Alight (12 page)

Her words, or Aramovsky’s?

“You’re lying,” I say.

I have no idea if she is, or if she’s telling the truth. I’m just so
frustrated.

Smith sneers. “You think you know everything. Well, you don’t know
anything
about this. If you’re smart, you’ll believe me.”

I want to hit something. We’ve worked so hard, sacrificed so much, and now everything is at risk. My fury isn’t going to fix anything, though, not when our survival is at stake. Calm plans can keep us alive—decisions driven by anger could move us closer to death.

A knock on the room’s metal door.

Smith walks to it. The handprint there—of course—has a circle-cross in the palm. She presses it and the door slides open.

O’Malley. Holding my spear.

He enters, smiling that lovely smile of his. He hands me the spear.

“Em, you look
much
better.”

He glances at Smith and Spingate.

“Can Em and I have a quick moment alone?”

“Sure,” Spingate says. “I have to test some of the shuttle’s food stores before the meeting anyway, make sure the mold hasn’t gotten in. Smith, come help me.”

Smith looks like she would rather go anywhere than with Spingate, but follows her out.

O’Malley waits a moment to make sure they’re too far away to overhear.

“Everyone knows about the spider, the food warehouse and the mold,” he says. “They are afraid. They need to hear from their leader that we’ll find a solution.”

I’m sure people are scared. I’ll do what I can to make them feel better.

“Thank you,” I say. “But…I don’t remember asking for a meeting. Did I?”

He shrugs. “I figured you would want to talk when you woke up, so I told everyone you called a meeting.”

That seems like odd behavior.

“Why didn’t you just say it was your idea?”

“Because people listen to
you
. You’re the leader. Ready?”

I’m not happy he lied. I’m also not happy that I left him in charge, and came back to chaos.

“We’ll go in a minute,” I say. “First, what happened while I was gone? How could you let Aramovsky open up the coffins?”

The question angers him.

“I didn’t
let
him do anything. Gaston never left the pilothouse. I had to control the kids from the
Xolotl
. They were getting into the food, going outside, running around. While I was busy watching them, Aramovsky slipped away.”

I notice the cut on O’Malley’s cheek is almost gone. It’s just a pink line, barely even a scar.

Smith healed him, too.

I point to the coffins. “Did Aramovsky and Smith let the new kids out while you were in one of those?”

He reactively touches his cheek. I’ve caught him in a second lie.

“Yes,” he says. “I didn’t think Aramovsky would try something while I was in there. How could I have known he would?”

It makes sense now. With me, Spingate and Bishop gone, with O’Malley unconscious, with Gaston learning about the shuttle, no one was watching Aramovsky. Someone
always
needs to be watching him.

“Em, I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

He did. I’m so angry at O’Malley. He always seems to think things through, but this time he didn’t.

“
Sorry
won’t keep us alive. The next time I tell you to do something,
do
it. Do you understand what this does to us?”

That familiar, blank expression settles over him.

“I get it,” he says. His voice is thin, his words clipped. “Are you finished yelling at me?”

I can only hope I’ve made my point.

“I’m finished. Let’s go.”

D
eck One’s coffin room is packed. People sit or stand on closed coffins, sit on the black floor in the aisles, lean against the red walls. Almost three hundred faces—most of which I’ve never seen before—stare back at me. White-shirted little kids whisper to each other, pointing at me as if I’m an ancient myth come to life.

Everyone my age is dressed in coveralls and boots. Okereke and Johnson, Borjigin and Beckett, Bawden and Farrar. Even Bishop, who stands by the shuttle door, red axe at his side. They all wear black. I can’t help but think of the Grownups we left back on the
Xolotl
.

Gaston is standing on a small stage made from empty food bins. He sees me and steps down.

As I walk toward it, people close in behind me. I’m surrounded. I step up on the stage. For once, I am taller than most of the people here.

I look out at the mass of faces. They’re waiting for me to tell them what happens next, that everything will be fine. I see everyone except Spingate. Where is she? I’d feel better if she was here.

“Uh…thank you all for coming.”

First thing out of my mouth and it’s so stupid. Where else would they be? Silence makes me nervous, so I fill it.

“Hello to you new kids. I know this is scary, but I was just like you not long ago—frightened, confused, no idea of what was happening. Try to relax, you’re with us now. See the people in black? They’ve been through far worse than this. We—”

A little hand goes up: Zubiri’s.

“Yes?”

“Food,” she says. She puts her arm down, stands. No smile this time. She’s as serious as Bishop. “What are we going to do about food?”

That’s something we’d all like to know.

“We’re working on it. There are animals here we can eat, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to catch them. And we haven’t even started looking at plants yet. It might be—”

Aramovsky raises his hand. I know he’s going to try and cause trouble, but I just answered Zubiri’s question—I can’t have people think I’m ignoring only him.

“Yes, Aramovsky?”

“Who built the fire? Other than having us cower in the shuttle, what have you done to protect us from this threat?”

He’s doing it again, asking me questions to which he knows there are no answers. He’s trying to make me look bad.

“We don’t know they’re a threat.”

“You didn’t find any food,” he says, not hiding his disgust. “Now the fire-builders—whoever they are—probably know we’re here. Sounds like your trip was a failure.”

“We found
water,
” I say. “Without fresh water we’d all die. Does
that
sound like a failure?”

“Water we can’t get to is the same as no water at all. How are you going to kill the spiders that guard it, Em?”

Why does he have to be so difficult? I hate him.

“We don’t know yet,” I say. “We will find a way. Now, about our food situation. Gaston, assuming we eat small meals, how long will the shuttle’s supplies last?”

Gaston glances across the room, at Borjigin, the half-circle wisp of a boy with big teeth and straight hair as black as his coveralls. When I left for the warehouse, he and Opkick were doing inventory on the storerooms.

“Twelve days,” Borjigin says. “If we stretch it.”

I feel some of the pressure ease out of the room. A bubble of calm sets in: we’re in bad shape, but we’re not going to die tomorrow.

Then, that bubble bursts.

“It’s worse than that.”

Spingate. She’s standing in the back wall’s open door. She must have been on Deck Two, maybe in one of the labs. She holds up a white package:
CRACKERS
.

“This came from a bin we opened when we landed, not even two days ago.”

She waves her bracer above the package.

The jewels flash orange.

“Contaminated,” she says. “Enough to make us sick. Maybe even enough to kill us. Everything in the open bins is contaminated. We have to assume the only safe food is in bins that are still sealed. Even those might go bad.”

I look at Gaston.

“How many bins did we already open?”

He hesitates before answering. “About half of them.”

We have, at most, seven days’ worth of food left. Not enough time to farm. Maybe enough to learn to trap those small animals, but how many of those would we need—every single
day
—to feed three hundred people?

Gaston looks nervous, like he thinks the crowd is about to attack him.

“Not my fault,” he says. “We didn’t know about the mold.”

Beckett stands up. The tan-skinned redhead has said almost nothing since my group merged with Bishop’s, but he’s suddenly so mad he can’t help himself.

“Why did you open so many bins, Gaston?” Beckett points to the gear symbol on his own forehead. “A
real
scientist would have tested first, made sure there was no reaction from the environment!”

Gaston huffs. “You’re a
real scientist
?”

“I wouldn’t have ruined half our food!”

Grumbles of agreement, even a few shouts—Gaston couldn’t have known, yet people blame him anyway.

This room is growing angry, fast.

Bawden points at some of the new kids. “The food would last longer if it wasn’t for all of these new
empties
.”

The coffin room falls quiet.

That word again.

O’Malley was embarrassed he said it. Bawden is not.

I don’t know the names of all the
Xolotl
kids, but I recognize their faces. On their foreheads, symbols: circles, yes, but also circle-stars, half-circles, gears, circle-crosses and a double-ring. On the foreheads of the new faces, though, I see only one symbol.

The empty circle. Like mine.

I scan the crowd, find O’Malley. I know full well he already counted.

“Are all of the new kids circles?”

He nods.

What does that mean? An entire shuttle full of my people? No,
everyone
here is “my people.” In only one other place were all the symbols circles: the countless massacred bodies in Bishop’s section of the
Xolotl.

I see some people my age glaring at the new kids. The children sense this sudden hostility. They lean into each other, hold each other, eyes flicking from one black-clad person to the next.

Can we really be capable of turning on each other this fast? We’re not even hungry yet—what will happen when we are?

“Bawden, that word is off-limits,” I say. “Don’t use it again.”

She sneers. “It doesn’t mean anything. Their circles
are
empty. And you can’t tell me what to do.”

A metal-on-metal
gong
reverberates through the room, makes everyone jump. All heads turn toward Bishop: he has smashed the flat of his red axe against the red wall. He stares straight at Bawden.

“Em is our leader,” Bishop says. His voice is calm, but unforgiving. “That means she
can
tell you what to do. She got us this far, didn’t she?”

Bawden stares at Bishop as if she’s ready to fight him, but he isn’t being aggressive. He’s
asking
her to cooperate, not ordering her. That seems to make a difference.

She looks at me. “Fine. I won’t use that word anymore.”

Not an apology, but it’s something.

How can we know a word is bad, but not know
why
it’s bad?

Aramovsky stands on a closed coffin.

“We shouldn’t fight each other,” he says. “The mold is our biggest threat. And its red color is no coincidence. It is punishment from the God of Blood, because not enough of us have accepted his divine way.”

Spingate shakes her head. “It isn’t a
punishment,
you idiot. It’s biological.”

“I see,” Aramovsky says. “Well, since it’s
biology,
I’m sure you already have a cure.” He smiles. “You’ll cure this before we run out of food, right, Spingate?”

Her face wrinkles with rage. She rightfully blames him for waking these kids up in the first place.

“Science doesn’t work that way,” she says. “It’s a process.”

Aramovsky looks around the room, playing to the crowd.

“She can’t promise us when she’ll find a cure, or if there even
is
a cure. See what happens if you put science over faith?”

The package of crackers smacks into his head, making him wince in surprise.

She puts her hands on her hips.

“When you put science over faith, you
save lives,
” she says. “Those crackers that just bounced off your thick skull? If you had eaten those, you’d be dead. My
science
revealed that before anyone got hurt. Why didn’t your
god
tell Farrar not to eat the contaminated food? Does your god want everyone to die?”

Aramovsky’s eyes narrow. “Not everyone, Spingate.” He stretches out his long arm and points a finger at her. “Just those who deserve it.”

Around the room, roars of outrage—and some of approval.

I slam the butt of the spear down on the makeshift stage. The plastic
thonk
isn’t as impressive as Bishop cracking his axe against the wall, but it quiets the room.

Spear in hand, I step off the stage and stride toward Aramovsky. People scramble out of my way. I stand in front of him, not hiding my anger.

“Did you just threaten Spingate’s life?”

“Of course not,” he says. “I was merely answering her question.”

“You pointed at her when you said it.”

He speaks loudly, making sure everyone can hear him: “My apologies. I see how that might have looked.” He faces Spingate, bows. “I would never threaten your life. Only the God of Blood can decide who lives and who dies.”