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The American Chestnut not very long ago was a dominant tree in dry forests throughout most of our region. Soon after 1900, however, a fungus bark disease believed to be of Asiatic origin became epidemic and in less than a human generation completely eliminated our Chestnut as an important forest tree. Sprouts may continue from some old stumps, and these may flower and produce fruits. As soon as these shoots attain a moderate size, however, the bark-shattering blight usually girdles them near their bases. Blight-resistant strains are being developed, and planted specimens may be encountered.
— Remarks for American Chestnut (Castanea dentata), Peterson’s Eastern Trees field guide (1998)
i.
Minerva leaps from Duck Newton’s head.
She leaps from his crown—easy, like the thrust of a sword, step into it and push, transfer your weight from one foot to the other. Easy, like shouting a battle cry, like saying hello to an old friend. Thanks for the lift.
“Hello, Duck Newton.”
“Hey, Minerva.”
He will ask her later, sitting in a strange booth with seats soft enough to melt into, “Why are you called Minerva?”
She shrugs. She knew once, long ago. She was named by her mother: for an old story about a warrior goddess, perhaps. A woman who strode down from the stars, shield up and eyes blazing, to defend her people. But stories took up valuable space that would be better used for diagrams and toy soldiers, so she has lost the rhythm and the meter.
“Why do you ask?” she says finally. He looks up from his French onion soup, a bit of cheese stuck on his upper lip.
“Dunno. It’s just—you remind me of one of ours.”
“One of our what?”
She has to wait for an answer: he’s taken another slurp of his soup. “Our gods. Warrior heroes. There’s one called Minerva, she was born from her father’s skull. I did a project on her in grade school. And you made a wormhole through my head—it’s, like, some kinda cosmic coincidence. ”
Minerva considers this. There are no coincidences, one of the generals once told her. Only infinite space for interpretation.
“I suppose there could be a connection, Duck Newton,” she says. “But if anything, my portal was forged through your heart.”
He looks at her—long, heavy, so close she could touch him.
And then he says, “Try your soup, Minerva. It’ll get cold.”
ii.
It is impossible to sleep here. It’s strange: the quiet back on Mira Five was so haunting, so heavy, that it took her endless workouts and careful meditation to reach unconsciousness. But now on Earth, she faces the opposite problem.
She lies flat on her back on Duck’s couch, head resting on the faded leather cushions on one side and feet hanging off the other, and she is surrounded: chirping, hooting, rustling. After decades alone on Mira Five her senses were trained to pick up the tiniest whisper, the faintest twitch of a cockroach on a rock formation half a kilometer away, and so now everything echoes. Every owl’s hoot and cricket’s chirp is picked up, as though by a microphone, and broadcast, pounding close inside her skull.
She springs to her feet in one fluid motion, turning and planting on the ground and standing as easily as jumping into a battle stance. Duck’s floor is oddly soft on her bare feet—carpet, he called it. It unnerves her. But then, so do four walls, and portals, and French onion soup.
Duck’s door is cracked open. It’s easy for her to push it further and pad into his room, quiet on bare feet, leaving heel-toe indentations in the carpet. There is a loose shield of some kind at the top of his window, but either he doesn’t use it or he forgot to close it tonight, because a shaft of light is coming in, illuminating first a toy ship in a bottle, sitting on the windowsill, then Duck himself in soft blue. He’s sleeping on his side with the blankets thrown back, one hand holding tightly to the sheet. His mouth is open. He is on his side: curled into himself slightly, the blue light softening the stubble on his chin to faint shadow.
“DUCK NEWTON,” she says.
He flips onto his back, then sits up, then stares at her. Then—fwump—lies back down again, throws up a hand to cover his eyes.
“What is it, Minerva?” he asks. His voice sounds funny, muffled beneath his elbow—like an echo from underwater.
“I’m sorry to wake you, Duck Newton,” she says, taking a step closer. “But I—ah. Well.”
It’s hard to say out loud. Minerva, Grand General of Mira Five, Herald of the Astral Mind, cannot sleep because the forest outside her is too distracting. Who is she to seek help for this?
Duck takes the arm down from his face, then sits up again, more slowly this time. He looks at her—and here, in the soft shadows, the moonlight, he looks almost how he appeared to her through the Communicator. Not the filled-out body of a man, but the hazy outline of one.
“Can’t sleep, huh?” he says.
She nods. An owl hoots outside—and the sound echoes, but only in the background. It harmonizes with the rustling of Duck shifting his legs over to the side of his bed, then standing, then padding past her to pull the door open.
“Come on,” he says. “I’ll make hot cocoa.”
She follows, and he does make hot cocoa. He makes it on the stovetop—it would be faster in the microwave, he says, but the stove is how his mom always used to do it, when he couldn’t sleep because of a thunderstorm or a nightmare, and anyway it tastes better when you boil the milk properly and then add the cocoa powder. He can’t explain it, it just does.
“I have never had this hot co-co-a before, Duck Newton,” Minerva says, watching him clatter back and forth across the kitchen—getting the box of powder down from the cupboard, and grabbing two mugs, and rinsing off two spoons from the sink, and then turning to switch off the stove as the pot almost boils over. “I will have to take your word for it.”
“Never had—well, of course, you’re from another planet.” Duck measures out three heaping spoonfuls of brown powder into each mug, then pours the milk. He hands her the first mug (a white one with a cartoon image of a cactus and the words “LIFE WOULD SUCC WITHOUT YOU” printed on the side) and takes the other (a green one with the logo of the Monongahela National Forest) for himself.
“To, uh, interdimensional portals, and—saving Kepler, and, uh—old friends,” he says, tapping his mug against hers with a faint clink.
“To old friends,” Minerva agrees.
The drink is hot as advertised, and sweet—much sweeter than anything on Mira Five. It’s smooth in her throat, going down like a slow-burning fire, like the last rays of sunlight on a hot day.
“This is…” She struggles to find the right word. “This is noble, Duck Newton. A noble drink for noble warriors.”
Duck chuckles at that, then takes a big gulp from his mug before responding. “Wait till you try it with little marshmallows. That’s fucking heroic. Also, you know,” he goes on, wiping a bit of foam from his lips, “you don’t need to always call me by my full name, Minerva. Just Duck is fine.”
“Duck.” Minerva considers it. She always thought “Newton” was some kind of title—Duck the Newton, or Duck of Newton. It is respectful, on Mira Five, to refer to one’s companion by their full title. This would be a difficult habit to shake.
There is another sound outside—an animal calling out, oooowhoooo. Minerva’s blood rises—she tries to suppress her instinct to fight, this is Duck’s apartment, Earth is in no immediate danger, by all circadian rhythms and local time zone-associated cultures she should be asleep right now—but she still twitches, spilling a few drops of the hot cocoa on Duck’s table.
“I apologize,” she says, wiping the stain with the sleeve of the T-shirt he let her borrow. (It is gray, and two sizes too small, and emblazoned with some kind of fish pattern, but it suits her needs just fine.) “I am not used to—to hearing a lot of noise. My planet has been quiet for a long time.”
Duck shakes his head. “Nothin’ to apologize for. It’s weird to be in a new place—I couldn’t sleep well for a month when I moved here from Maple Street, and that was just across town.” He takes another sip of cocoa, then squints at her, considering.
“Would it help if I told you what all the noises were?” he asks.
She cocks her head, so he goes on. “I mean, that howling just now, that was a wolf. And there are different birds and insects, some frogs—I’m a forest ranger, I’ve been trained in this stuff.”
It has been a long time since anyone offered to teach Minerva anything. The last time—she was one hundred and twenty, maybe, her first years as leader of a Navy battalion, and the ballistic weapons director gave her a crash course on operating cannons.
“Yes,” she says. “I would appreciate that very much.”
And so Duck and Minerva take their mugs of hot cocoa to the backyard of the apartment building, and they sit on an old bench of faded wood next to the small square of crabgrass where he used to come at 6:14 each evening, and he teaches her.
As she goes to sleep later, she counts them: three owls, ten bullfrogs, seventy-five crickets. All calling out. All telling her, at least according to Duck’s loose translation: Hello, welcome, this is Kepler, hope you enjoy your stay.
The morning after Minerva arrives in Kepler, Duck Newton calls a meeting.
It reminds her of the Generals’ Summits, back on Mira Five—or would, if it were taking place in a hallowed cathedral or cutting-edge battleship, all limestone and reflections, and not in Duck Newton’s kitchen, black-and-white map of Kepler and the surrounding forests pushing aside used coffee cups and coupon books. Aubrey Lady Flame, the first to arrive, pulls a purple marker out of her leather jacket pocket and starts doing bubble letters around the KEPLER, WEST VIRGINIA at the top of the map while Duck starts a second pot of coffee. Minerva, sitting on the map’s eastern edge, does not know what to do with her hands.
“Does this have a tactical advantage?” she asks Aubrey.
“What?”
“The purple.”
“Oh, not really.” Aubrey pauses, goes back to add a bit more girth to her R, then moves on. “I just find it easier to pay attention when my hands are doing something. The ADHD, you know?”
Minerva doesn’t know, but she nods anyway. She cocks her head to realign the map and studies it carefully: the trail leading up the mountain, the clearing with an arch marked in blue ink in the center. The notes, in a blocky, pencil handwriting that must be Duck’s, marking POPLAR GROVE here, WATCH OUT FOR FLOODING ON THE TRAIL there, BIG MOSQUITOES IN SUMMER over there.
Aubrey is halfway through coloring the N in VIRGINIA when Dr. Sarah Drake arrives, followed quickly by a heavy-set person in plaid who introduces himself as Barclay.
“Great,” Duck says, sitting down at the north end of the map. “I think that’s everyone.”
“You think? Didn’t you organize this?” Aubrey asks.
Duck flicks a scrap of paper at her.
“Respect your elders, Aubrey Lady Flame,” Minerva tells her. This, at least, is like a General’s Summit. Aubrey sticks her tongue out at Minerva—a curious gesture, meant to convey irreverence, she guesses based on the way Sarah chuckles at it. Minerva sticks out her own tongue in return.
“Guys!” Duck exclaims, in this voice that’s loud and deep and almost accidental, like he inherited the tone and is unsure how to wield it. “Everyone’s here, okay? Now, we have a lot to talk about and not much time before I need to get to work, okay, so let’s focus. I made an, uh, an agenda—” And he reaches under the map and pulls out a pad of yellow paper, the top page covered in scribbles.
“An agenda?” Aubrey echoes. “What is this, like, a book club?”
Duck looks at her, something stern yet kind in his expression. Of all these strange humans, he is the only one whose body language Minerva can read.
Aubrey looks down at her hands, still holding the purple marker. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m just—you know. On edge. After—after Ned, and everything.”
Ned?
Everyone’s face falls at the name. Minerva resolves to ask Duck later.
Duck nods. He thinks for a moment, then stands, opens his cupboard, and pulls out a package of cookies. The package is vertically aligned, white, with delicate lettering on the side. Duck rips it open and sets it in the center of the table. Barclay reaches in first, then Sarah, then Aubrey. Minerva takes one, just to see what it’s like. The cookie is oblong, pale brown with a thin line of what seems to be chocolate in the center. It reminds Minerva of the pastries she’d see at military dinners, thin and elegant, more for commenting on than eating.
But then, this is no military dinner, no Mira Five. This is a strategy meeting, and it is in Duck’s kitchen, steaming mugs and cookie crumbs bordering the map of Kepler, sunlight pouring in from the window and tinting the wood cabinets and chairs and pile of jackets on one empty chair in gold.
For a moment, all is quiet save for the crunching of four people eating cookies. Minerva eats hers in one bite, lets the pastry melt in her mouth—yes, that is indeed chocolate, sweet like the cocoa Duck made for her, sweet like Duck himself at sixteen, asking wide-eyed if she was from outer space or a computer simulation.
“Ned’s funeral is on the agenda,” Duck says, finally. “But first, we need to focus on the living.”
He wipes his fingers clean of crumbs, then points down at his legal pad, strong and certain.
Duck Newton has a day job.
She had imagined, all the time that she was digging herself out and rebuilding the Communicator for one last ride, that once she arrived they could really get down to business. Full-time training, part-time intel-gathering, part-time planning how to save his world without unnecessary violence. But instead, Duck is all, Minerva, I’ve been at this for decades, I can’t just quit, and, Minerva, how am I supposed to feed myself and you and half of Amnesty Lodge without a job, and, Minerva, the trees need me.
She’d argued that trees, to the best of her knowledge, are not sentient creatures and cannot talk to each other, much less broadcast need to an individual of a wholly different taxon. To which Duck had stared at her as though she’d grown a second head.
Which brings them to this: two days after her arrival in Kepler, a sunny morning in early July, light dappling through the leaf canopy of the Monongahela and drawing patterns on the dirt floor.
Duck drives slowly up the path to the forest station, his old pickup truck jumping with every thick root and unfilled ditch. The turns, in particular, are exhausting: wheels squelching faintly, each degree of the turn given weight, as though Duck is counting every tree as they pass. Minerva wants to complain at first, but then she starts looking out the window.
The forest is quiet at first glance. Easily flattened. But with closer inspection she can see how the trees make a kind of gradient: rougher, dark brown trunks to lighter, smooth gray trunks and back again. Large green leaves shaped like many-pronged spears, smaller branched leaves flecked in brown, leaves invaded by insect or infection but still growing. Birds dart past, flashes of blue and red and white, sometimes landing in the higher branches to call out to each other, sometimes soaring over the canopy. It is all so very crowded—reminds her of Oasis City, pushing past more people than you could speak to in a lifetime just walking from Battlestation A to that bar with the incredible soft pretzels. She was taught at the temple to say excuse me and thank you but politeness was impossible there in the city, all those sunglasses and elbows, that roar in her ears insisting no matter what she did she was going to be late, and there she is again now as Duck rolls down the windows and in comes the breeze and the cacophony of bird calls and the scents of pine and pollen and life all tangled together—she closes her eyes against it. She puts her hands over her mouth, her nose. But still she hears it, she feels it. Heart pounding. You’re gonna get lost and you’re gonna be late, you’re gonna—
Get a grip, General, that was lifetimes ago.
And so she opens her eyes again and focuses on one thing at a time. This tree leaning over the road, gnarled trunk patchy with moss. This bush beneath it, thick, dark green leaves holding up bright pink flowers. This bird calling out from the branches, a light, whistling psst-psst kind of call, tawny feathers poking up above a darker face as though it’s wearing a mask.
Minerva wants to ask Duck the bird’s name, but he is driving so intently, taking them slowly up a hill lined on either side with rock walls that look at least a hundred years old, and then he’s pulling into a dirty parking lot next to a low wooden building. He parks, tires screeching in the dust, and gets out. She follows.
As Duck locks the car and leads Minerva to the trailhead at one corner of the parking lot, calling over his shoulder that if she doesn’t want to piss in the woods this is her last chance for a while, another human comes out of the station.
The woman—Minerva isn’t great at human gender markers yet, but the person has a “she/her” sticker on her ranger badge—is adequately tall, with angular features and skin close in color to Minerva’s, wearing a uniform like Duck’s with a dark ponytail peeking out from under her wide-brimmed hat.
“Hey, Duck,” she says, walking over to them. “Who’s your friend?”
Duck looks at Minerva, then at the other ranger, then back at Minerva, looking for all the world like a green cadet caught in his supervisor’s crosshairs.
“Um, Juno, this is Minerva,” he says. His voice has gone oddly high-pitched. “Minerva is… uh, also a forest ranger, uh, she’s visiting, uh… from, well, it’s an international exchange program… so, uh, you see, she came here, and, uh, next year, I’ll go there, and, uh…”
Juno crosses her arms. “Where is she from, Duck?”
“Russia!” Duck practically shouts. “She’s from Russia. Works in the, uh, tiger—taiga forest.”
Minerva isn’t sure where Russia is or what the tiger-taiga forest entails, but from the way Juno is staring, she’s pretty sure it was an unlikely choice.
“You really have to stop lying to me, man,” Juno says. “Someday you’ll give yourself cardiac arrest, and we really don’t need to go through the hiring process right now.”
Duck’s face goes bright red. “Then what am I supposed to do, huh? Hey, Juno, this is my friend Minerva, she’s an intergalactic warrior from a faraway planet who’s been teaching me swordfighting and then came here through a portal in my head? Huh?”
Juno bursts out laughing. She has a nice laugh—warm and bubbling, like the sunlight through the trees.
“You know, I was gonna say you could just not tell me,” she says, “but that’s pretty good. So are you showin’ her around or what?”
“Duck Newton is going to show me why his job with the trees is more important than his training,” Minerva explains.
Juno looks from Minerva—sincere—to Duck—still bright red—and then back to Minerva. The expression on her face does not betray any singular emotion. Minerva is impressed.
“Alright,” Juno says finally. “Carry on.”
And so, Duck Newton takes Minerva into his forest. He says she shouldn’t call it his forest; it’s a state forest, he’s just a ranger, a kind of guardian. But she watches how he walks—so careful, yet so confident, as though he could tread this trail at midnight and still step over every root, turn clear of every branch.
He names each tree for her, gives her their stories: how the oak lives long and haggard, the elm discourages predators with its rough leaves, the mountain laurel shines pink in the spring. She asks him what pink looks like, and he waves his arms trying to describe it to her. But then he stops, one foot suspended, steps back and bends down. Minerva takes a moment to marvel at the shape of him, bent, softened, knees curled and heels pressed into the dirt—all this potential energy but quiet now, redirected, and he reaches down and whispers, “Minerva, look at this.”
She bends too—awkward, her knees not used to dropping lower than a warrior’s stance—and peers over his shoulder. He’s holding a tiny, slender creature, bright orange like the desert sand back home but so vibrant, a flash in Duck’s dirt-caked palms. As she watches, the creature slithers forward on legs too stubbly for its long body. But Duck catches it in his other hand, holds it soft but firm.
“It’s a salamander,” he says, softly as though wary of spooking the thing. “Notopthalmus viridescens, or the eastern newt. This is its juvenile form, the red eft. Someday, this guy will disappear into a pond and turn green or brown, but right now, he’s easy to spot. Easy to let go of, too,” he adds with a chuckle as the creature squirms.
Duck turns, still squatting, and offers his hands to Minerva. “Want to hold him?”
She shakes her head. “Isn’t it—slimy? And cold?”
“I guess,” Duck says. “But that’s how he is.”
He lets the salamander run across his palms one more time, then reaches back to the ground and lets it scurry beneath a rock.
“There you go, little guy,” he says, still squatting. “Hope the rains are good to you this year.”
Minerva wants to ask him: how do you do it? Fight, scream, save your planet, and then go back to naming trees and holding salamanders?
But instead, she offers him a hand up. He takes it easily, heels rocking back to flat feet, giving her his weight.
“Alright, we’re almost at the top of the ridge,” he says. “Let’s make like a tree and leaf.”
It takes him the rest of the hike to explain why that was funny.
On the third day after her arrival in Kepler, Duck Newton takes Minerva to a hospital. It is a terrifying building, all white walls and the scent of soap, and Duck has to argue with a man dressed all in light blue for fifteen minutes before he waves at her to follow him down a broad corridor.
His face is flushed when her long strides catch up with his hurried gait, so she asks, “What lie did you tell the desk person, Duck Newton?”
“I said we were family,” he replies. “And it’s not really a lie, okay, but like, you’re, what, seven feet tall, and I’m, you know, not exactly a Sports Illustrated model over here, but eventually I just said you were adopted and the dude seemed too tired to argue any further. So.”
Minerva only understands about half of that tirade in context, and she’s about to ask for clarification when Duck stops in front of a white plaster door. He peers in the little blue-tinted window at shoulder height, then tells her stay put for a moment and goes inside. The door glides quietly—they must keep the hinges well-greased.
She hears Duck exchange a few words of greeting with someone in the room. The conversation is muffled through the door, but she catches, you doin’ alright, and then store’s good, and then someone you should meet. The second voice is familiar, so familiar, as though she heard it once in a dream, or a memory, or—
Duck opens the door. He gestures for Minerva to come in.
And—Leo Tarkesian. Leo Tarkesian is on a bed in the center of the room.
Minerva knows this is Leo Tarkesian, because she has seen him: every night, for thirty years. She coached his limbs into place—bend your knees, straighten your shoulders, keep your arms up—and now those limbs are all splayed out flat here, dark skin against the white sheets. She looks at him. She looks at him, and the years fall away, shedding like a snake losing its wrinkled old skin, and she sees him—nineteen years old and shaking, shaking, sharp features and long hair and calloused palms, curled tight around the hilt of a sword.
You have a destiny, she told him then. She handed him that word, destiny. She sharpened it to a point.
“Leo Tarkesian,” she says, now. His name rolls off her tongue easily as it did decades ago: Leo, short and solid as a punctuation mark, and then Tarkesian, rough and sharp as an answering shout. But it feels heavier, now, with less distance between them. The syllables hang in the air, then shatter against the cold hospital floor.
“Minerva,” he says. And then he starts—sitting up suddenly, Minerva can feel the way his back aches as he does it—or she can feel an echo, at least. A remnant of their connection.
“Am I dreaming?” he asks. “Are you here?”
“I’m here,” she says.
“Yeah, the, uh—you remember the wormholes in our brains?” Duck says.
Leo smiles, like he wants to laugh but it would hurt. “Yeah, I remember. My concussion’s not that bad.”
“Yeah. Right. Well, Minerva—she expanded the one in my head, I guess? And then came through it?” Duck is gesturing as he says it: he mimes something that looks like an explosion, followed by what could be crossing a bridge.
Leo looks at Minerva for confirmation. She shrugs, like, yes, that’s one way to put it.
And then he lies back, propping his head against his gratuitous stack of pillows.
“Yeah,” he says. “Expanded the wormhole. Alright. Why not.”
“It is good to see you, Leo Tarkesian,” Minerva says. She tries to put weight on each syllable, as she says it. Tries to dig a hole in the earth and plant the statement two feet down.
“You too, Minerva,” he replies. “Can I—can I touch you? Is that weird?”
She shakes her head, and then moves closer—sits down on the side of the bed. It dips under her weight. She reaches out—and she used to do this in their training sessions, used to reach for him as though she could push his form into place just by wishing—and she puts her hand on his.
Palm to palm. Like crossing a desert. His fingers are calloused, curled slightly, warm.
He closes his eyes.
“You run hot, Minerva,” he says. “Has anyone told you that yet?”
“No,” she replies. “As usual, Leo Tarkesian, you are the first.”
Minerva runs her first patrol on the fourth day of her arrival in Kepler. She goes early, before the sun is up—the schedule, dictated by Duck Newton and transcribed by Aubrey Lady Flame and surreptitiously copied on the Green Bank Telescope printer for all relevant parties, specifies that morning patrols are to be conducted “as early as the patroller is able.” And she has never had trouble rising.
Minerva has never had trouble rising, especially here. Even as the stars begin to dim and the sky goes purple around the horizon, the earth sings. The birds, the cicadas, the frogs calling for mates. And there’s something about the smell of it—the trees shifting, pulling up nitrogen and water from the earth. Duck says that there are special sensors in their leaves, called stomata, that open and close to regulate when the plant is taking in air. She wonders if that’s what it is. Stomata opening. The trees readying for sunlight, for a special process with a name so melodic it could only have come from Earth—photosynthesis, Duck says.
She has one of his field guides with her now. Eastern Trees, a little green book with well-worn pages, dogeared at the species that Duck sees often, notes like OFTEN SHORTER IRL and THE BIG ONE NEAR UPPER CAMPGROUND IS A FAVORITE FOR BEES scribbled in the margins. He lent it to her under threat of no cocoa ever again, should the book return in suboptimal condition.
Minerva has the field guide, a map of the Monongahela, a compass, a bottle of water, five granola bars of varying flavors, and a communication device called a Walkie-Talkie, scrounged from Duck’s storage unit in his building’s basement.
As she climbs the mountain, the sun rises above the trees and turns brighter. It reminds her of something: there’s a song, Duck Newton says, he used to hear when she called him. Static over the airwaves, only transformed somehow—translated, as though the faint beeps and metallic whirring of pieces clicking into place on her end were the prototypes for twanging guitar, quiet percussion. He sang it over her, the night she arrived, driving back to his apartment from the French onion soup place, one knuckle tapping on the dashboard. It felt familiar, then. A melody she should’ve known, but couldn’t quite place.
“So it wasn’t on purpose, then,” he said, when she insisted she couldn’t place it. “Not, like, a dial tone, or hold music, please wait while Minerva moves this huge rock or defeats an evil robot roaming the desert or somethin’.”
“No,” she said. “Not on purpose.”
“Huh.” And he thought about it, as he brought the car to a slow stop at a large red sign and then started it up again. “Then why did I hear it again—echoing in my head, like I was the radio—when you came through today?”
The song, Duck says, is slow and simple, but it builds. A singular guitar melody moving closer, or perhaps growing. Low twangs taking in sunlight and water like the oak trees on the top of the hillside, gnarled and reaching. Like the sun itself, rising slowly over the valley, kissing color back into the landscape one inch at a time. The clouds go indigo, red, gold. The leaves on the trees rise and flutter. The birds call out, cheep-cheep and hooo and whirr and creee, drowning each other out even as they try to be heard.
Minerva saw a symphony once, back when she was a new General, when they could still afford entertainment—and what did the orchestra’s leader do? How did she corral them all, the horns and strings and bells all reaching? She raised her arms. Of course.
She raised her arms, like so: out and up, keep it light, like balancing on clouds. Minerva closes her eyes and pictures a fleet of twanging guitars, or battleships. Waiting on her signal.
But of course, when she opens them, she is alone in the forest, and the gesture does nothing.
“What’s in this for you, Minerva?” Dr. Sarah Drake asks.
At first Minerva cannot quite parse the words—she taught herself English mostly from radio transmissions, after all, with the occasional vocabulary question for Duck, and Sarah is speaking quickly, panting. Humans do this when they’re tired. Tired from a long run or a steep set of stairs or a practice sword fight—they try to take in all the air from a space, more than their tiny lungs can handle, and whoosh it all out in a rush, but still try to hold a conversation, as though whatever thought passing through their minds cannot wait for the rest of their bodies to catch up.
Minerva can wait, though. She waits now: Sarah stumbles over to the table on the edge of the patio, grabs her water bottle, and drains half of it, then heads for the stone step where Minerva is sitting. She’s not bad at sword-fighting, Sarah Drake. She claims she is sore from sitting in front of computers for years, hasn’t taken any kind of gym class since high school, but she picks up the techniques easily, following Minerva’s movements and imitating after only a couple of tries. She’s more adept than Duck Newton was when he started training, at any rate.
Sarah sits down with a low sigh, drinks more water, and Minerva asks her, “What did you say?”
“I said—well, it was a little rude, you don’t need to answer.”
“No, ask. I want to answer.”
“Okay.” Still, Sarah sits for a moment, drinks more of her water.
“I asked—why are you doing this,” Sarah says. “Coming to Earth, teaching all of us—me and Duck and Leo—to fight, giving us powers, helping us save the world. It’s really noble and all, and obviously I appreciate it, learnin’ this stuff—I feel like a hero in a fantasy story or some shit. But I was wondering. What’s in it for you?”
It’s a good question, especially when phrased like that, in one long burst. This is another thing Minerva likes about humans: the way they ask questions by talking around them, feeling out all the different angles and crevices, like a falcon investigating each crevice of the mountain before settling down to roost. They are careful, these humans, worried about feelings and impressions.
Minerva tries to answer in kind, but she is as straightforward as her training.
“Duck Newton and Leo Tarkesian have told you some of my past, I believe,” she says, “and I can tell you more myself if you like. I was a general, I was angry and foolish, I was unforgiving, and I let my people down. I am—I am a War Criminal, I think Duck Newton called it.”
“War criminal?” Sarah asks, shifting closer on the stone.
“Yes. A War Criminal. The only survivor of two worlds, my world and the world I fought. And when I learned of Earth and Sylvain, of the gate here, I thought this could be my way of… apologizing. Helping, so that you would not suffer the same fate.”
“Serving a penance,” Sarah suggests.
Minerva hasn’t heard that word before, but she likes the sound of it—the short e, the long a, like an exhale after a battle, like sitting down with a friend in the aftermath and drinking to those you lost.
“Yes,” Minerva says.
They sit in silence for a moment, after that: the sun is setting, and Minerva likes to watch the way its colors shift with the vegetation, purple against the faraway mountains and then a deep orange as the sun sinks into the trees, expanding slowly as it dives until it vanishes completely.
“Have you ever thought about writing something down?” Sarah asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Well—you’re the only person left from your world, you said.” She fiddles with her water bottle, now empty, shining faintly in the growing twilight. “You should write about it—what it was like, all the people, the accomplishments, the civilizations. So that something can remain.”
Minerva considers it. She closes her eyes, and for a moment she is back inside another sunset—the burnished orange of the desert, darkening to red echoing against the ruins, darkening to brown-charcoal-gray-black. Those limestone pillars were so reflective, they would ring out with even the slightest sound, a harsh exhale or a single word. It must be so quiet there, now.
“I remember,” she tells Sarah. “I remain. What else is necessary?”
“But what about after you?” Sarah replies. And then she gasps, brings one hand up to her mouth—“I mean, I’m sorry, that was morbid. But I’m a scientist, we’re kinda paid to be morbid, or at least to think long-term—I mean, you know a lot, and you remember a lot, but that’s different from a written record. Writing can be passed down.”
“Passed down,” Mineva repeats. Echoing, like the sunset against the pines, like the limestone pillars.
“Yeah. It’s like—when I do an experiment, right, when I search for something in that huge telescope, I record everything I’m doing and then I publish it in a journal, or at least I send it to other scientists in my field. And then they can build on my successes—or, more likely, they can learn from my mistakes. That’s how progress happens. Or at least, I like to think so. Otherwise my whole career would be—psshhh.” And she lies back, going horizontal against the stone.
Minerva looks down at her: sweaty face, eyes blinking behind circular glasses, frizzy hair falling out of its ponytail. They didn’t have scientists on Mira Five. Or at least, they didn’t call them scientists—all experiments were performed expressly for the purpose of improving the species. Higher agricultural yields, for example. Or more efficient weapons. Nobody was simply searching for the sake of searching. Scientist: long i, quiet ist, hanging off the end like a comet’s trail, soaring across the sky. Touching some miserable little planet with its light.
“I don’t know anything about writing,” Minerva says.
Sarah opens her eyes, holds out a hand, and lets Minerva pull her back up to semi-vertical posture. She’s light, it’s easy enough, but something about the action itself has weight. A hundred years, she went without touching anyone, and now she’s always so close. Skin to sweaty skin. It’s strange, and yet somehow it’s the most familiar part of this whole place.
“That’s okay,” she replies. “I can help you. Just think about it, okay?”
And Minerva says, “I will.”
She goes for walks in the woods. Once a day, sometimes twice, sometimes three times. Hikes, Duck calls them. Long i, clipped-off k. Clipped off by the brackets of trees, the rocks at the edges of the trails.
The hikes start as patrols. Go up to the mountain, the place where the peak was cut off. Check for unusual activity. Go toward the center of the woods, circle the FBI compound, get as close to the walls as you can without making a sound. Check for unusual activity. Go to topside and back, map the cameras in the trees. Check for unusual activity. If Minerva didn’t know better, she’d say Duck was trying to get rid of her. Not a great commander, that man. Oh, he has the charisma, but he’s too nervous. Too bad at lying. He couldn’t stand up in front of an armada, blasters at the ready, and tell them this whole cycle of violence is for their own good.
Actually, maybe Duck Newton would make a good commander, after all.
Shhk—thwack.
The branch she just stepped into peels back and hits the trunk behind her. A couple of leaves, stripped off, flutter to the forest floor. Minerva bends to pick them up. They’re deep green, in such an intricate shape: a curve at the base, stem going down from the middle, and three sharp points up top, each encompassing several jagged teeth. The leaves aren’t smooth to the touch as she expected but rather pock-marked, as though pricked by a needle or a precisely sharpened sword.
She wonders what kind of tree this is, this sapling that she stepped into. Duck Newton would know. Duck Newton can walk into the woods and greet every tree like an old friend, pick out their birds’ nests and mossy branches, their crowns stretching toward the sun.
This is something she likes about earth: that all the trees have names, that somebody knows them. That a man in a wide-brimmed hat and boots softened from wear can walk down a dirt path and say, oh, hello, here you are. And it isn’t only the trees: it’s the birds, and the squirrels, and the mosses, and the flowers, and the turtles, and the little salamanders scampering out from under the rocks after it rains. All named, each with their own page in a field guide somewhere and a soft-spoken person in a funny-looking hat who will stare at them as though they are solely responsible for keeping the planet spinning.
All Minerva knows are the names for weapons, and the positions with which they are most efficiently carried into battle.
She sits down in the dirt, there in the middle of the path with the wind rustling in the branches and the sky tinting darker above. All she knows are the names for weapons. But Mira Five did not only have weapons: it had vegetation, capable of processing the sulfur from the soil. It had swimming creatures in the ocean, armored creatures in the desert, winged creatures in the air—and, oh yes, those were her favorites, many-eyed and shimmering, reflecting the sunlight and hiding between the clouds. Someone must have known all their names. She must have known—well, a few. Or at least their shapes, or their calls.
What would Duck Newton look like on a hike through her seaside town? He would knock repeatedly into the poles on the piers, he’d be staring up—up at the birds wafting above, or down at the crustaceans they catch, or out at the lichens clinging to the rocks—and, hold on, there are three names. Three names!
Minerva nearly tumbles over at the memory, fumbles at her pouch—fanny pack, Aubrey Lady Flame called it—but of course she has no notebook or pen, only a small flask of water, a nutritional bar, the Walkie-Talkie, and the compass and map Duck gave her. She puts her hands down in the dirt, bent over, and breathes there for a moment.
What did they call them, the breathing exercises at the temple? Harhama. March to the rhythm of your stuttering heart. It must be level, even, before you can begin the day’s work.
A bird calls overhead, and for a moment it sounds so like the amluna above her town that she feels sliced open—turned on a stick and thrown, flailing, into the sea.
But she is not sliced open, and she is not near any ocean. She is here, Duck Newton’s Monongahela Forest. Her hands in the dirt.
She stands, slowly, one hand on the nearby tree trunk to steady herself. She picks up the leaves and puts them in her fanny pack. And she charges all the way back to Duck’s apartment.
“Okay,” she tells Dr. Sarah Drake when she returns. “I’ll do it. I’ll write down everything I remember.”
Sarah smiles, and says, “I’ll get a fresh notebook.”
Bang bang bang.
Minerva pauses. Waits. There is no response—nothing from inside the house, nothing from outside, save a gust of wind ruffling the leaves of the oak tree outside. It’s a strange practice, knocking on front doors: she’s always lived in barracks, close enough that anyone she needed could hear her with a shout.
Bang bang bang bang bang.
She pauses again. This time, there is some shuffling from beyond the faded silver door: footsteps, then a sigh, then a faint creak as the door swings inward.
“Minerva?” The figure is familiar, albeit surprising—angular features, hair more visibly curly without her wide-brimmed hat.
“Ranger Juno Divine!” Minerva says. “What are you doing here?”
“I—I live here,” Juno replies.
“Oh. Then, my apologies, I thought this was Dr. Sarah Drake’s residence. Do you know—”
“She also lives here,” Juno interrupts. “We live together.” She narrows her eyes, brow furrowing as though she’s about to write Minerva up for a Tree Infraction. “You got a problem with that?”
Minerva takes a step back, raising her hands. “No, of course not—why would I take issue with this?”
Juno looks at her for a moment longer, then nods curtly. “Good. So this is Chosen One business, I presume?”
“Well, ah—something of that nature—”
“Sure. I’ll go get her. Don’t make her late for work.”
And Juno goes back inside, leaving Minerva with several new pieces of information and a complete lack of the social context necessary to bring them together. She has just resolved to ask Duck Newton about this later when Dr. Sarah Drake appears, her hair hanging down around her shoulders, pink sweater half-buttoned over a T-shirt with a circular blue logo.
“Minerva, this had better be important,” she says. “Today I’m collecting data on a red giant, and we have to get the timing just right or the telemetry will be off.”
“Ah,” Minerva replies.
Sarah crosses her arms over her chest. She reminds Minerva of her first tactical officer, back when she was made Captain—something about that purse to her lips, the way she can judge the weight of any problem in an instant and then conjure up a chalkboard to start on a solution.
“Come on, Minerva,” Sarah says. “I haven’t had coffee yet.”
Minerva takes a deep breath, and then she says, “I can’t write.”
“You can’t… what?”
“I am incapable, Sarah Drake. I want to record my story, like you said, I have the notebook you gave me. But I look at the page and nothing happens. I was never trained for this, Sarah Drake—all my skills are in strategy, and combat, and—”
“Hey. Minerva.” Sarah uncrosses her arms, takes a step out of the doorway and puts a hand on Minerva’s shoulder. She is warm, her palm smooth from years of telescopes and computer screens. Minerva does not flinch.
“That’s okay,” Sarah says. “Writing is hard. Really hard. It takes me five days to get out one page of a paper sometimes.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Well. Sarah Drake is the smartest human being Minerva knows, which makes her by default the smartest human being on Earth, and if the smartest human being on Earth has this trouble…
“You just need to find a strategy that works for you,” Sarah goes on. “Like narrating stuff out loud first, or outlining, or working in a specific location—like, I can only write at my kitchen table with all the lights on, or in that coffee shop on Main Street. My lab is too distracting, and in other places in my house—if I’m too comfortable, I just doze off. Everyone has shit like that, you just need to find yours.”
A place. Free from distractions. Minerva pictures open sky, wind, cool rocks beneath her. Yes. She can find a place.
“Does that help?” Sarah asks.
Minerva smiles, and then taps Sarah on the arm—she tries for about five percent of full strength, but judging by the way Sarah winces after it was still too much.
“Sorry,” she says. “And yes. I believe so. Thank you, Sarah Drake, smartest person on Earth.”
And she takes off for the forest, followed faintly by Sarah calling, “Wait—smartest person on what?”
There is a rock up on top of Mount Kepler. Or perhaps more accurately: there is a ledge of jagged shale where the peak of Mount Kepler used to be. Before it was sliced and dropped, and it slid a few feet to the left. The rock is deep gray mottled with spots of lichen, rough to the touch like limestone towers of Minerva’s desert.
It catches light the same way, too: warms with the sun, then lingers, echoes, after the sun has set. Only a few days have passed since the mountain peak was sliced and dropped and slid, but thin reedy plants are already taking root in the crevices, and ringneck snakes are sunning themselves in the hollows, and hawks are winging in from the forest below.
From this ledge, Minerva can see all of Kepler. Spread beneath her in glittering miniature, like a city seen from a telescope, like a toy battlefield sculpted specifically to be torn apart. She can see it all: she can recognize Duck Newton’s apartment building, and a tall, angular place that could be Amnesty Lodge, and a few short squat buildings in the center of town where Leo Tarkesian has his general store. Cars wind through the landscape, doors slam and children get out and parents follow behind with the groceries.
She gets dizzy, just looking at it. So many heartbeats, so many warm hands, fingers twisting and grasping. And this is one town: one pin on the corkboard, one planet in the universe. She gets dizzy just sitting here, listening to the wind.
She gets dizzy. And so she closes her eyes, instead, and breathes in. Pine, wildflowers, aftermath of charcoal left by the Sylvens’ magic. Wind, birds calling, faint echo of engines rumbling below. And somewhere far beneath her, the earth turning. Orbiting a star so much like hers.
She takes out her notebook, the little blue-lined one Sarah Drake gave her, and she writes:
I was born in 71-802 in the dry season, during high tide, on the shore of the Western Ocean.
iii.
I was born in 71-802 in the dry season, during high tide, on the shore of the Western Ocean.
It was a small town, perhaps five hundred people. They lived by fishing, competing with the great black-winged birds for the fish, which shone pink and gold in the tides. I do not remember the name of the fish, but I remember the name of the birds. Amluna, they were called. Because of an old legend that these birds got their coloring—black wings, black bellies, and a white spot just over one eye—from staring too long at the light of the moon.
My father was a fisherman. He was one of the town’s finest. He could go out in a day and catch a whole case-full, my mother told me. She told me he had wrinkled hands, forever marred by the saltwater, and a great booming laugh.
The tenth day after her arrival in Kepler, Minerva attends the funeral of a man called Ned Chicane.
It’s a strange human tradition, funerals. Everyone dressed in black—Duck Newton in a three-piece suit that’s too tight around his shoulders, young Aubrey Lady Flame in a dress with lace going all the way down her arms and thick rings of makeup around her eyes. Minerva only has the armor and tunic she arrived in, so she borrows pants and a long coat from Duck: the pants hang awkwardly at her thighs, and the coat won’t quite button. But he tells her this is acceptable—respectful, as though the dead man is watching somehow and will be satisfied to see her in this color.
She picks at the coat, pulling steadily at one of the buttons, as the people file in. The whole town is coming, it seems—all the Sylvens formerly of Amnesty Lodge, the Sheriff and a couple of officers from his team, a whole squad of kids with slicked-back hair and silver jackets, a young man in a T-shirt depicting some kind of odd flying object and dark jeans, clutching a notebook to his chest.
They have the ceremony at the dead man’s store, a place called the Cryptonomica, full of items that would be thoroughly useless in a fight. Duck says this is what Ned would’ve wanted—the place decked out in black streamers, carnations on the table by the cash register, music from the musical Cats playing softly on overhead speakers. Every guest is invited to pick out one item from the shop to take home—but only if they contribute ten dollars to the Ned Chicane Memorial Fund. Minerva picks out a knife which is labeled as once belonging to the Great Actor Nicolas Cage, used in National Treasure 4. She sits near the back by a poster of several ghosts looming up over a dark forest, and flicks the knife back and forth during the ceremony.
It seems to be mostly people talking. Barclay Sylvain, the man who is also called Bigfoot, talks about how he first met Ned, whom he calls skeevy but somehow trustworthy, and how Ned hit a fearsome beast with his car. One of the kids in leather jackets talks about how Ned gave them something called Weed once when they were stressed about a school project. Leo Tarkesian talks about how Ned always remembered his sales, and complimented his arrangements of soup cans, and gave him ideas for dumb puns to use on the specials. “They were terrible, and I told him I’d never disgrace my store with such shitty wordplay,” Leo says, wiping at his eyes. “But I’m gonna use ’em all now, you all wait and see.”
Aubrey Lady Flame goes up. She stands at the podium for a minute, quiet. Touches the pendant hanging around her neck—it’s the only thing she’s wearing that isn’t black, an orange stone with the color and warmth of a setting sun. She stands, touches it, and then shakes her head and returns to her seat.
And then, Duck goes up. Duck Newton—it’s strange to watch him like this, close up. Minerva thought she knew him well, after years of meetings—thought she could accurately translate the light in his eyes and the curl of his lip to excitement or reluctance or anger. And yet this is still new, seeing him constantly, seeing him close up. Unbroken by static or misplaced memory. Seeing him walk, one halting step after another, to the podium. Seeing him take his hat and hold it in one hand, then shift it to the other, then drop it at his side.
“Ned Chicane,” Duck says, “was a good man. He’d be the last one to tell you that—and yeah, he did some shitty stuff, I guess, before he came here. But here in Kepler is what counts, and here—here, he was someone you could rely on. I gave him somethin’ important once, and I said hold onto it, I probably won’t need it again but I might, and he just kept it in the back room for, like, twenty-five years. No joke. Dusted it for me and everything. He’d keep secrets, and he’d keep all these little things, like when your birthday was or what kind of tea you liked and how you always messed up the lyrics to this one song from The Music Man because you played trombone in high school and—” Duck interrupts himself with a shaky breath, loud, like he’s steeling for a fight, and rubs a hand over his eyes.
“I’m sorry, y’all,” he goes on. “I just—I miss him. It feels like he should be here, making a dumb joke or quoting an old poem wrong or somethin’, but he’s not, and I just have this weird sense of—” He pauses again, rubs a hand over his eyes again. Strange, it’s so strange how close he is—how if she wanted, if he asked, Minerva could run up this aisle to the podium and take him in her arms, hold him until he stopped shaking.
“No,” Duck says. “No. I’m sorry. You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna tell his favorite joke. Okay. So, a rope walks into—no, okay, a string walks into a bar, right? And he asks for a drink, and the bartender goes, he goes, no, we won’t serve you. So you know what he does?” A pause—long, thick, as Duck wipes his face again. Minerva wonders what he’s waiting for.
“What the hell does he do, Duck?” Aubrey Lady Flame yells.
Duck nods. “Thanks, Aubrey. What he does—he goes out to the street, and he, uh—he fray—he ties himself up and messes up his edges, okay? And then he goes back in, and asks—” Duck starts laughing now, chuckling, only it’s chocked, heavy, mixed with something else. He wipes his face again. “He asks—asks for a drink again, and the bartender says, weren’t you just here? And the string, he—he—” Another laugh, another swipe at his face. “He says. He says, I’m sorry, sir, I’m afraid not. Get it? A frayed knot. Oh—oh fuck, y’all.”
Duck laughs, and then he cries, and then Aubrey goes back up and grabs his arm and helps him off, both of them shaking.
I never knew my father. In the years before I was born, the fish began to move south with the warming ocean, and he had to go farther and farther out to fill his boat. Or at least to have enough to sell at market, for the soldiers at the base just inland and the warriors at the temple down the coast. One day, a few months before my birth, he went out for a long trip just before autumn set in, was caught in a storm, and did not return.
My mother did not have any pictures of my father. You are not allowed personal keepsakes at the Temple. Sister Fatima said my mother was lucky enough to keep me, curled up at the foot of her bed the few times I visited as a child, before I joined myself.
My mother said that my father was lucky to die in a storm. He missed the rising tides, the hurricanes, the turtle migrations, the plankton sickness. He was lost quickly, honorably. He did not die a long, slow death with the rest of his village. I have always wondered whether she was right. After all, he was alone.
“Duck,” Minerva says that night, sitting down next to him on the bench behind his apartment. She’s changed back to her tunic, but he’s still in the suit, with the too-tight shoulders and the lopsided tie, all tinted faintly pink by the setting sun.
“What’s up, Minerva?” he asks. He does not look at her—he’s watching something in the forest, or maybe watching the trees themselves, the way they sway slightly with the wind.
“On Mira Five,” she says, “we did not mourn the dead. There was no time, no place for it. We simply announced the factual details—how, where, when, next of kin—and burned the body, and repurposed all of their belongings. Even names sometimes were passed on. Honor was gained in life, we thought—in practical accomplishments, the number of students or casualties, and once gone we were just like dead skin cells. Easily regenerated.”
Duck doesn’t turn, but his hands, gripping the edges of the bench, grip tighter, his knuckles going white.
“Minerva, if you’re about to say that your way is more practical and ours is useless and I should’ve been training today, I swear to God—”
“No, Duck Newton,” she replies firmly. “Your way is different, it is strange to me, but it is not useless. Remembering—sharing, and memorializing, and listening to Cats by Andrew Lloyd Weber, it is all a way of keeping the friend you lost with you. Recreating their spirit through all the items and stories, rather than repurposing it. It seems honorable.”
Duck turns now—it’s hard to see his face, in the faint light coming from the back windows of the building, but she thinks he might be crying again. A strange human thing, crying. So delicate, so open.
“I came out here to say thank you,” she goes on, “for inviting me. I am sad that I did not know Ned Chicane. He was a brave man.”
Duck makes that sound again—the one he made while telling the string joke, laughing and crying all at once.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, he was.”
On Mira Five, the women were taller than the men. The men were built for labor: farming, fishing, factories. Raising the children, raising the cities. Standing before the ocean when it floods. The women, meanwhile, were built for grace: dancing, fighting, leading. Composing the symphonies and the governments. Standing at the prow of a ship and pointing toward the horizon.
I was raised in my father’s village with seventy-two other children. I learned to sail, to swim, to spear fish with long poles when the traps were not sufficient, to call the amluna so that they pointed the way back toward land. Then, when I was twenty-two, I became a Novice and I joined my mother’s Temple. Or perhaps “joined” is not the correct word. I had to pass the entrance exam, like any other student. Intense study of the sacred texts and physical demonstrations of the ancient forms. It was my mother’s Temple, and one of the most rigorous orders on the Western Ocean. I trained there for one hundred and four years, until I Came of Age.
Minerva sees a bear in the woods.
She has walked this trail, down the west slope of the mountain, some twenty times before. It’s familiar—step carefully down the side of the ridge, knees lifting, one arm held out for balance—but this time it is cast in a different color. This time the forest stops still and listens. If a squirrel stepped on a twig anywhere in a half-mile radius, it would echo clean down to Kepler.
The bear stands between two maple trees—she thinks they’re maple trees, but she would need to check Duck Newton’s field guide to be certain—and looks at her. It is taller than she is, by a head or two. Strange. And it is brown, deep brown, almost the shade of the maples except that its fur is glossy—smooth, while the trees are scuffed by insects and wind and time. Minerva wonders what that coat would feel like, if she were to take ten steps closer—she thinks it would be ten steps—and reach out her hand. Would the coat be soft, would it be warm, would it have give?
She almost does it. She takes one step forward, even, like she’s back at the Temple and she’s about to start a ritual match. The bear looks at her: tiny eyes in an enormous face. And a nose—what a nose, long and pointed, and lifted slightly, as though sensing danger.
Is she the danger? She must be the danger. Minerva grins, and then she starts laughing—something in her chest has opened, like she’s won a battle she never knew she was waging—or, no, like she’s figured out a compromise, so that she never had to wage the battle in the first place.
The bear looks at her, and then bares its teeth in something that could be a grin or a snarl. She’s flattered either way. But then, Duck Newton told her—he said, if you see a bear, please, for the love of God, don’t fight it. Maybe you’ll win, probably you’ll win, but it’s not worth it. Just avoid confrontation. Back up slowly.
She almost takes one step forward. But Duck said, back up slowly. And this is his forest: this is, in a way, his bear.
Minerva backs up slowly. She waits for the bear to move on down the mountain, and then she heads to the ranger station as fast as she can so that she can report the sighting to Duck.
I suppose one hundred and four years sounds like a lifetime to a human. On Mira Five, it is a long and painful adolescence. At my Temple, each decade, a novice would take on a new skill—music, or biology, or combat—until she found one to which she would Dedicate herself, and then she pursued it.
I was the first Sister in the Temple’s history to accelerate the process: I knew from my first year that I wished to master combat. I trained with a broadsword, then a pike, then, when I was seventy-six, my mother gave me my Zweihänder. It was forged from the heart of a fallen star, and she herself did the casting—metalwork, that was her Dedication. I will never forget what she told me when she gave me the blade. “Minerva,” she said, “this may be a powerful sword, but all its power comes from you. You—your deeds, good or evil—will shape its destiny.”
Duck Newton takes Minerva grocery shopping.
It is a strange practice, uniquely human. Even when she was young and Mira Five was peaceful, she never had to remember names like this. The old men in the village, those with bones too creaky to go out on the waves, would take turns fixing dinner—roasting the day’s catch over a fire or boiling it in a stew, seasoned with salt and herbs that grew wild on the dunes. The temple had its own fare, too—Sister Alina’s garden, Sister Cornelia’s fresh-baked breads, a keg of cider from the basement on special occasions. The dishes were all lined up in the center of the table and they’d take portions with their hands, the oldest sisters first then on down to the novices. The dishes had names, Minerva is certain. They must have had names. But no colorful packaging or nutritional facts, like those packed into aisles and piled on metal shelves here on Earth.
“Duck Newton,” Minerva says, stopping in front of a bright red box on the low shelf of the cereal aisle.
“Yeah? What’s up?”
“What is tripotassium phosphate?”
“What?”
He comes over; she points. Duck peers at the box—bright red fading into orange, decorated with a bee and a bowl full of small golden-brown rings, yellow lettering declaring this product name to be “Honey Nut Cheerios.” It’s been left with the back of the box is facing out, by a curious shopper or one of Leo Tarkesian’s lazier clerks. Minerva takes it out and holds it to Duck’s eye level to reduce additional questions.
He peers at the nutritional label, then says, “I’m not sure, honestly. Some kinda artificial sweetener? Probably somethin’ like that.”
“You are not sure,” Minerva repeats. “Duck Newton! You put food into your body without knowing what all the ingredients are?”
“You’ve eaten it, too,” he replies.
And, when she gapes at him, adds—“Yeah, we both had this stuff for breakfast yesterday, Minnie. Don’t you remember?”
Ah. She does remember. Little golden-brown rings, dissolved into milk, served with raspberries fresh from the farms outside Kepler. Plus coffee for Duck and Aubrey Lady Flame, and cocoa for Minerva.
“I thought, if you were eating something, you’d know what was in it,” she says.
Duck shrugs. “Tastes good. I like the honey flavor.”
Minerva spends the next two hours in the cereal aisle, looking at every nutritional label and writing down the words she doesn’t know. Duck goes home with his provisions sometime around hour one. Around hour three, or when she has the full list—fifty-four terms printed carefully over three pages in her notebook—she takes it to Leo, manning the register.
“Tripotassium phosphate,” he says. He takes the notebook, holds it carefully as though it were a newly forged weapon, and puts his index finger to the word. “That’s a cleaning agent. They put it in cereal in really small amounts so that it’s less acidic.”
He goes down the page from there, explains each term in turn. Leo Tarkesian has always worked in grocery stores. He grew up helping his uncle run a deli in Queens, a little corner place tucked between an apartment building and a dry cleaner, with GROCERY in red block letters across the awning and a neon sign blinking, “YES, WE’RE OPEN” until three in the morning. He took management courses at CUNY, and then he slowly took on more and more of the business until his uncle retired. Minerva knows Leo Tarkesian stacking cans, knows him sitting on a rusted bench out front and cracking open a beer when updating the account book kept him up late, sitting and watching the lights flash as the cars went by.
He knows all these names: tripotassium phosphate, maltodextrin, tocopherol, all flow off his tongue easily, like he’s doing inventory. Minerva used to appear in the middle of the aisle while he was counting pasta boxes. She’d chastise him for focusing on trivialities when he should be training. She never asked what made the pasta boxes important, what made him stack them so carefully, lining all the corners up at precise ninety-degree angles.
“Leo Tarkesian,” Minerva says.
He stops, finger paused in the middle of the page. “Minerva.”
“What happened to your deli?” she asks. “Your uncle’s. In Queens.”
He closes the notebook. “You know what happened to it.”
“I do?”
“Yes. I sold it. You told me—when the gate moved. I had to go help the next chosen.” He looks down at the register, he doesn’t look at her. “I sold it to the Astor kid—he didn’t have experience, just a big loan and some connection to shady folks, probably, I’d wanted to wait and find a better buyer, someone I could trust, but. You said I had to go deliver Beacon. And so I went.”
She’s silent. The fingers on his right hand are curled, as though around the hilt of a sword.
She waits.
“The Astor kid ran it into the ground in two years,” he says. “That store is a Starbucks now.”
She knew this. Well, some of it—she can picture it, his face as he argued with her, insisting that he had to protect the place for his family. His dark eyes shimmering in the moonlight, Beacon on a park bench behind him.
Minerva reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder. Slowly, slowly, carefully. It’s still so strange, to be able to touch him. As though a line could be cut and he could disappear at any moment.
She puts a hand on his shoulder. He does not disappear. His shoulder is warm—blood pumping beneath his cotton shirt.
“Leo,” she says.
He doesn’t answer—only bows his head and stays there, silent, as the fluorescent lights hum softly above them. She wonders if Kepler is quiet, compared to Queens. If he misses the sirens.
And then, after a tiny eternity, he shudders—drawing all the air around him into himself, then letting it out. He looks up at her, a tiny smile on his face.
“So,” he says. “You gonna buy anythin’? Or did you just want a nutrition lecture?”
She does not buy anything. She helps him with the inventory, instead. He teaches her to pronounce all the names, to count pasta boxes and stack soup cans, and when the sun sinks beneath the mountains, they walk back to the apartment building together.
I became a Master, and I began to train Novices at the Temple. My sword hung glittering on the wall of my bedroom. But I began to take it out—to my father’s village, and further down the coast. Oceans were rising. Storms were more severe every year. And I heard rumors: monsters, of a strange shape and armored like nothing we had ever seen before, coming through an otherworldly in one of the eastern deserts.
They were connected to the natural disasters, people said in the villages. They were strange. They were otherworldly. They threatened us. I brought the rumors back to the Temple, and I fought with my Sisters. We had trained some of the best warriors on the planet, I said. We should take our skills to the east. Fight the monsters, protect innocents. My sword hung heavy on my wall. Each day my hands ached for want of wielding it.
The other Sisters reminded me of our philosophy. Reason, kindness, nonviolence. Yearn to understand the Other, not to fight it. To me, it was all empty words and the whole place was a false fantasy. Out there, real people were suffering. A hurricane wiped out my father’s village and ten others like it. A group of monsters from beyond the gate breached the eastern continent and got halfway across the ocean before a Navy ship stopped them. There were food shortages, disease outbreaks, heat waves—finally I could not take it.
I ripped my sword off the wall and left a note for my mother. I joined the United Navy the next morning.
Walking through the forest is like taking inventory.
Minerva takes Duck Newton’s field guide on patrols. Eastern Trees, little book with a green spine. It fits in the fanny pack Duck gave her, or it would, if she ever put it away.
She takes the path up the mountain slowly and identifies every tree along the way. Oak, oak, maple, oak, birch, birch. A strand of longleaf pines. A huge tulip poplar—that one’s easy; you can tell it by the broad, cup-shaped leaves.
The field guide has dog-eared pages from bygone decades: Duck used to do tree surveys, he said, for the Forest Service. He and Juno Divine and a few other rangers would divide the forest on a grid, then pick twenty plots as representative samples—sixty-foot radius for each. They had to measure every tree broader than one foot at chest height. They’d measure it, identify it, and mark it with tape so that they remembered not to double-count it the next day. Duck still has some of the diagrams from his first survey: notebooks lined with grid paper, marked out to scale, with initials standing in for the scientific names of each tree. A professor from Marshall University took over the surveys with a small army of grad students a few years back, but Duck still goes out and counts trees sometimes. Just for practice.
There’s something comforting about it, doing a tree survey. Minerva looks at each plant for half a minute—precisely half a minute, she counts to thirty in her head. She clocks the leaf shape, the bark color. She puts her hand out to get the bark’s texture. She consults the field guide. She writes down her best guess.
Some trees are easy: the oaks all have thick bark, thick leaves, like they’re preparing for a long winter even now, in July. The maples all have distinctively sharp leaves, collections of points curved into each other, like a bear’s claws. The birches have smooth, silver bark, long toothy leaves. The pines are trickier, but she can mostly tell them apart by counting their needles—apologizing, more often than not, when she pulls one off by accident.
Sometimes, she’s not sure. But she writes down her best guess anyway. It’s nothing really, just scribbles in her notebook, but something within her is quieted at the repetitive motion of pen on paper, at the thirty seconds when she stands and looks. After she categorizes a tree, she bows to it. Just the slightest forward tilt of her head.
When she really gets stumped on a tree, she marks it with a scrap of paper, draws a rough sketch, and brings a branch to Duck Newton. This happens one afternoon about two weeks after her arrival in Kepler, on a long patrol on the trail by the lower reservoir. The tree is skinny, just broad and tall enough to not be called a sapling, with thick bark and jagged green leaves. She rubs one leaf between her thumb and forefinger—it’s rough, almost sandy, like the paper Duck used when fixing up a bookshelf a few days back. She flips through the field guide: it’s not a maple, not an oak… not any of the families she recognizes.
She brings it to Duck, clearing a trail a few miles away. When he sees her he stops, rubs the leaf between his thumb and forefinger, scratches his head.
“I’m not sure,” he says. “It could be pignut hickory. But that texture… We’ve been getting some slippery elm out here in the past few years. Rough bark, you said? Dark greyish-brown?”
She nods.
He sighs. “Fuck. That could be either one of ‘em. Sorry, Minerva.”
“It doesn’t bother you?” she replies. “That you aren’t certain? Shouldn’t you know every tree in your forest, Duck Newton?”
Duck is silent for a moment, scuffs the toe of his boot against a rock in the trail.
“There’s several thousand trees in this forest,” he says. “Two hundred species, at least. If I spent all my time just trying to recognize them, I’d have no time left to look after ‘em. Y’know? It’s all a big balancing act, this gig.”
She’s doesn’t know, not really. But he has work to do, and she has a patrol to finish, so she goes back to the maybe-elm-maybe-hickory. She writes both names down, with a question mark after each. She bows. The wind whistles softly, rustling the leaves, and she moves on.
The temple excommunicated me, of course. But as I could prove my training as a Herald of the Astral Mind, I rose through the Navy ranks quickly. I was promoted to captain within a few months, then I was given a battalion, then a fleet, then after five years I was General of the Western Navy.
It was easier than I expected. Fighting a war was similar, for me, to fighting a single swordswoman. You watch her, you find her weak points, you keep your guard up, and you strike where she is vulnerable. I commanded my ships as though they were extensions of my arms and legs, and together we struck. Easy. Easy both to fight and to lose your sense of scale—to see the numbers as numbers, when in fact they are stand-ins for bodies, hearts. I could remember my own soldiers, I could see them and touch them. They bowed to me before I took my meals. But the Enemy—I only saw them represented as toy ships on a toy board. Send a toy missile, and—into the ether with them.
I did not doubt that I had made the correct choice in leaving. Not after the first two years. A hurricane ravaged further inland than anyone was expecting, and an attack from the Enemy took all of our forces and prevented help from reaching the western coast, and my Temple was destroyed. When I learned what had happened, my superiors asked me if I wanted time to grieve. I did not take it.
She goes up to Duck one day at breakfast, slaps her hands down on the table, and says, “I need a new species name.”
“Okay,” Duck replies. And then he pauses, puts down the coffee pot with half the water still unpoured into the machine, and looks at her. “Wait, what?”
“A new species name,” she repeats. “I was reading your tree book, the one on e-vo-lu-tion, and it said that when an individual of one kind moves to a new place, it grows distant from its kin. It goes through spe-key-a-ton.”
“Spe-she-a-shon,” Duck corrects her. He pours the rest of the water, hands holding the pot carefully, slowly, one muscle moving at a time.
“Yes, speciation. I am speciated, Duck Newton. I need a new name.”
“No, you don’t.” He says this so casually, as though this refusal is as easy as stepping over a tree branch on a path.
And her face must show that, because he puts down the pot with a less-careful thud and says, “I mean. If you want to go by another name, obviously that’s cool, Minnie, and I’ll call you whatever you’d like. But I think you’re misreadin’ the text, there. Speciation happens over, like, a hundred generations, not just one. You’re still from Mira Five. You might live on Earth, but your DNA and everything, it hasn’t changed. Your body still remembers where you’re from.”
Minerva sits down all at once. Her knees knock together. She is still not used to the chairs, here—sturdy backs and pliable cushions, inviting a simple pleasure in the act, just to sit and talk with a friend.
“Your body remembers where you’re from,” she repeats, slowly.
Duck smiles, and pushes a box of cereal to her. “If you have kids with anyone here, though, they’d be a new species. But cross that bridge when you get to it, huh? Want any milk?”
You must understand—I write this not to make excuses for myself, but simply to record what happened as I remember it. I know that Mira Five had thousands of creatures on the surface with us: birds, insects, even something like trees, though they were sharper and didn’t live as long. I know that we had art, literature, music. We had long symphonies that brought listeners to tears, we had towering cathedrals built simply to catch the sunlight in glass, we had verses that children sang as they played and old women sang when they missed their sisters. We had cities, beautiful cities, and medicines, and toilets that cleaned themselves automatically when you got up.
But ask me how any of it worked, and—I come up empty. I sit at night, pen in hand. I go to the ledge on top of the mountain. I try to remember nouns. Any nouns. Any names. But I keep returning to the structure of our navy. Eight soldiers to a platoon, ten platoons to a battleship, fifty battleships to a fleet. I could draw you a map of my command vessel in my sleep. But even then, I could not teach you how to build it.
This is why I know that there is no god looking after Mira Five. Or if there once was, we killed Her. If we had such a god, she would have sent a poet, or an engineer.
Three weeks after she arrives in Kepler, Minerva leads her three Chosen warriors on a run up Mount Kepler. Duck Newton complains the entire time.
“Minerva!” he shouts. His voice echoes down the ravine—Minerva-erva-va. She pauses, turns on her heel and jogs back down the path to him, steering clear of loose roots. She finds him panting, bracing himself against a tree with one hand. Birch tree. She’s fairly certain it’s a birch tree, silver and smooth.
“Yes, Duck Newton?” she says.
“I need a break,” he says. Or tries to say—it comes out more like, I-huh nee-huh a-huh break.
She frowns. “I am only helping you get in shape, Duck Newton!”
“I am in shape!” he shouts back. “I’m in this shape—” Here, he pokes his belly. “And it’s a fine shape! And I’m happy staying in it!”
“A compelling argument, Duck Newton. But you must be prepared to face the Quell, or the beasts from the world of light, or any other adversary! At any time! You do not know how intense the battle might become, or how long you might be in the fray, or—”
“Hey, Minerva? Shut the fuck up.” That’s Sarah Drake, coming up the trail behind Duck. She’s holding her side and wincing, her dark hair slipping out of her ponytail.
“Please elaborate, Sarah Drake,” Minerva says.
“Elaborate,” Sarah repeats. “Yeah. Sure. Okay. I’m down with this whole training thing, learning to use the sword-fighting skills that you gave me through a fuckin’ wormhole in my head. But I’m not running up an entire mountain. At least not without more practice.”
“But you also need to be prepared—”
“Minerva,” Sarah says, stepping forward. “The last time I exercised this much was when they made me run the mile in high school. And I puked after.”
While Minerva is considering this new information, Leo Tarkesian comes up the path. He’s still jogging, but very slowly, as though he’s a character in one of Duck’s video games put into slow motion.
“Leo Tarkesian!” she says. “You must be on my side. Tell these children why it is important to be prepared for future battles.”
“Well.” He stops next to Sarah, unclips a tiny water bottle from his belt and hands it to her. “I could do this run up the mountain workout. Maybe. Slowly. But these kids aren’t ready. You have to work up to this shit.”
Minerva considers. Runnygtyying up the mountain—it’s like diving into the ocean, she’s found, only in reverse. It’s starting from the parking lot and rising with the moisture in the air. It’s embracing the quiet forest, it’s joining a race with the trees and the birds and the deer. It’s muscles burning, feet slamming hard into the dirt, lungs pumping in and in and in.
But: Minerva looks at her warriors. Duck has sat himself down on a rock and laid back, arms splayed out at his sides. Sarah is leaning against a tree—red oak? maybe chestnut oak?—as she fixes her hair, sweat shining on her cheeks. Leo is stretching—one leg out in front of him, the other bent behind him, arms raised to the sky.
As Minerva watches, Duck rolls over onto his stomach and presses his face to the rock’s smooth surface.
“Alright,” Minerva says. “If you all can manage ten minutes of jogging on the way down, we will all go eat ice cream.”
I had been my world’s War Councilor for eight years when we began losing. You could say the planet itself was not on our side: Mira Five had increasingly been in turmoil since I was a child, and we were fighting hurricanes as often as we were fighting Enemies. And their troops—they just kept coming.
They developed technology to create more portals, all over our planet’s surface, and they could communicate long-distance through telepathic bonds, and as much as our scientists researched they could not understand these technologies. On our side, cities were wiped out in an instant. I lost general after general—and then, finally, I went to the High Council. I went to my knees before them, and I had not gone to my knees for another person in over a century.
“End it,” I said. “We have to end it.”
“Duck, do endangered animals know that they’re endangered?”
Duck sets his coffee mug down on the table with a soft clink. He looks at her, then at the clock on the oven, then back at her.
“Minerva,” he says. “It’s seven A.M.”
She looks at the clock—it is, in fact, seven-oh-six—and then back at him. “So?”
Duck picks up his coffee and takes a long drink. “It’s too early for you to be asking me complex philosophical questions.”
“It is not a philosophical query, Duck Newton. It is practical. I was reading that article in your Atlantic magazine, the one about George the Snail—”
“The Ed Yong piece, yeah.”
“Right. And I wondered. Does the animal know? Is there a sensation, to being last of one’s kind? Is there a—a weight that settles in the bones, or an extra layer of skin?”
Duck takes another long drink of coffee. The clock on the oven blinks from seven-oh-six to seven-oh-seven.
“I don’t know,” he finally says. “I mean, you’d want to think that it doesn’t, right? That the creature is innocent, just trying to live by instinct and survive and reproduce, like anything else. But maybe there is something unscientific about it. There’s something unscientific about caring for them, for sure. Or something extremely scientific, depending on how you define it.” He pauses, shakes his head. “But I can’t say for sure. It’s not like I could go up to the snail and ask it.”
She smiles. This is something she likes about him: his short sentences, his long pauses. The weight he places on every word.
“Oh, Duck,” she says. “You can ask me.”
The plan developed by our last leading minds was simple. A single ship would travel to the enemy planet directly, no portals or archways, and deliver a virus designed to take them all out. One missile fired at their central city’s water supply, and in a few hours, the planet would be wiped clean. I took the ship and flew, a long five-year trip to another world.
I could have slept in stasis, but I chose to train. Five years with nothing but a simulator. Each day, I practiced delivering the payload. I watched it work in miniature: a toy ship delivered a toy virus on a toy battlefield. I held the image of the Enemy in my mind, and I smiled.
Duck Newton does not ask her what it’s like to be the last of her kind. Not in so many words. He looks at her for a long time, there in his kitchen at now seven-oh-eight in the morning, as though she is a new structure dropped into the middle of his forest and he is trying to decide how to catalogue her presence.
And then he says, “Okay.”
He finishes his coffee and laces up his hiking boots, grabs his keys off the hook by the door. She follows him down to his car, then rides with him into the forest. He drives past the ranger station, past the first two reservoirs, and around toward the south side of the mountain. He parks in a clearing just before the trail narrows; she follows him out.
The forest is hushed, just shy of waking. A few birds are calling to each other, but their calls are almost hesitant—as though they’re saying, did I wake you, did I wake you, I’m sorry I woke you. A squirrel runs up the trunk of an oak tree and hides in the branches. The dirt, Minerva notices as they descend a ridge, is still damp from the morning’s dew, and growing swampier as they go. More moisture, more give. Minerva tries to name the trees as they pass—maple, birch, pine, pine, oak—but Duck is going too quickly to examine any properly, and besides, she left the field guide in the kitchen.
Finally, after twenty minutes along the trail and another ten of bushwhacking, Duck stops in front of a sapling.
“Have you come across this one yet, Minerva?” he asks.
She looks at it. The tree is about three feet tall—just up to her waist. The trunk is too slim for her to really get anything from color or texture, but she runs a hand up it anyway, careful not to use too much force and snap it by accident. It’s smooth, dark gray. And the leaves are large, longer than the span of her palm, and deep green, coarse, with fifteen or so jagged grooves along each side. Like teeth.
“I have not seen this plant, Duck Newton,” she says.
Duck sighs, and bows his head. His stance is oddly solemn, his hands clasped behind his back—it reminds Minerva of his posture at Ned Chicane’s funeral, when they lowered the coffin into the ground.
“This is American chestnut,” he says. “Castanea dentata. It used to be one of the great staples of American forests—a late-succession species, a keystone species. It could grow up to, like, a hundred feet tall, and live for hundreds of years. And chestnuts—they were famous. That’s where we used to get chestnuts, like the nuts, like chestnuts roasting on an open fire and everything.”
Duck pauses, glances at her. “Right, you wouldn’t know that. Sorry. But the point is—the point is, chestnut trees were all over these forests. But then, about a hundred years ago, there was this disease—chestnut blight. A bug, maybe from Asia, maybe somewhere else. It spread all across the east coast, just killing trees left and right, and botanists and forest rangers and everyone tried to stop it, but they couldn’t. They were helpless.”
Duck takes a shaky breath in and holds it, swipes a hand over his eyes. Minerva reaches and slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, puts her arm around his shoulders. He sags into the touch.
“Thanks, Minerva,” he says. “So. Yeah. Ask anyone who works in forests in this part of the country, and they’re probably still torn up about chestnut blight. It’s terrifying, you know? Like, what if that happened to our oaks? Or our pines? I have fuckin’ nightmares about it. And there are still a few trees—like this one, here. They’re scattered, almost imperceptible unless you’re looking for ‘em. And they’re stunted. If this sapling grows beyond a couple of feet wide at chest height, the blight will get it. It might put out seeds, but they’re doomed, too.”
“I am sorry, Duck Newton,” Minerva says into the silence that follows. Birds are still calling—part of her wants to shout at them, demand they quiet down out of respect. “I am sorry. But why are you telling me this?”
“Because.” Duck takes another shaky breath in, lets it out. “Because you asked me about being the last of your kind. The last person from your whole planet, Minerva. Fuck.”
She nods. She looks at the tree. American chestnut, Castanea dentata. A tiny thing, vulnerable to the wind and the rain. She could snap it in one flick of her wrist. And yet it’s growing, growing, turning its leaves to the sun.
“I wanted to tell you,” Duck says, “I wanted to tell you that it’s not just you who has a legacy to carry. There are five chestnut saplings in the forest—five that I’ve counted, anyway, there could be a few more. And there are snails, like in that article. And there are northern white rhinos and big blue whales. They’re all endangered—we all are, in a way. We’re all fighting.
“So—I want to know. Minerva. If there’s something special you feel, as the last person from your world. But I’m not gonna ask, because I want you to want to tell me. You can—if it helps, you can tell me. Does that make sense?”
Minerva steps out and forward, to hold the sapling again. To run her fingers along the edges of a leaf near the top. There’s a sting in her right eye, almost like—but it couldn’t be. She wipes it away.
“I understand, she says. “And I will tell you. Not today, Duck Newton, but I will tell you.”
He nods—bows, almost. To the tree and to her.
“You’re a good friend, Duck Newton,” she says.
“Thank you,” he replies. “I know.”
I would like to tell you that I hesitated, once I reached the Enemy planet. That I saw their forests and their mountains and their oceans, so blue like ours, and wondered if such a loss of life was truly the answer. But this is meant to be a true account. And I can still feel it: the launch mechanism, cold metal between my fingers. How easy it was to release.
I watched, safe from orbit, as their planet was stricken clean. I returned to Mira Five: five more years, this time in stasis. And when I reached the surface, my planet was dead, too.
On the hottest night of July, Duck Newton takes her camping.
He takes all of them, actually—Minerva and Leo Tarkesian and Dr. Sarah Drake, an interplanetary commander and her three warriors crammed into a single tent in a clearing near the furthest lake out because Kepler collectively blasted it’s A/C units so emphatically that the whole south side is out of power. Aubrey Lady Flame, Barclay Sylvain, and the rest of the former Amnesty Lodge residents are camped out at H2 Whoa That Was Fun.
(Technically, Sarah has a backup generator and doesn’t need to be here, but Duck promised her a lesson in making the perfect s’mores. Whatever that means.)
By the time they reach the lake, the sun is already dipping beneath the horizon, so they throw the tent and packs and cooler full of beer by the tree line and run for the shore. Duck gets his shirt and shoes off in thirty seconds flat. When he hits the water, the splash rises and echoes like a bird calling across the forest. Sarah Drake is next—she asks Duck to point out where the deepest area along the edge is, then executes a dive so perfect she must’ve plotted out its coordinates beforehand. Leo goes after that, wading in at a shallow point by a towering birch tree, cursing every time he hits pebbles.
Minerva goes up to a smooth, gray rock just where the lake comes to a point. She kicks off her sandals—the rock is warm from the sun—and surveys her charges. Leo’s up to his waist now, holding his arms out in parallel as though his fingertips can try the water next but they’ve gotta go one at a time. Duck’s just flipped over onto his back, and, as Minerva watches, Sarah lunges up from behind and launches a massive wave right over his face. He retaliates with a barrage of splashes that send her spluttering with laughter.
(They’re going to save the world, Minerva thinks. The certainty alights in her like slow-burning embers, like gravity. They’re going to save the world, and they’re going to do it just like this.)
“C’mon,” Sarah shouts, waving, when she notices Minerva watching. “Come in! Water’s great!”
“Minnie, you should do a cannonball,” Duck says.
“Cannonball?”
“Yeah, it’s like—” And here he gestures with his hands, he brings them together and slams them into the water. “You make a splash.”
Minerva considers it for a moment, then nods. Making a splash is a valiant goal.
She backs up a few steps on the rock, then gets a running start and launches herself into the water, pulling her legs up to her chest to increase the surface area. The water hits cold and beautiful—like the first raindrops of a thunderstorm.
When she surfaces, they are all cheering.
iv.
I still don’t know what happened. Was it an Enemy attack? A virus? A natural disaster? If I had stayed awake, could I have done something? Or would I have only watched as it all turned to ash?
I blame myself, regardless. What else could I do?
Duck Newton gives Minerva a key to the fire tower.
She emerges from a hill on the north side of the mountain and she sees it, rising from the trees, all painted-over wood and rusty metal. It’s an old structure and an odd one, might as well have been pulled in from an otherworldly portal to keep track of monsters. It rises—a hundred interlocking triangles stacked on top of each other, maybe two hundred, maybe three. She can’t quite see the top, has to shield her eyes against the glare of the sun.
It reminds her of the tower stretching up from her lab in Oasis City. A satellite dish reaching to nowhere. And it reminds her of a suit of armor. Or the ruins of a suit of armor—plates discarded, or disintegrated. Only the bones left.
She climbs it. The tower, Duck told her, was built in the first years after this forest was designated a protected area. A team of rangers threw it together in a few weeks, to be ready in time for fire season. The way it worked was a ranger, usually one of the mouthier kids, would be assigned to a weekend shift. They’d grumble, complain about missing some party, get a stern look from their supervisor, and finally go collect a sleeping bag and pack of supplies from the ranger station’s closet. And that would be their weekend. Park up there on top of the tower, keep the radio on. Piss in a bottle, or make the long trek down every few hours. Read a book or play solitaire, but be wary of the wind, and keep one eye on the horizon. Keep one eye on the horizon, keep the radio on. Keep watch for smoke.
Would they get tired of the view? Minerva wonders as she rounds the corner on the last set of stairs, wind whistling in her ears and raising goosebumps on her arms. She lays her sword out flat, shining against the dark wood slats. She sits with her back to the railing and looks out.
Is the view exciting at first, all these long stretches of green and blue all woven into each other like links of chainmail? Does it get tiring as you sit there? Do your eyes grow tired, watching for fires? Or is it the opposite—do you go up there still grumbling, promising yourself you’ll stew the whole forty-eight hours, you’ll invent a prank to pull on your supervisor, maybe you’ll keep the piss bottle and pour microdoses into his coffee—but within a few hours, the rest of the world has fallen away?
Minerva sits there for a while. The spirit of an angry forest ranger keeps her company. He grumbles about misplaced responsibility, his bladder, his stomach. But when she asks, he points to the ridges and recites their names. He picks out the reservoirs, the faraway mountain ranges, and Kepler, glittering in the distance. Kepler: a toy battlefield or an armada of ships in bottles, easily mapped in the afternoon sun.
She sits there, and then she calls Duck Newton on the walkie-talkie. Her reception is surprisingly good—something to do with the altitude, she expects.
“I’m on top of the fire tower,” she says.
“Cool,” he replies. “D’you see any fires?”
He’s joking; she can recognize the cadence by now. But she stands anyway, leans out over the railing and peers into the rolling links of blue and green.
“No,” she says. “No fires. All clear.”
The first six years I spent wandering. At least, I think it was six years. Later, I would develop a system: each night, when the sun set, I went to the ruins of Oasis City, near my camp, and added one stone to a column. When a column reached twenty-five stones, that meant a month had passed and I started over. I kept time like that, methodically, for eight hundred months before the meteor hit. But that was later.
The first maybe-six years. I had landed in the eastern desert, a vast place where nomadic tribes had roamed before the heat waves made such a lifestyle impossible. I crossed it slowly: village to village, army base to army base, checking for life and taking supplies from each building I passed. I found a few cans, usually. Pickled things. Baked things. Packages of rice with thin films of mold. My mouth was always dry, my shoulders were always sore. A small enough price to pay.
Minerva returns to Duck Newton’s apartment after a long patrol one Tuesday afternoon, and finds the place filled with sound.
It’s music, she realizes—something low and twangy, a guitar strumming steadily over a slow backbeat and lyrics about—a tractor? Is she hearing this correctly? And the lyrics are doubled: Aubrey Lady Flame is at the kitchen sink, her back to the doorway, scrubbing a pot and singing along.
“Aubrey Lady Flame,” Minerva says. She pushes the door closed and deposits her notebook and field guide on the kitchen table. “What is this music?”
Aubrey turns around, letting the pot fill with hot water. She’s wearing a jean jacket despite the heat, its sleeves rolled up almost to her elbows. Minerva has to admire the loyalty to a self-prescribed uniform.
“This is ‘Old Town Road,’” Aubrey says. “You haven’t heard it? It’s, like, the biggest meme right now.”
“Meme?”
“Oh yeah, right—Duck said you’re just getting into TV, I guess you haven’t been on the Internet much yet. But yeah, it’s like—it’s a really popular song.”
Aubrey turns to go back to the dishes. As she does, the song fades out, then starts over again. Yeahhhh I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road, I’m gonna riiiide till I can’t no more…
“I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road, I’m gonna ride till I can’t no more,” Minerva repeats. “What does that mean?”
“Literally, it means he’s going to ride a horse for a long time, I guess,” Aubrey says. “But figuratively, it’s like—a metaphor for escape and freedom. Feeling like you can ride forever and be unstoppable. He’s—this artist, he goes by Lil Nas X, he’s on track to break the all-time streaming record, and he’d be the first gay black man to do it. And there was this whole thing about how Billboard wouldn’t list the song on their country chart, but then he got Billy Ray Cyrus, who’s a big country singer, to do a remix with him, and now it’s blowing up—I dunno, I like supporting the guy. Plus, it’s catchy.”
Minerva doesn’t know much about streaming records or charts, but she knows this feeling. Escape and freedom. She hears it in the long, drawn-out vowels, the way the singer’s voice soars over his slow, even backbeats. She closes her eyes for a moment, and she can picture—flying up and out of orbit, maybe, or sailing alone across the ocean, or leaping through a portal.
“Ride till I can’t no more,” Minerva repeats. She nods. “I think I understand. I like it.”
“Yeah?” Aubrey turns around again, grinning. “I knew you had good taste, Minerva. Oh—can I teach you to floss?”
“Floss?”
“Yeah, it’s, like, this great dance—well, it’s a stupid dance, but it’s fun. It goes great with this song.”
Minerva has not learned any new movements since she was a novice at the temple. But the song is catchy, or it’s freeing, and besides, she likes Aubrey Lady Flame, or she is starting to—likes Aubrey’s loud voice and her jean jacket and the way she says thank you, every night at dinner, and starts to clear the table without being asked.
“Okay,” Minerva says. “Teach me to floss.”
When Duck Newton returns from work, Minerva is able to follow Aubrey’s movements at half-speed, and she has memorized every lyric from the song. He comes in just as they’re both singing along to the final verse—I'm like a Marlboro Man so I kick on back—and starts laughing so hard he has to sit down.
Six years, or something like it. Camps and army bases gave way to towns, and I realized I was approaching Oasis City. This city had been the heart of Mira Five’s technological development. The disease I carried to the Enemy planet was brewed in one of this city’s labs. If there were any remaining battalions, any secret bunkers—I would find them.
But I found only more echoes. Pickled things. Insects. Dried-out remains. Computer screens filmed over with dust. Glass boxes overrun with sand. Once, in one of the labs, I saw indentations—footprints, I thought, in the dust. I followed them to a panel, a crack in the wall which swung inward when I put my back into it. I held my breath—I still remember this. The scent of cold metal, the way my hands started to shake.
It was empty. Of course it was empty. I sank down to the floor, sat against the cold wall, and stayed for—I do not know how long. Five days, perhaps. My people, we have the ability to shut down our bodies in times of crisis, lowering our heart rates to almost nothing. Akin to hibernation in some Earth animals, I believe. I did not do it, then. Or I did. What I know for certain is only this: I lifted my head when, outside the glass windows, I heard rain.
It’s a hot day in early August. Hot doesn’t fully describe it—the air hangs, wet and palpable, as though a thousand storm clouds are gathering just out of reach and will drop all at once.
Minerva goes on patrol, and as she climbs the winding path up Mount Kepler, the storm clouds cluster and sit at the small of her back. Sweat falls in the creases of her forehead and the spaces between her fingers. Her sandals go slippery as she navigates the long, slate rocks at the peak. And the sun—the sun is hot like how she remembers the eastern desert, sharp like a blade out for blood. She can barely even see the roofs of Kepler through the glare.
When she makes her way back down, the forest is relentlessly quiet. Every bird, every squirrel and salamander, is dead or napping or holding its breath. She thinks for a moment she smells burning, then recognizes it as the trees, sweating in their own way. Ozone hanging in the air.
It is too quiet. Except that, as Minerva crosses over from the blue diamond mountain path to the white circle round-the-north-side path, she hears a shout, followed by a splash. There’s something bright and moving through the trees—a moving body, human-sized.
She goes to investigate. Off to the left of the trail, there’s a reservoir: about the size of Leo Tarkesian’s grocery store, give or take a few aisles, ringed by pine trees on one side and a low, brick dam on the other.
The sunlight glints off the still water. Minerva takes a moment to admire the colors in the reflection: the deep green of the pines, the way they fade into sky-blue. And then the reflection is broken by someone surfacing—a grinning face, dark curls spilling out of a ponytail. As Minerva watches, the figure pushes up and flips over onto her back, exposing her stomach to the sun.
“Good afternoon, Ranger Juno Divine!” Minerva calls.
Her voice echoes out over the water—Divine-vine-vine-vine.
Juno yelps and loses her balance, then comes up for air again a few seconds later, spluttering. Minerva gets up on the dam to wave, narrowly avoiding stepping on the majority of a forest service uniform, tossed haphazardly along the edge.
“Hey, Minerva.” Juno paddles closer—she’s got a black garment across her chest, Minerva can see now, and another below her waist, but other than that it’s just her and the water. She’s kept in good shape, it seems. Duck Newton has something to learn from her.
Minerva says as much, at which Juno laughs, her curls tipping into the water as she tilts her head back.
“Yeah, I’d say Duck Newton has everything to learn from me,” she says.
“Duck Newton is becoming a skilled swordsman,” Minerva replies. But then she tilts her head, considers the statement, and adds, “He has the advantage of my tutelage, however.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.” Juno does a flip in the water, kicking high and sending a splash in Minerva’s direction. The droplets hit her skin—and oh, that’s beautiful, that’s like a bite of fruit from Leo’s store, the deep pink fruit he calls watermelon.
Juno reemerges, then asks, “Hey, you wanna come in? The water’s great. Perfect thing for a Satan’s ass-crack kinda day like today.”
“Is it not against the rules for this body of water?” Minerva inclines her head in the direction of a sign she’d passed on her way in, reading NO SWIMMING: $100 FINE.
“Don’t be a square, Minnie! Who’s gonna arrest us? I’m the only ranger on patrol duty today.”
Juno does another flip, for emphasis, and comes up grinning.
Minerva considers. The sun—burning hot in the sky. The trees—panting out oxygen. The pool of sweat at the small of her back—gathering heavy and angry. Who’s going to arrest her?
She pulls off her tunic in one smooth motion, gets a running start, and leaps into the reservoir. The cold hits her all at once—like a storm finally breaking. Nothing to full precipitation. The cold hits, and then it sinks deeper, it settles in the spaces between her ribs and the vertebrae of her spine.
It is just as she remembered from swimming with Duck and Leo and Sarah, when they went camping, and yet it is entirely new. The beauty of water is—the way you can sink into it, and the way it lifts you back up. Sarah explained it to her once: buoyancy counteracting gravity. It might as well be magic. Or as magic, at any rate, as any of this is. This planet, and this water still cool in the depths of summer, and these humans.
Minerva paddles out to the center of the reservoir and flips over onto her back, the sun’s warmth on her face acceptable now that she has the water to balance things out. When she swims back to shore, Juno Divine is sitting up on the dam, legs stretched out in front of her.
“What’d you think, Minerva?” she says.
“Of the water? You were right, it was refreshing.”
“No, I mean—” Juno throws one arm out, then the other, as though if she stretched far enough she cold hold all of this, all the trees and the mountains and the sky. Minerva knows the feeling.
“I mean, the whole thing,” she says. “Our forest, our town, our world.”
“I think,” Minerva says, “even on a—what did you call it? A day like today, a Satan’s asshole kinda day. Even today, it is full of miracles.”
Juno laughs, and then she looks at Minerva, and she says, “Yeah. I think so, too.”
I remember that rain. It’s clearer than the heat waves and the dust storms, even though those were far more frequent. The water poured down and washed everything, like when the sun sets here and washes the town in dark light. I stood—it was so hard to stand, but I stood. I went to the window and stretched my palm out to the glass, felt it cold and solid, then I went out beneath the downpour.
It washed everything from me: the sand, the dust, the guilt. A temporary fix, as earth and guilt both rise to fill any available space if left unattended. But I had never been washed like that. Not before or since. The rain pushed beneath my skin, I think. It washed me clean in enormous, dark light. All the way down to the bone.
I started searching after that. I say started because I began to keep time. The rainfall, more than my arrival at Oasis City or even my return to Mira Five, was Something. And so I took a knife, scavenged from one of the first outposts I’d encountered, and cut notches into the hit of my sword. One for each sunset.
The thing about writing is it’s a lot like wandering alone in the desert.
Minerva spends hours just searching for words. She sits up on the peak of Mount Kepler and she stares down at the town, or she sits down on the patio of Duck Newton’s apartment building and she stares up at the mountain. She helps Leo Tarkesian do inventory, and she stops and stares at a single tomato or box of cereal. She picks up her notebook, hikes down the mountain and back, and maybe one sentence will come to her halfway down the trail, and maybe she’ll forget it by the time she’s sitting again, and maybe she’ll remember it but she’ll realize it’s useless. She sits alone on Duck’s couch and listens to the crickets, wonders if it’s true that she can calculate the temperature by counting the chirps, and maybe after two hours she’ll have a paragraph, and maybe she’ll have scratched out the scene she was trying to write and three scenes before, and maybe she’ll have resolved to call the whole project off by morning.
The challenge, the real challenge, is that she is neither a poet nor a physicist. Duck Newton will want to know the inner workings of the communication technology she used to drill a wormhole in his head. Or at least, Leo Tarkesian will want to know. Or at the very least, Sarah Drake will want to know. She had notebooks from Mira Five scientists that explained the procedure. But all she brought to Kepler was her sword.
Minerva spends a long afternoon up on Mount Kepler, one day in mid-August. It rained the night before, and the soil gives gently beneath her sandals as she navigates over roots and around puddles. She sees three orange salamanders: two on the north side trail, and one near the lower reservoir. All three scurry away before she can pick them up.
As she climbs, she has this fragment of an explanation—something about the tree, or the plant that she’s calling a tree for lack of more precise language, next to the lab where she learned to make portals. But what should it matter if she calls the plant a tree, anyway? It is the closest English word she has, and it wasn’t exactly listed in Duck Newton’s field guide, so she can claim botanical ignorance, or she can—well, but the tree had sharp extensions, deep blue, so maybe that’s something like a pine, or maybe it’s like a—she read an article about this, the word starts with a c, something sharp—
A cactus. That’s what it’s called. She gets to the peak, she writes cactus in her notebook, and then she writes and scribbles out sentences for the next four hours. Her fingers itch to tear out the page itself—but that would be littering, and Duck would chastise her for depositing trash in his forest, so she refrains.
She only notices the time when Duck calls her, to let her know she better come back soon or she’ll miss dinner.
After five hundred and sixty-four sunsets, I found the tree. It was not a tree like the trees in Kepler—no true roots nor true branches, just an angular shape reaching up, sharp extensions poking out at irregular intervals. Deep blue, the color of the ocean at my father’s town.
I call it a tree because that is the best word I have—the closest equivalent. This was a tree where there should not have been a tree. The deserts on Mira Five were sulfur-deficient, especially as the destruction of our climate persisted. We had weeds in the desert, and this other sharp thing I don’t know a good English equivalent for—we called them luacas. Nothing taller than two feet. And this tree—it was above my head.
Such a tree, I knew, meant someone had been taking care of it. Someone smart and diligent enough that it still lived, years after that caretaker hand gone. There was a building beside it: long and low, flanked with glass windows, a metal apparatus like three but a hundred times taller. The building was a lab, I discovered, and the metal apparatus was an antenna. Something like the Greenbank Telescope in Kepler. The scientists who operated it had discovered the secrets of the Enemy’s technology—generating portals and communicating telepathically, which it turned out were two applications of the same principle.
I was never trained as a scientist or an engineer. But I had another century’s worth of life ahead of me, two if I was lucky. The lab was well-supplied with rations. The tree would keep me company. I settled there and resolved to learn as much as I could.
Bang bang bang.
Minerva does not need to wait as long as she did the last time she visited this house: Sarah Drake answers the door quickly, her hair pulled up into a loose bun and a mug of coffee in her hand.
“Hey, Minerva,” she says. “C’mon in, Juno’s making eggs.”
Minerva does: she passes the coat rack laden with three Forest Service jackets stained with varying levels of dirt, and the bookshelves packed with physics texts on one side and field guides on the other, and the framed painting of two women in elaborate gowns smiling at each other from across a ballroom. Juno is making eggs as promised, scraping a spatula across a cast-iron pan, her hair down and sleeves of her sweatshirt rolled up.
“Mornin’,” she says when Minerva comes in. “How’s the autobiography going, Minerva?”
“Poorly,” Minerva replies. And then the full implication of the question hits: “Wait, you know about it? This project is private, only Sarah—”
“Yeah, I told her,” Sarah says. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it would be a big deal.”
Minerva looks from Sarah to Juno. She briefly considers smashing all the plates on the kitchen table against the tile floor, and then she briefly considers running for the door and hiding out in the woods for eight to twelve hours. But the smell of scrambled eggs hits, wafting up from the stove rich and salty, and she decides to be merciful.
“It’s alright, Sarah Drake,” Minerva says. “But please do not tell anyone else.”
Sarah agrees. And, over the eggs, coffee, and some truly exquisite French toast, Minerva explains the problem: the sitting up on the mountain and not being able to write, and the sitting on Duck’s couch and not being able to write, and so forth.
Sarah listens, chews her eggs slowly and thoughtfully. “I think,” she says finally, over half a plate of raspberries, “well, there are a lot of ways around writer’s block, and I’m not really an expert, but—for explaining the portals, that shit, you need to explain the science with a metaphor.”
“A metaphor?” Minerva repeats.
“Yeah.” Sarah pops a raspberry into her mouth, then goes on. “Some kind of extended comparison that relates the theory or the technology to a thing a lay audience would recognize. Like, Erwin Schrödinger, this Austrian physicist from the early nineteen-hundreds, he thought this quantum mechanics theory he read about was really ridiculous, so he tried to explain it by making up a scenario with a cat. And then lots of people read his cat scenario and understood how ridiculous it was. Although a lot of people think the cat thing is actually possible now, but that’s beside the point.”
“I see,” Minerva says. She doesn’t see, not exactly, but the construction of an image to help her explain something—it reminds her of building toy battlefields.
“It’s easier said than done, obviously,” Sarah says. “But I bet you could figure it out. And a lot of the best science writers—both the nonfiction folks and the scifi folks—they do it. You can borrow somethin’ from me to read as an example, if you like.”
Minerva nods. “I would like that. Thank you, Sarah Drake, smartest person on Earth.”
“Really, Minerva? You’re too kind, there’s no way I’m—”
“Oh, yeah, you are,” Juno says, smiling at her. And Minerva can read this smile now: can read it as affection and respect. These humans and their gestures. Miracles every one.
After breakfast, Minerva looks through Sarah’s books and picks out a colorful volume with an interesting title that Sarah says was her absolute favorite when she was a kid. She goes up on the mountain that day, and she writes, and the words for once do not fly off the page but stay there, planted.
Outside of my lab, a tree was growing. I tried to help it. I knew nothing of its biology, and any notes taken by the scientist who raised it were lost or indistinguishable. But I had helped in the temple’s garden, once. Sister Alina tended the carrots, and each spring I would sit in the dirt with her, warm up to my knees, and pull them out. (I call them carrots; it is the best word I have. They were purple.)
Vegetables need water, sunlight, company sometimes. I did this for the tree. I sat by it after sunset, when the stars danced brilliant and too-far in the sky, and read aloud from the notebooks I found in the lab. My voice was scratchy—pointed, like the spines along the tree’s back. When I gave the tree water, I resolved to drink myself, too.
The transportation technology and the communication technology were, I discovered, two applications of the same principle. I am no physicist, and the notebooks I found which explained this were lost when the meteor hit. But I will do my best. I will borrow an image from one of Sarah Drake’s books. Say you have a string held in place between two fingertips. You hold one end and your friend holds the other. An ant stands on your friend’s palm, and you want it to cross to you. The ant can do this in two ways: it can tiptoes the long way across, one careful foot in front of the other. Or you can fold the string.
When a fold like this is forged across space and time, we call it a wormhole. Or a tesseract.
Dani Sylvain and Jake Coolice are waiting in Duck Newton’s living room when Minerva returns from patrol.
They’re sprawled out on the couch with a massive bag of potato chips between them, the TV switched on to some kind of car racing game. Dani pauses it when she sees Minerva.
“Hey, Minerva!” she says. Jake waves.
“Hello, Dani Sylvain, Jake Coolice,” Minerva replies, nodding at them both. “Duck Newton is still at work, but he will be back at sundown. I am sure you would both be welcome for dinner if—”
“Oh, no, Minerva,” Jake says. “I mean, dinner sounds great, but—we wanted to see you.”
Minerva walks over to the couch, leans her sword up against the wall, and grabs a handful of chips while she waits for further explanation. The chips are salty, though a bit too crunchy for her taste—she prefers goldfish.
“You know sword-fighting, right?” Dani asks.
“I trained as a Herald of the Astral Mind for one hundred and four years,” Minerva says. “I mastered every style of combat that the Masters of the Western Ocean would teach me, and then I invented a new style of my own.” And then, when she clocks their blank expressions: “Yes, I know sword-fighting.”
“Sweet.” Jake jumps off the couch, sending chip crumbs flying.
Dani follows him, then goes to switch off the television. “And could you teach us?” she says. “We know some basic self-defense stuff, Mama taught everyone at Amnesty Lodge, but—with the FBI shit here and the Quell growing in Sylvain and everything… We want to be able to help.”
“We want to kick those fuckers’ asses, is what she means,” Jake says.
Minerva taught novices at the temple, once. Lifetimes ago. It took her years to learn how to be soft with them, to crouch down and smile and say, you’ll get it next time. Leo Tarkesian, Duck Newton, Sarah Drake, they all have her voice echoing in their bones already. They know how to jab and shout, while these children—Minerva is too tall for this job, too loud for it.
And yet. She looks at them, at their eager smiles and their scuffed sneakers. They want to defend their home.
“Okay,” Minerva says. “But stop me if I start turning you into soldiers, alright?”
It has been lifetimes since she taught novices, but she falls back into it. Patience, like destiny, is a quiet weapon: she can wield this, too. Dani takes to the beginning forms, at least, with ease. She has grace and a strong sense of posture; she can hold a lunge for a full minute. But give her a sword—not even a real sword, a branch Minerva picked out from the brush behind the yard—and she goes too still, nervous, her wrists tight and her hands clammy. Afraid of her own strength.
Jake, meanwhile, is almost too excited. He can hold a pose, raise his arms or bend his knees, but after a few seconds his foot will slip. He wants to be running, or he wants to be swimming, or he wants to be facing down a whole army by himself already. Minerva tries to walk through a standard sequence with him, but it’s more like tiptoeing than walking: she models a position, has him hold it for thirty seconds, and if he flinches or falls he must start over. He’s almost through it when—
“Training old fogeys wasn’t enough for you, huh?”
Minerva looks up to find Leo Tarkesian watching from the patio, his own sword in hand. It’s after sunset—when did that happen?
“They asked for a lesson,” she says.
“Of course they did.” Leo takes off his jacket, lays it across the bench, and comes down into the yard. “Let’s give them a demonstration,” he says.
“Let’s. But I will not go easy on you, Leo Tarkesian.”
He smiles—his teeth gleam in the fading light. “Oh, I’m counting on it.”
She does not go easy on him. The fight lasts for six and a half minutes, and by the time Minerva has Leo pinned up against a nearby tree, Dani’s gone hoarse from cheering, Jake has taken three distinct cell phone videos, and Duck has come down to see what’s causing the commotion.
It has been lifetimes since Minerva has had such an audience. She doesn’t mind it.
“Same time tomorrow,” she tells Dani and Jake.
They bow to her—clumsy, but emphatic. “Yes, ma’am!”
The insect creatures—my once-enemies—they had folded strings connecting everything. Each soldier sat in the middle of a spider’s web, tesseracts connecting them to siblings, parents, lovers, squadron leaders, and on and on across the species. The familiar connections they were born with, but they learned to push the ability outward, and then to expand it: fold physical space as well as mental space. They did it to make portals to Mira Five, near the end of the war. Had they known my ship was coming, I am certain, they would have used this technology to neutralize me.
I read the scientists’ notes aloud to my tree. I tried to decipher them. I had been washed in the rain and the loneliness, but still it was hard—between the lines of notes I saw the simulation from my ship, I heard the click as I fired the virus down.
I spent the sunsets building columns, keeping time in Oasis City, and I spent the twilights spinning my sword. Stepping, lunging, leaping. Beating back imaginary enemies. One morning I tripped on a stray piece of glass and landed flat on my back, and I screamed—the scream went right up into the atmosphere.
Nobody heard me, of course. I picked myself up and went back into the lab for a drink.
The laundromat is a cold place. Minerva is hit by a blast of air conditioning as she pushes the door open, and that air settles around her as the door closes with a faint jingle. She steps further inside, drops off the massive pack full of clothes.
The cold settles. Strange, that a place where you go to do your washing should be so cold—as though the clothing could grow too sweaty and refuse the soap. The room is long and crowded: a line of silver machines along the left side, each with a big circular compartment and a series of dials. Two lines of white machines, one line stacked on top of the other, on the right. Silver carts, similar to shopping carts but lower to the ground, scattered across the linoleum floor. The lighting is harsh, and the walls are full of signs with instructions like “PLEASE REMOVE YOUR LAUNDRY AS SOON AS THE MACHINE FINISHES” and “PLEASE DO NOT PUT YOUR CHILDREN IN THE LAUNDRY OR ON THE TABLE.”
“Why are we here, Duck Newton?” she asks as he comes in behind her, panting audibly. She must have made her strides too long for him again.
“I-told-you-Minerva,” he replies. His bag of laundry falls to the floor with a thud. “We-need-to-do-laundry-and-Barclay-has-the-car.”
“But why—” Minerva throws her arm out, encompassing the machines, the carts, the signs. “Humans put so much effort into maintaining their garments. I have my tunic and my set of armor, I wash them once a month in the river, and that serves me fine.”
“Humans have stupid priorities,” Duck replies. He goes up to one of the machines, the silver ones on the left side, and opens the circular door. “We like to look nice, whatever the hell that means. And we like to smell… not terrible.”
Minerva goes up behind him, close enough to get a good whiff. Duck smells like Duck: like peat soil, and charcoal, and the aftermath of a thunderstorm.
“You never smell terrible, Duck Newton,” she says.
He whips around, eyes wide. “Jesus—I mean, thanks, Minnie, but you don’t have to get in so close like that. What have I told you about personal space?”
“That humans like to have a perimeter around their person to guard against being uncomfortable.” She looks at him—deep brown eyes, focused on her, and one hand coming up to rub at the back of his neck. Oh. “Did I make you uncomfortable, Duck Newton?”
“Not really,” he says. “You surprised me, though. You’ve gotta be careful. Now, c’mon—I think we’re gonna need two machines.”
They do, in fact, need two machines: two circular, metallic chambers, filled up with Duck Newton’s jeans, and Aubrey Lady Flame’s cutoff tank tops, and Barclay Sylvain’s wool socks, and Leo Tarkesian’s plaid button-downs. And Minerva’s elastic pants, the ones she’s started wearing under her tunic to help with the sweat. Duck pours in a potion he calls “detergent,” and drops in several silver coins, and the machine begins to fill with soapy water. It begins to turn. The deep purple of her pants swirls in with the black of the tank tops and the blue of the jeans and the red of the button-downs and everything else, like the waterfall up on the north side of the mountain, streams from across the forest running together and swirling, sparkling, all those colors coming together into something new.
“Minerva. Hey.” There’s a hand on her shoulder—Duck Newton, looking down at her. His hand is a warm pressure in the cold laundromat, pressing down a little harder than he usually would, because he’s standing and she’s kneeling on the linoleum. “We can go get lunch now. We’ve got half an hour before we need to move it to the dryer.”
“Dryer?”
He turns and points; she follows his index finger to the white machines on the other side of the room. “Yeah, you know. Or I guess you don’t. But yeah—the clothes get washed in here, and then blasted with heat to dry ‘em over there. And then we take ‘em home and make Dani or Jake or someone fold ‘em, that’s really the worst part of the job.”
Wash, and then dry, and then take them home and fold. She and Duck are responsible this week, and then perhaps next week Barclay Sylvain will make the trip, or Dr. Sarah Drake will. Another week of colors in a swirl like this—she turns back to the washing machine, and she’s lost track, she can’t tell where her clothes end and the others begin.
“Do we have to go to lunch?” she asks.
Duck looks down at her, curious. “What, you want to stay and watch?”
She nods.
His stomach rumbles, a low grumble in the clean, quiet space—but he swats at it until it shuts up, and sits down beside her, crossing his legs on the linoleum.
“You know, I’ve always wondered whether it really takes half an hour,” he says. “I usually get distracted and come back late.”
He reaches up and puts one hand on the circular window. The clothes swirl beneath his palm—blue and purple and red, all held, safe, beneath brown skin.
I practiced, every night, with my sword. I went out into the desert behind the lab building. I raised my arms, and the dust, the heat, the silence, the guilt—it all sunk beneath the swing of my arms. The swing of my arms, the stretch and pull of my shoulders, the sweat pooling at the small of my back. My heart, pounding faster. I swung my sword, and the stars grew brighter: I could feel them humming.
Opening a portal works like this: the arc of my sword. I put a microchip, one of the portable connectors the scientists developed, in my Zweihänder’s hollowed-out hilt. It fit as though, when my mother sculpted the blade and welded on the hollow wood hilt, she had designed it precisely for this purpose.
I swung my sword, and I could feel the stars humming. I do not mean that figuratively. Across the universe, wormholes were opening. I could see them when I closed my eyes. As though someone had flattened the universe into a great sheet of paper, wide as the ocean, and folded it century by century into an origami crane. I saw worlds linked, I saw worlds at war. A portal lifting monsters up from of an endless ocean, a portal sending beings of glass into a planet of slow-sinking swamps, a portal pushing armored reptilians out onto a snowy wasteland.
I called it an origami crane but perhaps the universe is a giant woman, trails of stars for her arteries, and she has been cut at precisely the places where skin meets vein, and she is bleeding out slowly. Is this an honorable death? What does it mean, to bleed out, slow and giant and lonely? What does it stand for?
It starts simply enough: dinner with the Chosen Warriors, Leo Tarkesian telling a story about this time he and a few of his CUNY buddies tried to steal a subway sign from a station near Columbia, just to piss off the rich kids, and ran clear to the Hudson escaping the cops.
“Oh, and obviously we were high the whole time,” he says between gulps of his beer.
“Obviously,” Duck echoes, laughing a little.
“Hey, what’s so funny?”
“Nothing, nothing, it’s just—you, Mister Upstanding Citizen and Grocery Store Owner, getting high and stealing signs? It’s a lot to picture.”
Leo waves his finger. “I’ll have you know, young man, I was—”
“Wait, hold on,” Minerva says before either of her charges can insult the other further. “What does that mean, getting high?”
Both of them turn on her. No—all three of them, Sarah drops the dish she was wiping to come ogle.
“Minerva,” Duck says. “Have. You. Never. Been. High.”
“You must explain what it is first, Duck Newton, and then I will tell you.”
Sarah steps in: “It’s like, taking controlled—or uncontrolled, if you’re stupid—doses of substances, natural or artificially enhanced, in order to experience something beyond the normal human experience. We call it taking drugs on Earth, although drinking alcohol is a more legal form of the same thing. Did you not have anything like this on Mira Five?”
“We did,” Minerva says. Now that she has a definition, it’s easy enough to place—there were strains of seaweed that grew along the beach, some of the kids in her village would grind them up and boil them in tea. And there were other substances, grown in labs—the Navy had a whole black market, which she kept a careful eye to make sure it wasn’t impacting performance.
“I never partook myself, though,” she adds. “My temple was rather strict about limiting indulgence, and then I was a high-ranking military officer—it would have been irresponsible.”
“Well, you’re on Earth, now,” Duck says. “And we’re gonna fix that.”
He gets up, pushes his chair back into the table with a squeak, and goes into his room.
“Do you have—?” Leo asks. “Really?”
“Of course I do, old man!” Duck shouts from the other room. “I keep it for emergencies!”
“And finding out that our esteemed mentor has never been high is an emergency,” Sarah says.
“Yes! Exactly! You get me, Sarah, I knew we were lab partners back in high school for a fucking reason!”
Which brings them here, a few minutes (and a long expedition into Duck’s closet) later: seated in a circle on the floor of Duck’s living room, even though he has a perfectly serviceable couch and two perfectly serviceable armchairs. Sitting on the floor, Duck says, is key to the communal smoking experience. Leo complains about his old joints, but agrees. They walk Minerva through the process. Sarah explains the steps, while Duck performs them: first filling the tube with cold water, then grinding the green herbs Duck unearthed from the bottom of his closet.
“How old is this stuff?” Leo asks, watching. “Does weed expire?”
Duck fires back, “Shouldn’t you know that, man? You’re the grocer. And you’re gonna take a hit anyway, so shut up.”
“Should I be concerned?” Minerva says to Sarah, as quietly as she can manage.
Sarah shrugs. “Probably. But you’re gonna take a hit anyway, so. If I learned one thing in college—besides all the physics—it’s that you’ve gotta think at least part of what you’re doin’ is stupid if you’re gonna have a good time. And—okay, so now Duck’s filling the bowl with the weed, and then he’s gonna light it…”
Duck takes a hit first: he lights the small, cupped extension where he dumped the powder, and presses his face to the top, inhaling hard. The glass distorts his lips and chin, like they’re all looking at him from underwater.
He coughs once, exhales a long ring of smoke, then grins. “Yep,” he says. “Still got it.”
Leo goes next, then Sarah, then Minerva. She stares at the glass contraption in her hands—it’s heavy but so fragile, as though it could shatter if she breathed wrong.
“C’mon, Minerva,” Leo says. “Let us teach you for once, okay? I’ll light it, and then you’ve just gotta inhale as hard as you can. Try not to cough.”
Minerva stares at it for a moment longer, then does as she’s told: presses her lips close to the tube, waits for the crack of a lighter hitting herb, and inhales. Inhales as hard as she can.
The smoke is thick and heavy, pressing on her lungs, like—like salt, or the air in the swamp on a hot day, or, or—she’s too busy coughing to know exactly what it’s like.
She expects them all to laugh at her, but instead they applaud.
“Yeah, Minerva!” Duck says. “That’s my fuckin’ teacher!”
“Wait ’til I tell Juno about this,” Sarah says, grinning.
They keep passing the bong back and forth, going through Duck’s old stash. The three humans are hit by the drug after a few rounds: they blame their aging metabolisms, between hysterical giggles. It’s as though their minds have gone back in time—they’re like children, experiencing the world for the first time all over again. Duck tips all the way onto his back with a thud, points at the ceiling and starts tracing patterns in the air. Leo tries to tell a story about packaged bagels, but he keeps distracting himself halfway through sentences, trailing off into bouts of laughter. Sarah just sits and smiles, but she’s got this massive grin on her face, like she’s just learned the secrets of the universe and she’s not gonna share them with anyone.
Minerva wants to share that strange mental space with them, so she keeps taking hits, lighting and inhaling and refilling and inhaling and refilling and inhaling and inhaling until—
The bong hits the floor with a dull clunk. It sounds hollow, strange, like she’s underwater.
“Duck Newton, I apologize, I broke your equipment.” And her voice sounds hollow too—underwater, coming through a cave, maybe across a rift.
“It’s okay, Minnie, it’s not broken. Just your lap to the floor is—it’s nothing.”
“It’s nothing,” Minerva repeats. She tilts her head back and looks at the ceiling. The room spins around her. This should be concerning—she is a trained warrior, she should be counting exits and calculating how to maximize her momentum and tensing every muscle in her considerable body—but instead, it is comforting. The room spins. It rocks her back and forth, like the ocean, like she’s in her father’s boat and he’s going to take her fishing, never mind that her father died before she was born and she fishes only in her dreams.
Sarah is still grinning, as though she’s captured the secrets of the universe, as though she can share them with Minerva just by holding up a prism and reflecting the light. There’s starlight coming through the window, it seems blue-gray at first but when Minerva looks closely she can see all the colors, she can see silver and magenta and turquoise and she can line them all up to make a melody.
Is this it? she asks Sarah.
Yes, Sarah replies.
Minerva looks at all of them. Sarah, grinning, and Leo, laughing, and Duck, pointing up. The music swells somewhere beneath her. They’re all colors split from the same prism, or they’re all notes in the same chord, and coming back together is as easy as this, as easy as sitting in a circle, as easy as sharing a handful of smoke.
She could reach out, she could touch them. Isn’t that a miracle?
Minerva reaches out, and her fingers land on the bong, lying on its side. She picks it up and rights it between her palms. The weed has been exhausted, or she’s not sure how to grind more, but that’s alright. The glass is fragile, or perhaps it is not fragile at all. It’s just a few tubes, full of water, and—oh, that’s interesting.
“What is this water?” she asks. “Should I drink this?”
Three voices shout at her as one: “MINERVA, NO!”
She tries it anyway. It tastes like sewage. But she wouldn’t trade the experience—not even after coughing into Duck’s sink for half an hour.
I swung my sword. I saw the universe folding, and sometimes I caught glimpses of them: the beings of light. They strode through portals and battles like they were so much intricately colored smoke. And they always blinked out, just before I could put a face to their shape.
Pairs of worlds, connected. The links could be destiny, I thought. But destiny is a funny word: a weapon, all by itself. My training was in weapons, and I knew Destiny better than most. I knew how her weight felt in my hands, how to step with her and parry and thrust, how to shift my weight from one foot to the other so that I did not fall.
Twenty-six months after I began practicing with the Communicator, I saw an orange crystal, shattered but still humming, and a gate tucked into a tunnel in a city with tall buildings glittering in the sun. Monsters were coming through, but there were no battles. Monsters snarled and ate their fill and sank into the shadows.
My once-enemies would do more than simply communicate with their wormholes. They could transfer messages—information, even skills—as long as a clear signal was established. The antenna stretching up from the lab could create such a signal. The tall, glittering buildings in the city I saw could receive one. My mission practically wrote itself.
It happens almost without her realizing: one moment, Minerva is perched on the ledge, writing and watching the sunset, and the next, she’s fumbling in the dark on the path down. Duck warned her, it gets dark fast here in the fall, but it’s different to experience it. To walk the trail she’s walked fifty times before and find the shapes unfamiliar, every sound amplified.
She goes slowly, keeping one hand outstretched and the other on her notebook. When she was thirty-one, still new to the temple, all the Novices were challenged to find their way home from the marketplace blindfolded. It was intended as a test to open one’s other senses, diminish reliance on sight. She remembers stumbling—arms outstretched, as hers are now, taking one careful step in front of the other.
How did she make it? She’s trying to remember when she hears leaves rustling down the path, then a lamp swings in her face.
“Hello?”
It’s Arlo Thacker: the explorer, recently returned from Quell possession. If Duck Newton embodies the forest, Arlo Thacker is shaped by it. He looks like he’s just stepped out of a tree, with his gnarled beard and careful way of walking, especially now, with the shadows cloaking his face and extending his gray hair. Minerva hasn’t spoken to him much, but he’s joined the meetings at Duck’s kitchen table and so she supposes he is trustworthy.
“Hello, Arlo Thacker,” she says.
“Hey,” he replies. “Minnie, right? Duck’s alien friend?”
“Minerva,” she corrects him. “Duck Newton insists on using the nickname.”
He smiles at her, lopsided, with the lantern illuminating the right side of his face more than the left. “Got it, sorry. And what’re you doing in the forest so late, Minerva?”
“Patrol,” she replies. And writing, but that’s private. Not even Sarah Drake has read any of her narrative yet.
“And you were watching the sunset and got caught in the dark as you came down the mountain, I’ll bet,” Thacker says. “Want me to show you the way back?”
She doesn’t answer, but he clocks the way her face furrows, and says, “Yeah, I get it. How about this—come with me, I’ll show you something, what I came out here for, and then we’ll head back together.”
It is a valiant compromise, and she likes the way he offers it: voice light and intonation steady, as though he’s carrying light for one already so he might as well extend it to another. And so she follows the circle of his lantern to a pond on the south side of the mountain, muddy banks on each edge and willows hanging over the water.
There is something otherworldly about it: the light, reflected on the surface of the water. The pond is the same color as the night sky, it must be, but it appears brighter. As though something beneath the surface is lingering, holding on to what is not yet lost. Or is it simply that the water is closer—easier for her eyes to reach.
Thacker goes to the bank, swings his lantern back and forth for a few minutes. He makes high, croaking noises, then waits with his head cocked: listening for a response. And then finally he yelps and pounces, dropping his light.
She comes closer.
“Pick the lantern up, would ya?” he asks. She does, and it illuminates his cupped hands—a tiny, mottled brown-yellow creature caught inside. As she watches, the creature makes one of those high croaking noises and tries to jump out, but Thacker holds it steady.
“A chorus frog,” he says. “Did they have anything like this in your world?”
“If they did, I never saw one,” she replies.
He frowns at her, as though this is the most tragic statement he’s ever heard, and then holds his hands out. “You hold it. C’mon. Hold it by the legs, that way it won’t jump out.”
She holds the chorus frog. It is tiny, squirming, wetter than she’d expected and warmer, too. Like holding one of Duck’s salamanders, only the blanket of night and the quiet reflections on the water make it feel like a secret. As though now she is somehow keeping this frog safe, just by holding it. Just by knowing it is here.
“Tell me its name again,” she says. “I want to write it down.”
I said, earlier, that I do not know what happened to my people, why they were destroyed. This is true. But I have a theory. Say you were a scientist, a brilliant one, and you were running a population experiment on two species of ant. You took a colony of one and a colony of the other, and you dug a tunnel between the two. They could not communicate, and so they began to destroy each other. It was back and forth for a while, anyone’s game, before one side got a leg up and the other swept in with a surprise virus and wiped the first colony clean.
What would you do? Would you let that second colony rejoice in its tiny victory, or would you step on it? Would you stomp it out for good?
I delivered the payload myself. I am an ant to a galaxy, and a galaxy to an ant. So are you. So are we all.
Minerva is halfway to the turnoff for the mountain trail when she smells smoke.
It’s a terrible smell, familiar, like the lower deck of one of her ships during a firefight. She used to stride among her soldiers, calling out commands and words of encouragement, putting her index finger to the barrel of a cannon just to feel its heat against her skin.
She straightens, now. Hoists her sword up on her back and begins to run. She smells it for long minutes before she sees it: a firepit, about as big around as Duck Newton’s kitchen table, damp charcoal around all the edges but red-hot embers in the center. Steam rising, and smoke.
She looks around the clearing—this isn’t up on the mountain trail yet but it’s higher elevation, further from water, coarser soil. And it hasn’t rained in a week, so who knows how dry these pines might be. Minerva tries to identify water, any water, anything that could help—but her gaze is drawn back and back to the firepit. To the embers.
She calls Duck Newton.
“Fire,” she says.
And he yells until she explains—not really, not yet, but it could become a fire.
“Oh,” he says. She hears him sink into his chair at the ranger station, the old leather one that squeaks incessantly but he won’t buy a replacement because the shape has adjusted to his ass.
“Okay,” he says. “A campfire not put out properly—yeah, we get those a lot. Some careless kids, probably. I’ll grab a bucket and get over there, okay? Just stay put and keep an eye on it.”
Stay put, keep an eye on it. Stay put. Stay put. Stay put. That’s what she told her soldiers. Stay put, keep firing, our hulls are reinforced steel and we will gun them down before they reach our engines. She was right approximately fifty-one percent of the time. Stay put—this is different, she is in Duck Newton’s forest and the war is long over, but still her own voice rings in her ears, still the cannons and the fires and the screams.
When Duck pulls up in the ATV—well, Duck and Juno Divine and a bucket of water each—Minerva is sitting at the base of a nearby pine, her knees pulled up against her chest.
“Hey,” he says. He sits down next to her, scattering the yellowed needles at the base of the trunk.
Juno looks at them, then starts dumping water on the embers. Minerva watches as the cold water hits and transforms to steam—an easy transformation, easy as a stick or a rock or a sliver of metal might become a weapon. The steam rises: she follows his path as it vanishes into the underbrush.
“You okay?” Duck asks.
Minerva shakes her head. “How can humans be so careless, Duck Newton? One mistake in putting out a campfire, and you could burn the whole forest down.”
“Well, the whole forest—that’s kinda extreme,” Duck says. Minerva looks at him, and he leans back against the tree. “Okay, there’s, like, a one in a million shot of that. We’re lucky you caught this before it grew. But it’s okay, really. I see this every few weeks, especially this season.”
“Those dumb kids keep us employed,” Juno says, dumping the second bucket of water. More steam rises.
Minerva shakes her head. “I understand this, Duck Newton. But.”
She is trying to remember names of the trees on her planet. Any names, any nouns. She would catalogue this entire forest in her notebook, if she could. She would circle it in force fields so that nobody could bulldoze it. She wants to find the idiots who failed to put out their campfire properly and shake them until their bones ache.
“I know,” she says. “But I cannot allow—I cannot allow anyone else to get hurt. I have caused enough violence.”
“You won’t,” he says. “I promise, you won’t.”
And he sits with her, until the last of the steam rises and vanishes into the trees.
When I was seventy-six, my mother gave me my Zweihänder. It is forged from the heart of a fallen star, and she herself did the casting.
“Minerva,” she said when she gave it to me, her hand closing around my wrist as I felt its weight sink through to my shoulder. “This may be a powerful sword, but all its power comes from you.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Her hand was on my wrist: she guided me as I swung the sword slowly, from left to right and back, my weight shifting from one foot to the other.
“You,” she said, “and your deeds, good or evil, will shape its destiny.” And she took her hand from my wrist, and she watched as I lunged, and parried, and carried the sword forward.
What does it mean, to wield a sword? To wield the weight that someone else has given you? To keep your blade sharp, and to protect innocents with its polished shine?
I have grappled with these questions for a long time. Through my century of training, I thought I learned my answers, and through my next century of teaching and fighting and searching, I thought I had learned incorrectly.
I did not truly understand how to carry this weight until I met Leo Tarkesian.
By the end of August, Minerva has taken inventory of every tree on the path up Mount Kepler. It is five hundred and forty-five trees in total: the first two hundred stretching along the north side of the forest, the next hundred marching past the lower reservoir and nearby marshland, the rest up and around the mountain.
Minerva draws them all out on poster paper taken from the ranger station. She copies out a map of her stretch of forest as best she can, marks the path in bright blue marker, sketches out a circle for each tree, and copies the names down in meticulous pencil. It’s not drawn to scale, not rendered in three dimensions and brought to life with toy soldiers like her battlefield maps a lifetime ago. But there is something comforting about this: bending over the paper, knees flat on the ground at the back of the station, copying Latin binomials until her wrist hurts.
She copies the names, all five hundred and forty-five of them. She checks her spelling against Duck Newton’s field guide. And then she goes and counts all the trees again, just to be certain she hasn’t missed any.
Chestnut oak, red oak, chestnut oak, chestnut oak, red maple, red maple, white pine. She is staring up at a massive evergreen near the reservoir, poster paper rolled up and stuffed under one arm, trying to count the number of needles in each bundle, when a twig snaps on the trail behind her.
“Hey, Minerva,” Duck Newton says. “What’re you doin’?”
“Duck Newton!” She steps back—her foot lands on a root and pushes her off balance—not far enough for her to trip, but the rolled-up paper dislodges and falls. It bounces on the dirt path and rolls for several feet, unraveling until its momentum is stalled by Duck, standing a few trees down.
He bends to examine it—Minerva rushes forward.
“Duck Newton,” she says, “I was not planning to present my project to you so suddenly. I have not yet checked all of my identifications, Duck Newton, I have not even completed my re-counting, the numbers could be all wrong—”
“Minerva,” he says. And something in his voice stops her: something low and wondering, like the first time he’d picked up Beacon and asked if it could kill monsters.
“Minerva,” he says, “is this a tree survey?”
“Not formally,” she replies. “It is—well, on patrols these past few weeks, I have been identifying trees. It started as a way to practice with your field guide, as I wished to recognize what I was seeing. But then, I started walking more slowly, and I started writing in the notebook that Sarah Drake gave me. And it felt… it felt respectful, I suppose, to keep track of all the trees on the path I walked so often.”
She looks down at the paper—the map, hand-drawn. From her vantage point seven feet up, it looks like something a child might draw. The lines are crude, the blue marker cuts through like a massive river, uninvited, and all the places where she miscopied a name are marked with eraser shavings. And yet: as she looks, she recognizes the first tree she identified on her own, a red maple near the top of the mountain. And a tree that she guessed at, then returned to later with more confidence, a white pine near the turn-off. And a tree that she stared at for what felt like hours, then learned even Duck was uncertain, a maybe-hickory-maybe-elm. She recognized five hundred and forty-five trees. She wrote down their names. She bowed to them, long and low.
“How many trees is this?” Duck asks.
“Five hundred and forty-five.”
“And you identified them all? Damn, Minerva.” He leans down to examine the paper further and she watches as his lips move, silently reading out several names.
“I likely made some errors, Duck Newton,” she says, “which is why I had intended to go over them again before I showed you.”
Duck shakes his head. “Anyone would make errors. A trained ecologist would make errors. But you did all of this, without a scientific project or anything behind it.”
“It was respectful,” Minerva repeats. She leans down and gathers up the paper, rolls it back into a loose cylinder. “I cannot remember the names of the plants and animals on Mira Five, as much as I have tried. I cannot pay tribute to them. But I can remember the names of the trees of Kepler, West Virginia—and that is something, right?”
He looks at her for a long moment, considering, and then he says, “You should scan this and send it to the ecology folks over at Marshall. They do tree surveys here all the time, I bet they’d find it useful.”
“Even if I got some identifications wrong?”
“Even if you got some identifications wrong.”
Duck starts walking down the trail, passes her, then looks back over his shoulder as though surprised she isn’t following behind. “C’mon,” he says. “I’ll help you check.”
v.
Here is how I introduced myself to Leo Tarkesian. I projected myself into his tiny bedroom. A siren went off on the street outside.
“Leo Tarkesian!” I said. “You have been called to fulfill a fate of cosmic importance! Adversaries are closing in on your planet, and your planet is ill-equipped to defend itself. But I will train you, Leo Tarkesian! I will make you my apprentice! We will protect your world together.”
I have asked him to verify this transcript for accuracy. I have also asked him if he could tell, at the time, how my hands and voice were shaking: I had not spoken to another person in some thirty years.
He could not tell. He thought I was a Slimer. I could not tell this in the moment, just as he could not tell that I was nervous. I watched him sit back against his headboard, run a hand through his hair, and say:
“Yeah. Okay. Why not.”
Even after weeks of helping Leo Tarkesian with inventory, Minerva is still unnerved by his store.
Not the physical building—stout, rectangular, all angles where she’d expect them to be—or the products—a wide but evenly distributed array of human food items—or even the atmosphere—the tinny pop music on the radio and the occasional ching of the cash register. No, it is the very concept of a grocery store that she finds strange. The idea that she can walk into a building and be confronted with twelve whole rows of food options, distributed according to size and price and nutritional value.
Energy must have gone into each cereal box and bag of oranges, someone must have picked them and packaged them and shipped them here, but all those steps and touches have been flattened, spread out. You could shop here your whole life and never pull a carrot from the ground, the ridge of its outer shell hardened against the dirt yet pliable in your fingers. Easy to snap off a piece and lick off the dirt with your tongue, then taste that clear freshness even though Sister Alina told you to wash the vegetables first.
Minerva runs her fingers over a bag of baby carrots, wrapped in plastic and nutritional information. The package depicts a cartoon carrot with a face, smiling out.
“You good there, Minerva?”
She starts, yanks the bag from its stack and knocks it to the floor. Leo is there to pick it back up, laughing at her with his wrinkled face and his pressed yellow shirt with a name tag on. Leo Tarkesian. As though anyone in this town doesn’t know who he is already.
“Do humans need to make their food have human-like faces in order to sympathize with it?” she asks him.
Leo looks down at the bag in his hand, returns it to its space on the vegetable shelf, then looks up at her. “I guess so,” he says. “We’re pretty narcissistic creatures. If we can’t identify with something, we’re predisposed against it.”
She nods, considering. “Most of you are, anyway.”
“Yes. I suppose some of us like to think we’re better, which is narcissistic in a whole other way… But what’re you doing in here, Minnie? I’m about to close up.”
“Didn’t Duck tell you I hate that nickname?”
He grins. “Yeah. That’s why I’m using it.”
She glares at him. Lifetimes ago, this glare could turn a whole platoon to shaking children. Leo just keeps smiling.
Finally she sighs, and explains. “I ate the last of Duck’s goldfish, so he told me to go buy more. But I can’t find them. They aren’t with the fish, and they aren’t with the cheese or the bread, and there’s no aisle for gold. I’m starting to doubt your organizing principles, Leo Tarkesian.”
“Oh, they’re with the snacks,” he says. “I’ll show you.”
And so Minerva follows him to the snack aisle, past the carrots, and the cucumbers, and the five different sizes of tomatoes, and the four different colors of onions, and a small armada of pickles, and several other things in brightly colored packaging that she didn’t know were edible. She picks out a bag of pretzel goldfish, because she likes the purple stripe on the package, and a bag of rainbow goldfish, because she thinks Aubrey Lady Flame might like them. These, too, are given faces—the snack that smiles back, it says on the package. Strange. If a snack smiles back, wouldn’t that discourage you from eating it?
She asks Leo, who sighs and says he doesn’t know, can he please just ring her up and close out?
It’s not a satisfactory response, but she understands his desire to abscond for the day. So he rings her up, and then she helps him close out: wipes down the counter, sweeps the floor by the bakery, fixes the canned soup display so that it’s back in a pyramid. Once he’s dimmed the lights and locked the door for the night, they go sit at a picnic table out back.
The gate had opened in a place called New York City. It was a stone archway, scuffed silver like the hull of a veteran battleship, tucked into a tunnel where great metal beasts once chased through the dirt. You might not have known that the gate was anything new or unfamiliar, if not for the way that it shined on the night of the full moon. It shined faintly, like an echo, like starlight of a supernova reaching another planet light years away.
The first night Leo Tarkesian went to face the monsters, he could not see the stars at all. Well, it was unusual to see stars in New York City regardless, he told me—but on that night it was raining. The water soaked through his parka and shone reflected in the blade of his sword.
He was shaking, I remember. He was thin and scrawny, and he had not worn enough layers, and his teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. And he held onto that sword, a cheap thing he’d bought at an anime convention, as though if he let go, he would dissolve into shadow right there in the tunnels. He held onto that sword.
“Be brave, Leo Tarkesian,” I told him. I loved the way his name rolled off my tongue. I still do: Leo, short and solid as a punctuation mark, and then Tarkesian, rough and sharp as an answering shout.
“Leo Tarkesian,” I said again, just before I had to cut our connection.
“What?” he asked. He did not turn from the mouth of the tunnel, facing the gate.
I had delivered a thousand rousing speeches to my troops, convinced them to give up homes and families for the boom of cannons and the smell of smoke. But now, my mouth was dry. I could only look at him, standing and shivering, until I faded back to my own lonely stars.
He defeated that beast, of course. And the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. I found a better sword for him from what had once been an armory building in Oasis City—a curled, malleable blade with telepathic abilities that snarled at me as soon as I touched the hilt. He hung the blade on his kitchen wall, next to the spice rack, and used it to slice apples.
The sky is clear tonight, the stars winking softly. Minerva wonders, if she looked for long enough, could she spot Mira Five up there? Perhaps Sarah Drake would know. Strange, that it must be going on after her—the sun rising and setting, nobody to record its color or count the minutes it takes for the light to fade.
“I’ve been thinking more about what you said,” Leo says. He pulls out two beers from a six-pack on the bench beside him, an extra from the fridge inside, and hands one to her. “About most humans being narcissists, but not all of us.”
Minerva snaps off the top of her beer with her fingernail, then chuckles at his expression—not the standard human method, apparently. Leo opens his own with a small metal device hanging off his keys, clinks his bottle against hers.
The beer has a sharp taste, like soda with a kick. It fizzes pleasantly in her throat. Funny—he used to open one of these after they sparred, back when she was first training him. He always offered her one. She never imagined that she’d get to try it.
“Was I a bad Chosen One, Minerva?” he asks.
She swallows, places her beer on the table. “I don’t see how this connects to human narcissism. Or carrots, for that matter.”
“Well.” He takes a drink, a long one. She watches the liquid fizzle in the bottle as he sets it back down, like a stream coming off a waterfall. “I got narcissistic, I think. After a few years of fighting. The thing about New York is—it’s crowded, right? I could go to the gate every day, leaving at the same time, 7 to Bryant Park and transfer to the uptown B, and never see the same person twice. Kids going to school, women in nice suits, old folks carrying grocery bags, homeless people walking between the trains—it all iterates, forever.
“And I was responsible for all those people. Every two months, a new monster. And if I didn’t stop it, more people than I could ever meet or even imagine meeting would get hurt. That’s—it’s tiring, Minerva. It made me want to just throw the sword in the Hudson and let someone else figure it out. So when you told me my turn was over, I wondered—if you knew, somehow. If you were disappointed in me.”
“Leo Tarkesian.” Minerva puts down her beer bottle and reaches across the table. Grabs his hand. How strange, and how beautiful, that she can do this—his fingers are warm in hers, wrinkled but strong. He would pick up a sword right now, if she asked him to. He would torch this impossible grocery store and run, howling, into the flames.
“Leo Tarkesian,” she says, “I have never been disappointed in you. Quite the opposite. You trained, and you fought valiantly. You never backed down from a challenge. If you felt tired—feeling tired, feeling selfish, valuing yourself yet fighting anyway—this is all what made you a worthy warrior. When the gate moved, I thought of it as an opportunity for well-deserved retirement. Nothing more.”
He stares at her, searching her face. His eyes are luminescent in the twilight.
“Have you ever known me to lie, Leo Tarkesian?” she says.
He shakes his head once, and then he shakes it again, and then he squeezes her hand. “Thank you, Minerva,” he says. “I… I needed to hear that.”
“You are welcome.” She releases his hand, then drains the rest of her beer in one long gulp and stands. “Let’s go. I believe Duck was quite serious about the goldfish.”
New York City is very crowded and very lonely. You can start at one end of Manhattan just as the sun is rising, walk all the way down the Hudson River, and collapse in the soft grass at Battery Park without speaking to another breathing soul. I know this because I watched Leo do it, one summer near the end of his tenure as my Chosen One. The monsters were draining him, and the secrets were—his partner of several years had just left out of frustration. I watched Leo lie in the grass, his head pillowed on his arms. I lay down beside him.
“What does it feel like?” I asked. I meant the grass, but he sighed and started talking about the sunset. It felt like a slow rejection, he said. A loss of light and warmth. No matter what colors painted the horizon or danced reflected on the water, it would always fade to black.
I laid beside him as close as I could through the connection, and told him about my home: my desert, my oasis, the ocean I missed dearly. He did not answer me, but he lay one hand on the grass next to my silhouette, palm up, and I felt something. Like the last rays of the sun painting the Hudson: an echo of warmth.
The gate moved the next winter.
Seven weeks after her arrival in Kepler, Minerva learns how Ned Chicane died. It is Aubrey Lady Flame who tells her: they are going through the storage room of his Cryptonomica, helping Kirby with the inventory, and beneath a pile of colorful scarves on a dusty armchair they Aubrey finds a pack of CDs, some kind of showtunes collection. Minerva hears humming, and then she hears stuttering breaths turning into sharp gasps—she turns, shoulders braced, to find Aubrey slumped against the side of the armchair.
“We—we used to sing along to it together,” she says between sobs. “Only he never remembered the words right, so—so he’d make up new ones, and—fuck. Fuck!”
Minerva stands there for a moment, suspended. She is too tall for this. She towers. A hundred-odd years, and she’s still out of place anywhere beyond a battleship.
But then, she thinks of what Duck Newton might do, and she turns and sits beside Aubrey so that their knees are touching. The armchair scratches against her back.
“I miss him,” Aubrey says. “Fuck, I hate this.” And she tells Minerva, in shorn-off sentences and sharpened curses, how Ned Chicane tried to rob her family and inadvertently caused her mother’s death, became one of her best friends, got impersonated by an evil being of light, and finally died saving her girlfriend. Minerva sits and listens. The armchair is itchy, and the story is. It gets under her skin.
When she tells Duck, later, he sighs and goes to the top shelf of his kitchen cabinet, the one above the stove. He pulls out a bottle of something golden-brown and shimmering, wrestles with the cork, and then pours two glasses. The glasses are tiny, just the span of her thumb to her index finger.
Duck offers Minerva a glass; she takes it. Admires how cold it is, how smooth. There’s a tiny ship stenciled on the front.
“To Ned Chicane,” Duck says. He stares at the glass for a moment, as though he can see something beyond his reflection inside, and then knocks it back.
Minerva follows in kind. The liquid burns, like swallowing desert sand. She stares at her glass after: if she tilts it up, she can catch the fluorescent light there, shimmering.
“I don’t understand,” she says. “You aren’t angry? Your friend was taken from you, and this girl Pigeon—she had no right, she had no idea. Why aren’t you angry?”
“Well, I mean—I am angry,” Duck replies. His hands tighten on the bench. He does not look at her. “But not at her. It wasn’t her fault, really. Just an—”
“An accident? Whose finger pulled the trigger, Duck Newton?”
He sighs, drops his head into his lap. His shoulders begin to shake. “I don’t—I don’t want to talk about it, Minerva,” he says. His voice is small, think, like a leaf trembling in the wind, and she remembers another conversation like this, years ago—trembling fingers on a sword too heavy for him to wield.
“I don’t want to,” he says. “I have a job to do. Two jobs. Protecting Kepler and Sylvain. I can’t think about anything else.”
It’s funny—her first few nights here, she couldn’t sleep for the noise. But now, the forest is so quiet, as though all the birds and squirrels and salamanders have hushed, out of respect for this man’s shuddering shoulders. For the tremor in his voice as he says, “I can’t, Minerva, I can’t.”
That night, she goes to the Sheriff’s Station.
Pigeon is a slim girl: old jeans, a faded purple T-shirt, blonde hair hanging loose past her shoulders, pale skin with red marks along her arms as though she’s been picking at mosquito bites. She is scrawnier than Minerva expected—it is difficult to imagine her holding a gun, much less firing it.
Minerva trained for forty years before she was even allowed to hold a sword. She trained for forty years—back straining, muscles burning, going to the rock formations down by the beach just to have something to kick. And this girl gets to just hold a gun and shoot it. Like it’s nothing.
“How dare you,” Minerva says.
Pigeon doesn’t look up, and that’s worse. Minerva approaches, her index finger brandished, arm ramrod-straight and parallel to the floor, and maybe she shouldn’t have left her sword in Duck’s kitchen.
“How dare you,” Minerva says. “You killed him, like it was nothing. Have you no respect for what he did, Pigeon Wilson? Have you no respect for what they all did—what they all do, to protect this town? Have you no respect for the sacrifices they’ve made?”
Pigeon curls her arms tighter into her chest, her sneakers digging into the linoleum. Her shoelaces are untied, and Minerva keeps talking, keeps shouting, Aubrey’s tears and Duck’s stony face at the funeral and the strange silences in their morning meetings like they’re still waiting and all of it, all of it boiling out, all of it a dust storm in the desert, she might not even be speaking English any more, she might not be speaking at all, she might not even be here in Kepler, she is a dust storm in the desert and she is—
“Alright. Hey. Calm down, calm down. Hey, hey.”
Hands close around her arms. A man—no, two men—no, two men and a woman—pulling her back. The Sheriff’s Station comes to her in frames: the linoleum floor, a map of Kepler on the wall, a crack shaped like the sawed-off tip of a pine on the ceiling. She is sitting, and then a heavy-set man with heavy-set frown lines is in front of her.
He says something about decent courtesy for his prisoners, and then something about cooling off. And then a door is shut, a lock clicks, and Minerva is stuck staring at Pigeon Wilson. A mangy girl with too many mosquito bites who does not stare back.
Minerva wishes she had her sword, or she wishes she had her notebook. It takes her four hours and thirty-six minutes to fall asleep.
There are two ways I can describe Duck Newton.
The first is to call him an oak tree. This is the easier method: it’s intuitive. Plant him in the foothills of Kepler, West Virginia, and his feet will dig deep into the earth, his legs will stretch and crack and heal and stretch again. His arms will reach for the sun. He will remain there, steady, and you can take his hand if you need it, you can open his chest and build a nest there, you can stay warm until spring.
The second is to call him a ship in a bottle. He is not made of glass, but he is encased in it. He is careful, intricate, he requires patience and diligence and long fingernails to pry up pieces that have been stuck on wrong and a steady hand to keep the wood still as it dries. Some assembly required. Much assembly required, and a shelf to display him on after. You pick Duck Newton up and hold him, and it is as though you are holding an entire armada, all its sails and sea shanties and cooks trying to stave off scurvy. It is as though you are sitting on the broken-off peak of Mount Kepler and he is standing in the toy village down below, and a tidal wave is coming, and instead of running for high ground or battering up windows or even waving his arms and calling for help, all he will do is stand there calmly, look around, and say, “Hey, what the fuck?”
Duck Newton is already awake when Minerva returns the next morning.
“Good morning, Duck Newton,” she says, falling into her favorite chair—and it is strange, isn’t it, how a carved wooden chair can be more comfortable than a cot built for sleeping, or perhaps it is not so strange when the chair belongs to a friend. “Duck Newton, I spent the night at—”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You know?”
“Of course I know, Minerva!” Duck slams his coffee cup down on the table—drops splatter out across the wood surface. He filled it too high. Or he’s using unnecessary force. “Jesus Christ,” he says, “I know. Sheriff Owens called me—of course he would call me after my friend, my fucking sword-slinging mentor from another planet, barged into his police station and threatened his prisoner!”
“So you—”
“I recommended that he keep you there for the night. Yeah.”
Minerva stands up—and she is too tall for this kitchen. Her head is too close to the ceiling. One tiny jump and she could break the plaster off.
Duck tries to keep his voice level, but his lungs betray him. “I tried to tell you I didn’t want to talk about Ned, that Pigeon wasn’t a problem, but that wasn’t enough, huh? What is it, like, I’m a fucking teenager again, and I need to slaughter a monster with my bare hands before you listen to me?”
Minerva stares at him as he goes on, opening cabinets and slamming them shut at random. For emphasis, or so that he doesn’t need to look at her. “Or is this all a big pissing contest to you, like, who can shout the loudest, or puff themselves up the biggest, or swing a fucking sword—like, you had to go show her that her gun has nothing on you? Is that it? You had to go threaten an innocent girl—or, okay, a girl who made one fucking mistake, a mistake that she’s spent nearly two months in jail for and feels really fucking terribly about, and come in and threaten her for no reason? You had to go make her feel even shittier and weaker than she already does? Hey, Minerva? What the fuck?”
She should apologize. It would be the rational thing to do, or at least the human thing to do. But she is too tall for this kitchen, for this world, and the muscles in her back have forgotten how to bend.
“She hurt you, Duck Newton,” Minerva says. “She disrespected you, disrespected your comrades, and she was careless, and she—she should not be allowed to hold a gun, much less fire it. On my world—”
“I don’t give a shit about your world, Minerva.”
His words echo like a gunshot. He closes the cabinet over the stove, and then he turns to face her. His eyes widen, his shoulders drop, his hands go up—and she sees him like an echo, she sees him seventeen years old and frightened of a sword he doesn’t know how to lift.
Frightened of—
“Fuck, Minerva,” he says—whispers, almost. This is no gunshot, but it still carries. “I didn’t mean it like—like—”
“I know how you meant it,” she replies. She does not say his name.
She collects her sword, from where it is propped up against the wall by the door. She collects a tent, a pack of dried food, and the biggest pair of hiking boots, from the communal storage unit in the basement. She goes up into the forest: to the slope on the south side of the mountain, the swampy area where Duck showed her the chestnut tree. It takes hours—the sun is high in the sky when Minerva finally looks down at the field guide, and up at the sapling, and down at the field guide, and up at the sapling, and finally resolves yes, the ridges on these leaves are the right shape.
The last of its kind. Or, not quite the last, but—one of maybe five in the forest. Stunted forever—the blight will strike before its diameter reaches four feet, and yet it grows anyway. And Minerva could reach out and snap its trunk, one-two, take it for a walking stick and leave it abandoned in the mud, and all it would do is try to grow back. Stubborn, stupid, beautiful thing.
She watches the tree for a few minutes, or until a deer comes out of the bush and stares at her. And then she goes for a long walk.
I hated him at first. Duck Newton. How could he shirk responsibility—how could he take that luxury, to smoke and play video games when worlds were at sake? All he had going for him was proximity and a name that rolled off the tongue like Leo Tarkesian’s had. Duck Newton. Hard consonants pushed up against each other, like a dam ready to withstand a flood.
The problem was, though—Duck Newton was younger than Leo Tarkesian had been. By two years, but that was forever to a human. I could feel his fear, and I could feel how soft he was, how kind, how easily shattered.
I could feel his fear, and I could feel his heartbeat, accelerating when he picked up the sword. He is a ship in a bottle: carefully constructed, easily shattered. How do you convince someone you have made them impenetrable without ordering they throw themselves into the flame?
Duck Newton was seventeen when the gate arrived in Kepler. I was seventeen, once. Or there was a girl, another girl named Minerva with my skin and my shoulders and my wide, dark eyes, who was seventeen. I lay awake at night in the silence and reached for her. I remembered that she was frightened. In my mind she vibrated like a star exploding into being, like a telescope reaching. So many feelings at once—how did she not collapse under their weight?
If there was a god looking after Mira Five, I thought, she would have sent a poet. Or she would have sent a teenager. What use was I—an ancient warrior moving in slow motion, moving through the same drills every night with dried blood turned to rust on the tip of her sword?
She’s perched on the shorn-off peak of Mount Kepler, watching the sunset, when Duck Newton finds her the next day.
“Sarah said you might be here,” he says, settling down next to her on the rock. He crosses his legs, takes his hat off. In the fading light, his dark hair has a faint shine, like it might be going grey.
“Dr. Sarah Drake,” Minerva says. “She said I should find a writing spot, that it would help me to think.”
Duck looks down at the notebook in her lap, the new page with a few errant words scratched out at the top, then back up at her face. “And is it? Helping you to think, I mean.”
She looks out at the sky, the town, the lights coming on. She can pick out Amnesty Lodge from here: the angular roof, the hot springs behind. Duck and Leo’s apartment building, a light on in the backyard where Sarah and Leo might be sparring, or Dani and Jake might be practicing drills. The police station.
“I do not know, Duck Newton,” she says. “Sometimes, I think, yes. It is good to be away from other people, but still able to see them—reminded of their presence. But sometimes, I come here ,and I am back in my tower. My ship, on Mira Five—wondering what to say to my troops, how to raise their morale—how to make them forgive me. If they should.”
Duck pauses, and he looks down at the town, too. She wonders how many times Duck has sat and looked at this view. If he sees it, when he closes his eyes.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you, Minerva,” he says. “I—I’m not usually an angry person like that. I know you only did it ’cause you care about me.”
She shakes her head. The sun is sinking lower, lower, lower. The lights flickering on one by one. From her ship, she could watch the fleet like this: top sails furling, anchors dropping, lights on their masts blinking from green to white to purple. She used to count them, every night before she turned in: fifty battleships, ten platoons to a battleship, eight soldiers to a platoon. Four thousand ghosts ready-made at her signal.
“No,” she says. “I am the one who should be sorry, Duck Newton. And I am sorry. I am. I am trying not to be angry.”
“Well—I know, Minerva, but you can—you can relapse, I guess, that’s one way to put it—”
She shakes her head again. The stone is smooth beneath her, strangely still warm even in the rising darkness—retaining sunlight. Everything stays warmer for a longer time here on Earth than it did on Mira Five. She’s noticed that before. Wonders if it’s because this planet orbits its sun even closer than Mira Five did theirs, or if it’s something else innate, something in the people.
“Do you remember,” she says, “when I—when I appeared to you as you were tending to an enemy?”
“You mean when you yelled at me to kill Billy?” Duck replies.
“Yes. Billy. The goat man.”
“Yeah, I remember. Hadn’t got a chewing out like that since before my mom passed.”
“But you resisted it.”
She remembers it clearly. The way his face had twisted up, wrinkles forming across his forehead, as he had insisted. I’m not gonna do it. I’m gonna do this on my own terms. She’d wanted to reach out and touch him, then. To see what his skin felt like, if his pulse was pounding like hers.
She reaches out now. Palm to palm. She never could’ve guessed that it would be like this: crossing distances. Leaping through a portal to another world is as strange and as brave as two heartbeats finding the same pace.
“You resisted it,” she says again. “You showed me—I always thought that I was meant to be your teacher, Duck Newton. But in that moment, I realized that I also had much to learn from you.”
Duck keeps a hold of her with his right hand, goes up to swipe at his eyes with his left. It takes her a moment to put it together: the gesture, and what it signifies. Humans are so funny, so strange. So open. This human more than most.
“So I am sorry, Duck Newton,” she goes on. “I am sorry I hurt Pigeon. I will try to be kinder.”
“You are already, Minerva,” he replies, hand still covering his face. “You got that? You are.”
Duck Newton had been shirking his training for twenty-seven years when my supplies began to run out.
I scoured the city for cans and crackers and dried things, but my scavenge runs were less fruitful each time. I was never an accountant, but I knew how to keep a ship’s log: I counted my provisions twice, ran the numbers, and determined that I could go for two and a half more years. Three and a quarter, if I reduced my rations and took my chances with malnutrition. If my body weakened, I wondered, would Duck Newton feel it? Would he remember, or was I simply a ghost to him—a phantom in the woods he could push past on his way up the mountain?
When I appeared to him the night after I did that calculation, he walked through me. He was taller, heavier, a wide-brimmed hat planted squarely on his head. But he sounded the same: deep-rooted. I had worried that perhaps he would leave Kepler, run from his visions and his destiny, but of course he hadn’t, of course he was here among the oaks and the pines, his boots treading carefully down the path.
“Duck Newton,” I said.
He cocked his head at me, and I was surprised to find I’d missed him—the way he stuffed his hands in his pockets and the way he stood, quiet, as though listening to the earth below.
“Tell me again, Duck Newton,” she says. “What, precisely, is our objective here?”
Duck pauses, halfway up the path to the orchard, and looks out at the trees. It’s strange, this apple orchard—she’s just gotten used to West Virginia’s forests, the sprawling chaos of them, the way the trees grow and fall and push into each other, no sense of order or strategy unless you study the same acre for a hundred years. This place, on the other hand, is all neat rows, labeled placards, trees cut off at about the height of a short one-story house. Not much underbrush, no winding paths, only patches of fruit on the ground beneath each tree, dotting the green grass with red. She wonders what the place looks like from the air—a patchwork or a grid, with families and laughing teenagers and her small party, Duck Newton and Aubrey Lady Flame and Dani Sylvain and Jake Coolice, all winding among the trees.
Duck pauses, adjusts his hat, and then looks back at her. “We’re gonna pick apples, I guess,” he says. “That’s the goal. Yeah. Leo has an agreement with the woman who runs his place, she gives him bulk discounts, so really we should just get as many apples as we can.”
“As many apples as we can,” Minerva echoes. Then, she nods. “Got it.”
Aubrey, Dani, and Jake have all run ahead into the trees already—Dani’s clambered up into a tree and Aubrey is taking photos of her while Jake shouts pose suggestions. Do they know what the goal is? They don’t seem to know what the goal is. Minerva charges up the hill towards them, the gravel pathway crunching underneath her sandals.
“TEENS,” she says. “WE NEED TO COLLECT AS MANY APPLES AS WE CAN.”
Dani startles at the sound of her voice, nearly loses her balance, but Jake puts a hand on her ankle to steady her.
“Okay, Minerva!” Aubrey shouts back. “We got it!”
Minerva would argue that they have not, in fact, “got it.” The three teens spend more time climbing trees, attempting to shake down apples, and, at one point, chasing a wood frog that pops up out of the brush than actually contributing to the collection effort.
But she finds, almost surprisingly, that she doesn’t mind so much—their laughter rings out through the orchard like faraway bells, and anyway between her and Duck Newton they pretty much make the ultimate apple-picking team already. He points out which trees have the best fruit, then goes up to them with a barrel, while she reaches up and pulls the fruit down two at a time. It’s a good system. Efficient. She can reach the tallest branches, usually, and he can anticipate exactly where the apples will fall.
The exercise reminds her of an old drill, back at the temple, when she helped Sister Alina harvest the wheat. She’d swing her sword at each stalk in turn, trying to find the best angle to cut off the edible material while leaving the roots to grow back.
The afternoon falls away like that: reaching and pulling, sunshine and laughter. She and Duck cover something like half of the orchard without a word between them, just quiet gestures and muscle memory. But then, at the end of the row, they arrive at a particularly tall, gnarled tree labeled “Gala.” It’s got two branches shooting up from the trunk, mottled wood in shades of brown and gray, and a bounty of bright red apples shining at the top.
Duck points. She reaches. But her fingers grasp only air. The surprise must register on her face, because Duck frowns at her.
“Not tall enough, huh?” he asks. His voice is strangely loud after their long silence, wafting over the breeze. “Could you try climbing it?”
Minerva looks at him, then at the gnarled branches, then back to him.
“Duck Newton,” she says, “the tree would collapse under my girth.”
“Ah, yeah. Okay.” He takes a step back and surveys it with her, putting his hands on his hips. There are fifty other trees in the orchard just like this one, but. Well. A gauntlet has been thrown.
“Hey, what’s up?” Aubrey asks, running up from behind them, half-eaten apple in her hand.
“Minerva’s not quite tall enough to reach those,” Duck explains. “and neither of us is, uh, in a good position to climb it.”
“Oh.” Aubrey surveys the scene, too, but only for a few seconds before she says, “I could get on your back, Minerva.”
“What?”
“You know, sit on your shoulders? Did they not have piggyback rides on Mira Five?”
Minerva considers. “We had something like that, but it was a combat move. Climbing on your opponent’s back to choke them.”
“Oh, well, this is different,” Aubrey says, bouncing on her heels a little. “This is, like, you’re playing with a friend and trying to show how strong you are, or you’re doing a two-person race on Field Day.”
“Field Day?”
“Yeah, it’s like—the only good day of gym class?”
“Gym class?”
Duck looks back and forth between them, like he’s about to start laughing. “Not important,” he says. “But you should do it, Minerva. It’s a good idea.”
She’s still apprehensive: touching, casual touching, these gestures that humans do, arms around shoulders and hands to pull you up—it’s all too close and too warm. She’s still adjusting. But she knows Aubrey Lady Flame, has plotted and danced with her. And Duck believes this is a good idea.
“Okay,” Minerva says.
Aubrey grins. “Cool! Hey, Dani!” she adds, waving. “Come over here! I’m about to be so tall!” And then, back to Minerva: “Bend down.”
Minerva does, bringing her knees down towards the grass. Aubrey says, “I’m gonna put a foot on your back, alright, and when I say so you can stand back up.” Minerva nods.
It’s exactly as she described—one foot on her back, then Aubrey’s arms around her neck, then Aubrey’s knees up by her waist.
“You can stand,” Aubrey says, and Minerva stands.
It’s exactly as she described, and yet. The weight of another person on her back, the warmth of arms at her shoulders, the vibration where skin meets skin. She isn’t as heavy as Minerva expected. It’s like lifting a pack for a hike, only the pack is squirming and whooping and yelling, “I’m the king of the world!”
“How you doing, Minerva?” Duck asks, watching her closely.
Minerva takes a step towards the tree, bounces Aubrey a little. “Good,” she says. “Ready.”
“Alright—westward ho!” Aubrey says, pointing at the tree. Minerva takes her forward. She can feel the stretch in Aubrey’s legs as she reaches up, grabs two apples in each hand and passes them down to Duck. And then, she passes one to Minerva.
“Have you tried these yet?” she asks. “They’re incredible.”
Minerva starts to say, yes, of course, she’s been here all afternoon—only she hasn’t, actually. Tried one.
“Well, here,” Aubrey says. She hands Minerva an apple, smooth and red and shining in the fading sunlight, and waits as Minerva bites into it. The fruit is crisp and juicy, sweet and sour, the chill of the air and the green of the leaves and the warmth of Aubrey on her shoulders.
“Yes,” Minerva agrees. “Incredible.”
I do not remember the first time I killed another person. It is not for lack of trying: I have, many times, sat on the peak of Mount Kepler, watched the sun sink beneath the trees, and run through my first years in the United Navy. They always pass in a blur, gray waves and biting wind, following commands and giving them all in the same clipped syntax. Turn the ship. Ready the cannons. Fire at will. The Enemy ships were glittering shapes in the distance. I had the best aim in the fleet—a steady hand. I never wavered. I never dwelled for long on their faces.
I watch the sun set over Kepler, I close my eyes, and I see Duck Newton, the night he refused to kill his goat man. He had betrayed me before, of course, but this was simpler. More tangible. There was an enemy, and Duck would not kill him.
“I’m not gonna do it,” he said. I watched how his hands shook, and yet how sturdy he was. He furrowed his brow and he planted his feet. The sewing needle fit in his calloused fingers like a tree branch or a tiny salamander, squirming against new warmth.
“I’m gonna do this on my own terms,” he said. And it occurred to me, for the first time, that he had terms. That his refusal to wield the destiny I had built for him was one not of fear and inadequacy but of a kind of devotion out of tune with my own. One of us had to adjust.
I cut our connection, and I went out to the tree in the back of the lab building. I sat next to it. The sun went down, and I heard Duck’s voice: I’m gonna do this on my own terms. My own terms. My own terms.
Here are the people Minerva can carry on her back.
Aubrey Lady Flame. She stays on Minerva’s back for a solid half-hour, directing her like a steed as Minerva races through the trees, challenging Aubrey to grab as many apples as she can from the highest branches. Aubrey’s legs tighten around Minerva’s chest, muscles contracting, and apples rain down on Dani and Jake, following close behind with buckets. “Have we optimized the mission objective?” Minerva asks Duck, grinning, after they reach the far side of the orchard. Duck laughs, taking his hat off to wipe at his forehead with his jacket’s sleeve. “I’ll say,” he tells her. “But,” he adds, pointing to the trail of fallen apples behind Minerva and Aubrey, “it might not have been the most sustainable method.”
Jake Coolice. While Duck goes into the orchard’s store to pay for the apples and Aubrey follows to pick out cider donuts (a delicacy that she insists Minerva absolutely has to try), Jake goes over to Minerva, stares up at her with baby blue eyes, and asks if he can be tall, too. If she’s not too tired. She is insulted at the very suggestion that she might be tired, so she swoops him up right there and holds him just above her shoulders until he finds his footing. Jake is a more polite rider than Aubrey, asking her to go in one direction or the other rather than just kicking at her sides, but once he gets the hang of the thing he’s whooping and yelling just like Aubrey was, calling for Minerva to climb up the hill by the orchard’s parking lot so that she can sprint back down at top speed. “That was just like snowboarding,” he says, his hair windblown and his eyes shining, when she lets him down. She’s never heard of snowboarding. He says that’s fine, and promises to teach her come winter.
Dani Sylvain. After Aubrey returns and disseminates the apple cider donuts (which are, indeed, a sweet, warm delicacy on par with Duck’s hot cocoa), she asks Dani, “Hey, don’t you think this donut would taste better seven feet in the air?” Minerva catches on immediately, and crouches down. It reminds her of learning a new drill: strange the first time, muscles twisting and stretching in new directions, but now growing familiar, easy, her shoulders almost more comfortable with arms holding tight. Only this is no drill—it’s Dani screeching as Minerva starts to run, laughing as she catches sight of Aubrey sprinting behind, then grinning, her hair blown out of its ponytail, as Aubrey hands up a donut for her and Minerva to share.
Dani Sylvain and Aubrey Lady Flame, together. Aubrey gets that light in her eyes that means a spark of magic is alight, and asks Minerva precisely how easy it was to carry one Kepler teen at a time. “Like, do you think you could do two at once?” she says. And Minerva has trained as a Herald of the Astral Mind, Minerva has faced scores of enemy bugs with nothing but her wits and a broadsword, Minerva has crossed the galaxy to redeem her culture’s honor. Of course she could do two at once.
(Dani gets on Aubrey’s shoulders, and Aubrey gets on Minerva’s. Minerva stands still as an apple tree, her charges waving in the wind, as Jake takes pictures. “That’s one for the Amnesty 2020 calendar,” he says, and Minerva’s not entirely sure what that means, but something catches fire and burns, bright and brilliant, at the way he smiles as he says it.)
Duck Newton, for precisely thirty-five seconds. She kneels, braces herself. He climbs on. She stands. He is heavier than the others—more solid, all his weight pooled at one central spot at the base of his spine. She thinks of the myth of Achilles, a hero she read about in one of Sarah’s old books, a warrior who traded invincibility for one vulnerable point, a natural-built poison in the curve of his heel. Duck’s arms tighten around her shoulders—he, too, is invincible, but he was not built that way by myth or poison, he was built by picking up his belief and carrying it. It sits in his spine, in the spaces between his fingers. She feels it in the vibrations beneath his skin, echoing.
(She stands, she takes one step. She isn’t quite paying attention: her foot catches on a root, poking up from the path, and she loses balance. She loses balance, so he loses balance, and even though she crouches back down as quickly and smoothly as she can he still falls hard. “Shit,” he says afterwards, sitting up and rubbing his back. “Maybe you’d better stick to the kids, Minnie.”)
Leo Tarkesian. They go to his store to deliver the apples, and she returns from his employees-and-friends-only bathroom to his grinning face, saying, “I hear you give piggyback rides now?” Leo’s not as bulky as he once was, he tells her, hasn’t really worked out beyond lifting crates and organizing soup cans in years, but she still feels the ghost of past fights in the easy way his arms tighten. His arms tighten, his knees brace against her sides, and soon enough he’s laughing, almost shaking, as she sprints to the lot behind his store and takes the corner fast. If she closed her eyes, she could go back in time: a teenager, staring down at the blade in his hands, breathless at the monster he just vanquished.
(But closing her eyes would be unsafe, so she stays in the moment. She runs with him for a few minutes, then goes back inside to let him use his new height to restock pasta.)
Barclay Sylvain, but this item is pure speculation because, when she offers, he looks from her grinning face, to Duck standing well outside a “personal space” radius, groaning and rubbing his back, and goes back to drawing diagrams on the chalkboard they “borrowed” from the Forest Service and set up in Duck’s living room. They are planning something, she knows—it’s three days until the next Abomination is due, and the Pine Guard is going on the offensive. Minerva once commanded an army of millions, but now she is content to wait and be told her piece of the puzzle.
(She nods politely, and tells Barclay, “Your loss.”)
Dr. Sarah Drake. She comes to the backyard for her daily training session, stops at the edge of the patio when she sees Minerva grinning. “What?” she asks. “I’m developing a new move,” Minerva replies, and she bends down.
(Sarah Drake is not the heaviest of the people Minerva has carried today, but she is the most careful. She places her limbs one at a time, placing and then asking, “Is this okay?” before tightening her grip. And still she shouts when Minerva stands—it rings out, the pine trees listening and sending back the sound. Sarah asks Minerva not to move, so Minerva stands, and Sarah throws both arms out, and turns both her palms to the sky.
“I feel like I can touch the stars,” Sarah says. And Minerva laughs, and starts to run.)
If the meteor had come eighty years earlier, I would not have lived through it. This is a simple fact: living requires force of will. Force of will requires self-belief, or at least some outside force to serve as a proxy. Fear, for example, will do. As will love. As will revenge.
Eighty years earlier, I had no such will. I had a desert, endless, and my hands, bloody. I had two worlds hanging around my neck. Even fifty years earlier, or twenty, or ten, I would have been useless. A connection, perhaps a pupil, but I had filled some loose outline in passing my skills to a younger warrior and protecting another world.
It was not until Duck Newton that I felt the weight of the thing. The scope. I had given him a destiny, and I needed to take responsibility for it.
Duck Newton kneels before her.
He puts one knee to the ground outside the FBI compound, the khaki blending in with the dirt. He bows his head, and Minerva has the strangest sensation that she is kneeling, too. Or she is the one kneeling, and Duck Newton is the one lifting the sword and tapping it precisely at the fulcrum of each shoulder, sharp and cool.
She wasn’t planning to tell him. Duck Newton’s destiny is a precise thing, carefully balanced: a sword held between two fingertips. Duck Newton is a precise thing. Carefully balanced. One lie and he goes red in the face. He brought her to this world, with his oak trees and his hot cocoa, and if Minerva owes him anything, it is the truth.
So she told him the truth. What is destiny anyway, if not a game of probability? A tiny wooden ship drifting on a wide wide sea, waiting for someone to catch it.
She told him, he took it like a hurricane at first, and then he bounced back. Like she knew he would. He bounced back, and she told him to kneel.
He kneels, or she does. She balances the sword, or he does. The Temple’s name doesn’t translate well into English. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that they carry it on their shoulders and hold their heads high.
He stands, and for a moment he is taller than she is. And then they go back to the others.
“I delivered the payload myself,” I told him, the night before the meteor was due to hit. And it was so strange to say it—like diving into the ocean head-first only to find yourself rising, rising, now floating on your back with your face to the sun, the world one long chain of energy transfer, the ocean extrapolated from one grain of salt.
Duck Newton looked at me. He said, “Okay.”
Of course I had to survive, after that. Of course my work was not done.
Here is a person Minerva can carry on her back: Leo Tarkesian. It’s easy enough, after the conversation outside the compound reaches its conclusion. She looks at him, he looks at her. She crouches down, he climbs on. He claims to be old, retired, but she feels the way his arms tighten, a warrior’s instinct.
Leo used to drink from this little metal bottle before hunts, she remembers suddenly. He would pull it out of his jacket pocket, he would hold it up so that it shone in the streetlights, he would toast her, and he would drink. And then he would throw his head back and yell—something loud and ancient, like a shaft of molten metal on the anvil, ready to become a sword.
That—that yell—is with him now. She hears it in her head, echoing, as she runs with him: feet pounding on the dirt path, trees whipping past, moon watching serenely from miles above.
It’s easy enough, to carry him. And yet it is impossible. His very tangible presence, still, is impossible. As though she picked the moon up out of its reflection in a pool of water and cradled it, taught it to fight.
They reach the top of the mountain, or the cut-off rock where it used to be, and she lets him off. He sits down on the edge slowly, moving one vertebra at a time.
“Saving your energy for the fight, Leo Tarkesian?” she asks.
He rolls his eyes and pats the spot on the rock next to him. She plants her sword in a crack a few feet from the edge, then sits. And for a few minutes, they watch the lights come on: the library, the Cryptonomica, the Sheriff’s Station. Kepler is brighter than usual—not a toy village, but a planetarium in reverse. All the stars arming themselves for the battle to come.
“Do you think he’s ready?” Leo asks.
“Who?” Minerva replies.
“Duck.”
Minerva watches a bird take off a tree further down in the valley, wings catching the wind. She smiles, and says, “You trained him, and I trained him, and he has remained kind in spite of us both. He is as ready as he will ever be.”
Leo responds with a faint shuffling noise—she looks over to find him rummaging in the canvas bag he had slung over his shoulder. He emerges with a little metal flask and hands it to her.
Minerva holds the flask up so that it shines in the moonlight, unscrews the lid. It shines—it shines like a tiny satellite, or a gauntlet, thrown.
“To Duck Newton,” Leo says.
“To Duck Newton,” Minerva repeats. She drinks—the vodka goes down fiery and smooth—and passes the flask back to him.
One day, a few months before my birth, my father went out for a long trip just before autumn set in, got caught in a storm, and did not return. One night four years later, I nearly followed him. I snuck out of the dormitory and went to the pier, where the fishermen kept their boats. It was dry season, and the night was so hot and heavy that I jumped in. I was a good swimmer, all children of my village were, but a tide caught me and pulled me out.
I still remember it: the pressure on my lungs as they filled with water, as though the sky had inverted and was pushing down, down, the entire plane of clouds and stars condensed into one point and pressing into my chest. I waved my arms and screamed, even as I wondered if the sound could go anywhere, imprisoned as I was by the clouds and stars.
The sound did go somewhere, or it must have, because an old fisherman returning from a late trip found me and lifted me out. I wish—I wish—I cannot remember his name.
The meteor hit. I hid in a Councilor’s bunker beneath Oasis City. The roof caved in. And I was four years old again: screaming, screaming, the entirety of earth and sky pressed down to a single point.
Minerva opens the portal. For precisely three quarters of a second: the world of light. For roughly two hours after that: war.
It is nice, to have something tangible to fight again. Comforting. Like lifting stones into pillars out in the ruins of Oasis City. Like counting trees, like writing down their names. Minerva swings her sword and the monsters fall: easy as breathing.
The monsters fall. But these creatures of smoke are only proxies. She remembers a parade of bloodied worlds marching hand in hand. A portal lifting monsters up from out of an endless ocean, a portal sending beings of glass into a planet of slow-sinking swamps, a portal pushing armored reptilians out onto a snowy wasteland. A portal sending insectoid fighters into Mira Five’s eastern desert—
Minerva lunges. Minerva stabs. Minerva slices. A pile of decomposing invaders builds at her feet. It’s nice as a training exercise. It’s verification: she is not out of practice.
Here is the first vision Duck Newton saw.
He woke up, and he could not breathe. His house was on fire. His doorknob burned his palm. Smoke filled the air. He could reach his sister, he could not reach his parents. The world folded in on itself, as though his house and his town and his forest and his planet were only a tiny particle of dust, sucked up in a cosmic vacuum. He could only sit and scream.
I know this vision, because I saw it, too.
The Quell has been neutralized, Minerva has crossed through the archway, and Duck Newton is about to wake up.
There’s a faint scent of ozone in the air. Minerva has never been to this planet before, but she knows that this sky is not quite the correct color, even for the aftermath of a near-planet-killing storm. The clouds hang too heavy, their shapes are too symmetrical. Out of the corner of her eye, Minerva thinks she sees—no—maybe—too-close sunlight or a reflection that does not match anything in three dimensions. The people around her, humans and Sylvens alike, are talking of their victory—Aubrey says something about sandwiches—and at first she can make out individual words but slowly it fades to static, as though a radio dial at the back of her mind is being turned—
Duck Newton is about to wake up. She can see the vision playing across his eyelids: he twitches, his brow furrows, his fingers stretch and pull inward as though reaching for a sword.
Minerva leans down, kneels at his side. She places her hands on his shoulders, roots him to the ground as his shoulders shake. She feels it like an exhale when he opens his eyes.
“You have one hundred and thirty-four seconds to stop them,” she tells him.
A superposition: two hands reach for the same sword.
“We’ve got a hundred and twenty-eight seconds,” he tells her.
The music swells: he starts running, and she follows.
It is no easy task, lifting yourself out of a pile of rubble. Not even for me. But I had centuries of training, endless experience planning for worst-case scenarios. And I had been buried with my sword, which helped. I approached it in segments: my right hand first, then my wrist, up to my elbow, up to my shoulder. My left hand, wrist, elbow, shoulder. My right leg, my left leg, my waist. My torso. My head.
It is difficult to describe how I occupied my mind while I was pulling myself out. I have mentioned before that my people can enter a kind of hibernation state—I believe I was experiencing something similar. I do not remember it precisely. I do not know how long each limb took. It could have been hours or months. I cannot remember precisely but, sometimes, I wake up on Duck Newton’s couch and the blankets are too heavy, my arms are pinned and my back is caked in sweat and I cannot reach my sword even though it is there, just there, it should be beside me.
I lie on my back for a long time, when this happens. I count in my head until my breathing slows. And then I sit up, I go to Duck Newton’s room, and I ask him to make hot cocoa.
I think, if I knew there would be hot cocoa waiting once I reached Kepler, I would have freed myself faster.
Duck Newton has two angry swords.
He has Beacon, twisting and snarling. And he has Minerva, ancient and sharpened to a point. She has never been angry like this: facing Reconciliation. She has never been sharp like this. She leaps out of the golden sarcophagus into the world of light, and it is all so intangible—as though she not fighting a war, not fighting war itself but its ghost.
Her father was cut down by a storm decades before the Enemy started coming. A natural death: honorable. None of this—these lights, these chambers, these monitors dusty with disuse—is honorable. None of this has substance, none of this has weight. The whole decrepit ship is an afterthought—she could swing her sword, but she’d come up empty.
Her world died, and for what? A self-important computer program? An endless experiment? A peacemaking army of ghosts?
She looks, as she always does, to Duck Newton. If there is mercy to be found here, he will find it.
“That’s my sister,” he says.
He charges: she follows.
Minerva looks at Duck. Duck looks at Minerva. This—here—this moment, cased in glass in the battle swirling around them—is like looking in a mirror. She’s a ship in a bottle, and he’s the real ship on the other side, sails unfurled masts held high anchors up and spinning. Or she is the ship, and he is the reflection.
“I suspect our destiny will soon be fulfilled,” she told him. And this is it, the fulfilling: Minerva looks at Duck, Duck looks at Minerva. It’s easy, to see your reflection. It takes decades to really look at it.
There are two ways she can describe him. A tree, planted steady, and what’s a tree in a forest fire? A weapon, burnt to a point. A ship in a bottle, and what’s a bottle when you break the glass? A thousand shards, a thousand swords.
Their destiny: reconciling reconciliation. Decades boil over and start to wail as Duck drives Beacon into the machine. Beacon starts laughing, and Minerva laughs, and Duck laughs.
Their destiny: to look into the world of light and see themselves. To see themselves and say, we are messy, we make mistakes, and we forgive ourselves. We have high levels of aggression. We are the charred and broken bodies and we are the chestnut tree that keeps fighting, we are the cupped hands holding a salamander and we are the hawk diving up towards the sun.
We are a forest fire. We are the saplings sprouting from the ashes. We are a belligerence limit: watch us dance.
Alone on Mira Five, I had marked time by building columns. It was a physical training exercise—lifting something tangible—and a mental one—passing the ruins each day. By the time the meteor hit, I had an armada of columns. Their shadows followed me home.
After the meteor hit, I had a city of rubble once more. I nearly got lost several times returning to the lab—all the landmarks I’d used to navigate were leveled. The city was vanquished, more than abandoned, and I mourned it, and I reveled in it. When the stars came out that night it felt like the rainstorm all over again. My world was dead. My world was wiped clean.
The lab was destroyed: roof caved in, antenna snapped in half. But somehow, through everything, the tree had been spared. I laughed, and kissed its warm bark, and set to rebuilding.
Duck takes them out for French onion soup, after.
It’s peaceful at first: the quietest meeting of the Chosen Club yet, just four spoons clinking against porcelain. The soup is warm, all salt and melted cheese. It’s almost the opposite taste of Duck’s hot cocoa, and Minerva is just thinking about what it means to be malleable, boiling over a stovetop, when Duck stops. His spoon clatters to the table.
“I killed so many dads,” he says. His head drops to his hands.
“So many what?” Sarah asks. She tries to pry one hand free in order to hear him better, but Duck stays firm.
“Dads,” he says, muffled. “I asked Billy if I deleted his dad, and he said no, not his dad, but I probably deleted a lot of other people’s dads—Minerva heard him. Minerva, how could you let me do that? I thought my destiny was supposed to be being better than you!”
“Duck Newton,” Minerva says carefully, “your destiny is—”
“Fake, I know, whatever, but I still thought it was supposed to mean something.”
And then the table really goes silent.
“What do you mean fake?” Leo asks finally, pushing his bowl to the side.
“I mean—can you tell him, Minerva? I know you said not to, but. Fuck.”
Minerva sighs. Wayne Duck Newton. Striving always for the truth. She should’ve known it would only be a matter of time before this particular reveal: he let the secret slip, and so she explains to Leo and Sarah that the process was, in fact, random—all proximity and probability. Sarah takes it easily enough, nodding along like she’s making a list of questions to ask later, but Leo nearly storms out of the restaurant right there. He only stays because Duck stalls him with a hand to his arm—reminds him that he hasn’t finished his soup.
“Okay,” Sarah says. She gets a stray napkin, pulls a pen out of her jacket, and writes DESTINY in big letters. “One thing I love about science is, you get to define your own terms. So we say DESTINY is not a set in stone future contrived by divine force. Fine, we’re not using the conventional definition. Then what’s our definition?”
“A random algorithm that picked a fucking idiot,” Duck says.
“A load of bullshit,” Leo says.
“A sword,” Minerva says.
Sarah points her pen at Minerva, nib first. “Go on.”
“Destiny is a weapon,” Minerva explains. “I say a sword because that’s my weapon, but it could be anything. Still, if we say a sword—a sword is, someone picks out a material, shapes it, and gives it to you. Like my mother gave mine to me. It’s sharpened to a point, but it’s malleable—the use of it, the who and when and how, is all up to you.”
Sarah is nodding, scribbling down key words. Duck and Leo look skeptical, but they let her continue.
“I made a sword,” she says. “I said, a lone hero can protect Earth from unnecessary conflict, and I will train that person. I handed that sword first to Leo, then Duck, then you, Sarah. And you have each used it in your own way.”
“So, then,” Duck says slowly, “me killing the spirits all encased in that Reconciliation machine—”
“By Minerva’s definition, you were using the sword she gave you,” Sarah says. “You interpreted your destiny to be making sure Reconciliation didn’t hurt Earth, or Sylvain, or anyone else.”
“And also, literally, you used a sword she gave you,” Leo says.
Duck shakes his head. “But who gave me the right to just—end it like that? Delete everyone in there? Shouldn’t I be convicted of—of something?”
“Perhaps now we are both war criminals,” Minerva suggests.
Duck groans and puts his head back down on the table.
“Hold up,” Leo says, pointing his spoon at Minerva. “I can play this game. Define WAR CRIMINAL.”
“It’s when you kill a bunch of people you didn’t have to,” Duck replies, his voice muffled by his elbows. “Exhibit A, punching Beacon into an alien supercomputer and deleting a bunch of dads.”
“How do you know when the violence is unnecessary, though?” Sarah asks. “Like, what are the parameters?” She looks at Minerva, who considers the question. Parameters. Every army has its own belligerence limit, she supposes. Or at least, every army should.
“I trust Duck Newton to set my parameters,” she finally says. “Since the day he refused to kill the goat man. He holds the sword.”
“He fucks it up!” Duck practically shouts. He sits up, and his eyes are red-rimmed—cheeks stained and pushed in from where he laid on his arms. “You trusted me, everyone trusted me, and I couldn’t win them over! I didn’t even try! I just—fuck.”
His shoulders are shaking. A glass bottle, a leaf in the wind. Minerva remembers getting out of her ship, alone in a wide wide sea of sand, and screaming until her breathing came in raspy and she choked on the dust.
She reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder: fingers at the curve where his upper arm starts, palm at the base of his neck. He is warm through the fabric of his uniform shirt.
“Duck Newton,” Minerva says. “You fulfilled your destiny. The one I gave you, and the one you gave yourself. You saved at least two words—likely hundreds.”
“And anyway, those spirits—in the computer, they were, like, ghosts, right?” Leo asks.
Minerva nods.
And Leo goes on: “You said that ship had been roaming the galaxy and starting wars for eons. Maybe it was mercy to take ’em out.”
“Think of the planets you saved,” Sarah says. “It works with the definition—the violence is necessary. Shit, it was in self-defense. It’s not a war crime.”
Duck shakes his head. “Yeah, I guess,” he says. “I guess you could say it was necessary. But it still feels like shit. I still killed people, even if it was angry computer ghosts. I’d never—I spent this whole thing, this whole fucking thing, I didn’t hurt anyone unless I really had to, and now I just—I blew it.”
Minerva looks at Duck. Duck looks at her. Her hand is still on his shoulder: she can feel his pulse, a faint drumbeat, where her palm rests at the base of his neck.
“Perhaps we are both war criminals, Duck Newton,” she says quietly. “But if I can find redemption, so can you.”
I swung my sword, and the stars grew brighter: I could feel them humming.
There is a song, Duck Newton says. It played in his head when I spoke to him. A lone guitar, strumming softly, feedback echoing. Like the reflection of a distant star carried a million lightyears to Earth. It played in his head, and then it grew louder. The stars circled and came closer.
I have not heard this melody, but I know how it feels. I know how it feels to see a shape across an impossible distance, then to reach out and touch it. To reach into the light, to swing your sword and pull gravity with you. To jump, knowing that you will be caught.
But I am growing sentimental. I started this narrative intending only to recount the facts, as I remember them. And here are the facts: I rebuilt my satellite. I made contact with Dr. Sarah Drake. She helped me turn the Green Bank Telescope. I expanded the portal in Duck Newton’s mind into a door. I leapt through.
And I arrived here, in Kepler, West Virginia, and—well, you all know the rest.
vi.
“And I arrived here, in Kepler, West Virginia, and—well, you all know the rest.”
She closes the notebook and stands there for a moment, silent. She is not sure what to do with her hands. She puts the notebook on the table, and then she rests her hands flat against her hips, and then that feels too confrontational so she lets them drop, palms flat.
“I think you can sit down, Minerva,” Madeline Cobb says, just as Duck Newton is starting to say, “Do you really think I’m easily breakable?”
Minerva looks from one face to the next. Duck Newton, Leo Tarkesian, Sarah Drake, Barclay Sylvain, Jake Coolice, Madeline Cobb. All the Sylvens who chose to stay in Kepler and all the humans she knows here. Duck’s living room is small, not quite built for this many people, but with the couch pushed up against the window and extra chairs pulled out it is warm, washed in golden afternoon light.
“Where can I sit?” Minerva asks. There is no room on the couch, and all the kitchen chairs are here, save the one she broke accidentally by using it as a target in training.
“On the table?” Barclay suggests. She nods, and does so.
And then, she turns to Duck. “I read you the full narrative of my life, Duck Newton, including accounts of a major war crime and decades spent alone on my planet, and the item that most stuck out to you was the moment in which I compared you to a ship in a bottle?”
“It was a good metaphor,” Jake Coolice says, as Duck’s face goes slightly red. “I liked it.”
“I liked the part about making portals with your sword,” Sarah Drake says. “Can you show me how to do that?”
“Wait, which part?” Madeline asks. “Did I miss something?”
Minerva picks the notebook back up and flips to the appropriate page to show her, and Duck gets up to get out more snacks in order to avoid further embarrassment, and they stay there as the light outside begins to fade. It was easier than she expected, reading her narrative. Like when she told Duck what happened to her planet, only wider. Like sitting on top of Mount Kepler and looking out, only all the people of the town have stepped out of their houses, and they’re all waving up at her.
Is this it? Is this what redemption feels like?
“You should keep writing,” Sarah tells her between bites of pizza, ordered when it appeared the guests had no intention of leaving soon. “You got pretty good at the metaphor stuff near the end there.”
And Minerva thinks, maybe, maybe she will.
She finds him at the farthest lake out in the forest, sitting on one of the smooth rocks at the edge by the willows. Duck Newton is not a small man, but he seems oddly childlike here in the afternoon sunlight: he is dwarfed by the water, splayed out in a glittering crescent, and the pines at attention along the far bank, and the reflections, green and blue coming together.
From what angle would she need to look at the water to see his reflection, she wonders. Would she need to become a hawk, or an eagle, or a black-capped chickadee, to soar above the pines? Or—no, she can see it now, as she walks down onto the bank. His green jacket matches the leaves.
Minerva sits down beside him.
“Hello, Duck Newton,” she says.
If he is surprised to see her, he does not show it. “Hey, Minerva.”
He’s missed lunch, and if they do not return soon, they both will miss dinner. Minerva does not voice this concern: Duck Newton can tell time from the sun’s glare on the water and the length of the trees’ shadows on the shore. He knows what he’s doing.
Instead, she takes off her sandals. His bare feet are dangling in the water, and it’s easy enough to join him. The pond is cool, refreshing down to her toes, and she admires the way the water distorts their feet—Duck’s, deep brown and wrinkled as the bark of an oak tree, and hers, longer and darker and calloused from her years in the desert.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Duck says. “About redemption.”
“What have you been thinking?” Minerva asks, after he is silent for another long minute.
“Well. It’s hard, right?” He turns to face her, and his eyes are red, as though he’s been crying. “I mean, I know, that shit shouldn’t be easy, but. It’s like, in your biography, you were in the desert for—what? A hundred years?”
“Something like that,” Minerva replies. “The cycles of my planet are not fully equivalent to yours. If I knew more astronomy, I could make a precise conversion.”
“Okay, but still,” Duck says. “That’s a long-ass time. Humans don’t even live that long, usually. And I wouldn’t survive in a desert—I mean, come on, Minerva, look at me.”
“You could survive anywhere if you set your mind to it, Duck Newton,” she tells him. But she’s smiling a little—the cadence of a joke? is this it?—and he elbows her.
“Yeah. Sure.”
They are quiet again after that. Minerva pushes her foot up against Duck’s in the water, then he splashes her in retaliation. The sun is dipping beneath the treetops, so bright it hurts to look at directly. Minerva feels that way about Duck, sometimes. About Leo, about Sarah. All the humans she knows, giving off light and warmth.
“You are right, Duck Newton,” Minerva says. “Redemption is hard, and long, and complicated. You never feel that you have done enough. I’m still not sure—even now, after everything. But—”
“Great pep talk, Minnie,” Duck says. “Real inspiring.”
“I was not finished, Duck Newton.”
“Okay, sorry, go on.”
“But. You, Duck Newton,” and she points at him, “are the most forgiving person I know. I have faith in you, that you can figure out a way to forgive yourself for Reconciliation. And, if you would like, I would be honored to help you brainstorm.”
“Brainstorm,” he echoes. “Did Aubrey teach you that one?”
And yet he is smiling, and he lets her pull him back to his feet, and he puts his hiking boots back on.
“Thank you, Minerva,” he says. “Really. I think I need to figure this out myself, but—thank you.”
“You are welcome,” she replies. “Now, can we go home for dinner? Leo Tarkesian is making macaroni and cheese.”
She is coming down the mountain when she sees him. Barclay Sylvain, the man who is Bigfoot but does not like to be called Bigfoot, a small mountain all by himself in dark jeans and a red flannel shirt. She has never seen him wear a jacket, even when the wind howls and the rain pounds.
Minerva is admiring the way his red shirt clashes with the green of the pines when he notices her: stops, rests one head on a birch on the side of the path. (And yes, she knows it’s a birch: that silvery trunk and golden leaves.)
“Hey, Minerva,” he says.
“Hello, Barclay Sylvain,” she replies. “Are you out on patrol? I believed we had completed duties now that the Quell and Reconciliation are defeated, but it is wise to—”
“No, I’m not on patrol.” He reaches into the pack on his back, pulls out a metal water bottle and takes a drink.
“Then why are you here?”
“Personal reasons.”
He puts the water bottle back and straightens like he’s ready to move on, but she stands still.
“Show me,” she says.
He looks at her, long and hard. She stands, feet planted. Her heels dig into the path: only one layer of wood sandal between skin and dirt, and then beneath that rock, melted rock, fire.
“Alright,” he says at last. “Why not.”
And so she steps aside, he passes, and she follows him. Just before the trail starts winding up to the peak, he veers off to the left, towards lower ground. She follows through taller maples and birches, then a spot of pines, then over a stream swelling its banks, and then the forest opens. It’s strange, almost as though manufactured: a circle of pines, tall and angular, like palace guards with their spears up. There are canvas walls on the other side of the clearing leading towards what was once the FBI compound, and a few boxes and desks arranged in a loose semicircle, but they are all abandoned now—grass growing soft and dark green around them, pulling anything that does not belong back into the earth.
And in the center: a stone archway. It reminds Minerva of Oasis City, in the years after she returned. Sculpted of old stones, each one fitting perfectly into the next, shimmering faintly in the afternoon sunlight. Shimmering, as though waiting—as though nobody has come through in years, but someone could any minute, so it’s staying polished, just in case.
“You can see it, right?” Barclay asks.
She nods. “This is where the portal formed. I remember it from the final battle.”
He says yes, and walks closer. He reaches out one hand to touch it—and the forest holds its breath for a moment, as though the very earth is about to be lifted and shaken—but it is only a touch. Skin on stone.
Minerva takes a step closer, too, and plants her sword in the grass. Watching.
“There was one like this in the city, too,” she says. “Only it was in a tunnel, where there used to be a train—what did Leo Tarkesian call it? A subway.”
“Yeah, he told me about that.” Barclay keeps his hand steady, then moves it: skims his palm over the side of the arch and up to the top. He is just tall enough to keep his hand flat, parallel to the center stone.
“Why do you think our worlds were connected, Minerva?” he asks. “Why us?”
“There was an algorithm, Barclay Sylvain. The spaceship that we traveled to, the hivemind calling itself Reconciliation—”
He shakes his head. “I know. I mean, I’ve heard what happened, I’ve been at the meetings. There was an algorithm. But it still seems random to me—like, it could’ve been any other planet with similar aggression levels, right? So then, why us? What do you feel?”
It’s a strange question. Simple. But it is no stranger than the rest of this: an archway, built by no hands. A forest, tree branches waving softly in the breeze, trunks expanding and contracting. A world, not yet tainted, with life to spare.
“Do you believe in destiny, Barclay?” she asks.
He laughs—a loud, barking thing, echoing in the quiet forest. “What, like that shit you told Duck? The Chosen? It’s a nice story.”
“Yes,” she says. “A useful story. I feel that we are all connected. Earth, Sylvain, my planet or what’s left of it. It wasn’t our choice, and it is a waste of energy to speculate or philosophize. But we can take advantage of it. Learn from each other.”
She takes another step forward, two, three, four—close enough that she can put a hand on the archway, too. It is warm, warmer than it should be even after a sunny morning. Humming with a melody just out of reach.
“So, the thing about Duck’s destiny,” Barclay says.
“It’s true, if I tell it well enough.”
He laughs again, the sound ringing out among the trees. And then he steps back and smiles at her.
“You know, Minerva,” he says, “I thought you were weird at first—no offense—but I’m glad you’re here. Guarding our forest. Giving us a destiny, even if it’s kinda a made-up one.”
She steps back too, and then she bows to him, long and low.
“It is an honor to be here,” she tells him. And he does not flinch, does not laugh at her—he only nods, and begins leading the way back.
Leo Tarkesian keeps practicing with his sword.
The battle is won, the destinies all fulfilled. And yet Minerva sees him: every night after sunset, after the grocery store is closed and the doors locked tight, he goes into the compound out behind his apartment building and begins to stretch. He has a practiced sequence for it: she knows, because she taught it to him.
Start with stretches: bend your knees, then straighten. Touch your toes, then raise your arms to the sky. After that, lunges across the yard and back. Three or four footwork drills. Roll your shoulders back, roll them forward. And then, only then, after every muscle in your body is begging for it: pick up your sword.
“You don’t have to do this, Leo Tarkesian,” she tells him one night, two weeks after Reconciliation. The moon is waning, but still casts enough light for a conversation. Stars and fireflies twinkle softly.
“I know,” he replies.
He carries on through the drills: lunges, parries, and all the rest. She might be imagining it, but she thinks he’s holding his spine a little straighter, because she’s watching so close. Pushing forward with a little more force. Keeping his breathing even, even as she can hear the way it deepens. Lungs expanding.
She watches as he runs through his drills, and then he sits down beside her on the stone step where the patio meets the grass. He sighs a little as he stretches out his legs, takes a long drink from his water bottle.
“You haven’t stopped, either,” he says. “I saw you running drills this morning. And you went on patrol yesterday.”
She smiles—something like laughter filling her chest. “Of course you noticed. I taught you well, Leo Tarkesian.”
“Something like that.” He goes quiet for a moment, takes another drink of his water. Then: “Was Duck telling the truth? About our destiny being fake?”
Minerva sighs. She looks at him—studies his profile, the long lines of it, the way it’s weighed down by wrinkles. Human lives are so short, so easily combustible, like dry branches in a fire.
“Duck Newton never lies,” she says.
“I know,” Leo replies. He won’t look at her. “I mean—he’s incapable. But, our destiny—I kept it cool in there, you know, for the kids, but. Fuck, Minerva.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Do you know? Because that was my whole life—my uncle’s store, my place in New York, every relationship I had—all of it, for this stupid idea of destiny that didn’t really—didn’t choose me in the first place. Fuck!”
He leans down: draws his knees up and buries his head in his arms. Leo is old, for a human, or getting there, but sand off the wrinkles and dye the gray hairs and—he’s still that teenager Minerva knew, shaking as he stared at his reflection in his sword.
“Fuck,” he says again. “Maybe I read too many fantasy books as a kid. I wanted it too much.”
Minerva wants to touch him. And that’s the miracle, isn’t it—that she can.
So, she touches him. She lifts one arm, smooth and even, as though it’s just a stretch, as though it’s opening a portal, and she reaches around his shoulders. He is warm, slightly damp from the exertion of his workout, and shaking. He relaxes beneath her. She keeps still.
“For what it’s worth, Leo Tarkesian,” she says. Slowly, carefully. “I am sorry. I made you one of my soldiers. I had been carrying my own burden for so long, I forgot how heavy it was. I forgot, and I handed it to you.”
“Thank you,” he says, his voice muffled by his arms. “I mean—I’m not mad at you. Not really. I wish you’d told me. I wonder what my life would’ve been like if I said no, or if I’d read less fucking Lord of the Rings as a kid. But then, it’s like—I was thinking about this, when I did the drills today.”
And here he lifts his head and turns to her. His eyes are dark, deep, as sharp as they were at nineteen but brighter.
“I was thinking,” he says. “If it wasn’t me, it would’ve been someone else. Some other kid in New York. And I’m glad it was me. I got to save the world for, like—thirty years, there. It’s not a bad trade-off.”
“Leo Tarkesian,” Minerva says. For a moment, that’s all she can say. So she say sit again, she lets it sing out. Leo, short and solid as a punctuation mark, and then Tarkesian, rough and sharp as an answering shout.
He looks at her. He’s smiling. Not the sharp smirk of teenage Leo, just killed his first monster, but the confident grin of grocery store Leo, just perfected his pyramid of soup cans. A pyramid of soup cans—is there anything more noble, more important, on the entirety of planet Earth?
“I meant it, in my narrative,” Minerva says. “When I said you taught me what it means to wield a sword, to really understand it. You did. You do.”
“I know,” Leo replies.
And then he jumps up from the stone step, he says, “Want to come up to my place and have a beer, Minerva?”
“Leo Tarkesian,” Minerva says, “I would love nothing more.”
Dr. Sarah Drake takes Minerva to the Green Bank Telescope. It is her first time back there since the day she arrived.
“I wanted to take you sooner,” Sarah says over her shoulder, unlocking the door to the lab, “but the FBI revved up security ’cause of the whole top of the mountain thing coming off, y’know, and anyway now Dave’s out on vacation and Sun Li has been taking early shifts so she can help out her mom, so this worked out great. Come on,” she adds, when she sees that Minerva isn’t moving. “Let’s go, I’ve got something to show you.”
Minerva has been here before—this row of monitors, these stiff metal chairs, this chalkboard with orbital diagrams and chore charts pushed up next to each other. But it’s different like this, tangible. To actually have her feet on the ground. To reach out and poke at one monitor showing an abstract diagram in a funny purple color that reminds her of Duck’s favorite cereal. The monitor beeps in response.
“Don’t do that,” Sarah says. “All this shit is touchscreen now, one wrong finger and you could delete years of research.”
Minerva stops, frozen, in the center of the room.
Sarah turns and grins at her. She has a nice smile, lopsided—it widens her narrow face, reveals dimples in her cheeks. “Okay, not really,” she says. “It was a joke, Minnie, we have backups and everything, c’mon.”
Still, she has to press the monitor herself and let it beep even more aggressively before Minerva will agree to go. It is a privilege to be here, after all—to know Dr. Sarah Drake, the smartest woman in the world or perhaps even the galaxy, and to have taught her to hold a sword.
Sarah takes Minerva through the monitor room, down a short corridor, and into the main observatory. Minerva remembers this, too: the arched roof, panels wide at the base and sloping narrower up to a single point. The telescope itself, reaching up. It reminds her of a mast on one of her ships, if the mast were ten times bigger and decked out with gears and lenses.
“So, it’s the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world,” Sarah says. “We scan the galaxy, sometimes looking for particular phenomena if we get a request from a scientist, and sometimes just looking for anything interesting.”
Minerva stands, quiet, looking. The telescope reminds her of a mast, or of the satellite reaching up from her lab building in the desert. It’s only a metal tube with some panels and lenses and current running through, and yet it is able to reach up and touch galaxies, to wave at them and say hello and ask for their secrets. This is something Minerva loves about humans: they are always reaching.
“Can I touch it?” she asks.
Sarah looks at her for a moment, and then she shrugs and says, “Sure.”
Minerva takes five steps forward. She goes slowly. And then she reaches one hand out and puts her palm to the base of the telescope. It is cold, smooth, and humming faintly. Like the archway in the woods.
She stays there for a long time, until something catches her eye on the other side of the room: a desk full of monitors and printed readouts, and, next to it, a display case labeled “The Hall of Fame.”
“Oh, that’s just our way of holding onto some of the weirder stuff we’ve found,” Sarah says as Minerva goes up to it.
The case is mostly laminated photos and old monitors, showing star systems and nebulae in odd colors and shapes. Minerva doesn’t recognize any of them, but the post-it notes labeling each one suggest that the earth scientists have found reflections of Earth up there in space. There are a few metal boxes, too, with little “play” buttons, labeled things like “Baseball” and “Prince 1982” and “Interstellar Blues.”
Minerva stops, looking at that last one. Her finger hovers over the play button.
“What is it?” Sarah asks.
“This music piece,” Minerva says, pointing at it. “Duck Newton told me, when I contacted him, he would hear something in his head—a slow guitar, growing and then fading. He called it ‘Interstellar Blues.’”
“‘Interstellar Blues,’” Sarah repeats. She comes closer, puts her hand on Minerva’s shoulder. Minerva feels it: a warm pressure, solid and tangible. Like the telescope, and the floor beneath her feet, and the planet beneath that.
Sarah reaches out and presses play.
And there it is: the guitar, the slow build. It sounds almost like a march, or like the aftermath of a march. Like a march played by one solitary musician whose band has left her, but she cannot let the melody die out so she keeps going, she continues forward. Like a lone warrior in the desert, building columns, looking for someone she can save.
“I heard it too,” Sarah says. “Behind you, like an echo, when you asked to borrow my hands. And then, when we moved the telescope, it got louder.”
It’s a reflection, or an extension. This guitar song is Minerva’s voice, her hands, her swinging sword transposed. If she is a comet, speeding towards earth, this melody is her fiery tail.
The song keeps playing as Sarah leads Minerva back to the telescope, sits her down at the observation seat.
“Do you know how this works?” Sarah asks.
Minerva nods. It’s not one of Mira Five’s satellites, but it runs by the same principles. She peers through the lens: swirling galaxies, all dancing in white. It’s like looking at Kepler from the mountain’s shorn-off peak: all this life, glittering from a distance. It makes her dizzy. How many people are out there, just breathing?
“Okay, so when the feds cleared out and I knew you could visit, I started searching for something,” Sarah says. “Don’t move, keep looking. Don’t move.”
She starts muttering numbers, and Minerva stays dutifully put as the view through the lens shifts over, then in, then down, then in, then over again, then back, then in, in again, and finally—stops on a tiny ring of light.
“Okay,” Sarah says again, breathless. “I think this is it. I don’t know if you’ll recognize it, but—”
“I do,” Minerva says. She’s seen this from the window of a ship, hurtling back to report on a mission completed. She’s seen it in her dreams, and when she sits on top of the mountain and closes her eyes. One sun, six planets orbiting. The fifth, that dot no bigger than her fingertip, spinning all on its own. If she could zoom in further, if she could increase the image quality, she’d see a low desert dotted with ruins, strings of mountains, and a wide, western ocean, reaching the land at a low cape where, perhaps, the amluna still circle and the fish have returned, glittering and new.
“I know it,” Minerva says, and her voice is rough, unfamiliar—something in her eye clouds the view. “I know it, I do.”
There is a push at her side, and then Sarah is sitting on the cool, metal bench with Minerva, leaning her head on Minerva’s shoulder.
“I wish I could do more,” Sarah says.
Minerva shakes her head, leans back and puts a hand over her face so that she isn’t dirtying the lens.
“No, this is enough,” Minerva says. “This is enough. This is everything.”
Duck Newton asks Minerva to meet him on the peak of Mount Kepler, just before sunset.
“I’m going to the Amazon,” he says.
She sits down beside him. “The Amazon. What is that?”
“Well, it’s not really a what—more of a where. But also kinda a what, I guess, if you—”
“Duck Newton.”
He looks at her. Duck Newton. Minerva’s charge, her warrior, her only pupil in two hundred years to look her in the eyes and tell her, no. She knows the lines of his face as well as she knows the weight of her sword or the number of trees on the path up to this peak.
“The Amazon,” he says. “It’s a rainforest, the biggest one in the world. And it’s in trouble—there are tons of fires, and illegal mining, and this absolutely evil guy is president of Brazil—I don’t really know all the politics of it, honestly. But I know they need help.”
“And you are going to help,” Minerva says.
“Yeah.”
Duck looks out, and Minerva follows him. The sun is just starting to set, the light going gold and pink at the edges. The town is spread below in glittering miniature, past the trees and the ponds and the crickets, starting to sing. Minerva can recognize all the buildings easily now: Leo’s general store, the Cryptonomica, the apartment building that has become her home, the telescope in the distance, Amnesty Lodge open for business once more. She wonders, as she has before, how many times Duck has sat and looked at this view She wonders what it is like for him to see it: he’s lived in this town for his whole life. Does that familiarity cast the trees and buildings in another color? Does he know the shapes better, or are they more unfamiliar, this far away?
“Yeah,” he says again. “I contacted a woman who runs an environmental activist group down there—patrolling the forest for destructive activity, keeping track of endangered species, some replanting, stuff like that. I’m gonna go and help them in any way I can. I leave tomorrow.”
The light is fading. Within an hour, the sun will dip below the treetops, the sky will go from pink to orange to purple and finally dark blue, like the deepest point of the Western Ocean. The lights will come on in the houses. The trees in the forest will rest their leaves. The crickets will sing. Maybe moonlight will shine on an archway surrounded by pines and memories. Maybe a bear will teach its cubs to hunt, maybe a pack of deer will escape a hungry coyote. Maybe a chestnut tree will grow just wide enough that blight will begin to set in, or maybe it will escape the disease for another year. Maybe moonlight will shine on the archway, or maybe it will shine on the water at Duck Newton’s favorite pond, painting another world on the surface, quiet and inviting.
Minerva is there on the water, and she is there at the archway, and she is here, sitting and looking out. She is here, and if she wished, she could reach out and take Duck Newton’s hand.
“Tonight, before you go,” she says, “would you like to play Mario Kart and make hot cocoa?”
Duck Newton grins. He stands, and offers her his hand. “Let’s do it.”
Duck Newton departed for the Amazon Rainforest on September 21st, 2019.
The night before he left, we played Mario Kart. Mario Kart is a strange game in which one pilots a tiny car on a fantastical track. I tend to overshoot the road and land in water, or fire, or the far reaches of space, depending on the level we’re playing. Sarah Drake is teaching me to drive with more finesse. That night, she won ten rounds, Jake Coolice won five, his friend Hollis won three, and Duck won two.
While the teens played, Duck instructed me in the fixing of hot cocoa. I had the proportions correct, he said, but I burned the milk. This error, while inconvenient in the moment, is forgivable. I am still learning.
vii.
Duck Newton meets Minerva at the airport.
She sees his hat from across the terminal, faded green, a green that has been sitting in the sun all afternoon. His jacket is the same color: familiar.
The Amazon Rainforest is green, too. She could see it from the plane, a rolling sea of trees coming together with a broad river snaking through the center. There’s something like four hundred billion trees in that forest, Duck told her. Thousands of different species. Each one reaching for the sun, converting light to sugar, feeding ants and anacondas and everything in between. Four hundred billion trees, and she is going to learn every single one of their names.
Minerva runs across the airport. It’s easy enough: she has no bags, no questions, nothing to declare but the sword carefully packed in bubble wrap on her back. She is here to help the forest, she tells the customs agent, and he stares at her, but he lets her through.
Later, there will be soup—not French onion, they don’t make that here, but a stew with beans and pork—and there will be new names to learn, new field guides to read and earmark pages and write notes in the margins. Duck will sit with Minerva outside the compound and, together, they will try to match the hoots and whistles out in the forest with the animals they are newly sworn to protect. She will ask him, each time she makes a guess, is that right, and he will say, maybe, yes, I don’t know, and they will toast with their warm beers to the species they can’t name and the species they can, and they will toast to Leo Tarkesian and Sarah Drake and Aubrey Lady Flame, and they will toast to Sylvain and the Quell and Reconciliation. They will sit and talk until the sun rises over the horizon, painting the massive trees in pink and orange and gold.
And now—now, Minerva runs. She leaps across the barrier, and Duck Newton catches her. He is warm, and solid, and smiling.
“Hello, Duck Newton.”
“Hey, Minerva.”
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely ’twas, that God himself
Scarce seeméd there to be.O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
’Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company!— The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)