Beacon 23: Part Five: Visitor Read Online Free PDF Page A

places her hands on top of mine. My hands are bound to my legs. I curl a finger around one of her fingers.
    “They’re using you,” she says. “Don’t let them.”
    I listen. I strain to hear everything. It’s not me that’s an empath, and it’s not my warthen who’s an empath. It’s all of us. But there’s a scab over that sense, like the shame of not crying in front of older boys. Something we protect. We dare not share, so we dare not hear. Claire was right: it was something that happened in the trenches. It was something that happened the day I refused to set off that bomb. I’d seen too many children like me die for nothing, and I could feel and hear all those unborn alien minds, not yet scabbed over, still able to listen to the cosmos the way the GWB listens to the cosmos, and they pleaded with me not to do it. They asked for peace. And I gave it to them.
    The Ryph have something of this sense. Warthens, too. This great empathy. This rawness. This open wound.
    “There are people on both sides who want this war to end,” I tell Claire. “There are Ryph like me who are sick of the killing. Some of them are in high places. I think this guy, the larger one, is a prince or something like that. There are others. But so few of us. With no armies. Just unarmed civilians. Shameful pacifists. And even those in power who want to end the war, they don’t trust the other side. There’s no way to stand down. Nothing anyone will believe.”
    “What are you talking about?” Claire asks.
    “A trade,” I say. “An even swap. A gesture to those who don’t want to fight anymore, from one side to the other.”
    “What do they want you to do?”
    “I told you, they want me to destroy our fleet. And then they’ll destroy their own.”
     
     

• 7 •
     
    Two hundred and twenty million lives—a settled planet’s worth of young men and women—hurtling through space.
    I can feel them.
    I touch the button that will kill them.
    Wires run to the dome behind me that brings me peace.
    Hanging from my neck, a small rock trembles in fear.
    “Are you sure about this?” Rocky asks.
    He knows I’m not.
    There’s a clock on the wall ticking down the minutes. There’s a picture of a lighthouse keeper there as well. He and I stand watch over rocks. We let ships pass without thinking what’s in them.
    Deep down, I know that I’ll do nothing. I’ve been here before, with the power to annihilate. I keep these thoughts buried deep so the Ryph don’t know. One of the Lords stands watch over me. The other has taken Claire to her beacon. There’s another switch wired to her GWB, a finger hovering over it missing its nail. There’s no way this happens. Claire’s last words to me echo in my ears:
    “You can’t believe them.”
    Sitting there, contemplating treason upon treason, I nearly laugh out loud at how ridiculous it all seems. It’s something I felt on the front before, when the kinetic rounds were coming down from orbital artillery and throwing up geysers of hot earth and shrapnel, and somehow you’re wading through it all and handing death to those on the other side, and you just have to laugh. The orange blossoms of HE rounds, and the curving tracers like glowing and screaming bees, and the howling jets diving through atmo and dropping hell. The fact that you are alive is hilarious. The fact that the universe can come to this, that anyone finds it normal, is comically absurd.
    I remember Scarlett, naïve Scarlett, the equally absurd. I remember the bounty on her life. I remember the risks she took to get to me and the impossible task she expected of me. I remember, vividly, that she knew things she shouldn’t. She knew what had happened on Yata. She forced me to admit it, but she already knew.
    Looking up at the Ryph, whose hand matches my scars, I think about the fact that he was there. He’s the only other soul who knows what happened that day. This explains how Scarlett knew. It’s because he knew