His smile was sincere, but the gleam of artificial light against his dark skin reminded me of the children’s stories I’d heard growing up. Erdlanders have skin like ash, which will fall away if you touch them, leaving nothing but bone and claws. They are small and slow, but their grip is like the great squid and will tear you from the sea without hesitation.
“Um....” I hesitated, lost in my thoughts.
“Well, what division were you in before Iaera?”
“Oh, I—”
“With your skill and level of comprehension, I’d like to put you right into the Hub. Usually it’s restricted access to those who have clearance beyond the camp, but you can do it. That’s all right, isn’t it? I can be honest with you, can’t I?” Vaughn spoke more to himself than to me, jumping from thought to thought without waiting for my response.
“I... of course.”
He sat forward and folded his hands on the table. His brows came together as he spoke. “The war has gotten worse. The Fish have come on land, and they are no longer swimming in schools.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. Sualwet did not swim in schools like guppies: they had a community, a society more complex than mere swimming patterns. I dipped my head and looked at my hands, trying to contain my annoyance. This need to defend them, to explain, made no sense. The Sualwet never did anything for me, but they were my mother’s people, and no matter what they may have done, I loved her.
“I know it’s upsetting.” Vaughn’s voice softened as he took in my posture. “But that’s why we need to be even more vigilant. The Hub isn’t an easy place to work. It can get very emotional. You’ll be on the front line of communications, listening in real time to Sualwet chatter. By the end of the day, your head will be cluttered with their ridiculous songs, and it’s hard not to take it home with you. Do you think you can handle that? Can we count on you?”
“Yes.” I clamped my mouth shut, grinding my teeth to keep from saying any more as I looked up at him. What may have looked like determination in my features was actually an almost uncontrollable anger, but I didn’t quite understand why I felt so mad. I didn’t want to help these people. I didn’t want to be a part of their war or anywhere around it.
All I wanted was to go home, to lie in the sun and hope my biggest problems would be if Mother would be home before dark and if Tor would visit. Instead, I kept my face impassive and yearned for another glass of water.
“Good.” Vaughn beamed and slapped the palms of his hands down on the desk. The vibration of the impact rocked through me. “It’s been a long day. You should get some rest and come back in the morning.”
“Sir?”
“Vaughn, just call me Vaughn.”
“Okay, um, Vaughn, I don’t really know where I am.”
“Right! I’m sorry, Sera. You are such a natural that I completely forgot you’ve never been down here before.”
He stood, scraping his chair legs against the white floor. His brown suit bunched around his chest until he pulled the jacket down. “As long as I’m walking you out, let’s give you the grand tour.” Vaughn smiled and turned toward the opening we had come through.
It was only a second, a fraction of a breath, but the moment alone was so beautiful, so precious, I almost cried out for it to never end. Rather than savoring it, rolling it around on my tongue like slowly melting hard candy, I stood and followed the Erdlander who would surely kill me—or worse—if he knew my genetic makeup.
The panel-door opened, and I joined Vaughn as he walked out of the room and back into the white hallway with the gray floor. The air in the hall wasn’t as well circulated as in the testing room. It was stuffy and dry, and my skin itched so badly I thought it would flake away.
“Down here we have the best access to Sualwet communications,” Vaughn began as he turned right and walked along the ashen path. “Most of our research is done aboveground, where we can work with windows and sunshine. Being down here is too much like being underwater with the jikmanae Fish for most of us.” He laughed at his joke, and my chest constricted.
This was more like being buried alive than being in the water. I longed for the open freedom of the sea; even just to swim in my small cove would be like breathing.
“The more sensitive information is kept in this area. This room holds the Archives.” He gestured to his left, where a white panel pressed against the white wall. When he passed his hand over it, the panel slid aside and revealed a console, like the one he had used to open the testing room.
“Your password will get you into all of the rooms, once I process your clearance. The Archives aren’t very interesting, so with the exception of the Culture department, almost no one goes in there.”
“Culture?” Traz had said he worked in Culture. The resident Sualwetarian, as Ash had put it. I wondered what they would need from the Linguistic Archives.
Vaughn nodded and opened the door with a quick entry of his code. Inside, only one flickering light glared from overhead.
“In here, we keep all of our translations of the texts we’ve found, recordings we’ve made—everything. I don’t know what use it is: we’ve already compiled our dictionary from what’s in there and what Rhine learned. But the folks in Culture seem to find it all fascinating, so we keep it.”
I peered into the room past Vaughn’s square frame. Inside, file cabinets and shelves with boxes stacked in neat rows. The air coming from the room was stale and dry, and I heard the thick silence of a space long unused.
“What are in the boxes?” I ventured, taking advantage of his verbosity.
With a shrug of his shoulders, Vaughn ignored me, closed the door, and continued onward.
20
By the time Vaughn had shown me the underground facility and suggested waiting to visit the Hub until tomorrow, I was completely lost. The white walls blurred together, leaving me with a kind of sun blindness. All I could do was focus on the back of his head and try not to let my peripheral vision get lost in the infinite brightness.
Vaughn stopped on a black rectangle, which I now recognized as an inactive transportation chamber. At last, we were going somewhere else. I had lost my sense of time, direction, and space. Hunger bit into my gut, but I had nothing to eat. Had I missed lunch? Was it night? I was so tired, I imagined it was already another day and I’d been walking the whole time. I developed an absolute hatred for the underground facility I was going to be spending my days in. When the chamber walls surrounded us and the platform began moving, my anxiety level dropped in proportion to our speed.
Before long, we whisked past levels without the penetrating whiteness until we burst aboveground. The sun from the windows streaked across us as we continued to ascend.
“The administrative offices are on the eleventh floor,” Vaughn said as the platform slowed. “Up here is where I’ll be if you need me.”
When the chamber rose, the noise of the open room filled the space. Everywhere I looked, someone was speaking, either into a microphone or to another person. I picked out the Erdlander language, mangled attempts at Sualwet, and the familiar cadence of my native language crackling over speakers. My brain contracted, trying to pick out each voice, each language, from the din.
“This is the main room, where the translators work on the recordings we have picked up from our various outposts. Most of these will give us conversational or cultural information.” Vaughn strode through the collection of desks and people as if so many bodies in such a small space were completely normal.
I dug my hands deep into my pants pockets and pulled my shoulders in tight to keep from touching anyone as I maneuvered behind him. It was all I could do to remember to breathe.
The open room was lined with windows, except for one wall, which housed a row of doors. The desks were organized into columns. Sometimes two faced each other; sometimes there was just a large table with multiple people sitting around it. The faded green carpet and wooden furniture of the warm room contrasted the whitewashed spaces we had
just emerged from.
“This is my office,” Vaughn announced when we reached the door on the left end of the wall. “The rest of the offices are for the head of Linguistics, deputy of Vocabulary, and deputy of the Written Word.”
He opened the door and motioned for me to enter. Walking inside, I was relieved to find two of the walls were made completely out of windows. Vaughn’s desk stood in the middle of the room. Books and papers piled on the desk, cascading to the floor around his chair like an overflowing pond.
“I’ll introduce you to everyone at some point; they are all occupied with the recent turn of events in the war,” he said as he stepped in behind me and closed the door. “Please, sit down.”
“Thank you.” I forced my hands from their protective position in my pockets and tried to relax my fists. I eased into one of the stiff, high-backed chairs facing the desk while Vaughn poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher sitting on a side table and then sat at the desk. I didn’t dare get up and pour water for myself. Sualwets had rules about those kinds of things: never take without being offered, and never ask for something that is not yours. But I watched the glass sweat and drip on the paper beneath it while Vaughn ignored its presence.
“So tell me, Sera, are you staying long, or will you be requesting to go back to your home camp?” Vaughn’s voice invaded my concentration and pulled my attention away from the water. He continued before I was able to reorganize my thoughts. “You see, this is the best place to be as a young person. Once you leave and move to the City or one of the villages, you can continue working here. Unlike other, more remote camps, you don’t have to leave everything behind when you start your family. Am I correct that you are Matched?”
“Yes, with Tor... Torkek.”
“Wonderful. Yes, a solid Match is a wonderful thing.”
I tried to smile as Vaughn leaned back in his chair and crossed his hands behind his head, pushing the boundaries of what his suit jacket should be asked to handle. He swiveled his chair away from me, looking out the window. I could almost taste the cold water in the glass before me. It was so clear, it would be fresh and crisp.
“Well, it’s been a long day,” he remarked, turning back to smile at me with the same friendly manner I had first encountered in the testing room.
Standing, he gestured to his door. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk more as you get settled in at the Hub.”
I turned away from him to leave and paused when I felt him step closer. His presence was dense, like a tree or a boulder, and there was something immovable about him. After opening the door, I stepped out, and the battering sounds of the main room assaulted me. Out of the din, one voice sang: ~We’ve been attacked. They knew where the Domed City was. We’ve destroyed their ships. Kill all Erdlanders you see!~
The Sualwet words drifted from nearby speakers, pulling my attention away from the stocky man. A woman with her back turned to me repeated the sentence, trying to mimic the singsong flow of the Sualwet battle cry.
Her accent was grating, and as I approached, I saw she was not only trying to emulate the sound but also working from a translation from someone else.
Written on a piece of paper before her were the words: We are attack. City place is domed. We are destroy ships. Erdlanders see and kill.
“We received this message during the battle a few nights ago,” Vaughn said from behind me, his breath against my shoulder. “They were all repeating it, like some kind of mass hysteria. This is the kind of thing you’ll be doing in the Hub.”
My hands shook, and my stomach clenched down on my need to scream. This was the siren song of the night my mother died, the night some Erdlander speared her like she was nothing more than a trout. She hadn’t been fighting, only trying to take care of me. Once again, I was the reason for every bad thing that happened, and now here I was, standing among her enemies.
Everything about this place was wrong. Everything they were doing was wrong! My fists tightened in my pockets as I fought the urge to run from this building, straight to the sea. Instead my nausea mounted as I spoke.
“You have the grammar wrong. It’s ‘We’ve been attacked,’ not ‘We are attack.’”
“Let me see that.” Vaughn stepped around me and snatched the paper away from the woman who was so focused that she hadn’t noticed us looming behind her.
“What are you...?” she protested, until she saw who had taken her sheet. The look of fear and submission in her face told me everything I needed to know about Vaughn. He may have been nice to me so far, but there was more to him than I’d seen.
“No, we have this right,” he laughed, turning to me, holding the paper out so I could see it. “It clearly says, ~We’ve been attacked.~” He said the words in his clumsy accent, making me want to grab the paper and shove it down his throat.
“What you have written here translates to, ‘We are attack,’” I said. “It should be ‘We’ve been attacked.’”
Vaughn studied the paper again, periodically looking up at me with squinted eyes and a new look of concentration on his face.
“Well, I can see why you would want to translate it that way. I suppose both could be correct,” he conceded.
My ego and pride wanted to argue with him, to prove I was right, that he was the one who had no idea how to translate the intricacies of a language as complex as Sualwet, but I forced myself to smile, hoping I looked like I was grateful for the compliment.
“Kit, this is Serafay. She’ll be working with me in Decryption.”
I looked down at the young girl whose work we had been discussing. She was young, no older than thirteen or fourteen, with rounded cheeks and long brown hair.
“Hi,” I greeted her and received a shy smile in response.
“Back to work, Kit. Your accent is getting better every day.”
“Thank you.” Kit’s voice was barely a whisper, and when Vaughn returned her paper, she quickly turned away from us and sat back down.
“Now let’s get you home to your pod,” Vaughn announced before striding back to the platform.
I followed him, getting used to the abrupt way Erdlanders parted. I looked around the room, realizing this was just another day for the people working here, nothing special, nothing profound.
21
When I entered Pod Thirty-four, I went straight to the small bathroom. My breathing was shallow, and I couldn’t think straight. All I wanted was something to drink.
Inside, I filled the sink with water, put the stopper in, and placed my face inside its moist asylum. Closing my lungs, I allowed my skin to absorb the oxygen through my pores. My hair floated around my face as I opened my eyes and relaxed into the cool sensation of liquid soothing my dry irises.
I groaned. and the water rippled with the vibrations. I hadn’t realized how tired my eyes were, how dry my skin had become. I longed for the peace of the cove, where I could lie beneath the surface for hours, my entire body enveloped by the sea.
When my neck began to cramp and my back hurt, I stood up, letting my wet hair hang in a tangled mess around my shoulders. My shirt was soaked, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to wipe a single drop away with a towel.
I returned to my room and shut the door as others began to filter in from their day at work. Nalla and Jai came from the infirmary, Ash from the lab, Traz from Culture... and Tor. I hadn’t seen him all day. We’d barely spoken this morning. My tears and the lingering tingle of his kiss had left me mute. Was he back yet?
I changed my clothes, pulling on a clean blue shirt and one of the loose skirts Ada had brought me. My hair dropped down my back, soaking my shirt and bringing welcome moisture to my skin.
I pulled my bag from the shelf it had been sitting on since we’d arrived. Sand drifted to the ground as I carried it and set it on the mattress. I inhaled, taking in the salty scent of home lingering on the bag. It was the only thing I had left of my life before coming to the camp.
Pulling the string, I opened the woven bag and reach
ed inside. I tugged out my comb, some loose pages from a book, a jar of fish eggs, a scarf, a melodisk, my mother’s jewelry box, and my sparkling barrette.
I set each object on the bed as I removed them, lining them up so I could see each item separate from the others. These were remains of my childhood, the only tangible items I possessed. This was the culmination of my life.
Spreading the pages out, I saw they belonged to a children’s book that was missing pages, and I’d often struggled to fill in the blanks. A child who ran in a field of bluebells met an ogre who demanded she find him a magical ruby. Most of the pages were missing, but there was one I had read over and over again. It was the moment when the child realized the magic ruby was her heart, and to protect the village, she had to give it to the ogre. Her decision wasn’t written on any of the pages I possessed. I’d told myself this story time and again.
After slipping off my shoes and socks, I wiggled my webbed toes. The rip in the tissue between the third and fourth toes on my left foot was red but healing. I fanned the webbing out and noted the dry air between them. Shoes all day, no water. How did Erdlanders do it?
I reached for the jar with the last remnants of my mother’s breakfast in it. I didn’t know why I’d grabbed it. The jar was nothing special, just something she’d found that had a sealable lid. It opened with a twist of my wrist, and the smell of eggs filled my nostrils. Hunger rose in my stomach, and my mouth filled with saliva. I hated these things, but suddenly I craved them. I popped one in my mouth and tasted the viscous fluid as it rolled across my tongue. Salty and sublime—I closed my eyes and savored the flavor.
The knob of my door turned, and in a panic, I pulled my feet under me on the bed, hiding my toes from view. As the door opened, I twisted the jar closed and hid it behind my back in time for the light from the living room to stream in and outline Tor’s body.
Two Moons of Sera Page 12
