The latch was louder than she wanted it to be, no matter how gently she opened it. It felt like it was echoing in the empty house, but she’d spent too much time waiting already. She walked carefully, rolling her weight from carefully placed heel to her toe. Xan lay still on his table. She opened the back door, stepped out to the shed. When she pulled the cart out, she was almost surprised to see that the sampling drone was still in the shed. It seemed like an artifact from some other life, like it had been hidden there for years and not hours. Funny how time worked like that. She ran her fingertips over the repaired shell with its new veins.
Xan’s body was heavier than she expected. She’d carried him before sometimes, but he’d always been helping her, at least a little. He wasn’t stiff anymore, and she staggered a little getting him through the back doorway. It got easier when she stopped trying to carry him less like a boy and more like a sack of soil. When she dropped him into the cart, his head hit the side with a thump.
“Sorry,” she whispered as if he had felt anything. “But really, this is your fault. When this is done, you’re going to have to do my chores for me from now on.”
Xan’s eyes had opened a little. Tiny wet slits hidden behind his eyelashes, catching the starlight. His arms had folded under him when she put him down, twisted and bent at angles that made her own shoulder ache to look at. There wasn’t time to make him comfortable, though. She fumbled with the cart’s handle and started down the path, then paused and snuck back into the house. She pulled a bag of fruit and some rice bars out of the pantry, and a bottle of filtered water from the refrigerator. She tucked them beside her brother’s corpse, took up the cart handle, and started out.
Night on Earth was bright. That’s what they said. Their moon shone like a kind of second, crappy sun. Cities were big enough to drown out the stars with their extra glow. She’d seen pictures of it all, but that wasn’t what it had been like for her. On Laconia, day was bright and night was dark. The wide, smeary glow of the galactic disk was the brightest thing in the sky, and she could only navigate by it roughly. Enough to know which direction she was going. Two stick moons floated against the stars, shimmering and shifting, swimming toward each other in the darkness above the sky.
Cara put her head down and pulled. She’d been down this path so many times at so many times of day and in such different weathers that her body knew the way even when she couldn’t exactly see it. She knew the sound of the grass and the water, the places where the breeze changed shape, the smell of broken soil and
the pattering of bug honey on the lower fronds of the trees. She could have made the trip with her eyes closed, and with the darkness, she very nearly did.
At the pond, a rock deer lifted its head at her approach, its scales shifting and reflecting starlight like a little slice of sky that had come down for a drink. It was too dark to see its eyes.
“Shoo,” Cara said, and the animal turned and launched itself into the darkness, tramping through the underbrush and then running away faster than a soldier’s truck, even though there were no roads. Cara stopped. A film of sweat covered her forehead, and her armpits felt swampy. She was here, though. She’d made it.
“Hello?” she shouted. “Are you there?”
The darkness didn’t answer back. Even the night animals and bugs went quiet, like they were listening with her. Now that she was here, the plan that had seemed so simple was showing its holes. For her to take Xan to the dogs, the dogs had to be there. If they weren’t…
“Hello?” Her voice sounded thin, even to her. Stretched and desperate. “Please, are you there?”
She parked the cart in the soft ground at the water’s edge and stepped toward the trees. The already black night grew darker. There wasn’t even starlight here. Only an absence, like looking straight into the pupil of an eye as big as the world. She put her arms out, fingertips waving for the fronds and scrub that she knew was there but couldn’t see. Her eyes ached from trying to see anything. Her ears rang with the silence.
“Please? I need help.”
Nothing answered. Despair she hadn’t known she was fighting washed into her. If the dogs weren’t there, then Xan was gone. And gone forever. And he couldn’t be. Grief shifted in her belly, shook her legs and hands. The dogs had been there for Momma bird. They couldn’t leave her brother dead, and just save a fucking sunbird.
Her parents would wake up. They’d see the body was gone, and her with it. They’d be angry, and what would she tell them? What would she say to make them understand that the rules they knew weren’t her rules, that Xan didn’t have to be dead. They’d stop her. She balled her hands into tight, aching fists. She couldn’t let them stop her.
“Hey!” she shouted. And then again, loud enough for the air to scrape at her throat. “Hey! I need you! I need help! It’s important!”
The silence was absolute.
And then it wasn’t.
She couldn’t tell how far away it was. With nothing to see, sound could deceive her, but somewhere ahead of her, a hiss and crackle of scrub being pushed aside. The rock deer maybe. Or a shambler. Or any of the thousands of uncategorized animals of Laconia that were still waiting to be named.
Or the dogs.
Uncertainty came over her in a wave. It was too big and too strange. Like she’d waved at the sun and it had waved back. Maybe this had been a bad idea, but it was too late now. She steeled herself to face whatever came from the black. The tramping drew nearer, louder. It multiplied and spread. They were coming.
Something touched her hand. A gentle pressure that tingled like a mild electric shock.
Cara dropped to her knees and threw her arms around the dog, hugging the strange, too-solid flesh close to her. It was warm against her cheek, and rough. It smelled like cardamom and soil. It went still, like it wasn’t sure what do with her affection and joy, and it stayed still until she released it.
“Over here,” she said, stumbling back to the pond. She gestured in the darkness. And maybe the dogs could see her, because they followed. Starlight glimmered in their bulging eyes.
Xan’s funeral whites glowed in the darkness, a paler shadow. The dogs gathered around him, and it was like watching what was left of Xan dissolve. Darkness consuming darkness.
“He’s my brother,” Cara said. “A truck hit him. It killed him, like with Momma bird. But I need him back. And you brought her back, so you can bring him back too, can’t you? I mean you can, can’t you?”
She was babbling, and the dogs didn’t respond. Mostly blind, she stepped in close, her hands on their backs. The dogs were still and quiet as statues. And then one began making its ki-ka-ko call, and the others picked it up until it felt like a choir around her. Until her head spun with it. She sank to her knees to keep from losing her balance. In the sky, the stick moons glittered green and white and blue. The stars looked warmer than their lights.
Xan bobbed up to the surface of the darkness. The dogs were carrying him, one under him bearing his weight on its back. Others holding his arms and legs to steady him as they walked.
“You can, can’t you? You can fix him?”