"Ugh, George, move away from me!" Etty said. "You already threw up on me once."
"That was me drooling on you," George said.
Etty placed her hands on her hips. "Why are you drooling over me anyway? Can't stand the sight of a beautiful woman?"
"Etty, I was sleeping!" George said. "And you were trying to steal my chocolate bar."
She rolled her eyes. "Well, if you didn't sleep on a pillow of chocolates…"
"Guys," Jon said. "Guys. Look."
"I wouldn't have to sleep on my chocolates if somebody didn't try to steal them all day," George continued, "and—"
Jon grabbed his friends and pointed out the viewport.
A planet floated ahead.
It was mostly water—in all three states. Vast oceans. Swirling clouds. Frozen poles. But through the clouds, one could make out many islands. Thousands of islands and archipelagos, green and lush.
"There it is," Jon said softly. "Bahay."
"It's beautiful," George said. "I don't know what I expected. A ball of fire? It's a world at war, but it's beautiful."
Etty lowered her head. "Typical humans. We find a beautiful world, so we have to fuck it up."
"Maybe that's why Earth is fighting so hard to liberate Bahay," Jon said. "Because it's such a great planet."
Etty snorted. "Liberate? Or conquer?"
Jon groaned. "You're talking like the enemy."
"No." Etty shook her head. "I'm talking like somebody who thinks for herself, not somebody who just listen to Ensign Earth's propaganda."
"I don't just listen to Ensign Earth!" Jon said. "I—"
I lost a brother, he was going to say. And I know who killed him. I saw him—Ernesto Iron Santos. And that's all I care about. Not empires, not conquest, not liberation—but revenge.
But he could say none of that. Would Etty understand? Would anyone understand? Even Jon did not understand it. The anger he always felt. That all-consuming fury. The hatred of the enemy and the never-ending mourning. The emotions confused him, controlled him. Etty was wrong. He didn't let Ensign Earth think for him. It was his own emotions, confused as they were, that led him. That controlled him.
There's a reason why generals throughout history drafted teenagers to fight their wars, he thought. Teenagers are confused, emotional, and stupid, and when hurt enough, they will willingly go kill and die.
As the starship flew closer to Bahay, Jon felt a sudden, overwhelming urge to flee. To fly back to Earth. To step away from it all. To drown in his music and misery.
But he could not change his path now. The starship entered Bahay's orbit, and orders came through the speakers.
"All soldiers—report to your shuttles. Welcome to Bahay."
Chapter Thirty-Two
Under Two Moons
Mindao was not all poverty. Not all despair. When Maria climbed onto the landfills, she could see them in the distance.
Buildings.
Actual buildings. Not shanties of plywood and plastic, but real buildings of real concrete.
"Maybe there is hope there, Crisanto," she said. "Maybe we can find work. Live in an apartment. Still find a life."
She kept her pet Santelmo hidden in her pocket. The Earthlings hated the aliens more than anything. If anyone saw Crisanto, if anyone told, they would kill him. And probably kill Maria too.
But sometimes Maria still whispered to her hidden friend. So softly nobody else could hear. She knew he could hear.
She began to walk down the landfill, heading toward that distant promised land of concrete and light.
It was only a day's walk from the shantytown. But it felt like the distance between stars.
By the time she emerged from the slums, the suns were setting—both Sargas, which burned like a great oven, and Konting Liwanag, its smaller, dimmer companion which glowed like a candle. Even as night fell, Maria could not see Asul Mata or Pilak Mata, Bahay's two moons. Too much smog hid the sky. Even without the smog, she doubted one could see the moons from Mindao. Neon lights shone across the city, advertising bars, brothels, and opium dens. Skyscrapers soared beyond them, some ten or twenty stories tall. That probably wasn't very tall for Earthlings, but to Maria these seemed like the tower of Babylon. There was no sky on Bahay. No more than there was sky in the jungle.
The streets buzzed and rattled. Countless mopeds, psychedelic jeepneys, and rickshaws bustled back and forth, ferrying the locals home from work—or to the countless pubs and bars that lined the roadsides. Maria also saw jeeps and armored trucks painted with the phoenix of Earth's army. Earthlings filled them, some already drunk, many catcalling at women.
The Earthlings were everywhere here in the city center. They prowled the streets, whistling at girls, and smacking them on their behinds. They sat at roadside bars, nursing bottles of beer. They spilled out of brothels, pretty Bahayan girls on their arms, taking their hired dates out for a night of dancing and drinking.
The Blue Boulevard. It was a place of light and laughter. Yet even here, in the bright center of Mindao, sadness lurked.
Beggars sprawled on every street corner, reaching out shaky hands. Many of the bargirls had arms scarred from years of shabu use, and their eyes were dim and vacant. Urchins scuttled underfoot, begged, or slept in alleys. Most were Bahayan orphans, their skin brown, their hair black. But some children had blond hair, blue eyes, black skin, and a variety of other colorings.
They were mestizos, Maria realized. Half Earthling, half Bahayan. The sons of Bahayan women and Earthling soldiers. Homeless. Forgotten. Scurrying through alleyways or begging for scraps. Children of the war. The mestizos seemed the lowest on the rungs of beggars, hiding in the darkest alleys, eating the poorest of scraps. The downtrodden among the downtrodden. Maria wondered how many of their fathers were carousing with bargirls as their children from previous pleasures starved only feet away.
A group of soldiers stumbled down the road, leaning on one another, arms slung around shoulders. They held bottles of beer, and they sang a drunken song until they saw Maria.
"Hey, look what washed up from the slums," said one.
Another soldier wrinkled his nose. "Fuck me, she stinks."
"Pretty for one of the urchins, though," said a third soldier. "Wash her, put her in a nice dress, she'd be a snack." He smacked his lips and stepped toward Maria. "What's your name? Are you hungry?"
Maria stared at the soldiers.
And she heard the planes rumbling overhead.
She felt the fire.
She saw her parents' burnt corpses.
She fled down the road, heart pounding, and the Earthlings laughed.
I killed two of these giants, she thought. But they still terrify me.
She took a deep breath. Right now, she had no time for fear. She needed food. She had eaten nothing since the pagpag last night, and already she was dizzy with hunger.
She walked a few more blocks, moving away from the larger cluster of Earthlings, and along narrower streets. She approached a kiosk. Its walls were made from plywood, and its roof was a loose sheet of corrugated steel, rusty and dented, held down with old rubber tires. A flower shop, she realized when she stepped inside. Hundreds of plants grew from clay pots, filling the shanty with a sweet scent.
"Hello, I'm Maria de la Cruz," she said to the owner.
"No urchins here!" the old man said. "Go, go!"
"I'm looking for work."
The old man snorted. "So are a million refugees. Go, leave! Your stench will make my flowers wilt."
She left the flower shop. She walked down the cracked asphalt, passing under tangled bundles of crackling electric wires, strings of laundry, and a stained concrete overpass. A stray cat hissed at her, fur bristling, one eye puckered by scars, then turned and ran. A little neighborhood of shops had sprung up around the overpass's pylons, reminding Maria of barnacles under a fishing boat. People had stretched out plywood and sheets of plastic, forming crude shops and dwellings. The air hung hot and humid like a soup, filled
with the odors of the city.
Maria walked toward another shanty, a place that sold knockoff watches, healing crystals, and prayer beads supposedly carved from the cross Christ himself had died on.
"I'm looking for work," she said.
But the lady who worked there tossed her away. "No urchins!"
Maria emerged from under the overpass, walked down a street, and leaped back to avoid a racing rickshaw. She walked between crumbling apartment buildings, their paint gone, their concrete stained, their barred windows leaking rust. The buildings looked barely habitable, so decayed and filthy Maria kept expecting them to fall. But people lived here. Rusty air conditioners rattled in windows, and laundry hung between them, and orphans gathered around their doorways, begging as people came and went. Countless electric cables draped across the alleyways like the cobwebs of mechanical spiders, tangled up, buzzing and shedding sparks.
Maria stepped toward a building covered with graffiti and smog stains. A rusty sign swayed from hinges: HOTEL PARADISO.
She entered. She found a corridor that reeked of mold, and she approached a front desk. A pretty young woman sat there, dressed in ironed livery, her makeup meticulous. She seemed out of place amid such decay.
"I'm looking for work," Maria said.
"Are you a virgin?" the pretty woman said.
"I… What?"
The pretty woman nodded. "Men pay extra for virgins. Can you dance? Show me your breasts. Let me see what I'm working with."
Maria ran from the hotel. As she stumbled outside, she nearly bumped into soldiers. The Earthlings were returning to the hotel. Scantily clad girls—and a few boys—hung on their arms.
Night was falling again. More urchins emerged, battling for scraps. Maria, desperate with hunger, tried to rummage through trash bins, but the urchins had a pecking order, and they shooed her away.
The human body can survive for weeks without food, she reminded herself. But she had barely eaten for weeks already, and she began to worry that she would starve to death here. Perhaps it would have been kinder to burn with her parents.
She spent the night in an alleyway between a bar and brothel. She wanted to stay awake, fearful of rats, junkies, and rapists. But her exhaustion was too great, and she slept deeply. When she woke up, it was dawn, and a soldier was pissing into the gutter beside her. Droplets sprinkled her leg.
Her stomach growled. She was so dizzy. She stumbled down the street, delirious with hunger, and smelled frying pancakes. Her eyes rolled back. The smell practically grabbed her nostrils like hooks and tugged. Following her nose, she found a little shop where an old man was frying batter, wrapping the pancakes in newspaper, then serving them to customers. Maria had no money, but she entered the alleyway behind the bakery and opened the trash bin.
Two children and a cat were inside, licking crumbs off crumpled newspapers. Maria reached inside, and a child bit her. She fought. She was stronger. She managed to pull out some newspapers and collect a few precious crumbs.
At lunch, she found a place selling fried chicken. Earthlings queued up for lunch, joking around and swapping stories of battles in the north. Maria had to fight the urchins again, fighting her way toward a garbage bin, and she managed to score a chicken thigh. Somebody had eaten most of it, but there were still precious shreds of meat to be found. She revelled in her triumph, even as the hungry children wept, and she hated herself for it.
I should return to the rainforest, she thought. I could live like an animal, hunting, foraging.
But so much of the rainforest had burned. Mister Weird had wilted the rest. Maria feared those lands. Feared the villages of deformed babies. No, she dared not pass through that wasteland again. Even if virginal rainforest still existed on Bahay, it grew beyond her reach.
She tried to find work. She entered shop after shop.
"I can cook pancakes."
"I'm a good cleaner."
"I can sell anything, I can sell these rosaries for sure! I'm a good Catholic girl, you know."
But the shopkeeps all tossed her out. No urchins! No refugees! Half the city, it seemed, was like her. Refugees of the war, come to find work, finding only slow death.
She explored more neighborhoods, and she found more shantytowns. So much of Mindao was a slum. And the farther you went from the Earthling streets, the worse it became.
Maria traveled miles of slums, of misery, of teenage girls with so many children, of starving babies, of toddlers fighting dogs for scraps. This seemed barely a city at all, more like an asylum, a hellscape that never seemed to end.
She walked through throngs of starving people, over mountains of garbage, through shantytowns constructed of the trash they grew on. The landfills had come alive, sprouting cities of their own. From a hilltop, she saw the slums rolling in all directions, a sea of despair, of hungry eyes peering through decaying flotsam, rotting away, and the rivers of filth flowed.
And in the middle of these slums, she beheld light.
Beauty.
A beacon of hope.
Maria shuffled through the crowds, through the decay, heading toward that light. Barefoot and in rags, so filthy, a sinner by the glory of god. It towered before her, taller even than the barracks where Earthlings lived. A cathedral. A grand miracle of architecture, painted azure, its spires reaching toward heaven. Maria shed tears, for she had never seen anything more beautiful.
Many of the poor shuffled toward the cathedral, to worship in its light. But gates held them back. An iron fence would not let them in. A priest emerged to bless them, but he gave them no food. There was beauty and wealth here, there was a palace of glory, but Maria now saw it as a place of greed and false hope.
She slept outside the gates of the Azure Cathedral that night, and in the morning, she collected scraps of food from the landfill, and she sold them to those too weak to rise. All day, she moved back and forth, collecting edible garbage, selling it for pennies, until at night she had earned twenty pesos.
She spent them on an empanada—a pastry full of potatoes and beef, the outside hot and crispy, the inside soft and heavenly. It was the best meal she had ever eaten. And after she ate it, she threw it up, and she trembled all night, vomiting, feverish. Perhaps the potatoes and beef had come from the landfill, and perhaps the poison from the countryside had filled her. In the morning, she thought that she was dying.
She sat under a cluster of buzzing electric wires, and she drew her father's knife.
She sat in a city of decay, of concrete and rust and vomit and tears, but in her mind, she was back in San Luna. The papaya trees were blooming, and the rice was growing in the terraces, and her mother was cooking arroz caldo, tangy rice gruel rich with ginger and chicken, garnished with roasted garlic and scallions. The rooster was crowing, and in the evening when the air cooled off, she would run among the mango trees, picking sweet fruit.
She placed the knife against her wrist, trying to slice her veins. But she was so weak her hand couldn't tighten around the hilt, and she dropped it.
Crisanto emerged from her pocket, and the ball of light nuzzled her. It was a little light in the darkness of her soul. It kept her alive. She sheathed her blade.
So let hunger kill me, she thought. Or disease or a broken heart. But it will not be despair.
She stumbled onward, barefoot, heading toward flashing neon lights.
It was there that she found the Magic Man.
It was there that he changed her life.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Bugs
It was hot.
That was the first thing Jon noticed about Bahay.
It was damn hot.
He walked across the base, drenched in sweat, blinking in the sunlight.
"Goddammit, my balls are swimming in a pool of sweat," George muttered, walking beside him.
"Gross!" said Etty.
"Hey, you were just talking about boob sweat earlier today!" George said.
Etty snorted. "Yes, but my boobs are things of be
auty, and your balls are… Well, let's just say I don't want to walk in on you in the shower again."
"Dude, my balls are bigger than your boobs," George said.
Etty rolled her eyes. "Ooh, good one. You got me."
Jon sighed. "Are you two going to bicker the whole war? Focus on finding shade, not flirting."
"We're not flirting!" they both said together.
Jon rolled his eyes. "Suuure."
Etty flipped him off. "Fuck you, Maestro."
They had been on Bahay for several hours now, free to explore the base. Fort Miguel was a sprawling base located in South Bahay, fifty miles north of Mindao. Named after Miguel Lopez de Legazpi, the European conqueror of the Philippines, the fort was home to an HDF brigade. Thousands of Earthling soldiers bivouacked here.
The three friends kept walking through the base, exploring it.
This was nothing like boot camp. Back there, you'd end up in deep shit if your boots weren't perfectly polished, or your shirt not perfectly tucked in. Here, soldiers ambled around in wife beaters, rifles slung casually across their backs, smoking cigarettes. A few soldiers were playing soccer in a dusty yard. Others lounged under a Eucalyptus tree, listening to classic rock from an old-fashioned boom box.
The guitars were shredding, but Jon could barely hear them. Fort Miguel was loud. Gunfire rattled from the firing range. A tank squadron rumbled by, and Jon and his friends stood, waiting for the gargantuan machines to pass. Helicopters roared overhead, and far above them, Jon could make out a starship in orbit, a pale smudge in the sky.
Even the sky seemed alien here. This was a binary star system. Two suns lit Bahay. The largest one was named Theta Scorpii A, also known as Sargas. It was far too bright and hot for Jon's liking. Bahay orbited this star. Theta Scorpii B, known to the locals as Konting Liwanag, was smaller and dimmer. It wasn't much larger than Venus viewed from Earth, but it shone for all it was worth—just to add a little heat and make Jon a little more miserable. Twin moons hovered in the sky between the suns. Asul Mata was pale blue, while Pilak Mata was white. Both were crescent-shaped today, pale in the daylight. They would not reveal their true glory until Sargas set in the east. Yes, the sun set in the east here on Bahay.
The Earthling (Soldiers of Earthrise Book 1) Page 23
