by J. P. Smythe
I look at the screen that shows Earth. It’s so perfect, such a perfect sphere.
Home.
I press the button, and I wait to see what it will do.
12
Nothing happens. Nothing happens. This is like with the hatch, I think: the water has broken whatever was meant to come next. We’re all here now, stuck here, and we’re going to die in this place.
I shut my eyes. The water creeps higher. It laps against my chest, a wave splashing onto my chin.
I wonder how long my breathing mask will last. I hike Mae up higher and press it against her face.
“Take this,” I say. “Put it into your mouth and breath normally. You have to do this.” I’ll be keeping her alive for a little while longer, I think, for all the good it will do.
And then the noise comes. There is a grinding at first and then a lower rumble through us all, and we all shake. Then the blare of some alarm rings through everything, loud and sharp enough to make us all clutch our hands to our heads, fighting against the water, trying to stay on top of it. I look into the kitchen, which is now crowded with people, Lows and frees and Shopkeepers and weapon makers, and maybe even surviving Bells and Pale Women and anybody else, everybody who has ever lived here.
Somebody screams. I look at the screens, the ones still showing the rest of Australia. We didn’t get everybody. People are still up there, panicking, foundering in the water. Here, the people I’ve saved scream and cry, afraid of what’s happening. I shout for them all to calm down, but it’s pointless, and I get the horrible dark water in my mouth. The children will cry; the adults will be terrified. This gets better only when it’s over.
And then the entire room starts to shake, like nothing I have ever felt, even when the arboretum tipped. It’s like the rumbling of the engines, of the whole ship, only closer than ever before, more powerful. It’s brutal, shaking my teeth, making the water crash around us. I try to find something to hold on to for support, clutching Mae to keep her head above the water. The water splashes up, over our heads, and Mae screams, and the mask falls from her face into the mess. I lose it, and all I can do now is tell her not to open her mouth.
“It’s okay,” I say. “Don’t swallow this water, okay? Just keep your face looking up there.” And I point at the ceiling, and I realize that I can see it vibrating.
“What’s happening?” Mae cries. I’m clutching her to my chest. She’s heavier than I would like even though she’s light in the water, and my bad arm struggles to hold her. But this is more important than my pain, I think. Giving her comfort now, letting her know that it’s going to be all right, even if that’s just another story.
“We’re leaving here,” I say to her.
“Where are we going?”
I don’t get a chance to give her an answer. There’s another rumble and a creaking, and then we drop, falling slightly, and judder to a halt again. I can’t see the screen and have no idea what’s happening. The ship could be falling apart. It gets worse and worse: the rumble, the screaming of the engines. We quake. We thrash in the water, trying to find a way to stay steady, but the waves knock us left and right. The lights go dim and flicker off, leaving only the pale light of the screens to illuminate us. The children are all screaming, their mouths wide in the same terrified O. The floor lurches, and there’s a terrible noise of something uncoupling, like the noise of the arboretum falling, a thud, a crack.
And I know, I just know—in my bones—that we have left the spaceship Australia.
We are thrown around, all of us. I lose my grip on Mae for a second, just a moment, and she tumbles to one side, out of my hands, beating the water desperately. I heave her back, and she’s hit her head on something, and there’s blood on her face, being washed off almost as soon as I notice it. That’s the last time I’ll see Australia, I think. All the things that happened to me there, and as suddenly as a click of the fingers, a spark on a match, and we’re off, away from that place. We’re going somewhere new, and I notice that the water is going down, that there’s a wind. No: more than a wind. It’s like standing by the turbines, the air generators, at the parts where they suck in the bad air before making it slightly less bad. It sucks, and the water starts going that way.
The wind pulls more, and I panic, because I don’t know what is happening. On the screens, I can see the ship as this smaller part leaves. I can see the Pit, and I can see where the hatch must have been, the water in the Pit emptied out through where we wrenched the door loose, leaving a hole into nothing. All the mess in there, all the people who are left; they’re all being sucked toward it. The picture on the screen is crackly, grainy, harder to see than it once was. But I can’t worry about that, not now. There’s a hole in our new ship as well. It’s tugging at us, too.
In here the water gushes out, and everybody is still screaming. We’re carried along with it. We’re pulled out of the room, out of the kitchen, and I desperately throw my arms out, trying to grab hold of anything that will stay still, that I can use to stop myself. It isn’t until we’re in the hallways that I manage to grab a doorway, dragged off my feet, holding on with my fingertips, clutching Mae, and she clutches right back. I scream at her to hold on to me, to not let go, whatever happens, and I shout Jonah’s name, but I can’t see him anywhere, and he wouldn’t be able to hear me anyway, not over the noise of everything. Mae is making a noise, but I can barely hear it; it isn’t until I look at her face that I see she’s screaming, her face buried in my chest. She sounds so far away.
I look down the passage, and I see people being sucked out through the hole where the hatch door was. I don’t know how many we’ll lose or what will happen when they’re out there.
Perhaps this is what the Pale Women meant when they spoke about ascending.
And then I realize that this isn’t where my duty stops. It doesn’t end with my clinging on as the people I’ve saved are lost.
I struggle to push Mae up and around the corner of the doorway, into the room, and I scream at her to stay. Here the pull seems slightly less, and I wrench the door—she screams right back, begging me not to leave her, but I have no choice, not now, not after all that’s happened—and I tug it shut. I pray that she’ll be safe.
Down the passage, people try to block the hole, but they’re failing. They’re using bodies, I think. It’s hard to see, hard to tell exactly what’s going on, but there’s something happening at the door. So many people there, all trying to stay alive. We need something bigger, something that can cover the hole.
I touch the door that I’ve trapped Mae behind, and I get an idea.
I let go, and it’s like I’m dropping down a level in the ship all over again, clinging to the side of the gantry, doing this for the first time. Crossing my fingers.
I grab the next doorway down the hall. My shoulders—which have taken more than their fair share of pain—sting, but I work through it. I grab the door, pull myself around. I take my knife from the sheath and start hammering at the hinges with the hilt, smacking them until they buckle and the door starts to shake. I hit them harder and harder, over and over. The first breaks, snapping away from the wall. I start kicking the second, the one lower down, and then bend down. I lose my grip, and I swing around, and I cling to the door.
I am not even close to done yet. When you need it, you get strength. You find a way to get things done. I press my legs against the frame, and I wrestle with the door, and I wrench it away, pulling the last hinge clean off the wall. It jams in the doorway, being sucked by the hole in the hatch.
“Move!” I scream, down the passageway. “Move!” But nobody can hear me, so I do what I can. I hold on to the door, and I kick backward, and I let the air carry us down toward the hole.
I shut my eyes and cross my fingers, and I pray.
Then all is calm. There’s no wind, no noise. I wonder for a second if I have died and if I’m going to open my eyes to see somewhere else: somewhere that’s like a dream I’ve never had. But no, I’m still here, in this
passageway, in this ship. Around me, people lie, collapsed on the floor. The door that I broke loose is jammed against the hole, shuddering slightly but covering it entirely. It’s stopped the wind.
It’s not perfect, but it’ll do. I rush back down the corridor, treading over struggling and unconscious survivors, and I push open the door to the room that I put Mae in, and I drag her up from the floor, telling her that it’s okay, that we’re past the worst. I shout Jonah’s name, and I look for him, but he’s nowhere to be seen.
The floor shakes. I cling to the side, pushing through to the screen room to see what I can see, if anything.
They all show the same thing: there, in the distance, a red shape, six metal sides. Behind it, space: a blackness punctured with glimmering holes. I know, I just know, that the metal box is Australia. That place was my home. And now? Now it’s not.
Then everything rocks. Everything shakes, and the ship we’re in starts howling, the engines doing something else. Through the screens, I see something else fill the view: The black fades, replaced by a layer of beautiful pure blue and then white, and then we’re past that. I tell Mae to look at it, to look at the screens.
“Clouds,” I say, something about a story I was told when I was little about what Earth used to be like. I know that these are clouds. The screens are showing us what we’ve passed, what we’ve left, not what we’re heading toward.
I can feel the ship slowing. We level out, and we all find our feet. We stop having to cling on. “Wait,” I say, but I don’t know who I’m speaking to. Mae stares at the screen with me. She’s even more astonished than I am. I wonder for a second what we’ll see when we get out of this ship, if the stories were somehow true anyway, that Earth is gone and destroyed. Or if the people who abandoned us have carried on just like before, doing whatever it was that they used to do. Living, as we’ve been deprived of it.
Then I hear the same hiss that we heard when we left Australia. A hiss and a clunk and then grinding, and the craft rocks once more. There’s a scream from the children, no doubt thinking that we’re starting to fall again, but we don’t. We stop.
Down the passageway, the door that I used to block the hole in the hatch falls to the ground.
“We’ve landed,” I say. My voice cracks, and I can barely find it, but I say it as loudly as I can to try to reassure the people who are here, who survived. “We’re home.”
We all swarm the corridor, soaking wet and dripping, though no more than the corridor itself. There’s a rush and a push as everybody tries to get close to the hole to see what happens next. This is all we have ever dreamed of. The story we were told, that we would drift until we found a home: we’re now at the end of that.
“It’s okay,” I tell Mae, and I shout Jonah’s name. I look for him, for that flash of red hair, but I can’t see it. I’ll find him soon, I tell myself. When we’re on land, out of this place, he’ll be easy to spot.
He’ll be here, and he’ll be safe. I’m sure of it. He has to be.
I think that I should say something to everyone: tell them all that we’re back on Earth, that the myth was a lie. They don’t give me a chance. They struggle through, trying to get to the hatch, to climb the ladder. I stand back. There’s time. The Lows in here, the free people, everybody is suddenly united; we’re all just people. I don’t know how the people out there will take to us, to our group of people who had been stranded, who had been forgotten about. Maybe somebody will remember us.
And I look into the room that was mine once, my new home for such a short time, a new home that everything since spun out of. On the floor, by my bed, I see Jonah’s collar: the soft black leather now soaking wet, stretched and pulled, the spikes that hurt him. My gut aches, and I call his name again. I take the collar, turn it inside out so that the spikes don’t jab me, wrap it around my wrist, and tie it up. He can’t be lost. I know that.
I pull Mae close to me. We look up at the hole where the hatch was and see the sky up there: bright blue, lumps of white inside it. The yellow of a sun, brighter than anything I’ve ever seen, and when I look away from it, my eyes sting, and there are dark spots around everything.
A ladder drops through, made of metal and rope. I stand at the bottom of it and I breathe in, and I taste the air, clean and crisp and so cold that it makes me cough, and I can almost taste it. It’s almost so good that it’s hard to breathe it in.
I put Mae’s hands on the rungs of the ladder.
“Go on,” I say.
The air is thin, and it’s hard to breathe. Around us, shiny metal structures tower high, reflecting everything in their glass. Reflecting the sun from above us. There are spires and adornments across the top of some of the other buildings; some are blunt. I can see figures on some, the outlines of people watching us. I heave myself up and onto the top of our ship, and I see that we’ve landed in the middle of a gray area, cold and stark and ugly. And more than that: we’re not alone.
Seven figures stand in front of us on the ground. Their clothes are like nothing we had on Australia: harsh clean white fabric that clings to their bodies. Their faces are shrouded in masks. Their eyes shine through visors. In their hands, they have weapons. I shouldn’t be surprised. They didn’t know what they would find with us, I suppose.
One of them steps forward. “Line up,” he says. His voice is clunky, his speech different from ours, like the difference between the Lows and the rest of the ship. “All of you, line up.” One of the Lows who traveled down with us snarls and rushes toward him. Idiot. The man in the mask flicks his wrist out, a small black pole in it. It looks like the strikers, I think, and then it extends, a bar coming out of the end, unfolding to click into place, and it wraps around the Low’s neck like a whip being expertly handled. The Low screams and chokes and falls to her knees and gasps and beats at herself and the whip, but she can’t get free. I watch the whip tighten, and then she’s unconscious or dead.
“I said to line up,” the man says.
“Do as he says,” I say, hoping that the others hear me. They don’t know who we are, I’m sure. We have to explain.
“You should listen to that one,” the man says, pointing at me. He motions to the others to move forward. I try to count us all: fifty, maybe sixty. I look for Jonah again as we’re out here in the light. I still can’t see him, but there are so many of us, and I’m short. The crowd makes this hard, and I’m lost in it slightly.
These new people take the children, shoving them into different lines. The kids cry when they’re taken from their parents or from whoever held them as we traveled down here. “Scan them,” the man says. The others walk up to the adults standing in the front row, and they pull their arms roughly forward and hold machines over their wrists.
“No ID,” another of the masked men says. “But . . .” He whispers something to his colleague, their backs turned. We can’t hear them. They both nod, and then the first man turns back to face us. He paces, waiting for us all to come out.
“Stop it!” one of the women at the front screams as her child is pulled away from her, fighting back, beating at the man who’s taking her. I remember saving them both. I brought them both down below the Pit. This new guard—because that’s surely what these people are—raises his hand, his black weapon primed for her. Other parents hold their children back. We’ve come too far to let them go now. The guard shrugs. He must be their leader. They listen to him, as do we. He addresses us all. “All of you, eyes to me,” he says. And then he brings his stick out, twists it in his hand. He holds it upright. “Look at me.”
So we do. The stick flashes, a bright orange light, and it takes a second, but then I have never felt pain like it. We all collapse, falling to the floor. I can still see, even through the pain. I grit my teeth and try to call for Mae, but my mouth doesn’t work. I can’t turn my head. We’re all paralyzed.
I watch them walk through us, picking up the rest of the children. One by one they take them in their arms like useless limp dolls, and they carr
y them away. When they reach Mae, I can only watch as they haul her into the air, away from me. She drops her doll, and they leave it lying on the ground. She can’t react to its loss. She can’t cry, but she stares at me as she goes, and I stare back at her. She has to know that I will save her. Whatever they’re going to do to her, I won’t allow it.
When the children are gone, I watch as the guards climb into the ship and begin to pull the bodies out. Those who drowned, who died fighting, who didn’t survive the fall. Everything starts to fade. The pain becomes too much. My eyes sting, and they water, and my vision blurs. I try to focus. Jonah, Mae: I need them. This isn’t what was meant to happen. Jonah, please be alive, I think.
Please.
“One of them’s breathing!” one of the guards shouts, and they drag the body out just as my eyes close. I look for the hair, for the skin, for the eyes, because I know that it must be Jonah; it can’t not be him. He and I: maybe there’s something. He’s a person I can rely on, someone who knows me. I’ve always needed that. But now my mother’s gone, Agatha’s gone, even Mae’s gone. I’ve always had somebody who knows me, supporting me, I think. I can’t not have that—can’t not have him—now. They put the body down in front of the lead guard, and he peers down at it. I can’t stay conscious any longer. I’m fading.
“Welcome home,” the guard says, inspecting the body, laughing. It’s not Jonah. It’s not dressed the same. I see muscles, and I see scars, and I see the body twitch; the stump of where a hand should be, ragged and bloody from where I pulled my mother’s blade loose.
Then everything goes black.
EPILOGUE
I try to move, but I’m strapped to something: a table, maybe. I open my eyes, and I see that I’m upright. It’s not just me: It’s everybody from the ship who survived, and others I don’t recognize. I feel groggy, like I’ve been asleep for too long. I can move my hands and legs, but only a little. My muscles feel as if they are tired, as if they never want to move again. I am not strong enough to sit up, because I try and my back and stomach rally against me. I’m suddenly aware of how much every part of my body hurts: the dull aches, the sharp stings. No adrenaline to stop me from being in pain anymore. Still, I can open and close my hands, and I can move my feet. I feel myself slowly coming back into my body.