Skye Object 3270a (13 page)

Buyu walked with her to the little auditorium in the neighborhood of Vibrant Harmony, where Yulyssa had scheduled the press conference. Skye peeked in from a side door. She counted fifty-three mediots in the audience, all waiting to talk to her.

“Nervous?” Buyu whispered.

“Terrified,” she whispered back. “But I might as well get it over with.” She lifted Ord off her shoulder and set it on the floor. She didn't want the little robot crawling all over her, or asking silly questions while the conference was in progress. “Stay out of sight,” she warned it. “Don't let anyone see you until I say it's okay. I mean it, Ord
.
”

“Yes, good Skye.” It scurried across the floor, then oozed beneath a potted plant and disappeared.

Skye drew a deep breath, touched palms with Buyu, then stepped inside.

Facing the mediots, she tried again to make the argument she had made before the council—that she could not be the only survivor of her great ship, that other lifeboats must surely be out there—but the mediots kept asking pointless questions. What had it been like to be chased by a viperlion? Just how bad did the mound really smell? Were fourteen-year-olds still children? Did she have sex in the forest?

Skye flushed, trying again and again to return the dialogue to the lifeboats, but no one wanted to talk about that. She felt like a parrot-bird muttering its memorized speech over and over, while no one listened. When it was over, she knew she had failed to persuade anyone that her cause was real.

Buyu and Zia met her outside the auditorium. “Hey ado,” Zia said. “You did okay. They were just being twits.”

True enough, but that didn't make her failure any easier to take. She felt hollow inside. What did she have left now? Devi was gone, no one would listen, and half the city thought she was a dumb ado taking crazy chances with everyone's life.

Zia tried to cheer her up, but what Skye really needed was time alone. After a while, she slipped away.

She went down to Splendid Peace Park, following a path that led to the little pavilion by the outer wall, where she and Devi had talked that first night. She had just reached the final bend in the path when a flash of purple and gold fur jumped out at her from behind a tree. She yelped, while the dokey sprinted over her feet, only to turn around again, grabbing her ankles with its tiny monkey hands, while its bushy tail waved in delight.

“Jem!” She knelt, running her fingers through the dokey's short fur. Then she froze. If Jem was here, then Devi . . .

She looked up, to see him standing in the path, watching her with troubled eyes. She flushed and looked away. “I'm sorry. I didn't know you were here. I'll go—”

“No. Stay for awhile. Please?”

She picked Jem up. Then she stood, cradling the dokey against her chest. “You're not angry?”

“Sure I am. I guess.” He shrugged. “I'm angry most of the time these days.”

“I'm sorry.”

“How did you know?”

Her cheeks burned. “Yulyssa told me.”

He nodded, as if he had already guessed as much. “I've got some fortune cookies. You want some?”

She wasn't hungry, but it was a nice excuse to stay. “Sure. I guess.”

They sat facing the transparent wall of the canopy. By leaning forward just a little, Skye could look down on Deception Well's equatorial continent.
I
'
ve been there
. It was a fact she still found astonishing.

“Here,” Devi said, lifting the lid on a small box covered in gold foil. “Have one. This is the forgiveness collection. I bought it for you.”

The fortune cookies were golden discs arranged in two neat rows. Skye picked one up and turned it over. A message scrolled across the middle in chocolate-brown letters. It proclaimed
Obediance never requires forgiveness
. She wrinkled her nose and fed it to Jem.

Devi laughed. “Well I haven't looked at them all yet. Here, try this one.” He handed her another.

She held it, watching the chocolate words scroll past: I'm sorry I got angry . . . I shouldn't have walked out on you . . . Forgive me?

She looked up at him, amazed. “How did you do that?”

A rosy flush underlay Devi's brown skin. “Trade secret.”

“You had a right to get angry.” She nibbled at the edge of the cookie, while Jem batted the other one around on the pavilion floor.

“No,” Devi said. “It was stupid of me. It's just that whenever I think about
him
—you know, my brother—I start to feel like . . . like maybe I'm not me. Only I'm not doing a very good job of being him either. He could do almost anything.”

“Sez your mom.”

Devi smiled. He threw Jem another cookie.

“Anyway,” Skye said, “we cured Compassion plague. That's something.”

Devi grunted. “And if we could find those lifeboats, that would be something too.”

Several seconds passed in silence. Then Skye felt a touch against her hand. She looked down, to see Devi's fingers resting cautiously on her own. “When you were sick,” he said, “I was really scared. I've never been that afraid before. I've never met anyone like you.”

Skye was in no mood to be impressed with herself. “Crazy and bad-tempered, you mean? With an out-of-control mouth?”

“Sooth. Exactly.” Devi grinned. “And smart and tough too. And pretty.”

His fingers closed around her hand. She felt a flush run through her, happy and fearful at once. She looked up, and it didn't surprise her at all when his lips touched hers in a tentative kiss. It felt soft and slightly wet, and silly, and essential all at once. It felt demanding too, so that she had to trade a kiss with him a second time, and then a third.

She had never kissed a boy before. It alarmed her, the way that one simple gesture opened doors inside her that she had never dared to look behind. Frightened now, she pulled away. “I don't think—”

“No. It's okay.” Devi breathed the words into her ear, sending a delicious shiver running through her. He pulled back a little and turned his head, getting ready to kiss her again.

She stood up abruptly. “I need to think about this.”

He stared up at her, looking confused and a little angry. Then he drew a deep breath and nodded. “I understand. You're young.”

Indignant now, she put her hands on her hips. “Right. Like you're an old fart.” Then a new thought occurred to her. “How many girlfriends have you had?”

“One.”

“One?”

“You.”

Her eyes narrowed as she glared down at him. “I'm not your girlfriend.”

He stiffened. He studied her for several seconds, as if trying to see the landscape inside her mind. Then he shrugged. “My mistake. I must have had a vision of our future relationship.”

“That must be it.” She moved a safe distance away before she sat down again. Not really sure why. Her skin felt hungry—that was the only way she could describe it—hungry to be touched by him, but at the same time something around her heart was afraid.
There
'
s time
, she thought, and she left it at that, hoping Devi was willing to leave it alone too. For now.

After a minute or so of silence she said, “I'm not ready to give up on finding the lifeboats.”

Devi had been staring down at the cloud patterns over Deception Well's coastal mountains, 300 kilometers below. Now he turned to her with an expression of surprise. “Of course not. But we aren't going to get city authority behind us unless we can explain why no other lifeboats have been seen. It really is an interesting question.” He smiled, and she thought that maybe she had been forgiven.

“Let's start over again,” he suggested. “Take a look at things from the beginning. Tannasen must have filed a detailed report on the discovery of your lifeboat. We need to pull that out of city library. We can go over it in detail, and maybe we'll turn up some clue suggesting why the lifeboats have been so secretive. Where's Ord?”

Skye realized she hadn't seen Ord for quite awhile. She glanced around, then shrugged. “Somewhere . . . why?”

“Ord could do the library work for us. Hey Ord. Come here.” The little robot did not appear. “Ord?” Devi stood up, then circled the pavilion, scowling into the bushes and frowning at the path. Jem darted playfully around his feet. “Ord!” he called, louder now. “Come here, okay? Ord?”

Still the robot did not show itself. Skye stood up too, alarmed now. When was the last time she'd seen Ord? Sometime before the press conference. She hadn't thought to look for it, because Ord always tagged after her. It never got lost. She ran a few steps down the path, peering among the lower branches of the trees. “Ord?”

“Maybe it was trapped in the building where you had the press conference,” Devi suggested.

“No way. It would just wait for a door to open, then it would slide out.”

“Maybe it did, but it couldn't figure out where you'd gone.”

Was that possible?

She tried to remember the last time she'd seen Ord . . . and a second later, she burst out laughing.

“What?” Devi demanded.

She laughed some more. Then, struggling for breath, she tried to explain. “I warned Ord . . . to keep out of sight until I said it was okay. It doesn't usually obey me this well.” Skye knelt on the ground. “Hey Ord, it's okay. Trouble's over and it's safe to come out now.”

The shrubbery rustled. Then Ord slid onto the pavilion. “Skye is not eating right. Cookies are toy food. Come home to eat well, good Skye.”

Skye hardly heard the words. She stared at Ord, wrestling with a sudden, terrifying thought. “Devi? I . . . I think I've figured it out. I think I know what happened to the other lifeboats.”

D
evi held Jem, scratching the dokey behind the ears as Skye explained. “This is what we know about my lifeboat. It was sighted when the solar sail began to grow. The sail was huge, like a metal flag reflecting Kheth's light, very easy to see. Tannasen was in command of
Spindrift
, and immediately he took the research ship to investigate.”

“Sooth,” Devi said. “That's nothing new.”

“What happened after that?” Skye asked him.

“Tannasen rendezvoused with the lifeboat, and found you.”

“No. It was months before he reached the lifeboat. What happened next was, the solar sail started to shred. It was torn apart when it hit pebbles in the nebula. It was set upon by butterfly gnomes. Suppose the DI in command of the lifeboat mistook that for an attack?”

Devi stared thoughtfully at Ord. “Then it might have warned any other lifeboats behind it to stay quiet . . . just like you warned Ord.”

Skye nodded. “Their only defense is to go unnoticed.”

“Ord stayed out of sight until you told it everything was okay.”

“Sooth. Maybe the other lifeboats are doing the same thing—staying out of sight until they're told it's safe. But the DI on my lifeboat can't deliver that message because it isn't active anymore.”

Devi put Jem down. “This is an interesting idea.” He paced back and forth across the pavilion several times, his brow wrinkled in thought. “But something's missing. The DI must have some way to contact the other lifeboats. It would be senseless to send them into dormancy forever. But how could it send an all-clear signal if it's dormant too? It doesn't make sense . . . unless it's waiting for something . . . maybe for some kind of proof that things really are okay before—”

He stopped in mid-sentence, to stare at Skye. “It's you.”

“What?”

“You're the proof. It's waiting for you. Think about it. Ord came only to your voice, not to mine.”

“So . . . ?”

“Maybe the lifeboat is tuned to your voice as well. It would make sense. If you survived, then the others would stand a good chance too.”

She shook her head. “I was only two! The lifeboat won't know my voice.”

“Well, maybe it's not your voice. Maybe it's just you. Who you are hasn't changed since Tannasen picked you up. Not at the level of your cells. Not in your DNA.”

“You think my lifeboat would recognize me?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Her mouth went dry. “You aren't saying we should . . .”

Devi's gaze didn't waver. “That's exactly what I'm saying. We should make an expedition to your lifeboat, and see how it reacts.”

“You're crazy. There's no way to get to the lifeboat. Its parked in the construction zoo.
In space
. Beyond the end of the elevator column . . . and the elevator column is tens of thousands of kilometers long. Tours don't run up the column, Devi. So how could we get out there? Were you thinking we could climb?”

He laughed. “If we did, we'd be old enough to be real people by the time we reached the end.”

“So what do we do?”

He shrugged. “Well if you like, we could ask permission to go up. Maybe city authority will finally get interested . . . but maybe not. And if they say no, you can bet they'll start watching us every minute. We got away with our excursion to Deception Well. If we give them any warning, we won't get away with anything again.”

“So you want to sneak up there,” Skye said softly. “Aboard an elevator car, I guess.” There was no other way. She shook her head in wonderment. “Divine Hand, your mama is wrong. You're wilder than I am, by exponential powers.”

Skye didn't see how they could ever find a way to sneak up to the construction zoo. To succeed they would have to slip past city security, stowaway aboard a restricted elevator car, and ride it all the way to the top of the elevator column without being detected. The journey would take days, and once there . . .