Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“There’s nothing here,” Amy said. She stood in the wind at the top of the ridge, and the wind stole the words out of her mouth and flung them down the empty valley, and nothing at all answered back.
Valkesh was a sparsely inhabited planet with a small, mostly native population, and a peaceful air.
They’d found the northern trading routes Krebb had mentioned, leading from one small settlement to another, and landed just to the north of them in a bowl of grey rock between two mountain ranges.
They’d left the little cargo vessel crouched between them like a beetle in the vast stony bareness, and then they’d walked north.
Away from the few towns marked on the charts and towards the interior where Krebb’s overheard words had pointed and where, according to every instrument they had, no living thing had any business being.
Half a day of walking. And this. The ruins they’d seen in the images.
She pulled her borrowed jacket tighter. The air was thin and cold and smelled of dust and stone and something faintly mineral, like a knife blade held to the tongue.
Below them, the valley floor showed the bones of what had once been more than emptiness—low walls, tumbled and half-buried, laid out in the ghost of a pattern too regular to be natural.
A doorway that led nowhere, standing alone.
The stub of what might have been a tower.
And over all of it, blown up against the walls in soft grey drifts, the fine bitter dust that swallowed footprints as fast as you could make them.
“People lived here,” she said.
“Yes.” Brannik stood beside her, huge and still, his dark hair whipping across his face. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking down at the ruins with those metallic silver eyes narrowed to slits, and something in the set of his enormous shoulders made her chest hurt. “Lived. Past tense.”
They went down.
Closer, the emptiness told its story more plainly, and it was a sad one.
This hadn’t been a place destroyed—there were no scorch marks or shattered walls, none of the ugly signatures of violence she had learned to read after four years among violent people.
It had been a place left. Abandoned, deliberately and without hurry.
She crouched by a low doorway and found the room beyond it swept nearly bare.
But she found a broken cup wedged in a corner, its glaze a soft blue that had once been beautiful.
A shelf carved into the living rock showed the pale ghosts of objects that had stood on it for a long time and then been taken away.
Words were scratched into the lintel in a flowing script she couldn’t read, worn almost to nothing by the dust and the years.
“Can you read it?” she asked.
He crouched quietly beside her and traced the script with one clawed finger, not quite touching it. For a long moment he didn’t speak, and when he did his voice had gone rough.
“No,” he said. “But I’m sure it’s Aurelian. My mother used to trace the letters for me when I was small.” His finger hovered over the worn characters. “I never learned to read them. She was gone before she taught me.”
She didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t be smaller than the moment. She reached over instead and laid her hand on his forearm, on the warm bronze skin covering all that terrible strength, and let it rest there.
They searched the whole dead settlement as the pale sun crawled across a hard bright sky.
Room by room, wall by wall. And it was all the same.
The Aurelians who had lived here, his people, his mother’s people, the ghosts he’d chased across the galaxy since he was a boy, had gathered up their lives and their books and their pale blue cups and walked away, and left nothing behind but dust and worn stone and doorways that led nowhere.
By the time they reached the far end of the ruins, she could see the hope leaving him like heat leaving a body.
He didn’t say anything. He wouldn’t. But she’d learned to read him the way she’d once learned to read her captors’ moods, except that reading Brannik wasn’t about survival but about love, and she felt every degree of that cold as if it were her own.
He stopped at the last wall, one that looked like a gate and led to nothing, and set one huge hand flat against the cold stone. He bowed his head.
“Gone,” he said. Just that.
“Brannik—”
“They were here. And they’re gone. Twenty-five years I’ve—” His jaw worked, the tendons standing out in his neck. “It’s another empty road. It’s always another empty road.”
Her heart ached for him. She stepped into him and wrapped both arms as far around his waist as they’d reach, pressing her face to his side. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I know how much—”
The wall lit up under his hand.
She felt it before she saw it, a low hum that came up through the stone in a note so deep it was more pressure than sound.
Then light blossomed out from beneath Brannik’s palm in fine silver-white lines, running across the wall and up over the tumbled stones and down into the ground, a hidden network of them waking all at once like frost spreading backward, and every line of it pulsed in time with something.
Her pulse jumped when she realized that it was pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
“Brannik.” She grabbed his arm. “Don’t move. Just look. Look.”
He was already looking. He’d gone utterly rigid, his silver eyes wide, the light of the waking wall shining off them so that for a moment they seemed lit from within.
The lines raced away from his hand and gathered, and where they gathered they drew shapes in the air, shapes that formed a map rather than words.
She understood that much at once. A map, hanging in silver light in the thin cold air, and one bright thread on it ran away from where they stood, and deeper into the mountains, towards a mark she didn’t recognize but that made her breath stop anyway because of the way it glowed.
“It reacted to you,” she said, her voice shaking. “The wall. It reacted to your blood. Just like Thressk wanted.”
“A marker.” His voice was barely a voice at all.
He lifted his hand a fraction and the lines dimmed.
When he pressed it back, they surged, following his pulse.
“It knows who I am. They didn’t leave nothing.
” He turned to her, and his hard, battered warrior’s face suddenly looked young and raw and terribly hopeful.
“They left a road. They left it for their own people. For someone like—” He stopped, as if he didn’t dare finish it.
“For someone like you,” she said for him. “Your mother could wake the old machines. And you can too.”
The map hung between them in the cold, and the bright thread ran up into the mountains, and she understood, with a slow rolling certainty, that they might actually have found the thing he’d spent his whole life chasing.
Not an ending—not yet—but the first real thread that hadn’t frayed to nothing in his hands.
They were standing at the mouth of the road that might, at the end of it, hold his mother, or his mother’s people, or the answer to the question the abandoned boy in him had been asking for twenty-five years.
Why did you leave?
She should have been nothing but glad. She was glad—her whole chest ached with how glad she was for him, watching that terrible hope break open across his face—but under the gladness, a different thought uncoiled, small and cold and shameful.
If he actually finds them… If he finds his mother’s people, a whole world of them, others like him, somewhere he finally belongs, will he still choose me?
She’d been a body in a cell he’d wanted to protect.
A companion on an empty ship in an empty sky.
But out here, at the mouth of this glowing road, she was sharply aware of how small she was, and how human, and how easily a male who’d been alone his whole life might find, at the end of his long search, a place that didn’t have room in it for a stray Earth woman who couldn’t even read the writing on the walls.
She felt herself start to do the old thing.
She felt the instinct, familiar as her own pulse, to pull back before she could be pulled away from.
To make herself unobtrusive, unwanted, unhurt, and to slip away from the disappointment before it arrived.
Four years of survival had carved that groove so deep she’d half-slid down it before she even noticed.
She caught herself.
No. She thought of Brannik’s voice in the dark of the ship saying you get to make choices too. She thought of what it would cost him if, in the single most hopeful moment of his life, the woman standing beside him quietly stepped backwards into the shadows and let him think she didn’t care.
She wouldn’t do that to him. She wouldn’t do it to herself. If she lost him to a whole hidden world of his own people, then she would lose him honestly, standing in the light where he could see her, and not by sabotaging the thing he’d bled his whole life for because she was afraid.
So she looked up at that glowing thread running away into the mountains, and she made her voice steady, and she smiled at him, and she meant it.
“Well,” she said. “What are we standing around for? We’ve got a road to walk.”
Brannik stared at her. Something moved behind his eyes. She couldn’t quite read it, but it warmed her all the way down. He reached out and cupped the side of her face in one enormous hand, as gentle as breath.
“You,” he said, “are not what I expected to find on this road.”
“Better or worse?”
He didn’t answer with words. He never did, when the words mattered most. Instead he bent and kissed her, there in the light of his mother’s people’s map, slow and thorough and aching, and she felt in it everything he couldn’t say, and she let herself believe it, at least for now.