A Hero for WondLa

by Tony DiTerlizzi

The wandering tree had gone, leaving Nadeau alone asleep under the shade of a standing stone. The feeling had returned to Eva’s legs, though her wounds were still tender. She helped Rovender ease the now conscious Eva Eight onto a blanket next to Nadeau. Rovender threw the supply bag to Eva and flopped down, clearly winded. She handed him a bottle of water and rummaged through the first aid kit.

  “SpeedHeal ointment, yes!” she said, pulling out the tube of cream. “Too bad I had to throw off that utilitunic. It would have taken care of me.”

  “You will be okay?” Rovender asked, still panting.

  “Yeah,” replied Eva. “My leg is a little sore, but I’ll live.”

  “Well, you are better off than that Mirthian we saw,” Rovender said, sipping his water. “Now we know what became of him.”

  “And what that ship was that we saw last night.” Eva pulled off her sneakboots and her leggings, both plastered with dried pulp. The miasma of eukaberry was heavy in the air. “Do you think there are more warbots?” Eva asked.

  “I do not know,” replied Rovender.

  “I can’t believe he sent one after us,” said Eva. She rubbed the ointment into the puncture wounds on her legs.

  “I can.” Rovender scooted over to a pool of water surrounding the stone and filled his bottle. “My guess is that his attack on Lacus and Solas is supposed to be a surprise—”

  Eva finished his thought, “And he doesn’t want us to warn them.”

  “Cadmus.” Eva Eight sat up. “Damn him and his evil army,” she sneered. “We need to warn your friends so they can do away with him,” she said to Rovender.

  “I agree, Eva Eight. But I don’t know how that is possible,” Rovender said. “We are many days away from Lacus and Solas. I do not think we will reach them in time, especially in our state.”

  “What of the shuttle?” Nadeau was awake.

  Rovender grumbled into his bottle and sipped his water.

  “Shuttle?” Eva handed her sister the SpeedHeal ointment. “What shuttle? What is he talking about?”

  “There is a small ship at our village,” Nadeau said. “Used primarily for diplomatic trips for our leader, Antiquus, to meet with Queen Ojo.”

  “Do you think he’d let us borrow it?” Eva looked at Rovender.

  “No.” Rovender stood and paced. “That isn’t going to happen, Nadeau, and you know this to be true.”

  “But this is a matter of life and death for many of our sister clans, Rovender. Surely Antiquus will put aside past—”

  “He will not!” Rovender shouted. He wiped spit from his mouth with the back of his hand. “He will not.”

  Eva’s eyes were wide with surprise at Rovender’s sudden anger. She looked over at her sister.

  “I’m glad I’m not the only one who hates their leader,” Eight said under her breath.

  “The problem does not lie with the leader.” Rovender grabbed the fin rays and the crewman’s overalls. “Antiquus is a good leader, trusted by all. It is I whom they dislike.”

  “I know what you mean,” Eight replied.

  Eva approached Rovender as he laid out the bones on the ground. With his jacket gone, he was now adorned in a simple loincloth secured around his waist by a frayed fibrous cord. Without his big tattered jacket, Rovender seemed smaller. Lonely. Eva sat down next to her blue friend and helped assemble the stretcher.

  CHAPTER 27: WILD LIFE

  I don’t know about you,” Eva Eight said as she tramped between the stony monoliths, “but I think the wildlife here is just as dangerous as Cadmus’s army.”

  “It can be scary,” Eva said, “but it can also be beautiful.”

  They were hiking behind Rovender, who now pulled Nadeau in a stretcher of sorts—a travois—that dragged on the ground like a sled. The supporting rods of the travois gouged a pair of shallow ruts in the sand, which Eva followed. At one point Eva would have imagined that it was a magic path being rendered just for her, but now she found it harder to hold on to such childhood daydreams. “Don’t you think the wildlife here is beautiful, Rovee?” she asked.

  Rovender was silent, as he had been for all of the afternoon, leading the way through the standing stones toward his village. Far ahead the skies darkened and distant thunder rumbled.

  Don’t you miss the comfort of our old Sanctuary, Nine? Wouldn’t it be great to go back?” Eight said wistfully. “We could start our own community there. We would be able to come and go as we please and live safe from any outside dangers. That would be lovely, don’t you think?”

  “Uh . . . well . . . maybe.” Eva played with one of her braids. She missed the comfort of her Sanctuary, but she enjoyed traveling around the landscape and learning about the different cultures of Orbona much more.

  Rovender spoke over his shoulder. “Speak your truth, Eva Nine. Say what you mean.”

  “I am saying what I mean,” Eva retorted. “And I mean there were things that I liked about living in the Sanctuary and things I didn’t.”

  “Such as?” Eight’s face held the slightest smile, as if she enjoyed Rovender’s agitation toward Eva.

  Eva replied, “I didn’t like that we had to be a certain age before we were allowed to go up to the surface—”

  “Be thankful you weren’t old enough,” Eight interjected.

  “Muthr and I often argued about it,” said Eva.

  “Muthr.” Eight scoffed. “Another one of Cadmus’s robots serving his needs. A robot raising us? Some mother she turned out to be.”

  Eight’s words pierced Eva as if she’d been struck by a sand-sniper.

  “And if that place was really a ‘Sanctuary’ as we were told it was, we should have been allowed to feel safe within its walls for our entire life. Not be ejected by some mindless piece of machinery working for—”

  “TAKE THAT BACK!” Eva Nine tackled her sister headlong. They both fell into a shallow pool at the foot of a monolith. “Muthr wasn’t like that! She was just doing what she was told! She didn’t know! You don’t know!” Eva swatted wildly at her cowering sister.

  “Eva! Eva!” Rovender’s large hands seized Eva by the wrists. He pried her off Eva Eight and pulled her away.

  “What is wrong with you?” Eight yelled.

  “You don’t know anything about Muthr!” Eva spat.

  “Oh, I don’t?” Eight fired back. “I think it is you who doesn’t know anything, Nine. You don’t know that all she was supposed to do was train us to live ‘up here’ on the surface. You don’t know that on your sixteenth birthday you would be FORCED to leave the Sanctuary, alone, whether you had siblings or not. And that once you left, you couldn’t return, ever—even if you traveled all the way to New Attica and back again. Even if all you wanted was to feel safe in the only place you knew. To feel loved. To have a family. A sister. A daughter.”

  “But Muthr didn’t know,” Eva cried. “She was under the control of the Sanctuary.”

  “Yeah, right!” Eight retorted. “Like it’s the Sanctuary’s fault, not Muthr’s. She didn’t care. I brought back supplies for her, food and clothing for you. . . . I even found an old fairy tale book to read you, but she didn’t care. She could have overridden the Sanctuary computer at any time, but she didn’t. She locked me out of my own home. Our home.” Eight fell to her knees. “I could have taken care of you. I could have protected you. It’s not right.” She buried her head in her hands and sobbed.

  “The WondLa?” Eva whispered. “You brought it?”

  “I will never forgive her, Nine,” Eight said, and sniffled. “I hate Cadmus for programming my only mother to push me away, and I hate her for allowing it to happen.”

  “But . . . Muthr didn’t know.” Eva looked over at Rovender. “Rovee, you were there. Tell her. Muthr didn’t know.”

  “Mother robot did seem to be under the influence of the machine that was your home,” Rovender said. “But her heart was true.”

  “Oh, and you’re going to listen to him?” Eight pointed at Rovender in an accusatory way. �
�He spends a few days with Muthr, and now he knows her better than I do?”

  Large drops of rain fell from the tumultuous skies above.

  Eva remembered how angry and frustrated she could be with Muthr. But there were also good memories from her upbringing in the Sanctuary—even from their search for answers. Eva Nine had never hated Muthr. But what if she had locked me out? It didn’t matter now.

  Eva walked over to her sister and hugged her. “It’s going to be okay,” she whispered to her in a soothing voice.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. Seeing you just brings up these old feelings,” Eight said, looking up at Eva. She pulled the damp tresses of Eva’s hair from her face. “But don’t you worry about what happened with me and Muthr. It was in the past.” Eight wiped the tears from her face. “We are in this together now, right?”

  Eva nodded. “Right.”

  Eight clung to Eva’s thin shoulders, her fingers gripping her tightly. “I’ve felt like a stranger in a strange land during my years living in New Attica. No one truly understood what it is like to be Sanctuary-born. But you are here now, Nine, and you are all I’ve got,” she said with desperation in her voice.

  The rain began to come down harder. Thunder resounded overhead.

  Raindrops pattered on the blanket stretched taught over a cluster of several stone monoliths. Underneath, Eva warmed her damp body near the campfire she had built. Her sister wrung out her soaked tunic while Nadeau slept in a bundle of blankets.

  “You were right,” Eva said. “The temperature has dropped now that the sun is down.”

  “Here, catch!” Eight threw the second pair of crewman’s coveralls to Eva. “Like I said, I don’t think they have climatefiber or a life-monitoring system, but—”

  “It’s better than running around in my undertunic.” Eva pulled the coveralls on.

  In the dark beyond the fire’s light, the intermittent sounds of the wild called out.

  “I hope there are no sand monsters out here that will eat us in our sleep.” Eight pulled the lid from a food container and shook out a handful of nutriment pellets.

  “We are too close to rocks for a sniper attack,” said Eva, dropping a log onto the fire. “And I haven’t seen any more floaters since our encounter this morning.” Just as she had been during the escape from New Attica, Eva’s sister seemed eerily calm after their blowup. In fact, Eva Eight seemed completely unfazed as she downed a handful of pellets. Eva thought to her the way she spoke to the sand-snipers. Tell me you don’t like it out here. Tell me you want to go back to New Attica or go live with the Toilers.

  “How is it that you know so much about the creatures here?” Eight asked. “There were no sand-snipes or floaterzoans in our natural history programs.” She offered Eva some pellets.

  “Tell me about it.” Eva waved away the offer. “The Identicapture program on the Omnipod was useless.”

  “So how did you learn about all this stuff?” Eight grabbed another handful.

  “Rovender,” Eva said. “He knows a lot about a lot. I guess it’s from all his travels exploring Orbona.”

  “Orbona?”

  “Orbona is what the aliens call Earth.” Eva pulled off her sneakboots and socks. She stretched her toes out toward the campfire. “I prefer to call it that too, since the Earth we learned about is really no longer here.”

  “I’ll say,” said Eight.

  “You said you traveled from New Attica back to the Sanctuary?” Eva said, stoking the fire. “Didn’t you see aliens and stuff then?”

  “No.” Eight focused on the awakened flames. “I hitched a ride back with the retriever who brought me to New Attica originally, Evan Seven. He had a baby son of his own and was a good guy. And he was cute.”

  “What happened?” Eva leaned into the conversation. Though she had watched many romantic programs in the Sanctuary, she and Muthr had hardly ever spoken of boys.

  Eight let out a long sigh. “He stayed with me at the Sanctuary for a time, while I tried to convince Muthr to let us back in. When that didn’t happen, I tried to persuade her to let me take you with me.”

  “You did?” It was weird to think that Eight had been in the Sanctuary while Eva was there.

  “You were just a baby then, Nine. You wouldn’t remember,” Eight said.

  Eva’s mind flitted back to the memories from the Omnipod shown in Cadmus’s medlab. There was that one recording that was out of order: The older Eva arguing with Muthr in my bedroom wasn’t me—it was Eight. She imagined Eight and the pilot moving into the Sanctuary and raising Eva with Muthr, just like the image of the robot and the little girl and the adult on her tattered WondLa.

  “Anyway, it didn’t happen. Obviously.” Eight’s voice was flat. “So we left and returned to New Attica. I figured I’d wait for you there. My cute pilot took off with some radical group of explorers. I never saw him again. Men, right?”

  Are all men like this pilot? Like Hailey? Eva wondered.

  “But it doesn’t matter now. We don’t need any flaky pilots. Us gals can take care of ourselves out here in the wilderness.”

  Eva Eight’s gaze remained fixed on the fire. In the dancing firelight Eva’s sister looked different from when Eva had first met her. Under unkempt hair, dirt and smudged mascara now tarnished Eight’s face. Eva could see the exhaustion in her sister’s sea-green eyes. But there was something else in Eight’s gaze too—resignation.

  And yet the very thing Eva Eight had wanted—her WondLa—was no different from what Eva wanted. No different from what Muthr had wanted. As far as Eight was concerned, she now had the thing that had been missing in her life. She had told Eva how happy she was now that they were reunited, but there was great despair etched in those perfect porcelain features.

  “Dinner!” Rovender said, emerging from the dark. In his hand he carried two halves of a skinned turnfin. He plopped down between the Evas and pulled a piece of fin ray from a bundle on the travois. He pushed the narrow bone into the ground at an angle over the fire and then skewered the meat on the top, creating a spit. “Stir those embers, Eva Nine, and let’s get these started.”

  “Is that one of those weird three-winged birds?” Eight winced at the carcass sizzling on the spit.

  “A turnfin, yes,” Rovender replied.

  “And you are going to eat it?” Eight scooted away from the fire.

  “It’s not so bad,” Eva said. “I wasn’t sure what to think about it either at first, but the meat is actually pretty tasty, and it’s a good source of protein. Better than nutriment pellets.”

  “But it’s . . . dead,” said Eight.

  “True, it has given its life,” Rovender said. “But its energy, its spirit, will replenish yours. Respect that and enjoy the meal.”

  “You wanted to leave New Attica,” Eva added. “This is it. We are now non-trackers living off of the land.”

  “Well, we don’t have to live like animals.” Eight scowled at the meat smoking on the spit.

  With his eye on Eight, Rovender said, “Eva, while this is cooking, there is something I want to show you. Follow me.”

  “Sure,” Eva said and put on her sneakboots.

  In the drizzling rain Eva followed Rovender out into the night, leaving her sister to watch over Nadeau and their cooking meal. “You don’t think anything is going to happen again, do you?” Eva asked. She looked back at the orange glow of the campfire. It was like a burning star under the muted moonlight.

  “No, no, no,” Rovender said. “We’ll be gone only a moment. You have to take a look at this.”

  In the pale light Eva could see that he was leading her to a group of large standing stones overgrown with foliage. In fact, Eva realized that her sneakboots were no longer crunching over gravel and sand but were padding over soft patches of moss. “It’s the Wandering Forest! Are we close to your village?” she asked.

  “It is the Wandering Forest, Eva, but look closer.” Rovender lit his small lantern and set it down near the base of a stone.
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  At first all Eva could see was movement, small and steady movement as if the moss on the stone’s surface were vibrating. She leaned in for a closer examination and realized it wasn’t vibrating.

  “It’s . . . it’s growing,” said Eva. Roots, like tiny pulsing veins, twined over the surface of the stone. Tendrils sprouted out in all directions and interlocked, weaving a pattern of rich olive green over everything. “Right before our eyes it is growing!”

  “Yes, Eva,” Rovender said. “I know where we are, and the edge of the Wandering Forest used to be another day’s trek from here. But it has grown. Expanded. Soon all of Orbona will be green.”

  Eva watched as the growth overtook a giant monolith. “Earth plants don’t grow like this,” she said, astonished. “In our greenhouse they took weeks to germinate from seeds, even with fertilizer.”

  Rovender craned his head up as plumes of tufted plant-creatures sprung forth from the rock face. “This is what the Vitae Virus generator, that Huxley spoke of, has started. It restarts life where it once was absent, and spreads it. It is quite a gift.”

  Eva pondered this as she watched several odd insects flutter around Rovender’s lantern. The insects whirred and flew into the lantern as if they were in a contest to see which one could get closest to the light source. “If the generator isn’t in Solas,” she said, deep in thought, “then it must be somewhere in the forest.”

  Rovender nodded. “If the generator is indeed there, Cadmus’s forces will never find it.” The rain had stopped, and the two made their way back to camp.

  “But if the forest is expanding, Cadmus doesn’t need the generator. Eventually the green will come to New Attica. His land will become fertile once again,” Eva said.

  “Fertile or not, Eva, the land is not his,” replied Rovender.

  “But New Attica. The land it is on is his, isn’t it?” asked Eva. The Divination Machine’s prediction of humans taking over what had been Solas drifted into Eva’s mind.

  “Land does not belong to anyone. We belong to the land. To Orbona. The planet must be free to breathe and grow as we breathe and grow.”

  “If only Cadmus knew about the forest expanding,” Eva said with a sigh. Would he call off the invasion?