Chapter Eighteen
Roxie
They were still pulling me under. I just had to stand there and watch Vyken bleed. The man who saved me. The man who saved me from my stupid decisions, from my planet’s harsh laws, from a lifetime of incarceration. You name it, he saved me from it.
My own stubbornness. My own loneliness.
Fuck.
I bite down hard on my lip when I realize tears are streaming down my face with the same ferocity that blood is streaming down the General’s violet-colored arms. “Vyken,” I say softly, and with great effort he looks further away from me instead of into my eyes. Then he squeezes them shut, and turns, and locks his gaze with mine.
“Roxie,” he replies.
And all the feelings come flooding out. I haven’t cried in years, and it pours from my eyes like twin waterfalls. “Don’t leave me,” I whisper.
“We only knew each other a short time,” he says, and then grunts and grits his teeth, “but in that time you were everything to me. You made me feel…” He is woozy; he steps to the left and blinks hard. “You made me feel like I could do everything. All the things I was too afraid to do. You’re a miracle. I’m going to … I’m going to die fulfilled. Happy. Honored. Because of you. That’s the greatest gift you can give to a Mahdfel. Thank you.”
I move to wipe my nose with my forearm but my right arm has slipped below the roots. I can hear the meaning in the songs sounding out all around us in this underground cavern.
They can’t wait for me to join them. To give them the energy they need to survive without sunlight for another few … what? Hours? Days? I squeeze my eyes shut and then open my mouth.
Here goes nothing. I mean, literally, really, nothing.
I start to sing. Wordlessly, I use their tones and notes and patterns and I sing to them about the sacrifice Vyken is making this very second so that they can live.
I sing about the shrill noise from the black box that is keeping them feeling as though they can’t stand. I sing about what he’s doing to protect them. I ask them, please, to let me keep singing; keep fighting for another day.
And after my throat is raw from pleading with an alien species with the highest, most melancholy notes I can hit, after Vyken’s knees buckle and he falls on the ground, and my song takes on the guttural wail of a mourner … after all that, I feel the tugging on my body begin to slow.
And then stop.
And the song changes tune. They are thankful. They are sorry. They are sane enough to know how disoriented they are … I don’t know whether that was from Vyken’s blood sacrifice weakening the electrical device, or from my learning to communicate with them directly, but I like to think it’s a combination.
To no one in particular, I end our conversation with a solo about how my final act with Vyken was one that would benefit the universe to fight the Suhlik. To convey them, I let a terrible low hiss escape my teeth. The trees hiss back in agreement, and I finally pull myself out of the tangle of roots and lie, panting and hoarse, on the dusty ground.
“Wake up,” I say, partially to the Ferathorns and partially to Vyken.
Nothing stirs, but the gentle hum around me signifies that they are all feeling better. That’s good news, sure, but it also means … it means Vyken’s suicide mission succeeded.
I run to him, falling to my knees by his side. The device is no longer blinking and I pull him away, raising his wrist and wrapping it in the sleeve of my robe. I don’t know much about first aid but I had to take a course or two to work as a regular in a bar. I just about know enough to be able to make a tourniquet.
The heavy bleeding almost immediately slows to nothing, and I know that means one of two things: one, he’s an alien and he heals fast and I can’t predict what will happen next … two, he’s, well, he’s running out of blood.
The second option makes my body cold and heavy and I don’t know what to do.
The electrical device, no longer working the way it was intended, suddenly starts to beep so that my human ears can hear. The beeping gets faster.
“That’s not good,” I mumble. Three distinct ‘pop’s from all around the cavern sound out. The Suhlik’s last failsafe measure. A cave in.
I curse as loud as I can, my throat aching with overuse, and scramble out of the way of a tumbling dump truck-load of heavy dirt. Before I know it, I’m running as fast as I can. Away from everything that happened in there. I need to get my head together. I’m sobbing now. Confused and aching and hurting so badly inside it feels like it’ll never stop.
Vyken…
Why?
I almost run headlong into the Oracle, I’m paying so little attention. I manage to stop and I flail my arms comically, landing on my butt in front of the gently glowing mass of plant matter.
“Why?” I voice to it, my word quieted by the groan of collapsing tunnels. The Oracle must have enough mysterious power to keep its own chamber safe, because there isn’t so much as a falling particle of dust in here. “What just happened?”
There is a pause. I kind of miss the familiar sound of the singing surrounding me. “Are the Ferathorns alright?” I ask, desperately. I need something to come out of this. This day I’m certain I’ll look back on as the worst day of my life. “Is Vyken still alive right now?” I hate myself for running, but I know with one hundred percent certainty that it did nobody any good for me to lie there buried in a dirt tomb. At least from out here maybe I can help.
“This was the plan,” the Oracle finally says, pulsating with light as it speaks to me. I draw my knees up to my chin, a streak of blood on my arm from when I had briefly been able to tend to Vyken. He’d been so warm still. So soft and yet so firm.
I recall the way his body felt pressed against mine and my heart breaks all over again.
“It went as well as it could have gone,” it continues.
“I see,” I manage to reply, my voice cracking. I swallow. “You know, as far as a collection of bioluminescent consciousnesses serving to protect a colony of plantlike aliens goes, you’re kind of a dick.”
I can almost see it absorbing that with changing light patterns. “I have no genitalia,” it protests. “I am the culmination of a thousand generations of ripened souls. There is no greater representation of nature’s willingness to adapt and survive anything than I.”
“Never mind.” I rub my face hard. I don’t want to do or say anything right now. But Vyken’s death can’t be in vain. “What now?”
“Listen to me right now. Sometimes in a piece of music the silence is more important than the notes played. Do you understand?” I don’t answer. I just squeeze my eyes shut hard. “Sometimes in life we forget that taking a moment to rest, to breathe the air, to feel the earth, is just as important as to run around and … achieve.”
I smirk. I think about my life so far, and I know that I could have used someone I trusted reminding me of this when I was a kid, feeling unloved and feeling guilty for taking a moment to close my eyes and just remind myself to breathe sometimes. But I don’t think this advice is necessarily going to help me right now. I don’t know what will. Maybe nothing will.
“Then let’s sit,” I whisper. The lights dim almost completely, as if the Oracle is satisfied. Even though everything is dirt now, and I mean it literally.
Useless damn mushroom.
“I hear all,” it lazily reminds me. I ignore that.
I pull in deep breaths through my nose, and let them out of my mouth, trying to clear my head because I feel like that’s what the Oracle was telling me to try. But with every heartbeat the same thing throbs throughout my consciousness; my being.
I feel as though I had just discovered happiness. Just, you know, figured out life. The secret to it, and all.
To me, it’s Vyken.
And he was ripped away.
I pull in a deep breath and let it go. I wonder when this pain might lessen. It feels like … a rumble through my bones. Like cracking roots and snapping twigs. It feels like…
Um, no, wait a minute.
I stand and look over my shoulder.
“Be ready to help.”
It’s almost as if it’s my own thoughts telling me that, because instantly my legs start to move, and I stand and flex.
From the tunnels that lead to the cavern, there’s a sound. A yawning, crackling sound. Audible dirt spills from something slowly moving.
A seven-foot tree, thick with sharp branches, heavy with dry yellow leaves, a crown of wood above its head, crouches to enter the cavern and lays a bundle at my feet, bowing to the Oracle.
Although it’s unmistakably some kind of a tree thing, it’s also quite humanoid; more so than I was expecting. Its face is recognizable, and the split in the wood that is surely a mouth opens for it to speak, lips moving stiffly. Its eyes narrow, dark but sparkling with life.
“General Vyken of Paxia, Firosa,” it says. “He saved the people of Fera with a truly selfless act.”
“A truly selfless act,” the Oracle echoes. “Thank you, prince Rsharr. Lead the people to the sunlight now.”
The Ferathorn bows, a crackling noise that makes him wince ringing out. He turns and slopes back down the tunnels, grey dirt still spilling from his branches.
I look down to the bundle, wrapped in thick yellow leaves that are clearly half dead but still hanging on to life.
I hope that reflects the alien within. I kneel and peel away the leaves and blink away the tears, angrily -- now isn’t the time for them.
“Oracle,” I beg. “Can you help?”
“General Vyken of Paxia,” the glowing mass says thoughtfully. “You committed a truly selfless act. That requires a strength of mind so rare and so valuable that it is almost magical. It was the only way to save my people. That means his finding you was the only way to save my people. This was the plan.” A pause. “There is blood on the spacecraft, correct?”
I have no idea what to say, if it’s talking to me. How could I know? “There’s a medbay,” I say, but I only half know if that’s true. There were signs to one, if I recall right.
“General, you can get up and walk to the ship?” the Oracle asks. I don’t know what it thinks will happen, but I manage to ignore everything else going on and bend down and cup my alien’s paled purple cheek. His face is so handsome still, so smooth and still warm. The leaves he’s wrapped in feel warm to the touch, and I feel like they are contributing. He’s alive, for sure, but if he were a human and this was Earth I would know in my heart that he had only seconds left to live.
Something inside me holds me back from mourning him just yet, though.
His eyelids crack open. “Mm,” he says, unable to make words, and manages to move his hand to press over mine. It’s such a firm but gentle touch and it reminds me of everything I have come to respect, admire, adore about him. I smile, but his eyes shut before he can see it.
“Ferathorns, he requires the light of the suns as well,” the Oracle says gently. There’s a beat and then two burly tree-men crouch to enter the cavern on their way up to the surface, bow to the Oracle, and grab Vyken from under my fingertips to carry him.
“To the ship,” I call out, scrambling to my feet and tripping after them. “Take him to his ship!”
Wordlessly they change course once we get to the surface, and I squint at the sudden bright sunlight. Around me, Ferathorns bask in the sunlight with what I can only call smiles on their wooden faces. Prince Rsharr, the Oracle called him, is directing some younger, slighter ones up from the tunnels, brushing dirt from them, and dipping back under the ground to collect more of his people.
They’re alive, and they’re going to be OK. That means that Vyken’s sacrifice was enough…
No, I’m not as selfless as him, clearly, because I don’t think that’s enough. “Faster, please,” I yell to the trees carrying him to the ship, and jog up to them. They break into a faster walk than I could dream of keeping up with.
When we get to the medbay in the ship I expect to have to figure it out but the Ferathorns just lay him out on the metal slab and puncture his skin with tubes. One flicks on a switch and powers on a computer.
“Welcome,” the ship says. “General Vyken appears to be in critical condition. Should I enact the protocol to--”
“Yes,” I interrupt. “Obviously, yes! Every protocol!”
“Initiating.”
The tubes connected to his arm turn red as blood passes through them, and I turn to the tree aliens to thank them. But how can I? I’m flustered and sore and exhausted and thirsty and starving. I barely remember how to speak English.
They simply get to work fiddling with things in the medbay, working around each other as if they have been doing this all their lives. One of them programs the replicator and brings me some tea. Honest to goodness tea.
“How?” I croak, but I blow on it and sip it. How do they know all this?
They give each other a look. “The Ferathorns have a collective consciousness,” one says, his voice rich and deep like if varnished oak had a sound. “We have therefore lived a hundred thousand lifetimes.”
I nod, encouraging them to go on. “While we don’t have the memories of others,” the other one says, and I realize this one seems female -- if they are gendered like humans are -- because her voice is light and breezy like wind through canopies, “we have notions. It can alarm other beings.” She glances at her friend, who gives her what looks like an impression of a grin. It’s not unsettling, weirdly, though it should be. It’s a tree, after all. “It’s like a faraway whisper; an instinct. We tend to just understand things faster.” She gestures around. “Like how to use a standard Mahdfel craft’s medbay. A thousand of our ancestors or more will have walked around in one, and it feels therefore … familiar to us.”
I’d be fascinated normally but I’m barely listening. I have pulled up a stool and I am squeezing Vyken’s hand.
“Vitals?” the male one asks, moving around and checking the tech. Eyeing syringes and opening drawers. He has to check one or two before finding the right one, but that’s a dozen fewer than I’d need to look through.
“Far from perfect.”
I squeeze Vyken’s hand again. I just want to feel him squeeze back. Something; anything.
“He needs sleep.”
I look up at the Ferathorn and see the concern on the wooden face.
“So does she,” the other one adds. “You are no use to him half-dead from hunger and stress.
“That is a fact,” the first says. “Replicate a meal and sleep for an hour. Return then. He will not wake without you.”
The female shifts her arm-branches with interest. “Schorr,” she says. “They are mates. She does not want to leave him.”
“Mates?” I say again with a quirk of my lips.
“Fated,” she adds. “Throughout time we have seen enough to know a pair that are fated for each other.”
“The hell does that mean?” I narrow my eyes. “Like, I’m his DNA bride?” That’s the Earth term for a woman who’s matched with a Mahdfel and can have his children without risking death for her and the baby. It stands to reason that something scientific might have spiritual superstitions in other cultures. Not for me, though. I was never interested.
They exchange a look. “Get some sleep,” the male one says. “Like I say -- he will not awake without you, if that was a worry.”
It really was. “It’s not,” I say. OK -- I’m not big into people assuming they’ve got me figured out. I knew it was just a part of their ability to tap into whatever the Oracle had going on for them, but it was my instinct to stay aloof.
Vyken’s hand twitches, and then squeezes mine, and my heart aches with pure joy. I lift his hand and kiss it, leaving it pressed against my lips. Screw being aloof -- my man was OK!
After several minutes when we all confirmed he still wasn’t going to open his eyes, I took their advice. I made a piece of simple buttered toast with the food replicator, and took it into my room to eat it in bed. I set the plate on the side and then closed my eyes, the events of the day whirring through my mind.
I fell asleep within one minute.