Chapter Thirty-Four Arturo
Thirty-Four
Arturo
I sat on the floor of the forest. My lungs burned and my heart pounded like it was going to beat out of my chest. Was this what a heart attack felt like? My whole body still felt like it was falling, falling, falling.
But I wasn’t. I was on steady, soft soil. There were plenty of roots and logs to sit on, but I sat on the ground with both hands pressed into the dirt, needing to feel it beneath me.
Stars, I’d never been afraid of heights before, but I thought I might be now.
Leaves crunched to the side—Dayan had floated overhead just seconds after we landed. Naga had done a good job triangulating where to take us. I knew I should get up and make sure Dayan was okay, but the sound of them coming closer was probably a good sign.
And I wasn’t sure if I stood that I wouldn’t just fall back down again.
“You all right?” Dayan asked.
I looked through the trees to find them smirking at me.
“How are you okay?” I asked.
Dayan shrugged, though they did look pale, and I noticed they were gripping the low branch of a nearby tree rather tightly.
Maybe they were just better at putting on a brave face.
“Okay!” Naga chirped beside me, nuzzling my leg with her face.
“Okay,” I said. “Yes, we are okay. Thank you.”
“Thank you!” Naga replied.
I didn’t mean to seem ungrateful. Naga had saved my life. But stars, I was going to have nightmares about falling from the sky like that for years. I flopped backward, lying in the dirt, looking up at the canopy, which thankfully was not composed of scions.
“Let’s never do that again,” I said, mostly to the sky.
“Good plan,” Dayan said. “What, exactly, are we going to do now?”
We were well hidden here. I’d heard a drone fly by overhead, but if they’d tracked the location of our hyperjump, they hadn’t been able to pinpoint us here beneath the canopy.
“Find the others,” I said. “Though we can’t use the radio without advertising our location to Ivy.”
“Yeah, okay,” Dayan said. “That figures.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s focus on the options we do have.”
“We do have!” Naga said.
Right. “We have a hyperdrive. Sadie also has one. Ivy doesn’t appear to be able to track us when we hyperjump.
” Which meant Ivy was probably not a cytonic, though it could just mean she wasn’t great at that particular ability, the way Jorgen hadn’t figured out how to hyperjump, and Alanik hadn’t been able to form mindblades.
Stars, Alanik. She’d been in bad shape, and Gilaf hadn’t had a hyperslug to teleport them out. My chest ached, thinking about what might have happened.
We needed to find them as soon as possible. “Naga, can you ask Bob for permission to hyperjump again?”
“Again!” Naga said.
I hoped that meant that Bob, at least, had survived, though I couldn’t be sure.
So we waited. I knew Jorgen said it mattered more how many hyperjumps were taking place in the whole of the galaxy than in our particular area, but I still worried it would be a while for this one, since we’d just asked for multiple hyperjumps in a row.
I wanted to see the others, to be with Alanik and make sure she was okay.
I had no idea what we’d be jumping into if we had Naga take us to the others, but I’d rather be with my team than here alone, wondering, no matter what they were going through.
Branches creaked overhead. Dayan was on their feet in a heartbeat, their hand on their light-whip, which they’d managed to hold on to in the fall.
“Was it just the wind?” I asked.
Dayan didn’t answer, but one of the branches descended from the canopy, digging into the dirt just a meter from my head, stabbing in so hard that a good twenty centimeters of it buried itself in the soil.
Dayan held their light-whip out to the side, switching it on. Tendrils of light shot from the end, whipping at the trees. I leaped to my feet, wishing I hadn’t left the laser sword in my ship. In front of us, one of the thick trunks began to move.
“Are you going to fight it?” I asked.
“I was thinking we would run,” Dayan said. “No points to be gained fighting here.”
Dayan wasn’t wrong. “All right,” I said, keeping my eye on the trunk as the surface of it rippled, and two large eyes, gaping maws of blackness, opened in the bark. “On three.”
Dayan didn’t even wait for me to begin counting. They spun around and lashed their light-whip to the branches of a stationary tree, kicking their legs into the air and swinging away.
I reached down for Naga and turned to follow, fumbling with the light-line hanging at my belt.
The creature stabbed another branch into the ground right next to me, then hauled its enormous trunk into me, slamming me over a log.
My chest hit the curve of the log straight on, knocking the wind out of me.
Naga went flying over the branch and landed in the shrubs beyond.
I hung there, helpless, with my hands on one side of the log and my legs on the other, while the thing lumbered over me.
Dayan dangled from their light-whip in the branches of a tree.
They looked back over their shoulder and saw me stretched over the log like a side of meat, but they were too far to come back for me.
The thing would be on me in seconds. I’d freed my light-line, only to drop it in the dirt somewhere behind me.
I struggled to draw breath as the scion stabbed its branches on either side of me, easing its body over me.
Was it going to eat me? Crush me? Neither option seemed particularly appealing.
On the far side of the log, my hands found purchase on a large stick, almost as tall as I was. I still hadn’t managed to draw breath, but I latched onto it and dug my feet into the dirt, heaving the stick up over my head.
It collided with the scion, bouncing off its thick bark.
Stars, what did I think I was doing? Attacking a tree with a stick?
That was like attacking a person with…well, a part of another person.
But I didn’t know what else to do. I rolled over, kicking off the log and stabbing toward the creature’s gaping eyes, using the pointy end of the stick like a spear.
I managed to jab it right beneath one of its cavernous eyes, knocking off a large chunk of bark. The wood—was it wood?—was dark under there, a greenish-black color.
The scion swiped with one of its branches, and I tried to dodge but only got partly out of the way, taking a hit across my left shoulder. A moment later, the tendrils of Dayan’s light-whip hit that branch, wrapping around it and pulling it away, preventing the scion from walloping me again.
I probably should have run, but staring down that creature, I found I didn’t want to.
Maybe it was our loss in the space station, or the fact that my team had failed at our mission.
Maybe it was the multikilometer freefall still filling me with adrenaline, or the pent-up stress of trying to be spies when we were clearly anything but.
It could have been the pressure from my parents to be part of their empire to the stars, or even the awkward mess I’d made of things with Alanik.
Whatever the reason, I stood my ground, raising the branch in front of me like a spear. I couldn’t solve any of my other problems by threatening them with a stick, and maybe this one wouldn’t be solved that way either, but damn it, I was going to try.
I let out a guttural yell. The scion twisted and yanked its branches away from Dayan, who was launched into its branches, landing on a particularly thick one three meters up.
The creature thrashed, trying to throw Dayan off, but they held on with a vengeance, just as they had during the battle in the arena.
This time, I saw something else in the tree’s thrashing branches. Maybe I was projecting, but its body language suggested desperation. Fear.
“Hold still,” I said to Dayan, and I lowered my spear and backed away, moving through the trees so as to no longer threaten it.
The scion thrashed a while longer, then eventually stopped. It rested its branches, the ones Dayan was clinging to still twitching, as if it had a burr stuck there that it had resigned itself to not being able to shake.
Dayan stayed very still, then reached out for the branch of a nearby tree, grabbing it in a firm hold and turning off their light-whip. They slowly transferred their weight to the branch and lifted their body off the scion.
The scion seemed to sense the release and shifted its trunk, its black eyes blinking up at Dayan. The scratch beneath its eye was oozing a green sap, and I was suddenly sorry I’d injured the thing.
The scion swung its branches around and lumbered away, as if it just wanted to be free of us.
“Your form is terrible,” Dayan said, dropping down out of the tree. “But I’d give you full points for spirit.”
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “I should have run, like you said.”
“But you’re not dead,” Dayan said. “So who’s to say I was right?”
My shoulder was badly bruised where the scion had hit me, and my left side was a kind of numb that I knew was only going to get worse as the shock wore off.
But despite all of it, I smiled.
“Why didn’t you run?” Dayan asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I just wanted to face something I stood a chance against.”
Dayan snorted. “And you picked a scion?”
“Not my finest moment.” Still, the thing hadn’t been as aggressive as I’d expected. I wondered how much of their violence was only because they were cornered.
Stars, I knew the feeling.
“Are you worried about the others?” Dayan asked.
“Yeah, of course,” I said. “Gilaf didn’t have a hyperslug. I have no idea if he got out.”
“And he had that alien girl in his ship.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Alanik. She’s a cytonic, but she can’t have hyperjumped them out if she was unconscious.”
“So you’re worried about her, specifically,” Dayan said.
That was…an odd question. “Why do you ask?”
Dayan shrugged. “I thought you might be involved.”
Dayan had been with the flight for all of a day. Was I that transparent?
“What made you think that?” I asked.
“I heard some things.”
“You heard some things?” I asked. “As in, the flight is gossiping about me?”
Dayan shrugged again.
“Come on,” I said. “You can’t casually drop that you’ve heard things and then not elaborate.”
“I think I can,” Dayan said. “Though if you want to elaborate, I’m all ears.”
I groaned, sitting down on a log facing the direction the scion had fled. “You hate aliens,” I said.
“I don’t hate aliens,” Dayan said, settling down beside me, though they kept their light-whip at the ready. “I don’t know anything about aliens. Until I met you all, I assumed they were all trying to exterminate us. And apparently some of them are! But Alanik seems…nice.”
I laughed. “I don’t think a lot of people describe her that way.”
“Okay, well she seems nongenocidal, which is a good start.”
That was a good quality, if a dismally low bar. “Alanik is amazing,” I said. “And yeah, I’m terrified for her.”
Dayan nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“You’re really not going to tell me what the flight was saying about me.”
“No one was saying anything disrespectful,” Dayan said.
That was good, I supposed. Though I didn’t love people talking about my personal life.
“But you guys aren’t dating,” Dayan said.
“No,” I said. “It’s…complicated.”
Dayan laughed. “Good to know that’s a universal constant of the human existence.”
“That’s the thing,” I said. “She isn’t human.
And yeah, our cultures have some things in common, but other things not so much.
And dating is complicated enough without adding in a bunch of cultural misunderstandings, isn’t it?
Plus, people on both our planets would judge us. Maybe even the people closest to us.”
“Aliens are judgmental too, eh?”
“People are judgmental,” I said. “And aliens are people.”
Dayan nodded. They seemed to be adjusting to that idea pretty well, given that they’d been thrust into our world overnight.
“What do you want out of all this?” Dayan asked.
“Dating?” I asked.
“Being here,” Dayan said. “Making contact with my people. Fighting against your Superiority.”
I thought about that. “I don’t know,” I said. “What about you?”
“I want to survive,” Dayan said. “I was always taught that was the most important thing. We had to work hard, fight hard, train hard, make it to Elysium because all of humanity was counting on us to survive.”
“That’s how I was raised too,” I said. “That was the single goal of my people’s existence for a very long time.” We’d sacrificed everything for it—our pilots, our individuality. Maybe even our humanity, at times.
“Do you ever think maybe it’s not enough?
” Dayan asked, looking up at the purple-blue of the sky.
“Do you ever think, if the universe really isn’t full of aliens who want to destroy us, if things are better than we always thought they were, that it might be nice to want something else for a change? ”
The thought of that made my chest ache, and it took me a moment to understand why.
“I’ve been trying to figure that out,” I said.
“What I should want, if I’m allowed to want something other than mere survival.
” This mission had not helped with that.
It was alarming how comfortable it felt to worry only about making it home, bouncing from one terrifying situation to the next.
“I used to think I just wanted to fly, but it’s more than that.
I want to be a part of something important, you know?
I want my life to matter.” And maybe the place I could make the best difference was back in Command with Jorgen, but I hated that idea, and I didn’t know what to do about that dissonance.
Stars, was that why I didn’t want to leave the flight for Command? I was used to the existential terror of knowing I could be wiped out at any moment, so much so that safety felt uncomfortable. Alien, even.
Was I still flying because I didn’t know how to live if I wasn’t constantly fighting to stay alive?
“Again!” Naga said. “Again!”
“Does that mean your strange yellow alien is ready to take us to the rest of your team?” Dayan asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “I think that’s what she’s saying.”
Dayan squinted at Naga. “How do you know it’s a she?”
“I don’t think we do,” I said. “As far as I know, we don’t know how they reproduce. We just assigned them genders the same way we assigned them names. Feels better than saying ‘it,’ I suppose.”
“But not the only option,” Dayan said.
I supposed it wasn’t. “Here,” I said, scooping Naga into the crook of my elbow and reaching a hand out to Dayan. “Naga, take us to Alanik.”
“Are you trying to hold my hand?” Dayan asked, looking at my offered fingers skeptically.
“We have to touch or you’ll get left behind,” I said.
Dayan shrugged. “I guess that gesture does have a lot of meanings.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but Dayan took my hand without explaining, and the forest around us disappeared.