Glow

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  Kieran pushed the thruster controls to their maximum capacity and was thrown backward into his seat. He could barely lift his arm to steer the ship, and it took all the strength in his abdomen for him to lean forward enough to reach the joystick.

  Instead of aiming straight for the Empyrean, Kieran aimed the shuttle for a point ahead of the ship, trying to guess where the shuttle and the Empyrean would intersect. He held steady, ignoring his trembling limbs, the fearful warnings from Sarek coming over the com system, the ache forming at the back of his neck and in his crushed chest. This was going to work.

  Soon the Empyrean dominated Kieran’s visual field. He was almost there. He searched the bubbly surface of the ship, looking for the familiar octagonal shape of the shuttle bay air lock, until finally the orange lines emerged out of the mist of the nebula. The docking bay looked tiny as Kieran aimed the shuttle for it, forcing the ship into a diagonal trajectory. The outer air lock doors opened, and Kieran eased back on the acceleration. He could breathe again, and his limbs weren’t so heavy. He bit the side of his cheek until he tasted blood. “Come on, come on,” he muttered.

  The reality of landing a physical shuttle was more intuitive than a simulation. Kieran held the joystick steady as the shuttle glided slowly through the outer air lock doors. The ship bumped the ceiling on its way in, then screeched along the walls. But they were in. The outer doors closed around the shuttle, the air lock repressurized, and the inner doors opened onto the shuttle bay to a crowd of hopeful boys.

  He wished he could spare them the sight of their parents swollen, cut up, in pain. But when the hatch to the cargo hold lowered, and the boys saw the adults lying on the floor of the shuttle, they rushed in, crying in relief. As Kieran came down the ramp, groups of boys were carrying out their parents, dragging them down the cargo hold ramp, pulling them toward the infirmary. None of them looked traumatized by their parents’ appearance so much as relieved that they were still breathing. There was hope in their faces again, and it made Kieran feel hopeful himself for the first time since he’d watched Waverly disappear into the enemy shuttle craft.

  Maybe he would see her again. Maybe there was a way to find her. And his parents—they could still be alive. He needed to hold on to that hope as long as he could.

  Kieran found Seth struggling with his father out of the shuttle. He regretted that he’d ever treated this brilliant, resourceful boy as a threat. Kieran was the one who was marrying Waverly, wasn’t he? He should try to reach past their old rivalry, make a kind of alliance and work together.

  Seth was holding up his father single-handedly until several other boys rushed to help. Mason Ardvale’s eyes rolled around in his swollen face, his lips were cracked, and the tip of his nose was shiny and black with frostbite. But he was alive. Incredibly. It looked as though all the adults had survived.

  “I couldn’t have done it without you,” Kieran said to Seth, hoping Mason heard. The other boys paused to hear what Seth would say.

  Seth looked at Kieran coolly. “Don’t be so proud of yourself.”

  Kieran shook his head, not understanding.

  “You disabled the environmental control system when you crashed into the dome. We’re going to have to repair it in OneMen.”

  Several of the other boys looked at Kieran angrily. Why was Seth doing this?

  “We can handle that,” Kieran said, confused. “You were there. You saw how hard it was.”

  “I shouldn’t have let you drive,” Seth said loudly, as though performing for the other boys.

  “Let me?”

  “I think we’d all be better off if we kept you in the brig,” Seth said over his shoulder as he started off with his father, pulling the unconscious man out of the bay and toward the infirmary.

  The rest of the boys turned their backs on Kieran and followed Seth out.

  As Kieran trailed them down the corridors, he caught more than one boy glaring at him. He rounded the corner to find Sarek in the corridor whispering to two other boys, twelve-year-olds. When they saw Kieran, they gave him angry looks.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Kieran asked them, but they merely shook their heads and turned away.

  When he entered the infirmary, he found chaos. Most of the adults were semiconscious and groaning. Boys were rushing back and forth between the medicine cabinets and their parents, who were lying on the cots, their hands twisted in agonized knots, their faces blackened and bruised from the decompression.

  Kieran walked between the cots, looking at the faces until he found Victoria Hand, who was a nurse. She was lying in the corner of the room, her head rolling back and forth on her pillow, groaning. Kieran fought through the group of boys crowded around her and yelled, “Vicky! What do we do?”

  Her eyes lazed open, but she seemed incapable of focusing.

  “What do we do for decompression injuries?” he said loudly.

  “Oxygen,” she muttered from between cracked and puckered lips.

  Kieran clapped his hands over his head and yelled at the boys, “Find the oxygen tanks and masks. Each of you tend to your own parents! Hurry!”

  Drew Jones found the tanks in a cabinet at the end of the room, and fights broke out as boys tried to climb over one another to get to them. By the time Kieran crossed the room to break up the fights, they were already over, and the boys ran back to their parents, aunts, or uncles and fitted the masks over their faces.

  “How do we do this?” Bobby Martin asked Kieran, and pointed at the dials on top of the tanks. There were numbers along the outside edge. Kieran rushed back to Vicky Hand, who had lost consciousness. Her son, Austen, was leaning over her, clumsily fitting the clear plastic mask over her face as he cried, saying over and over, “I’ve got you, Mom. It’s going to be okay.”

  “Vicky!” Kieran said, and when the woman didn’t respond, he shook her by the shoulder.

  “Leave her alone!” Austen screamed. Tears streamed down his fat cheeks as he cried over her.

  Kieran shook her harder. “Vicky! What setting do we put the oxygen on?”

  Her eyes rolled in her head, but she was able to look at Kieran briefly. “One hundred percent,” she managed to say.

  “Turn the oxygen all the way up, guys!” Kieran called into the room, and watched as the boys cranked the dials as high as they would go.

  Kieran stood over Vicky, watching, anxious. He couldn’t afford to lose her. She was the only medical person left on the ship.

  Kieran looked around for Mason Ardvale and saw he wasn’t in the room. “Where’s Seth’s dad?” he asked the nearest boy.

  The boy pointed at one of the private rooms off to the side. “Seth took him in there.”

  Kieran went to the cabinet, pulled one of the last oxygen tanks out of it, and took it to the room, where Seth was bent over his father. The lights were off, and Kieran flicked the switch on. “Seth, he’s going to need oxygen.”

  The boy kept his eyes on his father’s face. “He doesn’t need anything.”

  Mason Ardvale lay on the cot, as motionless as a carving.

  Kieran lowered the oxygen tank to the floor. “Oh, no, I’m so sorry.”

  “You should be,” the boy spat bitterly before crumpling on top of his father, covering him with his torso as though trying to hold him down. It was one of the saddest things Kieran had ever seen.

  Kieran backed out of the room and closed the door behind him. He looked at the other boys leaning over their parents, watching their faces, taking note of each and every breath. Others might be lost before the day was out.

  Several boys huddled in the doorway. Their parents weren’t among the injured, but they looked on anxiously. One of them was Arthur Dietrich, and Kieran beckoned the boy over. “Arthur, there must be medical videos somewhere in the offices around here. Maybe Dr. Randall kept them, or Dr. Patel. Find them for me, okay?”

  “Good idea.” Arthur nodded and trotted off.

  Kieran raised a hand over his head and whistled. “Guys,
Arthur is looking for videos about how to treat radiation and decompression illness. When he finds them, we need to watch them so we know what to do. The oxygen is a good first step, but there will be a lot more to do, and we’re going to have to work hard.”

  Several of the boys were looking at something behind Kieran. He was about to turn when a sharpness entered his neck just above the shoulder. It felt like a bee sting, and Kieran batted at it to find a hypodermic sticking out of him. It had been plunged up to the hilt, sickeningly deep. He turned to see Seth’s tear-streaked face set in a furious scowl. “What did you…,” Kieran started to ask, but numbness crawled over his face, spread over his eyes. Arthur Dietrich ran back out of the doctor’s office, his hands trailing bunches of papers that fell, cascading in fluttery sheaths, as Kieran fell—no, sank—wondering what had happened to the gravity in the room, swinging his arms weirdly, searching for a hold on something to keep him from floating out the windows and into that sickly nebula, spinning, spinning …

  THE BRIG

  Kieran woke with the side of his face crammed against a metal floor. His head ached horribly, and his mouth tasted like the peat his mother used in her garden. He blinked his eyes open to see the underside of a metal cot, a dripping sink beyond it.

  For long minutes, Kieran’s mind was absent, and he could only look at the dripping sink, the silver water falling drop by drop into the basin.

  Kitchen.

  The word fell like an ice chip into his mind. Sinks are in kitchens. He could be in a kitchen.

  No. He was lying under a cot. No cots in kitchens.

  His neck itched. He tried to scratch it and touched something hard, something that stuck out of him, pulsing back and forth with his heartbeat. A syringe.

  It all rushed back. Seth had done this to him.

  This wasn’t a kitchen. It was the brig.

  His body felt like sludge as he struggled to roll onto his back. Whatever Seth had given him was powerful and still dragged him down. He fingered the hypodermic, trying to guess where it was poking him. Was it in his jugular? His carotid? Was it safe to pull out? He certainly couldn’t leave it in. He should go to the mirror that was hanging on the wall opposite him, but he couldn’t move.

  “Here,” someone said.

  Something slid across the floor and hit him in the side. He was afraid if he moved his head to look at who was with him, he might drive the needle deeper—or worse, he might knock it sideways to rip through his jugular. So he groped for whatever they’d given him and, with real effort, lifted it to look.

  A mirror. A woman’s mirror.

  “Thanks,” Kieran said breathlessly. The mirror, his arm, seemed impossibly heavy. “Is this needle going to kill me if I pull it out?”

  “Who knows?” the voice said. It wasn’t Seth talking, but there was little concern in the words. Someone else hated Kieran as much as Seth did.

  Holding the mirror in his left hand, he groped with his right, edging his fingers across his chest and up to the twitching hypo, closing around it. He took a deep breath and, a little at a time, pulled the needle out of him. It felt like removing a bone from his body the way it came unstuck from such a deep place. Once it was out, Kieran threw it away and looked in the mirror again. Blood trickled from the puncture, but not very much. Kieran dropped his left hand, suddenly too tired to hold up the mirror, and clamped his right hand over the wound to slow the bleeding.

  He stayed like that for a long time, catching his breath, before he could open his eyes again. He saw someone’s shadow on the wall behind the sink. Someone was still watching him.

  “Are you going to kill me?” he asked. Odd, how detached he felt from this question.

  “Not me,” the voice said.

  “Then can I have some water?”

  “Get it yourself.”

  “I can’t walk.”

  A pointed sigh, and then Kieran heard something sliding across the floor until it hit him in the head. A grav bag half-full of water.

  Kieran opened the clamp around the straw with clumsy fingers and sucked down the lukewarm liquid. It ended far too quickly.

  The water revived him enough that he could keep his eyes open without much effort, and he finally turned his head to see who was watching him. Sealy Arndt sat staring down at him, a long knife from the kitchen balanced on his knobby knees.

  “Do you know how ridiculous this is?” Kieran asked the boy, who dropped his eyes to the floor. “I just rescued all your parents.”

  “That’s not what Seth says,” the boy replied, his thin lips a narrow pink line across his face. “Seth had to take over because you crashed into the atmospheric dome.”

  “Only for a second! I piloted the shuttle the entire way. Ask Sarek.”

  The boy laughed.

  With a twisting fear, Kieran realized that he was at war. He had been all along without realizing it, and he was losing.

  He might not make it out of here.

  If he could just talk to his dad for one minute so he could ask him what to do. Kieran thought of the way his father’s hazel eyes seemed to glaze over in the middle of a conversation or during dinner. He was never quite all the way in the room with his son, but always somewhere else, thinking. Sometimes Kieran could pierce through that concentration and get his father’s full attention. Kieran would explain a problem he was having, some trouble with a friend or a teacher who had treated him unfairly. Always the explaining was what made him feel better, because he knew what his dad would say: The truth is powerful, Kieran. Just tell the truth the best you can and people will usually see your side.

  The truth. What was the truth?

  “You know, Sealy, Seth has always been unstable. He’s smart, that’s for sure. But he hurts people. It’s not that he’s bad. He’s just … angry.”

  Kieran was met with perfect silence.

  “We can’t turn against each other like this, you see that, don’t you?” Kieran said, trying to keep his tone calm and reasoning. He couldn’t let his terror show. “We need every single boy on this ship just to keep it going. We can’t be throwing people in the brig just because they make a mistake.”

  “You’ve made lots of mistakes.”

  “Haven’t we all?”

  “Seth hasn’t made any mistakes.”

  Kieran lost his temper. “You’re letting Seth do this because you’re angry at what happened to our families and you want someone to blame.”

  “Shut up!” the boy exploded. “I don’t have to listen to you!”

  Kieran held his tongue, but he could see how thin a veneer Sealy’s calm really was. Underneath it, Kieran guessed, he was a churning bundle of misgivings. Probably many of the other boys felt the same doubts. If he could get to them, if he could talk to them …

  “Sealy, do you really agree with this? Throwing me in the brig?”

  The boy didn’t answer. Kieran watched Sealy’s uneasy eyes. He was just a kid, plunged into a situation that would be impossible for most adults to cope with. He was confused, and frightened, and ready to latch on to anyone or anything that would help him feel better.

  “Sealy, you know, I think the shuttles are going to come back. When you think about it, they haven’t even been gone that long. They’re probably getting the girls right now.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “Neither do you. So why should we assume the worst? Captain Jones might be on one of those shuttles right now, on his way back. Did you think of that?”

  “Stop it,” Sealy snapped. “I know what you’re trying to do.”

  “What is Seth planning on doing with me?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Kieran’s mind raced. Could Seth be contemplating murder?

  “Getting rid of me will just make everything worse, Sealy.”

  “You’re being kept where you can’t do further damage.”

  “But how do you know I did damage? How does anyone know?”

  “Seth saw the whole thing.”


  “So it’s his word against mine? Is that how we’re going to do things from now on? Seth can throw anyone in the brig he wants?”

  Again, Sealy was silent.

  Kieran’s blood pulsed fear through his system until he forced himself into a cool, detached space where he could think.

  As long as he was in the brig, he was at Seth’s mercy, and there was no way to get out unless someone let him out. His only hope would be to gain access to someone outside of Seth’s inner circle. He had to talk to Arthur Dietrich. Or Sarek, who had witnessed the entire shuttle flight over the console. Sarek could contradict Seth’s story. “If Seth is a real leader, he shouldn’t be afraid of a fair trial.”

  “If you’re trying to talk your way out of here, it’s not going to work.”

  “I’m not just trying to talk my way out of here. I’m trying to save the ship. Do you really think Seth is the guy to lead us? Really?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “Oh, right. I’m sure he never bullies you.”

  Again, Sealy was silent.

  It was best to stop here. Let Sealy do some thinking on his own. Kieran had little hope that he could turn the boy’s loyalties, but even if he could make him doubt what Seth was doing, it might help. Besides, all this talking and thinking had exhausted him, and he had to close his eyes and try to sleep off the medication. Once the drug had worn off, he could think more about what to do.

  He was still so frightened, it took a while, but finally he was able to sleep. He didn’t know how much time had passed when he woke up again and saw a pair of boots in front of his face.

  He bolted up, afraid of being kicked. He tried to stand but lost his balance and had to catch himself on the metal cot.

  Seth stood over him, his arms crossed over his chest. “Well.”

  “You must be proud of yourself.” Kieran raised himself up to sit on the cot. He considered tackling Seth and beating the boy unconscious, but he was so weak, it would be useless to try. Besides, on the other side of the steel bars were two boys, and they were holding guns like the ones the New Horizon crew had used. So they’d gone down to the cargo holds and found them. “What do you want, Seth?”