Glow

by Amy Kathleen Ryan

  Kieran heard an angry scoff from the back of the room, but he didn’t pause to look up or even acknowledge it.

  “Why did this happen to us? We’ve been sent into the vastness of creation to remake our new home in the image of God’s perfect creation on Earth.” Many of the boys looked at him with puzzlement; still more looked thoughtful. “We all believed unquestioningly in the rightness of our mission, didn’t we? Let’s raise our hands in a show of solidarity that our mission is God’s work.”

  Kieran raised his right hand, and most of the boys raised their hands, too.

  “Look around you. Look at all these raised hands. The majority of us have known all along we were performing God’s work, haven’t we? Now, put your hands down, and let me ask you another question.”

  Obediently, the hands dropped, and Kieran paused, looking at the boys, all of them watching him, waiting to hear what he would say next.

  This was so much easier than he’d thought it would be.

  “Now, raise your hand if you attended services once a week.”

  Only about five hands went into the air, as Kieran knew would be the case. “How many went once a month?”

  Six more hands raised, but most of the boys looked at Kieran shamefaced.

  “You can put your hands down.” Kieran waited for the boys to drop their hands. “Now I’m wondering how different things might be if we had been paying attention to the spiritual side of our mission. What if we’d been more mindful? Would God have been kinder to us in the hour of our need? Would our mothers and fathers and sisters be with us here today, if we’d paid Him more attention? If we’d gotten down on our knees, just once a week, and thanked God for giving us the privilege of being the first generation to set foot on the planet that soon all of humankind will call home, forever after?”

  He looked around the room. There were skeptical faces in the crowd, sure, and plenty of boys seemed not to be paying attention at all, but most of them seemed to be thinking about what he was saying. Some of them even looked tearful.

  “I think in our day-to-day lives, we’ve forgotten who we are. We are the forefathers of a new civilization. We will lay the foundation for countless generations of human beings in a corner of the galaxy where nothing”—Kieran drew breath to build his voice and called out—“I say nothing like us has been seen before. We will get the girls back, and with them we will create a new world!”

  He had them. Many of them were looking at him with guarded awe. Amos Periwinkle had folded his hands under his chin and was staring at Kieran, rapt and amazed. Tobin Ames, the boy who had been plotting against him before, seemed thunderstruck by the enormity of Kieran’s ideas.

  “This is why I’m starting a new tradition. Every Sunday morning, we’re going to come here, we’re going to eat bread together, and we’re going to talk about these things. We’ll end every service by getting on our knees and thanking God for putting us on this miraculous ship and sending us across the galaxy. We’ll give our thanks to God for choosing us to be…” Here he paused, made them wait for it: “The world makers.”

  Kieran walked around the podium so the boys could see his full length, and with great ceremony, he got on his knees, folded his hands, and bowed his head in prayer.

  It took a few minutes. At first they just stared at him, but then, one by one, the boys got on their knees, leaned on the chairs in front of them, and bowed their heads.

  A few stayed seated. Kieran expected this. But the overwhelming majority had latched on to this new idea. Kieran stayed kneeling for several minutes, feeling the pulse of the room. It was perfectly silent while the boys prayed, but slowly, some indefinable tension in the air seemed to ebb away. When finally Kieran felt a peace settle over his congregation, he looked up, smiled, and said, “Amen.”

  The next Sunday there was flatbread with garlic and olive oil, and Kieran gave thanks to God for the harvest. The Sunday after that, there was cornbread and sheep’s butter, and Kieran praised God for the new batch of chicks that had hatched in the poultry bay. After a few months, he added a segment during which anyone who wanted could speak his prayers aloud. This was a good way to get a sense of how the crew was feeling. He knew the services were helping morale when one Sunday a boy named Mookie Parker stood and squeaked, “I thank God for these services because they make me feel better.”

  Kieran saw several heads nodding in agreement and many other faces looking at him with admiration. It had worked. He’d become a leader who inspired, with God’s help, and he felt grateful.

  One Sunday, about five months after the attack, Kieran looked up from his podium and realized that almost every single boy on the ship was attending his services. He was even more gratified when a young boy walked up to him after the services and tugged on his jacket. “Are my parents in heaven? Can I talk to them?”

  Kieran looked into his softly freckled face, and he said, “Yes. There’s a heaven. And you should talk to your parents every day.”

  The answer came so automatically, so naturally, Kieran felt it must be the truth.

  The boy relaxed into an apple-cheeked smile, and he walked away to tell a group of his friends what Kieran had said.

  Kieran felt sure of it now. He was doing the work of God.

  THE SETH PROBLEM

  The ship was dark. In his new quarters, Kieran lay on the Captain’s bed, a wonderfully soft, extra-wide mattress. This would be a good place to bring Waverly, if he ever saw her again. He pressed his face into his pillow, imagining it was her soft hair.

  For the thousandth time, he thought of changing the ship’s course to go look for her. It was almost a physical need, to take control of the Empyrean and begin circling toward the direction he’d seen the New Horizon take. He’d almost given the order yesterday, but Arthur Dietrich had urged him that the best hope was to stay on course. “Let them come to us,” he’d said.

  Even Sarek had agreed. “You were right all along, Kieran. There’s nothing to do but wait. If they’re looking for us in this damn nebula, the only way they’ll find us is if we’re where they expect us to be.”

  “It was tactically ingenious,” Arthur had said owlishly, “to attack inside the nebula.”

  “We’ll get back at them,” Kieran had said darkly. “If we have to wait until we get to the planet, we’ll get them.”

  The fact was, now that the ship was under control and all the boys were working, Kieran thought about Waverly all the time. He worried for his parents, of course, but Waverly needed him, and he wasn’t there for her.

  It was pointless to try to sleep, so he turned on the lamp by his bed. A framed reproduction of an old Van Gogh painting, brilliant yellow haystacks, hung opposite him. It made him long for Earth in a way he hadn’t before: If they’d never left Earth, there’d be an easy way to find Waverly—he could walk or run to where she was and simply bring her back. But he wasn’t on Earth. He was on a ship cruising through a hideous pink nebula, and there was nowhere to go.

  He startled when the com station on his bedside table blinked on. “Captain, you’ve got to come down to the brig!”

  Over the relay, Kieran heard crashing sounds and grunting. “What’s happening?”

  “The prisoners are fighting, sir. They’re killing each other!”

  Kieran pulled on his loose hemp pants and stepped into his sandals. He reached the elevator in seconds and was speeding down to the brig before he even tried to catch his breath. When the elevator doors opened, he could hear the fight echoing down the corridor. It sounded like animals wrangling over a bone.

  When he reached the brig, he found Seth standing over Sealy, kicking him in the stomach while Max tried weakly to make him stop. Sealy was unconscious, and Max wasn’t much better off. Seth’s breathing was labored, and his knuckles were blue with bruises, but he kept kicking at Sealy, over and over.

  “Stop,” Kieran said.

  Seth didn’t seem to hear him.

  “Stop!” Kieran shouted. He took the keys from the gu
ard, unlocked the cell door, and fell on Seth. Then they were on the floor and Kieran was hitting him in the face, over and over again, swearing.

  At first Seth clawed at Kieran’s face and tried to beat him away, but he couldn’t. So he went limp and allowed Kieran to pummel him. When Kieran finally stopped, Seth’s eyes were swollen, and his bottom lip was split and bleeding.

  Kieran’s fists stung where he’d cut his knuckles on Seth’s teeth. He was out of breath, exhausted. The guards, two young boys who were new to this, stared at him in terror.

  “What are you looking at?” he spat.

  “S-sorry,” said one of them, a thirteen-year-old named Harvey Markem. He was holding one pale hand over his belly, as though he were going to be sick.

  “Separate them, one per cell, ” Kieran ordered, getting to his feet and only now surprised at what he’d done. “They should have been split up long ago.”

  “Sorry,” Harvey said again.

  “It’s not your fault,” Kieran forced himself to say. “It’s mine.”

  Without looking Kieran in the eye, Harvey and the other guard, a fifteen-year-old who called himself Junior, stepped into the cell and took hold of Seth by the arms. As they pulled him across the corridor, Kieran stood in the doorway to make sure that Max couldn’t run away. But the boy was spent. He lay on the floor watching Kieran with indifferent eyes.

  Sealy was motionless, and Kieran eyed him with regret. He’d known Sealy might be in danger around Seth, but he hadn’t separated them. Now Sealy was half-dead.

  When the guards came back for Max and dragged him to another cell, Kieran turned Sealy onto his back.

  His face was purple with bruises, his wrist lay across his chest at a sickly angle, and his twisted hand looked like the claw of some stricken animal. Kieran ripped open Sealy’s shirt. The boy’s torso was blue and yellow from old and new bruises. He should have moved him long ago.

  “Contact the infirmary and tell them to bring a stretcher with restraints, and some bandages and antiseptic for the other two.”

  A few minutes later, two sleepy-eyed boys from the infirmary, wearing pajamas, bore Sealy away on a stretcher. They’d brought metal bowls full of antiseptic, ointment, and bandages, which Kieran pushed through the bars, first to Max, who was lying on the cot clutching his forehead, and then to Seth, who was leaning against the wall, panting through grotesquely swollen lips.

  “You’ll probably want some painkillers,” he said to Seth.

  “Probably.” Seth rooted through the supplies, found a tube of ointment, and dabbed at his bloodied lip. By the competent way he treated his wounds, Kieran guessed that Seth had nursed himself through many beatings, most likely from his father. That could be one reason for all his anger.

  “I guess the great Pastor Kieran Alden isn’t so perfect after all,” Seth said, bandaging a scrape on his arm. “You beat the shit out of me.”

  “I never said I was perfect.”

  Seth laughed at that. “You didn’t have to.”

  Kieran looked at his bloody fists, ashamed. “I’m sorry I attacked you.”

  “You had cause.” Seth unscrewed the cap on the bottle of aspirin, tossed a handful into his mouth, and chewed them loudly. He limped to the sink and drank from the tap.

  “Why did you attack Sealy?”

  “Take a guess.”

  “He did something you didn’t like.”

  “You could say that.” Seth gave Kieran a sidelong look. “He’s the reason I’m in here.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “He told me.” Seth laughed, shaking his head. “What a fool. He felt guilty.”

  The two sat in silence until Seth finished treating his injuries. Then he lay back on the cot with a grunt, placing an arm over his eyes.

  “I wish I could go back in time,” Kieran said.

  Seth looked at him, startled.

  “I’d do a lot of things differently,” Kieran admitted, wondering at his need to talk to Seth this way when the boy had almost murdered him. But with Waverly and his parents gone, Seth was the person he felt closest to. Arthur was smart, but too young; Sarek was trustworthy, but too distant. And it wasn’t just because he and Seth were about the same age or able to lead the boys, thought Kieran. It was more than that.

  He knew he was exceptional, and he knew Seth was, too. Under different circumstances, they might have been friends.

  “I guess I’d do some things differently, too,” Seth finally said grudgingly, then added, “Like that trial kind of backfired.”

  “Would you really have killed me?” Kieran asked, hoping that Seth didn’t detect the fear in his voice. Even now, with Seth safely locked away, Kieran was afraid of him.

  Seth gave it some thought. “I was just trying to break you,” he said, “so when I let you out, you wouldn’t cause any more trouble.”

  Kieran shuddered inwardly. It had nearly worked. There’d been moments when he’d been ready to do almost anything for a meal.

  “But then kids started asking for a trial,” Seth said. “They tried to act like they wanted your blood, but I could tell they were trying to help you. I knew that I’d never have control unless…”

  “So you would have?”

  Seth twitched as though the question were an annoying fly. “That’s not what I did, is it?”

  “But you wanted to.”

  “Wanting and doing aren’t the same things.”

  “You starved me.”

  “I didn’t do any worse to you than my dad did to me when he found out I got into his liquor. One bowl of soup a day for the entire harvest. Try that sometime.” Seth’s face was so swollen that it was hard to read, but Kieran knew that mentioning his father caused Seth pain. “Of course I snuck food when my dad wasn’t looking,” he added. “But then, so did you.”

  “You knew about that?” Kieran asked. “That Sealy was sneaking me bread?”

  “I told him to do it,” Seth said irritably. “I didn’t want you to know it came from me. That bread was supposed to be the beginning.”

  “Of what?”

  “Incentives. For good behavior.”

  It would have worked, too, Kieran thought. Seth had no idea how close he’d come to giving in. And he’ll never know, he told himself. “If I let you out of here, you’d try again, wouldn’t you?”

  “Try what again?”

  “To take over the ship.”

  Seth was quiet for so long that Kieran assumed he wouldn’t get an answer, and he stood. When he was at the door, Seth said, “That’s what you did, isn’t it?”

  Kieran stopped in his tracks. Then, without a trace of emotion, he said, “I’ll have fresh clothes sent down to you tomorrow,” and left the brig.

  STARS

  Kieran was running the combine, binding hay into bales. Two other boys stacked the bales using OneMan conveyors, lifting each one gingerly with the clawlike attachments on the fronts of the machines. The conveyors looked like fun, and if Kieran thought it would be safe to put a younger boy in charge of the combine, he’d take a turn. But for now he was stuck high up on the seat, driving the huge machine down row after row of grasses, gathering them for use as mulch or as bedding for the chickens and goats.

  He jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Arthur leaning over him, balanced on the footboard of the combine, out of breath, his face sweating, eyes wide and alert behind filthy lenses. Arthur spoke, but Kieran could hear nothing over the engine and had to switch off the tractor, and then the baler, before Arthur could make himself heard. This better be good, he thought.

  “I said the nebula is thinning out!” Arthur yelled up to him.

  “What!” Kieran stared at the boy. “What do you mean, thinning out?”

  “I mean we can see stars.”

  Kieran had to see this for himself. He waved to the two boys running the conveyors and followed Arthur out of the grassland bay and to the elevators that would take them directly to Central Command.

&n
bsp; “How many stars?” Kieran asked, unable to wait. “More than just a few?”

  “A lot. I think we’re almost to the edge of the nebula.”

  Kieran’s heart pounded, and he had to lean against the wall of the elevator. Over the months he’d gotten most of his strength back, but that period of starvation had left a mark on him. If he became very excited, the adrenaline in his system seemed to weaken him, and he’d feel dizzy and light-headed. He felt this way now as he waited for the elevator doors to open onto the corridor so that he could follow Arthur to the command room and see for himself.

  There were about a dozen boys in Central Command, but there was no sound. Kieran could hear them breathing as they gazed out the windows. Behind the thin haze still left of the nebula, there were stars. Millions upon millions of them, and more all the time as the ship sped toward the outer boundary of the pink gas. The effect reminded Kieran of the night his father tried to explain that back on Earth, during the day, you could not see the stars. “At dusk, they seemed to come out one at a time,” he’d said.

  Kieran had been incapable of visualizing this, but now it was happening before his eyes. The stars appeared one by one, as though pushing through a silk curtain.

  “My God,” he said under his breath.

  It really was true. They were reaching the outer limits of the horrible cloud that had swallowed them years ago.

  For a time, Kieran looked at the stars squinting his eyes, seeing the differences among them. Some of them twinkled red, some blue, some had a yellowish cast. But an idea took hold of him, and he shouted at Sarek, who was manning the com station, “Start a radar sweep! They might have come out of it, too!”

  Sarek stared at Kieran for a moment as though not comprehending, but suddenly his hands flew over his control panel as he enabled every radar dish on the ship to receive every possible frequency, and then he turned on all eight radar beams, sending their light waves into the darkness, searching for any solid object within ten million miles.