The Wadi Thooo was a blur of falling claws and open jaw. Anlyn braced herself; she pulled the lance between her and the Thooo. She felt a jolt of electricity as the Wadi screamed, its open throat yelling right by her ear.
But the scream was one full of rage and fear—a wail of the dying.
Anlyn fell to the rock, exhausted and unable to hold the lance.
Something heavy collapsed on top of her, moving and groaning. She pushed herself away and scrambled deeper into the shade. When she looked back, eyes wide, fear still gripping her throat, she saw what she had done: She saw the Wadi lance had pierced the wild animal’s stomach and had erupted out its back. One last wicked groan, and then its twitching arms fell still. The Wadi was dead.
Anlyn Hooo had killed it.
••••
When Gil finally reached her, Anlyn was passed out, her head resting on Coril’s back. She had fallen asleep in the shade, her body too weary to move, the last of her adrenaline scurrying away.
Gil woke her and held his thermos to her lips. He was panting heavily from his long run around the wedge-shaped wall, his breathing dry and labored. Anlyn took deep gulps from his thermos, then pushed his hands away so she could breathe. She watched him survey the messy scene scattered around her.
When his eyes fell back to hers, the two of them sat in silence, looking at each other, no words large enough to fill the mood. Gil gave her more water, which Anlyn accepted eagerly. She held his hand while she drank, then he helped her sit up.
“What now?” Gil whispered. He worked the cap back on the thermos, his hands shaking and a paler shade of blue.
Anlyn looked back at Coril, the youth and vitality of her small frame incongruent with its stillness. All she knew was that she needed to get her cousin home, but there was no way she could do it alone. She looked to the Wadi, which was just as motionless as her Cousin, the lance still shoved through its body. From tip to tail, it was almost two paces long. Big, but not so big she couldn’t carry it.
“What do we do?” Gil croaked.
Anlyn turned to him. “We do each other a favor,” she said sadly.
25 · Darrin
Anlyn’s homeworld of Drenard had forever been shaped by its cycles, by the slow orbit of its two great stars swirling around each other like two beads on a circle. Known as the Horis, these twin suns dominated her planet’s environment, its weather, even its culture. They burned one half of the planet and left the other to freeze. They would slowly wobble across lands out on the border of the planet’s habitable halo, parts that burned at times and cooled during others. There, the rocks cracked open and the blowing sand found wounds in which to sift. It was these unpredictable parts that Drenards looked upon with skepticism and worry, more perhaps than the frigid night and burning day.
Those changes occurred over a Hori cycle, the time it took for all things to come back around to where they had started. It was a cycle of burning followed by a cycle of cooling. Some temperate average may have been held over time but rarely in any one moment. And so Anlyn’s burning years, her great and wasted adolescence, ended how they began: With two ships matching move for move, one trying in vain to latch on to the other.
Only this time, Anlyn was flying expertly amid the rubble of Darrin, not above her home world of Drenard. And unlike her mad run from Bodi—her desperate escape from her father’s death and her forced marriage—this time Anlyn was the hunter rather than the hunted.
She closed in on the old GC-290 ahead of her, leaving Albert’s many competitors behind. It had become a familiar sight: Her ship chasing down the customer of Albert’s choice while the rest of the pack scavenged for leftovers. Anlyn went into each pursuit with a detached calm. Her body had shriveled on a Wadi’s diet of water and nothing else, leaving her fractured and tormented mind to wither. She had her fear, her sensitivity to pain, and her fine war skills etched back to razor sharpness—but only shadows and ashes of her true former self. The long burning had charred her down to her blackest essence.
She was halfway to the GC-290, only a few other pilots keeping up, when she realized she actually needed to concentrate. The pilot of the 290 had nearly shaken her by setting up a false pattern. He had teased to port before juking starboard, the sort of habitual twitch even expert pilots had a difficult time avoiding because they were normally unaware of their own tells. After a few false habits like this, the pilot did the opposite, which sent two of Anlyn’s companions into one another and nearly made her lose ground.
The skilled fighter in her awoke, coming out of its autopilot daze. It had been many years, going back to the civil war, since she had faced a worthy adversary. Anlyn pressed in further, ignoring the complaints and grunts from Albert in the nav seat as excess Gs wracked his body.
The 290 pilot changed tactics again. He was employing a vast array of strategies in rapid sequence. There was skill in the maneuvers, but a hint of desperation as well. He wasn’t trying anything long enough to see if it would work, preferring instead to toss all his tools out into space, hoping one would fit and secure his escape.
Anlyn knew the strategy was foolish; regardless, she couldn’t help but admire the shape and precision of each tool. This pilot wasn’t playing around if he was trying to make sure he attracted the Darrin salesman with the best gear. Anlyn pushed hers and Albert’s top-of-the-line grav suits to their limits as she pulled in tight to the 290. She darted around it, mere paces away, doing what Bodi had once tried so many sleeps ago. She readied the airlock to grab on.
When they finally collided, and Lady Liberty’s hull latched on to a ship identified as “Parsona,” Anlyn felt the tension of piloting drain from her limbs. Her job was over and Albert’s about to begin. It had been an unusual skirmish, a challenge to awaken something within her, some worm of her former self wiggling deep beneath the ashy layers. She didn’t feel quite alive, but she sensed the stirrings of something that could be once more. At the very least, she felt some of the stiff tension exiting her body, perhaps leaving room for an old vitality to return.
What Anlyn didn’t know—what she couldn’t know at the time—was that her feelings of release were far more than mere tension leaving her body. The moment she locked with this other ship signaled the momentous end of one great cycle for Anlyn Hooo.
And the silent, inauspicious beginnings of another.
•• Drenard ••
Anlyn and Gil stopped half a thousand paces from the Wadi shelter. Anlyn lowered the Wadi she had been carrying, and Gil did the same with Coril. There was no way she could’ve carried her cousin so far; she wasn’t even sure she could make what few paces were left.
Gil bent over, exhausted, and rested his hands on his knees. He coughed several times into his fist, wheezing for breath. “Are you sure about this?” he asked, his voice nearly lost on the wind.
Anlyn nodded. She was sure.
She stepped in front of Coril’s still form and crouched low. Gil lifted Coril and rested her on Anlyn’s shoulders. The extra weight on her open wounds—the deep claw gashes in her back—made each of them sing out, sending a chorus of cold pain down through her arms. Anlyn ignored it. She held her cousin’s wrists in one hand and wrapped her other arm behind her bent knees. Shifting the weight more up her neck, where so much seemed to already weigh on her heart, Anlyn tensed up wiry muscles already weak from so much ordeal—and gradually, haltingly, stood.
“You’ve got her?”
Anlyn didn’t waste her energy nodding. She took her first lumbering step forward. As she fell into a numb, silent routine of step after step, Gil hurried up beside her, the dead Wadi slung easily over his shoulder.
They were a hundred paces away—close enough that Anlyn could count down the end of her heartbreaking, trying ordeal—when her aunt and several other Rite counselors burst through the door of the shelter. They ran out, the worry visible on their faces even from so far away. When they got closer, that worry morphed into fright and disbelief. Coril’s closest uncle clasped his hands over his face, then ran up to Anlyn and seemed about to remove her burden.
Something in Anlyn’s guise, however, held him back. Instead of moving to help, the counselors formed a rough circle, a bubble respecting the Rite. Anlyn trudged the last dozen paces as moans and wails from her elders joined those from the distant canyons. A door was held open, which she stumbled through. She collapsed to her knees on the worn carpet and twisted to the side to lower her cousin flat. The adults went to Coril immediately, even though there was nothing they could do for her. Gil fell to the carpet beside Anlyn and sprawled out, his chest heaving from the long hike with so heavy a burden.
When Anlyn looked up, her aunt Ralei was standing before her. Tears streaked down the woman’s face, flowing around an expression of shock, or shame, or something of both. When their eyes met, Anlyn knew the ruse of Gil’s Rite would not last. The new hardness she felt inside her was reflected in the way her aunt stood before her, her adult carriage tense with respect. As the Counselors removed the Wadi from Gil’s shoulder, they too looked from it to Anlyn, then to the drying, heat-scabbed wounds across her back, exposed beneath her shredded suit.
The room stood silent, stuffed with sorrow and thick with somber respect. It pressed in on Anlyn, as stifling as the canyon heat. It filled her lungs, stung her eyes, burned her wounds with the stitch of healing.
The severity and importance of the moment—the loss of her cousin’s life mixed with the awesome power of her own survival—concocted a rapturous joy smothering under a blanket of regret. Anlyn was too happy to cry, too sad to smile, too guilty to exult. She felt near to bursting with all the conflicting emotions.
And in that moment, it suddenly occurred to Anlyn that whatever happened next, whatever followed for her, it wouldn’t be anything like all that had come before.
She was sure of it.
Part XXI - The Prophecy
“Things don’t come true. They are true, or they aren’t.”
~The Bern Seer~
26 · Lok · The Present
Mere hours after Molly dealt with Saunders’s reaction to Anlyn, she found herself faced with an even more daunting proposition: Now she had to introduce her friend to an entire crowd, a crowd that had been raised and taught to loathe her kind.
She cupped her hands around her face and leaned against the cargo bay’s porthole. Beyond, in the dim glow of Parsona’s landing lights, she could see the surviving Navy crewmen and the remaining Callites seated in rows, listening to Admiral Saunders speak.
“I’m nervous,” Anlyn said beside her.
Molly turned to see her friend’s face pressed up against the adjacent porthole, looking out.
“It’s not too late to back out,” Molly said. “You don’t have to lead this mission if you don’t want. I could go, and you could take Parsona to the Carrier for the missiles. You’d be hidden there—”
Anlyn shook her head but continued to gaze out through the carboglass. “I’m not nervous about that,” she said. “Going back to Darrin, flying in combat again . . . I think I can handle those things—”
“Are you nervous about facing them?” Molly pressed a finger to the glass.
Anlyn turned away from the view outside. “Let’s put it this way: If you didn’t have all the guns stored away in here, I don’t think I’d feel safe going out there.”
“They’ll be fine. The Admiral is breaking the news to them gradually, so there won’t be the same degree of shock.” Molly looked back out the porthole. “I hope,” she added quietly to herself.
Saunders looked like he was just warming up, his arm-waving reminding Molly of her Academy days and all his energetic debriefings after simulator missions. Like all his former cadets in the audience, she could tell when he was nearing his final point by how high his hands got in the air. They fluttered like featherless, wounded birds flapping for altitude. The poor things hadn’t made it past his shoulders yet, so she went to see how Ryke’s engineering lesson was going.
Molly joined Edison in the aft hallway and peered into the engine room.
Two of the new arrivals from the Underground—warped down from another of the captured Bern ships just hours earlier—were also in the hall. One was a Callite, an old recruit from Lok and a friend of Dr. Ryke’s. The other was a race Molly had never seen before, a smaller version of the Bel-Tra, thin and hairless. The two of them quietly chatted together, paying little attention to the lesson going on inside the engine room. Molly hoped their distracted affect meant they already knew what they were doing.
She patted Edison’s arm, and he moved aside enough for her to peek in. Ryke stood in front of Parsona’s hyperdrive. He had the control panel off, wires hanging everywhere. A large electrical schematic was taped to the side of the open drive, and Ryke waved a soldering iron in the air as he spoke. Molly listened in for a minute; she watched several of the gathered nod their heads as they absorbed the step by step routine. Counting Edison, they had a total of seven engineers who would soon know how to make alterations to hyperdrives, giving them the potential to jump from any one place to another while ignoring gravity and all obstructions between.
The only other piece they needed to make it work was Ryke’s secret nav program. It was at that point in his earlier conversation with Molly that she had balked. Her preference had been to wave off the entire mission, taking their chances with the long way back, rather than risk trusting anyone with such powerful knowledge. But Ryke had just grown more excited, explaining the alterations he could make to the code to create an absolute failsafe.
Each drive they altered, he explained, would be good for a single jump. Four of the tap wires soldered by the engineers would have nothing to do with making the modification work. They would fire when the hyperdrive engaged, but they would be connected to the control board that housed Ryke’s program. The ship would make its solitary jump from Darrin back to Lok, but the business end of the hyperdrive would jump somewhere else entirely.