She’s smiling, almost asleep, and I wish she wasn’t half a meter away. I wish we were in a hole in the floor.
“Which do you like better?” she asks slowly. “Beck? Or Beckett?”
I haven’t thought about it. I just take what comes. But then I say, “Beck. When somebody says Beckett, usually they’re mad at me.”
She smiles bigger, which I think is a funny reaction, and then I watch the expression fade into something still. Peaceful. So she likes to be called Sam. I shake a blanket loose and spread it over her. She doesn’t move. I put my elbows on my knees, back against the warm wall.
I am dead tired, and way too keyed up to sleep. There’s too much to think about. I reach beneath the rough cloth shirt, unclip the glasses from my T-shirt, and slide them onto my face. The alarm for the power source is still showing, faint, somewhere deep beneath me. I turn it off for now, to save the charge, switch to the database, and start a search for brain diseases.
The standard information scrolls past my eyes, almost what I could have guessed off the top of my head. The Lethe’s mutation messes with your memories, so it comes up. But Lethe’s was a biological weapon that altered DNA, an engineered toxin passed by air and touch, causing the cells of the brain to rewire their own connections. So, symptoms like paranoia. Psychosis. Distorting memories instead of erasing them. Nothing like Samara.
I think about Channing, riding that bike when we were ten. Amanda. All those people that disappeared from our complex. Lethe’s will kill you, but not quick enough. And the mutation, as it turned out, can be passed to unborn children before the symptoms ever show, no exposure necessary. It’s the only way it can be passed now. Supposedly. But this was a long time after the original colonists left for Canaan.
I keep searching for “brain disease,” only I change the parameters to conditions that take away the ability to forget. And there is nothing. I delete the word “disease” and restructure the search for any kind of anomaly with memories. I come up with photographic memory—an interesting, early tech side trail—developmental issues, aging issues, and none of it looks like Samara. Not even close.
I rub my eyes beneath the lenses, pull off the glasses, and gaze at the bed. Sam. She’s lying so calm in her sleep, one long black curl across her cheek. I wonder what Mom and Dad would make of her. Of all of this. They’d have theories, different ones, probably, and spend a happy night arguing them. It’s what we do best. Or what we used to do best.
If Mom and Dad have crossed Commander Faye, then they’re not in much better shape than Sam’s parents. And then I’m seeing Dad, on a dig in the Mexican Peninsula, with that horrible hat on his head, using his old field set. Radio waves and code, because satellites can be hacked …
And I hear Jillian saying, “Beckett.” This doesn’t seem all that significant, until I hear it again. “Beckett!”
I open my eyes. I’ve been asleep, my neck stiff from using Jill’s pack as a pillow. Samara isn’t on the bed anymore, and there’s a baby crying in the other room. Then I see Jill. She’s sitting up, eyes wide, one of the little boys from the loft last night, six or seven years old, standing behind her on the mattress, rubbing what are probably grubby hands all over her shorn blond head. He’s giggling. And when I cut my gaze to the side, there’s another one, older and more serious, his big brown eyes only a few centimeters away. I move to snatch the glasses off my face, but they’re not there. They’re inside my shirt again, next to my chest. I’m about 90 percent sure I didn’t put them there.
“We’re supposed to be waking you up,” says the boy next to me. His expression hasn’t even twitched.
Jillian is making a pretty valiant effort to stay calm while her head is rubbed. Then Nathan appears in the doorway. He’s about to say something but stops. Jill blinks her eyes once.
Nathan nods to her, almost formal, then tilts his head at his brothers. “Mum wants you.” The boys scamper, slamming the door shut behind them.
Jill is still for a minute. Then she whispers, “Who was that?”
“Nathan.”
Two more seconds and she says, “Hand me my pack.”
I get to my feet, wincing as I stand. I’m still bruised from my fall. I did three climbs yesterday, carried Jill across half a planet on newly mended bones, and slept on a floor. I hand over the pack and out comes the sanitizer. She starts spraying, rubbing her head and arms and legs.
“You’re going to run out of that,” I comment.
“I don’t want to hear it.” She glances around the plain, windowless room, at the flame near the ceiling, wavering in an open dome of glass, at the chains of dried herbs draped in loops along the walls. The many times washed, and yet not soft blanket over her knees. Her nose wrinkles.
“So where are we, exactly?”
I sit on the edge of Samara’s bed, rubbing the ache from my neck. “We’re Outside. These are friends of Samara’s. They know she’s one of the Knowing, but nobody else does, and they think we are, too. Do you remember getting here?”
“Not much.” Jill lowers her voice. “Are we safe?”
“I think so.”
“Why do you think so?”
“They kept us from getting caught last night. And Samara trusts them.”
Jill huffs once at that. “So is the city below us?”
I nod. I know what’s coming next.
“So we’ve got the coordinates. How soon can we get out?”
“We’ve got a food and water problem. The regenerators won’t charge—”
“But we don’t have to get far. You’ll get a signal, or the skimmers will find us and we’ll be picked up … ”
I hold up a hand. I don’t know whose baby was crying in the other room, but it’s stopped for a minute, and Jill is using words that shouldn’t be overheard. I switch beds, and she scoots up her feet to make room for me. She looks pale, weak, but alert. A lot more like Jill. Which is really good. And bad. I step carefully. Like tiptoeing through a bed of cactus in Texas.
“I don’t know if we can get picked up. The skimmers can’t see. I watched one crash straight into a mountain when I was climbing the cliffs. It looked right at me, too, and I don’t think it knew what I was.”
Jill frowns. “I don’t understand.”
“Me, neither. But there’s something else. I caught a power source. Fusion. Somewhere below us. Inside the mountain.”
Jill’s eyes open big. “There’s tech down there?”
“Has to be.”
She glances around the room. More than surprised. Like she doesn’t believe it. “But they would never live like this if they had tech, right? And there was never supposed to be fusion in Canaan. Even for the communications bunker … ”
She knows there wasn’t. It didn’t even exist. I don’t tell her what I’m thinking. The Centauri II. The ship that landed and was never heard from again. That we’ve found no trace of that missing ship gives me just as bad a feeling as the lost city.
“What can the glasses see?” Jill asks.