The Navigator (4 page)

I EXPLORE EVERY INCH OF THE SHIP, REMINDING
myself of its layout. It doesn’t take long, since the rocket is basically just one long hallway. There are four small personal rooms. The Chimærae stay at the back of the ship, nesting around the boxes and supplies we brought on board. We’re lucky in that, as part of the refurbishment and exhibition, the closets are stocked with clothes, and the galley has some useful tools and appliances. For the next year and a half, we’ll be living in a model home, surviving off of Raylan’s supplies.

I find an old data pad in the cockpit outlining the functions and capabilities of the ship and show it to Zophie and Crayton. I tell them it’s my duty as their pilot to know this ship as well as possible and excuse myself for a few hours, choosing one of the tiny private quarters to call my own. It’s cramped and sparsely furnished with a dresser, a chair and a bed that is six
inches too short for me. I toss the data pad onto the bed without turning it on and sit in the chair, staring out the dense glass of the porthole window. And I think of him. It’s not what I want to do, but it’s impossible not to, being out here, flying through space.

Zane. My younger brother.

There was a time when Zane was a constant, sunny figure in my life. He was a Garde who was going to make my grandfather the proudest Loric on the planet. At least that’s what he always said. I remember one morning when he was eight or nine¸ sitting around the breakfast table. He suddenly stopped eating, put down his fork and turned to our grandfather.

“Papa,” he said, his voice as serious as I’d ever heard it. “When I grow up, I’m going to be an Elder. And if there are already nine Elders, they’ll look at me and make me the tenth. I’m going to make our family proud.”

I’d stifled a laugh, but my grandfather just nodded and smiled.

“I believe you, Z,” he said. “But if you’re going to do that, you’ll need to start by eating the rest of your breakfast.”

When I think back on my life, the shining bright spot is when the two of us were both at the Lorien Defense Academy. He was just a kid—thirteen years old—but I was already in my second year as a technology specialist
for the LDA. Much younger than my classmates. I’d had a knack for electronics that sent me rising through the ranks, allowing me to work on projects other people my age wouldn’t have dreamed of being a part of. Stuff like programming simulations and satellite navigations. I even helped tweak a few of our Loric technologies to be taken to Earth. I thought I’d found my calling. I had no desire to be a Mentor Cêpan. Aside from Zane, I’d never felt the urge to train or supervise a kid with Legacies. But numbers and computer programs made sense to me. I felt at home there, at the LDA, working more hours a day than was probably healthy.

I saw Zane often. Mostly during meals or when he’d show up in the tech labs wanting to brag about how well he’d done in training. He’d study in the corner while I worked. Sometimes I’d have to wake him up and drag him back to his room when he’d fallen asleep over a book. We seemed like the perfect siblings. Both excelling. Both with promising futures ahead of us.

Zane was partnered with a Cêpan named Dalus, whose qualifications I had questioned from the very beginning. He was too new, too green to be training someone like Zane, who was headstrong and eager to show what he was made of. I didn’t think Dalus could handle him. The man was meek, with a quiet voice you had to lean in to hear. I’d spent enough time chasing Zane around our grandfather’s house to know that he
needed an authoritarian figure keeping him on track.

I even complained to the higher-ups at the academy. All they said was that the bond between Garde and Cêpan had already been established and that it would be damaging to both of them if they were separated. So were the ways of Lorien. The LDA spoke on behalf of the Elders, and whatever the Elders said went. There was no room for complaint. And so I tried to accept that the system knew what was best for Zane. That as his older sister, I was maybe overreacting. Being too overprotective. Caring too much.

After Zane developed the Legacy of flight during his second year at the academy, I hardly ever saw him with his feet on the ground. Several of the Garde could fly, but Zane flew with such grace and speed. It was as if he was teleporting, darting from one end of the campus to the other in the blink of an eye.

He was living up to the promises he’d made our family. He was becoming something undeniably special.

Dalus saw promise in him too. Not just as a pupil, but as something he could exploit. If Zane ended up being the fastest flier on the entire planet, there was a certain level of respect that would be given to his Cêpan, whether Dalus deserved it or not. People would look at Dalus and say, “Ah, look at how well he trained this magnificent Garde.” And there were other perks as well. Even in my station in the engineering branch,
I’d heard stories of older, wealthy members of the LDC betting on Garde races and other trials. If he played his cards right, Dalus could make a hefty profit off of my brother. So he pushed Zane to the brink, always insisting that he could fly faster, farther, for longer periods of time.

And then it happened.

I’d been at one of the council’s airstrips working on improving navigational systems in the newest ship models when I found out. An LDC higher-up I’d never met before was the one who told me. I remember seeing his tan robes as he stepped out of his transport and knowing something bad had happened. That he was there to see me.

“It was an accident,” he said. “Zane was performing long-distance training. He was flying at incredible speeds—far faster than should have been allowed. There was a Kabarak supply ship coming into the city. We don’t think Zane saw it until it was too late.”

At first I didn’t understand, until the man started telling me something about how Zane’s training band—the one that tracked his speed and location—went dead, and that
something
had to have brought down that ship. They were still trying to excavate the site where it crashed, but they wanted me to know as soon as possible. They wanted to tell me that my brother was dead.

“Again,” the man said. “We’re sorry for your loss. It was a terrible accident.”

The minutes that followed were a blur. I just kept thinking that there had been some kind of mistake. Zane wasn’t gone—he’d just ditched his training band and was hiding in the clouds somewhere. It was a joke. My beautiful, smart, talented, loving baby brother was still floating up there in the sky somewhere.

Zophie had been at the airstrip—she’d been there for some other LDA matter—and tried to calm me down, but I don’t remember what she said. I couldn’t hear anything but my own thoughts, shouting at me over and over again.

You just have to find him.

I wanted to run and scream and fight and cry. What I ended up doing was climbing into the cockpit of a ship I had no permission being in and taking off. It was the first time I’d flown alone, but the system was advanced and did most of the work for me. I knew how to take off and engage the autopilot because I’d helped design updates for the navigation system. And before I knew it I was soaring through the air, looking for Zane. I had no idea where he’d been training, but it didn’t matter. I just couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to find him.

Eventually, exhausted, I landed somewhere out in the country. LDA officials tracked the stolen ship and brought me back to campus. By that time, they’d finally
located Zane’s training band at the crash site. And his remains. I wanted to see Dalus—to tear into him—but they wouldn’t let me near him. Eventually he was shipped off to a remote Kabarak—no one would tell me where. He must have gone completely off the Grid; I never found him.

I tried to stick it out at the academy, but it just seemed so pointless now. People kept using that word—“accident”—as if it was supposed to make things better. Then, for the first time, I started thinking about how truly messed up Lorien was. How tenuous our freedoms were and how our leaders were never held accountable for anything, not really. What if Zane hadn’t been forced to go to the LDA? To be trained to fight and protect. What if he’d just been allowed to be a normal kid? What if he’d had any choice of his own in the matter? Or if the LDA had listened to me when I’d told them Dalus wasn’t a good match for him?

“Accident.” That word hit me like a sucker punch every time it was spoken. Because what happened to my brother wasn’t an accident. There were people to blame. Dalus being the most obvious. But the LDA, as well. And I couldn’t forget the Elders, who had ruled that our society’s most gifted children must be trained as soldiers based on a prophecy that I didn’t even believe was true. Not then.

And me too. I was to blame for buying into all
this—into the idea that the LDA and LDC would keep Zane safe. That they had our individual interests in mind instead of their own.

I couldn’t handle hearing the word “accident” anymore. I left the academy. I never returned.

In my tiny little room on the ship, I can’t get Zane out of my head. It’s been five years since he flew too fast through the sky, and even though I know he’s gone, there’s still a part of me that expects him to randomly show up and reenter my life.

Losing Zane left a hole in me. It’s for this reason above all others that I tried to stay free of too many responsibilities these past few years. People included. I couldn’t get close to anyone—couldn’t even say good-bye to our grandfather. I refused to be hurt again like I was by Zane’s death. If that meant I’d be alone for the rest of my life, so be it.

Only now do I realize that some of my assumptions about Lorien and the way it was run were wrong. The prophecy was real. We needed soldiers—some of the Garde even saved my life. But at what cost? Lorien is most likely gone. Burned away. And if Zophie’s intel is right, the Elders only saved eighteen citizens. Nineteen if you count Janus.

Why them? What makes them so special?

What makes them more worthy of saving than me? Or Zophie and Crayton and Ella?

Or Zane?

THE WEEKS WEAR ON
.

The Chimærae adapt faster than we do. I suppose that’s the story of their lives, though, changing to fit the present situation. They are mostly small, furry animals now. Rodents hibernating in storage bins. They seem to know that there’s not enough food on board for both us and them to survive and so they sleep away the days. Crayton spends too much time watching over them, stroking their backs when Ella is napping. Every few days he wakes them up one by one and goads them into drinking a bit of protein-based slurry pressed out of a little gold pouch. I hope that we make it to Earth before I have to know what the gray globs that fall out of that package taste like.

At first, we talk a lot about Lorien, positing theories and asking the same unanswerable questions we’d had when we could still see the planet’s scorched surface
through the portholes. We spend hours trying to come up with answers we can’t confirm. Everything is hypothesis, conjecture. We don’t even know the status of the planet itself. It doesn’t take long for us to realize that we’re having the same conversation over and over again, and without any of us having to say it, we make a conscious effort to keep our focus on the future. The time for answers will come when we’re on Earth, when we can track down Janus and the evacuated Garde and Cêpans. They’d be taking a different course than us, given their ship’s capabilities. They’ll be on Earth months before we are.

Zophie won’t entertain the idea that anything will happen to Janus’s ship on its journey or that the Mogadorians tracked or intercepted it. Crayton seems just as determined to believe that the others will be on Earth too. I think he feels unprepared to raise Ella, which is something I can’t blame him for. If she ends up a Garde like her parents, she’ll need a Mentor Cêpan to train her, and there are likely only nine of those left in the universe.

I try to remain optimistic that the other ship successfully escaped the Mogs and will make it to Earth unharmed. There are so many questions I have that only the chosen survivors can answer. Maybe Loridas himself is with them, and I can pin him down and ask him why. Why after all our training we weren’t ready.
Why the Mogs came for us.

Why so many had to be sacrificed.

Finding the others once we’re on Earth, though . . . that’s going to be the real challenge. Zophie had enough foresight to bring a data pad from the museum with her, and so over the course of our months in space she gives us a crash course on Earth, trying to acclimate us so that when we get there we don’t stand out too much. The planet hasn’t made contact with any extraterrestrial life—at least not that they know of—and Zophie is unsure of how they might react to the discovery that they’re not alone in the universe. Perhaps with hostility. But blending in ends up sounding much more difficult than I had expected it would be. On Lorien, the customs and cultures didn’t really change much whether you were in the middle of Capital City or shoveling Chimæra dung at a Kabarak. But Earth appears to be nothing like that. It’s so much bigger and split up into different sections that are all so different from one another. There’s no ruling body directing all the planet’s people, or “humans,” as Zophie calls them. That sort of diversity sounds great in theory—it sounds like the kind of world I always imagined Lorien might turn into if we just opened our eyes—but as someone from another planet, it makes trying to get a grip on humans pretty damned difficult. Fortunately, we have a lot of free time, so learning about Earth is at least a
distraction from the monotony of our journey.

Not to mention the anxiety of watching our food stores slowly dwindle. By Zophie’s calculations we should make it to Earth just fine, but we all start eating smaller and smaller amounts of food as the months progress. We survive on dried Karo fruit and protein chews.

Zophie insists we try to have a rudimentary knowledge of several languages before we land—enough to ask simple questions and sound like tourists or travelers from other Earth realms instead of three people who can’t speak a single Earth dialect. Again, I’m astounded by how different the people who all inhabit the same planet could be. How strange that these billions of people can’t even all communicate with each other. We start with a language called French, as its vowels are most like our native Loric tongue, then switch to others I’ve never heard of: Spanish, then English and then Mandarin. Crayton and Zophie excel at the languages, and before long they are laughing at jokes in one known as German while I’m still stumbling over “
Ich heiße
Lexa.” This is probably because I spend most of my free time writing down everything I remember from my days working on Earth’s communications systems instead of studying new languages. I am more at home with the vocabulary of electronics—ones and zeros and carefully formatted lines of code. Based on
my time at the LDA, I assume Earth has reached a point in its technological evolution that means it’s interconnected by machines and relying on them in the same way we were on Lorien. The internet was one of the many gifts that the Loric brought to humans over the centuries. Not that they know it or that any of the other treasures we bestowed on them actually came from us. Or even that some of their brightest minds were not of their planet at all but Loric. I used to wonder why we’d spent any resources helping a planet so far away when there was nothing in it for us. Not even recognition of our contributions. But now I’m beginning to wonder how long the Elders knew about the Mogadorians. How much of the “secret war” was real.

Had they been preparing for a Loric migration to this new world this whole time?

Six months into the trek, I find Crayton hyperventilating, sitting on the ground beside the makeshift crib we’ve put together for Ella—an oversize plastic bin fastened to a side table and filled with blankets. Crayton’s face is white, and his forehead is shiny with sweat.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, taking a few quick strides to the baby’s side. But she’s fine, sleeping without a care in the universe.

“What am I supposed to do with her?” he asks. “I watch over animals. That’s it. I just make sure they
have food and water and aren’t sick. I don’t know how to raise a child.”

I stare down at him. I’m not sure if he really wants an answer or if he’s just talking to himself. He continues.

“Even after all our studies, I feel like I hardly know anything about Earth. How am I supposed to make sure she’s okay? What
language
am I even supposed to speak to her in? Loric? And what if she asks about her parents? What am I supposed to tell her?”

I glance towards the cockpit, where Zophie’s lost among the stars, staring at everything and nothing at once. I guess this is something I’ll have to handle on my own.

“You’ll tell her whatever you want,” I say.

“That’s a great bedtime story,” he scoffs. “That her mom and dad are most likely dead and that they sent me with her on a ship with a bunch of animals to make sure she was safe. How do you explain that to a little girl?”

I don’t know what to tell him. What I’d tell Ella. What would I tell Zane? My first instinct is the truth, without question. But what if the truth is terrifying? How do you find the middle ground? What if the truth puts her in danger?

“Maybe you don’t explain it,” I suggest. “Maybe you tell her something that will help to keep her alive and
safe. Even if that means lying to her. You’ll have to ask yourself if her knowing the truth is more important than her being able to fall asleep without the fear of everyone she knows being destroyed in a hail of fire in the middle of the night.”

Crayton looks up at me. His eyes are bloodshot.

“I’m not going to lie to her,” he says.

Ella starts to wake up, stretching and cooing. Crayton is on his feet in an instant, bent over her. I shake my head.

“When the time comes,” I say, “you’ll do what you have to in order to protect her.”

I leave him with the baby and retreat to my room.