Living by the Sword
David Mack
The human gaze has real weight; never let anyone tell you differently.
I feel a hundred pairs of eyes on our backs as Papa drives us into town. Silent and heavy with hate, the locals’ collective stare follows our slow roll down Edenville’s main street. The few times I dare to look for sympathy from the crowd, I find only glares of contempt.
The dusty road is unpaved, dotted with potholes, and salted with rocks. It makes for a shaky ride. Not as rough as the earthquakes that shake the only continent on Arcadia (Mainzer-316c to the astronomers) with alarming regularity, but hard enough to rattle the outer panels loosely welded to our rover’s titanium frame.
We’re just meters from the settlement’s general store when a large rock caroms off our rover’s windshield, leaving a knuckle-sized white divot.
I flinch, then I reach for the wrench in my door’s cargo pocket. Without taking his eyes from the road, Papa says, “Put it down, Wai Ying.”
He never lets me fight. I slam the tool back into the door’s pocket.
It’s not a surprise. Papa’s a scientist, not a soldier. Light of frame and quiet by nature, he likes to say, “Violence is the language of the ignorant.”
He swings the rover through a wide turn to park it nose-first in front of the store. He switches off the engine, which settles with a rough and random clatter. He aims a hard look my way. I know what he’s about to say before he says it.
“Stay here.”
“I can help.”
“I said—”
“I know the list, Papa. You get the big stuff, I’ll grab the rest.” He’s about to object, so I keep going. “We can be in and out in half the time.”
His scowl softens. He tucks the rover’s starter fob into his coat pocket. “All right, let’s go.” We get out of the rover, slam its gullwing hatches shut, and climb the rickety wooden steps to the front door of Bickman’s Supply Co. It opens with a creaking of dry hinges and the tinkling of a tiny bell.
Inside the huge, tin-roofed building are long rows of towering shelves, all of them packed. Everything from tiny precision tools and integrated quantum circuits to plasma-powered backhoes you build yourself from a kit in a crate. Dimly lit, Tom Bickman’s place reeks of industrial solvents, machine grease, and mildewed concrete. The strongest odor of all? Tom’s funky cigarette.
The hand-rolled joint dangles from Tom’s lower lip as he looks up from his e-paper to greet us with a halfhearted wave. “Mister Li! How’re ya now?”
Papa smiles, not that Tom notices. “Good, and you?”
“Oh, not so bad. What can I do you for?”
“Spare parts. For my survey drone.”
Tom takes a deep drag, holds it, and then lets smoke spill from his mouth as he croaks out, “Y’know where to look. Help yourself.”
Papa stalks through aisles of second-hand junk. I follow him and then peel off toward the far wall, where Tom keeps cables, wires, and miniaturized gizmos. I grab what I know we need, coiling meters of hyperoptic fiber around my left arm and filling my fists with the least-obsolete processor chips I can find.
When I return from the maze of shelves, Papa is at the counter, watching Tom tally the latest charges to our tab. I add my haul to his. Papa smiles at me and tousles my hair. That draws a grin from Tom, who shoots me a playful wink. “Look at you, growin’ like a weed. How old’re ya now? Twelve is it?”
“Thirteen.”
“Unbelievable.”
Tom is still doing arithmetic when the shop door swings open. Two men walk in. First through the doorway is Javi Ortiz, a mountain of muscles wrapped in dirty coveralls and dirtier boots. The dust in his beard matches the gray in his hair.
Right behind him is his freakishly pale spindly sidekick Dmitri Volkov. I call him “Worm” because he’s hairless—smooth dome, no eyebrows or eyelashes, no stubble, not one hair on his forearms—and has weird, sallow eyes.
They flank Papa, who tries to ignore them.
Ortiz speaks first. “Look who it is, Dmitri!” He leans in, tries to compel Papa to make eye contact. “Li Sheng. Agent of the Mining Consortium.”
I watch Volkov sink his left hand into the pocket of his coveralls as he talks at Papa. “What’s the word, Li? Stolen any ranches for ‘the Man’ today?”
“I don’t give or take. I’m just the messenger.” Papa lets Tom scan the credit chip in his palm and blinks his left eye to confirm the charge with his retinal key. He picks up our bagged supplies and turns to leave.
Volkov rips the bag from Papa’s hands and paws through its contents. “Whatcha buyin’, Li? Ooo, hardware. Circuits. Gears. Wires. Photon batteries.”
Ortiz plants himself in Papa’s way. “Building something, pendejo?”
Papa’s cool never falters. “Just making repairs.”
The pale one lurks behind Papa’s shoulder. “Maybe you’re rebuilding that pesky drone of yours, eh?” As soon as Volkov says it, I see Ortiz glare at him, all but willing the younger man to shut up.
Papa makes a slow turn to stare at Volkov. “How would you know my drone needs repairs? Are you two the ones who shot it down?”
The big man steps forward, pushes far enough into Papa’s space that I see Papa wince at the man’s breath. “What if it was?”
Volkov’s hand creeps up out of his pocket—holding a knife.
Papa’s eyes are fixed on Volkov’s blade as Ortiz sucker-punches Papa in the gut. Papa doubles over as he shoves me away from the fight, and Ortiz knees him in the face. Blood flies from Papa’s mouth and spatters into my eyes. In the time it takes me to wince the goons are kicking Papa, who can’t get up from the floor.
Sickly light glints off the edge of Volkov’s blade as he winds up to stab Papa—and then a blur smashes the knife from his hand with a sickening crack of shattered bones.
The goons face the door to see a woman holding a wooden axe handle. She’s of average height with a sinewy frame, hair the color of night, and golden skin kissed by the heat of alien suns. Her dusty boots hug her calves, and her dark serape hangs loosely, leaving the twin blasters she wears on either thigh plain to see. Her face is hidden by the broad brim of her black hat until she looks up, revealing her to be in her fifties or sixties. Her ancestors were clearly Chinese like mine. She fixes her stare upon Ortiz. “Take your pet and go.”
Ortiz squints at the woman. “Who do you think you are?” He grabs a length of copper pipe from the shelf under the front counter and moves to confront the stranger. “Talk fast, puta.”
She steps toward Ortiz. He swings the pipe, and she deftly blocks his clumsy attack. Volkov lunges to grab his rusty switchblade from the floor, but she breaks his nose with a jab of the axe handle, then spins like a ballerina to clock Ortiz in the side of his head with her fistful of hickory.
Ortiz hits the floor like a sack of wet flour.
Volkov collapses on top of Ortiz.
The woman drops the axe handle on top of the vanquished bullies, then tosses a couple of ancient gold coins onto Tom’s counter. “For the trouble.”
Tom scoops up the coins and thanks her with a nod.
She walks out the door, into the street. Overwhelmed with gratitude and curiosity, I scramble after her, tuning out Papa’s plea for me to leave the woman alone. I need to know the name of our rescuer.
I find her standing in the street, lighting a slender pipe. The smoke from its bowl is rich with aromas of fig and black cherry. She puffs and gazes out at the broad rising curve of Arcadia’s rust-colored moon, whose close orbit is the cause of this world’s frequent quakes and eruptions. She stares at it like she’s peering through a keyhole to somewhere far away and long forgotten.
She pays me no mind as I sidle up to her. “Thank you.”
A puff on her pipe. “You’re welcome.”
“What’s your name?”
The woman sizes me up with a sly glance. “Xin Yi. What’s yours?”
“Wai Ying.”
She extends her gloved right hand. “Nice to meet you, Wai Ying.”
Papa shuffles out of the store clutching his purchases in a hastily packed new bag, which he stows inside our rover’s gear locker. His nose is bent and bloodied, his left cheekbone bruised, but I can tell the deepest wounds are to his pride. He can’t look me in the eye as he approaches me and Xin Yi. I introduce them, and he bows his head to her. “I am in your debt. How can I repay you?”
“I’m told the boarding houses are full. Hotel, too.”
“Wai Ying and I have a spare room.”
“I don’t want to be a burden.”
“It would be an honor.” He gestures toward our rover. “We live a few klicks outside town. Please, ride with us.”
She accepts Papa’s invitation with a small smile and a polite nod.
<* * *>
Xin Yi settles into our spare room as soon as we get home. She’s polite enough not to mention the ramshackle state of our prefab house, its cluttered rooms and half-bare pantry, or the fact that everything inside and out seems to be the same depressing hue of gunmetal gray. I spy on her from my bedroom across the hall, watching through the cracked-open door. She stands in the center of the spare room for a moment. Studies the space. Pivots slowly. Puffs on her pipe.
She checks the lock on the window shutters.
Takes off her serape and drapes it over the back of a chair.
Unbuckles her gun belt.
Sets it atop her jacket.
Then she starts adjusting the furniture. Changing the angles of things. Moving items around on top of the small desk. It takes me a moment to realize she is balancing the room’s feng shui.
Xin Yi pulls down the Murphy bed from the wall. It locks into place with a soft click. She sits on the end of the bed and strips off her boots. Free of her legs, the upper portions of the boots go limp, their leather supple from long years of wear. She slides her stockinged feet back and forth on our home’s faux-wood floor, and then makes fists of her toes. I wonder if it’s a ritual of some kind.
The woman goes still. Closes her eyes. Slows her breathing.
She snaps her head toward me and opens her eyes to look into mine. It feels like she’s reading the secrets of my soul.
I slam my bedroom door in a panic.
I put my back to the door and hyperventilate.
What just happened?
<* * *>
Dinner is a simple thing. Avian protein made in the biosequencer and charred in a skillet to hide its origins. Boiled fresh root vegetables from Papa’s garden out back. A loaf of spongelike instant bread. Papa does his best to dress up the carbon-printed bird meat with some five-spice powder he found in the back of a cabinet, and a pinch of salt and a dash of vinegar turn his rainbow beets into a delicious treat. But nothing can save the bread. Chewy and bland, its only redeeming quality is that it’s pretty good at soaking up drippings from the pan-fried not-chicken.
No one talks during dinner. It feels like Papa is ashamed over being rescued by a woman, and our visitor seems like the sort who keeps to herself.
I mop the last of the grease from my plate with a chunk of spongebread, fight to chew it enough to be swallowed, and wash it down with green tea. Proud of myself, I push my empty plate into the middle of the table.
“May I be excused, Papa?”
“After you clear the dishes. But stay close.”
I accept his conditions with a nod and collect the used plates, cups, and flatware from the table. He and Xin Yi watch me carry dinner’s remnants to the washing sink but say nothing, hiding their thoughts behind sly half smiles. I rinse the plates and utensils slowly, hoping to eavesdrop, but hardly a word passes between them. I start to wonder if they’ve taken a vow of silence when Papa says to her, “Have you always done that with your food?”
Xin Yi looks up, her expression self-conscious. “Done what?”
“Made each item an island.” Papa cracks a disarming smile. “I’m not criticizing. Wai Ying does the same. She doesn’t like it when her foods touch.”
Xin Yi seems amused but a bit embarrassed. “I hadn’t noticed.”
They don’t say another word while I wash the dishes. After I set the last item into the drying rack, I slip outside. I grab up a piece of scrap wood the length of my arm and try to emulate Xin Yi’s elegant spinning maneuvers, only to fumble my makeshift quarterstaff again and again in the gathering twilight.
I pretend to thrash a dozen other bullies from town, whirling and dodging and striking like a serpent until I leave myself sweaty and winded. My energy spent, I lean against our prefab housing pod, beneath the kitchen window, through which I hear Papa and Xin Yi speak in low voices.
“. . . always running off, her mind a million light-years away,” Papa says, sounding disappointed. “I try to teach her responsibility, but she does not listen.”
Xin Yi answers gently and with patience. “Do not blame yourself, Li. She is young. Forgive her as many times as you must.”
“I try. But she has no idea how much I give up for her.”
Sadness colors her reply. “She will. . . in time. That much I can promise.”
<* * *>
A muffled cough from across the hall wakes me in the middle of the night. I check the chrono. Dawn is still hours away. Papa is probably sound asleep, shielded from interruption by the white noise of the air management system, which is connected to the house outside his room.
I slip out from under my sheets and steal into the hallway, as quiet as falling dust. I plant myself outside Xin Yi’s door, which stands ajar. From the other side comes another round of hacking coughs—loud, phlegmy, and lungsore. Driven by curiosity, I peek into the spare room.
Xin Yi sits hunched forward on the bed. She holds a wadded clump of gauzy fabric over her mouth as she coughs. What I mistake at first for a pattern on the cloth, I quickly realize is a random spattering of bright red blood.
Her coughing abates. She wipes fresh blood from her lips before closing her eyes and drawing a deep, slow breath. Then she opens her eyes and stares into mine. “It’s rude to spy.” Her words paralyze me, and then she frees me with a wan smile. “Come in.” She pats an open spot on the bed to her left. “Sit.”
It feels like a trap, or at least a trick. Caught snooping, I expect some kind of punishment. But she doesn’t seem angry at me. Still smiling, she beckons again.
I nudge the door open far enough to slip by, and I cross the small room in short, halting steps. She watches me with a strange look on her face as I sit next to her. What does her expression mean? Does she feel sad? Protective? Wistful?
Unable to decipher the code of her emotions I look at her hands and the bloody kerchief. I speak without thinking: “Are you sick?”
“Yes.”
Her answer is so direct it surprises me. “Is it bad?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a cure?”
“No.”
“Maybe we could ask Papa if—”
“Please don’t tell him.”
“Why not?”
“Some things are best kept private.” She folds her kerchief to hide the fresh bloodstains, and then she looks at me. “Promise you won’t tell a soul.”
I feel like I couldn’t refuse her even if I wanted to. “I promise.”
“Swear on your guardian spirit. Swear on Chang Xi.”
“I swear by Chang Xi.”
Xin Yi accepts my pledge with a small nod. “All right, then.” She sets the folded kerchief onto her end table. “It’s late. Go back to bed.”
“I’m not tired.”
“I didn’t ask if you were.”
“Where are you from?”
She pauses to make up an answer. “Lots of different places.”
“I mean originally.”
“No place anyone ever cared about.” She takes hold of my arm, stands, and pulls me to my feet. I resist as she walks me to the door. “Now. To bed.”
“One more question?”
“Just one.”
All I’d wanted was to postpone the inevitable, to prolong my visit. But when I look up at Xin Yi, I think of something worth asking. “How did you know my guardian angel was Chang Xi?”
I wait for her to lie to me. To say she heard me pray to Chang Xi, or that Papa told her—just so I can tell her I say no prayers and have never shared my guardian angel’s name with Papa, because Mama told me never to tell it to anyone.
She smiles. “I know many such things.”
“But how do you know this?”
Her touch is featherlike as she pushes my hair from my face and tucks it behind my ear. Then she slips her finger underneath the slender silver chain I wear around my neck, and gently she lifts my blessed medallion from under my flannel nightgown. “Maybe I am Chang Xi.”
I let out a nervous laugh. “No, you’re not!”
“Then how do I know the engraving on the back of your medallion isn’t your name but your mother’s? Because your medallion was once hers.”
How can she know that? Is she really Chang Xi? Before I can ask, she ejects me from her room with a strong but gentle shove and closes her door.
Alone in the hallway, I feel like I share a bond with Xin Yi, even though I don’t know any more about her than I did before tonight. I just know I like her.
Maybe this is what it’s like to meet an angel.
<* * *>
Dawn’s first needle of daylight slips through my window’s shutters and stings my eyes. There’s no time to waste on a trip through the ’fresher, so I get up, pull on yesterday’s clothes and boots, tie my hair back in a ponytail, and hurry out to the kitchen. My haste is rewarded with aromas of black tea and bacon.
Xin Yi and Papa are both up and fully dressed. She sits at the table, expertly snaring dense clusters of noodles from her breakfast ramen with a pair of slender chopsticks. He stands in the far corner, hunched over the comm terminal, which is reconstructing a message relayed hundreds of light-years from the one of the core systems. This far out it takes forever to reassemble all the data packets.
I sit at the table. Xin Yi picks up a full bowl of breakfast ramen and puts it in front of me. “Eat. Before it gets cold.” I’m about to ask how they knew I’d be up this early when I realize this must be Papa’s breakfast, abandoned as soon as the comm unit trembled back to life after weeks of silence. Knowing that makes me hesitate to dig into it, Xin Yi urges me to eat with an intense stare and a nod, so I grab the chopsticks from Papa’s place setting and wolf down his breakfast.
The bowl is more than half emptied when he returns from the comm and drops into his chair. “Wai Ying, after you finish eating, go pack a bag. We’re taking a field trip.”
“For how long?”
“Four, maybe five days, depending on weather and terrain.”
Xin Yi sips her tea and then asks Papa, “May I ask where you’re going?”
“North, across the Bled. Some ministry honch in a corner office on Proxima wants me to scout a grid reference in the Cerulean Range.”
“Crossing the Bled is dangerous. Lots of Bàomín activity out there.”
“Only east of the gorge. They’re pretty scarce in the west Bled.”
“All the same, I should go with you.”
He waves off her suggestion. “I can’t ask you to do that.”
“I’m not asking. That survey request for grid ZX-127? It came from me.”
Papa nods but keeps his expression blank. “I see.” In an oddly upbeat tone of voice he tells me, “Looks like you’re sitting in the back this time, bao bao.”
<* * *>
Less than an hour later we’re on our way in the rover, which has been packed to capacity with fuel, gear, water, and provisions. Papa takes the main road out of town. Within a minute we pass the sign that reads “Now Leaving Edenville—pop. 4,311”. After that, the road vanishes into an endless reach of dust and stones.
By midday we’ve left behind the last traces of vegetation, which was already sparse back in town. Arcadia has some great forests and farmlands, but most of them hug the equator. Once you get past thirty degrees north or south, the only live vegetation consists of scrub brush, lichen, and a few succulents.
I don’t mind, though. There’s a beauty to the desolation, a peace unique to the desert. After we hit the parched red salt flats of the Bled, the silhouette of the distant Cerulean Range dominates the horizon like a row of broken teeth under an endless yawn of sun-blanched sky.
None of it seems to hold any appeal for Xin Yi. Between rounds of slowly savoring the smoke from her pipe, she sleeps in the front passenger seat, oblivious of the majestic landscape slipping past all around us.
Aside from a brief stop to relieve ourselves (taking turns behind the rover for privacy) and eat a quick lunch of cold noodles with artificial protein that’s meant to taste like veal but chews more like Kelvian watersnake, Papa doesn’t stop the rover until the sky starts turning purple, a harbinger of sundown. The rover has strong halogen headlamps, but that still doesn’t make it safe to drive at night.
For dinner, Papa pulls out the battery-powered hot plate, two liters of water, and some flash-frozen meal packs, which combine to make a pretty decent pot of duck noodle soup. An impressive feat when you consider that the nearest real live duck is over seven hundred light-years away. Or so he likes to tell me.
Xin Yi savors each spoonful of the soup like it’s ambrosia. “I haven’t had duck noodle soup this good in years. What’s your secret?”
Papa beams at her compliment. “The spices. Balancing the cloves and the star anise, the honey and vinegar, the salt and the ginger.”
“Well, make sure you write it down. It’s the best I’ve ever had.”
Her praise has Papa smiling like a fool the rest of the evening, until he finally tucks himself into a sleeping bag on top of the rover. Normally I’d sleep inside the rover, but tonight I insisted on sharing the pup tent with Xin Yi. It takes me only a few minutes to set it up, and by the time I finish, Xin Yi has switched on our infrared heater. It lacks the rustic charm of a crackling campfire, but its invisible warmth is better for stargazing—and less likely to attract attention out here in the Bled. There aren’t many native predators to speak of this far north, but there is always a risk of bandits roaming the flats. Better cautious than dead.
I sit close to Xin Yi in front of the tent, basking in the steady warmth from the heater while we look up at the heavens. She draws sweet smoke from her pipe as I point at a bright star high overhead. “Have you been there?”
“Alrakis? Sure.”
“What was it like?”
“I presume you mean its capital planet, Alrakis Prime. If you really want to know, it’s cold, crowded, and dirty. And that’s the nice part.”
I point at another star. “How ’bout there?”
She blows a smoke ring that disappears into the dark. “Betelgeuse? No one there, child. Just a supergiant star cooking everything to a crisp.”
I single out another star at random. “That one?”
This time Xin Yi freezes. Sadness moves behind her eyes like a storm’s shadow on the plain, and then it’s like she’s looking beyond the horizon. “Theta Indii. The New Busan colony. . . I’ve been there.”
Despite her melancholy, I can barely contain my excitement. “You’ve been to New Busan? What was it like? I want to know everything!”
She gazes skyward and heaves a long sigh.
“In the cities, the ’scrapers are over five kilometers tall. The rich ride around in airships with glass floors; they throw wild parties while they look down and laugh as their private police kill unarmed protestors in the streets. On the outskirts, people fight over scraps of food, a pair of shoes, or a few square meters of shelter. And if you go out past the wire, into the wilderness, pretty much every indigenous form of life on that planet will try to kill you any way it can.”
“That sounds. . . awful.”
“It is.”
“What’s the worst thing about New Busan?”
Xin Yi stares at the ground. “It’s where I had my first gunfight.”
I perk up. “Like a duel?”
She shakes her head. “Real life isn’t like that. People almost never square off at high noon.”
“So how’d it happen?”
“An ambush. One of them blocked my path, as a distraction.
“A second man hiding behind me tried to shoot me in the back. Hit my shoulder instead.
“I ran for cover as a third gun, a woman, came at me from my left.
“I jumped behind the wreck of an old speeder, but one of them shot me in the leg while I was in midair. No idea which one.
“Once I had cover, I took out the one who’d been behind me. Then I snapped a lucky shot at the one who’d blocked me. Got him in the throat.
“As he went down, his finger squeezed his trigger and put a wild shot into the woman who’d come to back him up.”
My pulse races. It’s hard for me to keep my voice down so as not to wake Papa. “Wow! Did you ever have a classic quick-draw gunfight?”
“A few.”
“That’s wild!” I mime fast-drawing a pair of finger pistols and blasting some unseen opponent to smithereens. “I want to be like you someday.”
She regards me with heartbreak. “No, child, you don’t.” Again she looks away, into the faded pages of her memory. “That woman from the ambush? Her partner’s misfire left her gut-shot, but she wasn’t dead. I knew if I left her alive she’d either put the marshals onto me, or track me down someday to shoot me in the back. So while she lay there gasping like a dying fish, bleeding out in a street of mud. . . I shot her in the face.”
I sit stunned by Xin Yi’s confession as she stands and dusts off her serape. “I’ll understand if you’d rather not share the tent,” she says, her voice taut with shame, “but I wanted you to know the truth: there’s nothing noble or heroic about the life I’ve lived.” She crawls inside the tent and leaves me alone in the dark to contemplate my shattered illusions and the cold, distant stars.
<* * *>
Our second day in the rover, no one says a word from sunup until nearly the end of the day, when we round the final bend that leads us into a dead-end box canyon. Ragged walls of rust-colored stone tower above us on three sides, framing a sky of low-hanging clouds painted an imperial violet by the dying rays of the sun.
But the only thing any of us can look at is the artifact.
It must be alien. I’ve never seen anything human made that looked anything like this. It’s enormous. Over a hundred meters high, and hundreds of meters across, its shape evokes the eight-legged abdomen of an arachnid. It’s made of some kind of black volcanic rock—obsidian, I think I once heard Papa call it—and so is the huge, oval platform on which it stands.
The platform is spiderwebbed with fissures and cracks, some of them as fine as a hair, others meters wide and as ragged as a serrated blade. A long, narrow shaft connects the structure’s abdomen (for lack of a better way to describe the bulbous mass) to the top of an upright ring of the same night-black glass fused into the artifact’s base. The alien construct emits no sound, but the wind howls and shrieks as it twists unseen around the artifact’s arachnoid features.
Surrounding the oval platform are ancient pieces of broken architecture. Dozens of toppled pillars, the debris of fallen archways and fractured obelisks, and cairns abandoned since the age of antiquity. . . all of them left here to gather dust in the lonely crags of the Cerulean Range.
Papa is entranced by the artifact. He ignores every bit of safety advice he ever gave me and sprints onto the platform. Desperate to drink in every possible detail, he pirouettes clumsily as he moves toward the central ring. He’s so caught up in the moment of discovery that he doesn’t notice I’m right behind him.
His voice is a reverent whisper. “Amazing. Just incredible.” He takes belated notice of me at his side, and then he points at the symbols inscribed upon the edge of the ring, starting at its apex and proceeding counterclockwise around its full circumference. “That’s an alien script. Proto-Kinaaran, I think.”
From far behind us Xin Yi interjects, “Correct. Well-spotted, Li.”
I look back. She stands behind a broad slab of angled stone that resembles dark marble. At her touch it seems to come alive. The black stone shimmers with moving streams of jade-green light. Xin Yi works quickly, tracing different symbols with her fingertips. As the characters beneath her hands begin to glow, so does the interior edge of the ring.
Galvanic prickly heat stings the skin of my exposed forearms like a million tiny insect bites, and then the vast space inside the artifact fills with huge green ribbons of electricity twisting around one another in a slow, hypnotic dance.
The air in the center of the upright ring ripples like a quiet pond disturbed by a falling stone. As the image further distorts, it shimmers like quicksilver.
“Take cover,” Xin Yi says. “Both of you. Quickly.”
Papa seizes my wrist and, in a clumsy jog, he tows me to cover behind the nearest mound of segments from a fallen pillar. Obeying his instinct to hide, he ducks low behind the stone barrier, but curiosity compels me to peek over the top, to see what Xin Yi does and what happens next.
The rippling pool of silver suspended inside the ring turns black, and then its void is salted with stars that seem to fall away, like grains of sand through the neck of an hourglass. They swirl faster each second, shrinking their orbits until they converge in the center with a flash of white light that swells to fill the ring.
Inside the blinding glare, a human figure takes shape and steps through the ring. Then another person’s silhouette forms inside the flood of light; as the second person emerges, I see the outline of a third following them through the portal. As the third traveler exits the gateway, its fierce white blaze dims and then melts back into a rippling vertical pool of silver.
The three visitors stand in a line. Those on the ends are each a few meters away from the one in the middle. They all wear the same style of black Stetson, but other than that they look nothing alike.
In the center stands a tall Arcturian with light gray skin, elegant genderless features, big aqua-colored eyes, and an almost imperceptible nose. Ze lets zir bone-white hair hang loose and flutter in the arid desert wind. The bottom of zir ash-colored longcoat flutters around gray serpentskin boots.
To the left of the Arcturian is a human whose salt-and-pepper hair matches his ragged beard. The deep creases in his sun-browned face are a ledger of injuries and disappointments. The hem of his black leather duster hangs below his knees. Unlike the Arcturian, this man wears heavy boots with reinforced soles. The only people I’ve ever seen wear that kind of boot on Arcadia are former soldiers.
On the other side of the Arcturian is a woman whose umber skin has cool blue undertones. Her braided black hair falls over her right shoulder and down the front of her dark brown canvas trench coat. She wears her clothes loose and comfortable, from her tunic and vest through her breeches and calf-hugging boots. Her face is both stern and beautiful, her affect calm, her carriage confident.
Xin Yi faces them from fifteen meters away. She offers a polite nod to the Arcturian: “Winter.” Then to the man: “Sánchez.” And finally to the woman: “Kasongo.”
Winter’s voice is mellifluous, almost musical, like those of most of zir species. “I was told I would find you here. Until now, I didn’t believe it.”
A rasping snort precedes Sánchez’s expulsion of spit into the dirt. His voice sounds like he has a throat full of grit and broken glass. “Neither did I. Anonymous tips usually ain’t worth shit.”
Kasongo stares long and hard at Xin Yi. “What happened, Wai Ying? Who sold you out?”
A chill goes down my spine when I hear Kasongo say my name—and then I realize she wasn’t talking to me.
Xin Yi adjusts her stance and throws the front of her serape over her left shoulder to reveal the twin blasters she wears holstered on each thigh. “No one sold me out, Marshal. I invited you. All of you.”
Sánchez narrows his eyes in suspicion. “And why would you do that?”
“Because I’ve run from you all long enough. Let’s end this.”
Winter regards Xin Yi with an odd tilt of zir head. “As you wish.”
The strangers untie the belts of their coats, pull them open, and sweep them backward to reveal that they each wear a holstered blaster on one thigh—and the famous, gleaming golden-triangle badge of a Time Marshal on their belt.
My jaw goes slack, and I feel as if the world has frozen around me. Every detail feels vital: the sweat on Papa’s forehead, motes of dust riding the wind, the weltering light of the gateway, each tremor and twitch in the marshals’ hands—
Then everything happens at once, almost too fast to see.
Xin Yi draws first, I’m sure of it. Both her blasters clear leather before any of the marshals get half as far, but she fires only one of her pistols. Her shot clips Kasongo’s knee, and the marshal loses her balance.
Sánchez and Winter finish their draws as Xin Yi fires her second shot, which passes harmlessly between the two marshals.
Kasongo falls hard to the ground. She squeezes off a wild shot as she lands on the rocky soil. The plasma pulse ricochets off one of the artifact’s massive legs.
Winter fires, puts a plasma bolt straight through Xin Yi’s gut and out her back in a spray of blackened tissue and boiled blood. Her legs buckle.
“No!” I spring to my feet and leap toward Xin Yi, too quickly for Papa to stop me. He abandons cover to chase me.
On her knees, Xin Yi fires both her pistols at once—and hits nothing but dirt.
She’s not aiming at the marshals. She isn’t aiming at all.
I see it now. She didn’t come to fight. She came here to die.
A wild shot by Kasongo screams over Xin Yi’s head and past me to blaze into Papa’s shoulder. The impact stops him cold and throws him onto his back. Stunned unconscious, he trembles as blood seeps from his charred, smoking wound.
I’m still running toward Xin Yi when Sánchez’s shot slams into her chest. Her blasters tumble from her hands, and her body goes limp. She lands on her back with her legs trapped underneath her.
When I reach her side, she isn’t moving.
I glare at the marshals through a broken lens of tear-stained eyes. Winter and Sánchez help Kasongo stand. The trio walks back to the shimmering silver ring. One at a time, they breach its quicksilver threshold and evaporate like mirages.
Then they’re gone, and all that’s left are the doleful cries of the wind.
<* * *>
It takes damned near every stim in the rover’s field medkit to wake Xin Yi. Her eyes flutter open, and she squints at me as if I’m too bright to see.
She musters a sad smile. “You’re still here.”
I nod quickly, not sure what to say.
She asks, “Are you hurt?”
I shake my head. Then a wave of anger hits me. “Did you really bring those marshals here?” Xin Yi nods, and I start to cry. “Why?”
“I needed you to see this. So you’d understand.” Xin Yi struggles to reach toward me. Keen to her intention, I clasp her hand. Her eyes shimmer with tears. Her voice turns brittle. “I need you to do something.”
“Not until you tell me why the marshal called you ‘Wai Ying.’”
She coughs, and a thick brew of bright and dark blood pools in her mouth. She turns her head to the side to let it spill out. When she looks back at me, her bravado is gone and only her sorrow remains. “You know why, child.”
She guides my hand to her throat. Beneath her shirt collar I feel a delicate metallic strand. With care and dread, I draw it out into the dying light of dusk to see a silver chain that bears a medallion of Chang Xi. And on the back of that medallion. . . my mother’s name, hand-carved in hànzì characters.
I have a million questions but all I can think to ask is “How?”
She wraps both her hands around mine, as if to signal she won’t let me go until she’s told me everything. “When I was a girl. . . Volkov and Ortiz. . . killed Papa in the store. Stabbed him in the back.
“I knew I’d be next. So I ran.
“I took the rover through the Bled, where I thought no one would follow. I drove for days. Until I followed a trail here”—she turned her eyes toward the artifact—“and found this.”
She coughs out another lungful of blood, spattering my hands and jacket. I give her some water. After she catches her breath, she continues in a weak voice. “I didn’t know what it was, or how it worked. The first time I used it, it threw me halfway across the galaxy and fifty years into the past.
“I came back here, over and over. Tried to make myself into a time-jumping Robin Hood. But it kept going wrong.
“Anything I did to make things better only made them worse. I lost lives I tried to save. Ruined everything I loved.
“Before long I was on the run from the Time Marshals. They hounded me through time for decades. It was all I could do to keep this hidden from them.
“It took me a lifetime to learn how to use the machine with any control. To get back to this moment. To you.”
Tears fall from her eyes, and I feel myself crying in sympathy even though I still don’t understand what’s happening. “Why?”
“Because this is when my life changed. Losing Papa broke me. Then I found this thing. I thought it was the answer to my problems, but all it did was multiply them.” A hard cough racks her entire body. Dark blood spews from her mouth, and then she starts to shiver violently. “Inside my coat. . . a red crystal rod. Put it in the center receiver. . . on the main panel. Destroy the machine.”
I can’t believe what she’s asking of me. “Destroy it?”
Her hands tighten around mine with fierce resolve. “Promise me.”
“Why?”
The strength of her grip slowly ebbs. “I spent fifty years on the run. No joy. No home. No love.” Her trembling worsens, so I hold her in my arms. There is guilt in her voice and regret in her eyes. “Don’t walk my path, child. There’s nothing at the end of this road but pain. I gave you and Papa. . . a second chance. Take it. . . and find a better way.”
Her last breath slips out, thin and weak. In the space of a moment, nothing seems to change, but I know everything has. Her eyes are still open but no longer see. The heat of her hands on mine will soon fade and her flesh will turn gray.
I extricate my hands from hers and lay her to gentle rest on the platform of cracked obsidian. As she requested, I search the inside pockets of her coat until I find an asymmetrically cut rod of red crystal. It is no mere hunk of mineral. A spark burns inside it, like the heart of an ember that refuses to die.
Papa is groggy and confused when I rouse him with a stim stick. There is too much to explain, and I’m not sure he would believe me if I did, so I browbeat him into the passenger seat of the rover, which I drive about half a kilometer away from the artifact, just around the bend in the canyon. Then I park the rover and get out.
Half-awake, Papa asks, “Where are you going?”
“To keep a promise.”
Exhaustion pulls him down into a restless half sleep as I walk back to the artifact, the blood-red crystal clutched in my fist as the sky turns black overhead.
I reach the control panel and find the receiver right where Xin Yi—where I told myself it would be. As I bring the crystal toward the panel, its defiant inner spark flares bright and true.
And I wonder if I’m making a mistake.
All my life I’ve dreamed of adventures. Of seeing distant worlds. Exploring the frontier. Of becoming the stuff of legends. . .
Then I hear the fathomless sorrow in Xin Yi’s voice: There is nothing at the end of this road but pain.
I insert the crystal into the receiver. Like compatible magnets, the console and the crystal snap together, drawn by some invisible force. A piercing whine fills the canyon. Cracks spread across every part of the massive alien machine, and then fiery light shines through them. Hot tears cut streaks through the dust on my face as the ground quakes with the promise of violence.
I run. Harder and faster than I’ve ever run before.
I clear the platform just before the structures overhead come crashing down and crush the central ring. The roar of the artifact’s collapse and the trembling bedrock are deafening. The heaving ground threatens to make me face-plant, but I keep going until I reach the rover. Only then do I stop and look back to see that the box canyon has collapsed in upon itself. Whatever trace there might have been of the alien time artifact is buried now, beyond recovery.
The wall of dust and smoke surges into the canyon from the site of the collapse. I scramble into the rover and close all the windows and vents just in time. The dust storm courses over the rover and coats it in thick grime.
About a minute later, all is quiet in the canyon.
Papa stirs in the passenger seat. He looks at me and makes an effort to focus in the dim light of the rover’s console display. “Bao bao? Everything okay?”
I press the engine start button, and the rover purrs to life. Then I reassure my father with a smile. “We’re all right, Papa.” I put the rover into gear and step on the accelerator. “Let’s go home.”