The Clouded Sky

by Megan Crewe

No resistance, Jule said. Just go with it. I let go as much as I can, but my teeth grit as my body continues to move with the vibrations in the air as if I’m a puppet on a thousand tiny strings. A thin layer of sweat breaks out on my forehead and is instantly wisped away by a tickle of cool air. I am getting a workout, as promised. But there’s none of the relief I’d get from a good run.

  Is this how all Kemyates stay fit? How can they stand it?

  My jaw is aching when the lights finally dim. I swipe at my eyes as the door glides open. Yenee is waiting on the other side. “Our turn!” Tabzi declares as Jule emerges from his cylinder. He must have taken the short version too, to make sure he’d be done when I was.

  I wobble on my feet. “Okay,” I say as Tabzi and Yenee slip into the cylinders. “I’m ready to go now.”

  Jule considers me. I hope my eyes aren’t red. “Not your thing?”

  “I don’t know how it can be anyone’s thing!” I snap. I’m not sure I’m just talking about the workout. Because I’m also thinking of Yenee, going through those motions like she’s going through her whole existence here, with all the resistance dulled out of her.

  He doesn’t rise to my anger. “It’s far more balanced than any fitness system on Earth,” he says evenly. “But I can see how it’d be an acquired taste. You don’t ever have to do it again. But—we should cool down a little. You’ll like how you feel tomorrow even less if you don’t.”

  His calm drains some of the ire out of me. I suspect I’d better trust him on this. So I stand with him in the area where we warmed up, where the shiver in the air feels more soothing than provoking now. The burn of muscles well worked has started to travel through my body, but my memory of the machine removes all pleasure from the sensation.

  When Tabzi and Yenee come out, Jule doesn’t make me ask again to leave. “I think we’re going to head out now,” he says to Tabzi. She whirls toward me.

  “We hardly talked! I am so much more curious. I want to hear about your house—your clothes— Do you drive? Cars! Well.” She seems to gather herself. “We will see each other again. I look forward to it.”

  “Thanks,” I say, not quite able to return the sentiment.

  She pauses, and then adds, in a lower voice that makes me feel guilty for how much I want to get away from her, “Win told me how you joined us—he says you are very brave. I think it must be true.”

  “Thanks,” I say again. Tabzi pats Yenee on the shoulder and makes a comment, and Yenee offers her mechanical head bob and a few words of farewell. My guilt slips away. “Thank you,” I say to Yenee, more emphatically.

  Jule hurries me into the public room. “Sorry,” he murmurs by my ear. “I didn’t realize Tabzi would go off quite that much.”

  Before I can decide whether it’s safe to reply, a voice calls out Jule’s name. He stiffens.

  A gangly guy with ebony-dark skin jogs over to us from near the door. “I didn’t think I’d see you in a . . . in this sector,” he says. I’d be more pleased that I understood all but one word of his Kemyate if it weren’t for his light brown eyes zeroing in on me. “Who’s this?”

  My back goes rigid. I catch myself. If this guy knows Jule, Jule has to tell him I’m a pet—I’ve got to act like one. I think back to Yenee, ignoring the thudding of my heart. Limp, distant, hesitant. I let my gaze drift away, my arms dangle.

  “. . . no time to talk,” Jule is saying. The other guy nods, his gaze still on me. I make myself smile—Yenee smiled, when she met us—and then Jule is nudging me toward the hall.

  I can feel the guy watching me until the door slides shut between us.

  8.

  Late that afternoon, Jule pokes his head into my room. “Nice job you did with the Jeanant re-creation,” he says.

  I pull back from my reading. “What?”

  “Thlo sent the recording around,” he says, and pauses. “But not directly to you, of course, since she was already sending the message to this apartment once. Come here.”

  The large screen in the main room shows an image of Thlo’s placid face. Jule tweaks several characters near the bottom—a code to protect the message’s real contents, I assume. I hug myself, suddenly wondering how foolish my comments to the group’s esteemed leader must look to the rest of them.

  My re-created scene from the Louvre appears on the screen as Jule steps back: Jeanant’s initial warm politeness, his defiance when he suspected I was an Enforcer, his swift escape. Then we’re in the caves by the Bach Dang River. There’s a flicker, and the manufactured video cuts to the moment when Jeanant asked me why I’d come to meet him. It jumps again, skipping maybe ten seconds. “I’m going to do everything in my power to ensure I don’t make a second mistake.”

  The tension in my arms ebbs as understanding creeps up over me. Thlo didn’t just encode and send out my efforts. She’s edited them. Edited out the questions he asked about me, the admiration he showed. His guilt over how his people’s actions affected me and the rest of Earth for so long.

  In the final piece, near Fort Miamis, Jeanant moves through the forest to meet me with that dazzling smile. Gone is his stumble, and most of our argument about why he won’t hand over the last pieces of the weapon. Thlo’s left only fragments: “What I planned before was right.” “It’ll all follow the plan.” “For Kemya.” “I’m not going to let you down.”

  I frown. She must have wanted to hide the weaker side of him, the fears that wore him down. She hoped the others would be inspired—by his strength, his belief in what the group could do.

  But they should know. They should know how that Kemyate need for caution threw even him off in the end.

  And how much he was willing to sacrifice for them and for Earth. Thlo’s also cut Jeanant’s admission that he knew he was on a suicide mission from the start. His death scene jumps from his lunge for the weapon straight to his crumpled form and blackened face, as if he tried to fight and the Enforcers stopped him. As if he hadn’t intended that outcome from the moment he reached for the blaster.

  The recording stops, and fades back to Thlo’s message. I keep standing there. It’s her movement now. If that’s how she wants to present him . . .

  “He was quite a guy,” Jule says.

  “Yeah.” That’s what’s most important. Most of the group, they never met Jeanant in person. Seeing him as their unflappable leader will help them stay dedicated to his mission, which is what matters most to me, isn’t it?

  I wonder what Win makes of this, though. I told him what really happened. He brought me to Jeanant—I can’t help feeling he, at least, should have gotten to see the full story.

  “My father hated him,” Jule goes on, his tone amused. “Probably jealousy. My grandfather used to comment what a loss it was, that Jeanant disappeared, all the good work he would have done. At least, that’s what I remember. Everyone stopped talking about him a few months after. It must have gotten out, some part of what he’d tried to do.”

  “The Enforcers didn’t announce it?” I ask.

  “We’re not sure how much of the truth they figured out,” Jule says. “And what they did know, they would have shared with the council of Earth Travel, and maybe the general Council too, but the average person—they wouldn’t want to stir up trouble with people wondering why someone might risk his life on a mission like that. Whether maybe he had a good reason to.”

  When we sit down for dinner, it occurs to me that the first job Thlo gave me is now completely done. The other, more secretive one . . . I haven’t been seeing most of the group to watch for worrisome signs.

  “When will we meet with the others again?” I say. “Now that I can go out.”

  “Already arranged,” Jule says. “Thlo’s called a meeting for the morning after next.”

  My spirits lift. Just one more day.

  Jule quirks an eyebrow. “Eager to be back in Darwin’s company?”

  “Eager to free my planet,” I say. “But yeah, that too. Why, is it policy on Kemya not to enjoy seeing your fri
ends?”

  “I’m just looking forward to getting to skip the five minutes every day reassuring him that I’m not carving you up.”

  I can believe Win’s been anxious, having some idea what Jule’s “reassuring” probably sounds like when directed at him.

  “You know I’m going to tell him you’ve been reasonably considerate?” I say. “No more tormenting.”

  “Oh no,” Jule says, a glint lighting in his eyes. “That’s just a different sort of tormenting. What would I have to do to upgrade ‘reasonably considerate’ to ‘incredibly charming’?”

  At that point it seems only reasonable to throw the wrapper from my dinner packet at him.

  I’m just getting up when the screen pings. Jule glances at the name and goes to take the “call” in his bedroom. When he shows up at the doorway to my room several minutes later, he doesn’t speak for a moment. He rubs his hand against his stubbly hair, and then sighs. “I thought this might happen.”

  “What?” I say, my pulse skipping.

  “The guy we bumped into at the fitness center,” Jule says. “Amad. Of course he went and told everyone that I secretly ordered a pet. So now my friends want to come meet you.”

  I’m so relieved it isn’t a problem with the Enforcers that it takes a few seconds for what he actually said to sink in. I’m not sure how well I can keep up the pet act in front of a whole bunch of people. The sum total of my practice has been about two minutes.

  “Right now?” I ask.

  “Whenever I say they can,” Jule says. “But they’re going to keep hassling me until I invite them over. And the more I put them off, the more weird it’ll be. They’ve already been asking why I’ve been too ‘busy’ the last few days to let anyone come by.”

  I take a breath. I don’t want to raise suspicions about Jule. This is the only responsibility I have right now—play my role, blend in. If I can’t handle that, maybe Thlo should dose me with that drug.

  “How bad is it going to be? I mean, if they’re your friends . . .”

  Jule’s mouth twists. “You know how most Kemyates think about Earth. Even the people who are cool otherwise can get kind of . . . uncivilized about it. Especially when there are one or two around who aren’t all that cool and enjoy being pricks. I didn’t pick everyone I hang out with. Some of them are family baggage.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “It’s not as if they’d hurt you or anything—we have a lot of respect for personal property here—but they’ll talk. Some of it you’ll be able to ignore, you won’t be able to understand it anyway, but practically everyone has at least a little English they’ll want to try out on you.”

  I’m going to understand more than he realizes, after all my Kemyate studying. I haven’t mentioned it to Jule, liking having an extra skill in my back pocket—and bringing it up now will just make him worry more. If I deserve to be here, I can deal with this.

  “I’ll grin and bear it,” I say. “Better I get in some practice with regular Kemyates before I run into an Enforcer, right? It’s not as if we’re always perfectly nice to each other back on Earth.” I survived the stares and teasing through three years of elementary school before I got my panic attacks under control.

  “You’re sure?” Jule says.

  “Yeah,” I say, with more bravado than I feel. “Let me at them.”

  His lips curl with a hint of a grin. “I’ll tell them they can stop by tomorrow.”

  The next evening, Jule brings me the jeans and sweater I was wearing when I left home, laundered, from I don’t know where. He seems more wound up than I am. He paces the apartment, fiddling with a panel near the door and opening and closing the cabinets. “It’ll be best if you’re in your room when they get here,” he says. “Give me a chance to get them settled, okay?”

  “What if they ask what I’ve been doing all day?” I say, with a flicker of uncertainty.

  He considers. “You’re too new for me to have been sending you on errands outside the apartment. You can say you watched stuff from Earth while I was at work and, I don’t know, I taught you how to operate the food packets.”

  As if I really were a dog, left with something to distract it while its owner is away, trained to be useful while he’s here.

  In my bedroom, as I sit on the bunk, the space starts to feel too enclosed. I stare at my hands, and the floor beyond them looks too solid, too there. The bunk under me is more real than my entire body. I shut my eyes. Three times three is nine. Three times nine is twenty-seven.

  The feeling recedes, but it leaves my stomach churning.

  I still have my eyes closed, no longer multiplying but focusing on the in and out of air from my lungs, when the bluesy tone of Jule’s doorbell goes off. My shoulders stiffen.

  Jule calls a muffled greeting, sounding a lot more jovial than he did when he was talking to me. The voice that responds says something about how much time it’s been and then drops too low for me to make out. The doorbell intones again, and again. I grip the edge of the bunk. Numb, I remind myself. I don’t feel this nervous. I don’t feel anything at all.

  At this particular moment, I wish it were true.

  The rap on my bedroom door makes me jump. “Out you come,” Jule says, a faint edge beneath his usual wry tone. He nods to me, holding my gaze with a reassuring steadiness. I make myself step out into the main room.

  Jule’s friends are gathered in the lounge area, a few sitting on the fold-down benches and others standing around the table, which has been elevated at its smallest setting and is scattered with cans of a drink that wafts an acidic peppery smell into the air. My mind itemizes the scene automatically as they gaze back at me: eight people altogether, six guys and two girls, all around Jule’s twenty-ish in age. Like most of the Kemyates I’ve met, they’re somewhat dark in complexion, skin ranging from amber to bronze, hair from chestnut to black, except the ebony-skinned guy from the fitness center—Amad—and another whose tan face is topped by sandy curls.

  “This is Skylar,” Jule says, poised partway between me and them.

  I think back to my meeting with Yenee yesterday, the way she greeted us. “Hi?” I venture.

  “Not very alert,” one of the guys says in Kemyate, but a few of the others smile. A brawny guy sitting with his legs stretched out from the bench gives me a toothy grin that somehow feels the least friendly.

  “I approve,” he says to Jule, and the girl perched behind him tugs on his dark hair.

  “Hain,” she says pleadingly. He chuckles.

  The sandy-haired guy makes a comment I only catch part of—something about not having thought Jule was the type to spend his money this way.

  “I got a good deal,” Jule says. “The one who bought her first changed his mind.”

  “If I got one, I’d want something more . . .” Amad says, the last word one I don’t know. The guy sitting next to him nods, studying me as if I’m a new car Jule’s bought.

  “Yellow hair is better,” he says. “Or red.”

  “I’d get one from . . .” the other girl says, her final phrase something I think translates into “far back.” “This one looks very modern.”

  I let my eyes follow them as they talk, keeping my expression as still as possible, measuring each breath. “And quiet,” says the guy who complained about my alertness, and I wonder if I should be volunteering more. Jule speaks up.

  “She arrived yesterday. Still adjusting.”

  Hain leans forward, with the grin that’s looking more and more like a leer. “Tell us about yourself, honey. Where’d they pick you up from?”

  “Earth,” I say, and they all laugh. My face burns. Numb, I remind myself. “America.”

  “Definitely twenty-first century,” the girl who pegged me as modern says. She turns away. “You know . . . last year got one from . . .”

  “You got any skills?” Hain asks with a waggle of his eyebrows. “Singing? Dancing? Acrobatics?”

  “I— No, not like that,” I say.

 
; He shoots a look at Jule. “I can guess how you’ll be putting her to use then,” he says, and purses his lips in an exaggerated air kiss. The others laugh again, a little more stiffly. My face flares hotter. The girl next to Hain seems to be watching me with particular curiosity. I cover my blush at the comment I shouldn’t have understood by swiping at my bangs, fighting to keep my hand from shaking.

  Is that a normal way for Kemyates to put their pets to “use”? I suddenly remember Isis’s hesitation when she was first explaining the roles pets play. So Jule’s friends all think . . .

  Jule rolls his eyes and says something along the lines of, that whatever happens in Hain’s head has nothing to do with him and he’s glad for it, and the laughter that follows is less restrained. Hain shuffles over on the bench and pats the now-open spot beside him.

  “Earthling,” he says. “Come sit.”

  My legs balk at the thought of following his command, but I’m not supposed to care that much. So I settle myself on the bench with a careful gap between Hain and me. The sandy-haired guy mentions some big game that’s coming up—I think he says the name of that antigrav sport Jule has been watching—and the others fall into a discussion about who is likely to win. The girl beside Hain reaches around him to finger my hair, so abruptly I can’t restrain a flinch.

  “Just looking,” she coos at me, twisting a strand around her finger and then letting go. Jule’s debating the merits of some player or team with one of the other guys, but he steps closer to me. His presence eases my nerves just slightly. Hain has joined in the chatter, but he peeks at me sideways from time to time with a slanted smirk.

  A fresh round of peppery beverages gets passed around the table, and everyone’s attitudes become more buoyant—something in that stuff must be making them a little tipsy. And they find a new way for me to amuse them. In the middle of a heated conversation about politics, one of the guys turns to me and asks, “What do you think of the Carmit Procedure?” His goofy grin when I just stare at him suggests that my ignorance is hilarious.

  The others are quick to pick up the game. Every new turn in the conversation, someone has to ask for my perspective, with a round of giggles when I acknowledge, my stomach clenching tighter each time, that I haven’t got a clue. A couple times they ask in Kemyate, so I have to fake complete obliviousness, and their giggles double in volume.