She understood why she’d been chosen. That didn’t make it easy.
“Imagine it, Sykes,” said Jason Iskinder, his dark gaze weighing her down, holding her in place. “No more deviations. A world without the inhuman, without the monsters. Forever.”
She could imagine, all right. She was thirteen years old, but she’d seen enough to form a picture.
Earth was dead. There was a way out, for those who wanted to take it: servitude to the inhuman creatures who wielded magic, who offered mysterious, new homes apparently unconnected to this world. Iskinder offered survival without following monsters into shadow, though it still carried a price.
Only humans like her qualified: intelligent, physically fit, and genetically pure. And young. They had to be young. Apparently, this escape would take years, and older people would just… fucking die, or something.
“You’re pure,” he said, big eyes excited. “Not only that, but you’re a genius. You understand the human psyche. We will need that.”
She did understand. Psychology (and the neuroscience behind it) were her passion, her favorite thing, a pattern of weirdnesses she could study for the rest of her life. “I know.”
“We’ll sleep the whole journey,” Jason promised. “By the time we arrive, a long time will have passed, but we’ve solved the aging and deterioration vectors. We’ll wake up largely as we went to sleep.” He took a deep breath, eyes gleaming, smile tight. “The Association has thought this through, Sykes. You’re essential to our success. We need you… and you need us.”
For a twelve-year-old kid, he was really good at this. It helped that he was attractive. It helped that she wanted to survive on her own damn terms. “I’m in,” she said.
“Water!” shouted someone whose voice she no longer recognized, deep and cracking. “—fucking water everywhere! What the hell! This isn’t where we were supposed to land!”
The words clogged her mind like hair in a drain. Was she hungover? Felt hungover. “Uh?” she moaned.
“We’re sinking!” someone else screamed.
That woke her up. She slammed open her sleep-pod and fell hard to the floor, shirt twisted, pupils rejecting the brightness of this room, and remembered everything.
Holy shit, she’d grown.
She knew she would, but… trying to move in a body a full foot taller than it had been was really throwing her, and she couldn’t stand yet. A rush of hormones (surely that’s what it was) made her feel so strange, itchy and tingly and warm.
Were they in space? No, they couldn’t be in space if they were sinking in water. All the pods but one were already empty, their inhabitants out in the hall. Move it, Sykes! she commanded herself, and staggered over to a viewport.
The screamers were right: water outside, water all around. She slid open a panel and typed queries, squinting through one eye. The intel was mostly good. They could breathe the air. There was enough of an atmosphere to protect from solar radiation. But there was water everywhere.
The planet had water, yes—she’d seen the mapping—but not like this. They’d missed? Landed in the gods-damned ocean? What?
She checked the computer and found that the only landmass detected was the one directly under the ship. This was not the planet they’d aimed for. This was one of its moons. Oh, no.
“Sykes,” Iskinder croaked, staggering from his pod to crash into the wall beside her. So he’d grown, which of course she expected, but… oh. Oh, my. His hair pointed in all directions. He looked like a man in great need of a toothbrush. And he was the most delicious thing Penelope had ever seen in all her life.
He stared back at her like he’d never seen a human before, and only now realized what he was missing. Then he shook his head sharply. “After-effects of suspension. Yoon said we would… hormones. Focus. What is happening?”
Penelope reported around desire so hot it hurt. “The ship is surrounded by water. There’s no land other than the islet beneath us. It seems we’ve landed on one of the moons.”
“Fuck!” Iskinder shouldered her aside from the console and typed quickly, never glancing at his hands. His jaw tightened. “Fuck. That’s what happened. Shit, we didn’t even see this landmass; we are so damn lucky. We could’ve drowned. Shit! We can’t… get to…”
They could not land on their chosen world because they had no fuel to leave this one. “It has to have more than water. We’ll die. We’ll starve. Jason…”
“Water!” Somebody howled out in the hall, and something crashed.
“Go calm down the idiots, would you?” said Jason, gaze locked on the screen. “It is time for you to use your particular talent for crowd control.”
Penelope rolled her eyes, but marched out anyway. Best stop them before they broke something irreplaceable. Best of humanity, indeed.
To be fair, they were all children emotionally, but surely a fully-formed frontal lobe would compensate?
When she returned, Iskinder was on his knees, forehead pressed to the wall, so that was probably not good.
Penelope considered him. This boy—no, this man—was neither humble nor religious. Through all the training they’d done, all the tests to ensure they could handle this mission, he’d never shown fear or even doubt that he would succeed. Well, now he looked like he was drowning.
Maybe it was time for her crowd-control skills again, laser-focused. “Iskinder.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. His breath hitched as though he’d been crying.
She still wanted to touch him, needed to, and it was distracting. He was right—hormones or something. Focus. “Iskinder,” she said again, kneeling beside him.
He breathed slowly, deeply in and deeply out. “We are screwed.”
“Okay.”
“We can’t leave. This place looks good—the air’s right, and there are lifeforms in the water, which, given the similarity of atmosphere, we can possibly hunt. Theoretically, we can survive.”
She kept her breath even, trying not to catch his panic. “Okay. This is good news, isn’t it?”
“It’s too small. We chose the planet below for a reason. It’s twenty-five times this size. We’ll overpopulate this place in a few generations, assuming we survive that long.” A slow breath. “Screwed.”
Penelope studied him. He seemed like he was about to lose it, and maybe he needed to. In fact, blowing off steam might just get him back on track. “Okay,” she said again, intentionally too casually, intentionally too calm, and he responded exactly as she’d expected.
“What do you mean, ‘okay?’” Iskinder snarled up at her, finally pushing away from the wall. “Do you not understand? We’ve only delayed our end!”
She had him; now she had to hold him. “We’ll figure something out.”
“No we won’t! The scan found nothing! No oil, no materials we could use to get out, just this damned water, and we don’t have the technology to turn it into fuel! We—”
She kissed him.
Why not? She’d wanted to since before they left, since he’d first visited her underground home and paced emphatically, arms waving, painting a future among the stars. They were adults now, right? So, why not? Even if this was the end, she would go out on her own terms and at least a little satisfied. If he was wrong, well, they still both needed this.
She fisted his hair and he growled, grasping under her like a man starved, and when he did not protest but responded instead, she took him there on the floor in front of the computer’s cold calculation of extinction, took him according to all the things she’d studied about sex and how it worked, and she screamed his name because life was fire and instinct and passion, and he might be ready to give it up, but she was not.
#
He lay sprawled, arms over his head like she’d taken him prisoner. “Wow,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” she said on his chest.
“Wow,” he added after a moment.
Penelope laughed softly and rose to grab a sanitary towel from the bin, which she tossed to him along with his clothes.
“The chemical effects of hibernation,” Iskinder rationalized.
“And we’ve got grown bodies now and had no time to get used to them.”
“You expected this?”
“Of course I did. Do you feel better?”
“We really chose the right crew for this.” He looked thoughtful. “Yes. I feel better.”
She stretched, sweaty and relaxed. “Good. Then let’s get to work. It’s not over yet, Iskinder. Let’s look at the practical first: can we drink this water? If not, can we purify it? Because if we—”
Like a bomb, the room suddenly filled with things.
Things, creatures, a dozen blobs of constantly changing shape and color and screaming trilling bass-rumbling sounds, and Penelope shouted and scrambled backwards as Iskinder’s word “lifeforms” fully registered: this place held alien life, and while she’d accepted that in the vague, distant sense of something to hunt, she had not prepared herself to meet them.
Her mistake, she supposed.
Her shout and Iskinder’s scream melted in the flood of sound, and then the things weren’t blobs anymore; they were wrongly familiar, half-dogs and half-gorillas, or people-faces on fish bodies, or eyes on butterfly wings with tails like dinosaurs. Their sounds were thought-tangling, howling and yipping and trilling and…
One began to resemble the Fey.
“No!” Iskinder shouted, and that one instead dissolved into something like a turtle but with spines.
And then one of them spoke.
One of them spoke.
One of them SPOKE. “Beautiful humans,” it said, so black it seemed to absorb the light. “Beautiful humans.”
Aliens. Sapient aliens. This had not been a consideration, not been in the plans, because all the scans said there was no developed life on the planet, but they weren’t on that world, were they? “You can talk?” she croaked, pushing through the fear that threatened to rattle her apart. Behind her, Iskinder gasped raggedly.
“You are beautiful,” said the black blob, and then it elongated. Grew arms and legs. Grew something like a head. It did not add the long ears of Fey, did not develop those peculiarly slanted eyes. Instead, he looked almost human. Too beautiful, to solidly dark, too androgynous, but human.
Except for the glowing orange eyes, of course.
One by one, all the things followed its lead, taking shapes and combinations of shapes, not one identical to another, peering at her with newly-formed eyes that rippled like still water touched by insect feet.
“You speak English?” she managed.
“Yes,” said the spokesthing, studying his newly-formed hands. “What wonder!”
“HOW?” roared Iskinder, making her jump, making her turn. He was still on the floor, had pressed into the corner, knees up as if to protect himself, both hands clawing the walls behind him as if he wanted to climb into the floor and disappear. “You can’t speak our language! How are you doing this?”
He was panicking, and if these creatures were dangerous, that would set them off. “Jason,” she said slowly. “Pull it together.”
“We speak it because you speak it,” said the black-skinned creature as if that made perfect sense, and the top of his head bloomed silky black hair that grew until it almost touched the floor. The spokesthing smiled with white teeth it had not had a moment before. “Do not be afraid! N’aie pas peur.” French? “No tengas miedo.” Spanish. “Ðừng sợ.” Vietnamese. “Osoreru koto wa nai.” Japanese.
It kept going. Arabic. Swahili. Cantonese. Somali. Hausa. Latin. She knew it was repeating itself over and over again: do not be afraid. A small, wondering part of Penelope Sykes’s heart perked up like a child’s, joyful and hopeful. Was this magic? This couldn’t be magic. Could it?
“Stop!” Iskinder moaned, pained, pulling her away from wonder.
The creatures stared at them, trilled, whistled, made sounds like laughter or hooting. They didn’t seem to comprehend.
“Easy, soldier,” she murmured, unable to take her eyes from these creatures, who at least had yet to do anything directly threatening. “You’re scaring us,” she said slowly. “Do you understand that?”
The spokesthing had become magnificent, a long, slim being with irises of brilliant orange-red and ebony hair that moved on its own. “Why?” He blinked slowly, an imitation learned too quickly, chilling her to the bone. “Oh. We are too different?”
The ice in her bones turned glacial. “No. You’re reading our minds.” Magic. It had to be magic. “Is this magic?”
“No,” Iskinder mumbled to himself. “No, no, it can’t be.”
“I do not know if it is magic,” said the black-skinned one, imitating human warmth and human gentleness while behind it others whirred or chirruped or barked. “We are we. You are lost. You have no home. You are welcome here. You…” Its brow knit with what looked like compassion.
“Stop,” Iskinder whispered, and Penelope hushed him.
The spokesthing shook its head slowly, side to side, and grief twisted its perfect, beautiful face into horror. “You are sundered! Oh! You are sundered!”
The creature-sounds changed, growing concerned, buzzing with murmurs.
“What?” said Penelope, glancing at Iskinder and back at herself. “Sundered?”
“We will heal you!” the thing proclaimed, and raised its brand-new hand.
Every thought and every memory from every human being in this ship slammed into her like a cinder block, evicting air, smashing thoughts, smearing identity like half-set paint, and in knife-sharp pain that shuttered the world black, she only knew that she fell.
Penelope woke on the floor, face sticky with blood, and hitched one weak, pitiful sob before getting hold of herself.
It hurt. It had hurt. It… no longer hurt? Her head felt fine—an odd echo of pain, ghosting, like her nerves remembered but the source was gone. She was also alone in her head. Her fellow shipmates weren’t in there. That was good. That was… very good.
“That was not good,” said the spokesthing dolefully, crouching in front of her; he had produced full male genitalia, somehow artistically pretty instead of just hanging there like fruit. “You cannot be One.” All the creatures nodded together, somber wide-eyed. “We have repaired the injuries,” added the spokesthing apologetically.
“Repaired,” Penelope managed.
It tilted its head quizzically (how quickly did it learn, how fast, how frightening). “You are repaired,” it repeated.
Had that been an attack? No. They’d done such harm by accident. “Thank you?” she said.
“How can you be sundered?” said an orange frog-looking thing so ugly it was cute. “To be One is to be whole. You believe you are whole, yet you are not One. What is loneliness? Sadness? Frustration? Intimidation?” It seemed to be pulling negative words out of nowhere like they had no relatable meaning, were gobbledygook.
“You brought us here,” Iskinder accused from the floor. Dried blood painted his mouth with madness and a twisting, growing rage.
The spokesthing shook its head back and forth again. “We did not.” And then its eyes went very wide. “You believe that we did, yet this one believes we did not. How?” Wonder lightened its tone to a honey tenor. “You believe different things? How?”
Oh, that was fascinating. She had to study them. She had to analyze.
“Stop,” said Iskinder, struggling to sit up. “Do not listen to my thoughts. Stop!”
A moment of silence. A moment when Penelope knew, knew, they were all communing together, at once, like a person thinking to themself. “We will stop,” the spokesthing decided. “This makes you happy?”
What? Were they that trusting? She’d never give up such a tactical advantage. “Really?” she said.
“Yes.” It showed puzzlement at her doubt.
“What is tactical advantage?” said the orange one.
She chose not to reply.
“None are injured,” said the ebony one. “We repaired!”
The orange one did a little caper.
Penelope swallowed the sudden lump in her throat. They were beautiful. Dangerous and crazy and terrifyingly, but beautiful. Magic. We came all this way and we found magic.
“You are beautiful,” repeated the ebony spokesthing.
She swallowed back the lump. “So are you. God help me. So are you.”
Behind her, Jason Iskinder seethed through clenched teeth, betrayed by hope in the stars, betrayed by magic (or something resembling it), and given only his mental privacy to mourn it.
He didn’t look like mourning. He looked like he was ready to burn the world and laugh as the smoke claimed him.
Penelope took his hand. “Come on. This wasn’t planned, but we have to play the hand we’re dealt. All right? It could’ve been so much worse. We’re all alive. It could have been worse.”
He looked her right in the eye. “No. It couldn’t.” But then as though he hadn’t said that at all, he stood, and smiled, donning artifice like a new skin, and asked the creatures’ names.