Em led the Birthday Children to a bitter victory, clearing the city of enemy soldiers, only to find that the Uchmal attack had been a distraction. Tanks, artillery and tens of thousands of alien troops had landed deep in the jungle.
An overwhelming force that marched toward the city, killing anything and everything in its path.
The rocket roar is already fading.
Above the blazing tree line and billowing black smoke that blocks any view of Uchmal, O. Vanev watches a cluster of lights streak high into the dusk sky. Three larger lights, rising rapidly, heading for the stratosphere, chased by a dozen smaller lights. The three larger lights: the ships of his people, deserting the planet. The smaller lights: enemy fighters giving chase.
He knows what this means. He doesn’t know if B. Bureau, Y. Pajari and B. Marija truly understand, but reality will hit them soon enough.
Four people, barely into their second year of actual life, and they are all as good as dead.
Physically, they are all thirteen years old.
None of them will see fourteen.
“They’re leaving,” Bureau says. “How can Em leave us?”
Bureau’s young face is streaked with ash and mud, flecked with bits of dead leaves. He holds a hatchet in his right hand. His left hand holds nothing—it’s burned to a glistening, blistered, red and black claw that he keeps close to his chest. Haunted, empty eyes. In the last four hours, Bureau has faced death. He has killed.
All of them have killed.
They’ve watched their friends die horribly, screaming for someone to save them, screaming for mothers and fathers they have never known.
Vanev wonders if he will scream the same way when the Wasps come for him, when one of their bullets punches through him, like the one that killed S. Eadburg, or when one of their knives drives into his heart, like the one that killed J. Nikole.
Will he cry out for his mother? He never met her. Or his father. He doesn’t even know what they looked like. He has only a vague sense of their existence, shadowy memories that refuse to crystalize.
Because they aren’t his parents. Not really. They are the parents of his progenitor, a person that travelled for a thousand years to reach this place. Vanev is a copy of that person; Vanev is a receptacle. He was never meant to live at all.
But none of it matters now—Em has abandoned them.
“We need to move,” Marija says. “The Wasps will be hunting for us.”
Marija’s mud-covered face makes her eyes seem shockingly white. She holds one of the strange Wasp rifles in her arms; it looks far too large for her teenage body. Before the battle began, she covered herself in mud and ash—both on the exposed skin of her face and hands, and all over her black coveralls—then wrapped herself in the blue vines, camouflage that let her fade into the jungle. The mud and ash mostly covers the circle-star symbol embedded in her forehead. That symbol signifies she was bred for war, engineered for bloodshed.
Vanev has a different mark on his forehead: a plain circle. Y. Pajari and B. Bureau have the same symbol. They are all Empties— engineered to work, not fight—yet Em gave the Empties weapons, sent them into the streets and the jungle to battle the invaders.
Because everyone had to fight.
Is Em on one of the shuttles streaking for orbit? Probably.
She gave the order, the order that Vanev and the others followed, yet she is undoubtedly alive.
Alive, because she ran.
“They left us,” Bureau says, his voice cracking, maybe from the smoke, from the pain, or from puberty. “It’s all over. We’re dead.”
Bureau gets it. Will Marija and Pajari? Or will Vanev have to explain it to them?
The enemy is overwhelming. They have more weapons, more soldiers and more technology.
Em knew this was a battle that could not be won. The only way for the Birthday Children to survive was to flee Omeyocan, abandon the very planet they had been created to live upon.
The shuttles in the city center hadn’t been ready for evacuation. Vanev and the others—everyone, really, who wasn’t involved in prepping the shuttles—had marched into the jungle to fight the aliens.
Em had called it a “delaying tactic.” The goal of the battle wasn’t to win; it was to slow the enemy long enough for the shuttles to fuel up, to load supplies and people, then leave Omeyocan behind forever.
The shuttles were the only way off the planet.
Now they were gone.
Bureau was right; it was over. Only one question remained—how long would Vanev and the others survive? On a planet overrun by alien soldiers, in a jungle ablaze, he knew the answer: not long.
“Em will come back for us,” Pajari says, her voice so weak Vanev can barely make out her words over the flames and the rockets and his own coughing.
Pajari is on the ground, one hand clutching her bloody stomach. An hour ago, maybe more, maybe less, a Wasp artillery round had hit a tree, sending out an explosive hail of wood shards that killed two people. One shard had punched into Pajari’s belly. She was still alive… but for how much longer?
“Em will come back,” Pajari says again, staring up at the tiny lights steadily vanishing into the night sky. “She promised.”
Em promised no such thing. Her orders had been simple: fight hard, slow the Wasps down, and when the retreat signal sounded, get back to Uchmal as fast as possible.
Vanev and the others had heard the signal. They’d retreated as ordered, but had been slowed by Pajari. She had to be carried, each step causing her to cry out in pain. Then they’d run into several Wasp stragglers. The brief firefight had caused another delay. When the four Birthday Children finally killed the stragglers, they’d rushed for the city—only to find a massive blaze blocking their way. A spreading wall of flame too thick to go through, instead they’d desperately tried to go around.
One delay too many.
“Wasps control this area,” Marija says. “We have to move away from the city, hide deeper in the jungle.”
Somewhere in the shimmering flames, the crack of a falling branch, the whoosh of a burning weight hitting the ground. The air grows hotter by the second. Vanev is sweating. Soon this small clearing will be surrounded by fire.
He coughs again. It hurts. Something wrong in his lungs. He’s breathed in too much smoke.
“No,” Pajari says. “We have to stay near Uchmal. They’ll come back for us.”
Marija looks to the clearing’s edges, searching the flames for any sign of the enemy. She’s coughing, too; not as bad as Vanev is, but the smoke is getting to her.
“Ammo check,” she says. “Sound off.”
Pajari doesn’t have a gun. Neither does Bureau—his only weapon is the hatchet.
Vanev looks at his rifle, still leaning against the tree. How many rounds did he fire? He closes his eyes, trying to remember the firefight with the Wasp stragglers. He knows he hit two. One died instantly. The other had taken a round in the chest. Too weak to fight back, it had made strange noises as Vanev hammered its head with the rifle butt, hitting it over and over again, continuing to smash the broken pulp until Bureau had grabbed him, yanked him away. If not for Bureau, Vanev might still be back there, screaming, smashing, turning the strange alien flesh into yellowish paste.
“Vanev!”
He lurches, startled back into the moment. Marija is staring at him.
“Ammo count,” she says again.
He remembers firing eight times. “Two rounds left. No reloads.”
Marija looks to the others.
“Pajari? Bureau? Any rounds on you? I know you dropped your weapons.” Marija says dropped your weapons as if it is the greatest sin that could ever be.