The Fall

by Laura Liddell Nolen

  We crowded through another door, then another, until I thought my lungs would explode. At last, we folded ourselves into a low supply closet. I’d tried to keep my bearings, but it was nearly impossible. I figured we were maybe halfway out on a spike and headed toward the massive sphere at the center of the Ark.

  “This is where we stop. Wait for the signal,” Isaiah said to me, then he turned to Mars. “You got me worried back there.”

  Mars shrugged. “She’s really off her game. Nothing like you said.”

  “She is armed now,” I said pointedly. “And she can hear you.”

  “And I’m really scared, let me tell you,” said Mars. “Especially after that demonstration of your mythical abilities. That was some of the worst escaping I’ve ever seen.”

  “Oh? Well, that was the worst fake accent I have ever heard. No, literally. The worst.”

  She pressed a patient sigh out of her nose. “I’m afraid I’m just not cut out for the theatre. Anyway, look. I had to be European. Not that you’d appreciate this, but it took some effort to get me in there.”

  “So why not be, oh, I don’t know, Spanish? Seems a no-brainer.”

  “No wonder you thought of it, then. But for your information, I’m Honduran. Different accent. Different continent, actually. But that was some awesome work with the stem there, Char. Inspired, really.”

  I raised my voice, attempting to mimic her Polish accent. “Hey, let us sit around to play the mattress forts while One-Armed Wonder does the magic escape! Is solid plan, am right? Never mind bullets. Are rubber.”

  “Um, excuse me, but whose rescue op is this, anyway? Still mine? Shut up, then. And here,” she said, shoving Isaiah’s pack at me. “Get some real clothes on.” She glanced at me in the half-light, and I saw that she was smiling. I smiled back, and slid into a dark corner of the closet to change.

  It was actually pretty great to see her. Not to mention Isaiah. I wondered what he’d been up to for the past five years, but before I could ask, the red alarm lights were replaced by blue ones. They illuminated the floor at the bottom of the door. “That’s the signal,” he said, his voice low. “Let’s move.”

  This time, as we sprinted through the cavernous hallways of the EuroArk, we started seeing people. After the third strange glance at a doctor running around with fire-red hair, a Guardian, and their fairly winded sidekick, Mars began to look nervous.

  “That’s my cue,” she whispered. She peeled away from us, and I looked after her, surprised. She caught my expression and laughed. “Good to see you, Char. Really.”

  Isaiah nodded his goodbye. “See you on the flipside, Mars. Be well.”

  I stopped my awkward, panting, sprint-walking to watch her go. She faded into a side hall and out of sight. The hallway felt emptier, somehow.

  Isaiah took me by the elbow. “Let’s keep on it. We still have a ways to go.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked, suddenly worried. “I have questions.” More than anything, I wanted to ask about West, and whether they had a plan to rescue my father.

  And Eren. I hadn’t spotted him during my brief, non-smoky, fully conscious moment in the sick bay.

  I was also anxious to hear about Maxx, the lockie from the cargo hold of the North American Ark who’d been friends with Amiel. But I knew better than to mention names, or even refer to other people. I wasn’t sure what kind of surveillance this Ark had, but I was willing to bet my left hand that someone would be watching a vid of this moment in the very near future.

  “Not to worry,” he said gently. “You’ll see soon enough.”

  “So what was that thing you set off back there? You doing bombs now?”

  “A microwave, in fact. An 80-watt, circuit-breaking microwave with an antenna, if you want to get technical about it. It’s older mech, but it works just fine. Knocks out most of their signals. S’why we aren’t being chased. The cameras are running, but the vid feeds are down.” He gave me what seemed like a long glance through his glasses and slid through an inner port.

  The passageways were much wider here. I figured we were nearing the enormous sphere at the center of the Ark. He stepped quickly, without feeling his way, and I frowned. Something was off. Not with his voice, or his mannerisms. And it wasn’t his confidence, either. That was the same Ise I’d always known.

  “I’m glad you didn’t use a bomb, for what it’s worth, Ise,” I said, and it hit me. He was moving differently, like he knew his way around. But that wasn’t possible, was it?

  He nodded. “I’m nonviolent now.”

  When it came to Isaiah, I’d always found it wise to hold onto a thin strain of skepticism. Right then, my strain was big enough to fill the entire hallway. “Says the guy who once overthrew an entire Ark.”

  We stood at the end of the passage, in front of an enormous port. The ship stretched out around us, as wide as I’d seen it. Isaiah put a hand on the door, then slid the circular latch open without effort. A small smile played across his lips, and he chuckled. “Don’t be so dramatic, Char. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “I’m not the one who just appeared in a cloud of smoke, Ise.”

  This time, he laughed out loud, like I was finally catching up to the joke. And maybe I was. “Any other questions?” he asked, teasing. “I know you got ’em.”

  “Oh, I have so, so many. But if I had to narrow it down, I’d start with this one: Isaiah, can you see?”

  Fourteen

  By now, I was smiling, too, but the thought was too strange to swallow. “You can, can’t you?” Isaiah had been blind since around the time they announced that no one with a major disability would be allowed on board an Ark. Not by coincidence, of course, but at the hands of his own brother. I supposed that he thought he was protecting the family—their mother especially—from Isaiah, who’d given her more than her share of worry. I pictured his brother’s face, guarded and hard, and I had no comfort from the thought of his death in the meteor. “You can see.”

  He held his hands out, an open gesture of invitation, and the moment was heavier than it should have been. Finally, I reached up to lift his glasses off his face. My hand was steady, to my immense relief, but my heartbeat was not.

  Silver eyes gazed back at mine.

  “What,” I breathed, unable to complete the thought. Isaiah continued to smile, looking at me. His face was serious beneath his grin. A moment later, I smiled, too. “Is that—are they mechanical? Some kind of transplant?”

  He paused, still staring, before breaking the moment. “Prosthetic.” He took the glasses back and folded them carefully into a pocket. “A whole system, actually. It captures images and converts them into electrical pulses. Built from the same tech they’ve had on earth for decades. But the implant transmits them to the neural pathways. It’s like watching a stop-motion film,” he said, looking up to the ceiling, then at the walls, and finally, back at me. “I am told the processors will improve in the coming years, but I don’t mind. The effect is somewhat… lovely.”

  I touched a tiny scar on the side of his eye, just above his cheek. It was jagged and angry. Not the work of a surgeon. “This is from your brother.”

  Isaiah nodded solemnly. “He loved me once, you know?”

  Of course I did. I was suddenly anxious to get to wherever it was we were going, and I pressed into the door, which didn’t open. Isaiah put a hand on mine, stopping me, and in response, I pushed harder.

  “There are things we can never heal, Char. I’ve made my peace with that.”

  No kidding, Ise. I took a breath and yanked the door back instead. It flew open. “Good for you. Let’s go.”

  He gave me a look like he’d known I’d react that way. Like my scars were written on my face as plainly as his own. He took the door from me, holding it steady. “After you, little bird.”

  I’m not sure what I expected the sphere to look like, but it was striking enough that I supposed I hadn’t considered it.

  An immaculate hall stretched before me, and
I knew instinctively that it was perfectly straight. In fact, it was a perfect square. It was vibrantly blue, not as though it had been painted, but as though it would still be blue if you took a knife to the wall and dug a scratch in it.

  Not that anyone had scratched anything in here. It was pristine. Untouched.

  A series of bright yellow rings stretched exactly down the center of the wall, seemingly at random. The rings were different shapes and sizes. At places they were tangled together, and at places they were more sparse. The pattern, or whatever it was, was echoed on the opposite wall.

  The effect was like someone had stretched a measure of chaos in a perfectly encased line on either side of us.

  I stepped out, and immediately regretted it.

  My legs and shoulder swerved down onto the wall next to me, followed by my arms, hip, and forehead. I gasped, pushing against the wall, but the wall pushed back. I felt dizzy.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, electing to cling to my current spot for a bit. “Is this—is this the floor?”

  “It is indeed.” Isaiah made no effort to hide his amusement. He stepped out into the cubed hallway with perfect confidence to stand next to me. “Rite of passage, baby,” he laughed.

  “Oh, hysterical. Close the door. I can’t get oriented with the other hallway just… looking at me like that.”

  Isaiah complied and waited patiently for me to get my bearings. I thought at first that I should close my eyes in order to reset my point of view, but the result was an intense, sharp nausea, and I popped them open as wide as I could, resolving never to blink again.

  “Well, that’s new.”

  “It’s an electromagnetic grav gen—”

  “Yeah, yeah. There’s a grav generator in the floor. Wall. Whatever. Kinda figured that one out when I started falling sideways.”

  “Same paragrav tech as the Asian Ark.”

  I chuckled in spite of myself, remembering our foray into diplomacy beneath the grand deck of the center of that ship. That had been dizzying, too. “I do recall, Ise. Thanks so much for the tactile reminder.”

  He graciously offered a hand, which I refused with rather less grace, and I tripped on my own forearm as a result. I decided to hug the wall a little longer. No, the floor. “It’s a floor now,” I said firmly, mostly to myself. “Flooooor.”

  For some reason, he found this amusing. “Come on, Char. The only way out is through.”

  I sniffed at him, but accepted his still-outstretched hand, and stood. Now the tangled yellow rings were above and below me.

  I took a tentative step, clinging to Isaiah, and felt some of my balance return. “Okay. That’s better.”

  “Nothin’ like your first time,” he said, gently guiding us forward. “So. This is the Center Sphere. It’s made of several blocks, each built with the highest tech Earth had to offer.”

  “The balls are cities,” I began, picturing the whole Ark, “and the spikes are control towers and landing pads.” We were moving steadily now, and I released his arm.

  “Some of them may be weaponized. We’re not sure.”

  “Oh, I think we can be pretty sure,” I said dryly. “So what’s in the sphere again?”

  “Whatever’s needed. It’s broken down into blocks, like I said. Every block can do almost anything you can think of. They change ’em out when they decide they need to. Here, watch this.” We had come to a gap in the floor. It was a perfect cube of empty space. Isaiah backed up a bit, got a running start, and leaped across. “Gotta have a little momentum,” he said from the other side. “The very center of the gap is microgravity. Like jumping over a big hole on every side at once.”

  I shook my head, bemused, and took a few steps back. Then I clenched my fist and, releasing it, catapulted myself across the gap. My stomach dropped, or floated, for the split second I spent at the center of the gap, but by sheer force of will, I landed neatly next to Isaiah.

  “Not bad, little bird.”

  “You don’t have to sound so shocked.”

  He smiled down at me, and I thought for the thousandth time that he had changed in ways I had yet to understand. Then he leaned in close. “Then follow me.”

  He took off running down the hall, leaping across the next gap. I followed, and he nodded his approval, a devilish glint in his eye.

  Not to be outdone, I increased my speed.

  That was a mistake, as it turned out. The very next gap we came to, Isaiah didn’t jump. Instead, he did some twisty, flighty hop and went directly into the square, alighting easily on the wall of the intersecting hallway.

  No, Char, the floor. Once you land on it, it’s a floor.

  Unfortunately for me, this happened about the same time that I reached the edge of the gap, so I went flying past Isaiah, only sideways. I drew my legs in, mid-leap, and attempted to land next to him but got caught in the directional switch of the competing grav generators and made a complete flip.

  And then another. And another.

  Blast. I flung my legs out, slowing my inertia, and hurled myself toward Isaiah, arms first. Mercifully, this worked, and I flopped onto the deck at his feet like some kind of astonished porpoise.

  “Spectacular form,” he observed. “I gotta take a few points for that landing, though.”

  “Shut up.” I stood carefully, not letting so much as a finger out of place. Meanwhile, Isaiah did not bother to hide his amusement. I gave him a prim sniff. “Are we going someplace or not? And anytime you want to let me in on the plan would be just great. Do we have somewhere to be, or don’t we?”

  “We have to be where we are, Char. It’s all part of the journey. Although we are awaited, since you ask.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Well?”

  “Well, what?” he said.

  “Well, let’s go, then.” He laid a hand on the wall near my head, where there was a flat black doorpad I’d somehow missed during my acrobatics routine. It turned yellow at his touch, matching the rings on the floor, and the adjacent wall retracted into itself.

  I leaned forward, peering through the doorway, but Isaiah guided me gently through. My foot landed on dried leaves, and I breathed in as the door slid shut. The air was warm and clean, and it smelled like fresh dirt.

  Not dirt, I corrected myself mentally. Earth.

  We were surrounded by trees—young pines, saplings—and I thought I heard the sound of flowing water somewhere nearby. I realized that I could not speak. I squeezed Isaiah’s arm, full of desperate hope. A thin trail was etched into the burgeoning forest before us. There was only one place this could possibly be.

  In response to my mute expression, he smiled, and I felt my face split into a grin so wide it hurt. His voice was deep and cool, and he said the words I’d wanted to hear since I woke from Adam’s drug. “Welcome to the biosphere, Charlotte. Someone’s been expecting you for quite awhile now.”

  I raced through the trees without stopping to marvel at the world around me. Dappled light hit the crude earthen trail before me, and the underbrush flicked across my ankles every few steps. I saw birds.

  Birds.

  And squirrels, and I knew without looking, as surely as I could feel my own heartbeat, that there were insects in the trees and worms in the ground. That if I went far enough, I’d be brushing the gossamer remnants of a spider web off my arm or out of my hair.

  Isaiah was behind me, but I ran so fast that within moments, I’d lost the sound of his footsteps. I ran faster, unwilling to turn back until the trail hit a clearing, but Isaiah was nowhere to be seen. It didn’t matter. I didn’t need him to tell me I was exactly where I wanted to be.

  The clearing was short, surrounded by the woods on all sides save one, and across the way stood a long row of short houses. The space was lit by a warm yellow light that could almost have been the sun. I took a tentative step into the meadow. When I’d crossed half its length, I was spotted by a boy of about twelve, and as I looked at his face, something pulled against my already-full heart. He cocked his head and
ran into a cabin before I could put a name to the feeling.

  And then he returned with my brother.

  Fifteen

  West was tall, taller than our father. His once-pale neck and face were lightly tanned, and his skinny, fragile aspect had given way to a lean, wiry bulk. He wore simple work pants and a white cotton shirt that was worn but clean. Its sleeves were rolled to the elbow, revealing a similar tan on his hands and forearms.

  He saw me at once, and broke into an easy grin, then came bounding across the field toward me, followed by the boy, laughing and shouting all at once. “You made it! You made it!” He punctuated this with a goofy skip, arms wide, every few paces, and I found that I was laughing, too. The first new joke between us. I skipped a few leaps of my own, and then we were together.

  He wrapped me in his arms and spun me around until my feet left the ground. “You made it,” he said again.

  “And so did you,” I said, trying to fit this image of West together with my memory of the pale, frightened boy I’d struggled to protect during Adam’s fateful attack on the cargo hold of the North American Ark. I couldn’t. The thought made me laugh out loud all over again.

  “Hey, man,” said West. “Say hello.”

  The boy at his side shuffled a foot and offered me a dimpled grin of his own. “Hey. You’re here!”

  When I heard his voice, I gasped. “Maxx? Good grief! You’re—wow. You got so big, buddy.” I gave him a hug, and he smiled at me, still shy. We were just about the same height. “Ise!” he said, breaking away. “You got her!”

  “I did indeed,” said Isaiah. “You got the cards?”

  West nodded behind him and began to usher us across the remaining length of the field. “Yeah, back in the house. We better get them on you before the next scan.”

  I walked as though on a cloud. My brain continued to process each happy revelation a beat slower than it should. “You have a house. And a son.”

  “Sure do,” said West. “And, okay, brace yourself…” he said, letting his tone trail at the end. We reached the door, and he gave me an enigmatic look, then guided me inside.