DUST
Somehow we gave it the slip.
The flamethrowers held it at bay long enough for everyone to scramble out of the hollow and onto the trucks. There wasn’t nearly enough room, people hung out the windows and held onto the rails as we bounced and jolted over rough ground. Yov stuck his elbow in my eye, I’m pretty sure not by accident. We must have put twenty miles between us and the creature before slowing down, circling the trucks, and checking for injured or missing. Miraculously, no one had fallen off. The worst anyone got was a scrape from someone else’s fingernails or a bruise from one of the fuel drums. My dad did a head count, twice, but of the fifty-one of us, the only people not accounted for were six of our eight scouts.
The little kids hadn’t cried once the whole ride.
My dad stayed up the rest of the night in the command truck, talking to Aleka and the other officers. Everyone else found a spot in the remaining trucks or just threw themselves on the ground. But no one really slept. I curled up behind a tire, and for what was left of the night I lay half-awake, hearing boots shuffle past my head and whispers from the other teenagers lying nearby. Every time my eyes flickered open, I saw the shadowy forms of the sentries prowling the outskirts of our makeshift camp. Sometime in the middle of the night I heard Korah reading our one storybook to the little kids, a fable about a mother rabbit and a baby rabbit. “I’ll come back for you,” she said soothingly. But her voice got all mixed up with the image of the bared teeth of the man in the hollow, and I had the weird thought that the mother rabbit was threatening her baby instead of comforting it. It must have been near morning when I heard two grown-ups arguing, in the hissing whispers people use when they’re trying to keep their voices down.
“It was too close this time.”
“Do you think they know?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“This is new territory. Unmapped territory.”
“You’re suggesting we go back?”
“I’m suggesting it’s not safe.”
“It never was.”
The next thing I knew, a hand settled on my shoulder and my eyes fluttered open to see a man crouching beside me. The light stood behind him, and it took me a second to recognize him as my dad.
“We have to talk,” he said.
“Did it come back?”
“Not so far.”
I dragged myself from behind the truck and sat to face him. He lowered himself carefully, with his good leg, the left, tucked beneath the right. His hair, long and brown and streaked with gray, veiled his face. With a stick, he absently traced patterns in the dirt. Nothing I had to worry about memorizing, like instructions or schematics, just doodles. Swirls of dust rose to coat his already filthy boots.
I surveyed the scene while I waited. The sun hung above the trucks, a brownish smear in the brown sky. People sleepwalked around camp in soiled uniforms. My dad had switched the sentries, but even the fresh ones looked dead on their feet. The little kids were still dozing, their bodies flung everywhere like firewood. I could tell from the low haze on the southern horizon that we’d camped near the river, but other than that, the land was empty of familiar markers, no road or rise or ripple to fix our position.
“Aleka tells me you gave her a hard time last night,” my dad said, not looking at me, still drawing his random squiggles.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
I ran back over the events of the night before, but I couldn’t think of anything that would qualify as “a hard time.” I wondered if Yov had been bad-mouthing me.
“Is it true?”
“No way,” I said. “She told me to stick with her and I did. She practically threw me in the back of the truck. End of story.”
“Because you know I expect you to listen to her the same way you listen to me.”
“I did, Dad,” I said. “What did she tell you?”
He sighed and lifted his head to look at me. His face was deeply lined, with dirt in the crevices of his cheeks and the hollows beneath his eyes. An old scar trailed across his forehead to the bridge of his nose, so filthy it seemed to have been dyed black.
“Aleka’s the best officer I have,” he said. “You saw how close we came last night. From now on, we all need to buckle down. No more fun and games.”
“Yeah, it’s been such a blast till now.”
He ignored me. “And we both know you can have trouble focusing. Concentrating on what you need to do.” His fingers speared the air between us, the old signal. “You remember what happened six months ago.”
“That’s the problem, Dad,” I said bitterly. “I can’t.”
His eyes flared briefly at the interruption, but his voice stayed calm. “Next time, if there is a next time, I don’t want to have to have this conversation.”
That makes two of us, I thought.
“Querry?”
“Yeah,” I said. “All right. Fine.”
“I can’t be worrying about you in addition to everything else.”
“All right, Dad,” I said. “I get it.”
“I hope so.” He tossed his stick aside and climbed slowly and painfully to his feet, then held out his hand. “Let’s get moving.”
I took his hand and stood. We didn’t exchange another word. His lecture took me back to the morning, six months ago, when I’d woken to discover two things: I was a member of Survival Colony 9, and my past was gone. I squeezed my eyes shut, recalling that morning, trying to recall what lay beyond it. But as always, I came up empty.
The smudge of a sun beat down on us as we started our first day on the edge of the unknown.
* * *
Querry.
That was the first thing I remember him saying that morning six months ago. His bearded face hovering over me in the gray dark. His almost black eyes keen and watchful. And the unfamiliar word on his lips, spoken with an intensity that made me sure I was supposed to know what it meant.
“Querry,” he repeated that morning. “How are you feeling?”
I shook my head.
“Let’s see if we can get you on your feet,” he said.
I threw aside the blanket, found myself clothed in camouflage gear. My body ached, hypersensitive to his touch. But I stood, draped my arm over his shoulder. Together we staggered into the bleak light of a newly risen sun.
And I stared, speechless, at the scene that lay at my feet.
“What . . .” The word felt like a weight on my tongue. “What is this place?”
He looked at me sharply. My head throbbed, my eyes felt like they’d been held to a fire.
“You don’t remember,” he said.
I shook my head. Everything was fuzzy, blank. I didn’t know what I’d expected to see. Just not this.
The world stretched in an endless circle of dust around me, broken only by the shapes of ragged tents and squat, rusted trucks. Both were patterned with camouflage colors. Everything else was a dead reddish-brown, the color of dried blood under fingernails. The sky reared across the waste, a uniform brown so similar to the soil my head spun with the feeling that the solid ground was only a reflection. The heat felt like a blanket wrapped around my hands, my eyes, my throat.
“The Skaldi,” he said. “Do you remember?”
The word made me shiver, shiver in a hundred-twenty-plus degree day, but why it did I couldn’t have said.
That’s when he did a strange thing. At first, when he reached out, I flinched. He gripped my hand, guided my fingers to the back of my head, a few inches above where my skull joined my neck. My fingertips brushed against a lump, hard and sore.
“Querry,” he said. “We have to talk.”
He told me about the accident that had occurred the night before. The Skaldi attack, the creature in our midst. Me falling off the truck as we were peeling out, the blow to my h
ead. When I still looked at him blankly he gave me a crash course on planetary history. As much of it as he knew, anyway. The wars, the colonies, the Skaldi. How five thousand years of civilization had been wiped out in a few years of madness, how the survivors had barely begun to pick up the pieces when the Skaldi appeared to feed on the few who remained. He sounded annoyed, maybe because this was all news to me. Or maybe because he was so unclear on the details. He’d only been a little kid himself when the wars began, and by the time they were over, hardly anyone was left who remembered.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said. “Check in on the troops.”
He helped me stand. Dust billowed around our legs as we walked. When I looked back I saw clouds of it suspended in the angled rays of the sun like spears.
We approached a tall woman who stood with her back to us, hands on hips, the sharp angles of her elbows accentuating her slenderness. When she heard us she turned, and her eyes, hard and gray as iron, fell on me.
“Aleka,” he said. “As you can see, Querry’s back on his feet.”
She nodded curtly. “Laman,” she said. “I’d like to have a few words with you once you’re done showing Querry around.”
She spun and stalked away.
“What did I . . . ?” I started to say.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just been a bad day for all of us.”
We resumed our walk. More faces passed in front of me. A boy with bare, muscled arms and shaggy hair, who looked at me with a smug, superior smile. Wali. The black-haired girl by his side, whose brilliant blue eyes watched me curiously in a way that made my heart pound in my chest. Korah. Grown-ups, all of them confronting me with surly expressions I couldn’t understand. Araz. Soon. Kin. A group of little kids who trailed each other in some frenzied game, moving so fast the names he hurled at them didn’t seem to stick on any one in particular. A lean, lanky boy who lounged on a crate outside a tent, skinning a stake with his pocketknife. He smiled crookedly and pointed his blade at my chest as we approached.
“Might want to button up,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to catch cold.” His eyebrows rose mockingly. “Space Boy.”
I looked down and saw that my uniform top was unbuttoned from my midsection to my belt. I hastily did the remaining buttons, shoved the top into my pants. My escort looked at me, shaking his head slowly.
“This is Yov,” he said.
The scraping sound of the knife prickled along my spine.
We moved on. More names, faces. Scouts, officers, drivers. The camp healer, Tyris. The mechanic, Mika. A group of teens. Adem. Nessa. Kelmen. With each introduction my right hand itched to reach out, but none of the uniformed people offered to do the same. And their names and faces, no matter how much I repeated them, became tangled the moment we moved on.
My guide must have seen it in my eyes.
“They’re just spooked by what happened,” he said. “Give it time.”
I nodded. The knot on my skull throbbed.
The days immediately after the accident were the worst. I walked around in a fog, staring at faces without names, thinking I had to get dressed only to discover I already had my clothes on. Every morning the same: his bearded face floating above me, the word on his tongue, the empty world outside. He walked me through camp, showing me the trucks, the supply tent, the latrine. That was nothing but a hole in the ground. He reviewed drills, briefed me on the procedure in case of Skaldi attack. He tried to fill in the larger world, our coordinates, our movements. We hiked south to the riverside, north to the remains of the road that had once carried thousands of cars, then squadrons of military vehicles, then nothing but dust. But for those first few days my brain was like the road, empty of traffic. Only snippets stuck: Yov’s knife, Aleka’s frown, Korah’s eyes. Maybe a week passed before the snippets turned to solids, before the camp started to fall into place, the names, the history, the routines. One morning, I woke with the realization that I could string days together, each day enough unlike the others to tell the difference, and fix the whole sequence in my head to compose a larger span of time. I reached behind me to touch the tender spot on my head, only to find it was gone.
“I remember,” I told him that morning. For the first time, when I’d woken to find him hanging over me, it hadn’t been either a surprise or a shock.
“Tell me.”
“I remember what we did yesterday.” The concept of yesterday was so new to me it seemed miraculous. “When we reviewed troop formations. And the day before. When Korah helped me set up the tent.”
I felt my face grow warm as I said her name, and I knew I remembered her. Our hands had touched once or twice when she instructed me how to lift the frame, tie the stakes. I even thought she’d smiled at me, before Wali showed up to steer her away.
“And . . . ?”
“And . . . the day before. I remember about the Skaldi, what you told me. How they take control of your body. Imitate you. How you can’t trust anyone you don’t know.” I sensed I’d reached the end of what I remembered, so I added, “Or anyone you’re not sure you know either.”
“You watch them,” he said, nodding, his face darkening. “For erratic behavior. Not acting like themselves. If you suspect, you alert the commander and have them taken in for the trials.” He leaned back on the canvas and metal seat beside my bed. “That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
And that was all. The week rested in my memory, more or less intact. But beyond that, nothing. Not the creature attacking, not the fall from the truck, not the impact with the ground. Not a trace of all the years that had come before. The accident had cut me off from my past as completely as a knife slicing through rope. I could unspool days in my mind, think I was getting closer to the starting point, but then the rope would fall slack. And no matter how much I pulled, all I’d end up with in my hand was the frayed end.
“Give it time,” he had said. I clung to that.
But time passed.
And time failed.
* * *
That first morning we returned to my tent, as the sun lent a reddish cast to the dun brown sky. I’d begun to feel lightheaded, the bump on my head pulsing to the beat of my heart. He’d reintroduced me to everyone in camp, but I’d confused all the names and faces by now.
He helped me lower myself to my cot. He was about to go when I stopped him. “How old am I?”
“Fourteen,” he said. “More or less.” He dropped his eyes. “We don’t keep such good track of dates. They don’t matter much anymore.” He reached inside his jacket. “Here.”
I took the shard of half-silvered glass. Through splotches and black speckles I saw a shock of sandy blond hair, a forehead sprinkled with red dots, a chin covered with fine fuzz. A face that seemed both lean and lumpy, as if someone had stretched the skin tight over cheekbones and nose and forehead. I stared at it for what seemed hours. Its blue-gray eyes stared back.
I handed the mirror back to him. “Keep it,” he said, waving it away.
Finally I asked the question I hadn’t wanted to admit I had to ask.
“Who am I?”
“You’re my son.” He said it as if he was trying to force it through the hole in my memory. “My name is Laman Genn, and I’m the commander of this camp. Survival Colony Nine. Your name is Querry Genn. You’re my son.”
Your name is Querry Genn. I rolled the words around on my tongue, repeated them inside my head, listened for a response. None came.
“We don’t keep much in camp,” he said, lowering his eyes again. “Only what we need. I wish I had something to show you. Some proof.”
“Proof?”
“Something from when you were growing up,” he said. “Boots, a drawing. Some parents keep those things. I don’t.”
“That’s okay.” I felt the room spinning, not from dizziness or nausea. It was like everything had come loose from
its moorings, like the whole world was floating in space with nothing to hold it down. “I’ve lost so much,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“I’ve lost everything.” My hands grasped the air between us. I didn’t want to cry in front of him, but I felt the sting in my eyes. “I’ve lost everything.”
“Then you’ll just have to win it back.” His eyes met mine, and I saw no compromise there. “I’m sorry this happened, Querry. But we don’t have the luxury of mourning or regret. Those creatures are out there, the western desert is swarming with them, and if they see a weakness, they’ll strike. You’ve lost a lifetime of training, information we need to fight against them, and you’ll have to relearn it in a matter of days. Before they find us again.”
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Try now.” He leaned forward, his eyes holding mine. “We talked to Araz earlier today about the loading sequence for an evacuation. What do you remember?”
“Araz?”
“My driver. The loading sequence.” And then he said it, his fingers pointing straight at me, his mouth a grim line beneath his unkempt beard. “Focus.”
I tried. I struggled to remember. For my sake, his, ours. I pictured Araz, a burly man with a shaved head, leaning on the tailgate of the truck and ticking off supplies on a mental manifest. I closed my eyes and fought to recover the items on his list, information I’d apparently learned at one time, apparently relearned just hours ago.
“I don’t remember,” I admitted.
He sighed, sat back, chewed the ends of his mustache with teeth that were chipped and discolored. “Well then,” he said. “I’d better go over it again.”
He began, running down the contents of Araz’s list, naming everyone responsible for the loading, rattling off numbers and figures and code. I found myself nodding, his words becoming a steady hum of sound. I studied his mannerisms, the way he narrowed his eyes and averted his head when he paused for thought, the way his bony fingers came together to make a point, steepled then separated, sliced the air in invisible diagrams. Something nagged at me, something important. I didn’t care if he’d thrown away my baby boots and drawings, but this I was sure I needed to know.
Survival Colony 9 Page 2
