by Hugh Howey
“Let them go, and I’ll do whatever you want,” I say.
The words take shape in the air and across our minds. I feel how to muscle the thoughts into clear form. I realize their voices have been mere whispers in my mind, and that just the same, my words have been mere whispers in theirs. But I am shouting now. I can feel Cricket in my head, a growl of courage slicing through her fear. I give her comfort in return.
“Let them go.”
One of the Lords moves out of my vision, but not out of my sight. I can see his mind behind me. I can feel the cosmos through the GWB. I can feel the other beacon and all the rocks and the calm at the core of empty space. The Lord returns, bringing Claire into my view. She is pulled, on her knees, her body sagging, her eyes down at the floor, a bruise on her cheek, jumpsuit ripped, the signs of the struggle she put up, my lovely soldier.
The Lord pulls the gag off Claire’s mouth so she can speak.
Rage burns.
There is no keeping it out of their minds.
The aliens look to each other and to me, and I feel as though I should be able to rip my hands free of my bonds and launch into them and kill the indestructible. I am fury and fear and grief. I just want my arms around my love, my body to shield her, and those who wish her harm dead, dead, dead, dead.
peace
This word cannot penetrate.
Peace
I cannot hear it with the sight of Claire in pain.
Peace.
I will not have it.
Please—
And Claire lifts her gaze from the floor, and she sees me, and she smiles. There is a line of blood along the top of her teeth, and she smiles through the pain. “Hey,” she mouths. “I love you.”
I flood her with love in return, and I see her flinch from the shock of it all. So much at once. Feelings without form. Thoughts without word. What I feel from Cricket when she nuzzles her head against my arm. What I feel from Cricket when she licks my cheek before I can stop her. “No lick,” I’ve said over and over. As futile as it would be for Claire to tell me, “No love.” How do you stop loving? You can’t. And the war passes through me. The rage dissipates. It’s gone. The Lords seem to relax.
“Why haven’t they killed us?” Claire asks. Her voice is weak. Her hands are bound together in front of her, and I can see a fingernail that’s missing; blood trails down her elbow.
I answer as the thoughts flow between the Lords and through me.
“They want us to murder our own fleet,” I say, as startled as Claire to hear the words leave my lips, as we both hear them and process them at the same time. “We’ve been planning an invasion, and it’s passing through here, and they want me to wreck them across those rocks. They want me to turn off the lights in the GWB at twelve past the hour.”
Claire shifts from knee to knee, her ankles bound, until she reaches me. The Lords don’t stop her. She leans her head against my chest, sags there, trembles a moment before collecting her thoughts.
“Why don’t they just do it? What are they waiting for?”
“I have to do it,” I say. I think I understand what Scarlett wanted and what these Ryph want. Proof of the impossible. Of sheathed claws. To see if we have free will, are not just warring animals. I remember the paperbacks I read that were really written by my enemy. Scarlett said we were the invading aliens. And we are.
“Don’t let them use me,” Claire whispers. “We’re already dead. Don’t you dare let them use me to get you to do this. If they’re scared of our fleet, then let them get what’s fucking coming to them.”
I’m watching the Lords while Claire says this. They aren’t moving. They’re watching us. At least this is real, this conversation with Claire. The thoughts that come next feel just as real.
“They want a trade,” I say. “But you aren’t part of the bargain.”
“Fuck them,” Claire hisses.
I stare at the Lords. They’re talking to me. I’m talking back. I tell them I understand, but that I don’t believe them. That I won’t do it. That they’ll have to kill us both. That none of this makes sense.
remember
I remember the day I failed to kill the hive. The day I won my medal. The day my belly was opened and I bled on alien soil. The day the Ryph pulled back and no one knows why.
I remember holding Scarlett as she died in my arms. I remember feeling the life leave her body. She came to tell me all of this. She was the messenger. I can feel how much it cost these two Lords to make it here. What they’ve endured. Rebels on either side, factions who want to put an end to the cycle of violence, to the profits and votes that wars make. I feel a gap in understanding as great as that between my warthen and myself. Alien minds. Minds that know only to mistrust the different, to kill the other. Anything deemed other.
“They’re serious,” I tell Claire. “Our fleet will pass through here today. I can feel it. The war is coming, and they want me to stop it. They want us to stop it. It has to be by our hands, don’t you see?”
Claire pulls herself upright to sit by me. She places her hands on top of mine. My hands are bound to my legs. I curl a finger around one of her fingers.
“They’re using you,” she says. “Don’t let them.”
I listen. I strain to hear everything. It’s not me that’s an empath, and it’s not my warthen who’s an empath. It’s all of us. But there’s a scab over that sense, like the shame of not crying in front of older boys. Something we protect. We dare not share, so we dare not hear. Claire was right: it was something that happened in the trenches. It was something that happened the day I refused to set off that bomb. I’d seen too many children like me die for nothing, and I could feel and hear all those unborn alien minds, not yet scabbed over, still able to listen to the cosmos the way the GWB listens to the cosmos, and they pleaded with me not to do it. They asked for peace. And I gave it to them.
The Ryph have something of this sense. Warthens, too. This great empathy. This rawness. This open wound.
“There are people on both sides who want this war to end,” I tell Claire. “There are Ryph like me who are sick of the killing. Some of them are in high places. I think this guy, the larger one, is a prince or something like that. There are others. But so few of us. With no armies. Just unarmed civilians. Shameful pacifists. And even those in power who want to end the war, they don’t trust the other side. There’s no way to stand down. Nothing anyone will believe.”
“What are you talking about?” Claire asks.
“A trade,” I say. “An even swap. A gesture to those who don’t want to fight anymore, from one side to the other.”
“What do they want you to do?”
“I told you, they want me to destroy our fleet. And then they’ll destroy their own.”
• 33 •
Two hundred and twenty million lives—a settled planet’s worth of young men and women—hurtling through space.
I can feel them.
I touch the button that will kill them.
Wires run to the dome behind me that brings me peace.
Hanging from my neck, a small rock trembles in fear.
“Are you sure about this?” Rocky asks.
He knows I’m not.
There’s a clock on the wall ticking down the minutes. There’s a picture of a lighthouse keeper there as well. He and I stand watch over rocks. We let ships pass without thinking what’s in them.
Deep down, I know that I’ll do nothing. I’ve been here before, with the power to annihilate. I keep these thoughts buried deep so the Ryph don’t know. One of the Lords stands watch over me. The other has taken Claire to her beacon. There’s another switch wired to her GWB, a finger hovering over it missing its nail. There’s no way this happens. Claire’s last words to me echo in my ears:
“You can’t believe them.”
Sitting there, contemplating treason upon treason, I nearly laugh out loud at how ridiculous it all seems. It’s something I felt on the front before, when the kinetic r
ounds were coming down from orbital artillery and throwing up geysers of hot earth and shrapnel, and somehow you’re wading through it all and handing death to those on the other side, and you just have to laugh. The orange blossoms of HE rounds, and the curving tracers like glowing and screaming bees, and the howling jets diving through atmo and dropping hell. The fact that you are alive is hilarious. The fact that the universe can come to this, that anyone finds it normal, is comically absurd.
I remember Scarlett, naïve Scarlett, the equally absurd. I remember the bounty on her life. I remember the risks she took to get to me and the impossible task she expected of me. I remember, vividly, that she knew things she shouldn’t have. She knew what had happened on Yata. She forced me to admit it, but she already knew.
Looking up at the Ryph, whose hand matches my scars, I think about the fact that he was there. He’s the only other soul who knows what happened that day. This explains how Scarlett knew. It’s because he knew Scarlett. They were working together. I see this in his thoughts, and he sees what I’m thinking. I see that this is a test.
“They don’t know if we’re capable of kindness,” I tell Rocky. “We can’t speak their language, can’t think to each other like they do.”
“You mean they don’t talk crazy like you do,” Rocky says. “You know I’m not real. None of this is real.”
“I think it is,” I say.
I touch the button that will kill my beacon to reassure myself of what’s real. This button is real. One press, and the greatest army of humans ever assembled disappears.
“This is what’s wrong with me,” I say. And Rocky listens. “It’s why I feel the gwib. It’s why I don’t want to go on. It’s too much.”
“Listen to Claire,” Rocky says. “Listen to her.”
I shake my head. “No. This is right. She should listen to me. They want to see if we’re worth saving or if we’re too dangerous to have around. I want to see the same from them.”
“And then what?” Rocky asks.
I rest my head against the dome. I can feel the cosmos breathe, can feel the black hole at the galaxy’s core pulse. There is a rift between the two, between pulse and breath. A warring divide. I sense Claire over there, near the other GWB. Two antennas. I reach out to her, feel her anger and fear, the fact that I’ve betrayed her. I feel her bound arms, Cricket trembling by her side, the Ryph Lord who will push the button when I tell him to, if Claire won’t. They just need to see what we’re capable of. Will one be enough? Just me? I think of Claire’s spreadsheet with all the checkmarks and no Xs. That’s data. What will the Ryph conclude if only one of us goes through with it? And what if the Ryph sitting elsewhere don’t go through with their end? Will I be killing my people or their people? Is there a difference? Is this what they want me to see, to feel? That there is no difference? That life is life. Is this the test?
Two hundred and twenty million lives. Even more on their side. Over half a billion souls. Tearing along through the cosmos at each other. They are already dead, all those young men and women. I tell myself this, and I tell it to Claire. Half a billion now or billions and billions more later. No end in sight. Don’t generals and admirals make this call? Don’t they kill our boys and girls every day? When I was sane, I bawled over the death of eight human souls, the crew of a cargo bound for Vega. What am I thinking now? I go back and forth, like a man crazed then sane, like a finger punching in three digits of a lock code with confidence, then hovering over the fourth, a man who can only kill himself so far, who can’t quite go all the way. I hear Scarlett yelling at me from the beyond to do this, to end this war, to be brave.
Just a few minutes to decide. All those boys and girls. The smell of gun oil. Anticipation. Dreaded Sundays. Fathers clutching their dead pups and old hearts and strong wives and crying for the first time in how long? How fucking long?
“I’m gonna do it, Rocky. For Scarlett.”
“No—”
“For Hank.”
“Please—”
“If there’s a chance, just a chance—”
“And then what?”
It’s Claire speaking. It’s her thoughts. She’s crying too. She taught me how.
“Do you love me?” I ask.
There is quiet.
Tears.
Fear.
“. . . yes.”
“There are good people, Claire. There are enough good people on either side. You and me—”
She sees into my thoughts. I hear her laugh behind those tears. I feel the word:
politics—?
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe. Something more than this. Something less cowardly.”
The ships are near. A wall of ships. Designed to break through and hit sector eight all at once, to overwhelm with the element of surprise, but everyone sees this coming. Just as everyone must see the coordinated response from the other side. Some of the people working with the rebels helped plan this, helped on both sides, helped line them up like sitting ducks.
I look to the Ryph Lord who nearly took my life. “I’m trusting you,” I tell him. “I’m trusting you.”
He makes a sign with his claws. I don’t know what it means, but I can read his thoughts. I am an empath, a dangerous thing. I didn’t ask to have my soul torn open, or my belly, or my goddamn life. I didn’t ask for any of this. But it was handed to me. And the only thing that ends a war like this is trust, release, love for those we hate, arms around those who would kill us, forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.
“Do you love me, Claire?”
“I do.”
She is shaking with tears, listening to me, knowing the time is here, that it’ll be with her or without her. It’ll be her clawless hand or the Ryph’s. But she knows now, either way, what my hand will do.
Rocky is gone. Clarity takes his place. All my brothers and sisters, and why is this act so unthinkable when my orders on Yata were the exact same? Who gets to make that choice? Right now, I do.
The moment.
Here.
War, coming.
They’ll kill me for this.
When I deserve a medal.
I pull my head away from the GWB, want to feel what I feel, want my mind clear, want to allow those memories of war to creep in, creep back, torment me for a sliver of time longer, before I pull a trigger of horrible pacifism, a button of treason, those ships traveling too fast to stop, and the world is aglow, Claire crying for what we’ve done, the two of us, a million stars coming to life and full of death, and across the module the portholes facing out toward Yata glow as in the distance a similar wall of flame erupts, more stars appearing briefly and burning out, this violent, terrible, treasonous, glorious eruption of peace.
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Note from the Author
I know it is fiction to imagine, but what would happen if we stood on the rubble of attacks against us, whether literal or figurative, physical or emotional, personal or political, and we chose to forgive rather than escalate? What does that world look like? Maybe we’ll never know. But I like to pretend.
• Epilogue •
The Ryph turbines and the navy jet engines scream in harmony. Steel cables hang taut from two craft built for dogfighting but now converted for commercial use. Swinging from the end of the cables, and hovering over the shore of the Chesapeake, is an old lighthouse. The stonework is intact, but the crown and foundation will take rebuilding.
I’ve spent countless hours staring at a picture of this lighthouse, a giant wave crashing up its spine, an old man standing there back when those rusted stumps were the stanchions for steel railings. I can almost see the ghost of the old man there, smiling at me.
When I got back to Earth from the Yata Peace Council, the first thing I did was track the old lighthouse down. I found her like a battered old soldier standing out in the waves, the foundation ready to go at any moment. Soon, she would have been lost for good. And so I decided to save her. I did the opposite of what those old wreckers used to do w
ho demolished for profit. It took calling in some favors, but there’s very little a planetary governor-elect and old war hero can’t do.
The crew marrying the old lighthouse to its new foundation are a motley bunch. The foreman in charge of the project is Tryndian. There are two Hokos on his crew, three humans, and one of the pilots up there is a Ryph. A Ryph on Earth. Races that grew up warring among themselves and with each other now concentrate on the job at hand. And the job at claw, I suppose.
Reading my mind, Claire slips her hand into mine. Her other hand rests on her belly, which is full as the moon. Ten paces away, Cricket slinks into the tall grass, only her tail visible, stalking something only she can see.
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with contentment. Sometimes I question what I did. Laughter and sobs still orbit too close to one another for comfort. But it won’t be my challenge to forgive my actions. That’s a test for the next generation. It shouldn’t be easy; that’s the whole point. I remember what I felt after the attack on Delphi. I remember the anger that caused me to enlist. The last thing in my mind was forgiveness. With the end of the war, someone tallied the total cost of all those little decisions, and it came to just over eighteen billion dead.
Half a billion of those are on me.
Claire pulls me close, places her hand on the back of my hand, holding my palm where the baby is kicking, is trying to distract my thoughts and redirect them to life. To renewal. The old lighthouse settles onto its foundation, the work crew tight and organized. I can feel the lacework of scars beneath Claire’s dress. She’s been trying to convince me that the boy should have my name. I haven’t liked the idea. I don’t want him to turn out like me.
But maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll do my name proud. And so I squeeze Claire’s hand and I agree. I test it out, whispering my own name in Claire’s ear, but the syllables are lost in a sudden breeze, and the soft sound is carried far out to sea, where it will swirl and mingle and be lost and present for all the rest of time.
