The Survivor

by BRIDGET TYLER

  What would I do, if it did? Could I kill Grandpa to end this? To save us all, and the Sorrow? Tarn did it. He killed his own brother to stop him from committing genocide and destroying their ecosystem. I’m glad I don’t have to make that choice. I just wish I could think of another choice to make. A choice that would change all of this.

  “It seems that nothing is simple anymore,” Tarn says. “The Beasts protected us today. They sang with our Givers as they healed my body. A song sung by enemies . . . and now those notes are sewn into my flesh.”

  A song sung by enemies.

  For some reason, the words conjure up the yearning I heard in Chris’s voice as his flex light caressed the high-arched black wings of Tarn’s ship.

  “Why are you building a spaceship?” I ask.

  Tarn rumbles a sound that pops over my skin like a million tiny bubbles.

  “So you found it,” he says, without answering the question. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s beautiful,” I say. “Chris wants to help you build it.”

  “Imagine,” Tarn says, slowly, like he’s savoring the word and the thought that goes with it. “A craft built by Sorrow and humans that can travel beyond the ceiling of this world. What a song that would be.”

  Before I can respond, my satellite phone blurbs an alert.

  Relief splashes through me. Mom. It has to be Mom. She finally got through. My legs tangle in the soft web of fabric as I struggle to my feet and pull the sat phone from the pocket of my utility harness.

  “I’m sorry . . . I need to . . . I have to . . .” I trail off as I see that it isn’t a call from Mom. Or Dad.

  It’s a text from Grandpa.

  Joanna. We need to talk. Come alone. You can reach me.

  The last sentence is linked to a set of coordinates, far at the northern tip of the Diamond Range. Why does he want to meet me up there? And why does he want me to come alone?

  My mind spirals around his invitation.

  You could challenge your grandfather.

  I can’t do that. No matter what he’s done, he’s still Grandpa. I can’t kill him.

  But what if I don’t have to?

  Another voice slices through my memory. Grandpa on the first day, after the survivors came.

  I need to see this world through your eyes.

  After everything that’s happened, can I still do the job he promoted me to do? Can I make him see what I see? If I try, will he listen? Will I know what to say if he does?

  “Sometimes, it is easier to carry the weight of those who follow your path if you maintain your momentum,” Tarn says, gently pulling me out of my spiral of indecision.

  “No one follows me,” I say.

  He covers his face, palms in. A Sorrow no. “For your sake, Joanna, I wish that were true.” He’s glowing a fiercer, deeper yellow than usual. I can see the waves of brightness pumping through him with every beat of his heart. Is he excited? Or terrified? His choral voice is higher than usual, less complex, like many voices singing the same note. “It is a difficult thing, walking with no footsteps to guide you. But willful blindness will not change your place in the melody.”

  Willful blindness.

  Grandpa is reaching out to me. Offering me another chance to show him Tau as I see it.

  I have to take it.

  Twenty-One

  Like Jay said, there’s no point in following orders anymore.

  I am going to meet Grandpa, but I brought my friends with me. We’re in beta flyer—Tarn must have sent one of his Takers to retrieve it, sometime after we were brought to the Solace. The coordinates Grandpa sent me are almost an hour’s flight away. Every ten minutes or so, I try to get through to Mom and Dad. The calls never connect. Chris says Grandpa must be controlling our access to the satellites—that’s why he can reach me, but I can’t reach anyone else.

  I hope Chris is right. Any other alternative is too terrible to consider.

  As we go farther north, the mountains crumble into high desert—long expanses of glittering opalescent sand punctuated by clusters of parrot palms and massive crystal formations that jut over the soft, sandy hills. A sculpture garden built by the patiently brutal hands of sun and wind and time.

  We reach the coordinates Grandpa sent me and I set the flyer down on a broad mesa. Huge chunks of crystal are scattered through the sand at its feet, casting broken rainbows through the blinding sparkle of the desert.

  With the sun high overhead, I have to turn the brightness down on the screens before I can pick out the Vulcan, crouching below a towering lopsided arch of crystal less than half a klick from the mesa. Grandpa is sitting on top of the arch, his silhouette like a black hole in the bright.

  You can reach me.

  “What the hell?” Leela says.

  “It’s a test,” I say, dread coiling in my guts. This is just like the lake. He wants to see if I’m strong enough and clever enough to get to him. But why do this now? What’s the point?

  I leave the exterior cameras running and recording, zoomed in on his hunched form sitting in zazen on the arch.

  “Stay in here. Unless . . .”

  “He’s not going to hurt you,” Beth says quietly.

  “I hope you’re right. I just—” I shake my head. “I don’t know. I don’t know him. At all.”

  “You know him better than you did a week ago,” my sister points out. “And no matter what he’s done, he loves you very much.”

  My whole body clenches involuntarily around the thought. I don’t know if it’s rejecting the idea or clinging to it.

  “Whatever,” Leela says. “Keep a feed open on your flex, too, so we can hear. We can be in the air in less than a minute, if you need us.”

  I walk down the ramp. My eyes water as I emerge into the radiant brilliance of the desert. I wish I hadn’t had to abandon my utility harness with all my gear in it when Shelby tried to capture us. I thought to bring extra harnesses during my middle-of-the-night packing session, but spare sunglasses weren’t on the list of gear I thought we’d need in the Sorrow caves.

  It takes almost a full minute before I can see clearly. I walk to the edge of the mesa and look out at the arch. Grandpa hasn’t moved. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he didn’t notice us landing. But he knows I’m here. He’s just waiting for me to get to him.

  How the hell does he expect me to do that? Climb the arch? That will take ages.

  You can reach me.

  No way. It can’t be that easy.

  I clamber out on the farthest tip of the mesa, as close as I can get to the arch. I tap the autoconnect button on my harness. My tether zips out across the open space and thuds into what must be a climbing spike anchored on the top of the arch. I can’t see it from where I’m standing, but my harness buzzes gently, letting me know the tether has connected with an anchor point and the contact is secure.

  That wasn’t much of a test.

  I jump, letting my momentum swing me down like a pendulum toward the glowing desert sand for a few seconds before I hit the button again and the tether begins to retract, pulling me up and onto the arch.

  By the time I reach the top, I’m tingling with effort and exhilaration. It’s almost enough to overcome the pain singing in my ribs and the dread churning in my stomach. Then I look down, and a sick thought bursts through the glow of achievement—I had no idea where or how that anchor point was set. I just tethered in and jumped.

  After everything he’s done, I still trust him.

  That was the test.

  Anger jabs at me as I scramble up the rocks to the top of the arch.

  “Are Mom and Dad okay?” I demand as I retract my tether.

  Instead of answering the question, Grandpa eases to his feet and crosses the arch to take me in his arms. My ribs ache at the strength of his embrace. He encloses me completely, blocking out the world. Once, his arms felt like the safest place in the universe. Now they feel like prison. The emotional double vision makes me want to scream i
n his face.

  I restrain myself and push him away.

  “Answer the question, Grandpa.”

  He sighs a wealth of mixed emotions. “The last time I saw your parents, they were alive. But there was a great deal of confusion after your mother’s rebellion.”

  “Rebellion?” I gasp. But relief chases the dread through my veins as I hear the truth behind the word. “Oh. Mom found you unfit for command.”

  “She asked me to retire.” His face twists into a bitter mockery of a smile. “Apparently, your parents disapproved of my decision to attack our enemy’s resources.”

  Every breath I take feels a little easier.

  “So Mom is in command of the Landing now?”

  He hunches his shoulders against the words. “When the situation became violent, I chose to fall back to River Bend with Lieutenant Shelby and the others who remain loyal. The only reason I let them engage at all was to secure 3212 and Vulcan.” He draws in a shaky breath. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen human beings fight each other. Kill each other. Brings up a lot of bad old memories.”

  “They . . . we didn’t have a choice, Grandpa,” I say, as gently as I can. “You were asking us to participate in atrocities.”

  Rage snatches his bowed body upright. He glares at me.

  “You’re a child,” he snarls. “You don’t know the meaning of the word atrocity. I do. God help me. But you . . . You. Know. Nothing.”

  I don’t flinch away from his anger.

  “I know we can do better than this.”

  “We didn’t start this!” he roars. “You told Tarn that our species was on the brink of extinction and he tried to strangle you with his bare hands. Then he ordered his soldiers to set our homes on fire so they could steal our technology and our raw. And yet you accuse me of atrocities.”

  “Yes,” I cry. “I do. You tried to destroy their primary ecosystem. The fact that they attacked us first doesn’t make that any less wrong.”

  “Every step we take on this world is wrong!” he shouts back. “You know that. You told me so while we were watching my very first Tau sunrise.”

  I take a deep breath, trying to steady myself.

  “When I told you that, you said you needed to see this world the way I do, so you could find a way to make things better.” I fight to keep my voice low and steady. “After what happened with Tarn, I was too frightened to see much of anything. But I’m not afraid anymore. I can show you what you need to see, if you’re willing to look.”

  Grandpa sags again, folding in on himself as though the righteous anger was all that had been holding him upright.

  “Cleo was right,” he whispers, almost like he’s talking to himself. “She was right.”

  “What does Grandma have to do with this?” I ask, confused.

  His face twists into a sad smile. “Everything. She is everything, to me. She’s everywhere. In every face I see. Every sunrise. Even here, in the midst of all this beauty she never had the chance to see. I carry her with me, always. That’s how I found the strength to do what had to be done.”

  “What had to be done?” I ask, fresh confusion surging. “What did you do, Grandpa?”

  “What?” His eyes snap into focus, like the question is a light in the fog. He looks at me. His lips twitch. He opens his mouth as though to speak, but then he squeezes his eyes closed and swallows hard, like he’s physically restraining the words.

  “I did what had to be done,” he says finally. “What she would have done, if the opportunity had presented itself. Cleo was a ferociously brave woman. You get that from her.”

  “I get that from Mom,” I say.

  He sucks in a loud, shaky breath that could be a sob or a bark of laughter.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he says. “Maybe you’re right.” He shakes his head. Hard. “But now is not the time for you to be brave. I know how to end this conflict, but I can’t do it unless you’re safe. You’re going to come with me back to the Prairie.”

  “No,” I say. “This is my planet now. I’m a part of this, whether you like it or not.”

  “You mean that, don’t you?” he says, studying me.

  “I do,” I say without hesitation.

  “Oh, Little Moth.” He closes his eyes, pained. “This isn’t . . . it wasn’t supposed to be this way. I want you to know that. When I realized the Vulcan was still on Tau, I knew she would be the solution, but this . . . this wasn’t at all what I imagined.”

  He runs both hands through his white hair, making it stick up all over his head. For a heartbreaking moment, he looks so much like Teddy. Like Beth. Like Mom.

  “I tried to reprogram the Vulcan’s scrubbers,” he continues. “For weeks, I tried. Starting that night when Tarn nearly killed you. But the Sorrow share over ninety-seven percent of their DNA with other species on this planet. There’s no way to be sure the nanobots could seek them out without endangering the greater ecosystem.”

  “You tried to program the scrubbers to attack the Sorrow?” I gasp. “To just . . . wipe a whole species away?”

  “Without a single human casualty,” Grandpa says wistfully. “But the algorithm just isn’t sophisticated enough. So we’re going to have to fight this war with the Sorrow. It’s going to be ugly. And we’re going to lose, if we remain divided against ourselves. People will die. There are so few of us now. We can’t afford to sacrifice lives for the sake of Nicholas Watson’s fine ethical principles. So I’m going to wipe the slate clean and we’re going to start again. United. Humanity deserves that.”

  “Wipe the slate clean?”

  My eyes jump to the Vulcan, perched in the sand below us. No. I must be wrong. He would never do such a thing. Not to his own people. His own family.

  “Grandpa,” I say, my pulse thudding so hard I can hardly hear myself speak over its frantic tattoo. “What do you mean by ‘wipe the slate clean’?”

  He hears the understanding in my voice.

  “I know it’s awful, Little Moth,” he says. “But it’s necessary.”

  I’m not wrong. He’s going to turn the planet scrubbers against us. He’s going to kill everyone who won’t follow him.

  I have to stop him.

  I look up to the mesa, where my friends are waiting in the flyer. My flex is transmitting this conversation to them, but the moment I try to alert them, he’ll run. I can’t use his tether to restrain him the way Shelby did to me—I don’t have command authorization. And I definitely can’t fight him. I’m not armed, and he’s bigger and has decades of combat experience. I don’t know what would happen if I tried. Especially up here. We’d probably end up going over the side.

  That gives me an awful idea.

  I look down again. Rainbows blaze off the crystal sand, a dozen meters below us. Vertigo spins through my guts, hurling waves of remembered pain over my skin. But the sensory flashback is different this time. Incomplete. I can still feel my boots planted on the rocks. I can still feel the ineffectual sunlight on the back of my neck.

  I’m still here.

  I charge Grandpa.

  The top of the arch is just wide enough to give him time to react. He throws himself forward, using his greater weight to send us both sprawling back onto the rock instead of over the edge.

  My head cracks against the arch.

  The world swims around me as I scramble away from him and stagger to my feet.

  He holds his hands out to me. Pleading. “I know this is hard, Joanna. But you’re brave. You’ll see how necessary this is, if you’re just willing to—”

  The roar of beta flyer’s rotors spinning to life drowns him out.

  I raise my wrist and shout directly into my flex, “Leela, you have to get the Vulcan out of here. He’s going to—”

  That’s as far as I get before Grandpa slaps me across the face, hard enough that I stumble-step backward. He grabs my wrist just before I fall and pries off my flex.

  “Power down, Cadet Divekar,” he snaps into the flex, glaring past m
e to the flyer. “The Vulcan will only respond to my command codes. She’s not going anywhere without me.”

  “Please,” I sob, twisting against his iron grip. “Please, Grandpa, you can’t deploy the scrubbers. That will kill every human being on Tau.”

  “I designed them,” he snarls. “I know what they do.” His eyes jump back to the flyer, which is lifting off the mesa despite his orders. “Goddamn it. This is what happens when you tell children that everyone can be a hero.”

  “How could you . . . You just finished telling me how precious every human life is now,” I sputter.

  “Exactly!” He flings my wrist away and paces up the length of the arch, still clutching my flex. “People died today, thanks to your mother’s little insurrection. And so many more were wounded. If I allow this conflict to continue, how many more will die? We only have five qualified space pilots. What if all of us are hurt or so badly injured we can’t fly? What if the Vulcan and 3212 had been damaged in the fighting? We could have lost all means to get into space. If we can’t wake the survivors and shut down the deep-sleep system, Prairie’s orbit will decay and she’ll crash into the planet and destroy us all. I have to end this.”

  “So you’re going to reduce everyone who won’t follow you to their component molecules?” I gasp. I feel like my lungs can’t get a full breath.

  “Do you think I want to do that?” Grandpa cries.

  “So let Mom take command!” I cry. “Give her a chance to find a better way.”

  “No!” he shouts. “No! I can’t.”

  “WHY NOT?” I scream back at him.

  He doesn’t answer. He just stands there, staring at me, a weird expression creeping over his face. Then, to my shock, tears start running down his cheeks.

  His hand goes to his flex. He swipes and taps a few times. His tether rears up over his shoulders, swirling around him like someone is scratching him out of the world in black pen. Then it snaps down to bond with the anchor point at our feet.

  “I’m just not brave enough, Little Moth,” he says. “I thought I was. But I’m not.”

  Then he runs off the edge of the arch, disappearing into the blinding light of the desert below.