Eren made a commendable effort to catch his breath. “Here, let me help you,” he said, reaching for my arm again.
I brought the stunner toward his face and pulled the trigger. The electricity snapped off the end. I tried not to take too much satisfaction in the shocked look on his face. I may not have hated him anymore, but I was definitely still sore about his deceiving me. That might have been the torture, though. It was hard to say.
“I’m going alone, Eren. Don’t follow me.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me right now. Did you miss the part where I just broke you out of this cell?”
“We can’t be together. And anyway, I can’t hide you. You’re the Commander’s son. He’d never stop until he finds us.”
“You don’t know my father. He’s never going to stop anyway.”
“Yeah, but he’d never hurt you. Not really.” The Commander was capable of plenty, but I was pretty sure he’d never seriously harm his own son. “You’re safer with him. No one’s ever safe with me.”
I snapped the stunner one last time, and Eren’s expression changed. He looked hurt, angry. He looked like he understood that this was goodbye.
I turned and ran.
Twenty
Footsteps pelted along the hall behind me. I was certainly outnumbered. Just when I thought my lungs would tap out, I found the door to the stairwell. I wanted to make it to the cargo hold. My plan was far from perfect. There was no way out of the hold, for example, and it would be easy enough for the guards to search every bin systematically. But that would take time. The hold was huge, and somewhat familiar, and there were plenty of places I could hide.
Oh, right…and there was an unsecured cache of weapons roughly the size of a military takeover.
At least I could go down with a proper fight. If they arrested me in the weapons bin, they’d pin its existence on me. But by then it would be impossible to hide the weapons. Everyone would hear about them.
I slid the door open and gently guided it back into place behind me. With any luck, the guards wouldn’t catch where I’d gone. Then I started running, breathing harder than usual because of the extra gravitational force.
I wove indiscriminately among the bins, many as tall as a house, abandoning any attempt to remain quiet. I’d worry about stealth when the guards entered the hold. Right now, I had to worry about distance. The bin with the weapons was farthest from the door.
The corners of bins brushed past in bursts of color—red, red, yellow, blue—until I nearly tripped over a pair of figures standing in the near-darkness. I stepped back to size them up. They were unarmed, without even so much as a stunner, and more importantly, they weren’t wearing uniforms.
We locked eyes. A boy, maybe twelve years old, stared back at me. Beside him, a younger girl gaped openly, and my thoughts began to race. They had no uniforms. They must be stowaways.
Something deep in my soul shook itself awake and assumed a shaky perch in my heart.
Maybe they weren’t alone. Maybe, just maybe, there were more of them. Outlaws, like me. Maybe they could hide me.
I lacked the courage to finish the thought, but it persisted, folding and unfolding its wings… Maybe I could belong with them.
But my hope served no purpose, so I ignored it even as it hopped up and down, testing the branch that held it.
I forced myself back into escape mode. “You guys better run. I think the guards are coming.” They exchanged a glance. The girl’s eyes widened for an instant. “My bad,” I added as an afterthought. “But seriously. Run.”
They did.
It is common courtesy, when running from the law, not to follow directly behind one’s cohorts. You scatter, and the sooner, the better. Even the greenest criminal knows to split up when the chase is on. Makes you harder to catch. Gives the cops a decision to make, which might slow them down, if you’re lucky. It almost always ensures that one of you will make it out. In general, it makes things more interesting.
But all that was irrelevant now. I was far from green, and I never broke the code without a good reason. I followed them, flush with hope, and flew through the aisles in their wake.
As it turned out, I didn’t follow closely enough. When we’d made our way nearly to the edge of the hold, the pair rounded a corner and disappeared into the wall. Or into a door in the wall, I supposed. It slid shut behind them, leaving me in silence and darkness. I stopped running, and my fledgling hope stopped flying.
“Wait!” I banged on the wall where I guessed the door to be, then thought better of it, due to the noise. “Please! Let me in!”
There was a beat, and I pictured a brief argument while they decided whether to trust me.
The door clicked, then slid open a crack. I heard a grunt and realized it had opened manually. Someone must have disabled the power in this part of the wall.
“State your name,” said the boy.
My name wasn’t Magda. It couldn’t be. Like countless other aliases before her, Magda had died in a holding cell. She died with my mother’s picture, with my mother’s name on her lips. Magda was a lie. Magda was a liar.
The boy’s voice was more urgent. “Come on. Your name.”
Magda died on Earth. Magda died in space, in Eren’s arms.
Eren was a liar, too.
If there were more of them, more free people on board the Ark, I didn’t want to lie anymore. “My name is Char.”
“Wrong answer.”
“What? That’s my name.”
“Your real name.”
“It’s Char. As I may have mentioned, I am being chased. Open up.”
“Wrong answer.” He took a breath. “It doesn’t suit you, you know.”
My hands went cold. “What did you say?”
But he didn’t answer again, and I thought I might go mad before the guards reached me, just to save everyone some time. I gave an exasperated sigh and started working on another plan. I wasn’t sure whether I could overpower the boy, but I was definitely stronger than the girl. Not that it mattered, if I couldn’t get the door open.
At length, the girl spoke. “We can’t open it until you tell us your name.”
I paused. Somewhere behind me, the door from the hallway opened again. More light spilled into the cargo hold in long streaks broken by the bins. “They’re coming for me,” I breathed.
“Come on,” she said, her voice stronger than mine. “You’re supposed to know this. Your name.”
The footsteps focused in our general direction. The guards must have heard me pounding on the wall. What kind of game was this? I began to panic. “I have no idea what you mean! It’s Char! Charlotte! It’s Charlotte.”
There was a moment of silence, then the door slid open.
A mismatched pair of hands pulled me into the wall, and I traded the near-dark of the cargo hold for an inky blackness so thick that I coughed, just to make sure my other senses were still working.
“They can’t hear us here,” said the boy, but his voice remained quiet nonetheless.
“Well, they definitely can’t see us,” I said.
“Amiel?”
There was a rustling of fabric. “Hang on, hang on. It’s coming.” A plastic click popped through the air, illuminating it, and the darkness pressed back several feet. “A flashlight.” Amiel smiled at me.
The boy rolled his eyes, betraying his status as her older sibling. “No kidding. It’s not like she’s blind.”
“Adam!” Amiel looked genuinely surprised by her brother’s choice of words.
He sighed. “C’mon, Ame. I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Still,” she said, pursing her lips primly. I liked her, suddenly.
I took another moment to consider the boy. Something about him put me ill at ease, like a pit of quicksand I had barely avoided walking into. My guard was up, and I didn’t know why.
He turned to face me in the light. “Do you want to carry it?” he asked. His face was so young, so innocent, that I was caught of
f-guard and quickly declined.
He shrugged. “Okay. We’re supposed to ask.”
“It’s my turn anyway,” said Amiel.
The boy nodded. Adam. His name was harder to plant in my mind than Amiel’s. He reminded me too much of West. Not in any specific way, necessarily, but his eyes followed me, widening slightly when I slid practiced hands across the nearly undetectable seam in the wall, to check that the door had sealed behind us and make sure the lock was one I could trust. I knew that look. It meant that from then on, whenever he passed this way, he’d do the same. West had been like that. Eager to watch me, to learn from me.
Until he wasn’t.
Deep down, West had never been like me. I’d always known that about him. About us. West was good and smart in all the right ways. I was smart, too, but not in the ways they gave out trophies for. He deserved better than me for a role model. For a sister. All along, I understood that, but I didn’t act on it until it was too late. And by the time I’d started pushing him away, for his own good, it had been too late. He’d discovered that fact for himself. He never saw the need to follow me again.
I shook my head, trying to free myself from that particular train of thought. One day, West and I would meet again, but as equals. I just had to find him first.
“It’s this way,” Adam was saying, but Amiel insisted on taking the lead. He smiled, helping her past him, and together, we set off into the darkness.
We trotted along the inside of the wall, me tagging several feet behind my new companions. It was an easy pace, without the urgency of pursuit. They spoke in hushed voices in spite of their apparent confidence that we were no longer being followed. After a few unsuccessful attempts at eavesdropping, I gave up and focused instead on getting my bearings. I didn’t think we’d made any turns, so I figured we were still against the wall of the cargo hold, maybe half a mile away from the hidden door, when they stopped.
The boy rounded on me suddenly. “Were you really in jail?”
“Down there? Or up here?”
“Both.”
I thought a moment before replying. “Yes. Why do you ask?”
“How’d you get out?”
It was too easy. All I’d have to do is give a knowing smile, maybe even a wink, and say something mysterious, and he’d be mine. He’d follow me anywhere.
Given his status as a stowaway, Adam almost certainly didn’t have citizenship. There was no bright future here that my influence would threaten or destroy. One instant of conspiratorial scheming could pass between us, with nothing more at stake than the breath it took to speak the words.
But I had no room in my heart for another West, and certainly no capacity for further heartbreak. So I bit back the kindness I could have extended him and offered a dismissive shrug in its place.
After a moment of silent staring, he turned from me to face what must have been another secret door. His hands pressed into the seal, and a keypad appeared. I glanced over his shoulder with interest. It was old school, with separate physical buttons, the kind they used nearly a hundred years ago. Adam made an awkward but deliberate attempt at hiding the code from me as he punched it in. We wouldn’t be planning any heists together anytime soon.
At last, he turned back to me. “This way.”
The room was warm. That’s what I noticed first. The rest of the ship was cold, like a museum. Like space. But here, you could almost picture a summer breeze. Not that that was possible. But for the briefest instant, I was nearly able to forget that there was no longer any such thing as a summer.
Next, I noticed the light. It, too, was warm. There were no open flames, of course, but somehow, the bulbs here seemed to burn more gently than the harsh glow of the cargo bin, the holding cell, and even Eren’s room.
But that’s not why I noticed them.
I noticed the lights because they burned more precisely here than in the rest of the Ark. I shrugged off the idea that a light could be discriminating in its choice of target, but there I stood, watching the scene. The people before me ranged greatly in age and race. They were dressed differently. There were some who could not walk. They could not have been more firmly or obviously placed outside of the ideal demographic for the Ark. And as I approached them, mouth agape, they appraised me as well, and I adjusted my posture in an attempt to convey the confidence I lacked. The enormous room seemed to shift, and a path was cleared for me. People stepped back, displaying friendly smiles, and the light came to bear more intently upon its subject.
He sat on a chair in the middle of a raised platform. His posture was large and easy, and as I studied him, barely able to breathe, I came to understand that it was more of a throne than a chair.
I approached uncertainly, and he stood. The room fell silent. Despite his blindness, he had always known when I was near.
Isaiah broke into a grin. Then a beat, and he began to laugh, as though the pain and terror of the last several days had been some excellent joke between us. At last, he paused to speak.
“Char, baby. Welcome to the Remnant.”
Twenty-one
I have no memory of running toward him, of the embrace that must have happened. I was far too engaged in the series of mental acrobatics necessary to process the fact that Isaiah was here, on the Ark. Isaiah was part of the Remnant.
Isaiah was King of the Remnant.
Now, there was a title I would never get used to.
“King? Really?” I followed behind him, almost beside him, anxious to explore my new surroundings, but unable to ignore the fact that our hands kept touching, then not touching. “You didn’t want to go for Emperor?”
He laughed again, and I concentrated on relaxing my arm. I had a hard time picturing how it should hang naturally. As soon as I softened, his hand fell away from mine. Whatever we’d been back on Earth, it was never this awkward.
I took a breath and continued. “I hear it comes with a new wardrobe.”
“Ah, yes. The one people can’t see? I’ve got my excuse all worked out already.”
I gave a little laugh, grateful for the joke. . He slowed his pace, intending me to walk closer to him. I fell into step and soldiered on, convinced we would find our rhythm again. “Supreme Dictator for Life wasn’t available? Honestly, where is your ambition?”
“I didn’t much care for the retirement plan,” he said. His hand quested out toward mine again, and after a moment’s consideration, I left it unanswered.
In response, he stopped walking. I stumbled to a stop, then turned to face him. I could feel the corners of my mouth tightening. Whatever part of my brain was responsible for acting casual had clearly not recovered from the stunner.
“Char,” he began. “I suppose we should call you that. You will get used to the extra weight. I promise.”
The pull of gravity, despite being an ever-present burden down here on the cargo level, was the furthest thing from my mind. How many years must he have known about the Remnant? It wasn’t like we’d been close back on Earth, exactly. But we’d always been friends. Or so I’d thought. “You can’t just—”
“I know.” His hands brushed both my arms at once. His touch was light but deliberate. “I know. But let’s not talk about it right now.”
I stared at him. When I spoke, my tone was low and level. “What should we talk about, Ise?”
“The future! Look around you, baby. We made it. Here we are. And there’s more.” His hands slid down my arms to cover my hands. It wasn’t unwelcome. But it wasn’t friendship, either. “Char. We’re gonna get it right this time.”
Had we been wrong before? I shook my head so slowly that he didn’t see my hesitation.
“Everything is in our power, now. Schools, food, hospitals. Everything. And we can make sure we use them equally.”
I blinked. Of course. He wasn’t talking about us. He was talking about everyone else. His hands tightened, and I managed a smile. “That’s great, Isaiah. Really great.”
“I mean, now we can make sure.
No one will be left behind again. We control half a sector! Right under their noses! We’ve been taking in the stowaways, of course, but the rest of the group was already on board.”
His excitement was a hard, solid thing. I couldn’t slow it down, nor could I match it. He seemed to flit from one issue to another, bound to a thread only he could follow. “On board the Ark?”
“On board with the plan. We chose them from all over the world. They’ve known what it’s like to live like we did, Char. If that’s going to be your name. You can choose a different one, if you want. Not because you’re a fugitive. No more hiding. Because now, you are free. We’re free.”
I was cold. His hands, like the rest of the room, were warm against my skin. It wasn’t enough. “You chose them?”
“Inmates. Political prisoners. Convicts. Refugees. We chose them. And then they chose me.”
“As King,” I amended. “And when was that, exactly? How long have you known about all this? Your cage was never really locked, was it? Still, you were cutting it kinda close, if you ask me.”
He sighed. “Char, this path don’t lead nowhere. I know you can see that.”
“All I see is an old friend who had a way out, but for some reason, he decided not to take me with him.” Another thought hit me, and I jerked my hands away from his. “Is that why you came back to juvy? To recruit the Remnant?” I was awash in pain, anger, fear, and even jealousy. It was too much at once, so I grasped onto the one emotion I’d always understood best. Anger. “And what? I didn’t make the cut?”
He raised his brows, as if to say, Are you sure you want to challenge me? It was not quite a question, not quite a threat. I had never seen his anger. Not out in the open. Isaiah was always careful. Calm. Assured of the world, and his place in it. He was always in control. Of himself first, and everyone else tended to follow. I doubted he’d lost his temper once in his life.
I wasn’t afraid to change that.
I opened my mouth, intending to push further, but his hands were suddenly against my cheeks, and his face loomed in close. And then he kissed me.
The Ark Page 15
