Glow (26 page)

Amanda handed out books of poetry and had the girls read verse by a poet from deep in North America’s past called Walt Whitman, and then they discussed it. Most of the girls were silent, off in their own worlds, but a few seemed heartened to be in a classroom again and raised their hands to join the discussion. Waverly sat back and watched the guards, looking for some angle she could use.

The men paced the room, holding their guns to their chests. Waverly noticed Amanda glaring at them more than once, and she even stopped the lesson long enough to ask the guard to stop distracting her students. But he only smiled and went on pacing. Once Samantha turned around in her seat to look at Waverly, but the guard flicked her scalp with a finger, and she turned back around, her spine stiff and straight.

“Girls,” Amanda said to the class. Her voice shook with nervousness. “Now that you’ve read a sample of Whitman, why don’t you spend twenty minutes working on a poem of your own? I’ll have you read what you write aloud, so do your best work!”

The only sound in the room was the scratching of pens on paper, but soon heads started popping up as girls finished their poems. Waverly watched the guards, trying to think of a way to get a message to Samantha undetected. But the room was small, and they were vigilant. Waverly imagined hitting the one with the scar over the head and running away with the rest of the girls to commandeer a shuttle. Her hand closed over the wooden leg of her chair, and she imagined it was a club. She gripped it so tightly, a film of sweat formed between her skin and the wood.

“All right,” Amanda said. “It looks as though most of you are finished. Would anyone like to share what they’ve written?”

A hand darted up and waved in the air. It was Samantha. Waverly straightened in her seat.

Samantha stood, hunched over her poem, head bent, her thick brown bangs hanging in her face. Her gaze shifted onto Waverly, she raised her eyebrows, and said, “Don’t everyone
copy
me.” Her voice seemed to catch. “I worked hard on this. Every other word felt like torture.”

Amanda laughed. “You sound like a true poet.”

Samantha stared at Waverly, then dropped her eyes to the pen on Waverly’s desk.

What had she said? Don’t
copy
me? Did she want Waverly to write down what she read?

Waverly picked up her pen. Barely perceptibly, Samantha nodded. The guard with the scar stood behind Samantha, eyeing her suspiciously.

Waverly bent over her desk as she copied down Samantha’s words. The girl paused between each line of her poem, lifting her eyes to make sure Waverly was keeping up.

I’ve often taken love like a knife,

Will I acquire love more through blood or will

We spill love?

Like a trap for everyone, love hides inside,

Its services thin.

Felicity only told in your stingy message.

Kept where mercies are paltry.

They wait, question cryptic marks.

No response.

No tomorrow.

Samantha went back to her seat, her head tilted over her desk.

“Well,” Amanda said, uncertain what to say. “That was an intense poem, Samantha! It reminds me of the early-twentieth-century poets. Would someone else like to read?”

No one else volunteered, so Amanda called on Melissa Dickinson, who stood to read in a monotone about stars and time.

Waverly watched the guards, who had begun pacing again. The one with the scar was coming toward her. She wanted to cover her notepad where she’d copied Samantha’s poem, but that would look suspicious and she’d be found out. Her heart knocked like a broken piston as she felt the guard creep behind her. Did he stop to look at her notebook over her shoulder? She didn’t know. Eventually he moved away. Waverly found she’d been holding her breath, and her lungs screamed for air, but she forced herself to breathe calmly until she could be sure the guard had lost interest in her.

When the guard circled to the front of the room, his eyes were on Samantha, who bent over her notebook. She erased words, rewrote them, crossed some out. For a moment he seemed about to take the poem away from her, but when he saw Amanda watching him with narrowed eyes, he backed away and stood in the corner of the room.

At the end of the day, the guards marched all the girls through the corridors, back the way they’d come, so that Amanda and Waverly were the first to be dropped off.

“That went well, don’t you think?” Amanda asked Waverly, her voice purposefully cheerful. “I don’t like having those goons there, but I couldn’t talk Anne out of it. I think you scared her when you went down to the cargo hold, and she says she doesn’t want any of you getting hurt.”

“I suppose,” Waverly said, but she made it clear in her tone that she didn’t believe this explanation. She could see that Amanda didn’t believe it herself.

Waverly pretended to yawn. “Sitting up all day tired me out. I’m going to take a nap if that’s okay.”

“Be sure to read your history lesson before tomorrow!” Amanda chided.

Waverly shut herself in her room and turned on her desk lamp. She stared at Samantha’s poem, trying to tease out the message, but it seemed just a jumbled mess of words. She’d worked herself to the point of frustration and was about to give up for a while when she remembered that Samantha had said something odd before she’d read the poem. What was it? Something about torture.

Every word was torture?

No.

Every
other
word was torture. Samantha must have laced a message through the poem.

Waverly crossed words out, playing with different possibilities, until the embedded message came through:

I’ve taken a knife. Will acquire more. Blood will spill. Trap everyone inside services. Felicity told your message. Where are they? Response tomorrow.

Waverly worked for hours on her response for Samantha, writing and rewriting another poem in the hopes that there would be a similar assignment in class tomorrow. She was exhausted when morning came, and Amanda didn’t want her to go to school, but Waverly insisted. When the guards came by with the girls, she was ready in her strange uniform, her message for Samantha tucked into her notebook under her arm.

When Amanda gave them time to write a short poem based on “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, Waverly waited until a couple of girls had read their work before she raised her hand to volunteer. She didn’t want to seem too eager.

“Why don’t you sit at your desk and read, Waverly?” Amanda said.

“Every other line was like chipping away at my teeth.” Waverly forced a giggle.

“I’m glad to know you’re taking the assignment so seriously!” Amanda said, beaming.

Waverly glanced at Samantha, who had her pen poised discreetly on the writing pad in her lap. Waverly smoothed her poem out on her desk to read, careful to pause at the end of each line break:

I don’t know where

The lovers go to hold each other.

They are being kept

Apart by their hard hearts and minds.

They are in a place where

Only the bravest may wander.

There’s a rhythmic thrumming sound

Of their hearts beating in unison.

Like the water plant

That longs to hear a trickle, finding,

However, no sound of water,

I search for you, try to

Find others to help

Me catch you before you can

Escape. I’m going to search for

Our hearts in love’s forest, calling

Them when I can

Spare my voice.

Once I find them,

I will keep yours safe for you until

We can run away

Together into the wind.

For weeks, the girls communicated this way, embedding messages in poems, in essays, right under the noses of the guards, who had relaxed over time and were no longer vigilant so much as bored. In one complex message woven into a sonnet, Waverly learned that Samantha had been boarded with a couple that had an elaborate kitchen with every conceivable gadget. This was how she’d been able to take knives without being noticed. She had a total of three and didn’t dare take any more. Sarah embedded ideas for where there might be a rhythmic sound like the one Waverly described, suggesting the environmental control system, which was housed in the upper floors of the ship, or the water turbine that kept the water running for the fish hatcheries. But there was no way to go looking, and it tormented Waverly to know that her mother was somewhere on this ship, suffering and afraid, and she couldn’t get to her.

They made progress in other ways. Back and forth they worked on a plan for escape, honing it carefully until Waverly believed it could actually work.

Everything depended on her being able to search for the Empyrean survivors. But the guards were outside her room constantly, and there was no way to get past them.

One afternoon the solution came to her in a flash. If Mather was keeping the Empyrean captives a secret, she’d have to keep the crew away from them. She might have restricted access to that area. It was so simple, she should have thought of this sooner!

“Amanda,” Waverly said when Amanda came in carrying a large gourd full of red grapes, “what have you been up to today?”

“Not much. Just a little gardening.”

Waverly fidgeted with her pencil. “I’m just curious. Because I heard no one is allowed to go into the sewage plant.”

“Really? I thought it was atmospheric conditioning they were worried about.”

“Oh?”

“They think the metal in the floor is stressed or something. Only trained personnel are allowed. Not that anyone cares. No one goes there anyway.”

“I guess that’s true,” Waverly said, unable to hide the joy in her voice, though Amanda didn’t seem to notice.

Atmospheric conditioning. Yes! That explained the sounds she’d overheard from the com station that night in the lab. That’s where her mom was.

Relief flooded through her, and she had to leave the living room to be alone in her room because she might cry. After months of worry, fear, and scheming, they finally had the key.

There was nothing left to plan.

It was time to kill Anne Mather.

SERVICES

On the day of services, Waverly rose, bleary and anxious. She hadn’t been able to sleep at all. Instead she’d stared into the darkness all night with glassy eyes, going over everything again and again. Her life, Samantha’s, and Sarah’s depended on getting this absolutely right.

She only hoped she could move fast enough with her injured leg and was glad to have the cane Josiah had made for her.

“Oh, you’re up,” Amanda said, poking her head into the room, something she’d been doing a lot lately. When she stepped inside, Waverly realized that Amanda looked truly pregnant now, with a rounded belly and widening hips. Her own daughter or son was inside Amanda’s body, Waverly thought with disbelief. “Better hurry. We don’t want to be late.”

“Yes, I know.” Waverly slipped on her church smock, tucked her hair into the kerchief, and looked at herself in the mirror.

She was so changed. Her face was thinner, there were circles under her eyes, and a line was carved between her eyebrows, vertical and severe. She’d aged.

“Let’s get a move on!” she heard Josiah call from the living room. He was eager to try out a new hymn he’d written. It made Waverly sad to think that he and Amanda didn’t know what was about to happen.

Waverly limped out of her room. She knew she was weaker now than she’d been before the attack, but she was certain she was still stronger than Anne Mather. She had to be.

On their walk to services, a very pregnant woman stopped her and actually kissed her hand, glowing with happiness. “God bless you,” she whispered.

Waverly barely looked at her. She was too frightened.

She wove between the chairs to take her customary place with Amanda in the front row, where they could see Josiah and the choir. Waverly scanned the crowd for Samantha, who was sitting where she was supposed to on the starboard side, and then for Sarah, who was in the other corner of the room, on the port side. She raised her right hand in a signal to Samantha and waited, holding her breath.

Samantha gave her a quick thumbs-up. The knives were in place. Samantha’s task of getting here early to plant them had been the riskiest, but Waverly knew she was the best one to do the job.

Waverly’s heart was knocking in her chest. Facing the stage she’d have to climb onto, and seeing Anne Mather’s throat, soft and pliant, she felt suddenly that their plan was hopelessly simplistic. Was it really just a matter of some locked doors and a few knives? Could it possibly work?