When We Wake (31 page)

“Fam.”

I traced the outline of his lips, feeling the corners stretch and curl as he smiled. “And what’s the translation for ‘kiss me’?”

“
Boseeni
,” he replied, his breath warm against my skin. It seemed a shame not to close that gap.

After that, I discovered that language lessons held less interest than the other things Abdi could teach me.

We woke up when the lights flickered back on, squinting painfully at each other through the glare. At some point during that long night, we’d found our way to Abdi’s bed and dragged it back over to mine. Lying on the camp beds wasn’t the most comfortable thing ever, but it beat the heck out of sitting on concrete.

And, okay, not that it’s any of your business, but no, we did not go all the way. Neither of us had any form of protection handy, and the whole thing was so weird and new. We weren’t ready.

Besides. As much as I liked the touching and the kissing, it was the talking that was most important that night; it gave us the most comfort and support. We talked about everything, until Abdi couldn’t even mumble replies to my slurred questions, and I followed him into sleep.

Everything, that is, except what we were going to do in the morning.

But morning, or its artificial equivalent, had come, and we had to deal with our situation.

“I should move the bed back,” Abdi said quietly. “I don’t want them to separate us.”

I nodded and combed my fingers through my hair, trying to get it in order while he shifted the evidence of our nighttime tryst.

The Inheritors of the Earth came in, five of them, all men, Conrad leading them. He eyed us both.

“Can you hear me?” he said, slow and loud.

“Yes,” I told him, and he nodded, looking relieved.

“Food and water will be brought to you,” he said. “In the meantime, if you need to relieve yourselves, come with me.”

You’ve probably never been escorted to a toilet, with one guard waiting outside the door and another outside the tiny window—I know, because I climbed up to check. I can tell you, it’s not much fun. It was good to see daylight and breathe fresh air, but other than my escorts, I didn’t see another living soul; they must have warned everyone else to stay inside. Here and there, bumblebees swam lazily through the air.

I would have liked them, but they reminded me of the flock of bumblecams that had haunted me, which, in turn, made me think about Bethari filming the ranks of frozen refugees. I was desperately afraid for her and Joph, and was pinning all my hopes on Zaneisha having the ability and inclination to do something
to help them. Abdi and I couldn’t do a thing unless we escaped, and I was running low on ideas of how to accomplish that.

There was a chemical toilet set up for us behind a privacy screen when we got back to the cellar. I guessed that it might be a while before we got to go outside again.

Rachel brought food down to us on a tray. Cold roast beef sandwiches, a couple of apples, a pitcher of water.

“How long are we going to be down here?” I asked.

“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” she said, and then blushed, looking stricken.

“We won’t tell,” Abdi said, giving her his small, careful smile. I bristled a little bit, then hauled myself back.

Rachel was looking troubled. “Those children,” she said. “Those murdered children. Are they real?”

“Yes,” I said softly. “They’re real, and they’re secret. The Father knows, but he hasn’t told. We want to make sure the secret is known, Rachel. That’s why Abdi has to escape. I can stay. It’s me you need.”

She jerked away and joined the men at the other end of the room.

“Too far,” Abdi said critically.

“Worth a shot,” I told him, and bit into my sandwich.

When Rachel came back to collect our plates, she was biting her lip. “The Father is back,” she whispered. “I heard Joseph tell Mrs. McClung that he wants to see you after you’ve eaten.”

I should have been afraid. I know that now. But at the time, I was eager to have it out with my mysterious foe. Maybe I could persuade him to tell the world about what we’d found. He wasn’t
a supporter of cryonics; surely he wasn’t in favor of freezing refugees.

Abdi’s expression didn’t reflect my anticipation. “Be careful,” he said.

I smiled at him, and Rachel looked modestly away from whatever she saw in my face. “I will,” I told him. “I mean, really, what can he do?”

You’d think that by that point, I’d have learned to stop asking those kinds of questions.

The Father was shorter than I’d thought.

Other than that, he looked just the same as he had in the tubecasts: dark eyes, pale skin, a strong, clean-shaven jaw. His hair, which had been covered by a hat in the ’casts, turned out to be an indeterminate brown.

The thing that a tubecast could only faintly convey, though, was the sheer power of his presence.

I felt it like a fist in the face when I walked into his office, my Inheritor guards on each side, and those dark eyes fastened intently on mine. I’d thought Tatia had strength of personality, but the Father had her beat without a fight.

“Tegan Oglietti,” he said, each word measured and precise. “Are you ready to return to the grace of God?”

“If by that you mean top myself, no, not so much,” I said. I’d wanted to sound brave and angry, but in the face of his charisma, I sounded childishly petulant.

The guards made shocked noises behind me; the Father waved them out with a trace of amusement around his mouth. The door closed with a thunk; there’d be no escape that way. I was very aware of the knife in my pocket, but that was a chancy last resort. It would be better to persuade him to see my point of view, if I could.

The Father placed his chin on his folded hands and regarded me. I leaned back, as nonchalantly as I could, determined not to break the silence first. But he was accustomed to this sort of power play, and I wasn’t very good at being patient.

“How did you know about the Ark Project?” I said. “The Inheritor who Gregor shot—he mentioned it. You knew, too, didn’t you? What does it have to do with me? Why did you want me to know about it? And why haven’t you exposed it?”

He said nothing.

“They’re killing people! Doesn’t that bother you?” I was trying to sound reasonable, but sarcasm crept in. “I guess it’s okay, since you want me to die.”

“You are already dead, Tegan.”

“I
was
. Now I’m alive. Isn’t that the part you guys object to? If you don’t think I was really brought back to life, then you’ve got no reason to hate me.”

“We do not hate you, Tegan. We object, in God’s name, to the abrogation of his holy privileges, and those of his son. Without God’s grace, no true resurrection is possible. Thus, you are not truly resurrected. Your every breath is a mockery to the God with whom you claim to hold faith.”

“I
do
hold faith,” I said. “It’s you who’s got it wrong. Look, maybe you don’t understand. I can explain the revival process; you’ll see that it’s pure science, not—”

“Tegan,” he said, interrupting me so firmly that I actually shut up. “It is you who doesn’t understand. Would you like to learn about the other half of the Ark Project?”

My argument caught in my throat.
Other half?

“Yes,” I said, almost whispering. “I would.”

Unlike his flock, the Father used computers.

This hypocrisy shouldn’t have surprised me—he had to have made those tubecast appearances
with
something, after all—but when he opened the wooden cupboard to pull out his equipment, my jaw dropped. Another computer was balled into the corner, and after a moment, I recognized it. Bethari’s computer, the one with the footage.

“That’s mine!” I said. “What happened to ‘Thou shalt not steal’?”

He ignored me, settling back into his chair and opening the computer. “Why do you think you were brought back, Tegan? Do you think it was out of mercy? Did you think they took pity on your youth and beauty?”

“I think they wanted to test the science, and my donation form let them study the aftereffects,” I said. “I’m not naive.”

“You are,” he said, and spun the computer so that I could
see. “Why would they test on you? You know they already have thousands of bodies upon which they can practice their debased corruption of a miracle.”

My breath caught. Of course they did. If they were freezing refugees anyway, why not carefully shoot them first and use those bodies to practice reviving trauma victims? There was absolutely no reason to use me in particular.

“Your father was a military man, was he not?”

The abrupt change of subject caught me by surprise. I said nothing, but he kept going, unperturbed by my silence. “So was mine. He was a general when the Ark Project was first proposed at the highest levels of government. He retired soon afterward, but he maintained his contacts, even as he rediscovered his faith. A few of the Inheritors of the Earth have always known what this earthly authority intended. Several of our young men have made great sacrifices, joining the enemy forces to maintain our watch over their efforts.”

“You sent spies.”

“The word is inappropriate to soldiers of God.” He whipped the computer around. “This, Tegan, is the Ark.”

It took a moment for my eyes to make sense of what I was looking at—some sort of vast structure in a hollow space, like a massive silver egg, partially cracked open. There were girders and plating and machines. And people, tiny as ants against the immensity of the structure.

“This is the prototype of a starship,” the Father said. “It is being built in a secret military installation beneath Mount Ossa, right here in Tasmania. If all goes well—and my sources suggest
it goes
very
well—it will be rebuilt in space. This first stage is nearly complete.”

I gaped at him.

“The Ark Project is designed to send people from Earth to colonize other planets, similar enough to ours to sustain human life. But these will be long journeys.”

“Centuries long,” I said, stunned at the scope of it.

“Perhaps thousands of years. No one lives for so long unaided. And the governments of this world have little trust; they will not believe their followers can bring up successive generations to be obedient to their vision. What if they forget their mission? What if they lose their science, grow to believe that their entire world
is
the starship? No. Better to freeze your elite colonists. Have some awake at given times to crew the ship. Have them sleep when their shift is done. Inch closer to the new world. And once they arrive, wake the sleepers in the hold, to labor on the land.”

It was nightmarish. It was sickening. And it was all too possible.

That’s how the British had set up their Australian colonies, after all, with waves of indentured laborers, prisoners compelled to work out their sentences in a land so distant it might as well have been another planet.

And today’s refugees were all
illegal
immigrants, breaking the laws of Australia simply by being here.

The government and army could do it. If they threw out the last two hundred years of human-rights progress, they really could.

The Father spread his hands when he saw the understanding in my face. “And they will never give a thought to the blasphemy they have created. Now, tell me, Tegan Oglietti. Why did they raise
you
?”

“Because I’d been dead for a long time,” I said. It was unfolding out before me, like a composition I’d heard only in fragments. Now the whole score was becoming clear.

“Yes,” he agreed. “A hundred years dead, and they raised you, healthy in body and stable in mind. Or healthy and stable enough, at any rate, to proceed. You see? There was no need for us to interfere until
you
were revived.”

It finally explained the mystery I’d pondered, why they’d bothered with someone prepared for cryorevival so long ago. It explained the battery of psych tests and intellectual tests—even the way they’d let me go to school. They wanted to see how well I could adjust.

And I’d performed for them like a trained dog.