Lotus and Thorn (4 page)

My mother’s obsession with the Colony had extended to the Curadores. Once when I was twelve, Mom and I were weeding the gardens together. She’d stopped midrow and I watched her just kneeling there, staring up at the Dome. Then she asked in a hushed
voice, “What if God
wasn’t
punishing us with Red Death? What if we didn’t have to live like this?”

I’d sucked in my breath, stunned by the extent of her blasphemy. Then I’d looked around, afraid someone else had heard. But Mom just squeezed my hand and looked at me in this wide-eyed way she had and said, “Oh, Leica, do you think it’s very beautiful inside?”

Now, as I made out the gleam of the Curadores’ white isolation suits under the lights of the Exchange, I wondered the same thing. But then the door of the magfly slid shut, the metal disappearing seamlessly into its streamlined shell. And it started moving toward me.

“No!” I shouted, the wind whipping my words away.

The train picked up speed, flying inches above the track. It was a long silver blade slicing through the sand and I had no way to stop it or slow it down.

I needed to find my way back to that half-buried shuttle. And for that I needed water. And food. I would not fail now. I would not let them leave me.

So I simply stood there, in the middle of the tracks, watching the headlights grow bigger and bigger. The buzzing of the metal rails crept up through my boots, echoing in my hip bones and chest, all the way to my jaw. It eclipsed my parched throat, my cramped belly, even the grief sitting on my chest, until I was only this one single thrumming sensation.

And still the massive beast rushed closer. A blast of the horn blanked out the world and shuddered my eardrums. They had seen me.

But it still kept coming. Whipping the wind around me, knocking me off my feet so my kneecaps cracked against the rails. I kept
my eyes wide—facing the glaring lights head-on—daring them to try. Rudders jammed into the sand and I was swallowed by a dust cloud. I shut my eyes against the stinging grit, bracing for impact.

It never came. When the air cleared, the pointed nose of the magfly was so close I could touch it—when I pulled off my sandmask, my breath fogged its surface. I pressed my forehead gratefully against the cool metal. Death had been after me all day, but he hadn’t caught me yet.

Then a Curador in a white isolation suit was towering over me. The lights of the Exchange reflected off the clear plastic face, making the Curador into a featureless giant. His nasally voice blared from the speakers of the suit. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I forced myself to my feet—taking a step back to put distance between me and the Curador. My legs barely held.

I swallowed but I had nothing left to moisten my throat. I pushed the words out anyway. “I’m here to trade.”

“Get off the tracks!” His hands clenched and unclenched, as if he wanted to physically remove me. But he didn’t dare touch me, even with his suit on.

I squinted up at him, the beam of the magfly blinding me, my whole body numb with exhaustion and adrenaline. I’d never spoken to a Curador before. In Pleiades, the Abuelos council dealt with them. Out here, it’d been Suji. I remembered the way she’d talked to them, though—respectful, but uncompromising. Silently, I asked Suji to help me to stay calm. I
had
to make them listen to me, one way or another.

No one was leaving until I got my supplies.

“We found uncorroded metal.” The
we
scraped in my throat and I swayed a little on my feet.

“Get her out of here.” Another Curador joined the first. He switched on a headlamp and scanned the desert around us—the light only making a small dent in the dark. His voice was tentative. Nervous. “We should’ve been back by now.”

“I need you to listen—” But the first one was trying to move me off the tracks, without really touching me. He sort of shoved me with his foot.

Instinctively, I grabbed it and twisted. These were men used to being obeyed, and the faceless Curador went down with a surprised yell. But I had no strength left and I went down with him—a tangle of slick white suit and harness straps.

The Curador on the ground fought to get away, striking out at with me with his huge fists, panicked blows thumping my gut, my shoulder, my face. The other one kicked me in the ribs, yelling for me to get off. But I was still strapped to the slideboard, and the most I could do was protect my head.

Then there was a commanding shout and the blows stopped. A third Curador joined the others.

I blinked up at the new headlamp starbursting above me and struggled to hold on to consciousness. But the voice was gentle. “Are you okay?”

No. I wasn’t okay. The world was closing in on me.

“I have to go back . . . I have to find it . . .” Before it went dark, I managed to push the last word out of my raw throat. “Earth.”

“WHAT WERE YOU THINKING, PLANCK?”

It was the third voice. The gentle one. Except it wasn’t gentle anymore. It was angry and authoritative. “Couldn’t you see she was half dead on her feet?”

I opened my eyes, but the men were just out of view. My body was tangled in the harness, my slideboard and its haul twisted alongside me. Being trapped made me nervous, but at least I still had my pack and something to trade.

“I’m sorry.” The one I guessed was Planck answered in a nasal whine. “I was just trying to follow Jenner’s orders about getting in before nightfall.”

“Let me worry about Jenner,” the third one said.

“Edison . . . I think . . .” The second Curador—the nervous one—came around the slideboard. I half closed my eyes as he crouched just a couple meters away. His suit was lit from the inside now and he frowned from behind its plastic window. A few brown curls stood out against his cheeks, a shade darker than his skin. He switched the headlamp of his suit brighter and wiped the dust from my Find. “I think you’d better come see this.”

The third Curador, Edison, came into view. He was impressive. At least a head taller than the other two. Something about him—his walk, the way he stood—made it clear that he was in charge. But despite his importance, he dropped to his knees, brushing away more of the dust. “What did she say before she passed out?”

“Something about Earth.”

I shifted, propping myself up a little to see better, and the movement caught the eye of the nervous one—his eyes darted toward me. His bushy eyebrows raised and his bright green eyes went wide.

“She’s awake!”

Planck joined the other two. His blotchy pink skin matched his nasally voice—bright yellow hair standing out against it.

Even in my exhaustion, I marveled at how different they looked. From each other. From me.

Since the Citizens had all descended from such a small group of surviving Colonists, we were like slight variations of the same song—straight black hair, dark eyes, light brown skin.

But the Curadores were different. Their variations were endless. Blond hair, brown hair, black, curly, straight. Skin from pale moon to the darkest dusk. The only thing they all had in common was their size. The smallest of them were still larger than the biggest of the Citizens.

Edison helped me to sit up, his suit warm where it touched me—heated in the chilly desert. I groaned involuntarily as I moved, my body throbbing from the blows of the other Curadores. From escaping the exiles. From the grief of the last days. He took my hand—pausing for the slightest of seconds as he stared at my fingers—before molding them around a heavy plastic jug.

“Here. Drink.” His voice was quiet, but insistent.

And suddenly the mad thirst reared up through the pain. Not able to stop myself, I grabbed the jug, gulping the water in giant, greedy swallows.

“Slow down.” Edison eased the plastic jug away from my lips. Precious drops spilled across the sand but he didn’t even notice. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

I nodded and tried again. Forcing myself to take small sips, catching my breath in between.

“I’m Edison. This is Planck”—he jerked his head first toward the pink-faced Curador, then at the nervous one—“and Sagan. Let me apologize for what happened. My men shouldn’t have treated you like that.”

There was true concern in his eyes as he knelt in front of me. Unlike Planck and Sagan, Edison wasn’t afraid to get close to me, and it was impossible not to stare.

He was perfect. Like someone had taken the best parts of every face and arranged them in complete balance. High cheekbones that gave his face a sleek, angled look. Matched with a straight, broad nose. And skin that gleamed deepest brown with a hint of purple. The color of the mountains at dusk. It made your eyes drift to the brightness of his mouth. Making his smile or frown matter that much more. But his eyes were the finishing touch. Yellow-orange eyes. Like the blaze of firelight through a glass of mezcal.

“I’m Leica.” I tilted my head in greeting and gave him my name as a way of accepting his apology. This was the Curador to trade with. It wasn’t just that he was in charge, which he obviously was. Something about him made me sure he’d give me a fair deal. He was the kind of Curador who would fit inside the lovely Dome my mother had imagined.

“What happened to you?” Edison squinted into the dark behind me. “Where’s your crew?”

No Citizen was fool enough to wander Tierra Muerta on their own. Especially no woman.

I couldn’t begin to describe the past few days, so I simply said “Gone.” The single syllable sounded harsh and cold, so I added “Red Death . . . May God protect them.” The last words spilled out of my mouth—half habit, half prayer.

“Looks like it’s too late for that.” His words were sharp and I was reminded that there was a much bigger difference than what we looked like. The Curadores lived with the luxury of isolation suits and the safety of the Dome, whereas Citizens spent our lives exposed, at the mercy or wrath of God.

“Though he seems to have had a soft spot for you.” And there was an eagerness in his eyes now, something he was trying to rein in. “Is this all you found? Or is there more?”

His hint of eagerness infected me. I managed to pull free of the harness and get to my feet. I tried to plant myself in a confident fighter’s stance, but I imagined what I must look like to him in the glare of the magfly. A short girl with lukewarm brown skin smeared with blood. Wild black hair that I’d kept short, barely long enough to cover my ears. My freakish hands covered in blue-grey dust.

Together, we looked down at the oval door with a small window in it. Uncorroded metal—worth a fortune in Gratitude. The headlights shone yellow against the tarnished letters that’d been stamped into it over five hundred years ago:
Lockheed Martin
.

“There’s more,” I said. My neck ached as I looked up at Edison. He was one and a half times my height, his wide shoulders
stretching out the white plastic of the isolation suit. “The whole shuttle is intact and—”

But Edison interrupted. “Is that how your crew got sick?”

I nodded and touched my aching head, trying to block out the memory of what we’d found inside the shuttle. “We were forced to abandon it, but I have to go back. There was someone . . . on the radio. Someone from Earth.”

And in a voice used to giving orders, Edison said, “I’m going with you.”

“No.” A Curador was not going to be the savior of my people.

A flicker of anger crossed his face. It was a risk to refuse a Curador. I tried to backtrack. “I mean, the whole thing is infected with Red Death . . .”

“So you said. But I’m wearing an isolation suit and you appear to be immune. So we’re just the people to go after it.”

“No. Just trade me for supplies and I’ll be on my way.” This was a
Citizen
matter. When Sarika preached of God returning us to Earth, I’d always imagined the Citizens being miraculously transported to a divine realm. But maybe
this
was what forgiveness looked like—a long-forgotten shuttle and a staticky voice. I looked down at my hands—maybe I had been marked, not for suffering, but for salvation.

“And what will you do when you find it? Will you haul it back by yourself? On your slideboard?”

There was a smugness in Edison’s voice that made me want to hit him, but he was right. What had I expected to happen when I got there? Did I think that God would reach down from heaven and take the shuttle to Pleiades himself? No, the truth was, I hadn’t thought past making it back to the shuttle.

“There will be no trade—no food, no water—unless you take me with you.” Edison smiled as he said it. There was no threat in his voice. No malice. It was just a simple fact from a man, a boy really, who was used to getting his own way. And he was about to get it this time too.

“IN THE NAME OF
the Curadores, I claim this object, found beneath the sandline. It will be used for the good of all who live on Gabriel and all those who will live.” Edison intoned the words of the trade ritual. Behind him, Planck and Sagan were distracted, scanning the darkness that pressed in around the Exchange.

We didn’t haggle about the Gratitude—enough food to make the journey there and back. The shuttle would be the real prize. And as long as I made it back to the radio, I didn’t care what happened to the rest.

As I made the proper response to Edison, the other two hauled the shuttle door into the magfly and loaded my slideboard with bowls of chiken, beeph jerky, five jugs of water, a packet of salt, and two bottles of mezcal. “I accept your Gratitude. In the name of the Citizens, I surrender these sins of Gabriel into your hands. My hands are clean.”

Then while Planck went from pink to red trying to convince Edison to come back to the Dome with them, I filled my belly with a tepid slurry of chiken and water and unrolled my blanket. I lay down, exhausted, on the hard grit, but the voices of strange men
were the least of what kept me awake. Knots of grief sat tucked behind my shoulder blades. Tied themselves around bruised ribs. Banded themselves down aching, tense arms.

It hurt to breathe. It hurt to close my eyes—as everything I’d lost came rushing back. It even hurt to look at the stars. There were just too many of them.

And yet, sleep must have taken me. Because at some point I opened my eyes and the magfly was gone and Edison sat alone by a fire. The weight of night had settled itself on the valley.
Had Edison slept at all?
Do
Curadores sleep?

The cold had deepened too and I walked over, letting the flames warm my stiff muscles. “We should get going. It’s sandstorm season and the desert’s already got three days’ head start.”

But there was another reason I wanted to get moving. As soon as the sun rose, we risked running into another crew. More than likely, they’d leave a Curador alone, but I didn’t want to chance it. I had enough strength left to get back to the shuttle. But not enough to fight anyone else off.

Edison pulled a bowl from the edge of the fire and sat it steaming on a nearby rock. “Then taking another few moments for you to eat something won’t matter.”

It smelled like beeph. Something—aside from the jerky—I’d only ever had at Festivals. My stomach groaned. Then Edison brought out a jar of kimchi and started heaping it onto the meat. My hands moved without my permission. I was lucky I didn’t burn my fingers as I snatched the bowl from the rock and pulled my whittled chopsticks from my pack.

The beeph was rich and tender. But after more than a year and a half in exile, it was the kimchi that I craved. The sting of vinegar
and peppery heat hit my nose, waking me up. Crunchy and soft at the same time, fire exploded on my tongue, playing against the sourness as I chewed.

“Where did you get this?” I couldn’t help the awed tone that crept into my voice.

“From the Abuelos. We trade for it along with the scrap. We have to decontaminate it before it comes into the Dome, of course . . . but it’s worth it. I figured you could use some to warm you up.”

It was odd, thinking of the Curadores inside their dome eating our kimchi. It was something so rooted in Pleiades. I took another bite and when I closed my eyes, I could
see
home. Cabbages growing in the Commons—rows of bright green heads in the dirt. Chiles just ripening—flashes of red hidden among the leaves. My sisters on their knees weeding and singing—their voices weaving a dizzying harmony, each trying to catch the other.

It wasn’t until I was almost finished that it occurred to me I was eating alone.

“Do you want some?” I panicked, wondering if maybe it was the custom of Curadores to share from one dish.

“No thanks.” He laughed at the sad remains in my bowl. “My suit takes care of all that, releasing nutrients as needed, filtering and recycling . . .” He trailed off, almost looking embarrassed. “Suffice it to say, nothing in or out while we’re away from the Dome. It’s safer that way.”

I shrugged, happily running my finger around the inside of the bowl, savoring the very last bits. Then I scrubbed the bowl out with grit and stood up. Edison was on his feet a second later, throwing sand on the fire and slotting his arms through the
slideboard harness. I started to object, but shut my mouth. Right now, I could barely carry myself, let alone my supplies.

We traveled in silence—keeping our feet and eyes moving. Edison’s headlamp lit up a broad swath in front of us, but I watched the edge of the beam. Wild dogs were calling to each other in the distance. Though not as distant as I would’ve liked. There’s a reason you don’t usually travel at night in Tierra Muerta. Anything the dogs outnumber they considered food.

Even without the slideboard, my bruised body was painfully slow. I longed to run across the desert—to reassure myself that the shuttle was still there. At first, Edison stuck close, but his impatience won out. His vast, long legs strode out ahead; then he’d have to wait for me to catch up. As the hours wore on, he crept farther and farther ahead—leaving me only a puddle of light. I knew why I wanted to find the shuttle, but what was at stake for him? I always assumed the Curadores were happy in their Dome. But was it possible they also prayed for God’s salvation? And it hit me how little I knew about my companion.

I kept my eyes on the stars, my only guide in the darkness. Once I had to call Edison back to make a course correction. I crouched in the sand, drinking water while he retraced his route.

“Sorry,” Edison called as he climbed up the dune again to reach me. He sounded almost embarrassed.

I shrugged. “Your legs, not mine.” Then I couldn’t help myself. “What exactly are you doing out in Tierra Muerta in the middle of the night?”

“I thought we were looking for the shuttle.”

“But surely you could’ve sent your lackeys. Why are
you
here?”

Edison sat in the sand next to me. “We heard your voice on the radio.”

“You and Planck and Sagan?” I didn’t understand.

“Actually, everyone in the Dome heard you. Your signal was picked up by the Curadores’ receivers . . . in fact, it broadcast across all our channels.”

It was strange, thinking that my voice had traveled into the Dome without me knowing it. That others had been listening to Suji and me that day. Then again, if the signal could travel back and forth from Earth, why wouldn’t it travel across the valley too?

“And you heard the response from Earth too?” The idea was both reassuring and deflating. If the Curadores had heard the message from Earth, it made it so much more
real
. But at the same time, somehow it made it less
mine
.

“No, actually. A few receivers picked up a second set of transmissions, but it was nothing but a garbled squealing. Still, we guessed where that second signal must be coming from. Though, honestly, it was
you
that got my attention. There was . . .” And he paused, as if trying to put something into words. “There was triumph in your voice.”

And I remembered standing in the shuttle, grabbing the radio—as if this was a moment I always knew would come—and shouting
“This is Ad Astra! We’re alive!”

“So you came out to find the radio,” I said.

“I had to. My whole life, I’ve been stuck under that Dome. Or in this damn suit. I want to know what it’s like to walk under the open sky.”

“To be in a place that isn’t trying to kill you?”

“Exactly.” And Edison gave me his wide grin. His amber eyes flared in the light of his suit. “I’m hoping that place is Earth.”

And it was that spark in his eyes that caught
my
attention. The men in Pleiades trudged through life, spending their days erasing the past. Praying for a future they didn’t believe would come. And the men in Tierra Muerta were angry, just trying to live for another day. Trying to keep hold of anything they could get their hands on. None of them had anything like that spark.

I looked up at the thousands of tiny lights glowing above us. Earth was out there somewhere. We
would
reach it again. But right now, I saw something else too. The line of mountains, black against the less black sky—dawn wasn’t far off.

“We’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Let’s go.” I stood, dusting sand off. Not that it helped much.

“Okay.” Edison kept pace next to me as we headed in the right direction. “It’s your turn now. You’ve been through hell and yet here you are, dragging yourself across a freezing, dark desert. Why?”

The prophesied return to Earth was such a central tenet of Pleiades, it seemed impossible Edison could even ask that question. Perhaps Citizens were as big a mystery to Curadores as they were to us. “How much do you know about the Rememberings?”

“A bit. But if your God
is
calling the Citizens back home, surely he wouldn’t show you the shuttle just to bury it again.”

I glanced down at my hands, then gave him a bitter smile. “Let’s just say I don’t completely trust God.”

As dawn came, so did the wind. My book of fairy tales described Earth as having seasons like Summer and Winter, but Gabriel only had Dry, Less Dry, and Windy. It’s why Pleiades had regular
Festivals—to mark the passage of the year. If I’d counted right we were still a few months shy of two years since I’d been exiled, and that put us right in the middle of Windy.

But today, the sun never properly took to the sky. The desert picked up sand and threw it in my face. Reluctantly, I admitted to myself that this was more than just wind—a sandstorm was building. I forced myself to walk faster, but the wind pushed at us so we were moving even slower than before. We were running out of time.

My eyes—trained to scan for salvage even in the dust—kept catching on right angles jutting out of curved dunes. Rust red against the blue sand. Ancient buildings finding their way to the surface only to be buried again by the next sandstorm. None of them were the shuttle.

I was so focused on the dunes that I almost ran into Edison and the slideboard when he suddenly stopped.

“What’s wrong?” I pulled my knife—turning in a slow circle—searching the desert for signs of another crew or dangerous animals.

“Look at that!” Edison pointed at the sky. A shaft of sun had pierced the murky grey-blue haze. High above, grains of sand caught the light—swirling and dancing—before swallowing the sun again. “I’ve never seen anything like it!”

There was gleeful awe in Edison’s voice, clueless to the danger we were in. I, on the other hand,
had
seen something like it. This was no passing dust devil. It was a Hwangsa—a wall of unforgiving sand rising straight up into the sky.

“Let’s hope you live to remember it.”

Edison heard the fear in my voice and his smile disappeared.
His words—amplified by his suit—rose up over the wind. “How much farther?”

“Just a kilometer or two, I think. But we’d better cover them fast.” I had an extremely good sense of direction, even in Tierra Muerta, where dunes shifted and disappeared every day. But there was nothing of the mountains or sky left to navigate by. Only clouds of sand churning on the horizon.

I pulled on my sandmask and we fought our way up one dune and then another, and with each aching step, I went over our choices in my head. We had no shelter. No sand anchors. And no tarp to attach them to even if we did.

There it was—there were no choices. There was only sand.

And then . . . a tiny bit of not-sand.

“There!” Edison saw it too. He pointed down at a silver wing sticking out of the ground. The shuttle was already half buried and the Hwangsa was coming to finish the job.

Edison lunged down the dune toward the shuttle. But I grabbed his arm, stopping him.

The first rule in Tierra Muerta was: head to high ground. When making camp, it gave you a defensible position. When scavenging, it gave you the best vantage point. In a sandstorm, assuming you could anchor your shelter, it gave you a fighting chance. It only took one mistake for you to learn that rule. And by then you were dead.

Edison’s voice was low and calm, but there was a cord of urgency running through it. “Tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”

“Do you have any way to communicate with the other Curadores? Can they send help?”

“Yes.” Then Edison was quiet for a second. His lips moved, but no sound came out of the speakers. He shook his head. “The storm’s messing with the signal. I’m not picking up anything.”

And he switched on the speakers so I could hear the hiss of static coming through them. It matched the hiss of the wind in my ears.

“In that case, if we stay up here, the sand will blast away your isolation suit and tear off my skin. If we go down there, we’ll be buried.”

“Well?” Edison flashed me a manic grin. “Which is it?”

“Well?” The wind lashed and pulled at my hair—raking through the tangles. Its hunger hot on my face. “Well . . . what are you waiting for? Run!”

And I rushed down the dune. Edison gave a sort of battle cry, sprinting after me. Soon, he was in the lead, his giant legs pulling him and the slideboard across the sand. In spite of everything, it was magnificent to see. Almost like the magfly skimming across the ground—impossibly fast. He reached the shuttle long before me and was on his knees, clearing the door hatch and throwing the contents of the slideboard inside.

The storm was on us now, scouring my skin. Sand clogging the filters of my sandmask. Sneaking in the edges. I ripped it off. Gasping for breath and getting a mouthful of grit.

I couldn’t see anymore. I let the sloping ground pull me forward, hoping to God I hadn’t veered off course. Then I saw it, the outline of the shuttle visible only as an absence of sand.

Edison pulled me in. But the sand easily followed us inside the dark, cramped shuttle. The shuttle was probably fifteen meters long, but we couldn’t move any deeper into its shelter because the
narrow aisle was crammed with crates and bags. I dumped everything off the slideboard, and with Edison’s help, shoved it in front of the door.