Glow (5 page)

“Go,” Harvard told him as he stepped through the doorway. “I’ll tell the Captain.”

A sudden, deafening wind ripped through Kieran’s ears. He tried to stay on his feet, but he felt the soles of his shoes sliding along the floor. He was being sucked toward what looked like an enormous hole in the side of the ship.

No. It wasn’t a hole.

The air lock doors were opening to the emptiness of the nebula.

Kieran grabbed on to the doorway. “Oh God!” he screamed, but he couldn’t hear his own voice.

Kieran looked for the other crew members.

Hundreds of pinwheel shapes were twirling out the open doorway. The shapes were people.

“Mom! Dad!” he cried into the wind, searching for his parents.

“Kieran!” someone screamed.

Harvard Stapleton was ten feet away, on his hands and knees, struggling toward Kieran. The wind sucked at him, pulled on his clothes, flattened his hair, kneaded at the skin on his face.

Kieran flattened himself on the floor and stretched his feet toward Harvard. “Grab on to me!”

“Close the door!” Harvard screamed, even as he struggled toward Kieran.

“Just another two feet! You can make it!” Kieran bellowed.

Harvard lunged for Kieran’s foot and held on with both hands, pulling himself up Kieran’s legs until they could fight their way into the corridor.

He felt Harvard’s hold on him loosen for just a moment, and then suddenly the metal door to the shuttle bay closed.

The wind stopped.

It was so quiet.

“What are you
doing
?!” Kieran screamed. “They’ve got no air!”

“We can’t depressurize the entire ship, Kieran,” Harvard said. But he was crying.

Kieran pressed his face against the glass and watched as a cluster of survivors opened the ramp to the nearest shuttle. A few crew members straggled toward it, but they were losing consciousness in the vacuum. Kieran studied them, looking for his parents. He was near despair when he saw his mother emerge from behind a OneMan, crawling weakly toward the open shuttle.

“She needs air!” Kieran screamed, and punched at the lock. The doors opened and the wind began again, earsplitting and deadly.

Kieran watched as his mother, revived by the air, got up and ran weakly toward the shuttle ramp. She dove onto the ramp, and someone on the inside pulled her all the way in.

Harvard closed the doors again, and the gale disappeared.

“Your mom’s safe. Okay?” Harvard said. “Now go to the auditorium.”

“What about everyone else?” Kieran cried. “We have to go get them!”

“We can’t, Kieran,” Harvard said. The man seemed remote, robotic.

“We can’t just leave them!”

“Kieran, they’re already gone.” Harvard gripped Kieran’s shoulders. “We can’t think about that now.”

Kieran stared at Harvard. Everything inside of him had been pulled out the air lock and was spinning in the thin gas of the nebula with all those dear people, men and women he’d known all his life. Was his father with them, too, already suffocated, already frozen?

“Kieran…” Someone shook him. The blackness in Kieran’s mind cleared. Harvard put an arm around him. “Come on. I’ll take you to the auditorium. Okay?”

Kieran hated himself for the tears that flowed down his face. Harvard was brave and calm, but Kieran wanted to scream, collapse, kill someone. Kill the people who did this.

“Why did they attack us?” Kieran said fiercely.

“I don’t know,” Harvard said, bewildered. He took hold of Kieran’s shoulders and drew him into the stairwell that led to the auditorium.

Kieran’s shocked mind wanted to run backward, back to this morning when everything was safe and normal, starting with his conversation with Waverly and ending with his newscast.

His newscast, which he’d finished only minutes before.

The newscast.

The announcement at the end.

“They have no children,” Kieran said vacantly. When he heard himself, terror jolted him out of his shock. “Harvard, they have no children!”

The man’s face went slack.

“Samantha,” Harvard whispered. The name of his daughter.

They broke into a dead run, pounding down the metal stairs two at a time. Kieran reached the door first and flung it open. They sprinted down the metal grating to the auditorium door, where they could already hear the sound of mournful crying.

“Oh God,” Harvard muttered.

They turned the corner to find the auditorium door closed and the lock engaged from the outside. Harvard jabbed at the keypad and the doors slid open to reveal dozens of children huddled together at the base of the stage, trembling and sobbing. Kieran’s pounding heart slowed. “Thank God.”

“Samantha! Where are you?” Harvard yelled into the din.

Kieran looked around for Waverly, but she wasn’t there, either. He ran down the aisle, looking between the rows of seats. In his panic, he nearly tripped over Seth Ardvale, who was splayed on the floor, barely conscious. He had a bad cut on his forehead and a busted lip. “What happened to him?”

“We tried to stop them,” said Sealy Arndt. He sat on the floor next to Seth, holding his hand over a nasty cut on his ear as blood trickled from between his fingers. “They took all the girls.”

“Where?” Harvard yelled at Sealy. “Where did they go?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said in a daze.

“The shuttle bay,” Harvard said. “The port shuttle bay.”

Of course. After blowing out the starboard bay, they’d have to use the port shuttle bay to get the girls off the Empyrean.

Harvard ran to the com console and yelled into it, “They’re kidnapping our kids! All hands to the port shuttle bay!” He pushed a button, and the message cycled through in a loop, Harvard’s voice endlessly screaming, “They’re kidnapping our kids … port shuttle bay … kidnapping our kids … port shuttle bay…”

Harvard started to run toward the stairwell, but Kieran cried, “No! We have to get the guns first!”

“There’s no time!” Harvard screamed and ran off, with Kieran close behind.

As he ran, Kieran heard dozens of feet pounding on the levels overhead. He skidded into the stairwell and flew down the stairs to the shuttle bay level.

Strange, piercing sounds echoed through the ship, sounding like pebbles hitting metal.

“What’s that?” Kieran yelled at Harvard’s back.

Harvard didn’t answer, but Kieran knew. He could guess.

More than anything, Kieran wished he had a gun.

RESCUE MISSION

“We just want to move you girls to a safe place,” the man with the scar told Waverly as he and six others ushered all the girls down the corridor toward the port side. The girls, the youngest two years old and the oldest fifteen, sounded like a small army as they ran. Waverly wondered what the men would do if all the girls ran away at the same time. Would they shoot? After what they had done to Seth, she didn’t want to find out.

They’d been rounded up like goats, the girls pulled from their brothers, cajoled, the men saying brightly, “Ladies first!” The men lined up the girls by the door while the man with the scar casually pointed his gun at the boys, who had shrunk away, too scared to protest.

All except Seth, who stood up, fists at his sides. “You can’t do this,” he’d said. His eyes had skirted over to Waverly, who looked on, crazily hoping that Seth could do something.

Seth lunged for the man with the scar, but with one fluid motion he whacked Seth on the head with the butt of his gun. Sealy Arndt had run to Seth’s side, and the man swung his gun again, tearing Sealy’s ear and sending the boy sprawling. “That’s what happens when people panic,” he said to the rest of the boys, and turned toward the girls. “Quick time, march!”

Now the men were walking cautiously down the corridors, but they were horribly out of breath, and sweat streamed from their foreheads. The man with the scar on his face was clearly in charge, and though he was slightly built, with weak, bony arms, he was obviously capable of anything.

Were they afraid, or sick? Waverly could hardly breathe herself. Her muscles were still horribly cramped, and her heart seemed to have lost its rhythm. She needed to catch her breath, but her terror only made everything worse.

“There’s been an accident,” the man with the scar announced in response to a question that Waverly hadn’t heard. “The port side is the safest area.”

“Then why not bring the boys, too?” Waverly asked.

“We
are
bringing the boys,” he said cheerily, as though she’d asked a silly question. “They’re right behind us.”

She wanted to believe him, but a nagging unease spread through her when she looked at the gun he held so tightly. If he was trying to help, why did he need a gun?

But what could she do? She tried to think how to get away from these strange people, but her mind felt charred. She couldn’t think. So she went where the men told her to go, and she kept quiet.

The corridors were empty, probably because the entire crew had been pulled away to deal with the accident. The emergency lights cast a dull pallor over everyone. Serafina clung to Waverly’s shirt, letting herself be pulled along as they jogged through the hallways. Each time they crossed a junction between corridors, she looked desperately for a crew member from the Empyrean. But there was no one.

Finally the man with the scar stopped walking, holding up a hand for the others to stop.

Waverly looked back over the long line behind her and saw Samantha Stapleton, a tall girl of fourteen, carrying Hortense Muller, who was crying, her knees bloody from a fall. Samantha and Waverly had always had a strained relationship, ever since a fistfight they’d gotten into in the seventh grade. Samantha had been jealous that Waverly had been tapped for pilot’s training when she herself had been assigned to farming. “You cheated,” Samantha spat through the gap between her teeth.

Waverly didn’t see the first punch coming, but she didn’t let a second one land on her. Both girls walked away from the fight with black eyes and learned to avoid each other ever since. But now, Waverly could see that Samantha was the only girl here who wasn’t paralyzed with terror. She was fully alert, watching the guards, noticing things.

Samantha looked at Waverly with wide eyes. In that one look, their old rivalry melted away. Waverly wished she could signal something that would get them out of this somehow, but all she could do was shake her head. Samantha shook her head, too, as if to say,
I can’t believe this is happening
.

That was just it. Waverly couldn’t believe this was happening.

The man with the scar motioned to the girls to get moving again. Waverly followed behind him, frightened now because he was moving toward a door. At first she didn’t recognize where he was taking them, but when he opened the door to reveal a cavernous room, Waverly stopped in her tracks.

The shuttle bay. He’d taken them to the port shuttle bay.

The man saw Waverly staring, and he smiled. “Didn’t you hear there’s an air lock malfunction in the other shuttle bay? We need to get you into a pressurized chamber.”

“The auditorium can be pressurized,” Waverly said. Dimly she realized that must be why Mrs. Mbewe had told her to take the children there. “We were already safe there.”

“But if the ship is lost, you’d have been trapped,” the man said.

He was lying. Waverly knew there were pressurized conduits from the auditorium to the central bunker, where they could have survived for months if need be.

“Where are you taking us?” Waverly’s voice was floating in the air above her.

“If the ship depressurizes, we’ll have to take you to the New Horizon,” the man said. “You’ll be safe there.”

“Safe?” said Waverly’s voice, testing the word.

“Come along,” the man said, waving the gun in her face. The motion seemed to take all his strength, and he had to use both hands to hold up the gun.

Something was wrong with him. Had he been electrocuted, too?

Her feet came unstuck from the floor and she stepped through the doorway. The bay was cold, stark, the metal walls like a cage, the ceiling so high that it disappeared into a dark gloom. The hulking forms of the shuttle craft, arranged in a circle around the room, perched on their landing gear like watchful vultures. OneMen hung along the walls, their thick gloves extended toward the girls as though waiting for a good-bye hug. The room was so large that Waverly told herself it would take five minutes to cross it. Five minutes for Kieran to come find her, or Seth, or her mother. Anyone. Because someone would come. They had to come.

She could hear the shuffling of hundreds of little feet behind her, sounds that seemed to multiply in the room’s echo. She no longer felt Serafina clinging to her shirt, but she felt too much pain to turn her head to look. She saw a shuttle that was out of place, its nose cone pointed toward the air lock, its rear pointed to Waverly, the thrusters glowing with heat. The shuttle ramp extended down to the floor, and as she approached, Waverly could see into the cargo hold and the stairway inside that led up to the passenger area. A few people stood around the shuttle, holding guns. Some of them were women.

Suddenly the intercom system crackled to life, and a frantic voice shouted through the speakers, the same message over and over. But the shuttle bay was so large that the message echoed, and Waverly couldn’t understand all the words. Something about kids.
Maybe it’s about us,
she thought.
They’re coming
.

As they got closer to the shuttle, which was surrounded by people, Waverly noticed that there was one woman who wasn’t holding a gun.

It was Mrs. Alvarez, the nursery school teacher, and she was standing next to the shuttle ramp in front of an angry-looking woman. The woman’s eyes scanned the girls mechanically as several of the youngest ran to Mrs. Alvarez, who opened her arms wide. “Hello, everyone,” she said. “Captain Jones sent me to tell you that everything is all right, and that you need to board this shuttle just in case the Empyrean depressurizes.”

Waverly heaved a sigh of relief. Everything was okay after all. She started to go up the ramp, but she felt a hand on her arm. Mrs. Alvarez was studying her.