The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song) (11 page)

16: Preparation

Onor woke with the sheets tangled around his knees. On the bunk below him, Marcelle snored softly. He hadn’t expected girls to snore, especially not any as petite as Marcelle. But she did. He was almost used to it after three months.

There was something he meant to remember, a bit of a dream bubbling up like a stray thought. He reached for his journal, flicked it on so he could see, and started writing. Reds lived on all the levels. If there were three levels, then they were gray and blue and something else. There must be at least one more level, no matter what The Jackman said, one more set of people with power that he never saw.

He’d woken up in the middle of the night possessed by the certainty that the blues did what someone told them. The blue in the funeral had ripped off the necklace Ruby gave Ben. But he’d done it after the video was off. He hadn’t wanted to be seen. Since he hadn’t known Owl Paulie (Hugh had sworn he’d never seen him before), it wasn’t respect for the old man. But it was respect for someone.

Ix?

But the machine was run by men; it didn’t run them.

So there were layers of blues, or there was something else.

Marcelle snorted below him and rolled over.

That was another thing to figure out. Ix. Ix saw everything, kept everything running. Ix obeyed rules and laws. In fact, it was very careful to stay inside all the bounds they knew about for it. One of his teachers had called Ix too stupid to think for itself, although Onor didn’t believe the teacher was right.

Ix enforced rules—or at least it helped the reds enforce them. But that was like Conroy keeping the reclamation plant going or Ruby cleaning up crusty old bots. It was what Ix did, not what Ix was.

Marcelle’s voice drifted up. “Do you ever stop thinking?”

“What?”

“I can hear you thinking from here. You’re thinking about the test again.”

“And you’re not?”

Onor heard wrestling-with-clothes noises. He watched the ceiling until the sound stopped and Marcelle’s feet scuffed on the floor. She stood up and leaned against the wall, her dark curly hair a soft tangle around her face. “I’ll get stim.”

“Don’t spill it.” He waited for the door to click shut behind her before he pushed his own covers away and pulled on his rumpled clothes.

How the hell did he end up sleeping with Marcelle instead of Ruby? Not exactly sleeping with her, but he wanted to hear Ruby breathing at night. Surely Ruby didn’t snore.

Marcelle padded back in. He took a steaming cup of stim from her, liking the way it warmed his hands and smelled of mint. “Thanks.”

“Are you sure The Jackman’s going to be up this time of day?”

“He asked me to come. We need him if we’re ever going to figure this out.”

Marcelle blew on her stim to cool it. “What were you thinking so hard about?”

“Power.”

She was silent for so long that they almost finished their stim before she glanced at him thoughtfully. “So you mean who has the power to tell us what to do?”

“The blues.”

She held out her cup to him. “Your turn.”

Onor took both cups and put them neatly in the sink in Kyle’s neat kitchen. Then he slid his shoes on, grabbed his journal, and met Marcelle by the door. She wore a pale dress with darker gray straps and a gray belt, and she’d pulled a comb through her hair to make it lay in dark waves and rings across her shoulders. He swallowed back a compliment. It was Marcelle, after all.

Five minutes later, they knocked on The Jackman’s door. It slid open a crack, and Onor whispered, “It’s me and Marcelle.”

The door opened wide enough to let them in, and after they entered, it closed quietly behind them. A faint light from The Jackman’s sterile kitchen illuminated a bulky profile on the couch. Onor swallowed and wished the door hadn’t closed.

“Onor,” Conroy said unnecessarily.

“Good to see you.” Onor blinked, trying to parse Conroy’s presence. “Did you move here?”

“No.”

He came for this talk? Onor let out a worried sigh. “Is Ruby here yet?”

“No,” The Jackman answered. “We want to talk to you two first.”

Great.

Conroy laughed. “You could move over to F with me. I tried to find you the day of the disaster.”

“He wanted to be with his girlfriend.” The Jackman laughed, a good-natured tease that still stung.

If only Ruby
were
his girlfriend.

Conroy stood up, his physical bulk intimidating. Onor stepped around him, flustered, instinctively trying for a little distance from his former boss. “I’m not working for you today.”

“I can fix that.” Conroy sounded matter-of-fact about it. Not bragging.

“Maybe. Maybe that’d be good again someday. I’m studying now. So why are you here this morning?”

Marcelle stuck her hand out and smiled up at Conroy. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Marcelle. The Jackman told us you’re one of us.”

Conroy’s face twitched like he was swallowing a laugh. He glanced at The Jackman before saying, “I don’t know who
us
is. I came to talk about you and Ruby. You’re making enemies. Dangerous enemies.” He looked at Onor. “I don’t want to see you dead.”

Marcelle answered, sounding for all the world like Ruby. “So we just lay down and do nothing? I don’t want to stay here all my life, getting told what to do.”

“What’s so bad? You’ll finish growing up and you’ll fall in love and you’ll have kids and you’ll have a job and you’ll have food.”

Onor tried to keep up. That was exactly what Marcelle had always wanted, and Conroy had always grumbled at the reds. It was like the world was upside down, especially when Marcelle spoke with complete certainty. “I don’t want my kids to be slaves. And if we’re really going home, I want to help decide how things are. Where are we going to go when we get there? Are people waiting for us?”

The Jackman spoke from the dark shadows of the kitchen. “I told you they were naïve.”

Marcelle flinched but stood her ground and looked from man to man.

“So enlighten us,” Onor snapped at The Jackman, not liking that he was picking on Marcelle. “Owl Paulie said they were scared of us.”

“I know. The vid went viral; we’ve all seen the clip of the Owl’s last speech.”

Conroy didn’t live in this pod. Onor let that sink in a bit. “Everywhere. All the pods?”

The Jackman again. “And the ‘The Owl’s Song.’ Ruby’s famous.” He narrowed his eyes at Onor, looking disappointed. “You all are, a bit. You might have succeeded before, when it was mostly quiet. We were watching you, and we thought just the three of you, and maybe Hugh and Lya, were going to take this on.”

“We didn’t do that,” Marcelle said. “Distribute the video.”

Conroy laughed. “No, you didn’t.”

“Who did?”

“There’s a better question. Who didn’t stop it from going viral?”

Onor drew in a deep, slow breath. “Someone out to help us?”

“Or not. Maybe to get you all in trouble. We don’t know for sure.”

“It’s gotta be Ix,” Marcelle said.

The Jackman shrugged.

Conroy spoke next. “You might have convinced Ix to let you in. Heck, you might have provided entertainment, been a curiosity. The blues might have decided letting you succeed quietly was better than the noise you’d make if you failed. But so many? They’ll never let it happen. The test is lost.”

“So they
are
scared of us,” Onor mused.

The Jackman came out from the kitchen with glasses of water. “Sit down. We need to talk this out.
Before
Ruby gets here.”

Marcelle flounced past Conroy, giving him a sharp glare as she went. She settled onto the frayed, dirty couch. “I want to know who
they
is. Is
they
all the blues on the world, or some of them, or is
they
Ix?”

Conroy gave her such a hard stare that she leaned back away from him, pressing her spine to the back of the couch.

Impressive, given that Marcelle never listened much to anyone, and here she was reacting to a stern look.

Conroy said, “
Them
is about who’s in charge. Really in charge. Not about the color of uniforms, which is just an easy way to tell you who you’re supposed to think has power. And who you have to listen to. If you don’t listen to a red, they make you do extra work, or they lock you up for a day, or they get you in trouble at school. Maybe, if they’re told to, they do worse. But the reds aren’t power. Not usually. Others tell the reds what to tell you.”

Marcelle said, “We were talking about that this morning. About power.”

Onor, still standing, bounced on his feet. “It doesn’t seem to be the blues all the time either. Sometimes it’s the blues in power, sometimes it’s the reds.”

Conroy looked the tiniest bit proud of him. “Good. That’s what you have to understand. Influence. Power. The ability to tell other people what to do. Something you don’t have any of. Zero.”

Ouch.

Marcelle gaped at Conroy for the space of a breath, but she was obviously thinking fast; she got the perfect question out before Onor thought of it. “Are there grays with power?”

The Jackman and Conroy didn’t say a thing.

“Ruby thinks she’s one,” Onor whispered.

The Jackman nodded. “That idea might kill her. She’s wrong.”

“What if Fox saves her?” Marcelle asked.

The Jackman laughed out loud, no gentleness in this laugh. Just a slight derision.

Onor liked that. Damn Fox for existing anyway, and for becoming so big in Ruby’s imagination. Stupid romantic girls. He’d been beside her the day the sky fell, and his memory of Ruby pushing herself on Fox was different from how she remembered it. She remembered Fox responding, and Onor hadn’t seen that. “It won’t happen,” Onor said.

Marcelle looked at him like he’d betrayed Ruby. “How do you know?”

“She’s gotta be a kid to him.”

Marcelle scowled. “You know shit about men.”

The Jackman cleared his throat. “The power on this ship isn’t scared of you, or Ruby, or for that matter even of me. Not by ourselves. We’re not much bother at all. Except in a large group. That’s what they’re scared of. Losing us all.” He let a moment’s silence pass, the look on his face discouraging Onor and Marcelle from speaking. When he judged that his previous words had sunk in, he nodded. “There’s a history there, a time before when things changed on this ship. I haven’t quite figured it out, but I someday I’ll understand. We all need to. So we don’t make whatever mistake those poor buggers made.”

For a moment, Onor felt all the generations on the ship, all the people who had lived and died in her, as if he rode with them all. He couldn’t say if it was good or bad luck to be part of the generation that would bring
The Creative Fire
home.

The Jackman’s next words dragged his focus back into the room. “I told you Ruby would get you in trouble. And she has. If you’re not careful, if you don’t make her stop,” he glanced at Marcelle, “if you don’t stop yourselves, you’ll end up dead. They’ll kill Ruby at least, but maybe all of you.”

The Jackman meant his words.

Onor paced, angry. He couldn’t stand up to the men, and he didn’t have any idea what to say, much less what to think. There wasn’t much room, so he paced, three steps one way, three the other, almost dizzying himself.

Marcelle stuck her lower lip out. “Tell me who
they
is.”

Conroy’s words came out sharp with frustration. “Figure it out, little girl.”

Marcelle’s eyes widened. For once she didn’t have a snappy reply.

A knock on the door broke the awkward silence. The Jackman opened it, letting Ruby in. Her red hair had been caught back in a blue scarf, and at least seven strands of blue beads hung over her gray uniform shirt. Her cheeks were slightly flushed, her eyes bright.

Ruby looked surprised at the silence that met her. Then The Jackman smiled in greeting and said, “Come in,” and Conroy introduced himself, even though they’d met before. At least they’d each talked about the other. Maybe they hadn’t actually met.

Ruby settled into a chair opposite Onor, and he sat beside Marcelle. Conroy leaned against the wall on one side of Ruby, and The Jackman took the other side.

Ruby didn’t seem to notice the tension. “So,” she started in. “I was thinking that we should maybe show the students the vid Onor found. With Lila Red. But I’m not sure how to do that and not get caught. We can’t just send it to everyone’s journals. Ix’ll strip it, and we’ll probably lose it altogether.” She looked at The Jackman, at Conroy, at Onor.

None of them said anything.

“We should at least show it to
some
others. Then they’ll believe. I don’t think most people think Lila Red’s even real, and now we know.” She forged ahead, talking fast. “Lila’s story was history, and we should all know it. But they never taught it in school—” She broke off, as if the silence had finally sunk in. “So what’s wrong?

Conroy spoke. “Rumor is you’re drawing too much attention. I heard there’s three crack peacers assigned to stop you.”

Ruby looked up at him, blinked, and then reset her features into stubborn lines. “So I guess I need to stay in public. The last-years test is only a week away. I can manage that.”

Marcelle nodded, but she looked uncertain.

Onor held his tongue, proud as hell of Ruby even though his stomach twisted at the idea that people might be trying to hurt her, might be trying to find her right now. He glanced at his old boss. “Where’d you hear that?”

Conroy just grunted. “From a friend that heard I might be looking after you.”

Onor felt puzzled. “Me?”

“Yeah.” He turned to Ruby. “I don’t much want you hurt either, but Onor here was handy in the rec plant. I’d like him around to help me in the future.”

Onor protested, “But I care about her!”

“Shhh . . . ,” The Jackman said. He stepped closer to Onor and whispered in his ear. “Think, Onor. Don’t waste yourself the way your parents did.”