Stone in the Sky

by Cecil Castellucci

  In that moment, the starlight playing on our features, I knew that peace between us had been made.

  “I’ll be the noisy wheel,” he said, whispering in my ear. “I’ll keep Brother Blue’s eyes on me so he doesn’t see you.” Then he put his arms around me and pulled me to him. I could feel my body tense and then relax until I leaned my head on his strong chest and slowly slid my arms around him.

  He held me all night, and I marveled at the pure astonishment of skin and heart.

  Parts of me felt the same, as though we were one. But I also felt as though I were missing one piece of my true self. I felt like I was missing Tournour, no matter how alien he was. No matter how high up in the sky. Tournour made me feel Human.

  “You’re me and I’m you,” Reza whispered.

  I answered Reza with kisses.

  But my heart beat out a message in Loor.

  37

  Part of me loved being around other Humans. While we worked hard during the days in the fields, at night there were songs and laughter. We discovered the pleasure of bonfires and meals shared under an open sky.

  The children, though there were not many of them, took easiest to the planet and adjusted to gravity best. Once they’d adjusted, I could see how much they loved the air and the running. They were lucky. Quint was a little lighter than base gravity on most ships, and since they’d gotten the nanites, they did not have to struggle as hard with the atmosphere.

  “There will be more of them soon,” Ednette said as we watched them together from the field. “A planet gives room to spread. On the hitches we had to keep our numbers manageable.”

  It made me happy to think that there would be babies born on Quint. It would be the first generation of Humans out in space not born on ships. They would be the legacy of both the intergenerational ships and the colonists. They were really the beginning.

  I was the only person they knew who had ever lived on a planet, so they looked to me to help them figure out how to be on one. I had naively imagined that despite the fact that we were basically owned by Brother Blue, the older Humans would take to the land and learn to become self-sufficient. But they couldn’t understand the land. They were overwhelmed by the sky like I had been on Tallara. The children had a flexibility of spirit that the adults did not. Even so, it was no lie that Humans were creative and adaptable, and skills that had been long-forgotten through the generations of wandering came easily to some.

  I realized that I had survived my odyssey because I had been young. I doubt that my mother would have survived in my or Bitty’s place. She understood settling a colony. But surviving by your wits? I don’t know that she had that kind of strength.

  While we set up camp they would come to me with questions that they thought I could answer. But I only knew what a child would know, and so my knowledge only went so far. Still it was more then they knew, and I answered as best I could.

  “What do we do about insects?”

  “Where do we get the water?”

  “How do you dig?”

  They had to be taught how to do everything: how to build a house, how to deal with dirt, how to shade themselves from a sun. Some things I could show them, other things I had to guess. Luckily, the younger, like Bitty, took to it quickly. She was always helping Myfanwy to organize things for us.

  “I have other things that I have to think about,” I complained to Reza when he got away from his claim and visited me. “I don’t know how to build things.”

  “They look up to you,” he said. “This is all new to them.”

  Then I would give him a look that made him laugh.

  “Fine. I’ll help,” he said.

  Reza became a fixture at our camp.

  He was instrumental in helping the Humans. At first he did it in secret, after hours, in the makeshift tents, then in the wooden huts, and then in the more sturdy homes. He answered every question about how to live on a planet. I loved to hear him speak about it as though it were something new. Although I had been on a planet before, it felt like my first time.

  And eventually, he even convinced Myfanwy to let him take some Wanderers to his claim to teach them his methods.

  “He’s a good one,” Ednette said. “He reminds me of my man.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not like that.”

  But her and Bitty gave each other a look and then laughed at me.

  I still sent messages to Tournour. But I couldn’t deny that I sometimes snuck away to be alone with Reza.

  I kept waiting for Ednette or someone else to step up as leader. Instead, they seemed more and more dependent on me. And after our first month when everyone had acclimated, they held their tattooing ceremony. This time, the marking was the image of a planet, instead of a ship. It seemed as though most of the Humans, despite the difference between wandering and being planetbound, were glad to be grounded.

  I looked at my feet in the dirt. I looked at the gold earth dangling off of my wrist. I looked at my new tattoo of Quint, with the extra bar on it.

  I was the journey leader now.

  38

  It was first harvest.

  I was in a row of alin delicately scraping the pollen off of the flower and dusting it into my small bag. We would have a good haul.

  I heard my name being called and turned to see Bitty running toward me.

  “He’s coming.” Bitty burst through the field, and I jerked my head so fast that a bunch of pollen floated away on the air. If I cared about the harvest because it would help us, I would have yelled at her. But this wasn’t for us—it was only a part of our plan to show Brother Blue a big haul. And then destroy it.

  “Who?” I asked, shading my eyes from the weak noon sun.

  “Brother Blue,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Myfanwy told me,” she said. He could not see me. Brother Blue had to think that everything was going right before everything could go wrong. I needed to have the Humans entrenched on the planet to keep them safe. I feared if the harvest failed too soon, or if he found out that I was here and was the journey leader, he would uproot them and send them to one of the empty colonies.

  I drew the string on my pouch to secure the pollen and then handed it to her to add to the haul.

  “She’s not your friend,” I said. It irritated me to see them always together whenever Myfanwy was down here visiting. But I could not deny that there was that spark of friendship between them. And there were so few people near to Bitty’s age here.

  “She’s not as bad as you think she is,” Bitty said.

  “She works for him,” I said. But I had to admit, she had been kind to us down here. Making sure that we got the materials we needed. Allowing Reza to teach the Wanderers. Giving us time to organize our own days as long as the tasks got done. And she had never once let on that she knew Caleb, even when he accompanied her down to check on us and get his payment.

  “Cover up. You have to hide,” she said, and threw me the long covering she was wearing.

  I gathered my things and covered myself up so that I looked like a Wanderer.

  I watched from down the road as Brother Blue and Caleb arrived at the camp. It irked me to see him come to the fields. Put the dirt in his hand. Turn a flower over and put his nose to smell its fragrance.

  From where I stood I could see him laughing and making jokes with Caleb and the other Humans, and I knew that they were growing to like him. It was hard for them to believe that he was behind the atrocities. They could not understand what my problem with him was. He brought down supplies. He listened to their needs. He was making it happen and gaining people’s trust. He filled them up with false hopes, as he had with mother and me.

  Parts of me ached when I saw him, because he was doing what I wanted to do for the people down here. The thing that truly bothered me was that he was able in a way that I was not. He had currency, and he had Imperium backing. With one hand, he could make things flourish; and with the other hand, he could kill.<
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  I knew that sometimes the Wanderers questioned if Brother Blue was really behind it all. They couldn’t understand how a beast could hide behind such charm, or why I wanted to ruin this man. Even though they knew that he had killed their families and many others, they couldn’t see it when he was in front of them. I had to remind them.

  He’s a killer. He’s a liar. He’s betrayed us all.

  Currency was his mistress. So of course he was only visiting because a good harvest would make him even more of it.

  When I saw him looking at the fields, I could see something in him that I used to see; that look of a visionary. I could see how proud he was of the Humans and the alin fields. I could see that as much of a monster as he was, in this he was truly excited. You cannot fake that kind of unguarded enthusiasm.

  I could not watch anymore and so I walked to Reza’s.

  “Let me show you something,” he said as I walked into his fields. It was acres of yellow petals. His fields burst with flower. I remembered how just my one plant on the Yertina Feray had given me such strength. Seeing it all around me made my sour spirit at Brother Blue melt away a little and my resolve return.

  We walked to a small corner of his field where he was experimenting with cultivation. He brought me to a stretch of land where the earth was dark and bare.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “This is where my Earth garden will grow. The soil is not right yet. I’ve been sifting it and feeding it. That’s why I needed that frass. It’s getting there. Thado is helping me with that.”

  “I never thought I would see anything like this again,” I said.

  “It’s the first year,” Reza said.

  I tried to remember what was among the cargo of the Prairie Rose. Grain. Potatoes. Corn. Tomatoes. Leafy greens.

  “What will grow?”

  “I don’t know. It will be fun to experiment. But right now I don’t have the right kinds of seeds.”

  “I could get you some,” I said.

  “You could?”

  I tried to calculate the trades it would take. Just calculating the number made me feel like my old self again.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Give me a little time.”

  * * *

  When we first arrived on Quint, with so many different species coming here, aliens wore their allegiance in patches on their uniforms, or as rings or earrings, or embedded in the fabric of their clothing. Were you from homeworld, or offworld? Were you a Major Species or a Minor Species or no species worth talking about?

  They came to work the alin. But they were all running from the Imperium.

  The suspicion of trouble and betrayal was everywhere. In town, every species that came to Quint had a story about a terrible thing that their own people were doing to themselves through the Imperium. In a way, everyone here was escaping something from out there. Each species had its quarter in town. The only place to mingle was in the entertainments bar since there was only one. The town was mixed, but elsewhere was separated.

  But I was on a mission to get Reza his seeds. And Myfanwy grew to depend on me to go to town and get supplies because she knew that I could make a little turn into a lot. I, in turn, depended on barter and favors to get the best things that we needed. Barter and favors meant that more species were working together without having to work together. We were all depending on each other. The real power on Quint was not in currency, but in goods. Whoever had it could make things happen.

  Every trade I initiated made the species that kept apart come together. It was something familiar to me. That coming together was how the Yertina Feray had survived all those years when it was just a skeleton of what it was now.

  “Did you notice that there are more and more coming here?” Reza asked one day as we walked through town.

  “They think it’s safe here,” I said.

  “You make it safe,” he said. “You’ve gotten everyone to trust each other after running.”

  “But they don’t know what they are doing,” I said. “Their fields are failing.”

  “I could teach them,” Reza said.

  He had a way with the plants. He’d been there first after all. He’d been prudent in what he cultivated and in what he did. He took care of his soil. He was scientific about it. Between Reza’s casual lessons on how to care for the land and the alin and the favor trading that I was doing, Quint was beginning to find its pace.

  He taught all of the claimants, not just the Humans and the new arrivals, how to look at the soil. How to care for the leaves. How to water. How to observe the insects that came. He tried to figure out which ones were good and which ones were bad. In his field, life thrived, and the other aliens took that knowledge back to their fields.

  We were all starting to work together in secret.

  Reza would have nightly gatherings in the field with representatives of all kinds of aliens that lived on the planet. Some were working for him on the sly, and others had their own tracts of land, but they were also learning. Learning the tricks that he had learned. He didn’t keep his knowledge to himself. He showed them his method for collecting pollen beads while managing the integrity and bloom of the plant. He showed them the shed where he pressed oil from the alin.

  Every time I walked to his field and saw the many aliens milling about, my heart soared. I imagined that this is what it would have been like on Beta Granade. Whenever a Human woman smiled, I imagined my mother smiling. Whenever an alien helped to raise a barn, I imagined that I was getting closer to the life that I had dreamed of living while traveling on the Prairie Rose.

  “They might outgrow you,” I said of the aliens.

  Reza laughed.

  “Nah,” he said. “And if they did, what would it matter? Really, it’s better for us all if we cultivate and succeed.”

  He had a fire in him. While he had given up on his idea of saving Earth from the Imperium, he got pleasure in uniting Quint. It was as though his dream had been rechanneled. And every day he grew a bit brighter with his cause.

  We looked up at the night sky, and I could see the station as it passed us by, like a moving star, and I wondered about Tournour and if I would ever see him again.

  Despite all of this happiness, he was the thing that was missing.

  And there was still the matter of Brother Blue.

  But one thing that I was learning on Quint was that a seed takes a long time to grow.

  39

  We were bundled up against the dust and the morning frigid air. Days on Quint were only twenty hours, so morning always came sooner than a person wanted. We were moving into the fall on this world, and the angle of the light made it seem as though midday never came.

  The alin started to drop their petals. And along with that, something was wrong with Bitty. She seemed to be drooping like the flowers.

  “What is it?” I asked. She had always been moody when we were growing up. Always crying and scared. But this was deeper than a childhood fit.

  “I find myself restless,” Bitty said.

  “Me too,” I said. It was hard to cultivate patience. I’d been on the planet four months, and while the alin was stored in a shed and the way to ruin it with a mold had been started, it took a long time.

  “No,” she said. “I mean to travel. It’s all I’ve ever really done.”

  “You want to wander again?” I asked. I did not want to wander. I wanted to find home.

  “Not in the way that I did before,” she said. “We weren’t the only ship. We weren’t the only ones to get trapped. There are others out there.”

  It was true. As much as I loved having Bitty here, I knew she was right. But these past months I felt that buzz of creating a community and a home, and I wanted Bitty close to me and to always be a part of it.

  “It’s not safe now,” I said. “You can’t go.”

  But it would never be safe.

  “Myfanwy offered me a job up on the Yertina Feray,” Bitty said.

  “What? No!”
I said smacking her arm. “You can’t leave me.”

  I didn’t want to be abandoned again.

  “I’d be back every week. And it’s only from here to there, but I’d be traveling,” she said.

  “I’ll think of something,” I said. But I thought of how Bitty looked envious when others thrived. Wandering was in her blood. She was always the one who hiked the claim when Myfanwy came, leaving for hours at a time. She did not like to do the chores that kept her close to the camp.

  “You really want to go,” I said.

  “Yes,” Bitty said. “I can leave the next time Myfanwy comes.”

  “I don’t like you leaving,” I said, holding her hand. “I wish you would stay.”

  “I’ll be happier on the Yertina Feray,” she said.

  She was a grown person who was free to make her own choices, not the little girl who used to follow me around. We hugged tight. It was hard to let go.

  We walked arm and arm back to the camp. In my room, I pulled an object from under my bedroll. It was a cuff that I had made for Tournour out of a lock of my hair, the remnants of the clothes I’d worn on my travels since I’d left the Yertina Feray, scraps of leather and rope. There was no indication that it was from me, but I knew he would know where it came from. He would have a part of me with him.

  “Will you give this to Tournour if you can?”

  “Gladly,” Bitty said, giving me a sly look. “I am so curious about your Loor.”

  “He’s not my Loor,” I said.

  “That’s not what I heard,” she said. “That’s not what Reza says when you’re not around.”

  “It’s impossible to be with an alien,” I said. “I’m with Reza. Reza’s Human.”

  “Of course,” Bitty said. “Reza’s Human.”

  “Humans are meant to be with Humans,” I said.

  “Impossible loves have a place in the universe,” she said.

  “He’s there, and I’m here,” I said.

  She let it drop by changing the subject.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be your eyes up there.”

  It would be good to have a spy on the Yertina Feray; someone that I could trust. Caleb was supposed to be up there cozying up to Brother Blue. Get him scared. Get him soft. Get him trusting. But was he doing it? Sometimes I felt he was simply enjoying himself and all the creature comforts that the Yertina Feray offered while I was down on Quint, working the fields.