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?? CHAPTER 20 ??
Macie
Ryle must be short-circuiting my brain somehow. I was in a near panic when I sought him out on the riverbed. I have to make sure that this prediction is right, but then what? What if it is? What do we do? Is it a hurricane and a tornado? Is our ship safe enough, or will it flood? Or, even worse, be swept out to sea?
So many questions swirling in my mind. And then there he was, blotting them all out.
I should be annoyed. This problem doesn’t have spare time. We aren’t facing a flexible deadline, here. But, my head is clearer now. His fierce eyes and his gentle touch actually soothed some of the panic out of me. I’m ready to face it again.
He finds us an empty room on his ship. At first I wonder if they’ve stripped everything out of it, but then the horror dawns on me. The ship is unfurnished because they were being thrown out like garbage. Trash doesn’t need beds. Trash doesn’t need comfort. You blast it into the sun, where all evidence is burned away.
I can’t imagine the terror they must have felt knowing they were being sent to their deaths. I squeeze Ryle’s hand, and he smiles at me. It explains his exuberance in a way. The big guy is just so happy to be alive. I don’t know that I’d react so well. If it were me, I might have never stopped screaming.
“Were you afraid?” I ask him. He sits against a wall and I settle across his legs, just like we sat in the caves.
“Afraid? What? Only human and Rurim on this ship.”
Right. Past tense is probably going to take him a little longer to pick up. “When you were flying toward the sun, were you scared?”
He looks down. His mouth twists into a snarl. Something close to anger that I haven’t seen on him before. “We are awake the whole journey. Little food, little water. Glad to be with my friends.” He glances out the door. Two Rurim are working on the ship’s computers right now. “Angry that they die. Fits no cefku mejt. How many fail and die? How many?”
A horrifying thought.
“I’m glad you’re with me, now,” I say.
He kisses the top of my head. “Work. We work.” He turns his own screen to his face, the one he wears on his arm. I pick up my own and start scrolling.
It’s an effort not to doze off, but the harsh lighting of the ship helps. There were so many images scrawled on those stones. These aliens were smart enough to track the cycles of their planet, but not artistic enough to render clear illustrations of themselves. It took me a long time to conclude that the hunched beetle-like figures were supposed to represent the aliens themselves. The ones that did all of this work. The marks could have just as easily symbolized rocks or shrubs. Or actual beetles.
There’s a drawing where they are definitely fishing in the sea. I guess fins are a pretty universal shape. Below that is an image that looks like a campfire surrounded by little bones - the fish bones, presumably. A simple enough story to see once I interpreted the beetles.
Another panel seems to tell a tale about the monkeys. Some stand on the beetle’s backs. The beetles chase them, but there're no signs of death or battle, so I assume they couldn’t catch any. I smile - how funny to see that the mischievous creatures harassed the planet’s residents so long ago in the same ways.
The image below that one is concerning, though. The beetles surround one monkey-like shape that’s four times larger than them. Those little ones couldn’t actually be, like, babies, could they? That roar that we heard - could that have been a huge, hulking alien gorilla? Anything is possible. The image further down is too damaged to read, so there’s no telling who won that confrontation.
My eyes are growing bleary. I’m ready to drop the tablet on my face and doze off when I finally stumble across something that may be Something. It looks like the beetles are in a cave. I straighten up.
“Maysee?”
“Look at this.” Ryle takes the tablet from me. “I think that’s our cave.” I lean my head on his warm shoulder and point at the screen. “See? Three caverns. This big one full of tall rectangles.”
“Door.” He points at a shape placed at the far end of the tablet cavern, and sure enough, it’s a little arch that definitely resembles a door.
I pull the image further down. The beetles are filing through the caverns and through the door. There’s a patch of short lines outside the first cave here. Could that be the rain?
As I pull the third image into focus, I grab Ryle’s wrist. “Oh, shit.”
“Tsek,” he agrees.
The beetles are behind the door. Now, outside the cave, there’s a drawing of a spiral. It’s in the midst of the rain strikes. Little marks that look like waves surround the caves, above and below, and the first cavern is full of them. To me, it looks like they mean water. Water everywhere, higher than the caves, higher than the cliffs, flooding the first cavern.
No waves in the second cavern, though. The section is slightly damaged, but there’s something there. I zoom in further, adjust the brightness setting. Ryle’s breath brushes my hair as he leans in closer.
It’s the mushrooms. The cavern is full of mushroom shapes, puffy and crowded, pressing up against the roof. The mushrooms kept the beetles safe?
And what else is beyond that door? Are they huddling in an empty cavern, or does it lead further down?
I have to tilt my head back to see Ryle’s face. His brow is creased. I squeeze his wrist where I’ve gripped it.“We have to go back. We have to see.”
