The cabin was simple. Four walls, a window, and two beds, one lofted above the other. A basic stovetop over a short icer. A rocking chair, a woven mat…
And a crib.
My universe stopped right there, right in that house in the middle of an impossible forest, and redirected itself toward the child before me. Dark brown eyes in a pale, round face, topped off with a rug of thick black hair. Seeing me, she smiled, and I saw all eight teeth in her head, and plenty of gums to spare.
“Easy on the arm,” said West, prying my hand off him. “That’s my livelihood, you know.”
“You’re… you have a…”
Without ceremony, West scooped up the child and placed her in my arms, resting her against my hip. Shocked, I wrapped my arms around her. She returned the favor, and my existence was expanded in a thousand ways, all of which crowded into my mind at once, choking me.
When he caught my expression, West seemed to freeze as well, taking in the sight of his daughter in my embrace. “Cecelia,” he said, and his voice broke. “That’s our Cecelia.”
I hunched my back and lowered my head over hers, wrapping myself around her as closely as I could. She was warm and soft, and as long as I lived, I would never let anything happen to her.
“Cecelia,” I whispered at last. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Put this on,” said Isaiah. He looped a plastic-looking chain over my head. It was delicate and white and had a green square, which I hung in front like a charm. “It’s a green card. Kind of like a guest pass.”
“For the biosphere?” I asked absently. Cecelia rested an arm on top of mine, and I decided to spend the rest of the week squishing its little fat rolls.
“For this part,” he said. “There are a few sections open to the public, as long as they stay on the path. Everything else is monitored by body signature. Delicate nature of the ecosystems. Can’t have people walking around everywhere.” He paused. “I gotta say. It’s strange to see you like this, Char.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maternal, or something,” said Isaiah.
“Aunt Char,” said Cecelia, and I looked at West, my eyes wide.
“She just said—” I started.
“Aunt Char,” Cecelia insisted.
“That’s your name, right?” West grinned. “We talk about you.” The thought made me shake my head in wonder.
“She can talk,” I said, as though that were the most fascinating thing I’d ever thought of.
“Well. She’s a year and a half old,” West offered. “She can say a few things. Which makes her a lot more talkative than her brother.”
“See ya!” she giggled.
“Hey, I’m not going anywhere,” I said, giving her a little bounce.
“No, it’s Ce-ya,” said West. “That’s how she says her name.”
“I love her,” I said firmly. “Aunt-Char-loves-you, Ce-ya,” I said gently, directly into Cecelia’s face. She returned my solemn gaze, and I turned to Maxx. “And you, too, Maxx Man. I love you, too.”
Dinner was lentils and a salad, the best I’d ever had. A light rain had begun to fall, and it pattered against the simple roof of the cabin. I ate delicately, directing my fork around Cecelia, who remained firmly planted in my lap. My mind remained on Eren and my father, but Cecelia seemed as unwilling to part with me as I with her, and as the meal went on, stretched by animated retellings of shared memories, her warm, solid little body relaxed into my other arm, giving the full weight of her head to my shoulder and making me calm, like a heavy blanket on a dark, peaceful night.
Marcela returned halfway through, offering no explanation for how she’d spent the rest of her day, and served herself a bowl, shaking thick drops of rain from her hair. She never let her eyes off her daughter in my arms. She must have decided she approved of the situation, because she sat across from us, between West and Maxx. She kissed West easily on the mouth, a sight I’d yet to get used to, and ruffled Maxx’s hair, squeezing the back of his neck. They were the most natural gestures in the world. As they looked at her, she seemed different to my eyes. She fit into the space between them as though they’d been carved around her. She was no less the soldier I’d known her to be, but this was a dimension of her soul I hadn’t seen before. Marcela, Wife and Mother.
Just as I admonished myself to stop staring, her eyes met mine. Isaiah was in the middle of the story of our escape from the sick bay, so she simply smiled a greeting. I smiled back, cuddling Cecelia a little closer, and she gave me a nod.
Maybe I belonged here, too.
As always, my happy moment tempered itself almost instantly, and I cleared my throat, stopping the well of pressure that had built up in my chest. Unfortunately, it was a little louder than I’d intended, so I stopped the conversation around me, too. “So. Rain,” I said.
My brother nodded. “Started up about a month ago. It comes and goes. Can be kinda unpredictable.” He took on a contented look. “Just like back home.”
“Better than the old system,” said Maxx. “I don’t have to run the hydros any more.”
“It’s easier,” West agreed. “Probably takes some getting used to, for some of us.” He glanced pointedly at Mars.
“I like to show up for work not soaking wet,” she shrugged. “Call me crazy.”
“It’s only been a few weeks,” he said gently. “Give it time.”
“Speaking of which,” I said. “What have you heard about Dad and Eren?”
Isaiah and Mars exchanged a quick look. “We haven’t been able to get them out,” said Ise. “But I think we’d know if anything had happened to them.”
“I haven’t seen your dad at all,” said Mars. “That’s probably a good sign.”
“And Eren?” I asked.
“It’s rare,” she said carefully. “But it happens. He’s fine, Charlotte.”
“Fine, how?”
She turned to Isaiah, who shrugged. “Thing is,” Mars began, “we don’t know. But it looks pretty good. As far as I know, they’re not hurting him at all.”
I shifted, unsatisfied. That could easily change now that I was no longer around.
“The plan right now is to keep you here,” said West. “No one’s expecting that green card back. It can’t be traced. I don’t think they can trace me, either. I got all new papers as a refugee. I’ve never used my real name here, and neither has Mars. Dad never contacted us. Isaiah would be recognizable, but he uses a different pass every time he visits, and we don’t usually meet here at the house. Or even in this biome. Seems pretty clean.”
“We’re already at Eirenea. They’ll probably announce debarking plans any day now, unless they start with the biosphere transfer,” said Mars.
Something in her tone made me weigh her words more carefully than West’s, but he jumped back in enthusiastically. “We’ll see how the new Treaty reads, and then maybe apply for immunity, or a trial, or something. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
It was a nice plan, a sweet little dream, and they had worked so hard. I didn’t have the heart to spoil it. So I nodded, soaking it in for as long as I could. Somewhere over the forest, the rain increased its intensity.
When we’d finished eating, Maxx went to sleep, and we sat on the front deck of the house in the gathering darkness, sipping hot tea from clay mugs. I peppered the others with questions. I was starving for information. What was their life like? How had they gotten here?
It turned out that West had taken four years to qualify for a post in the biosphere, but it was his as long as he wanted. “The work is hard,” he explained, “but everyone wants in anyway. I spend most of the day tending to the biome—this is the Deciduous Biome, by the way; we have four others in the ’sphere—but I also have to produce groundbreaking research every so often. Pun intended.” He snickered at his own joke, and Mars rolled her eyes to me good-naturedly. I had to laugh.
“Maxx has ed and training for most of the day, and Mars is always at the sick bay.
We qualified for refugee status immediately, thanks to Adam’s psychotic tendencies, and they were happy to have an Academy-trained doctor, so for a long time, we lived in general housing, in the city dorms. It’s not the worst, but it’s crowded. Maxx had to sleep on the floor. I couldn’t even work in maintenance. Those guys have a PhD in engineering, minimum. I wasn’t qualified to teach preschool up here. If she hadn’t married me, I don’t know where I would have ended up.”
“Straight out the airlock with the rest of the rabble,” said Mars.
“She jokes,” he said, “but without her, I’d have been boxing lunches and soap rations in the hull for the rest of my life. Maxx, too.”
“Better than the alternative,” I said, but West shook his head.
“Not to me,” he said seriously. “They put you in a tiny room for twelve hours a day, and it’s all crowded with supplies. Everything shakes whenever the grav generators adjust to the acceleration. I was having attacks a few times a week. It got bad. I stopped eating, couldn’t sleep. I honestly didn’t think I would make it.”
“The Lightness?” I asked.
He nodded. “She’d wake me up from the spells by reading me biotech research and making me study for the next boards. I failed so many times, but she’d just sign me up for the next one. She never quit.”
I looked at Mars, expecting another joke, but her face was serious as she gazed at my brother. “Neither did you,” she said quietly. “You’re stronger than you think.”
My throat was tight, and my niece was warmly nested in my arms. West was fine. He’d never needed me, anyway. In many ways, he was better off without me, same as always. It was a strange feeling—something like relief, but much harder to swallow.
My brother’s family belonged here, by right of accomplishment. I did not.
Even if I could clear my name, I’d missed several years of regular, doomed-to-die-in-a-meteor school back on Earth. No amount of biotech papers could ever possibly catch me up. The last time I’d set foot in an elite institution, the War dominated the news, and daily life had been tragically easy to take for granted. We hadn’t been trained for survival in space at all. No one around me even knew about the meteor. I was barely ten years old, with no criminal record.
I would never, ever be good enough to live here.
“How did you leave it with Dad?” I asked.
“He decided to stay,” said West, his voice distant. “It all happened so fast. He was getting on the hopper, then he jumped back. Told Mars to get in the pilot’s seat. He said he couldn’t leave you.”
His words hung in the air, and the rain pressed in from outside, making the space inside the cabin brighter. Sacred.
My father hadn’t left me. I pulled Cecelia closer and blinked a few times. Her hand rested on the end of my arm, where my hand should have been.
“None of us wanted to,” Mars added. “I had to make them safe.”
“You didn’t have a choice,” I said quietly. “I can’t even think about the things Adam would have done if you stayed. I’d have been so mad at you.”
She nodded solemnly. “He had it in for all of us. Didn’t make it any easier.”
West was staring through the open doorway. The rain broke, and the tops of the trees were again visible from the table. “Dad shook my hand. He looked me in the eye and told me he loved me. He said he was sorry. It was so weird, Charlotte. I told him I was too, and he said he’d never lose hope of seeing me again. And that was it.” He dug his thumb into a knot on the wooden deck. “All that time I spent being angry, and now he’s gone.”
“We didn’t give up on seeing you, either,” said Mars. “We knew you had Eren.”
“I thought he might have turned, actually,” said Isaiah. “I couldn’t get anything through to him.” In general, the Remnant had never trusted Eren, the son of their greatest enemy, and Mars and Isaiah were no exception.
“I wondered about that myself not too long ago,” I said. “Turned out to be a very convincing scheme to keep Adam from killing me. A little too convincing for my taste, if I’m honest. Apparently, he’d decided that keeping me in deep stasis was better than risking death.”
“He decided right,” said West firmly. Mars didn’t look so sure. “We’re here now, Char. We made it across the sky. They’ll forgive you for escaping.”
“That’s actually true,” said Mars. “We just have to convince them you were innocent with Ark Five.”
“Why not just leave me in prison, then?” I asked.
Three sets of eyes looked at me like I was crazy.
“I mean, I’m so glad you didn’t. I wouldn’t give up this night for anything. But if we were already at Eirenea, and I was already presumed innocent—”
“You didn’t know?” Mars asked. Her voice was more gentle than usual. Which was irritating. I didn’t need her pity.
“Know what?”
“They were planning to torture you, more and more, until you cracked. They passed some kind of special resolution about it a few weeks ago. Sacrifice the one life in the hopes of saving a whole lot more. I mean—” she added hastily—“that was their plan.”
“And we couldn’t have that,” Isaiah said frankly.
“We got to work as soon as we could,” said Mars. “We couldn’t stop the first few rounds, but we were able to get you out before they escalated.”
“They were never going to stop, not ever,” West added grimly.
Something finally clicked together in my mind. “The first rounds?” I said. “I was drugged. I knew it.”
“According to what I could find, you were,” said Mars. “Not quite a hallucinogen, but enough of a punch to put you out of your mind a little. They just wanted to get you to talk, at first. Trippy stuff.”
“She found a way to get on the team in charge of monitoring your vitals,” said Ise. “Smart girl.”
West smiled at her adoringly. It should have irritated me, but this time, it didn’t bother me at all. I hoped I could always remember them exactly like this. Together, happy. In love.
“If you’d confessed right then, they’d have stopped. Held a trial. But you didn’t, so the plan was to keep going,” Ise told me.
“Until I died?”
“Or confessed,” he said.
“But I couldn’t confess. I didn’t do anything.”
“That’s what we’re telling you. They decided to eliminate the possibility. Get as much as they could out of you, for the greater good. Char, they lost an Ark. It’s unforgivable. But I understand.”
My hands went cold. I stood suddenly, jarring Cecelia. She woke and began to fuss. “Oh, no. Oh, no,” I said. “They still have Eren.”
Mars bit a lip, and I had the sense that I was finally catching up to the rest of the group. “Not exactly,” she said. “I mean, they do, but they don’t. I knocked him out. He’s in stasis.”
“You WHAT?” I said, prompting a full-on cry from Cecelia. “Sorry, sorry,” I whispered. The night sky seemed to redden before my eyes. I couldn’t believe I’d trusted her for one minute.
“I had no choice.” Mars stood, lifting her hands in a surrendering gesture. “If they drug him enough, he’ll tell them our names, and they will come for us.” She indicated Cecelia. “All of us. But this way, they can’t hurt him. He’s safe. We’re all safe.”
I was never safe. Not ever. “Until they get the antidote,” I said, jaw clenched.
“They’ll never suspect me. They’d have to find Adam first,” she said. “Or they’ll have to figure out a million things he’s known for years.”
“How did you…?” I shook my head at her. My anger was dissipating, but in its place, I felt a gaping sense of despair.
“The stasis drug? I stole it from him years ago, along with the antidote, when we worked together in the Remnant. Before he started blowing stuff up. Just in case.”
I blinked. “Just in case.”
“I like to be prepared.” She shrugged, taking Cecelia from my arms. “You
are here. We are safe. I don’t have anything more to say about it. Good night.”
West stood up too, disliking the tension, but wanting to follow his wife. “G’night, Char. We’ll talk tomorrow. It’s so good you’re here.”
“Goodnight,” I said at last, my despair hardening into resolve. “And Mars. Thank you.”
The night air was cold after the rain. I sat next to my old friend Isaiah under a starless sky, mere feet from my family, and wished the moment could go on forever. I felt safe, happy.
And that feeling never lasted.
We were not in a forest, deep in the woods of Earth. We were in space, surrounded by a ship. And ships could be sunk.
Still, the darkness gathered around us, and I felt secure for the moment. I’d missed so much. I hoped that in time, our years of separation would lose their bite. My family had been waiting for me here. Isaiah had come for me. My father had never left the North American Ark.
Eren had never left my side.
“How long since they fixed your eyes?” I asked abruptly.
“’Bout three years back. I have Mars to thank for that. She’d been studying the system since we got here. Once she infiltrated the medical wing, we had access to all the equipment. She built a team—on the level, by the way—and they fixed me right up.” He smiled again, an easy smile, and I wondered if there weren’t other changes I had yet to pick up on.
“On the level, huh? Seems like she fits in here. Belongs.”
He nodded. “They all do. Look at ’em.”
His melancholy hung in the air between us, creating a companionable silence. “So Mars became a doctor. West became a farmer. What about you?” I asked him. “Where have you been?”
“Oh, the boxing rooms aren’t so bad,” he said, his tone blending with the night air.
“But you like the dorms? Better than prison, anyway.”
“I didn’t qualify for housing. They take the refugees, they give you food. You work when a spot opens. It keeps the madness away. But they can’t house everyone. The Ark was full when it took off.”
Isaiah was one of the smartest people I’d known. “Surely if you—”
The Fall Page 11
