The Clouded Sky

by Megan Crewe

  “I’d never have thought anyone in the group wasn’t committed to the cause,” he says. “I can’t imagine . . .” He pauses. There’s nothing to imagine. The betrayal has already happened.

  Then he squares his shoulders, with a determination that in that moment reminds me of Jeanant. “It doesn’t change anything, really. You and I managed to outrun the Enforcers for days on Earth. We’ll figure this out and stop whoever it is before they hurt us any more.”

  His confidence doesn’t diffuse my fears completely, but it steadies me. “We will,” I say, hoping he’s right.

  Thlo and Isis step out then, Isis motioning for me to follow her. Win turns back to his job, but not before shooting me a quick smile that feels like a return of the guy I thought I knew.

  “We’re really going to put you to work now,” Isis says as we squeeze into the adjoining room, which holds only a single console and a couple of screens that fill the narrow walls on either side.

  “How?” I ask.

  Isis flicks on the console’s display. “Given the situation,” she says, “Thlo thinks—and I agree—it’s best to limit how much of our plans we share with the entire group. We have one obvious option for gathering the rest of the kolzo fuel, but it’s going to be difficult. We need skilled people to provide support. We know we can trust you, and I think you can handle this.”

  The display wavers to show a complex web of interconnecting lines that drift as I watch. “That looks like one of the navigation charts Britta was using on the ship.”

  Isis nods. “It is. Since all the kolzo stores on the station are being tightly monitored, we’re going to go off-station, straight to the source. It’s one of the materials we . . . I suppose you could say ‘mine,’ from the planet of Kemya. So we’ll mine some of our own.”

  That does sound difficult. “How are we going to do that without anyone noticing? Doesn’t mining take a while?”

  “It does . . . and it doesn’t,” Isis says with a quirk of her lips. “As soon as the early Kemyates who’d escaped here realized we were still going to need resources from the dead planet, they set up a series of localized time fields in the most valuable areas. Inside those fields, we can jump into the past and set the chain of reactions in motion, and then jump to a later point to collect those resources immediately. The risky part is getting to the planet. We’re in the outer edge of orbit, so it’s not a long trip, but there’s a lot of monitoring between here and there.

  “That’s where you’d come in. We’ll have to use a pod ship, and they don’t have full navigation systems—they need assistance the way your spacecraft on Earth rely on a control center. We’ll have a plan based on the records available, and I’ll be watching to make adjustments as new variables arise, but it’s best to have a second set of eyes. Yours seem keen. What do you think?”

  She’d know whether this is a task I can handle better than I would. “I’ll do my best,” I say.

  “Excellent. I’ll give you a rundown of how to use the navigation interface, and we’ll try to arrange for Britta to come by Jule’s to take you through a more detailed tutorial in the next couple days. A lot of it you can learn directly from the program, once you’ve got the basics.”

  The lines shimmer across the display. I can already make out patterns in their movement, parallels and interactions. I can do this. I might be just backup, but they trusted me with that responsibility above anyone else.

  “You should know, we’re going to be communicating less overall,” Isis adds. “Pavel intercepted further information on Kurra’s plans—she’s gotten permission to monitor the private transmissions to and from all the people who are being interviewed. We’ve gotten good at coding our messages, but any code can be broken if it’s noticed. So we’ll only be passing on the most essential information. No more notes from Win.”

  “Oh.” A twinge of loss passes through me, but he hasn’t reached out that way since the first meeting, when things got awkward between us. Maybe a little distance will help me sort out the different sides of him I’m seeing. “I understand.”

  “Good.” Isis bends over beside me. “Let’s get to work.”

  She runs me through the essential features of the interface, until I can distinguish between the three types of sensor sweeps, and between them and other objects around the planet’s atmosphere, and predict how all of them will move. My focus narrows automatically as we work, a habit formed by those years of practice at absorbing every detail around me.

  “You’re a natural,” Isis says as we wrap up, and I can’t help grinning at the praise. It’s nice to get something other than panic attacks from my weird mental habits. “How has the ‘pet’ role been going?” she asks when we turn toward the door. “You’re managing all right?”

  “It’s not exactly fun,” I say. “But I think I’m getting the hang of it.” Her question reminds me of my earlier inspiration. “Actually, I thought of another way I might be able to help.”

  “Explain.”

  I tell her about the comments I overheard from Jule’s friends. “I thought, if there’s a way we can arrange for me to be around people in the Security division, I guess, or anyone else who might be involved with tracking down a group like ours, they might say things they intend to be private even if I’m around, since I’m ‘just’ a pet. About what they know or who they found it out from. Or how they’re planning to try to catch us.”

  Isis makes an approving sound. “I like that. We’d have to consult with Thlo, and give some thought to how to best position you. The wealthy families, council members, and other people who are respected, they have ‘functions’ regularly to socialize away from the offices, and from what I understand a lot of business talk still goes on. Some important people from Security must go to those. And it’s become a trend in the last few decades to hire pets to act as servers.”

  “That sounds perfect,” I say.

  “Of course, to gather information efficiently, you need to know who to pay attention to. I’m not sure I like the idea of you doing a lot of that research from Jule’s apartment. Kurra could be watching all sorts of network activity . . .” She brightens. “Ah! You should come to the Joining Day celebration—it’s in just a few days, and all the key people will be there. And you’d get to see there’s a more pleasant side to Kemya.”

  “Joining Day?”

  “It’s a historical holiday,” she says. “No one will think it’s odd for Jule to bring you along. You two meet up with Britta and me there, and we’ll give you a thorough introduction to Kemya’s ‘best and brightest.’ ”

  13.

  Three days later, I walk into what Jule called the assembly hall and am struck dumb. Jule comes to a stop behind me as I stare at the crowd filling the tiered standing areas that circle a huge gleaming platform, at the doomed ceiling crisscrossed with a framework of supports and sparkling with hundreds of lights, at the space, at least as big as the baseball stadium back home. The hall looked large on the station’s maps, but after so many days of cramped rooms and narrow halls, I wasn’t prepared for its true scope. I grip the cool railing beside me and breathe, in and out, until the impact recedes.

  “Quite the place, isn’t it?” Jule says with a grin. “Come on, we can get a better view than this.”

  He directs me down a padded ramp. Kemyates of all ages hustle past us, gesturing to one another and clustering in conversation. Many have glinting strings woven into their hair or strung around their necks. “Is this everyone on the station?” I murmur to Jule as we sidle past a middle-aged couple with two young kids.

  “Nah,” he says. “This room only holds a quarter of us. They do the big event four times so everyone can come, and then there’ll be smaller celebrations in every ward.”

  “How do they justify having a room this big just for holidays?”

  “It gets used for presentations and sports too,” Jule says, “and when none of that’s going on, it can be sectioned off into smaller areas for specialized experiment
s and tech work. This is the best indoor space to do anything antigrav.”

  Because it’s in the middle of the station? “How do you maintain consistent gravity in here anyway?” I ask—one of the many puzzles I haven’t been able to find an answer to on the network that I can wrap my Earthling brain around.

  “Well, the gulmar fields have to be synced up properly with the station’s rotation, and that basically takes care of it.”

  “Great,” I say. “And what exactly are gulmar fields?”

  “They use the, ah . . .” He grimaces. “We learned the basics in lower school, but it’s not my field. I’d have a hard enough time explaining in Kemyate.”

  Isis did mention Jule’s dislike of “tech talk.” “That’s okay,” I say. “Never mind. How are we going to find Isis and Britta?”

  “I’m not good enough company?” Jule says with mock hurt. A group of teenagers jostles by us. I stumble into him, getting a perfect reminder of why I’d rather it wasn’t just him and me. He steadies me by the shoulder. For a second, our bodies are pressed as close as we were in my bedroom the other morning. Then his hand falls and I scoot forward, and we pretend it didn’t happen. It’s about as awkward as all those random moments in his apartment when our gazes snag for a second too long, or he gets partway through one of his flirty remarks before he catches himself. That is, pretty freaking awkward.

  “Jule!” a voice shouts. Hain pushes through the crowd to meet us, the girl who sat next to him the other evening and Amad trailing behind. I edge to the side to put Jule between his friends and me. That doesn’t stop Hain from looking me up and down.

  “Didn’t want to let her out of your sight?” he says, with an arch of his eyebrows.

  “I’m curious to see how she’ll react,” Jule replies evenly.

  What’s there to “react” to? I wonder. I looked up the background on Joining Day: It seems the people who call themselves Kemyates now aren’t representative of all the people who used to live on the planet of Kemya. Their ancestors were from the most powerful republic—the only republic that happened to have a space station in orbit when the disaster happened—and that republic was officially formed on this day a heck of a long time ago, when the country at its center “convinced” its four surrounding neighbors to join it. I get the impression, reading between the lines about how technologically advanced those people were, it was an “offer they can’t refuse” type situation. Join us or we make you. But I guess it was so long ago that everyone’s happy to remember it a more positive way.

  “Where are you headed?” Hain asks, and I suppress a jab of concern. Jule and the others won’t be able to talk to me properly with Jule’s friends hanging around. We’re going to have to be careful enough as it is.

  “I’m supposed to meet up with Yori,” Jule says, and whoever that is, it’s obviously someone Hain isn’t keen to see. He wrinkles his nose.

  “Good luck with that. You’re coming to the party tonight?”

  “Of course.”

  Hain gives me a wink, which I pretend to be too zoned out to notice, and the three of them weave on through the bustle.

  “Thank God,” I murmur when they’re out of hearing.

  “Thank Kemya. Ah!” Jule raises his hand, and I spot Isis’s crimson hair amid the crowd ahead of us, a few tiers down. She waves back. “Looks like we’re going to ‘miss’ Yori.”

  We hurry the rest of the way to where Isis and Britta are standing, squished near the translucent wall that runs along the edge of the tier. A tickle of cool air rises from the floor—I guess temperature control would be important when you have more than twenty thousand people crammed into one space.

  Britta’s wearing one of those glinting strings like a crown around her head. Up close, I can make out five strands in different shades of metallic gray and brown. Symbolizing the five united countries?

  “What do you think?” she asks, knocking her elbow against mine.

  I look around me again. For a second, I feel every bit the dazed Earthling. “It’s . . . big.”

  She laughs. “You’re getting too used to Kemyate life.” Her voice drops and she leans close to my ear, so the spectators around us have no chance of overhearing. “Check out the stage. Most of the people you’ll want to know will be around there.”

  Leaning against the dividing wall, I can see over the heads of the mass of people on the last two tiers that separate us from the platform at the hall’s center. There’s a low inner circle directly around the platform, dotted with stools to allow those spectators to sit. Front row seats.

  “That thin man with the silver hair,” Britta says, pointing her chin toward a figure standing beside the stage, “That’s Shakam Mol-Rilly Nakalya, the current . . . I think you’d say ‘mayor’ of Kemya. Elected two years ago. Any unauthorized activity the Enforcers know about, they’ll be keeping him informed. The big woman in green beside him, she’s part of the council of Health, not as useful to you. But the short guy next to her, that’s Elt Madrin-Tomas Pirfi, the head of the Security council. And that woman next to him . . .”

  I recognize her from my earlier research. “Tabzi’s mom.”

  Britta nods. “She’s not on a council, but she throws a lot of credits at whatever cause she’s into this week, so they like to keep her close.”

  “Why isn’t Tabzi with her?”

  “She’d probably rather celebrate with her friends than those stiff necks.”

  Understandable enough.

  Isis dips her head toward us. “There’s some of the council of Earth Travel people, that bunch by the left of the platform,” she says. “Along with Nakalya and the Security division, they have the most influence over policy here. The Enforcers will be talking with them about the investigation, since most of the activities they’re looking into happened on Earth.”

  “They’re the ones convincing everyone the Earth experiments need to keep going,” I say, and Isis nods in confirmation. “Why do people listen to them so much?” If the average Kemyate really thought about it, surely they could figure out that after all this time, there can’t be anything really useful left to learn from my planet?

  “It’s the way they present themselves,” Jule says by my other side. “They’re the ones who’ve ‘protected’ us for so long, by ensuring that we don’t make any rash decisions and that we’ll have every possible problem solved ahead of time when we finally do move on. The voice of wisdom.” An edge of sarcasm has crept into his voice. “The Travelers are only part of their jurisdiction—they recruit most of the best scientists to work out the experiments and improve the Travel tech too. No one sees any reason to doubt them.”

  “People don’t want to think our leaders could be swayed by selfishness,” Britta remarks. “They’re supposed to be the best of us. And everyone’s already afraid of setting off without being quite prepared enough to face the danger.”

  “Is that really why they’re still playing around with Earth?” I say. “Selfishness—because they don’t want to give up the little ‘vacation’ out there for the time it’d take to get everyone moved somewhere else?” Win explained it to me that way, but I still have trouble accepting it.

  “That’s oversimplifying,” Jule says. “The people in Earth Travel, in the Council, they all grew up like we did, hearing how important it is to avoid risks, how much we need the data we get from Earth to make sure we don’t make some new mistake that ruins everything in a new place. From the way they talk, I’m sure at least some of them honestly believe that. And who would want to be the one to stand up and say, ‘We’re ready,’ and then have to take the blame if it turns out we’re not? Whatever selfishness there is . . .” He shrugs. “For some of the Travelers, maybe, it’s like a ‘vacation.’ But I’d say a bigger part is that you have a lot of people who’ve focused all their learning on a particular field, and once the experiments stop, that field is hardly going to be relevant anymore, let alone influential. We’ll continue to use time fields on a minor scale, of cour
se, but nothing like the setup on Earth. Almost everyone in Earth Travel is going to have to find some new calling. Knowing that has to affect the decisions people make.”

  Can we really be sure that people won’t just campaign to put up a new time field over Earth, then? My fear must show on my face, because Isis gives my shoulder a quick pat. “It’s always easier to keep going the way things are than to veer off in a new direction,” she says. “Basic physics. But we’re not going to give them a choice. Ah, look—the woman Thlo’s talking to down there, that’s the head of the Earth Travel council. Milades Niko-Shen Silmeru.”

  I spot Thlo’s petite but sturdy frame next to a stately woman with one of those glinting strings wrapped around her upper arm. Strange, seeing our rebel leader in the midst of people who apparently hold so much power, even though I knew she worked with them. It must be awful having to hide the huge secret she does.

  I open my mouth to speak, and an elbow bumps me from behind. “No more room here,” Jule says to whoever was crowding closer, reminding me how suspicious this conversation would sound.

  “How many councils are there?” I say, modulating my voice carefully.

  Britta counts them off quietly with a press of her fingers against the railing. “Tech, Earth Travel, Industry, Health, Treasury, Education, Security.”

  “And the heads of all the secondary councils, along with Nakalya, make up the primary Council,” Isis adds. “The secondary councils can make decisions within their divisions’ areas of expertise, but it’s the heads who advise and bring wider proposals to the mayor, and that’s when the most important decisions are made.”

  My gaze snags on a familiar slouched posture at the edge of the tier closest to the inner circle. “Is that Pavel?”

  Britta cranes her neck. “It is. Prime spot he grabbed!”

  Close enough to talk to the council members if he wanted to. My skin crawls. There are so many people to be suspicious of.