Starbreak Page 7

  I saw Aleksandra’s thumb bend as she depressed a button. The voice was silenced. But still I’d heard it. Violence in the dome. I thought of Rachel, waifish, gentle, dressed in silk and lace. Concerned with boys and clothes and little else. What defenses would she have against violence?

  “We’re heading east,” Aleksandra said. “All of us. Understand?”

  I still heard that echo, deep inside me, that animal clatter that had reverberated in my dream. I heard my own voice, too, timid and frantic, promising the boy that I wouldn’t take a single step deeper into these woods.

  But then I looked at the others. Ettie was busy plaiting her long, tangled hair against her shoulder. Laurel had leaned her mouth against Deklan’s ear to whisper a secret. Jachin stood at the corner of the camp with Rebbe Davison, talking about the path that lay ahead. The crash had bound us all together. If I led them south, and was wrong about sanctuary waiting for us there? If one of them got hurt, or worse? I could never forgive myself.

  “I understand,” I said to Aleksandra, hiking my pack up high onto my shoulders. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  She nodded her head crisply, then commanded her guards through the forest.

  • • •

  The trees grew thick all around, towering up meters and meters above. And yet they still shifted their branches curiously, peering down at us. Aleksandra’s guards walked up in front, their steps cautious as they peered into the forest beyond. They’d finally removed their helmets, but only that. The globes of glass clattered at the hips of their flight suits. One was an older man, haggard and gray-faced. The other was hardly any older than I was, a soft gold beard curling out past the neck of his suit. When he spoke, it was timidly. But we all followed him in a scattered line. Even me. Even as every cell in my body objected.

  South. South. We need to go south. I swallowed hard, forcing the thought away. Aleksandra was in charge now, whether I liked it or not. She knew how to take care of us—how to lead.

  She walked by herself, rifle in one hand, the radio clutched in the other. Every few minutes the radio would let out a gasp of white noise. She’d speak into it, and then the voice on the other end would give its report.

  “Rafferty attempting to mobilize forces.”

  “Council rations low.”

  “Nineteen bodies found in the lower level.”

  “Rafferty’s control limited to the bow.”

  When I’d last seen my family, they’d been up in the bow with the Council, all gathered there for my wedding. Ronen, dressed in his best drab suit, had looked sweet and dopey—even hopeful. I wondered if he was still up there, or if he’d been pushed out into the dome by the wave of rebellion. Funny, I thought, how little I knew of him. We’d never even discussed politics. I had no idea how he felt about the rebels’ plans.

  I’d been so eager to act that I’d never even bothered listening.

  But my ears were sharp now. Past the thick trees ahead, buzzing through the tangled undergrowth, I heard a sound, low and steady, familiar. At first I told myself that it was nothing. After all, not even Aleksandra’s guards seemed to hear it. They just stalked on ahead, oblivious to everything but their rifles and the commands that Aleksandra gave them.

  But then the sound grew, and grew. It reminded me of bamboo shoots striking one another—or maybe bones. A hollow, empty sound.

  “You guys,” I called, softly at first. If they didn’t hear that insectile gnawing, of course they didn’t hear me, either. So I shouted again, louder this time. “Hey, do you hear that?”

  Deklan glanced over his shoulder, the corner of his mouth lifted. For the first time I noticed the dimple in his cheek, and the proud, unruly hairs of his dark eyebrows.

  “Don’t worry so much,” he said easily, swinging Laurel’s hand in his.

  I fumbled for a response. But I never got to answer. Because at that moment a beast came trouncing through the woods, trampling whole trees beneath its feet. It reared back, brandishing its massive horns, and then jabbed one straight through Deklan’s chest.

  • • •

  His scream rose up and died as his body was flung across the forest. The creature was easily four, five times the height of a man, covered in hard yellow skin, as gnarled as old scar tissue. When the guards lifted up their guns, I knew it would do no good. And I was right. The sonic blasts succeeded only at making us shield our ears. Even though the nearby branches shifted, flinching back, the weapon seemed to do nothing to the stampeding creature. Soon the beast ran over the handsome young guard, smashing his lean body to pieces.

  Ettie screamed as she knelt down on the forest floor, clenching her fists over her head. I acted on instinct, dashing across the clearing toward her. My fingers flashed out, grabbing hers. We had to duck a fury of thick legs and dash away from the tail that twitched wildly through the air, but we made it. Over the rattles I heard heavy, ragged tears. Laurel stood nearby, blood splattered on her clothing, tears streaming down her face.

  “I—was—holding—his—hand!” she sobbed, each word punctuated by a wheeze. Ettie flung her arms at Laurel, hugging hard. But this was no time for comfort. I peered over the rocks. One guard had been crushed by the beast; the other cowered behind Aleksandra as if he expected she would save him. There was blood everywhere, spilled over the gray old snow and the bare trees and especially over Aleksandra Wolff’s white face.

  She stood about ten meters back, her posture tense as an alley cat that was ready to strike. At the other end of the clearing, the beast reared and kicked, digging its horn into the remaining guard’s body. I had to look away from the stream of blood, but Aleksandra wasn’t scared. I saw her lift up her rifle. She aimed it carefully and gave the trigger a tight pull.

  The sonic boom sounded. But the creature didn’t care. If anything, it only seemed annoyed now, rearing back on four legs as it prepared to strike. I saw Aleksandra hesitate, staring up at the massive beast over her rifle’s sight. She coiled low, preparing to run—but only tripped on a nearby root instead. The beast put thundering feet down against the permafrost and started to charge.

  I had a thought: Aleksandra is going to die. And even though that meant that I’d probably die too, I couldn’t help but feel a spark of relief at the idea.

  But then I heard another sound, not the animalistic growling of the beast but strains of music wafting up through the winter air. How strange to hear music here, in such a savage space. Notes intermingled, weaving together like beautiful threads shimmering and opalescent in the midmorning light. It was haunting. No, hypnotic. I found my breath slowing, my heart slowing too. The beast also heard it. Massive front feet fell gently against the ground. It turned back, searching over one hulking shoulder for the source of those sweet, twisting notes.

  Aleksandra didn’t fire another shot. She didn’t even lift her rifle to aim it again. Instead she took a few stumbling steps toward the sound. I stood up from behind the rock where I was crouched too, listening. Every note was bittersweet. It seemed to cut right to the heart of me, spelling out some part of myself that had, up until now, been unreadable. I suppose the others felt the same way. Together we took slow, careful steps over the frozen ground. The beast didn’t rear up. It didn’t seem to even see us. It just walked closer and closer to the music, and we followed.

  That’s when a vehicle streaked through the forest, tracing the path of the trees that had been felled by the beast. It had no wheels—no wings, either, from what I could see. Instead it was draped with long bolts of multicolored fabric, which hung down like the tail feathers of some tropical bird. In a glass capsule on top, three passengers could be seen, three bright faces with pitch-black eyes.

  Their skin was the color of the inside of a pomegranate. Bipedal, smaller than us, with faint red hair covering their arms and heads. One held a stringed instrument against his chest, his fingers almost invisible as they tripped over it. Soothing, strange music streamed out of a speaker on the vehicle’s side. We stumbled closer as they
landed their craft in the clearing’s center, as the vehicle’s gleaming glass top lifted away. The musician kept playing, his song flitting like water over stone. But the other two aliens climbed out, hefting spikes of metal in their three-fingered hands. They approached the beast and felled it with a single blue burst of light, moving with perfect, measured efficiency. They reminded me of my cat, Pepper, hunting mice. Their focus was so tightly narrowed on the beast that they missed the people who stood, frozen, before them.

  But as the creature collapsed, cracking snow and branches beneath its heavy body, we came closer. In the craft, the musician played on and on. I raised my hands to my cheeks. I was crying—and not for the loss of the guards or Deklan, who lay splayed out and bleeding on the forest floor as vines enveloped his broken body. I cried because for the first time, I felt sure that someone knew me. This music proved it—it told my story, lacing my story’s notes through the chilly air.

  But then something happened. The musician paused, and Laurel jostled me as she stepped forward, and the spell was broken. The music now sounded tinny; half the notes were out of key. I stopped where I stood, the wind making my flight suit crinkle, my hands dead weights at my sides. But my eye caught on something. A dark shock of hair, streaming in the wind.

  It was Ettie. She stood before one of the creatures, facing him earnestly. He was busy slaughtering the beast, exposing organs, yellow and fatty. The air stank of tallow and flesh. And yet despite the stench, Ettie let out a sweet laugh.

  “The music!” she said. “It’s my music, isn’t it?”

  In a flash the alien’s focus shifted. He darted black eyes up to her. His face was strange. His mouth was too broad and full of teeth, and, above he had only a flat gap of wine-red flesh where his nose should have been. The long slits that traced the edge of his jaw widened. He glanced over his shoulder at his companion, letting out a stream of strange words.

  “Ezaz xoslex aum dazzix vhesesazhi osiz tauoso?”

  His companion grunted. “Dadix aum eddi tauoso.”

  “Please,” Ettie said, “tell me more about my song!”

  The creature looked at her, not quite understanding her words or her intentions. He gripped Ettie by the shoulder, lifting up his metal stick. He was no taller than she was, but I knew it would be nothing for that flash of false lightning to come again, striking her down. I tightened my fists. I had to do something, to prove we were more than animals for slaughter.

  I glanced desperately up into the golden sky. It was too early for the stars—too early for the moons, Akku or Zella or Aire. But the sun still shone, a steady bright light in the sky. Epsilon Eridani. Eps Eridani, we called it on the ship. But that wasn’t their name for it. I knew because I’d dreamed it, because the boy had whispered it into my ear even as I’d slept.

  “Xarki! Xarki!” I screamed, pointing up at a sun that shone like a polished coin in the sky.

  • • •

  The music finally stopped.

  “Xarki! Xarki!” I screamed, gesturing wildly. “The sun! That’s what you call it, right? And the moons? Akku, Zella, Aire?”

  My voice cracked, was wild and raw. Everyone had turned toward me now, even Ettie, who looked like she’d just woken up from a pleasant but mildly puzzling dream. The creature who stood before her lowered his silver spike, holding it limply. He gazed toward his closest companion.

  “Ahatho raizaz!”

  “Raizaz eddi ahatho, taurax zhiesesik!” The creature in the vehicle bared his teeth. A disagreement, perhaps? We all stood there in helpless confusion as they growled at one another, blood soaking through all of our clothes.

  “Tauoso vhesesazhi taurax,” the musician said. There was a hint of resignation in his wheezy voice. He reached out over the lip of his vehicle and grabbed Aleksandra by the crook of her arm. But now that the spell was broken, she resisted, twisting and struggling in his grasp.

  “What are you doing?” she snarled. “Where are you taking us?”

  The creature lifted her effortlessly into the vehicle. Soon the others were rounded up too, herded into the craft’s wide cab. The dismay and fear was clear on their faces. But I walked willingly toward the creatures, my head held high. I knew that if we were ever going to reach the city—if we were going to escape Zehava’s wilderness and the creatures that roamed her forests—then we’d need their help. As I went to scramble into the vehicle, one of the creatures gripped his weapon tight.

  “Ososhum es!” he snapped. I stared at him, my gaze even, trying to ignore the frantic way my heart seemed to fill up my mouth.

  “Raza Ait,” I replied. “We need to go to Raza Ait. City of Copper. Do you understand? Raza Ait.”

  The creature’s wide mouth split open, showing teeth, too many teeth—hundreds of them, as sharp as needles, as hungry as wolves. He took his weapon’s tip, nudging it against my ribs.

  “Hyuuuu-mon?” he asked darkly, in a tone that chilled me to the bone. I sat down in the craft beside Ettie and prepared for take-off.

  “Yes, human,” I said simply as the vehicle’s glass lid lowered over us.

  8

  The craft moved far faster than our legs could have possibly carried us, streaming first only a few meters from the ground and then higher and higher still as we sped southward. Below, the trees became sparser; the forests became frozen plains, uninhabited save for an occasional slow-moving beast. But I think I was the only one who saw the beasts, the only one who couldn’t help but glimpse down through the glass and watch the scenery change. The rest of them—Aleksandra, Laurel, Rebbe Davison, Jachin, and Ettie—all sat silently, their clothes and faces splattered with two shades of blood-human and beast both. They looked like they’d had the air wrung out of them. Now they were nothing more than stone.

  “I can’t believe it killed him,” Laurel said at last, but faintly. Her voice was almost swallowed up by the wind. Before I could respond, Aleksandra gave a hiss.

  “Get a hold of yourself. Do you think I had time to mourn when I learned my mother died?”

  I glanced away from the shifting landscape, from the blue lakes and white mountaintops that glittered below, and over to where Aleksandra sat with her chin angled up. It was a strange fiction, the idea that she had learned that her mother had died, rather than drawing the blade across her mother’s pale skin herself.

  “Of course not,” Aleksandra said, answering the question when Laurel didn’t. “I knew there was still work to be done. More important things that I needed to attend to.”

  She met my gaze, her dark eyes boring into me. Hate. They were filled with hate. I’d saved all of their lives, and yet she watched me now with gritted teeth and poison on her tongue. It didn’t make any sense to me—she was the captain’s daughter, the leader of a great rebellion, a killer. And I was nothing more than a sloppy, selfish girl.

  But maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I had something she wanted. I knew things about Zehava that no one else did: words, geography. Thanks to the boy, I could communicate with the strange creatures that populated our new home. Aleksandra glared and glared. I forced my eyes down into my lap, where my hands were clutched so tightly that my fingers had started to go numb.

  “What work do I have left to do?” Laurel said. “I crashed the shuttle, and now Deck . . .” Her words became strangled, then died. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rebbe Davison reach an arm out. He tucked Laurel’s shoulders under it, pulling her close.

  “You’ll be okay,” he said softly. “You’ll be okay.”

  But Aleksandra didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either. I still felt her eyes burning into me, as steady as starlight, as the craft streamed through the air.

  • • •

  The creatures were like my boy, but then again they weren’t. Separate races, maybe. Or closely related species. I counted their differences. He was tall and as thin as a reed; they were smaller and squatter. His eyes were far-spaced and lozenge-shaped in his bald head; their flesh was lightly furred, and they had close-set eyes
. His teeth were small behind thick lips. Their mouths seemed to hold dozens of fangs.

  They spoke among themselves as we traveled. They seemed to be arguing, baring their teeth between their words. Jachin watched them with peculiar intensity. I wondered what his biologist’s mind made of them, of their smooth, efficient movements and their three-fingered hands. As I studied them—their small bodies, draped in loose fabric, as fragrant as flowers under the feeble winter sun—I heard Mara Stone’s voice in the back of my head, listing the impossibilities. She would have said that it was unlikely that we’d find a humanoid species here. One that was bipedal, one that used language as we did, one that hunted and used technology and argued in a manner hardly any different from man. It was some kind of stroke of luck, insane and unlikely.

  There’s no such thing as luck, came the memory of Mara’s voice. If she were here, what could I have possibly said in response? Chance then, as slim as a splinter. But the proof was right there in front of us. There were people on Zehava. Sentient people. Humanoids, at that.

  “They don’t breathe,” Jachin said suddenly. I turned toward the creatures, who bickered over the craft’s controls. Beside him Rebbe Davison snapped his head up.

  “What? How is that possible?”

  “Their chests don’t move, not even when they speak. Their respiratory systems must be completely different from ours. Who knows how they vocalize?”

  He was right. As they argued, their bodies were strangely still, the fabric that wrapped their torsos not stirring a single millimeter. I suppressed a shudder. Less like us than I thought, then. That would comfort Mara, if she ever had the chance to meet these creatures. She’d never been one to believe in miracles.

  “They might respire passively,” I suggested. “Through pores in their skin, or stoma. Like . . .”

  I trailed off, remembering the vines that had fled from Deklan’s touch—the vines that had reached out to envelop him when his body had collapsed on the forest floor.