He gestures to Spingate. “She could fly it herself, with a few more lessons. I could teach—”
Spingate’s eyes snap up, her lip curls into a sneer.
“In case you couldn’t tell, I’m busy. Of course I could fly the shuttle, but it would take time to learn. Does it look like I have time?”
Gaston backs toward the lab door.
“I’ll go find Beckett,” he says. “Orders received and believed, Fearless Leader.”
With that, he’s gone.
Spingate glares at me.
“Gaston needs to be focused on what he’s good at,” I say. “I’ll have Okereke and Johnson help you. I’ll make it their only job.”
She throws up her hands in exasperation. “Okereke and Johnson? Em, they’re not gears, they’re empties, they’re not smart…”
Spingate’s words trail off. Her glare fades.
I can’t believe she just said that.
“They’re not smart enough,” I finish for her. “Because they’re circles. Like me. Right?”
We made it this far without the symbols affecting us, and the first real division doesn’t come from Aramovsky, it comes from Spingate—my friend. Has she always thought of me as stupid?
“Em, I…I didn’t mean it like that.” Her face is bright red. Her words rush out. “We all have some pre-existing training. Gaston knows how to fly, Bishop knows how to fight. I already know a lot of math and science that only other gears will know. There isn’t time to teach these things to someone who doesn’t already understand them.”
Her excuses fall short. I should have known. I probably knew it all along. Spingate is a tooth-girl; at her core she looks down on me because of my symbol, even though she doesn’t know why. Maybe that explains my dim memories of school, of the tooth-girls making my life miserable.
My feelings are hurt, but my feelings don’t matter, because she’s right—reality is what it is whether we like it or not.
“You need someone who can understand what you’re doing,” I say. “We had the knowledge of a twelve-year-old when we woke up. The kids from the Xolotl do, too, right?”
She nods slowly.
“Zubiri is smart,” I say. “Have you met her?”
“I talked to her a little.”
“Good. She and M. Cathcart will assist you with your research. Don’t worry—Cathcart is a gear, so I’m sure he won’t be too stupid to help.”
Spingate blinks. “Em, I was angry before you even came in. I haven’t had any sleep. About what I said, I—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
My eyes sting. I leave before she can see me cry.
I’ve had it with all of this. Our symbols are a simmering poison that will corrupt what we’ve worked so hard to build.
O’Malley knows something about them, and he’s going to tell me.
I turn the wheel. I open the door.
O’Malley pivots to see who has joined him—the image above the pedestals suddenly changes. I don’t know what was there a moment ago, but now it’s the same thing I saw the last time I was here: little heads of Aramovsky, O’Malley and Matilda.
O’Malley seems pleased—he probably thinks I came to take him up on that kiss—but only for a moment. The look on my face tells him otherwise.
“Em, what’s wrong?”
I think he’s hiding something, but I’m not sure. My father’s voice echoes through my head: Attack, attack, always attack.
“You lied in the meeting,” I say, letting him hear the anger in my soul even while I hope I’m wrong. “You already knew the Observatory had power.”
His mouth twitches, just once.
“I did,” he says.
I was right. I don’t want to be. I wanted to trust him.
“Did you remember your access code?”
He stares for a few seconds, his expression blank and impenetrable. He’s weighing his options: lie and see if he can get away with it, or tell the truth.
“I didn’t remember it, but I figured it out,” he says. “I thought maybe my progenitor picked a code of something important from his childhood. I’ve been working on it since I first found this room.”
I wait. There is more and he will tell me.
His stone-face cracks, shifts to sadness. He looks away.
“When I was little, I had a kitten,” he says. “I mean, he had a kitten. White, with a black spot on its face. They made him kill it. The kitten’s name was Chromium.”
I have no idea what to say. I’m excited and jealous that he recalls something from the past. I also feel for him, because it’s clear that—although the cat has been dead for a thousand years and was never really his to begin with—this is a hard thing to remember.
“Why did they make your creator kill it?”
He stares at the floor for a moment, then shrugs.
“I’m not sure,” he says. “I think they were trying to teach my progenitor something about emotions.”
What kind of lesson on emotions could be gained from making a little boy kill a kitten? Then I remember who we’re talking about—the Grownups. Compared to what we’ve seen, making a child murder his pet is nothing.