Glow (11 page)

“After a lifetime at low gravity? I can’t ask that of them.”

“You must! Or I’ll report your crimes to the authorities on Earth. They’ll effect a mutiny.”

“There’s nothing they can do to hurt me, Anne, and you know it.”

“So you admit it. You admit you sabotaged us!”

Captain Jones’s face took on a vicious expression, and he pointed his finger at the vid screen. “Listen, you frigid bitch, I’m not going to risk the health of my crew to satisfy your paranoid delusions.”

“I ask again. How did you know about the phenol, Captain? If you didn’t send a bastardized formula?”

With a sour smile, the Captain said, “What’s the matter, Anne? Disappointed you won’t be the Prophet of New Earth?”

Mather pressed a button, and the image of the Captain froze. The twisted look on his face frightened Waverly.

“So you see,” Mather said, “we had no choice. I’m so very sorry you and the girls got caught in the middle. But we’re talking about our survival.”

Waverly didn’t want to buy into Mather’s story, but something about the Captain in the video seemed wrong, just as wrong as Anne Mather seemed.

“So you were lying about the decompression,” Waverly said. “That wasn’t why you came for us at all.”

“No, I wasn’t lying. There was a decompression, but it merely hastened our actions. We didn’t have time for diplomacy anymore. We had to rescue you girls immediately, in whatever way we could.” Mather closed her eyes as though pained by the memory. “We tried to prevent loss of life. It’s looking more and more like we failed.”

The two looked at each other across the desk, taking measure.

“I think maybe that’s enough for today, dear. You have a lot to take in.”

The woman struggled to her feet and walked with Waverly to the door, her hand on the girl’s back. Waverly felt so confused that she wanted to burst away and run to some abandoned place on the ship where no one would ever find her. But she could only follow the guards as they plodded down the corridor toward the elevators.

Everything Mather said twirled like a sickening gyroscope in Waverly’s mind, mixing up her thoughts. As she followed the guards, she tried to find a hole in Mather’s story, but she couldn’t. In truth, she believed what the woman said about how Captain Jones behaved toward the women on the biosphere, because her own experience confirmed it. Still, she did not trust Mather. Could not.

She barely noticed when the engines kicked into a higher drive, making the floor shimmy. The artificial gravity inched up a notch. She felt heavier as she lifted one foot, then the other, thinking about what the Pastor had said. The guards seemed to feel it, too. They walked hunched, with labored breathing, sweat beading on the backs of their necks. The ship must have increased its rate of acceleration just now, and the artificial gravity increased as a result.

Waverly stopped in her tracks.

Gravity.

She was flooded with understanding. The hunk of metal in the shuttle bay couldn’t possibly be from the Empyrean, and the New Horizon couldn’t be conducting any kind of search for survivors. Above all, Waverly finally understood why the adults aboard the ship seemed so sick and weak.

“Keep up,” said one of the guards breathlessly. Waverly ran to catch up to where they were waiting for the elevator.

By the time the elevator doors opened and she boarded with the guards, she was certain the Empyrean was still out there and that she’d found the key to getting back home.

IN THE BANYAN TREE

Waverly met up with the rest of the girls in the tropical produce bay.

Though the rest of the ship was identical to the Empyrean, the agriculture bays looked completely different. The coffee trees were twice as large as the ones Waverly was used to. In fact, all the plants on the New Horizon seemed to thrive especially well. The tour guide, a smallish man in his fifties with a gentle voice, spoke with pride about how the crew had experimented successfully with different fertilization techniques that increased crop production by twenty percent. Feigning interest, Waverly wove among the girls until she stood by Samantha and Sarah at the back of the crowd.

“Where did that witch take you?” Sarah hissed, and Waverly appreciated again how spirited this girl was. Her small body reminded Waverly of a sapling: If you bend it too far, it’ll snap back and whip you in the face. She had a steel-trap mind and a determination Waverly found very comforting.

“She took me to her office to talk,” Waverly whispered, her eyes on the two sweaty guards who stood next to the tour guide, smiling benignly as they caught their breath. Felicity was standing off to the side, fingering the necklace that hung around her long neck. Waverly watched the two guards and the guide, waiting for one of them to look at Felicity with desire as so many men aboard the Empyrean had done. But they barely glanced at her. In fact, they were smiling warmly at the littlest girls, who were sitting on the floor staring up at them.

“The men here are different,” she said under her breath. Both Sarah and Samantha looked at her, puzzled. “Did either of you ever feel…” Waverly froze for a moment. The tour guide had paused in his lecture and was looking at her, waiting for her to pay attention. Once he turned to point out the morphology of a vanilla tree, Waverly continued. “Did you ever feel weird around any of the men on the Empyrean? The Captain’s friends? Or the Central Council?”

“Why?” Samantha asked, suspicious. “What happened today?”

“Is there something you girls would like to share with the rest of us?” the guide shouted. All the other girls turned to look at the three of them. Waverly opened her mouth to come up with an excuse, but once again, Samantha was ready.

“We were wondering what kind of tree that is.” She pointed across the room at some enormous, twisted-looking trees that lined the bay. “I don’t think we had those on the Empyrean.”

The guide seemed pleased. “Those are banyan trees, and we have some magnificent specimens! Follow me!”

The man and the guards led the girls between rows of peanut plants to the banyan trees, whose roots were plunged into a swampy section of topsoil. The trees were unlike any Waverly had ever seen. They were huge masses of wooden tentacles, emerging from a base of roots that twisted together to form a trunk and then unraveled toward the ceiling in wide-flung branches. “These are some of Old Earth’s most wonderful creations,” the ecologist said wonderingly.

“They look good for climbing!” Sarah suggested, and the rest of the girls agreed.

“That’s true, they are! Why don’t you? You’ve been listening to me long enough. Let’s take a break, and you girls can explore. Just don’t leave the room.” He nodded to a guard, who pressed some buttons on a remote device. To lock the doors, Waverly guessed.

Waverly pulled herself onto the lowest branch of the nearest banyan tree. Samantha followed her, and Sarah crept up a branch slightly above the others. The tour guide and the guards watched the youngest girls, who were toddling off toward a sunflower patch.

“You missed the latest,” Samantha said, her eyes trained darkly on their three escorts. “We’ve all been invited to what they’re calling ‘family time.’”

“What is that?” Waverly asked.

“We’re each having dinner with a different family tonight,” Sarah said bitterly.

This was the reminder that Waverly needed: Whatever Mather knew about Captain Jones and his inner circle didn’t change anything. The girls had been taken away from their families. Nothing justified that.

“I’ve realized something important,” she said to her friends. “Have you two noticed how weak the adults are?”

“Yeah,” Samantha said pensively. “It’s weird.”

“I think I know why,” Waverly said. “They had to slow the ship down to let the Empyrean catch up.”

“So?” Samantha rubbed at her button nose, a tic she had that made her seem anxious and ferocious all at once.

“So, how long do you think it took for that to happen?”

Sarah shrugged impatiently. “A few weeks, I guess, considering how fast the Empyrean was going.”

“Wrong. It would have taken years for them to slow down, years for us to catch up. Remember what they always tell us in physics class?”

Sarah stared blankly for a moment, but then said, “Yes! Each year we’re covering millions more miles than the previous year because we’re constantly accelerating.”

“Right. And each year, the Empyrean and New Horizon were getting farther apart because this ship took off a whole year before we did. We’re almost at the middle of the journey right now, so we should have been the farthest we ever would be. So think of the distance between the two ships.”

Sarah looked at the leaves above her as she considered this. “But what does this have to do with them being weak?”

“They had to slow down to let us catch up. And remember, the inertia from our acceleration is why we have gravity.”

Samantha got it first. “So for the last few years, while they were slowing down, waiting for us to catch up…”

“They had weaker gravity. Or maybe none at all,” Waverly finished for her.

“But why wouldn’t they have just turned around and pointed the thrusters in the opposite direction?” Samantha asked. “They’d have gotten to us faster.”

This stopped Waverly. Of course, that was the original mission plan. Halfway to New Earth, both ships were supposed to cease their acceleration, turn around, and point the thrusters toward New Earth to slow themselves down. With the ships pointing in the opposite direction, slowing down would create as much a feeling of gravity as accelerating. So why didn’t the New Horizon just do that? Waverly was stumped.

“The nebula,” Sarah whispered tentatively.

“Oh, my God, you’re right,” Waverly said. “They had to time it perfectly so that the attack could happen inside the nebula so the Empyrean can’t track us with radar and get us back. It gives them a huge head start.”

“And Captain Jones probably didn’t know they were coming until they were on top of us,” Sarah said. “So they had the element of surprise.”

“But why not attack years ago?” Samantha asked. “Right when we entered the nebula?”

“The ship isn’t designed to function in zero gravity,” Sarah said simply. “The plants and animals couldn’t have survived.”

“So they probably slowed down as soon as they were inside the nebula,” Waverly said, imagining the time and the vast distances. “The Empyrean has been crossing the nebula for the last year and a half…”

“So they were waiting here for even longer!” Sarah said.

“That would be years of muscle atrophy,” Waverly said happily. “They might never fully recover from it.”

Samantha nodded. “So we
are
stronger.”

“I think we’re much stronger than they are,” Waverly said. “But there’s one more thing. We’ve had near constant gravity since we got here, haven’t we?”

“Pretty much,” Samantha said. “I felt lighter at first, but for the most part it’s been pretty normal.”

“So how could they be gathering up debris from the Empyrean? To have constant gravity, they can’t be stopping and starting and changing directions.”

Samantha let out a groan of relief. “I knew they were lying, but you’re right. If the Empyrean exploded, we’d have left the debris behind long ago.”

“So that hunk of metal is a lie,” Waverly said.

Tears tumbled onto Sarah’s freckled cheeks. “Thank God.”

Samantha’s narrow face hardened. “That bitch.”

“There’s one more thing.” Waverly’s breath caught in her throat. “They don’t have any kids on this ship,” she said softly.

Both girls looked at her, alarmed.

“What do you mean?” Sarah said.

“I mean they never solved the fertility problem.”

All three looked around the room at the other girls wandering through the gardens. Waverly wanted to scoop up the little ones and run away with them somewhere safe. She knew Sarah and Samantha were thinking the same thing.

“That’s why they only wanted girls,” Sarah said. Her voice quavered, and she was pale.

“More and more of the girls are starting to trust her,” Samantha said, visibly shaken. “We need a plan right away.”

“How will we make a plan? They’re going to separate us!” Sarah said, too loudly. Waverly saw that the men were standing near the tree now. They might be listening.

“It’s going to be okay,” Waverly said loudly, then whispered, “We need to figure out how to communicate with each other. Any ideas?”

Both girls looked at Waverly, anxious. “How can we figure out a plan before we know what they’re going to do with us?” Samantha said angrily.

Samantha was right. Waverly was overtaken by rage that she was here, on this ship, with these problems. Days before, her biggest worry was about marrying Kieran. She should have said yes to him, with no hesitation.
Yes, Kieran, I will marry you. I love you.
He needed to hear that, and she should have given it to him.

“Okay, break’s over!” the tour guide called, and the girls began to gather around him once again.

“We’ll just have to find a way,” Waverly whispered as Sarah started to climb down.

The tour extended to the granaries and the orchards, all perfectly manicured, before finally circling back to the dormitory. Once the girls were left to themselves, the mood became much more somber, for naturally their minds returned to that twisted heap of metal Anne Mather had shown them that morning. Several of them were huddled in lumps on their cots, crying. Sarah went to each girl, whispering in their ears until their faces brightened. Waverly knew she must be explaining why that piece of metal couldn’t be from the Empyrean.

Soon two men carried in trays of food, red faced and straining with the weight. After they left, Waverly lifted one of the trays that had seemed so heavy to them. It was surprisingly light.

Waverly saw Felicity sitting on her cot at the back of the room, facing the porthole. The glow from the nebula looked smothering. How far away must they be from the Empyrean? How could they ever find home in all that pink sludge?

Waverly walked up to Felicity, put a hand on her back, and sat next to her.