Just to be sure, I kept my hands safely in my lap.
With so many levers and buttons and gauges and monitors the panel in front of me surpassed high tech. And what I’d thought from the outside was a window, turned out not to be a window at all. It was one enormous screen, and as soon as my weight settled into the chair, the display flashed to life.
I gasped.
From the other end of my earpiece, Molly’s voice reached out to me. “Everything all right?”
“I . . . ,” I faltered, momentarily spellbound by what spread out before me. What had begun as random start-up commands had now shifted to images, a rotating series of what looked like weather maps or maybe radar screens . . . all blips and rainbow blobs that swelled and shifted with intersecting lines and numbers, none of which meant anything to me. “I . . . I guess so.”
“Do you have questions? What are you seeing? What’s happening in there?” she fished.
I leaned forward, examining the joystick between my knees and tried to imagine how they possibly thought I’d have the first clue about flying this thing. “How could I not?” I admitted. “Starting with: What is it you think I’m supposed to do in here?”
There was silence, followed by crackling . . . a muffled noise, like she had her hand over the mic. When she came back, she said only, “We were hoping you might know.”
“Me? You were hoping I’d know how to use this thing?” I would have laughed, and I almost did, because the idea was so . . . out there. Did they really think they’d just . . . throw me in here, and I’d somehow-magically-cross-their-fingers figure it out? Was that their big plan? “You people are nuts,” I accused, rolling my eyes.
They’d wasted my time, sending me down here. The joke was on them.
I put my hands on the grips at either side of my seat, planning to get the hell out of here before I seriously messed something up. But when I did . . . when I put my hands on those handles . . . something happened.
I wasn’t sure it was real at first, the slight, barely unnoticeable shift. It was so very, very subtle.
Except somewhere, deep inside me, I knew the truth because my heart picked up speed, every muscle in my body went still, every synapse started igniting.
Things just got real.
I waited an eternity, then, when I trusted myself enough, when I could actually breathe again, I squeezed my fingers around the grips again . . . just the tiniest bit. Testing it.
This time when the ship moved, it was more than just noticeable, it was staggering. I wanted to be blown away by what I’d just done, because that’s what I should be, that’s what a normal girl would be, blown freaking away. It was the normal response, to be overwhelmed . . . frightened . . . horrified by the fact I’d just managed to move this thing.
“Kyra?” Molly’s voice was demanding in my ear. “Kyra, what’s happening? Is everything okay? Was that you?”
I couldn’t answer because my mouth was stuck in a giant, stupid grin. That was normal, right?
The display in front of me had stopped showing the blobs that made it look like the Weather Channel, and a new series of images were rotating past in rapid succession. They were too fast for me to take in, except here’s the weird thing: they weren’t going too fast for me.
I understood each and every one of them.
This whole thing . . . all of it was getting more and more bizarre. But I stayed where I was . . . mesmerized.
There were strange patterns, of stars and landmarks with lines of longitude and latitude that crisscrossed them to create maps; similar to the one Tyler had drawn out in the desert. But now I somehow knew where all of these places were. I wasn’t afraid or even shocked at how easily the information came to me.
Many of them were places I’d been before—Thom’s camp at Silent Creek, Griffin’s at Blackwater Ranch, the old Hanford site where Simon and his people had been hiding out when he’d first introduced me to them. There was even a map of the abandoned asylum in Wyoming where Natty and Eddie Ray had been holding me. There were other things in those images as well, not just maps, but information that shouldn’t have made any sense at all, that I shouldn’t have had the first clue how to comprehend, but that my mind somehow just . . . absorbed. I was a sponge, sucking in all the knowledge being thrown my way.
I was a computer, and this was my download.
By the time it was finished, I knew this ship inside and out. Its schematics were etched in my mind as if I’d engineered the thing myself. I knew which alloys had been used and where they’d been mined. I had a working knowledge of the components—of the spectrometers, nodules, shields, and trusses.
I knew exactly what I needed to do, just like Molly had hoped I would.
I knew how to fly this thing.