When Night Falls (3 page)

“Be safe on your patrol,” she said for lack of anything better.

Rolf
inclined his head before gradually allowing himself to get tugged away. He never glanced back.

“What was that about?” Hunter
asked when Scarlett joined him on the step. “Since when did you and Rolf Gray become buddies?”

That was a good question. She’d wondered about it herself countless of times. Had it been the morning he returned her ribbon? Or was it the night they both wound up at the disposal hatch with the same idea in mind? It was hard to say when they never really spoke. The single night they spent together every year never consisted of talking. They met in the cloak of darkness by the same hatch. Then they just sat there until dawn. The rest of the year was spent stealing glances and the occasional murmured greeting, but nothing more. Him approaching her as he had was a surprise, even to her.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“You mean he just woke up this morning and decided to talk to a complete stranger?”

Scarlett frowned at him. “We’re not exactly strangers, Hunter. We’ve been on the same ship for three years and he’s a marshal in my sector. I see him like every day.”

“So you’ve spoken to him.”

She rolled her shoulders in a shrug. “A couple of times.”

He was staring at her like she’d just told him she’d been on the moon. “Not sure how it could get stranger than that.”

It killed her that she couldn’t tell him the truth, couldn’t tell him how they’d saved each other and continued to save each other every year on the night of her birthday. It somehow felt like a betrayal to confess that Rolf was the only one she felt remotely sane with on that night. Hunter would be crushed. He’d be so angry and hurt. He wouldn’t understand.

“Attention all passengers!”
The captain’s cold, brusque voice shattered the tension like a fist through glass.
“Report immediately to deck eighteen for an important announcement. I repeat. All passengers report immediately to the conference room for an important announcement!”

Scarlett, who had never cared either way about Captain Isabella, felt a surge of gratitude for the interruption. It was just enough to pull Hunter’s attention away from her
encounter with Rolf and focus instead on getting them to the meeting. But it wasn’t enough to keep the self-loathing from eating her up alive.

Chapter
Two

Deck eighteen was brimming with the steady flow and chatter of people. It was the only room large enough to accommodate the number of passengers onboard. It used to be one of the thirteen movie theaters, but grander to impress the high end cliental the luxury cruise catered to.

It was also where the original captain had met Isabella, if the rumors were true. The whirlwind romance had been a big deal three
years ago, before Captain Marcus had unexpectedly passed away and Isabella took his place. But that had never interested Scarlett.

She’d been
fourteen when the cruise liner had made its first ever launch. A month later, the ship lost contact with the main switchboard on earth. The trip had been cut short as they turned around and went back, taking a full month to return only to find a charred ball where their home had once been.

“Kinetic bombs,” Captain Marcus had told them. “We found the projectile platforms during one of our orbits. There were eight of them from what we could detect, each strategically placed for maximum impact. We believe the projectiles were undetectable by tracers on earth and meant to burrow into the earth’s core and simultaneously erupt, causing irreparable damage.”

He’d been standing where Isabella stood now, a tall, handsome man with a headful of salt and pepper hair and kind brown eyes. Like everyone else, he’d lost family in the blast and stood as pale and shaken as the rest.

Scarlett had been sitting in the back with her grandmother and Hunter, too numb to even breathe. She sat staring at the stage, wondering if it was all some kind of sick joke someone was playing on them, because if it wasn’t, that meant her parents were gone. Her friends. Her neighbors. Everyone she had ever met no longer existed. They’d all been destroyed in a single day.
On her birthday.

“Who would do something like that?” was asked a lot, but not even the ever wise Captain
had a response to that question.

“How can you be sure it’s the whole world?” someone in the crowd had shouted.

Someone else had agreed, leaping out of their chair. “We should go down and see!”

Captain Marcus had
shaken his head, face grave and looking much older than he’d been that morning when she’d seen him at breakfast. “We have already sent probes down. The data reached us this morning. There is nothing down there and, from what we detected, won’t be for a very long time, if ever.”

His calm explanation didn’t appease the masses.

“Earth is a big place! We should try to land somewhere else. Europe maybe.”

“I’m sorry!” Marcus had said again. “There is nothing there. No land. No water. No life. It’s all gone, a wasteland of fire.”

“What are you saying? That we’re the only ones left?”

Marcus straightened his shoulders. “I’m afraid so.”

“But we have family down there!” a man shouted.

“My children are down there!” a woman cried, sounding hysterical. “I left them with my parents. I … I promised them I’d return!”

“I’m sorry!” Marcus had said again for what felt like the millionth time, as if the world getting destroyed was somehow his fault. The look of torment on his face at the woman’s anguished wails spoke very clearly just how much he meant his apologies. “We’ve all lost people, but there is nothing any of us can do now. We have to keep going.”

“How?” someone demanded, sounding angry. “We can’t just live on a space ship!”

Others had shouted their agreement.

“We can!” Marcus had argued, silencing the crowd. “The cruise liner was designed to maintain life for extensive periods of time. If we are careful, we can make our supplies last for quite some time. The rays from the sun will power our solar panels, giving us heat and electricity. We will keep in orbit until we think of a better solution.” He’d paused, peering over the crowd. “And we will find one! I am confident that this is not the end. There are other planets and I will find one that we can make our own.”

“Red?”

Scarlett jolted from the memory, stomach nauseous. Hunter had a hand on her shoulder. His fingers tightened when she dropped her ashen face into her palms.

“Hey, you okay?”

“I hate being here,” she mumbled, scrubbing at the tears clinging to her lashes.

His hand fell away. He dropped back in his seat. “Yeah, me too.”

Scarlett reached for his hand
and squeezed his fingers.

“Attention, please!”

Captain Isabella stood on stage, a breathtaking woman with a mane of glossy brown hair, almond-shaped eyes the soft grey of pearls, and lips that could shame a rose. She studied the crowd before her down a narrowed nose placed strategically in the center of a heart-shaped face.

Behind her, seated on a plastic chair, hands folded neatly in her lap, sat Eira. She had a polite smile on her face as she watched her stepmother. Her cap of chin-length curls framed her pretty face, the thick ebony a striking contrast to the milky-white of her skin. Her eyes sparkled like blue gems beneath delicate brows and surrounded by long, thick lashes. Both women were gorgeous, but only Eira glowed from the inside out, warming everyone she came in contact with. Scarlett had never met Isabella personally, but even from a distance, the woman exuded a lofty disinterest that seemed to shroud her like a coat of winter.

One seat over, Dr. Ora, the ship’s resident physician, sat anxiously shifting between crossing and uncrossing her legs. Her green eyes flicked over the crowd, then back at the hands she had squished together in her lap. Every so often, she would pause in her fidgeting to push back a coil of caramel-blonde hair off her cheek and yawn. She did this often. Working as the only top medical adviser on a ship supporting seven thousand people had to weigh on a person after a while. There were dark circles under her eyes and her face was drawn as if all she really wanted was to stretch out on the stage and sleep.

On Dr. Ora’s other side, sitting ramrod straight, was Cindy,
one of the ship’s resident commanding peacekeepers. She was in charge of the marshals, who were in charge of keeping and maintaining peace amongst the passengers.

Three
years ago, their job was probably the hardest thing in the world to do. People were breaking down all over the place. There were riots that destroyed Decks two and seven and several people were charged with murder. There were a lot of deaths that first month. It had gotten to the point where Marcus had to issue a curfew where people would get shot if they were found wandering the corridors. Those arrested were taken into holding in the boiler room to await trial, which was the worst punishment offered short of blasting them into space, which actually happened to those who committed sever crimes. The others were given a trial and punished accordingly.

“Thank you all for coming,” Isabella began, long, slender fingers clasped together primly in front of her. “I have some wonderful news
.” She paused as though for affect, grey eyes like slivers of ice danced from face to face. “We have located a habitable planet!”

Her bright, red lips curved into, what was probably supposed to be a
delighted smile, but only seemed cruel and malicious in Scarlett’s opinion as the room imploded with excitement. She watched and waited as people embraced and shouted their questions with all the kindness of an indulgent mother.

Scarlett wasn’t sure what to feel. Relieved? Maybe. It would mean finally getting off the ship.
Guilty? Yes, because her parents couldn’t be there. She was definitely sad. But there was something else, a numbness that seemed to be blocking any real enthusiasm from filtering through.

Hunter, on the other hand, roared his elation and leapt to his feet, whacking palms with the boy in
the row in front of them. Others were doing the same, leaping over chairs and down aisles to find their friends and share the news, as if they all hadn’t just heard it.

Four rows up, one aisle over, Scarlett found her gaze captured by the only other person
who hadn’t left their seat. An overwhelming sense of déjà vu poured over her; memories of that night three years ago when she’d met those same eyes while the theater exploded in a flurry of chaos. Only this time, the energy wasn’t hot with anger and terror. It was charged with exhilaration and adrenaline. They should have been happy. But Rolf looked no happier than she did, and she couldn’t figure out why.

Hands shot up in the air
like flags and waved for attention. Isabella looked over the crowd.

“Yes?” she said, pointing to
a hand at random.

“How do we know it can sustain us?” a woman asked.

“We don’t.” She ignored the gasps and hushed murmurs and plunged on. “Nothing is for certain until we arrive. Once there, we will send scouts down to investigate. The probe we sent was programmed to locate planets that were most like earth in atmosphere, density, and mass. It was also programmed to locate vegetation and water. The planet we’ve found has all those things. From what we can tell, it has everything earth did.”

“Where is it?” the same woman asked.

“It is located just on the other side of the sun, about three light years from where we are now,” Isabella replied. “We will reach it in a month’s time.”

“How did we find it?” another woman shouted.

Isabella smiled with no real kindness. “As you all know, Marcus was very adamant about finding us a home. Before his tragic death, he had several probes sent out. One of those probes came back this morning with positive results. Our crew has already rerouted our navigational system. We changed course about an hour ago and are on our way to the new location even as we speak.”

“Do you foresee complications?” a man demanded from the crowd.

Straight, white teeth flashed in a tight smile that said very clearly,
idiot
. “I don’t think anyone can
foresee
complications. But we will do our best to avert any that may come our way. In the meantime, we ask that everyone continue on as normal. Updates will be posted in your data links so be sure you check your messages frequently. If you have any questions, please see any of the ship’s commanding officers and they will inform you the best they can.”

“Can you believe it?” Hunter slung his arm around Scarlett’s shoulders as they maneuvered their way out of the conference room ten minutes later. “We’re
getting off this damn ship!”

“Yeah,” she murmured distractedly, still unable to shake the
knot in her gut.

Hunter peered down at her, eyes narrowed. “What?”

Scarlett shook her head. “Nothing. I’m just…” She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. She smiled sheepishly. “I guess I’m still in shock.”

Appeased, he grinned down at her. “Think about it
. No more recycled air. No more rules and regulations. Maybe there’s even other life forms on this planet, like us, but smarter.”

“Smarter than you?” she teased,
raising an eyebrow.

He smirked. “Hey, we didn’t think we’d find another planet. I’m a full believer
in miracles.”

Rolling her eyes, she broke out from beneath his heavy arm. “I have to go. It’s my turn to clean our compartment. But I’ll meet you in the
refectory for supper, okay?”

Hunter n
odded, taking a step backwards. “Okay, catch you later.” He started to jog away, when something occurred to him and he turned on his heels, still walking backwards. “Hey! Don’t worry about my room, okay? I’ll do it when I get back.”