Dove Arising

by Karen Bao

“Why what?”

  “Training. Not killing me. This.”

  If he was restless before, he’s altogether twitchy now. “I can’t give a simple answer. I suppose I found a similar soul, you know?”

  Yes, we’re very, very alike—dutiful, competitive, solitary. It has brought us closer and driven us apart in equal measure.

  “So.” He stares intently out the window. “I never want anything to hurt you.”

  My stomach plunges into a free fall unrelated to the ship’s motion. I thought that Wes had ulterior motives related to his Earthbound roots.

  “I’m not some pawn you found useful in your assignment?”

  “Absolutely not. Well, you were the daughter of a woman who despised a regime I also despise—but that no longer figures into my opinion of you.”

  “Oh.” After a moment, I mumble, “I don’t want anything to hurt you either.”

  “I was hoping to hear that.” He knits his fingers together. “So can we trust each other? I’m asking again because on Earth, you’ll be all I have. And vice versa.”

  “What about your family?”

  “I haven’t seen them in years. And I have plenty to hide from them, especially my parents.”

  I don’t doubt that, but it seems deplorable to trust someone you just met over your entire family.

  “Allying yourself with an accidental Loony rebel might not be safe either.”

  “I’d have done it the moment you uttered a complete sentence to me.”

  That was a month after we met.

  After I check that the ship is properly cruising, I examine Wes’s profile. He’s different now that he’s not pretending. Even his eyes don’t have that once-prominent cold metal quality.

  “Your name isn’t Wezn.”

  It’s a question disguised as an observation, and he knows it. “And for that I’m grateful. I’m Wesley. People call me Wes at home too.”

  “Wesley,” I repeat. The name tastes grassy and cool. “Are you really eighteen?”

  “Of course I am.”

  Part of me is relieved. He always acted more mature than the other trainees.

  “Enough questions. I have one for you too, if you’ll answer. After all that I’ve done, and in spite of who I am, will you please trust me?”

  I shouldn’t.

  “I doubt you have other options.”

  True.

  “I promise you’ll be safe. We will come back for everyone you care about; we will see justice done—”

  An explosion jolts us in our seats, and the ship schematic before me flashes a frightening red. Wes shouts foreign swearwords.

  What could hit us here, surrounded by the comforting nothing of space?

  42

  “DEAR GOD, NOT AN ATTACK!” WES PLEADS at the ceiling. He unbuckles himself from the copilot seat, floats away, and straps himself in again at the right wing controls.

  Every centimeter of me freezes. Has my autonomic nervous system exhausted itself, given up on me?

  Instead of being moved, I need to move—or, at a minimum, think.

  Because we wrecked the Base IV hangar doors, our pursuers were probably sent from a different base to chase after us. I have to steer our ship out of danger, and quickly, because Wes alone can’t possibly take down all of our attackers. There are at least three.

  I push hard on the speed lever and try to turn us to the left. The controls shift smoothly under my hands, but the ship doesn’t respond.

  “We’re stuck,” I call. “They must have hacked us, programmed the ship to autopilot.”

  Wes swears under his breath. Another tremor rocks the ship; we’ve been hit again, in the port side of the belly.

  “Blast!” I cry when I see the blinking red light. “I’ll fix that.”

  I turn to the set of buttons and levers that man the repair arms sheathed in the belly of the ship. The arms emerge and grope their way toward the ship’s wound, but they’re clumsy and slow. Our ship convulses again, and even though I’m wearing a seat belt, my bare head slams into the wall of buttons in front of me. Globules of light, which may or may not be real, explode before my eyes.

  Scope out the damage, Yinha tells me in my head. I clear my mind and read the ship schematic before me.

  ESCAPE POD FUNCTIONS TERMINATED.

  They put a hole through the exposed portion of the pod. We’re stuck inside the main cabin, wherever autopilot takes us, without a backup craft—and as Jupiter would say, it’s damn scary.

  “Enemy is retreating,” Wes observes tersely.

  I check the blinking black radar screen—he’s right. The Militia ships are heading back to the Moon; they apparently set out only to wreck our means of steering. But one of them has left us a message through the intra-fleet communication system. It flashes on the screen before me.

  PHAET THETA, COME HOME OR ENJOY PACIFIA. THE FOLLOWING FOOTAGE WILL HELP YOU DECIDE.

  —STANDING COMMITTEE OF THE LUNAR BASES.

  A fresh gust of panic freezes my nervous system as I remember Yinha’s warnings about our destination.

  Wes busies himself with the ship’s repair arms.

  The Committee’s message is replaced with a pixelated video filmed by Security Pod Phi 273 approximately fifteen minutes ago. I recognize an eye-level view of the hallway leading to Umbriel’s family’s apartment and a masked corporal scanning three privates into Phi 343.

  The security pod follows the soldiers inside, where my hero of a brother tickles the surface of his jailbroken HeRP without even a glance at the intruders. How long did they know he was the hacker? When he shut down the Militia headsets, or before?

  He doesn’t look up until the corporal bashes his fingers with a glass truncheon. I cover my ears so I don’t hear the scream. Fifteen minutes too late, I cry for his pain.

  “Phaet . . .” Wes begins.

  “Shh!”

  Two privates grab Cygnus by the elbows. He kicks his spidery legs until the Beater swings the truncheon again, putting those out of commission too. Cygnus’s lifeless feet sweep the floor as the group exits Umbriel’s apartment.

  END FOOTAGE, the ship’s screen reads.

  I wrap my arms around my belly, trying to contain an explosive mixture of shock and guilt. The Committee had taken Cygnus mere minutes after publicly apologizing for Belinda’s fate and swearing to protect the children of the Bases. Will his ordeals be as terrible as Mom’s, or worse? No one should have to find out. My quivering hand finds the speed lever, begins to pull it back.

  “I feel terrible about Cygnus.” Wes hangs his head, but only for a heartbeat. “But here’s what I think—no, don’t slow down. Keep going! They took your brother to lure you back to the Moon.”

  I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t do this. “What would you do if they took Murray?”

  “They’ve likely got an armada of ships waiting outside the hangar to ambush us. Once they have you, they’ll exterminate Cygnus, and you, and your little sister.”

  He’s right—Orion was too. Today, my reasoning ability has hit a new low. Four months ago, dampened cognition would have bothered me. Now it’s a petty concern, blotted out by remorse.

  Wes leans across me and pushes the speed lever forward. I let him, admitting to myself that the only way to help Cygnus is to find refuge in Wes’s city, then sneak back onto the Moon when the time is right. My brother’s a clever boy—he’ll survive until then. He’ll find a way.

  As we continue falling, the weight of my heart increases along with the gravitational constant.

  I look down at the ship schematic, which is dotted with yellow. Small objects have hit us, and the hull is knitting itself back together. If only my arm and my heart could also self-repair. We’re passing through a region of concentrated space debris. It’s a small comfort that the Bases have removed the biggest pieces.

  “Thanks for understanding, Phaet.”

  “Mm.”

  “Now, if you’ll permit me a little rant about our present route
. . . and the unholy cleverness of your Committee. See, if you’d joined Dovetail, you’d be captured and disposed of. If you’d stayed obedient, you’d have gone to Pacifia on assignment. And though you escaped the Moon, you’re still going to Pacifia. We’ll probably be smoked on a stick when we get there, and they’ll air the footage all over the Bases.”

  I push his words to the back of my mind as I join him in trying—and failing—to fix our vessel’s belly damage. It seems autopilot will govern our flight path until we land, putting us in the vicinity of the hated city. Escape once we get there isn’t an option. There’s no use trying to lift off from Earth; with the damage, we’ll barely have the energy to touch down. We can’t turn, accelerate, or decelerate until we’re well into the troposphere and the autopilot switches off, but the Pacifian fleet is probably guarding the airspace around the city, leaving us no escape.

  As I’m scrolling through and dismissing our options, feeling more and more helpless, Wes fires heavy artillery out of the right wing. Missiles exit the wingtip all in one direction. I’m about to ask what in the universe he thinks he’s doing, but then I comprehend the answer. Accelerating objects to a high velocity requires a large force to the right, which will apply a leftward force to our ship. It’s not much, considering how massive the destroyer is, but it helps. We must do all we can to veer ourselves off course.

  Wes can operate the wingtip weapons, and I was able to use the repair arms. So the autopilot setting hasn’t rendered all the controls useless. I gingerly try flipping the light switch. It works.

  We’ve entered the ionosphere over Eurasia. The readings on the surrounding composition meter indicate sparse air molecules around us. And it’s too bright out. No simulation, accurate or not, could have prepared me for the strength of the sun’s rays in the Earth’s atmosphere.

  Within a few minutes, the mesosphere goes by, and the stratosphere greets us with a gradual strengthening of horizontal airflow and indications of ozone molecules in the surrounding composition readings. All around us is pure azure, a color that’s surprisingly gentle on the eyes.

  Soon enough, the horizontal wind—we’re feeling wind—picks up, buffeting us to the left even more. I pull a scarlet lever with my left hand, causing our ship’s massive parachute to open above us. As our fall abruptly slows, it feels as if the ship jerks upward. Wes gives me a smile of approval. I bought more time for the wind to push us away from the directed route.

  Now the Earth’s crust approaches, partially hidden by clouds. The color of the sky is different here—gray, with an ugly hint of green. I wrinkle my nose at the remnants of pollution from the Earth’s so-called “Information Age,” when people got rich quick and everyone wanted one of those smelly fossil-fueled automobiles. But I’m more worried about motion sickness than air quality. The gales of wind, huge hands tossing our ship back and forth, recall the manipulative hands of the Committee.

  We should come out of autopilot any second. The wind strengthens as drops of water—real rain—pelt the top and sides of our ship. I pull back on the altitude controls. We’ve been blown around so much that we could land in all sorts of places, from the floating wood city of Taeru to the mountaintop stronghold of Silni. Most likely, though, we’ll touch down on Earth’s expansive, never-ending ocean.

  The water comes up faster and faster. Finally, the ship reacts to my hands—we’ve escaped the autopilot setting—and flies parallel to the plane of the waves. There are no floating cities in sight.

  We have to land, and soon, because the rain is seeping in through the hole in the hull. If it touches the engine, we’re done for.

  “D’you know how to land this thing in water?” Wes calls over the noise.

  “Of course not.”

  He sighs. “Might as well get ready for a storm.”

  We reach under our seats and put on the white life jackets. Wes finds the folded-up emergency boat. Clutching it to his chest, he staggers to the back of the ship and retrieves the backpack stocked with disaster supplies. In my panic, I forgot how much we’ll need it.

  A high-pitched alarm shrieks in the cabin. Water has slithered into the engine through the hole in the side of the ship.

  To land, I’ll need a smooth patch of sea, but it’s impossible to find one. I never imagined water could be so expansive, metric tons of it rolling away in every direction. I never saw more than a few liters at once, and never pictured water as anything but sweet and life giving. This gunk wants nothing but to destroy.

  “We should jump.” Wes shoulders the backpack and tightens the straps.

  “I can’t swim.”

  “You’ll be all right. You have a life jacket, and you have me.”

  I wag my head hysterically. Wes struggles over to me, grabbing appliances to keep from being knocked over by the rocking motion of the ship. He lays his hands on the controls, overlapping my own, and touches the ship to the waves.

  The sea throws us up and down. It feels as if we’re in another moonquake.

  One by one, Wes pries my trembling fingers from the levers and buttons. I grasp desperately at his hands, if only to hold on to something in my terror. His eyes probe mine, purer and brighter than the muddy gray of the sea outside.

  With a rush of blood to my face, I see how warm, how beautiful they are. The new commotion inside me matches the passionate wind outside—the prickly sensation is returning, intensifying until it feels like pine needles sticking me from the inside.

  I stand on shaky legs.

  Wes opens the side hatch, revealing the putrid gray outside, and lowers himself into the water. As he holds on to the ship’s railing with one hand, his legs drift away. I understand that I must follow.

  The water flings itself into my eyes. It smells of salt and filth, stings my laser wounds and pulls at my black clothes. But the taste is familiar, even comforting.

  The sea tastes like tears left out in the cold.

  I hold on to Wes’s hand, and he clutches the ship’s railing until it goes under.

  Our life jackets keep our heads above the water, but they don’t save us from the rain, which feels like bolts of electricity when it strikes my skin. I faintly remember that Earth’s rain is acidic, sometimes with a pH as low as four, and hope that this kind isn’t so dangerous.

  The boat. Wes scrambles through meters of plastic to find the packet of sodium azide, keeping one arm around my middle, and pops it open. The boat inflates with nitrogen gas. I silently thank Engineering for their brilliance and contract my right arm to hoist myself onto the boat. When I collapse on the surface, blood from the three laser burns on my arm leave distinct red pools on the plastic.

  The craft rocks as Wes joins me.

  “Your arm got wet, didn’t it?”

  I don’t answer.

  Sighing, he kneels beside me like he did after Jupiter and Callisto’s ambush, on a harrowing night from another era. He fumbles in the backpack and pulls out a packet of disinfectant. After pushing aside my sleeve, he applies the goop liberally to my wounds.

  “It could get infected,” he chides. “I should have done this earlier.”

  I hardly register his words. Though I’m on a crude inflatable raft with an Earthbound boy, bobbing atop a stormy ocean that wants to consume me, I feel safer than I have for a long time. I shut my eyes and fall asleep knowing that this will forever remain the day I learned to scream.

  43

  UP, AND DOWN, AND UP ONCE MORE. I’M tiny again, and Mom’s holding me in her arms, rocking me from shallow sleep into deep, deep slumber.

  Some wiser part of me knows that I’m passing through REM cycles, that Mom is dead and I’ll never be safe again. Her ghostly hand smoothes the hair on my head.

  But the touch can’t possibly be hers. It’s time to wake up and face what I have done, and what I must do.

  I open my eyes to a swath of sky vastly different from the black nothing above the Moon. It isn’t the polluted gray mess that I’ve been lectured about all my life, but pure cer
ulean, like the surface of Uranus at its brightest. The clouds look as if someone pulled a ball of cotton in different directions and added touches of yellow and purple around the edges. Wes’s face hovers above me, and his hand rests on my forehead. I pull myself to a sitting position and wince when I put weight on my left arm.

  “Good afternoon.” Dark half-moons cradle his droopy eyes. Did he stay awake that whole time, meditating on the ocean and checking me for fever?

  “You need sleep.” My voice barely escapes my throat.

  “You need water.” He reaches into the backpack, pulling a pouty matronly face to make me laugh, and produces a collapsible canteen. He stretches it to its full size, fills it with ocean water, and shakes it back and forth, providing the mechanical energy that will help the purification mechanism boil the liquid.

  When the canteen finishes the condensing process, I push him to drink some before I cough and splutter my way through three greedy mouthfuls.

  We gingerly eat some dried fruit. I’m astonished by my hunger; my stomach hasn’t experienced pangs like this since I joined Militia, but I limit myself to five pieces of dried apricot, which taste as if they’ve been sitting in that backpack since prehistory.

  Wes clasps his hands to his forehead, staring into the distance.

  “God knows when we’ll find land.”

  I don’t believe in God. On the Bases, because we aren’t allowed to worship, we believe in the hard truths of science instead. But my theorems and laws aren’t enough now.

  Why did I live, to be reunited with my species’ home planet, when so many tried to kill me? Throughout my ordeal, many concrete details—Wes’s quick thinking, Andromeda’s treason, the soldier who stabbed the General—saved me, moment by moment. But why did those details assemble and bring me to Earth today? Logic can’t explain it; perhaps there is something more.

  I let out a sound more like a bark than a laugh into the briny air. The girl named Phaet, maybe believing in fate. Mom would love it.

  But she’s gone, her life snatched away by a violet wave tearing through flesh. Cygnus and Anka—I left them at the mercy of the Committee, which will likely tell the entire Base that I died while attempting a cowardly flight. Receiving the two shocks, one after the other, could destroy my siblings—if that destruction, in Cygnus’s case, hasn’t already happened.