“Em, do you have anything sweet?” His hopeful expression makes him look like a child. Wide smile, wide nose, dark eyes and that big jaw…Farrar is pretty. Everyone here is pretty: I wonder if the Grownups somehow modified their “copies” to fit a vision of what they thought they should be, rather than what they are.
I shake my head. “I don’t think protein bar and hard biscuit sound sweet.” I offer him the half-eaten grain bar. “Want to try this? It tastes nutty.”
He takes a bite, chews, thinks, hands it back to me, then leans in close.
“It’s just…well, you’re the leader. I thought maybe someone brought you cookies.”
He says that word the way Gaston said cloud cover and Spingate said microorganism.
“Sorry. If I had any, I would share them with you.”
He snarls, smacks a closed fist against an open palm. I know it’s only a gesture of frustration, but it scares me a little.
I notice Bishop is still holding his bin, still walking from person to person, offering more food. He stops in front of Aramovsky, who is sitting at the foot of his coffin, and offers the tall boy a package. Aramovsky takes it and sets it on a pile of unopened packages on the floor—his food, and food from the others around him.
Bishop is making sure everyone has enough, and Aramovsky is hoarding?
I think of when I was first walking down the Xolotl’s endless hallway with Bello, O’Malley, Spingate, Aramovsky and Yong. We were starving, talking about the food we dreamed of. Aramovsky wanted cupcakes.
I whisper in Farrar’s ear.
“Maybe there’s something sweet in Aramovsky’s pile, even if it isn’t labeled like that. The people who packed the food could have made a mistake.”
Farrar runs down the center aisle toward Aramovsky. Children scramble out of his way. Aramovsky sees the big circle-star coming and moves a hand to cover up his collection.
That wasn’t nice of me, but it’s fun to watch them argue about something unimportant. And it makes me happy to give Aramovsky some grief. It shouldn’t, but it does.
Two little girls run up to me and throw themselves down, somehow landing cross-legged. One is Zubiri, the dark-skinned tooth-girl who calmed me when I fought against O’Malley and Bishop putting me in my coffin. There are no leaves in Zubiri’s jet-black hair. No blood, no scratches, no bruises, no scars. Like most of the younger kids, she hasn’t suffered that much.
The other girl I don’t recognize. She’s got hair just as black as Zubiri’s, but her skin is light and her eyes are so thin I can barely tell they’re open. She’s also a little chubby. The symbol on her forehead is a circle inside of a circle: a double-ring, the same as Aramovsky’s.
“Hi, Em,” Zubiri says.
“Hi, Zubiri. Who is your friend?”
“This is B. Walezak,” Zubiri says. “Our cradles were next to each other.”
I offer my hand. “Nice to meet you, B. Walezak.”
The girl stares for a second, then giggles and hides her face behind Zubiri’s shoulder.
Zubiri rolls her eyes dramatically. “Oh, Walezak, you have to learn how to talk to people.”
I’ve spoken with Zubiri only a few times. Somehow, she seems older than me. Maybe more mature is the right word. That’s good, I think. Soon, she will have to do her part. All the kids will.
Like a shadow, O’Malley silently sits down beside me.
“I was able to access the lower decks,” he says. “You need to see this.”
Farrar and Aramovsky are yelling at each other. Everyone is watching them, laughing at the argument. I quietly follow O’Malley to the back wall and through the stairway door.
“Once a door is unlocked, we can leave it that way if we close it and don’t press the handprint or turn the wheel,” he says.
We descend past Deck Two to Deck Three. As Gaston told me, the door has a wheel with a half-circle symbol on it.
“Try and open it,” O’Malley says.
The pilothouse door has a gear symbol. That door wouldn’t open for me, so I doubt this one will, either, but I try. The wheel spins easily—the door unlocks.
“I thought so,” O’Malley says. “Locked doors will mostly only open for people who have the matching symbol, but there are a few exceptions. I think you can open some doors because Matilda was in charge of the Grownups—I’m pretty sure the other empties can’t open any door that has a handprint lock.”
Empties. That word makes me instantly angry and I don’t know why. O’Malley seems surprised he said it, embarrassed, but I can tell he’s just as clueless to its meaning as I am.
“Anyway,” he says, “let me show you what I found.”
O’Malley pulls the door open. Inside is a small room with three waist-high white pedestals, the same kind that were in that spherical room where I first saw Brewer and Matilda—the place she called the Crystal Ball.
I instantly want to knock the pedestals over, smash them…if Matilda’s face appears, or Brewer’s, I will do just that. We need to leave the Grownups behind, forever.