Alien--Echo, page 18
“Stop thinking like that,” she says abruptly, pitching her voice low, so it won’t be heard above the rumble of the engine.
I manage not to swerve off-course, but it’s a near thing. “I—what?” I squeak.
She looks briefly, bleakly amused. “I can’t read your mind, if that’s what you’re worried about. But you had that look, the one you get when you think I’m too good for you, or that you’re making me do something I don’t want to do, or—you really think I’d be here if I didn’t want to be? If I didn’t need to be?”
She shakes her head, the motion and the wind making her curls bounce in all directions. “You know how I knew you were staring at me all the time in class? Because I was staring at you, too. None of this has ever been one-sided. I kissed you first. I liked you first.”
“You only came out to see me because you wanted to know if Viola was real.”
“Well, yeah.” She looks at me like she thinks I might be a little bit stupid. “If you were lying about whether you had a sister, you were a creep, and I didn’t want to date a creep. Michel gave me the excuse to do a field test without actually committing either of us to anything. Maybe we would have realized we didn’t get along as well as we thought we did. Or maybe we would have had time. I wanted us to have time.”
She looks out at the horizon, at the rapidly approaching line of the mountains.
“I wanted us to have time,” she repeats, and I feel the same way, and so I don’t say anything at all. I just keep driving.
I know we’re going the right way when we pass the carcass of the lion-worm. It’s massive, maybe the same massive one that tried to attack Kora on our first date together, and something has ripped it open from just below the jawline all the way to the base of its tail. Organs and viscera spill onto the ground, cooling slowly in the open air. I stop the ATV, studying it.
The lion-worms are the apex predators for this part of the ecosystem. For something to kill one of them at all is a horrifying statement of strength and power. For something to kill one this large is …
Well, it’s terrifying.
“What happened?” whispers Kora.
“Something bigger than it was wanted its territory,” I answer. The claw patterns on the lion-worm’s hide don’t match anything native to this area, but they do match what I saw of the new predators. This is one of their kills. “We’re heading the right way.”
Kora shudders. “I don’t know if I’d go that far.”
“We’re heading the way we need to go, how’s that?”
“I hate that you’re right. But you’re right. We’re going the way we need to go.” Kora gives the horizon another anxious glance before she turns to me. “I want to ask you something right now, and I want you to answer.”
“All right.” I start the ATV again. Something about the lion-worm’s carcass makes me uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the missing pieces. Maybe it’s that not enough pieces are missing. Something about it is just … wrong. “What is it?”
She’s going to ask me whether I think we’re going to make it out of this alive. She’s going to ask me whether I plan to stay on Zagreus. She’s going to ask me—
“Will you take me with you?”
I barely succeed in keeping myself from slamming on the ATV’s brakes. As it stands, I take my eyes off the terrain in front of us, several times, as I turn to gape at her. I have to keep looking back at where we’re going, since there’s no road or trail out here: a moment’s distraction could end in an accident. But she came up with about the most distracting thing she could possibly have asked me.
“What?”
“I know you’re going to leave once you have Viola back. You have to. Your parents are…” She hesitates before practically spitting, “dead, and we don’t allow androids here, and I wouldn’t stay if I were you. I’m not you, and I don’t want to stay. Will you take me with you?”
“What about your mother?”
Kora shakes her head, very slowly. “She loves me. I know she loves me. But she loves the idea of Zagreus more. She loves what she thinks the colony is going to be, and she loves the idea of being the person who makes that happen. That’s why my father didn’t stay here with us. He couldn’t stand sitting by and watching her eat herself alive.”
And now these creatures from the survey ship are going to eat the planet alive. It would be darkly funny, if we weren’t stuck in the middle of it. I worry my lip between my teeth for a moment.
“It’s not a luxurious transport,” I say finally. “There’s plenty of room—it’s sized for four—but we won’t be comfortable, and we won’t be coming back. If you change your mind, you’ll have to find someone else to bring you home.”
“I know all those things,” she says. “I still want to come with you.”
She sounds like she genuinely means it: she sounds like her mind’s made up. I try, for just a moment, to see things from her perspective. She’s pretty and she’s popular and she’s funny and she’s trapped. She’s trapped on this backwater colony, where her mother’s position means she’ll be watched no matter what she does, judged no matter what she does. She’ll always be in her mother’s shadow, expected to keep her hands clean and her chin high, expected to represent Zagreus in everything she does.
Every time I’ve kissed her, she’s tasted, distantly, like engine oil. She knew enough about field vehicles to call our ATV cherry, and compared to the machines on Zagreus, I guess it is. I fell for her because of the pieces she has to show the public, the pieces of her that fit the role she’s been forced to play. I’m still falling, because bit by bit, I’m seeing the Kora under that public design, and she’s amazing.
“You have to say goodbye to your mother, because I don’t want you to hate me when you realize you’ve done something you can’t take back, and it has to be all right with Viola,” I say. “She’s my sister. She’s an android, and she’s been an android since we were too small for me to remember her any other way, and if you’re not going to be comfortable with her having a say in all the decisions I make and where we go and—”
“I don’t really know her yet,” says Kora. “If I push back on anything she says or does or whatever, it’s going to be because I don’t know her, not because I think she’s not a person. Of course she’s a person. She’s your sister. That’s what matters. Not all the rest of this ‘who’s real, who isn’t’ garbage. If you say she’s real, she’s real, and of course I’m going to listen to her.”
I nod. “Then yeah. You can come.”
Kora smiles. She opens her mouth like she’s going to say something as we pass the first rank of rocks marking the edge of the mountains. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t close her mouth, either. She sits there, slack-jawed, staring at the devastation in front of us.
I stop the ATV and join her in staring.
The shuttle crashed into the ground about ten yards from the entrance to the cave network. If it had hit the actual mountain, it might have exploded; it might have spared us from its deadly cargo. Instead, it looks like it slid across the ground, ripping up rocks and destroying brush, until it came to a stop and burst into flames.
Everything is blackened and charred, creating a perfect environment to camouflage the creatures. There could be a dozen of them, pressed motionless against the mountain, and we wouldn’t know until they struck. The grasses have burned away, the larger bushes and trees have been reduced to lumps of charcoal. Nothing lives here. Nothing is ever going to live here again. It’s like standing on the surface of a mined-out moon, one that’s about to be abandoned by its corporate owners for having nothing left to exploit.
There are a few spots that are less charred than the rest, spots where the ash has been scraped away by the passage of chitinous bodies, or rubbed away by terrible claws. They all point toward the mouth of the largest cave, slowly converging together.
I reach into the bag I scavenged from the office, pulling out two jars of thick, yellowish pollen. “Here,” I whisper, passing one to Kora.
She looks at me, eyes wide and cheeks pale. “Why?” she whispers back.
I open my own jar and dust it over myself, covering my clothing, skin, and hair in a dusty film. “We don’t know if it works on them, but if it does, it might buy us a few seconds,” I say. The lion-worm makes me suspect that it won’t do a thing. They can’t be hunting subterranean predators and hunting by scent. Still, anything to take that look of terror out of Kora’s eyes. Anything to make her think we’re going to survive this.
This day has been horrible and hectic and life-changing, if not in the good way, and on top of everything else, I’m pretty sure I know whether or not I love Kora now. I do. I love her. I’ve fallen in love with her. And yeah, that’s trauma and adrenaline speaking, and maybe I won’t be in love with her tomorrow, or next week, but right now, I love her. I want her to stay with me, now and always, and I’m ashamed of the fact that I love my sister more. If I didn’t, I would turn this ATV around and head straight for the launch port. I would get Kora off this doomed world and run for the nearest safe haven.
But I love Kora, and I love Viola, and I’m going to save them both, or die trying. I have to die trying. It’s the only thing I have left to offer them.
Kora opens the jar and dusts the pollen all over herself, until she’s a ghost sketched in dusty yellow, the volt gun still in her hands. I take the jar gently away and screw the lid back on, before slipping a few more vials into my pockets. I hope I won’t need to use them.
Mom’s gun is a comforting, deadly weight in my hand. “Ready?” I whisper.
“Yes,” says Kora. She’s trembling. I don’t have time to make sure she means it. We have to go. I slide out of the ATV and start across the blasted ground toward the mouth of the cave. Kora follows, and by the time we reach our destination, we’re walking side by side. We stay that way, as Zagreus opens its terrible geological jaws and swallows us both whole.
16
INTO THE BLACK
The sunlight only reaches for the first ten feet or so of the cave, which is cold and dark and smells like mold and rot and petrichor. Kora moves closer as the light begins to fade. I can feel her trembling. I pat her shoulder with my free hand, trying to be reassuring, and stay silent. I should have anticipated this. It’s too late for me to say anything.
Bioluminescence is a lot more common than most people realize. Even humans are bioluminescent, technically—we glow in the dark. We just do it so faintly that our own eyes can’t detect the light, and so we assume that it’s not there. During the day, Zagreus is as devoted to camouflage and predictable coloration as any other world. At night, however …
Maybe it’s because their primary predators don’t use sight as a hunting tool, or maybe it’s because nature is funky and doesn’t like to be told what to do, but Zagreus doesn’t believe in rules when it comes to bioluminescence. We pass beyond the reach of the sunlight, and we step around a narrow bend in the tunnel, and suddenly the walls are ablaze all around us. Kora gasps.
Under other circumstances, I would probably be delighted to have surprised her like this. Considering the danger we’re in right now, all I do is shoot her a tight, chiding glance. She nods, looking properly chagrined.
It is pretty impressive. The walls aren’t just glowing, they’re glowing in a dozen different shades of green and blue and red and yellow, all of them spiraling and crisscrossing together in carefully segregated bands as the different species of moss war for territory. They mirror the colors of the grasses outside. Dad used to argue that they might be the grasses outside, just adapted for a different environment.
The thought causes me to pause and squint at the glittering wall, following the patterns until I find a few small patches of orange. The orange grass is a flesh-eater. Maybe the orange moss is, too. I’m not sure what I’ll be able to do with that knowledge, but knowledge is power, and I have so little of that right now that every scrap feels valuable.
Kora stays close by my side, but she looks less frightened now, and more amazed. This is a whole new side of the planet she’s lived on for most of her life. It hurts a little, how awed she is. How many more secrets does Zagreus have? How many of them are we never going to have the opportunity to see?
I put my foot down in something wet. I stop, looking at the ground. It’s a thick, asymmetrical puddle, barely an inch deep, and I know what it has to be even before I crouch down and touch it with the tips of my fingers, testing it. It’s had time to chill, but it’s blood. Human blood. Nothing on Zagreus has quite this consistency when it clots. I straighten up, giving Kora a firm nod.
We’re going the right way.
That should make me feel better. It doesn’t. I feel almost numb, like all of this is happening to someone else, like maybe Kora’s mother was right in her assumptions and I’m the android after all. Part of me wants to seize on that idea, to cling to it for all that I’m worth. It would make more sense, wouldn’t it, to build an android replacement for a dead daughter and make it as healthy as possible, so that it could go out and see the worlds on the behalf of the daughter you still had left? The one who was damaged by the illness that had carried off her sibling?
Viola’s—the original Viola’s—genetic condition was all too real. I can say that with confidence. I’ve seen her medical files. Mom and Dad sat me down with them the year we turned fifteen. It was part of the sex talk. Use protection even if you don’t think you can get pregnant, because some diseases don’t care about the gender of your partner; don’t do anything you don’t want to do, no matter how much someone says they love you; your sister has a genetic condition and we still don’t know where it came from, so if you do decide to have children, you need to be very, very careful about your medical care.
I should have noticed that all those files were from genetic tests performed before we turned three. Hindsight is its own special kind of monster.
I wish I were the android. I wish I could convince myself that I’m unkillable, that no matter what happens here, I’m going to save my sister and get her to the transport and get Kora off this planet and do it all with a smile on my lips, because I can’t die. I’m not, though. I’m a flesh-and-blood girl who just stepped in a puddle of blood that may have come from my mother, that may have come from my classmate, and nothing I can try to tell myself is going to make this any better.
Then we come around another curve, and instead of getting better, things get worse.
Michel is hanging from the wall. No, not hanging from the wall: he’s stuck to the wall, encased in a thick, almost gelatinous-looking substance that manages to be simultaneously viscous and hard. It looks almost like he wandered into a cloud of repair foam, and got himself stuck when it hardened in response to exposure to the air. His head is bowed. His eyes are closed. He isn’t moving. I want to tell myself that he’s dead, that there’s nothing we could possibly do for him, but there’s one little problem with that idea:
Corpses don’t bleed, and Michel is bleeding. It’s a slow, steady trickle from his ear down the side of his neck, dripping from there onto the front of the foamy substance that’s keeping him suspended. If it were just gravity pulling blood from a dead body, he would have run out by now. The fact that the blood’s still falling means his heart is still beating, still working to do its job.
I glance at Kora. She seems horrified and disgusted, but also … sad, like she’s silently mourning for someone that she’s known almost her entire life. She doesn’t understand what the blood means.
I don’t want to tell her.
I don’t have to tell her.
He’s hurt. Badly. He’s hurt, and he’s trapped in some substance I’ve never seen before and don’t want to mess with, because what if touching it is what alerts the creatures that we’re here? They have yet to put in an appearance, but that doesn’t mean they won’t. He’s not going to make it. If we try to get him off the wall, he’s only going to slow us down.
Guilt blooms in my chest like a poisonous flower, choking me. If I don’t tell her that he’s still alive, I might as well have killed him myself. He’s not my friend. I don’t owe him anything. But Kora …
Loving someone and lying to them are not the same thing. If I start lying to her now, I may as well give up on the idea of loving her. No matter how much danger it puts us in, I have to tell her the truth.
Leaning as close to her as I dare, I press my lips against her ear, and breathe, “He’s alive.”
Her eyes widen. She gives me a quizzical look. I touch my own neck, then point at him, guiding her attention toward the blood that trickles down his neck.
Slowly, Kora nods, and mouths, “What now?”
It should be flattering, the way she expects me to have all the answers. It’s honestly a little scary. I don’t have any of the answers. I just have a gun, and a missing sister, and a lot of monsters between me and the end of this unwanted adventure.
I can’t refuse to act, not with her looking at me like that. So I inch carefully forward, toward Michel. He doesn’t react to my approach. He doesn’t even seem to know that I’m there. The closer I get, the firmer the stuff holding him to the wall appears. My initial impression seems to be accurate: it looks like a single solid piece, somehow extruded from a biological source. There’s a slickness to it that hurts my eyes when I look too closely … so I don’t look too closely.
I focus on Michel. That trickle of blood is continuing, which means he hasn’t died on me, however much I halfway wish he would. Cautiously, I reach up with my free hand and check his pulse. It’s surprisingly steady, if a little weaker than it should be. He’s holding on.
There’s a cut above his left eyebrow, and some split skin around the corners of his mouth and cracking his lips, like his mouth was pried open with a lot of force and held that way for a distressing amount of time. I slap his cheek, very lightly. He doesn’t react at all, but the sound echoes down the tunnel. I freeze. Behind me, I glimpse Kora doing the same, both of us waiting to see whether the sound is going to be enough to bring something terrible running.
