The Navigator (5 page)

BY THE TIME WE HAVE A VISUAL ON EARTH,
Ella has a full head of auburn hair. The rest of us are looking unkempt.

Crayton sports a bushy dark beard that hangs almost to the middle of his chest. There’s a puff of black hair an inch thick on my own head. Zophie keeps her long, red locks tied back with a piece of cloth.

Actually seeing our destination is reassuring, as we’re starting to run out of supplies. Without ever talking about it, we’ve all been doubling down on rationing, and the result is three gaunt Loric with dark circles under their eyes. Ella is the outlier. She’s practically chubby, which leads me to believe that Crayton has been giving her some of his own food. Not that I mind. The girl can stand now, and will run a little if we’re not careful—the ship wasn’t really made with children in mind and is full of sharp corners. She can even say
a few words. Maybe more than a few. It’s hard to keep track of whether she’s making gibberish noises or trying to form words in one of the languages we practice.

She definitely knows our names at least, even if she does struggle with some of the consonants. We have become “Ex,” “Zoey” and “Ray-un” to her, the last of which is the strangest to hear coming out of her mouth since it could just as easily be her trying to pronounce her father’s name. But there’s no denying that it’s Crayton she’s calling for when she wakes; her eyes light up whenever she sees him.

And for his part, the way he looks at her has begun to change. No longer is it only with worry, like she’s a fragile bubble he has been tasked with protecting. That’s still there, but under a thick layer of affection.

When I call everyone to the cockpit to see Earth, even though it’s only a blue pinhead in the distance, Crayton brings Ella with him.

“You see that?” he asks her, pointing into space. “That’s our new home. That’s where you’re going to grow up.”

She just coos and pulls on his beard with chubby little fists.

It’s a few more days before Earth looms large ahead of us and we can discuss where and how we’re going to land. We don’t exactly have the luxury of time or travel, as we’re coasting on the fumes of synthetic fossil fuels
by this time. Based on our angle of approach and the rotation of the planet, we have a very narrow window of where, geographically, we might land. We’re so low on power reserves that we’ll be relying on the force of Earth’s gravitational pull to bring us down to the ground as it is.

Zophie pores over scans from Earth’s surface, seated in the copilot’s chair. Finally, she points to a spot on the digital map she’s pulled up on one of the cockpit monitors.

“There,” she says. “It’s a desert.”

“So, lots of sand?” I ask. It takes a few seconds for me to understand what this means since deserts weren’t exactly abundant on Lorien.

“Right. And more importantly, it’s largely uninhabited, so we won’t have to explain where we came from to a bunch of bystanders. We’d be able to set the ship down and journey a day or so to a major metropolitan area—a city called Cairo.”

I bring up the coordinates on a navigational panel.

“It looks like that’s doable,” I say. “Tell Crayton he needs to strap down with Ella. When we enter Earth’s atmosphere, things will start to get bumpy.”

The three of us remain quiet as we start our final approach to the planet. Even Ella is silent, as if she realizes that this is important. I keep my eyes locked on the instrument panels, monitoring the increasing heat
outside as we shoot through the atmospheric bubble.

“This isn’t so bad,” Crayton finally whispers. “At least there’s not a fleet of ships hovering around—”

The ship begins to shake violently, shutting him up.

“Is everything—,” Zophie starts.

“We’re fine.” I keep my eyes moving back and forth between the instruments and the quickly approaching surface of the planet in front of us. The ship continues to jostle back and forth, as if it’s trying to tear itself apart in the sky. But it holds together as we sail headfirst towards a golden expanse of land.

A readout from one of the monitors beeps. It’s time to deploy our reentry measures: a dozen outboard thrusters that will rapidly slow our descent until we’re hovering above the sand.

“Hold on!” I shout, and flip the switch.

Only, nothing happens.

I hit the switch again. And then again. Still, there’s no response.

“Shit!” I mutter. My heart and brain begin to race. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“What is it?” Crayton asks.

“The reentry thrusters aren’t working.”

We’re traveling too fast. We have practically no fuel. There’s no way we can eject ourselves at this velocity. Alarms and warnings start to go off around the cockpit. I tap on the controls until I’m given a readout
that helps explain what’s going on—we never properly rebuilt the thrusters during the restoration. I’ve got two front thrusters I can engage, but it’s a one-time deal, and they’ll only change the direction of our much-too-rapid descent slightly.

We’re going to crash.

Somewhere behind me the Chimærae shriek and Ella cries as the cockpit instruments make terrible whining noises that seem to say “It’s too late; you’re dead.”

I try to remain calm, going over options in my head. There’s nothing we can do—not even a reentry parachute we can deploy.

And then, suddenly, an image comes to me. Zane. His favorite way to scare me after he developed flight was to race towards the ground until I was screaming for him to slow down, to stop, always sure he was going to end up crashing into the lawn or street. He’d wait until the last conceivable second and then finally pull up, shooting past me horizontally. A tornado in the form of a little boy.

“Everybody get ready,” I say. “I’m going to try something.”

I hear them shout things at me, but I don’t listen. I have to be completely focused. We’re getting closer and closer to Earth, but I wait. I have only one chance at this.
We
have only one chance.

The sand is almost upon us now. Zophie screams.
Crayton wraps his arms around Ella.

I punch the front thrusters.

We straighten out for a split second, until we’re parallel to the earth. That’s when I blow the last of our fuel in one hard boost straight ahead. It works—by some miracle, we don’t crash. Not exactly. The surface of the desert is a blur as we skim across it. We start spinning. I’m sure that at any moment the ship is going to break in half and send us spilling out, our bodies breaking against the sand. But it stays together long enough to smash into a giant dune. Sand covers us, blacking out the cockpit but for the still-beeping emergency lights.

Everything is calm except for the howling of the animals. And the child, Ella, cries.

I’m almost afraid to look away from the controls or let go of the flight yoke. And then I hear Zophie gasping for air and Crayton talking to Ella, and I know that they’re alive. I look at them. They glisten with sweat and their eyes are wide, but they’re okay.

I hadn’t even realized I’d been holding my breath, but I exhale finally, peeling my shaky hands off of the controls.

“You did it,” Zophie says.

And I can’t help but laugh a hysterical, confused laugh as I try to gulp for air.

GETTING OUT OF THE SHIP PROVES TO BE A
challenge.

The only way we’re able to escape is thanks to Raylan’s weapons cache—one of the few boxes we haven’t touched in the year and a half of our journey. My landing might have kept us from crumpling against the earth, but it also deeply embedded us in a sand dune. The loading door is blocked, and without any fuel to punch the thrusters or engine, it’s impossible for us to dig ourselves out of the sand. After a little bit of brainstorming, I find an old incendiary grenade in one of the boxes from Lorien and blow a hole in the side of the cargo bay while we huddle in Crayton’s living quarters along with the Chimærae.

On one hand, it’s perfect that we’ve crash-landed in the middle of nowhere, with no humans to catch sight of us. On the other, seeing nothing but sand and
dunes surrounding us isn’t the most welcoming sight imaginable.

“How’s the radar on Earth?” I ask as I jump down into the hot sand, wearing the T-shirt and black pants I had on the night everything changed on Lorien. They’re a little baggier on me now, but I hardly notice. It is so good to be breathing air that hasn’t been recycled and to feel sunlight beating down on my skin. I don’t mind the heat. I
welcome
it, just as I welcome the solid, stable ground under my feet.

“Their systems aren’t exactly unsophisticated,” Zophie says, climbing out through the smoking hole. “It’s possible someone caught our entry. We’re in northern Africa. Egypt. We’re close enough to their capital that they may have had eyes in the sky.”

“Can someone take her?” Crayton asks, and then he hands Ella down to Zophie.

Soon the three of us stand at the top of the dune our ship has crashed into. The sand stretches out for what seems like an eternity.

“Which way do we go?” Crayton asks. He’s now got Ella strapped to his chest, holding his hand over her head to shield it from the sun.

“I’m not sure.” Zophie bites her lip. “I was charting us visually from space once we were close enough.”

“Isn’t there something on the ship that can point us towards civilization?”

“None of our tech is made to work with the satellites here,” I say. “I might be able to reconfigure something, but I have no idea how long it would take.”

“If the humans tracked our entry they might be coming this way.” Zophie raises her hand to her eyes, squinting.

“Then we should move,” I say. “Try to find a populated area and blend in.”

There’s some kind of commotion below us, and I realize that the Chimærae have all flown out and are now stretching their bodies, morphing between shapes and wrestling with one another in the sand. They seem as happy as we are to be outside again. A few of them take avian forms and soar up in the air.

“I’ve never seen them so riled up,” Crayton murmurs.

“They should get it out of their systems here,” I say, “while we’re out of sight.”

I can’t help but wonder: What are we going to do with all these beasts now that we’re on Earth?

One of them—a giant blue bird—flies higher than the others, golden eyes shining like a beacon in the sky. It lets out a shrill call and then swoops down, looping around us in two tight circles. It flies so close to me that I can feel its wake in the air on my face. Then the animal is in the sky again, beating its wings against the wind but looking back at us.

“Did I go completely insane in space or is that Chimæra beckoning for us to follow it?” Zophie asks.

“Possibly both,” I say.

“Her name is Olivia,” Crayton says. “She’s always been one of the brightest among them.” He turns to us. “I think we should follow her.”

Zophie and I exchange glances. She shrugs. “That direction looks as good as the others.”

Before we leave, I take a closer look at our ship. Or what’s left of it. Even without the gaping hole we’ve blown out of the back hull, the main propulsion units look like they were fried in our reentry. Without the necessary parts and materials, there’s no way the vessel is ever moving again.

“I think this ship’s seen its last flight,” I say, suddenly feeling very much stuck on this new planet.

“So do we just leave it, or what?” Crayton asks.

Zophie suggests we blow it up if we don’t want the humans to find it and suddenly come face-to-face with the realization that they’re not the only intelligent life in the universe. I can’t tell if she’s joking or not, but either way I argue that it’s a bad idea—I’m not exactly thrilled by the thought of destroying what might be one of the few remaining Loric computer systems in the universe. Besides, the ship is almost completely embedded in a sand dune anyway, obscured. After a few days, it will likely disappear beneath the sand
completely. So we gather the few supplies we still have and distribute them among bags for equal carrying weight. There’s little food and only a handful of weapons—knives, concussion grenades and a few blasters. Raylan didn’t skimp on other resources, though. We split up the jewelry—rings, bangles, necklaces—and precious stones.

We walk. It is perhaps the first time that the enormity of our situation has dawned on me. We are now refugees. Four beings without a planet. We are a species on the brink of extinction. Trusting the guidance of an animal because we have no better plan or option. Even though Earth has been our intended destination for months, being on its sandy ground feels surreal. It feels so foreign.

It’s been so monotonous on the ship that I’ve let old fires grow cold, but now that we’re on Earth, I remember all the hatred I had for the way Lorien was run. And for how it fell. I silently curse the names of each and every Elder. It’s something I’ve done countless times, usually thinking of Zane. Or for the Loric who died in the Mog attack—even those who were a part of the system, whether they realized it or not. At this moment, though, with the child crying and our feet sinking into the sand, I curse the Elders for me and Zophie and Crayton and Ella. For everything they might have kept from us. For getting us into this situation.

For thinking that we weren’t worth saving.

We follow Olivia. The rest of the Chimærae trail behind us. Eventually, when our pace slows, a few of them transform into four-legged beasts and carry us and our supplies. We march on until they too begin to grow weary. And then we camp.

Night falls. Zophie guesses that it must not be summer or winter, otherwise the temperatures in this climate would be extreme. It’s chilly, but we make do. One of the Chimærae morphs into a large animal with long, soft fur, and after a little hesitation I give in to leaning on it. I fall asleep quickly, my mind drifting to other times. Zane and I playing games at our grandfather’s home. Our mutual excitement on his first morning at the academy. Perfect afternoons on Lorien.

It’s the middle of the next day before we spot structures in the distance. Tall, sand-colored triangles jutting out over the horizon. When Zophie sees them, she cries out, running forward a few steps.

“The Great Pyramids,” she says. “They’re ancient constructions—one of the first projects the Loric spearheaded here on Earth ages ago when we were still trying to assess the capabilities of the life-forms here. This is it. The Chimærae led us in the right direction.”

And so we soldier on with renewed vigor.

A few hours later, we begin to pass small buildings and finally hit roads. The Chimærae shrink down
to smaller sizes. Some scurry through the gutters as lizards. Others perch on rooftops above us as birds. I swear I see a small rodent crawl into one of Crayton’s pockets.

We stand out, with our bags and sallow expressions. A few men congregated in front of what looks like a small market ask us questions in a language I don’t recognize. But Zophie does. It must be one of the ones she studied on her own. She converses with them for a few minutes, finally laughing a little.

“What is it?” Crayton asks in Loric.

I shoot him a look. “That’s not our language anymore,” I say in French.

Zophie smirks. “They say we look as if we just walked across the desert. They say that would be a long journey indeed.”

“Ask them where we can find a place to stay.”

She goes back to talking. The words come rapidly, and it sounds as if things are getting heated.

“We’re in Giza,” she says. “I told them we need to find a place to sleep, but they’re trying to sell us a tour of some local landmarks. They think we’re visiting from another place on Earth.”

I take a few steps forward, scowling. I have several inches on these men, and when my boots plant in front of them, I can feel their apprehension. I reach into my pocket and remove a small, glittering ring from Raylan’s
stash, holding it out to them in my palm.

“Tell them it’s theirs if they can get us to comfortable beds,” I say.

Zophie speaks. The men grin.