“I guess so,” I reply. How can I tell her that what the N’Terrans have done might affect her as well? “My grandmother says there might be war.”
“There was not war last time,” she says. “But perhaps this is one leaf too many on the pile.”
“You know about that?” I say, referring to the memory Hamankush had shown me. “You weren’t even born yet.”
She shoots me a sideways look. “What do you speak of? The last time your people”—she pauses, deciding whether to be kind—“I was certainly born. The last time the N’Terrans sent a weapon to Mbekenkanush, its target was Dr. Lemieux. I don’t know if that was the goal this time as well, but in any case perhaps our hosts grow tired of human skirmishes.”
I stop walking, and when Joi continues I reach out and grab her bicep, dragging her backward more forcefully than I intended.
“Excuse me? Dr. Lemieux?” I snap. “You mean my grandmother?”
She wrenches her arm from my grasp, with the assistance of her suit. It’s a strange feeling under my bare fingers, the material growing slippery to loosen my grip.
“No,” she says. “Your grandfather. The last time this happened, the thing they sent was not an animal. I do not have much memory of it. I was very young.”
I think of the thing that had come from the sky that I had seen in the memory, the thing my grandfather called a drone.
“Why him?” I wonder out loud.
“As I said, I was very young. But my mother says N’Terrans only ever think about one thing, so whatever that one thing is, it must be that. But in that way, your grandfather is very N’Terran.”
“What do you mean?” I say.
“His one thing is the black lake,” she says. “For the N’Terrans it’s something else, but good science isn’t single-minded.”
I shoot her an ugly look, lacking the energy to debate what good science is. But she’s right about N’Terran whitecoats: all their discoveries, all their studies, and it’s all done while looking backward at the Origin Planet.
“The N’Terrans sent an envoy to Mbekenkanush a few months back,” she said. “Did you know?”
“What? Why would they do that?”
“They wanted to search the city. We said no, of course.”
“Search it for what?”
“I do not know,” she says. “You did not know they came? I am surprised your grandmother did not tell you. Though she has a lot on her mind. Grief is a heavy thing.”
The disdain on her features softens into regret then, and it’s as if my mother has risen from the ground and floats between us before settling onto my shoulders, the weight of which Joi can’t imagine.
“What was it like?” she says. “Growing up there? With them?”
“With who? The N’Terrans?”
“Yes,” she says.
“It was . . . I don’t know. Normal. I don’t have anything to compare it to.”
“You do now,” she prods as we round the last edge of the pink lake.
“Barely,” I say, glancing at her sideways. “I just got here.”
“True. I think I am trying to understand if you are more aware of your people than Jaquot is.”
“They’re your people too,” I say.
“Yes and no.”
“What are you asking me, Joi?”
“Where do you want to be?” she says abruptly, turning away from the city and settling her eyes on mine. “You have come here, away from your place of birth. But you do not seem to think this is a place for you. Why is that?”
Anger and grief converge in my throat, ready to become a stream of sharp words. But the rush of them settles almost as quickly as it rises, Joi’s frankness like a splash of water over a young flame. She doesn’t understand. How could she?
“It’s complicated,” I tell her. “I just got here. I lost my mother. My father is back there.”
“So you are not like Jaquot in that way,” she says, looking curious. “You are close with your family. Or at least your mother?”
“I mean, yes,” I reply, confused. “We didn’t see each other much. They were in the labs. Studying. A lot.”
Something about the way she nods in response to this makes me feel that while I’m having a conversation, Joi is taking notes.
“What?” I say sharply.
“Like the Origin Planet,” she says. “In that way. This is why humans have so little knowledge of who we were before we came here. Forcing people to work rather than create.”
“No one forced my mother.”
“Maybe not,” she says. “Not exactly.”
A tongue of wind makes the nearby trees tremble and I glance over, my heart jumping unconsciously, afraid of what else might emerge from the leaves. When I look back at Joi, her expression is an annoying mix of amusement and condescension.
“You are afraid,” she says. “Like Jaquot.”
“I didn’t grow up in the trees,” I snap. “Not like you. It’s still weird to me.”
“How can where you live . . . be weird?” she says, almost laughing. “How can you be afraid of the place where you are?”
“Because where I was is different from where I am,” I say. “I don’t know what you think N’Terra is like, but whatever you think, it’s different. We weren’t meant to stay here. We weren’t prepared.”
“My grandparents wanted to be prepared,” she says, shrugging. “That’s why we came here.”
She gestures at the qalms around us now that we’ve edged closer to the center of the city. Far down what becomes a wide path there are several Faloii on their way to various places, the trees far over their heads like guardians, the vines looping from trunk to trunk. Joi’s gesture seems to encompass all this, and something larger too: a history connecting the humans that live here and the ones I left behind, the line that connects them smudging somewhere in the middle. I’m about to ask her what her grandparents hoped to find on this planet, if their journey’s ending here was a thing they were satisfied with, but she’s turning away, leaving me.
“Where are you going?” I call.
“To my qalm,” she says. “I suggest you do the same.”
The qalm admits me readily, everything in my chamber exactly as I left it: my rumpled white N’Terran skinsuit discarded on the floor from this morning. I pick it up, squeezing its familiar fabric in both hands, remembering my last day in the Mammalian Compound, everything that had transpired. I thought discovering the truth about the Albaturean process and the plans for the Solossius would unravel the truth, all of it, but those bits of yarn had only led me to more knots. Two attacks on Mbekenkanush: once before I was born, and once with my grandfather as a target? How long had N’Terrans been chipping away at the Faloii’s fragile trust—who is the enemy of who, and where does that leave me?
I cast the skinsuit aside angrily and turn back toward the qalm wall. Joi said the instructions were to return to my chamber, but this new information drives me to disobey. I need to go back to my nana and this time demand answers.
I press my fingertips lightly against the wall and wait for the creepy stirring feeling that tells me the vines recognize what I want. But nothing happens.
I ignore the sinking feeling in my gut and try another spot on the wall, fanning my fingers out wide this time.
Nothing.
“Stars,” I whisper.
I rub my fingers together and try one more time, pressing each fingertip firmly against the cool greenish material.
Nothing. It’s exactly as I had feared. I am a prisoner. Rasimbukar and the Faloii have made their decision. I am not to be trusted, and even the qalm knows it. I back away from the wall and sink down to the ground. I can sense the never-ending stream of communication from the qalm, fast and fluid and green, but it ignores me. The words aren’t for me. Nothing is.
Chapter 8
In the dream, my mother is alive. I’m in my room back in N’Terra, swallowed by the darkness of our ’wam, when my door folds open. She enters the
room carrying a light in her palm, a glow that illuminates the smile on the lips that look like mine.
She speaks, and her lips move, but they don’t match the words. I hear them in my head as if in Arterian but different somehow.
We used to sing, she says in her dream language. I don’t remember the words, but we used to sing.
“I’ve never heard you sing,” I tell her.
I don’t remember the words.
Whatever glowing thing she carries, she places on the desk in my N’Terran bedroom. She’s not wearing a white coat but a tunic made of yellow material. It reminds me of the yellow cloth that used to hang on our ’wam’s door in the commune. My grandmother’s cloth. Carried from far across the universe, my mother wears it in whatever universe is now her home.
We didn’t have much to bring, she says. Scraps. But songs don’t have any weight. We carried what we could.
“Sing me one,” I plead. She’s fading. I need her to stay. “Sing me one of the songs.”
I don’t remember the words.
It’s not a sound that wakes me, or light. It’s still deeply night—I can feel that in the still thickness of the air and see it from the moonlight that fades in softly through the ceiling of my qalm. But when my eyes flutter open, it’s as if someone shook me awake, a fingerless hand reaching out from nothing and plucking a string in my mind. The reverberation still travels through me as I raise my head from the floor.
I don’t remember lying down. I’d fallen asleep right here on the ground by the wall, my hip pressed slightly against it. Though the miraculous pulse of the organic wall is ever present, I must have gone on half conscious of it in my sleep, because the flowing rhythm is barely noticeable now, steady and constantly changing, a stream of unintelligible thought and knowledge, forever a mystery to the simple wood of my brain.
Until it’s not.
I bolt upright, the sudden change almost incomprehensible at first. But there it is: a shape of something emerging from the impossibly complicated stream of its consciousness. I can’t make it out: it’s like the music of Rondo’s izinusa but sped up by a machine more powerful than anything I can fathom. And yet . . . one or two notes reach me where they hadn’t before, finding me in the Artery and resonating there like spinning planets.
“What is it?” I whisper in the dark. My mind streaks back to the moment in my mother’s office, so far away in my ’wam, when she’d spoken to me in Arterian for the first time. A jolt of longing rips through me: this language of the qalm feels as unreachable as my mother.
The qalm is changing. The room is so dim I barely notice at first, but between shadows I can make out the solid green and brown and dark. A smell of soil and sky reaches my nostrils, as a shape grows from the wall, twisting and stretching like a tentacle, forming itself, reaching for me. . . .
Not a tentacle. A hand. A hand almost like mine and almost like the Faloii’s but not quite like either. One moment it has too few digits, one moment too many, but it’s trying very hard to maintain the shape, bits of soil sprinkling from it every second or two. It beckons to me, and in my head the notes of the qalm’s strange complex music are still surging, but with the hand before me, I think the one or two notes that find my inner ear mean a certain thing. I reach out for the hand and it recoils, shrinking and disappearing as I continue to extend. By the time it has gone, swallowed back up by the qalm, my palm is against the smooth dark wall and the vines are parting with their usual rapid snakiness.
The qalm is allowing me to leave.
I understand this with a certainty as solid as the ground beneath my feet. In the language I only comprehend but a breath of, this building—the very stuff of Faloiv—is making way for me to depart. Beyond my parted vine door, the corridor is dark and silent. I could be the only person on this planet, just me and the world itself.
I almost leave right then. But I pause, turning back to the small space that the qalm had arranged just for me, my scent like a wafting fingerprint I leave behind. In the pale moonlight, my eye falls upon my old skinsuit, discarded at the foot of my sleeping platform. It looks limp, lifeless, a shell of a former life that seems more and more ancient with every second. I turn away and pass through the vines.
The moon lights my way to the jungle’s edge. The silence is almost suffocating. My mind wanders back to the night out in the main dome with Rondo; the night I saw my father tranquilize Adombukar. The same moon. The same ground beneath my feet. But in N’Terra, the hum of the compound’s energy stores and the distant voices of whitecoats, the sound of Rondo’s breath in the shadows beside me . . . I didn’t feel alone. Here, I am the only one who knows where I am. What I plan to do. What do I plan to do? I tilt my head back and look up at the stars, like the eyes of the Faloii but infinitely more vast. I try to envision a path through those stars, a black map that my veins can follow like a familiar scent. But nothing up there looks like home. My ancestors had looked to the stars and seen a future . . . all I see is the end. Ahead, the stalks of a plant whose name I don’t know but whose red petals are like the faces of kin sway stiffly in a night breeze.
Behind me, the shapes of Mbekenkanush rising against the sky remind me of Dr. Albatur’s towers inside N’Terra. The feeling of my room inside the qalm being aware of me and watching me returns, and I shudder with the thought that the city itself watches me go, and I can’t quite shake the idea that Mbekenkanush will keep me from leaving. I move slowly and softly, thinking of what Joi had said earlier and cringing away from my own fear: How can you be afraid of the place where you are?
When the hand grabs me in the dark, I have every intention of screaming. But it catches at my mouth before any sound escapes.
“Shh,” comes a soft voice through the dark. “Afua, quiet.”
“Nana,” I whisper as her hand comes away. “I was just . . .”
“I already know what you were doing,” she says. “I would expect nothing less of my daughter’s child.”
“I have to do something,” I whisper, giving voice to my intentions for the first time. “We can’t just . . .”
“If you’re going to do something, you must hurry,” she says, her face shifting in and out of sight as clouds pass over the moon. “The Faloii have made a decision. We don’t have much time.”
“What decision,” I whisper. “About us? About humans?”
“They are going to the Isii,” she says, speaking quickly. “It is the brain of Faloiv. It was where Adombukar was headed when N’Terra abducted him. The Faloii are going to deploy a small group of their people there, where the greater decision may be made.”
The urgency in her voice is like a prod of electricity delivered straight to my neurons.
“What does that mean? What does the Isii do?”
“Many things,” she says. “Listen.”
My mind is widening before I’m even consciously asking it to, and my grandmother sweeps into my head. I sense that she has never seen the Isii herself—and perhaps would not be permitted to—but that it carries great power. The impressions rush over me: the essence of Faloiv swirling inside what feels like the core of the planet. My grandmother said this is where the greater decision will be made, but decision is a pale word: our human expressions lack the ability to illustrate what really happens at the Isii, so she tries her best to show me. At the Isii, planets are made. Species are born . . . and eradicated.
“Stars,” I whisper.
“Yes,” she says. “The Faloii have decided that N’Terrans have gone too far.”
Somewhere behind us in Mbekenkanush, something stirs. We both feel it: a pulse in the Artery. Someone is awake and is aware of our presence. My grandmother turns back to me in a hurry, snapping her mind shut. I follow suit, feeling suddenly guilty and panicky.
“You know where my heart lies,” she whispers. “I have no love for N’Terra. But the Faloii Elders would not take kindly to me sending you off to interrupt their plans. That is why you must be quick. It will take a few days for the
Faloii to choose their group and to prepare for the trip—there are rituals involved. By then maybe you can have changed this course. It is not dangerous for us yet, but depending on what the Isii feels from the human presence, that could change very quickly. That’s why if there will be action, it must be from you.”
“Me?” I say as loudly as I dare.
“Flowers don’t just grow at other humans’ feet,” she says, her face lost in shadow.
“So?”
My mind is closed, so it is with my physical senses that I hear the approach of Faloii.
“You need to go now,” she says. “Find the one who keeps the eyenu. Her memory is deeper than ours could ever be, and the past will answer for the present.”
“The who?”
“Quickly! There is a mineral I have found. When it encounters water, it erupts with crimson smoke. If the Faloii decide there will be war with the humans, I will release the smoke. If you look to the sky and see it, you will know what is to come. Now go!”
She’s pushing me, trying to bury me in the darkness. She moves quickly, hoping to head off whoever comes our way. I step into the jungle.
It’s as if a curtain has been pulled back, the silence of Mbekenkanush’s clearing disintegrating like sand meeting water. The chorus of night surrounds me. The sound of trees swaying against each other, blurred like many deep breaths. The close and faraway calls of animals N’Terra doesn’t yet know exist, animals with skins made of shadows and stars. I open the tunnel reluctantly, afraid of what it might show me. I think of the myn in the stream of the Mammalian Compound, how Alma had said that being able to hear in the tunnel was an advantage as well as a handicap: I can hear the animals, but they can hear me too. I wonder if they hear how angry I am at my grandmother.
Even as I am surrounded by life—in the jungle and the Artery—all I can feel is my anger. This feels too familiar: everyone around me knowing something I don’t, while I blunder through the mess trying to solve the puzzle. A stream of moonlight breaks through the foliage, illuminating what appears to be a reptile with deep blue skin. It hovers with the assistance of a double set of wings, using its long prehensile tongue to grip the buds of glowing white flowers. The flowers are opening one at a time, as nocturnal as the animals around them. The reptile picks them off one by one, the wings thrumming like a chorus of insects. I wish I could ask them what the eyenu are. A plant? An animal? An object of the Faloii? The mystery of it only feeds my anger.
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