Alight (13 page)

He stands straight again, looks down at me. “Just like only the gods can decide who leads.”

My skin prickles. Is he challenging my leadership? That thickness in my chest again…my temper, surging. I control it, but barely. I lean close to him, whisper so quietly he has to bend forward to hear.

“If anything happens to Spingate, I’ll hold
you
responsible.”

Aramovsky glances at my spear. The blade is only inches from his face. He wants it, wants to stab me with it.

Bishop clears his throat. “Aramovsky, let’s take a walk.”

The tall boy’s face goes blank. He looks around the room, as if searching for someone who will help him. Everywhere he looks, people stare at the ground. No one wants to cross Bishop.

First Bawden, now Aramovsky—Bishop is making things worse. People will think I can’t handle problems on my own. I want to tell Bishop to be quiet, but if I say something now it will just cause more confusion.

“Now, Aramovsky,” Bishop says. “A word, please?”

Aramovsky swallows, smooths out his new black coveralls. He walks to the door, trying to look like this doesn’t bother him. He and Bishop exit the shuttle.

The coffin room is quiet, tense. No one knows what to say. How did things get out of control so fast? The only noise comes from Spingate. She’s crying a little—because she’s so angry, I think. Gaston stands next to her, rubbing her back. Some people are looking at her like
she
did something wrong.

O’Malley steps onto the stage.

“That’s all for now, everyone,” he says. “As soon as we have more information, we’ll share it.” He steps down, walks to me, whispers: “Can I see you in the pilothouse?”

O’Malley is better at these situations than I am. Maybe he can help me figure out what to do next. I follow him to the pilothouse. He closes the door behind us.

T
he pilothouse walls are solid black. Perhaps this place only comes to life for Spingate or Gaston. It hits me that if anything happens to them, we won’t be able to take the shuttle anywhere. Beckett is a gear…could he fly it?

O’Malley leans against a wall. “Aramovsky is a problem.”

“Wow,
Chancellor,
you’re really observant.”

He says nothing. His expression remains blank.

I take a slow breath. I’m so mad at Aramovsky I want to attack everything and everyone.

“Sorry,” I say. “I can’t believe he threatened Spingate.”

“While you were gone, he was talking to people. He wants everyone to follow his religion.”

I feel my teeth grinding. “He doesn’t even know what the religion is. The
God of Blood
? Doesn’t sound familiar to me, at all. I think he’s making it up as he goes along.”

“He doesn’t care about truth, Em—he cares about
power
.
Your
power.”

“I don’t
have
any power.”

O’Malley shakes his head. “You do. That’s why you’re the only leader for us. That’s why you’re the only leader for
me
.”

“Watch him,” I say. “
Really
watch him this time. We can’t let him do something else to make things even worse.”

O’Malley comes closer. There is a hunger in his eyes. I see his gaze flicking all over my face, like he’s trying to take in every part of me all at once. He reaches out, gently holds my shoulders. Even through the coveralls, his touch sends a tingle through my body. He smiles, which chases away my thoughts of anything
but
that smile.

My breath gets short. What is he doing? I try to tell him to stop, but the words won’t come out.

He pulls me closer.

“Em, you’re so beautiful.”

He said the same thing on Deck Three, when he was looking at Matilda’s face.

“Because my bruises have healed, right?
Now
I’m pretty enough for you, is that it, O’Malley?”

“When we’re alone, you can call me Kevin.” He leans closer. “You were the first thing I saw when I woke up. You’ll
always
be pretty to me.”

I want to be mad, but I can’t. So I’m healed up now, so what? This isn’t Matilda’s face—it’s
mine
.

O’Malley is so sure, so confident, but I’m confused. Bishop likes me. I know he does; he kissed me. Now, though, it’s like he doesn’t want to be near me. O’Malley leans in. He’s moving slowly, giving me plenty of chances to pull away if I want to.

I don’t.

His lips meet mine. It feels…delicious. As good as it felt with Bishop, but different. Does every boy kiss different?

O’Malley’s fingertips caress the back of my neck. I can’t think of anything but him, his lips, the way he smells, the feel of his hands on my body.

Unlike Bishop, O’Malley wants me and he’s not shy about it.

Bishop
…

Our kiss almost got Spingate killed.

I shove O’Malley. He stumbles back, surprised.

“Don’t ever kiss me again.” I try to sound hard, but my words come out as a cracked plea.

He smiles. “I won’t. Until you ask me to.”

Anger floods in, washing away the confused feelings.

“That’s not going to happen,” I say. “Now get out.”

His smile widens. So stunning, and yet there is something off about it.

“As you wish,
Empress
.”

He leaves the pilothouse.

I close my eyes, try to calm myself. I didn’t want him to stop, I admit it, but who does he think he is?

I don’t know. But I know what he
doesn’t
think he is—he doesn’t think he’s a leader. He’s not like Aramovsky in that way, or even Bishop. O’Malley is comfortable being at my side, giving me counsel, providing the information I need. Not once has he challenged my leadership. Not once has he stepped in because he thought I couldn’t handle something.

But just now he was so…
aggressive
. Not physically, he was
emotionally
aggressive.

When I opened his coffin and looked at his face for the first time, I had never seen anything so beautiful. Since then, I’ve experienced so much more: spaceships, cities, ruins, stars and moons, blood and death, love and tenderness…

…and through all of that, Kevin O’Malley is
still
the most beautiful thing I have ever known.

He kissed me.

He
wants
me.

I don’t know if I can be mad at him. I don’t know if I can be mad at Bishop, either. I don’t know what to think about any of this.

A shake of my head, a rub of my face.
Push those thoughts away, Em—there are more important things to worry about
. We need food. There are people who survive in Omeyocan’s jungle, who obviously know what to eat. For us to survive, I have to find them.

And that means tomorrow, as soon as it’s light, we have to go outside the walls again.

T
he sun is about to rise. Most everyone is still asleep. I am in the pilothouse with my friends: Spingate, Gaston, O’Malley and Bishop. And, unfortunately, Aramovsky.

I don’t want him here, but what choice do I have? If he’s with me, he’s not talking behind my back. And as much as I hate to admit it, he’s
smart
. I won’t ignore good ideas just because they come from someone I don’t like.

We stand around Gaston’s map. Somehow, the area shown seems smaller than before.

“We all know how much trouble we’re in,” I say, concentrating on not looking at Aramovsky when I do. “You are the people I trust to help me make decisions. I think we need to send a party to the fire pit.”

“But a spider was in the jungle,” O’Malley says.

I nod. “It was also inside the city walls. If it’s a threat no matter where we go, we might as well try to find the people who know what food is safe to eat.”

Spingate hugs her shoulders. Everyone else looks rested. She looks like she hasn’t slept at all.

“It’s not just the spider,” she says. “We heard many animals. And the people who made that fire might be hostile.”

We’re desperate. If they are hostile, can we
take
food from them? How far are we willing to go to survive?

“We should focus on the mold,” Spingate says. “The labs on Deck Two have scientific equipment, and pedestals with instructions on how to use it. I’m studying the mold, trying to find a way to neutralize the toxin. I worked on it all night.”

No wonder she’s so tired.

“Brewer knew about the mold,” I say. “Is there any information about it in the pedestal’s memory?”

She shakes her head.

“How convenient,” Aramovsky says.

I shoot him a glare, but he ignores it, continues.

“You and your
cure,
Spingate. How long will it take?”

She shrugs. “Maybe ten days. Maybe twenty. Maybe never.”

“Keep working on it,” I say. “You can do that while the rest of us look for other solutions.”

Gaston gestures to the countless buildings laid out on the map. “We’ve only looked in the warehouse, right? Other buildings could have uncontaminated food. We need to search them. And as far as we know, there
are
people in this city, we just haven’t seen them yet.”

He drags his fingertip through the map, leaving a glowing line from the dot that represents the shuttle, through the streets we used to reach the warehouse, then to the waterfall. I see his point—we’ve explored only a tiny portion of this city.

“The warehouse bins were sealed,” O’Malley says. “The mold got in anyway. If we find more food, odds are it will be in the same condition.”

“Still worth a try,” Gaston says. “We should explore.”

Maybe that’s dangerous, too, but there are a lot of us. And Gaston is right—we have to try everything.

“We’ll send teams to search buildings around the landing pad,” I say. “We’ll assign lookouts, keep the teams close enough that they can run to the shuttle if the spider is spotted. We can do that in addition to sending a team to the fire pit.”

O’Malley crosses his arms, purses his lips in thought. “There are thousands of buildings. If only there was a way to see if some were more important than others. Gaston, the landing pad had to have power to rise up, right?”

Gaston nods. “I think it has its own small power plant. Nuclear, probably. When the shuttle came in range, I think the power plant activated.”

O’Malley opens his mouth to speak, but Gaston cuts him off.

“Before you throw out your genius idea, O’Malley, I already asked the shuttle if it could detect other buildings with power. It said that capability had been erased—like almost everything else I’ve asked it.”

O’Malley puts his hands on his knees, bends so he’s looking down the north-south street at eye level. “Maybe the shuttle has bad memories like us. Maybe it’s recovering them, just like we are. Ask it again.”

Gaston rolls his eyes. “All right,
fine,
O’Malley. Let’s do it one more time, just for you. Shuttle?”

“Yes, Captain Xander?”

“Highlight any buildings or areas that have power.”

A small circle lights up below the shuttle icon, and so does one other spot—the massive ziggurat at the city center.

“But…wow, it
worked,
” Gaston says. “O’Malley, I take back half the bad things I’ve ever said about you.”

This seems strange to me. It was almost like O’Malley already knew what the shuttle would find. Did he remember an access code for the pedestals on Deck Three? No, that can’t be—he would have told me right away if he had.

“Let’s test our luck,” Gaston says. Then, in an overly sweet voice: “Shuttle, love of my life, my true north, do you know what that building is?”

“Yes, Captain Xander. That is the Observatory
.
”

Bishop’s face wrinkles. “What’s an
observatory
?”

“A place to see stars,” Gaston says.

Bishop points up. “We can see them at night. We don’t need a building for that.”

“It still has power,” Spingate says, ignoring him. “We
have
to go there. If the city builders wanted to make sure their knowledge was preserved—science, engineering, maybe even
history
—they would store that knowledge in a database of some kind. It makes sense they’d keep that database in a building that maintained power no matter what happened.”