And his words feel right.
“We’re not going to defend anything,” I say. “We attack, O’Malley. When in doubt, attack, always attack, never let your enemy recover.”
O’Malley gives me a curious look.
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’re going to the Garden. Every last one of us. We’re going to find Bello. We’re going to find the way off this ship, and if the monsters get in our way, we are going to kill them and be forever free.”
I meet his deep-blue eyes. He’s observing me, measuring me.
“Em, sometimes you’re kind of scary.”
I nod. “Thank you.”
“And what do you mean, off this ship? We’re in a building.”
“Come on, let’s move. I’ll tell you everything when we’re all together. I have a plan.”
We run downhill.
THIRTY-SEVEN
I stand on Okadigbo’s coffin.
The room is so full of people I can’t see the floor. They sit cross-legged in the aisle of dust, they sit on coffins, they stand with their backs to the walls. Faces stare up at me, both familiar and new. I tell them what I know. I describe what must be done.
O’Malley counted. The numbers are hard to accept. I was a leader of twenty-two people; now I lead a hundred and thirty.
How will we take care of these kids? I don’t know. Neither does O’Malley. We have to figure it out. We will not leave a single person behind to have their newly hatched minds wiped out by the evil that runs this ship.
I understood Brewer’s riddle. If they found you, you found them. There is much more to this “building” than we first knew. Beyond the doors that Brewer melted shut to keep our older selves away, beyond the Garden’s walls, there lie seemingly endless sections of this ship.
If they found you, you found them.
When we opened the door to the empty section, as Brewer called it? we broke his seal. Did Matilda know that someday kids might escape the coffins, and if they did, they would eventually wind up in the Garden? Maybe. Maybe she waited centuries for someone in a white shirt and a red tie to go there, so she would know there was finally a way through Brewer’s defenses.
Matilda got Bello in the Garden. We will find the path the monsters used to attack us there, and we will use that same path to attack them.
We will capture a Grownup. We will make that monster tell us what we need to know: the location of Bello, the location of the shuttle and how to use it.
The faces look up at me. I tell them about Matilda, Brewer, the husks and the receptacles. I tell them about the Xolotl and the Crystal Ball. I tell them about Omeyocan, and the shuttle that will take us there if we can find it.
I tell them we are being hunted.
I tell them what the Grownups will do to us if they catch us.
And then I tell them my plan.
As I expected, Aramovsky doesn’t like it.
“That’s ridiculous,” he says. “You’re going to get us all killed. Even if we do survive, the gods will be furious at our insolence.”
He’s using bigger words now. All the older kids are, including me. It happened gradually, I think, but now I’m noticing it—especially when Aramovsky talks. He doesn’t like my plan? Something tells me he wouldn’t have liked any plan I put forth. He wants to contradict me no matter what I say, so that the people who think he is “chosen” will pay more attention to him.
He objects, but as I figured, his objection doesn’t really matter right now—because my friends believe in me.
“It will work,” Bishop says. “We can beat them, I know we can.”
The circle-stars grunt. They thump their chests. Bishop has their backing, and I have his. As long as that holds, there’s nothing Aramovsky can do. The five circle-stars in this room are itching for a fight, and that’s what I aim to give them. Only El-Saffani isn’t here: the twins are in the hall, preparing.
Bishop, Coyotl, Visca, Farrar and Boy El-Saffani used O’Malley’s knife to cut the legs off their tattered pants, which are now roughly the same length as the short skirts of Bawden and Girl El-Saffani. I think the circle-stars also cut themselves to make fresh dust-paste: they are coated head to toe in a red-gray that is almost the same color as the scarred monster’s blood.
Shirtless, bare-legged, with paste caked on their exposed skin, on their faces, even mashed in their hair, the circle-stars all look the same. We can barely tell the boys and girls apart.
O’Malley has his knife back. He fiddles with it, absently moving it from hand to hand. He has that look on his face again, like he wants to tell me something but doesn’t want to say it in front of the others.
“Out with it, O’Malley.” I say. “What are you thinking?”
He glances around the room, sees that everyone is waiting for him to talk.