“What does he look like?”
Never mind. I’m sure that he was. I don’t understand Sampson Archiva. Whether he’s with or against my mother. There’s not one thing in my world I truly understand right now.
Nathan is standing there, waiting for me to do … something, the group of Outsiders standing bunched by the door. They’re wide-eyed—shaking, some of them. They don’t know where they are or where they’re going. Not any more than I do. And they are afraid. Of me.
And the rage that has lived inside me since Nita, since Adam, flares. Blazes. Explodes. I can feel the heat in my head and in my chest. Everyone is wrong. Earth. The Knowing. Everyone has blood on their hands. And that woman—the Commander—and my mother, think they can have Beckett Rodriguez? I don’t think so.
I take Nathan’s arms, look him in the face, and start talking fast. “Seal this door. The resin is right there. Make it so that no air can come in, then do the same with the gates. Do you understand?”
“But—”
“The Forgetting is coming. With the white sunrise. It’s in the air. Tell Grandpapa that everything has to be sealed before the sky turns white, and it has to stay that way for three full days.”
“Where are you going?”
“Three days, Nathan! Do you understand?”
Nathan sighs, and his eyes are so sad. “You can’t get him back. Not any more than I can get her.”
Watch me.
“Wait,” he says. “Wait … ”
I give him one quick, hard hug, and then I throw open the metal door, and start up the tunnel. Any doubts I had are a pile of ash.
Beckett Rodriguez came for me, and now I am coming for him.
And I have no idea what I’m going to do when I get there.
I sit still while Dr. Lanik cleans me up. It’s disorienting, being back on the Centauri. Another rabbit hole. Except this time it was up through the air instead of down through a hole in the ground, into a world that’s bright, clean, and completely unreal. Even the air smells fake.
Lanik and I haven’t talked so far. We have company, armed company, keeping watch from the door, and I don’t know on which side of all this the doctor lands. He’s gotten rid of my pain, and I can feel the swelling going down around my eyes. When he leans close to clean the cut on my side, I gamble, and whisper, “Mom and Dad?”
I see one finger go up while he gets ready to close the cut. He looks over his shoulder once, and the armed soldier whose name I don’t know gives him a brief nod.
“He’s a friend,” whispers Lanik, “and we only have a minute, so let’s keep this to essentials. Sean and Joanna are confined to quarters. Faye’s been waiting for you before starting their punishment.”
So they’re fine, but not for long.
Then he asks, “What’s happening on the surface?”
I glance at the guard, who’s looking the other way, and at the windows, where military uniforms are passing back and forth. Dr. Lanik moves his body, sealing my cut, but also blocking my face from view. I look up at the ceiling and say beneath my breath, “Faye is rounding up locals. They’ve surrendered, but on conditions that the formal surrender happen in the old city at sunrise.”
“The advantage?”
“Don’t know. But there is one.” Lanik straightens and starts working on the cuts on my wrists. “How many are you?” I breathe. I mean on Dad’s side, and he gets it.
“Thirty that Faye doesn’t know about. And growing.”
“A condition of surrender was seventy-five military present in the city. And me.”
The doctor’s gaze flicks upward. That’s more than half the ship when you take away who’s already confined. “Good to know,” he whispers.
A discreet cough from the guard shuts us up. But when I’m patched and back in a jumpsuit, I get another very quiet “Careful out there” from Lanik. I nod.
“We’re headed straight to transport,” says the guard, being a little overly official. “Launching to the surface in twelve.”
I know I’ve been away a long time when I get to the door of the med center and reach out for a latch. How stupid, I think, that we can’t even open our own doors. And the light in here is hurting my eyes. It’ll be good to go back out to the dark, even if it’s almost sunrise. I wish I could show all this to Sam, though. She’d like the med center.
It was a hard-won, terrible half hour, but I’m glad I got to see her again. I don’t want to see her again if she’s caught, forced to Earth with a value on her head.
I think it would be better not to survive than to come back on board this ship.
When I hear the walking patrol coming, I slip back into the shaft in the dark supply hut. Assuming their technology is like Beckett’s, they can’t see me when I’m below the surface. I wait them out. The patrol is so quick and regular it only took me a few minutes to work out their pattern, just a little longer for the whooshing noises passing overhead. Air bikes, that’s what I heard Jillian call them in the rubble mound.
I want one.
I’ve watched them land and take off twice now, a strange kind of handled chair that you straddle. There seems to be a regular stop in front of the gates. I go through my memories. Leaning to the front to land, leaning back to take off, both accompanied by a twist of both wrists on the handles, forward for speed, back for slowing. It might be all I have time to Know. The white sunrise is coming.
I hear the whoosh above my head that I was waiting for, and jump out of the shaft, slip out the back of the hut, and wait. Marking, calculating my time. My breath is coming hard, pushing against the beat in my chest, so I hold it in. Listen. And here it comes. The next whoosh. I mark the time again, then step around the corner of the hut, raise a heavy, broken piece of lid from one of the stacked boxes, and swing.
The Earthling is flying now, only in the other direction. Off the air bike.
The machine doesn’t crash or even fall down. It just slows and lands. Upright. I don’t have time to marvel. I hike up the red dress, throw a leg over the air bike, twist the handles, and lean back. And I shoot almost straight up into the air, the peaks of the roof thatch shrinking as I climb. It feels like rising out of a memory, only I’ve never been afraid to be hit and obliterated by other memories while I was doing it.
But doing is definitely different from Knowing. I give the handles a little twitch to the right, telling the bike to fly me between the peaks, over the parks and across the plain. But the machine isn’t responding. Even when I turn the handles hard. And then I realize that I’m not in control. I’m on a prescribed course. I’m on patrol. And how long before the Earthlings realize that a girl patrolling New Canaan in a flapping red dress is not one of their own? Not long.
I hang on as I pick up speed, plunging down in a way that leaves my stomach behind to circle the water clock. But I am remembering, sifting what is inside my brain. And I see Beckett talking to the squares of light.
“Turn right,” I say, loud over the freezing wind.