Chapter 29 #2
“Extraterrestrial,” she says. “You mean . . . an alien brought it here?”
Parin snorts, and tries to cover it by coughing.
“Are you skeptics?” Dr. Canterbury says. “A shame. I thought you were here for the truth.”
“Well if I was looking for the truth, I wouldn’t already know it, would I?” she says. “So why don’t you tell me your theory? I promise my friend will be less . . . reactive.”
She gives Parin a look. He shows her his palms in surrender.
“You have heard, of course, about the extraterrestrial theory of the Empty Time,” Dr. Canterbury says.
“Um . . . no.”
“Well, most scholars agree that the Empty Time resulted from a collection of global catastrophes—-multiple epidemics and environmental disasters that dramatically reduced the human population on this planet, followed by a devastating attack on all digital records, which resulted in almost no information being stored from that time period,” Dr. Canterbury says, and that’s about what Hela learned in school, so she nods.
“Good. Where scholars don’t agree is in what exactly happened during the Empty Time that led to the dominance of the Talus family.
Among the most puzzling mysteries: their language.
The language bears no resemblance to any other language on this planet, so there’s a theory that it’s extraterrestrial in origin—-carried here by an alien race. ”
“So you think the Talusar are descended from aliens?” Parin says. “Explains some of the fashion choices.”
Hela can’t bring herself to laugh at the joke. She’s supposed to find this ridiculous, maybe. But given that she’s just used a goddamn plant to communicate with a woman nowhere near her—-in Talusar, no less—-she can’t find the humor in it.
“And then there’s the launch,” Dr. Canterbury adds. “I have footage of it.”
“Launch?” she asks weakly. “Don’t you mean landing?”
“I wasn’t present for the landing, though evidence of it is scattered across this table,” he says, gesturing to the scraps in the middle of the room. “They’re not comprised of Earth materials. Your friend is welcome to examine them while I show you the footage, if you like.”
Hela follows him through a narrow doorway framed with tinsel to a desk that takes up most of a little room.
A grid of screens confronts her, lighting up all at once when he taps the keyboard.
This kind of personal--use technology isn’t legal in Cedre, so he must have pieced it together from old salvage on his own.
She has no idea how all of it works, but after glancing back at her to make sure she’s paying attention, he makes a video play on one of the screens.
“This is from deep in the desert, far outside of Losan,” he says. “Between here and Valla. A little over twenty years ago.”
The video was taken in broad daylight, so she can see the beige landscape surrounding it, the flat, dry ground that’s so familiar in the Losani desert.
Glinting in the middle of the screen is a gilded ship.
The clarity isn’t spectacular, but she can tell the shape of the ship is nothing like a Cedre craft—-it’s jagged and almost menacing--looking, not sleek like the Cedre military’s Sparrows.
She frowns. Is it a secret project of the Talusar?
She wishes she brought an Eye to record this.
As she watches, a brilliant light surrounds the gilded ship, so bright it whites out the footage for a moment.
And then in an instant, the ship is gone, the only sign of its presence the blackened ground it left behind.
She stares at that scorched earth, baffled.
She’s never seen a Cedre ship leave that kind of mark when it launches, not even the large ones.
“You see?” Dr. Canterbury says.
“I see,” Hela says. “My question is . . . how do you know it’s not built by the Talusar, or a secret Cedre military project? Or even a development from one of the raiders—-”
“Well, that was the first thing I considered,” he says.
“But that was before I found the scraps—-they appear to be from some kind of launching apparatus, so they broke apart somewhere above Earth and scattered everywhere. And every analysis I attempted of their materials yielded strange results. Types of metal that don’t exist, things like that. ”
“Incorrigible?” she calls out.
“This material looks weird as hell,” he replies.
Hela chews on her lip. The launch footage is frozen on the bare, black ground where the ship used to be.
“Why were you out there?” she asks.
“Weeks earlier, I had met . . . a stranger in distress,” he says.
“A Talusar man, or so I assumed. He saw my tool belt and asked me to help him build something. I worked for the military, then, and decided it was better to play along than to communicate any suspicions to him. So I helped, and I managed to get a few recordings as proof. But when I took them to my commanding officer . . .” He scowls.
“He mocked me. Close--minded boors, the lot of them . . .”
“You know, they really are,” Hela says. “Do you mind if I replay part of it?”
The doctor opens his mouth to object, but Hela is already bent over the keyboard, moving the progress bar back so she can watch the launch again. It happens in only an instant, like it disappeared into thin air rather than pulling away from the ground.
She notices, then, that the progress bar has more time left on it than she thought. She advances the footage, and that’s when she sees a woman standing near a rock formation, not far from where Dr. Canterbury is recording.
“Who’s she?” Hela says, pointing.
Dr. Canterbury clears his throat. “I encountered her at the launch site. I assume that she, like me, was drawn by some kind of signal and went to investigate—-”
Hela frowns. The woman is tall, like Hela herself, with dark hair.
“Did you speak to her?” she says.
“I may have.”
Hela raises her eyebrows at the doctor.
“I don’t mean her any harm,” Hela says. “I’d just like to ask her a few questions.”
“I don’t think you’ll be able to get in touch with her anyway.”
“Because she’s Talusar?”
Dr. Canterbury looks wary, guarded. “I didn’t know she was Talusar at the time.”
“I’m not . . . accusing you.” Hela rolls her eyes. “Do I look like a Peacekeeper? I don’t care if you get a beer with her every Wednesday.”
Dr. Canterbury sighs. He adjusts the bandana holding his hair back.
“I don’t see her anymore,” he says, defensive. “I knew her before it all happened—-”
“Before what happened?”
“Before the attack on the Getty!” Dr. Canterbury rubs the back of his neck. “I didn’t know she would turn out to be—-”
“Oh.” Hela looks at the woman in the video, standing by the rocks with her head tilted up to the sky. “Oh. She’s Kesia Forint, isn’t she?”
She can’t help it—-she laughs. And then she stops . . . and laughs again.
She’s outside in the desert sun, dust clouds rising up around her boots, when she realizes:
She can’t leave the plant there.
“Parin.”
“Yep,” he replies.
Together they turn around and walk right back into Dr. Canterbury’s house, right through the first room with its grow lights and orbs and hot--wax lamps, and into the second room where the plant sits on the table amid all the metal scraps.
Dr. Canterbury is at his wall of screens until he hears them come in.
“Did you forget something?” he says.
“I did, actually. Parin?”
Parin picks up the plant from the table as Hela tugs her spear free from its holster and points it at the doctor.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “But I can’t let you hurt it.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Dr. Canterbury says, and he reaches under his desk to take out . . . a gun.
For just a moment Hela stares at it, marveling.
Guns haven’t been in regular use for a long time, since they’re ineffective against Talusar armor.
In Cedre’s more lawless years, they were popular among the criminal element for use against fellow Cedrae, but Peacekeepers cracked down on that harder than anyone likes to admit, and now . . . she’s never seen one in person.
But she’s familiar with the concept.
She knows she should put her hands up and give him anything he wants. That’s what you’re supposed to do when someone points a gun at you; even Hela knows that. But instead she follows her instincts.
“Run!” she screams at Parin, and she throws her spear at Dr. Canterbury.
She doesn’t have good aim. The spear flies only a foot before it stabs down into the doctor’s boot. The gun goes off, so loud it sounds like the world is coming apart, and Hela is running, her arm over Parin’s shoulders to push his head down.
Above her, a light bulb shatters and the bits of glass prickle in her hair, but she keeps running. She and Parin sprint across the junkyard, and the gun fires a second time as Hela wrenches open the driver’s side door and heaves her body inside.
The windshield of the Hummingbird shatters, but she’s already powering the ship on.
In the passenger seat, Parin is hunched over the plant, protecting his head.
Hela looks back for just long enough to see Dr. Canterbury with his gun in the air and a trail of bloody footprints behind him, and then she’s launching, and flying as fast as she can in the direction of Twentynine.
“You all right?” she shouts at Parin, over the howl of the wind through the broken windshield.
“Just exciting enough!” he calls back.