Thren Valis's Arc

Chapter 14 of 18

The cuff worked. The ship obeyed Sylvana's hand now. But Thren saw a harder truth the next morning. She stood in the shipyard and watched Sylvana's vines sink into the dirt beside the hull. Sylvana could command the ship. She could not board it. Her roots held her to the ground like an anchor. A pilot who cannot leave the soil cannot crew a flight. "You steer it from here," Thren said. "But I need you inside when it flies." Sylvana pulled one vine free. Soil clung to it. "The ground holds me," she said. "Go too deep, I do not come back. My legs are these roots. They do not walk." Thren stared at the vines. Roots were just a system that carried signals and food. She had spent years teaching plants to run through frames she built. She could build a frame that walked. A crashed drone sat rusting at the yard's edge. Thren had stripped it for parts before. She dragged its lower half into the light. Two mechanical legs hung from the hips, joints still greased, contours smooth and metal. She laid them flat and cut open the hip casing. "Give me a root," Thren said. "A small one. One you can spare." Sylvana hesitated. She spoke through pictures when words ran short. "A hand feeding a stranger," she said. Then she severed a thin vine and passed it over. Thren fed the vine into the drone's leg. She spliced the living root into the motor lines, the way she wove mycelium into her hull. The vine gripped the wiring. It read the signals like it read the ground. But the legs stayed dead. No power. Then she remembered the panels. A crashed explorer had left behind solar cells, sleek dark plates rimmed in pink and blue. Thren had saved them for the nursery. She wired the panels into a top piece and fitted it across Sylvana's chest, cells facing the sun. Light struck the plates. Current ran down the lines into the legs. The motors woke. The metal legs twitched, then bent at the knee. "Pull your roots up," Thren said. "Slow." Sylvana drew her vines from the earth, one by one. For the first time she was not rooted. She wobbled on the mechanical legs. Then she thought a step, and the legs answered her root the way the ship did. She took one stride across the dirt. Then another. "I walk," Sylvana said. Her flowers shook. Thren opened the hatch. Sylvana climbed the ramp on her new legs and stood inside the hull. The ship recognized her hand and her step both. A pilot who could board and fly. But walking freed Sylvana from the soil. And the older voice under the ground had reached her through her roots. Now those roots dangled in the air, cut loose from the earth that had answered them. Whatever spoke below had lost its hold on her. Thren did not yet know what that would cost.