“Wait … ” he says.
I stop, breath still coming short, stone digging sharp into my newly healed hands. Beckett stays very still, squatted down among the broken rocks. I can see Jillian over his shoulder, a void of darkness beyond her.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he says. “But you weren’t breathing there for a second.”
“Is she sick?” Jillian asks.
I close my eyes. I haven’t slipped into a memory of before my birth in years. Not since childhood. That should have been well and truly cached, and can only mean that I am beyond tired. I am exhausted.
“I think she should tell us what’s wrong with her,” Jillian says. “And while she’s at it, she can explain why her own people want to kill her.”
I open my eyes, gaze at Jillian.
“Not now, Jill,” Beckett says over his shoulder.
“Well, it’s a fair question, isn’t it? I mean, won’t these people just be trying to kill us again as soon as we get to this city?”
Her eyes are so blue, like Nita’s. And yet not like Nita’s at all. I wonder what Jillian would do if she knew I murdered my best friend.
Beckett says, “When was the last time you ate, Samara? Or slept?”
I slept once behind a thicket of oil plants on the edge of the plain, and I’ve eaten two breadfruits since then. But I’m more worried about my mind than my body.
“Come on,” Beckett says, holding out a hand. He pulls me to my feet, like he did in the ruined street. “The cavern ends over there. Just a little more, and we’ll find a place to set up camp.”
I don’t understand the word, but it doesn’t matter. I’m almost completely out of control. Beckett drops my hand and bends down to get my jar of light, miraculously unbroken on the rocky floor.
“He grabbed it right before you fell,” Jillian says. “Wasn’t that lucky? Beckett was watching so close, he was able to catch it before you even got near the ground.”
If Beckett notices any acid in these words, he doesn’t acknowledge it. He just shrugs a shoulder. “It was handblown glass.” And then he’s doing that smile again, like he’s been a little bad and gotten caught at it. I don’t Know what he’s talking about. What other kind of glass is there?
I follow him this time, Jillian coming after us. He was right about the cavern ending. Another twist and turn and the darkness pales, another turn and we stand in a tall, skinny corridor of rough blue stone, the river foaming white in its course, a narrow piece of purpling sky above our heads, streaked with pink. We’re at the bottom of one of the deep clefts I skirted on my run to the city. There’s a smell in the wind, a sweetness that I think must be something Nita described to me once. The scent of plants going to sleep. For the dark.
Jillian goes to a large shelf of rock, jutting out from the cliff face, ducks down, and looks beneath it. “Over here,” she calls.
There’s a space below the rock, opening after one or two crouched steps into a small oval cavern about half the size of my bedchamber and not quite its height. Jillian and Beckett go to one side and drop their packs in a pile, setting down the lights, their bodies making long, misshapen shadows on the curving walls. Beckett says, “I’ve set a perimeter.”
I’m so close to losing control I don’t even care when I don’t Know what that means. I go to the opposite side of the chamber and sit, light and pack beside me, arms around my book like a child, back against a stone near the entryway. Where I could get out if I had to. I breathe, close my eyes, and, room full of aliens or not, I sift through my mind. Organizing. Uncluttering. Like I’ve been taught since the day my memories came. Some I relegate to the shelves in the background, some I leave sitting out to use, others I cache to the very back, to the high shelf, never to be felt again. And I Know that I am slipping. Sinking. Pulled by a force that is stronger than I am. Like gravity …
And when I open my eyes again I see the stone chamber, the whitish light and the shadows, but I’m wrapped in something warm. Jillian has her yellow head bent toward Beckett, whose back is to me, low murmurs rustling along the walls.
I feel a thrill of disorientation. Fear. I look back inside my mind. I’ve been asleep. For more than six bells. I feel my book beneath my hand, my pack behind my back. And now I’m mad. How could I have been so careless? If the Council did decide to travel this way, they could be right behind us.
But I don’t move. I close my eyes again. Stay still. Caverns can be tricky with sound, and this one has a curved ceiling. Beckett and Jillian are barely speaking, but I hear it like they’re whispering in my ear.
“I’m getting about forty meters of penetrating vision at a time,” Beckett is saying. “If you’re mapping, we can’t get lost, even if she doesn’t know where she’s going.”
“We can run out of food,” Jillian counters.
“She’s been going fast. I think she’s taking us straight to it … ”
Taking them straight to New Canaan. The words make me cringe with doubt. Doubt makes me mad.
Beckett says, “How’s the charge on the cartographer?”
“Full. But it won’t stay that way. And we’re losing the sun. What about the glasses?”
“Eighty-two percent. I won’t be able to leave visual recording on anymore. Not all the time. They’ll get another charge before we go back underground, but that might be all there is until the next dawn. Or the ship … ”
And I’m thinking now. About technology. About the word “glasses.” Pieces of glass. I open my eyes, and there, perched in front of me, on top of the pile of packs, are Beckett’s magnifiers.
“I think we should tell her,” Beckett says.
I’d be very interested to Know what he thinks he should tell me. But I’m also feeling an itch inside my mind. I slide my body almost imperceptibly closer to the magnifiers. Jillian only has eyes for Beckett.
“Why,” she asks, “are you so determined to break every rule we ever swore to?”
“Protocol doesn’t say to never tell anyone anything. Just to do it at the right time. With thought. They sent us, and so now I’m giving it some thought.”
“Well, it’s the wrong thought, Beckett! You know what those orders meant.”
“You were the one explaining to me how those orders don’t make sense.”
“And you’re acting like you have no future after this planet!”
I move my hand, but it doesn’t attract Jillian’s attention. She drops her voice back to a whisper.
“The Commander already heard you criticize protocol on the visuals,” she says, “and I bet they uploaded again when the skimmer was here, didn’t they? So now she’s seen you interfering with a local, against orders. What kind of career are you going to have if you only follow orders when you feel like it?”
“Careers are on the other side of the galaxy, Jill.”
“But what if … ” Jill hesitates. “What if things are … different from what you think?”