Alight (15 page)

T
here are little kids
everywhere
. Running around, goofing off and generally getting in the way. The shuttle is big, but we have far too many bodies in here. I’ll find a way to put them all to work.

They are even on Deck Two, where the labs are. The lab doors are closed. I heard Spingate’s voice coming from behind the door of Lab One. She’s yelling at someone.

I knock.

“Go
away,
” she shouts.

“Spin, it’s Em.”

A pause. The door slides open. Gaston steps out. He’s wide-eyed, frazzled. He closes the door behind him.

“Em, save me,” he says quietly. “She wants help, but the work she’s doing is way beyond me. I was trained to fly, not to do biology research. I need to be in the pilothouse—I think I’ve found weapons systems.”

My heart surges at this good news. “You mean like bracelets?”

He shakes his head. “No, weapons that are part of the shuttle, that it can use on outside targets. Like missiles.”

I vaguely know what a missile is. I can’t see how it will help us unless he can aim it at a spider.

He takes my hand. “Come on, talk to Spingate”—his voice lowers—“and
watch out
.”

Before I can ask him what he means, he pulls me into the lab. The narrow room is white, like Smith’s medical room. Cabinets, gear and devices I don’t recognize line the walls. Spingate is staring at something floating above a white pedestal marked with a golden gear symbol.

“Hi, Spin,” I say. “I came to see if there’s anything I can do to help.”

“I doubt it,” she says without looking up from her work. “Gaston is already helping me.”

The image on the pedestal before her looks like some kind of twisting ladder, rungs made of different colors. I don’t know what it’s supposed to be.

Until now, every time a puzzle presented itself, Spingate was excited to solve it. Not now. No smile, no giggle. Eyes sunken, hair askew—she’s frustrated.

She stares at the twisted ladder, seems to have already forgotten I’m here.

I glance at Gaston. His eyes plead with me—he wants to leave. Partially because he wants to learn more about the shuttle, I know, but more so because of the angry mood that radiates from Spingate.

That reminds me: he’s the only one who knows how to fly—maybe I can solve two problems at once.

“Gaston, can you teach Beckett to fly the shuttle?”

He frowns. “Why? I know how to do it.”

Maybe he’s still mad that Beckett yelled at him about the food contamination. Or maybe Gaston doesn’t want anyone else to know what he knows, so that he continues to be special.

“Because if something happens to you,” I say, “we could be stranded.”

He gestures to Spingate. “She could fly it herself, with a few more lessons. I could teach—”

Spingate’s eyes snap up, her lip curls into a sneer.

“In case you couldn’t tell, I’m
busy
. Of course I could fly the shuttle, but it would take time to learn. Does it look like I have time?”

Gaston backs toward the lab door.

“I’ll go find Beckett,” he says. “Orders received and believed, Fearless Leader.”

With that, he’s gone.

Spingate glares at me.

“Gaston needs to be focused on what he’s good at,” I say. “I’ll have Okereke and Johnson help you. I’ll make it their only job.”

She throws up her hands in exasperation. “Okereke and Johnson? Em, they’re not gears, they’re
empties,
they’re not smart…”

Spingate’s words trail off. Her glare fades.

I can’t believe she just said that.

“They’re
not smart enough,
” I finish for her. “Because they’re circles. Like me. Right?”

We made it this far without the symbols affecting us, and the first real division doesn’t come from Aramovsky, it comes from Spingate—my
friend
. Has she
always
thought of me as stupid?

“Em, I…I didn’t mean it like that.” Her face is bright red. Her words rush out. “We all have some pre-existing training. Gaston knows how to fly, Bishop knows how to fight. I already know a lot of math and science that only other gears will know. There isn’t time to teach these things to someone who doesn’t already understand them.”

Her excuses fall short. I should have known. I probably knew it all along. Spingate is a tooth-girl; at her core she looks down on me because of my symbol, even though she doesn’t know why. Maybe that explains my dim memories of school, of the tooth-girls making my life miserable.

My feelings are hurt, but my feelings don’t matter, because she’s right—reality is what it is whether we like it or not.

“You need someone who can understand what you’re doing,” I say. “We had the knowledge of a twelve-year-old when we woke up. The kids from the
Xolotl
do, too, right?”

She nods slowly.

“Zubiri is smart,” I say. “Have you met her?”

“I talked to her a little.”

“Good. She and M. Cathcart will assist you with your research. Don’t worry—Cathcart is a gear, so I’m sure he won’t be too stupid to help.”

Spingate blinks. “Em, I was angry before you even came in. I haven’t had any sleep. About what I said, I—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

My eyes sting. I leave before she can see me cry.

I’ve had it with all of this. Our symbols are a simmering poison that will corrupt what we’ve worked so hard to build.

O’Malley knows something about them, and he’s going to tell me.

I
turn the wheel. I open the door.

O’Malley pivots to see who has joined him—the image above the pedestals suddenly changes. I don’t know what was there a moment ago, but now it’s the same thing I saw the last time I was here: little heads of Aramovsky, O’Malley and Matilda.

O’Malley seems pleased—he probably thinks I came to take him up on that kiss—but only for a moment. The look on my face tells him otherwise.

“Em, what’s wrong?”

I think he’s hiding something, but I’m not sure. My father’s voice echoes through my head:
Attack, attack, always attack.

“You lied in the meeting,” I say, letting him hear the anger in my soul even while I hope I’m wrong. “You already knew the Observatory had power.”

His mouth twitches, just once.

“I did,” he says.

I was right. I don’t want to be. I wanted to trust him.

“Did you remember your access code?”

He stares for a few seconds, his expression blank and impenetrable. He’s weighing his options: lie and see if he can get away with it, or tell the truth.

“I didn’t remember it, but I figured it out,” he says. “I thought maybe my progenitor picked a code of something important from his childhood. I’ve been working on it since I first found this room.”

I wait. There is more and he
will
tell me.

His stone-face cracks, shifts to sadness. He looks away.

“When I was little, I had a kitten,” he says. “I mean,
he
had a kitten. White, with a black spot on its face. They made him kill it. The kitten’s name was Chromium.”

I have no idea what to say. I’m excited and jealous that he recalls something from the past. I also feel for him, because it’s clear that—although the cat has been dead for a thousand years and was never really
his
to begin with—this is a hard thing to remember.

“Why did they make your creator kill it?”

He stares at the floor for a moment, then shrugs.

“I’m not sure,” he says. “I think they were trying to teach my progenitor something about emotions.”

What kind of lesson on emotions could be gained from making a little boy kill a kitten? Then I remember who we’re talking about—the Grownups. Compared to what we’ve seen, making a child murder his pet is nothing.

“So that was your access code? Chromium?”

“That and some other numbers and letters,” he says. “I’m not sure what they mean, or if they are just random stuff.”

The pig I killed in the garden—it was so hard to take that animal’s life. I can’t imagine what it must be like to do the same to something you love. How unfair that O’Malley remembers that act when it wasn’t even him that did it.

Maybe this is something he needs to talk about. If he wants to talk to me, I will listen, but not now. There are more important things than a dead cat.

“We need to know more,” I say. “Can the pedestals tell us about the city? The mold?”

He shakes his head. “It looks like most of the information was permanently erased. The Grownups did that, I think. I don’t know why. I was able to see some organizational information. That’s how I learned the Observatory has power.”

The Observatory. All he had to do was come out and tell us about it. Instead, he wanted us to think that going there was someone else’s idea.

Attack, attack…

“What do the symbols mean, O’Malley?”

His stone-face returns. “You don’t want to know.”

“Oh, don’t I? Now you know what I want?”

“I know what you
need
.”

How arrogant. My sympathy for the hurt he feels over the cat is fading fast.

“Out with it. Right now.”

He pauses.

“You’ve been telling us that we can’t afford to be divided against each other,” he says. “You’re correct. So, if I found something the Grownups did that doesn’t apply to us, and would upset people, then you’re right to say it’s best if we leave it alone.”

Arguing with each other, splitting into factions, that’s the fastest way to failure, to disaster. Do we really need things that could divide us? I want all the information I can get, but…

…wait.

Wait
.

I know we can’t afford to be divided—but I never
said
that. Just like I didn’t say anything about looking near the shuttle to see if spiders were close.

O’Malley said those things, not me.

My anger spikes, but this time I’m ready for it. I shove it down. I set my spear against the wall, reach out and take his hand. He stares at our linked fingers, somewhat surprised. Maybe he’s only comfortable with contact if he’s the one initiating it.

“You want people to think your ideas are mine,” I say. “Why?”

His eyes go wide. He’s been caught and he knows it. Did he think I wouldn’t notice? Does he think I’m stupid,
just an empty
?

“My training,” he says. “I know ways to…to
convince
people to do things. Ways to make sure everyone thinks the leader knows exactly what’s going on. It’s bad for people to doubt the leader. As soon as I started helping you, back on the
Xolotl,
I remembered some of what I learned in school.”

He had a flashfire of memories. The same thing happened to Gaston, to Aramovsky, to Bishop and Spingate. I’ve yet to have mine.

“What you did was wrong,” I say. “Just because you know how to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it.”

He shrugs. “It’s how I was trained.”

“That wasn’t you. That was your creator.”

He huffs. “Is there really a difference? I
remember
that kitten. I remember holding it, petting it. I remember how it purred, loving me,
trusting
me, right before my hands closed around its tiny neck. I remember it scratching me…”

O’Malley seems confused. He slides up the sleeve of his black coveralls, stares at his forearm. He turns his arm this way and that, looking for something.

“It scratched me,” he says. “Really bad. There were scars.”

I take his forearm in my hands. My thumbs make slow circles on his skin.

“Your progenitor had scars. You are
not
him. You asked if there was a difference. There is—you don’t have to do things like he would have done them. You have a choice.
We
have a choice. I don’t need you to lie for me. We’re not going to make the same mistakes our creators made. If people doubt me, that’s fine.”

“You’re wrong,” he says. “If people don’t think you know exactly what needs to be done, they’ll look for someone who does.”

I shrug. “Then we’ll have another vote and pick another leader. We can’t keep secrets from each other.”

He laughs, looks away. “That’s what you say now.”

I cup his face, force him to look at me. “We
will not
keep secrets. Tell me what the symbols mean.”

His eyes plead with me. “Leave it be. This will change everything.”

I nod. “And we’ll handle it.”

O’Malley closes his eyes. He slowly tilts forward until his forehead presses against mine. That tiny spot of contact sends a tingle through me. It isn’t aggressive, like his kiss, yet this gentle touch reaches me in a way that kiss never could.

He straightens, faces the pedestals.

“Shuttle, show her the wheel.”

The invisible voice speaks:
“Yes, Chancellor.”

The little heads above the pedestal blur, then fuzz out. A circle forms, dotted with tiny images around the outer edge. In the circle’s center there is a flat, fat-cheeked cartoonish face that looks like it was carved into flat stone. Its tongue sticks out. The style of art reminds me of my birth-coffin’s carvings.