He wants to protect me. His concern makes me feel warm inside, but I will not sit back while my people face danger.
The flesh around his left eye is swollen and bruised. When he put me in the coffin—trying to save my life—I went crazy and punched him. I feel horrible about that. Such seriousness in his face. I want to reach out and touch his blond curls, but now is not the time. When I first met him, he smiled easily, seemed so happy and confident. Not anymore. He killed two Grownups. Taking those lives changed him. I hope he can find his smile again, but if he feels inside the same way I do, I doubt it.
At the back of the coffin room, I see the door in the red wall open. O’Malley and Spingate step out, walk down the center aisle to join us. He’s holding the knife I used to kill Yong. Somehow, that weapon became his.
“I’ll take a good look around the shuttle while you go outside,” he says. “But…are you sure I shouldn’t come with you?”
Does he want to see the planet, or does he also want to protect me? It doesn’t matter; we need to learn all we can as fast as we can. Besides, he’s made for thinking, not fighting.
“I’ll be fine. I have Bishop with me.”
O’Malley looks down, and I cringe inside. I meant to say I have the circle-stars with me, but that’s not what came out.
If he’s hurt, he recovers quickly, grins at me.
“Just be smart,” he says. “We have all the time this world has to offer—don’t rush anything.”
Our ordeal has affected him, too, but not like it has Bishop. O’Malley’s blue eyes are vibrant, filled with excitement for our new adventure. Brittle bits of leaves cling to his brown hair. Dried blood stains his ill-fitting white shirt, especially at the collar below the nasty cut on his left cheek. He suffered that wound in the Garden, during our fight with the Grownups. I wonder what he had to do back there. I wonder if he—like Bishop and I—now knows how it feels to kill.
O’Malley looks at Bishop, then offers the knife, hilt-first.
“Take it,” O’Malley says. “If I’m staying here, you need it more than I do.”
Back on the Xolotl, the two boys came close to killing each other. Will they get along better now that we’re on Omeyocan?
Bishop lifts his axe slightly.
“I like this better,” he says.
The two boys have been “alive” for only a few days, yet they are both already marked with wounds that will become scars. In that, they aren’t alone. My fingertips touch my split upper lip, the bump on my forehead, trace my cuts and scratches and bruises. We earned these badges of bravery.
Our creators designed our bodies. Our faces are theirs—these scars are the only things we can truly call our own.
Bishop isn’t the only one with a new weapon.
White-haired, pink-skinned Visca holds a sledgehammer that is almost as tall as Gaston. Farrar chose a long-handled shovel. He is the largest of us save only for Bishop, and I bet the point—or edge—of the thick shovel blade could do horrible damage to flesh and blood. Bawden has an axe just like Bishop’s. I find myself wondering how long it takes hair to grow: the first hints are showing on her shaved head, dark-brown skin giving way to stubble. With most of her dust gone, there is no ignoring the fact that she wears nothing but a tattered skirt. Her nakedness makes me want to look away; she doesn’t seem to notice it.
Coyotl made the strangest choice of all—he still holds the thighbone he used against the Grownups. His skin has a bright hue, as if he spent far too long in the sun.
I meet Spingate’s gaze. Her eyebrows rise in a silent question.
It is time.
“Open it,” I say.
The shuttle doors slide apart.
The morning sun is a blinding, reddish ball creeping above the high tree line. I lift a hand to block out the light, feel the sun’s heat against my skin.
A breeze caresses us, carrying new scents. My head spins as Matilda’s fractured memories rush to the surface, try to put names on what I smell: damp wood, burned grass and something like mint.
I step onto the shuttle’s platform. I don’t know where the platform goes when we fly, but it is exactly as it was on the Xolotl: a metal rectangle big enough to hold us all. A ramp leads down to flat ground covered in dark-blue vines with wide, pale-yellow leaves. Some of the leaves and vines are burned black; maybe our shuttle did that when it landed.
We’re in the center of what looks like a large, round clearing. A dense wall of leaves—the same pale yellow as the vines that cover the ground—towers up from the clearing’s curved edge. The sky is a circular patch high above us.
I understand why Gaston thought we flew into a hole.
Bishop walks slowly down the ramp, both hands on his axe. Muscles twitch and flex. He scowls at the trees, at the vines covering the clearing, maybe at the sun itself—he wants this world to know he is ready to fight.
He stops at the ramp’s end, reaches one bare foot toward the vines.