FORTY
Bishop carries Matilda cradled in his arms, as if she weighs nothing at all.
She’s led us into unknown areas. We run across a flat surface, which means we’re moving down the length of the cylinder instead of up or down the curve. Everything is dark. Thin lines of glowing colors stretch across the floor—it’s enough light to keep me from panicking, but barely.
El-Saffani is once again out in front. Bishop, O’Malley and I are a few steps behind them. The rest follow, including the three lines of kids. Some of them are crying, whining for mothers and fathers that don’t exist, but they stay in their ranks and they keep pace. That’s all we can ask for. Bawden and Visca bring up the rear, my ash-covered warriors making sure no one attacks us from behind.
All of this is catching up with me. The march to the Garden, the fighting, the fact that I have been going for so long, making all the hard decisions…I am so tired. Every muscle screams at me to lie down, to give up, but we can’t stop now: we must escape before it’s too late.
“Keep moving,” I call to the others. “Keep moving.”
We are all close to quitting. The fighting in the Garden must have been bad. We leave a trail of blood behind us. There isn’t time to fix our wounds. I should have had us grab fruit to eat as we run, but I didn’t think of it and now it is too late to go back.
Matilda has us following a blue line. The ceiling is somewhere high above, the walls are hidden by shadows. The echoes of our footsteps tell me this area is big…bigger than the Garden, bigger than anything we have ever known. We don’t have time to explore, and even if we did I wouldn’t want to know what the darkness holds.
“Monster,” I say to my creator, “how much farther?”
“We are the same person,” she says. “You should call me by our name.”
“How much farther?”
She sighs, seems to wince at the same time. The fight was bad for her, too. She’d been waiting at the hidden opening she used to attack Bello and me. She knew we would come: she is me, after all, and attacking the Garden is exactly what she would have done in the same situation. She laid a trap for us, but she hadn’t planned on our ability to organize and work together, or on our ferocity. Maybe in her mind, we are still kids—it should have been easy for her kind to overwhelm us.
Things did not go how she expected.
When I poked my spear through the thicket wall, the blade pierced her shoulder. An accident, but at least we finally had some luck go our way. Matilda has lost a lot of blood. And then there is her ruined eye. She’s in great pain, doing her best to not show it.
“The shuttle is close,” she says. “Can’t you see your people are exhausted, little leader? We have time to stop and rest.”
I sense she’s lying about time, but telling the truth that the shuttle is near. I think she’s trying to stall. It doesn’t take the brilliance of Gaston or Spingate to know why—her friends are preparing to come after us…or are already on the way.
Up ahead, the dim blue line on the floor splits in two. Part of it keeps going straight, part of it angles off to the left. El-Saffani stops there, looks back at us.
A dried-up black hand reaches out, points a thin finger to the left.
“That way,” Matilda says.
In the darkness, El-Saffani’s cracking red-gray paste makes the twins look identical, neither boy nor girl but some combination of both. I point down the path to the left, and they go rushing on ahead.
We all follow them.
It’s still too dim to see, but the echoes of our footsteps change: we have entered a smaller room.
Lights come on.
Too bright, so bright it burns. I shield my eyes, blink as something starts to take shape.
Something…long.
Unlike everything else on board the Xolotl, there are no runes or carvings.
It is not made of stone.
It is smooth, sleek, gleaming metal. It is big enough to hold all of us a dozen times over.
The shuttle.
If we can figure out how it works, Omeyocan is ours.
FORTY-ONE
Memories roil in my head. My brain searches for words to describe the things I see. The shuttle’s tail is off to our left. The tapered nose points to the right. A long, thick tube—thicker than four or five of us standing on each other’s shoulders—connects them. At the tube’s middle is a wide metal platform. A ramp—running perpendicular to the shuttle—leads from the floor to that platform.
We are perhaps a hundred steps away from the shuttle.
The gleaming hull is smooth as glass, even where the platform is: I don’t see a way in.