by Scott Sigler
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.
The kids are dirtier now, grease and grass stains on their clothes. As for those who are my age, their shirts are torn, streaked with dust and blood. They carry clubs of bone. They have fought to get here, faced down nightmares to earn this moment.
Then I see that girl, Zubiri, the tooth-girl with the
dark skin. She walks to me. Her eyes are round, terrified discs.
“Em, are we going to die?”
“No, honey,” I say. “It will be all right. I have to show you something scary, but I’ll be right by your side, so don’t be afraid.”
I take her by the hand. I push down my revulsion at the thought of all those coffins, and I lead her to the room.
My people spread out. They wander around. They collapse in the aisles. To my horror and amazement, most of the children crawl into coffins and lie down. People are everywhere—the circles, circle-stars, circle-crosses, the tooths and the double-rings. Every last one of them is exhausted. They have given everything they have to give, and now, hopefully, their efforts are at an end.
Aramovsky is sitting on the floor of an outer aisle, his back against the red-carpeted wall. He isn’t looking at anything. He’s just staring. His shirt is bloody, torn and—finally—wrinkled. At last he looks like one of us, but is he? He stabbed his progenitor, drove the spear into the ancient Aramovsky’s leg. If our Aramovsky hadn’t done that, would the two of them have already been gone by the time Bishop ripped through the thicket? Our Aramovsky does not look well. Once we make it to Omeyocan, I’ll have to keep an eye on him. If he needs help, I will help him.
Zubiri tugs on my hand. “What’s scary, Em?”
I point to the coffins.
She laughs. “Oh, those? Those are beds.”
Zubiri stands on her tiptoes, pulls on my hand. I bend toward her—she kisses my cheek, then runs into the room.
This little girl isn’t afraid of the coffins, but I can barely even look at them? Some leader I’ve turned out to be.
Zubiri sits cross-legged in the aisle. She takes a deep breath. She’s already relaxed and resting.
Very soon I can rest, too, but not yet: the other door awaits.
“Gaston, Spingate, come with me.”
Bishop is still in the corridor, still holding the thing called Matilda. O’Malley stands with him. As I move past them, they follow me, falling in with Spingate and Gaston.
I stand in front of the strange door.
“Gaston,” I say, “get up here.”
He does. He looks at the wheel’s hub, then at me. The sly, self-confident smile again lights up his face.
“Open it,” I say.
Gaston puts his hands on the wheel. Left hand presses down, right hand presses up: the wheel turns.
“It’s good to be me,” he says.
There is a heavy click, and then this final door opens.
FORTY-TWO
I don’t know what I expected to see, but I did not expect a blank room.
There is nothing in here, nothing but a black, sparkly floor and four black, sparkly walls. This can’t be right.
What have I done?
I walk in. There has to be something here. There has to be.
There is not.
I turn to the others. Spingate and Gaston are standing in the doorway, looking around. Bishop still holds the monster that is myself.
“There’s nothing here,” I say. “What do we do now?”
I feel lost. I led everyone here. I have made a horrible mistake. This shuttle must be where the monsters wanted us to go. Matilda tricked me. The monsters will catch us, take us away. We will all die, we will all be overwritten. Our brief, fear-filled lives will cease to exist.
Gaston smiles. Not his arrogant smile, not the joking grin he has when he tries to annoy Bishop. This smile is genuine. It is sweet. It is a smile of pure wonder, the smile of a twelve-year-old boy who remembers something truly astounding.
He walks forward. The room comes alive.
Lights flash everywhere, not just on the walls and floor and ceiling, but in the air itself. Streams and streaks of color swell and move, turn and twist. Red and blue and green and yellow, lines and dashes, glowing dots. It overwhelms my senses.
A new voice speaks from nowhere and everywhere all at once, a voice that is neither male nor female.
“Welcome, Captain Xander.”
Gaston walks up to me. He has never been this handsome. Joy radiates from him, makes me want to hug him, kiss his cheeks. Lights play across his face. Glowing dots dance on his eyebrows, his lips, moving when he moves as if they are a part of him.
He takes my hand and squeezes it tight.
“Em…you did it,” he says. His eyes gleam. He looks at me like I am his hero. “You saved us. Spingate and I will take it from here.”
What does he mean? “I…Gaston…I don’t—”
“Xander,” he says. “My name is Xander.”
He raises his right hand above his head. Yellow and green lines bathe his fingers and palm, as if he’s wearing a glove woven from light.
He again flashes that stunning smile at me, gestures to the room that has come alive.
“Em, you got us here,” he says. “No one knew what to do, but you did.”
The madness of this room makes no sense to me. Shouldn’t I understand some of this?
O’Malley sees my dismay, and speaks for me.
“You’re right, Gaston, Em got us here. Do you know what to do next?”
The glowing boy shrugs. “Not yet, but I have some ideas. I think I know how to fly. I just have to remember.”
Spingate stands next to him. She, too, is painted in light.
“I’ll help Xander,” she says.
I look at my hands and see that they’re normal. There are no lights on me. There are none on O’Malley, either, or on Bishop.
Spingate looks tired and drained, but elated as well. She glows like a living torch. She is so happy it’s impossible not to fall in love with her all over again from simply looking at her face.
“Go talk to the others, Em,” she says. “Tell them everything will be okay. Tell them…tell them that we’re going home.”
Home. She’s right. The Xolotl, with its Garden and its coffin rooms, its pigs and Grownups and butchery, this place is not ours. Neither is the dead planet the monsters left behind so long ago. Those places were never our homes.
We were created to live on the planet below.
We were made to walk on Omeyocan.
An arm around my shoulders. O’Malley, guiding me out of the strange room. I walk with him. I stop at the wheel door and look back.
Spingate and Gaston shine like a pair of angels. The black walls and black ceiling have vanished. In their place, I see many pictures floating free, so realistic you could reach into them, touch whatever was there. One picture shows the chamber outside this shuttle. Another, the dark hallways we just walked through. Another, the brown and blue and green planet below. And yet another shows a long, spinning copper cylinder…the massive ship we are still inside of.
O’Malley pulls gently, gets me moving again. He guides me to the shuttle’s entryway, where Bishop is waiting, Matilda still cradled in his arms. The platform is empty. At the bottom of the ramp, El-Saffani, Coyotl and Farrar stand guard.
Bishop leans in close. “O’Malley and I talked,” he says. “Do we do it in the new coffin room, where everyone can see, or outside the shuttle?”
Matilda has given up the fight. She lies limp, awaiting her fate. She looks at me, her one good eye a swirling red jewel.
My legs won’t hold me up much longer. They shake from fatigue. I need to find some space in the aisle between the coffins. I need to lie down, I need to sleep.
Wait…Bishop asked a question. Do we do it in the new coffin room?
“Do we do what, exactly?”
He lifts Matilda slightly, answering my question by showing her to me anew.
“Gaston can fly the shuttle,” he says. “So we don’t need her anymore.”
Matilda’s body shivers; I hear the sound of bone scraping on bone.
“Bishop is asking if you want to kill me quietly, or execute me in front of the others,” she says. “Do it in front of the others, little leader—it is important you show people what happens if they cross you.”
Some people do not approve of being sacrificed.
That’s what she wants: she wants me to sacrifice her, make an example out of her so that everyone will fear me. Fear, and obey.
All the bodies, all the death, the massacre of the Xolotl. How much of that was by her command? Matilda doesn’t really think she murdered anyone at all; she thinks her butchery served a greater purpose.
If this woman is me, how did she become like this? Did something happen to her after her twelfth birthday that turned her into an obscenity? She is an appalling creature that shouldn’t be allowed to exist.
If anyone deserves to die, it is Matilda.
But if I give that order, will it end with her? Who might be next, and for what crimes? Matilda today for mass murder, and because she is a threat to us. If Aramovsky challenges my leadership again, does that make him a threat?
The question isn’t if I have the power to order death, because I obviously do. The question is: if I use that power now, will I use it again?
The answer terrifies me worse than anything I’ve seen or experienced so far, because I can’t deny the hard truth: the answer is yes.
I shake my head. I am not her. I am not Matilda. I am Em, and Em has a choice to become something better.
I point down the ramp. “Leave her there. She led us to the shuttle. She did what we asked, so we let her live.”
O’Malley and Bishop stare at me like I’m crazy.
“She is our enemy,” Bishop says. “She wants to erase you.”
O’Malley nods vigorously. “Bishop’s right. Matilda has to die.”
They agree? The two boys don’t agree about anything, yet they find common ground when it comes to murdering a prisoner? Bishop I get, he sees things in simple terms, kill-or-be-killed terms, but I thought O’Malley was more…complex. Disappointment wriggles uncomfortably in my chest.
“I said no. We’re getting away. No one else dies. Once we’re down on the surface, she can’t follow us. She won’t be able to hurt us anymore. My decision is final.”
