Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel (11 page)

She climbed the stairs to the passenger area, which was even worse. Discarded ration containers littered the floor, and the seats were in various stages of recline. She remembered the crying, the pleading, the endless questions: “How much longer? The Empyrean is out there still, isn’t it, Waverly?” And the worst questions of all, repeated endlessly by practically everyone: “Why couldn’t you save my mommy? My dad? My uncle? Why did you leave them behind?”

She could show them the bullet wound on her shoulder all she wanted, but she could never make them understand what it had been like.

An image of a man dying as blood blossomed red on his shirt. Dying because of her.

“I don’t think about that anymore,” she said aloud.

“Hello?!” A male voice, one she didn’t recognize.

Waverly jumped. Someone was in the cockpit. Her heart kicked into overdrive and she took one step backward, but then Arthur Dietrich looked out the small doorway and smiled. “I thought you might come. When you heard the announcement, I mean.”

Waverly said nothing. She watched Arthur. Waited for him to say something, because she couldn’t.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Arthur said. He turned back to the cockpit and beckoned to her with one hand over his shoulder. “Any ideas where he could have hidden?”

Waverly slowly walked toward the cockpit to find Arthur sitting in the copilot chair.
That’s where Sarah sits,
she thought irrationally, but held her tongue. The screen in the center of the control panel flickered, making shadows over his round face. He was watching a video recording of the few minutes before the shuttle took off from the New Horizon.

“I didn’t even know there was a camera on board,” Waverly said.

“It turns on when the engines warm up, and records shuttle takeoffs and landings. In case there’s an accident.”

“Oh right.”

“I can’t see when the stowaway got on,” Arthur said. “Could it have happened before you got to the shuttle bay?”

“Sarah brought the girls. I came last.”

“Oh yeah, there you are.” Arthur pointed at the screen, and Waverly saw an image of herself—a skinny, desperate girl limping through a crowd of benign-looking women. She was wild-eyed, her hair a nest of snarls, blood dripping down her arm. She moved like a wounded animal, pointing her gun at anyone who came near.

“God, Waverly,” Arthur said, and looked at her, shocked. “I had no idea—”

“Don’t.” Waverly held up a hand, and quickly Arthur turned back to the video.

“There! What’s that?” Arthur pointed at the cart of supplies being rolled toward the shuttle by a group of women. The Waverly on the video screen watched the women suspiciously and then slowly walked toward the shuttle, the muzzle of her gun pointed into the crowd.

It made her sick to see it. What had she become? Was she still frozen inside like that?

Was she still a killer?

“Do you think someone rode in on that cart?” Arthur asked her.

“No way,” she said, jarred back to the present. “It was full of food, and that other cart? See there? That’s full of water. There was no way a person could have fit.”

They watched the screen a few minutes more as the women backed away from the shuttle when the engine’s exhaust flared. The shuttle eased inside the air lock, then it moved out and pulled away from the New Horizon, which grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared into the black sky.

But the New Horizon is still out there,
Waverly reminded herself.
It didn’t disappear. And she’s waiting for us. Because she has what we want, and that puts her on top again.

“Wait,” Arthur said. “I thought there was…” He ran the recording back, and they watched the image of the New Horizon shrinking away, until Arthur hit pause. “There!” He pointed at a dim, blurry dot floating in the frozen image, just above the New Horizon.

“What?”

“A OneMan. That’s a OneMan!”

Waverly squinted at the screen, and Arthur hit play again. The dot drifted up from the New Horizon and sped toward the shuttle. Quickly, the OneMan sank out of view below the border of the screen, but it was unmistakable.

“He tethered to you. He reeled himself in. And then somehow he got on board and hid.”

“How? When?”

“He must’ve used the small air lock in the cargo hold.”

Arthur got up from his seat, beckoning to her over his shoulder, and the two of them went down to the cargo hold. At the aft side there was a man-size hatch with a tiny porthole in the door. Arthur and Waverly peered through the scratched glass to see the face mask of an empty OneMan peering back. “You guys didn’t notice this here?”

At first Waverly was too stunned to speak, but she regained her voice to say, “I think I looked in there once, just to see what was inside. The OneMan was facing the other way, so I could only see the back of it.” She shuddered. She’d looked right at the stowaway, hiding in that suit, and she hadn’t seen him. “I thought it was standard to keep a OneMan in there.”

Arthur nodded. “I would probably have thought the same thing.”

“He might have even slept in there, spent his time in there.”

“Logical. It would get claustrophobic, but if he kept the air valves open, he could have stayed there almost the whole time.”

“Yes,” Waverly said. “Oh God, Arthur!”

He put a hand on her shoulder and waited for her to look at him. “Waverly,
we
should have thought of it, too. We should have searched the shuttle, quarantined it. Hell, we should have jettisoned it.”

She nodded. She could see why Kieran liked Arthur so much. He was kind.

The two walked down the shuttle ramp, and Arthur pressed the button to raise it up again. Waverly watched as the evidence of her frightening passage home disappeared behind the door.

“I have something I need to tell you,” Arthur said as they crossed the empty shuttle bay. The OneMen hanging along the wall seemed to lean away from their hooks, heads bent, as though trying to eavesdrop. Waverly didn’t like looking at them. It reminded her of how many people
weren’t
on the ship. “You’re going to get upset.”

He had her attention now. “What? What are you talking about?”

“First I want your promise—that you won’t do anything right away. You and I will think about what to do, and we’ll come up with a plan, and we’ll execute it. We’re not going to let our emotions get the better of us, okay?”

“What happened? Did he capture Seth?” Suddenly the rest of Kieran’s announcement came home to her. “There’s no way Seth would work with the stowaway, Arthur! No way! Kieran was wrong to make that announcement.”

The panic in her voice seemed to give Arthur pause, and he looked at her, his brow furrowed.

She bowed her head. Arthur might be kind, but he was loyal to Kieran. She must remember that.

The two walked through the doorway and into the corridor. Arthur closed the shuttle-bay door behind them. “Waverly, Sarah was mouthing off to Kieran earlier.”

“Oh God.”

“You need to understand, though. Sarah was really goading Kieran on, implying that she knew something about Seth’s escape. She said she knew why our surveillance system isn’t working, but she refused to tell us. So Kieran—”

“He threw her in the brig.”

Arthur nodded.

Waverly shook her head. Her anger made her fingers tremble. Every heartbeat was painful. “God, Kieran.”

“Here’s the problem as I see it,” Arthur said. “If Kieran was
really
Captain, he’d have every right to arrest her for insubordination.”

“But he’s not really Captain.”

Arthur nodded.

“And you want to hold an election to give him that power?”

“It might help with the crew’s attitude. If he were really Captain, Sarah might have been more cooperative.”

“Or Kieran might have been even more of an uncontrollable bastard.”

To this, Arthur said nothing.

“So what do you want to do about it?”

Arthur didn’t pretend to think about it; he’d clearly already considered what he wanted Waverly to do. “I want you to talk Sarah into telling you what is wrong with the surveillance system, so then I can talk Kieran into letting Sarah go. That way they can both back down and still save face.”

Waverly sighed heavily. “Have we all lost our minds?”

“Kids aren’t meant to deal with this kind of stuff.”

“Adults are no better,” Waverly said ruefully, thinking of the way Captain Jones and Anne Mather had both seemed to have their adult crews hoodwinked completely.

“So you’ll do it?”

Waverly nodded.

“And you won’t run at Kieran?”

“I think it’s best if we avoid each other for a while.”

“I’m thinking tomorrow morning would be a good time to visit Sarah,” Arthur said.

“No, I’m going now.” She started toward the elevator, but Arthur stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. She turned to see him biting his lip anxiously.

“I just wanted you to know, it wasn’t my idea for Kieran to phrase it that way. In the announcement.”

“What way?”

“When he said the stowaway was on the shuttle piloted by Waverly Marshall.”

She stared at Arthur as his meaning sank in. Of course. By mentioning Waverly in the same sentence as the stowaway, Kieran was pinning responsibility for the stowaway’s presence on her. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“It was kind of a dirty trick, I thought,” Arthur said, embarrassed.

“Yeah.” Her voice sounded disaffected and cold.

“He’s under a lot of pressure…,” Arthur began.

“Don’t even tell me,” Waverly said, shaking her head, and strode off to the starboard elevator bank, leaving Arthur behind. When the doors opened, she marched in and punched at the control panel. It was a long ride down to the brig, and the more she thought about everything Kieran had done, the angrier she got.

The elevator opened to the deepest level of the ship, and Waverly headed toward the brig. The noise of the engines was especially loud down here, and she wondered how Seth had been able to stand it night after night. But then, she supposed, you could get used to just about anything if you had to.

She heard voices when she turned onto the corridor to the brig. Boys’ voices, mostly, and then a shriek that sounded like Sarah.

Waverly broke into a run, all Arthur’s admonitions forgotten. When she got to the brig, she stopped to listen for Sarah. There were over a dozen cells here in a long line of steel bars that stretched ahead on either side of her. She heard voices on her left and took off running. In the third cell down she found Kieran standing over Sarah, who was sitting on the metal cot in the middle of the cell, surrounded by boys, looking enraged.

“Sarah, I’ve got a ship full of kids to protect, and I don’t have time to play games with you.”

“I’ll tell you if you let me out of here!” Sarah growled through her teeth.

Kieran reared back, hand raised, shaking from anger. He looked like he wanted to slap her.

“Stop it!” Waverly screamed. She barreled past two guards who were standing in the doorway. “What are you
doing
?”

Kieran looked at her as though replaying the scene in his mind and considering how it would look. But he recovered quickly. “Get out of here, Waverly.”

“No! I won’t let you do this!” Her voice sounded hoarse and panicked.

Kieran grabbed Waverly by the elbow, but she jerked away from him. “You’re a monster! I don’t know you!”

“Waverly,” Kieran said softly, and dragged her out of Sarah’s cell by the arm. She pulled against him, but his grip tightened painfully and he jerked her out of the brig, her feet skidding as she tried to claw at him with her free hand until he caught her wrist. Once they were in the corridor he backed her into a corner and pressed against her with his weight, his eyes on hers. His face was swollen with the edema caused by the increased gravity, and she could see the tiny capillaries under the surface of his skin. Once he’d been so handsome, but now he looked hideous to her.

“Waverly,” he said softly. “I wasn’t going to hurt her. I was just angry.”

“Yeah, right!” she spat.

“It’s true. Come on, you know me. I’m not a bully.”

“You
weren’t
a bully before you made yourself Captain.”

“Look.” He shoved a finger in her face. “I’ve got a terrorist on this ship killing my crew. I don’t have time for Sarah’s stubbornness. She knows what’s wrong with our surveillance system, and she won’t say what it is.”

“The more you treat her this way, the less she’ll want to help you!”

“What do you suggest?”

“Reason with her, for God’s sake!”

“You want to try it?” he said. It sounded like a rhetorical question, but he raised his eyebrows hopefully.

“You’ll let her out if she cooperates?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll try,” Waverly said coldly. “If I have your promise you won’t threaten anyone on this ship again, no matter what.”

She jerked away from him and marched back into the brig. The two guards, Harvey Markem and Vince Petrelli, looked over her shoulder at Kieran. Harvey wore a filthy bandage over his forehead, but otherwise he seemed as sturdy as he always had. Vince was just as big as Harvey, but their faces were still those of young boys. They must have received a nonverbal signal from Kieran, because they stepped aside for Waverly, and she went into Sarah’s cell.

The girl looked shaken but strong. She stared at Kieran with pure hatred, but when Waverly knelt in front of her, she softened.

“Sarah, if you know how to fix the surveillance system, you have to tell them.”

“Why?” the girl spat.

“You
know
why. Because there’s a stowaway from the New Horizon on board, and we need to find him.”

“There’s a
stowaway
?” The girl’s eyes grew so wide her irises were ringed by a circle of white.

Waverly turned to Kieran. “You didn’t
tell
her?”

“I made the announcement an hour ago,” Kieran said, confused.

“Well, I didn’t hear it,” Sarah said. “Because you didn’t turn the speakers on in the brig! Idiot!”

Kieran bristled, but Waverly held up a hand in warning. The best thing for Sarah right now was to keep Kieran from losing his temper.