Dove Arising (39 page)

With a rush of blood to my face, I see how warm, how beautiful they are. The new commotion inside me matches the passionate wind outside—the prickly sensation is returning, intensifying until it feels like pine needles sticking me from the inside.

I stand on shaky legs.

Wes opens the side hatch, revealing the putrid gray outside, and lowers himself into the water. As he holds on to the ship’s railing with one hand, his legs drift away. I understand that I must follow.

The water flings itself into my eyes. It smells of salt and filth, stings my laser wounds and pulls at my black clothes. But the taste is familiar, even comforting.

The sea tastes like tears left out in the cold.

I hold on to Wes’s hand, and he clutches the ship’s railing until it goes under.

Our life jackets keep our heads above the water, but they don’t save us from the rain, which feels like bolts of electricity when it strikes my skin. I faintly remember that Earth’s rain is acidic, sometimes with a pH as low as four, and hope that this kind isn’t so dangerous.

The boat. Wes scrambles through meters of plastic to find the packet of sodium azide, keeping one arm around my middle, and pops it open. The boat inflates with nitrogen gas. I silently thank Engineering for their brilliance and contract my right arm to hoist myself onto the boat. When I collapse on the surface, blood from the three laser burns on my arm leave distinct red pools on the plastic.

The craft rocks as Wes joins me.

“Your arm got wet, didn’t it?”

I don’t answer.

Sighing, he kneels beside me like he did after Jupiter and Callisto’s ambush, on a harrowing night from another era. He fumbles in the backpack and pulls out a packet of disinfectant. After pushing aside my sleeve, he applies the goop liberally to my wounds.

“It could get infected,” he chides. “I should have done this earlier.”

I hardly register his words. Though I’m on a crude inflatable raft with an Earthbound boy, bobbing atop a stormy ocean that wants to consume me, I feel safer than I have for a long time. I shut my eyes and fall asleep knowing that this will forever remain the day I learned to scream.

43

UP, AND DOWN, AND UP ONCE MORE. I’M tiny again, and Mom’s holding me in her arms, rocking me from shallow sleep into deep, deep slumber.

Some wiser part of me knows that I’m passing through REM cycles, that Mom is dead and I’ll never be safe again. Her ghostly hand smoothes the hair on my head.

But the touch can’t possibly be hers. It’s time to wake up and face what I have done, and what I must do.

I open my eyes to a swath of sky vastly different from the black nothing above the Moon. It isn’t the polluted gray mess that I’ve been lectured about all my life, but pure cerulean, like the surface of Uranus at its brightest. The clouds look as if someone pulled a ball of cotton in different directions and added touches of yellow and purple around the edges. Wes’s face hovers above me, and his hand rests on my forehead. I pull myself to a sitting position and wince when I put weight on my left arm.

“Good afternoon.” Dark half-moons cradle his droopy eyes. Did he stay awake that whole time, meditating on the ocean and checking me for fever?

“You need sleep.” My voice barely escapes my throat.

“
You
need water.” He reaches into the backpack, pulling a pouty matronly face to make me laugh, and produces a collapsible canteen. He stretches it to its full size, fills it with ocean water, and shakes it back and forth, providing the mechanical energy that will help the purification mechanism boil the liquid.

When the canteen finishes the condensing process, I push him to drink some before I cough and splutter my way through three greedy mouthfuls.

We gingerly eat some dried fruit. I’m astonished by my hunger; my stomach hasn’t experienced pangs like this since I joined Militia, but I limit myself to five pieces of dried apricot, which taste as if they’ve been sitting in that backpack since prehistory.

Wes clasps his hands to his forehead, staring into the distance.

“God knows when we’ll find land.”

I don’t believe in God. On the Bases, because we aren’t allowed to worship, we believe in the hard truths of science instead. But my theorems and laws aren’t enough now.

Why did I live, to be reunited with my species’ home planet, when so many tried to kill me? Throughout my ordeal, many concrete details—Wes’s quick thinking, Andromeda’s treason, the soldier who stabbed the General—saved me, moment by moment. But why did those details assemble and bring me to Earth today? Logic can’t explain it; perhaps there is something more.

I let out a sound more like a bark than a laugh into the briny air. The girl named Phaet, maybe believing in fate. Mom would love it.

But she’s gone, her life snatched away by a violet wave tearing through flesh. Cygnus and Anka—I left them at the mercy of the Committee, which will likely tell the entire Base that I died while attempting a cowardly flight. Receiving the two shocks, one after the other, could destroy my siblings—if that destruction, in Cygnus’s case, hasn’t already happened.

The probability that Umbriel will do something stupid is approximately 80 percent. He’ll throw everything away to find me. Dovetail and Sol Eta will contact him, if they haven’t already, and drag him into all this.

To get back at me, the Committee might use Nash, Orion, and my other friends in sadistic ways I can’t fathom. For their own good, I hope their allegiance to the Bases is stronger than their attachment to me.

As I sort through the horrible thoughts, as the names echo in my head—Vinasa, Leo, Belinda, Mom, Anka, Cygnus—I realize something that nearly makes me jump over the side of the boat.

People would be better off if they’d never met me.

“Phaet?” Wes peers at me, concern stamped on his every feature.

“Yes?”

He gingerly scratches his nose, right over the freckles. “I wanted to hear you speak. You were being extremely quiet.”

I continue being extremely quiet. I wish he’d stop interrogating me and scoop me up like a baby, but he’s the wrong person for the job. He’s not Umbriel, and he’s not Mom.

After a time, Wes tries again. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m—I’m lost.”

“I don’t know where we are either.” He chuckles darkly.

Wes turns to the side and contemplates the gentle, glinting waves. The copper wires of his hair have strayed from their strict parallel formation; tickled by the breeze, they liquefy, moving fluidly across his head. Though he doesn’t make eye contact again, he slips his pinky finger over mine and squeezes for a moment. It’s a singular gesture, but it’s what I need.

I lean my head over the side of the boat. The water is opaque, bedrock nowhere in sight. I know Earth’s oceans are kilometers deep—the thought makes me fidgety. So I stop trying to find the sea floor and bring my attention back to the rippling surface.

In the water, the reflection blurred by the waves’ motion, is someone neither old nor young, her expression neither sanguine nor agitated. If anything, this person looks tired, frayed. Strands of oily hair have fallen out of her droopy, weeping-willow bun.

I haven’t examined myself in a mirror for a long time. With painful curiosity I unwind my bun and undo my braid, finger-combing the long, dirty hair. Nets of black come away in my fingers, and I cast them sacrificially into the ocean. Most of what’s left is coarse and gray.

A tickle on my ear distracts me from the old-young girl in the water. I reach my hand up and find a feather, soft and light, as pure white as undiluted sun.

Far above me are wings of that same color, riding currents of wind across the earthen sky before blending into a cumulus cloud.

Land must be close.
The thought turns the predominantly blue scene around me rosy with hope. When Wes clasps the feather between his fingers, twirling it before my eyes, I let myself laugh in disbelief.

A dove has welcomed us to Earth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without the following people, this book wouldn’t have left my computer’s hard drive. Thanks to:

Kendra Levin, my editor, for her unwavering efforts to shape the manuscript into something we both could be proud of. Ken Wright, who created a cozy niche at Viking for the series. Alex Ulyett, for lending a hand in the whole process and for some really insightful comments.

Simon Lipskar, my agent, for believing in me, and Genevieve Gagne-Hawes, for a rocking year of edits. Every time I start to think writing isn’t so hard, the two of you set me straight. Cecilia de la Campa, Phaet’s champion abroad. Joe Volpe, for read-throughs, logistics, and picture books.

Christopher Paolini: storyteller, role model, friend.

My teachers, who have inspired me more than they know.

Friends in Baltimore, New York, Princeton, and beyond, for pulling me through these past few years. Here’s to shenanigans forever.

Mom, Dad, and Larry, who have shared my life from the beginning.

And thanks to you, reader. I’m glad you came along.

KAREN BAO
is a writer, musician, and aspiring scientist. She has a brother three years younger than her and a violin sixty years older than her. Born in California and raised in New Jersey, she currently studies environmental biology at college in New York City. Karen began writing
Dove Arising
at the age of seventeen. Visit her at karenbaobooks.com.

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