Authors: Kevin Emerson
The hostess leads us toward the center of the cylinder, which is maybe a kilometer long inside and half as wide. There are banks of SafeSun lamps at intervals, and a hazy sense of sky, but always overhead there is some part of the landscape spinning by.
In the very center of the cylinder there is a spindly metal structure that connects to the near and far end and also to four equidistant points on the rotating wall. I can see open-air elevators carrying people up and down and side to side.
That is the spot. I rub my leg. Breathe hard.
“You can do it,” says Rana. “Do you want me to open your compartment?”
Everything about the question is weird but then I realize that I have pants over the wound on my thigh and I'm surrounded by people.
“Yes.” It's a good thing I only have to whisper, because my mouth is dry.
This is it. Only minutes left now.
I feel Rana's hand slip out of me and tingle down my side to the dark mole below that line of plastic stitches. Her long fingernail peels up the mole, which is not a mole at all but a camouflaged tab. She pulls it up, and the tab works like a zipper. The plastic stitches come apart like teeth, revealing a thin pocket in my skin. It feels like I am being opened up, like I am a machine. Once the zipper is open, her fingers probe inside and begin to slide out the carbon cylinder that is embedded there. It is six inches long, and I feel a strange tugging sensation beneath my skin as it pulls free.
“Ready,” she says.
It is time.
The hostess is going on about the features of
Egress
, where the dining rooms are and how the three-sixty pool works, all about grav yoga and how the engines function, but I am not hearing it.
My heart pounds.
My legs feel weak and my arms tingle. This is it. This is it, this is it . . .
And I press down on all the stormy feelings, the guilt and worry and shame and also hope because this is what I'm doing,
this
is what I want.
I will no longer be someone's tool, someone's instrument.
I will no longer serve powers that cannot help me, that could not keep the only thing I loved, the only thing I had left, alive.
I won't be someone's hero. Or their martyr. I won't be their anything. I will do what I need to do.
This is what I have been telling myself, in secret, since I was pulled from the ice.
This is my secret plan.
It is not what the Nomads think it is.
I'm sorry, Robard, Serena, but I will not die for some cause. I will not strip away myself after all that's been taken from me.
We board an open-air elevator and it takes us up, up into the space in the center of
Egress
, where my weapon will have access to the most oxygen possible.
Where it could tear this ship apart.
And it will if it has to.
But that is not my plan. I do not want to die.
No more dying.
“Go,” says Rana.
She understands. She is the only one. She knows what it is like to live without love and that is all that matters.
So I am doing something I have told no one but her. This, right here, right now, is where I launch my own plan.
My fingers are slick with sweat, but I have positioned myself at the railing of the elevator and I reach down and take the oxygen detonator, still warm from my insides, out of Rana's misty fingers.
“PAUL!” I shout as loud as I can. Everyone turns.
“Excuse me, sirâ” the hostess begins.
I hold the detonator up over my head, between my two hands.
“PAUL!” I shout again. I know there are surveillance camerasâthis is an Eden, after all.
“What are you doing, kid?” a large man calls to me, and I can feel all the eyes in the elevator sizing me up, figuring out if they can take me.
“It's an oxygen detonator!” I shout, my mouth dry and my voice threadbare. I know I sound crazy, all my pent-up hatred for Paul seething out of me. “All I have to do is snap it and it will incinerate all the oxygen in this ship, and this whole place will blow!”
“What is he saying, Mommy?” Penny whines. “What is that bad boy saying?”
“That is a very risky plan, Owen.” Paul's voice. Coming from the intercom system, echoing in the vast space. “One that you won't survive.”
“I know!” I shout, trying to hide how much I'm shaking.
Silence. I feel like I can hear Paul thinking. Everyone on the elevator is frozen in terror.
“It's nice to see you again, by the way,” he finally says. “Well, if you're going to do it, why haven't you done it already? You've lost your element of surprise.”
And now I have to say it. And maybe I am betraying a whole planet. Or maybe, despite my hatred and rage, I am just doing what Paul asked for way back at the beginning. In the temple beneath Eden, he asked me to join him, and I said no. Because I thought I knew better. And because I wanted to see who he really was, and I wanted to have my honor. And yet ever since that moment, I've lost more than I've won, and Paul has punished me again and again. Maybe he has won. Caring about that doesn't matter. All that matters is now.
“I want to make a deal!” I shout.
“Really?” Paul sounds intrigued. “Well, by all means . . .”
“I won't blow up the ship, and I'll stay here and help you. I can talk to the Terra. She speaks to me. She chose me to save her.”
“Yes,” says Paul, “I suspected as much.”
“But I won't save her!” I shout. “I won't save anyone. I'll stay here and talk to the Terra for you, and help you understand her.”
A long silence.
“Well, you certainly have my attention. But what's the catch, Owen? What do I need to do for you?”
My body is shaking all over like my nerves are short-circuiting. Swallowing is hard, and I can feel the tears forming, but I force myself to press on. “I know what the Terra's energy can do,” I say. “And all I ask is that you save one person for me.”
I don't know if this feels right anymore, but nothing does. I am either betraying everyone I've known on earth or I'm going to die, and in neither of those circumstances will I be happy, without . . .
“Bring Lilly back.”
As I say it, a sob overwhelms me. I hate that I look so weak, or maybe, based on the faces around me, I look insane. It doesn't matter.
“Bring her back for me,” I say, “and I'm yours. Otherwise, I've got nothing to live for.”
The longest silence yet.
“Where is her body?”
“Safe in a cave, near where we last met.”
Rana rescued Lilly from her coffin, the one I built to float longer, rescued her body and put it in a small cave in the mountains, then sealed the entrance. That was the first part of our secret plan.
There are murmurs among the people around me. Frightened looks.
It is all I can do to keep holding up the detonator as Paul considers my offer.
“Owen,” he says finally, and I can hear how his voice is shaped by a grin. “We have a deal.”
IT IS A BEAUTIFUL ROOM. THE NICEST ROOM I HAVE ever stayed in. The walls are clean and lined with drawers. Inside are clothes, casual wear, shorts and sneakers, a pressure suit and a helmet. A window looks out on the stars, our view slowly spinning.
“It's kind of like the view from Giza,” says Rana, “only without the imagining.”
I don't know whether she means that as better or worse. I don't ask. Looking at the stars, I think of Lilly.
Wouldn't that be amazing? To see something like that,
she said of Orion's shoulder. She wished to travel in space, to see the stars. . . . It hurts to think about, but I remind myself,
She will get to see them
,
soon enough
.
The light in the room is always golden, like late afternoon. The bathroom shower literally rains on you from a hundred points in the ceiling. And smells like pine trees. The bed feels like floating, the sheets silky and cool.
But I have barely slept.
When I did, I found myself running from frozen Cryos that were lurching toward me over ice fields, as a legless version of Robard, stuck in the ice, called me a traitor. Told me I had sold my soul. So when I snapped awake, out of breath, I turned on the lights and stayed up.
I have watched videos detailing all the amenities that await us at EdenHome. It's small and spartan compared to an Eden on earth, and it makes me wonder why Paul didn't choose to bring the Paintbrush along for the journey. That would have at least made sense with what he once told me, about perfecting the technology.
“Good morning,” the pleasant, honey-toned female voice says over the ship-wide communication. The clock reads seven a.m., but outside the darkness hasn't changed. It's no help when earth is visible, as we're zooming around it in orbit, seeing day become night become day again, almost as if time is in fast-forward.
Everyone is dying down there.
I fight the thought.
But she will live.
“Today we will be welcoming the final selectees from EdenNorth,” the voice continues. “Unfortunately, selectees from EdenWest will not be joining us, due to an internal conflict. That said, we are still on schedule to begin the journey to EdenHome. The trip will take approximately seven weeks, given our current uranium fuel supply.
“Now, I know that is longer than our original timeline, but given the deteriorating situation on earth, we feel it is best to leave now, which means we need to take it a little slower to conserve fuel. And remember, the board of directors will be waiting to greet you with a party that they promise will be the finest that Mars has ever seen.” She chuckles at this.
“Please let me kill her,” says Rana. She sits beside me on the bed, both of us with our hands in our laps.
“Once we are under way, we will begin calling you all to
Egress
's version of extension services, where you will begin your exclusive Eternity treatments. In the meantime, relax and enjoy all that the ship has to offer. Have a pleasant day,” the voice concludes.
“When are you going to go look around?” I ask Rana. “You don't have to stay with me.”
“I want to be sure you are safe. I don't trust Paul. Do you?”
“No. Though, I'm not sure it matters now.” I made my choice, I think, and this thought chills me. Did I really choose this? I look at the lovely room. I think of Lilly getting a room like this. I think of the alternatives on earth.
There are no other alternatives for her
, I remind myself.
A beep sounds and the door begins to slide open.
Rana slips into me.
It is Paul. “Well. Good morning,” he says mildly.
He stands there and he is just Paul: a middle-aged man in khakis and a shirt and tightly knotted tie. He wears the dark sunglasses to hide the eyes I now half share, but other than those, he is just a man; and seeing him here in this normal light, not in some underground chamber, makes it almost hard to believe that he is the same monster we were running from for weeks.
But is calling him a monster even fair? He's saving all these people, and these people will have children and the human race will go on, improved by the Terra's power. All he did was take matters into his own hands. Except there are many more people, both living and dead and suffering now, who will lose their chance to survive because of his actions.
“Did you rest?” Paul asks.
“Yeah,” I lie.
“I have to say, Owen, I did not expect this.” He sighs. “You know, I still regret not just talking to you at the moment you arrived at Camp Eden. Or even when I woke you from cryo. Had I made the full reality of your situation clear from the start, we could have gotten to this point with so much less difficulty.”
“Difficulty like leaving me for dead in the ice?” I know I sound sulky but I don't care. Seeing Paul reminds me that the pit of hatred I feel for him is still there. His casual assumption that I would ever have chosen to go with him while I had any other choice only reinforces it. Except I have to wonder if maybe he's right. Would I have been strong enough to resist him, to run, to at least try, before I'd found Lilly and Leech and Seven and the rest?
But I remind myself that it doesn't matter now. They're gone and I've made my deal. And yet all this makes me feel like I am made of lead.
“Actually,” says Paul, “I always thought you'd survive that. Despite my best efforts, you've had a way of persevering. I'd mostly given up, but I always suspected that you and I would have another chapter together.”
I don't respond.
“And I suppose the difficulties were necessary to finally get us on the same page. Anyway . . . ready to go see her?”
I force down my nerves. “Yes.” I get up and grab the skull bag, which Rana insists that I bring everywhere I go. I think she feels more whole with it around, even though she can't be inside it.
“Why do you still have that?” Paul asks. “I think we're a bit past those old notions of the Three.”
“I like it,” I say.
“Suit yourself.”
We walk down a dark-carpeted hall of numbered doors: more staterooms like mine.
Egress
has rooms for a thousand selectees and support staff. Every few doors, a panel of the wall is accented by a waterfall of mist, or a tasteful reproduction of a famous work of art.
“We're going to be a lot lighter with the news out of EdenWest,” says Paul. When I don't say anything he adds, “but that also means we can travel faster. I heard it was Nomads who launched the attack there and leaked the information. Are they the ones who helped you get in here?”
“Yes.”
“And they thought you were going to blow this place up.”
“Yeah.” Saying it reminds me of the dream, of a maimed Robard shouting to me.
“That's going to be a major disappointment for them,” says Paul.