Aramovsky is holding it. He’s smiling. None of this bothers him. In his mind, the way things are is the way his precious gods want things to be.
“Go back up the ladder, Em,” he says. “It’s all right. I’ll handle things from here.”
Bishop reaches out fast, tears the spear from Aramovsky’s hands. Bishop hands the spear to me.
Aramovsky doesn’t stop smiling. Perhaps Bishop isn’t the only one who wonders who would win a new vote. That’s what Aramovsky said. At the time, I thought he was saying Bishop would win.
But maybe he wasn’t thinking about Bishop at all.
Matilda speaks; her voice drowns out all thoughts of Aramovsky.
“We don’t need everyone,” she says, now calm and loving. “If you and the ones we do need put down your weapons, fulfill your obligations, then the ones we don’t need will be allowed to live.”
She wants me to agree to this?
“The ones you don’t need get to live,” I echo. “Which means the ones you do need…die?”
“None of you will die,” she says. “Not that any of you are alive to begin with. At least this way, some of you get to carry on with your excuse of an existence.”
Bishop snarls, shakes his head. He won’t give up any of our people, and neither will I. Not to this vile thing, not to anyone.
“We refuse,” I say. I will fight her, fight for my own life, fight for all of our lives, but I’m reeling, in danger of going as insane as Brewer. My voice is harsh and defiant one second, softly begging the next. “How can I be you? I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t,” Matilda says. “You’re not old enough to understand.”
“Just tell me!”
It’s hard to know what her facial expressions mean when she doesn’t have a human face, but she seems to be getting annoyed.
“Brewer woke you,” she says. “He did it to hurt me, to hurt all of us. That bastard. Every moment you are awake, girl, it puts my life at risk. Every piece of information you learn, it puts my life at risk.”
How can that be? How can my learning something be a danger to her?
We stare at each other, two Matilda Savages locked in a battle of wills, the same will, separated by whatever magic made this happen. She needs me, yet I want nothing to do with her. No, that’s not true—I need to know what this is all about, and she can tell me.
“If you want me to consider your offer,” I say, “then explain how it’s possible you and I are the same person.”
She sighs, a sound like ripping paper. “I accept, but we aren’t really the same person. I am a person—you are property. This ship traveled from a place to which we can never return. We left there to find a new home, a new world. We knew the journey would take centuries. To survive the trip, our bodies were permanently modified. They cannot be changed back. We were remade as you see us now.”
“Ugly,” I say before I can stop the word.
Matilda nods. “Yes, the process made us ugly. It also brought constant pain, pain we have endured for longer than your unfinished mind can comprehend. When we started the trip, the Cherished began cultivating copies of their bodies, making what we call receptacles. These receptacles were modified to survive on Omeyocan, the planet below.”
Omeyocan.
Brewer didn’t tell us the name of the planet. Omeyocan…the word is a song that makes my brain tingle and my throat tighten. It is where we belong.
She also used a word that Brewer said earlier: the Cherished. Is she part of that group? Are we? I don’t think it matters. If we can get to Omeyocan, we can leave this all behind.
“Receptacles grow very, very slowly,” Matilda says. She’s talking to me like I am a child, or stupid, or both. “When we arrived here, we were to transfer our thoughts and memories to the receptacles so that we could live on the surface without disease, immune from Omeyocan’s subtle poisons that would have slowly killed us.”
I look at the planet hanging in the starry blackness.
“So why didn’t you do the transfer?”
“On the way here, there was a…let’s call it a disagreement,” she says. “Some people had to be taught a lesson. Brewer was one of those people. The bastard tricked us, found a way to lock you away from me. You were supposed to come out of the husk two centuries ago, when your body was twelve years old—just as the scripture requires. But you didn’t come out, because of Brewer. Your body kept growing, becoming older and bigger than it was supposed to.”
My reality is crumbling. I was in that coffin for two hundred years? No, that’s the extra time I was in there. That’s why our clothes are too small—they would have fit the twelve-year-old me. And it’s why they are so big on the people who died as little children. Had those kids stayed alive, they would have grown into their uniforms. But many, like the other Brewer, didn’t get that chance.
You are the person who murdered me, he said.
Now I understand. My skin crawls anew at the sight of this evil thing before me.