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Dys likes Glow.
He’s alone in that, but solitude is nothing new. There’s an odd… harmony to it all. A feeling of connection to the planet that this colony can’t understand. They see darkness, and their only thought is danger.
It’s wrong to say Dys has given up on convincing anyone otherwise, since that would imply he’d tried in the first place.
Doesn’t matter. He can perch on the colony’s wall and simply take it all in. At some stage, the attack will come. People will die. Then, everyone will go back to pretending that they actually have a right to live here, fighting a war they can’t possibly win.
The so-called authorities don’t even know that they’re up against an intelligent enemy. Almost a decade, and they still don’t understand a thing. He knew more about the real Vertumna as a child than the entire colony’s learned to this day.
Well, with one exception.
The click of booted footsteps drifts from further along the battlements. Dys half turns his head, bracing for an annoying conversation with some idiot who thinks they know better than him because there’s a gun in their hand.
Then Dys realises what he’s seeing, and turns his head the rest of the way.
His sister is hurrying towards him, and it’s definitely not incidental, because the second she notices him notice her she speeds up.
There’s a slight sheen of sweat on Tang’s brow as she stops next to him, her breathing a little heavy.
“Hello, Dys,” she says, tone trying to be clinical, but tinged with something else.
“Tang.” He frowns at her. “What do you want?”
She doesn’t answer right away, scanning the vicinity. Then she sighs. “She isn’t here.”
There’s only one person Tang can mean, because there’s only one person in the colony who can reasonably be expected to be in Dys’s company. “No,” he replies. Then, because there’s an unfamiliar tension in Tang’s shoulders, he continues. “I haven’t seen Solly since yesterday morning. I thought she was mostly in xenobotany this month.”
“According to her father, she didn’t show up for her shift.” Tang curses. “I… was very much counting on you knowing something.”
Dys can’t feel fear, but in that moment, as the hope in his twin sister’s eyes withers, he gets somewhere close. Solly doesn’t miss shifts. Not when she’s on one leg after a glider mishap, not when she’s so choked on fungal spores she can barely breathe, not when she’s grieving what she thought was Sym’s death. He can barely talk her into taking days off.
Instinctively, Dys checks his holopalm for messages. He disables notifications, so maybe he missed her.
Nothing.
He wets his lips. “Where have you checked?”
Tang’s voice cracks. “Everywhere.”
The two of them don’t get along, and haven’t since they were young children. Liking Solly is the only thing they have in common. Dys can’t remember the last time he even spoke to Tang without Solly around. He starts to reach for her, then his arm drops.
“I’ll help search. I know a few spots.”
If Dys couldn’t already tell his sister was rattled, the absence of a snippy retort would be confirmation. “Yes. Yes, alright. I suppose I will make another loop of engineering.” Tang turns away, but pauses, looking carefully back over her shoulder. “We’ll find her, Dys.”
She’s out of sight by the time it occurs to Dys that she was trying to reassure him.
He tries not to think about that as he begins to look in earnest.
One by one, Dys’s hidden places turn up empty. Solly isn’t here.
Solly… isn’t here.
Dys, from the little nook in the perimeter wall where they’ve spent so many evenings together, stares out beyond the colony, out into the otherworldly gleam of Glow.
She wouldn’t.
Would she?
Solly’s not a rulebreaker. She’s told him, giggling, that people say he’s a bad influence on her.
“Which is very unfair,” she noted. “Because I am entirely capable of getting myself into trouble, thank you very much.”
Still, Solly toes the line a whole lot more than Dys. She’s part of the colony in a way that he could never be. She listens to what the adults tell her… usually. She quietly, firmly objects when he snarls that Vertumna would be better off with humanity removed from it.
If it wasn’t for Solly, Dys would be long gone. Maybe along with the entire colony.
Dys stares into the iridescent lights beyond the wall hard enough his eyes begin to hurt. Even he’s never ventured further than a few metres outside in Glow. He may be fearless, but he’s in no rush to die.
Wherever they’ve explored, Solly’s always been one step behind. Closer than anyone else, but still behind. While they’ve shown each other a lot of things, it’s rare that she leads the way.
But earlier this year, there was the array. The compulsion Solly had to go deeper and deeper into the Gardener facility. Three times they went there together, turned back first by the radioactive flowers, then by the mounting pain overwhelming her to the point of passing out. The third time, they made it to the very centre of the place, and Solly… saw something. She tried to explain and Dys did his best to follow along, because anything that gets Solly frantic is something worth attending to.
Dreams of other lives. Visions. Seeing the future and the present and the past all at once. It sounded impossible, but Dys knew and knows that Solly wouldn’t lie to him.
She talked about the wormhole too.
Dys looks to the sky. Looks to the whorl of the wormhole, which almost seems close enough to reach out and touch.
Opening his holopalm, Dys taps out a quick message.
Dysthymia: I might know where she is.
Dysthymia: If I’m not back in three hours, don’t come after me.
Tangent: Dys.
Tangent: Don’t you dare.
Dys closes the window. Even if Tang somehow convinces Utopia to allow a search party, he will already be well beyond reach.
Dys isn’t sure why Solanaceae decides to make herself his problem only after the Stratospheric lands. On the ship, she was always hanging around with Cal or his sister, so when Solana starts badgering him about where he sneaks off to, he assumes—correctly—that Tang sent her.
But even after he shoots her down, she keeps trying to spend time with him. She agrees with him when he mutters that he’d rather be exploring outside the colony, and then she actually does it.
‘Yeah right’ he’d mentally scoffed, spying as Solana wandered dejectedly away from Uncle Tonin, who’d gently refused to allow her outside of the colony’s gate. ‘No way would she really leave’.
Showing her the drainpipe he uses to sneak out is Dys’s version of a practical joke; a dare there’s no way she’ll take, and he’s childishly amused by it up until the very moment Solana pops up over the edge of his hill with a satisfied “There you are!”
Solana does tell Tang what he’s up to, but she doesn’t tattle, and she keeps exploring with him. Not only that, she starts seeking him out inside the colony too. She doesn’t make fun of him, she doesn’t fill silences with pointless conversation, and she couldn’t care less about Marz making ‘clever’ comments. It’s—he doesn’t know how to react. Why now, when she has to go out of her way to find him, is she so interested in his company?
There’s a catch. There has to be.
“Why won’t you leave me alone?” he huffs at Solana, on one of the worse days, where everyone’s been laughing at him and he just wants to disappear. “N-nobody really likes me. You’re just g-gonna tell Tang about what stupid thing I did cause I’m not as smart as you two.”
Solana tilts her head. “I do like you. You’re my friend,” she says it like it’s as simple as ‘we grew up on a spaceship’ or ‘there’s two suns in the sky’.
Dys feels his cheeks turning red. “I don’t believe you,” he mumbles, tucking his chin into his jacket’s high collar. His stupid mouth is smiling, so he’s hiding it from her.
He has a feeling that she knows.
Under the wormhole’s gaze, the forest is transformed. Glow out here is strangely peaceful. There’s a part of Dys that has always suspected it would be.
Orienting himself is difficult under these conditions. The colony’s immediate surroundings had become routine to Dys by the time he turned twelve. Usually, Dys would be confident he could navigate these dull hills and trees with his eyes closed. Now, he feels clumsy and misplaced, each footstep loud as a cannon, broadcasting his unwelcome presence to all Vertumna. His senses strain, alert to any possible danger. He can’t afford delays.
Here, he steps off the path to avoid walking through a curtain of weblike filaments. There, he scales a half-fallen tree, vaulting over a slumbering… creature in his way. Wait, poised in the bushes as a manticore crashes through the undergrowth ahead of him, chittering fearfully. Move, because he does not want to know what can frighten a manticore.
Dys recognises the hill he’s climbing halfway up it. Atop, he recalls, is a flat clearing, wide open to the skies above. Unconsciously he speeds his pace, urgency mounting with each step. His instincts are telling him that if Solly’s out here, this is where she’ll be. Dys trusts his instincts more than he trusts almost anyone.
He crests the hill.
And there she is, flat on her back, glow’s light glinting off azure hair.
Motionless.
Dys has broken into a run before his brain finishes processing what he sees.
His knees hit the ground, skidding with a pain he doesn’t feel, gathering her body into his arms. Her chest rises and falls, breaths delicate as a newborn hopeye.
“Solly. Solanaceae,” he says, low and urgent. “It’s Dys. I’m here. Look at me.”
One morning, Dys looks Solly in the eyes and is startled to find them amber and birdlike. He’s not sure whether to be angry or proud that she’s tinkered with her own genes. Even Tang hasn’t gone that far.
He asks her why, and she shrugs. “Because it’s useful. Because I wanted to see if I could.”
Dys grumbles a wordless complaint, scuffing at the dirt with the toe of his boot. There’s a possessive undercurrent lurking in his reaction that he will most certainly never unpack. He liked Solly’s eyes the way they were, and now they only exist in memory and holos.
That piercing falcon gaze does end up growing on him pretty quickly, though.
But now those avian eyes stare at nothing. They see nothing.
“Solly, please.” He shakes her, and then again, more firmly.
No reaction.
His hands move across her body frantically, searching for signs of injury, but there’s not a mark on her. She hasn’t been stung or bitten, she’s just… limp. Dys’s palms find their way to Solly’s face, cupping her cheeks, tilting her head to align exactly with his.
And there’s still nothing. Not a twitch of the mouth, not a flicker of a pupil. It’s like staring into an empty shell.
“I stayed for you.” His voice cracks. “You can’t leave me. You can’t.”
Solly does not respond.
Dys cradles her in his arms and starts to sob, great, heaving gasps that shake his entire body, tears flooding down his face, dripping onto her inert form.
Behind him, something stirs the air.
“Sym,” Dys chokes out. “What did this to her?”
A long pause. Then a familiar voice.
“That question has… a few answers, and none of them are entirely correct.”
Dys’s head snaps around. Sym is standing a few feet back from him, and it’s a moment before Dys recognises the uncertainty in the pinch of Sym’s eyebrows, the way Sym hugs his arms to himself.
Dys doesn’t care. He doesn’t think he can care. “Sym,” he hisses.
“I think… I believe…” Sym swallows. “I believe Solly has… connected with the wormhole. She told you of her dreams, correct? This may well be the source.”
Dys stares at him, then looks to Solly. Still blank. Still lifeless. He can barely begin to understand what all of that means and he isn’t going to try. What matters is that Solly’s gone.
“When will she come back.” It comes out as a statement. It needs to be a statement.
Sym exhales unsteadily. “She can’t.”
It’s only Solly in Dys’s arms that stops him from leaping to his feet. “Then how do I connect with the wormhole too?” After a moment’s silence, Dys looks up again, fixing Sym with a glare. “How, Sym?”
Sym gives him a small, sad smile. “You can’t.”
Dys stills. Very carefully, he lays Solly down on the ground.
Then, he launches himself off the floor and rushes at Sym, snatching fistfuls of his coat in a thudding collision. The impact drives them back two steps. Sym stumbles, catches his balance, and then… stares, wide-eyed with shock.
“Then fucking fix her,” Dys snarls.
“That isn’t how this works,” Sym murmurs. “I’m sorry. Truly I am—”
Dys cuts him off with a harsh pull on the coat. “Then get the Overseer. Or—or Noctilucent. There has to be someone.”
Sym shakes his head, ever so slightly.
Dys is trembling now. “Sym. I’ll do anything the Gardeners want. I’ll make another bomb. I’ll kill them myself if that’s what it takes, just—just please…”
Sym says nothing. For what feels like hours, their gazes lock together. In Sym’s eyes, Dys sees pain and sorrow and worst of all, sympathy.
Then, in the faintest of whispers.
“Is that what Solly would want?”
Dys’s fist ploughs into Sym’s jaw, dropping him to the dirt. It’s every ounce of Dys’s restraint to not dive on top and continue swinging.
Instead he stands, shaking like a leaf. On the ground, Sym props himself onto his elbows, then slowly runs his fingers along his face. It’s a few moments before he refocuses in Dys. When he does, the look in his eyes is just the same as before.
“I didn’t know this would happen. I’m sorry.”
Dys clenches his fists so hard his bones creak, and turns away, staring down at Solly. “Just… just go.”
“Dys—”
“Leave me alone!” It tears out of him like he’s ten again, hating everyone and everything, wishing he could just vanish into the jungle.
Silence.
Dys drops to his knees alongside Solly. Gently, he closes her eyes, as much because he can’t stand the vacant stare as to protect them from drying out.
Then he pulls her head into his lap and gazes at her. Unconsciously, his hand starts stroking her hair.
It’s so much longer than when they were kids. The length had crept up on Dys, like he’d blinked and suddenly Solly’s hair was halfway down her back. He was sold on it the moment he saw her with it pulled back in a ponytail, a couple of errant strands wisping out across her forehead.
She didn’t tie it back before venturing into the dark.
He keeps stroking her hair.
“If I’m trapped like that hopeye, promise me you’ll let me go,” he says, urgent, feverish, seized by the unplaceable desperation that’s had him in its jaws since he laid eyes on the mutilated animal caught in its snare.
“I’d do anything for you Dys." Solly’s smile is melancholic. “Even that.”
It isn’t supposed to be this way.
They explore together. They discover together. They show each other what they’ve found. If one of them gets too far ahead, they stop to help the other along.
She’s not supposed to go without him.
Dys sits in the dirt, Solly’s hair between his fingers, smearing it with bloody knuckles.
Dys sits, his other hand touching the knife at his waist.
Dys sits, and wonders what he would have said, had Solly asked him to make the promise he’d begged of her.