The Survivor Read online

  “Let me explain,” I beg, scrambling backward, trying to get enough room to stand up.

  He grabs the cross strap of my utility harness, yanking me to my feet and past them, to the point where my toes are scratching desperately in the dirt.

  “Tarn!” I whimper, my voice retreating deep inside my throat. “Please—”

  “I never expected you to keep your promise.” The words thrum around me, sticking to my skin like stinging nettles as my brain struggles to interpret the layers of his voice that go beyond the range of human hearing. “But I did not expect you to lie.”

  “Lie?” The startled question leaps free of my choking terror before I can snatch it back.

  “Yes. Lie. Do you really think I don’t know how long it takes one of your ships to get from Earth to this planet? Lucille told my brother when your people departed your planet, and when you would arrive. You and I both know that the great ship that now orbits my planet left Earth long before you made your so-called promise.”

  “That’s true, I guess, but I didn’t know—”

  “More lies!” Tarn sings the word into my face, his layered voice discordant with outrage. “But it worked, didn’t it? You lied to me, and I believed you. I gave you time to bring more invaders to our soil.”

  “What?” I cough, gasping for air. “No. No. You’ve . . . We aren’t invaders, Tarn.” Once the first sentence is out, the others pour through the space it left behind. “We’re refugees. Our world is gone.”

  “Gone?” He follows the English word with a burst of Sorrow. I feel the words, even though I don’t understand them. The Sorrow can echolocate, so their language has a sonar element that human brains interpret in some weird ways. Whatever he just said makes my skin flush hot and my stomach twist like I’m about to throw up.

  He switches back to English. “How is that possible? Not even humans could destroy a whole planet.”

  “It isn’t gone.” I gasp. “The planet itself is there. But humans can’t live on it anymore.”

  I take a deep breath. Another. Another.

  “It was just a stupid mistake.” I can feel my voice getting louder and firmer as anger mingles with the fear and sadness. “The ISA pushed a software update to all of its computers, including a bunch of tiny robots that float around in Earth’s upper atmosphere eating pollution and extra carbon to stabilize the climate. The update had a bug in its calendar system. The atmosphere scrubbers had to reboot, and when it came back online, the nanobots couldn’t tell the difference between hydrogen and carbon and . . .”

  I cut myself off before I start babbling about the technical details.

  “It doesn’t matter exactly what happened. By the time the ISA figured out how much damage was being done, it was too late to stop it. We only have a few ships with superluminal drives—the kind that can travel between stars. There was only one in Earth’s solar system. A prototype colony ship they built to follow us to Tau. It was already stocked up for its second test flight, so they loaded in as many people as they could and just . . . left.”

  “And came here,” Tarn says, finishing the thought.

  “There are a little more than ten thousand survivors,” I say. “By now, everyone left on Earth is dead.”

  My knees give out then, and Tarn lets me fall.

  I stay there, sprawled in the grass, looking up at Tarn. He’s staring past me at the lights of the Landing and the pair of shuttles looming beyond it.

  “I wish . . .” I whisper. “I wish this was just an invasion. You could win that fight. But it’s not. It’s worse. We can’t leave Tau. We don’t have anywhere to go.”

  I slump, resting my head in my hands.

  I don’t know how long we stay that way, each lost in our own grief and fear.

  Then Tarn begins to speak in Sorrow. The words feel like swimming underwater in Grandpa’s lake—cold and heavy and suffocating, but in a weirdly pleasant way. Peaceful.

  He drops to the first of his two knee joints and plants his forehead against mine, wrapping one hand around the back of my neck. His trijointed fingers are so long, they fold all the way around my larynx to meet his palm.

  It happens so fast that I don’t have time to object or struggle.

  Then he’s squeezing. Pressing his fingers into the flesh of my neck. They feel kind of springy—like I’m being throttled by a Slinky. It should hurt, but all I can feel is the dense vibration of the Sorrow words, shuddering through my skin. Somehow, that makes it worse. I try to protest, but my voice has gone back into hiding. My hands fly up to grip his arm, his fingers, anything that might give me leverage.

  Tarn grabs them with his free hand, pinning them to my chest as he talks. Or sings, really. The suffocating peaceful Sorrow words are lilting—rising and falling in a thick melody. I can breathe, but just barely. Tears are running down my cheeks, dripping onto his glass-clear skin.

  All he has to do is twist and he will crush my windpipe. Or break my neck.

  But he doesn’t twist.

  He just sings.

  I can feel the sound radiating through his forehead and the implacable fingers around my neck. The buzz is sharply percussive at first, rattling through me in sizzling bursts that leave my body hot, like I’ve been working in the sun, despite the frosty chill in the night air around me. Then the tactile melody settles into a profoundly unsettling hum. A thick, wet sound that seems to pluck at every nerve in my body. It isn’t painful, just . . . I don’t know . . . awful. I need to get away from him. Now.

  I twist in his grasp, throwing all my weight backward to break his hold. I don’t care if it breaks my neck. I just want that sound to go away.

  It’s useless. He’s too strong. I try to scream in his face instead, but I can barely summon a whisper.

  “Tarn. Please.”

  He ignores me. The humming gets more intense.

  I’m sobbing now. Racking tears that shake my whole body.

  I thought he was my friend.

  The crack of a gunshot punches past my left ear, leaving behind a whine so loud I can hardly hear Shelby call out after it, “Leave the kid alone!”

  Tarn shoves me down into the mud and leaps over my head, straight at Shelby.

  She fires again, but he’s moving too fast. The bullet punches past him and slams into the shield.

  Then he’s on her.

  It’s so dark that I can only see flickers of movement in the yellow gleam of Tarn’s bioluminescence. I want to help, but I know better than to jump into a close-quarters fight between two armed combatants.

  As I pull my flex off my wrist and slap the emergency alert, Shelby bucks Tarn off, sending him sprawling. He bellows in pain. I startle and drop my flex. It disappears into the dark grass. I crouch, fumbling frantically to find it again.

  There’s another scream. I look up and see Shelby leap onto Tarn’s back. A stun gun crackles. Tarn shouts in pain and rears up, bending his second elbow joint backward to snatch her off his back and whip her several meters through the darkness.

  She cries out, and I hear rather than see her scrambling to get her feet back under her.

  Tarn finds his first. He stumbles upright and roars, throwing sound out like shrapnel as he swings his heavy staff down into the small of Shelby’s back.

  “No!” I cry, giving up on my flex and stumbling toward them. “Don’t do this!”

  Tarn draws his staff back again. A killing blow.

  I scream wordlessly.

  Shelby raises her pistol and fires. Bam. Bam. Bam.

  Tarn throws himself back, bending almost horizontal to evade the bullets. He snaps upright and sweeps the gun from her hand with his staff. Then he whips it back, slamming it into her torso with a vicious wet thud.

  Something flashes through the darkness and I’m moving even before my mind puts together what I’m seeing. I throw my body between them just as Tarn stabs his narrow black blade down toward Shelby’s chest.

  He manages to pull back, but just barely. I can feel the ti
p of his blade pressing into the padded shoulder of my parka.

  He pulls, slicing through the waterproof shell of the jacket as he draws the knife across my body, centimeters from my skin.

  I don’t move.

  It isn’t bravery. More like terror-induced paralysis. I desperately want Shelby to scramble up behind me, but she’s just lying there.

  Tarn leans in close, until his black eyes fill my field of vision, the yellow light of his blood burning out everything around me but him.

  “Leave this world, Joanna Watson.” The words pour over me like boiling water. “Leave this world, and take your people with you.”

  Then he bellows a blast of sound so loud, it fills my ears with hollow silence and the pounding of my own heart. And even after I can’t hear anything anymore, I can still feel him shrieking.

  Light flares, snagging my eyes from Tarn to the particle shield behind us. Crackling bursts of light are popping over the force field, burning its translucent rainbow to an opaque white.

  Then the shield bursts, falling away to empty air.

  Tarn just took down our shields with his voice.

  He says something then, words my deafened ears can’t hear that spatter over my skin. With that, he flicks his hood back into place and disappears into the night.

  I twist back to look down at Shelby. She’s lying on the ground behind me. She isn’t moving. She might be dead.

  I can’t hear myself screaming for help.

  Seven

  “Wake up, Joanna.”

  Beth’s voice cuts through the deafening silence of my nightmares.

  I can’t hear myself screaming in my dreams, but Beth can. It’s been three weeks since Tarn attacked me, and I don’t think either of us has had a good night’s sleep since.

  “Sorry, Beth,” I say.

  Beth flops back down in her cot. “Don’t be sorry, just be quiet. I’m going out on another raptor survey with Leela in three hours, and I will be more functional if I can spend them in uninterrupted sleep.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’m trying . . .”

  I trail off because I don’t know what I’m trying to do. Not be so scared at every moment of the day that I scream all night? That doesn’t seem like a thing you can try.

  “I know,” Beth says. “I know, Joanna.”

  We both lie there in the dark, staring at the hexagonal tiles of the ceiling. She isn’t sleeping either. I can hear it in the rise and fall of her breath.

  This is so bad. We need rest.

  We’ve all been working 22/7 to prepare for the survivors. What Beth is doing is even more important than constructing new buildings. She’s studying the phytoraptors, trying to develop a strategy so we can interact with them safely. Or just avoid them.

  But avoiding them has been getting harder.

  Ever since construction began, we’ve been seeing a lot of raptors around the Landing. We don’t know why. Beth hasn’t found anything that suggests there’s a nest nearby or that phytoraptors frequented the area before we started tearing up the grassland.

  I wonder if they’re keeping tabs on us.

  Beth doesn’t think so, mostly because these raptors don’t use sign language. Dr. Brown and her team taught some of the phytoraptors to sign when they first encountered them. A few have acquired a pretty sophisticated grasp of the language. Especially one the Rangers nicknamed Bob. Bob seems to like humans—he actually saved my life a couple of times.

  We know Bob has been teaching the other raptors in his nest sign language, but none of the phytoraptors around the Landing seem to know it. That makes it pretty unlikely that they’ve organized in some way to keep track of us, or intimidate us. Beth thinks they’re just curious. That almost makes sense, except for one thing—if these raptors aren’t local and they aren’t somehow communicating with Bob’s nest, then how did they even know we were out here?

  It’s Beth’s job to find out. The rest of the botany team is hunting for a stable food source, and basically everyone else is on construction duty. Printing and building even temporary shelter for ten thousand people is going to take every second of the next nine weeks.

  We’ve already woken up two hundred survivors—people with useful skills like construction and engineering, and the families of Shelby’s squadron. The lieutenant insisted we wake her squadron’s families first. She’s fiercely protective of her people.

  She’s also kind of a jerk.

  When she found out Dr. Kao had convinced Grandpa that prioritizing the Prairie squadron families might cause tension between our team and the newcomers, Shelby left the medical center in the middle of a nanobot treatment to heal her burst spleen. She limped into Ground Control in her patient gown to demand that Grandpa keep his word to her people.

  She openly doesn’t care if that pisses anyone else off. Shelby told Dr. Kao to his face that she doesn’t give a “good goddamn” about anyone she met after Earth was destroyed, because most of us are going to die anyway, and there’s no point in getting attached. Shelby and her people don’t even live with the rest of us. They’ve been rebuilding the old Ranger camp. They call it River Bend.

  Shelby has both squadrons doing half a shift of combat drills every day, as well as their usual patrol and construction obligations. And she insists on formal military discipline—a bunch of “sir, yes, sirs” and synchronized marching that just intensifies the separation between pioneers and soldiers I felt that first day, after the memorial. I really don’t like it. We’re all in this together. It should feel that way.

  But it’s more than that. I feel like the closer Jay gets to his new squad mates, the further he gets from us. From me. I’ve only seen him a couple of times since that morning before the memorial, and even when we manage to be together, it isn’t the same. If he isn’t being distant and weird, he’s talking about weapons training or battle drills, and all I can hear is the little voice in the back of my head reminding me that this is all my fault. The marines wouldn’t have to train like this if I’d done the job Grandpa promoted me to do. He was counting on me to help him negotiate with Tarn, and I started a war instead.

  I guess that’s hyperbolic. It’s not a war yet. We haven’t seen any sign of the Sorrow since the night Tarn almost killed me and Shelby, but we will. Shelby insists that it’s not a question of if they attack us. It’s a question of when. Since we can’t trust the shields anymore, she’s got two-man armed patrols walking the perimeters of both settlements twenty-two hours a day.

  As Leela has pointed out, repeatedly, Tarn started this by attacking me. But I’m the one who took it upon myself to tell him about the destruction of Earth. I should have gone with my first instinct and called Grandpa and Mom. They could have formally requested asylum, instead of hysterically telling Tarn that he was stuck with us because we have nowhere else to go. But I just had to do it myself. Now I’ve done worse than break my promise to Tarn that we’d leave. I’ve turned us into enemies.

  I’ll never forget the look on Grandpa’s face when he came into the medical center that night and saw the bruises on my throat. He was so angry. I’ve never seen him like that, out of control, almost.

  And Grandpa’s not the only one who seems out of control. Dad is angry all the time. He does nothing but argue with everyone about everything. But that’s better than Mom. She spends all her time in her new second-in-command office doing paperwork, and when she isn’t working, she’s sleeping. I don’t think she’s said more than two or three words at the same time in weeks. It’s like she’s disappearing, a little bit at a time.

  I tried to talk to Dr. Kao about it, but all he’d tell me was that he’s working with her and I shouldn’t worry.

  Don’t worry.

  Everyone keeps saying that. Grandpa even told me not to worry about Tarn and the Sorrow, which is just ridiculous.

  Tarn fried our shields with his voice. If the Sorrow can overload our shield projectors like that, then they can definitely use focused sound to destroy other vital stuff. Li
ke our brains. My eardrums were both ruptured by Tarn’s battle cry. Doc thinks Tarn could have killed me with that scream, if he’d wanted to.

  We should have realized it was possible. Sorrow Givers used their healing chant to repair injuries that my human doctors thought I’d have to live with for the rest of my life. That means, at a minimum, they can rearrange molecules and stimulate cell growth with sound. Why did we never wonder whether they could use sound to kill as well as to heal? Why did I never think to ask Tarn what else they could do with sonic manipulation?

  Just another entry on the list of Joanna’s potentially deadly mistakes.

  I offered to give up my commission after the incident with Tarn. Grandpa wouldn’t even consider it. He told me I’d earn my pips in other ways.

  I want to earn them. I do. But I keep volunteering for piloting assignments instead. Nobody turns me down—we need to make as many trips up to Prairie and Pioneer in orbit as we can to get all the survivors and supplies back to the surface. But running endless missions into orbit isn’t what I was promoted to do. I’m supposed to be helping Grandpa understand Tau so he can negotiate with the Sorrow, not leaving the planet every chance I get.

  The problem is, I feel like I don’t understand Tau anymore. No. There’s no point in lying to myself. I understand Tau. I’m just terrified of it. I remember when the intense strangeness of its beauty was thrilling. It wasn’t that long ago. Now everywhere I look, all I see is disaster and death. For the Sorrow. For the phytoraptors. For us.

  And I’m afraid. I’m so afraid, and I don’t know how to stop.

  I roll onto my side and squeeze my eyes shut. I’m taking the Trailblazer back up to the Prairie at 0530 for another load of raw. I need to be well rested.

  I lie there for a few minutes. I can feel sleep tugging at my brain, but my body is still tense. Clinging to wakefulness. I really don’t want to dream again.

  The nightmares aren’t just about Tarn attacking us. My brain comes up with creative new mash-ups every night, mixing and matching sense memories of burning of solar radiation with the sound of Miguel’s body hitting the rocks after Sunflower the phytoraptor tackled him off a cliff and the look on Teddy’s face, seconds before I pressed a button and sent him to his death. The medley of fear and anger and guilt feels like acid, dissolving me slowly from the inside out.