The Survivor

by BRIDGET TYLER

“Did you hear that?” I whisper, twisting to look back to the others.

  The faint plea comes again.

  “Help me! Please!”

  “Holy crap,” Jay breathes.

  Leela runs toward the pleading voice, her stun gun clutched in her hand. Beth and Chris follow her.

  “Can you walk?” I ask Jay.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” he says, groaning as he pushes himself up onto his knees. “So far, so good.”

  But it hurts. I can see it in his face.

  I want to tell him to stop. To stay here and rest.

  “Keep going.” Nor hums the words with a thick, almost electric undercurrent of Sorrow sonar. “You are capable.”

  She holds her hand out to him. Jay looks up at her for a long beat. Then he grabs her hand, her trijointed fingers wrapping around his and pulling him to his feet.

  “Thank you,” he says again.

  She follows Leela and the others without a backward glance.

  Jay limps after her. I slide my arm around his waist to take some of his weight. He squeezes my shoulders, but doesn’t comment as we cut through the trees. Tarn takes up the rear, his staff gripped across his body, at the ready.

  The gray sunlight barely penetrates the murky shadows of the swamp solace canopy. The trees aren’t nearly as big as the ones back in the Diamond Range, but they’re big enough. Their stiff branches tangle a half dozen meters over my head.

  We don’t have to go far before cloying smoke creeps through the jungle shadows. The trees ahead of us are sagging. Charred. My stomach twists as we emerge into an open hollow that has been melted out of the swamp by the backwash of 3212’s engines. The sharp-nosed shuttle crouches at the center of the blackened clearing.

  Its ramp is down, and its airlock doors are standing open. There’s no movement inside. There’s nothing human moving around outside the ship, either, except us.

  “Can anyone still hear that voice?” Beth asks.

  I shake my head. “Dead?”

  “Probably,” she says, as Tarn and Leela circle the shuttle and then duck up the ramp, Leela clutching her stunner and Tarn his knife and staff.

  I hold my breath until Tarn emerges, Leela on his heels.

  “Empty,” she says as Tarn leaps off the ramp and strides back to Nor.

  “So what makes a team of marines abandon their only ride off a planet that’s going to turn them all to soup in less than ten hours?” Leela says.

  “Nothing good,” Chris says.

  That’s when I hear it. A wordless wheeze, like someone trying to call out who can’t get enough air to scream.

  I bolt toward the sound.

  “Jo!” Leela calls as she chases after me.

  “Shhh!” I hiss, stopping to listen. Leela skitters to a stop beside me.

  We’re quiet.

  Just when I start to think I imagined it, a faint choking sound rasps through the trees.

  “We’re close,” Leela breathes. I just nod and keep going. We pass a swamp solace with a dark green root cone and another with a crooked dome of roots so pale they almost look like a fibrous soap bubble.

  There’s another helpless wheeze.

  I spin and see Preakness is hanging from a tight fist of silver-gray roots. Blood drips down the translucent gnarls, mingling with the tree sap that’s running all over his body, slowly burning away uniform and skin alike.

  “Oh my god,” Leela says from behind me. “He’s alive.”

  Preakness groans at the sound of our voices. Eyelids fluttering.

  He’s not just alive. He’s conscious.

  “Stay alert, you two,” Jay calls as the others hurry through the rainbow-stained murk to catch up with us. “They wouldn’t have left him behind like that if they didn’t have a damn good reason.”

  “Look,” Chris says, pointing into the marine’s shredded abdomen. I come to stand beside Chris. From that angle I can see that a prong-tipped Sorrow knife is buried in the mess of blood and gore and bioluminescent root. Someone sliced open his belly and ripped up his intestines. Now the tree is dissolving him from the inside out.

  “Did Dr. Brown have a knife like that, Tarn?” I ask, numb.

  He comes to study the gruesome wound. “Several.”

  “This is promising,” Beth says. At my look of horror, she makes a face. “Don’t be ridiculous, Joanna. These people came to kill Dr. Brown. Clearly, she fought back.”

  “Which means there’s a chance she’s still alive.” Leela grimly stares up at Preakness.

  I guess they’re right. This is a good sign. Still . . . gutting a man and feeding him to a carnivorous tree seems . . . excessive.

  A Sorrow throwing shard buries itself in Preakness’s throat.

  He sags, dead. I spin to glare at Tarn.

  “How can you—”

  “Even an enemy cannot be left to suffer,” he says. “Come. We must find Lucille.”

  He strides forward into the dim light of the jungle, his robes gleaming in the green shadows.

  We follow.

  The quiet is rich with rustling branches and our squishy footsteps. The gentle clicking sound blends right in, at first. Then it gets louder.

  “Tell me that isn’t what I think it is,” I say.

  “What are you—” Jay cuts himself off when he catches the noise. “Oh. Crap. So much for those things staying in the water.”

  Leela gasps. I spin, following her horrified gaze past a bright purple cone of roots.

  Apparently, the ant-birds can fly.

  A shimmering cloud of them swarms a few meters beyond the tree. They’re all shades of red, from pale pink at the top of the swarm to a deep, almost black scarlet at the bottom.

  Below them, another human body lies in what’s left of a pool of blood. Her head is lying several meters up the path. It has its own, smaller cluster of ant-birds hovering over it like a slow-motion geyser plume.

  “Shit. That’s Cardwell,” Leela whispers. “Shit. I can’t deal with this. I can’t.”

  I grab her hand. “Yes,” I say. “You can. We can.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we have to.”

  “Stay where you are.” Tarn’s multitoned voice is sharp as he slips past us, holding a lit flex out in front of himself. The cold white light catches on something I couldn’t see before, stretched between two trees. A wire.

  It glitters in the light as Tarn cautiously slices one knotted end with his knife, then winds the gleaming line carefully around the handle of the blade.

  “We soak these threads in pulverized crystal,” he says. “They are used to protect our Growers during the warm season, when the Beasts are hungry. They’re quite dangerous.”

  That’s a ludicrous understatement.

  “I think Lieutenant Shelby might have underestimated Dr. Brown,” Jay says, coming to stand beside me.

  Tarn tucks the shining flex into the raptor-skin armor he’s wearing under his robes. The light catches in their amplifying folds and multiplies, eating up the shadows for meters all around him. It’s so bright, it hurts my eyes. It must be horrible for Tarn’ sensitive eyes.

  “Stay behind me,” he hums. Then he starts off through the trees.

  As we follow him, I struggle to reconcile the brave, selfless being I’m trusting with my life right now with the being I’ve been having nightmares about for the last three weeks.

  Fear is a powerful weapon.

  Fear. And anger. I don’t know if Tarn was trying to kill me that night, but I know he was angry. I know he was hurting me. I wasn’t wrong to be afraid. But it was wrong to let that fear hold me back.

  I can almost feel Mom’s hand on the small of my back, pushing me forward to confront my fears even as Grandpa lunges out to stop her. To protect me.

  To hold me back.

  His fear became my fear. It almost made me sit back and watch while he ripped my world apart in the name of keeping me safe.

  I should hate him.

  I ca
n’t.

  I think I miss him. Or I miss the person I thought he was. My head is full of things he’s given me—memories, skills, knowledge. Little pieces of who he is that have become part of me. And now they all feel tainted and strange. Suspect. I’m going to have to rebuild my own self-image from the ground up. Assuming I don’t die in the next couple of hours.

  We pass two more glittering trip wires, and one rigged at ankle height that Tarn almost walks right into before Nor calls out to stop him. We don’t see any more dead marines. Or Dr. Brown. Or Shelby.

  Are any of them still alive?

  The shining black and red of a Vulcan-marked flyer slips through the palette of brown and green ahead of us.

  Dr. Brown’s flyer is parked at the foot of a swamp solace. Its shields are up. Two portable projector pylons stretch the shimmering force field around a tent and a fire pit. A long tangle of gray fabric is strung through the lower branches of the tree. It’s a Sorrow hanging chair like the ones in Tarn’s house.

  The shield extends about halfway through the swamp solace’s bright orange root cone, which doesn’t look particularly cone-like at the moment. It’s tangled into a tight fist below its rotund trunk. The tree caught something. Recently.

  “Dr. Brown?” I call, dread engulfing the words. “Are you here?”

  There’s no response.

  “Why would she build her camp in one of those things?” Chris says. “Imagine getting up in the middle of the night to pee, tripping on something . . .”

  And falling into the paralyzing tangle of roots. Yeah. I can imagine it. But I can also imagine what ant-birds must sound like, swarming a particle shield. And who knows what else is out there that this tree scares away?

  “Dr. Brown?” I call again, louder this time.

  “Do you smell burning?” Jay asks, making a face.

  “Yeah,” Chris says. “But I don’t see a fire. Could it be the shield pylons?”

  “No,” Beth says. “It doesn’t smell like an electrical fire.”

  She’s right. But what is it? I don’t see any flames or smoke.

  A ragged sliver of sound catches at my ears. Then another. It’s familiar, but also not. The bursts are so short that I can almost believe I’m imagining them. Or having some kind of a flashback. But of what? What is that sound?

  A longer, sustained shriek rips through the air. Then I know.

  “It’s the tree!” I shout as a sharp burst of light crackles through the knotted roots. Thick white smoke follows, pouring through the ropy orange tangles from the heart of the cluster.

  “Get back,” Chris shouts, dragging me with him as he stumbles behind the flyer. The tree screams again as one side of the orange root cluster abruptly withers. Then a hollow sound rips through the clearing and the tree keels backward, howling, withered roots flailing up to the sky.

  A pair of human bodies tumbles free. At least, I think it’s two people. They’re twisted together into a single knot of raw flesh.

  Beth turns away, hand clamped over her mouth. I can’t even find the energy to be sick again.

  There isn’t much left of the first body but bones and half-melted Prairie blue fatigues. The person sprawled below the dead marine is wearing phytoraptor-skin armor, but they’re clearly human. It has to be Dr. Brown.

  She’s dead.

  That means we’re all dead.

  A deep guttural moan ripples up from the ball of flesh. The marine’s corpse shifts, vertebrae poking through its melting flesh as it slides into a heap beside Dr. Brown. Her head and torso are shrouded in a metallic black solar-collection tarp. The tarp writhes, then flies back. A painful groan heaves from its depths.

  She’s alive.

  “Lucille!” Tarn bellows. “Lower your shields!”

  Dr. Brown lurches up out of the bloody mess. She stares at us; then she collapses again. Limp.

  She’s unconscious. Or dead.

  “Chris!” Jay shouts.

  “She’s got the shield locked to her command codes.” Chris is already crouched over the pylon, his flex bonded with its cracked, muddy skin. “It’ll take me a couple of minutes.”

  “I don’t think she has a couple of minutes,” Leela says.

  A high, piercing hum grates through the air around us. I spin to see Tarn pressing his trijointed fingers deep into the force field.

  He drops the tone of his hum lower. Then higher. Like he’s tuning himself. Which he is, I realize. He’s searching for the right frequency.

  Tarn starts to sing.

  The sound is thin and hot, like an invisible needle digging into my brain. I press my hands over my ears. but that’s useless. The sound is everywhere.

  The shield crackles, warping around Tarn’s wide-splayed hands. His voice cuts through the humid air like a blade. I can’t hear his song anymore—it’s way above human hearing range. But I can feel it. We all can.

  “Tarn!” Jay shouts, clutching his head.

  Then the shield disintegrates.

  Leela hurls herself through, collapsing on her knees beside Dr. Brown. Beth hurries to help her peel back the solar canvas. Underneath, Dr. Brown’s face and arms are red, like she’s been in really hot water for too long, but otherwise her upper body looks okay. Her legs are another story. Where her armor ends, the flesh bubbles with chemical burns from the tree sap. I see a few puncture wounds too, where the vines burrowed into the flesh.

  “She’s breathing!” Beth calls. “But I think she’s in shock.”

  “We need to stop the bleeding,” Leela says. “Is there a med kit in the tent?”

  “Out of my way,” Tarn hums, pushing past them to sweep Dr. Brown up in his arms.

  He carries her to the flyer, up its open ramp, and slams the airlock closed behind them.

  Twenty-Seven

  Nor is sitting on the ramp of Dr. Brown’s flyer, her back to the tightly closed doors. I don’t know if she’s guarding Tarn while he tries to heal Dr. Brown or sticking close to him because she isn’t comfortable being alone with us.

  Not that we’re particularly threatening, at the moment. All five of us are a mass of cuts and bruises coated in mud and something green and sticky that the drying water left behind. I really hope none of it is toxic, or infectious, since everyone has at least one open wound.

  Tarn has been working on Dr. Brown for a long time. Long enough that Beth and I have already helped Chris find new battery packs for the shields, to replace the ones Tarn blew out.

  The force field is online again, but Leela is perched on the flyer’s wing keeping watch anyway. She has a rifle we found on the ground by the fallen swamp solace. It must have belonged to the marine Dr. Brown dragged into the tree with her.

  We covered what’s left of the body in a tarp, but I can still smell the blood. I wish we could put it outside the shield, but who knows what else would smell it.

  No. Not it. Them. The pile of flesh under that tarp used to be Corporal Isis Green. At least that’s who Jay thinks. He recognized the gold ring that’s half melted into the body’s illegible dog tags. He says they have a wife and kids back at River Bend, though I’m guessing Corporal Green’s family is probably in space now. Shelby would never have agreed to help Grandpa activate the planet scrubbers unless the squad’s families were safe.

  I wonder if Shelby’s still alive out there.

  I hope not.

  I wish that were hyperbole. It’s a weird feeling to fervently, unquestioningly wish another person dead. I don’t like it, but that changes nothing. If Shelby’s out there, she’s a threat to all of us. She’s a threat to our whole species.

  But there’s nothing I can do about Shelby right now, so I focus on getting my friends patched up instead. Beth found some medical supplies in Dr. Brown’s gear while we were looking for the battery packs. It isn’t much, but antiseptic, pain patches, and dermaglue are better than nothing.

  While Beth and Chris keep searching for food and other supplies we can use, I make Leela peel off the glue on her leg
so we can wash the wound out again. Then she helps me wash out the puncture wound the ant-bird left on my hand and covers it with a layer of dermaglue. We’ve both got brewing infections, but we’ll live. Assuming Tarn can keep Dr. Brown alive.

  I turn my attention to Jay’s legs. Whatever Nor did to get the death bubbles off seems to have stopped the bleeding, but the bites are gooey rings of gore that look like they’ve cut into the muscle in places. He’s going to have some nasty new scars.

  I rip open a cleansing pad and gently press it to the first bite. The antiseptic bubbles and hisses through the torn flesh. Jay hardly seems to notice. He’s staring at Nor. His jaw is clenched tight, like he’s trying to carry something that’s too heavy. I can’t tell if it’s anger or guilt. Maybe both.

  I want to help, but I’m scared he’ll push me away again if I try, so I stay quiet as I finish cleaning his wounds and cover them with dermaglue.

  I paint over the last of his bites, sealing the fizzing antiseptic in to do its work.

  “There you go,” I say. “Not even close to good as new, but I don’t think you’ll bleed to death.”

  Jay drags his eyes away from Nor and offers me a hollow smile. “Gee. Such an encouraging bedside manner you have, Dr. Hotshot.”

  “You know me,” I say. “Always upbeat.”

  His unconvincing smile gets a little bigger, like he’s trying to laugh, but the unbearable tightness sucks the humor away again.

  His eyes go back to Nor.

  My stomach clenches. I can’t just sit here and watch him quietly tear himself apart. And I don’t want to watch him snap and tear Nor apart, either.

  “She saved your life,” I say, as gently as I can.

  He huffs a bitter laugh.

  “I know.” The resentment in his voice is so palpable that the words almost feel like Sorrow. “And I’m really, really glad that I didn’t shoot her.” He sucks in a shaky breath. “Which means I’m glad Hart is dead.”

  “No,” Nor says from across the camp. “It doesn’t.”

  Surprise snatches my gaze to her gray-shrouded form. Jay’s voice was hardly more than a whisper, but I guess the hum of the force field wasn’t enough to hide it from Sorrow hearing.

  “I never wished to take a life,” Nor continues, her harmonic voice simmering in a minor chord that feels like sitting by the memorial stone on a sunny day. “That is why I wear the gray. I chose to build instead of fight. So I’m not glad I took your friend’s life. But I am glad that I didn’t give mine. The two thoughts are not mutually exclusive.”