing buttons. “Come back!”

  That’s when I noticed the trickle of blood dripping down her fingers. I grabbed her hand, and when Suji turned to me, her wide eyes were already streaked with pink. And her skin had flushed a coppery red.

  I closed my eyes, forcing the tears to stay locked behind them. I would not allow them to come in this place. In this moment. No. Right now, I would be the Leica I needed to be to get through the sandstorm. To survive. To find a way home.

  “Then that’s what made your crew sick.” Edison nudged the broken glass with the toe of his boot. “And these unlucky suckers too.” He squatted by the broken case. “I mean, why have something like that on board a shuttle? You think they brought it from Earth? Or maybe they meant to take it back with them?”

  “Do you think they even knew what they were carrying?” I shuddered, thinking of the dead people around us. Of Suji. “The thing is . . . the fever came so fast. Minutes, not days. As soon as we figured out what’d happened, we abandoned the shuttle . . . before I started showing symptoms too.”

  “But you never did show symptoms.”

  “No. That’s the funny part.” I gave him a grim smile and I recited the words of the Remembering. “But God is merciful. He saved some. Made them immune. Made others strong enough to survive the plague. Scattered that strength through the generations.”

  There was irony in the idea of God wasting immunity on someone he’d already damned. And there was that wheedling thought again: What if I’d been marked for another purpose? But that would mean God had just let everyone else die. Why?

  I was shocked to realize that I didn’t care what the answer was. I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore, but I was certain of one thing: if God did exist, he was a bastard.

  “Suji pretty much collapsed before we made it to the ravine, and by the time we made camp, two more of them”—I refused to say their names, refused to see their panicked faces—“had fevers. It came for them one by one . . . but not for me.”

  Edison reached out for my clenched fist, trying to loosen it, to soothe me. I had the urge to punch him—my anger, my pain, was mine to feel. I had no wish for it to be soothed away. I glared up at him and was surprised to see my own pain reflected in his eyes. And I reminded myself that I had no idea what Edison might’ve lost in his own life.

  I let him ease open my fingers. He ran his gloved thumb over the five half-moon indentations I’d left on my palm.

  I pulled away and swiped at my face. Forcing myself back to the here and now. “So the upside is, I should be perfectly fine in here until I run out of oxygen.” I breathed in—hot and musty. It was a big shuttle, but the air wouldn’t last forever.

  “Well, I certainly don’t want that happening. I mean, these guys don’t look like very good company.” Edison put on a cheesy grin and said, “Let’s see if we can’t use the radio to get ahold of the Curadores . . . see if we can’t talk them into paying a visit and hauling us out of this thing.”

  “Right.” I headed back up the aisle to the front of the shuttle. Then froze.

  “What’s wrong?” Edison asked.

  “One of the bodies. It’s been moved.” When Suji and I had first investigated, there’d been a corpse sitting in the front seat, straight up, like the others. But now the dead woman was sprawled across the aisle.

  Edison’s headlamp illuminated the cockpit. Instead of panels of lights and dials and glowing screens, there were only loose wires and gaping holes.

  It was all gone. I felt like I’d been punched in the throat. That radio had been my way out of exile. Its link to Earth had been my way home.

  “Dammit.” Edison’s jokes disappeared fast. He slammed his fist into the ceiling of the shuttle. The whole thing shook—dust kicking up into the air, plastic windows rattling against their frames.

  “Careful,” I hissed. “All we need is for this thing to fall in on us.”

  “Sorry.” His face was contorted in what almost looked like pain. This was more than simple curiosity about Earth or yearning for open sky. And I wondered again if the Curadores wanted to find a way off Gabriel too.

  Edison closed his eyes, breathing deep. When he opened them again, the frustration had been cleared away.

  I was glad. There was something untethered about his anger.

  “Someone else beat us to it.” I stepped over the woman’s body, looking for anything useful that might be left. But whoever’d been here had done a good job of it. They’d gutted all the electronics for salvage and snipped the wires close to the ends. There was nothing left to work with. “Does that mean whoever did this got sick too?”

  Edison considered for a moment. “Probably not. The hiss you heard when Suji opened the case was probably some kind of coolant system. The case must’ve had its own power source . . . and even then, after all this time it’s surprising the virus was still alive. If Suji hadn’t cut herself on the contaminated glass, I doubt it would’ve been strong enough to infect any of you. My guess is that any trace of the disease died minutes after the test tube broke. But as it was, the virus went straight into the bloodstream, allowing it to hit hard and fast.”

  It made it worse somehow—the happenstance of Suji’s death.

  “Now what?” Edison asked, looking at the scavenged cockpit.

  “Now?” Sand had climbed past the tops of the windows, muffling the Hwangsa until it was only a faint moan. I sat down on the floor, leaning against the slideboard and the makeshift wall of bags holding it tight against the hatch. “Now we wait.”

  Automatically, I slid the knife out of my belt. When you were exhausted . . . when you were resting . . . these were the times to be at the ready. Only then did I relax enough to have some water and jerky.

  Edison sat against the opposite wall, leaning forward against his bent knees, facing me. He was trying to make himself as small as possible in the cramped shuttle—putting as much distance as he could between himself and the dead. He was like a giant from the pages of my book, only folded up and shoved in a cupboard.

  In the quiet, I could feel the weight of the sand bearing down on us—blanking out the world. How long until we were just another piece of salvage buried beneath the sandline? But it was a different question that kept going around and around in my head until it spilled out. “What if that was our one chance and we
missed it? What if we can never contact Earth again?”

  Edison shook his head. “I don’t believe that. I won’t. You know how I told you that we couldn’t understand the reply from Earth . . . that the signal was garbled over our radios? It wasn’t the first time we’ve heard unidentifiable transmissions like that. In fact, we usually have to avoid that channel on our coms.”

  “Do you think the transmission was garbled on purpose?”

  “I think it was some kind of code.” He nodded, his eyes bright. “And more than that, I think there was something about this radio and this shuttle that let you ungarble it.”

  His excitement was contagious. I tried to picture all the buttons and flashing lights and switches Suji and I had hit. There’d been much more than just a radio on that dashboard.

  “And something that allowed us to respond.”

  “Exactly!” A grin spread across his face. “A descrambler. And when the exiles who took the equipment bring it to an Exchange, we’ll have it! Then we can try again.”

  We. We can try again. We is the problem. Because I wanted the radio for Pleiades and Edison wanted it for the Dome. But the Rememberings said nothing about Curadores. Even if I no longer believed God had much to do with all this, the Abuelos certainly did. And if I wanted to see my sisters again . . . if I wanted to prove myself a devout Citizen . . . I would need to play by Pleiades’ rules.

  “Yes.” I tried not to let my doubt show in my face. “As long as we manage to get out of here.” I leaned my head against the makeshift wall. “Let’s get some sleep while we can. If we’re lucky, when the storm passes, you can reach your buddies and they can get us out of here.”

  “And if we’re not lucky?”

  “Then we’ll need all the strength we can get to dig ourselves out.” I closed my eyes.

  But no sleep came.

  After a few minutes, Edison’s voice broke the quiet again. “Will you tell me about Pleiades?”

  “Why?”

  “Because when you’re talking, I can’t hear the sand burying us alive.”

  “What should I tell you about?”

  “How about your sisters?”

  I usually tried not to think about them. In some ways, I’d always been an exile from Pleiades, so leaving my home was not the burden it might’ve been. But leaving my sisters . . . that was different. “We were born, one after the other . . . three children in three years.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  I laughed. “Sometimes it was. Sometimes they drove me crazy.” I remembered the sudden isolation of those first days in Tierra Muerta, before Suji found me. I’d never been without my sisters before. “But it meant I always knew my role. I was the damaged one.” I glanced down at my hands. “The one who knew how to break the tension with a laugh. I was the lightening rod.” And then suddenly, I was nothing.

  “And what about them?”

  “Taschen’s the oldest. She’s the peacemaker. She knows what to do to keep everyone happy.” But that wasn’t right. Not happy, so much as, make everyone okay. I struggled to explain it. “Like just before I was exiled, I was . . . anxious.”

  That was putting it mildly. The Abuelos had been going after rumors of unrest. They’d been raiding apartments, sometimes to look for salvage smuggled from the Reclamation Fields. Sometimes just to show they were in charge. My extra fingers and our family’s reputation made us the perfect target. “And Taschen slipped this bit of lime peel into my pocket. It was a scrap of nothing, but when I found it later in the day, I was deep down in the pits and the smell was like a bit of sunshine. And I felt . . . cared for, you know?”

  My chest burned and I was surprised by how much that memory still hurt. Then Edison asked, “And your younger sister?”

  “Lotus.” I thought about her hesitation that day at the Festival. “It’s strange. Even though she was the youngest, she was the protector.”

  I remembered her as a little girl, frowning the first time one of the older boys spit at my feet and told me I couldn’t play some game or other. Lotus studied my extra pinkies as if seeing them for the first time. But that’s stupid, she said, that’s just the way you were born. “She plays things close to the chest . . . watching. Thinking. It made her a good fighter, but it also made her hold back.”

  Until it didn’t. A week after the incident, six-year-old Lotus had been working in the garden while the other kids were playing tag. She waited until the older boy ran past, then stuck out her rake and sent him sprawling into a heap of compost. Then she’d disappeared into the rows of blackberries before anyone could figure out what’d happened. But she’d made sure I’d seen it.

  Lotus had an innate sense of righteousness. Like the sudden rainstorms that hit the desert—unrelenting as they gouged a path through the dunes—her vindication was swift and absolute.

  “Lotus. That’s what’s printed on the necklace.” Edison looked up at the corpses.

  I shrugged, feeling protective of my family. The old habits of hiding were hard to break. “You find the word everywhere out in the Reclamation Fields.”

  It was true; in the lowest levels of the pits the word was everywhere. Printed in chipped paint on the walls. On fragments of equipment. And, of course, on the necklace. The gift hadn’t been arbitrary, though. The oblong pendants were made out of a curious metal—something I’d never seen anywhere else in Pleiades or the Reclamation Fields. The black alloy wasn’t rusted or tarnished and its matte finish was so dark, it seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. My mother wouldn’t have been able to resist such a Find.

  Edison said, “I thought everyone in Pleiades was named after the original survivors . . .”

  I nodded. “When my mother was pregnant, Lotus came too fast . . . she was actually born down in a digsite Mom was scouting. And my mother had a thing about the Reclamation Fields. In fact, she named us all after Finds she salvaged while she was pregnant.” I didn’t mention anything about the stealing.

  “What about your name then?”

  “Leica was a camera. Boxy with curved lenses.”

  “And Taschen?”

  “A book.” I glanced involuntarily at my pack. “Our names did nothing to help our popularity.”

  Edison nodded in the silence—as if he understood something I hadn’t said out loud. “My brother and I were like that too. Different from everyone else. Alone.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “It’s not the same in the Dome. We don’t really do things like that.” By the soft light of his suit, I could see the frown pulling down his mouth.

  “You don’t have parents?” So little was known about the Curadores and their Dome, but I couldn’t imagine how that was possible.

  “Well, after the plague first came to Gabriel, there weren’t enough of us left inside the Dome to repopulate. But we had genetic samples from Earth . . . we used those to prevent inbreeding. So we don’t really know our parents.”

  “How are you born, then?”

  “Well, one of the Mothers has to carry us, of course. But we aren’t her child. When we’re born, we become children of the whole Dome. And all the Mothers raise us.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you were alone.”

  “My brother and I weren’t allowed to spend much time with the other kids. We just had each other. And Jenner.” But the way he said the man’s name sounded almost like a curse—I didn’t dare ask more about him. “Like I said, Nikola and I were different. We’re . . .” And he hesitated before saying, “The future.”

  The word set off a kind of wild combustion in his eyes. Like he’d lost his footing and was falling. His fists tightened into balls and he was almost shaking. I didn’t need him punching walls again, so I reached over and put my hand on his leg. I met his eyes—matching the caustic fire with the unflinching blackness of my own. Slowly, the panic eased from his face.


  “I wish, growing up, that Nikola and I had known you and your sisters,” he said.

  “Well, I know you now,” I said.

  Edison smiled at me and his eyes settled back into a steady flame.

  • • •

  At some point, I must’ve drifted off. I was dreaming of wild dogs attacking. Ripping me apart. Then suddenly, my dream self was very alert. Sounds were filtering down to me, through layers of sleep.

  Breathing.

  Someone . . . nearby. Closer than they had any right to be. Closer to my belongings than was smart.

  Careful not to twitch my face or eyelids, I tightened my grip on my knife. Then I launched myself in their direction at the same moment I opened my eyes.

  I had my knife at Edison’s throat before I even understood who he was or where we were. My pack flew across the shuttle in the attack, but Edison was frozen—wide-eyed, backed against the wall. My book clutched to his chest.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I said. Edison made a choked noise and I pulled the knife away.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to wake you,” he said. “I just wanted to see if you had anything in your bag that might help us get out of here.”

  “Like a working radio?” My voice was a growl, but I stuck the knife back in my belt and checked my pack. Water, scope, jerky. And I felt the outline of Lotus’s necklace, sewn into an inside pocket.

  Edison looked chastened. But I wasn’t sure if he felt bad for rifling through my things or for getting caught. “I don’t know what I thought. I was just hoping . . . I’m sorry. I should’ve realized it would be an unforgivable invasion.”

  He laid my book gently in front of me. “I’m sorry.”

  As I picked it up, I was struck by the ridiculousness of the whole situation. Here we were, trapped inside a shuttle. Probably completely buried under the sand by now. Edison wasn’t trying to steal anything. I mean, what would he do with it?