Alien--Echo, page 22
Kora clasps her hands over her mouth, making a thin whimpering sound. I wish I felt like I could do the same.
“We have to go in,” I say.
She shakes her head, quick and violent.
“Kora. The creature I killed, it wasn’t the only one out here. We’re not safe out here.” We won’t be safe in there either, not with the hole in the dome making it absolutely clear that the colony has been violated, but that doesn’t matter. Out here, we have an ATV with a limited amount of remaining fuel, our dwindling supply of ammunition, and my family’s residence, which has already been attacked once. In there, we have the entire population of Zagreus.
These things are fast, efficient hunters, but there are guards in the colony. There are people with weapons. There are doors that lock and shutters made from the hulls of salvaged spacecraft. There’s no way the creatures have been able to kill everyone in the colony. There’s just no way.
And most importantly of all, in there, we have a way off this stinking planet. If we can reach our transport, we can go, we can take off and go, off to someplace where people will listen to our story, off to someplace where knives don’t hunt under their own power.
We can leave this floating graveyard behind, and never look back. Not even for a second.
“This looks bad, but I’m sure the guards reacted fast enough.” I’m lying. “I’m sure they were able to chase the creatures away with minimal loss of life.” Lying, lying, lying. “There’s no way those things could have overrun the colony that quickly.”
But they overran the seastead, didn’t they? And the caves, when we’d been there, had been so empty, like most of the creatures were somewhere else, doing something else—something important enough that they’d been willing to leave their gestating young virtually undefended. The hive is always more important than the individual with eusocial creatures like these. What would have been big enough, valuable enough, to lure them away from their burgeoning hive?
What, if not the resources they needed to expand at an exponential rate? I had a sudden, terrible feeling that I knew why the caves had been so empty—why getting into and out of them had been so easy, compared to what it could have been. Yes, we’d been forced to face two monsters, and kill one of them, but there was no way we could have escaped the notice of an entire hive. Not unless something had the rest of them distracted.
We’re so close to the entrance that driving doesn’t make much sense, and could put us in more danger than we’re already in, if the creatures hear our engine approaching. If they’re still here …
If they’re still here, the only way we get away is by somehow sneaking past them. That means being as quiet as we possibly can. I disengage the last of the controls, and the ATV slips into silence, waiting for a command that’s—hopefully—never going to come. It can rust here. It can rest here.
“Vi, I’m going to put you in my backpack,” I say, moving her onto the seat beside me so that I can unhook it from my shoulders. “I need my hands free.”
“I understand,” she says, then grimaces. “I just tried to nod. I miss having shoulders, Olive. I miss having hands.”
“Mom made sure I had the specs for your next body,” I say. “You’ll have hands again just as soon as we can get someplace that builds androids. The best hands money can buy.”
“Well. Maybe not the best hands,” says Viola. “I sort of like the ones I had.” Then she sobers. “I can’t help you anymore. I can’t hold a gun or close a door. Please be careful. You’re the only family I have left. I can’t lose you, too.”
“I’ll be careful,” I say, and pick her up.
She closes her eyes as I press a kiss to her forehead. It feels the way it’s always felt. It feels warm, and real, and alive. If I pretend I’m just holding her cheeks, and that there’s still a body below her neck, I can pretend the last day didn’t happen.
Pretending never changes the world. It just leaves you helpless when the monsters come.
Viola keeps her eyes closed as I tuck her into my backpack and fasten the compartment, sliding it over my shoulders. I look to Kora. She offers me a small, wan smile.
“What,” she says, “no kiss for me?”
So I lean over, and I kiss her.
Maybe it’s a waste of time. Maybe we should be smarter than this, stronger than this; maybe we should be battle-hardened and ready to do whatever’s necessary to survive. But I’m seventeen. Kora’s seventeen. I’m scared, and from the way she’s been looking at me, she’s scared, too. This isn’t the world we know. There are still supposed to be adults ready to protect us, people who can say “everything’s going to be okay” in a voice that makes us believe, really believe that they can keep their promises.
We’ve lost that. We’ve lost all that, and it happened so fast that there wasn’t even time to understand that it was happening until it was already too late. So I wrap my arms around her waist and I kiss her. I kiss the pollen off of her lips until they stop tasting like nothing, until they start tasting like salt and engine oil again. I kiss her until she presses herself against me and wraps her fingers through my hair, and if the world could stop right here, right now, that would be fine. We would be safe, imprisoned in a single crystal moment of absolute contentment.
But the world can’t stop. The world never stops. Before I’m ready to let the moment go, it passes. Kora steps back, taking her hands off my shoulders and her mouth away from mine. The air between us feels suddenly, brutally cold.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
I’m not. I’ll never be. “Yeah,” I say, and nod. “Totally prime. You?”
“If we make it off this planet, I want to stay with you and Viola,” she says. “Maybe forever. I want to be your girlfriend, and hold your hand, and sleep knowing you’ll watch over me. Can we do that?”
This time, I nod in silence. I want what she’s describing so much that it feels too big for my body to hold, like a secret that should never be spoken in the outside air.
She smiles, teeth white as stars in the gathering gloom. It’ll be dark soon. We can’t be here when it’s dark. “Then yeah,” she says. “I’m ready.”
She draws the volt gun. I draw the gun I took from Mom, the one that might break my wrists if I fire it more than once in quick succession. It makes me feel small. It makes me feel safe. I don’t understand how both those things can be true at the same time, but they are. They are.
Side by side, with Viola in the bag on my back, we walk toward the closed colony gate. The hole in the dome is a silent accusation above us. We didn’t try hard enough to sound the alarm. We didn’t make enough of a fuss.
But what were we supposed to do, really? Everyone who’d been at the residence when Paul and my mother were taken had seen as much of the creatures as Kora and me—they knew as much as we did when we reached the colony gates. They’d learned even more in the seconds that followed, when Michel and Viola were taken. Why was it my responsibility to tell people what was happening? Why was it Kora’s?
And if it was somehow Kora’s, why wasn’t it enough that she’d gone to her mother, and told her what was happening? Kora’s mother was the planetary governor. It was her responsibility to take care of these people. Did she?
The answer is on the other side of the door. When we reach it, Kora produces her mother’s access card and steps anxiously forward. I swing my gun into position, ready to blow the head off of anything that comes looming out of the shadows to attack her. She glances at me. I nod.
She swipes the card, and the door opens on a slaughterhouse.
For a terribly long moment we both stand frozen, trying to process what our eyes are telling us—trying to understand. We can’t understand. This is too much for understanding. Kora gets paler and paler, until it seems like there’s no blood left in her body, until her normally warm brown cheeks are the color of dust gathering in the corners of an unswept room. I feel faint. The sound of my heart is like a drumbeat pounding in my ears, and it’s so loud that I’m sure the creatures that did this must be able to hear it, must be able to follow it back to me.
Kora takes a step back. I take a step forward to meet her. There’s no other way left for me to go.
There’s blood everywhere. On the walls, on the ground, painting everything in the same unrelenting shade of dull rusty matte. The people of Zagreus have always seemed to hold this ideal of sameness, and now they finally have it, because once something is covered in blood, it looks like everything else that’s been covered in blood. They have finally found homogeny.
I guess I should be proud of them. All I can really feel is sick to my stomach, and relieved that Viola doesn’t have to see this. She saw what happened in the cave. We didn’t. I can spare her from this, if she can spare me from that. We’re sisters. We protect each other.
I take another step toward the open door. Kora doesn’t move. I look back at her and she shakes her head, silent, shivering. She looks like she’s on the verge of passing out.
I want to grab her, to yell, to tell her that we don’t have time to waste. I don’t do any of those things. I move back a step, until we’re close together once again, and say softly, “You can’t stay here, Kora. You have to come with me.”
“No.” She shakes her head again, harder this time, so that her hair slaps against my cheek. “I can’t. Do you see … I can’t. We can’t go in there. It’s death in there.”
“It’s death out here.” If we’re outside when the suns finish going down, we might as well give up. “They weren’t in the cave because they were at the colony. So they’re probably not at the colony anymore, right? They’re probably on their way back to the cave. This is the closest it’s going to come to being safe here. We have to get to the transport. We have to get off this planet.”
“My mother.” She gasps as she looks at me, sudden comprehension in her eyes. “Our residence has the best locks in the whole colony. My mother—she’s probably there, she probably let refugees in. Please, we have to go and get her. Your ship can take one more, right?”
I don’t want to point out that if her mother has allowed refugees into their residence, she probably won’t be willing—or able—to leave them behind. My family’s transport can handle six passengers if we’re willing to be cramped. That’s a hard stop, although I guess Viola technically doesn’t count right now, since she doesn’t weigh as much as she usually does. So fine: maybe we could take Kora’s mother and three of the colonists … but that’s it. That’s where the space runs out.
And what’s going to stop Kora’s mom from deciding that an off-world teenager whose parents failed to prevent a biological disaster doesn’t need a functional transport as much as she does? She could leave me and Viola behind to face the creatures, all alone, last denizens of an involuntary graveyard.
It’s a chilling, if improbable, thought, and I know I’m dwelling on it because it covers up the much greater possibility that she’ll grab hold of Kora and say that no, her daughter can’t leave with us; her daughter belongs with her, in a Zagreus-owned transport, surrounded by good colonists who would never dream of running if it weren’t the only way. I don’t want to lose Kora after everything we’ve been through. I’m pretty sure surviving a dark cave filled with unknown, unknowable monsters is even better than agreeing to go steady.
I take a breath.
I force a smile.
“Let’s go get your mom,” I say, and this time when I move toward the opening in the wall, she moves with me, toward that terrible bloody landscape, until we can smell it, the bittersweet reek of blood left to dry in the fading sunlight, and something more, something sharper and crueler and less familiar.
Acid. Not just the kind that eats through walls: the kind ants, Earth ants, use to keep track of the rest of the colony. When Viola and I were little kids, our dad set up an ant farm for us, as part of his ongoing campaign to get us interested in the natural world—Earth first, since that’s where humans come from, and then the rest of the universe, in all its strange and complicated and weirdly predictable diversity.
Life seeks out forms that work. That’s why we find beetles, crabs, skeletons, skins, everywhere we go. There are exceptions—even back on Earth, there are almost no absolute rules that can be applied to every single living thing—but once evolution finds something functional and easily replicated, it replicates it over and over again, from one side of the universe to the other.
Eusocial insects frequently organize the colony by laying down scent trails. They use special acids and pheromones, things the rest of the colony will be able to pick up on and understand. The smell in the air isn’t exactly like the smell we used to pick up from our ant farm, but it’s close enough to be another piece of convergent evolution, another piece of the puzzle snapping into place.
The creature that followed the ATV here in the first place left a scent trail to mark where it was going, and then it came back to the hive with proof that there was food to be found in the colony, good food, food suitable for the incubation of its young. We had drawn a straight line from the residence to the colony, a line that might as well have been a flashing sign reading “come and get it, the buffet is open.”
I can’t be sorry about that. I was trying to save us. I did the best I could with what I had. But I look at the blank, stricken expression on Kora’s face, and I hope that she never figures out what I just figured out. I hope she never blames herself.
The streets are bathed in blood, and the walls are red and sticky, but there are surprisingly few bodies, at least out in the open. The creatures must have carried them away. I wonder how many they were able to take alive. How many of the colonists are in the caves where my mother died, stuck to the walls and waiting for their own lives to come to a horrifying, unheralded end?
The ground feels soft and spongy under my feet. I don’t look down. I won’t look down. If I don’t acknowledge what I’m stepping in, it won’t count, and I won’t have to think about it.
Kora shakes as we walk, a fine, unceasing tremor that seems to start at the center of her belly and radiate out from there, pulling her entire body into the motion.
Then we come around a corner, and Alisa is there, gore matting her hair down to her scalp, tracing the planes of her cheeks. Her eyes are so wide that I can see the white all the way around her irises, making her seem like something out of a children’s horror show, some terrible monster from the depths of a haunted space station or a forgotten colony. But she’s not a monster. She’s a girl, she’s only a girl, and the monsters aren’t part of any story. The monsters are real.
There’s a gun in her hands. I recognize it as Rockwell’s sidearm. Every other time I’ve seen it, it’s been strapped securely to the guard’s hip, more for show than anything else. It’s not for show now. Alisa has her fingers wrapped securely around the grip, one hooked into the trigger, and it’s all I can do not to step back immediately.
“Alisa!” Kora sounds overjoyed. That’s good. Kora also sounds very loud. That’s bad. Her voice bounces off the walls, a beacon telling anything left in the colony where we are and that we’re ready to be taken. “You’re okay!”
Alisa’s eyes don’t quite focus as she turns her face toward Kora. The urge to run is even stronger now.
“Okay?” she says, voice oddly disconnected, like she’s speaking from a very long way away. “I’m okay? They took my fathers. Both of them. We were in the front room, we were getting ready to run for the transports, and then the wall wasn’t there anymore, and there were two of those … those things, and then the things were gone, and my fathers were gone, and I was alone, and I’m okay? Because none of this blood is mine, I’m okay?”
“Alisa…” Kora sounds horrified. It’s the only reasonable response. “I’m so sorry. I’m so—that should never have happened to you. We’re on our way to get my mother, and then we’re leaving. We’re leaving the planet. You can come with us.”
I think I manage not to react to Kora offering Alisa space in my family’s transport like it’s nothing. Maybe it’s a good thing. If there are three of us, plus Viola, and we tell Kora’s mother that the transport can only hold six, maybe she’ll be able to leave the refugees behind. Or maybe they have their own transports. Most of the colonists have given their private vessels to the colony for disassembly and reuse, but they had the shuttles they sent up to the survey ship, they have the transports they use to reach nearby ships for trading and medical supplies. There must be more private transports on this planet than just ours. There have to be.
Maybe we can all get away from here safely, and never need to look back at what this world has become.
“Come with you?” Alisa blinks, looking briefly, heartbreakingly confused. “Why would I want to come with you? This is my home. I was born here. I was the third baby born in this colony. My dads have the certificate from the governor framed and on our kitchen wall. It proves this is my homeworld, not anyplace else in the whole universe. Zagreus is in my blood. I’m not going to go anywhere.”
“Alisa…” Kora takes a step forward, one hand outstretched in a beckoning gesture. It would be sweet, if not for the fact that everything around us is covered in blood, the fact that Alisa is covered in blood. “You know you can’t stay here. It isn’t safe anymore.”
“Whose fault is that?” Alisa moves surprisingly quickly, and suddenly the gun in her hands is aimed directly at me. Her hands are shaking, but it doesn’t matter: at this range, she only has to pull the trigger. A shot to the gut will be just as deadly as one to the forehead. “Your parents were supposed to make sure nothing like this happened here. We paid them good money to make sure nothing like this happened here. You were supposed to protect us.”
She snarls her final words like an accusation, like a condemnation, and I realize two things at the same time. First, that seeing her parents taken by the creatures has broken her in a way that I can almost understand, having seen my own parents die. She’s lost and she’s scared and she’s lashing out, and it’s my bad luck that she managed to get her hands on a gun before we ran into her.
