by Tessa Elwood
“Asa?”
I jump. Coffee sloshes lukewarm waves over my dirt-black fingers.
“Do you know if—” Eagle stops when I face him.
I glance down, but my shirt is so caked in grit, splashed coffee shouldn’t matter. “Yeah?”
The digislate disappears as he stands. “It’s late.”
It’s not really, not according to Urnath’s sun, but we weren’t under Urnath’s sun when we woke up this morning. Or yesterday. Sometime. I can’t remember.
“Shouldn’t we get the other tanks?” I ask.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
EAGLE’S FEET HANG OFF THE MATTRESS. THE BED IS as small as the room and we have to tuck tight against the cold walls to keep our shoulders from touching. We’re both on our backs. Maybe that’s normal for him, but not for me. Turning away feels wrong and facing him is too something, but there’s nowhere to move and I almost wish he was in the cockpit because then my limbs could just be tired and not so very aware. Limbs and shower soap. Sheets and skin.
He should be home in a bed that fits. Not in a ghost city on a ghost planet, with a ghost girl who isn’t anyone’s anymore.
“I think you should go home,” I say. “No one’s looking for you.”
“No.”
“Eagle.”
“No.” One word shouldn’t be able to fill so much space.
Exhaustion sticks to my lashes, but there’s too much dark and too much him.
“Did you have to walk far?” I ask. “When you ran out of fuel?”
He shifts, shrugs maybe. “Been practicing.”
With me, every day, twice a day, for an hour.
“At least we won’t have to walk anymore.”
A hesitant, “Yeah.”
I look over, but the dim blue safety light from the cockpit illuminates exactly nothing. “You hate walking.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You never talk.”
“You do.”
A weird gumminess sinks deep in my chest and spreads. “You . . . ?”
He can’t like me talking. Nobody likes me talking. Even Wren liked me best quiet.
“What?” Eagle asks.
But if he means something else and the gumminess frosts over, I’ll shatter in half.
“You think we’ll make it?”
A movement. A touch. Fingertips on the back of my hand. Rough, scraped fingertips sliding across my canister scratches to find my palm. Or my heart, which now beats in the core of my hand.
“Yes.”
A whole universe of certainty in a steady voice that can’t be sure of anything.
I choke back a laugh. Or a sob, I can’t tell. He squeezes my hand and my fingers close tight. Our breath falls into rhythm. We could almost be walking.
“Reggie said I took an emotional survey,” says Eagle. “That’s how we met.”
“I know. I had to say something, so that’s what I said.”
“What did you ask?”
“Reggie?”
“In the survey.”
I shrug against the sheets. “Odd things. They start out normal—how long you’ve been in the ward, if you like your medics—”
“Six months. Not particularly.”
My lungs trip out of sync.
Answers. Actual answers.
What did you ask?
If it was real, if I’d called and the medic patched me through, I’d have asked, “Do you have family?”
“Yes.”
“Do they visit?”
“Sometimes.”
“Were they there when you woke up?”
“No.”
No. They should have been, all of them. The Lady at the very least.
I hesitate. “Were you glad when you woke up?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because no one else did.”
I shift, scoot until ours shoulder touch, my bare arm to his cotton sleeve.
“It was the worst hit on record,” he says. “The meteors. The communications tower blew in the first strike. We couldn’t get help and flying was dangerous. Not that some didn’t try.”
He turns our hands until mine is flat under his. Traces my fingertips.
“We were running drills in the city. Guard cadets. Our final infiltration training, that’s why we were there. Our instructor, Tevon, handpicked six of us from the academy. It was supposed to be a quick, three-week session. Our parents didn’t know.”
That’s why they weren’t there when he woke up.
“We volunteered in fire and rescue. Second strike wiped out half the city. In the third, Tevon had his medichip removed and plugged into me.” He laughs, a brittle near-sob. “Rumor was Tevon was a high-level Officiate before taking on our class. Didn’t believe it until his chip didn’t scan. The medic shredded his shoulder digging it out. But I was the Lord’s son, top priority, and required a ‘fighting chance.’”
Medichips are supposed to heal anything, up to and including death.
That’s what Wren always said.
His hand falls away. “Our service tower was hit two days later. No one else made it out.”
I snatch it back, hold it tight to my chest, and try to channel every warm thing into his open palm.
“But that’s enough,” I say. His whole arm tenses, starts to pull, but I hold fast. “Maybe you’re all that’s left, but that’s more than enough and if anyone says different, they’re wrong.”
The mattress shifts, and waxy fingers float along my cheek. “You’re crying.”
“You know that, right? You know?”
The sheets tug and his forehead presses against my temple, but he doesn’t answer.
THE BED SHIFTS, THE PILLOW MOVES, AND ITS HEARTBEAT disappears. I reach out into warm sheets with no one in them, which is wrong somehow, but my eyes don’t want to open. A noise, a rustle, a sliding something.
“Eagle?”
His hand is on my ankle. The fingers wrap all the way around. “Go back to sleep.”
“Are we getting up?”
“Just checking something.”
“Help?”
The mattress dips and he’s closer, leaning in. “What?”
“Need help?”
Nothing. Then, “I’ve got it.”
“Okay.”
His fingers trail down my arm and disappear.
I curl into the place where he was.
EIGHT YELLOW CANISTERS HUDDLE NEAR THE scratched hull of Eagle’s wing. Their red tops lipstick bright above white scan labels. Eagle crouches on his heels before them, elbows on knees, one thumb tapping his chin.
Eight, not six, and Eagle is decidedly dusty.
“Why?” I ask, and he almost falls over. “You went by yourself? There are ghosts down there! You carried two canisters and the penlight? I would have—”
“The canisters aren’t full,” he says. “None of them. Scanned the rest this morning. We don’t need to bring the others up.”
No, that’s not right. Casser wouldn’t touch them. They were for Wren.
Wren who was safe in Decontamination, on the moon.
I fight to get the words out. “How short are we?”
“Depends on what fuel we can siphon. Are the base flightwings still here?” He pushes off the ground and stands impossibly straight. Very much the Lord’s son.
He’s thought about this.
Which means he knows the answer.
“How short?”
At his sides, his fingers curl then stretch. “One and a half.”
We used half a tank getting here.
“One tank? All those canisters only made one tank?”
He nods.
Which means we just replaced the fuel we burned getting here.
Nothing. This was all for nothing.
“Are there still wings on base?” Eagle asks again.
“They won’t help.”
“But are they here?”
“Maybe?” I sift through my numb head, he
ld tight between my palms. “Wren’s digislate would have a list, it’s in her office. Used to be.”
“So we go to her office.” He strides to the docking bay’s entrance.
Everyone will know we’re gone by now. They’ll come looking. Maybe Dad will stop us at the border if we try to leave.
“Asa?” He waits at the entrance.
“There’s nothing left,” I say, more to myself than him.
Except he hears.
“You don’t know that.”
But I do.
EMPTY EYE SOCKETS FIND OUR PENLIGHT IN THE stale dark. Bones in uniforms and street clothes, amid busted courier carts and digislates. Stale, damp, and rancid underneath. Office doors face each other across the chaos, some with personalities intact. Old Mr. Frensis’s magnetic welcome sign, Ellena’s painted bell-flowers, Pally’s hanging fairy with the winged ears.
I speed past, don’t look, don’t stop.
If I stop, I’ll scream.
Wren’s door is third from the end, still locked and intact, its access panel blank. Only supplies warranted minisolar circuits, not offices. Eagle pulls out a power pack from his pocket, then a multitool knife. I hold the penlight while he pries off the panel’s dusty cover, sorts through wires, and plugs one into the pack. The access screen flickers orange to green, and then reboots.
I scan my palm and key in the override. A low rusty rumble and the door slides slowly open.
Wren’s desk faces the door, in perfect alignment with the two silver tube chairs. Datacrecord shelves line the walls, leaving no room for pictures or windows, the brown carpet musty but not decayed.
Almost like nothing happened.
I jerk out of the doorway and heave up my lungs.
“Asa—?”
“Her desk. It’s in her desk.”
Eagle nods and slips past me through the door. I squeeze my eyes against the hidden bone faces with once happy smiles—all of whom knew me by name.
Carpet-smothered steps. “Okay,” Eagle says.
“You found the slate?”
“Yes.” He touches my shoulder. “Are you—?”
“I’m coming back.” I turn, but the penlight’s pointed down and he’s just an outline. “Someday I will come back and sing all the House songs and remember because even if they think they’re forgotten they’re not.”
Eagle’s hand slips into mine. “I know.”
THE TREES ARE DEAD. BLACK SNAKES STANDING SENTINEL over gape-toothed tower entrances and hollow windows. They used to be brown. Soldiers and biotechnicians would chat below them while the breeze fluttered their silver leaves. I remember.
The trees don’t.
Wren’s slate has a map, so Eagle doesn’t need help finding the base’s flightwing hangar. He walks ahead, pace never slowing. Not for the weathered wreck of the research tower or the melted supply warehouse.
Not for the connecting alley between.
Shadows seep from its narrow walls. Hook long fingers under my ribs and pull.
I can hear the screams. The echoes, the shouted orders. Everyone wanting something different, Wren’s scream loudest of all. Asa! Get back inside.
But inside I’d dangled from a fourth-story walkway, while Casser fought through fire and panic to get me down.
Wren grabbed my hand and ran full tilt toward the supply warehouse I’d just gotten free of. I dug in my heels, but she was so strong. Strong and deaf through the smoke and blasts, and no matter how much I yelled she didn’t hear me.
Or else she wouldn’t turn.
She outpaced smoke, skidding us into the warehouse alley, uniform insignia flashing as she spun round.
I cannot deal with you right now, you hear me? I can’t. Get back in the damn warehouse and stay until I—
The whole sky whistled.
Wren slammed me to the ground. Broken glass and grated pavement. Curled over me, arms pressing my head into the dirt as the world sparked white.
EAGLE’S SILHOUETTE BLOCKS OUT THE SUN. HE crouches and leans forward enough that I can’t see the sky. Dry face, dry fingers. No drips. I reach up, pat his temple and hair. My fingers don’t come away red.
“Asa?”
“She knew she wasn’t chipped. She was the one who took it out. Maybe she forgot.”
Fabric rustles the pavement, and the air shifts to accommodate it. Eagle lies beside me in the dirt. Watches the clouds drift. “Three will get us to Sonnac. We only need a tank and a half.”
“Wren chipped the flightwings,” I say.
A confused, “What?”
“We didn’t have any fuel.” I shake my head. That’s not right. “I mean, we had a ton of ecoflux from before the factories shut down, just sitting in tanks because all our wings were uleum. Everything was uleum. We hadn’t gotten far enough to make new grids yet, which would take old power to build and we didn’t have any. Not after quarantine. And we were running out of food, which no one believed because it was Urnath.”
He shifts, looks over I think—movement and presence.
“Urnath could grow anything, any season. Nobody went hungry. Not that everyone was safe or healthy or happy, it was just—you could walk out the door and find something to eat. Dad has community farms and orchards on all our planets, but especially here because it was so easy. And if that was too far away, and you took something closer, nobody cared. It’d just grow back in a week or two. And the people who did care, nobody liked them much. It wasn’t even theft because there weren’t even laws, not for that, not until the Blight. Then everything was poisoned, and we had to fly farther and farther afield to find eatable food. It didn’t take long for our uleum to run out. So Wren chipped the wings.”
The alley boxes the sky between rooftops. Crisp, stark. I can taste the emptiness.
Eagle half says something, changes his mind, and changes his mind again. “She made them self-healing?” he asks at last, piecing the words together. He’s close, almost as close as last night. His face is too much to see all at once.
I rise on my elbows. “No, she made them masking. Medichips work by convincing your body the biotech cells are real, right? That you’re running only on your own blood, when you’re really not. At least, not wholly.”
“Okay?” Slow. He sits up even slower.
“And bodies are a hundred times more complicated then flightwings, right? She just had to make the wings think ecoflux was uleum so they would take off.”
Eagle shakes his head. “But it’s a completely different tech.”
“No, it’s a story. Wren could do anything. You should see the models she built for her tech classes.”
“But the fuels aren’t compatible. Even if the wings booted, they wouldn’t fly.”
“Yes, they would. They did.” I sit, too.
He waits, waits, and watches, hand splayed on the ground near my thigh.
I rub my neck. “Okay, so they only lasted a few flights, four tops, but that was four shipments more than we had.”
“Then what?”
“The engines blew.”
“So you had no wings.”
“We had nothing!” I push onto my feet, away from the grit and rugged ache. “Don’t you see? It’d been months and there was nothing left. Maybe we lost the wings and maybe half the shipments were Blighted by that point, but at least it was something.”
Look. Wren held out the bloodied medichip she’d had the lieutenant so carefully remove. This is our truth and we’re going to make it stick.
And she did. We did. Casser never caught on, or the flight crews. Wren rewrote schematics and hacked together duplicate chips to wire into the engines. I broke all the measurement gauges on the uleum tanks so no one could see how little we had. We told them all we had enough for the next flight, and then we made it true.
My breath dissipates. Balances.
I am a Daughter of Fane. My truth and my story.
Wren’s medichip would make it stick.
She wired it into her wing, but I could get it out.
“You have Wren’s digislate?” I ask.
He stands and pulls the slate from his pocket. Holds it out. I tap through the menus and access Wren’s research files and diagrams. Everything labeled with full sidebars of notes.
“She could remap me,” I whisper. My whole body’s a whisper.
“What?”
The medichip file unpacks layer after layer of biocell programs, schematics, and tests—the final perfect combination that made ecoflux look like uleum.
That could make me look like I’m Dad’s.
“Wren can mask me!” I hand the slate to Eagle, bounce onto my toes. “We’d need a control point to copy, so we’d have to visit Wren, and of course, we’d need the medichip from her wing.”
He scrolls through, tapping notes and scanning lines. “Asa—”
“You’re not seeing it.” I point at the screen. “If we get the chip, we just have to hook it up to the slate. The schematic will do everything else. It was easy, I watched Wren. We just need to copy her blood signature and—”
“No.” Eagle switches the slate off, as if that’s the end of it.
Which it absolutely is not.
“But she could prove me,” I say.
“No.” The slate disappears into his pocket. “The engines blew. You said.”
“So will everything! All of Fane’s planets are uleum-rich. We have enough to last Galton decades, and Mom knows it. We’ll be leveled like the independents, and everywhere will turn into this.” I fling out my arms. “This is what a dead planet looks like. And even if they don’t invade, if you’re blood bonded to Galton, do you think they’ll let your dad ever send the food?”
“No.”
“And it’s my fault! I did this, Eagle. Me. I drugged Emmie. I tied you and your House to somebody who isn’t even real. I could have found another way to save Wren, snuck her out of the medicenter or something. But no, I went and married us in an impossible bond and I’d give anything to take it back.”
The words echo. Split like shrapnel and scatter.
“Well,” says Eagle, one harsh line from head to foot. “You can’t.”
