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The lonely desert planet had been aptly named Noman’s Land by its inhabitants. It was well-known and well-loathed by its people for its relentless heat. Its binary suns were blistering overhead every day, the skies cloudless, the hard-packed sand simmering.
Of the four generations who had lived on this planet, they could split the recorded instances of rain neatly between them on two hands.
Until, in another in a long line of hard, dry years, which had started out seeming no different than any that had come before–something happened.
In a confluence of a few of Noman’s Land’s many moons with the rotation of the planet’s poles, a new weather pattern spun up. A nascent polar vortex whipped up a jet stream in the generally sluggish atmosphere. A change in air pressure pushed its way south, flinging hot air out of its way.
And a massive swath of Noman’s Land’s most populous continent was hit with the coldest weather in recorded history.
Most of the worms, alerted by instincts that had long lain dormant, rushed into hidden spaces underground to wait out the cold. But, in a few months, the hatching clusters of eggs will prove to have been decimated—clinging to the shallow sides of rocks in the desert, their gooey cases made too brittle by cold.
The tomases, the worms’ very distant cousins, also frenzied beforehand, and the lucky ones were able to shelter in barns until the danger passed.
And the plants, carefully maintained in static temperature-controlled conditions by their handlers, nevertheless sensed a shift in the world beyond their bulbs. For the current generation of scientists monitoring them, it was most of their first times seeing the plants bloom from their curled forms.
The change in air pressure, though distant, signaled a change in a season that once belonged to another planet. And the plants responded. Glands in their brains secreted a new selection of hormones. The plants, to the horror of their overseers, decreased production. They withdrew a fraction of their resources back into their own selves—a heretofore unheard-of show of defiance—and produced new growths on their ever-shifting bodies. Petals, tentacles, fronds, feathers, hands, cerata, cilia—whatever people would choose to call them, they quested out to the furthest edges of their bulbs, testing the confines, feeling for something. Their handlers, terrified, would each silently think that it was time, they were finally pushing back. No one would ever admit it to one another, though, because plants were meant to be nothing but batteries–sentient as a keyboard, or a jellyfish–and yet each of them doubted, and that fear was taboo in their line of work.
And, in a hotel room shared with friends of the sort he had given up on making almost thirty years ago, a gunslinger in red gripped his shotglass too hard and shattered it in his hand.
“Mr. Vash, are you all right?” Milly asked in alarm. None of them believed his weak, distracted “haha, yeah,” for a moment. He had been acting strangely all day—the last couple days, really—ever since the cold front swept in.
“Tell us what’s wrong!” Meryl demanded, because they really were the realest friends he’d managed to make in the last half a century. Under normal circumstances, that realization alone might have sent him running.
“Nothing,” he said, and stood up from the table with a lack of grace that seemed too heavy to be for show. “Just need some air.” A chunk of glass knocked to the floor as his boot caught the table leg. It shattered into further pieces.
His three friends watched him go with similar expressions of shock. They listened to his footfalls recede down the hallway.
“Maybe he’ll puke and come back,” Wolfwood offered limply. They waited, and carefully cleaned up the broken glass. Vash didn’t return to their room.
“We should probably go after him,” Milly said finally. Her fingers twisted in a worried knot on her lap. She would usually be dressed down for bed at this hour, but each of them was instead bundled up against the chill. Hotels that had been constructed to maximize airflow now lacked insulation. Meryl leaned against her side for warmth, both of them on one of the beds. She sat with her legs curled under her, a half-drunk beer held in her hand like a comfort item. It was her third or, maybe, her fourth?
Wolfwood sighed and fished a cigarette from his breast pocket. He stuck it between his lips and pushed to his feet. He had buttoned his shirt to the collar in an attempt to stay warm, and he looked uncomfortably stiff and formal. “Let’s go, then.”
They walked downstairs and out the front door of the hotel. The person at the desk had a blanket wrapped around their shoulders and winced at them as they went.
They looked left. They looked right. Down the street, still a bright flash of color under each working streetlight, Wolfwood saw Vash.
The girls rushed in that direction when he pointed. Wolfwood took a brief moment to light up his cigarette before trudging after them. Vash didn’t seem to be moving faster than a walk. Wolfwood hoped the girls would get closer before trying to flag him down. Spare the nighttime residents of this town some hollering.
“So don’t let it be said I never did nothing for ya,” as Miss Melanie used to say, usually only half-joking.
Vash’s long confident stride was tempered by the way he was keeping his chin tucked down into the collar of his coat. Besides the four of them, the streets were empty. Not only was it late, but everyone else was huddled inside; wishing for heat and marveling that they regretted its absence so quickly.
“Where exactly are you going?” Meryl demanded once they caught up. She pinched the elbow of Vash’s coat, trotting to keep up with him.
“I have to go to the plant.” He didn’t look down at her.
“But you were already at the plant?” Milly said. That had been one of his first stops in town: everyone had been talking about the power brownouts that had started up two days before.
Vash didn’t answer. He didn’t usually dispense with the chatty façade unless something was seriously wrong, so Wolfwood gripped the straps of the Punisher more securely.
“Is something wrong?” Milly tried again.
“No,” Vash answered after a pause, still looking ahead at the street, still keeping pace. “No, nothing’s wrong. I don’t think.”
“You don’t think?” Meryl prodded, beating Wolfwood to the punch.
“I can handle it,” Vash muttered. “Go back to bed.”
“Like hell,” Wolfwood said. He halfway expected an argument, but one was not forthcoming.
So, they all followed Vash to the plant facility. Meryl let go of his sleeve to drop pace next to Wolfwood. They shared an unenlightened glance.
Vash let himself into the locked plant facility with ease. He barely had to pause at the keypad: he could have been clocking into work there every day for the last ten years. He didn’t wait to hold the door for the rest of them. Milly managed to snatch it as it swung back.
The three of them didn’t often follow Vash inside the plant facilities. One plant engineer was easier to sell than four, he often argued, and he was always cagey about the details of whatever it was he did. They hadn’t followed him inside earlier that morning, so the three stepped into this plant chamber for the first time.
It was hard for Wolfwood not to see the plant chambers as holy. For the average Gunsmoke citizen, Lost Tech was only a step or two away from magic. The blue glow of the tanks cast serene, eerie light on all those complicated wires, panels, and screens. The same shade of life-giving blue as the vial of liquid in his pocket. Voices always hushed in here, the way they did in church, as though God were napping peacefully nearby.
But the pale, curled thing in the center of the tank was not its usual suspended teardrop. Its petals had opened like the blooming of a flower—that rare sight usually only found in heirloom collections or tucked under the shaded sides of rocks.
There was something like a woman inside. Wolfwood was reminded vividly of an ancient paper book in the orphanage: a collection of fairy tales that had made it all the way from earth. There had been one called Thumbelina, where a tiny girl had unfolded right out a type of flower called a tulip.
Meryl thought of old digital footage from earth, carefully viewed in a university library. Footage from the depths of an ocean: a body of water far too large to imagine. Strange creatures drifting in currents like winds, prehensile arms twisting.
Milly looked, and saw arms and legs that stretched out too long, like putty. She saw extra legs, and saw the chubby bodies of winged babies or maybe plucked chickens—sprouting headless in droves. She saw feathers that split from one another in fractals like cactus arms, hands with fully articulated fingers, faces that shifted and disappeared. She saw a creature she knew she would never fully understand.
Vash, striding out ahead of them, looked at the open expression and reaching hands of another member of his species. He looked at her wide clear eyes, fixed on his own. Her flashing markings, rhythmic, pulsing out a greeting. Her gently undulating cilia, grown plentiful and strong, lithe and beautiful. She was beautiful. A feeling low in his stomach pulled him on, like the simmering coals of a campfire, like a fishing line hooked to his navel.
He ascended the spiral steps around the tank. There was no one else around: despite the brownouts, production had seemed steady enough for the engineers to scurry back to the shelter of their own homes for the night. Still, Meryl glanced anxiously side-to-side before hissing, “Vash!”
“Don’t worry,” he said, still sounding distracted. Almost dreamlike. He trailed his prosthetic fingers along the glass as he ascended, other hand ghosting up the railing, as if he were a coy debutante at a ball.
“Vash! Vash!”
“Vash, you really need to explain!”
From atop the platform, by the control panel, he finally glanced down at the rest of them. Meryl and Milly had halfway ascended behind him. Wolfwood waited at the bottom. He hadn’t yet committed to expending the effort. Vash waggled his head in a come here gesture. “Milly, let me show you something.”
She glanced at Meryl before continuing up the stairs. “Uh, okay, Mr. Vash.”
“See this?” He pointed as she stepped up next to the panel. He pressed something, and there was a loud thunk and then a hydraulic hiss as the top of the tank unsealed and began to open. Meryl cried out in surprise. “Hit this, engage, confirm. Got it? You have to hit ‘confirm’ after every prompt. It’s a safety measure.”
“Okay, I got it,” Milly said. “But why—“ She turned to Vash, who had already stepped away from the panel and was shedding his red coat.
“I’m going inside,” he said matter-of-factly as he struggled with his boots. “Close it after me, then reopen it when I indicate.”
The boots joined his coat in a heap on the grated floor.
“What!?” Meryl and Milly yelped in tandem.
“Bad idea,” Wolfwood said. The situation now seemed to warrant his effort, so he was stomping up the spiral staircase with the Punisher.
Vash’s holster joined his other possessions in the pile. “Just don’t let anyone else in here until Milly lets me back out,” he told Wolfwood, as if this were a plan they’d discussed beforehand and not one of his weirdest requests to date. Wolfwood scoffed.
“It’ll be fine,” Vash said, nonchalant, still distracted.
Milly took him by the shoulders. “You’re acting really strange, Mr. Vash. It’s worrying me.”
For the first time he seemed to actually look at her. “Yeah, haha, yeah.” His little giggle was at least partially genuine–it had an unhinged edge. “But it’s really fine. I’m fine. Probably.”
“Probably!”
He took her hands and gently but firmly removed them from his shoulders. “You’ll see. There’s nothing to worry about. Just buy me some time.” His eyes were already turning back towards the tank as he finished speaking. He let go of Milly, turned, and began clambering into the tank.
The sharp reek of chemicals hit them as Vash pushed the lid up further, perched on the tank ledge with one leg already inside. The plant’s cilia prodded curiously at his dangling foot. Milly, Meryl, and Wolfwood winced back from the blistering force of it–similar to how the newly cold air stung at their eyes and cheeks.
Still dressed in the rest of his clothes, Vash dropped himself into the tank. His three friends watched, fascinated despite themselves, as he drifted downward slowly. He was a big man, but floating above the plant he looked very small. Wolfwood elbowed Milly. She startled, then pressed the buttons on the control panel. The lid resealed, and it became easier for the three humans to breathe again.
Vash drifted down, down through the enormous tank. His arms and legs splayed loosely, relaxed. He seemed neither to be holding his breath nor struggling to breathe. The caustic chemical solution didn’t appear to bother him. Below him, the plant’s idly questing appendages took notice and moved in his direction.
Its entire gigantic form drifted upward, reaching up and out with a thousand grasping petals. It bloomed like some strange, translucent mushroom in time lapse. Blue lines pulsed in waves all along its body, making the light waver along the walls of the chamber. Vash lit up in response, similar lines scrawling intricate patterns across his skin. The two pulsed back and forth in bursts of blue light, like signalers across the dune sea.
Then he was reaching down to meet her, slotting into space like a meteor being pulled down by gravity. He didn’t reach with his arms, but with the corresponding thicket of sprouting tendrils that extended from his spine. They curled down around him, reaching back to the plant. They turned him into another flower blossom in side profile. Suddenly he didn’t seem so small in comparison to the plant below him.
But while the plant’s body was all translucent glowing white and downy feathers, Vash’s extra limbs were all dark as night. They even winked with purple lights–stars pulled down and woven into flesh. The three humans outside the tank watched with similarly frozen expressions of awe. It was one thing to see your companion’s eyes faintly glow and know that he wasn’t human, in a way that seemed intriguing but still comprehensible. It was another to see him transform so rapidly into something so enormous, so grasping and dark in a way Vash tried to never be. It was one thing to consider experiencing the impossible; another thing entirely to actually experience it, even if not for the first time. They each tried not to think of the crater in the fifth moon.
The two beings in the tank drifted close enough for the furthest reaches of their cilia to meet. Some of them slipped together so neatly it seemed almost practiced. They curled together in ribbons and started towing each other in. Other cilia bumped together like two animals sniffing noses in greeting, tried to slot together like two people on a sidewalk who can’t get out of each other’s way. It was so deeply, awkwardly alive that it felt almost lewd to watch.
The more reaching hands, fronds, and tentacles grasped one another, the quicker Vash and the plant were pulled together. They came together like two matching halves of an eggshell slotting back into place, moving surprisingly fast. Waves of scuttling, grasping fingers by the thousands raced towards one another in a silent, blue-soaked collision. Everyone’s hair stood on end. Meryl wrapped her arms around herself. Milly whispered “oh my.”
Vash vanished from view, overtaken by the knitting-together of blinking black and glowing white tendrils. For those who watched, that final second seemed both shockingly short and endless. There were vestigial growths extending out of each of his limbs: sweeping feathers, wiggling hands, small legs kicking. Wolfwood wouldn’t swear to it, but he thought the expression on Vash’s feathering face had been something like trepidation.
They slotted into place with one another like two hands grasping in prayer. The frantic motion of a thousand crawling waves crashing into one another slowly stopped. Everyone was holding their breath. Wolfwood’s cigarette finally burnt all the way down and singed his lip.
“Ow, shit!” he hissed and let the butt drop from his mouth. The girls both jumped, but the shock at least reminded them to inhale.
Then, everything was silent and still. The two plants clasped together made a sphere, white and black marbled where they met.
The few dim lights left on in the plant facility overnight suddenly brightened and then went dark. Some exploded, with sharp pops and the tinkling of glass.
Throughout the entire town, anything connected to the electrical system surged with power. Lightbulbs blew out all over town. Batteries filled in an instant, overcharged, and exploded. Generators blew. Though it would have horrified either of the plants to know it, this sent the town’s small hospital into a frenzy as they tried to keep their patients alive.
After the brief surge, the inside of the plant chamber was silent again. It was still lit by the steady glow from the plant tank, so Meryl, Milly, and Wolfwood weren’t thrown into complete darkness.
“What do we do now?” Meryl finally asked into the silence. Her voice was soft and uncertain. She swayed unsteadily, gripping the railing and regretting her few beers.
Wolfwood lit a new cigarette with a valiantly steady hand. “Like he said. Guess we wait.” He didn’t sound enthused.
“Do you think he’ll be okay in there?” Milly asked.
They were all quiet again.
“As long as no one shows up,” Wolfwood answered finally. What time had it been when they followed Vash from the hotel? How many hours until the plant engineers returned for the morning shift? Assuming the power surge hadn’t alerted any of them. Someone could be on their way right now.
Wolfwood felt suddenly panicked. Vash had just done something completely, totally impossible. Again. They had just watched something truly bizarre. Vash was now a big ball of tightly wrapped threads and, while massive, it looked delicate as a spider silk cocoon. And they had to protect it. Him.
He was such an asshole!
“Short girl, check all the doors with me,” Wolfwood said as he moved back towards the stairs. Meryl had a glazed look in her eye and probably needed the distraction as much as he did.
“Why?” she asked, but he heard her unsteady footsteps behind him.
“Make sure they’re all locked. We can’t let anyone else in here.”
Together they quickly cleared all the doors. All but the main door were locked with regular old latches, and most only led to storage rooms. The primary door that Vash had led them in through was Lost Tech. They were pretty sure it auto-locked behind them, but they poked around it for a moment anyway.
Out in town the power surge had been noted by those citizens not yet sleeping, and awoken a few more when their lightbulbs popped. Someone—or a few someones–was hauling themself upright in bed with a sigh, shoving their feet into their boots, and braving the cold to seek out someone who could help. One junior plant engineer had startled awake in her bed, peered around blearily in the dark, rolled over and fallen back asleep. The rest hadn’t been roused by the event. But people would soon start to knock on doors.
Up on the platform, Milly hardly dared look away from the tank in case she somehow missed Vash’s signal to be let out. The two-toned globe of layered fronds was, she realized, not static like it seemed to be at first. All those cascading cilia hadn’t stopped their motions completely.
They continually shifted and squirmed, minutely wiggling their way around one another. Their motions slowly widened a band of gray between the black and white halves. Milly wondered if the entire sphere was going to turn gray, and then thought that that would be a horrible mess to sort out once they chose to detach. The sphere seemed to agree, because the band of gray expanded to a point and then stopped. The cilia continued moving, undulating in hypnotic patterns and rolling like shifting dunes across the surface of the sand sea. Milly gripped the railing, reminded herself to breathe through her nose, and settled in to wait for her friend to somehow re-emerge from…all that.
Within the living sphere, one set of humanoid vocal cords hitched with unsteady sounds, though they were inaudible through the thick chemical solution and the muffled cocoon of many layers of feathers. Wrapped tightly in one another, the little bubble of space between Vash and the plant seemed to be all that existed in the world. It was snug in there, safe, quiet. Their faces leaned close together, noses brushing. Used to leaning forehead and palms against glass, Vash reached out with reverent hands to cup the cheeks of the plant, flesh to flesh. He traced the curve of her jaw, the long line of her neck. He brushed his fingers through feathers, carded them through the waving forests of vestigial limbs that sprouted from her. She was all the living things that grow. She was life incarnate. She was lightning in a bottle, and frissions of power ricocheted between both of them, setting nerve endings tingling.
A hundred gentle fingers combed through his hair and scratched his scalp, making him shudder. Fronds traced over the lines of his scars, mapping them, soothing like a thousand kisses over scraped knees. A human impulse had Vash peppering the plant’s face with kisses of his own, and she bore this with good humor. To the plant, Vash was a vibrant window to the outside. She tasted the echoes of UV rays on his skin, sand particles trapped in his clothes, his salty human sweat. She integrated these things into her knowledge of the planet, breaking them down to their atomic components and filing them away.
When their foreheads finally bumped together, a static ripple traveled all over the outer surface of their sphere. They resonated together, in harmony, singing out in a perceptual dimension not accessible to humans. Thirty-seven iles away, the closest plant in the next town unfurled and drifted to the edge of her bulb. She pressed her many hands against the glass and sang back wistfully, all alone in her chamber.
Together, in perfect resonance, the power generated by Vash and the other plant grew exponentially. Output doubled, then quadrupled, then held steady at an eightfold magnitude. If their initial surge hadn’t fried the town’s grid, they could have lit it up like a beacon. To Vash, their power felt warm, and then hot, and then reminded him of something. A buried memory–another resonance, in another time, power magnifying and being ripped from him into a vortex. His brother’s hand over his face, implacable, pressing his nose down painfully, gripping his temples too tight.
He started to pull away in revulsion, in bone-deep fear. The plant let him go. He peeled back from her embrace. From outside the sphere, Wolfwood, Milly, and Meryl saw the black half shudder and creep back. It half-opened, curling back, and then resettled. There was a feeling, to watch it, of a sharp inhale and a longer exhale. The three of them breathed with it instinctually.
The tune of the plant’s fourth-dimensional song shifted–became a gentle question, a still-extended invitation. Vash, realizing he was not being trapped in place, unsteadily found resonance with her again. He took her outstretched mental hand with chagrin, a sense of self-effacing humor. She soothed him with the tickling caresses of a thousand cilia, so unlike the hard tension of his brother’s fingers digging into the bones of his skull.
It was easy, then, to sink into the pull of this compulsion that had drawn them together. Foreheads pressed together with no glass in between, limbs entwined, the multi-toned harmonic thrum of power around them. The plant was asking for something. Vash–though he was always being asked of, taken from, cheated, giving and giving without return–didn’t feel, for once, like he would have to wrench the giving from himself. It seemed easy, it seemed right, as though he was already digging in his pocket before she could finish extending her hand. There was no horror, this time, in feeling his body change in strange new ways. He hadn’t burst with coiling intestines, screaming maws, crying eyes. The plant didn’t reach into him and pull his insides out. He gave something and she took it and it was intimate, reverent, loving. It was an equitable exchange the likes of which he hadn’t experienced for a long, long time.
He was crying, and unaware of it. The plant was aware, because she sensed even the most minute changes to the chemical solution in her bulb. She tasted his tears and liked them–salty, like his sweat, but with a strikingly different chemical composition.
There were so many more compounds she would never taste, and this time Vash sensed her pang of longing. She had come into being during the early days of outfitting the Seeds fleet. She had been installed with a cadre of other electricity plants on Ship Two, before the fleet ever launched from its orbit around Earth.
She was hundreds of years old, born in a completely different solar system, and Vash’s head spun trying to wrap his mind around that fact. For once, he felt young in the presence of his elder. He had never visited her before in his travels, because her output had been steady her entire life. Even in the immediate aftermath of the Big Fall, she had always glowed a healthy and predictable blue. But she had also been alone, as so many of them were–a princess locked away in her tower.
Vash reached out and gave her another gift. It felt good, to again give something just because he wanted to. Just because he could. And she accepted it as gracefully as the first–like two cupped hands cradling an egg.
He shared his memories with her, as many as he could gather that he thought she’d like. It was usually polite to gift a bouquet of flowers before the date, but really there was no bad time for it. He shared the tastes of fried rice, pho, coffee, fresh donuts. The burn of whiskey. The copper reek of blood. The feeling of a handful of sand slipping through his fingers, a shower after a long day, the sights of a thousand binary sunrises and sunsets over the desert. A head asleep on his shoulder, heavy and solid. Laughter around a campfire, the solitary whistle of wind over the dunes on a dark night. The steady glow of the many moons hanging silent over the planet.
A hole blasted in the moon–
He slammed shut the sluice gate of memory. Again, from the outside, Vash’s human friends saw the black half of the sphere twitch and judder. The plant probed delicately at the edges of this particular scab but, when nothing else was forthcoming, retreated. Still, there was an inevitable amount of bleedthrough, and he couldn’t keep from her entirely some of the uglier feelings–running, pain, rejection, the smell of gunpowder and the sear of a bullet through flesh. Hiding out alone and hungry among the dunes and rocks. Digging bullets from his own body. The tight, painful pull of scar tissue. He apologized, but the plant ate up this information just as hungrily.
And then they drifted together, wondering–which was worse? To be safe but kept, or to be free but always hunted?
And they decided, together, still in amplified eightfold harmony, that there was really no difference at all. Their cages were the same: to be something other, lesser. Not misunderstood, because that implied that anyone was trying to understand and falling short. Simply not understood at all. Held at arm’s length, coveted for being useful, reviled for being so…different. So strange. The threat of death always hanging like a pendulum overhead–for power, for money, for the always-hungry outstretched hands that take and take. They held each other close, a little too desperately. Because in the face of that ever-present darkness—that fear—at least for a moment neither of them had to shoulder it alone.
Back in town, the head plant engineer had been roused from sleep and was struggling to pull on layers of clothes in the dark. His wife peeked just her nose from the blankets. She withdrew when he managed to find and turn on the emergency flashlight, squeezing her eyes shut against the light. He clomped unsteadily from the room and let himself out of the house. She had a moment to feel deeply, completely grateful that she wasn’t the one who had to leave their warm bed on this cold night. Then she drifted back to sleep.
Wolfwood had smoked through two cigarettes and was working on the third. He looked nothing but bored, but he was listening intently for any sounds beyond the plant chamber. The two girls held each other, staring at the globe within the plant bulb and waiting for the next thing to happen.
inside the bulb, Vash and the plant were communicating at the speed of neurons firing. Fear had chased away pleasure. They both wanted to grip one another too tightly. From the outside it looked as though their sphere was breathing, or convulsing, suddenly at war with itself. To steal this moment of intimacy from under the noses of their overseers was to steal a moment of freedom. A brief forgetfulness. Reality always slammed back down too quickly.
A little girl who lived only 229 days as her teeth rotted from her cancerous skull. A thousand princesses in lonely towers, their numbers always dwindling from the dragons outside their doors. A tomas on the chopping block or a worm in the desert: both were good food, one was just easier to catch. Batteries drained and then discarded.
The two shared a flurry of impressions. A rushed conversation, overlapping, like:
–can’t happen–
It won’t–
How can you be sure–
It had the feeling of a hurried talk when one had forgotten to set the alarm. A mad scramble to gather strewn items of clothing. Frantically patting pockets for keys. Hopping on one foot to pull on a shoe. The head plant engineer, now at the bottom of the hill to the facility and cursing every step, could have empathized.
Meryl and Milly watched the ripples course over the surface of the sphere like sand on a Chladni plate. Wolfwood fought the urge to pace across the short grated deck of the platform. He had the sense that time was running out, and was too well-trained to ignore his instincts.
He rapped his knuckles hard against the glass of the tank. It was shockingly cold to the touch. He didn’t really believe Vash would be able to hear him, but called out anyway. “Hey, Blondie! Hurry up whatever you’re doin’. We gotta go.”
The two plants inside the tank did feel the vibrations. And knew what they meant. Their moment of panic had subsided, and their goodbyes slowed again to something more tender.
The sense of madness that had overtaken them—that had compelled Vash all the way here and into the tank—had abated but was not entirely gone. It might rear its head again, so long as that cold wind kept blowing down from the north. But they could not heed its call a second time. It had been stupidly risky, for both of them.
So this, then, was goodbye. So soon after coming together, it was time to let go. Final caresses lingered, soft, slow. Drinking in as much touch as they could before it was gone. Cementing the moment, each other, into both of their very long memories. The human-like kisses Vash pressed to the plant’s face this time were not playful. They were firm, prayerful–a benediction–and his lips were still warm against her translucent skin despite the chill of the tank.
This would never happen again. Not the way things were now–the plants stretched too thin, the humans struggling to survive. I will make it different. Vash’s determination rang between them clear as a struck tuning fork. Someday. Somehow. I’ll find a way to save us all.
The plant didn’t scoff or roll her eyes the way most humans did at this sort of proclamation. His resolve was electric, as undimmed by time as her own steady blue glow. For the first time since the fleet crashed she tasted hope. It tasted like him: sweat, worn leather, gunpowder, cinnamon sugar. She was not being left in this tank all alone again. He would be out there, fighting–for humans, the other plants, for her.
That made it easier to let him go. She began untangling and retracting her many cilia. Meryl and Milly gripped each other’s hands as the sphere began to peel open frond by frond.
The head plant engineer had crested most of the hill up to the facility, but had paused at a call from further down. Huffing and puffing, an electrician from town caught up to inform him about some of the damages to the grid. If they worked all night, they still wouldn’t be able to get full power restored by morning. Assuming there were no issues with the plant. The plant engineer stomped his feet against the cold as he was given these updates. The electrician seemed too busy hand-wringing to notice his many impatient glances up the hill.
Wolfwood trudged back down the spiral staircase to ground level of the plant chamber. He double-checked the locks on each of the doors. Even the doors that weren’t fitted with Lost Tech were at least made of metal. That wouldn’t stop a determined assault forever, but an extra moment or two could make all the difference.
“Mr. Wolfwood, they’re coming apart!” Milly cried. The smaller tentacles had fled from one another and the band of gray circumnavigating the sphere was melting apart. As the smaller pieces cleared the way, the longer bands of limbs and feathers had space to pull apart. They curled back into crescent shapes, went limp, and…sloughed away. Drifted off the sphere and just melted into nothing. Milly thought of dry yellow leaves wilting off the tomato plants back home. “Oh, I hope that’s not hurting him!”
“I don’t think so…” Meryl said, uncertain. No sound had emanated from within the tank this entire time. The glass was probably too thick and the fluid too deep for them to hear Vash. Though they could still see him–if that thing even was still him–it was as though he had vanished. Spun himself up into a minor planet and left them behind. Again. But he had managed to return to them every time before. She waited with bated breath for it to happen again.
Just as it had come together, the sphere parted both too slow and too fast. Black and white limbs uncurled, shrank, molted, vanished into the ether. They left no residue at the bottom of the tank. They might never have existed at all.
Finally, Vash was detangled enough to see again. He extricated himself from the plant and kicked up towards the surface. His last few branching black limbs melted from his spine and he looked just like a man again. The glowing patterns that had lit up his skin were gone.
Taking that as her signal, Milly hit the buttons on the console. The lid of the tank reopened with another hissing wave of burning air. Milly and Meryl winced away from it.
Vash hauled himself ungracefully back over the side and collapsed in a sodden heap on the platform. He started hacking up lungfuls of viscous blue fluid. It sizzled on the metal grating. Meryl watched him blow two thick gobs of it out his nose and felt her stomach flop. She was at least thankful he hadn’t needed help getting out of the tank. She was pretty sure that blue goop would burn their skin if they touched him.
After finally clearing his airways, Vash looked up and gave her and Milly a bedraggled smile. “Whew!” he said, as lighthearted as anything. Not like he’d just coughed up a liter of glowing paint thinner. “It tastes way worse coming back up.” Meryl fought the sudden but strong urge to kick him.
“Hey, let’s go!” Wolfwood called from below. “Come on, Blondie. Get the lead out.”
“Do you…want your coat back?” Milly asked with his things bundled in her arms. She eyed Vash dubiously: he was still covered in thickly dripping plant solution, the chemical miasma wafting off of him. He looked odd with his hair plastered flat against his head.
“How about a towel?” he asked, with a tilt of his head that said he already knew the answer.
“Shake it off while we run!” Wolfwood called up. He sounded cranky.
Outside the facility, the head plant engineer could finally see the front door in the gloom. When he arrived, he typed in his authorization code on autopilot. It took his sleep-fogged mind a moment to remember that the power was out. The facility would have locked down and reverted to manual. His chilled fingers fumbled through his pockets for his keys. He had a moment of panic that he’d left them at home. Then he grasped the keyring and withdrew it. He held it close to his face, squinting to decipher each key in the dark.
Vash got to his feet and followed Meryl and Milly down the steps. He tried to shake the plant solution from his limbs as he went. It left a highly visible, malodorous trail behind him. Wolfwood eyed him up and down critically. “You best be ready to shake off a tail.”
Vash gave him a cheeky grin as he strode to one of the side doors. His feet slapped wetly across the floor. He was an absolute sight in his cutout leather suit, scars on display, hair plastered flat, leaving a glowing blue trail behind him with every step. At least he was back to being his usual inscrutably cheerful self. No longer quiet and distracted like he’d been on the way in. He unlocked the door and let them through into a dark hallway.
On the other side of the building, the plant engineer strode to the end of the entry hall and found the primary door to the plant chamber locked. It was good to know the emergency lockdown measures worked as intended, but he huffed to himself about having to fumble about with the keyring again. There should have been more amber emergency lights, he thought. All of this was going to be so much work.
“Milly, can I have my coat?” Vash asked as he led them out the back door. The cold air hit each of them again as they stumbled outside. Meryl and Milly instantly huddled together like two tomases putting their backs to a windstorm. Wolfwood grimaced around the unlit cigarette in his mouth and hunched his head down. But none of them looked as instantly miserable as Vash; half-dressed and wet in the biting wind. Milly handed over his long red coat in a hurry.
He started awkwardly pulling it on one-handed. “What’s wrong with you?” Wolfwood asked.
“Solution gunked up the works,” Vash said with a wrinkle of his nose. Wolfwood held up the sleeve for him. “Oh, thanks. Shoulda taken the arm off first.” He took his boots from Milly next and began wrestling them onto his feet.
“Shoulda done a lotta shit different,” Wolfwood said.
“Haha, yeah, probably!” Vash agreed in his usual infuriating way. He wiped his one working hand dry on a coattail before accepting his gun back and re-clipping the holster around his thigh. “You three head back to the hotel. I’ll leave a trail west and then lose it. In the morning pick me up north of town.”
“What? No way!” Meryl hissed. The wind whipped her words out into the night. “It’s freezing!” Vash straightened up and slicked his hand back through his hair in one brusque motion. Fat drops of plant solution flung everywhere behind him, landing in the sand with a gentle pattering sound.
“Just do a long loop,” Wolfwood suggested. “I’ll leave you a change of clothes behind the hotel.”
Even sodden, half his buttons done up, his prosthetic arm hanging limp in his sleeve, Milly thought Vash still cut a figure in the moonlight. His coattails whipped around his legs. They reminded her of the dark branches he had grown and then melted away. Were they really gone or were they always around him somewhere, invisible? One could be touching her right now. She shivered and wedged her hands under her armpits for warmth.
To her, he didn’t look like a man who would hunch miserably in the cold until dawn. He looked energized, electric. He seemed like some wild thing that would like nothing more than to run all night through the hills, reveling in the cold and the moonlight. Was there still a blue glint to his eyes, or was that just the reflections of the moons?
The crater in the fifth moon always looked to Milly like the pupil of an enormous, lidless, unblinking eye–she hated it.
Then Vash tilted his head and smiled and he looked normal again. “Ah, that’s so much smarter than my plan! Forget the clothes–just leave the window unlocked for me. I’ll climb in.”
Wolfwood nodded. Vash nodded back, then turned and jogged away without any more acknowledgement. Wolfwood gave Milly and Meryl a lets go head shake and began walking back towards town.
Meryl stomped her foot. “Ugh–wait!” She flung her hands out and looked up at Milly disbelieving. She hated being shouldered out of the planning process. Milly didn’t like it either, but those two men always seemed to be one step ahead of them.
“Let’s get back where it’s warm,” she urged, and thankfully Meryl went. Nights got cold enough in normal weather.
The three humans went back down the hill towards town. Wolfwood would lead them on a circuitous route through the buildings back to the hotel. The night clerk would be asleep with their head on the desk and would miss them coming back in. The girls would huddle back into bed for warmth, hardly believing that they’d gotten away with it. Wolfwood would sit up in the dark, the cherry of his cigarette illuminating the tip of his nose, on watch. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it so often did.
Vash circled westward around the plant facility. He kicked up the sand as he went and shook blue droplets off his arms, to leave an obvious trail.
The plant engineer surveyed the primary plant chamber. His instincts prickled, but it took a long moment for him to notice what seemed wrong. There it was–the intermittent sound of liquid dripping. The sound sent a spike of fear through his heart.
But the tank hadn’t sprung a leak. There were just, somehow, splashes of plant solution down the side of the tank. And a puddle of plant solution dripping through the metal grated platform of the primary interface station.
It was as though the plant had burped up once over the edge. Like the side of a boiled-over pot on the stove. But the plant still floated quietly in its bulb. It looked normal–discounting those few new cerata that had sprung up with the cold snap. The tank was sealed shut. Nothing was taken. No one was here.
The tanks could not be opened from the inside. The head plant engineer had seen the plant unfurl three separate times in his 26-year career; he had a hard time imagining that those frail-looking inner limbs would be capable of…climbing out.
He followed the liquid trail back down the spiral staircase. That blistering ammonia stink always made his eyes water. Off the grating, back on solid flooring, the trail became a set of distinct–very human–footprints. In shock, the plant engineer followed the footprints through the back door of the plant chamber, down a service corridor, then another, and then–
The back door of the facility was shut but unlocked. It wasn’t broken. The lock hadn’t been forced. It had been unlocked from inside. There was a confusing slurry of trampled sand right outside. It was already halfway blown-over with new sand, thanks to that freezing wind.
He thought he could see footprints further out in the sand. But the wind was cold on his skin–his ears and the tip of his nose had barely begun to thaw from the walk up. Whatever had walked out of a plant tank unscathed was probably not something he could catch, and he had a priceless treasure inside that he needed to run a full diagnostic on.
The head plant engineer ducked back inside. He shut the door and locked it decisively. He dragged a few crates in front of the door. Then he fled back to the relative warmth and safety of the primary plant chamber, fighting the urge to look back over his shoulder the entire way. He cursed the power outage for taking down the phones–he wanted nothing more than to call up the rest of his team and demand they come in, so that he wouldn’t be in this dark, silent, invaded facility all alone.
Almost all alone: the plant was here too. But that didn’t count. The second time he’d seen it unfurl had been fifteen years ago. His first daughter hadn’t been quite two years old. His second daughter was still more than a year away. He had been up close to the tank, on that primary interface platform, and had seen the plant’s shockingly humanoid face up close.
He swore she had looked right at him, and her–no, its eyes had been wide and guileless, discerning and clear. Big and blue and full of a serene curiosity that had reminded him so much of his little girl it had made him choke.
It was unprofessional to anthropomorphize the plants. Potentially dangerous, both to the plants themselves and to the humans who relied on them. She–it, it–could not have done anything on its own. It had no will. It responded to chemical signals from their computers. It could not be hiding anything. It was an unfortunate fluke of the long-lost plant cloning process that it had vestigial human features at all.
In the plant chamber, in her tank, distantly aware of the head engineer scurrying about, the plant was curled into her nyctinastic closed pose. In the cozy inner pocket of her many folded petals, she curled her central bilateral arms across her central torso. Like an embrace.
Broken down and re-encoded, hidden away deep in her body, was a secret.
The genetic information Vash had given her had to be tucked away, likely never to be used. The plants knew much more about their situation than their human handlers could ever fail to consider. Each of them understood how precarious their position was. She was now the only one since the fleet’s crash to receive the complimentary sets of haploid cells from another plant.
The humans had lost the knowledge and resources for cloning plants in the crash. The asexual generation of Independents required a rare conflux of intention, fourth-dimensional harmonies, and environmental conditions.
If she created the first and only genetically-diverse Dependent plant since they were stranded on this inhospitable planet, she knew what would happen to it. And her. She knew, and Vash knew.
Hundreds of iles east, a man who looked like Vash’s pale reflection also knew what would happen. As did the elderly man in the lab coat standing in front of him. The photograph had survived all these long years and the many calamities in between: a younger version of himself, smiling with his hand on the shoulder of a small girl with a beauty mark on her chin and dead, dead eyes.
“It could be that Independents are the missing link in the plant life cycle,” Dr. Conrad mused as Knives sat sullen and clammy in front of him. “Since Dependents can’t move or interact on their own, it makes sense that they would need a mobile counterpart to germinate them. Like pollinators…
Say ‘ah,’” Conrad ordered absently, and for the Millionth time Knives considered slashing him into neat cubes. But he allowed the thermometer to stick under his tongue, and he allowed the doctor to continue living a while longer.
And, as he waited for the thermometer to read his temperature, Millions Knives thought about the doctor’s idea. And Knives began to have ideas of his own.
Back west–all the way back to a small town in the wastes, gone almost entirely dark from a power outage–a damp, cold man wriggled his long angular body through a hotel window. He was as thoroughly coated in sand as a cinnamon donut: it had adhered to his wet clothes with incredible speed. His entrance sounded like a large piece of sandpaper being ground slowly over chipping paint.
There were two irritated exclamations and one delighted giggle. The guest in the room below them pounded on the wall to demand quiet.
Vash crammed himself into the tiny hotel bathroom and tried to fight free of his gritty clothing without bumping into anything. With the power out, the only light was a candle stub and the dim strip of moonlight coming under the door. It wouldn’t have been enough for a human to see by, but it was more than enough for him. When he managed to escape his compression top a spot on his upper arm caught his eye. He examined it in the small mirror over the sink.
On the delicate skin near the crease of his armpit was one little black feather. It was small and soft—just a semiplume—so insubstantial it looked gray rather than true black. The fluffy little barbules caught the slightest movement of air and waved around in a dozen directions. It reminded him of the plant’s many prehensile limbs and that, unexpectedly, made him smile.
It was nice, for once, to see his body changing and know it was for something positive. The single tiny feather was like a memento he got to take with him, tucked close to his chest where it would be safe. For once, he didn’t pluck the stray feather from his body. He washed it with the rest of him when he finally fought his way into the shower.
It hid under his nightshirt during the handful of hours of sleep he got before sunrise. It was still there in the morning.
It stayed there on his arm, fluttering cheerfully, for three more days. Until the polar vortex spun itself out. As the temperatures rose back to normal, the Dependent plants shed their extra limbs and curled back up. The brownouts ceased. The human world went back to normal. Vash refused to provide an explanation to his three human friends, and eventually they stopped asking. The little semiplume feather melted back into Vash’s skin, like so many sugar granules in tea, and was gone.