by Beth Revis
“I’m sorry,” Elder says immediately, leaning back up and staring into my eyes. “Stars, Amy, I’m sorry,” he adds. “It’s just—with Marae’s death, and the planet, and—frex!”
My eyes widen, but Elder just punches the wi-com in the side of his neck. “What?” he barks into it.
I sit up slowly, no longer comfortable lying in the grass. As Elder listens to his com, I stare at the still surface of the pond.
I have no idea what I want. I told Victria that love is a choice, and I told myself that I didn’t have to choose Elder, but I can’t forget the way my heart stopped when his did.
47
ELDER
SHE LOOKS SO SAD AND ALONE, SO ABANDONED—AND I’M the one who abandoned her, even though I’m still sitting by the edge of the pond beside her. I shouldn’t have kissed her. It’s like tasting dessert before supper is served; it’s only made me want more. But I couldn’t help it. I don’t know what it is about Amy. I couldn’t help it.
But I should have. With everything that’s happening now, the last thing I should be trying to do is kiss Amy. I need to focus on the planet—and she needs to figure out what she wants. I can see the questions in her eyes, the way she won’t quite name what’s between us.
Now she sits quietly, not meeting my eyes, her cheeks almost as pink as her lips.
Her lips.
No.
I look away from her. And her lips.
“What happened?” she asks quietly.
A beastly roar rises up in me, and I force myself to swallow it down. What happened? I can’t control myself around her, that’s what happened. I want her so much that it overrides everything else, every other thought in my head, every instinct, every restraint. My want is consuming—and I’m afraid it won’t just consume me, but her too.
“With the Shippers, I mean,” she adds when I don’t answer her. “When you told them about the planet.”
I frown. It’s obvious Amy would rather ignore everything that just happened—or I’ve scared her off between my frustration and impatience. Frex. I run my fingers through my hair, tugging at the strands, hard, trying to pull some coherent thoughts up through the roots.
“They’re running scans,” I say. “If everything indicates that Centauri-Earth is habitable, then we might begin planet-landing in a matter of days.”
Amy narrows her eyes. “Might?” she asks.
If she could, she’d land this ship right now. “Amy,” I say, warning already creeping into my voice, “we can’t just land the ship on Centauri-Earth. We have to make sure it’s safe.”
“Who cares if it’s safe?” she says, throwing up her hands.
“I care. And I care about everyone else on this ship.”
“It’s just going to take a couple of days, right?” she asks.
Maybe. If we’re lucky. “Of course,” I say.
“Okay, then,” Amy breathes. “I’ve been worried about . . . The sooner we land, the better.”
“It’s not all bad here,” I think, put off by the disgust in her voice.
Amy looks at me incredulously. “People are angry. Marae was murdered.”
“Without Phydus,” I say, “the people—they’re thinking . . . they’re doing . . .”
“Shut up.” There’s cold anger in Amy’s voice. “Some people are good. Some people are bad. Phydus doesn’t fix anything. It just hides the good and bad under a haze of nothing.”
“But—” I start, but I keep it to myself. But maybe it really is worth hiding the good if it distorts the bad, too.
Marae would have thought so.
“The water’s very still,” Amy says.
I don’t try to contain the disbelief on my face. Frex, really? We’ve gotten to the point where I can kiss her breathless, then we can talk about murder, and all she can comment on is the frexing pond?
“Aren’t there any fish?” she asks.
Fish. Frexing fish. We’re not painting charts on walls or setting up guards or trying to track down a murderer. I guess when it’s my people being killed, not hers, she doesn’t care so much.
“No fish,” I growl, standing up. “Not anymore.”
Amy looks up at me, questions in her eyes. “You’re really upset.”
“Frex, Amy, of course I am!” I shout. She flinches from my voice. “I’m sorry.” I run my fingers through my hair. “Sorry. It’s just—yes. I’m upset.”
She reaches for my hand and opens her mouth to speak, but before I can find out whatever it was she wanted to say, a voice interrupts us.
48
AMY
“OH, I’M SORRY,” LUTHOR SAYS. “I DIDN’T MEAN TO INTERRUPT.” While his face is impassive, his eyes linger on the inch of exposed skin above my waistband. I tug my tunic down with such violence I’m afraid my fingers will poke through the handwoven material.
“What do you need, Luthor?” Elder asks. I’m not sure if the impatience in his voice is because Luthor interrupted us or because Elder knows how close Luthor is to Bartie’s plans for a revolution. Elder twists around to look up at the man. “Stars, Luthor, what happened to you?!”
Now it’s my turn to smirk at his black eye and busted lip.
“Nothing of importance,” Luthor tells Elder. “Nothing I can’t . . . handle . . . myself.”
I don’t let my face betray my fear.
Luthor sneers down at me, but when Elder glares at him, he shrugs, chuckling softly to himself as he meanders down the path away from us.
“That man is a frexing nuisance,” Elder says. “The only reason he’s been helping Bartie is because he likes trouble for trouble’s sake.”
“Yeah,” I say in a hollow voice. Before Luthor interrupted, I was going to tell Elder about the stairs and everything else I’d found out this morning. But Luthor’s very good at silencing my words.
Elder turns his full attention to me. “What’s wrong?” When I don’t answer, he adds, “Amy, do you know something? About Luthor? Did Luthor do something?”
A hand wrapped around my wrist, pushing me down into the ground, cutting off the circulation in my hand, fingers digging into that little space over the blue veins under my palm. But when I look down, it’s my hand wrapped around my wrist, not Luthor’s.
I open my mouth.
“Tell me,” Elder says.
I can’t.
It’s too late. I can’t change the past, and it will only upset him. I can’t explain why I never told him before—a combination of being afraid to put what happened into words and being worried about what his reaction would be. I let too much time pass. Part of it was my fault—I shouldn’t have gone outside during the Season. And even though I know, logically, it’s not my fault, it’s his, I still can’t forget—
His body straddling mine. Holding me down. His eyes, laughing—knowing what he was doing. The way he watches me even now. The way his gaze lingers on all the wrong places. The way his thumbs rub against his fingers, as if imagining my skin under his touch.
Elder touches my hand.
I flinch away.
But then I remember how Victria shied away from me.
And if I can’t speak for myself, I can at least speak for her.
I talk to the pond, because it’s easier to talk to water than to Elder’s rigid face. I start at the end, telling him about how Victria and I used the med patches to exact something of revenge on Luthor. I tell him that Victria’s pregnant, and explain how it wasn’t her choice. I know I shouldn’t betray her trust, but I also know that Elder, more than anyone else on the ship, needs to know the full extent of Luthor’s evil. I add my fear that Luthor did the same to the girl in the rabbit fields.
And then I tell him how Luthor has been threatening me. I try to be emotionless as I describe the way he chased me across the field, the way it excited him when I tried to escape, but my voice still cracks.
To his credit, Elder doesn’t interrupt, not once.
“It was his eyes, Elder. I could tell,” I say. “He kne
w what he was doing. He knew, and he was enjoying himself.” I think of the way he slowly licked his lips. “He still is. We’re a game to him. We’re just mice, and he’s a cat, and he loves toying with us.”
For the first time since I started speaking, I glance at Elder. There are scars in the earth, claw marks. Elder loosens his fists when he sees me staring, and two clumps of dirt fall from his hand.
“Thank you for telling me this, Amy.” His voice is so cold that he reminds me of Eldest.
I reach out to him and grab his forearm. His muscles are taut and hard.
“I’ve been so fixated on Bartie and whatever revolution he thinks he can cook up,” Elder says, “that I forgot the evil one man can do on his own.”
I try to draw Elder’s gaze to me, but his narrowed eyes are focused on the ground. “It was Luthor the other day in the Recorder Hall.” I say. “He’s the one who said he could do whatever he wanted. Maybe Bartie even got the idea from him.”
He stands. “Thank you for telling me this, Amy,” he repeats.
“Elder?”
He walks away, fists still clenched and stained brown and green from the ground.
49
ELDER
“ELDER, THERE’S—YOU NEED TO COME TO THE CITY.”
Doc’s com arrives just when I don’t need it to. I’d gone to confront Luthor as soon as Amy had told me everything he’d done. I’d never been so mad in my entire life. I can still feel the rage coursing through my blood, although it’s somewhat cooled now.
“Frex!” I shout. “All I’ve done is run across the ship from one place to another! I’m frexing tired of this!”
Doc’s silent on the wi-com a moment. “You won’t be doing that soon.”
For a moment, I think he’s talking about the planet, but no—I’ve not told him about that yet. Only Amy and the first-level Shippers know.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Elder, it’s chaos. It’s—mutiny.”
“Frex!”
“I think it’s Bartie, but—look, you’ve got to come out here.”
It takes me a while to get from the cyro level to the City, but I race as fast I can, driven by the urgency in Doc’s voice. I can tell before I’m at the City that something is very, very wrong. I hear it first—or, rather, I don’t hear it. I don’t hear the regular noises of the City, the undercurrent of sound that is always there during the day merely from the people living. Instead, muffled voices and footsteps reverberate.
That’s when I see it.
The Food Distro is at the end of the main street, and that’s where everyone’s pressing together. They’re all looking at one thing.
Fridrick, dead.
His body is plastered with so many med patches that they cling to his skin like scales. Someone’s taken a great swath of cloth, probably from a bolt in the weaving district, and hung it from the windows of the third floor of the Distro. Fridrick’s body hangs from the center, sagging the cloth down precariously, his arms and head flopped over the front.
In big bold letters painted in black across the front of the impromptu banner: Follow the leader.
“This is a message!” a voice roars. My eyes drop from the banner and the body down to the front of the Food Distro, where Bartie stands.
I realize that the people hadn’t been silent in order to observe Fridrick’s death. They had been silently waiting for Bartie to speak.
“Anyone who won’t blindly obey the leader”—he sneers the word—“will be dealt with! Have we not seen it with Stevy? As soon as he protested against Elder—dead!”
“Protested against me” is a bit of an understatement—the man beat me across the face.
“And we all know Fridrick’s protests! He was trying to save us all, keep the food stores in check—and look! Elder forced him to distribute food, and now there isn’t enough! And Fridrick’s protests”—he pauses dramatically, swooping his arm up to the body above him—“have been silenced!”
If Bartie’s trying to stir up a revolution, it’s not working that great. Although the front of the crowd cheers him on, I can’t help but smile smugly at the fact that at least two-thirds of the crowd is silent—worried, but not ready to overthrow the only government they’ve ever known.
Still, I’m not going to let him stand there and frexing lie about me.
I push my wi-com and order an all-call.
“Attention, all residents of Godspeed,” I say. The group at the front of the crowd stills. Many turn to look at me. “As you are well aware, the Eldest system has worked on this ship for countless gens. I chose to work a little differently from my predecessor. I chose to give you the ability to make choices for yourself.”
Beep, beep-beep.
“Attention, all residents of Godspeed,” Bartie’s voice says in my wi-com. My head snaps up. Bartie’s looking over the crowd, straight at me. “Elder is not the only one who can control the wi-com system. But he is right. He gave us a choice. And for that, I thank him.” He bows his head a fraction of an inch in my direction. “Because he gave you the ability to choose someone other than him.”
The crowd’s attention is entirely on Bartie now. How the frex did he break into the wi-com system? Only a few select members of the crew—me, Doc, the First Shipper—have the permissions needed to do all-calls. Bartie must have hacked into the system.
I slam my hand into my wi-com. “System override,” I order, then begin another all-call. “People of Godspeed,” I say in as loud a voice as I can. “Calm down. This is not the time for mutiny and dissent. This morning, I discovered we are much closer to Centauri-Earth than we ever thought. We will begin planet-landing—soon. Very soon. You only have to—”
“LIES!” Bartie roars, not through his wi-com, but from his perch at the Food Distro. His face is twisted, enraged, and the word expels from him like a rock thrown into the crowd.
“It’s not a lie,” I insist, my voice crackling over the wi-com. “Please, everyone, calm down. The mission—”
Beep, beep-beep.
“Frex the mission!” Bartie roars into the wi-com all-call system. “This is just one more way that Elder wants to manipulate you! Look around you, friends! This—this—is all we have! Godspeed is our home, there’s no point in trying to reach Centauri-Earth anymore! There is only this—and freedom!”
“I gave you freedom!” I shout, then remember to use my wi-com. Before I can, though, Bartie overrides me.
“He may say he’s given you freedom, but think about how much he still controls. He makes all the decisions. He controls who eats, and how much. He controls who gets what meds—and he is the one who let the poison Phydus back on this ship. That was his decision, his choice, and you paid for it.”
I remember that day I found him in the Recorder Hall. Technical Instruction on Communication Systems. And a history of the French Revolution. He was probably the one who hacked into the floppy system—but I wonder, if I had handled things differently, would his rebellion have stopped there rather than escalating into a mob gathered around Fridrick’s dead body?
“What about the food?” someone calls from near the back.
Bartie pushes back the doors of the Food Distro. “Take what you can,” he shouts. “There’s little left.”
And that does it.
The people stampede into the Food Distro. The windows in the front are smashed open and people start running through them. The mob swarms forward in a surge so fast that Bartie has to dive out of the way. People fight their way out of the building, rolling barrels or hefting heavy sacks of food on their backs. Others start fighting them, ripping open the sacks and brawling over the contents. In the rush, Fridrick’s body flops out of its tenuous hold on the banner, crashing into the ground. The mob swells back, then washes over where he landed, ignoring the body in the rush for food.
Fighting breaks out. It starts out as shoving as people wrestle their way to the front of the crowd, closer to the food stores. Shoves turn into punches,
punches turn into brawls. Food is forgotten as two men turn on each other. The larger man punches the smaller one in the mouth, and an arc of blood sprays out over the crowd. The smaller man’s friends leap into the fight, and soon there are so many punching and kicking and shouting that I can’t even find the original two fighters amid the fists and blood, the sound of flesh hitting flesh.
I’ve seen the chaos of Sol-Earth from vids and pics on the floppy network. But this is different. I’m in it here.
A woman shouts, “Get out of the frexing way!” as a barrel of milk rolls down the street. She chases after it, screaming at anyone who gets too close to it.
“The Greenhouses!” a man roars, leading a group of twenty or so off the main road toward the produce section. Shite. They’re going to kill every crop we have.
I try to do another all-call. No one even notices.
A man shoves a woman out of his way; the woman crashes to the ground. Another man leaps to her defense, slamming his fist into the first man. Before I can even respond, two more men enter the fray. The woman scrambles out of the way as the fight grows. The bag of produce the man had been carrying crashes to the ground, spilling its contents—tomatoes and peppers—out onto the street. Some of the others pick up the smashed vegetables and start hurtling them at the fighters. The circle of fighting grows and grows.
And then one of them turns to me. I had lingered at the back of the crowd, away from the surging masses, when I should have run away.
“It’s Elder!” he roars. “Get him!”
They turn as one, a multi-headed monster ready to strike.
“Fire!” someone screams. A trail of smoke rises through the windows, snaking out around the Follow the leader sign.
In the distraction, I run for it. As I turn down a side street, I press my wi-com.
“Amy,” I say as soon as she answers. “Get to your room. Lock your door.” I disconnect before she has a chance to respond.
