The Fall

by Laura Liddell Nolen

  “Char, baby. I’ve spent twelve years of my life in prison, where we barely went to class, and I wasn’t all that old to begin with. Half of that I spent learning how to read, once my sight was gone. Maybe if things had gone another way, I could have trained to be a teacher, or worked in the government. I’d have liked that. Even working with Guardians. And maybe I did matter up here, almost. But that was a different life, and it’s time for me to count my blessings. You could stand to do the same.”

  “But, after everything. The Remnant. You were a king.”

  “The Remnant is gone. And maybe that’s the way it was always meant to be.” Isaiah’s words were soft, but his jaw was tight, and his silver eyes seemed to blaze in the moonlight. “I did what I came to do, Charlotte. Your family are citizens. I have kept my promises to you.”

  I knew his pain wasn’t directed at me, but it burned anyway. It made me bitter. “It’s not over. None of this is over. We made it, Isaiah. We got all the way to Eirenea. But we’ll never make planetfall while Adam is out there. Look, we’re still alive. That has to count for something.”

  “It counts. Enough that I don’t take it for granted.” He shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe how naïve I was. “Doesn’t it scare you that no one’s tried to stop him? Peace at any cost. Did you expect me to bring you an army?”

  In the silence that followed, I wrapped my mind around my next move. As long as Adam was out there, this Ark wasn’t safe, and neither was mine. And as long as my father was out there, I would never stop trying to find him. I wouldn’t abandon Eren, either, even though I didn’t doubt that Marcela had hit her mark. They wouldn’t hurt his body. His mind would be enslaved, tortured. But he would remain alive.

  I glanced back at the cabin, at my sleeping family. I would make them safe if it was the last thing I ever did.

  And then I looked at Isaiah. “So you won’t come with me. You won’t fight.”

  Isaiah regarded me calmly. “My daddy died in the War. They called him a hero, and I suppose he was. Didn’t make much difference though, did it?” I finally recognized the anger underneath his words. I think it had been there all along, but I hadn’t known him as well as I thought. I hadn’t heard it until now, and now that I heard it, it was a part of every word.

  “I think about him sometimes,” he continued softly. “I wonder what he would think of me. My mother lived with her grief, but at least she knew the War was over. Then we get up here, and people still just want to fight. So I did what I could.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’m not a king, Char. Never was. But I made a difference for a little while.

  “All that’s over now. It came to nothing, just like how my daddy died. It’s the end of the road.” His arms reached for mine, but I saw in his eyes that he knew my mind already. His tone went down a pitch, pleading. “Stay with me here among the trees. Let’s just enjoy the journey together.”

  I’d always loved his voice, mellow and deep. There had been a time when I’d have followed him almost anywhere. In another life, he was still young. He’d never grown stubborn or jaded. He’d never broken.

  In another life, we could have loved each other differently. Better.

  But I couldn’t fix him, and none of us could change the past. All I could do was press forward. I set my voice to steel and pulled free of his embrace.

  I was going to find Adam. My brother would grow old, his feet planted in a real forest. He would watch his children grow.

  My life could still count for that much.

  “Goodbye, Isaiah.”

  He nodded, silent, and watched as I started across the small field. I looked back once before disappearing into the trees. Isaiah sat motionless in the moonlight, exactly as I’d left him, his silver eyes following me.

  The trail ahead was dark and thorny, but it couldn’t go on forever. I braced myself and entered the forest.

  When I reached the edge of the biome, the rain had begun anew. This time, it was anything but peaceful. It set me on edge, and I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because I had no sanctuary from it or perhaps because I was cold. I pushed the thought aside and fumbled around for several minutes, glad I still had the green card hanging from my neck. The doorpad had to be around here somewhere. But it was too dark out, and the doorpad was black, as I recalled. At least I wasn’t racing against the scanner.

  At long last, it activated, and the door slid open, retracting into the wall of the cube. “Huh,” I muttered. I was several feet away from it. I hopped back down the wall, keeping a hand against the flat plastic panels. Rain slid around my hand and down into the earth below. I ducked, feeling the water run down my back, and sped up. Why had they put the panel so far from the door?

  “Hey,” hissed a voice, causing me to jump nearly out from under my own scalp.

  “Aagh,” I scream-whispered. “Isaiah? West?”

  “It’s me,” said Mars, her scarlet hair visible among the trees in the starlight. “Stop with the names already.”

  “Mar—sorry. What on earth—”

  “Please,” she said. “Like you could do this by yourself.”

  I grimaced. “You belong back there. With them.”

  “I have as much to lose as you. And besides. You can’t even open the door.” Her smirk glinted in the light from the hall. “Don’t act like you don’t need me.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, my mind flitting back and forth between dread and something lighter. Relief, perhaps. I wasn’t alone after all. “So. It’s one last adventure. For old times’ sake.”

  “Let’s go save the ships,” she said grimly. “Let’s go end this.”

  Sixteen

  I managed to leap over the micrograv spaces without embarrassing myself too much, and Mars looked at me as we reached the end of the maze of blue, cubed hallways.

  “Where to?” she asked. “What’s the plan?”

  I cleared my throat. “I, uh, don’t have a whole plan just yet. But I think I know how to defeat Adam. And I think I know where he’s going, too.”

  She nodded approvingly. “And?”

  “Well, I think he’s with An. He can’t have gone back to the North American Ark. We’d have heard about it.”

  “There’s always Ark Four. Maybe he went there.”

  I shook my head. “They’re unarmed, and Europe wants him dead. If he wants to avoid capture, he’s going to need weapons. An army. The Asian Ark’s the only place he could get that now.”

  “So we hijack a hopper? The Asian Ark is impenetrable,” she said flatly. “That will never work.”

  “Oh hey, thanks for the confidence, but no. I think our best move would be to contact An. See if she’s willing to give him up. At the very least, we can warn her about him.”

  Mars weighed that idea. “She’s not exactly reliable.”

  “She’s reliable in her way. We know she’s ruthless. She wants to preserve the peace as long as possible. But if there’s a fight, she will make sure she can win. I’m betting Adam makes her nervous.”

  She sighed. “We’d have to find the comm room. I’m pretty sure it’s all in French, though. Do you speak French?”

  “No. Do you?”

  She shook her head. “Okay,” she said, her voice determined. “Do you know where it is?”

  “No,” I said. “Do you?”

  “No. What makes you so sure she’ll even speak to you?”

  The truth was that I wasn’t sure of anything. But An and I had a strange connection. We understood each other. Something told me that if I found a way to reach her, she’d give me a shot. I couldn’t explain all that to Mars, so I gave her an apologetic look instead.

  She scoffed. “The rumors of your abilities have been greatly exaggerated.”

  “Not helping. Besides, that’s not the first step anyway.”

  “What is the first step, then?”

  I couldn’t help smiling a little. “It was going to involve breaking into your office. So.”

  She narrowed her e
yes. “What for? Wait, no. You want the antidote.” Her voice sped up as she pieced together my thoughts. “You think we’re going to go rescue your boyfriend. He’s safe where he is. That is a terrible plan.”

  “First of all, no it’s not. And second, you’re here now. So obviously, we’re not breaking in.”

  She sucked her teeth, glanced around the corridor. “Look,” she said, her voice softer. “I know you care about him. But my antidote is an older version. When he wakes up, he’ll be… less than functional. It’s a lot of extra risk, and he’ll probably be dead weight.”

  “Nevertheless. We’re getting Eren first.” I crossed my arms.

  She shook her head. “I’d get caught, be exposed.”

  “None of that will matter if we don’t stop Adam. We need Eren, Mars. He’s good at preventing major wars, which is pretty key here. I mean, he trained as a diplomat. He’s an expert with the comm systems, and he speaks French. At least, I’m pretty sure he does.” I stopped, giving her time to fully roll her eyes. “But none of that is what really matters.”

  There was a long pause before she threw a hand in the air. “Fine. Astonish me.”

  I couldn’t help my grin. “He’s wearing a k-band.”

  She weighed the idea as though tasting it, tilting her head back and forth. Finally, she nodded. “It’s doable. Not easy, of course. But doable.”

  An hour later, I was hiding in a med supply closet, wondering what was taking so long, when the door sucked open and Mars flung herself in. “Hey,” she hissed. “Where are you?”

  I moved the pile of sturdy white linens I’d carefully arranged in front of my body and emerged from underneath a shelf. When it came to hiding, I took my work seriously.

  Mars looked at me like I’d spent the time painting myself purple. “You get a good nap?”

  “You laugh, but if someone came in here for supplies, they’d never have seen me,” I said archly. “Did you get the antidote? You sure you weren’t followed?” I moved to brace the door.

  She held up a small object wrapped in a black swatch of fabric. “Here’s the deal. The shift change is in ten minutes, but the timing’s going to be tight. If the new doctor shows up during the transfer, the current one will know I’m not on duty.”

  I looked at her blankly. “You need to be on duty? It’s a heist, Mars.”

  “I need to access the screen with the patient manifest. That way, I can order his room unlocked for treatment. So you’ll have to distract the incoming doctor while I get the other one to transfer the screen to me.”

  I shrugged. “Makes sense.”

  “That’s not the hard part. Eren’s going to come out of stasis right when the alarms start going off. All of them.”

  “Okay. So we’ll run.”

  “Still not the hard part. When he wakes up, Adam will know. He’s probably monitoring the k-band. He might try to attack the ship.”

  “So we’ll run fast.”

  “Char. Stop to think for one second. Where are we supposed to run to? We can’t take a k-band back to the biosphere, and you have no one. No one.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “We have to warn An. We have to get her to capture Adam and betray him. Nothing else matters.” I didn’t add that our chances of convincing An were slim at best, and if we failed, they’d both want us dead. An and Adam were as different as ice and steel, but you could cut yourself on either. The one thing Adam could offer her was the only thing she really wanted: stability. As long as he kept his hands off her Ark and prevented everyone from fighting—and getting grabby with the nukes—on board ours, she was probably willing to work with him.

  Mars looked at me for a long moment before nodding. “All right. Wish me luck.”

  Wearing a set of uniform scrubs freshly stolen from the supply closet, I felt my skin come alive. It was good to have a job to do. The new doctor was predictably punctual, but he looked to be an easy target, stopping to give pre-round orders to the first nurse he saw.

  Which was me.

  “I’ll need all the scans from yesterday and an update on the Read lady. Has the coffee come through yet? Where’s the other doctor?”

  I looked at him. “My shift hasn’t started yet. I got five more minutes.”

  “Close enough. Let’s get going. They’ll be diverting staff to the secure areas again today.”

  I gave a slow nod at the clock above the door. “Four minutes, now.”

  The doctor seemed briefly at a loss before deciding he was angry. “Listen here. I don’t give a single blinking ion what kind of shop they ran on your last assignment, but we’re not here to play around. There’s a list as long as your arm of people who want your job.”

  “You wanna write me up? Go ahead. I’m not clocked in. I can’t even access the reports yet. You asking me to steal them? I’ll let you explain to the board why you didn’t take protocol seriously.”

  He opened his hands in a show of shock. “What are you doing standing around if you haven’t even clocked in yet?”

  I leaned against the wall. “You know, my last super tried to get me to work off-hours. He’s shipping band aids now.”

  “Are you threatening me?” He took a step closer, clearly expecting me to shrink back. I didn’t budge. “Let me put it this way. The review board takes my comments under special advisement. So if I were you, I’d get moving.”

  “Sure thing, doc. In three-and-a-half more minutes.”

  He scoffed, and finally threw up his hands. “You people think you’re above everything. Let me know how that works out for you at your next placement.” He turned to blast through the door.

  “Wait!” I said quickly. The note of panic wasn’t entirely fake. “I have children!”

  He didn’t look back. “Should’a thought of that before mouthing off to a shift super.”

  “Look!” I put a hand on his shoulder, stopping him. “I just needed a break! Five minutes without them screaming at me and tearing up the condo after I spent all morning cleaning it,” I said, echoing something I’d heard a juvy instructor say on more than one occasion. “Five minutes to myself, before work started! Don’t you have kids?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s not easy.” I let my chin quiver. “My shift hadn’t even started yet.”

  He groaned. I doubled down, chewing my cheek until I felt my eyes well up.

  “All right, all right,” he said finally. “Look, don’t cry. You really shouldn’t have— Stop crying. We’ll start over. Name?”

  “Magda,” I said.

  “Magda. Could you please—” he glanced at the clock pointedly—“get clocked in. And then bring me the report on Ms. Read.”

  I sniffed. “You still want the scans?”

  “That would be ideal.” He turned to leave.

  “Wait!” I said.

  With the air of a man of unending patience, he paused heavily. “Yes?”

  “What about the coffee?”

  At that moment, Mars appeared behind him. She was only partially supporting Eren. His shoulders slumped, and as I watched them, he swayed hard to one side. Mars yanked him upright and, seeing us, gave me a panicked look.

  “Let’s—let’s get coffee,” I said to the doctor. “Right now.”

  “Miss Magda. As I’ve attempted to impress upon you, I have work to do.”

  I grinned at him sheepishly. “Not for another ninety seconds, you don’t.”

  At this, he laughed. “Tell you what. You go. Bring me back a cup. We all need a break sometimes.”

  My look of surprise was genuine. Beyond him, Mars was lunging into Eren, forcing him to swerve into the supply closet. The door closed. I breathed a sigh of relief, to the satisfaction of the doctor. “Okay. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said magnanimously, and disappeared into the sick bay.

  “Is he okay?” I said, crowding into the darkened supply room. “Is he coherent?”

  “He is,” came Eren’s voice. “But not one hundred times.
Percent,” he corrected himself sloppily. “Definitely not one hundred percent.”

  “O-kay,” I said slowly. “So how was stasis?”

  “Not as fun as you made it look,” said Eren. “Way more nightmare-y. Where are we? I’m not still dreaming, am I?”

  “Nightmarey?” I said. “Wait. Fun?!”

  “Kidding,” he said. I could hear his smile.

  “I didn’t tell her that part,” said Mars, “and we are on the EuroArk.”

  He looked at me, thoroughly confused. “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “But anyway,” said Mars. “An. How do we get in touch with her again, exactly?”

  “You want An?” said Eren. “For what? Doesn’t she usually just blow stuff up?”

  “For Adam,” I said. “We think that’s where he went. What’s all this about nightmares?”

  “It’s not important,” Mars said quickly. “An.”

  “Nightmares,” I said flatly.

  “I may have used an older version of the stasis serum that gives the victim nightmares. Night terrors. I didn’t know.” She looked at Eren in the near-darkness. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, Eren.” I took his hand.

  “I would have dreamed about you anyway,” he said. “Although I’d have preferred a more pleasant setting.”

  “That’s—that’s weirdly touching, Eren.” Lightning fast, I ran through the details of how we’d gotten there. The explosion, our imprisonment, and my interrogation. When I told him my theory that Five might still be out there, he nodded.

  But when it was his turn to speak, I realized he was still fuzzy from the serum. “I keep thinking of the ways we missed each other,” he said. “Like when you traded yourself to the Remnant for me. And then I missed you when you were in stasis. When I find Adam…” he trailed off, then traded that thought for another. “I don’t know where we’ll go from here,” he said. “You and me. But at least we’ll be together.”

  I thought of my family, hidden in the trees, and of the weight of Eren’s head in my lap, and I wondered if I’d ever have to choose between them. My breath came lighter. “That’s… sweet.”