Earth & Sky (The Earth & Sky Trilogy) (21 page)

25.

T
he cloth heaves to the ground, and Win staggers. I catch him as he turns back to the display.

“Win, you have to stop! You’re hurt.”

He’s panting. It wasn’t just fatigue I heard in his voice before, it was pain. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Just a cut. Stupid glass.”

His hand slips, and I see what he means. A thick chunk, its edge glitteringly sharp, is protruding through a tear in his shirt from the flesh just below his ribs. The shot I heard on my way up the stairs, or an earlier one, must have caught one of the glass desks when he was near it. Blood is welling up around the chunk, soaking into the waist of his pants now. Nausea washes over me.

“You’re not fine! We have you to get to a hospital. You need someone to look after that
now
.”

He’s shaking his head. The idiot. He’d let himself bleed to death in front of me if he could. He almost did, wandering around that office with Kurra following him when he could have jumped away. I push between him and the data panel, digging Jeanant’s cloak from my purse.

“At a hospital . . . records . . . they could track us,” he mumbles as I try to wrap the thin fabric around his abdomen. He looks down at his side. At his bloody fingers. A gasp sputters out of him. “That doesn’t look so great. Okay.”

“I don’t care where we go,” I say. “As long as it’s someplace you can get help.”

He’s still staring at the wound. I nudge his hand away and hold the cloak in place. Blood immediately begins to seep through the fabric, but it’s something.

“She’s going to be mad,” Win says shakily. “Well . . . she was already going to be mad. And the cloth . . .”

I don’t know what he’s talking about. He reaches past me to tap the panel.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“Somewhere good,” he says. “Everything’ll be fixed. I promise.”

It’s night where we touch down, on a cobblestone road lined with squat wooden buildings. The windows are dark, but the light of the near-full moon catches on puddles and moist patches on the stones. The smell of rot tinges the air. I grab the time cloth from Win as he tries to stuff it into his satchel one-handed. His other hand is clamped to his side, over the expanding red splotch on the cloak, and I don’t want him moving it.

“Where do we go from here?” I murmur.

Win jerks his head toward the end of the street and starts walking, a hitch in every step. His jaw is clenched. He swerves around the corner at the first cross street and heads down a narrower road. When his knees wobble, I grasp his elbow. His lips twist into a grimace. He keeps going, with my grip steadying him, past a courtyard and around a stable. But his steps are slowing to a hobble.

“Just a little farther,” he rasps. “Couldn’t let the Enforcers trace us too close.”

If I were strong enough, I’d carry him the rest of the way. As it is, I’m scared to get any closer—scared of bumping that slice of glass deeper into his side. My hold on his arm tightens as we scramble over a particularly uneven section of road. He stops, his gaze drifting, and then pushes onward.

“There,” he says.

We edge around the back of a house, and pause at a small wooden door in what appears to be a shed. The knob looks ordinary to me, but Win does something with it, pushes one spot and tugs another, spins it and jiggles it, and somewhere inside a bolt grates open. He shoves the door wide and lurches away from me, down the flight of stone steps on the other side.

“Close it behind you,” he mumbles. I do, bracing myself for the darkness, but the instant the door clicks into the frame, the deadbolt shoots over of its own accord, and a faint streak of artificial light flickers down the slanted ceiling.

Win’s already made it to the bottom of the stairs, where there’s another door almost identical to the one above. Only this one doesn’t even have a knob. He slides his fingernails along an indent in the middle, and flips open a thin flap in the wood to reveal a black metallic square. Clearing his throat, he presses his thumb against the square.

At the short phrase he says in his alien language, the door emits a quiet hum, followed by a sound like a sigh. Then it glides back into the wall. Win staggers on into the room on the other side.

I hurry after him. The door whispers shut behind me, so swiftly I flinch. The second it’s closed, three bright lights blaze on above our heads.

The room is smaller than my bedroom at home, and windowless, with a set of narrow bunks built into one wall, two wide cabinets on the other, and a spindly chair mounted on a large silvery cube at the opposite end from the door. Even though the place feels unlived in, there’s a fresh tang in the air and no hint of dust. Everything—the seamless mattresses on the bunks, the chair, the tiled floor—has the hard sheen of metal in muted shades of gray, peach, and brown. But the surface beneath my feet gives like linoleum, and when I set my hand on the edge of the upper bunk, the frame offers the warmer, slightly gritty texture of plastic, as if it’s some synthesis of steel and polyethylene. Which I guess it could be.

Win motions vaguely around him. “Safe house. Only for total, absolute emergencies. There’s supplies. Take anything you want.” He limps over to the chair and sinks into it with a wince, reaching behind its arm.

There must be a control there I can’t see, because a moment later a shimmering glow flows out of the block at the chair’s base, cocooning him. It seems to condense at the spot above his wound. He peels away the cloak with a shudder and tips his head back, closing his eyes.

Through the ragged gap in Win’s shirt, I can see the rough edges of broken skin, the blood seeping out around the jutting chunk of glass. His body looks so fragile. Fragile, and human. Human skin ripped back from human flesh, human blood coursing from human veins.

Colonists. Ancestors.

The memory of the conversation I overheard weighs on me. But I can’t ask him about it now.

As the glow continues to pool over the wound, the slice of glass starts to crumble and then wisp away, as if the light is somehow consuming it. Win’s blood bubbles up more quickly as the obstruction dissolves. I step toward him, afraid something’s gone wrong, but a second later the bleeding slows. His skin creeps over the exposed flesh. The glow intensifies, so bright it stings my eyes. When I look again, as the light dims, Win’s abdomen is smooth and whole again. Even the blood on his clothes has been whisked away.

Win keeps lying there, completely still and silent except for the stutter of his breath in his chest. The glow wavers and swirls, I suppose healing whatever was injured on the inside. I sit down on the lower bunk, watching. The minutes drag on.

What if he was too hurt for it to completely heal him? My fingers itch, and I reach into my purse for my bracelet, but the slick surface of the beads gives me none of their usual reassurance. To distract myself, I get up and walk over to the cabinets.

The first door opens to reveal six shelves, two stacked with bottles like the ones Win was carrying in his satchel, but tinted green instead of blue, and the others holding boxes stuffed with sandwich-size packets that feel waxy to my touch. Win said I could take anything, but who knows what’s in there?

The bottles seem safer. I pick up one and twist the lid open. The liquid fizzes lightly as I tip the bottle to my lips. I sip tentatively, then take a few deeper gulps, washing the traces of soured pecan pie from my mouth. The liquid has the same sweet taste as the blue stuff, but a prickle of some sort of spice as well—like cinnamon, but not quite.

I lower the bottle, feeling my heartbeat slow, my muscles relaxing. Maybe there’s something in there other than water and flavoring.

My newfound calm doesn’t stop me from jumping at an unexpected rustle. “Hey,” Win says softly, straightening up in the chair. The glow has dissipated. He twists at the torso, and then leans forward to rest his elbows on his knees, his body tilted a little to the left as if his right side is still tender. Then he sneezes, twice.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Yes,” he says. His voice is faint, but nowhere near as wretched as when he was bleeding all over himself. “You know, I think somewhere in all this Traveling, I caught a—what do you call it?—a cold.” He sniffs experimentally, and chuckles. “We’re inoculated against everything serious, but even we haven’t come up with a proper vaccine for an ever-mutating virus. The one thing the med seat can’t cure.”

“Not much good then, is it?” I say without thinking, and Win outright laughs. He pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Well, it fixed everything else.” He tips a little farther, and then pushes himself upright, his eyes suddenly intense. “You talked to your friend? Did she help you figure out Jeanant’s message?”

After what he just went through, he still cares more about the mission than anything else. He’d rather die than fail, I think with a twinge. Even though it’s my planet we’re saving. He’s risked so much more than I have, and I was ready to step away.

“There was a battle,” I say. “Between the American settlers and the Natives, near a British fort, somewhere a bunch of trees had fallen because of a storm. The name probably has something to do with that—with fallen trees.”

“That’s enough,” he says, a smile crossing his face. “And Jeanant said he’d leave the last two parts for us there?”

“He didn’t really have time to go into detail,” I say. “But when I asked him to give me everything we needed, he told me to go there.”

“That must be his plan, then. Hand me the cloth? I should be able to find the exact date easily now.”

I pick up the cloth where I left it in a heap on the bunk. When I turn, Win bends his head to cough, looking so tired despite his relief that I’m afraid he’s going to topple off the chair. So . . . vulnerable.

So human.

I stare at his face. Following the shape of his jaw, the angle of his brow, the curve of his cheeks. I never questioned it, just assumed it was a disguise. But he never looked fake, or felt it, or—in that moment, in the rain—
tasted
anything but real.

Win glances up at me. His forehead furrows when he catches my stare. Exactly as a human’s would.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” I say.

The furrow deepens. “What?”

“I heard your conversation with Kurra,” I say. “Most of it, anyway. About . . . colonists from Kemya coming to Earth?”

“Ah,” he says, and his head droops again. “I forgot you didn’t know.”

My fingers tense around the time cloth. “Well, I don’t,” I say. “You didn’t
tell
me.”

“You seemed so disoriented already, when I was explaining why we came here,” he says. “And it doesn’t really matter. When the time field’s destroyed, when Kemya has no business with Earth anymore, it may as well not be true. We’ll be two separate peoples.”

“But we’re not,” I say. “We’re— You’re—”

He nods, with a shamed curl to his lips. Every time he forms another distinctly human expression, my awareness of it prickles deeper.

“The story I told you before was true,” he says. “Except there wasn’t any fully sentient species on Earth when we discovered it. All the plants and animals you know, yes, some quite similar to what we had on Kemya, but . . . no people. And we needed people down here to participate in the experiments, to test our survival strategies, to make sure that even if all the tech we had stopped functioning before the rest of us landed, or if we crashed, or anything else that could go wrong, we could still survive. To try out different techniques and different situations, to see what worked best. It was going to be our only chance to do things right . . .”

“So you sent some of your people down.”

“A few hundred Kemyates volunteered. I don’t know how much they were told—it’s usually glossed over when we talk about our history; everything’s about their valiant sacrifice. You heard the way Kurra thinks about it. They were sent down with no tech, no way of communicating with the scientists above, prepared to face the worst and let their experiences guide the rest of us. But they must have assumed that after a decade or two, everyone else would follow. Once we were confident we could handle any problem the planet presented.”

He pauses, his expression miserable. I know the rest: “But then your experiments started screwing up Earth, and it wasn’t good enough for the rest of you anymore.” I should be horrified, but mostly I’m numb. The idea refuses to sink in.

“And the people we’d left down here, they had children, and their children had children, and they slowly lost the story of where they came from,” Win says. “You can see echoes of it, in some of the myths . . .”

We’re all just aliens who forgot we were aliens. I start to laugh, but it catches in my throat. No. Not aliens. Humans who didn’t know we didn’t belong on Earth.

“There are fossils,” I say. “I know archeologists have found— There are remains in our evolutionary tree, going back
millions
of years.”

Win shrugs. “Faked. Like I said, there was already some similarity between the species here and what we had on Kemya. The scientists planted missing links when they noticed you were looking. To see how you’d react. To erase any lingering doubt. I’m not totally sure.”

“But . . .”

What argument do I have that defeats the vast reach of Kemyate technology? These are people who can leap through time, travel across galaxies, heal a near-fatal wound with light. Why shouldn’t they be able to make a skull read as millions of years old?

“I know it’s awful,” Win says. “I can’t even explain how everyone just kept going along with it for so long . . .”

“You don’t really think we’re part of your people anymore,” I say. The way he talked to me when we first met. The way Kurra talked about us.
Shadows
. “Because we’ve been fading away, just like our history. Because of what you’ve done to us.”

What they did to us not as aliens looking down on some less advanced species, the way Earth scientists poke at rats, which was horrible enough. They conducted their experiments and played with our lives as one set of human beings manipulating another. The figures I’ve imagined up there, staring down into their goldfish bowl from orbit, think and feel almost the same ways I do. And somehow they could do this.