Chapter 8
Theren didn’t touch dirt until he was six years old. His first--year class went on a day trip to the garden district of Cedre Station, and it seemed like a long journey, to a child. They had to take the high--speed tram and everything.
In the plant nursery, a horticulturist explained the basics of how plants grew and what being in orbit did to them.
Then she laid out trays of seedlings for them to plant themselves.
They were vegetables. Tomatoes and cucumbers and bell peppers—-it was hard to believe they started their lives as little sprays of green.
Theren chose one of the bell peppers, but he couldn’t get a good grip on his trowel, so he dug a hole with his fingers instead, and nestled the plant in its place, and squeezed the moist earth between his knuckles before piling it around the roots of the pepper plant to keep it stable.
On the way home, he looked at his hands and saw that despite washing them, there was still black earth under his fingernails.
He didn’t think he would ever become more acquainted with dirt than that, his mother standing with him at the kitchen sink and scraping it out from under his nails with a little brush.
But then a Talusar soldier is chasing him into the woods, knocking him down, and pinning him face down in the dirt, so he tastes dirt on his tongue.
It fills his nose with the smell of growing and rotting.
It’s only then that he realizes: he ran. Instead of fulfilling his oath, instead of performing his duty, he ran. And the Hope of Cedre might be dead because of it.
The soldier brings him, still bleeding from the nose, to a small unit of Talusar soldiers who are holding the other Knights captive.
Fenn and Lisia, Furik and Maeve, each of them scraped and battered to varying degrees.
None of them managed to escape. This, he thinks, is the cost of not training us properly.
Maeve and Furik embrace him, relieved to find him alive, but Fenn stares right through him, like he’s made of glass, made of water.
One of the soldiers takes out a knife and sterilizes it with fire.
Then two of the others force Furik to kneel.
Maeve starts screaming, and Lisia sobs, and Fenn throws himself at the nearest soldier, only to be put in a chokehold.
But Theren stands still. He doesn’t think the Talusar dragged them away from the Getty just to execute them. Why would they bother?
“Your tracking devices need to be removed!” one of the soldiers finally shouts—-in English—-over the chaos.
After that, there’s calm. One by one, each of the Knights kneels as the soldiers peel their clothes away from their shoulders and dig the knife into flesh to root out the devices buried there.
Each of them screams and thrashes and bleeds.
It’s only when Theren sees one of the soldiers put all the tracking devices in a bag and mount her horse to ride away that it really hits him: now there’s no way for anyone in Cedre to find them.
And he doubts they’ll put too much effort into saving the people they only gave citizenship to begrudgingly.
The Knights are on their own.
Then the Talusar take them to a clearing where horses wait for them.
When Theren first gets on the animal’s back, at the insistence of one of the soldiers, he’s terrified.
It’s bigger than he expected, a snorting, powerful creature of solid muscle.
He isn’t ready for how forcefully it bounces when it moves, how he has to clench his legs and shift his weight to stay on.
They put Maeve on the same horse, so the two of them are pressed together more intimately than either of them wants, smelling each other’s sweat.
They ride along trails that only the Talusar seemed to be able to discern.
By the end of the first day, there’s dirt everywhere—-in his ears, in the corners of his eyes, in the rims of his nostrils, in the cracks of his lips.
Dirt chafes skin already raw and red from the sun, though they only travel for a few hours in the day.
His skin is unused to unfiltered sunlight.
In all of the Cedrae’s romantic talk of home, they never mention how many ways this planet can hurt you.
But even the most abnormal things, the most terrifying things, become normal after some time.
By the second day, it doesn’t matter how bad either of them smells, it doesn’t trouble him when the horse breaks into a gallop, and he doesn’t notice the constant burn of thirst in the back of his throat.
He doesn’t struggle to sleep when the sun is high.
They rotate through the horses, to give them breaks, and he gets used to the gentle ones and the touchy ones alike.
He gets used to the guilt burning in his chest, a reminder of how he failed. He gets used to everything.
He stops looking for Cedrae rescue ships on the third day.
The soldiers offer no explanation for where they’re going or why they’re going there—-or why none of the Knights are dead yet.
They don’t know if any of their parents survived the Getty attack or not.
Theren keeps listening to the low conversations the soldiers have in Talusar, but they don’t speak much, not even to each other.
Instead, they follow the orders of the woman at the front of the pack, their obvious leader.
He knows what the emperor looks like, and even his niece, Ileth Vidar, thanks to the news, but all other Talusar leaders he only knows by name and by rumor.
This woman is young for the position of authority she holds, which means there has to be something about her, some skill or heritage he doesn’t understand.
She’s taller than him, and the plates in her febra armor are made to look like feathers.
Her hair is the color of flax, a rare shade, and she never looks at any of them. Her eyes are always on the horizon.
Some Cedrae want to search for another planet to call home, one free from Fever.
That’s what the Sundial—-the ship that hovers beside Cedre Station like a tiny moon—-is for: an exploratory mission in pursuit of the extrasolar visitors that once invited Earth to participate in a greater interstellar order.
That was before life on Earth almost ended.
Theren had always understood the desire to seek refuge on another planet.
He was never interested in reclaiming Earth from the Talusar, as some Cedrae insist on attempting instead of sending the Sundial on its mission.
But he understands the longing for Earth better now.
Now that he’s walking on the planet’s surface.
Earth is different than he imagined. In moments when he can set his terror and remorse aside, he marvels at it.
The mountains surround them from all sides, and in the dark, there are no glimpses of the horizon, no beautiful vistas, just the impression of dark, massive shapes against a dark sky.
But then they reach a valley, and the sky opens up in every direction, and the moon can’t crowd out the light of the stars.
Cedre Station, too, glows above them, the shape of a barrel or a cork, reflecting the light of the sun.
The Sundial—-so small it’s almost nonexistent next to Cedre Station—-hovers beside it like a promise that Theren will never get to keep.
He saw so clearly the size of Earth on his descent, but the only way to understand how large the planet is is to trip tiredly across it. To ache from head to toe from the sheer force of its gravity.
Every so often, when they stop to give the horses water, and everything is still, he can hear the silence of the desert.
The wind, the call of a bird, and nothing else.
There were no silent places on Cedre Station, always humming with electricity and air flowing through the vents and the distant clanging of one thing or another.
They ride through stretches of strange trees, oddly human in shape, with sharp protrusions and scaly trunks.
Furik cuts his hand trying to touch one when they stop for water, and the Talusar soldiers sneer at him when he asks for a bandage.
Lisia ties a handkerchief around his palm to stanch the bleeding.
Only one of them tries to escape: Fenn, at the end of the second day.
That’s the day a Cedrae ship passes close enough for them to hear its hum.
When he sees it, Fenn digs in his heels as hard as he can, sending the horse into a canter with him clinging to its back.
One of the soldiers swears and gets on her own horse, which is faster than Fenn’s, even with the head start.
She brings him back within five minutes, forces him to his knees on the hard ground, and whips him with the reins until he screams for mercy.
Maeve begs in four languages for her to stop, none of them Talusar. Theren can’t move, can’t look away.
The leader looks on, her expression unchanging. She’s the one who gives the order to stop, eventually, just holding up a hand and then turning back toward the horizon.
Theren knows there’s no point in escaping.
The Cedrae won’t find them, have probably stopped looking.
They can’t outrun the Talusar, either. And even if they somehow manage to, they’ll be alone in the desert with no water and no food and no survival skills.
This place is as good as a prison for people like them.
On the fourth day, Maeve props her chin on Theren’s shoulder and speaks against his ear.
“See that?”
At first, he thinks she’s talking about a rock formation up ahead.
The rolling hills around Losan, with their dry brush and occasional tree, have turned sharp and bare, and the shapes they make look inorganic and strange to him.
But then the dark mass in the distance catches moonlight, and he sees that it’s metal.
It’s two Sparrows, parked side by side in the desert.