They have her cornered. Alma stands at the end of the hall, close to what must be the very front of the ship, her chest heaving. There are three doors around her, but I can’t read their signs, obscured by dust.
“You did our work for us,” one of the guards is saying, buzzgun aimed squarely at her chest. I stand there frozen behind them, desperately looking for a way to intercede.
“Back up,” the other says. The sight of Alma’s eyes, wider than I’ve ever seen them, fills my heart with ice.
“Back . . . up,” the guard says again when Alma doesn’t move. Finally, one shaky step after another, she retreats three paces. The guard aiming the buzzgun uses the weapon to gesture at one of the three doors. “Open it up,” he says to his partner.
The door is opened with a wheel, as if it’s a cryo chamber. They have them in the Zoo—when opened, a burst of frozen mist escapes with a wheeze. Not so here. The only thing that exits the chamber now is a vague rotten scent, decaying leaves and stale air.
“In,” the guard with the buzzgun says. “Until we comm back to N’Terra and figure out what to do with you.”
I wish Alma could see me. Every time her eyes flicker over the shoulders of the guards, I pray that she’ll catch sight of me, the blur of my camouflage waking before her, but if she notices anything unusual about the sight of the hall, her face doesn’t betray it. Both guards outweigh me by one hundred pounds and they’re armed. I just have to pray they don’t lock the door.
Alma steps hesitantly toward the vault, every pace heavy with dread. The guard who stands waiting makes a sound of impatience and grabs her hard by the arm.
“In,” the man says, and drags her the last few feet into the room. As soon as she clears the door, he swings it shut behind her, the clang echoing through the close halls and reverberating in my teeth for the brief moment of silence after the door has closed behind her. And then I hear her screaming.
The guards laugh on cue, and one spins the wheel to latch the door. I have to press myself against the wall, grinding my knuckles into the hard surface, shutting my eyes tight to keep from throwing myself at them in rage. The dry dead smell from my best friend’s cell lingers in my nostrils as they go on chuckling.
“It won’t hurt her,” one says. They’re moving back toward me now, and I keep my eyes shut, praying my suit continues to protect me, that the dim light and the colors of the crisscrossing vines remain my friends.
“Think she’s one of them?” the other says. They’re close enough for me to smell their sweat. “One of the traitors who lives with the aliens?”
“Must be. I don’t know how the hell she would’ve gotten way out here otherwise.”
“Did that look like a N’Terran suit to you?”
“Unlikely.”
“It looked like it to me.”
“If it was, she stole it. Albatur said there was a break-in from outside, right? All those specimens that escaped. They probably took more than just animals.”
They pass by, and I have to hold the sigh of relief that builds in my lungs. I have to wait. I have to be patient. The suit knows it and cools me, gives me extra air, feeding my skin with oxygen. I sense that it has to work harder to do so here inside the Vagantur, where the sweet air of Faloiv is less free. Alma’s screams have quieted. I hear the buzz of her voice but can’t make out the words. Whatever she’s saying, she’s repeating it over and over. I focus on the receding sound of the guards’ shoes, and when I can’t hear them anymore, I sprint the ten yards to where Alma has been trapped.
“Alma,” I whisper, my mouth nearly kissing the door. “Alma.”
She can’t hear me. Her voice floats through the door. “Oh, stars. Oh, stars. Oh, stars . . .”
“Alma,” I say, as loud as I dare.
A pause.
“Oc-Octavia?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Oh, stars, O, you have to get me out!” she cries, almost hysterical. “There’s a dead body in here.”
My hands fly to the wheel latch. It’s much heavier and stiffer than I anticipated, and I have to use my strength and weight to turn it. It creaks an inch, the sound like a crack of lightning, rending the still air. I freeze, but all I hear is the shuffle of Alma against the inside of the door, struggling to stay as far away from whatever she saw as possible. I heave on the wheel once more, and it creaks again, though not as loud this time. Another full-body jerk gets it going and then I just have to maintain the momentum, turning the wheel as if steering a massive ship. I turn faster and faster until the bones in my arms are jolted with a sudden stop. The door cracks open.
Alma topples out, gasping for breath.
“It’s in the air.” She heaves. “I can’t breathe it. It’s like the air is dead too.”
She knows it’s me, but when she actually looks up at me, she startles anyway.
“Octavia, oh my . . . how? What is this? Camouflage?”
“It’s the suit,” I say, reaching down with my blurry arms and trying to yank her to a stand. “It’s . . . special.”
Alma’s mouth opens and closes, and in her eyes I see the mechanics of her brain whirring. But the logic of it all is too heavy for the moment, and she can only look back into the dark room I’ve sprung her from.
“Look,” she says. “I mean . . . look.”
Bones. They gleam out from the folds of old cloth like jewels buried in sand. A hand. A skull. Everything else is obscured. Alma’s breath seems to come from the skull itself: I’m fixated on it, the caverns of its eyes seeming to be the source of the chamber’s darkness.
I take a step toward it.
“Octavia, we need to get out of here.” Alma pants. She rubs her arms, as if the skull’s breath had filled the room and sunk in through her skinsuit.
“Hold on.” I move into the chamber, and the smell of old death slides over my nostrils like a clammy hand.
The suit on my body isn’t alarmed though; no extra burst of oxygen or prickle of warning. It gives me courage and I edge farther into the room.
“Stay just outside,” I whisper. “So no one closes us in.”
“Obviously,” Alma says, but her voice is still thick with dread.
The skeleton is crumpled in a corner of the chamber, and the closer I get the more of its teeth I can count. I realize now that the doorway isn’t the only source of light: there are no windows, but the vines outside have begun to force their way in through what looks like a valve of some kind, as delicate as eyelashes but with the force of Faloiv allowing them to muscle in and make cracks where there had been none. How does Albatur think he can make the Vagantur space-worthy again? This ship wouldn’t get them to the moon, let alone a brand-new galaxy.
There’s something glittering there among the bones, a shiny edge that I glimpse through the skeletal fingers of the shrouded hand. I squint, reluctant to move any closer, but the glitter sticks in my eye, holding my gaze.
“Open the door a little wider,” I whisper.
“Octavia, we need—”
“Come on, Alma! Quick!”
A creak of metal, and the angle of dim solar panel light from the corridor falls over my back, shining on what had once been a human’s body.
“They have something in their hand,” I say.
“So what? Let’s go.”
But it is calling to me. I inch closer, reaching out to gingerly swipe at the dust and grime that have formed a glove of age around the hand. I try to reach the object without touching the bones but even when using two fingers as pincers, it’s impossible. I try to ignore the brittle feeling of the skeleton as I reach between the dead thumb and forefinger to withdraw the shining object.
It’s a pin, smaller than the space of my palm. Stupidly, I expect the gold pin of the Council: the Vagantur surrounded by the round representations of the compounds. But this is something else. The remnants of four letters, caked in grime, worn by age. A circle behind them, a flowing forked design arching across the face of it. Wings on either sid
e, and beneath, one word, which I extend a single finger to clear the dust from. Some letters are missing, too faint to make out after so many years of darkness and dirt. But I can read the word.
“Williams,” I breathe.
Chapter 16
Alma is at my side in a flash, her dread of the room and its dead smell fallen away like an old skin.
“Captain Williams?” she whispers. “This is her?”
“It has to be.” I point. “Look at the wings. She flew the Vagantur. I mean, there were others. But she was the captain.”
“So she is dead,” Alma says, recalling my father’s words. “Shouldn’t she have been, you know, cremated?”
I stare at the bones, a sudden anger seizing my tongue. My father had sneered about Captain Williams—mocking a dead woman, and a woman who had saved hundreds of lives no less. At one point I might have cared that he would think me emotional for defending a pile of bones, but that point is long past. Now I can only think about him with the same disdain: a crooked finger on the hand of N’Terra.
“What else is in here?” I cast my eyes around the small dark room, looking for I don’t know what. A reason. A clue. Some explanation for why the woman who delivered us safely from the ruin of the Origin Planet would be cast aside in a dark cell.
“Nothing,” Alma says. “Just her. Four walls. No windows. Not even a bed.”
“This wasn’t sleeping quarters,” I say, taking a step away. “It’s not like this could have been her room and she died in her sleep or something. This makes no sense.”
“She was just holding her pin,” Alma says, her voice sinking. I’ve only seen Alma cry a few times, and it’s more something you hear than you see: no tears, just a tremble in her voice and her lip. The trembling is here in this room with us now. She echoes me: “This makes no sense.”
“How long do you think she’s been here?” I whisper. I can’t take my eyes off the empty caverns of the skull—the skull of Captain Williams. “Or . . . you know . . . how long was she here, before . . .”
“Before she died,” Alma finishes, her jaw shaking. Before I can find any words of comfort, her gaze has sharpened, the shine of unfallen tears evaporating to make way for a laser.
“What’s that,” she demands, and she’s elbowing past me, crouching by the wall opposite the body of Captain Williams. There’s just enough light let in by the vines and the vault door to make out the presence of a disturbance on the graying Vagantur walls. Alma quickly runs a palm over it, then uses her fingertips to search more closely.
“Something scratched in the wall,” she says under her breath. “Something . . . words.”
She snaps her head around at me. “Octavia, get out of the light!”
I stand there for a moment, confused. Her eyes widen with impatience and one hand shoots out, swiping at the air.
“Move!”
I step sideways, back toward the skeleton. Light falls across the wall, illuminating the back of Alma’s head, her face close to whatever she has found.
“She left a message,” Alma whispers. “The captain left a message.”
“What does it say?” I demand, stepping closer.
“Get out of the light!” she snaps, not looking back. Her fingers move slowly over the shapes. Then she spits.
I move backward, giving her as much light as I can. She’s rubbing vigorously, desperately, using her saliva to clear away the grime.
“The dirt has sunk into the letters,” she says in wonder. “And . . . blood maybe. Stars.”
I keep staring at the skull, transfixed. I’m waiting for Alma to tell me what the wall says. I’m waiting for Captain Williams’s empty jagged mouth to tell me what she knew, why she’s here. I gaze down at her captain’s pin in my open palm like a key to a lock that may not even exist. The floor seems to be made of something softer than real ground: the sensation of sinking into this ship and its many secrets is so vivid I have to look down at my feet to ensure they’re not being lost in melted metal. Alma whispers under her breath, the words unintelligible and blurring into a hum. When she reads what’s on the wall so that I can hear it, the words might as well be rattling from the silent mouth of Captain Williams.
“‘Only one will make it run. Three pieces to return.’”
There is a long moment of silence.
“Three pieces of what?” Alma says.
“Read it again,” I whisper.
She repeats herself, but the words still don’t make sense. I imagine Captain Williams alone for weeks in this small dank room, before the vines had pried the wall apart and let in the ribbons of light. Darkness. She can’t have come here to die on her own. Someone would have found her, cremated her, let her ashes rise to the stars and become part of the galaxy. She was forgotten, purposefully. This square shadow of a room was not the place she chose to rest but the place that had been chosen for her.
“We need to go,” Alma says. I hear the disappointment in her voice, that her hero Captain Williams had not had more wisdom to impart.
“She may have lost her mind,” I say quietly. I squeeze the pin and let it dig into my palm. “Who knows how long she was here.”
“We need to go,” Alma repeats.
I crouch, planning to return the pin to the skeletal hand, when Alma stops me.
“Bring the pin.”
“Why?”
“We might need it,” she says, but I know we means her.
I pause, staring down at the empty bone hand. The idea of leaving those fingers void, without the one thing they’ve clung to for so many years, makes my lip tremble. I tell myself that when everything is figured out, I will come back and get her, and cremate her the way she ought to have been.
“Come on,” Alma whispers. She’s already out in the corridor, her plan unfolding as I slip the pin into one of the hidden pockets of my suit.
Together we close the vault door, sealing in Captain Williams and the shadowy smell of her tomb.
“Don’t tell Rondo that we almost got caught,” she says. “He’s already going to be super mad that we up and left him in the forest.”
“I was going to say the same thing. But we were so close. We almost had the slate.”
“Sorry I dropped it,” she mumbles, glum.
“Don’t apologize,” I say quickly so that she doesn’t hear my disappointment.
Alma leads us toward what had been the nose of the ship; and as anticipated, there are more holes the closer we get. Neither of us speaks: the hauntedness of the cell is here in the rest of the ship as well, the breaths of passengers from the Origin Planet lingering like an invisible smoke in the hallways. They had been here. All my life, in N’Terra, the place my people had been born seemed far away, unnecessary to acquaint myself with: a dead place to which I had no connection. It wasn’t real. But it is real—or was.
“There has to be a way out,” she says, but I hear the dragging of feet in her voice, regretting that she can’t stay longer, soaking in everything, looking for clues about the past. She’s slowed down, her eyes sweeping the ship around us not for an escape route but for anything, everything. The dust that coats it all is only a thin disguise that she thinks she can wipe away.
I step ahead, quickening my pace. Her longing is contagious and we don’t have time for this.
“There,” I say, pointing. “Up ahead. There’s light.”
She says nothing, following me. I sharpen my ears for the sound of the guards, any minute expecting them to appear before us, or for the sound of an alarm wailing through the labyrinth of the ship. This all feels too much like the night we helped Adombukar escape, the night my mother died, and I have to swallow the dread that expands like a wormhole in my throat. Alma wants to stay here inside these dim-lit walls, but I need to be outside as soon as possible and let the sun and the ogwe clear my lungs. They call to me.
The hole in the side of the ship is large enough for us to escape through—that’s not the problem. The problem is the crew of three gray-suited
guards on the ground below, milling around with their tools and their covered tents, combing the ground for either parts and pieces they can use to make repairs or for the mysterious pods that Manx calls their mission. They’re not directly below, but the sight of two people dropping to the ground from inside the ship is guaranteed to draw their attention. I wonder if they’ve seen Rondo, if they’re on the alert for more of us. I dismiss the possibility that he’s been taken captive. Not an option.
“Now what?” Alma mutters.
“I—I don’t know,” I say.
“This was your plan,” she says, and I can tell she’s biting back attitude, that she’s being gentle with me. It’s like a scalpel prodding just under my skin.
“You can be mad,” I snap. “You can be mad if you damn well please.”
“I know I can,” she snaps back. “But what good is it going to do?”
“What good will any of this do? You might as well be honest about how you feel!”
“Honest? I think you need to be honest, O. Because I don’t think you are. Not with yourself. I mean, I want to help Rasimbukar and them too, but your dad has a point. Shouldn’t you be thinking about N’Terra? Our families? Why don’t we just go back to Mbekenkanush and ask for a kawa? They know you! Maybe they’ll just give it to you and all this will be over!”
“Is that what you think?” I say, feeling breathless. Through the ship’s holes, the ground suddenly seems dizzyingly far below. “That we should just go get a kawa because Albatur and those other fools demand it? I don’t understand exactly what the kawa are, but I do know they’re important. To the Faloii. To Faloiv.”
Alma averts her eyes, and I know she’s ashamed of what she’s said, of what she’s about to say.
“I know, but—but if you have to choose a side, you know? Shouldn’t it be . . . I don’t know . . . ours?”
The fury rises up in me in the form of the smell of syca. I barely recognize my own anger, cloaked as it is in the Artery’s different languages. Is it me that’s angry or the trees? I open my mouth to rage at her.
An Anatomy of Beasts Page 14