Brightly Burning

by Alexa Donne

  “This is not what I had in mind for an adventure,” Justine said.

  “We never said it would be dry,” Jon cracked.

  While I managed a smile, I found myself weighed down by serious thought. We’d walked a third of the day, yet it seemed we were no closer to finding Hugo, and now it was likely the tracks had washed away. I felt a hand touch lightly to my arm. Xiao.

  “Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll find them soon. I’d wager whoever we’re chasing is only a few days’ walk away.”

  A few days? I did my best to hide my consternation, and after another minute’s rest, we forged on. I counted steps instead of minutes. Four hundred steps, and the cold and damp set into my bones; a thousand, and my pack of supplies was killing my back. But it took only one step around a bend to turn weariness into excitement.

  I could see people.

  Four figures loomed on the horizon, maybe half a mile ahead of us on the road—​I was getting the hang of judging distance—​so I knew if I sprinted, I could reach them in just a few minutes.

  “Wait, Stella!” Jon barked before I could get farther than a few feet past him. I stopped and looked back to see him incline his head at Xiao and Hanada, who both placed ready hands on their gun holsters.

  “Is that really necessary?” I squinted into the distance. “They don’t look any bigger than I am.”

  “It’s a precaution.”

  “A stupid precaution,” I argued. “If they meant us harm, they would have left Hugo for dead, not carted him off, presumably to help him. If they see we have guns, they may assume we’re a threat and respond in kind. Have a little faith.” I looked to Xiao for backup; she was an officer, but she understood diplomacy, too. After a moment of clear consideration, Xiao relaxed, moving her hand away from the gun. Mari followed suit.

  “Let’s approach carefully,” Xiao said, specifically directing her authority at Jon. He was the tracker and planner of our group, but she had fifteen years as an officer under her belt. “Stella, you take the lead; Jon and Mari fall back.”

  We began to move in new formation, finding that our potential friends hadn’t stopped to argue about their approach and thus had bridged a quarter of the gap between us. I could make out some features. They reminded me of Jatinder, Navid, and Preity. “Did the Crusader have a significant South Asian population?” I asked, quickening my pace.

  “I don’t think so,” Jon said.

  “Hello!” I called out when we were finally within hearing distance. But all I got back was confusion. Justine attempted a greeting in French, and Hanada tried Japanese, Korean, and, inexplicably, German.

  “Nín hǎo!” Xiao tried finally, which immediately elicited a reaction. The four of them turned and started chatting excitedly to one another. “They speak Mandarin,” Xiao informed us with considerable amusement. There was no way they came from the Crusader—​the chief language among the fleet was English. Who were they? And where were we?

  Now close enough to have a conversation, Xiao rattled off something, of which I caught nothing but Hugo’s name. As a conversation was conducted in rapid-fire Mandarin, I observed the party, affirming my belief that they were not from any fleet ship. Their clothing was roughly hewn but looked sturdily made—​they wore bodices made of leather over tawny-colored slacks. Brown, tan, and bleached white were the dominant color scheme, which led me to believe they had no access to the variety of dyes we had on the fleet.

  “They have Hugo.” Xiao turned to us breathlessly to report the good news. “And he’s alive. Injured, but alive. They saw our ship come down and were coming to investigate. They’ll take us to him now.”

  Xiao walked up front with her four new friends, the rest of us following behind, hopelessly shut out of a conversation we couldn’t understand. Every few minutes, Xiao relayed the highlights to us in English.

  “It’s absolutely unbelievable,” she said. “They’re from here. From Earth. Descended from survivors of the ice age.” She turned back to the woman who seemed to be the ringleader, who wore a long, neat braid that stretched halfway down her back and had bright hazel eyes that crinkled at the edges. I placed her at maybe forty. When she spoke, her tone was warm but firm.

  Xiao piped up with new information. “They lived in underground shelters carved out of old mining shafts until about sixty years ago. We’re heading toward their settlement.”

  “Where are we, exactly? Do they know what part of the world we’re in?” Jon asked.

  “More importantly for the present,” Justine piped in, “how long until we reach their settlement? I am exhausted.”

  “It’s a few hours’ walk, I’m afraid,” Xiao replied. “They say they walked all morning, as we did, though they likely set out a bit later. And to answer your question, Jon, they say we’re in the country formerly known as India.”

  Like Hugo’s Jungle Book, I thought.

  We introduced ourselves, with Xiao acting as interpreter, and they did the same. The leader was Reshma, the other two women named Jia and Adeebah, and the man was Ravi. Xiao asked why they spoke Mandarin and relayed that the shelter their ancestors had taken was Chinese in origin; thus, they had learned that language primarily. I wished I remembered enough of the Hindi Jatinder had taught me to ask if they had retained that language too. But then again, this part of the world had had hundreds of languages. So much culture had been lost.

  When I witnessed my second sunset, I was no longer in any position to express awe; I was still damp and my muscles ached, the gravity of Earth and our long journey no match for my space-light bones. By the time we reached Reshma’s settlement, Jon was telling any of us who would listen about new plans for endurance training so as to acclimate to our new environment.

  The settlement was built right on the main road; first we saw several dozen small houses, which quickly gave way to multi-dwelling units, then businesses and shops, a veritable main street. Residents peered out of windows and stopped on the street, gawking at us as we passed.

  Reshma explained that the town was called New Delhi, not the real city of old, but named in honor of it, as we were apparently very close to those ruins. Jon cracked a joke about how it should have been called New New Delhi, but I was too tired to laugh. We left the road, going onto a side street, until Reshma stopped in front of a building. Xiao translated the Mandarin written on its front.

  “This is the hospital,” she said. “Hugo must be here.”

  The words stopped my breath.

  Jon took that as his cue. “Xiao, could you ask them if we could sit down somewhere, maybe dry our things, if there’s a fire?”

  “And eat something,” Justine chimed in. “I am starving.”

  “I’ll go with you, since you’ll need a translator,” Xiao said. When I protested, pointed out that surely she wanted to reunite with Hugo as badly as I did, she demurred. “I’ll have my turn.” She said some words to Reshma, indicated me, and from the way Reshma’s face softened in pity, I knew Xiao had told her about Hugo’s and my relationship. My checks burned at the attention.

  Based on the medical bays I’d seen on the fleet, I was expecting shiny metal and a sterile air, but New Delhi’s clinic entry hall was lit by candles, and the air was fragrant with spices—​cloves and cardamom. But underneath, I could make out the smell of sick and ointments.

  “He has suffered burns. And has mostly been sleeping,” Xiao translated for Reshma before they led me toward the back of the building and stopped before a plain door. Then Xiao departed, promising to fetch me food. I thanked her and tried to tell her not to worry about it, but she smiled and patted me on the arm, repeating her intentions.

  When I opened the door, my stomach dropped; I choked on shock, bile rising in my throat.

  He suffered burns. Reshma had said it. I’d seen the damage to the bridge, but I’d not really thought about it, spent any time imagining what that could look like. I stumbled a few steps forward, put my hand to my mouth to stop from crying out. Hugo lay on a bed spread-
eagle, large leaves of some kind draped over his chest, abdomen, upper arms. Skin, tender and pink, peeked out from the edges. His right leg was in a cast. A large swath of his cheek, extending to his collarbone, glistened with ointment. The burns were less severe there, but that was a relative statement. I could see yellow, angry blisters bubbling across his skin from the door.

  There had been an engine fire on the Empire when I was a girl; thankfully my father had been off-shift and was unharmed. But against his instructions, I’d snuck down to the scene of the accident. I wanted to see the bodies. They were angry red and black, charred—​some unrecognizable. Hugo was lucky to have escaped that fate. But he would certainly bear many scars. And a painful recovery.

  I found myself thankful he was asleep. It afforded him some relief, and me the chance to slip in quietly to a chair by his bedside. I held my breath, touched tentative fingers to an uninjured spot on his shoulder, to his cheek, through his hair. He was real, and he was alive. I licked the salt off my lips, wiped at my eyes.

  “Hugo, I’m here. I came all this way to make sure you were all right. And I’m really mad at you for doing something so stupid as running off to Earth by yourself.”

  He wheezed, breath rattling in his chest, then coughed, stirring. Perhaps to respond to my ill-timed joke.

  “I imagined death would feel better.”

  I frowned, trying to puzzle out his meaning.

  “Hugo, you’re not dead,” I reassured him. I touched the back of my hand to his forehead, which was burning up. His eyes fluttered open, but he did not turn his head or seem to see me.

  “I must be dead. You’re here, which is impossible. So you must be a ghost, and I am in purgatory.” His breath caught, and he winced, his burns obviously smarting. “That would explain the pain. Atonement.”

  I didn’t know what to do or say—​he thought he was imagining me, and how could you convince a person under such a delusion of what is real verses imagined?

  I stood, and carefully but firmly kissed him. “I’m real, Hugo, and I’m here. Now stop being so dramatic. Bianca was right.” Hugo finally opened his eyes wide, blinked up at me.

  “Stella,” he breathed, breaking into a smile, then wincing. The burns on the left side of his face impeded physical expressions of joy. I had to settle for words and the light that danced in his eyes. “I don’t understand. How are you here?”

  “The Stalwart sent down a forward party before they settle here. I convinced them to track your ship, turn it into a rescue mission.”

  “But why would you come after me? You must hate me. What I did.”

  “I could never hate you.” I took his hand, careful not to disturb his arm. “I got your letter, and I understand. Xiao told me about your mother—” I cut myself off. I couldn’t bring myself to say it. “Hugo, I’m sorry.”

  “It was all for nothing,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “I let Mason get away with it, and she still died.”

  “We stopped the worst of it, though. We went to the news media; there were quarantine procedures put in place.”

  “Four hundred and fifty-three people died. Those deaths are on me.”

  “I think you’ve suffered enough for it.” I stroked his cheek, fussed with his hair, pushing sweat-soaked locks off his forehead. “We’re starting a new life here. You and me. And Xiao. And, oddly, Justine Ingram.” It felt good to joke a bit, to see the corners of Hugo’s mouth quirk. “Hanada came too,” I said. Hugo winced. “We’ll talk about that later.”

  “What about Jessa?”

  “Still safe on the Lady Liberty, with Orion and Poole.”

  “Good.” A coughing fit overtook him, shaking his body painfully. He winced, and I couldn’t help doing so as well.

  “We’ll get you pain meds from the Rochester,” I said. “You’ll be okay.”

  “I have some now, actually.” Xiao appeared as if by magic. She joined me at Hugo’s bedside, frowning down at his prone figure. “We should get Hanada in here to examine your burns. But in the meantime . . .”

  While Xiao administered a shot of clear fluid into Hugo’s vein, I partook of her other offering: dinner. The curry I’d had on board the Empire paled in comparison to this; it was rich, aromatic, perfect. I’d not even finished eating before I looked over to find Hugo asleep. Xiao held on to his hand tightly, stroking his hair.

  “I’ve known him his whole life,” she said. “I never admitted it before, but he and Jessa are the closest I’ll ever come to having my own children.” She let out a shuddering breath. “I should have done something, acted like the mother he needed instead of playing the part of the First Officer. I can’t help but feel this is all my fault.”

  I settled a hand on her shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “It’s not your fault. Just . . . focus on the fact that we’re here now. We’ll start over. That’s the most any of us can do.”

  Reshma came a short time later with a tumble of blankets and a pillow, intuiting that I would not want to leave Hugo’s side. I slept fitfully, waking every few hours with a start, rising to check on him, paranoid he would stop breathing. But everything was fine. The pain meds worked like magic, blurring the next few days as Hugo slept through the worst of his recovery, and I held court by his side. We rarely talked, even when he was lucid enough to do so; all we would do is run ourselves in circles, Hugo castigating himself, me repeating over and over that I loved him. I was here. That had to be enough.

  I waited until Hugo was better recovered; after a week he was sitting up, and with yet another, he was walking, albeit with the aid of crutches. I took him outside on a brisk Tuesday evening to watch the sunset; we huddled up close on an overturned tree that had been fashioned into a bench, gazing up at the sky. The words I’d said to Xiao echoed like a new mantra. I shared them with Hugo, hoping he’d find the same solace in them as I did.

  “I think we should start over,” I said. “You and me. Well, all of us. But particularly you and me.”

  Hugo bristled. “You don’t love me anymore.”

  I rolled my eyes at him, refusing to take his histrionics seriously. “I’ve told you a hundred times a day for the last two weeks—​of course I love you. I came down to Earth for you. Don’t be stupid.” I kissed him on the forehead for good measure and wove our fingers together. “But the circumstances of our meeting, our engagement, the people we were—​that was our old life. I don’t want to pick up where we left off. I want to start over. No parties with Bianca Ingram this time.”

  That got him to crack a smile.

  “We’re not defined by who we were up there,” I continued, looking up, rendered breathless as always by the cascade of colors giving way to pinpricks of starlight. “Who our parents were, or how they died, what jobs they had, the ships we lived on. We’re all equals down here.” I squeezed his hand. “Let’s start over. Okay?”

  He squeezed back. “Okay.”

  Epilogue

  We created a settlement by our landing site and began the long process of learning how to survive on Earth, the next weeks and months full of wonder, frustration, compromise, and, gradually, contentment. It was hard to say which presented the greatest challenge—​learning to understand and live with weather, or the sudden lack of indoor plumbing. Jon could be heard ranting to anyone who would listen that, if only more engineers would come down, we could fix the abhorrent issue that was the indignity of outhouses. I didn’t mind them; in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t kill us to use simple systems of resource management, so long as our population was small and easily sustained. The New Delhians briefed us on myriad elegant solutions for living off the land, from how to filter clean drinking water to animal-based farming techniques. They lent us horses for plowing fields, cows for milk, chickens for eggs.

  We lived inside the Ingram on half power until we learned to build houses and while the farmers among us waited for crops to sprout. By that time, Hugo was fully recovered, though he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, and
his scars would always tell a story. I did not care one whit how he looked or walked; I was thankful that he was alive.

  Lori and Rori argued for weeks on how to establish video communication links with the fleet, but eventually Xiao and I coaxed them to work together, the two AIs seeming to make each other smarter with every interaction. Three weeks after landing, we could finally not only talk to, but see the Lady Liberty, let her know that we were okay and show them Earth was habitable and had been for many decades. Soon enough, the Stalwart wasn’t the only ship planning reentry. But she was the first, and two months later, she landed in a field two miles from the Fairfax settlement, hundreds joining our community.

  I found myself in a classroom again, no longer teaching theories about the Earth as it might be, but facts about how things were. The children adapted more quickly than anyone, Arden and the other Stalwart kids taking on farming and building tasks, in addition to their studies, and generally keeping the older teens and adults in our place. If we ever complained, all it took was an incredulous look from a nine-year-old having the time of her life in the fresh air to knock you to your senses. They also picked up our new language with incredible speed. Xiao taught not only the children Mandarin, but everyone else, too. On weekends, some of the New Delhians would visit us to learn English from Xiao as well. It became a full-time job, and she frequently took breaks on the Ingram bridge, talking to Orion up on the Lady Liberty and begging him to recruit some more Mandarin speakers to come down.

  She got more than just Mandarin speakers: the Mumbai de-orbited next, then the Saint Petersburg. Each ship established its own town, and soon we had our own little Earth-bound economy going. Over the coming years, more would join us. Eventually, we hoped, all.

  We received word that Mason had finally been exposed and brought to justice, though not the fleet’s old standard of death by airlock. Orion had him confined to the brig on the Lady Liberty so he could keep an eye on him. We owed it all to George, who had taken it upon himself to track down Karmina Ocampo at the Tribune and made her print the truth. In time, Hugo could forgive himself for the role he played, though it was long after everyone else had done so, including me.