The Ark

by Laura Liddell Nolen

  Adam stood, frozen, in the center of the room. His hands were raised.

  “What’s the hold-up?” I asked.

  “Funny you should ask,” he said, through gritted teeth.

  The answer came from a robotic voice located somewhere in the room. “I-repeat:” it said, sounding far more metallic than human. “State-your-name-and-credentials-for-further-access. Bioscan-in-progress.”

  “Oh, that’s going to be a problem,” I breathed. Isaiah’s team hadn’t mentioned anything about more security, but that shouldn’t have surprised me. If they’d been able to get inside the room, he wouldn’t have needed me.

  “Identification-not-recognized. You-are-under-arrest. If-you-attempt-to-leave-or-make-any-other-movement-I-shoot-to-kill.”

  That was when I noticed the jointed white pipe protruding from the wall panel above the computer screen. It reminded me instantly of a creepy robot arm, but instead of fingers at the end of its thin hand, it had small, straight barrels, all trained on us.

  I spoke without moving any part of me, including my lips. “Let me guess. A gun? Five guns? Does anyone still pretend those are illegal here?”

  “No, not a gun,” Adam muttered back, barely intelligible. “Worse. It’s a laser.”

  I didn’t see how lasers were worse, but whatever. It wasn’t good, anyway. “So, if we move, it shoots us?”

  “Pretty much. See the panel in the middle of its palm? That’s a motion sensor. We have to hold still until they disarm it.”

  I resisted the urge to bite my lip while I wracked my brain for a viable plan. “They?”

  “The guards.” He swallowed. “We’re going to jail. I mean, unless you want to die a fairly painful death.”

  “Pass.” I was still standing in the doorframe, out of habit, so that it had not been able to shut yet.

  “Jail, then.” Adam’s voice cracked, betraying his adolescence.

  “Pass on that, too. Now, don’t move.” Without another thought, I threw myself out of the room. The laser fired almost at the first twitch of muscle, nicking my leg. I landed on the floor in the hallway, one fist around the edge of the door. If I let go, the door would close, and I’d never get back in.

  “What are you doing?! You can’t leave me here!” Adam’s pitch crept higher and higher.

  My leg was numb where the laser had hit it, but a second later, the pain began. A white-hot jaw clenched onto my thigh and refused to let go. With my free hand, I yanked the bag of chips from my pack and ripped them open. The pain was unbearable. “Calm down,” I growled at Adam.

  But Adam was too young, too scared of being shot. Worst of all, he was inexperienced. “Don’t leave me!” he whined. “Please.”

  This was why I really needed to work alone. “Seriously, shut up. The door is still open.” I dumped the chips onto the floor of the hall and turned the Mylar bag inside out. It was silver, and shiny enough that I saw the rough outline of my facial features in its surface.

  It was reflective.

  Adam’s panic crescendoed. “I’ll tell! I’ll tell them everything if you leave me here!”

  I blocked him from my mind along with the pain in my leg and took a long, slow breath. Working as fast as possible, I pulled my old black shirt out of my pack and twisted it around my hand, which I then slid into the inside-out bag of chips, shirt and all.

  This really was an awful plan. But it was all I had at the moment, and the guards would be there within a minute. “Just a friendly reminder that the laser will kill you if you move, Grasshopper. So stay. Still.”

  I bit down hard on my gum and leaped into the room, pointing my covered hand at the laser. All five fingers fired, hitting the silvery bag ten or fifteen times. My hand in the bag felt some heat, but most of the deadly energy from the laser was deflected onto the walls on either side of us.

  My weeks in the Remnant had not dulled my ability to move as fast as I wanted. The adrenaline pulled the sting from my thigh, and I crossed the room in a flash. A second later, I had the bag over the creepy laser hand, silver side in.

  I secured it to the thin white wrist with a wad of gum. Inside the bag, the white hand jerked around, firing repeatedly, but the gum held. For now. The deadly shots were reduced to nothing more than a reedy, high-pitched twiptwiptw‌iptwiptwip.

  I turned to Adam with a smile. “Okay, you’re up. Start hacking. Hack like the wind.”

  To his credit, he snapped himself together and slid into the chair. He clicked the key pass into the side of the screen, popped his knuckles over the keyboard, and got to work.

  “Technically, this isn’t hacking,” he said. “I’m sitting at the actual source; no more break-in necessary.”

  “I wouldn’t get too smart with me, if I were you. Not after what just happened.”

  “That was pretty cool.” His fingers flew across the keypad.

  “I’m talking about what you just said, Adam.”

  There was a long, awkward pause, but his hands never stopped working, and his eyes didn’t leave the screen. “I didn’t mean it,” he said at last. “I was scared.”

  “We’ll talk about it later.” Above my head, the Mylar bag crinkled furiously as the laser hand fired impotently. “The guards should be here any time now. They have a hundred twenty second response time for this room, right?”

  “Okay, first, yes. I am going as fast as I can. Second, you’re not helping. Third, it’s the most important program on the entire Ark. It may take a minute, you know?”

  I cocked my head to study his face. “Most important?”

  “Done.”

  “What?”

  “I’m done. I got it.” He popped a tiny slice of metal from the side of the computer and tucked it into the strap of the black leather band on his wrist. I had to be impressed with his speed.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t fast enough.

  The sound of heavy fists pounding the door made me jump nearly out of my skin. “You!” The accompanying voice was equally heavy, and easily as angry as the fists. “You’re under arrest! Come out with your hands up!”

  “Blast,” I muttered, hopping toward the door. It had no window, so I couldn’t see how many guardians we were up against, and I couldn’t tell how much progress they’d made against my little stunt with the gum wrapper. “That is not ideal.”

  I paced in a quick circle, then put my ear to the door. The voices were muffled, but fairly worked up. Whoever was on the other side of that door was not planning a friendly welcome party. “You got any ideas?”

  “Just one,” said Adam. “Move to the side of the door and hold still.”

  I turned back just in time to see Adam reach for the bag over the robot hand.

  “No!” I shouted, understanding his plan. “Adam, STOP! They’ll die!”

  His calmness froze my blood. “People die in a war,” he said grimly. “Don’t move, starting now.” He ripped down the bag, exposing the deadly, thin barrels.

  The white fingers clicked and popped, as though attempting to realign their gears, and then were still.

  We were still, too.

  I was frozen, my hands still out toward Adam, fingers splayed in a universal sign for stop, a horrified look on my face.

  Adam’s eyes were locked on mine. His face held a mix of determination tinged with fear. And… anger?

  Maybe we had more in common than I realized.

  Outside the door, the guards continued to pound away, oblivious to the fate that awaited them once they opened the door.

  “Don’t come in!” I shouted. My eyes were wide enough to feel dry, and I tried not to blink. “The laser is armed! Stay away from the door!”

  They either didn’t hear me, or, more likely, didn’t understand. A moment later, the door popped. I screamed motionlessly as it sucked open.

  Three guardians entered the room. The robot hand began firing.

  Three guardians fell.

  Everything was suddenly silent.

  My mouth was still open, but my
scream dissipated into a cold, pale cloud inside my skull.

  Adam flipped the bag easily back over the hand, displaying a deftness I hadn’t known he was capable of. The hand began firing again, a useless series of twips and clicks against the Mylar.

  Adam crossed the room, stepping over the body of a guardian on his way to the door. I followed him, very like a robot myself, willing my mouth to shut and my brain to reboot.

  My stomach fell with every step as we descended into the heavy part of the ship. The wound on my leg didn’t appear deep, but the laser had effectively cauterized it, so it was hard to tell. The pain made me sick.

  Or maybe it was the look on the face of the guardian who died nearest me.

  Isaiah had lied. This was absolutely a war, and we’d fired the first shots.

  Ise would say that they fired first, when they kept stacking the deck against us. We were only fighting for what was right.

  Were we right? I thought there was a chance that we were, and that it might be a war I could believe in. Maybe this was my fight, too.

  My thoughts were a fast-swirling haze. I needed to see the medic. I hadn’t finished digging the potatoes this morning. I shook my head, aware that my breath was coming hard, and tightened my grip on the rail. Those guardians—two men and a woman—were dead, and we were to blame. But we’d gotten the lighting algorithm. I hadn’t let anyone down.

  I was still the best.

  Kip would know it was me if they announced the bit about the gum wrapper on the news.

  Wait, not Kip.

  Not Kip.

  I reached another landing, and another, and I finally started grabbing the rail at each landing as far below me as I could reach, and just letting my body swing around that anchor and onto the next flight of steps. I needed time, space. I hoped my leg was not infected. The wound had already sealed. Everything was so heavy.

  Something else was making me sick. And it wasn’t the pain in my leg, or even the look on the face of the guardian. It certainly wasn’t Kip. I needed to clear my mind, but my gum was all the way back at the entrance to Mission Control, along with my pack. Something slippery was snaking its way through the nimbus cloud in my brain, leeching away my body’s life support…

  “Adam.”

  He turned, and when he saw me, his expression morphed into one of shock and concern. “Okay, okay, hang in there. We’re almost there.” He looped a skinny arm under my shoulders and slumped us toward the door. “See? No more stairs. Man, you look rough.”

  “Adam.” I closed my eyes and let him guide me.

  “Hey, that’s my name. Don’t wear it out. Come on, come on.” His face was impossibly young as he pulled me past the cargo bins. They went on forever. How had we ever made it through so many bins? Adam kept up a constant, quiet chatter in my ear as we hobbled along our crooked way, but he didn’t need to worry. I wasn’t faint. I was sick.

  After twelve eternities passed, we reached the last bin. I slammed myself into the far wall, grateful for its stability. But that was a lie, too, because nothing was stable. We were spinning and spinning. We’d only ever been spinning on Earth, too. I swallowed a wave of nausea.

  I looked at Adam, who was busy opening the secret seal to get to the Remnant, the lighting program tucked safely away in the band at his wrist.

  “Adam.”

  “What?”

  “That program isn’t for lighting, is it.”

  He looked at me in the peculiar half-light of the cargo hold. “Oh. Of course it is.”

  “It’s the ‘most important program on the ship,’ right?”

  “People don’t want to—” he began to quote Isaiah.

  “To be in the dark. No, they don’t,” I said pointedly. We regarded each other, and his concern melted into something harder. I rubbed my face. “It’s life support, isn’t it.”

  His new expression told me everything I needed to know.

  “He’s going to do it. Isaiah plans to suspend life support on the rest of the Ark until he gets what he wants.”

  “This is a war,” he said.

  “This is the end of everything. We just have to survive until we get to Eirenea. Then we start a revolution. Give me the program.”

  “I can’t. You know I can’t do that.”

  “Adam, my brother is out there on this ship somewhere. I can’t let you take that program.”

  “With all due respect, you can’t stop me.”

  I started to lunge at him, but stopped short. He stood, one foot in the black space and one in the cargo hold. In his hand, pointed at me, was a gun.

  My gun.

  Oh, Isaiah. It is the end of everything between us.

  He motioned me forward with the barrel, his voice far less steady than his grip on the weapon. “Come on. I’m not going to hurt you. We’ll get you to a doctor.”

  I thought of West suffocating in the blackness of an Ark without life support, his body spinning through space forever. I stood testily, leaving the weight off my injured leg. “I’m not going with you. And you’re not taking that program.”

  I lunged again, forgetting that Adam had already killed that day. Forgetting that unlike me, he had found something to believe in. Something he was willing to fight for. He leveled the gun at my chest.

  He shot me.

  Twenty-four

  There was a dull pain below my collarbone where the bullet had landed. I placed the tips of my fingers on my neck, then cautiously swept them across my chest. A heavy bruise was blossoming out around the bullet.

  But the bullet hadn’t killed me. In fact, it hadn’t even penetrated the skin.

  The ship continued to spin, and I retched onto the black floor. When I was done, I looked around me, wiping my face on the sleeve of my black uniform. Adam was long gone.

  I thought back to when I’d handled the bullet in Isaiah’s room. It wasn’t as hard as steel, but it had been harder than plastic, and I’d been shot at point-blank range. By anyone’s measure, I should be very, very dead.

  I sat up.

  The bullet dropped into my lap. It hadn’t even made it through the uniform.

  I looked around, thinking. Had the Commander, or whoever owned the weapons, engineered the polymer and the uniforms? Isaiah said the molecules were stacked so that they wouldn’t damage the ship. Maybe they couldn’t damage the black fabric of the uniforms, either. It was a smart move by the Commander. Everyone on his side would be armed and fully protected from the bullets they carried. Everyone else would be helpless.

  I was sick again.

  This time, I stayed seated afterwards. I gathered my thoughts like errant wisps of steam in a thunderstorm and ran through every scenario I could think of. They were all terrifying, but the ones that scared me the most were the ones where West was in danger. And my father, too, if I were being honest. Perhaps there was something I could fight for, after all.

  I needed to get to the Remnant and stop Isaiah from using the program. I’d never catch up with Adam, especially with the head start he had going. So he would get there first, and he would warn Isaiah about me. But I had to try, so I reached for my pack. Breaking into places I wasn’t supposed to be had always been a tough habit to kick.

  My pack wasn’t there. I must have left it in Mission Control. Either I was slipping, or a room full of lasers was bad for my concentration.

  Wait. Adam couldn’t warn Isaiah about me. He thought I was dead. He was nothing if not a good soldier, so he’d absolutely tell Isaiah what happened. He’d explain that I had tried to stop him, to recover the program, and that he’d shot me. Isaiah’s suspicion that I couldn’t be trusted to carry out the mission if I knew what was really going on would be confirmed.

  Even if I could break through the seal, my chances of success were slim. I still hated the Commander, but I wasn’t sure whose side I was on. Maybe there was another way to stop Isaiah. I couldn’t go back to the Remnant. Not yet.

  And once I carried out my new plan, I could never go back. />
  I was going to warn the Ark.

  The interminable length of the cargo hold gave me plenty of time to think. It didn’t do any good. I didn’t exactly have access to hordes of high-ranking officers. Heck, most of them would probably kill me on the spot. Which left precisely one option. Eren.

  By the time I got to the Guardian Level, I still hadn’t come up with a better plan. It was probably too much to hope he’d be happy to see me, but I pushed that thought from my mind. I had no future with Eren, because I had no future at all. I was about to burn my last bridge. Central Command wanted me dead, and I was well on my way to betraying the Remnant, as well.

  A cacophony of warning bells tolled in my mind as I strolled down the carpeted floor as casually as possible, considering the searing pain in my chest and thigh. I ignored them. My pulse beat faster and faster, but I kept my pace the same. I wasn’t trying to run anymore. There was no escape at the end of this tunnel.

  Eren’s door was open. You’d think they’d have things a bit more secure, what with a dangerous fugitive on the loose. I walked right in. Eren was bent over a screen at his desk, giving me a generous view of his bright yellow hair and full shoulders. My throat tightened. Some bridges are harder to burn than others. I gave a little cough.

  Eren stood up at his thin yellow desk, his eyes wide, looking for all the world as though he had no idea what to make of me. It was an uncomfortably familiar expression, albeit a new one, coming from him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I didn’t know what I’d wanted him to say until disappointment bit through me. I guess I’d used up my last warm greeting in the holding cell. I told myself that it didn’t matter what he thought about me, or even what I thought about him. That wasn’t why I’d come.

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s great to see you too, Ambassador.”

  A muscle worked its way through his jaw. “Magda. Tell me you didn’t come back for me.”