She didn’t know about Dad letting me watch the skypad.
But I was willing to bet everyone else did.
Next, Aly told me about all the books she’d left in the basement. She hadn’t done it by accident. Leaving them for me to stumble upon had been a part of the plan. She’d memorized them long before I’d found them. The hope had been that the longer I lurked in the shadows with her books, the less likely I was to yearn for friendship, purpose, and love, three things I wasn’t ever destined to have.
Most of all, and the thing that hurt Aly the most to admit, was that tormenting me hadn’t ever been something she wanted to do. Someone, the nameless faces who’d planned for me to end up in Abid’s program, had instructed her and my family to behave in very specific ways. Taking abuse from my sister was just one of them.
If I’d have heard such truths before coming to Ebes, I would’ve fallen on my face. I’d have been broken hearted at my parents’ lies. I’d have felt betrayed.
But there, standing in the Ring’s cold, chrome kitchen, I was ready. It barely hurt me. Compared to what I’d endured, a childhood full of lies felt like nothing.
“How many?” I asked. “How many other candidates’ families did they deceive? How many did they take away to train?”
We’d been on the Ring for two days, and still Aly’s body rattled whenever she spoke. “A few hundred.” She trembled. “I think. Most washed out. One girl had her Ring malfunction and crash; it was all over the news. The rest, I don’t know what happened. Not that it matters now.”
Right. The way she said it felt strange. Not that it matters.
She and I had only just begun to talk. Despite her poise, she remained in a state of shock. I heard her voice crack. I saw the shadows darken her eyes. I wanted to tell her things. I needed her to know what had happened on Ebes, what the result of Abid’s training had been. But I didn’t want to terrify her with tales of the Strigoi.
Not yet.
“Were you a candidate, too?” I asked. “Is that why you’re here?”
“No. Not a candidate. Mom sent me here.”
Mom?
More questions blossomed in my head. I forced myself not to ask them.
“Mom knew about Doctor Abid.” Aly looked up at me. “They went to university together. That’s when he targeted our family as candidates for…well…the things he trained you to do. Don’t be mad at Mom. It’s not as if she could’ve stopped him. He had the government’s support. He was their favorite scientist. Regular people didn’t want to hear what he had to say. But the government respected his opinions…and feared them. And it turned out he was right. All along, he was right.”
Was he?
The more she spoke, the faster my heart raced. I wondered what lies Abid had spun to keep his program funded. I ached to know, and yet I didn’t want to drown my sister with questions.
Were other candidates locked in the fortress with me? The whole time? Were there other Sabres? Other Rings?
Did Abid hate the Exodus colonies? Did he know about the Strigoi? Was he just trying to steal the string reprogrammers?
Was he a good man? An honest scientist with plans I couldn’t understand? Or was he the worst kind of human imaginable?
Don’t ask her.
Not yet.
“What is it?” Aly asked. “What are you thinking?”
“I just…” I stammered. “Do you know why there’s just a big cloud of dust out there instead of two stars? Do you know what happened to Ebes?”
As it turned out, she didn’t. Not quite. Of course she’d guessed the stars had been destroyed by S.R.’s. That much was obvious. But she had no idea who’d pulled the trigger. Or how. Or why.
I spent hours explaining it.
To her credit, she listened without a word.
I told her about my training in the fortress, about my solitude, about meeting Callista. I described the journey to Ebes, and I saw her nod with sympathy when I recounted the long, dark hours spent in hypo-sleep fugue. I came slowly to the tale of Ebes, leaving out all mention of the Strigoi until the very end.
And then it arrived, the moment at which I could go no further without giving a name to the star-destroying horrors. They’d pulled the puppet strings of everything I’d done. It was time I told someone.
“The Strigoi. That’s what Frost called them.” I shuddered. “Neither alive nor dead. They might’ve been humans once, maybe. They could’ve changed into those things millennia ago or only just a few centuries back. I don’t know where they came from. Before I destroyed them, they claimed to have cleansed entire galaxies of life. But it’s impossible to know. They’re gone, at least for now.”
Aly looked at me without emotion. I couldn’t tell whether she already knew about the Strigoi or whether she was horrified beyond expression.
“It’s their fault,” I went on. “All of this. Maybe Abid wanted me to destroy them. Or maybe he blamed everything on Frost and her people. I’ll never know. But if not for them, if not for the Strigoi, everything would be different.
“We’d be back on our farm.
“We’d be at peace.
“We might even be happy.”
Aly paled with my final words. But it wasn’t for the reason I assumed. She wasn’t aghast at my revelation of the Strigoi. She didn’t look appalled when I described destroying two stars and snuffing two planets. She looked calm, too calm.
Because she already knew.
She wasn’t worried about herself. She was afraid for me.
Because I didn’t know. Not yet.
Oblivious, I carried on.
“I’ve always believed I’d never see home again.” I sank into the chair beside her. “But now I don’t know what else to do. I don’t understand why Mom sent you here of all places. I guess it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s time we go back, you and I. We have two hypo-chambers, one on the Ring and another on the Sabre. We can sleep. We can find Mom. We can get all our questions answered. It’s done now. It’s over.”
Aly just sat there. Her face turned as pale as Earth’s moon, her mouth a hard flat line.
“You mean, you don’t know?” she said.
“Wait…” I said. “I don’t know what?”
“I thought you knew.” Her eyes were wide and dark. A tear dribbled down her cheek.
“Know what, Aly? Say it.”
“Mom didn’t send me to find you.” More tears streamed from her eyes. “She sent me here to find Ebes. She thought it would still be here. She wanted me to live there. When I saw you on my ship, it was like seeing a ghost. I thought you were dead. I had no idea.”
“Oh.” I drew back in my chair. Knowing what I knew about my parents, I shouldn’t have been wounded. “No surprise, I guess.” I pretended it didn’t sting me. “After all, they offered me up to Abid. They gave me away. But it’s ok. I still love them. I still want to see them. I think I’m ready now.”
Aly trembled so hard I thought she might shatter. Her tears were frozen on her cheeks as if they’d turned to ice halfway down. She reached out and cupped my hands in her own. Her skin was cold, and her hands shaking.
“Joff, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. All this time, I assumed—”
I pulled my hands away from hers. Something was wrong. All at once, it came to me.
I knew what she was going to say.
“Earth,” she said it. “It’s gone. I saw it happen moments before my Ring sent me away. Mom put me aboard just in time.”
“No.” I wanted it to be a lie. “No, that’s not right. That would mean—”
“They knew.” Aly cut me off. Her tears, heated by her sorrow, rained in rivers down her face. “They knew, Joff. There was no stopping it. Frost…the Strigoi…it didn’t matter who killed our star. They fired the star-killer before you left. Mom knew. She wanted to save everyone. She could only save me. You and I, we’re the last people from Earth.
“Everyone else is gone.”
I leaned back in my chair. A grea
t stillness washed over me. I couldn’t feel my fingers, my body, or my mind. My mother, my father, and my planet…destroyed. Though incomprehensible, I knew it to be true. The human in me wanted to argue with Aly, to shout her down and send her away for filling my head with lies.
But in my heart, I’d known long before she’d told me. For the same reason I’d stood beneath the stars as a little boy and guessed I wouldn’t always be earthbound, I knew. Of course the Strigoi had struck first. They’d laughed at me even as I was destroying their planet. They’d mocked my killing two stars, so pale an effort compared to their slaughter of millions.
I’d heard it in their voices.
I’d felt it even before I’d come to Ebes.
Denying it had been too easy.
Because who would want to believe such a thing?
I understood then why Abid had sent me. I knew why he’d given me weapons and taught me how to kill. If he’d concluded long ago Earth was doomed to die, only one reason to send me to Ebes made sense.
Vengeance.
An eye for an eye.
Dirt
In a field far from everything, I leaned on my shovel and wiped the sweat from my forehead. I was done working for the day. It was time to cross the little green river and eat dinner with the others.
As ever, I took my time.
If it didn’t feel like Earth, it’s because it wasn’t. The winds here were hot and humid, the grasses dark and green, and the trees mightier than anything I’d ever seen, with leaves huge enough to use as umbrellas against the nightly rain. It didn’t feel like home yet.
The others assured me it would.
One day.
I gazed across a far green field. I’d toiled there all day, digging trenches for drainage. The others had called to me to join them on the trek home, but as usual I let them go ahead. Except for Aly, I didn’t know them, not yet. I knew their names and their faces, but not their lives. They’d lived on their planet for more than fifty generations. I’d only just arrived a year ago.
They called it Sumer, this world. It was the farthest Exodus settlement from Earth, and the only one whose stars the Strigoi had yet to vanquish. As I waited for twilight, I looked up at Sumer’s two suns, one red and one pale blue. They weren’t like Hera and Zeus. They were smaller, but hotter. Life on Sumer was always hot. I’d never been so tan in my life.
Most days, Callista stayed behind in the elegant glass structures Sumer’s people used for their houses. She had work to do, after all. In the moments before we’d fired the string reprogrammers and killed mighty Hera, my little Cal had mapped the S.R. structure in her mind. She’d lost much of it when she’d split herself, but with Aly’s help it seemed likely she’d be able to design new S.R.’s within the next few months.
We’d need them to succeed on Sumer. To grow better crops. To perfect the atmosphere and prolong our lives.
And in my mind, to prepare for a few thousand years of war against the Strigoi.
But that eve, as the stars dipped to the far horizon, Cal floated to me. Even little blue nano girls needed their rest, it seemed. She’d wanted to take a day off and watch me work.
“You know, I think that girl likes you.” She buzzed around my head with a grin.
“Which one is that?” I smirked.
“Maura. The pretty one with the dark hair. She’s always trying to sit with you at supper. How come you never talk to her?”
“I don’t know,” I sighed. “I’ve got a lot on my mind. If we can get these pipes laid in the next week, we can plant more crops and double our food stores for next year. You know what that means, don’t you? More food means more people. More people means more scientists…more fighters.”
Callista rolled her eyes.
“Joff, the Strigoi won’t be back for hundreds of years, if they come back at all.”
“I know,” I said. “So what?”
“Soooooo it’s time to live your life a bit. You’re giving these people what they need. You’ve taught them better ways of farming than they’d ever imagine without you. You don’t have to do more than that. You don’t have to plan for a war that may never come.”
I lifted my shovel and stuck it right back in the earth. The dirt on Sumer was wet, always so wet, and the soil full of more nutrients than any field Earth had ever had.
Even so, I missed my farm.
My dry, cold farm.
My tractors.
The barn.
Mom’s griddlecakes.
“I can’t,” I said.
“You can’t what?” Cal floated between me and the fiery blue sunset.
“I can’t help it.” I looked to the dirt, then to the sky. “It’s all I think about. I sometimes wonder if they were lying. Maybe the Strigoi made it all up. Maybe the planet we destroyed was their only one. But then, when I close my eyes at night, I hear their voices, and I know they told the truth.”
Cal looked as miserable as I sounded. She knew. She remembered.
“You still haven’t told anyone, have you?” she asked.
“No,” I admitted.
“Why not?”
“Have you seen how happy they are?” I gestured across the river, where the glass houses were lighting up for the settlement’s communal dinner. “They look forward to everything, Cal. I’ve never seen anything like it. Why would I ruin that? Why should I tell them that someday their grandchildren might all die? That their beautiful planet might burn?”
Cal looked me dead in my eyes. “Have you told any of them about Earth? About what happened?”
“No,” I glared back at her. “And neither has Aly. We made a pact. Earth is just a legend to these people. You, me, and Aly…we’re just accidents from the stars.”
Cal fluttered to within centimeters of my face. She was strikingly human, no matter the blues fluxing up and down her tiny body. She had more emotion in her than I’d ever known. Abid must’ve made a mistake when programming her, or else it’d been someone else entirely who’d created her.
Tiana, maybe, I mused.
Or Mom.
“So what happens now?” Cal asked me.
“We go eat dinner.” I cracked a grin. “Actually, I eat while you keep me company. I guess it’s one pleasure you’ll never know: eating. Sorry for that.”
I picked up my shovel and started for the river. Callista floated right in front of me.
Always so persistent.
Always so worried.
“That’s not what I meant.” She put her hands on her hips. “I mean what happens tomorrow? The next week? The next year?”
I’d meant to walk quickly to the little glass dwelling I called home, but her questions slowed me. I couldn’t help it. Whenever she looked at me the right way, I was a blade of grass blowing in a wind of her design.
“I don’t know,” I exhaled. I meant it. I really didn’t have a plan. “Aly and you have more purpose here than I do. I don’t want to get married or have children or anything. I think I might want – I don’t know – to just dig holes.”
“Dig holes?” Cal sighed.
“It’s what I’m good at.” I shrugged. “Besides, it’s not like I’m going to live forever. The Strigoi really did a number on me. There’s no sense falling in love or anything like that. I might just topple over and die after the first kiss. Anyway, I’ve got you. Who needs real girls?”
“First,” she said as she fluttered beside me, “I am a real girl. Second, I wish you’d be serious for once. Acting like you don’t care about anything – it’s really not you.”
She’s right, I knew.
Who am I kidding?
I know exactly what I want to do.
I stepped onto the bridge over the warm, green-watered river. I heard the water babbling below us, and I caught the suns’ last rays sparkling against the pale rocks on the shore ahead. I had to admit; although Sumer was a hot, rainy, sometimes miserable place to farm, it had a beauty much like Earth’s. They called it a garden world, among the most li
fe-rich of all the places the Exodus people had found.
How lucky the Strigoi haven’t found the stars here.
Yet.
“You really want to know?” I bounced off the bridge and stepped onto the stone path leading to the settlement.
“Yes,” answered Cal.
“Ok.” I breathed deep. “I want Aly and you to build me a skypad. Just a little one; nothing fancy. And I want to sync it up to the Ring’s long-range scopes. The Ring’s just floating up there in orbit being useless. Might as well put it to use.”
“Why scopes?” Cal looked suspicious.
You know the reason, I thought.
“Oh, I see.” She read the look in my eyes. “You want to count stars again. You want to come out here every night and do it. Don’t you?”
I nodded.
We were almost at the settlement. The great glass houses, ablaze with white and blue lights, rose up out of the grasslands before us. I could see the people inside. They were laughing, smiling, and eating their meals without a care in the world. I even saw Aly. For so many months, she’d been a broken-hearted mess. But she’d met a kind young man who was smitten with her beauty and her mind. He’d learned to speak our language and written poems to leave by her room.
She’ll never love him, I knew.
But he makes her smile sometimes. Tiny little smiles.
And that’s a good thing.
I saw them sitting together in the smallest of the glass houses. She was laughing at something he’d said.
And for a moment, she reminded me of Mom.
“If we agree to do it, what then?” Cal chimed in.
“I’ll fly up there in the Sabre, calibrate the scopes, and come back down. I won’t mention what I’m looking for to anyone. I know you don’t want to disturb the peace here, and neither do I. I’ll just say I’m stargazing. It’s natural, you know. They already think of me and Aly as aliens.”
“They don’t—”
“They do and it’s ok.” I cut her off. “Because it’s true. We are aliens. Look at me, a sunburned mess. It’s like I’m from Donva, and they’re from Ebes. Aly and I don’t even really look like them.”
Cal had expected me to go into one of the big communal houses, but I veered right off the path and toward the small glass dwelling the Sumer people had built for me. The Sabre sat behind it, draped in shadows, a silent symbol of all that I’d done. The Sumerians didn’t know its true purpose. They were a little curious, and more than a little afraid.
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