A Phoenix First Must Burn

by A Phoenix First Must Burn (retail) (epub)

  But this is a half-truth. The other half is that after all that talking, it’s gotten harder to see the orc—see Kaizahn—as a target.

  As an it.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  We don’t make our move until hours into Santos’ shift.

  “Like I said, I’ve been talking to them,” Santos says as we creep through the main corridor of the prison. “The Nokira. For a couple of weeks, I’ve been learning about their people, their history, their various cultures.” She glances off to the corner of her eye, and I know she’s reading the time from her feed. “The guards will be waking in an hour. Maybe forty-five minutes.”

  They’ll be real pleased to discover that the so-called UDL .Reg3.3 regulatory neuralnet feed update that Santos claimed was from the guys in the comms department was, in fact, a sleep-enhancement virus.

  Now we’re running through the prison, unlocking the doors so that the Nokira can make their way to the south wing to escape. According to Kaizahn, they don’t need pods or anything: We need only the water.

  As we open the doors and the Nokira rush out, I read their expressions. Some look as if they want to kill me despite the rescue, but most just look tired. And sad, a heavy sorrow that jars against the relief I’d expect from them in this moment.

  When we get to Kaizahn’s cell, I hesitate before unlocking the door. Maybe because it’s probably the last time we’ll ever see one another, maybe because I’ll be labeled a traitor to the human race if anyone finds out.

  When Kaizahn does step out, he gives me a brief look of gratitude before nodding to Santos, and then the three of us unlock the other cell doors before sprinting down the corridor, dozens of Nokira prisoners behind us as we head for the south side of the prison.

  When we step outside the facility, I’m hit with the moss-scent of humid air. My eyes adjust to this planet’s strange predawn light, and in a few seconds I’m able to see through the light mist that hovers over the grounds. When I’m certain all is clear, the Nokira rush to the black waters of the swamp, their prison-garbed bodies submerging quickly and quietly. They can breathe underwater. Part of me wants to follow them, to discover the secret they’ve kept so successfully.

  Kaizahn steps forward, but turns back to face Santos. Some communication—something closer to reverence than gratefulness—passes between them. Then he turns to me.

  “Salquay.”

  The translation program isn’t turned on, but I don’t need it to know what he’s saying: Thank you.

  Hoping he understands everything I put into the gesture, I nod: You’re welcome. I’m humbled. I’m ashamed. I’m sorry.

  There’s something else in Kaizahn’s expression, in those too-human eyes of his.

  But before I can interpret it, he’s off, and then he’s gone beneath the murky deep.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Needless to say, this morning, all hell broke loose.

  The base commander was beside himself. “The damned orcs!”

  But there were no altercations, no throats slit in the middle of the night. The orcs, thanks to us, disappeared without a trace.

  Still, while everyone prepares to head out, some of us have been ordered to patrol one last time beyond the perimeter in hopes of securing at least a few of the Nokira.

  Santos and I have been riding in the pod the last two hours, and we finally park near the edge of an especially large expanse of swamp water.

  “What do you think is down there?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” Santos says.

  I turn to her. “What do you mean?”

  “There is nothing and no one, Mitchell. The Nokira are all they have. Each other and the clothes on their backs.”

  “There’s got to be something . . . Santos?” But she just keeps her gaze fixed on the water. “A couple of minutes and we head back.”

  Santos turns to me. “I’m not going.”

  “We’ve got to get back to base right now or we’ll be stuck here.”

  Santos dives forward and frees the navigation cell from the dash. In half a second she’s wrapped her jacket around it, and before I can stop her, she drops it out the window, at the roots of a black tree with winding, leafless branches.

  I glare at her. “Is this some kind of tantrum?”

  Theoretically, the pod could travel even through space back to Earth, though without the navi cell, only on manual mode. But we know our way back to base, so I don’t understand the point of throwing the navi cell from the window.

  “Santos.”

  She stares me down.

  “You want to stay here?” I throw up my hands and panic shears the edges of my voice. The transport ship will be leaving in just over an hour. “This planet is dead. There’s nothing here.”

  “But there will be.”

  “Why did you throw out the navi cell?”

  Silence.

  When I ask again and she doesn’t answer, I bang my fist against the tempered glass. Beneath my consciousness something stirs . . . “Santos!”

  “I drop you off at the base, and I keep the pod.” She means it with every blood cell in her body but her voice is also strangely practiced, like she’s reciting a line.

  “You’re seriously trying to stay? Alone? Why?” But I don’t wait for an answer because the question was just a distraction.

  I lunge for my door in an attempt to get out and grab the navi cell, but Santos has secured the doors. We end up staring at one another, chests heaving, limbs trembling.

  “We’re going to need the navi cell,” Santos says. “Much later.”

  “We?”

  The navi cell is virtually indestructible. Meant to stand the test of time. A long time. I feel like I’m going to be sick.

  Because I realize.

  I see everything Santos must’ve known for days, now. I understand the sadness of the Nokira as they escaped: they, too, are separated from their families by time. And I understand the look Kaizahn gave me a couple of hours ago: solemn expectation.

  I whisper, “This navi cell . . .”

  They need it. Thousands of years from now, the Nokira will need it to find their way to Earth. Because thousands of years from now, they’ll have developed an entire civilization. And they’ll have built spaceships.

  I swallow. “They have to find Earth to find us so that we can come out here and . . .”

  “And they can exist in the first place,” Santos finishes quietly. “We’re their ancestors.”

  My knees weaken and my head pounds at the paradox but there it is.

  She whispers, “You don’t have to stay.”

  “You don’t either.”

  “I do. The reason they even have a chance on Earth is because they are part human, too. It’s a small part, but it’s in their genetic makeup.”

  Their eyes.

  That strange sensation of encountering someone foreign but familiar. I recognized it in Kaizahn, in all the Nokira. I recognized myself. Their bodies are stitched with human DNA, are fueled with whispers of human blood. Whispers of Santos.

  “But just you alone?” I say. “You’re enough to influence genetics so far down the line?”

  “There will be others. Five UDLs are staying behind.”

  We’re their ancestors, Santos said. We. Goddess Santosa and her retinue, and the Nokira.

  “If you stay,” Santos says, “it will make all the difference. Genetically speaking.”

  I don’t want to stay. I want to see Uncle June. I have to make sure he’s all right.

  But I will see him. Not me, but a different version of me. Uncle June and I have been thrown into separate timelines and there is nothing I can do about that now.

  I can make a difference here, though, for the Nokira. I can stay here with Santos so Kaizahn and the Nokira can exist.r />
  You do what you can, Lil Bit, Uncle June said.

  I laugh to myself and sniff. My eyes burn. Because we will return thousands of years from now. Only it won’t be exactly us, will it?

  “How many times has this happened?”

  I don’t realize I’ve said it aloud until Santos responds. “An infinite number of times, I think.”

  The Great Leaping, Kaizahn called it. Leaping and simultaneously creating new timelines.

  Finally, I look up at Santos and nod. She hands me a lemon Fruitbomb. I unwrap it and pop it into my mouth as I lean back into my seat, kick my feet up onto the dash, and take in the fiery sunset. Santos leans back, too. This certainly wasn’t what I signed up for, being left behind on a swampy alien planet and helping to birth a new species. Plus I’m pretty sure there’s nothing on this rock that tastes this good. Maybe in a few thousand years. I tuck the candy wrapper into my pocket. As a reminder.

  A few tears slide down my cheeks, and I don’t bother wiping or sniffing them away, not even when the huge transport flies up through the burning sky and we are left behind.

  This is the end.

  But it’s also another beginning.

  GILDED

  By Elizabeth Acevedo

  THE INGENIO OF THE ADMIRAL DIEGO COLÓN

  LA HISPANIOLA, 1521

  Tía Aurelia, the healer who raised me, says my mother was a stoic woman, evidenced by the fact that she did not cry out, not even once, as I pummeled myself from her body. She simply squatted in Tía’s leaf-thatched bohío, and pushed me forth. She caught me with her own two hands, hands still covered with mineral dust from the gold she’d been panning for in Río Ozama. Tía Aurelia says the metal on my mother’s palms mingled with the slick that covered my body and turned me into a gilded, black being.

  She says I was god touched, gold touched, from that moment forward.

  The other ladinos stood outside our bohío, listening to sounds they never thought they’d hear again. I was the first babe born breathing to a negra. To the ladinos, I was proof that survival here was possible. But I was also a troubling omen: the first of a future generation born on this island and domesticated, declawed by their own lack of memories. The blood that puddled down Mamá’s legs would not stop, and although Tía Aurelia packed her body with herbs and prayed, calling on the true names of God, and stretched out a hammock for Mamá to rest in, Mamá’s strength exited her body in much the same way I had: one hard breath after another until she was emptied of life.

  Her gift to me? The gleaming palm print that could not be scrubbed off my back, and the magic that came with it. Tía Aurelia, who has seen more than she can recount, and has story upon story of unbelievable marvels, said she’d never seen anything like it, flesh transferring to flesh a miracle of metal. Even as an infant when I would cry, the tin spoon would rattle in the trencher. If I was having a nightmare Tía would have to put down her sewing, since the needles might fly out of her hand without warning.

  There are rumors that some of the Tainos have the ability to disappear into thin air. Other stories whispered late at night assert that there are dragons to the west that crawl out of a lake on hind legs and speak with the voice of a man. Some even say they have seen a negra, blue as a moonless night, wandering through the mountains with backward-facing feet, in her throat a song that lures soldiers deeper and deeper into the woods until they are never seen again.

  But I have never heard of someone quite like me, born with the ability to bend copper and bronze to my will.

  My gift looms over me like the fifteen-foot cane we harvest at the ingenio, as dark as the molasses I stir all day. Metal sings to me. Sometimes when the admiral is coming to watch us work, I can hear the copper buckles on his shoes even though he is still several miles away; I usually warn the others to put a bit more strength into their swinging arms. It’s the same when I’m at the ingenio working with molasses. I stand at the large bronze vats, and as I get tired the big metal spoon makes itself lighter, helps make the stirring easier. When a ladino gets injured, they come to our bohío. Tía numbs them using a tonic of rum spiced with anise, cinnamon, and cloves. As long as the injury is not in a visible place, I bend scraps of metal to graft a broken bone, or seal a bleeding wound. Every single ladino at the ingenio has had my touch on their body, and they pray over my hands, and they help keep my abilities secret.

  If the admiral knew, or any of the friars, they would burn me alive—for only a bruja can manipulate the elements, and a witch is considered a blight on the world.

  When I was a babe, the ladinos kept me hidden from the admiral. Children, like women, are rare here. They are not brought to work the land, or considered valuable stock, and although I have heard of other babes born after I was, I was not raised near other children. But when I turned three the admiral was made aware of my presence, and he put me to work. Tía Aurelia says it was a trap. The moment I proved useless the admiral would have me killed or would force me into the forests, but my ability to metal-whisper was helpful; back then we were working in the mines. Every week when we had to lay ore at the admiral’s feet, it was my pile that stacked up the highest. I knew exactly where all the largest deposits of precious metal were.

  I was branded lucky, but not magical, and the difference was enough to spare my life.

  I was ten when the admiral and I negotiated my coartación, or manumission. The opportunity to buy one’s freedom was not something that had ever been offered on the admiral’s ingenio, although we had all heard of ladinos elsewhere who were given the chance. Tía says it is a way to keep the slaves hoping. Pick one slave to make the others believe that if they work hard enough maybe they, too, will be presented a chance at liberty. And how better to inspire—and strike jealousy—than to offer freedom to the youngest at the ingenio? At least, that is how Tía believes it to be, and from her night work she knows the intention of men like the admiral better than their own wives do, which means she is probably correct.

  And so as a child with freshly washed hair and dirty-soled feet, I stood in front of the admiral and an appraiser, who determined I was worth the purchase price of seven hundred pesos, to be paid in seven years. An almost impossible amount if I was not attuned to metallics. But these men did not know I was a girl formed by impossibilities.

  When the rivers of gold dried up at the Río Ozama, the admiral moved us four leagues west and transformed his estate into this ingenio, a massive sugar mill. And so we, his ladinos, laid brick for his dungeon, set the doors for his armory, and raised his entire mill: an altar to sugar. Despite his grand palace in the center of the city, he had us build a new house with ballroom and bedrooms. For ourselves we built a tight circle of bohíos bordering the fields we would work. And we prayed to be useful enough to live another day, for the admiral was known to have the guillotine ready for any slave who was considered lazy, or worse, rebellious.

  Tía Aurelia says I am a fool for believing the admiral will honor his word regarding my freedom. And she is right; the admiral is a man with small, soft hands and a hard, cruel heart, and no court or contract will change either. But regardless of how she feels, Tía gives me salves for my palms, and ointments for my feet, and if she gets an extra peseta for her healing, or the men she offers comfort, she gives me that toward my coartación. My manumission date is in a month’s time—I have five pesos left to pay. From sunup until the stars are twinkling I slash, and carry, and peel, and boil, and churn, turn my arm around the molasses vat, and heal the broken, and dream and dream and dream of belonging to no one but myself.

  The boy was never a factor in those dreams.

  For the last few months, we’ve heard rumors from other ingenios that new enslaved people have been brought over by the hundreds. Black like us, who unlike us do not speak Castilian, are not Christian, have never set foot on the Iberian Peninsula. Since the first, the admiral’s ingenio has been toiled over by the ladin
os—those who lived in Sevilla and served the admiral’s father before being brought here—and me. But today a group of five men show up. I hear the metal when they are still half a league away; it rings louder than the admiral’s gold rings, louder than the horses’ shoes. This metal is not from here, and I almost drop my stirring spoon into the boiling molasses.

  The men appear at the ingenio in a straight line, all of them with ankle shackles hindering their steps; thick chains around their waists connect them to one another, and their garb is unlike any I’ve seen before. Of the five men, it is a young man my age, a boy with a proud forehead and fearless eyes, a brass collar around his neck, it is he who for a second stops my arm from stirring, and perhaps my heart from beating.

  I drop my head, and the metal in my hand pulls slowly through the thick, dark sugar. Yet from the corner of my eye I see the admiral address the young man, and then motion with his bejeweled hand for him to explain to the others. I cannot make out the boy’s words, but his voice is lower than I would have imagined for such a young man, and I know he is someone who is used to giving orders. The admiral yanks the chain that binds the men together and pulls them like a pack of dogs behind him. His treatment is not unusual, but it makes me want to snarl with my teeth. Just before they leave, the boy looks over his shoulder, and his eyes find mine.

  Tío Prieto and Nana Silvia are gathering leftover bits of cane to dry in the sun, and they begin whispering like a chorus of crickets; soon the other ladinos join in. The same word erupts from their mouths: Bozales. Bozales. The muzzled ones are here.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  A week after the bozales arrive, I exit Tía’s bohío to see the five men in the fields. Every morning since the day they arrived, I find them like this: kneeling and genuflecting and rising, and doing this time and again as they chant. I stand at the edge of the field with a hand shading my brow so I can watch them. When they have finished, the youngest stands up, and his head swivels toward me as it has done whenever we are in the same vicinity. But today he does not move deeper into the field and instead walks my way. I do not smooth the linseed cloth of my skirt, although my hand itches to do so. I am glad Tía ran her fingers through my hair last night, and rubbed the part neatly with coconut oil before plaiting a tight coronet around my head and saying, “You will be your own woman soon, Eula. But I can mother you for a little bit longer.”