We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from This World Is Not Yours by Kemi Ashing-Giwa, an action-packed space horror novella about a toxic polycule consumed by jealousy and their attempts to survive on a hostile planet—publishing with Nightfire on September 10th.
After fleeing her controlling and murderous family with her fiancée Vinh, Amara embarks on a colonization project, New Belaforme, along with her childhood friend, Jesse.
The planet, beautiful and lethal, produces the Gray, a “self-cleaning” mechanism that New Belaforme’s scientists are certain only attacks invasive organisms, consuming them. Humans have been careful to do nothing to call attention to themselves until a rival colony wakes the Gray.
As Amara, Vinh, and Jesse work to carve out a new life together, each is haunted by past betrayals that surface, expounded by the need to survive the rival colony and the planet itself.
036
In the far reaches of space, a verdant planet becomes a world. The world observes the life It has made and, perceiving the life to be very good, is pleased.
But a critical piece is missing. Life is so very precious, so very fragile. How best to protect it? Walls can be scaled and poisons can be purged. All it takes are the right tools. No, the world needs something else.
Something… more.
The world takes care of Its own.
Before
She has two hours.
That’s how long the grunts gave her. After that, anything’s fair game. They didn’t say those words explicitly, but she’s been in the security industry for a while now. She completed the same “information extraction” tutorials as the local station officers. She knows what the thin smiles and blank eyes meant.
She’s not proud of every scattered fragment of her past, of the things she had to do on the only jobs she could score. But these are the hardest orders she’s ever had to follow.
It takes about two minutes to pack. She’s always refused to call the duffel she stowed under the marble tiling in the foyer a go bag, but that’s what it is. She told herself, over and over, that the extra changes of clothes, the ration packs, the flashlights and guns and solar chargers were for them. But the shirts are two sizes too large for her girlfriend, and there’s only enough food to last one woman for long. Amara doesn’t know the first thing about gun safety, anyway.
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Leaving takes an eternity.
She takes one last look at her world before she goes.
She has to.
There’s the satin-bound stack on the living room bookshelf, stuffed with every mortifying love note she wrote Amara when they first started dating. There’s the tiny flower Amara plucked from the palace gardens, pressed under a stack of books and presented to Vinh (so fucking proudly) two weeks ago, sitting on the coffee table. Hidden behind the cheap print Vinh scrounged up savings for is the newly installed safe Amara thinks Vinh doesn’t know about, with a little velvet box Amara also thinks is a secret. They’ve laughed and wept in every room, bathed in the light of countless stars. They built a life here, together.
And now she has to leave it. Leave her. Forever.
She’s almost died twice. Those long, agonizing moments pale in comparison to this.
She sees two final texts from her girlfriend before she wipes her talkglass, snaps it in half, and lobs it down the trash chute: What do you want for dinner? I’m thinking we can order in? Closely followed by: Let me know. Love you so much!! 🙂
Amara will be fine. She’ll even be better off, and someday she’ll find someone who actually deserves her, as soon as she realizes she always could’ve done better. Hot tears blur the room. But it’s okay.
Vinh steps out of their apartment for the last time, the engraved steel doors rolling shut behind her like a tombstone.
035
They’ve been planning this for months, almost since they got back together a year ago.
Amara leans out the window of the helicraft, pointing toward the land below with the hand that isn’t currently holding Vinh’s. The ground is so bright with foliage it burns the eye just to look at it. Amara has taken so much for granted over the course of her thirty (conscious) years, but one thing she’ll always deeply appreciate is the smell of life—the rich scent of fertile soil and the fresh perfume of flowers and the odor of animal sweat. The air on her family’s residences, scattered across hundreds of orbiters and ships and stations, and even on the capital planet, is painfully pristine. It smells like nothing. This planet, their new world, is so different from everything she’s ever known.
Vinh’s eyes go wide. Amara watches as her girlfriend’s gaze slides past the verdant forest flying by underneath them, latching onto the undulating, semitransparent thing moving toward the trees. It oozes over the red grass in an unstoppable, shapeless, swallowing tide.
“What the hell is that?” Vinh whispers into the microphone tip of her headset. Her fingers grip Amara’s tighter.
Amara laughs, the wind whipping her dense brown curls about her face. She knows it’s the same giggle that made Vinh turn around in that club forever ago to get her first good look.
“Come on, I’ve shown you every picture I took for the council reports,” says Amara. “Actually, I was worried you’d be bored if I took you here.”
“Bored?” Vinh lets out a broken chuckle, pulling on a lock of straight black hair—an old nervous tic Amara hasn’t seen in years. “Bored? Sweetheart, I’m terrified. The Gray— everything about it seems wrong.”
Vinh is never scared. She’s almost literally fearless. Bravery is action in the face of terror, certainly, but Vinh doesn’t even need the courage her fellow security officers do. She just acts without fear, without a shred of hesitation or self-doubt. It’s what makes her the settlement’s best protector and the enemy’s worst foe. The rival outpost of Jacksonhaven hasn’t attempted a raid since she took over the security force.
Amara theorizes Vinh’s problem here is that you and your forces can fight off a couple hundred grunts trying to steal food or fabricators, but you could fire a thousand rounds from a plasma cannon into the squirming mass below, and all you’d have is a busted cannon. If the Gray comes for them, there’d be nothing Vinh could do. All her training, all her skills— everything she is and everything she’s worked for would be for nothing.
Amara lays her other hand over Vinh’s in gentle reassurance. “I know it looks monstrous from a certain angle, but see?” She gestures toward the land below with a wide sweep of her palm. “The trees are untouched. If not for this loud hunk of metal, you’d still be able to hear all the animals.” She smiles, almost fondly, as she surveys the sap-slow flood. “This is just the planet’s self-cleaning mechanism. We could swim around in it and come out better than we went in. You can even breathe the Gray. In fact, the only time I’ve ever seen it attack two species at once was when they were in the same taxonomic tribe.”
Vinh’s mouth contorts into a grimace. “So what’s it cleaning this time?”
“An invasive fungus from one of the other continents. We think Jacksonhaven brought it over from one of their surveys. Idiots.” Amara smirks. “One of these days the planet’s just going to get rid of them, I swear.”
“Hm.” Vinh’s eyes flick up to the nearest hollow. It’s a low, conical rupture, much like a squat volcano. But the planet’s guts aren’t solely magma. Instead of lava and toxic gas, hollows spew out the Gray.
If Jesse were here, which he isn’t, he’d probably point out that there are, in fact, a number of genuine volcanoes in the sector. Their number and semi-frequent activity are part of the reason why the land is so fertile. Over the last several thousand years, their eruptions have showered the region with volcanic “ash”—nutrient-rich rock, mineral, and glass particles.
“But you said it never kills animals?”
“If that were really impossible, I probably would’ve been out of a job this past year,” Amara says. “As far as I know, it hasn’t. There’s a chance the Gray could be a threat someday, but as long as we’re careful, the probability of that happening is basically zero.”
The Gray works across limited areas between hollows, hunting down the intended target with a ruthlessness Amara has to respect. As New Belaforme’s head biologist, her job is to ensure the settlement is never seen as a contaminant, never perceived as the invasive species they technically are. She’s taken thousands of samples, spent every day since being pulled from her sleep-cradle on Landing Day studying the digestive proteins that make up the Gray. They’re fascinating molecular machines, flawlessly designed to reduce their targets to nothingness. Every week, she submits a report to the Council on everything they need to do to ensure the people of New Belaforme live in nothing less than perfect harmony with the planet. It’s hard work, but critical. She’s proud of herself, of every step she’s taken without her family’s power and privilege paving the way for her.
“It’s sort of beautiful,” says Vinh, pulling Amara from her thoughts. Her voice sounds very far away.
Amara hums her agreement. She’s always thought so. The Gray isn’t really gray; it’s opalescent. In direct sunlight, its surface glitters with every color on the visible electromagnetic spectrum.
A herd of ungulate-class, ectothermic creatures run through the Gray, kicking up scintillating globules with their six hooved limbs. The herd leader shakes her arrowlike head, fluffing her magnificent striped mane. She throws open her tripartite, shell-piercing beak to let out a trill, the sound cutting through the helicraft’s hum. Both women flinch and laugh.
“I’ve only heard that call in field recordings,” Amara says, awed.
One specimen tucks in his legs, sits beside one of the arms of Gray creeping toward the forest, and starts sipping the fluid as the sun warms his hide.
“I know this is our life now. I know that being here, on this world and with you, is the new normal, but… I’m going to remember this trip for the rest of my days,” says Amara, warmth swelling in her chest. She loves Vinh so much it hurts.
Vinh says nothing. For a moment Amara thinks she hasn’t heard. Or maybe she’s just so absorbed by the Gray. Amara understands the feeling—
Vinh sits back. Her cheeks, a few shades lighter than true copper, glow with a faint blush. Her eyes meet Amara’s. “Do you want to get married?”
Before
In a richly appointed private chamber, Amara weeps into Vinh’s shoulder.
“I’m not even a person to them,” Amara sobs. Her shoulders shake under three layers of gold-threaded silk. “Just another pawn, just another vessel for their dynasty.”
“I know,” murmurs Vinh, carding her fingers through Amara’s hair. Her braids flow freely across her back, a rare sight; normally they’re pulled up into an intricate coiffure. “I know. I’m so sorry.”
They’ve been hiding away on a remote family estate, a diamond-shaped orbital station circling a turquoise gas giant at the edge of the system. Five minutes ago, Amara’s family formally ordered her to return to the capital planet, where she will wed the politically advantageous match selected for her. Vinh is expected to disappear somewhere along the short journey. If she does not, there will be dire consequences for them both.
“I wish they could love me,” Amara whispers. “Or… I wish I could just escape them.”
They both know she wouldn’t, even if she could. Amara’s family is a supermassive black hole, each member orbiting around it like a blazing star. Together they form a galaxy, but even the greatest of them are helpless in the face of the singularity’s thrall.
Vinh can’t change that. But she can comfort Amara. “It’s okay. You have me.”
Amara lifts her forehead from Vinh’s collarbone. Her eyes meet Vinh’s.
“Promise?” she asks. They both know it’s not a request.
Vinh’s onyx-black eyes reflect the starscape outside with cutting clarity. A thousand suns glimmer in unshed tears. She brings a hand up to Amara’s jaw, her thumb dragging gently across the other woman’s cheek. “I promise,” she says.
They both know it’s not really an answer.
Excerpted from This World Is Not Yours, copyright © 2024 by Kemi Ashing-Giwa.
