A Conspiracy of Stars

by Olivia A. Cole

  “What? What is it?” I snap.

  She can only point, and I close the gap between us in two quick steps. On the left side of the screen is a diagram, being projected from a slate propped on a nearby shelf. I look quickly, scanning the projection with my eyes: a humanoid figure, its skeleton illuminated—many sketches, words, formulas. On the right side of the screen, another diagram: a tower, tall and angular, a platform at its pinnacle, bars around its perimeter. A structure like a metal tomb in the center, the size and shape of a person. The tower’s spiny construction is familiar; even if the way I’ve seen it is incomplete, the image in my mind not quite as tall, no platform yet. . . .

  To the side of the diagram a word catches my eye: “Solossius,” I whisper.

  “Sun. Bones,” Alma says softly, covering her mouth. She peers at the sketches, finally understanding. “The tower. They . . . want to harvest energy from . . . from his bones.”

  “They’ve been building it this whole time.” The truth of it crushes me, as if I’ve woken from a dream and found myself in the jaws of a dirixi. The diagram seems so simple and harmless. A figure on a screen. A sketch of a machine. Floating numbers and equations. But when I jerk my eyes away, forcing them to take in Adombukar, crouched in his cell, the horror of it sinks into my lungs, coating them in what feels like ash.

  “Like the salamander,” Alma says. “The Faloii make their own energy, and Dr. Albatur wants to harvest it with the towers.”

  “Right out in the open,” I continue. “Right in the middle of the commune where the sun is bright. No wonder Albatur has been so focused on making everyone believe the Faloii are dangerous! He doesn’t want anyone to say anything when he starts using them for energy!”

  “But energy for what?” Alma cries. “We have energy!”

  I stare hard at the diagram of the tower, the last few weeks swirling in my head, rearranging.

  “The Vagantur,” I say. “Remember? My mom said there’s a power source that’s precious to the Faloii—that it’s what Dr. Albatur wants to use to power the ship so he can leave the planet. And my dad is helping him.”

  The room seems to be pulsing, but I know it can’t be. It’s my mind. Emotions flood my brain, tidal waves of fear. It takes me a second to realize some of the fear is coming from Adombukar, who stares at me hollowly from his prison.

  “We have to get him out.”

  I rush back to the cage and inspect the bars, looking for a hinge, a fault line, anything. Nothing.

  “Did they ever take you out?” I ask.

  “Yes.” He nods weakly. “But I was unconscious.”

  “Damn,” I say. We’re wasting too much time. The guards are probably mobilizing as we speak. By now the Council surely knows of intruders in the labs—sending reinforcements to protect their secrets.

  “Move,” Alma says, surprising me by appearing at my elbow. She looks at Adombukar. “Hello, sir.”

  She reaches inside her skinsuit, digging into an inside pocket. When she withdraws her hand from the material, a long blue vial is in her grip.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  “Pavi extract,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Pavi?” I say. “Alma, where did you get that?”

  She uncorks the thick vial. “I swiped it from the engineer that came to dissolve Jaquot’s bed. I thought it might come in handy.”

  I just stare at her.

  “Stand back as much as you can, sir,” she says, and with quick, slightly awkward movements, she sprinkles the liquid on the bars of the cell, stretching high to reach the top of the cell, and crouching to make sure it reaches the bottom. It only takes a few drops. She stands back and I follow her lead, the pavi extract already beginning to hiss. The dust rises from the cell like fog.

  Adombukar steps through the opening Alma has created before the dust has fully cleared. I stand before him as my father did that night in the main dome. I could take the tranq gun from Alma right now and put an end to all this, avoid the trouble that I know I’m in. But the screen with the Solossius diagram glares at me like a glowing white eye, the dreadfulness of that tower forcing me to turn away.

  “Let’s go.”

  I expect the hallway to be filled with guards, buzzguns aimed at the place on the wall where we appear. But it’s empty aside from the sound of the alarm.

  “What do we do now?” pants Alma, the vial of pavi extract recorked but still in her hand, tranq gun in her other hand. These aren’t the tools I expected us to be using in the labs.

  Adombukar groans. He’s barely standing, leaning against the smooth white wall for support. My mind prickles: he’s trying to show me something, but I don’t understand it. It’s jumbled, the shapes fuzzy, lacking distinction. The spots on his forehead cluster and disperse again and again.

  “Something’s wrong,” I say, returning to his side, the alarm grating on my ears. I take hold of his arm to help him, expecting to feel him enter the tunnel to show me what he’s trying to communicate, but he’s weak.

  “It’s probably the tranquilizer,” Alma says. “Remember how disoriented the kunike was when Dr. Depp woke him up with the blue thing?”

  She’s right. Adombukar feels dizzy, his mind blurred and unfocused. Who knows what else they’ve done to him while he’s been a prisoner here.

  Adombukar’s energy pulses: he manages to push one image through the tunnel and into my mind. The kawa. I recognize its smooth shape, can almost feel its mass, heavy in my palm. I know what he wants, even if I don’t know why.

  “He needs the egg,” I say.

  We grasp Adombukar by the arms, walking on either side of him as we half guide, half drag him down the hall. Without realizing it fully, I find that I’ve opened the tunnel as we walk, passing him different things through it: hope, warmth, light. I show him my last memory of Rasimbukar, even though I couldn’t see her face: her presence out in the trees, demanding his return. Hold on for her, I tell him, wrapping the feeling of the words in comforting shapes. Your daughter is waiting.

  We turn a corner, returning to a hallway that has actual doors and windows on either side.

  “We’re getting closer to the front,” Alma says.

  Wait, Adombukar tells me, and I freeze at the corner, Alma following suit. He’s listening: his energy, though weak, pricks toward the hall ahead. Then I see them. The guards appear at the intersection of the next hallway, fifty paces ahead. There are six of them, faces covered by black mesh masks that I’ve never seen. Armor of some kind? Or just for intimidation? If the latter, it’s effective. One of them lifts his finger to listen to his comm. Then they raise their buzzguns and start down the hall toward us.

  My mind is humming. I don’t have time to figure out the source of it. Instead I try to focus on Adombukar’s presence in my mind. He’s trying to tell me something, but with the buzzing and the blaring alarm, I can’t hear him.

  “In here,” he finally says out loud, nodding weakly at the door to our left. “Here.”

  Alma’s already opening the door. It’s not a lab, just a scrub room. The door slides open and she shoves me and Adombukar inside. Outside, the guards’ footsteps break into a jog. The door slides shut.

  “What do I do! What do I do! They’re coming!”

  “Break it!” I yell. “I don’t know! Just . . . break it!”

  She still holds the tranq gun and aims it uncertainly at the door. The darts won’t do anything, I think frantically.

  “Smash the scanner!” I cry over the buzzing in my head. Adombukar leans on me heavily. His skin has begun to turn stark white to blend in with the scrub room’s walls. I wonder if he’s doing it on purpose or if it’s automatic, danger compelling his body to hide. The sight of it gives me goose bumps, the deep brown leaking away.

  Alma switches her grip on the gun from the handle to the muzzle. Using it as a hammer, she bashes it against the square scanner panel: once, twice, three times. On the fourth strike, sparks fly, the displa
y screen flashing irregularly before going dark.

  “Kawa,” Adombukar whispers.

  “That’s only going to hold them off for a little while,” Alma says, dropping the tranq gun, which is as smashed as the scanner now.

  “Through here,” I say, nodding at her to come help me with Adombukar. When we’re supporting him on both sides, we stagger toward the second door of the scrub room, which opens on its own, designed to be touchless for hygienic purposes—there will be no breaking the scanner to keep them out. Behind us, on the other side of the door, I hear the muted voices of the six guards. I try to think of a plan beyond this next room, but the buzzing in my head has intensified and I can barely focus.

  As we step through the doorway, I see why. We’re in the containment room. I gaze around the large space, the endless rows of different-sized cages with their deathly quiet captives lying motionless in each one. I feel all of them: their fear, their loneliness, their anger, pulsing through the tunnel and widening my mind with their mass. My head feels as if it might split.

  Adombukar collapses. His energy is sapped, his body too weak from his time in the cell, away from the jungle and the light of the sun. I drop to my knees, Alma joining me. We’re both crying, and it doesn’t occur to me to feel ashamed. Alma balls her fists.

  “What do we do, O? We can’t carry him!”

  “I don’t know!” I sob. I can’t get my emotions under control. The guards are probably only minutes away from breaking through the door, and we’ll be right here, a heap on the floor.

  “Does he need water? Maybe he needs water! Like when we’re in the jungle,” Alma says.

  “No!” I shout, the sleeping animals around me like a cemetery. “He doesn’t need water. He needs the kawa, and I don’t know where . . .”

  I freeze. My gaze pauses on the gwabi, its inky body prone in its cell. I stand slowly, my legs wobbly. The buzz in my head is a roar, but I squeeze the muscle in my mind as hard as I can, identifying the source of each hum and pushing them out one by one. There’s something swimming just beyond the edge of my consciousness, the image getting clearer and clearer as my mind becomes quiet. A memory, and not even a memory of something real. A dream. I’m remembering a dream I had, the pieces of it floating up through the darkness in my mind and reassembling to form a complete image: my mother, her hand in the mouth of a large, fanged beast. A gwabi. She pulls her hand from its jaws, and in it she holds . . .

  “The kawa,” I say.

  I rush to the creature’s cage, one of the largest in the room. The body of the gwabi is like a velvet boulder: enormously muscled and covered in fine sable fur. Its huge head lies just inside the bars, close enough to touch, the eyelids fluttering in sleep.

  I reach out for the gwabi in my mind. She’s there, waiting for me: her energy flares as we meet. I greet her—not with “hello,” but with a feeling like hello. Open. Warm. Familiar. She feels hard at first: I can sense her perceiving me but holding back, keeping her mind just out of reach. She investigates me, the chain between us glowing brighter, and then she bends, allowing me near, letting me see her. Like all the others, she’s afraid.

  I reach into my skinsuit pocket and withdraw the wand I used to wake up Adombukar.

  “Octavia,” Alma snaps.

  “Wait,” I say. Behind me Adombukar is slumped on the floor, his pulse of light barely registering in my head. He’s not dying, but he’s drained, weak. His mind is slipping.

  No time to waste. I reach my hand through the bars, work the wand through the gwabi’s mane of fur, and press the tip to her neck.

  She stirs, both in my mind and beneath my fingers. I withdraw my hand as slowly as I dare, just as she opens her eyes.

  They are huge and green, a strange pixilated color as if painted with a thousand different overlapping shades. The eyes fix on me, and I can’t help but break the gaze for a moment to glance at the huge fangs that protrude from her mouth.

  I need it, I tell her, communicating not with words, but with feeling.

  She knows.

  “Alma, give me the pavi extract.”

  “Are you insane? It will kill us—”

  “Give it to me!”

  She slaps the vial into my palm and backs away as I uncork it. I stare into the multifaceted green eyes before me.

  Not us, I tell her.

  She stares back, knowing.

  My nervousness grows hooves, galloping so fast in my lungs that it makes my breath ragged. I flick my wrist, splashing the thick white bars of the cage that holds her captive with a few drops of the pavi extract. A moment later, the bars are crumbling into piles of white dust, leaving an opening large enough for the gwabi to fit through. I retreat, nearly falling, and out she comes, her huge body graceful and lithe. She stops in front of me, her paws enormous, each of the six toes tipped with a fearsome claw.

  The great mouth opens, each tooth as long as my finger. One snap and she’ll end me.

  But the mouth doesn’t close. It waits there, held open. The wet heat of her breath wafts into my face, smelling of jungle and something else I can’t identify. Terror makes my chest heave, but I swallow hard, move closer, and put my hand into the gwabi’s mouth.

  At first, nothing. Just the hot, wet sensation of her tongue on my palm; the terrifying texture of her molars brushing a fingernail. But something’s grazing my fingertips: a hard, smooth object, rising from her throat and rolling into her mouth, heavy and strange. I grasp it, my hand deep in her mouth, and slowly, slowly—avoiding her curved fangs—pull it from her jaws. I don’t need to look: I know it’s the kawa.

  I nearly drop it, slick with the gwabi’s saliva. She stares at me neutrally. Her energy hums, glowing. She’s pleased to be out of the cage, ignoring Alma completely. I thank the gwabi, who acknowledges and dismisses my gratitude with a coy blink of her luminous eyes, translating as a twist of pink in my mind.

  “Where did that come from?” Alma breathes from the corner where she’s hunched.

  I rush to Adombukar’s side, where he still slumps on the floor, his eyes barely open.

  Adombukar. I form the shape of his name and push it through the tunnel along with the shape of the egg. He struggles to turn his head. I’m trying to figure out how to help him without dropping the kawa when Alma appears at his shoulder, glancing nervously back at the gwabi, and helps raise him into a sitting position.

  “Where did it come from?” she says again.

  “Here’s the kawa,” I whisper to Adombukar.

  I put it near his face. I don’t know what he needs from it, what he plans to do. Unlike the gwabi, his jaws aren’t big enough to swallow it whole. Instead, though, his large paw-like hands slowly rise and take the kawa from my grasp.

  “It’s hot,” Alma gasps, and I almost ask her how she knows—but then I feel it too. In Adombukar’s hands, the kawa has begun to radiate a halo of heat, warm at first and then intensifying into a blast I have to back away from. Alma is forced to release Adombukar’s shoulders to get away from it, but he doesn’t need her anymore. He’s growing stronger: the blue of him in my mind glowing brighter, its flame widening until the tunnel is illuminated with its blaze. He rises from the floor. It’s not just in my mind that he’s glowing: the kawa is illuminated, bathing him in its light. In the tunnel, I perceive something deep in his body growing stronger. His very bones seem to radiate, absorbing some unnamed energy from the core of the kawa.

  Are you better? I ask him, afraid to interrupt, but we don’t have time to spare.

  Soon, he tells me. The spots on his forehead find a fixed pattern, evenly spaced, and stay there. The light fades from the kawa. When it flickers out, Adombukar approaches the gwabi, who obligingly opens her mouth and swallows the kawa once again.

  “Now what?” Alma says, looking up at Adombukar’s face. With his back straight and some of his strength regained, he’s an imposing figure. “Where can we go? The only other door is the one at the back that goes deeper into the Zoo. We’d get caught for
sure.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut tightly.

  “I don’t know,” I say, gritting my teeth. “I don’t know. Adombukar . . .”

  I turn to him, but he’s not listening to me. He’s turned to look at the containment room, his eyes on the many cages of animals, all tranquilized. I quickly open the tunnel and find him reaching out to every creature in the room, the chains connecting him to them all like a glowing web. His connection with them is so much more powerful than mine. My communication is like rudimentary sign language. His is rich and deep and complicated. He speaks each animal’s unique language. Listening in the tunnel is like standing on a cliff and staring out into space: the conversations happen like shooting stars, simultaneous and incredibly bright.

  “Adombukar, we have to go.”

  We do.

  He walks to the nearest cage, a smaller enclosure containing what appears to be a pregnant marov. I didn’t notice her before and wonder how she became pregnant. Are the whitecoats allowing them to mate? More likely, they have artificially impregnated her to study her process. The idea makes me burn, both with anger and shame.

  I didn’t know they were doing this, I tell him. He ignores me.

  He opens his huge hand wide and places it against the front of the cage. It happens in an instant: the bars crumble. The dust falls to the floor in a whisper, leaving the marov free. He takes one finger and touches it gently to the animal’s neck. It doesn’t glow like the wand: he merely touches her. And she’s awake.

  He moves on to the next cage, and the next. Alma has come close to me and grabs my arm as we watch. He works quickly, far more quickly than seems possible. But what he does with his hands isn’t a special trick that needs concentration: it comes as naturally to him as snapping one’s fingers or clapping one’s hands. Animals are out of their cages, milling about, some of them coming over to Alma and me to sniff our legs. Some of them merely stand, watching Adombukar. I’m in awe of their beauty, their bright colors, their unique movements. This is what I always thought it would be like: seeing the amazing animals of Faloiv up close, watching them live their lives. I just didn’t think it would be . . . like this. When Adombukar reaches the cages of animals that are potentially dangerous—igua and a younger gwabi—I say his name, afraid.