I shake my head. “No, I don’t remember anything.”
“Ah, of course not,” Brewer says. “Then again, you were always smart enough to use people smarter than you. Where is Okadigbo? Is she still alive, or did you kill her again?”
“I haven’t killed anyone, Brewer.”
Yong’s gasping face flashes through my thoughts. The wide eyes, the shock, the terror-filled knowledge that he was as good as dead.
It was an accident….
I focus on Brewer’s words. Okadigbo, he said. That’s a name on one of the coffins in my room. A shriveled skeleton in a big, white shirt. She’s dead, yes, but I didn’t kill her. I couldn’t have. Unless I did it before someone put me in the coffin, and I can’t remember that just like I can’t remember school, or the face of my father.
I shake my head, sharp and fast. Brewer is trying to confuse me.
“Stop lying to us,” I say. “And tell me where we are!”
“No Okadigbo? Oh, well, I should have checked the husks, but there wasn’t enough time and time was all that was enough. How about your nemesis, Theresa?”
I don’t know what a nemesis is. I don’t know who Theresa is, either.
“Oh, you don’t recognize that name?” Brewer says. “Of course you wouldn’t, not at your age. But if she lived, you might know her last name—is Theresa Spingate still alive?”
I shouldn’t be surprised that he knows more of us, but I am. Surprised and furious. I won’t let anything happen to her. I’ve lost Latu and Bello. There is nothing I won’t do to protect Spingate.
“I wager that Theresa still lives,” Brewer says. “I’m surprised she didn’t tell you where you are. Perhaps she hasn’t figured it out yet—side effects of the husk are so bad-bad-bad I am not glad. Or maybe she has figured it out and chooses not to tell you. So many secrets locked away in that pretty red head.”
I can’t take it anymore. I step forward. I lean in close to the strange, floating presence that is Brewer’s disgusting face. My words come out as a brutal scream.
“Tell me where we are! Tell me or I will find you and I will cut you open. I’ll watch you die, Brewer. I will make you hurt. Do you hear me? Do you?”
The red eyes gaze back at me, so close, so real.
“You already did that,” he says quietly. “You hurt me more than you could ever know. Now you threaten me again? Some things never change, never ever never. You always were a bitch, Savage.”
I lean away so fast I stumble. Bishop’s hand on my back keeps me from falling.
The scarred monster in the Garden said the same words.
These things…they know who I am.
Brewer sighs as if he’s disappointed in me.
“Little circle girl, you are not in a building,” he says. “You are not underground. You are not underwater. You’re not under anything. And you’re not in a prison—not for you, anyway, although that’s exactly what this place is for me. Me-me-me a sad cat in a sadder tree.”
Madness bubbles from his every word. He’s insane. Insane enough to have made pyramids of human skulls? Or to have arranged severed left arms in a big pinwheel?
Enough to have impaled babies on hooks?
I try to keep my own murderous anger in check. I try so hard, but I can’t hold it all back. My words are a growl, a low, grating promise of revenge.
“Tell me what this place is, Brewer.”
“Oh, little circle girl, don’t you know it is better to show, rather than tell?”
Below, above and around us, the curved, black walls flicker and swirl, a million colors suddenly twisting and spinning. As quickly as they came, the colors fade away. Somehow, I am now looking beyond the curved walls, into a different kind of blackness: a blackness that seems to go on forever. In that blackness, I see tiny points of bright light.
Points of light, moving slowly—almost imperceptibly—upward.
I feel a fuzziness in my head; my brain is reaching, grasping, trying to beat past the blanked-out parts. And when it does, when it connects the images to words, I realize what I am looking at.
Stars.
Those points of light, those are stars.
“Little leader learns the truth,” the monster says. “Take a look behind you.”
All of us turn away from the pedestals.
I see the backs of Gaston and Aramovsky, of El Saffani. I see the ladder that brought us down, and past it, the clear, curved wall. But beyond that is something so big I can’t even comprehend it. Out in the star-speckled blackness, I see a vast, slowly rotating disc of brown and green and blue.
Another word connects, clicks into place.
I am looking at a planet.
“Space,” I say. “We’re in a spaceship.”
THIRTY-FOUR
You are wrong-wrong-wrong quite a lot, are you not?
That’s what Brewer said to me. He’s right.
We all stare at the spinning sphere out in the blackness. Below us and on our sides, the moving stars seem to spin in time with the planet, as if they are pinned to it by infinitely long invisible sticks.