Alive (21 page)

T
his creature doesn’t know what’s real. He’s alive, he’s talking to me, but he thinks I killed him?

“Little Savage,” the monster says. “You seem so strong, so healthy.” His tone has changed—loathing drips from every word. “Do you feel hot, Em? A fever cleaver in your head, perhaps?”

Even if I was sick, I wouldn’t tell him, I wouldn’t show him any weakness.

“I feel fine.”

The monster sighs. “It’s been so long since the husks were serviced, I shouldn’t be surprised. The needly wheedly must be jammed, much like I am.”

Needly wheedly?
Does he mean
needle
? The one that stabbed me? How could he know about that, unless…

“That tube in my coffin.
You
made it attack me?”

“So many malfunctions,” he says. “Other husks far worse than yours, some far better. Broken valves, frozen hinges, corrupt controllers…the centuries have not been kind to the Cherished. I hope the newer ones are in better condition. We’ll see soon enough.”

“Answer my question.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own: it is cold and hard, the edge of the spear blade turned into sound. “Did
you
make that needle stab me?”

“Of course I did,” he says. “You murdered me.”

Again with that gibberish. I’m the only one that woke up like that. And he…wait, his words earlier…

“You mumbled that the needle
jammed,
” I say. “What would have happened if it hadn’t?”

His red eyes bore into mine. “Pain in the brain, little circle girl. A slow demise was your prize. I wanted your death to last, as did mine.”

He tried to kill me. Me, no one else. A
malfunction
is the reason I am alive.

“Where are we, Brewer?” I ask. “What is this prison?”

He laughs again.

“Prison? For a
leader
you are wrong-wrong-wrong quite a lot, are you not?”

“What else was I wrong about?”

“You said I am no god. And yet I am your eternal protector. You and yours are alive because of me.”

I shake my head. I will not play games with this creature.

“Protector? You just admitted that you tried to kill me. And your kind attacked us, took one of us away.”

The black face leans forward. The red eyes swirl faster, narrow to slits. “Which one? And where was he abducted?”

He pretends he doesn’t know? More games.

“
She,
not
he,
” I say to the monster. “Bello. Taken by your kind. In the Garden.”

A wicked hiss slides out of its hidden mouth.
“Bello?
That’s not fair, it’s
not fair
! I will fix that, oh yes I will. You said
the Garden
? You must mean the orchard. The only way there is through the empty section, but I sealed that off.” He looks off, thinking. “The scepter in your coffin room. I never did get it out of there, not that I wanted to touch my own murder weapon. Theresa must have used it.”

The tool we’ve been using to open doors…that’s what someone used to smash in little Brewer’s skull.

The monster’s eyes again settle on me. “Is anyone in the orchard now?”

I shake my head. “Everyone is out. I won’t tell you where.”

“I’m not the one you need to hide from,” Brewer says. “They know you are awake. It had to be Aramovsky, that insightful man. That’s not fair, that’s
not fair
!”

I turn to the tall boy standing behind me. Aramovsky’s mouth hangs open. His tongue is moving, as if he’s trying to say something but can’t quite remember how to speak.

I again look at the monster. “There is another Aramovsky?”

The monster nods slowly. “Oh, yes. I know that bastard only too well.”

“And we know another Brewer,” I say. “There was a boy in a coffin…in the room where you tried to murder me.”

My words drip with venom, with raw fury. All the pain I felt, it’s because of this creature.

“Coffin?”
The red eyes narrow, the thick folds of jet-black skin at the edges deepen. “Why do you call it that?”

“Because that’s what they are. Many of us died in those boxes.”

The monster pauses. He seems to calm down a bit. He nods again.

“Perhaps
coffins
is a fitting name after all. At least for the boy named Brewer. I waited for him for so long, but you killed him.” He starts to bob back and forth, slowly picking up speed. “They cracked open his husk—what you call his
coffin—
and they slaughtered him. He was helpless. They didn’t care. After that I tricked them, gas fools the lass, and I locked them out. They couldn’t get me they didn’t
dare
because I would kill them like they killed me and I wanted them to suffer wanted
you
to suffer damn them to hell they are the demons and I will get them oh
yes I will get them
and make them
hurt
in the worst way, they—”

“Shut
up,
” I snap. I don’t want to hear any more of his deranged rambling. I have the spear: he
must
listen. “Tell us where you took Bello. And where are we? What is this building? Are we buried underground?”

The bone scraping comes again, louder than before. He laughs so hard that some of his black wrinkles flop around like rolls of fat.

I am tired of being laughed at. I glance at Bishop, see him snarling—he’s tired of it, too.

The monster’s laugh abruptly changes to another cough, this one far worse than the first, a grating sound that reminds me of when I awoke with all that dust in my throat and lungs. The way Brewer shakes, it looks painful. It takes him a few moments to recover.

His eyes are now more black than red.

“You haven’t figured it out yet,” he says. “You’re not a very good leader,
Em
. You’re
just a circle,
wasn’t that their words? How they belittled your acumen. How foolish they were, remember?”

I shake my head. “No, I don’t remember anything.”

“Ah, of course not,” Brewer says. “Then again, you were always smart enough to use people smarter than you. Where is Okadigbo? Is she still alive, or did you kill her again?”

“I haven’t killed anyone, Brewer.”

Yong’s gasping face flashes through my thoughts. The wide eyes, the shock, the terror-filled knowledge that he was as good as dead.

It was an accident….

I focus on Brewer’s words.
Okadigbo,
he said. That’s a name on one of the coffins in my room. A shriveled skeleton in a big, white shirt. She’s dead, yes, but I didn’t kill her. I couldn’t have. Unless I did it before someone put me in the coffin, and I can’t remember that just like I can’t remember school, or the face of my father.

I shake my head, sharp and fast. Brewer is trying to confuse me.

“Stop lying to us,” I say. “And tell me where we are!”

“No Okadigbo? Oh, well, I should have checked the husks, but there wasn’t enough time and time was all that was enough. How about your nemesis, Theresa?”

I don’t know what a
nemesis
is. I don’t know who Theresa is, either.

“Oh, you don’t recognize that name?” Brewer says. “Of course you wouldn’t, not at your age. But if she lived, you might know her last name—is Theresa
Spingate
still alive?”

I shouldn’t be surprised that he knows more of us, but I am. Surprised and furious. I won’t let anything happen to her. I’ve lost Latu and Bello. There is nothing I won’t do to protect Spingate.

“I wager that Theresa still lives,” Brewer says. “I’m surprised she didn’t tell you where you are. Perhaps she hasn’t figured it out yet—side effects of the husk are so bad-bad-bad I am not glad. Or maybe she
has
figured it out and chooses not to tell you. So many secrets locked away in that pretty red head.”

I can’t take it anymore. I step forward. I lean in close to the strange, floating presence that is Brewer’s disgusting face. My words come out as a brutal scream.

“
Tell me where we are!
Tell me or I will find you and I will cut you open. I’ll watch you die, Brewer. I will make you
hurt
. Do you hear me?
Do you?
”

The red eyes gaze back at me, so close, so real.

“You already did that,” he says quietly. “You hurt me more than you could ever know. Now you threaten me again? Some things never change, never ever never. You always were a bitch, Savage.”

I lean away so fast I stumble. Bishop’s hand on my back keeps me from falling.

The scarred monster in the Garden said the same words.

These things…they know who I am.

Brewer sighs as if he’s disappointed in me.

“Little circle girl, you are not in a building,” he says. “You are not underground. You are not underwater. You’re not
under
anything. And you’re not in a prison—not for you, anyway, although that’s exactly what this place is for me. Me-me-me a sad cat in a sadder tree.”

Madness bubbles from his every word. He’s insane. Insane enough to have made pyramids of human skulls? Or to have arranged severed left arms in a big pinwheel?

Enough to have impaled babies on hooks?

I try to keep my own murderous anger in check. I try so hard, but I can’t hold it all back. My words are a growl, a low, grating promise of revenge.

“Tell me what this place is, Brewer.”

“Oh, little circle girl, don’t you know it is better to
show,
rather than
tell
?”

Below, above and around us, the curved, black walls flicker and swirl, a million colors suddenly twisting and spinning. As quickly as they came, the colors fade away. Somehow, I am now looking
beyond
the curved walls, into a different kind of blackness: a blackness that seems to go on forever. In that blackness, I see tiny points of bright light.

Points of light, moving slowly—almost imperceptibly—
upward
.

I feel a fuzziness in my head; my brain is reaching, grasping, trying to beat past the
blanked-out
parts. And when it does, when it connects the images to words, I realize what I am looking at.

Stars.

Those points of light, those are
stars
.

“Little leader learns the truth,” the monster says. “Take a look behind you.”

All of us turn away from the pedestals.

I see the backs of Gaston and Aramovsky, of El Saffani. I see the ladder that brought us down, and past it, the clear, curved wall. But beyond that is something so big I can’t even comprehend it. Out in the star-speckled blackness, I see a vast, slowly rotating disc of brown and green and blue.

Another word connects, clicks into place.

I am looking at a
planet
.

“Space,” I say. “We’re in a spaceship.”

Y
ou are wrong-wrong-wrong quite a lot, are you not?

That’s what Brewer said to me. He’s right.

We all stare at the spinning sphere out in the blackness. Below us and on our sides, the moving stars seem to spin in time with the planet, as if they are pinned to it by infinitely long invisible sticks.

Stars and planet, all spinning in the same direction.

The twins stand close together, their clubs now aimed past the ladder, perhaps at the planet, perhaps at space, perhaps at the stars.

“We should be falling,” Boy El-Saffani says. “Why aren’t we falling?”

Girl El-Saffani stamps her foot, testing the firmness of the metal grid below us. The metal rings, vibrates.

“Solid,” she says. “Does the floor keep us from falling down?”

Boy El-Saffani shakes his head. “It’s in front of our faces.” He points his bone-club at the planet. “We wouldn’t fall
down,
we should tumble
forward
.” He turns and looks at me. “Shouldn’t we, Em?”

He thinks I have any idea what’s going on?

Gaston pushes past them, slides around the ladder. He reaches out with both hands. I start after him, scared he is going to fall off the edge, but stop when his hands press against the barely visible curved wall. He leans forward, fearless.

“The stars aren’t spinning,
we
are,” he says. He turns, his smile wide, his face alive with joyous amazement. “Hey, Aramovsky, remember how Spingate said we were walking on the ceiling and you argued with her?”

Gaston points a finger straight up.

I look. The ladder is still visible, but the tube around it is not. The ladder rises up into another impossibility: Spingate’s
cylinder.
It is smaller than the planet, I think, but still so big my brain can’t make sense of it. A coppery color, huge, sprawling, sides curving up and away, the length of it stretching out and out and out for I don’t know how far. The surface is dented, scratched and pitted, like the hallways where the battles occurred. The cylinder doesn’t spin at all: it is fixed in place above us.

Only now do I truly understand what Spingate meant. We walked along the inside of that cylinder, as small as insects. We walked straight, but in a circle at the same time, until we looped up and around to wind up where we started.

This ball-shaped room we’re in is
outside
that cylinder, connected by the tube that contains the ladder. The metal-grate floor of this ball is parallel to the cylinder’s surface.

At the top of the ladder, I see two confused, gray faces peering down: Bawden and Visca, probably wondering why they can suddenly see us. To them, it must look like we’re standing in space.

Gaston snaps his fingers and laughs.

“It’s because the cylinder
rotates,
” he says. “That’s what makes us stick to the inside. I can’t quite remember how it works, but if it spun faster, we would feel heavier, and if it spun slower, we would feel lighter. That’s why it’s heavier here, in the ball, because we’re actually spinning faster than the cylinder below us. The farther out we are, the heavier we feel. I bet at the center of the cylinder, we wouldn’t weigh anything at all. We would
float
.”

Float? Gaston sounds even more insane than Brewer. What he says is
impossible
. But the room of dead babies taught me that when he talks, I should listen. I need to listen to him now.

Aramovsky raises his hands, tilts his head back.

“Miracles,” he says. “We float above a planet, we float in
space,
but we do not die. The gods protect us.
Brewer
protects us—he truly is one of the gods.”

I turn back to the hideous head hovering above the pedestal.

The stars spin behind him, too, but in the opposite direction. On my left, the stars seem to move from up to down; on my right, from down to up.

“We’re in a ship,” I say to Brewer. I know it’s obvious. The words just come out. “A ship, all this time?”

“It’s called the
Xolotl,
” he says. “I find it hard to believe Theresa didn’t figure it out. Perhaps she is not as smart as she thinks she is. A shame to blame the game, but a tame dame never came to fame.”

He’s babbling again, talking to himself more than to us.

I point behind me, toward the spinning brown, blue and green planet. “What is that?”

“That was supposed to be our home, our new beginning. Well, for me and Bishop and Aramovsky, anyway. For you, my little Savage bird, I doubt it would have been paradise, at any price, with or without sparkly ice.”

Gnarled, black fingers come up to scratch his head. Fingertips dig between the wrinkles. He stops, puts his hands down and stares at my symbol.

“Em,”
he says, speaking the word like it is the answer to all questions. “I can’t believe I missed it, but of course. Of course
you
survived. Of course
you
are the leader. Would you like to know your first name?”

My heart bangs so hard I feel it in my throat, in my ears.

I need to know who I am.

I nod.

“Very well,” Brewer says. “Your name is Matilda.”

Matilda…Matilda…Matilda
. The word echoes through my head, discovers itself hidden deep in the blanked-out areas. I know he speaks the truth.

My name is Matilda Savage.

The feeling of relief overwhelms me. Despite the horrors we’ve been through, the problems we still face, I can’t help but smile.

Bishop slaps his chest. “What about me? What’s my first name?”

The monster’s spidery hand gives a dismissive wave. “It hardly matters. Everyone knows you as Bishop, and Bishop you are.”

Brewer’s voice lowers, softens, becomes sad and wistful.

“All of you can have what I can never possess. You could go to that planet.”

Gaston slides between me and Bishop. He moves close to the monster’s face, even closer than when I lost control and screamed horrible threats. Seeing little Gaston standing right in front of Brewer makes me wince, as if the monster might reach out, bite down and drag Gaston into nothingness.

“Is it safe?” Gaston asks Brewer. “The planet?”

Brewer laughs so hard his furrowed head tilts back and he starts to shake. As before, the bone-scraping sound grinds into a coughing fit. This one racks his body, makes his limp hands flop about like boneless birds. Fluid bubbles up from leathery folds covering where his mouth should be—grayish red glistens on black.

It takes a few minutes for the coughs to ease. We wait.

He finally gets it under control. “Who are you, little tooth-boy? I don’t recognize you.”

“My name is Gaston. Gaston, X.”

The monster rubs a skeletal black hand across his face, across the leathery folds of his mouth. He looks at his palm, seems sad to see wetness there.

“Not fair,” he says quietly. “Not fair-a-dair.”

He focuses on Gaston.

“Without the burns and scars, you aren’t nearly as dashing, Xander. Yes, the planet is safe. Well, the air won’t kill you, anyway. Hopefully you can break the mold. If you can’t, that was one very long trip for nothing.”

I wonder what it’s like down on that planet. I try to imagine a place with no walls. Sky instead of ceiling, sky that goes on forever and ever. A place where the dust of the dead doesn’t cover everything, doesn’t coat our tongues and invade our lungs.

Something about that planet calls to me.

I don’t even care if it’s safe: I would rather die down there than live up here.

A very long trip
…
the centuries have not been kind
…

Brewer’s words push and pull at my muddy mind. A sliver of memory sneaks out: a planet, but not
this
planet. Something brown, ugly. The thought slithers around like a snake, feeding, growing, becomes almost clear. Another planet…a
dying
planet. A desperate need to flee.

And then, I understand.

The planet we’re looking at doesn’t just call to me, it calls to 
us
.

It calls to the sleepers.

It calls to the birthday children.

“That’s what this ship was made for,” I say. “To bring us here.”

The monster nods. “Very good, Miss Matilda Savage. And the journey took a mere ten centuries.”

Bishop huffs. “No one lives that long.”

“Some do,” Brewer says. “Many more should have, but revolts can get in the way.”

A thousand years. If Brewer has been alive that long, maybe he is some kind of god.

I think of all the bodies we’ve seen. So many corpses on this ship. A trip of a thousand years. More things click into place.

“The Garden,” I say. “All that fruit…food for the trip. And the pigs. Were they meant to be food as well?”

“Filthy beasts,” Brewer says. “Did you know swine are smart enough to learn how to open basic husks? Simple buttons were a design flaw, I fear. Live and learn. Swine are always after that calcium. I warned against bringing them. The smarter a creature, the less likely it is to behave. Once they got out of their section, there was no getting them back in. You don’t see cows and chickens and sheep turning against their masters, do you?”

Gaston gives a doubtful look. “Livestock? You’d need a lot of space for cows, and we haven’t seen any cows at all. Or chickens. Or sheep.”

The image above the pedestal blurs and shifts. Brewer’s head disappears. In its place, a grassy field with dozens of animals. They have black fur, like the pigs, but are much bigger. Are those cows? In the distance, I think I can make out thicket walls.

So the Garden isn’t the only room with food after all.

The image shifts again. A tall metal rack filled with small cages, and in each cage, a black bird. These I recognize: chickens.

The image blinks, and we’re again looking at Brewer’s horrid head.

“Don’t base reality on what you have seen when you have seen very little,” the monster says. “The
Xolotl
is vast. Far larger than your young minds can comprehend. You might say that the journey of a thousand years begins with more than a single flightless bird.”

This ship came from another planet, a trip that seems desperate and impossibly long. People must have worked together to make that happen. And it seems like they had plenty of food. How many people were on this ship before the killing began?

“Brewer, what happened here?” I ask. “What made you do these things to each other?”

He raises a long, bony black finger and wags it side to side.

“Oh no-no-no, Miss Savage. You won’t get me to laugh again, no matter how funny you are. What happened? Some people do not approve of being sacrificed.”

I look at Bishop; he shrugs. Brewer is talking in riddles and I’m getting tired of listening to him.

I feel Aramovsky’s hand on my shoulder again, gently pushing me aside so he has room to speak.

“The bodies,” he says. “The adults, the children…they were
sacrifices
?”

I don’t like the way Aramovsky speaks that word, so breathy and excited.

“Not all,” Brewer says. “Many, yes. Many more chose to not go gentle into that good night. For twenty years, this ship shuddered from war. A war to liberate those that did not need to be liberated. And in the end, they’re all dead anyway.”

War. Revolt. Sacrifice. The Grownups did this to themselves. It has nothing to do with us. If we stay here, we’ll wind up like them—butchered and burned, our flesh turned to powdery dust.

“Brewer, how do we get down to that planet?”

“You fly,” the monster says. “Fly-fly-fly, a rocket in the sky. Down there you can start over and never-ever-never worry your pretty perfect little heads about the
real
cost of your trip, about the sins of those who came before you. To get down there, you need a special ship, a
shuttle
. And oh, irony of ironies, as big as the
Xolotl
is, only one shuttle remains.”

A shuttle. The word calls up a flash of memory—a long ship with wings. It will take us away from here. We can go where we were meant to go, and, maybe, leave these monsters behind forever.

“One shuttle,” I say. “Does that mean if we take it, your kind can’t follow us down there?”

Two gnarled hands rise up, slowly clap together.

“You understand what the word
one
means,” he says. “And people said that Matilda Savage was stupid. Correct, my kind can’t follow you, but you can also never come back.”

I fight to stay calm. If he’s telling the truth—and I have no way of knowing that he is or isn’t—we can leave this nightmare behind.

“Tell me where the shuttle is.”

Brewer sighs, a chest-puffing thing that rattles the black folds hiding his mouth.

“Long, long ago, during the revolt, I sealed your chambers off from the Mutineers. I had machines destroy corridors, cut away floors, even melt doors to your area.”

I think about the first intersection we found, back when our long walk began. The black wall that looked like frozen ice. Brewer did that? To keep us
safe
?

“Why did you protect us? You say I killed you, yet you keep talking about how you kept us alive. Why would you do that?”

Brewer doesn’t answer immediately. We wait, long enough that I’m not sure he heard me. I’m about to repeat the question when he finally speaks.

“I’ve asked myself that a million times,” he says. His eyes have calmed down to a pale red. “Sometimes it is because I hope that I can change the way things work, even though I know that is impossible. Sometimes it is for revenge. Sometimes it is because if all of you die, who will I have to keep me company? These reasons and more, but looking at you now…maybe it is none of them. Perhaps the real reason is because I’ve known all along that you were made for the planet below. A millennium’s worth of lies leads to a single truth—the future belongs to the young, if the old would kindly die and get the hell out of the way.”

I’m not entirely sure what all of that means. I latch onto one part of it.

“We were made to be down there,” I say. “You’re right. I can feel it. Let us do that, Brewer. Let us go where we belong. Tell us where the shuttle is.”