by Lucia Ashta
And right now it was necessary. All sorts of things were necessary that shouldn’t have been in a fair world, one that didn’t push the men and women that were already battered farther down.
But if long years of life had taught me anything it was that a man—or woman—was more or less capable of making his own destiny. I’d been born into this world screaming and fighting, and it’s how I’d leave it.
One step in front of the other, no matter what.
“Do you want me to trade places with you?” Ilara asked me.
“I’m all right for now.” I didn’t want to burden her if I didn’t have to. Even though she was free of any injury that bled or oozed, she’d endured two leaps across space in far too little time. The travelers of the sand industry upon Origins were only allowed to do two journeys to sand per year because it was considered too taxing on the body, and they were trained for this shit. We’d leapt across space nearly by accident, and now the man who’d dragged us here might die before we had enough of our wits returned to us to properly chastise him for what he did to us.
“You’re sure? You don’t look so great.”
“Gee. Thanks.”
“You know what I mean. You always look great to me, it’d just be nice if I couldn’t make out the ivory white of bone on not just one but two parts of your body. It freaks me out, Tanus.”
“I know. But we’ll get out of this, and I’ll heal.”
“Don’t say ‘I promise.’”
I smiled a smile she wouldn’t see in the dark. “I wouldn’t.” I started to say something else, stopped, then resumed. “You know, I realize you don’t remember a lot about our time together before you left, but so much of you is the same, whether you remember it or not.” I left out the bit about how much about her was different. “We used to tease about promising, and how half the time it seemed that people made promises only to break them, and how foolish it is to make a promise you have no way of knowing you’ll be able to keep.”
“I’ve always thought that.”
I wished I could see her face and understand what was going on inside her. I felt myself ready to begin wondering if I’d ever have the chance to understand her and I tore myself away from the dangerous thoughts, which could sweep me away to despondency.
No. Just one step and then another. Nothing more.
“Are you doing okay?” I asked Lila.
“It’s hard to say.”
“Why? Is it getting worse? Is the pain unbearable?” I didn’t know. I’d never been stung by a Vikas viper—obviously—or whatever vipers lived on this planet.
“No, it’s not that. Maybe it is. That’s just the point. My brain’s starting to feel foggy. Like I just woke up from a long nap and haven’t yet figured out what’s happening around me. Do you suppose that means I’m dying?”
“If it is, then I’m dying too, because I feel half as smart as I used to.”
“I understand precisely what you mean.”
We continued on at a pace that wasn’t going to get us anywhere fast, especially when it was hard to tell we’d made much progress at all. In the darkness, our surroundings were monotonous, to the point that I stopped looking to avoid despair. Had we not begun to spot the occasional rocky outcropping around us, I might’ve imagined we’d traveled in a circle.
“Hey,” Kai called out. “It’s starting to lighten.”
“He’s right,” I said to Lila and Ilara. I’d lived to see another sunrise. If I was destined to die, maybe Planet Sand would honor me with a splendid farewell, one that would make up for the pitiable sunset of last night, the one I barely noticed because a pack of wild animals was far more remarkable.
But as the sky continued to lighten, as slowly and gradually as our progress across the eternal sand, it brought hope, fresh and unexpected. Not only had we all survived the night (as Aletox still breathed), but with the sun out we’d be able to see our surroundings once more.
“We might just make it,” Lila whispered as pink finally tinged the edges of the sky.
A furious orange blasted across the sky, leaving me breathless for a good reason for the first time since arriving on this planet. When purple exploded behind the orange I thought I’d never seen a sky as gorgeous as this one in all my many years of soaking in the suns’ transitions on O. When red burned along the horizon and the sun slipped above it, shooting rays that could be nothing other than faithum, I thought I might cry from the beauty of it.
But I didn’t. Ilara did.
She fell to her knees and sobbed.
19
“By the oasis, Ilara, what is it?” I wobbled to a stop next to her, putting all my weight on the leg that didn’t feel like it’d been gnawed in half. Lila slumped into me.
The woman I loved said just one word, but it was the kind of word that could change a man’s life. It changed mine. “Look,” she said and raised a limp arm up to point ahead of us.
“Holy shit,” Dolpheus said. “There’s something there. Something big, really big.”
“More importantly, it’s something manmade, and if it’s what I think it is, then there’s a whole huge city right behind it.”
We didn’t say anything more, there was too much strangled hope gurgling to life in our empty chests. Ilara stood back up and staggered on, and we trudged along right behind her. We dragged and limped and stumbled, but there was no way in hell we were going to stop now.
The sun continued to marvel me with its brilliance, fueling me when I needed it most. We didn’t have water and we cared little about food when our mouths could crumble into pieces at any moment. But this... this glory would be enough for me to keep moving, dragging a stumbling Lila along with me. She lived. We all lived, even Aletox, whose breath had become ragged and irregular in his chest.
Eyes trained forward, yearning, wishing, reaching, we walked until Ilara delivered the news of angels. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. You guys! It is what I thought it was! Those are the pyramids of Giza, and that’s the Sphinx.”
“Are they a settlement?” Kai asked.
“They were a sacred part of one at one time, a very long time ago. But people don’t occupy these buildings anymore, if live ones ever did.”
“What does that mean?” Dolpheus said. “Will there be water or not?”
“Oh yes. There will likely also be a bunch of tourists milling around, along with security that protects the sites, so there’s little chance we’ll be inconspicuous. Which I guess doesn’t really matter at all because most of you need to go to the hospital immediately.”
“A hospital? Is that some kind of healing place?”
“Yeah, although they don’t have anything as advanced even as your healing wand.”
“And in this hospital, will they help us even without these IDs and visas you spoke of?”
“Shit.”
“I take it that’s a no?”
“That’s a it’s-fucking-complicated.”
“Will they help us or not?”
“Maybe. We’re in Egypt now, a country that we theoretically have no legal right to be in since we don’t have any travel papers allowing us to be here. So even if they do help us, things will get very, very complicated for us afterward.”
“How might they get complicated?”
“Authorities would be called, I imagine. We might be held in custody.”
“I take it that’s not good.”
“No, it wouldn’t be, especially not if they draw blood from any of you and run it and things come back that aren’t normal. I mean, you obviously bleed because I’ve seen plenty of the red stuff since meeting you, but is your blood like regular human blood? If any of your lab work comes back indicating that you’re, you know, aliens, we’re pretty much fucked in all sorts of ways you don’t want to be fucked.”
“So no hospitals then,” I said.
“Pretty much, but even so we’ll be lucky if nobody calls the cops on us, or whatever the equivalent of that is in Egypt. I mean, we’ll look
pretty suspicious coming out of the desert like this. And we’ll all need to be treated for dehydration. At the very least by now, I’m sure we all need IVs. I can’t even understand how my brain’s working right now.”
“Neither can I,” Kai said, sounding like he’d had a few cups too many of nectar.
“And we don’t have money! That’s a big problem.”
“Why?” Dolpheus asked.
“Because nothing works on Earth unless you have money.”
“Can we at least get water without money?”
“Yes. We’ll have to. I’ll suck a hose dry if I have to.”
“I don’t understand half the words you’re using anymore, but how can we get money, if we need it?”
“Luckily, I happen to have kept my debit and credit cards on me when Lila made me change clothes when I first got to Origins. I’m just so used to needing them all the time, that I kept them with me even though I couldn’t use them. So I have those.”
“And those can get us money?”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s great then,” Kai said.
“Definitely.”
“So why’s there a big stinking ‘but’ in your tone?” I asked.
“Becaaaauuuuse... I don’t know if you remember the little fact that I disappeared from this planet. Literally, vanished into thin air. Surely someone’s noticed it by now and reported it. I might’ve been a loner, but my parents have certainly tried to call me by now. If I didn’t pick up or call my mom back before long, she’d get worried, and she’d try to track me down. If she couldn’t, then eventually she’d call the cops to report me missing. How many day’s has it been since I left? Tanus, when did I cross through space to land in your arms?”
“I’m not sure. Time’s been a bit funnier than usual lately. Maybe three days, four?”
“Oh.”
“Oh what?”
“Well, if it hasn’t been that long, then maybe no one’s realized I’m gone yet. Maybe no one’s reported me missing, which means me using my cards won’t raise any red flags anywhere.”
“Which is good, right?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Then why do you sound sad?”
“I don’t know, no reason, I suppose. It’s just been a long-ass night, and I never really cared about what it would feel like to realize nobody would notice me missing unless I was gone for a very long time. I alienated myself from others—on purpose, and I liked it that way. I don’t know, I’m rambling, I’m probably half crazy from dehydration and exhaustion. It just kind of sucks right now to realize it’s likely that no one, on an entire planet, even noticed I was gone, that’s all.”
“I noticed you gone. I felt you, missing every second you weren’t with me on Origins. It nearly drove me mad with longing, with desperation to find you, wondering all the time if I was truly crazy thinking you alive when everyone said you were dead.” I wasn’t usually this forthcoming in general. I especially wasn’t this open in front of an audience. But the threats and joys of the last several days had changed something in me. I imagined they’d changed something in all of us.
Ilara looked at me then. It was the first time I’d really been able to see her eyes since the sky darkened and delivered mystery and danger to us. The sun wasn’t yet at its full brightness, but I could already see enough of the swirling cosmos to know my words affected her. Good.
Lila said, “So if we can’t go to a hospital thing, what do we do? Aletox obviously needs some help or he’ll die, assuming he isn’t dead already.”
“He’s still breathing,” Dolpheus said. “Barely, but he is.”
“Honestly,” Ilara said, “I have no fucking clue what we’re going to do. By now, Aletox probably needs a blood transfusion, and I don’t know where we’d get one besides at a hospital. And that’s assuming that you guys have blood that’s compatible with ours—or, er, the humans on Earth.”
Ilara didn’t know what she was anymore than I did. Whether she was a princess of Planet Origins or a regular woman from Earth, she could still be my Ilara. But I couldn’t deny that her essence would be somehow different. Was her blood the same as mine? Would we even be able to breed together if her internal functioning was incompatible with mine? When I’d made love to her I’d felt more compatible than ever before, but was that enough? Useless concerns, of course, unless we survived the day, and the next one after that, all on a foreign planet that had so far given us a questionable welcome.
Ilara continued with a focus that eluded me. “If we could get somewhere private and get some sewing supplies, I could sew you guys up like I did with Kai. Your wounds are bad, but we could score some disinfectant and use that healing wand thingie some more, and you all might make it. But Aletox, I really don’t know. He’s at the point of a transfusion and IV antibiotics, if you all aren’t as well. Dammit.”
“Ilara,” I said, “this doesn’t all fall on you. We’ll figure it out together.”
“But you guys have no idea how things work on Earth.”
“True. But things are similar enough. You were able to manage on Origins.”
“Yeah, but you were there guiding me through it.”
It was tough to comfort a woman when I had a half she-dragon half padlune-bear hanging on me. “And you can guide us now.”
“But—”
“Ilara,” I said again, “one thing at a time, okay? You’re not alone. You’re in the company of two scientists. Well, maybe one and a half since Aletox isn’t conscious now. And then the rest of us are soldiers. Dolpheus and I’ve survived some nasty experiences before.”
“Take his word on that,” Dolpheus interjected.
“We’ll manage, and what we can’t manage, well, that’s just out of our hands. So now, just one step at a time, that’s how we got through the Sahara Desert.”
“All right,” she said. “Okay.”
And we put one foot in front of the other until we managed to put the expanse of the Sahara Desert behind us.
We’d soon enter the shadows of buildings that looked familiar enough to suggest that parallel dimensions that were nearly holograms of each other might actually exist. Which meant there truly might be more than one Ilara.
20
“What are these smaller buildings?” Kai asked. “Do they have water?”
“No,” Ilara said. “They’re tombs.”
“Tombs?”
“Where they put mummified dead bodies, ages ago.”
“Mummified?”
“Sorry, Kai, I’m too tired to explain everything in depth right now. Basically, it’s believed that these smaller buildings on the edge of the pyramids are tombs of lesser nobles, or the equivalent in pharaonic times, and the greater pyramids the tombs for the pharaohs. Ancient Egyptian culture believed that life in the body continued after death, so they preserved the bodies so they could be accessed after a person died. That’s the gist of it. Were you able to follow?”
“More or less. So they wouldn’t have water in them then?”
“No, but we’ll start seeing people soon enough, and one of them will have water. But I warn you, after we get water, you might soon start wishing we hadn’t reached civilization at all.”
“Is civilization bad? Are people on Sand bad?” Kai asked.
“No, I guess not. Maybe I’m not being fair. I’ve just never really liked people terribly much, only a select few.”
“Wait,” Lila said, sounding more alert than she had for hours. “Did you just say that the bigger pyramids are also used to put dead bodies in?”
“Yeah. That’s what’s believed at least, for the most part. There’s some controversy about what they were actually for and how they were built and all sorts of stuff. But the general consensus is that they were burial chambers for pharaohs, your equivalent of a king, like my... uh, father on O, I guess.”
“You’re kidding right now, right? That’s not what people actually think these condensers are for.”
“Lila, let
me assure you, my desire to joke about anything evaporated about the same second we side-stepped your vomit to enter the ginormous Sahara Desert. What are you talking about?”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes, for fuck’s sake, I’m serious, and low on patience with half of you dying on me.”
“If these are anything like the condensers on O, which I imagine they are, then there’s no fucking way that dead bodies of any sort should be inside them. I don’t even want to think about dead bodies inside them, actually. That’s horrifying. What that might be doing to the energies...”
We were almost to water and yet Ilara stopped walking, after all her reminders about how dire our situation was, about how urgent our treatment was, she stood as still as the dead.
I nearly bumped into her. “What are you doing?”
“Processing.”
“Processing what?”
“The out-of-this-world mind blowing shit that Lila just threw at me.”
I was low on patience too. My body felt broken, my mind hanging on by a thread, and Ilara was sounding more like an alien herself with every passing second. “What are you even talking about, woman?”
“You’re telling me that you have pyramids like this on Origins?”
“Condensers, yes.”
“And you built them?”
“I didn’t personally, but yes, of course we built them. How else would we have them? They wouldn’t just appear out of nowhere with no explanation, now would they?”
“That’s more or less exactly what’s happened here on Earth. No one’s really sure how the pyramids were built or why or what they’re for. Really, everything about them is a mystery. Every ‘fact’ about them is no more than a theory, in the end.”
Dolpheus and Kai stopped too, Aletox hanging like a dead beast between them. Dolpheus craned his head to look at her. “You’re actually serious, aren’t you?” He sounded as dumbstruck as I felt.
