“Psh.” Zhade ducked his chin.
“I don’t know you,” Andra said. “You could be anyone, and bragging about being banished from your hometown isn’t a great recommendation.”
Zhade looked affronted, started spluttering an argument, but Andra cut him off.
“I owe you nothing. Thanks for waking me, but I didn’t ask you to, and honestly . . .” She took a deep breath. “. . . I probably would have been better off left in that ’tank. I’m not a goddess or a sorcer or whatever, and I certainly can’t save anyone. I’m just a normal girl in a—” She laughed under her breath, kicking her foot lightly against her ’tank. “—a ridiculous situation, and all I want now is to figure out what happened to my family and try to get a ride back home—”
Her voice caught. She swallowed, thinking of home. Of Earth.
Earth: the blue-and-green ball hanging in space, third planet from Sol. But also Earth: the scent of rain in spring and the sound of leaves crunching in autumn. The park where she and Oz would race drones. Her favorite sushi restaurant. Getting hit with a blast of cold water when the shower temp’con glitched. The wall of pre-books in her room. Warm socks.
One thousand years. All of that would be gone now or changed beyond recognition. She didn’t have a home to go back to. She felt the hot smart of tears welling in her eyes. Zhade didn’t notice, and Lew pretended not to.
“I can’t go with you,” she mumbled. One tear slid free and she quickly swiped it away.
Zhade blinked into the desert wind, then nodded seriously. “Certz, certz.” He stood up with a groan, dusting off his pants. “I was hoping, but fishes and wishes, marah? It’s your fate to decide.”
At the bottom of the hill, there was a high-pitched cry. One of the children had stabbed a knife into the fox/dog. The animal whimpered, and the child—a girl of about six—twisted the knife until the animal fell silent. Andra gasped, covering her mouth to hold in a scream. The other children whined words she couldn’t understand.
“I spoze her fam will have meat tonight.” Zhade didn’t look at Andra. Instead, he watched the girl haul the carcass across the desert. “If she were in Eerensed, she wouldn’t have to worry. We have full bars meat. Angels to cook for us. And a gods’ dome to protect us from pockets.”
Zhade turned to go, but one of the words in his strange dialect cut through the fog in Andra’s mind.
“A, uh, gods’ dome? Was it always there?”
On this strange planet where ’bots were angels and a girl in stasis was a goddess, a gods’ dome must be a bio’dome. And this city Zhade talked about wasn’t replete with magic—or gifts from benevolent gods—but with technology.
Zhade shook his head, a ghost of a smirk tugging at his lips, and Andra felt like she’d somehow stepped into a trap. “Neg. The First created it.”
“The First what?” Andra asked.
“The First Goddess,” he said simply. “Did you imagine you were the sole one?”
Andra’s breath hitched, her heart stopped. Other “goddesses”? That could mean other colonists like her, who hadn’t woken with the others. People from her time. From Earth. Too many questions sifted through her head, and she spluttered out the first one she could catch. “How many?”
Zhade shrugged, but the movement was anything but casual. “Three we reck. The First was the goddess of knowledge and light,” he recited. “The Second brought us chaos and fright. The Third—”
“And the other two? They were like me?”
“Impatient?”
“Frozen. In a ’tank.”
The side of Zhade’s mouth twitched. “Certz. Immortal and unchanging and powerful.”
Maybe Andra wasn’t the only colonist left. She didn’t want to hope, but perhaps these other goddesses were women she knew. Whoever this First was, she’d created a fully functioning bio’dome. You had to be a certified genius to do that. There were a handful of people Andra could think of from her time who were capable of something like that. And one of them was her mother.
But the ’bot had said Andra’s mother was dead. Maybe it was mistaken, or misinterpreting data. ’Bots weren’t omniscient after all; they could only recite the information fed to them. And they weren’t AI; they couldn’t deduce. Someone had sent Zhade to find Andra, and who would do that, if not her own mother? It was too much to hope for—that she had some family left—and she tried to tamp down the thought.
“I’ll go with you,” she said, and watched Zhade’s smile spread.
Something about it didn’t seem genuine. Too many teeth.
“But you’ll tell me everything you can about the goddesses on the way.”
Zhade’s smile twitched, showing a single dimple in his left cheek. He blinked slowly. “I’ll tell you as much as I can.” He gave Lew-Eadin a look Andra couldn’t interpret, then started to descend the hill. “Full good. We’ll peace in the moren. Decide your fate, Goddess,” he called over his shoulder, and then he was gone.
Andra watched as his footprints filled back up with sand. “He’s a bit . . . much,” she said, but her mind was spinning with possibilities.
“He’s intoleristic,” Lew answered, but laughter tinged his voice.
The wind picked up and Andra was forced to cover her face or get a mouthful of sand. What little skin she had exposed started to sting, a million tiny pricks.
“We aged up together.” Lew’s voice was muffled by his sweater. “He’s . . . more than he seems.” After a moment, he asked, “Why don’t you reck you exist a goddess?”
“The same reason you don’t think you’re a giant. Because I’m not one.”
“Certz to full small creatures, I am a giant.”
Andra laughed.
“Amid their own kind,” Lew said slowly, “gods might not seem so special, but among mere mortals . . .” He let the implication hang in the air and stood. “I’d best make certz he doesn’t set anything afire.”
Andra eyed the rock town below. If anyone could set fire to stone, it would be Zhade.
Lew bowed slightly, just a dip of his head. “Goddess,” he said, then caught himself. “Andra.”
“Lew.” She nodded back and he smiled before following his friend down the hill.
Andra waited at the top of the dune until the sun started to set. Not the sun she knew. Not Sol, but Andromeda. Her mother had named her after the star that supported Holymyth. With Earth’s resources dwindling, the only option for sustaining the growing population was to spread across the galaxy, to travel to the nearest habitable planet, orbiting a sun not too different from their own. Humanity’s last hope, her mother called it. Andromeda will save us all. What a joke, Andra thought.