Hugh Howey: Visitor

The Lord pulls the gag off Claire’s mouth so she can speak.

Rage burns.

There is no keeping it out of their minds.

The aliens look to each other and to me, and I feel as though I should be able to rip my hands free of my bonds and launch into them and kill the indestructible. I am fury and fear and grief. I just want my arms around my love, my body to shield her, and those who wish her harm dead, dead, dead, dead.

peace

This word cannot penetrate.

Peace

I cannot hear it with the sight of Claire in pain.

Peace.

I will not have it.

Please—

And Claire lifts her gaze from the floor, and she sees me, and she smiles. There is a line of blood along the top of her teeth, and she smiles through the pain. “Hey,” she mouths. “I love you.”

I flood her with love in return, and I see her flinch from the shock of it all. So much at once. Feelings without form. Thoughts without word. What I feel from Cricket when she nuzzles her head against my arm. What I feel from Cricket when she licks my cheek before I can stop her. “No lick,” I’ve said over and over. As futile as it would be for Claire to tell me, “No love.” How do you stop loving? You can’t. And the war passes through me. The rage dissipates. It’s gone. The Lords seem to relax.

“Why haven’t they killed us?” Claire asks. Her voice is weak. Her hands are bound together in front of her, and I can see a fingernail that’s missing, blood in a trail down to her elbow, the fight she put up.

I answer as the thoughts flow between the Lords and through me.

“They want us to murder our own fleet,” I say, as startled as Claire to hear the words leave my lips, as we both hear them and process them at the same time. “We’ve been planning an invasion, and it’s passing through here, and they want me to wreck them across those rocks. They want me to turn off the lights in the GWB at twelve past the hour.”

Claire shifts from knee to knee, her ankles bound, until she reaches me. The Lords don’t stop her. She leans her head against my chest, sags there, trembles a moment before collecting her thoughts.

“Why don’t they just do it? What are they waiting for?”

“ I have to do it,” I say. I think I understand what Scarlett wanted and what these Ryph want. Proof of the impossible. Of sheathed claws. To see if we have free will, are not just warring animals. I remember the paperbacks I read that were really written by my enemy. Scarlett said we were the invading aliens. And we are.

“Don’t let them use me,” Claire whispers. “We’re already dead. Don’t you dare let them use me to get you to do this. If they’re scared of our fleet, then let them get what’s fucking coming to them.”

I’m watching the Lords while Claire says this. They aren’t moving. They’re watching us. At least this is real, this conversation with Claire. The thoughts that come next feel just as real.

“They want a trade,” I say. “But you aren’t part of the bargain.”

“Fuck them,” Claire hisses.

I stare at the Lords. They’re talking to me. I’m talking back. I tell them I understand, but that I don’t believe them. That I won’t do it. That they’ll have to kill us both. That none of this makes sense.

remember

I remember the day I failed to kill the hive. The day I won my medal. The day my belly was opened and I bled on alien soil. The day the Ryph pulled back and no one knows why.

I remember holding Scarlett as she died in my arms. I remember feeling the life leave her body. She came to tell me all of this. She was the messenger. I can feel how much it cost these two Lords to make it here. What they’ve endured. Rebels on either side, factions who want to put an end to the cycle of violence, to the profits and votes that wars make. I feel a gap in understanding as great as that between my warthen and myself. Alien minds. Minds that know only to mistrust the different, to kill the other. Anything deemed other .

“They’re serious,” I tell Claire. “Our fleet will pass through here today. I can feel it. The war is coming, and they want me to stop it. They want us to stop it. It has to be by our hands, don’t you see?”

Claire pulls herself upright to sit by me. She places her hands on top of mine. My hands are bound to my legs. I curl a finger around one of her fingers.

“They’re using you,” she says. “Don’t let them.”

I listen. I strain to hear everything. It’s not me that’s an empath, and it’s not my warthen who’s an empath. It’s all of us. But there’s a scab over that sense, like the shame of not crying in front of older boys. Something we protect. We dare not share, so we dare not hear. Claire was right: it was something that happened in the trenches. It was something that happened the day I refused to set off that bomb. I’d seen too many children like me die for nothing, and I could feel and hear all those unborn alien minds, not yet scabbed over, still able to listen to the cosmos the way the GWB listens to the cosmos, and they pleaded with me not to do it. They asked for peace. And I gave it to them.

The Ryph have something of this sense. Warthens, too. This great empathy. This rawness. This open wound.

“There are people on both sides who want this war to end,” I tell Claire. “There are Ryph like me who are sick of the killing. Some of them are in high places. I think this guy, the larger one, is a prince or something like that. There are others. But so few of us. With no armies. Just unarmed civilians. Shameful pacifists. And even those in power who want to end the war, they don’t trust the other side. There’s no way to stand down. Nothing anyone will believe.”

“What are you talking about?” Claire asks.

“A trade,” I say. “An even swap. A gesture to those who don’t want to fight anymore, from one side to the other.”

“What do they want you to do?”

“I told you, they want me to destroy our fleet. And then they’ll destroy their own.”

Two hundred and twenty million lives—a settled planet’s worth of young men and women—hurtling through space.

I can feel them.

I touch the button that will kill them.

Wires run to the dome behind me that brings me peace.

Hanging from my neck, a small rock trembles in fear.

“Are you sure about this?” Rocky asks.

He knows I’m not.

There’s a clock on the wall ticking down the minutes. There’s a picture of a lighthouse keeper there as well. He and I stand watch over rocks. We let ships pass without thinking what’s in them.

Deep down, I know that I’ll do nothing. I’ve been here before, with the power to annihilate. I keep these thoughts buried deep so the Ryph don’t know. One of the Lords stands watch over me. The other has taken Claire to her beacon. There’s another switch wired to her GWB, a finger hovering over it missing its nail. There’s no way this happens. Claire’s last words to me echo in my ears:

“You can’t believe them.”

Sitting there, contemplating treason upon treason, I nearly laugh out loud at how ridiculous it all seems. It’s something I felt on the front before, when the kinetic rounds were coming down from orbital artillery and throwing up geysers of hot earth and shrapnel, and somehow you’re wading through it all and handing death to those on the other side, and you just have to laugh. The orange blossoms of HE rounds, and the curving tracers like glowing and screaming bees, and the howling jets diving through atmo and dropping hell. The fact that you are alive is hilarious. The fact that the universe can come to this, that anyone finds it normal, is comically absurd.