The Remnant

by Laura Liddell Nolen

  “Wait, you’re going with me? Not… her?” I blinked apologetically at Mars, still processing everything.

  “You know what they say, Charlotte. You want a job done, you got to—”

  “Avoid a land war in Asia,” Mars cut in, her voice like acid.

  Isaiah chuckled from the darkness. There was ice in my spine.

  “Wait! Send the agreement back to the Remnant, in writing.” I hesitated. “In case you don’t come back, either. All right?”

  “Fair enough. Full citizenship for her family, if I don’t come back,” he said to Marcela. “Think you can handle that?”

  They exchanged a look. Both appeared to be suppressing a smile. “I’m on it, King.”

  “Thank you kindly,” he said easily. “Now. Let’s shake on it.” He lifted his hand up through the open hatch, and I realized I was gripping the edge of the airlock with the strength of four men. I stared at my fingers, willing them to release it, and fumbled for Isaiah’s hand.

  He adjusted our grip to something like a handshake, and I caught the barest hint of a smile on his upturned face before he pulled me down into the airlock head first.

  Eight

  I slid into the hatch. He caught me before I hit the seat, and my hand was like a limp rag in his as we completed the handshake inside the Arkhopper. I was in a tiny, round glass cabin with two metal chairs. A complicated series of straps hung from the seats and was mirrored in the webwork around the glass. Marcela leaned in after me to buckle my seatbelts. I pursed my lips and turned away. The process took a long time, then was repeated with Isaiah.

  “Thank you, Mars. Now show her the stuff so we can get out of here.”

  Marcela turned to me and extended a hand toward the dash. “This is your helmet and a skin. You have four hours of oxygen. If they’re not sealed together correctly, your blood will boil as soon as the cabin loses pressure. Get yours on before you do his, or you’ll both boil. Not that anything’s going to happen.”

  I tried not to let my rising panic show in my voice. From the look on her face, she was definitely enjoying this. “Who’s flying this thing?”

  Isaiah laughed out loud. “You don’t think I can do it? Come on, little bird. Have a little faith.”

  Marcela smirked. “Okay, time for your heads.”

  Without further warning, she pressed my forehead back until my head was against the cushion behind it, then pulled the cushions around the side of my head, securing them with a heavy strap. If I was nervous before, now I was approaching outright dread. I couldn’t move my head at all. Sounds were muffled by the cushions, and my vision was almost completely obscured, save for a view of the dash in front of me. My breathing came harder, and my fingers curled into fists.

  At the last second, Marcela turned back to me. “Try to keep your neck relaxed, if you can.” She slapped Isaiah’s headstrap into place on the velcroed side of the cushion. “I’ll have auxiliary control of the avionics until you get there,” she said to him. “Then I’ll transfer.”

  The tightness in my chest pressed up against my throat. “To whom?” I squeaked.

  “The Asian Ark,” said Isaiah, louder than usual, thanks to all the padding around our heads.

  “That’s our big plan? We’re just going to pop into the Asian Ark and beg them not to blow us up?”

  “Unless we lose pressure and boil first. Zai jian, Mars. Thanks for that image.”

  In response, Marcela slammed the hatch shut. She met my eye through the glass for one final instant while securing the latch from the other side. She was still pretending to suppress her amusement when the port closed off completely.

  “Hang on tight, all right?” said Isaiah. “You’re not going to like this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Right now, we’re spinning. Whole Ark is. But when I hit the release, the airlock will open, and we’ll be free floating. Takes a minute to engage the thrusters, so we’ll still be spinning for a minute. Then there won’t be any gravity at all. It takes some getting used to.”

  Apparently, Isaiah had done this before. Where had he gone that time?

  I took a deep breath. “I’m ready.”

  His long fingers spread out on the dash, delicately brushing the switches and buttons until they found a square yellow knob. “All right. Here we go.”

  The pressure that had forced its way up to my throat was joined by the new sensation of my neck being pulled down into my stomach from deep inside me. The tension in my innards spread to beneath my belly. I heard myself make a strange, guttural sound, but I didn’t start screaming until the pulling and pressing reached its icy hands inside my head.

  I was spinning. Heavy arcs of swinging motion overtook me in waves. I screamed louder and louder, until my voice broke. We were completely helpless.

  A dull pain bit into my right forearm, and I realized Isaiah was trying to get me to hold his hand.

  Then, gravity gave out, and the stars swung slower and slower around the clear pane of the Arkhopper. We went around and around, and the pressure forced its way fully into my skull, blackening my vision. The stars winked away. The dash went dark.

  I kept screaming.

  I knew I had to stop, but I couldn’t. Isaiah’s hand was frantic against my arm. He’s afraid for me. He’s worried.

  Then, gravity released us completely, relieving me of what wits I still commanded. My body lifted from the seat.

  I think I’m dying. I definitely wasn’t breathing. The world was red, with streaks of gray. My face felt cold. Everything was so cold, except my hand.

  “Charlotte. Char, baby. Come on. You still with me?”

  My throat tried to swallow, but failed. “What was that?! What happened?”

  “I don’t know.” Isaiah was calm, except for an errant muscle working its way through his jaw. “I couldn’t hear Control.”

  “No. Right.”

  “Because of all the screaming.”

  “Ah.” I looked at him, pulled a face. “Sorry.”

  “Take my hand, Turner.”

  I spread my fingers, and his fingers slid across my palm. I folded my hand to his. It occurred to me that this was Isaiah’s first order. I laughed. What a stupid waste of an order. The streaks of gray in my vision shrank hard, and the red was abruptly angry.

  “Marcela. Come in,” Isaiah’s voice was tense. It made him sound like someone else. “Mars, you there?”

  “I’m here, sir. Cabin lost some pressure right out of the airlock. Some kind of defensive mechanism, maybe, or something standard that we just weren’t prepared for. I couldn’t warn you because of… the noise. Life support is rebooting. You’re two minutes out, but there should be enough air to go on if she calms down.”

  “This isn’t her fault, Mars.”

  “I wasn’t—yes, sir.”

  “Get us back on track right now.”

  “Yes, sir. Eighty seconds.”

  “Sign off, too. I don’t think she likes your voice.”

  There was a moment of silence. My stomach seemed to float in a space all its own, only briefly knocking into my ribs and lungs.

  “Char, you have to breathe slower. You gotta calm down.” He gave my hand a little squeeze, and I found I could make sense of his words.

  I focused on nothing but Isaiah’s hand and its warmth against my own. It wasn’t the first time his steady grip had taught me how to breathe again. I squeezed him back.

  “Hey. There you are.” His voice was warm, too. And tangibly relieved.

  “Sorry ’bout that. Space is not really my thing.”

  “You’re one stone-cold criminal, Charlotte Turner.”

  “I’m so dizzy.”

  “Just concentrate on your heartbeat. Make yourself slow down. And for real, stop screaming. I’m already blind. Don’t want to be deaf, too.”

  “I don’t remember it being like that when the OPT docked.” I frowned. The truth was that I didn’t remember anything from when the Off-Planet Transport docked with
the Ark. I’d been drugged, along with all the other passengers. “Was it that bad?”

  Isaiah made a small noise. “It was worse. They had to slow the rotation anytime an OPT docked. When you woke up, they were already back in full swing. Planned it that way. Apparently a lot of people got the Lightness.”

  “Lightness?”

  “It’s a thing they call it when you don’t have gravity.”

  “Why not just call it ‘zero gravity?’”

  “No, that’s just the fact of it. The Lightness is about whether you can take the fact, or not. Some people plain can’t.”

  On my second journey through space, I didn’t feel like talking anymore than I had on my first. But this time, I sat with Isaiah, not a wing full of strangers. He was a solid mass in the seat next to mine. He was a co-conspirator and a familiar comfort. For the moment, he was both a captor and a friend. It was a strange mix. In his hands, just out of my reach, he held everything I’d wanted since my mother died. I could not leave him, yet I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to. The Arkhopper stopped spinning, and the stars ceased flinging themselves around us.

  The sky was full of them. I mean, full. The more I concentrated on the black spaces between the stars, the more stars I saw. They were everywhere. My spine lifted away from the seat behind me, pressing me softly toward the straps all around me.

  I missed my mother. My grief over her death was a constant companion. It swept along the bins of the cargo hold, barely a step ahead of the guards. It roamed the halls of the Remnant, and lately, it had paced the floor of my cell, sometimes weeping at the loss of her, sometimes laughing at her memory. It lay in my bed at night, wrapping its long arms around my ribs, pressing them in and out as I breathed. At times it spoke to me in tenderness, reminding me that she had loved me. Now, it intoned mercilessly that she had died in this blackness, free from gravity forever. Free from light.

  She should have seen the sight in front of me: an infinite flood of stars, each more subtle than the last, filling the voids as my sight adjusted to the dark, then blurring out with my tears until I blinked.

  She loved the stars.

  My grief raged against me only rarely these days, but as gravity released its grip on my body, it reached long fingers around my throat, threatening to choke me. In a strange way, sitting with Isaiah was like sitting with an older version of myself, a past I had never escaped, and I didn’t try to stop the few tears that fell. He’d seen worse from me. His hand tightened over mine, and my grief lessened its noose round my neck.

  I did not squeeze him back.

  At length, I spoke, but my gaze remained on the stars. “I’m angry, Isaiah. So angry. I don’t know why.”

  He didn’t respond, but he didn’t take his hand away, either.

  When the Asian Ark came into view several hours later, I found that I had slept. I pulled myself together. I had a long way to go that day and not a lot of information to work with.

  I had found my father. My mother would be glad of that, glad that we were no longer angry at each other. But I had yet to find my brother, really find him, and I would never stop until I did. And it all started here.

  This ship was massive and built like an enormous round cake with layers. Unlike the North American Ark, they’d engineered gravity via an electromagnetic field generated underneath each layer, and cancelled out, inches later, with every ceiling. It had a single discernable decoration: an enormous circular logo on the “roof” the size of several city blocks. As the pull of the oncoming Ark slid me back into my seat, Isaiah cleared his throat.

  “So,” he said, “Couple of things. First, your new job description. You’re the Remnant’s ambassador to the Asian Ark, and fully vested with the authority that brings. Which might not be much, depending on how this goes. Second, you work for me. You represent me and everyone I work for. So don’t do anything hasty.”

  “Ise. What on earth—”

  “Tshh,” he said, shushing me. “The mission.”

  I gave him a blank stare. “Enlighten me.”

  “We are here to get official recognition from Asia.”

  “We—the Remnant?”

  I heard his smile, though I couldn’t see it. “Yep. See? You’re a natural.”

  “Recognition as what, again?”

  “A sovereign nation-state of the North American Ark.”

  “Isaiah. You can’t possibly be serious that I’m the one you want doing this. And are we even supposed to—”

  “You rather I picked Adam? He was eager enough. Can’t trust him, though. You’re the daughter of a senator. You’ve met foreign leaders before.”

  “Yeah. When I was, like, eight.”

  “You know the inner workings of Central Command, and you understand the Remnant: why it exists, how we do things. And you can predict how bad it’ll be for all that if the Commander takes us over.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “We don’t want to go to war. We just want to be left alone. And we can’t do that unless we have independence. And the more support we get from the other Arks, this one especially, the less likely the Commander will be to blow us all up, so to speak.”

  “Actually, I’m not sure that’s a figure of speech,” I frowned as he strapped my head back onto the chair. “But why this Ark especially? You heard something?”

  “Let’s just say I don’t trust them, either.” He stopped fiddling with the strap long enough to fix me with his blind gaze. “Keep focused, Char. Thousands of people are depending on us for everything. They need safety. They need justice. And they need to eat. As a separate nation-state, we’ll have the authority to fight back whenever those things are taken away from us, and more importantly, we’ll be in a better position to form alliances.”

  “This proves my point, Ise. I can barely remember any Chinese from middle school. They do speak Chinese, right?”

  “And Hindi, officially.”

  “Officially. Right.” I shook my head. “That’s not much of a plan.”

  “Adam reached out weeks ago and established a backchannel. There’s a big party tonight. The Commander will be there to state his case.”

  “I take it we’re not exactly on the guest list.”

  There was a pause, and I pictured him tilting his head, as though weighing his answer. “We’re not not on the guest list. Adam found us a contact: an ambassador’s assistant. They’re sympathetic.”

  “As far as we know,” I sighed. “I don’t like our odds.”

  “’S not the first Ark we’ve boarded without an invitation. This time, we won’t even have to hide once the party starts. You gotta remember, most people don’t want a war.”

  “I haven’t even read the Treaty yet. Everyone keeps referring to the pre-OPT training that I kinda missed, what with being in prison. And, Isaiah, people go to school for years to learn how to be ambassadors.”

  “You think you’re the only criminal we got? No one in the Remnant went to pre-OPT training. That was kind of the point, Char. We weren’t supposed to survive the meteor. Most of them don’t even accept the Treaty as valid, seeing as it planned for them to die. We don’t have years. And we don’t have a diplomacy program. Yet.” He let out a sharp breath. “But I will build this nation-state out of what we do have. And right now, that’s you.”

  I sat in silence, focusing for a moment on assisting Isaiah with his own headstrap. “This leader thing looks really good on you. You know that, right?”

  “I think a lot of that is going to depend on you, Ambassador.”

  “I’m not talking about the outcome. I mean they’re lucky to have you right now.”

  He clucked his tongue. “They?”

  “We. Maybe.” I squinted at him. “Anything you’re not telling me this time? Like, I don’t know. Something critical that I’m really going to wish I’d known earlier, or something?”

  The airlock before us opened, and our little ship found a harbor.

  “Oh, there’s plenty,” said Isaiah. “Now, l
et’s go be diplomats.”

  Nine

  The hatch of the Arkhopper popped open easily, and we were greeted by silence.

  The air was cold—too cold—and I suppressed the urge to hang onto Isaiah. As comforting as it would be, it was far better for us both to be ready.

  “Should we … I don’t know. Just start running? Look for a place to hide?”

  “They should be here any minute. We’ll stick around.”

  I shivered. “May I suggest a new plan? Get me away from this airlock before someone flips a switch somewhere and we end up dying in space.”

  “Tell me what you see. And get me out of this strap; I can’t find the buckle-thing.”

  I fumbled around his wrists and legs, keeping my eyes on the hatch. If we were walking into a trap, I wanted to know as soon as possible. Not that there was anything I could do about it. “Okay, it’s dark,” I said in a low voice. “But the airlock opened on both ends of the port as soon as we docked, probably automatically. That’s the last strap—you’re free. There’s a little room on the other end. I guess we should get in there before it locks again. What’s his name? Your friend, I mean.”

  “Her name. An. But I never met her. She was more friends with Adam, to be—did you hear that?”

  I froze. His hand brushed my arm, beckoning me forward, and we slid through the port and into the little receiving room. We were both pretty good at sneaking anyway, but at that moment, we were like silent snakes. My metric was off, thanks to my stint in the Remnant, but it felt like we were in reduced gravity. Maybe it was lower on purpose, to help other visitors adjust to regular gravity after space.

  I was still resisting clinging to him when we straightened out in the dark room and pressed the lock to seal off the Arkhopper.

  “All right, your highness,” I whispered to Isaiah. “We’re here. What now?”

  “They monitor everything. They know we’re here. Be patient.”

  “Light?”

  “If you must.”