Alive (22 page)

“Ah, yes, the shuttle,” he says. “Fly fly fly, like a rocket in the sky. For centuries they have tried to get to you, and for centuries I have stopped them. Sadly, Miss Savage, when I sealed you
in,
the shuttle was sealed
out
. You will have to go to the Mutineers’ section and take it. And while you’re there, see if you can find your Bello, because that is where she’ll be.”

Bishop takes in a sharp breath of surprise. “You think she’s still alive?”

“Perhaps,” Brewer says. “Although I suppose that depends on your definition of the word.”

More riddles. I wish this thing would give us straight answers.

According to Brewer, our way off the
Xolotl
is to go where these “Mutineer” monsters are. We will have to face the things that attacked us, that took Bello.

Bello…could we get her back
and
get out of here?

I glance at Bishop, wondering if he’s thinking the same thing. His chin is at his chest. He’s staring at Brewer’s image from beneath furrowed brows. If there is any chance to get Bello back, Bishop is ready to take it.

Knowing he is with me gives me strength. I stand tall once again.

“Brewer, tell me how to get to the shuttle.”

The monster shakes his head. “If they found you, then you found them. As the cleaning flea said to the dirty elephant,
Perhaps I missed a spot
. Surely I can’t let you sully a pristine, perfect planet if you’re not smart enough to figure things out for yourself.”

I whip the spear down, a short arc that rips through Brewer’s head in a spastic cloud of sparkles. The blade
clonks
against the pedestal top, taking a chunk out of the white stone.

“Stop playing games with us! We’ve already lost three people. The longer we stay, the more that will die.
Let us go!
”

He gazes at me for a long time.

“Maybe I kept you all in your husks because I didn’t think you would survive outside of them,” he says. “But you have. I tried to kill you, little Savage, and yet here you are. Maybe I was wrong…maybe you can make it off this ship. If you do, you deserve to create a world in your own image, not ours. Those that don’t know history aren’t poisoned by it. I will wipe the records clean. And when you go, don’t forget to take your little friends. I’ll start waking them up now.”

Little friends? Does he mean there are more of us?

“Brewer, you—”

A sparkle-wave ripples his face. His image bloats into a black cloud, then vanishes.

Brewer is gone.

Bishop nudges my arm. “Em, what did he mean?”

The air above the right-side pedestal flickers, glows.

A black face with red eyes appears, but it is smaller and slimmer than Brewer’s. Rage billows within me when I recognize it—it’s the female monster from the Garden.

She stares at me like I am the only one here.

“You found your way to the Crystal Ball,” she says. “It used to be my favorite place. In a way, I suppose I should be proud.”

That voice, the voice of death. So similar to Brewer’s—old and hissy and ancient and
wrong
—but different,
so
different, in a way that makes me start to shake.

I realize why the voice is familiar: I
know
this creature.

My teeth grind as I fight to get my body under control. I can’t show weakness, not now. I squeeze the spear shaft so tight it makes my fingers hurt.

“I am the leader of our group,” I say. “Who are you?”

The new monster shakes her head. “You haven’t figured it out yet? That’s too bad. You are the leader of nothing. You
are
nothing. You aren’t even a person.”

Why does her voice terrify me so? I know her, I know this thing. I know she hasn’t always looked like this, I feel it in my chest, but I can’t put the pieces together.

“I
am
a person,” I say. “We all are, including Bello. Give her back to us.”

“You are
property,
” the creature says. Her eyes narrow, the swirling red eyes squeezing into thin slits. “You are an empty shell waiting to be filled, an egg with no yolk. You will lay down your weapons and stop fighting us, and you will do it at once.”

That voice…
that voice
…

My breaths are ragged gasps ripping in and out. My head hurts. A realization is bubbling up through my mind, pushing away the muddy thoughts, and now that I almost have it I suddenly, desperately don’t want to know. I want my brain to
stop,
to leave it alone, but it’s too late for that. Cold stiffness spreads through me, swirls in my belly and turns my heart into a frozen lump.

Bishop’s hand on my arm, reassuring, supporting—whatever we face next, he will face it with me.

I shake my head. “We will not lay down our weapons.”

“You should,” the monster says. “It’s a big ship, but there is nowhere to run.”

“If we run, you will hunt us. If we kill you, then—”

“Then you are forever free,” the monster finishes.

She knew what I was going to say, yet I’ve never spoken those words out loud. I’ve only
thought
them. A new strain of anxiety swirls inside me, a sense of foreboding and despair. The mud is sinking, retreating, a hard knowledge is solidifying…it’s almost here, almost here and I don’t want to know I
don’t want to know
.

I scream at her, a three-word roar so loud it could shake the stars themselves.

“Who…are…you?”

“You still don’t know? Amazing.”

The truth erupts, stabs through me like a thousand spears shredding my flesh. I finally understand my fear, and I know why this thing is death.

I recognize her voice, because it is
mine
.

“My name,” she says, “is Matilda Savage.”

T
he monster is me.

I am the monster.

I want to shout out that this thing is a liar, but there is no point. At the core of all that I am, I
know
she is telling the truth.

How can this be? How can I be in two places at once? How could I look like
that
?

Everything goes black. Falling. I feel Bishop’s hands around my waist, lifting me. I must weigh nothing at all, it seems so easy for him. My feet find the floor. I stand on my own, woozy, head swimming.

I look for my spear.

Aramovsky is holding it. He’s smiling. None of this bothers him. In his mind, the way things are is the way his precious gods want things to be.

“Go back up the ladder, Em,” he says. “It’s all right. I’ll handle things from here.”

Bishop reaches out fast, tears the spear from Aramovsky’s hands. Bishop hands the spear to me.

Aramovsky doesn’t stop smiling.
Perhaps Bishop isn’t the only one who wonders who would win a new vote
. That’s what Aramovsky said. At the time, I thought he was saying Bishop would win.

But maybe he wasn’t thinking about Bishop at all.

Matilda speaks; her voice drowns out all thoughts of Aramovsky.

“We don’t need everyone,” she says, now calm and loving. “If you and the ones we
do
need put down your weapons, fulfill your obligations, then the ones we don’t need will be allowed to live.”

She wants me to agree to this?

“The ones you
don’t
need get to live,” I echo. “Which means the ones you do need…die?”

“None of you will die,” she says. “Not that any of you are alive to begin with. At least this way, some of you get to carry on with your excuse of an existence.”

Bishop snarls, shakes his head. He won’t give up any of our people, and neither will I. Not to this vile
thing,
not to anyone.

“We refuse,” I say. I will fight her, fight for my own life, fight for all of our lives, but I’m reeling, in danger of going as insane as Brewer. My voice is harsh and defiant one second, softly begging the next. “How can I be you? I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t,” Matilda says. “You’re not old enough to understand.”

“Just tell me!”

It’s hard to know what her facial expressions mean when she doesn’t have a human face, but she seems to be getting annoyed.

“Brewer woke you,” she says. “He did it to hurt me, to hurt all of us. That
bastard
. Every moment you are awake, girl, it puts my life at risk. Every piece of information you learn, it puts my life at risk.”

How can that be? How can my learning something be a danger to her?

We stare at each other, two Matilda Savages locked in a battle of wills, the
same
will, separated by whatever magic made this happen. She needs me, yet I want nothing to do with her. No, that’s not true—I need to know what this is all about, and she can tell me.

“If you want me to consider your offer,” I say, “then explain how it’s possible you and I are the same person.”

She sighs, a sound like ripping paper. “I accept, but we aren’t really the same person.
I
am a person
—you
are property. This ship traveled from a place to which we can never return. We left there to find a new home, a new world. We knew the journey would take centuries. To survive the trip, our bodies were permanently modified. They cannot be changed back. We were remade as you see us now.”

“Ugly,” I say before I can stop the word.

Matilda nods. “Yes, the process made us ugly. It also brought constant pain, pain we have endured for longer than your unfinished mind can comprehend. When we started the trip, the Cherished began cultivating copies of their bodies, making what we call
receptacles.
These receptacles were modified to survive on Omeyocan, the planet below.”

Omeyocan.

Brewer didn’t tell us the name of the planet.
Omeyocan
…the word is a song that makes my brain tingle and my throat tighten. It is where we belong.

She also used a word that Brewer said earlier: the
Cherished
. Is she part of that group? Are we? I don’t think it matters. If we can get to Omeyocan, we can leave this all behind.

“Receptacles grow very,
very
slowly,” Matilda says. She’s talking to me like I am a child, or stupid, or both. “When we arrived here, we were to transfer our thoughts and memories to the receptacles so that we could live on the surface without disease, immune from Omeyocan’s subtle poisons that would have slowly killed us.”

I look at the planet hanging in the starry blackness.

“So why didn’t you do the transfer?”

“On the way here, there was a…let’s call it a
disagreement,
” she says. “Some people had to be taught a lesson. Brewer was one of those people. The bastard tricked us, found a way to lock you away from me. You were supposed to come out of the husk two centuries ago, when your body was twelve years old—just as the scripture requires. But you didn’t come out, because of Brewer. Your body kept growing, becoming older and bigger than it was supposed to.”

My reality is crumbling. I was in that coffin for two hundred years? No, that’s the
extra
time I was in there. That’s why our clothes are too small—they would have fit the twelve-year-old me. And it’s why they are so big on the people who died as little children. Had those kids stayed alive, they would have grown into their uniforms. But many, like the other Brewer, didn’t get that chance.

You are the person who murdered me,
he said.

Now I understand. My skin crawls anew at the sight of this evil thing before me.

“You killed the Brewer boy in our coffin room. He was just a child.”

Matilda scoffs, a sound like gravel scattered across a hard floor.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” she says. “Not a
child,
a
receptacle
. Nothing more than a shell waiting to be filled. You, little leader, are
my
receptacle. Understand now? You’re not a person at all. Brewer has held you hostage for centuries. He said that if we came after him, he would destroy my receptacle the way I destroyed his. He must be dying. He woke you up out of spite, so that I could know my chance to be born again was fading away forever. He did it to
hurt
me, to make me suffer. But he made a mistake. Now that you are out, he can’t simply press a button and kill you in your husk.”

It’s all so much,
too
much.

“Brewer said he protected us.”

Matilda laughs. “Did he? No, it was his threat to kill you that kept me away all these years. But now his leverage is gone. I can finally have the reward I was promised.”

What she says is impossible. Yet, once again, I know she is telling the truth. I am her
reward,
like some animal to be given away as a prize. But she said I wouldn’t die. Would this process fill in my missing memories? Would it end the madness of not knowing who I am? My parents…I might finally remember my parents.

“If you transfer your thoughts, what happens to me? Would I know what you know?”

Matilda pauses. “In a manner of speaking, yes. We are the same person. The transfer would make us whole.”

She’s not lying, but she’s also not telling me all the truth.

“It would make
you
whole,” I say. “I asked what happens to
me
. If you do your transfer, what happens to the person I am?”

“You are not a person! You are—”

I shake the spear at her. “Then make another copy! You can’t have me! You can’t have
any
of us!”

The red eyes fade to a reddish pink. She visibly calms herself. The loving voice comes back—does she think she can soothe me the way a parent soothes a little child?

“We can’t make more receptacles,” she says. “The process takes
centuries
. Mental maps, synaptic connections, baseline memories that form neural pathways—if these things aren’t a match, if the foundation isn’t identical, then the transfer can’t overwrite.”

Overwrite
. The word instantly terrifies me. The word is worse than
death,
worse than
murder
. If Matilda gets me, my body will live on, but who I am—
what
I am—that will be erased.

I was created to be destroyed.

“So if I’m you, why can’t I remember? I know how to speak and read, but my past is all muddy, all blanked out. Why?”

“Because you don’t really
have
memories,” Matilda says. “Language, math, science, skills…those things are the framework of a mind. It is our experiences that make us what we are. Individual identity forms in the way we perceive things, the way we react, the way we feel. The knowledge your brain received while you were in the husk provided the biological scaffolding needed to support who
I
am. You’re a
shell,
little leader. I am the yolk. You were made so that I can live. You’re my only hope. Come and merge with me now so we can be as we were meant to be.”

I thought she was a monster because of the way she looks, but her evil goes far beyond appearances. She wants to make me vanish. She wants it to be like I never existed at all, and she’s trying to make that sound like it is a beautiful thing.

I shake my head. “I refuse.”

The colors in her eyes darken, spin faster.

“You don’t understand,” she says. “You’re not old enough to understand. I am your progenitor and you are my receptacle—you can’t make your own decisions!”

Maybe she knows more than I do, more than I could ever learn, but she doesn’t know
me
.

“You’re wrong, Matilda. I’ve been making decisions since the moment I woke up. And I’ll keep making them. I think I get it now—the longer I live, the better the chance that you’ll die. And you should have died a long time ago.”

She is so angry she shakes. I see a bit of fluid leak down the left side of her face, a thin rivulet that gathers in one wrinkle before overflowing it, oozing down to the next.

“What about the ones we don’t need?” she asks, obviously fighting to control her rage. “Don’t you want them to survive, little leader? Their progenitors are already dead, so they can’t be overwritten. Come to me willingly, and they will live. If I have to hunt you down, I will kill them all, each and every one. I will torture them first, tell them that their agony is because of your selfishness. I will—”

“You will
never
get me.” The words come out like grinding glass. Matilda had her life, and she can keep it—my life is
mine
. “You won’t get me. You won’t get
any
of us.”

She leans forward until her furious red eyes fill the air above the pedestal.

“I’ll find you. Brewer held you hostage, but that is over. Come to the orchards, girl. You will come or I swear by Tlaloc that all of your friends will suffer.”

That name again…

“Tlaloc,” I say. “I remember that name. Who is it?”

Matilda leans back. “You’re lying. You don’t remember that name. You
can’t
remember things like that, it’s not part of the process.” She’s more agitated than angry now. She seems worried. “Do you remember anything else?”

I do. I remember the smell of pork chops. I remember how it felt to be mocked and ridiculed. I remember that Tchaikovsky was a musician. I remember the trip to the farm. But if Matilda is this upset about that name,
Tlaloc,
telling her more could make her panic. She wants me to come to her: that gives us a little bit of time, time we probably won’t have if she comes after us instead.

“Not really,” I say. “Hints of things, vague emotions, but…I don’t remember anything.”

Matilda’s sigh of relief makes her face-folds flutter.

“That’s good,” she says. “Brewer obviously made mistakes in the process, but it is not too late. The longer you are away from me, the more memories of your own you form, the more likely the overwrite will fail and we will
both
die. Come now and I promise you that I will be humane to your friends.”

Humane
…the same word I used when Bishop and I killed the pig. More wisps of memory filter in from that trip to the farm. The farmer told us that when they slaughtered the pigs, they tried to do it as quickly and painlessly as possible. He called that “being humane.”

Kill them fast or kill them slow, the pigs all wound up dead. That’s all we are to Matilda…livestock.

She is a monster, a thousand-year-old abomination. She wants me to fulfill my “destiny,” a destiny defined by her.

“We are not your property,” I say. “Our lives are our own.”

The ugly thing shakes its head.

“Sooner than you think, hunger and thirst will drive you to me anyway,” she says. “Throw down your weapons, come to me now, and at least your friends will live. If we have to hunt you, they will all die. Last chance, girl—what is your answer?”

In that moment, I know that if I ever come face-to-face with Matilda, I will kill her.

We are the Birthday Children, and we will find a way to survive.

“My answer is
never,
” I say. “And one more thing—you always were a bitch, Savage.”

I look over to El-Saffani, point at the three pedestals.

“Break those, then follow me.”

I turn my back on Matilda and walk to the ladder. I hear her screaming at me, saying something about how I
must
listen, how I
must
obey, how I’m not old enough to really understand.

I start up the rungs, leaving behind the sounds of destruction.