The Ark

by Laura Liddell Nolen

  Not that anyone around me had an issue with that. I was surrounded by the youngest, healthiest group of people I had ever seen. Except for the part where they radiated blue, everyone was clean-cut, too, as though they were fresh out of a family photo session.

  My thoughts were broken by the same blue-uniformed man. His voice had that practiced, pleasant tone calculated to position him as the voice of reason to everyone else within earshot. “Sir. Please make your way to a ladder. We’re on a schedule.” A couple heads turned.

  There was no response.

  “Sir. I’ll have to ask you to find a line. As stated in your pre-boarding materials, counselors will be available once we’re on board the Ark, but hesitation at the launch site is discouraged.”

  Again, there was no response. Several more people turned to watch the scene unfold. I couldn’t afford to stand out, so I ignored it.

  The uniformed man cleared his throat. “If you’re having second thoughts—”

  The “Sir” in question finally spoke. “I am not. I will board in due time. I’m waiting for someone.”

  My chest squeezed so suddenly that I felt faint. There was only one man in the world who could silence an armed guard so cleanly.

  My mouth flapped open as I turned. “Dad.”

  “Charlotte.” In three efficient strides, he stood beside me in line. I reached out to hug him, and his arm stretched around my shoulders. I felt warmer than I had all day.

  He had been waiting for me. I smiled up at him. He met my eye, then guided me forward in line.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said.

  He didn’t respond. Instead, he squeezed my shoulder again. I beamed.

  “Where’s Mom? And West?”

  My father cleared his throat. “Your brother has already boarded.”

  “Oh, right.” They’d probably gotten here hours ago, but Dad had insisted on waiting for me at the bottom of the ladders so that we could all sit together. It was the reunion I’d dreamed about for years. We finally had a fresh start.

  “Thanks for waiting for me, Dad. It… it means a lot.”

  “Your mother insisted.”

  I paused. Of course, he’d still have reservations about me. It had been a long time since I’d done anything worthy of his approval. He couldn’t have known—truly known—that I had changed. But now, I had the rest of our lives to show him. I sighed happily.

  The line was surprisingly fast, considering it depended on people scaling a totally vertical ladder, and by the time I found my tongue again, I was nearly at the front.

  “I want you to know that I’m different. I won’t screw this up.” My words were urgent, but stilted. I told myself that it didn’t matter. We’d be together, and he’d see. He’d understand, eventually, and we would be a family again.

  He looked pained, but that was to be expected, too. He waved me in front of him, and I gripped the ladder. When I was about four feet in the air, I turned back. “Look, Dad. I know what it must have cost you to find an extra starpass, and I’ll never take it for granted. I won’t—”

  “No. You don’t.”

  His tone extinguished my grin. “I don’t… what?”

  “You don’t know what it cost. There is no such thing as an extra OPT pass, Char.”

  He’d never, ever called me that before, and it stung. I looked at him, really looked, for the first time. When I took in his face, something sharp lodged itself in my heart, and I felt the world slipping away. The man in the blue uniform told me to keep climbing, but he was a billion miles away, in a different world.

  A world where my mother had boarded the OPT.

  My mouth opened, then shut. “Mom,” I whispered. “Where is Mom.” It was a statement, not a question. It was a dare. He had to contradict me, to tell me that she hadn’t given me her starpass. Then I saw that he hadn’t mounted the ladder after me. Instead, the way down was blocked by the next person in line.

  “She didn’t tell me until I had gotten through the line. I had to tell her goodbye across a line of assault rifles. She made me promise to go with West. And I went.” He made a sound like a cough, and became smaller than I’d ever seen him before. “I went.”

  To my horror, he began to back away.

  “Dad, wait.”

  “For years, I never let myself think of you, except as a little girl. And you were. My little Charlotte.” He laughed, a tight laugh, choked by grief and anger. “I’m sorry, Char… Charlotte. I can’t know you anymore.” He turned abruptly and sprinted into the crowd.

  The guard swung into my field of vision. “Miss, you must climb. You’re delaying the boarding pro—”

  “Wait! Dad—” A pair of hands shoved me another rung up on the ladder, and I looked down in surprise. When I looked back up, redoubling my grip on the rung, I couldn’t find him. “Let me down! Move off!” But the person behind me refused to leave the ladder. Even inside the launch site, the fear of death lingered over the crowd, just below the surface.

  So I jumped. It wasn’t far to the ground—maybe six feet or so—but the impact was meteoric. My knees connected to the asphalt, and a sharp groan pressed out from my lungs. I stood and breathed, then began to scream.

  “DAD! DAAD!” Over and over, like a sheep stuck in a fence. Around me, the crowd froze.

  I know he heard me. But I never found him again, and he never came back.

  Ten

  “I must ask you to stand.” The blue-clad guard wrenched my upper arm, and I winced. Somehow, I also stopped screaming.

  “Please start climbing, miss,” he said. “The line is empty.”

  No way. There was no way I could board the OPT, now that I knew my mother was out there. I glanced up the ladder. The last person was about halfway up. “I can’t,” I said firmly. “I have to go back. Could you show me how to get back to the gate?”

  We locked eyes, and a flicker of understanding passed across his face. “Come with me,” he said.

  There was nothing for me up there, anyway. My own father didn’t want to know me anymore. But I still had a few hours before the meteor hit. I would find my mother. I would tell her, once and for all, that I loved her. I’d find someone in the crowd to give the pass to. Someone worthy of living. The woman with the baby.

  I turned in the direction the guard had indicated and lifted my chin. I would tell my mom that we had saved two lives.

  I never saw the needle, but I felt it a moment later. There was a sharp pinch at my back, just below my shoulder blade. My legs buckled, and I tried looking back at the guard, but my neck was suddenly unable to support my head, and the concrete swung up to meet my face.

  I landed roughly against a rock-solid forearm, and the ground pulled away before I hit it. “I’m sorry, miss. Boarding is compulsory for everyone who clears the screening.”

  The guard swung me around before lifting me like a doll, and my head lolled backward. “No pain, no effect on the mind. It wears off fast.” He seemed like he was trying to sell me on whatever he’d done to me, but there was a note of disappointment there, too, like he wouldn’t have minded causing pain.

  Either way, he was right. My legs twitched a moment later, and I lifted my head just as we passed through a metal doorway marked “OPT Personnel ONLY.” A moment later, I began to struggle.

  And then I stopped. The guard was easily twice my size, but he was ten times as strong, and the effects of the drug were steadily increasing. I felt detached from reality, like I was trying to view my surroundings through a suffocating film of smoke and plastic. Wherever he was taking me, I couldn’t do anything about it until we got there.

  I didn’t have long to wait. He stepped onto a thin metal platform and hit a button with his knee. We pressed upward, toward the loading platform, and arrived well ahead of the people still climbing the ladder.

  Up close, I understood that the core of the Transport was the rocket, and the wings contained the rows of passenger seats, twenty rows per wing, stacked theatre-style and all facing
the same direction. There were ten wings sticking out of the core like the spokes of a wagon wheel.

  Still holding me in his arms, the guard stalked onto the nearest wing and deposited me into a shiny black leather seat with a horn sticking up in the middle. He slipped my bag off my shoulder—I’d forgotten it was even there—and dumped it into a plastic bin underneath me. Then he pulled the restraint over my shoulders. It was heavy, and it attached to the horn between my legs. When the lock clicked into place, I was completely trapped, but the drug he’d given me stopped me from caring. He barely had time to mutter an insincere “Have a nice flight” before disappearing.

  It occurred to me that you wouldn’t have to be much larger than I was before you no longer fit in the seat. But again, that didn’t seem to be an issue for any of my fellow passengers, who hopped into their chairs as though they’d been doing this all their lives.

  The seats were right up against each other, but the restraints were such that no one could touch anyone else. Some of the passengers were making small talk, but my tongue seemed thick in my mouth, and I didn’t try to chat. The back wall of the wing was a black panel, but in front of me was a wall of thick, clear plastic. I couldn’t see the crowd below me, but I looked out into the darkness and imagined that, from this height, I’d have a view of several miles.

  The robotic female voice sounded again. “The time is two a.m. Takeoff will begin in four hours. Passengers are encouraged to rest quietly.”

  They wanted us to sleep? Really? I was about to blast into outer space, and, oh, right, the world was ending, but sure. A catnap could happen.

  I was only dimly aware of the passage of time, and only because the announcement seemed to ring out more and more frequently. If I’d been able to panic, I would have. But instead, I floated through my final moments on Earth in a sticky, blurry haze.

  At five fifty, I felt a surge of panic, as though I were a prisoner in someone else’s body. I squeezed my hands into fists, then released them, over and over. My skin felt tingly, and I wondered whether it was from the UV light-bath, or if there was something seriously wrong with me. And was it my imagination, or was it hard to breathe?

  Just as I calmed down enough to breathe without conscious effort, my seat swung out without warning, so that my legs came into view in front of the window, and I was lying on my back. My nerves returned, forcing me to start from scratch.

  I wasn’t alone. Somewhere nearby, a group of kids cried out together, and a man chanted a prayer under his breath. On the far end of the wing, someone sang a soft hymn.

  The rumbling began with the earliest rays of Earth’s final sunrise.

  It started in a place deep below us, and swelled up to the wings. My seat began to vibrate violently, but it felt like the rumbling was inside my chest, as though I might come apart from the inside.

  I had no control over anything, not even my own body. My terror forced its way through the druggy fog and into my brain, and I willed myself not to pass out.

  Then came the pressure. Slowly, ounce by ounce, my body was being compressed into the seat behind me. The noise was overwhelming. We were taking off.

  The force that pushed me down continued for an eternity.

  And then, more quickly than it had begun, it stopped. There was still a pull, but it gradually shifted us toward the window, instead of back into our seats.

  The terrible rumbling was replaced by a slow, swinging sensation. We had broken through the atmosphere. We were in space. A cheer broke out among the passengers, but I did not join in. Our seats shifted back to their original positions, so that I had a clear view of the window, and Earth.

  “It’s the orbit,” said the woman next to me.

  “Sorry?”

  “One last view of the whole thing, to gain momentum. Then we slingshot into space.” She seemed to be speaking more for her own benefit than mine. Her eyes never left the window.

  “Out of the frying pan,” I mumbled, and she gave me a strange look before turning pointedly away.

  Conversation broke out around us, this time in earnest. I got the feeling that, having come through the takeoff together, people felt bonded to each other.

  I wasn’t much for bonding, so I kept my mouth shut.

  Things continued like that for a few more hours, until the drugs and adrenaline began to burn off, and I felt the first tugs of sleep behind my eyes. Still, I could not rest. The Pinball would strike any minute now, and I would not waste a moment of my last chance to gaze at Earth. From this distance, the world was a tiny, helpless thing, like a child’s toy.

  The meteor struck at ten, as predicted.

  It was a bright light against the small planet. At the moment of impact, time stopped. We leaned forward into our restraints, taking in a view we could not yet process. The Pinball struck Africa directly. The mighty continent split apart, creating instant shockwaves that coursed over the surface of the Earth. Australia was underwater within moments, along with all of Western Europe. Near the poles, the remaining clouds ripped apart, then evaporated as the atmosphere shattered.

  Earth no longer existed.

  Instead, for a brief window, there were only pieces of the Earth That Was. Without centralized gravity, the moon would be free of its orbit and would now circle the sun alone, accompanied by the shards of the broken planet.

  My mother no longer existed, either. This thought was as catastrophic as any other. Maybe worse.

  The rumbling that shook my body was not the result of the transport’s rockets. As gravity decentralized, we were flung into deep space, out of view of our home planet forever. For a length of time, I was conscious of nothing. At some point, I began to hear the screams of those around me, and my thoughts returned.

  The wing was filled with the cries of the insensible. The screaming filled the cabin, and my head, until I pressed my hands to my ears. What I heard was not grief. It was not sorrow. The enormity of what had happened blacked out the senses. We were like animals.

  Then there was a sharp hissing noise. For an instant, I wondered whether the wing had sprung a leak, and we were all going to die in space, along with the rest of our species. But then I tasted a sudden sweetness in the air, and I knew that we were being gassed. And I realized that I longed for sleep, or death, and that my wish had been granted as soon as it formed in my mind.

  I don’t know how long I slept. When I awoke, we had already docked with the Ark. I was numb. I stood; I took my things; I exited the wing. I did not wonder at the existence of gravity because that would require me to deal with reality: I was in space. I would never return to Earth.

  There was no Earth. The reality hit me again and again, but never seemed to solidify in my mind. It slipped past me and all around me, unseeable, haunting my periphery, seeking out soft, unprotected places to land its blows.

  Meanwhile, here, over two hundred thousand miles away, our OPT had found the Ark. We were being herded down the core of the transport and toward a massive airlock at its center, where we waited for the Ark to clear us for entry, but I could only gasp for air and grope for a wall. Uniformed officials exchanged a knowing look, and someone came to press me forward, toward the Ark’s entrance.

  I was given a shot in my arm and a cup of water; I accepted both without question. The faintest of warnings rang in the back of my mind, but I was too numb to heed it.

  Instead, I watched as the doors of the airlock sucked apart. I worked my jaw open and closed until my ears were pressurized.

  The alarm in my mind rang again when we crowded through the lock. It was a silent bell, ringing only for me. It was the part of me that knew when I was in danger, that kept me on my game when I needed it the most. And it was definitely ringing now.

  The lush robotic voice floated out over the loudspeaker. “Welcome to the North American Ark. Citizens are encouraged to form an orderly line to pass through the final phase of immigration. An officer of the Ark will escort you to your new home shortly.” After a pause, the message be
gan again. “Welcome to the North—”

  That’s when I noticed the row of blue-clad officers spread out along the wall in front of us. We must have looked confused, because they wore identical looks of patient contentment. “Let’s get started with you!” A particularly cheerful woman stepped away from the wall and touched my arm. “I’ll just scan your pass, and that will tell us what level and which room you’ll be living in. Then we’ll be on our way!” I was still formulating a response when she held up her screen, as if to show it to me, then swung it down to wave it over my pass, which was still in my hand.

  Immediately, my mother’s face appeared on the screen. My hair, my nose. My mouth, when I wasn’t smirking.

  West’s eyes.

  The officer’s smile widened. “Dr. Turner. Welcome on board. We’re so honored to have you.”

  Hearing my mother’s name was like expecting that first gasp of air when you’ve been underwater, but instead, you breathe too soon, before you’ve surfaced. My lungs burned.

  The attendant didn’t notice. “Let’s see. There’s a note here that your husband and son have already checked into your new apartment. I’m afraid they couldn’t wait for you. We’re supposed to clear everyone out of the docking bay as soon as possible. This way.”

  I attempted to return her smile, but my mouth was frozen. I couldn’t take my eyes off the image of my mother on the screen, and when I did, I looked around for her, stupidly. Breath, pain. Some remote part of my mind was working out whether it was worse to float through space, gasping for air, or to drown.

  “Now, I just need to check your vitals.” She slid a monitor ring over my finger and turned back to the screen. “Well! You’re as strong as an ox! You have the health energy of a woman half your age.”

  As she said this, her smile faltered, and the alarm in my head grew to a full-blown siren. I ignored it. It couldn’t fix the pain in my lungs. Surely it would be easier to drown. Water is more peaceful than nothingness.