Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

The 290 pilot changed tactics again. He was employing a vast array of strategies in rapid sequence. There was skill in the maneuvers, but a hint of desperation as well. He wasn’t trying anything long enough to see if it would work, preferring instead to toss all his tools out into space, hoping one would fit and secure his escape.

Anlyn knew the strategy was foolish; regardless, she couldn’t help but admire the shape and precision of each tool. This pilot wasn’t playing around if he was trying to make sure he attracted the Darrin salesman with the best gear. Anlyn pushed hers and Albert’s top-of-the-line grav suits to their limits as she pulled in tight to the 290. She darted around it, mere paces away, doing what Bodi had once tried so many sleeps ago. She readied the airlock to grab on.

When they finally collided, and Lady Liberty’s hull latched on to a ship identified as “Parsona,” Anlyn felt the tension of piloting drain from her limbs. Her job was over and Albert’s about to begin. It had been an unusual skirmish, a challenge to awaken something within her, some worm of her former self wiggling deep beneath the ashy layers. She didn’t feel quite alive, but she sensed the stirrings of something that could be once more. At the very least, she felt some of the stiff tension exiting her body, perhaps leaving room for an old vitality to return.

What Anlyn didn’t know—what she couldn’t know at the time—was that her feelings of release were far more than mere tension leaving her body. The moment she locked with this other ship signaled the momentous end of one great cycle for Anlyn Hooo.

And the silent, inauspicious beginnings of another.

Anlyn and Gil stopped half a thousand paces from the Wadi shelter. Anlyn lowered the Wadi she had been carrying, and Gil did the same with Coril. There was no way she could’ve carried her cousin so far; she wasn’t even sure she could make what few paces were left.

Gil bent over, exhausted, and rested his hands on his knees. He coughed several times into his fist, wheezing for breath. “Are you sure about this?” he asked, his voice nearly lost on the wind.

Anlyn nodded. She was sure.

She stepped in front of Coril’s still form and crouched low. Gil lifted Coril and rested her on Anlyn’s shoulders. The extra weight on her open wounds—the deep claw gashes in her back—made each of them sing out, sending a chorus of cold pain down through her arms. Anlyn ignored it. She held her cousin’s wrists in one hand and wrapped her other arm behind her bent knees. Shifting the weight more up her neck, where so much seemed to already weigh on her heart, Anlyn tensed up wiry muscles already weak from so much ordeal—and gradually, haltingly, stood.

“You’ve got her?”

Anlyn didn’t waste her energy nodding. She took her first lumbering step forward. As she fell into a numb, silent routine of step after step, Gil hurried up beside her, the dead Wadi slung easily over his shoulder.

They were a hundred paces away—close enough that Anlyn could count down the end of her heartbreaking, trying ordeal—when her aunt and several other Rite counselors burst through the door of the shelter. They ran out, the worry visible on their faces even from so far away. When they got closer, that worry morphed into fright and disbelief. Coril’s closest uncle clasped his hands over his face, then ran up to Anlyn and seemed about to remove her burden.

Something in Anlyn’s guise, however, held him back. Instead of moving to help, the counselors formed a rough circle, a bubble respecting the Rite. Anlyn trudged the last dozen paces as moans and wails from her elders joined those from the distant canyons. A door was held open, which she stumbled through. She collapsed to her knees on the worn carpet and twisted to the side to lower her cousin flat. The adults went to Coril immediately, even though there was nothing they could do for her. Gil fell to the carpet beside Anlyn and sprawled out, his chest heaving from the long hike with so heavy a burden.

When Anlyn looked up, her aunt Ralei was standing before her. Tears streaked down the woman’s face, flowing around an expression of shock, or shame, or something of both. When their eyes met, Anlyn knew the ruse of Gil’s Rite would not last. The new hardness she felt inside her was reflected in the way her aunt stood before her, her adult carriage tense with respect. As the Counselors removed the Wadi from Gil’s shoulder, they too looked from it to Anlyn, then to the drying, heat-scabbed wounds across her back, exposed beneath her shredded suit.

The room stood silent, stuffed with sorrow and thick with somber respect. It pressed in on Anlyn, as stifling as the canyon heat. It filled her lungs, stung her eyes, burned her wounds with the stitch of healing.

The severity and importance of the moment—the loss of her cousin’s life mixed with the awesome power of her own survival—concocted a rapturous joy smothering under a blanket of regret. Anlyn was too happy to cry, too sad to smile, too guilty to exult. She felt near to bursting with all the conflicting emotions.

And in that moment, it suddenly occurred to Anlyn that whatever happened next, whatever followed for her, it wouldn’t be anything like all that had come before.

She was sure of it.

Mere hours after Molly dealt with Saunders’s reaction to Anlyn, she found herself faced with an even more daunting proposition: Now she had to introduce her friend to an entire crowd, a crowd that had been raised and taught to loathe her kind.

She cupped her hands around her face and leaned against the cargo bay’s porthole. Beyond, in the dim glow of Parsona’s landing lights, she could see the surviving Navy crewmen and the remaining Callites seated in rows, listening to Admiral Saunders speak.

“I’m nervous,” Anlyn said beside her.

Molly turned to see her friend’s face pressed up against the adjacent porthole, looking out.

“It’s not too late to back out,” Molly said. “You don’t have to lead this mission if you don’t want. I could go, and you could take Parsona to the Carrier for the missiles. You’d be hidden there—”

Anlyn shook her head but continued to gaze out through the carboglass. “I’m not nervous about that,” she said. “Going back to Darrin, flying in combat again… I think I can handle those things—”

“Are you nervous about facing them? ” Molly pressed a finger to the glass.

Anlyn turned away from the view outside. “Let’s put it this way: If you didn’t have all the guns stored away in here , I don’t think I’d feel safe going out there .”

“They’ll be fine. The Admiral is breaking the news to them gradually, so there won’t be the same degree of shock.” Molly looked back out the porthole. “I hope,” she added quietly to herself.

Saunders looked like he was just warming up, his arm-waving reminding Molly of her Academy days and all his energetic debriefings after simulator missions. Like all his former cadets in the audience, she could tell when he was nearing his final point by how high his hands got in the air. They fluttered like featherless, wounded birds flapping for altitude. The poor things hadn’t made it past his shoulders yet, so she went to see how Ryke’s engineering lesson was going.

Molly joined Edison in the aft hallway and peered into the engine room.

Two of the new arrivals from the Underground—warped down from another of the captured Bern ships just hours earlier—were also in the hall. One was a Callite, an old recruit from Lok and a friend of Dr. Ryke’s. The other was a race Molly had never seen before, a smaller version of the Bel-Tra, thin and hairless. The two of them quietly chatted together, paying little attention to the lesson going on inside the engine room. Molly hoped their distracted affect meant they already knew what they were doing.