Alight (5 page)

O
’Malley and I return to the top deck. People are playing, talking, even napping inside the white coffins.

I catch Bishop’s eye, tilt my head toward the pilothouse. He nods, picks up his axe and follows us.

Before we reach the pilothouse door, the wheel spins. Gaston and Spingate step out. They don’t look as rested as I’d hoped, but they look happy, and that’s something.

“Back inside,” I say. “I need to talk to you both.”

We enter. Bishop starts to swing the door shut behind us, but it stops halfway: smiling Aramovsky is blocking it with his body.

“Are we making plans?” he says. “Good. We need to discuss the spiritual needs of the people.”

Bishop glances at me, but when he does, skinny Aramovsky slides through the door and into the room. It would have been one thing to say he couldn’t come in—it’s entirely another to make him leave. Which, of course, Aramovsky knows.

Bishop shuts the door.

The first time I entered the pilothouse, the walls were black. Now it’s as if there are no walls at all. It looks like I’m standing in the middle of the clearing that ends in a tall, circular wall of piled vines. I see the shapes of the strange buildings beyond, and I seem to float high above yellow vines even though the pilothouse floor feels just as solid as it ever did.

Bishop leans the flat of his axe against his hip. He’s waiting for me to speak, as are the others.

“O’Malley accessed the shuttle’s lower levels,” I say.

Gaston glares at O’Malley. O’Malley is expressionless, as he always seems to be during discussions like these.

I don’t mention the room with the pedestals. If Aramovsky is going to make everything his business, I don’t want him messing around in there. I quickly describe the room we saw on Deck Four, making sure my friends understand these are not simple white coffins, but rather the same kind in which we all first awoke.

Bishop looks angry. Spingate and Gaston seem shocked.

Aramovsky is delighted.

“How
wonderful,
” he says. “Did you open them?”

Bishop huffs. “Of course she didn’t. Em wouldn’t do something that dangerous without me and the circle-stars there.”

“Dangerous,” Aramovsky says. “Ah, I see. Those new coffins might hold Grownups instead of people like us. Don’t worry, Bishop, I have absolute faith in you—if there are Grownups, I’m sure you’ll find a way to kill them all.”

Bishop snarls. “I did what I had to do.”

“You
had
to murder?” Aramovsky’s hands close into fists, open, close into fists. “Is killing the only thing you’re good for, Bishop?”

“Stop it,”
I snap. “Aramovsky, your progenitor would have overwritten you, don’t you get that? Bishop saved you.”

“I didn’t need to be
saved
. I was made to join with my creator. Now he’s dead—his thousand years of wisdom and knowledge, lost forever.”

Aramovsky makes it sound like we’re not as important as the people who wanted to erase us.

“We have the right to survive,” I say. “The Grownups think we’re property, shells to be filled up. They are
wrong
!”

I realize I’m yelling. I take a deep breath, try to calm myself. Aramovsky is so infuriating.

“We shouldn’t open them,” O’Malley says, so calmly it makes my yelling seem all the louder.

Aramovsky holds up his hands as if to say,
What choice do we have?
“We must open them. And quickly. We don’t know what dangers we’ll face on this planet—there is strength in numbers.”

“There is
hunger
in numbers,” Spingate says. “Our food won’t last long as it is. And as far as we know, there could be people in there who look just like us but have already been overwritten—Grownups in young bodies.”

If that’s the case, would they accept us? Would they try to take over, marginalize us, because they think they know better how to live, how to run things?

Or maybe they would just kill us. We’re only receptacles, after all; empty vessels have no rights.

Gaston nods in agreement. “Spingate is right about our food situation. How many coffins were there?”

O’Malley answers. “One hundred and sixty-eight.”

The number frightens me. Once upon a time, I led five people. If those coffins open—if the people inside
are
like us—I could be responsible for almost three hundred.

“That would more than double our numbers,” Gaston says. “Our food will be gone in half the time.”

Spingate frowns. “The Grownups sure seem to like multiples of three. Or maybe twelve. Were any of the coffins cracked open, like back on the
Xolotl
?”

O’Malley shakes his head. “I didn’t see any damage. They all looked sealed.”

“Leave them that way,” Bishop says. “At least until we find more food. Whoever it is, if they’re in the coffins they aren’t eating anything. And they aren’t a threat.”

O’Malley picks at the scab on his cheek.

“What if the shuttle decides to wake them up?” he says. “Or what if someone up on the
Xolotl
can do it somehow? Gaston, you’ve been talking to the shuttle. Ask it about the coffins.”

Gaston sighs. “Shuttle, what do you know about the coffins on Deck Four?”

The honey-sweet voice answers from the walls.

“I have no information on Deck Four, Captain Xander. My knowledge of that part of the ship has been erased.”

“I figured,” Gaston says. “
This
has been erased,
that
has been erased—if I ask about anything other than flying, the shuttle doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t even know why it picked this place to land.”

Like us, the shuttle has blank areas.

There are instant questions of who erased its memories, and why, but those things aren’t important right now.

“We have to find food,” I say. “We’ll eat up what we have very quickly. Finding food is our first objective.”

Bishop shakes his head. “First we need to understand our immediate surroundings. Find places from where we could be attacked, and ways to escape if we are. We need to
reconnoiter
the area, Em.”

He says that big word the way Spingate said
microorganisms.

Gaston’s sleepy face brightens. “I can help with that. The shuttle has powerful sensors for flying. I bet it can make us a map.”

He whispers something. He tilts his head, listening, and I see a black jewel in his ear, just like Spingate’s. He raises his hands. Light bathes his skin, making him glow like a god.

The images on the walls around us suddenly flow toward the middle of the pilothouse, shrinking rapidly as they go, the contracting vine ring at the center. In a blur of motion, the entire ruined city seems half the size, a quarter, a tenth, a hundredth. Buildings rush in, transforming from immense blocks of stone to tiny toys lined by tiny streets.

The pilothouse walls are once again black. The city that spread out in all directions is now a circle hovering at waist level. Bishop, Aramovsky, Gaston, Spingate, O’Malley and I stand at the map’s edge.

A glowing compass rose points out north, south, east and west. The center of the rose is a circle with the same Mictlan symbol that decorated our ties.

Streets and avenues are laid out in a grid. The two widest streets are perpendicular. Where they would cross each other, they vanish beneath the city’s largest building—that towering pyramid I saw when I was standing atop the vine ring.

To the northeast, a river flows into the city, so real I see the water sparkling, moving. The river ends at a tiny waterfall that drops into a wide pool.

I notice something about the vine-covered pyramids: they are flat squares stacked one on top of another, each smaller than the layer below. They look like the ones that were carved into my birth-coffin.

“Ziggurats,”
I say. The word just pops out; I’ve remembered something from Matilda’s past. The others look at the stepped pyramids, at each other, and nod. They now remember that word, too.

Spingate points to a glowing dot at the map’s center. “That’s our shuttle.”

It seems so small, further emphasizing the vastness of the ruined city.

Gaston gestures to the map’s circular edge. “That’s as far as the shuttle can see.”

Even though it’s fairly small on the map, the tallest ziggurat—the one on top of the two intersecting roads—is detailed enough for me to make out a pillar at the very top, where the yellow vines don’t grow. Six black symbols run down its length: empty circle, circle-star, double-ring, circle-cross, half-circle and, at the bottom, the tooth-circle or “gear.”

About two-thirds of the way up that ziggurat, on a corner, a vine-covered statue of a person faces up toward the peak. I can’t tell if it is a man or a woman. The statue must be huge.

This building seems important.

“Gaston,” I say, “how long would it take us to reach that tall ziggurat?”

He leans toward it, thinks. “If you walk fast, the better part of a day, most likely.”

O’Malley reaches out to touch the buildings near his waist, as if they are tiny things he might pick up. His hand goes right through them, kicking up a small cloud of sparkles.

“These buildings look different from the rest,” he says.

I see what he means. The ones near him are more broken down: partially collapsed, many with caved-in roofs and trees growing out of them. Their shapes are different—six sides, not four like most of the buildings on the map. And they are smaller, dwarfed by even the medium-sized ziggurats.

To the northeast a bit past the waterfall, I notice a thick line that intersects the map’s circle. The six-sided buildings are all on the far side of that line.

I point at it. “Is that a wall?”

Gaston reaches down with both hands, grabs the air above that section, and stretches his hands apart—the map zooms in. There is less detail now, and the image looks a bit fuzzy, but it is clearly a high, thick wall.

Aramovsky crosses his arms, frowns in thought.

“Four-sided buildings on our side of the wall, six-sided on the other,” he says. “Why would that be?”

No one answers.

O’Malley takes in a sharp breath of surprise, points. “Zoom in on that!”

Gaston does. It’s a rectangular building, big enough to hold a dozen shuttles, about halfway between us and the waterfall. The building is covered in yellow vines, like all the others, but it has a unique feature: thick, vine-draped poles rising up from the roof’s edge, as if there is an army of spear-holders down there, standing guard, weapons held high. The poles taper to a rounded tip with just the hint of a point. I almost recognize that shape.

“Those are statues of corn,” O’Malley says. “The building is a warehouse.”

We all look at him, doubtful.

O’Malley’s steady calm has vanished. His eyes are bright and his smile blazes, a smile so real and beautiful it makes my breathing stop.

“I remember something,” he says. “My father—I mean, my
progenitor’s
father—worked for a city. Maybe. Anyway, my progenitor saw buildings like this. They’re used to store food.”

If he’s right, that means the Grownups built this city. So where are they? What happened to them?

If that building holds food, it could mean the difference between life and death. We need to learn what plants we can and can’t eat, how to farm and hunt, but mastering those skills will probably take much longer than our supplies will last.

“It’s not far,” Gaston says. “It would only take a couple of hours to walk there.”

Aramovsky points to the glowing dot at the map’s center. “Why not just fly the shuttle right to it?”

“I’m not sure there’s a place to land,” Gaston says. “And besides, the shuttle needs fuel to fly.” He pauses, opens his mouth to say something, then closes it.

Spingate finishes for him. “We have barely enough fuel left for one trip to the
Xolotl
. If we fly around for other purposes—for
anything
—we won’t be able to go back. Not ever.”

Everyone falls silent. I hadn’t realized going back was an option. The thought is uncomfortable: if we fail on Omeyocan, our survival might depend on returning to a place where people want to kill us.

Aramovsky waves a hand dismissively. “The God of Blood sent us here. We are destined to succeed. God gave us this shuttle, and we should use it to—”

“We walk,” I say sharply, cutting him off. “Like Bishop said, we have to reconnoiter anyway, so we’ll do some of that while we go to the warehouse. If we find food there, we have more time to figure out what to do next.”

Bishop stands straighter. “I’ll take Farrar and Coyotl. We’ll move fast, come back and report to you.”

“I’ll go as well,” Spingate says.

Bishop shakes his head. “No, you’ll slow us down.”

Spingate lifts the arm with the bracer. “If we find food or water, this will tell us if it’s poisonous.”

“If we find food or water, we’ll bring some back,” Bishop says. “Then you can tell us if it’s safe.”

Spingate puts her hands on her hips.

“She’s going,” I say. “As am I.”

Bishop glares at me. So does O’Malley.