“I don’t know why I’m here,” he says, returning to the question I asked earlier, as I stare at what’s playing out before me. Explosions, fires, devastation, men in gas masks shooting guns, miles of forests disintegrating into ash, people running. And Lurkers, thousands of them, ignoring the humans begging them for help, ignoring the crying babies. “I’ve never seen someone like me, ever, on any screen. I have never heard another naga speak of our origins either. I assume we have always been here, but perhaps that’s not the case. If what you say is true.”
I’m watching the final hours of news feeds of Earth and realizing this, my stomach drops further. This is something I thought I’d never see. Never wanted to see. Has anyone seen this besides Vruksha?
There had been calls for help, messages from Earth that survived and were archived in history logs, but so much was lost, never to be found again. And live feeds? None of that made it to the colonies. But here it is, playing out in front of me, stored like it has been waiting all this time to be found.
It’s the images of the Lurkers that frighten me the most. The death.
“What I say is true?” I repeat absently. My heart grows heavy.
“That maybe we’re not supposed to be here. That Earth isn’t supposed to have sentient life, female.” Vruksha straightens, and my eyes cut from him back to the screens and the death playing out there.
So much death.
“Vruksha, you have watched this?”
“Many times.”
The man reporting is sweating bullets as ‘Breaking News’ flashes on the screens. He wipes his brow as a new video feed rises behind him, showing thousands of ships taking off from Earth.
I know it’s the Lurker ships leaving like the monsters they are, abandoning all to die. There are other ships, thousands of human ones, and at once, the Lurker ships assault them with their weapons, destroying all of them.
Every last one.
The sound cuts out as the Lurker ships vanish, leaving nothing but dust clouds behind. Silence fills the room as only a picture of Earth from orbit remains, slowly graying, dying before my eyes.
Billions of lives lost in hours. It took two more days before those that escaped were able to contact the colonies. By then, there was nothing left to be done. Nothing anyone could do. And the years after? Only more death.
Humanity was nearly wiped out to extinction.
It’ll happen again if the Ketts can’t be held back.
“Turn it off,” I beg.
A rumble leaves him as he does what I ask. The gray Earth disappears as the feeds of the forest return. I sag in the chair. “Why did you show me that?”
“You asked me, earlier, if I was a Lurker. I’m not. You also asked what a naga was, and I can’t tell you that… because I don’t know. I don’t know what I am, and this—these old images—is all I have, all any of us have here in explaining our origins. I can’t tell you because I don’t know, and I would like to… know.”
I swallow as I take in Vruksha. He’s looking at the screens like they hold all the answers.
“I want to know too,” I whisper.
He turns to face me. We share a look, a despondent one. The truth is likely ugly. Do we actually want to know?
“I need to go back,” I say.
Vruksha’s face hardens. “No.”
“You don’t understand—”
“What is there to understand? I won’t let you leave.”
“The facility might have the answer.” I glance at the screens. “Daisy is somewhere.”
His tailtip coils around my wrist. “No.”
“You just said you wanted to know about yourself, and my people need this information. They need to see this.”
“They need history? And not the technology that wiped you out the first time, the same technology you’re trying to uncover, right? It’s what you want to steal from us.”
My face scrunches. “It’s not like that. It’s also not your technology.”
“It is our technology,” he snaps, sending shivers down my spine. “We have protected it, learned a little from it, valued it for what it is—but we don’t use it. It is evil. Explain to me why it’s so important that your people would trade you for it, female.”
“We’re in the middle of a war,” I blurt out. I rise to my feet but nearly fall and catch my body on the chair. Vruksha’s tail releases my wrist and curls around my middle again. I push it away. “A war that could do what you just showed me all over again, but this time, on an intergalactic level. And you do use the tech,” I accuse. “The Lurkers on the screens carried the same spears you wield!”
Vruksha’s nostrils flare, and he moves to meet me head on. I straighten.
“You are mine. You belong with me. I won’t trade you for an answer to a question I didn’t care about yesterday. No amount of curiosity will change that. This is all the past, the past! Not the future.”
“Then you shouldn’t have shown me this,” I say.
Because now that I know, I have to do something.
“I will not allow your life to be endangered again.”
“That isn’t your decision to make. You were so willing to trade your precious knowledge with us for me. Why can’t you do it for me, instead?”
Vruksha hisses. “You are not being fair.”
“What is it you gave them, that first day? In the box?”
“Scraps. Odds and ends that have no use.”
“Scraps,” I guffaw. “My people can’t use scraps. They’ll be back for more. You understand that, right? Once they figure out what you gave them was useless, they’ll search for you.”
“We’ll kill them if they do. We’ll kill them all.”
“Kill us? There are millions of us.” I can’t hold back my shock, my fear. For him. “You live in ruins. Humans have battleships the size of the moon. How can you hold us back from taking
