Phoebe North - Starbreak

“I can’t believe it killed him,” Laurel said at last, but faintly. Her voice was almost swallowed up by the wind. Before I could respond, Aleksandra gave a hiss.

“Get a hold of yourself. Do you think I had time to mourn when I learned my mother died?”

I glanced away from the shifting landscape, from the blue lakes and white mountaintops that glittered below, and over to where Aleksandra sat with her chin angled up. It was a strange fiction, the idea that she had learned that her mother had died, rather than drawing the blade across her mother’s pale skin herself.

“Of course not,” Aleksandra said, answering the question when Laurel didn’t. “I knew there was still work to be done. More important things that I needed to attend to.”

She met my gaze, her dark eyes boring into me. Hate. They were filled with hate. I’d saved all of their lives, and yet she watched me now with gritted teeth and poison on her tongue. It didn’t make any sense to me—she was the captain’s daughter, the leader of a great rebellion, a killer. And I was nothing more than a sloppy, selfish girl.

But maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I had something she wanted. I knew things about Zehava that no one else did: words, geography. Thanks to the boy, I could communicate with the strange creatures that populated our new home. Aleksandra glared and glared. I forced my eyes down into my lap, where my hands were clutched so tightly that my fingers had started to go numb.

“What work do I have left to do?” Laurel said. “I crashed the shuttle, and now Deck . . .” Her words became strangled, then died. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rebbe Davison reach an arm out. He tucked Laurel’s shoulders under it, pulling her close.

“You’ll be okay,” he said softly. “You’ll be okay.”

But Aleksandra didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either. I still felt her eyes burning into me, as steady as starlight, as the craft streamed through the air.

The creatures were like my boy, but then again they weren’t. Separate races, maybe. Or closely related species. I counted their differences. He was tall and as thin as a reed; they were smaller and squatter. His eyes were far-spaced and lozenge-shaped in his bald head; their flesh was lightly furred, and they had close-set eyes. His teeth were small behind thick lips. Their mouths seemed to hold dozens of fangs.

They spoke among themselves as we traveled. They seemed to be arguing, baring their teeth between their words. Jachin watched them with peculiar intensity. I wondered what his biologist’s mind made of them, of their smooth, efficient movements and their three-fingered hands. As I studied them—their small bodies, draped in loose fabric, as fragrant as flowers under the feeble winter sun—I heard Mara Stone’s voice in the back of my head, listing the impossibilities. She would have said that it was unlikely that we’d find a humanoid species here. One that was bipedal, one that used language as we did, one that hunted and used technology and argued in a manner hardly any different from man. It was some kind of stroke of luck, insane and unlikely.

There’s no such thing as luck , came the memory of Mara’s voice. If she were here, what could I have possibly said in response? Chance then, as slim as a splinter. But the proof was right there in front of us. There were people on Zehava. Sentient people. Humanoids, at that.

“They don’t breathe,” Jachin said suddenly. I turned toward the creatures, who bickered over the craft’s controls. Beside him Rebbe Davison snapped his head up.

“What? How is that possible?”

“Their chests don’t move, not even when they speak. Their respiratory systems must be completely different from ours. Who knows how they vocalize?”

He was right. As they argued, their bodies were strangely still, the fabric that wrapped their torsos not stirring a single millimeter. I suppressed a shudder. Less like us than I thought, then. That would comfort Mara, if she ever had the chance to meet these creatures. She’d never been one to believe in miracles.

“They might respire passively,” I suggested. “Through pores in their skin, or stoma. Like . . .”

I trailed off, remembering the vines that had fled from Deklan’s touch—the vines that had reached out to envelop him when his body had collapsed on the forest floor.

“Like what?” Rebbe Davison pressed. I shook my head. It seemed too absurd to contemplate. But then my eyes caught the craft’s pilot as he curved his body back, reaching for a hunk of meat from the cabin. It bent too far, wrong. Like there weren’t any bones inside.

“Like plants,” I said faintly. “Like plants.”

Chuckles arose from the others, weak laughter. Even Laurel, in her tears, cracked a dim smile. Not Ettie, though. She set her little fists on her hips, jutting out her lower lip.

“It’s not funny!” she said, then spared a proud glance to me. I gave her a grateful nod.

But inside I was cringing. Plants? The idea wasn’t even miraculous. It was absurd.

Soon plains melted away into marshy bogs crowded by ice floes. At first the craft’s shadow was the only thing that could be seen moving across the gray, dappled ground. But then hulking shapes joined it. Beasts—hundreds of them—moving in a herd through the swamp. They kept their young at the center of the pack, but even they were as a big as a shuttle craft. Beneath their massive feet they left a stretch of flattened mud wherever they went.

“Megafauna,” Jachin said, gazing over the craft’s edge. “Destructive, at that. Their caloric needs would be huge, as would their methane output. It might explain the lack of genetic diversity.”

I looked at our captors, packed into the front of the craft with their rotting spoils. The driver was moving his spindly fingers over a console built into the craft’s dash. This time they didn’t park the vehicle or disembark to hunt. They only noted the presence of the herd, recorded it, then sped rapidly through the sky.

“They’re not the top of the food chain, though,” Rebbe Davison said. Jachin nodded in agreement. Then his expression shifted, darkening.

“HaShem help us,” Jachin said. “Imagine if we’d continued east. What if we’d encountered a herd? We’d be mincemeat.”

No one said anything. The sound of the motor was high and whistling. At last I forced a smile—but a jangly one, full of nerves.

“It’s funny you’re religious,” I said. “Mara always told me that religion and science were incompatible.”

Jachin frowned at the notion.

“My parents gave me my faith,” he said. “When the Council assigned me my vocation, I worried it meant I would have to abandon those beliefs. But the more I learned about evolution, the more it became clear to me. How would such a complex system develop without the help of God’s hand? Sometimes I think that we wonder about the afterlife, about a higher power, because it helps us endure. No other Terran animal has such an awareness of his own mortality. And none has been as resilient as us either.”

“But we haven’t had God on the ship,” Rebbe Davison said. I could tell from his expression that this was an old argument, one they’d rehashed many times before. “And we’ve gotten along fine.”

“We’ve lived ,” Jachin replied. “But have we thrived ?”

Had I? I stared down at my hands. There was blood caked under the nails. The truth was, I’d never worried before about living well. I’d been too busy just barely surviving.

“Hey,” Ettie shouted, drawing me out of myself as she pointed out toward the horizon. “What’s that?”

We all turned, staring out past the craft’s copper walls. The swamps had faded, and the beasts with them. In their place was a sprawling complex of white stone and green copper, hundreds of kilometers across. It spiraled out from the crowded center like a web growing wider and wider as it had expanded. Like our ship, the main hub was capped by bubbled glass. But this glass was ancient, fractured by a thousand tiny cracks. Brassy metal and sandstone structures towered up inside it, each one trying to touch the ceiling overhead. And a blood-colored jungle seemed to glow inside the city’s walls.