Phoebe North - Starbreak

But then I heard another sound, not the animalistic growling of the beast but strains of music wafting up through the winter air. How strange to hear music here, in such a savage space. Notes intermingled, weaving together like beautiful threads shimmering and opalescent in the midmorning light. It was haunting. No, hypnotic. I found my breath slowing, my heart slowing too. The beast also heard it. Massive front feet fell gently against the ground. It turned back, searching over one hulking shoulder for the source of those sweet, twisting notes.

Aleksandra didn’t fire another shot. She didn’t even lift her rifle to aim it again. Instead she took a few stumbling steps toward the sound. I stood up from behind the rock where I was crouched too, listening. Every note was bittersweet. It seemed to cut right to the heart of me, spelling out some part of myself that had, up until now, been unreadable. I suppose the others felt the same way. Together we took slow, careful steps over the frozen ground. The beast didn’t rear up. It didn’t seem to even see us. It just walked closer and closer to the music, and we followed.

That’s when a vehicle streaked through the forest, tracing the path of the trees that had been felled by the beast. It had no wheels—no wings, either, from what I could see. Instead it was draped with long bolts of multicolored fabric, which hung down like the tail feathers of some tropical bird. In a glass capsule on top, three passengers could be seen, three bright faces with pitch-black eyes.

Their skin was the color of the inside of a pomegranate. Bipedal, smaller than us, with faint red hair covering their arms and heads. One held a stringed instrument against his chest, his fingers almost invisible as they tripped over it. Soothing, strange music streamed out of a speaker on the vehicle’s side. We stumbled closer as they landed their craft in the clearing’s center, as the vehicle’s gleaming glass top lifted away. The musician kept playing, his song flitting like water over stone. But the other two aliens climbed out, hefting spikes of metal in their three-fingered hands. They approached the beast and felled it with a single blue burst of light, moving with perfect, measured efficiency. They reminded me of my cat, Pepper, hunting mice. Their focus was so tightly narrowed on the beast that they missed the people who stood, frozen, before them.

But as the creature collapsed, cracking snow and branches beneath its heavy body, we came closer. In the craft, the musician played on and on. I raised my hands to my cheeks. I was crying—and not for the loss of the guards or Deklan, who lay splayed out and bleeding on the forest floor as vines enveloped his broken body. I cried because for the first time, I felt sure that someone knew me. This music proved it—it told my story, lacing my story’s notes through the chilly air.

But then something happened. The musician paused, and Laurel jostled me as she stepped forward, and the spell was broken. The music now sounded tinny; half the notes were out of key. I stopped where I stood, the wind making my flight suit crinkle, my hands dead weights at my sides. But my eye caught on something. A dark shock of hair, streaming in the wind.

It was Ettie. She stood before one of the creatures, facing him earnestly. He was busy slaughtering the beast, exposing organs, yellow and fatty. The air stank of tallow and flesh. And yet despite the stench, Ettie let out a sweet laugh.

“The music!” she said. “It’s my music, isn’t it?”

In a flash the alien’s focus shifted. He darted black eyes up to her. His face was strange. His mouth was too broad and full of teeth, and, above he had only a flat gap of wine-red flesh where his nose should have been. The long slits that traced the edge of his jaw widened. He glanced over his shoulder at his companion, letting out a stream of strange words.

“Ezaz xoslex aum dazzix vhesesazhi osiz tauoso?”

His companion grunted. “Dadix aum eddi tauoso.”

“Please,” Ettie said, “tell me more about my song!”

The creature looked at her, not quite understanding her words or her intentions. He gripped Ettie by the shoulder, lifting up his metal stick. He was no taller than she was, but I knew it would be nothing for that flash of false lightning to come again, striking her down. I tightened my fists. I had to do something, to prove we were more than animals for slaughter.

I glanced desperately up into the golden sky. It was too early for the stars—too early for the moons, Akku or Zella or Aire. But the sun still shone, a steady bright light in the sky. Epsilon Eridani. Eps Eridani, we called it on the ship. But that wasn’t their name for it. I knew because I’d dreamed it, because the boy had whispered it into my ear even as I’d slept.

“Xarki! Xarki!” I screamed, pointing up at a sun that shone like a polished coin in the sky.

The music finally stopped.

“Xarki! Xarki!” I screamed, gesturing wildly. “The sun! That’s what you call it, right? And the moons? Akku, Zella, Aire?”

My voice cracked, was wild and raw. Everyone had turned toward me now, even Ettie, who looked like she’d just woken up from a pleasant but mildly puzzling dream. The creature who stood before her lowered his silver spike, holding it limply. He gazed toward his closest companion.

“Ahatho raizaz!”

“Raizaz eddi ahatho, taurax zhiesesik!” The creature in the vehicle bared his teeth. A disagreement, perhaps? We all stood there in helpless confusion as they growled at one another, blood soaking through all of our clothes.

“Tauoso vhesesazhi taurax,” the musician said. There was a hint of resignation in his wheezy voice. He reached out over the lip of his vehicle and grabbed Aleksandra by the crook of her arm. But now that the spell was broken, she resisted, twisting and struggling in his grasp.

“What are you doing?” she snarled. “Where are you taking us?”

The creature lifted her effortlessly into the vehicle. Soon the others were rounded up too, herded into the craft’s wide cab. The dismay and fear was clear on their faces. But I walked willingly toward the creatures, my head held high. I knew that if we were ever going to reach the city—if we were going to escape Zehava’s wilderness and the creatures that roamed her forests—then we’d need their help. As I went to scramble into the vehicle, one of the creatures gripped his weapon tight.

“Ososhum es!” he snapped. I stared at him, my gaze even, trying to ignore the frantic way my heart seemed to fill up my mouth.

“Raza Ait,” I replied. “We need to go to Raza Ait. City of Copper. Do you understand? Raza Ait.”

The creature’s wide mouth split open, showing teeth, too many teeth—hundreds of them, as sharp as needles, as hungry as wolves. He took his weapon’s tip, nudging it against my ribs.

“Hyuuuu-mon?” he asked darkly, in a tone that chilled me to the bone. I sat down in the craft beside Ettie and prepared for take-off.

“Yes, human,” I said simply as the vehicle’s glass lid lowered over us.

The craft moved far faster than our legs could have possibly carried us, streaming first only a few meters from the ground and then higher and higher still as we sped southward. Below, the trees became sparser; the forests became frozen plains, uninhabited save for an occasional slow-moving beast. But I think I was the only one who saw the beasts, the only one who couldn’t help but glimpse down through the glass and watch the scenery change. The rest of them—Aleksandra, Laurel, Rebbe Davison, Jachin, and Ettie—all sat silently, their clothes and faces splattered with two shades of blood-human and beast both. They looked like they’d had the air wrung out of them. Now they were nothing more than stone.