Chapter 1

Chapter 1

I buried the last of our failed colony beneath her favorite tree, one that provided a sweet fruit she had risked her life to try. Emeliara’s discovery that they were edible and nourishing had bought us time our first year. Had everything gone to plan, we would have landed, established our new home, and sent out a comm with the planet’s conditions.

I still failed to understand why we’d needed to explore the stars and find another habitable world. Ours wasn’t overpopulated. We barely occupied half of the main continent. We’d been mostly happy. It’d been over a decade since we’d engaged in war.

The rest of the universe left us alone, and we liked that.

Yet, for reasons that remained mysterious, I’d been chosen with a thousand others to venture among the stars and find someplace else to settle. In case we encountered other life, I’d been given a linking system. The other life would have to teach me to use it — and provide the chips.

We possessed the links and the ability to install them but lacked the rest of the technology.

The whole mess had puzzled me, but I’d been younger and more foolish then, agreeing to the link and the mods so I might travel the universe. In reality, I hadn’t had a choice in the matter, and I’d known that.

Failure to agree meant incarceration.

I’d been ‘blessed’ with the ears and tail of the vulpes vulpes along with nails prone to growing in hard, curving to a sharp point. Had all gone well, I and my other adapted colonists would have become a new branch of humanity and brought prestige to our original home.

Nothing had gone to plan.

Our comm system had been the first to fail, ultimately leading to the colony’s demise. Upon our arrival some ten winters ago, we’d discovered the ruins of another civilization.

They’d had skyscrapers and spaceports and technology more advanced than ours, yet they’d fallen.

We’d come armed with emergency tents, our ship’s cabins, and a fabrication system that had broken within hours of our comm system’s premature death.

It hadn’t taken us long to understand our fate.

We would die, leaving ruins within ruins destined to puzzle future explorers just as we’d been puzzled. Who had come before us? Why had their civilization fallen? What had wiped them out?

The first winter had come and gone, harsh with its deep snows and ice but survivable. I’d grown in a plush coat of fur, which made me ideal for scavenging while the other colonists hid in the shelters we’d built for ourselves. Then our first spring had come, bringing with it floods and disease. The disease had stolen two lives, and in our naivety, we’d assumed they’d suffered from poor luck.

They’d quarantined themselves by their choice; they’d explored the abandoned ruins in the hope of finding something useful.

Had we been a little wiser, we might have understood nothing but death waited for us where our predecessors had once gone.

But we had not been wise — nor had we been taught how to be wise.

Our first summer had brought good fortune; we’d found the plants the previous settlers had cultivated, and we’d learned what we could eat and what we couldn’t with minimal loss of life.

At the end of our first year on the planet, we made our fatal mistake, venturing into the old ruins in search of a place to call home. We lost another two to disease, but they’d been standoffish folks, and we hadn’t been wise enough to realize their unintentional quarantine had saved us all — or doomed us to a slower demise.

In the second year, the colony fell in ones and twos and threes; the bolder people going farther into the ruins had brought our deaths back with them, but we’d made unfortunate assumptions.

We’d been fools, ignoring the same set of symptoms, the same pocks marring the corpses of the dead, and how it spread, in ones and twos and threes, to those who handled the bodies.

In the third year, the disease dug deeper roots into our numbers, striking in threes and fours and fives. Then the illness came in sixes and sevens and eights.

By the eighth year, most had died, leaving me to struggle alongside a handful of survivors.

Emeliara and I had made a pact at the end of that eighth year. Everywhere we went, we would go together.

We would live together, and we would die together. But she had also made me promise that until the first marks appeared on my skin, I would survive, as would she.

We had done as promised — I had done as promised — but somehow, I remained while everyone else had returned to the soil.

Armed with an obsidian knife, I carved Emeliara’s name into the trunk of her favorite tree, and I marked the date of her birth and the date of her death. Then, in an effort to leave some legacy behind, I carved the name of our exploration ship, its designation number, and our home, Galeize.

Below that, I carved a warning that the ruins carried plague, and to enter them would be to condemn themselves to a long and painful death.

With nothing left to do, I considered the world I’d left behind because I’d been blind enough to believe those who’d told me I’d needed to leave for the benefit of all.

The original inhabitants of Galeize, upon rescuing my ancestors a thousand years prior, had renamed their world as a gesture of welcome — and they had worked their science to change the atmosphere to be better suited for us. What had the planet been named before being dubbed Galeize? Such knowledge remained a mystery, taken away with the original inhabitants, who’d left us to our own devices.

We’d asked for that.

I supposed I’d been a little too different to be deemed acceptable. I regretted having stared at the distant stars as a child, longing to leave a mark and make some form of discovery, something that would last. The only thing to withstand the test of time had been a single clock with a battery the manufacturer claimed would last for three hundred years. The device fit in my pocket, and I thought about leaving it with my friend’s corpse for company.

We’d buried the rest in a mound an hour’s hike from our camp, hoping the contagion that had felled them would leave us be if only we got the corpses far enough away. I’d suggested condemning the bodies to the flames, but the others had worried we might attract predators to our site.

In retrospect, the predators might have been a mercy rather than observing the slow and steady decline of a thousand people and their children.

When the first hive had made its appearance on Emeliara’s arm, ten days following Kamarreo’s death, we’d known the end had come. In two to fifteen days, hives would mark me, too, and nothing would remain until the next unfortunate souls attempted to make landfall on the alluring world, lush with life — just not human life.

The disease killed humans without mercy, and it would kill again.

I gave it ten days for the first marks to develop on my skin, and if I had even a scrap of luck, the end would strike in no longer than four days. Emeliara had been fortunate.

She’d endured for only three and a half days, and she’d breathed her last before the worst of the symptoms could take hold.

Wisdom showed itself in strange ways, and she’d helped herself along through refusing to eat or drink when the first mark had appeared. In her memory, I would do the same.

Until then, I would survive and do my best to pretend I did not linger and wait for death to claim me.

***

When we had first landed on the world, the haunting call of the ghost birds had terrified us. We’d heard them long before any of us had spotted one, thus their name. Most refused to go anywhere near the forests where the ghost birds hunted, but I’d volunteered to explore.

I supposed the wildness of my adaptation suited me for it. Others had been given adaptations, but none were as expansive as mine. I supposed it was more of curse than a blessing, an extreme experiment my people had only done once.

None of my fellow colonists had viewed me as repulsive, but they had been outcast as well.

None of us had fit in well with the puritanical people of Galeize.

In retrospect, I marveled that I’d survived the genetic modification and the installation of the link, though the surgeon, from a world far from ours, had done much of the work.

A ghost bird cried out as though something strangled the life out of it. I’d learned I could spot the gray, white, and brown bird of prey if I stood still and stared up into the tallest of the trees.

Its call served as a summons for more of its kind; it had found food in the skirt of the forest and wished to begin the hunt. It liked small, furred animals with a long jump and a high-pitched chitter, and flocks of ghost birds worked together to flush their prey out into the open.

The tiny bones left behind by the ghost birds made excellent tools, easy to whittle down to sharp points suitable for sewing and piercing through even flesh.

Over time, I’d learned to hunt with the ghost birds. They each took one of their furry prey, and they were plentiful enough I could take advantage of their hunt to snag one for me, too.

When coupled with tree nuts, the foliage of the edible trees, and fish I could drive into the shallows and catch by hand, I ate enough to thrive. If I got lucky and caught two of the bounders, I would smoke one to give it good flavor and turn it to jerky, which would last for quite a while in the dry cellar we’d built. Something about one of the mosses that grew in the forest sucked all the moisture from the air, making it ideal for storage.

We needed to flush oxygen into the cellar before we entered it, but without oxygen, the jerky remained sound for months on the wooden shelves we’d fashioned before realizing we’d been stranded on a lethal planet.

I had a supply of fish I’d smoked and dried before storing in the cellar; with some water and the tubers in our root cellar, I’d be set for the winter.

Following the death of the colony, the fish stocks had replenished themselves, and I’d taken advantage of the bounty to prepare for when the chill of winter came calling.

A ghost bird called again nearby, and I spotted the bush it meant to bomb. Leaves rustled, faint enough my breathing would have drowned it out had I not been still and quiet, waiting for the moment one bird took the initiative, flushed out its prey, and chaos struck the forest floor.

As long as I got close to one of the animals, I could strike it down. When it had become clear Emeliara would not survive, I’d allowed my nails to grow into claws, claws I could use to better snag my prey.

If I hunted well and the ghost birds did not, I would share my bounty with them.

With a final strangled cry, a bird dove through the branches. Before it hit the ground, it snapped open its wings, spread out its curved talons, and raked at the bush. Most times, the bird failed to catch anything, but luck was with it. It caught the scruff of one of the hiding animals, aborting its leap to safety. A tussle ensued, one I stayed out of.

The bounder, for we had no other name for them, would not last long against the curved beak and talons made for shredding through fur and flesh alike.

The other animals bolted for safety, and I joined the flock of ghost birds in pursuit. I flanked the fleeing mass of bodies, the largest of them the length of my forearm, which would provide excellent meat for the one lucky enough to catch it.

The ghost birds tended to avoid the largest of them, for their powerful hind legs could deliver lethal kicks.

I held no such concerns.

For the most part, I ran on two feet, but when needed, I went down to all fours, which allowed me to dive through the thickets and worm through the smaller passages the larger wildlife created for themselves. My position kept the bounders from scattering much, and I funneled them towards the open ground flanking the river and cutting through the trees.

It was in the clearing that the remaining ghost birds struck, descending from the sky in a gray, white, and brown wall of death. As expected, they avoided the larger bounders, leaving them for me. The fear of the ghost birds drove more than a few my way, and I balled my hand into a fist and clobbered the first on the head, stunning it long enough I could step on its neck with my foot. The second I caught more by luck than skill. It collided into my leg, stunned itself, and became easy prey for my free foot.

I snagged a third by its scruff as it jumped by me, and I slammed it onto the ground with sufficient force to snap its neck. As I refused to force my supper to suffer, I dispatched the other two through the use of a rock and several quick blows. Then I waited for the chaos to settle. Twelve ghost birds hovered over their prey, leaving one to hunger. I selected the smallest of my catch, gave a call similar to their hunting cry, and tossed the bounder towards it.

I’d done the same often enough the bird of prey did not hesitate, hopping over and settling over the body, spreading its wings and fanning its feathers while it ate.

I admired the bird, close enough to touch. I would not reach out and disturb the closest thing I had to a companion. But I would speak before I forgot how and hope it would not fly away.

“I am Kithya. Do not worry, for I am the last of my kind here.”

Soon enough, their forest would return to as it had been before we’d come, and the birds would find peace once more.