“No time! Just do it.”
I get an eye around the edge of the doorway, but Beckett doesn’t see me. He’s sitting up, concentrating through the magnifiers on his injured leg. Jillian is on her knees, looking at his injury, too, but with something in her hand, a smooth, metal cylinder, shiny, and it’s from one end of this that the unnatural greenness is coming. The other end she holds against Beckett’s ankle, and whatever happens, he doesn’t like it. I watch him wince and hiss.
“Don’t move!” Jillian instructs him. Then, “How are we doing?”
“The crack is almost filled. Just a little … There.” I hear his relief. “She did a good job setting it, didn’t she? Okay, one more, a tiny one, hurry … ”
I step back, disoriented. Their words, tone, and that odd light. It’s all wrong. And Beckett talks as if he can see his own injury, which is impossible. Then Jillian says, “Are we still alone?”
I find the wall and press myself against it.
“I think so … ”
“Scan and make sure.”
“Right this second I’m looking at a cracked metatarsal. Go two centimeters left, no, my left. Angle about fifty degrees … Now.” I hear him grunt. “You’ve got it.”
“Okay. Ten minutes to set the gel, and we’re out.”
“Jill … ”
“Ten minutes and we’re out, Beckett.”
“What about … what she said?”
“What, the locals coming to kill us?” Jillian’s voice sounds a little hysterical. “I don’t know, that seems like, oh, a really good reason to break contact and go!”
“And what about her?”
“You know the protocol.”
“So your idea of protocol is that we leave her to die?”
“Beckett … ” Jillian’s voice pauses, drops. I have to lean forward to hear. “We can’t interfere in her life, or her death. You know that. We’re lucky to have gotten this far without completely messing up. And we took an oath, remember?”
His voice comes low beneath his breath. “Well, the oath looks a little different in Canaan than it did on Earth.”
Jillian says something about how this is exactly where his oath isn’t supposed to look different, going on about commanders and ships. I’m hearing, but I’m not listening. I’m sliding down the wall, sitting in the dust of the floor, paying attention to only one word inside my mind. Earth. Beckett said “Earth.”
I go back in my memory, quick, frantic, and feel that cloth between my fingers, that shoe covering, hear the clipped speech. I see the confusion, hair the wrong color, the wrong lengths. That eerie green light. Could that be … technology? And that shadow in the sky. That’s where Earth comes from. The sky. Where they swoop down and take us. Lie to us. Use their technology to enslave us.
I don’t understand. But I think I do understand. What an inexplicable feeling it is, when your world breaks, turns upside down, and the pieces shake out all over the floor. It happened when Adam died, and when I found out about the Forgetting. When I killed Nita. I didn’t think it could happen again.
But it has.
I remember all the things the Council said, made sure we were taught. Not myths. Not lies. Truth. They taught us truth. I can’t believe it. But I do believe it. That’s the incredible part. After what I’ve just heard and seen, I don’t Know how not to. Earth is real. And just on the other side of this wall.
The reality slides through my head, like the pebble that starts a rockfall. If Earth is real, and the recitations of the learning room are true, then what are those two here to do to us? To my city? I see the blue sky and green land of the mural in the Forum, fading into the flat and ruined brown. My people, Outside and Underneath—they have to be warned. I shouldn’t be running from the Council. I should be running straight to them. But would the Council even listen to me? Or would they just kill me on sight?
I put my head in my hands, fingers digging into my hair. Giving myself up to the Council, giving them power over me, when I was going to take their power from them—it makes me cringe. It makes me furious. And afraid. I was going to fix so many things. But the problems of Knowing, Forgetting, the injustice of the Outside, none of these things matter if we’re dead. Taken. Our planet ruined.
And then I lift my head. I told them there was another city. A city underground. My breath stutters, stops, and I close my eyes in the darkness. The ruse begun 379 years ago was actually working. They were fooled. And I stripped the protection of my people with a sentence. Earth knows to look beneath the surface. They will find New Canaan. Soon.
I have to tell the Council what I Know. No matter what they do to me.
I Know what they’re going to do to me.
I push myself to my feet, start back across the black and empty room. Jillian and Beckett are still arguing. There’s a kind of haze coming down in my mind, clouding my thoughts, like the cold fog when I killed Nita, and when Jillian says, “Did you hear something?” I’m sure it was me.
But the words aren’t significant. Nothing is.
I don’t look back through the dark.
“We observe, we study, and we record, but we never influence, alter, or interfere with the emerging history of a developing culture.”
I had to sign that today, swear it on my life’s blood or something. But now I’m wondering. What if the culture we observe is actually smarter than we are? Maybe they should be the ones influencing us.
FROM THE LOG BOOK OF BECKETT RODRIGUEZ
Day 17, Year 1
The Lost Canaan Project
Did you hear something?” Jill asks.
It takes a second to switch the glasses to the night function, but before I can even begin to pierce the gloom, text starts rolling across the lenses. “I’ve got a message.”
“Do we have a signal?”
“No.” I’m reading fast, summarizing. “No, they broke protocol and sent in a skimmer to find us. They got the position of the city, but not until the skimmer came back. They had to fly it in low to send the orders. There’s no long-range communications, and … Wow. It looks like the scans have been … reflecting somehow. They’re going to have to go back and relook at everything, the whole planet, to find the holes … ”
“Are the air bikes coming?”
“No. They … ” I hesitate. But it isn’t right not to tell her. “They say ten humans are inside the walls, twelve including us. Our orders are to avoid interaction at all costs, but if interaction has already taken place, follow protocol to break it and get back into communication, beyond the mountain range.” I stop reading, and look at Jill through the lenses. “They’re coming for her. Like she said.”
“So, nine of them?” says Jill. “And we have to get ourselves out? But they know where we are! Message back and tell them we’re in danger, that we have a situation … ”
“I can’t. There’s nothing within range. The skimmer must have come in and out.”
She puts her hands on her head. “She changes the whole mission. You know that, right? Everything … ” She looks around the room. “What do you think this place is? Ritual?”