by Hugh Howey
Supposedly, the colors weren’t as severe on these other planets when their suns rose and set—they weren’t nearly as beautiful as what she’d grown up with on Drenard. But she could do without the frozen sunset of her home. Maybe, as the sight varied with each day, she would love the lesser spectacles even more. Their temporary nature might make them dearer, if drearier. She had heard as much from elders visiting from other planets.
And after the setting of the sun on her dream world, the night would come. It would be like the dark side of Drenard, but not deadly. The world would cool, shedding itself of its aura of trapped heat. The stars would begin to flash and twinkle, the sight of them temporary and fleeting. Anlyn and her husband—chosen by her and madly in love with each other—would lie out in the waving grasses and shiver and snuggle up together as their land began a plummet in temperature.
But the cooling wouldn’t go on forever. It wouldn’t freeze like the always-night on Drenard. Before the land could continue to grow cold, that forever-moving sun would race back around, hurrying through its task of warming the far side of her planet, keeping everything lovely and temperate by constantly orbiting and heating things just a little piece at a time.
Anlyn loved to imagine a sun doing that: Moving. She knew it wasn’t what really happened, that other worlds just spun in their orbits so fast that they experienced day and night, but the illusion would be hard to ignore. And it made her imaginary sun, this sun on her dream world, feel as if it had a noble chore to perform, like a spotlight of energy working tirelessly to evenly distribute its powers across all the lands.
“Hey, we’re here.”
Anlyn snapped out of her sleepy dreaming and found the shuttle had stopped. Her cousins were already out of their seats and following the cluster of guards and officials toward the exit. Outside, her uncles and her aunt strode toward the Royal Wadi hut. Anlyn gathered her things—just a small pouch of good-luck items her mom had left in her will—and hurried after her cousins.
The interior of the Wadi hut was very different from the ones Anlyn had visited in museums and on fieldtrips. Instead of bare walls and confined spaces, it looked more like a getaway mansion for a Circle member. Blue and purple finery slathered the walls and furniture; there were even hints of real wood trim framing the large windows and doorways. Anlyn would like to have pretended the differences between the huts were due to the eras in which they were built, but she knew that wasn’t the case. While most of her friends from private school were riding subways to normal Wadi huts, she and her cousins were being coddled in royal finery. And where the males would be allowed to hunt real Wadi, Anlyn and her cousin Coril would be relegated to snagging eggs, making them Drenards in the most limited of ways. In name only, really.
As they gathered inside, out of the feisty wind, their escorts gave them a brief overview of the hut, showing them the ready room and their private quarters. Anlyn and Coril picked out neighboring rooms while the boys fussed about in the ready room clashing with Wadi Lances to the chagrin of their poor escorts.
“It sucks Thooo eggs to have to wait a whole sleep,” Coril told Anlyn as the two made their way back to the lounge.
“Are you feeling anxious to get going?” Anlyn asked.
Coril nodded. “Just to get it over with. This whole charade seems like a waste of time.”
Anlyn didn’t say anything. Part of her agreed with Coril, knowing that their coddled female version of the Rite did nothing but make a mockery of what the old Wadi hunts were used for. In the days of thin living—many Hori cycles ago—the band of hospitable land on Drenard between cold night and hottest day made population growth a real concern. Back then, the Wadi Rite served a sick culling purpose, a twisted and sanctioned system of eugenics designed to weed out the weak. Now, with offworld settlements and two wars absorbing as many offspring as Drenard couples could make, the Rite had become a hierarchical selection process for some quasi-meritorious caste system. Except, paradoxically, it now meant bureaucrats and office workers were selected for their physical prowess, their tendency toward risk-taking, and their aggression. It was a trifecta of traits that had predictable consequences for the ruling of Empire: the hot-headed now dominated discussions and stifled other sorts of progress.
In Anlyn’s much cooler opinion, at least.
“You’ve been awfully quiet on this trip,” Coril pointed out. “You’re not scared or nervous, are you?”
Anlyn shook her head. “No. I think I’m like you, just wondering what we’re doing here.”
Coril looked out at the colors wavering above the canyons. The two cousins were currently much closer to the twin stars of Hori than normal, which made the light shimmering through the air look different.
“You’re not bummed about the throne one day moving off to another family, are you?”
Anlyn shrugged. “Maybe a little. But not because I’d ever want to be king, or because I wish I were a boy. Maybe I just feel a little guilty, or something. I guess I feel bad for my dad for only having me to pin his hopes on.”
“I would never want to be king,” Coril said. “All they do is get blamed for everything.”
“Yeah, but if you were king, nothing would ever go wrong,” Anlyn joked.
The two girls laughed. Everyone said Coril could do no wrong—that problems rolled off her like wind on marble.
“Oh, I’d make plenty of mistakes if I were king,” Coril said. “Don’t forget, I’d have to be a boy.”
They laughed even harder at that, the two of them bending over, panting, and wiping at their eyes. Anlyn peeked back at the hallway and saw one of their uncles leaning against the doorjamb, frowning.
“I think we’re supposed to be taking this more seriously,” Anlyn said.
“Yeah? Well, then they should take us more seriously, first.”
••••
Anlyn spent that night tossing and turning, her head full of nightmares of large empty eggs and hatched Wadi scratching at rock. She awoke from one of the nightmares with a start, her heart pounding and her mind overwhelmed by the sensation of a nearby presence. She sat up, clutching her sheet—and a large figure at the foot of her bed shifted, as if startled by her movement.
Anlyn flinched.
“Gil? Is that you?”
“Not so loud,” he hissed.
Anlyn leaned closer, blinking away the sleepiness and peering at the dark form sitting at the foot of her bed. “Gil, what in Hori’s name are you doing in here?”
“I can’t do this,” he said softly.
Anlyn saw him shake his head, her eyes gradually adjusting to the soft light filtering in from the hallway. Gil had always been one of the few male cousins Anlyn didn’t mind being around. He rarely teased her, possibly because he was familiar with being on the receiving end so often. At the age of two Horis, he was just barely double the size of a female youth, which put him on the small side among his more manly classmates, who rarely let him forget it.
“You’ll do fine on your Rite,” Anlyn told him. “Our uncles wouldn’t send you into any trouble you couldn’t handle.” And certainly not us girls, she thought to herself.
Gil scooted closer, forcing Anlyn to tuck her feet up under herself.
“But I don’t think I can do it at all. I mean, kill a real Wadi.”
“It doesn’t have to be a big one, Gil. You can always—”
“I know, I know, size doesn’t matter for me. My dad’s got a cushy job waiting no matter where I end up ranking. It’s not that. And it isn’t the moral objections, I mean, I fantasize about killing one as big as my dad.”
“And shaped like him, too?”
Anlyn and Gil had to stifle their giggles. The two of them scooted even closer.
“I’m scared,” Gil said flatly.
The cousins sat in silence, digesting the concept.
“I think I’ve always known I couldn’t do this. I don’t know how I even got here.” Gil reached out and fumbled for Anlyn’s hands. She squeeze
d him back.
“Is there anything I can do?” Anlyn asked. “Anything I can say?”
Gil shook his head. “I wish you were bigger so we could swap places. No one would know with our Wadi suits covering us from head to toe.”
Anlyn felt a sudden sadness for her cousin as she realized just how terrified he must be to utter such craziness. She rubbed his arm. “And I would do it, Cousin, but the escorts would know. And anyway, I’ve heard rumors that they use tracking devices to make sure nothing bad happens to us. But I promise, if there was a way…”
Her voice trailed off, and the two of them sat together on the bed, their brains consumed with shame and pity.
“I should go try and get some sleep,” Gil said. “Thanks for talking.”
“You’re welcome,” Anlyn said, but she felt like a fool as soon as she uttered the words. She couldn’t remember saying anything that might’ve made him feel better. She only began to conjure up decent reassurances as Gil slid out of the room, his large silhouette hunched over and sad as it turned out of sight.
18 · ???
Anlyn woke when it became hard to breathe. It was her body’s way of jostling her into consciousness, telling her to do something. It was a warning that the air in her suit had grown too thin.
As she came to, she had a moment’s doubt about where she was. She had been dreaming of her Wadi Rite, and now she found herself floating in space. All around her were bright stars and pyrotechnics—the flash and silent explosions of a major war.
A circulating fan whirred near her ear, moving air around her helmet, but her lungs told her that precious little oxygen remained inside. Her breathing had become wheezing—each laborious inhalation a vaporous disappointment. Her suit was kind enough to filter out her toxic exhalations, but it couldn’t create oxygen from nothing. Gradually, a vacuum was forming within her suit to match the one embroiled with fighting beyond.
As she spun around in her ejected pilot seat, Anlyn got a sweeping view of the action taking place around her. Bolts of plasma the size of Drenardian skyscrapers could be seen coursing through the cosmos. They travelled near the speed of light, but the distances they crossed meant their path could be followed, actually watched. Anlyn tracked them with surreal detachment. One of the bolts impacted the bright orb of a nearby planet. The cylinder of energy punched through an atmosphere choking with smoke. It struck land, already little more than magma, and a red crack appeared in the crust. The energy was so great, chunks of the planet’s continents exploded away with enough force to drive them into orbit. Some of these jetted through space, glowing and trailing coronas of fire. Others fell back to the surface, throwing up destructive echoes of the initial blow.
Amid this chaos, two fleets swarmed, intertwined. The crafts seemed impossibly fast and agile, but they all were, and so a continuous stream of them winked out in puffs of spectacular coordination and aim. Dozens of orbital stations seemed to be the targets of these buzzing attack fleets. Swarms of missiles agitated around each one, brought down by equal swarms of countermeasures. Another column of hellish plasma erupted from a nearby station and began its lightning-quick stampede toward another planet in the distance.
Anlyn sucked in fruitless gasps while she lost herself in the swirling battle. Her head had already begun to throb with dizziness. When she spun around in the direction of her ship, she marveled at the cloud of debris it had become. Flashes of light caught on the tinsel and confetti of the craft’s remains. All that was left of any substance was half of one wing, blown off before the second missile struck. There was that, plus Anlyn and her ejected flightseat.
She labored for another breath. Her chest swelled with effort, pushing on the harness restraints pinning her to the seat. Since the flightseat no longer served any purpose, Anlyn unbuckled herself and floated away from it. She tried, once again, to wick some oxygen from what little air swirled inside her helmet. As her gasps quickened into frantic, shallow pants, Anlyn felt her mind slipping away. She had a sudden impulse to pull off her helmet, a hallucinatory feeling like it was the thing constricting her breathing, keeping her from taking in the air that surely must be all around her. She felt like she was underwater. Drowning. She needed to come up. Needed to kick and swim and break the surface of her awful torment.
Anlyn fumbled for the latches on the sides of her helmet. She fumbled for them, even as some receding and sane part of her screamed not to do it. She groped along her collar with her too-big flight gloves, the unwieldy padding making it difficult to do anything. Her lungs burned as they starved for air.
And then the hallucinations grew worse. Something like a ship, but silver and gleaming and fluid, danced in her vision. It hovered in front of her, windows like giant eyes, like a metallic and curious face watching her die. Anlyn screamed. She beat her hands on her helmet, her palms smacking her visor. She was frustrated she couldn’t open it, couldn’t pop it off to take in a deep breath. She pawed at her gloves, trying to tear them off, but her fingers had already grown tingly. Her entire body was becoming numb. She shook her arms, and a spasm vibrated through her chest. With a throat deadly empty, she took one last feeble pull on the thinning air. The great metal face sat there, watching.
Watching as the black fell over her eyes once more.
•• DRENARD ••
“Girls to the right,”
The voice filled Anlyn’s head, relayed through the D-bands worn by each of her Rite mates. Anlyn and Coril exchanged looks but obeyed. The three boys jockeyed for position to their left, lining up to receive their great Wadi lances. Gil flashed a quick, sad glance Anlyn’s way, then continued his half-hearted charade of feigned excitement as he shuffled closer to the other boys.
“Settle down, you three.”
One of Anlyn’s uncles—a former member of the Circle—joined the other Rite leaders by the lobby’s window. Anlyn assumed it was he who had spoken the last, though it was improper for her to guess. During the Rite, all were supposed to be equal, the questions and answers made diffuse by the power of the bands.
“Come forward to take your maps.”
The boys scurried toward the Rite leaders as the Drenard adults reached for a table that had been draped in layer upon layer of blue honeycloth. They each picked up one of the fabric maps laid out on top and turned to present them to the boys.
Anlyn and Coril approached a smaller table to the side where their Aunt Ralei stood. Anlyn accepted her map blindly; she was distracted by the flurry of excitement around the boys’ table as they took their own maps. Gil turned and met her gaze, and a shiver of fear leaked into her band. Her poor cousin was doing an awful job of concealing his inner thoughts.
Something pinched Anlyn’s hand, drawing her attention away from the lads. She turned to find her Aunt Ralei giving her a severe look. Her aunt’s eyes darted down to the map she was pressing into Anlyn’s hands.
Anlyn looked. The map had been folded over several times, leaving one section exposed. It showed an intricate tangle of Wadi canyons.
Her aunt’s finger moved from Anlyn’s hand and slowly traced one of the canyons. Anlyn felt Coril leaning against her arm to see, and her Aunt Ralei twisted the map to better facilitate this, showing both girls some specific route through the labyrinth. Anlyn wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be looking at; the bands were silent, no thoughts leaking through them save for a twinge of Gil’s fear.
She watched her aunt’s finger tap one spot in particular, then the same finger slid to the edge of the map and up the back of her Aunt Ralei’s arm, pulling her cloak back to expose a pale-blue wrist.
It was there that Anlyn saw what her aunt was speaking of. Trailing out of the woman’s sleeve were three parallel scars, the knotted flesh heaped high and sinister, looking like white ropes laid into her skin. Anlyn gasped at the sight of them; she felt her deep thoughts leak out as she looked up to her aunt’s face. But gone was the scowl her aunt had been giving her earlier. It had been replaced with a grim smile. Her aunt n
ow bore a look of happy, hopeful, and raw determinism.
•• ??? ••
When Anlyn passed out the second time, gasping for air, she had felt certain it was her last moment of life. Her final thoughts had been like a sliver of shimmering oxygen, piercing the black suffocation coiling itself around her. She had thought how nice it would be for the end to come, to find an escape from the slow torment. And if there was something beyond—a peaceful afterlife for those with sound souls—she thought, right at the last, that she was about to discover it.
She came to once again to find her journey had been delayed.
Her helmet was off. She could feel something pressed over her mouth and nose and the pinch of tight straps wrapped around the back of her head. Above her, the silvery curve of a ship’s hull arched up, its surface spotted with portholes of varying sizes. Through these, Anlyn could see the bright bolts and explosions of a battle still raging beyond.
Someone leaned over Anlyn. She blinked and tried to sit up, but a gentle hand kept her in place. Large, wet eyes blinked slowly, her own reflection clearly visible in the black dome of them. When the head pulled away, Anlyn recognized the race immediately, even though she’d only ever seen them in books. It was a Bel-Tra, the mysterious surveyors of the universe.
Anlyn tried to say something, but she managed only a groan. Her head felt as if it had been split in two. Now that she was out of her flightseat’s harness and back in gravity, she could feel how traumatized her body had been by the explosion that destroyed her ship. She felt bruised all over and completely empty of air.
The Bel-Tra brushed Anlyn’s forehead with the back of its hand, then reached to its side. Anlyn turned her head to follow and saw that she was lying on the spaceship’s decking. Clear tubes led away from a mask over her face and trailed to a small canister by the Bel-Tra’s side. The figure freed a device—one of many hanging from its belt—and slipped it over its wrist. It looked like a flat rectangle of some sort, like an LCD display. When the Tra turned it around for Anlyn to see, words were already marching across the screen:
