I, Cassandra

63 | CASSANDRA VALLIS

He's not Ryan.

His eyes open and find me. He moves his arm, slow, reaches up to touch his head, then his chest, his eyes never leaving mine.

'Am I dead?' he asks.

'If you are then I am, too,' I say.

He grunts then hauls himself up to sit, checks his legs.

'How about that,' he mutters. 'Not a single broken bone. Lucky me.'

'The vines are pretty thick here,' I offer. 'I guess you had a soft landing.'

'Didn't feel that way.' His eyes move back to me. 'I'm Amadi. And you are?'

'Cassandra.' I take a step back. My legs brush against something hard. I turn. It's a metal box, completely bent out of shape.

'That's mine,' he says. 'I found it a year ago. Been trying to open it ever since.'

'You've been here a year?'

He pats the vines around him, cautious, his attention on whatever it is he is looking for.

'More than that,' he says, 'almost two.'

I sink to my knees beside the mangled box. 'Alone?' I whisper.

He nods. 'Just me and the box.'

Another session of gentle pats against the vines follows. I wait, marinating in disappointment. If only he could have been Ryan.

Amadi pulls a long piece of metal free of the vines. From behind the wild mat of his beard, he cuts a smile at me. 'At least it wasn't all for nothing,' he says.

'What wasn't?'

'My fall from grace,' he rolls his eyes up into the heights of the strut. 'The things you do in a world ten thousand years from the one you left.'

'Ten thousand?' I repeat, bleak. 'How can you know?'

He looks down at his worn clothing, brushes a vine leaf from his leg. A shrug. 'The stars. They moved.'

I look up at the sky. I barely know the names of the constellations let alone where they are supposed to be. 'But—'

'How long have you been here?' he asks before I can ask how he figured it out.

It's my turn to shrug. 'Who knows, it just feels like one long endless night.'

'Make a guess,' he says as he pulls himself to his knees and reaches past me for the box.

'Maybe a month,' I say. 'Long enough to lose hope.'

He pulls the box into his lap with a grunt and wedges the metal bar into it. 'First months are the hardest.'

'How are you still alive after two years?' An hour ago I was ready to die. Two years of this shit is unfathomable.

He continues to work at the box with the lever, prising at a narrow opening with infinite patience. I can't help but wonder at his apathy to another human being after being alone for so long.

'Because I wanted to open this box,' he says without taking his eyes from his work, 'and it's taken a long time to find a way to do it.'

'Was it your box?' I want to find out how he ended up here, what he knows of this place, and if he ever saw Ryan—or what was left of him.

'No,' he answers with another grunt. 'I found it.'

'So you have no idea what's inside?'

He doesn't answer, just keeps working at the box, methodical and determined.

'What if it's nothing?'

'It won't be nothing,' he says, terse.

I give up and leave him to his task. It's clear he isn't in the mood for a chat, at least not until he opens his damn box.

I sink onto my knees and wait. A hundred questions speed through my mind in stark contrast to the slowness of his work. I hope whatever is inside will be worth it.

My gaze returns to the sky. The stars continue their procession along their stoic paths, communicating a language I never learned. All I can do is watch and admire them, ignorant of their eternal secrets.

A quiet creak comes from the box, followed by a slow exhalation of a breathe held for years. With something approaching reverence Amadi reaches inside and pulls out a severely cracked clear container, and examines it from every angle. Inside, locked in place by the clear material is a dark metal sphere outlined with indentations and lines. Whatever it is, it's impossible to guess what its purpose is, especially without any light. I begin to curse the darkness when the shadows ease just a touch. A moment later, the shadows lessen again. Thinking it's a trick of my mind, I glance at the horizon. A smear of pale blue tinged with streaks of orange heralds something I thought I would never see again.

I catch Amadi watching me. 'If you thought the dark was bad,' he says, unsmiling, 'just wait for the light.'

And so my first dawn arrives, and one by one, the stars die.

With the sun comes humid warmth, sudden, heavy and brewing with insect life. We sit in the shade of the strut as a multitude of bugs awaken from wherever they've spent their long, silent night.

Amadi picks up a black-shelled beetle the size of his thumb. 'I missed these. Tons of protein.' He pops it into his mouth and the crunch of its shell makes me gag. He plucks another from the depths of the vines and holds it out to me. 'Want one?'

I shake my head and look away.

'I know it's a cliché, but they really do taste like chicken.'

I get up and submerge myself in the broiling heat of the sun so I don't have to hear the crunching. I don't bother to tell him he probably doesn't even know what real chicken tastes like, at least not like I do. One of the perks of my last months in Alpha VII. He's a loud eater, so I still hear it. I hope when I turn around there won't be bug guts on his beard.

'So, Cassandra,' he says when the crunching at last ends. I turn. No bug guts, thank god. He leans back against the vine-covered strut and crosses his legs at his ankles. 'What's your story?'