The Survivor

by BRIDGET TYLER

  Shelby leans forward in her seat as we shoot out over Angel Valley, drinking in the view. The expanse of green grass is unbroken now that the wreckage of our first shuttle, the Wagon, has been recycled. In the gray predawn, it looks like an inland sea crashing against the cliffs.

  I’m surprised Shelby is so affected. I didn’t think she cared about stuff like natural beauty. But I guess I don’t know her very well, after all.

  We swing wide over the valley and climb through the steep, intertwined ravines and cliffs that cut through the gray-green canopy of solace trees. We’re high enough to see the ocean beyond, still dark despite the fading dawn sky.

  I accelerate, pushing the flyer to full speed as we shoot down the western side of the softening mountain range. Bob’s nest is in a deep ravine that’s hidden in a long stretch of solace tree forest, a few kilometers from the place where the mountains melt into the turquoise ocean beyond.

  The sun is just cresting the mountains as we settle onto a clear, flat patch at the edge of the ravine. As I power down the flyer, the nest explodes with light.

  Phytoraptor nests are designed to trap and refract sunlight so that the raptors can absorb it. Meter-high pillars built out of crystal shards and now salvaged human scrap metal and solar panel pieces are strategically placed around the ravine. These intricately balanced structures splinter the light of the rising sun, breaking it apart and weaving it together again in a delicate fractal web that arches over the nest. It doesn’t matter how many times I see these cathedrals of light. They don’t get less astounding. Especially considering that the beings who designed this are not, so far as we can tell, even tool using.

  But maybe it’s wrong to judge them on the spectrum of our own evolution. Maybe tool using isn’t a goal the phytoraptors ever need to aspire to. Our tools destroyed our whole planet. Not like I’d want to give up my flex or live without the chance to ever fly or go to space or anything. But it’s something to think about.

  “Perfect timing,” I say.

  “Actually, we’re early,” Beth says, without looking up from the flex she’s working on. “I calculated our travel time under the assumption that Leela would be my pilot. Your tendency to use manual control shaved almost twenty minutes off that estimate. But I can use the extra time to check my spectrometers.”

  “Extra time?” I say, my brain catching up with what she’s saying. “You mean you’re planning to interact with them? Awake?”

  “Nope,” Shelby says. “She isn’t. I did not bring enough guns for playtime in the carnivorous alien vegetable patch.”

  “Asleep or awake, phytoraptors aren’t interested in humans unless we threaten them,” Beth says. “We will be perfectly safe.”

  Shelby bursts out laughing. “Girlie, it’s only mostly safe to step out of your damn cabin in the morning on this planet.”

  “I wouldn’t think safety was such a high priority for someone in your line of work,” Beth says, untethering from her chair and starting toward the rear hatch.

  “Clearly, you don’t know much about my line of work,” Shelby fires back, bouncing to her feet. “And at the moment, my job is to keep you and little sis here from being eaten by those beasties. And the only way I can do that without risking my own hide is for you to stay put.”

  Beth expresses a wealth of irritation in a single sigh. “They are classified as Chorulux phytoraptor, but we commonly refer to these sentient beings as raptors. Not ‘beasties.’ And, assuming you can contain your anxiety, I should be able accomplish my current goal without interacting with them at all.”

  “It takes a lot more than some hyperactive houseplants to make me anxious, Mendel,” Shelby grumbles.

  “That’s probably for the best,” Beth says. Then she reaches past Shelby and smacks the door controls. The hatch swings open and the ramp unfolds.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Beth says, raising a pointed eyebrow at Shelby.

  Shelby rolls her eyes but steps aside. “Be my guest. But if you get eaten, I’m not gonna be the one to tell your grandfather.”

  I untether and follow Beth out into the blue-green dawn. She strides down the ramp and crosses to the nearest prismatic spire, but I don’t make it past the top of the ramp.

  You can hardly even see the raptors in the nest from here. Just the dome of light and the thick solace forest around the ravine. It’s so quiet. Quiet enough that I can hear my heart thundering frantically in my ears. Every muscle in my body is locked tight.

  I take a deliberate breath, pulling in air and letting it go, trying to exhale the irrational fear. And it is irrational. The raptors are asleep. They could care less about us. And there’s no way the Sorrow can know we’re up here.

  Unless they’re watching the Landing. Unless they followed us.

  Stop it, Joanna.

  The Sorrow do have flyers—Dr. Brown gave them the 3D printers from the Vulcan and taught them to build vehicles and equipment. Including guns. But we’d have noticed a strange flyer following us. It’s just us and the raptors up here.

  Shelby elbows past me and strides to the bottom of the ramp. She stops there and scans the area, her fingers restlessly toying with the safety catch on her rifle. She’s anxious, no matter what she says. She’s also heavily armed—she’s got a pistol and a stun gun holstered on her belt. Whatever her reason for being here, this mission has her on edge.

  Maybe that means I should stay in the flyer.

  Or maybe it just means Emily Shelby doesn’t belong here. She doesn’t even try to hide her xenophobic tendencies. She would never have been selected for an E&P if it hadn’t been the end of the world. But I was raised for exploration and pioneering. I don’t fear things I don’t understand. At least, I never used to. I’ve done way more dangerous things on Tau than this. I’ve walked through this nest before, more than once.

  For a second, I can almost see Miguel standing at the edge of the cliffs. Grinning. Triumphant. Oblivious to Sunflower charging toward him, their ruff of yellow blossoms glowing in the rising sun. I don’t want to see this again, but my memory doesn’t care. Closing my eyes doesn’t help. I can still see Miguel dying.

  I might have trained for life here, but that doesn’t make me safe. It doesn’t make anyone safe.

  Since when do I care?

  I half run down the ramp.

  “Guess I’m not the only one who needs to contain my anxiety,” Shelby says dryly, without turning to look back at me.

  An answering quip goes dry and sticky in the back of my throat as my eyes catch on a vivid burst of yellow, only just visible in the ravine below. Sunflower is down there.

  Miguel’s last smile pops into my head again. He opens his mouth to call out to me in victory, but the vicious crunch of his body hitting the rocks comes out instead.

  I gasp, taking an inadvertent step backward.

  “Seen some nasty shit up here, haven’t you?” Shelby says, quietly interrupting the rising tide of my silent panic.

  “Yeah,” I say, sloshing through the memories to string words together. “You read about it in the reports?”

  She shakes her head. “Nah. But I know that face you’re making.”

  She looks up, her gaze drifting through the knotty solace tree branches that tangle around the flyer, their big round leaves occasionally licking insects out of the air.

  “Pretty trees. Remind me of the big ol’ oaks, back home.” She makes a face at the word. “Habit is a funny thing. That place hasn’t been home for twenty years.”

  “You grew up somewhere in North America, right?” I guess, from her accent.

  “Mississippi,” she says. “Of course, you probably don’t even know where that is.”

  “It’s part of the depopulated zone now,” I say. “Isn’t it?”

  “It was plenty populated when we were kids.” A little smile crests her lips. It’s startlingly gentle. I almost wouldn’t recognize her. “Joined the IntGov marines because they saved our butts, back in the day.”

  �
��You survived the flu?” I say, more pieces sliding into the puzzle that is Lieutenant Emily Shelby. The flu epidemics that hit after the Storm Wars were devastating. I thought everyone in depopulated zones had died.

  She nods.

  “We survived. They separated us for a while. Couple of the real little ones like Hart even got adopted. But we swore we’d join up, as soon as we could. Be a family again.”

  “‘We’? You mean, your whole squadron . . .”

  She nods. “We’ve been to hell and back. And now we’re on a goddamn alien planet. But we survived. And we’ll survive this, too. And so will you.” She raises her voice. “Unless your sister turns us into a morning snack for the phytoraptors when they wake up.”

  “If you’re scared, you can always wait in the flyer,” Beth calls back without looking up from the notes she’s taking on her flex.

  “Your sister is kind of a bitch, you know that?” Shelby says. “I like it.”

  With that, she strolls over to Beth’s spot on the cliff. I watch her go.

  Shelby looks . . . I don’t know, different somehow. Like she’s been out of focus this whole time and now I can see the flecks of gray in her blond braid and the nanofilament tape patching the heels of her boots. But it’s more than just noticing details. It’s like my brain recognizes her now, in a way it didn’t before.

  “You might wanna stick to your inside voice,” Shelby says as she reaches Beth’s vantage point. “Avoid waking up the murder grove down there.”

  “We landed a flyer five meters from their nest without attracting their attention,” Beth points out coolly. “Our repartee is hardly a concern.”

  “Shucks,” Shelby says. “I didn’t know we were having a repartee.”

  “Well, it hardly qualifies as a conversation,” Beth says, noting something in her flex. “But if you’re so concerned about waking the nest, perhaps you should keep your thoughts to yourself.”

  But Shelby isn’t listening anymore. Something down in the ravine has caught her attention.

  “Are those juveniles?” she says, pointing into the nest.

  “Yes,” Beth says.

  I hurry to join them and peer down into the ravine.

  “Oh.” Joy claws through me, splintering into longing and regret as it rakes through my fear. There are a dozen almost identical little phytoraptors crouching in the shallow river. They’re tiny. The huge white flowers that bloom from their spines look sort of like the folding solar sails on Grandpa’s boat back on Earth. Which is exactly what they are, I realize. Big petals to suck in as much light as possible for their growing bodies.

  “They’re . . . cute,” I say, surprised. Not so much that baby raptors are cute, but that I feel so fuzzy about it.

  “And someday they’ll be killers,” Shelby says. “Just like Mommy and Daddy.”

  Bob is planted at one end of the tiny garden of baby raptors. Sunflower is perched at the other. Will the deadly raptor let Bob teach their babies sign language, so that they can talk to us? Or will Sunflower teach them to hunt humans, just like the raptors hunt the Sorrow?

  Maybe they’ll do both.

  “Oh come on,” I say, shoving the thought away. “They’re babies.”

  Shelby rolls her eyes. “I’ll never understand why people are so impressed with procreation.”

  “The propagation of life is a biological imperative,” Beth says, a gentle awe lingering under the clinical words.

  “I must be wired backward,” Shelby snarks, patting her pistol. “I’ve always been more interested in ending life than multiplying it.”

  But Shelby is studying the swaying patch of tiny raptors just as intently as Beth and I are. No. I take it back. Beth isn’t watching the raptors at all. She’s watching Shelby. She has a weird look on her face. Calculating.

  Without looking down, Beth folds the flex she’s been working on and tucks it into the pocket of her parka. Then she unwraps a second flex from her wrist, casually letting it unfold into tablet mode. If I hadn’t seen her do it, I would never have known it isn’t her original tablet.

  My brain churns, trying to come up with a good reason for my sister to be doing sleight-of-hand tricks with her flex. I can only think of one: Beth is hiding her data.

  “Learn something new every day, don’tcha?” Shelby says, cutting through my speculation. She nods to Beth’s flex. “You get footage of those things?”

  “Obviously,” Beth says. “Given that they are my mission objective.”

  “Well, sync your ‘mission objective’ with the shared drives, hmm?” Shelby says.

  “That is standard procedure,” Beth says, making a show of swiping at the new flex like she’s closing an app before folding it around her wrist. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck prickle. Beth didn’t have any apps open.

  My sister is meant to be collecting vital data on these dangerous predators so we can protect the survivors. Instead, she’s hiding it. Sabotaging our team. Our species. And Shelby knows it. That’s why she’s really here. It has nothing to do with protecting Beth.

  Shelby’s trying to catch her in the act.

  Nine

  “Don’t we have other spectrometers to check?” I ask, grabbing Beth’s hand. I tow her away without waiting for an answer, dragging her around the edge of the ravine.

  When we get out of Shelby’s earshot, Beth hisses, “Can you at least attempt to be subtle? Lieutenant Shelby is suspicious enough as it is.”

  “Why are you hiding your data?” I demand, trying to drop my pace back to something that will pass as casual.

  “I would have thought it was obvious,” Beth fires back.

  “No,” I say. “It isn’t obvious. It’s sabotage. And Shelby knows.”

  “She’s not subtle, either,” Beth snaps, crouching beside another light-catching pillar and adjusting the tiny spectrometer planted at its base. “But she is observant. Protecting even a fraction of my results has been tediously difficult since she arrived.”

  “Since she . . . you mean you’ve been hiding data since before the survivors got here?” I gasp, startled.

  “Of course I have!” Beth jumps to her feet and turns on me, glaring. “I was nearly responsible for a genocide, because the ISA lied to us about this planet and our mission on it. Why would I ever trust them again?”

  With that, she strides toward the next light catcher.

  “You’re talking about Grandpa,” I protest, chasing after her. “And Mom. They are the ISA now.’”

  Beth stops and turns to stare at me, wide-eyed. “Joanna. Mom lied to us. For years.”

  “She was ordered to—”

  “Being under orders is no excuse,” Beth says. “Even Mom acknowledges that. If not for you, those lies would have made me responsible for a genocide, if not a complete ecological collapse.”

  “Okay. Fine. But Grandpa is in charge now.”

  “And I don’t trust him either.” Beth’s response is so rushed, it sounds like a single word.

  We stare at each other. She looks as surprised that she said that as I am to hear it.

  “Why don’t you trust Grandpa?” I ask quietly.

  She throws a look to Shelby. “You really want to get into this now?”

  I want to say yes. Badly. And for some reason that makes me angry. “You know what? No. I don’t. I don’t care. We’ve got thousands of untrained civilians coming down soon. We need your data to protect—”

  “Do we really?” Beth snaps, cutting me off. “What do you think Lieutenant Shelby is going to do with the data on phytoraptor babies that will protect the survivors?”

  I don’t want to answer that question. It’s too horrible to contemplate.

  I look from Beth to Sunflower, swaying in the sunlight beside the little crop of baby raptors. The sound of Miguel’s body hitting the ravine floor thuds wetly through my brain again.

  He died because the ISA kept vital information from us. Now Beth is doing the same thing to the team. What if she’s protecting the
raptors at the expense of the survivors? What other horrors might come of this?

  “You ladies decide to take a tandem crap or something?” Shelby calls across the ravine.

  To all of our surprise, Sunflower’s head snaps up, as though roused by the sound of Shelby’s voice.

  Fear catapults through me, its momentum shoving me back toward the flyer before I have a chance to think.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Beth says, catching my arm. “Just stand still. The raptor will settle again if not provoked.”

  But Sunflower doesn’t settle. Their ruff of yellow petals stands out around their head in a stiff halo as they rear up on their hind legs. Claws slide out of their huge fingers and they yawn wide, showing their fangs.

  “Unusual,” Beth says calmly, like Sunflower isn’t totally capable of scaling that cliff and killing us all before we can make it back to the flyer.

  But then logic pokes a hole in the gauzy fear swaddling my brain. Sunflower isn’t looking at us. Or at Shelby. Their eyes are on the other side of the narrow ravine, where a thick tangle of solace trees is growing halfway down the sharp slope. At first, I don’t see what they’re glaring at. Then I catch a flare of light in the shadows between the trees.

  Two Sorrow Takers in hooded black robes are leaning out over the sloping cliff face. Each has a heavy staff in one hand and something small in the other that catches at the newly risen sun, throwing rainbow sparks.

  As I watch, they toss whatever it is out over the river and onto the crop of little raptors below.

  Sunflower screams, throwing themselves between their babies and the glittering dust. The big raptor’s outrage explodes into pain as the prismatic stuff hits them and opalescent white blood wells all over their broad back. Whatever that stuff is, it’s sharp enough to do serious damage just floating on the breeze. It would have shredded the babies’ petals.

  Bob is waking up now, too, as are other raptors around them. Groaning and shrieking in protest as they drag their sleep-logged limbs from the dirt to try to help Sunflower.