Heaven's Fall (32 page)

Or if one of the other girls just happened to wake up and realize that three were missing.

This wasn’t usually a huge problem; girls were frequently sneaking off to meet boys. Dulari, in fact, was one of the most active sneaks. But tonight . . . all it would take was one curious parent who decided to search toward the Beehive. Or, just as dangerously, happened to catch them coming back—

“Yahvi, come on!” It was Nick, furious with her for falling behind.

The others had carried their sad burden into the Beehive entrance, a cave mouth twice as tall as Yahvi and at least twice as wide as it was tall. It looked rocky, dirty, and moist, as if the evening mist-rains clung to it . . . or, more creepily, as if water or some other fluid were oozing out of it.

The whole area smelled, too.

Inside it was dark, except for a kind of yellowish glow from the many different-sized cells that lined the walls as high up as any of them could reach. All of the cells were roughly rectangular—“like coffins,” Rachel had told her, which then prompted a discussion about what a coffin was—and all had been laid open, leaving dried-out shards of some kind of casing in their openings.

“Okay,” Yahvi said, “we’re here with the thing. Now what?”

Brows furrowed, as if considering a problem in math, Nick was surveying the walls of cells. “Find one that looks as though it might work.”

“I think you’ll be looking a long time,” Rook dared to say. He rarely challenged Nick.

“And how will we know?” Ellen said.

“Look for one that seems . . . fresh.”

“And I don’t think you have any idea how these things worked,” Yahvi told Nick.

“How would you know?” he snapped. “I’ve been talking to Jaidev for a whole year.”

“Jaidev doesn’t know everything,” Yahvi said, though he was considered the smartest of all the HBs. She was a bit offended that Nick had overlooked her mother when making inquiries.

“Jaidev knows more than we do,” Nick snapped. “And tells more than anyone else.”

“Then why hasn’t he tried this experiment?” Ellen said.

Nick ignored that, though Yahvi thought it an excellent question. She had a pretty good idea why no one had done much experimenting with the Beehive since it stopped working almost twenty years ago, after disgorging human Revenants and several dozen terrestrial animal Revenants: It was just too terrifying to imagine what life in the habitat would be like if those who died kept coming back!

Yet, here they were, five teens thinking they were smarter than the adults. Of course, Nick
was
smarter than most of them, possibly even Jaidev.

Which made this even more dangerous.

He had completed his survey. “Let’s try this one,” he said, indicating a cell toward the back of the Beehive, near the other exit, which had been blocked off by HBs in the past. (On the other side, they said, was vacuum: a tunnel leading to the surface of Keanu.) Its lowest point even with Yahvi’s waist, the cell appeared large enough to hold a human being, which troubled Yahvi—what if this was the cell her grandmother had emerged from? It just seemed wrong, even more wrong than digging up Cowboy in the first place.

“You’re picking that one because you can reach it,” she said to Nick.

Nick shot her a look that, had his eyes been heat weapons, would have burned her to the ground.

But that didn’t stop him. With Rook and Ellen’s help, Nick raised the tarp containing the dog’s remains to the cell, then dumped them inside. The whole process looked crude, as far from scientific as it was possible to get.

Yahvi kept stepping back, her heart pounding. Now was likely to be the time Rachel or Pav or some other adult walked in. What on earth would she say? She had no excuse. She would simply have to stand there and suffer the consequences . . . or possibly run.

Once the remains had been completely placed in the cell, they rolled up the tarp. (Yahvi wondered what Rook was going to do with it . . . she hoped he wouldn’t just try to put it back where he found it.) “And now what do we do?” she said.

“Pray?” That was Dulari, with a typically inane suggestion. Yahvi remembered that Dulari’s family was one of the few openly religious among the HBs.

“Not necessary,” Nick said, regaining his normal confidence. “Jaidev said that the one amazing thing about the Revenant process is how it seemed autonomous, almost like magic. They figured out later that it was all Keanu’s control systems starting and stopping it, after they’d retrieved whatever morphogenetic pattern they needed—”

“But how did they know to find whichever morpho-whatever pattern that was?” Rook asked that question, and it made Yahvi want to kiss him, not because she needed the answer; she just wanted to see Nick flounder.

“They never did figure that out,” Nick said. “But given that their technology is probably ten thousand years more advanced than ours—”

At that instant, a shudder went through the Beehive. Yahvi and the others found themselves outside before they could complete a thought. Nothing magical about it; they were just so terrified they turned and ran.

Yahvi had never been brave enough to return to the Beehive.

But Nick had. The Cowboy-kidnappers had never been a group, but they surely avoided contact after their creepy adventure.

One day, however, several months before the
Adventure
launch, Yahvi had found Nick lurking around the Temple. She assumed he had just returned from a shift on the Substance K conveyor. “Are they working you too hard?” Yahvi said. She had endured her own first shifts on the conveyor and found the work incredibly tiring. And Nick, pale, even unsteady on his feet, seemed to have had it worse.

But he said, “No.”

Yahvi wasn’t the type to accept an answer that struck her as ridiculous. “You look like death.”

“I guess I can tell you if I can tell anyone.” Then he glanced around, as if afraid of being overheard. “I went back to the Beehive.”

By that time Yahvi had tried to forget about the Beehive. She was angered by the reminder. “You asshole!”

Nick didn’t notice. “It was gone, Yahvi.”

“What?”

“The
dog
.” Apparently Nick had made his way to the cell where the five of them had left Cowboy’s remains. “The cell was empty!”

“So someone came along and dug him out of there, just like we dug him out of the ground.”

“Maybe,” Nick said. “But that cell looked . . . fresh, like it had worked again.”

“What are you saying? When was this?”

“Two days ago. And what the hell do you think it means? There’s a Revenant Cowboy running around!”

“And that’s what you’re doing? Looking for him?”

Nick nodded.

She had not wanted to hear more. She had not wanted to know anything about this.

She had run from Nick and not looked back . . . and did not talk to him again prior to
Adventure
’s launch.

She never heard of anyone seeing a dog in the habitat.

It was after the third—or thirtieth—bump that Yahvi said, “I want to go home.”

They had been confined to their seats for more than an hour, ever since the problems in the back of the cabin with Xavier’s machine, and the bad weather. Yahvi wasn’t sure which had come first, though it seemed as though the sudden turbulence had damaged the proteus.

She was in her seat in the second row, on the left side of the cabin. Chang and Colin Edgely were in the first row, right side, hunched over their stupid datapads.

Pav sat to Yahvi’s left, in the window seat. Rachel was across the aisle to her right. She said, “We’ll be home soon enough.”

“When?”

“A few weeks,” her father said, “maybe less.” Which only made Yahvi more angry; she was arguing with her
mother
.

“That’s bullshit,” she said.

“Don’t swear at your father,” Rachel said.

“Then bullshit to
you
.”

Yahvi knew that would ignite her father, but Rachel was fast, holding up her hand and silencing Pav. “I’m going to say that that’s fair,” she said to Yahvi. “We brought you along on this. We knew it might be dangerous—”

The plane bumped again. The little bell that Yahvi had grown to loathe rang again, and the
Fasten seat belts
sign came on.

Yahvi could feel the plane descending. It went so fast that for a moment she could have believed she was back in
Adventure
! From Yahvi’s aisle seat, it was difficult to see much through the windows, but it was all dark clouds. God! What were these people doing to her?

She turned to look at Rachel.

And what Yahvi saw on her mother’s face made her anger vanish, to be replaced by total fear.

Rachel
was afraid they could die!

And if
her mother
felt that way—

Yahvi did not want to die in this plane, in this stupid seat.

She began to undo her buckle.

Across the aisle, Rachel said, “Pav!”

A seat removed from Yahvi, her father grabbed her arm. “Stay where you are!”

But she was not going to stay here! She jerked her arm away from her father and lurched out of the seat, heading toward the rear of the plane. Surely that would be safer if they hit something . . . and maybe they would crash-land—

There was considerable noise behind her, Rachel speaking forcefully to Pav, Tea offering to help, none of them moving very quickly as Yahvi reached the middle of the cabin, where she had a clear view of Xavier in his seat, still struggling with his stupid proteus. It was no longer making smoke, thank goodness, but it was still in pieces, and with the plane bumping and diving, Xavier was doing very little good.

But he was at the back of the plane—

Yahvi felt herself lifted off her feet and pulled backward. For a frightening moment she thought it was the plane doing something awful.

Then she realized it was Zeds! The Sentry had grabbed her and pulled her into the seatless space where he had been strapped. Yahvi struggled but only long enough to establish that Zeds was going to hold on to her, and there was nothing she could do about it. He was, after all, forty percent taller and a hundred percent heavier.

And had twice as many arms.

None of this kept her from saying, “Let me go!”

“You shouldn’t be out of your seat,” he said.

“I’ll go back.”

“It’s too dangerous to be moving.”

She struggled again; nothing doing. Zeds was still in his e-suit, though he had shed his gloves. She felt as though she had been abducted by a humanoid machine of some kind . . . a child’s toy. It hurt being pressed up against the straps and tools on the front of the suit.

Yahvi said as much.

“You won’t be damaged,” Zeds said. “Just inconvenienced.”

“Mom!” she called. “Make him let me go!”

But Rachel didn’t answer. It was probably because the plane started shuddering worse than at any previous time. Whether it was because she was not strapped down, or because circumstances were different, she had a sense of real forward motion now, mixed with a stomach-clenching rocking motion and even a bit of side-to-side.

She had heard Pav talk about roller coasters and seen imagery . . .
This must be what it’s like,
she thought.
Only you don’t die on a roller coaster.

She must have made a noise—probably a whimper—because Zeds spoke again. “This is difficult, but not impossible. We are probably descending out of the storm.”

“You don’t know that.”

With one of his free upper hands, Zeds pointed toward the window behind Yahvi. “I have been seeing more clear sky and fewer clouds.”

But he still wouldn’t let her go. So she tried another tack. “Aren’t you afraid?” she said. “This is really not your world.”

“My world is not my world,” he said. Zeds often made joking comments; Yahvi realized, after a moment of confusion, that this was one of them.

It took her so long, in fact, that by the time she realized it, the airplane had stopped bumping and the seat belt sign was off.

And Xavier Toutant was saying, “I think I’ve got it now.”

Day Six

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 2040