I look around. We’ve passed through an archway of heavy, rust-free metal. Like all the archways before, this one is dense with images, but these are images I have not yet seen: planets, groups of stars, long cylinders and some things I don’t recognize.
This room isn’t much taller than the shuttle’s tail. Above it, a curved ceiling of crisscrossing white bars. A short distance from the shuttle’s nose stands a second archway—the biggest I have seen yet, big enough for the entire shuttle to pass through. The doors within it are metal, not stone.
I wonder if the blackness of space is beyond them.
“Bishop, bring the monster. Everyone else, stay here.”
We run to the ramp. The ramp’s surface is sharp, maybe to keep people from slipping. Small, hard points dig into the soles of my feet, reminding me how sore and swollen they are.
We stand on the platform.
“Matilda, tell us how to get in.”
Her head lolls over Bishop’s thick arm. I don’t know if she’s faking or dying. Her half-limp hand points to a spot on the shuttle’s hull. There, I can make out a thin-lined square about the size and height of my face.
“Do we press it?” I ask. “Tell us how it works.”
Shriveled shoulders shrug. “I don’t know. I’m just an empty.”
An empty? What is she talking about? Is she lying about not knowing how it works? Is she stalling again? No, I sense that she’s telling the truth. We came all this way and now we can’t get in. We’re running out of time. We have to do something, and fast.
I need someone smarter than me to figure this out.
I look back to our group. A hundred steps isn’t that far away, but beneath this room’s sprawling ceiling my people look so small. The children stand packed together with my friends surrounding them, protecting them.
“Spingate, Gaston, get up here!”
The two sprint to join me. I turn back to the gleaming shuttle, to examine that square—and for the very first time in my life, I see myself.
A beat-up girl’s reflection stares back at me in wide-eyed disbelief.
Those eyes…they are brown.
Strands of heavy black hair hang down my face, drape across my shoulders. The braid that Bello lovingly made is now a tattered mess. Red-gray ooze has dried on my cheek and chin. My upper lip is split and bleeding. One of my eyes is swollen, the skin there discolored and blacker than Gaston’s was when I first met him. I see a growing, shiny lump on my forehead. I am covered in cuts, scrapes and bruises. Ripped shirt, scratched skin, bloody and beaten…
…I am beautiful.
Not “beautiful” as in what I could be when all of this goes away, but rather what I am right now, with these badges of bravery spotting my skin. Someday these wounds will heal, and I will see myself as Matilda intended me to be, but for now this face—the battered face of a fighter, a warrior—is mine and mine alone.
Spingate and Gaston thump up the ramp.
I have to tear my attention away from my reflection. It is a hard thing to do. I point at the hull’s gleaming surface without looking at it.
“That square is the way in,” I say. “Matilda claims she doesn’t know how to open it.”
Spingate caresses the metal, slides her hands across the lines almost like she’s smoothing out invisible wrinkles. Her fatigue and fear vanish. Here is a puzzle: her whole being responds instantly.
She puts her hand on the square, pushes it in, then turns it. The square slides away inside the shuttle, revealing the same kind of plaque we saw in the door that led down to the haunted room—black glass with the imprint of a hand, and in the center of that hand, a jagged circle.
No, wait…I finally recognize that symbol—it’s a gear.
I cup Spingate’s elbow.
“Spin, put your hand on it.”
She licks her lips, takes a breath, then presses her palm to the imprint.
Nothing happens.
Gaston nudges me, grins.
“Well, I guess it’s time for me to be the real hero, huh, Em? Should I give it a try?”
He’s got a splatter of red-gray across his chest, and his right ear is a sheet of blood that stains his shirt collar. Fighting monsters and running through an unknown ship haven’t dulled his arrogance, not in the least.
I nod at him.
He rubs his hands together like he’s trying to warm them, flicks his fingers outward once, twice, three times, then presses his hand to the black imprint.
The shuttle vibrates.
More lines appear in the metal, emerging out of nowhere as if the hull is splitting. The lines form a rectangle, taller than Bishop and wider than it is tall. Like the small panel Spingate pressed, it recedes slightly back into the ship.
A vertical line forms down the middle of this rectangle, cutting it in half. Without a sound, the halves slide away.
The shuttle has opened.
It is dark inside.
“El-Saffani,” I say, my voice a bark that echoes through this cavernous room. They both sprint to the ramp. In seconds, they are at my sides. Oddly, neither of them are bloody; the battle must have missed them. I point my spear into the shuttle’s darkness.
“Find out what’s in there.”