At the Dawn of the Second Age

Evie was only six years old the first time she met a unicorn.

It was not, as she had thought, a horse with a horn on its head. Rather, it was like a horse, a goat, and a deer, all mushed together. Its legs were long and slender, with bifurcated hooves, like a deer’s. It had a mane like a horse, and horse-like eyes, all dark and soft-lashed. And it had a wispy beard and tufted hooves, like a goat. But it also had a horn, pale and keratinous, and a long tail that ended in a tuft of fur.

It snorted, skittish, as Evie approached it.

“Mom! It doesn’t like me!”

“It’ll like you fine, sweetie. It just doesn’t know you yet.” Evie’s mom reached into her pocket. “Here, why don’t you give it some apples?”

Evie wrinkled her nose. She didn’t like apples—they were too dry and crumbly, and she didn’t think something like a unicorn would want them. But her mom fished a few crumbles out of her pocket and pressed them into Evie’s hand, so Evie stretched them out to the unicorn.

The unicorn considered. Snorted. Lowered its head.

“Palm flat,” her mom encouraged. Evie bent her fingers backward.

The whiskery mouth touched her palm and Evie flinched. Then the tongue, and Evie decided she did not like that sensation at all.

“Ew! Ew! Mom!”

The unicorn pulled back a few steps, crunching over bits of apples. Evie attempted to wipe her hand off on her shirt.

Her mom laughed. “Oh, you would have hated our old dog. He licked a lot more than the nice lady unicorn here.”

Evie frowned. “I don’t want a dog to lick me.” She’d seen pictures of dogs licking people before, but she hadn’t expected animal tongues to feel so squishy and slobbery.

“Maybe you’ll like it more someday, when you’re used to animals,” Evie’s mom said. “Do you want to say bye to the unicorns now? We can go watch the angels land.”

Evie perked up. “Yeah, let’s go see the angels!”

Evie’s mom tugged the door open, then shut again, sliding it on its rails until the rubber seals pressed shut. “Okay, girlie, let’s go.”

The hallways were always under low lighting. Not pitch black, just in case there were multiple people moving at once and they needed to see each other. But stuck in what her mother called ‘perpetual twilight.’ It saved energy, and it didn’t matter how bright the halls were anyway. Isla had run eyes-closed drills since she could walk. Seeing wasn’t an impediment to navigation.

As they walked, her mom fished a walkie-talkie out of her pocket. “Heya, Santos. Can I get a temp check?”

Evie’s ears perked up. Too high of a temp check and they’d need to wear cool-suits. She hated the cool-suits. The child one was ‘one size fits all’ which was some sort of blazing lie, unless ‘fit’ meant ‘bags in weird places and your fingers don’t reach the ends of the gloves.’

The walkie-talkie crackled. “We’re in the thirty-minute zone. Temp won’t kill you, but it might be good to get a filtration mask if you’re gonna be out for a bit.”

Evie frowned at that, too. Filtration masks hurt her face.

“We shouldn’t be out too long. We’re just going to see the angels land.”

Evie’s legs burned from the slope as they made their way upward. The ground was always sloping, and the direction and steepness of the slope was another way to tell where you were in the dark. But the slope to the outside was the steepest.

The bulkhead door was thickly built, and set firmly into the wall. Isla’s mom had to brace her shoulder against it and shove until the rubber seals popped. Once they were in the transitional room, they put on the full-cover suits (thankfully less annoying than the cool-suits) and Evie’s mom braced against the outer seal door. Her feet slid against the ground with the effort of pushing it open.

Evie squinted out at the horizon. It was brighter than the indoors, the sun slanted toward the horizon in a red haze. The ground slipped beneath her, sending her sliding against the gray powder. She kicked at it and the dust caught the air, drifting for a few feet before settling on the ground again. It reminded her of the snow she’d seen in movies, except that was supposed to be like shaved ice. This didn’t melt and the air was too hot for snow.

It was too hot for anything. Within a couple minutes, Evie was panting. Even in their white cover suits, the sun wormed its way in, cooking them. Humidity plastered her hair to her face.

“Are the angels here yet?” she asked.

Her mom had taken a pair of binoculars and was scanning the sky with them. “Oh, yes! I see them!” She gestured Evie closer. “Right up there. Be careful of the sun, but you can see them, right?”

Evie squinted for a minute, but… yes! Up above, there were tiny green specks flying through the haze of clouds.

“Yes! I see them!” Evie hopped on the balls of her feet as the angels swooped closer and lower.

She lowered the binoculars just as the first one thumped to the ground a foot or so away.

Evie had seen larval angels before. They were barely more than pale grubs with massive, membranous wings on either side. Fully grown angels were flushed green. Their membrane wings were thicker, and their four-eyed, mouthless faces scrunched up from the dust. Evie thought they still looked a bit like grubs, but cuter. The one closest to her huffed out of its slit-like nostrils.

A few more thumped to the ground around Evie. Her mom picked one up. “Lookin’ good, little fella. Had a lot to eat?”

Most of the ones around Evie were trying to go somewhere, using their wings to drag themselves along. A few, though, had thumped to the ground and stopped, wings spread.

“Mom?” Evie said. “They’re not moving.”

“They might be old,” she said. “Angels don’t live forever.” She scanned the sky with the binoculars once more, then lifted her walkie talkie. “Santos. They’re all down. We’ve got…” She counted. “Uh, eighty-four. What was the original sendout?”

“Haven-Arc 36 said they launched ninety-one. That’s an eight percent loss. Not bad over an ocean, honestly. Any injuries?”

“Not at first glance. There are… four on their last legs, but I think it’s probably old age.”

“That’d match with the report we got. I’ll send up a collection team, and we’ll get those four down to the lab.”

“What’s the lab gonna do with them?” Evie asked.

Her mom waved her off. “Do you want to send up a dove?”

“Not right after they land. We’ll send one up tomorrow morning.”

“Copy, I’ll get to launch point bright and early.” Evie’s mom put the walkie-talkie away. “Are you done playing with the angels, sweetie?”

Evie patted the one closest to her on the head (angels were nice, sensible creatures; their skin felt like a human’s, and they didn’t try to nibble your fingers or lick you) and headed back to her mom. The cool air of the underground was relieving against her overheated skin.

Her mom was talking about sending up a dove. Evie wasn’t sure why they called it that. Doves were what adults called ‘real’ animals. But doves weren’t real, not like unicorns and angels and fairies were real. She’d only ever seen pictures of doves. This dove wasn’t even alive. It was a machine.

“What’s the lab going to do with the angels?” Evie asked again.

“They’ll make sure the old ones are comfortable when they die,” her mom explained. “Then they’ll transplant some of the algae under their wings to baby angels, so they can grow their own when they fly.”

Evie nodded. She’d paid enough attention in science class to know what a symbiotic relationship was. Angels needed the algae because it provided them with the sugars they used to stay alive when they flew (plus some vitamin supplements when they got back to a Haven). The algae needed the angels because the angels carried it around to get sunlight and carbon from the air. And humans needed the angels and the algae to trap carbon in the air, so it would stop being so hot.

“The angels are helping us go back outside,” her mom told her regularly. “Don’t you want that?”

Evie wasn’t sure. All the grown ups wanted to go outside. She wasn’t sure why. Outside was terrible. Even when her mom showed her pictures of the outside, all lush and green, and told her it was beautiful and everywhere might look like that one day, she wasn’t sure she wanted that. It looked weird.

But her mom seemed happy about it, so Evie would at least try to be happy about it.

She was less happy when her mom dragged her out of bed to go to the launch point before dawn. Her mom checked various readouts, squinting all the while, even though the light was brighter in the room. Adults squinted a lot. Her mom had told her most of them had bad eyes, something to do with a big flash going off. None of them wanted to say much about it when Evie asked.

Her mom wrote some things down, did some calculations. Isla wandered over to another desk. This one showed a whole bunch of camera images, from the menagerie.

The unicorns were there. There was a big cage for the recovered angels, with bars they could use to climb up the sides. An enclosure for a clutch of dragons. A nest, for the fairies. A big tank, for the nereid and sea spirits and leviathans.

Behind her, her mom made a disappointed noise. She checked in over the walkie-talkie. “You get the report, Santos?”

“Yep. It’s getting better.”

“Not that fast.”

“Never expected it to be fast. It’ll get faster. Dragons can go out in a couple years, at this rate.”

“I know. It’s just…” Evie’s mom shook her head. “Never mind. We’ll keep working on it.”

Evie watched as her mom slumped over the desk. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, sweetie.” Her mom smiled. It was the weird smile she sometimes did, where her mouth went the right way, but her eyes didn’t change. “Are you looking at the animals?”

“Uh huh.” Evie frowned at the dragons on the monitor. They were lanky and scaly, with big flaps of skin at their sides. “Mom, you said the dragons are going to go outside?”

“In a couple years, yeah. Do you remember what they called dragons in school?”

Evie’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “Um. Extre.. Extremaphores?”

“No. Close. Dragons are our extremophiles. They can withstand a lot of heat and radiation, so they’re going to be one of the species that can go outside first. And do you know what dragons are supposed to do outside?”

This was starting to feel like a test. Evie sighed. “They… eat rocks?”

“Well, they are lithivores. But that’s only part of their job. They’ll eat and compress a lot of the ash in their stomachs, and they’ll start digging beneath it to reveal some of the dirt that used to be there. And they’ll help pull some carbon out of the atmosphere too, by breathing it in and converting it into carbon that’ll help strengthen their bones and claws.”

One of the dragons on the screen rolled over, showing its stomach. Evie had a hard time imagining them doing anything important.

“And then the unicorns will go out, once the dragons have cleared out some of the ash,” her mom said. “And they’ve got special bacteria in their stomachs, too. Do you remember what those do?”

“Puts nutrients back in the ground?”

“Yep. A long time ago, people planted a lot of the same crops over and over, and they took a lot of nutrients out of the ground. The unicorns will help us put it back.”

“What about the fairies?” Evie asked. She liked the fairies. They were tiny, and shimmered with pink iridescence as they flew.

“Do you remember what all the bees and butterflies and wasps and flies did, a long time ago?”

“They… helped the plants?”

“Exactly. And the fairies will do the same thing for us.”

“Why don’t we just make the bees and butterflies and wasps and stuff if we made the fairies?” Evie asked.

Her mom’s mouth pursed, like it did when she banged her shin off a wall in the dark. “Maybe we will,” she said. “But bees and butterflies and wasps all needed to live in a specific kind of world. And that world-” She made a gulping noise. “That world isn’t around anymore. If we made all the bees and butterflies again, they wouldn’t be able to do the things we need them to do. They need all kinds of specific plants and temperatures and cycles. We had to make new creatures, ones that could do the things we needed.”

“Like how we made the ambrosia?” Evie liked ambrosia. The texture was pleasantly squishy, far better than the dried fruits and meats her mom liked on holidays.

“Exactly. The angels clean the air, the dragons clean the earth, the unicorns help make the soil fertile and spread the seeds, the fairies will pollinate the flowers, and the nereids and leviathans will help clean the oceans and lakes.”

“Everything has a purpose,” Evie nodded. That was what all her teachers said, too. All the animals had a purpose. She paused, thought about it. “Mom? Humans are animals, right?”

“Yes, we are.”

“Then if all the animals have a purpose, what’s our purpose?”

Her mom paused, then smiled. It wavered in the flickering light of the screens.

“We watch the Earth and the animals and we’re the ones who know enough to fix things when they go wrong. We’re the ones with enough power to destroy and the ones who maybe, possibly, can recreate things from the ashes.” Her smile sharpened. “I guess that makes us gods.”

She laughed, then. Evie didn’t like it. It wasn’t her mom’s laugh. It had too many edges, too much bitterness. Her mother, half lit by the flickering screens, looked like a stranger.

Then she came back to herself. She crouched next to Evie.

“Being human is a very big responsibility,” she said. She curled her fingers around Evie’s. “Do you think you can do it?”

Evie nodded.

“Good girl.” Evie’s moms stood, and the strange moment passed, leaving Isla oddly cold and heavy. “Let’s get some breakfast, kiddo.”

#

Evie was thirteen when the unicorns stepped out on the surface.

It had taken another seven years for the dove to declare it safe for habitation. It was still too hot for Evie’s liking, but temperatures of just under a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in summer, only marginal radiation, and clouds of mostly water meant habitation efforts could truly begin, and travel south as the world improved.

The unicorn she was guiding (one year and two months old, ten hands, grayish-white, short horn) bleated as his hooves touched the ground. The dragons had cleared most of the ash, but with no roots to hold it in place, it still slid.

“Shh,” Evie reassured the unicorn. “Come on.” She prompted it with ambrosia, threaded with a variety of seeds. The unicorn stepped forward. Once it had eaten and digested, it would spread the seeds and fertilizer together. Gradually, the Earth would become green as herds of unicorns spread fertility, and fairies pollinated the resulting flowers.

Her mother was inside. All the grown ups were. Exposure to radiation had caught up with most of them. Her mother had developed cataracts and bone cancer. She would be alive for another few months. The likelihood of her living beyond that… Isla tried not to think about it too much.

Once, her mother had called them gods. Creatures with the power to make and destroy. Sometimes, Evie looked at the machines keeping her alive and thought it was ridiculous. How could gods have so little power?

Then she remembered that her mother had lived twice her expected lifespan with those machines, and felt strange again.

The unicorn nudged her, nervous. Evie looked out over the gray, dusty landscape. Tried to imagine it green and florid. Didn’t quite succeed.

And yet, it was still her job to make it so. To repair things. The old gods had destroyed the world.

The new god placed her hand on the unicorn’s mane and started to lead it onward, toward the next step of reparation and stewardship.

Evie was fourteen when she saw the first green shoots of wild plants emerge from the Earth.