Athel (18 page)

“Did you
get the signal back?” I ask, but he doesn’t reply. “The signal from the
rocket?”

He
crouches down by one of the fallen pillars, the beam from his data feeder
swallowed by the hard shadows.

“What’s he
doing?” Wes whispers.

“No idea,”
I reply.

I jump to
my feet and wade over to see what Lukas has found. Wes tags along, hissing for
me to wait.

The
enclosure past the half arch looks like an ancient plaza. Patches of old cobblestone
bulge out of the carpet of moss and grass. There are no trees blocking the
light from the moon here, and the scattered ruins paint a picture so vivid I
can almost imagine the way it looked back in the days when Astraca was alive
and thriving. Rich men and women would stroll through these arches and talk
about politics, art, and philosophy. Musicians would sit on the stairs and play
their drums and fiddles, while dancers leaped to the rhythm in a celebration of
life.

Lukas sets
his data feeder on the ground and starts pulling a web of dead roots and weeds.

“What did
you find?” Wes asks, crouching next to him.

“Best
thing ever,” Lukas replies. “Check it out.”

I run over
to see.

A light blinks
in the patch of ground Lukas has just uncovered. Broken words stream on a
cracked screen. Some of the LED lights are missing, making it hard to read.

“Fopesicht?”
I ask. “What does it mean?”

“Foresight,”
Lukas corrects.

And then
it dawns on me. “The Foresight door!”

“It says
it’s been unlocked,” Wes whispers.

Wes is
right. The message loops over, and as my eyes adjust to the missing pixels, I
can finally read it in full: “Foresight door unlocked.”

Lukas
whistles. “Whoever took the key knew exactly what they were doing. They came
here and unlocked the door.”

Excitement
nibbles the tips of my fingers. “This changes everything. I mean—if this
one’s been unlocked … we can still make it. We can still unlock all the doors
before dawn!”

“Did you
see the rest of the message?” Wes asks.

The words
stream across the screen.

“Three of
five doors unlocked,” Lukas reads aloud.

“Three?” I
say.

“Athel and
I unlocked the Prudence door,” Lukas says, scratching his head. “Who’s
unlocking the other ones?”

Wes squeezes
my arm. “Wait. Did the message… It just changed!”

I lean
closer and read the new message aloud: “Foresight door unlocked. Four of five
doors unlocked.”

“Whoa,”
Lukas mutters. “Someone’s unlocking the doors as we speak. Only one left now.”

“You think
Athel’s behind this?” I ask. “Maybe Athel, Tahari, and Aghad got hold of the
Foresight key and spread out to open all the doors at once.”

“Not
sure,” Lukas replies. He gets up and shoves the data feeder into Wes’s hands.
“Here, take it. There’s enough battery life to make your way back to the main
trail. Find Tahari and tell him to bring everyone here. Tell him we’ve found
the main entrance to the Underground City, and soon it will be unlocked.”

Wes takes
the data feeder with uncertain hands. “You mean—by myself?”

“You need
to be fast, and neither one of us can keep up with that,” I say.

Wes
squeezes the data feeder and nods. “We can do this,” he says, and then sprints
into the darkness, the soft thuds of his blades swishing across the low
vegetation.

Lukas and
I return our gazes to the screen, both holding our breaths.

“So little
now until the last door—” he says.

A rustle
creeps closer from the grass behind us.

“Wes?” I
call, thinking maybe he forgot something and came back.

Steps thud
in the darkness. They approach slowly, methodically. Lukas grabs my arm.

I stand up
and squint, my eyes useless. “Who’s there?”

No answer,
only the relentless beat of the steps coming closer. And then, suddenly, the
ground shakes and a rumble comes howling from the deep bowels of the earth. As
I fall to my knees, I barely have time to catch one last glimpse of the screen.

“Foresight
door unlocked,” it reads. “Five of five doors unlocked.”

Chapter
Eighteen

Athel

Day Number: 1,589

Event: All Mayakes have evacuated into the
forest

Number of Mayakes left: No official
report

Goal for today: Hide in the forest and
prepare for the attack.

The night is cool, the forest
fragrant with scents of bark, moss, and moist soil. People make small talk,
babies cry. But once we hit the trail, all sounds die out except for our steps
and Aghad’s heavy breathing. Tahari positioned Aghad next to me as lead.

“Cool
night,” I say, for the sole purpose of passing time.

Aghad
replies with a grunt. After that, all my conversation attempts fail miserably.
So I shut up and count my steps, trying to focus on the trail rather than what
lies ahead.
 

I don’t
manage well, though. I keep thinking about what’s going to happen to the Tower
when the Gaijins attack. Will they see we’ve all left and come looking for us
in the forest? Will they destroy our home, our things, the solar fields, the
rice fields… Will it all be gone, just like with the fishing platforms and
cranes? If so, what’s the point of hiding if when we return, there will be
nothing for us to eat, no energy to recharge our batteries, no walls to keep us
safe from the harsh heat of the days and the bitter cold of the nights?

Somebody
behind me moans and we all stop to see what happened.

Aghad
sighs. “Just a child.” He turns to shout, “Pick her up and keep walking!” and
then resumes hiking, undaunted by the darkness.

“Do you
know where we’re going?” I ask.

“North,”
he replies. “Just keep walking north.”

The trees
rustle and creak around us. At every oak we pass I crane my head and hope it’s
Lilun’s oak. I keep wondering whether somebody’s missing her right now, or even
looking for her. Do they know she’s here? Would they still attack us if they
did? Would they—

A thought
dawns on me.

No, not the rocket
.

She’s the one the Gaijins want back
.

But then…
how is she to return home without the rocket? Maybe the droids can take her
back?

They’re just robots. How would they know
?

The
thought leaves me restless. I increase my pace, stomping over fallen branches
and rocks.
I need to find Lilun again
.

The child
wails again. Commotion ripples down the procession until Aghad, once more,
makes us all stop. He sighs, stomps his walking stick, and tells me to take a
break. “At this pace, they’ll lag behind and get lost. Let me go see what’s
happening.”

He walks
back, squeezing among the people hiking up the trail.

I sit on a
rock and cross my arms. Long beards of moss dangle from the tree branches,
whispering softly. A mockingbird whistles, a rat comes out to check me out and
then vanishes again. I hear a whoosh, turn, and scan the expanse of trees. Pale
trunks emerge from a drape of blackness. Something trembles underneath the
ferns to my left.

Back on
the trail, people stand and wait for Aghad to resume the lead. Some sit on the
ground, others take the chance to drink or take a nibble of food. A mother
rocks to sleep the child strapped to her chest.

The ferns
give another shudder. I leave the trail and decide to check them out.

Something
jumps at me from behind a tree and presses a hand to my mouth. The hand is cold
and smells funny, a mix of medicine and metal. Makes me smile.

“What are
you doing here?” I mumble, but all that comes out under the pressure of her
cold skin is, “Mhh-mmhh-mhh?”

Lilun
brings a finger to her lips. “Shh!”

That’s
when I realize that “shh” works in all languages.

She steps
back and motions for me to follow. Behind me, the people are still waiting
along the trail. Somebody looks in my direction, their eyes vacant, their
vision limited to only a few feet around them. Maybe they think the noise is
some kind of animal. Somebody shines a flashlight and Lilun and I both duck.
The beam sweeps from left to right and then dies out.

“Now,” I
say. She nods, and then we run.

Lilun
can’t see in the dark like me, but she has a small light clipped to her head.
She turns it on as soon as we’re far enough from the trail and I follow as it
bobs between trees and down an incline, skipping over slabs of rock and bushes.
We reach a ravine covered in logs. Lilun crawls to the bottom and sweeps away a
curtain of ivy hanging from the low branches of a sycamore. The beam from her
flashlight reflects off something shiny.

“The
rocket!” I cheer. “You’ve found it!” I reach out to touch it, but Lilun slaps
my hand and pushes me away.

“Achs!”
she hisses, her eyes suddenly hard.

I step
back, confused. “Why show it to me if I can’t touch it?”

But it’s
not the rocket she wants me to see. She crawls behind it and pulls out a sack,
rattling with loose objects.

I sit on a
log and wait, pondering. She has the rocket.

A rocket booster
, as Lukas
called it.
This puppy is the propelling
engine of some kind of capsule. It didn’t get here on its own
.

Lilun
acquired the rocket and used it to fly to our side of the mesa. Now the Gaijins
want her back, and they’re going to destroy us if she doesn’t get home again.

I’ve tried
telling her about the attack. I’ve drawn a picture and thought she understood.
Lukas fixed the rocket. Why doesn’t she fly back? Where’s the capsule she used
to get here? Maybe it’s too dark to fly it. Maybe at the crack of the dawn,
when the light comes out… Except the crack of dawn will be too late.

I scratch
my head, puzzling over our options. Did the rocket end up here after Yuri and
Cal set it off or did she retrieve it herself? She wouldn’t be strong enough to
lift it on her own, not with just one hand anyway, but she could’ve rolled it
down the ravine. What happened after that? Lukas claims he lost the signal for
several hours, until it finally popped up again on his data feeder. Why is he
not here, then? Last time we talked, he was going to get Dottie and Wes and
together they were going to retrieve the rocket.

Lilun sits
in front of me and sets the bag on her lap. The bag is closed at the top with
ties and she struggles to untie them with her only hand. I slide next to her,
untie the knot, and widen the opening. The beam from the light clipped to her
forehead falls on Mom’s old prosthesis, which she’s packed together with a few
other items: the blue blanket I’ve seen in her niche; some spare engine parts,
from the rocket, I’m guessing; the white, seamless box I’d found on the ground
next to the blanket.

I pull
Mom’s prosthesis out. “You’ve got to wear this,” I say. “It’ll make things a
lot easier. Let me show you.”

My hands
shake as I take her wounded arm and unwrap the gauze around it. Here I am,
teaching a Gaijin girl how to use a rudimentary prosthesis when our people are
about to be destroyed by her people. The realization that she may be the cause
of all this doesn’t help. I find myself helpless, unable to fly the rocket
lying just a few feet away from me. So I do the only thing I would’ve done in
any other circumstance, if the world weren’t about to end and four hundred
lives about to be endangered.

I help her
wear the prosthesis.

Maybe,
once she learns how to use it, she’ll agree to fly back home. Maybe she can
still be back in time to avoid carnage. Maybe the world won’t end after all.

Lilun’s
wound is capped with dried blood. The flesh around it is swollen and red but
it’s starting to scab over, and, as far as I can tell, it’s clean and free of
infection. I take the prosthesis and fit the cup snuggly over the stump of her
severed wrist. She winces and stifles a yelp but doesn’t offer any resistance.

“I know,” I
say. “It’s painful for a while, until you get used to it. It’s like wearing a
new pair of shoes.” I grin and try to read her face, but the light clipped to
her forehead burns my sensors, and all I see is white. So I return my gaze to
her arm, secure the cup around her wrist, and then tell her to use it.

It takes a
few attempts before she realizes how to control the clamp, and once she does,
she practices plucking things from the ground: a stick, a rock, a bunch of
weeds. She then dips the prosthesis into her bag and fishes out the seamless
white box I saw yesterday in the niche.

“Garah no
hookj,” she says, as if I knew exactly what she meant. But that’s what I’ve
been doing, too, talking to her as though she can understand me. And in a way,
we did manage to communicate.

I reach
over and cover the light on her forehead.

She
understands, reaches for a button, and turns it off.

I can’t
decipher a word she’s saying, but at least now I can try to read her face.

Holding
the white box with the clamp of her new prosthesis, Lilun brushes a finger
along the edge and somehow makes it click open. A small disk—about the
size of my hand—sits nestled in black foam lining. She carefully takes it
out, holds it up in her open palm, and presses the center with her thumb.

Something
zaps out of the disk so fast all I see is a flash. A metallic sound thrums
through the air, and the tree branch across from us comes down with a loud
swoosh. I run to check it out. A piping hot metal cable is wrapped around the
five-inch-thick branch, fastened so tightly around the wood it dug half an inch
into the bark. Smoke hisses from the groove it etched.

Another
click, and the cable unfastens and vanishes. Lilun grins.

“Wait,” I
mumble. “Is that… Is the cable wrapped inside that disk? Did you release it
with just the push of your thumb? Just like that?”

Lilun
pushes the disk into my hands. I hold it between my thumb and index finger. It
weighs a lot given its small size, and the edge all around is seamless, just
like the box that contained it. I brush a finger along its side, but I can’t
find a dent or a hole from which the cable shoots out.

A red
circle flashes in the middle of the disk.

Lilun
looks at me and nods. I point the disk to a tall branch about twenty feet away
and press the red circle with my thumb. The cable zaps out, jerking my hand
backward from the recoil. Leaves rustle and another branch comes down, filling
the air with the reek of scorched wood and resin.

I squeeze
the white disk, still finding it hard to believe that such a small thing can
have so much power. “Wow! This thing is wicked.”

“Vuja,”
Lilun says. She points the clamp to the disk and repeats the word: “Vuja.”

“Vuja,” I
reply, nodding. The moon comes out of the veil of clouds and twinkles between
the treetops. A frog croaks from a nearby creek.

I stifle a
yawn, exhaustion numbing me. “You really need to fly that rocket back home,
Lilun,” I say, returning the vuja.

She pushes
my hand away and shakes her head. “Nach. Vuja gala maar.” She points both the
clamp and her index finger at me. “Gala maar.”

“For me?”
I say, closing my fist around the disk.

She nods,
then closes her eyes and bows her head. “Grodan.”

Whatever
grodan means, it feels like an important word. So I bow my head too and repeat
it. “Grodan. Now, for that rocket—”

Her eyes
harden again. She makes a sweeping gesture with the prosthetic hand and says,
“Nach!”

“Wait.” I
try to explain. “The droids—bugger, what was the word you used for them?
The big, nasty bots.” I draw a big box in the air with my hands and then mimic
lots of explosions. “The droids are attacking us. You need to go back where you
came from,” I add, pointing to the rocket. But every time I try to get closer
to it, she pushes me away and hisses, “Nach.”

“Whoa,” I
say, stepping back. “I thought we were friends. You just gave me a gift.” I
show her the vuja.

“Vuja gala
maar,” she says. “Pradna gala cred.”

Right.
Like I know what she’s saying. The only thing that’s clear to me is that I’m no
longer welcome here. I wonder if Aghad’s noticed that I’m missing, if they’ve
resumed hiking north, or if they’re waiting for me. I bob my head, raise my
hand in what I hope is a universal salute, and turn away from the hissing girl
and her rocket.

Maybe if I
run fast enough, I can find Lukas and the others. Maybe the four of us together
can convince the girl to fly back home in time.

Maybe…

I turn one
last time. She’s still there, glaring at me through narrowed eyes.

“Be safe,
Lilun,” I say.

Be safe
.

Grodan.

Whatever that means
.