Dove Alight

by Karen Bao

I look behind me to see a squad of loyalist troops hunkered down in the hangar’s rear, pointing laser blasters in our direction. Someone must’ve predicted we’d try to escape through here and sent a suicidal group of Militia to ambush us.

  They manage to hit Wes’s thigh too before the drone cloud surrounds them, burrowing through their uniforms’ fabric. They clutch their throats, unable to breathe. Several flip up their visors in vain, thinking it’ll give their lungs access to air. The bumpy red skin on their suddenly visible faces takes on a blue undertone, as if they’re bruising from the inside out.

  Horrified, I turn away and struggle to stand, slinging Wes’s arm over my shoulder once more, but the soldiers’ screams pierce through the layers of pain and concentration. My oxygen-deprived legs throb; my burnt left calf gives way. Blackness creeps in around the edges of my vision.

  “Phaet, get up! We’ve got to try again . . .” Wes mumbles. Then he looks up at the ceiling and shouts with a strength I didn’t know he still had. “God, why? It wasn’t supposed to end this way!”

  The copper cloud is twenty meters away.

  Alex and Callisto holler in my ears: “Come on! I’m sorry, but you’ve got to leave him . . . it’s gonna hurt, but you have to live . . .” I yank off my helmet to silence them. Right now, there’s only one voice I want to hear.

  Wes touches my exposed cheek, and it brings everything back into focus. His voice, his face, his big heart—he is everything. “Get out of here, Phaet. Do you understand? Go. I’ll be okay.”

  By okay, he means . . . gone. I shake my head; tears fall from my face and land on his jacket.

  “Your life can’t end here.” His eyes pierce me; his voice is stern. “People need you, Phaet.”

  But I need you.

  His face softens suddenly, and as he blinks, tears start rolling down his cheeks. “But . . . I don’t want to be alone when I die.”

  Even as his grip falls slack, I tighten mine around his hand. Our gloved fingers lock together like puzzle pieces, and I feel the weak blip of his pulse through two layers of fabric. I could stay here, with him . . .

  “Still, I can’t ask you to come with me,” he whispers. He’s right. My life is too important to end now, and I have too many things left to accomplish.

  As the cloud descends upon us, the drones radiate heat onto the top of my head. It’s like they’re breathing down my neck. Why can’t they allow me a few more moments with him? My mind tells me to go, but my body cannot obey.

  Wes lifts his Lazy and presses its muzzle against my heart. He switches off the safety, readies his finger on the trigger. “I’ll use this unless you turn around. Get home safe. Work for peace until everyone forgives one another for what’s happened here.”

  I feel a minuscule prick on my cheek. Two. The drones have reached us, but they mean nothing compared to the words he’s breathing out.

  “Live long and die happy, my girl. I love you.”

  I leave him then, voids opening between my fingers.

  FOUR HANDS HEAVE ME INTO THE DESTROYER. The world has already begun to swirl. I see everything as if through a melting telescope lens—Callisto’s and Alex’s panicked eyes, checking on me every few seconds; the loyalist ships fleeing from us like so many flies from swatting hands. The contents of my skull swell with fever.

  I don’t cry. Tears release emotion. My torn-up body is trying to hold on to every feeling I associate with Wes, even this blistering pain in my chest.

  “. . . Dove Girl, you’ve got to tell me. Where did those—those things sting you?” Alex’s voice is low and choked.

  “She might respond better to her actual name, Alex.”

  A syringe’s needle burrows into my face below my left cheekbone. It starts sucking out my poisoned blood; another needle injects a clear liquid into the crease of my elbow. Immediately, my heart beats slower. Trying to stop the poison’s spread.

  “Phaet, I’m—I’m not gonna lose you too. Can you hear me?” I lower my chin by one centimeter. “That’s not good enough! Tell me, can you hang on until we’re home? We’re going home, Phaet.”

  The corners of my mouth spasm sideways: the most pathetic smile I’ve ever worn. Dimmer than Wes’s lowest-wattage grin.

  “Phaet?” Callisto says. “Say something!”

  “Come on, Phaet, stay with us! Phaet . . .”

  Fatefatefate. Destiny. After all that’s happened, I want to chide my parents for choosing the name they did. If the Odan afterlife exists—a preposterous idea, but it helps me cope—maybe I’ll see them soon.

  My eyes shut, but my ears stay open.

  “. . . Alex, there’s Destroyer four twenty-four! The one we want—the Committee . . .”

  I can’t miss this. Haven’t I waited years to see them in pain? I wrench one eye open—a millimeter—and focus on the windshield. The ship in question doesn’t lead the pack. It lingers in the middle, protected on all sides by three more vessels. Cowards.

  They fire at us, and we dodge with a jerking motion that makes my head loll on my shoulders. We send a flock of missiles at the ships; in true loyalist fashion, they scatter, leaving the Committee undefended. Two more missiles are all it takes to destroy them. The ship explodes in a small red cloud, its obliteration accompanied by no booming fanfare. Hull fragments jet toward the guard ships, and they swerve predictably. Alex and Callisto take them down.

  A series of silent flashes, and my enemies are dead, their bodies’ burnt cells permanently dissociated.

  But the sight brings me no satisfaction. They died too perfectly. They suffered one moment of agony, though they deserved many more. And they expired outside the public eye, as they would’ve wanted. How ironic, that the Committee members lived ostentatiously but died anonymously. The opposite of Murray, a side casualty in their endless war.

  So . . . unfair. Cold hatred breaks through my fever . . . not of a person, but of the situation. Of the past few hours. My soul’s numb—frostbitten—by the fact that I’ll spend my entire life, whether it lasts a minute or a century, with only the memory of him.

  People call my name, seemingly from kilometers away. I hear the voices of Wes, Murray, Mom, even Dad—or my mind’s fabrication of them. Fatefatefate. You belong here. As the voices grow louder, I feel closer to the dead than I ever did.

  I cozy up to the cold, and the sensation of nothing becomes everything.

  * * *

  One copper wire, thin, endlessly long. To what—or whom—will it lead? Him?

  My dream-eyes spark with unshed tears. I lean forward until the wire is level with my eyes and raise the magnifying glass in my hand.

  Wings twitch. The wire’s formed of reddish-brown mosquitoes, lined up in rows. They clutch each other’s abdomens with their front legs, strengthening their hold by inserting their proboscises—the feeding tubes—inside the bug in front of them. I leap backward, quivering with revulsion, but their beady eyes find me and zoom in. They are camera lenses.

  If I could scream, I would. Even in my sleep, I can’t shake the impression that someone, somewhere always has eyes on me.

  “You’re sleeping, and the world keeps going,” says a girl’s voice. I love her, I vaguely remember. “We’ve made a list, so that we can tell you everything when you wake up.”

  The name comes to me. Anka.

  “They’re drafting a constitution.” The deeper voice is Umbriel’s. “Didn’t even wait for Mira Theta’s girl to see it.”

  I will my blood to flow faster, my heart to pump with greater gusto—as if conscious effort could control my autonomic nervous system.

  “They’re rebuilding the Singularity in another crater on the Far Side,” Cygnus says. “And Base I. About half the people there got to the Dugout before the drones got them.”

  “But we’re on Base IV,” Umbriel says. “We knew you’d want to wake up here.”

 
Home. Home! I struggle to shake off the shroud of sleep. They’re so close . . .

  “Mhm,” Anka says. “We miss you so, so much. Wake up, big sister . . . wake up, won’t you?”

  Doors slide open; footsteps approach. “She’s not ready,” says an authoritative male voice. “Her body hasn’t recovered from the toxin yet. I’m sorry to do this, Miss Anka.”

  “No!” Anka’s voice becomes indignant. “Don’t keep her from us any longer.”

  I picture Umbriel restraining her. “You know Phaet needs this . . .”

  Something pinches my forearm. Chilly liquid enters my bloodstream, and cold once again blocks off my senses.

  * * *

  “. . . blood pressure rising, pulse accelerating.” An unfamiliar woman’s voice. “She’ll wake soon—no, don’t touch her. Or you could disrupt the dialysis.”

  “And then she’ll have a harder time recovering.” A young man’s voice. He sounds clipped, rushed—a Medical assistant, perhaps. Instinctively, I picture him in a white coat, speaking patiently to me, and the jab of memory jolts me further into consciousness.

  “Psh. If she dies, I’ll kill her.” Yinha—she’s alive! And her voice sounds so nonchalant; it’s morbidly funny, and morbid things no longer scare me. Death feels like nothing but an impatient friend I’ve put off seeing.

  Laughing hurts, but I do it. I sound like a congested coal engine.

  “She’s waking up,” Anka says. “Someone tell Umbriel!”

  My eyes crack open. Stung by white light, they take in the elliptical intensive care room and the wireless devices lodged in my body to measure my vitals. A large, colorful screen shows my heartbeat, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature. I also see my cells’ average rate of protein synthesis, which indicates how quickly they’ve recovered from the abrin. The two Medics, noses and mouths obscured by masks, adjust my bed so that I’m reclining at a thirty-degree angle. Then they retreat to the far wall.

  Anka and Cygnus lean over the glass barrier, probably breaking some Medical guidelines about proximity to patients. Yinha paces in a small portion of floor space. Seconds later, Umbriel skids into the room, completing the picture. He opens his arms wide, as if to hug me, and then seems to remember that I can’t lift mine yet.

  “Phew. You’re up in time for the new constitution’s ratification ceremony.” Yinha’s smiling in spite of herself. “It’s in four and a half days.”

  “Psh,” Umbriel says, “it’s not like they would hold the proceedings without her.”

  “Fine. But are four and a half days enough to get her looking like the Girl Sage again?”

  How bad is it? Supporting myself on my elbows, I raise my head off the pillow and struggle to a sitting position, nearly hitting my head on the top of my glass bubble. Ouch. Too much leg movement, too soon.

  “No, don’t look, Phaet,” Umbriel says, moving closer. “You don’t want to see . . .”

  Yes, I do. I catch my reflection in my bed’s glass barrier—and it’s mesmerizing. I’m fascinated, not repulsed, by the changes in my appearance. This is how war has marked me. My face has shrunken and my skin has turned the color of old soybeans, except for two shiny scarlet splotches on my cheeks where the drones pricked me. Each blemish must measure a full centimeter across.

  Even my eyes have changed. Dull, unblinking, and opaquely dark, they’d haunt me if they belonged to someone else.

  But most strikingly, a silver tide has washed out every black hair on my head. Millions of comet tails, with no empty dark space between them. It’s the fullest night sky I’ve ever seen, and I’ll carry it wherever I go.

  Amazing, how it completes me.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, I BOMBARD MY brain with all sorts of stimuli. They don’t fill the empty space in my heart, but if I keep my mind occupied and don’t think about him and the life we’ll never have, the emptiness manifests as a muted ache.

  A carousel of friends and family stop by my bedside. Anka and the Phi twins sneak me my favorite rice candies from Market, but I can’t stomach them. Asterion, Andromeda, and Callisto bring me a small sprig of purple sage blossoms. They use a graduated cylinder from Chemistry as a vase.

  Alex, the only person on the bases whose grief over Wes might compare to mine, is absent. He has left for Earth, to “clean up that garbage dump of a planet,” Yinha says. I envy him. He can translate feelings into action, as I’m so accustomed to doing, while I’m a passive observer stuck in bed.

  “Poor guy—he has to tell Wes’s parents,” Yinha says with a sigh.

  I don’t envy him that. Telling Wesley and Holly Carlyle, who have already lost their vulnerable daughter, that their indomitable son is no more will destroy them. Wes’s life had just begun. Parents mourning their children reverses a natural rhythm as old as humanity—a reversal that’s wrong.

  My brooding seems to alarm Cygnus. “Grits, you’re reminding me of me when I had nothing to do.”

  A day later, he and Umbriel remove the HeRP from the room’s one table and install it on the ceiling. The Medics remove the glass lid of my coffin but tell me not to leave the bed. Now I can watch live updates on the Earth situation while lying down. My family’s no-nonsense display of affection helps thaw my brittle heart.

  * * *

  Three days after I wake, Pacifia and Battery Bay conduct peace talks. Although people have gathered in the Atrium to watch the live feed on the big screens, homemade drinks in hand, my siblings join me in my Medical room.

  On the HeRP screen, we watch Pacifia’s Premier, an East Asian woman with crimped black hair and dangling fist-shaped earrings, shake hands with Prime Minister Sear. Thousands of people have crammed side by side on the widest boulevard on Battery Bay under a cloudy, pre-monsoon sky to watch. The Premier’s wide, red-lipped smile droops at the sides so she looks more feral than compliant, more likely to throttle Sear than to parley with him.

  And yet, with their tattered armies standing behind them, the two leaders sign treaty after treaty. Both alliances agree to bilateral disarmament, a peace summit once a year, and economic and humanitarian aid to war-torn areas. I feel sorry for the Earthbound, who must repair their ruined planet because of a war started by the Lunar Standing Committee. And I’m angry with the Committee for dying when it was convenient. For heaping the fallout from a world war onto innocent people’s shoulders.

  Speaking of innocents, the Odans are absent from Battery Bay. They’ve gone home. Or have they? Within the next hour, the screen shows a panorama of razed forests, scorched meadows, and collapsed rock formations. No bacterial lamps cast blue illumination over the cracked, bloodstained footpaths. Instead, multi-drill mining rigs spread their arms over swaths of land like gigantic spiders. As Wes and I feared, Battery Bay has come to collect payment for saving the Odans’ lives last year. His homeland will become a mining settlement for natural gas, iron, and zinc.

  The unmistakable shape of Koré Island’s peak and the presence of familiar faces indicate that this wasteland is, in fact, Saint Oda. The Odan people stolidly watch bulldozers, cranes, and armored trucks ravage the once-beautiful landscape. Only some of the adults cry for what they’ve lost. The children regard the scorched earth with puzzlement. These young ones can’t recognize their old home.

  Up here on the Moon, I don’t feel I have the right to cry with the Odans. All the guilt in the world won’t change the fact that I’m partly responsible for this . . . this crime.

  The video’s focus shifts to a group of men patching up a collapsed tunnel. Alex, wearing a beige shirt soaked with sweat, strains to lift metal supports into place. He stares straight ahead and doesn’t make eye contact with anyone.

  I should be with him. But my tumbledown shell of a body can’t leave this sickbed.

  Someone steers the video camera closer to Alex, who notices it, slams a strut into place, and glares into the lens. “Get out!” he shouts, str
iding toward the camera. “Get out and—”

  The scene cuts to a familiar vista overlooking the cliffs and sea; gray clouds shift over the Odan harbor, rearrange themselves around pine tree branches. A lumpy shadow takes up the middle of the shot. It’s a family, all tangled in one another’s arms, kneeling, shivering with sadness. A father, a mother, two girls, their grandmother, and a pony-sized black hound. In front of them are two square blocks of petrified wood, the ancient trees’ xylem and phloem replaced with swirling patterns of black, white, and rust-colored stone. Two memorials, for the boy and girl who didn’t make it home.

  It’s impossible to breathe.

  “Anka, she’s shaking.” Cygnus’s fingertips are light on my forehead. “Should I get her another blanket?”

  “No, that’s not it.” Anka shuts off the HeRP. “She needs a good cry.”

  “Oh,” Cygnus says. Confusion washes over his face. Then he wraps my free hand in his fingers and says something that he might’ve learned from watching Umbriel comfort people. “Let it out, Phaet. No one will ever know except for us.”

  The mattress dips as my sister sits beside me. She pushes silver hair off my forehead, the way our mother used to. And like Mom, she bends down and kisses the spot she’s cleared.

  I haven’t felt so safe since both our parents were here. Surrounded on all sides by my family’s love, I let myself feel. Grief fills me up, and then ebbs with each sputtering breath.

  “You did so much to save us from dying, big sister.” Anka’s voice cracks on a swell of sadness. “But how do we keep every part of you alive?”

  AS THE DAYS STRETCH ON, MY BODY GETS stronger. My laser-burned leg begins to feel pain, and then sensations other than pain. The splotches on my face disappear, and my skin loses its anoxic pallor. Medics move me from intensive care to a recovery room. The walls, floor, and ceiling are stark white, as Medical rooms always are, but someone has hung colorful ribbons over my bed. Even though the tinted glass window blocks out sunlight when I’m sleeping, the intrepid decorator has put up a yellow window shade printed with the black outline of trees.