Starbreak (10 page)

•  •  •

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.

“Like what?” Rebbe Davison pressed. I shook my head. It seemed too absurd to contemplate. But then my eyes caught the craft’s pilot as he curved his body back, reaching for a hunk of meat from the cabin. It bent too far, wrong. Like there weren’t any bones inside.

“Like plants,” I said faintly. “Like plants.”

Chuckles arose from the others, weak laughter. Even Laurel, in her tears, cracked a dim smile. Not Ettie, though. She set her little fists on her hips, jutting out her lower lip.

“It’s not funny!” she said, then spared a proud glance to me. I gave her a grateful nod.

But inside I was cringing.
Plants?
The idea wasn’t even miraculous. It was absurd.

•  •  •

Soon plains melted away into marshy bogs crowded by ice floes. At first the craft’s shadow was the only thing that could be seen moving across the gray, dappled ground. But then hulking shapes joined it. Beasts—hundreds of them—moving in a herd through the swamp. They kept their young at the center of the pack, but even they were
as a big as a shuttle craft. Beneath their massive feet they left a stretch of flattened mud wherever they went.

“Megafauna,” Jachin said, gazing over the craft’s edge. “Destructive, at that. Their caloric needs would be huge, as would their methane output. It might explain the lack of genetic diversity.”

I looked at our captors, packed into the front of the craft with their rotting spoils. The driver was moving his spindly fingers over a console built into the craft’s dash. This time they didn’t park the vehicle or disembark to hunt. They only noted the presence of the herd, recorded it, then sped rapidly through the sky.

“They’re not the top of the food chain, though,” Rebbe Davison said. Jachin nodded in agreement. Then his expression shifted, darkening.

“HaShem help us,” Jachin said. “Imagine if we’d continued east. What if we’d encountered a herd? We’d be mincemeat.”

No one said anything. The sound of the motor was high and whistling. At last I forced a smile—but a jangly one, full of nerves.

“It’s funny you’re religious,” I said. “Mara always told me that religion and science were incompatible.”

Jachin frowned at the notion.

“My parents gave me my faith,” he said. “When the Council assigned me my vocation, I worried it meant I would have to abandon those beliefs. But the more I learned about evolution, the more
it became clear to me. How would such a complex system develop without the help of God’s hand? Sometimes I think that we wonder about the afterlife, about a higher power, because it helps us endure. No other Terran animal has such an awareness of his own mortality. And none has been as resilient as us either.”

“But we haven’t had God on the ship,” Rebbe Davison said. I could tell from his expression that this was an old argument, one they’d rehashed many times before. “And we’ve gotten along fine.”

“We’ve
lived
,” Jachin replied. “But have we
thrived
?”

Had I? I stared down at my hands. There was blood caked under the nails. The truth was, I’d never worried before about living well. I’d been too busy just barely surviving.

“Hey,” Ettie shouted, drawing me out of myself as she pointed out toward the horizon. “What’s that?”

We all turned, staring out past the craft’s copper walls. The swamps had faded, and the beasts with them. In their place was a sprawling complex of white stone and green copper, hundreds of kilometers across. It spiraled out from the crowded center like a web growing wider and wider as it had expanded. Like our ship, the main hub was capped by bubbled glass. But this glass was ancient, fractured by a thousand tiny cracks. Brassy metal and sandstone structures towered up inside it, each one trying to touch the ceiling overhead. And a blood-colored jungle seemed to glow inside the city’s walls.

Raza Ait.
I had named it in my mind without even realizing it. It was the first city we’d ever seen, many times the length of our ship and far more surprising. We watched it grow longer beneath us as the metal capsule came in close.

I spoke softly, speaking aloud without thinking. “The copper city.”

But the sight of it didn’t fill me with relief. Because in my head all I could hear was the echo of the boy’s voice, pitiful and lonely; all I could see was the wounded look in his eyes as he’d drawn his hands away.
The city where I die
, he’d said. I found myself crossing my fingers in my lap, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t be true.

Hoping that my boy was a survivor too.

•  •  •

The city was gated with bars of towering copper filigree, dozens of meters high. Through the gaps we could see the shadows of buildings, though we couldn’t touch them, not yet. Especially not after the hunters tied our hands in front of us with lengths of synthetic rope.

At the gates we were met by a retinue of aliens. Their clothes were finer than the others, though they, too, carried long metallic prods at their sides. As the gates swung open, groaning on hinges gone green, the aliens examined us with black, lively eyes. In whistling tones they conversed with one another. Then they lifted our arms, smelled our hair, bared their teeth. I watched as Aleksandra pulled away from one of them, growling, as though their touch seared her skin. But I stayed
as still and calm as I could. For one thing I didn’t want to scare Ettie, who stood just a small way up ahead, her bound hands twisting in their shackle. For another, I thought if I watched carefully, then perhaps I’d see my boy—if not among our fur-faced escorts, then definitely among the city’s wider inhabitants.

The atmosphere inside the city walls was different. It was as warm and fragrant as summer here, the air as sweet as fruit left to rot on the
Asherah
’s damp ground. On the ship such a smell would have only attracted houseflies. Here there were no insects. But there were people. Thousands of them. They loitered by the mouths of buildings and underneath the thick canopy of the interior forest. It seemed that they’d gathered for our arrival, and they craned their necks as we passed among them. Many of them were furred, small in stature. They seemed bold—dashing down the thoroughfares to catch a glimpse, grabbing for us as we walked by.

But they weren’t alone. There were other creatures, smooth-skinned, their bodies shining like rubies in the afternoon sunlight. They wore gowns stitched from bolts of smooth, metallic fabric, but even from beneath the lengths of cloth, I could smell them, summer-sweet as they perspired. They kept to the edges of the streets, and though their gazes were no less curious, they seemed somehow afraid of us. Most clutched the nearby hands of their companions—long, three-fingered hands—and, owlishly, watched.

They stood three or four heads taller than the aliens who guided us through the streets; one or two heads taller than any of us. And as we passed, they twisted their spines, gazing down curiously. Their bodies coiled and crept like vines. It reminded me of something.

It reminded me of the boy.

He was here, he had to be. I whipped my head about, searching. But if he was tucked somewhere among all these bright, shining people, then I didn’t find him. Only teeth and eyes and fingers greeted me, probing, cold. I stumbled at the sight, but then one of the creatures pressed his weapon against my spine, pushing me forward. I walked on.

Up ahead Ettie cried. I heard Rebbe Davison trying to comfort her, repeating over and over again that everything would be all right soon. But I didn’t feel so certain. It was so crowded here—in the pavilion up ahead were hundreds of aliens, lazing beneath the dripping vines. And they all
watched
us, their toothy mouths open, murmuring “Hyuuu-man, hyuu-man” as we passed. No wonder Ettie was upset.

“I’m scared! I’m scared!” she panted, and her progress stopped dead. She wouldn’t go any farther. The others from the
Asherah
turned back to look at her, but pressed by prods and alien hands, they all walked on. I felt my heart squeeze hard in my chest. Rushing ahead, I crouched down so that our gazes met. Her eyes were the color of
mahogany, flecked with amber bits. And they were full of tears.

“Ettie,” I said, my voice serious. I didn’t want to lie to her. That’s what the grown-ups had always done to me, telling me that my mother would be fine, that my family would be fine. They’d said that we just had to keep our chins up and live on and everything would be okay. But I’d been smart enough to hear their lies even then—even though people thought I was nothing more than a stupid little girl. Ettie was smarter than that now. “It’s scary, isn’t it? This place. So much bigger than the
Asherah
.”

She reached her small, dirty hands up, cradling them over mine as she gave her head a fierce nod. “I don’t like the way they look at me,” she said, and let out another hiccup of tears.

“No,” I said. Behind me a creature pressed his prod to my back. His mouth was open wide. There were probably four dozen teeth in there as, sharp as needles, all lined up in front of his bright purple tongue. “I don’t either.”

“Ettie!”

It was Aleksandra. Her hair was coming undone, stubborn black hairs worming out of the braid. She seemed to have lost all of her patience, all of her poise. Just another difference between her and her mother, I guess. Captain Wolff could keep up appearances, but Aleksandra’s emotions were much closer to the surface of her pretty white face.

Ettie turned, staring fearfully at Aleksandra.

“What?”

“Pull yourself together. You’re not a baby.”

Her words might as well have been a slap, for the way that Ettie winced at them. In the distance I saw Rebbe Davison give his head a dismayed shake. My own brow furrowed. But Ettie didn’t see that through her sheen of tears. She wiped her eyes against her shoulder. Her chin trembled. But soon it stilled.

“I’m sorry, Giveret Wolff,” she nearly whispered. She trudged forward, her hair a black net over her eyes.

I gaped at Aleksandra. The edge of her lip ticked up at me.

“It’s up to me to see that our people stay strong. Even the young ones.”

But when I looked at Ettie, I wasn’t certain that Aleksandra’s words had helped one bit. Her small shoulders were hunched; her head hung down as if she couldn’t bear to face the city that surrounded us. And what about the people Aleksandra had left behind—hundreds of them, packed like sardines into the tin can of our ship? How was she helping
them
?

But then I felt something cold against my back. A weapon’s blunted end. I glanced behind me. There was an alien, snarling, showing every single tooth.

“I’m going! I’m going!” I said, and continued the long march into the heart of the city.

•  •  •

The dome overhead seemed to amplify the sunlight; it burned strong enough that soon my body swam with sweat inside my flight suit. The others didn’t look much better off: Aleksandra’s hair was pasted to her neck. Perspiration rolled down Jachin’s face in a steady stream. Though Rebbe Davison’s hands were bound, every few minutes he still managed to wipe his palms against his flight suit trousers. And Laurel?

Well, I couldn’t blame the heat for her condition. She sniffled hard again and again, trying to suck back the tears. But it didn’t do any good. By the time we reached the western edge of the city, where the ground dipped into an overshadowed park, she’d slicked the entire front of her flight suit. But she didn’t seem to care, and if she did, I’m not sure she could have stopped anyway—no matter what Aleksandra said.

The aliens led us through the jostling crowds, past towering buildings that stretched like arms overhead, and through groves crowded with fragrant fruit trees. Finally we reached a fenced area, where copper links were interlaced with sheets of synthetic fabric. It was a tent, an enormous tent, with a hole at the center of the roof and smoke streaming out. An alien stood guard at the gate; he nodded to our captors.