Starbreak (15 page)

Vadix’s lips lifted, showing a thin line of teeth.

“No. You are not. We are only trying to understand you. Your nature. The Ahadizhi, they have not believed that animals are capable of language, of logical thought.”

“No?” I asked. “But they’ve heard us. They should know by now that we’re not just animals.”

“Does the hunter believe that sounds a beast makes constitute more than growls and grunts? Of course not. But perhaps if we listened, we would find the beast believed differently.”

“You’re a philosopher?”

“No. I study the meaning behind words. Foreign words—foreign languages. Yours, for instance.”

“Translator,” I said, angling my chin up. “Linguist. That’s what Hannah said.”

Vadix nodded. “I study for many years in Aisak Ait. South of here, where the summer is longer. I learn to listen. But—”

He reached a long finger up, touching his earslit. I watched him, wondering at the strange precision of the gesture.

“But what?” I asked.

“I understand more than I should. In the days after the first probe landed in Raza Ait, I was called to translate the glyphs atop it. It was easy, too easy. And then your shuttle crew arrived. I was summoned too. The words that spill from my lips? Too swift. I should not be able to speak to you so simply now.”

I fell silent. The dreams—it had to be the dreams. They’d scattered knowledge through my mind too, images I should have never seen, words I shouldn’t have understood. But here we were.

“Vadix—” I began, but, waving a three-fingered hand through the air, he cut me off.

“No matter. The senate has grown weary of these experiments. You will not find yourself this ‘lab rat’ soon. They have asked me to call your ship’s botanist to the surface. She will speak to us, negotiate your people’s place on our world, if they might have any.”

“Wait,” I said. My tongue felt suddenly heavy. “What?”

“Your ship’s botanist. I have spoken to her myself, a ‘Mara Stone.’ She speaks to plants, does she not?”

I brought my hands up over my mouth, smothering my shock. “Mara Stone?” I asked, through a web of fingers. “Vadix, she’s no diplomat.”

“She is not?” He stood with his broad shoulders squared, his wide mouth firm. I saw then that he was stubborn—proud. He was the type of boy who didn’t like to be told he was wrong.

“No,” I said carefully. “She
studies
plants. Where we’re from, plants don’t talk.”

A pause, a long one. Hurt and confusion bruised his full mouth. “No?”

“No. Mara Stone is my teacher, and she—well, she’s not even very good at talking to
people
.”

“She is a scholar, then? A scientist? Surely it will be fine.”

I thought of my haughty little teacher, the diminutive woman
with the crooked nose who liked to taunt and tease. And I cringed at the memory. But before I could warn Vadix, the door behind him shivered open, revealing a stern-faced Xollu.

“Sale xaullek esedh, dora zhiosouek.”

“Ehed sale!”
he shouted back.
“Vaulix aum xaullek razi.”

The door closed. He turned back to me.

“What did she say?” I asked

“She said that the sproutling—a girl, I believe you call it? Her scans were quite unusual. High concentrations of phytodistress receptors. It is quite unusual, unlike anything they have seen in man.”

“Phytodistress receptors? Like plants use to communicate damage?”

The way his mouth opened was almost like a smile. It did something to me, for all that his lips were too wide and too full of far too many teeth. My belly and rib cage swelled with warmth. Yet he began to turn toward the door. “Yes. You understand. I should go translate for them before—”

“Wait!”

I reached out, setting my hand on his slender wrist. We both flinched at the spark that flew between us, but this time neither of us drew away.

“Vadix,” I said, my voice low. Passionate. “You asked them to bring me to you because I knew your name. I shouldn’t know your name.
I shouldn’t know anything about you. And you shouldn’t know anything about me, either.”

For a moment the light that flashed at the back of his coal eyes was gentle. I felt certain he would bend his head down, press his lips to mine. My heart was beating very fast. But then he pulled his smooth wrist out from my fingers’ grasp.

“Phytodistress receptors. The sproutling has them. You are young, are you not? Perhaps it is nothing special.”

He spoke in a rush, like he was trying to convince himself. Trying to convince me. But he was wrong. I’d never met anyone who had dreams like mine—dreams of a crowded jungle, filled with vines, where flesh touched flesh across hundreds of kilometers. It
was
special. It had to be. I shook my head.

“Please, Vadix. If I mean anything to you, let me speak to the senate with Mara Stone. My people are in danger.
I’m
in danger. If you don’t help us, I don’t know
what
we’ll do.”

He stood there, his long, flexible limbs stiff. At last he answered.

“They say that a Xollu is even hungrier than an Ahadizhi,” he said. “Not for meat. For knowledge.”

“You want to know the truth as badly as I do,” I said in a low voice. “The truth about me, and you, and our dreams.”

He didn’t deny it. But he didn’t agree, either.

“I must go,” he said instead, and turning on his slender feet, he
rushed out the door, and left me sitting there, on the crinkling paper, alone.

•  •  •

When they brought us back to the quarantine camp, the Ahadizhi had already delivered the day’s ration of meat. The shuttle crew worked in silence, sorting out the good from the bad, the rancid from the fresh. As they worked, Aleksandra sat on the edge of the fire pit and continued to detail her plan. From what I could hear, it involved fashioning weapons from the sticks they’d given us to roast our food, rushing the Ahadizhi when they returned the next morning to take the men, and fighting our way out of Raza Ait.

I thought of the world beyond. The crowded city, filled with sharp-toothed hunters and delicate scholars, who would watch, fascinated and birdlike, as the Asherati were torn to pieces. It was dangerous, crazy, but aside from Rebbe Davison, their eyes were all bright—even Ettie’s—as Aleksandra gathered up the roasting sticks and set them to work sharpening the ends into points.

I sat alone, turning my meeting with Vadix over and over again in my mind. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t have expected this strange boy to listen to my pleas. But these circumstances weren’t normal. I
knew
him. Nothing else could explain the electricity of his touch, or the way he’d looked at me, his head angled down, his soft mouth open. Maybe he would listen to me. Maybe . . .

“What did he do to you?”

The log beneath me suddenly bent with the weight of another body. Laurel. Her expression was flat as she stared into the fire.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

She sighed, and pushed her dingy curls away from her face. “We all heard you talking to the translator. Heard him asking for you.”

I winced at the memory. Waving my arms at him, shouting, shoving to the front of the crowd. In my urgency I’d forgotten that there were others watching. Of course, my eager shouts hadn’t inspired confidence in Laurel. They’d been the childish cries of a girl, calling out for her boyfriend as he walked across the dome.

“Nothing,” I said, ignoring how my cheeks had begun to heat. “We just talked.”

“Oh,” Laurel said. Then, after a moment, she let out a small, humorless laugh. “I thought maybe he . . . I thought he
touched
you. You’ve been so quiet.”

“Touched” me? I turned my head sharply, staring at Laurel. She’d been quiet too since we’d returned from the hospital. We all had—all except for Aleksandra.

“Laurel?” I asked, reaching out and grabbing her by the arm. She flinched away from my hand, bending her fingers into a tight fist. “What did they do to
you
?”

“Nothing!” she said, a high blush crawling over her cheeks, making
her freckles nearly invisible. “It wasn’t like
that.
They just examined us, and put us in this tube. Scanned us. But I can’t stand being around them after what happened to Deklan. And it’s not even just that. There’s something about them. It makes my skin crawl. The way they move. It’s just not human, just not right. Sitting there in that little room, I just got more and more nauseated. And the smell of them . . .”

I thought of the summer-sweet scent of Vadix as he stood beside me. An unconscious smile lifted my lips. But then I noticed her watching me, and I hardened my mouth into a frown.

“What’s wrong with their smell?”

“It’s just not
human
!”

Laurel was right; they weren’t human beings, not at all. The people I had known all had the same odor—musky, like the recycled gray water on the ship. With our water rations and our hard work, few Asherati smelled like roses. Momma’s hands had been dusted by the odor of yeast and flour; Abba’s clothes had been perfumed by the cedar boards in the clock tower where he’d worked. Field-workers smelled like fresh-turned dirt. Granary workers like dust and corn silk. But I’d grown used to the smell of flowers. Their pollen stained my lab coats yellow, and the mossy scent of the greenhouses stuck to my trousers and hair. Vadix’s scent was like that, only amplified tenfold. Sweet, pungent, rich.

“It’s not,” I finally agreed. “Because they’re not like us. And if
we’re going to live here among them, then we have to get used to it.”

“Among them,” she said, and shook her head. “But Aleksandra says that we can’t. She says that we need to get back to the ship and land the dome. She says it doesn’t matter what
they
want.”

I glanced over at Aleksandra, at the way she brandished one of the hand-wrought spears and jabbed the air with it. Her body seemed so lithe, strong despite the trials of the past several days. If anyone could push their way out of the city, Aleksandra probably could.

But it wasn’t going to work, I felt sure of that. It was too dangerous—would be too bloody.

“It’s a terrible plan,” I said, turning back to Laurel and dropping my voice down low. “The city is full of aliens. You’ll die, Laurel.”

She watched me impassively, her mouth a faint line.

“We have weapons,” she said at last.

“Sticks! They have knives and prods and who knows what else.”

There was a long stretch of silence. We watched the other adults pick up their spears and skewer the air. Their movements were far less graceful than Aleksandra’s but just as forceful.

“It’s our only way out of this place,” Laurel said at last. She lifted herself up from the log, then gestured overhead—to the white canopy, the city’s cupola, and to space, far, far beyond. “I just want to go home, Terra. There’s nothing for me here. Not without Deck.”

I didn’t know what to say. I looked at her, swallowing hard to chase away the lump in my throat. I’d never convince her, not me, not after all that had happened. And besides, she didn’t even give me a chance. She only shook her head, once, twice, then went to join the others.

I didn’t stick around to watch her pick up a spear. Instead I rose, and ducked inside my tent. Squeezing my eyes closed, I willed the whole world—Laurel, Aleksandra, the city, all of it—away.

H
e waited for me in the forest. Or maybe I waited for him. It wasn’t clear how the physics of this place worked. Sometimes I felt like the paths were familiar, an extension of the domed forests of my childhood but grown wild in the corners of my mind. Sometimes the paths felt new and strange and foreign—as foreign as his body, foreign as
him
. But there he was, at the center of them, and there I was, and we both hurried down the overcrowded paths toward each other, our bare feet slapping against the flattened soil as we drew near.

But we stopped just short of touching. We watched each other, cautious, uncertain. Now that we’d seen each other in the flesh, how could we ever go back to that raw state where we tumbled together and I kissed him until I couldn’t tell where my mouth ended and his body began? When I’d believed him to be imaginary, it had been easy to draw him into my arms. But now that he was Vadix . . .

Is Mara Stone here yet?
I asked. His lips parted. He wet them again—a nervous tic. I was beginning to see so many, like how he touched his hand to his chest when he spoke, covering a wound that was buried deep under his translucent skin.

The botanist,
he said.
No, she has not arrived. But her shuttle should touch the planet shortly.

Good,
I said. And then, silence. I wasn’t sure what to say.

You are not supposed to be here,
he said at last,
in the dreamforests.

Familiar vines dripped across the treetops and crept over the path, enveloping our ankles and toes. They didn’t seem to mind my presence here.

No?
I asked. He shook his head: no.

It is the purview of the Xollu alone. Not even Ahadizhi come here. Our Guardians say they dream only of the hunt. Their dream lands are killing fields.

And what are your dream lands?

Vadix was serious at first, but then a shade of a smile lit the corner
of his mouth. He held out a hand. A nearby tree stretched down, settling a fruit inside his palm. He picked it, and held it in his palm, caressing the fuzz that covered its tender flesh.

Fertile grounds. This is where we walk with our mates even when we cannot be with them in the flesh. Over short nights and long winters. Our scripture says the god and goddess made this place for us. It is where our souls live before we sprout, and where we return when we die. This is why, when we close our eyes at night, we feel ourselves returning to familiar lands. Because we are. Dreamforests. Ahar Taiza.

I held out my own hand. A nearby tree wrapped a branch around it, encircling my wrist like a bracelet.
Our dreams aren’t like this,
I said.
The things we see and learn and do in them aren’t real. I don’t understand how this works.