Alight (44 page)

If Barkah thinks the same thing, he doesn’t show it. My brave new friend hops up the ramp.

Lahfah looks to the sky and taps his throat. For some reason, the gesture makes me think of a human sighing heavily in exasperation. He follows his prince up the ramp.

I run into the shuttle, gesture to Lahfah and Barkah to stay in the entryway.

In the coffin room, I see dozens of kids. All the symbols are represented. Of the people my age, I see Okereke, Cabral and Opkick. I don’t see Bawden, Johnson, Ingolfsson or D’souza—they are with Aramovsky’s army, cannon fodder to be used against the Springers.

I look for Zubiri—she’s not here.

And then I see Bello.

My frustration and anger draw down to a single point:
her
.

“Your fault,” I say. “It’s your fault O’Malley is dead.”

Her eyes go wide—not with fear, but with annoyance.

“The transfer didn’t work on Kevin? That’s too bad, but how in the hell is that
my
fault?”

On Kevin…

She thinks I’m talking about that wrinkled old monster…Bello thinks I’m
Matilda
.

Rage engulfs me without warning, hot and tingling and all-powerful. She isn’t really just Bello anymore, she is
all
the Grownups, she is the reason we have suffered endlessly, the reason my friends are dead.

I rush her, hurdling coffins and kids alike.

Bello shakes her head—a confused
What are you doing?—
then I am on her. I slam her into the red wall. The back of her head hits hard enough to make the metal thrum. She cries out in pain and surprise. I bend my right arm, whip my elbow at her face—O’Malley’s silver bracelet slams into her mouth.

She falls, spitting blood and teeth.

“You
used
us,” I say.

I viciously kick her ribs with the toe of my heavy black boot. She lets out a sound that is more hiccup than groan, rolls to her back. Her hands rise up, trying to surrender or ward off the attack—I don’t know which, and I don’t care.

“You were supposed to
protect
us.”

I drop my knee into her stomach as hard as I can. The wind shoots out of her all at once. Her eyes widen in shock and fear—the fear of not knowing if she will ever draw another breath.

“You wanted to make us
just like you
.”

I’m vaguely aware of kids screaming, of my fellow circles shouting at me to stop, yet none of them lay a hand on me.

I straddle Bello, pinning her hips to the floor. I punch her in the eye, feel the skin of my knuckles split.

“You are all
monsters
!”

I rear back, hit her again. Her head bounces off the floor. I hit her a third time, smashing her nose.

Blood covers her face. Her eyes are open, but they don’t really see anything.

“You couldn’t just let us be,” I say. “It didn’t have to be like this.”

I aim the point of my bracelet right between her tear-filled eyes.

“Crying doesn’t fix anything,” I say. “You cry because you are
weak
.”

She trembles. She’s beaten, she’s helpless, and I don’t care.

All I have to do is straighten my fingers, then she will be no more.

The shuttle shudders. I hear and feel a rumble.

The engines—Gaston has started them up.

It’s enough to distract me, to make me look at what I have done.

A deep cut above Bello’s eye pulses with red blood. Her nose lies at an angle, bone or maybe cartilage sticking out of a jagged rip that leaks blood down her cheek. Her upper lip is split, bleeding badly. Her front two teeth are gone, and the left incisor is broken in half, a splintered tip jutting from bloody gums.

A strong hand, gentle on my shoulder.

“That’s enough,” Bishop says. “Come to the pilothouse.”

The kids are staring at me, wide-eyed, openmouthed, as are Okereke, Cabral, Borjigin and Opkick. A handful of Aramovsky’s young circle-stars stand there, their faces alive and drinking in the violence. They look at me with newfound respect. I have spoken a language they were programmed to understand.

Bishop lifts me, sets me on my feet.

“Put Bello in an empty storage room,” he says. “Lock her in. Don’t hurt her further.”

People rush to gather her up, just as the kids outside rushed to gather up Farrar after Bishop knocked him out.

At the coffin room entryway, Barkah and Lahfah stare at me. How much of Bello’s beating did they see?

The shuttle shudders again. The unseen engines scream so loud I almost cover my ears, then the noise drops down to a mere roar.

I sprint to the pilothouse, gesturing for the two Springers to follow me.

Inside, both Gaston and Spingate are bathed in color.

“Preflight checks complete,” Gaston says. “Shuttle, give us handholds.”

Spots on the black floor rise up, seem to flow right out of the solid surface. Gaston and Spingate each grab one. Barkah and Lahfah do the same.

“The floor of the pilothouse accommodates for sudden banks or thrust, but it’s not a perfect system,” Gaston says. “That means hold on tight. Shuttle, open internal comm.”

“Internal comm open, Captain.”

When Gaston speaks again, I hear his words echo throughout the shuttle. “Everyone, get into a coffin and stay there. This ride will be short but the landing might be bumpy.”

He waves his hand. I hear something click. He looks at me, and when he talks his voice is normal.

“We’re ready,” he says. “Is this still what you want?”

Behind Gaston, one of the walls shows the rising sun. The blazing red orb has just lifted free of the horizon.

“Take us to the clearing,” I say. “As fast as you can.”

Gaston nods. “Shuttle, initiate flight plan.”

We lift off. I feel us banking slightly this way and that, but as Gaston told us, the floor shifts instantly at each movement, tilting to counter the effects. Despite that, I grip the handhold far harder than I ever held the spear.

We rise quickly. Images on the walls change, showing us the spreading grandeur of Omeyocan. In seconds we are up high, much higher than the Observatory. We can see mountains off in the distance, great rivers, vast plains and the ever-present yellow jungle.

Barkah and Lahfah look terrified, but they hold on tight and make no noise. They have suffered much. A broken leg, a ruined eye, burned and blistered skin. Some of their cuts have crusted over, others still leak blue blood.

“Five minutes,” Gaston says.

The sun is up—has the battle already begun?

I look at Bishop. Cuts and welts dot his swollen face. His knuckles drip blood to the pilothouse floor. The beating his creator gave him…I don’t know how any human being could keep going after that, yet here he stands, at my side and ready to go even further.

“You look terrible,” I say.

He smiles. “And you look like a warrior.”

I keep one hand locked on the handhold while the other feels my face. My broken nose. O’Malley, hitting me so hard. His knife. The way it slid into him…the shock on his face, his horror at knowing he’d gotten what he’d sought for a thousand years and I had just taken that away from him.

“You had to do it,” Bishop says softly. “But what you killed, that wasn’t O’Malley.”

He knows my thoughts.

I want to believe he’s right, but I can’t. Kevin was still in there, at least some small part. If I had captured him rather than killing him, maybe I could have found a way to bring him back. Instead, I stabbed him to death.

In my head, I know I did the only thing I could. There was too much going on, blood and death and fire all around—there was no other option.

In my heart, though, I will always know I could have found a better way.

Bishop reaches out, touches my cheek. So gentle. It is almost enough to make me forget the horrors, forget the things I’ve done.

“And my progenitor,” he says. “Don’t feel bad about killing him, either, because doing so saved my life.”

I nod again, but I know that is a lie, too. Bishop’s creator was done fighting. Maybe forever. I could see it in his strange, red eyes. He’d won his battle, somehow proving to himself that the man he’d become after a thousand years of experience and wisdom was superior to the raw talent and energy he was as a youth. But that victory cost him—he could no longer see my Bishop as an empty shell waiting to be filled. Even after a thousand years, there was a good man in there. A man who finally remembered right from wrong.

And when he did, I ripped him into pieces.

Yong…the pig…Ponalla the Springer…Old Bishop…O’Malley…Old Visca…

All dead by my hand.

And Bello, beaten to a pulp, alive only because the shuttle’s engines distracted me.

Why am I like this?

What’s
wrong
with me?

How many more will I kill?

“I am the wind,” I say quietly. “I am death.”

Bishop nods in solemn understanding. “Someone has to be, Em.” He glances at Barkah, at Lahfah, taking in their wounds. “In every civilization, someone has to be.”

“We’re in visual range,” Gaston says. “Three minutes from landing.”

The front-wall view changes from a crystal-clear picture of endless yellow jungle flowing by to a slightly shaking image of the crescent-shaped clearing. It curves away from us, as if we are approaching the bottom point of a quarter moon that is surrounded by tall trees.

On that clearing, I see lines of tiny, moving things, morning sunlight glinting off of metal. A long line of Springers, marching forward, muskets in hand.

Then, from the trees on the opposite side of the wide clearing, four yellow machines scurry out.

Spiders.

We are too late. The battle is about to begin.

“G
aston, get us there,
now,
” I say. “Go faster!”

He nods. “Give me maximum thrust.”

The shuttle lurches forward so violently that the floor beneath me can’t accommodate fast enough; I almost lose my grip on the handhold.

Lahfah is chittering and chirping. I’m not sure if he’s scared of the ride, or dreading what he sees on the battlefield.

Images on the pilothouse wall gain detail as we close in. I see my people at the edge of the jungle, hiding behind trees and cowering in shallow ditches. Most of them hold tools that should be used for farming, and most of them are circles—fodder for Aramovsky’s war.

The Springer lines stop. A staccato flash of glinting metal as hundreds of muskets take aim. As one, they fire, and are obscured by a long grayish cloud of smoke.

One of the advancing spiders slows to a stop.

From the other three, beams of white light shoot out, sweeping across the Springers. Clouds of dirt and grass fly into the air, clouds that I know also contain meat and bone, blood and brains.

Barkah cries out, a howl that rends my heart.

The remaining Springers flee. What came forward as an organized line runs away as scattered individuals.

But the spiders don’t stop. On they march, to the middle of the clearing, beams blazing new holes, turning living beings into explosions of fluid and char and vapor.

I feel so helpless.

“Dammit, Gaston, get us there!”

“The poles you’re holding aren’t designed for aggressive flight,” he says. “There’s too much inertia to—”

“
Do it!
We’ll hold on! Put us down between the Springers and the spiders. We have to push our people back.”

Spingate looks away from the little images of light floating around her, locks eyes with me.

“We’re in range for the shuttle’s missiles,” she says. “We can destroy the spiders.”

The missiles…I’d forgotten that Gaston told me the shuttle has weapons.

But if we destroy the spiders, will we kill whoever is riding them? If we had left a few minutes earlier, we might have stopped this. And now the only way to end it is if I order the death of my own people?

The image before us now shows the battlefield in perfect detail. Torn earth. Burning vines. Smoldering corpses. Severed limbs. Springers, trying to crawl despite missing legs, or hopping around holding bloody stumps that used to be arms. In the motionless spider, I see two young circle-stars and a tooth-girl, unmoving behind the protective ridge, a pool of blood filling the deck beneath them.

“Thirty seconds to landing,” Gaston says. “We’re coming in fast, so this is going to be rough—hold on tight.”

“Em, I have missile-lock,” Spingate says. “Do you want me to fire on the spiders?”

I open my mouth to say yes, but nothing comes out.

Something rolls forth from the Springers’ side of the clearing—dozens of those strange wooden wagons Barkah showed me. Springers push them along at a fast clip, wheels bounding over uneven ground. The wagons aren’t empty anymore: each one carries a boulder bigger than the biggest Springer, a boulder wrapped in ropes. The long wooden tails no longer trail behind, but stick up at an angle like some kind of off-center teeter-totter.

A spider-beam lashes out, catches one of the wagons dead-center. Springer bodies pop and burn; the wagon flames bright, becomes an instant inferno of wood and rope.