The man slid sideways toward the hole, using one leg but not the other. “My foot.”
“You have to,” she said.
He crawled toward her, his face contorted with the effort.
She forced her hands free of the tree trunk and went to him, pulling him up.
His right leg buckled, taking him to his knees. “I can’t. Walk.”
“You must.”
His muscles bunched across his neck and jaw. His brows drew in over startling blue eyes. Sweat shone on his forehead, but he stood, wobbly, one hand on her shoulder.
The floor shifted underfoot and he fell again. Ruby tugged on his arm with both her hands. “Come on. You can do this.”
He shook his head.
“You’ll die.”
Another effort, and he was up. She took as much of his weight as she could, wishing for less gravity. His clothes felt slick and unfamiliar. She tested the ground in front of her as they went, unsure how stable anything might be. He grunted with each step, crying out once. “Keep going,” she encouraged him. “We need something else to hang onto.”
“It hurts.”
“Less than death.” Sweat stung her eyes as she supported him and led him to a different bench by a different tree, helping him sit. She grabbed onto the back of the bench with one arm and used her free hand to curl his hand around the top slat. “Hold on.”
He did. At first that’s all he did, grip and look around, his brows drawn together and his face white. The dim, strange light barely defined his features. A shock of red hair hung over bluer eyes than any she’d ever seen. He was older than her brothers. Maybe twenty-five? He wore a clean blue uniform with a darker blue belt. She blinked at the color; she’d never been so near a blue.
Clean. He looked and even smelled clean.
The ship shuddered and he gripped the bench so tightly his knuckles whitened. “What’s happening?” he whispered.
Ruby shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe we hit something.”
He winced. “If we hit something we’d be dead.” He sounded entirely sure of himself.
“So what do you think?”
“Something broke.”
Another sound of metal screeching and giving way came from below them.
Sirens started up, strident but far away. Probably from the living quarters. “Someone’s alive,” Ruby said.
“Is it always so cold in here?”
“No.” She glanced at the hole in the floor. “The temp systems must have gone wonky.”
“I can breathe okay.”
“Me, too.” The sirens stopped, the silence ominous if also a relief.
He seemed to focus on her for the first time. “Thanks for helping me.”
“We all help each other. It’s how we stay alive.”
He hesitated, then asked, “You’re a gray?”
Surely he could see her worn-out uniform. Really, who else lived down here except a few reds, and even in the awful light here he could tell she wasn’t wearing red. “I’m Ruby.”
It was the first time she’d seen him smile, and it made him look younger. “Glad to meet you. I’m Fox.”
The light flickered up and then down. Nothing moved in the park, including them. It felt to her like The Creative Fire held its breath, unsure how to react to whatever had torn bits of its guts apart. She’d only ever seen a small part of the ship, but there had been pictures of The Creative Fire in school, so she knew it as a fat disk. She had been shown the layouts for the cargo bays and the places the grays inhabited: eight self-contained pods between the cargo ring and whatever hung above their heads. “Do you know if the whole ship’s falling apart?”
He shrugged. “How would I? There wasn’t any warning. The sirens went off just before the floor opened up under me. Thank god it wasn’t during shift change. There’d have been more of us in the corridors.” He rubbed at his ankle and grimaced.
Someone would come for them. Ix would know everything, Ix always did. Ix watched over everyone’s safety. “At least the Fire’s not tearing herself up anymore.”
“If we’re lucky.”
Ruby sat curled opposite him on the bench, the armrest digging into her back. It gave her a good view of his white face and the pain in his eyes. She pointed toward the roof. “Where did you come from?”
“J-pod.”
That didn’t tell her anything except that he wasn’t from anyplace the grays lived, but she’d known that. Still, she hesitated, and finally chose not to admit she didn’t know what he meant. “I’ve never been there.”
He grimaced. “Of course you haven’t. And I haven’t been here. I never—” he shifted his position on the bench, grimacing—“thought grays would be so pretty. What do you do?”
She blushed, caught off guard. “I’m studying to maintain the repair bots. This is my last year.”
He raised an eyebrow. “You don’t look old enough.”
She bristled. “I’m sixteen.”
“It takes us longer.” He looked lost in thought for a moment, chewing at his lower lip, then he smiled and said, “I guess we’re slower.” He looked around. “Someone will come, won’t they?”
“They’re probably worried about other things.”
The idea seemed to surprise him. He sat back and closed his mouth tight, then nodded. Maybe he was right. Maybe the reds would worry about him and come rescue him. A blue might matter more than an apprentice robot-repair girl. “At least we can breathe. It could be worse.”
He gave her a soft smile at that, like he approved of her positive statement or maybe needed it. “I might freeze to death.”
“Ix’ll get to us. It must have our body stats and know that you’re injured and in the wrong place. So there’s worse going on than us being cold and your ankle.”
“I hope someone comes soon.” He drew his arms in close to his chest.
He was a bit of a baby for a blue, she thought. His foot must be hurting badly.
Cold seeped into her lungs. With Fox’s injury, he probably felt it even more than she did.
Someone should have come by now.
She didn’t have her journal, so she couldn’t use it to call out. Fox didn’t have anything with him. At home, school, any of the work places, there would be first-aid gear. There would be a kit in the walls here, too, but she couldn’t risk moving them away from the safety of the bench. There were no handholds on the floor of the park, and she didn’t trust the gravgens. Not yet. If the gravgens switched off while she walked through an open space with no handholds, she could lose her grip on the floor.
Her shirt was a hand-me-down, big on her except across the chest and too long. She ripped a strip of material off the bottom and held it out to him.
“What?”
Whoever this Fox was, no one had apparently taught him basic first aid. She let go of the bench and knelt by his ankle, which was in front of him, his knee bent so his foot rested bottom-down on the middle of the seat. “I can give it some pressure, maybe stabilize it a little. If the gravgens go wonky again, grab me? I don’t want to float away from you.”
He nodded, finally offering a smile. “Be careful. It hurts like . . . a . . . like a lot.”
She probably knew more curse words than Fox. Still, it felt sweet that he’d been careful not to use them around her. Even though his boot pulled off fairly easily, he grunted when she made her last tug. His ankle was twice the size of the other one, but the skin hadn’t broken. He only cried out once while she wrapped it. When she finished, she said, “That should help. Not stop the pain, but maybe keep it from getting more swollen. We should get a cold pack for you.”
“It’s getting cold enough.”
She laughed.
The lights went out, and she clutched his hand. She didn’t think about it, she just did it. They were so alone, and everyone else could be dead.
If only she’d told someone where she was going.
The lights flickered again and came up lower than before. She le
t go of him, her cheeks hot.
“Here,” he said, scooting along the bench and pulling her up beside him, his back against her shoulder. “There. I can keep you warm.”
She wasn’t ready to trust him, but she didn’t mistrust him either. At least not like she did most men. Except for her shoulder being a rest for his back, she didn’t touch him.
The act of breathing together in and out of the same dangerous dark made them almost like one being. She felt floaty, suspended between anxiety about the safety of the ship, and her family, and the strange excitement of being warmed by a blue.
2: The Water Plant
The floor in the reclamation plant slanted under Onor’s feet, forcing him to use the metal handrail to pull himself along the wall beside the water tanks. After the gravgen failures, his hands shook. He needed something to hold onto anyway, even though nothing worse than a banged knee had actually happened to him. Yet. The screams of stressed metal intake tubes above his head had softened to groans and mutterings. They were still louder than the strident but muffled sirens coming from a distant part of the ship.
Both made him want out of the corridor he was in quite badly.
Maintenance bots slid by on their own little strip of walkway, one of them clearly needing a lube job. From time to time, grey water sluiced through a pipe, burbling and rushing toward the hold where it would be trapped by plastine seals before it was allowed into the tanks. The corridor smelled of grease and damp and disinfectant.
The heavy metal door at the end of the corridor looked wrong. He searched around the edges where the door met the frame. Intact. But still wrong. The angle? There. The walkway he stood on had pulled slightly away from the wall in the corner, leaving an opening into blackness. Although the opening wasn’t big enough for him to see through, he knew from his early training that a maintenance level ran beneath the water plant.
He held his breath and jumped lightly, testing.
The walkway creaked but held.
He reached carefully for the metal handgrip on the door and pulled. Nothing.
He braced his foot against the doorframe and pulled. It gave, but it didn’t open. A second try produced a high, thin whine of resistance as the door scraped against its frame, but it opened far enough for him to slide though. On the other side of the door the sirens sounded louder and more eerie.
The corridor beyond looked empty. Entrances led to a small galley or to showers or offices. Everything looked right, in spite of the noise around him. Just abandoned.
He turned back to the door and focused on pulling it closed as tight as he could. It took three tries to get the seal tight enough to latch.
He turned, and almost jumped back against the door as Conroy stepped out of the galley and stared at him, seeming equally startled. The big man yelled to get over the background noise. “Onor! Where are you supposed to be?”
He pointed back at the door. “There’s water leaking, a lot of it. From an intake toward the end of the row. A pipe—”
“Thank you.” Conroy looked worried and distracted.
“We have to turn it off.”
Conroy focused more closely on Onor, frowning. “Drill. Where the hell are you supposed to meet up during a drill?”
Onor blinked at him. “This isn’t a drill. We have to stop the leak.”
“Go!”
Conroy was his boss, but he was stubborn as hell and would probably stay and fix things himself. Except the damage was too devastating for all of them together to fix. “What happened?”
“Onor. For once in your life, do what I tell you to. Go now.”
The look on Conroy’s face didn’t leave him any choice. Besides, Conroy was twice his size.
Onor went.
Ruby would know what had happened. Common. That was where Ix told people to go in drills.
Onor started heading toward common, jostled by people going every which way, surrounded by names being called, children snapped at, hushed voices full of worry.
The loudspeaker came on. Ix’s voice, “All crew report to the transport station immediately.”
As Onor turned along with the rest of the crowd, someone stepped on his foot. Tripping, he almost knocked an older woman down. The pain in his foot drove him to choose an empty corridor going the wrong way. He tested a door and ducked into one of the machine shops. He stuffed his pockets with energy gels and a full first-aid roll from the medikit. He glanced around the machine shop one last time to see if there were any other useful emergency items before he plunged back into the corridor to be swept along by nervous crowds.
Onor watched for Ruby, but the crowds were dense and confused, and he failed to spot her.
He’d never seen so much chaos. All one thousand two hundred and seventy-two inhabitants of C-pod appeared to all be trying to occupy a space meant for fifty or so at most. They clutched bags of food and bundled clothes and bedding, and they wore way too much jewelry. Many, like Onor, stood on tiptoe, looking for people they’d lost.
He spotted bruised cheeks, scraped arms, and one already purpling black eye. Here and there, a splint.
The crowd spilled through multiple corridors and into adjacent rooms. Loudspeakers periodically barked for order, which didn’t emerge.
Being small let Onor slide and duck through the crowd, looking for the familiar bright splash of Ruby’s red hair. Being small also made it harder to be sure he wasn’t missing her. He finally found her little brother, Ean, and close by him, her mother. Ruby’s mother had clearly once had her daughter’s beauty, although in darker features, with intense black eyes and black hair barely touched with gray. She stood on tiptoe, trying to scan the crowded room. A boy almost as tall as she was clutched her arm, as if afraid he might lose her at any moment. Onor addressed her. “Suri? Have you seen Ruby?”
“No.”
She didn’t sound like she cared. He mumbled, “Thanks” and kept pushing forward until he reached the platform. The metal trains stood still, the doors that allowed people onto the boarding platform shut tight against the crowd. He asked people he knew. No one had seen Ruby. As he pushed out a different door than the one he’d come through, three reds in body armor were coming toward him. “Wrong way,” the leader stated, but kept going without stopping Onor. The third red in line caught Onor by the arm and squeezed it hard enough to hurt. “The habs are closed.” Onor noticed that the red wore half a uniform, a red shirt over blue pants that were a color he sometimes saw on men who talked to Conroy, but not to him.
Someone had called in extra help.
Damn it. Where was Ruby?
The reds—true and fake—continued down the hallway, clearing space with their voices. He spotted Conroy choosing people to help keep order in the lines. Onor turned around and followed the reds, going a longer way, cursing the time lost. If Conroy caught him and put him to work, he’d never find Ruby.
3: Conversations in the Dark
The cold stillness of the park felt completely wrong. Ruby wanted to be moving, needed it. But the pain in Fox’s ankle remained painted across his forehead in tiny, tight lines, and her belly remembered the loss of gravity. Every drill she could remember had taught her to stay put when the gravgens failed. Her teeth chattered with the cold, the only noise except for their breath and, sometimes, a far off screech of metal or the faintest hint of siren or loudspeaker.
She remembered something, or maybe it was just now sinking in. “You said we’re almost home. What did you mean?”
“We’re almost to Adiamo.”
“Adiamo’s a game.”
“Locked down, so no one can change it. Did you ever wonder why? Besides, why do you think it’s everywhere?”
“I don’t play games much.” She rolled the new meaning of the word around in her head. Adiamo equals home. She had seen the game, of course, had tried it a few times. It was where she’d learned about birds. “What do you mean by almost?”
He furrowed his brow at her, looking puzzled. “We’ve been slowing
down since before you were born. We expect contact in a year or two. We’re not close enough to see the details of the system yet, but it’s changing how everybody acts.”
“Not how we act.” Why didn’t she already know something so important? She shifted her weight around on the bench, swinging her feet in and out as a way to keep warm. “No one tells us anything. We’re not too stupid to be told the ship’s almost home.”
He didn’t say anything at all to that.
She spoke into the awkward moment of silence. “So what’s Adiamo like? Is it much like the park?”
He laughed. “Black and dim?”
So he had a sense of humor. “Like the park usually is. Light. Happy.”
“I don’t know about the park.”
“Does Adiamo have birds and trees and grass and sky?”
“Adiamo’s the name of the star, but there are planets with birds and grass, I think. Like the parks.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“It’s probably like the game.”
All her life she’d known that the ship was going home, but never when it would get there. She’d assumed she’d die first. “So what happens when we get home?”
“I don’t know. There’s arguments about the value of the cargo and who owns what and all kinds of stupid nonsense going on.”
She felt an extra chill, one that had nothing to do with the cold of the air around them. “Who decides?”
“Garth, I guess. The same people who decide everything else. But we don’t even know what the choices are yet. First we need to get home.”
Ruby didn’t feel up to telling him she didn’t know about Garth. She closed her eyes, felt the anger that had driven her here in the first place rising in her body, warming her a little. The world inside the Fire had been the same for so long that the idea it could be different simmered slow inside her bones. This was big. Bigger than the sky falling or Fox beside her. “Someone else is going to tell us what to do when we get home? Going to decide?”
“For me, too, I suppose.”
“But you know about it.” Her voice sounded bitter, even to her own ears. “You know we’re going home. So you can talk about it. We can’t even do that.”
The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song) Page 2