Alive (26 page)

M
emories roil in my head. My brain searches for words to describe the things I see. The shuttle’s tail is off to our left. The tapered nose points to the right. A long, thick tube—thicker than four or five of us standing on each other’s shoulders—connects them. At the tube’s middle is a wide metal platform. A ramp—running perpendicular to the shuttle—leads from the floor to that platform.

We are perhaps a hundred steps away from the shuttle.

The gleaming hull is smooth as glass, even where the platform is: I don’t see a way in.

I look around. We’ve passed through an archway of heavy, rust-free metal. Like all the archways before, this one is dense with images, but these are images I have not yet seen: planets, groups of stars, long cylinders and some things I don’t recognize.

This room isn’t much taller than the shuttle’s tail. Above it, a curved ceiling of crisscrossing white bars. A short distance from the shuttle’s nose stands a second archway—the biggest I have seen yet, big enough for the entire shuttle to pass through. The doors within it are metal, not stone.

I wonder if the blackness of space is beyond them.

“Bishop, bring the monster. Everyone else, stay here.”

We run to the ramp. The ramp’s surface is sharp, maybe to keep people from slipping. Small, hard points dig into the soles of my feet, reminding me how sore and swollen they are.

We stand on the platform.

“Matilda, tell us how to get in.”

Her head lolls over Bishop’s thick arm. I don’t know if she’s faking or dying. Her half-limp hand points to a spot on the shuttle’s hull. There, I can make out a thin-lined square about the size and height of my face.

“Do we press it?” I ask. “Tell us how it works.”

Shriveled shoulders shrug. “I don’t know. I’m just an empty.”

An
empty
? What is she talking about? Is she lying about not knowing how it works? Is she stalling again? No, I sense that she’s telling the truth. We came all this way and now we can’t get in. We’re running out of time. We have to do something, and fast.

I need someone smarter than me to figure this out.

I look back to our group. A hundred steps isn’t that far away, but beneath this room’s sprawling ceiling my people look so small. The children stand packed together with my friends surrounding them, protecting them.

“Spingate, Gaston, get up here!”

The two sprint to join me. I turn back to the gleaming shuttle, to examine that square—and for the very first time in my life, I see
myself
.

A beat-up girl’s reflection stares back at me in wide-eyed disbelief.

Those eyes…they are brown.

Strands of heavy black hair hang down my face, drape across my shoulders. The braid that Bello lovingly made is now a tattered mess. Red-gray ooze has dried on my cheek and chin. My upper lip is split and bleeding. One of my eyes is swollen, the skin there discolored and blacker than Gaston’s was when I first met him. I see a growing, shiny lump on my forehead. I am covered in cuts, scrapes and bruises. Ripped shirt, scratched skin, bloody and beaten…

…I am
beautiful
.

Not “beautiful” as in what I could be when all of this goes away, but rather what I am right now, with these badges of bravery spotting my skin. Someday these wounds will heal, and I will see myself as Matilda intended me to be, but for now this face—the battered face of a fighter, a warrior—is mine and mine alone.

Spingate and Gaston thump up the ramp.

I have to tear my attention away from my reflection. It is a hard thing to do. I point at the hull’s gleaming surface without looking at it.

“That square is the way in,” I say. “Matilda claims she doesn’t know how to open it.”

Spingate caresses the metal, slides her hands across the lines almost like she’s smoothing out invisible wrinkles. Her fatigue and fear vanish. Here is a puzzle: her whole being responds instantly.

She puts her hand on the square, pushes it in, then turns it. The square slides away inside the shuttle, revealing the same kind of plaque we saw in the door that led down to the haunted room—black glass with the imprint of a hand, and in the center of that hand, a jagged circle.

No, wait…I finally recognize that symbol—it’s a
gear
.

I cup Spingate’s elbow.

“Spin, put your hand on it.”

She licks her lips, takes a breath, then presses her palm to the imprint.

Nothing happens.

Gaston nudges me, grins.

“Well, I guess it’s time for me to be the
real
hero, huh, Em? Should I give it a try?”

He’s got a splatter of red-gray across his chest, and his right ear is a sheet of blood that stains his shirt collar. Fighting monsters and running through an unknown ship haven’t dulled his arrogance, not in the least.

I nod at him.

He rubs his hands together like he’s trying to warm them, flicks his fingers outward once, twice, three times, then presses his hand to the black imprint.

The shuttle vibrates.

More lines appear in the metal, emerging out of nowhere as if the hull is splitting. The lines form a rectangle, taller than Bishop and wider than it is tall. Like the small panel Spingate pressed, it recedes slightly back into the ship.

A vertical line forms down the middle of this rectangle, cutting it in half. Without a sound, the halves slide away.

The shuttle has opened.

It is dark inside.

“El-Saffani,” I say, my voice a bark that echoes through this cavernous room. They both sprint to the ramp. In seconds, they are at my sides. Oddly, neither of them are bloody; the battle must have missed them. I point my spear into the shuttle’s darkness.

“Find out what’s in there.”

They adjust their grips on their bone-clubs, then step inside.

The moment they enter, lights snap on. It is a corridor that runs left and right, a corridor of red cloth walls and a black metal floor. I can’t see anything other than the red corridor wall opposite me.

The twins step inside and dart right, disappearing for a moment. Seconds later, they pass in front of me, silently heading the other way.

O’Malley walks up the ramp to stand at my left. Bishop moves slightly to stand at my right, Matilda still cradled in his arms. Along with Gaston and Spingate, we wait, both hopeful and full of dread at what El-Saffani might find inside.

This has to be it. It
has
to: we have nowhere else to go.

El-Saffani returns to the opening.

“No one here—” Boy El-Saffani says.

“—it looks safe,” Girl El-Saffani says.

Boy El-Saffani points to his left, my right, toward the shuttle’s nose.

“A door that way, locked tight,” he says.

Girl El-Saffani points to her right, my left. I’ve never seen her so excited.

“That way is a big room,” she says. “With
hundreds
of coffins.”

Coffins? No, that can’t be. Hundreds of us, hundreds of coffins…I’m so tired, and this is starting to confuse me. I won’t lie in a coffin again, no matter what…I
will not
.

But if there are hundreds of coffins, that means the room is big—big enough for all of us. It doesn’t make any sense to leave our people outside the shuttle, exposed if the monsters come.

“O’Malley, get everyone up here,” I say. “Let’s get them inside.”

Bishop leans close to me. “Post guards at the bottom of the ramp, Em. In case we’re attacked.”

I nod, annoyed at myself. “Yes, of course. O’Malley, tell Coyotl and Farrar to stand guard at the base of the ramp. El-Saffani, join them.”

The twins rush out of the shuttle and take up their positions.

O’Malley runs to the others, waving and calling them all to him.

Spingate and Gaston step into the shuttle. They go left, toward the room with all the coffins. I don’t stop them.

Bishop, Matilda and I remain on the platform.

He holds her out to me like she is some kind of offering.

“We don’t need this anymore,” he says. “Do you want me to kill it?”

I do. I want that very much. I want him to smash her, stomp her head in so I can see her brains spill across the platform. Her one eye looks at me.

“Go ahead,” she says, her voice croaking, spent.

Images flash in front of me, conflicting visions: Bishop strangling the life out of this thing, and Yong, terrified…dying.

(Kill your enemies…)

“Go ahead,” Matilda says again. “If it was anyone other than me, you’d have already told your Bishop to cut my throat.”

It would be so easy. I don’t even have to touch her, I can just tell Bishop to do it.

Yong, gasping for breath, his eyes asking me
Why?
over and over again.

(If you run…)

We’ve made it. No one needs to die.

I shake my head. “You’re wrong, Matilda. You are a prisoner, I won’t kill a prisoner.”

Her eye narrows—she doesn’t have a mouth, but I know she’s smiling.

“I’m not wrong,” she says. “You won, little leader. I wasn’t that much older than you when I handed out my first death sentence. I
know
you would kill your enemies, because that’s what I would do.” The eye closes. Her voice becomes a regretful whisper. “It’s what I
did
.”

(Be forever free…)

She ordered people’s deaths? I think of all the bodies in the
Xolotl,
all the sacrifices and the mutilation. A shudder ripples across my skin. All those bodies…were they because of
her
?

My knife sliding into Yong’s belly. The rage I felt, the hatred. He thought he could hit
me
? He thought he could take away my leadership?

Finally, that confused, desperate moment with Yong becomes clear. My memories crystalize, come into sharp focus.

I know what I did.

And I am horrified by it.

When Yong attacked me…I
stabbed
him. I remember pointing the knife, I remember the small step forward as he came in.

I remember jamming the blade into his belly.

And, I remember sneering when I did it.

Stabbing him felt…it felt
good
.

Yong’s death was no accident: I killed him.

Guilt pours over me like an icy waterfall.
I killed Yong
. My brain played some kind of trick on me, hid the truth away, but now that I’ve seen it for what it is, I will never be able to
un
-see it. I don’t know if it was right or wrong.
He
attacked
me
. I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t stabbed him, I will never know, but there is no denying the fact that when he came at me, I cut him down.

It’s all too much to handle. I need someone to help me understand. Perhaps the only one who can is the creature who made me.

“Matilda, did you ever kill anyone?”

She coughs. “I told you I did. So many people.”

I shake my head. “No, not
order
someone to die…did you ever kill anyone yourself?”

Her one eye stares at me like I’ve asked her a question in another language. The silence is its own answer. She’s responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, maybe thousands, but she commanded other people to do the dirty work.

She’s never taken a life.

Her hands have always stayed clean.

Yong died right in front of me, staring at me with accusing eyes. He died crying for a mother who never existed. Maybe it was just a playground fight to him. Maybe he was just being a bully. Maybe he didn’t understand who he was attacking, and that ignorance cost him his life.

I killed him. His blood was on my hands. It was on my shirt. It was all over me.

Unlike Matilda, I know what it feels like to take a life, to see the look of intelligence wiped away, to know that I have forever ended a person.

Bishop glares at me, shakes his head in disapproval. “Em, don’t listen to this thing. Give me the order.”

It would be so easy to do that. Matilda is my enemy, and I want her dead, want it so badly….

No. That’s what she would do, this creature that I could become, that in some ways I already
have
become. If I make the wrong choices, I could follow her path.

I know what it means to kill.

Even though she is far older, she does not.

And that knowledge, I hope, is the thing that will let me be different.

I shake my head.

“We still need her,” I say.

Bishop’s eyes narrow. I’m not sure he believes me. Maybe he’s judging me because I can’t do what needs to be done. If so, he has every right—the leader has to make the hard decisions.

I take a deep breath, try to calm myself. I enter the shuttle.

As the twins said, to my right is a closed metal door. It has rounded edges and a wheel in the middle. I haven’t seen a door like this before. I walk to it. There is no handle. I try the wheel: it won’t budge.

At the wheel’s hub is a circular plaque. In the middle of it, a golden gear.

I quickly go back the other way. The short corridor leads me to a low-ceilinged room.

When I enter, I see that El-Saffani was right.

Gaston and Spingate stand in a wide central aisle. On either side of them, long rows of plain white coffins, the same kind the pigs opened to eat the skeletons inside.

Aisles also line the outside of the room. There is so much space in here, space for people to sit, or walk, or lie down, or
play,
or whatever anyone wants to do. We don’t need to actually use the coffins; there is enough room for all of us without getting in them.

I return to the platform. At the base of the ramp, my people are waiting: the circle-stars, the kids, O’Malley and the others. They have been through so much, even the children who have only been awake for a handful of hours.

I wave them in, point toward the coffin room.

“Get in here, fast. Find space and sit down while we get the shuttle going.”

They filter past me.
Can
we get the shuttle going? I don’t know. It isn’t from a lack of memory or a muddy mind—I have no idea how this thing works, and I know Matilda has no idea, either.