The Ark

by Laura Liddell Nolen

  I gasped, surprised, and the kiss seemed to freeze. He did not back down, and I didn’t pull away. It was a different sort of challenge than the one I’d been expecting. It was bright, and fast, and over too soon.

  “Charlotte. Maybe you prefer I call you that? Nobody needs to know but us.” His voice was calm. Tender. I’d have to wait for another day to see Isaiah angry.

  Too soon, the frozen moment lifted, and my thoughts forced themselves on me all at once. I am safe. Finally safe. I will have friends now, and family. I will have Isaiah. I will have happiness.

  That’s what I should have been thinking.

  Instead, all I could feel was confused. Had he betrayed me? Had he betrayed his own brother? We had both lost so much, but did we even deserve a second chance? Was such a thing possible?

  And most of all: What about Eren? He had definitely betrayed me. But in his arms, I really had felt safe. But that was stupid. Eren had been loyal to the Commander all along. Not that everything between us had been false. Some parts were definitely real.

  Then again, I had never been the best judge of character.

  And underneath it all was a small, quiet voice, the one I hated myself for listening to, but ignored at my peril. It was the part of me that had named me Char and never stopped trying to win. This was the part of me that had ruined my family, that had lost my mother to the burning sky and my brother to his better judgment. The part that had almost let Meghan die alone. This voice was the only thing that had ever made me strong. It was the part of me I would never be rid of, because deep down, I knew it was my truest self. I loathed it—I loathed me—but I listened anyway. And right now, it was practically screaming.

  You can’t afford to refuse him.

  It’s not like there was another Remnant, one Isaiah didn’t control, or another life I could pick up and carry out, like an open closet full of someone else’s clothes. This was it. The rest of the Ark was closed to me, and Central Command wanted me dead. But here, I could make my own path. And Isaiah would be part of it. This was surely a good thing.

  So it surprised both of us when I pulled away.

  Isaiah stepped back instantly, releasing me from his embrace.

  My mind filled with the memory of his hand on mine as I drove down the interstate, Cassa’s gun at my neck, Kip careful not to intervene. I remembered how, in that moment, I had been drowning, and I had needed Isaiah more than air. And he had not wavered.

  I wrapped my arms around him, confused, hoping to feel him pull me toward him again. I felt no fear, and no anger, so I spoke honestly. “Isaiah. My mother was down there.”

  I didn’t finish the thought, at least out loud: And you could have saved her.

  But his response, uttered after a long moment, answered what I couldn’t ask. “Mine, too. And Abel.”

  The horror of the meteor was heavy around us, pressing us toward each other. At length, he returned the embrace, and we were finally still. My body relaxed, enveloped in the warmth and safety of my old friend.

  My mind, however, continued to race.

  Isaiah had never doubted that I would make it this far. I’d come to him in desperation, and he’d helped me. I’d thought we were helping each other, but I understood now that Isaiah had been in control the whole time. He’d always had a plan. He might have changed his course, slightly, once I’d approached him in his cell. He must have decided there was room for me in the bigger picture he was working to create. I looked up at his face, and he tilted his head so that my hair grazed his cheek. It was tender, but was it also calculated? Did he have other, bigger plans I’d yet to discover? I looked over his shoulder, wide-eyed, and it hit me.

  I didn’t know him at all.

  The next several days were a blur of new sights and sounds. Life among the Remnant was everything the rest of the Ark was not. Instead of carefully assigned quarters, we shared bunk rooms in no particular order. There was an abundance of blankets. Those who preferred to sleep alone certainly did, but most people piled themselves into heaps of three or four. After a week, I found myself doing likewise, and the cold, constant pressure of space receded slightly during the nighttime hours. Often, people slept in different places and with different groups each night, but I felt myself pulled toward a certain set: a boy and girl about my age, and a woman old enough to be our mother. We did not talk or even really touch, but we shared a large, soft mat, a pair of cotton-stuffed comforters, and an unspoken agreement not to exchange names.

  Instead of ration cards, we had a stockpile of food and a dedicated team of cooks. Everyone took what they needed. We had enough to last a year, according to Amiel. Adam wasn’t as certain. I was never sure how to ask Isaiah which sibling was closer to the truth. Something thick and quiet grew between us, and I never brought it up.

  My plan, if you could call it that, was to bide my time until I could find my family. Second to that, I’d become intrigued by the enigma that was Isaiah, and increasingly worked to understand his game. Surely he wasn’t planning for the Remnant to remain quietly hidden until we reached the new planet. It was unthinkable that the Commander didn’t realize we were here. The mystery of Ark Five, along with the cache of weapons, took a distant third seat.

  I resolved to play my hand cautiously.

  Isaiah asked a thousand questions about my time in the part of the Ark under the control of Central Command. He was warm enough toward me, but it was clear that I was never his priority. Once he was content that I’d settled in, I went days without even seeing him. Then he would appear, suddenly, wanting to know more about this or that aspect of the holograph, or the layout of the Guardian Level, or some such thing. Always, he was kind. Always, he wanted to know if I needed anything.

  Always, he was evasive. My questions to him went unanswered, and the mystery deepened.

  Not that I could blame him completely; I kept secrets of my own. I never mentioned Eren to Isaiah, for reasons I couldn’t make clear even to myself.

  Everywhere, there was work to be done. Dishes to clean, vents to maintain, laundry to wash, and, of course, toilets to scrub. I threw myself into the labor crews with my whole heart, working long days alongside chatty children, quiet teenagers, and adults who only wanted to talk about life on Earth, or not at all. I rotated often, so that I never got to know anyone too well. At night, we slept soundly, or at least I did. It was the first honest work I’d done in years.

  And the work was just the beginning. In the mornings, informal exercise groups sprung up all over the place. In the evenings, those who knew, taught, and classes for foreign languages, computer building, literature, ninjitsu, plumbing, music, lock-picking (which I carefully avoided), history, and even needlepoint cropped up in every corner. About the only thing we scheduled was the late evening entertainment: guitarists, comedy troupes, opera singers, dramatic monologues, you name it.

  On my second night, I finally heard Handel’s “Messiah” in its entirety. The choir hadn’t had sheet music, but there was a man who’d spent years as a conductor, and he’d painstakingly taught each musician the parts they performed. The result was solemn and joyful and loud, all at once, and I had to swallow several times in order to keep calm at the end. But I clapped as hard as I could and found that the swell of applause was almost as heartrending as the performance had been.

  Technicians worked around the clock to give the lighting the quality it had on Earth: sunrises bathed us in pale blue and yellow, and every evening, the dining and sleeping areas were ablaze in orange and red. Star patterns, visible only in the darkness of night, adorned the ceilings.

  There were no curfews, no assignments, and no rules. Everyone did whatever they thought best.

  I came to love the Remnant in spite of myself. It was the resurrection of everything I’d believed lost. The rest of the Ark may have salvaged Earth’s art, but the Remnant had saved the artists. The rest had libraries full of history books. We had those who had lived in the world long enough to understand them. They had the recip
es, and probably most of the food, along with most of the surviving copies of music and movies, but we had chefs, writers, actors, and thinkers. They had the politicians.

  We had the dreamers.

  The rest of the ship measured its passengers carefully. Here, among the Remnant, we cared only that you were, in fact, here. You had survived. They had survived. We were bound together by the common thread of life, and little else mattered.

  I discovered I had a knack for gardening, and increasingly spent my waking hours among the careful rows of dirt containers in the rooms that comprised our greenhouse system. One morning, I asked the caretaker, a man whose tanned, deeply lined face was accented by a shock of wild white hair, what kind of plant a potato grows on. He shook his head and took my hand, leading me to a particular row in a room coated in UV light. When we arrived in front of his chosen series of plants, he reached deep into the soil and produced a single, dirt-encrusted russet potato, which he placed in my hands without comment. He went back to the lettuces, but I stayed behind to stare in wonder. Here was food. From dirt. I turned it over in my hand for a few minutes, then carefully placed it back in the garden.

  I visited him every day after that.

  Twenty-two

  It’s totally weird to date a friend. But when that friend turns out to be King of a secret world of rebels and outcasts, maybe weird is exactly what I should have expected. Maybe I was lucky it wasn’t worse.

  Now there’s an epic friendship for you. Lucky it wasn’t worse? When had I become so cynical?

  Oh, right. Roughly seventeen years ago.

  I didn’t have to work to find the silver lining. I truly loved the Remnant. For the first time ever, I felt like I was becoming a whole person, instead of just someone’s idea of a cautionary tale.

  But underneath it all was a sense of loss. I missed my mother so much that, at times, it hurt to breathe. It wasn’t like I’d had a lot of quality time with her in recent years, so I didn’t know why it hurt as much as it did. I missed West, too.

  And Eren.

  It was several weeks before I could admit that last part.

  I didn’t deserve to miss him. We barely knew each other. And he definitely didn’t deserve any pining from me.

  But my feelings of loss were mirrored in the eyes of everyone around me. No one who was still alive—literally, no one—hadn’t experienced catastrophic pain. We were all looking for some kind of healing, for the right steps forward.

  Adding to the weirdness between Isaiah and me was our apparently mutual decision to avoid defining exactly what we were to each other. We never kissed again. As far as I knew, which wasn’t all that far, Isaiah never planned time alone with anyone else.

  My respect for him grew even as the mystery deepened. He had so many ideas and dreams for our future. “Our” meaning all of humanity, not me and him. I told him honestly that I believed in his dreams, too, and that I knew they’d come true. He tolerated no inequality among the Remnant, and, although he never spoke about it, I came to believe that he was working tirelessly to ensure its survival.

  That the Remnant had chosen the right King was indisputable in my mind. Whether I’d chosen the right boyfriend, less so.

  One night, everyone decided to learn the tango. There were more than a few people who’d danced before, and plenty of musicians. Someone gave a short lecture on the basics, the technicians lowered the light levels, and then, we danced. It was slower and weightier than I’d imagined the tango to be, possibly because of the relentless pull of heightened gravity we had come to view as normal. I knew instinctively that Isaiah would be in attendance, and that he would find me.

  Within minutes, I was in his arms. We slinked around, not taking anything too seriously, and ended up making passable small talk. Unsurprisingly, he was a better dancer than I, but I liked to think I could hold my own.

  Or, I would have, if the self-appointed instructor hadn’t kept yelling out directions. He was a small man, but his voice carried, and he had the annoying habit of punctuating random words by shouting them more loudly than the rest. The effect was highly distracting.

  “A tango only truly happens when the MUSIC has pulled you into its power. The tango will own you, but when you understand its strength, it will already be TOO LATE. You will tango. Those who dance the tango have no choice but to TANGO.

  “Step, step, lunge, and pull, now. Lunge and pull. Feel the music. She is SLOW, very SLOW. So you must be slow as well.”

  I tightened my grip on Isaiah’s hand, and he led me through the thick crowd. It goes without saying that we never bumped into anyone. That could have been because we were all so in tune with each other, or, more likely, because people were watching us, and tended to give us a bit more space. In prison, Isaiah’s merest presence had commanded attention. Here, he was King in name as well.

  But I had never been one to back down from a challenge. I threw myself into the dance, trying to match my steps to the long, wandering pull of the music without thinking too much about it.

  It was exhausting, to be honest. But fun, too.

  I made my next lunge, and Isaiah’s face drew close to mine. The instructor continued shouting. “The tango is Earth! She is loss and beauty. Sneak, be stealthy!”

  Isaiah snorted.

  I glanced at him in surprise, and caught the end of an unmistakable smile.

  “No, no, no, do not observe your partner. FEEL his presence in your heart.” The instructor, like everyone else, was watching us. I doubled my effort, but this, too, was met with criticism. “Do not think. NO THINKING.”

  Isaiah turned to the instructor and continued dancing. “This one’s always thinking, man. The day she stops thinking.”

  “That’s funny. I’d have said the same about you,” I said.

  In response, the instructor directed his considerable volume in our direction exclusively. “YOU MUST RELAX! There is no wrong in the tango! Only the MUSIC.”

  “Unless you look at your partner, apparently,” I muttered.

  Isaiah smiled. “I mean, come on, can’t you sneak any better than that? They used to say you were stealthy.” He pulled me toward him and lowered his voice even further. “Your TANGO must not be from the HEART.”

  I snorted. “Oh yeah? Where is it from, then?”

  “The legs? I don’t know, baby. The arms, I reckon.” Isaiah smiled, and I risked chastisement to steal another glance.

  “Speak for yourself. My arms are absolutely sneaky.”

  “Mine too. Don’t know about my legs, though. They do a lot of thinking.”

  “What do they think about?” I let him spin me in a slow circle. When he pulled me around, I was slightly off-balance and had to scramble to catch up. We both tripped. “Not the tango, apparently.”

  I suppressed another fit of laughter as we composed ourselves. The instructor hurried toward us. “NO! Again you are THINKING! Stalk. Stalk your partner!”

  At this, we lost it.

  Our laughter began silently, rocking us back and forth until it escaped, and we laughed out loud until we gasped for air. The instructor, clearly taken aback by our appalling indifference to the sacred TANGO, regarded us coldly for a moment before giving a small, dignified sniff and returning to the podium.

  Long moments later, still in each other’s arms, we returned to the dance.

  Our laughter was spent, and the music was slower than before. The instructor pointedly ignored us. Isaiah’s hand on mine was as steady as ever.

  We tangoed.

  The music swept over us, and together, we pressed a path through its currents.

  Soon enough, Isaiah swept me into another spin, and I emerged off-balance once again. This time, instead of scrambling to catch up, I let myself fall into a long, straight dip, supported only by his arm behind my shoulders.

  I was barely upright when we slid into the next steps, and his face came near to mine. I wanted so much, in that moment, to believe that Isaiah would always catch me. The heat of the dance had
given chase to my fears, suspicions, and most of all, my usual abundance of caution, and I leaned toward him, careless and very nearly happy.

  But Isaiah didn’t kiss me. Instead, he whispered, “Hey, little bird. We need to talk.”

  Isaiah led me to an empty room with an enormous porthole. Windows, however small, were extremely rare on board the Ark, since they compromised the integrity of the hull. But there were a precious few, and it seemed that one of them was within the half-sector controlled by the Remnant. I took my first look out at the sky since being on the OPT.

  I waited for Isaiah to speak with a growing sense of dread that had little to do with the nothingness of space. Conversations beginning with “We need to talk” never ended well, in my vast relationship experience. I knew what was coming next. At least, I thought I did.

  “I want to make something clear, to start with,” he said.

  I alternated between looking at Isaiah and looking out at the infinity of stars and blackness that surrounded us.

  He continued. “So I’m going to tell you the whole truth: I love you. But we can’t be together. Not now.”

  I stared at him in silence.

  “The day is coming when I can be with you, and there won’t be anything to stop us. But right now, it’s all wrong.”

  He waited for me to speak, but I wasn’t feeling generous enough to help carry this conversation. It was a lot to process. For one thing, I didn’t share his optimism regarding our future. How could I? Wasn’t he breaking up with me?

  For another, love? This wasn’t love. I was suddenly sure of that. Whatever Isaiah and I had, it needed some other name. But he kept waiting for me to speak, so I finally said, “Okay.”

  “I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t even expect you to wait for me. But the day is coming when we will be together. Our story doesn’t end here. So that’s that.”

  I shook my head slowly. “That’s that, then.”

  Isaiah cleared his throat. “Char, baby, I have to ask you something.”