Beneath Soil and Sky
by S. D. Brown
I am not human. I do not share their DNA, but I have compassion for their pain. As a daughter of the Kin, one of my duties is to care for James, to ensure that his final days on Earth are at ease and serene, but he’s terrified of me.
“Where’s my family?” he asks, voice rasping with fatigue. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Your lineage is dead.” I gently press him onto the mattress. My elongated fingers pull the cotton sheet up to his chest. “Your body needs rest.”
It must be frightening dying in the hands of another species. James constantly watches the door to his room, fighting sleep out of what I’ve come to know as dread. His blistered face burns, earthen brown skin peeling in red, scaly patches.
“My name is J’Miah. I’m your assigned daughter, and I live on your Californian farm.” I’ve been trained to say those words as a comforting reminder. I ease my seven-foot muscular frame onto a chair near his bed.
James grips his sheet as if it were a shield, as if he needs protection from me when the worst is yet to come. There’s no one here but us. He’s been in my care for a few days, but sometimes he forgets who I am or where he is.
I grab a glass of milky water from the nightstand, small in my enormous translucent hand. I hold the cup to his lips, which he purses.
“Take a few sips. It’ll relieve some of your pain.” I don’t move the glass until he’s almost done. Afterward, I dab his mouth with a cloth. “Now rest,” I say, watching a familiar haze cloud his eyes. For the Kin, sleeping is important; it’s how we bond with our elder.
Assigned sons and daughters like me were taught that human dreams are too unstable for Kin links, so I sit by James’s bed until the corner of his mouth parts and glistens. When he starts to snore, I raise myself from the chair, gently stroke his balding head, and stride quietly to my room.
There, I stretch my back on the worn wooden floor and twitch my ears to pick up extrasensory connections from my surroundings. I flick my forked tongue, tasting the acrid stench of dying horses, cows, and chickens on the farm. All is still now, so I relax my seeds, glowing verdant underneath my lucent abdomen.
The cells of my body glitter in colors of the night like a blackened sky speckled with stars filtering throughout the room. I close my eyes, and my mind shuts off each white-hot spot in my skin, one by one, until I am sable and asleep.
In my dream, I’m standing on a distant planet’s gleaming coast where Kin have rescued a race of ocean dwellers. There are thousands of Kin standing on the glistening sand.
Together, we kneel below twin suns and thrust our large toes and elongated fingers into the shore. Bending our backs and knees, we burrow our hands and feet into the beach, stretching our extremities until we twist each with our neighboring Kin, becoming a nexus of roots bonded.
We absorb the images shared with one another, each Kin partaking in what we’ve seen, tasted, heard, and touched on our assigned earths. Our collective experience grows. Within the connection is our elder, T’Oyga. I offer my experience with James. “His memories and cells are dying. My training taught me what happened but not why.” I say telepathically. “Why would these beings destroy themselves?”
T’Oyga’s link to me tightens as I feel him speak, roots curling in on me. “Human beings, they seek damage, destruction, and ultimately, they seek their own death. Now you must renew the planet. Help James return to the soil.”
The muscles in my body spasm as I kneel with arms deep in sand. “I’ll be ready to help him make that transition. The time is near.”
For the rest of the night, I breathe with my Kin. It isn’t until I hear a sharp scream that I loosen myself from the link in my dream. James’s voice pierces my ears. I open my eyes, still drowsy with sleep.
“Oh, God!” James screams. His racing heart is louder than my own thoughts. I leap into his room. He’s in bed and arched into a ball. I stroke his arm like he’s a frightened child.
My training has taught me to stay calm. “James, I’m here.” My fingers collect globes of sweat; he’s drenched with nightmares, likely of a time before the Kin. I can’t save him. I can only ease this evolution, so I sit in the chair next to his bed and wait for that fateful end.
By midday, the seeds in my abdomen are hungry, but I’m worried about James. He’s not doing so well. He doesn’t have the strength to walk, so I let him rest. “I’m going to check on the farm. I’ll return with some food.”
James nods as I place a cool cloth on his forehead. Clumps of black curls slide off his scalp and onto his pillow. I brush the cottony hair away. His eyes close, and I want to give him pleasant visions, but I’m not allowed to bond with him. My desire is in vain.
I exit his room, and in a few strides, I’m outside the front door and standing on the porch. The air is warm. My luminous skin darkens to a golden brown beneath the sun. I head across the yard and into the barn.
Farmhands have been released from their pods along the walls. All six mechanical beings work, tossing grains onto the ground for featherless chickens while milking dying cows and brushing horses’ thinning tails. These humanlike machines don’t acknowledge me; they simply work according to their programming. They don’t stop to consider why these animals are expiring like James. I take the last of the contaminated eggs and place them into a basket.
I pass through the barn, leaving colossal footprints in the powdery dirt. My skin sorts these nutrients, but I need more food. On the outer edges of the farm are fruit trees. I stop underneath a canopy of leaves and search the ground for plums and nectarines, making sure to pick up fruit that has fallen from branches. I gently place the fruit into my basket of eggs and press my hand onto a tree, thanking it before I leave.
Back inside the house, I boil the eggs until the interiors are firm and slice the fruit with a nail extending from my finger upon mental command. I ingest the fruit pits, cracking each open with muscles in my tongue, swallowing the almond-like kernels for my offspring. The nourishment is crunchy and bitter.
After arranging the eggs and fruit onto a plate, I carry the food to James. I place the breakfast on his nightstand and wait for him to wake. He’s dreaming again because his eyelids are quivering. I’m lured to bond with him, but I remember my training: Kin links are too dangerous for humans, and I don’t want to cause more harm.
When James awakes on his own, I give him food. He seems calmer after some rest. “Are you one of them?” he asks, watching me carefully as I feed him from my hand. He bites a slice of nectarine, and the juice runs down my wrist. I want to lick the remnants, but my forked tongue frightens him.
“Yes, I’m one of the Kin.” I sit on the edge of my chair, sensing his fear.
“Where’re the others?” he asks. “Are they coming back?”
I tilt my head. Is he talking about the others who died in the war? I find his question mystifying. “No, they will not return. They’re being absorbed by the Earth. You’re one of a few surviving humans in this region.” Soon, there will be nothing left but machines and Kin seeds to inherit this planet, but I don’t say that. His heart is already beating too fast.
I grab an empty glass near his bed, place my mouth to the cup, and excrete the milky liquid from my crescent lips as James watches. “These fluids help with the pain.” I hand him the glass, which he knows now will soothe him to sleep through his final days. There’s nothing else I can do about the radiation. His blood cells are dying; his DNA strands are rupturing each day.
“The animals, are they okay?” he asks. “My horse, Tucker—”
“The farmhands are caring for them,” I say. It’s not a lie, but I feel an odd sensation in my brain, as if I’m constructing a truth.
“Thank you,” James says. As he drinks and peacefully dreams, I rest by his side in my chair until the sun begins to set. Every now and then, I place a hand over my abdomen, stroking my seed chamber.
Later that night, I feed James another egg in small bites, which he eats and vomits. The fevers are getting worse, so I give him more of my milk. Afterward, I bond with my species, searching out T’Oyga among the cluster of Kin in a forest dream. Our limbs are plunged deep into moist soil. “I’ve never seen such devastation to an organism. It doesn’t make any sense,” I say.
T’Oyga’s arms emerge and shell around mine. “Their metals do not live and breathe like ours. Their machines only cause harm.”
My limbs tense. “But the farmhands are the only ones caring for this land. Not all of their technology causes war. If I connect with James, I may have a better understanding.”
T’Oyga’s extensions, stronger and thicker, swell around mine, constricting cells in my appendages. “Do not! Bonding with him will infect us all. Instead, you must center on your duty. Have you planted your seeds?”
It’s difficult to breathe. I twist myself free from T’Oyga’s grip, which he now loosens. “I have not, elder.”
“Then what’re you waiting for?” T’Oyga severs our bond; my roots are unearthed.
By the end of the week, I am secreting my milk over red, scaly patches in James’s irradiated brown skin. He’s lost all of his wooly hair, and his scalp burns when exposed. I fold a cotton cloth over his head for protection from the elements. He shivers cold.
Despite the worsening sickness, James is awake and talking tonight. “Why do you help me now?” His voice rattles in his chest, and it takes me some time to process that question.
“Because I can.” I remember my training and what my elder said: Humans did this to themselves. I don’t understand Earth’s annihilation when it’s so very new, and I’m so young. I consider letting James rest, but I have to ask, “What do you remember about the war?”
James turns his head and stares achingly out of the window. “I remember the ships.” He coughs, and there’s a sprinkle of blood on his white sheet.
“Ships?” This surprises me. In my training, I was taught that humans were incapable of interstellar travel, that their inventions were rudimentary. I inch to the edge of my seat. “Where did they come from?”
James shakes his head. “Don’t know. The sky grew dark and these tentacles…” His voice trails, and his eyes drift to me. “Those things plunged through the clouds and dug into the ground.”
The seeds in my abdomen twitch, and James notices. He frowns.
“No, what you’re describing is our salvage,” I say. “My Kin came after that conflict.” I pull back his bedsheet, drenched with fluid. His skin continues to peel in layers. There’s nothing more I can do. He doesn’t comprehend that the Kin will inherit. We arrived too late to help him and the others. I give him a few sips of milk and leave him to sleep.
I need to understand this world’s war, so I go to my room next door and lie down. My translucent skin darkens. White luminaries cover my body until each one dims and I am sable again. In sleep, I find my Kin.
Together we stand among a field of wildflowers, each one a different color of the sunset, dark hues of purple, orange, and red. A cool breeze curls through the pasture as we kneel and bore our limbs into dirt. Through this network, I find my elder.
“Have you renewed your planet?” T’Oyga asks. I sense the nexus caressing my limbs. My burrowed body relaxes.
“I will, but James asked why I was helping him. He doesn’t remember the war or anything I was taught in my training.”
T’Oyga coils his limbs closer to me. “It’s for the best. Remember, you must seed soon.”
When the muscles in my ears twitch, I immediately pull myself out of sleep, severing the connection with my elder and Kin. I open my eyes to find James raising a kitchen knife over my abdomen. I quickly roll away as the blade lodges into the wooden floor.
Twisting my torso, I sweep a muscular leg into James. He crashes onto his back and wails; my skin blooms from sable to violet. I stand over James, picking him up by the neck and squeezing it. I raise him to eye level; his feet dangle over the floor. I peer into his jaundiced eyes.
“You—” he spits crimson onto my face. “—killed us.”
My skin grows opaque, a thick angry white. Scarlet cells gather in stripes down my arms and legs. I squeeze my hand into a tighter grip around his neck. “Deceit!” I yell.
James gasps, choking up more blood. I drop him to the floor and grab the knife lodged into the wood. He must have secured the weapon while I went out for food. James is on his last breath, and the house suddenly feels too small for me, like it’s shrinking.
I lurch out of the room, knocking over framed photos on the walls: a picture of James with a woman and a child, another photo with his horse, Tucker. There is James everywhere as I exit the house and stagger down the front porch. I fall to my knees on the earth, prepared to plant my seeds. My fingers dig into dirt. I search through soil, but there’s something about this land; it oozes with screams of the dead. I sift through clumps of the earth, searching for the truth when all I find is death.
T’Oyga believes this planet is worth inheriting when there’s so much pain to its core, but perhaps he’s wrong. I’ve upset my seeds; they’re churning in their lucent chamber, each one bright and verdant. I need food and rest, but I can’t let my guard down. My training didn’t prepare me for this.
James, his strength goes beyond anything I’ve ever witnessed. I hear him coughing and struggling to breathe. I rush back inside, and he’s on the floor where I left him, rounded into a ball. I pick up James in my long, strong arms and carry him to his room.
After placing him on the mattress, I sit until his breathing slows. He’s passed out now, and it occurs to me that I have a source that can tell me what happened in the war, what happened to make James lash out this way.
Silently, I stride out of the farmhouse as the sky glows into another dawn. I head into the barn as the androids are stepping out of their pods to begin their early morning chores. They ignore me, but I stop one of them. There are tiny lenses in its eyes.
I’m not sure where the visual memory is stored, but I use my enormous hands to search and prod the farmhand’s face and mouth. The human machine blinks at me. I turn it around and place my palm on its back where I find a clasp beneath the clothing. I raise the shirt and open a compartment to find a system of wires with cerulean liquid. Pulling one plastic vein to my crescent lips, I close my eyes and drink, tasting traces of silicon, silver, and titanium.
My body breaks down the storage, so I can study the recorded memories. Violent images cloud my mind; hundreds of Kin ships black out the sky. I try finding a time before our salvage, but there is no warfare, only dozens and dozens of my Kin spreading across the atmosphere, tentacles writhing through clouds and into soil.
I cannot sever this connection; it flows through me now, and I’m forced to witness it all: our arrival and our attack, our ships draining this land, tainting waters and food. Humans deployed bombs, attempting to destroy the ships, but our bonds hardened to resist. The invasion only lasted a few days, but it was enough to leave humanity in devastation. One by one, each ship disappeared, leaving life and what was left in despair.
I consider linking with James, but I can’t heal his damage. It’s too far gone. This morning, genetic mutations overrun his blood. He’s bleeding uncontrollably from his nose and ears, having used all of his strength to try and kill me. Now, his body is failing. I’m in the chair near his bed. “My Kin, we did this,” I speak softly, calmly. “We will inherit.” I hold a gray hand over my abdomen; long slender fingers gingerly stroke my seed chamber. James doesn’t speak. His breathing is shallow, and my sorrow is deep.
My ears catch the faintest exhale. James is gone now. I carry him out of the house and through the barn where I ask a farmhand to help me bury James with others who’ve passed away in my care. Out in the field, the android digs with a shovel. I clutch James until the cavity is deep enough to lay him on his side. I kneel, place him into the ground, and begin gently covering James’s body by cupping dirt with my hands. I need to do this.
I scoop soil with my long fingers, working by a flashlight held by the farmhand. I move quickly, but the dirt has not fully covered him no matter how fast I work. I scream, a deep growl rumbling like an explosion through the night. My howl echoes across the sky.
After I bury James, I amble my way through darkness until I stumble on the ground out of exhaustion, laying beneath moonlight. White-hot spots in my skin dim until I fall asleep in the farm’s softly lit field. In my dream, I stand with other Kin in a desert veined with rows of copper sand, rising to a hill where a cluster of trees thick with jade leaves meets. T’Oyga rests; his limbs are folded. He leads us kneeling in the loose ground until our roots are bonded.
As the ceremony of sharing begins, I take the data I’ve collected from the farmhand’s memory cells stored within my skin, and I immediately sow the evidence into my neighboring Kin. It takes a short while for the images to soak the brood. One by one, in a flood, I watch as the truth spreads until it reaches T’Oyga at the crest of the desert hill. His roots are slithering to me, curling and tightening around mine now. “J’Miah has betrayed us,” he says through the shared link, breathing and infecting his lies among the group.
“We’ve been deceived,” I say to the brood. “Those were our ships. You’ve seen it.” My body aches as I reach deeper with my limbs buried in copper sand. “The evidence is clear.”
Lightning strikes the ground, zipping directly to my arms and legs with a bolt of pain through my back, jolting me and nearby Kin. My elder parts the earth; rows of sand whirl away from my limbs and expose my flesh, but the data continues to tendril out of me, images of our ships and the radiation we caused.
T’Oyga’s razor-sharp roots cut through the gnarled parts of my body in the red earth. I’m being pushed out of the sand, spinning away from my body, exhuming me. Nearby Kin shudder; another daughter reaches for me through the tangle of T’Oyga, who lashes us both with great force. T’Oyga’s roots stab the knot I’ve formed with my neighbor, now connected to another Kin. Together, they pull me back into the sand.
T’Oyga attempts to cut me off from the brood, whipping my feet until I’m bleeding, red sand soaked with my fluids. I loosen my fingers from my adjacent Kin and curl them back to snap against T’Oyga’s limbs.
I pull his stem closer to me, and within that bond, I root out the truth for all to see. T’Oyga sent and remotely controlled the ships that poisoned Earth weeks before we arrived, leaving humans to die.
Twisting my arms deeper into the sand, I find an angle to wrap my network around my elder’s as I share the final images of James buried. T’Oyga squeezes my extremities, cutting off blood flow as my arms grow numb.
I yelp, and Kin surround me; their roots are young and thin like mine, but intertwined, we are a force steaming with wrath. We are all in unison, winding into thicker hands with dense extensions, hundreds, thousands snapping with vengeance, grabbing hold of T’Oyga and uprooting him from the brood with our collective strength, pulling on his limbs in all directions.
“Reckless children,” he says. His final breaths are on the wind. His limbs detach from the group and everyone knows the truth about what our elder has done. He won’t survive torn and bleeding like that, sundered from our dense mass.
And we, what will the assigned sons and daughters do? We will spread the truth.
When I open my eyes, it’s midmorning. Rainclouds blanket the sky. I awake from my dream, knowing what’s been done and what’s to come.
I roll onto my stomach still covered in dirt from James’s burial. My body aches from the fight with my elder. Down the trodden road, farmhands harvest fruit. I think of my seeds and how they’ll come to learn the truth about the destruction the Kin have caused. I’m heavy with what they will inherit: a land that is not ours, a world not salvaged but stolen.
I press my hands onto the soil beneath me. Rain mists my back as the land quakes, violently shaking the terrain.
I dig my fingers into dirt, prying my way through the crust. With a single punch of my fist, a large fissure cracks open the ground across the farm, opening the upper mantle of the Earth. I dive into this fracture, thick cords dangling from my seed chamber.
Each glowing pod tunnels its way into the ground, pulling me past roots, spiders, and worms, drawing me into the planet where my translucent skin hardens to rock, rich with silicon and oxygen as my seeds burrow through layers of the wounded Earth. They stop, but I push forward, each jagged surface of my exterior plowing through the planet until I sense my fellow Kin. We are a collective assigned to restore.
Above the surface, I sense the crumbling of distant mountains and hear the roar of far-off volcanoes; I feel the roll of tectonic plates shift as the seafloor spreads.
We are cocooned beneath soil and sky, resting above a roiling outer core as heat scalds our stony limbs. Our seeds plunge and swim in the belly of the globe; the walls cave back in close. We are cloaked as a great fire rages on and on, blazing its way to the surface of the Earth as we shape a new dawn.
S. D. Brown (she/her/hers) is a Black writer living in Southern California. Their work has also appeared in Augur Magazine.
