Evolution (22 page)

“What sorts of things can he do?”

“Well…” Dr. Troy hesitates, seeming nervous. His cheeks are flushed red. “Yes, I think it'll be all right if I show you. Let me grab some samples—I'll be right back.” He rushes out of the room, barely giving me another glance.

I smile, pleased at myself, and then quickly return my attention to the tank. The vul is still staring at my face. Maybe I'm crazy, but I swear he knows who I am.

“My name is Clementine,” I say. “Do you remember me?”

The vul doesn't make any sort of response. He just keeps staring at me. It's eerie, the way they can't blink.

How will he be able to give me any sort of information, if he can only respond with gestures? I suppose I'd better try anyway. Dr. Troy said he responds to commands given in Kielan, so he should understand my language, at least. I don't know how much time I'll have until Dr. Troy returns with the samples; I need to talk fast.

I take a deep breath and move a step closer to the tank, lowering my voice in case there are any security cameras that could pick up sound. “Listen, the reason I came to see you is because I need your help. Our peoples are at war; your kind has taken over the Surface and captured many of us. But the people they took were innocent. Most of them were prisoners of our leaders before you came, bred to be slaves. They had no part in our past conflicts. Do you know what your kind want with them? Why did they come here for war? If it's revenge they want, the only people they should take it out on are the Developers, our leaders. They're the real enemy. Not us.”

The Tessar continues staring at me. Frustration riles up inside me, but I force it back down. I have to stay calm, or there's no way he'll want to help me.

“Please, you have to tell me what you know,” I say. “The Developers are planning something that's going to wipe out every last one of the vul in your army, as well as my friends you've taken prisoner. I want to stop them, but I don't know how. Maybe, together, we can find a solution. Maybe no one else has to die.”

The vul looks over his shoulder in the direction Dr. Troy went. I can't see him through the door. I'm worried he's almost coming back.

Turning back to me, the vul opens his mouth and a string of noises comes out. Hisses and clicks that almost sound like actual words, but the water garbles them.

“I'm sorry, I can't understand you,” I say.

He raises two fingers of his right hand and beckons me forward. Running my teeth along my bottom lip, I do as he says. I stop a few inches in front of the tank.

Reaching his hand out, he presses his three fingers against the glass. He wants me to touch the glass too, but I hesitate.

What's the worst that can happen?

Holding my breath, I align my middle three fingers with his. A blue glow emits from his hand the moment our fingers connect. It grows brighter and brighter, a wave of light encapsulating the two of us in a bubble that drowns out everything else.

 

22

I'm inside a fighter ship, and a vul wearing silver armor sits in the pilot seat. A shudder runs through the ship; we've been hit. The pilot tries to slow us down as we speed toward the plains below, but not fast enough. I black out before we hit the ground.

I'm in a cell, strung to the ceiling by chains. Everything is hazy. A soldier yells at me and holds a gun to my head. He wants information. I want to know how many more of my people were taken. Neither of us gets what we want.

I'm alone in complete and utter darkness. I summon strength from somewhere deep inside me and press my fingers together to make light. A voice calls to me from far away, someone begging to know whether I'm alive. I've been too weak to send a message before now.

Yes, I'm alive, I tell the new
Qassan
of the vul, Hashima. She plans to lead her people to come and rescue me. I tell her the time is not right yet; the vul need to recover from the wreckage of the war and rebuild.

I will wait. I will survive.

Time moves a lot slower when I'm alone. The years stretch longer and longer with every passing decade.

I watch old human commanders die and new ones be born. I watch them struggle to keep their control.

Sometimes I wish they would kill me, like they killed all the others they took when they attacked our home. But I am doomed to continue existing and feeling and knowing all things from inside my cell.

I feel my own people growing older. I feel their pain, their hunger, their sorrow. It is too much to bear when I can do nothing to heal them from so far away.

A new commander is born. I fear for those who will live and die under his rule.

Hashima tells me it is time. She has done all she can do to save her people and their home, but it is not enough. Help is needed. This time I don't tell her to wait.

I am moved to a new cell. I'm underwater, locked in a metal cage inside an enormous tank of ocean water. A girl in a diving suit, with an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose, peers closer to the bars of the cage. The girl's red-orange curls float around her head.

Clementine.

*   *   *

The connection abruptly ends, and all the light disappears. I'm standing in the laboratory room again.

I pull back, startled, dropping my hand from the glass. There's a fierce throbbing in my head.

Those were memories; they had to be. I was inside the Tessar's past. I saw him captured in the last war, and I saw him imprisoned for three hundred years here on Kiel.

“You can share your memories,” I say.

The Tessar stretches his lips, showing me his sharp yellow teeth. Smiling.

“What else can you show me?”

This time when our fingers connect, I'm ready. A weave of blue light surrounds me and I embrace the visions as they come. They feel different this time, like I'm seeing bits and pieces of memories from different vul, stitched together.

I see an unfamiliar world, where the light from the sun is golden instead of red and the sea is a greener blue. The thin, weblike grass of the plains weaves and tangles together, forming spiral shapes. I see an enormous silver city atop a cliff, a structure of interconnected, oval buildings that reminds me of an insect hive. Transports weave through the sky overhead. On the sea below, vul work on metal boats, fishing with spears that shoot lightning into the water. Other vul work in the fields on the other side of the city, flying hov-pods between perfect rows of strange-looking crops, climbing out of the pods to harvest the plants.

I'm flooded with peace, calm, and comfort. The vul are flourishing.

And then everything changes. A torrent of rain lashes down from the sky, flooding the crop fields. The storm rages on and on and on. The sea churns with waves so big, no rafts can go out onto the water. Lightning crackles through the sky above the city and hits one of the hive buildings. A shock of electricity shoots through the entire structure, making it glow bright red for a split second.

Again, the vision changes. I sense that many, many years have passed. Now the fields are barren of life, riddled with ash and dead grass. Wind howls across the emptiness. Fewer transports fly through the sky overhead. The sea remains the same, but the nets the vul haul in don't have any fish. Something has killed life in the ocean.

The vul plant seeds in the fields, but nothing grows. No rain falls. Inside the houses in the hive city, I see families huddled over bowls of liquefied food, and then over plates with nothing but crumbs. All of them look skinny, stricken with hunger. They're slowly starving to death.

I feel their terror. Their grief. Their fear.

This is why the vul came to Kiel. Not because they wanted to destroy us, but because our planet was their only hope. Their old home was dying, and they couldn't save it.

A voice comes into my head now, a hissing, clicking voice I somehow know belongs to the Tessar:
We must restore the balance.

The image changes, showing me the planet before it was dying. The city on the cliff is gone. Instead, there are houses with dirt roads running between them. The fields are lusher than ever before, tended by humans. The vul work on wooden rafts on the sea, reaping fish in plenty.

A feeling of peace overwhelms me again. Harmony.

The planet was thriving before human and vul began fighting, before we stopped coexisting peacefully. Humans farmed the land, and the vul farmed the ocean. A balanced ecosystem. Only after the system fell apart did things go wrong.

Marden fades away, and I see a group of people huddled together in a dark hold. Hundreds and hundreds of people who look like refugees. Girls and boys from the work camps. The prisoners the vul captured in the Surface city. They look cold, hungry, scared.

Somehow, I know this isn't a memory—the vul is showing me where they are right now. They're still alive aboard the Mardenite battle stations. I was right; the vul didn't capture them to kill them.

We need their help
, the Tessar's voice says inside my head.

The images evaporate, and I'm back in the laboratory room with the vul in the tank. The two of us are still surrounded in a bubble of blue light, which gives the world beyond the bubble a hazy quality. I feel strangely weightless, though my feet are still on the floor.

My eyes widen in awe and confusion. “What is this?” I ask. “How are you doing this?”

“We call it a
mayraan
,” the Tessar says in his hissing, clicking speech. His voice sounds weaker than it did when it was only in my head, though clearer than it should when he's underwater. “It means our minds are connected, melded together. There is not time to explain how.”

I stare at the blue glow emitting from his hand, pressed against mine with the glass of the water tank between our palms. The glow has drifted into my skin, making my hand look like it's on fire. But I don't feel any pain.

“Can you see my memories?” I ask.

“I cannot,” the Tessar says. “Your mind is strong, and I am no longer strong enough to delve deep and see your thoughts. I have stretched out the moment to give us more time to speak before the doctor returns. But we do not have long. Do you understand what I showed you?”

“Your people want to bring the humans they captured back to Marden,” I say. “They want to restore the balance to keep the planet from dying.”

“This is right. We need your help, and I believe I am right in thinking you need ours.”

This changes everything. The vul didn't come here to kill us; they need our help. But after all the wars of our past, they were sure we wouldn't help them except by force. And they were right; Commander Charlie and the other Developers wouldn't help them, or even believe their reason for coming. But the rest of the citizens? The boys and girls in the work camps who are controlled by ruthless leaders all their lives? If they knew the truth … I think they might.

Marden could be our new hope. It could be our escape, if we can help it grow again.

But there's still the problem of the Developers. Even if I could convince the vul most of the people on Kiel want peace, the Developers wouldn't give up their plan to detonate Fred's bomb. They don't want a ceasefire; they want to slaughter the vul. They've been working toward that goal for decades. Learning the vul are dying on Marden isn't going to change their minds. So how am I supposed to stop them?

It seems the Tessar is already two steps ahead of me. “The vul army in the sky must invade the Core,” he says, his unblinking eyes piercing mine on the other side of the tank glass. “They can help you overpower the Developers and win freedom for your people.”

We could somehow knock the citizens out of their mindless states, and then we could tell them the truth about everything. The control serums, the Mod Project, the war with the vul. All of it. We could let them decide if they want to return to Marden with the vul and try to save it, or if they want to remain here on Kiel and build a new, better society, one where the Developers wouldn't be in control.

But none of this can happen without the help of the vul army. I need to get a message to the vul commander as soon as possible.

“Can you still communicate with the other vul?” I ask the Tessar. “Can you talk to the commander of the army?”

The Tessar shakes his head. “I cannot communicate with them. I've grown too weak to make the
mayraan
from such a distance.”

My stomach sinks, but the Tessar continues:

“But you can speak for me.”

My heart beats fast in the silence. “How?”

The blue light consumes me again, and the laboratory room disappears. I see one of the Mardenite battle stations floating in space above Kiel's atmosphere. There's a flash, and I see a vul in silver robes walking over the roots of a giant tree. The tree seems to be growing inside an enormous room—a room aboard the battle station.

Go to the sky and find Hashima, the Qassan of the vul,
the Tessar says in my head, as the vul in silver robes turns around.
She is our leader and the commander of the army. She is the one you must convince to help you. Tell her I sent you and she will listen.

We return to the laboratory. The blue bubble still surrounds us in the lingering moment, but seems to be fading. The connection is breaking.

The quickest way aboard the battle station would be to go to the Surface and let the vul take me prisoner. It would require stealing a ship and escaping the Core, but I could do it. It wouldn't matter if anyone caught me leaving; I'd only need to get a head start to the Surface.

The real trouble will be convincing the Qassan, Hashima, to believe my warning, agree to my plan, and pull off an invasion of the Core in less than fourteen hours. If something went wrong, I wouldn't be in the Core when Fred's bomb went off. I'd die in the explosions.