The Remnant

by Laura Liddell Nolen

  I couldn’t judge him for that. The feeling was mutual.

  The silver lining was obvious: he’d have a heck of a time trying to kill me in here, and I doubted the Remnant would give him the satisfaction anyway. The Remnant controlled its sliver of a sector with an iron fist, guarding the dark space that separated Sector Seven from Central Command as though their lives depended on it.

  Which was absolutely the case.

  I made myself focus on the slow, even breathing of Helen, my cellmate, until the time passed more easily.

  Helen was a lifer, and over the course of several decades, prison had made her in its image. Convicted of one thing after another back on Earth, she’d had the criminal connections to find her way to the Remnant without the difficulty the rest of us had suffered. You’d think illicit organizations dedicated to saving the dregs of Earth would have higher standards, but no. The Remnant left the sorting of humanity to Central Command, which had dedicated itself to the task with an admirable fervor, which is how Command ended up with all the young, straight-and-narrow scientists and doctors.

  By contrast, if you were alive, the Remnant believed you should have a shot at survival. All you had to do was find them.

  Which is how the Remnant ended up with all the criminals.

  Suffice it to say, no one around cared how Helen had gotten here, let alone whether she’d done hard time. The Remnant were way past that line of thinking. They’d been willing to overlook every mistake she ever made in her life, right up until they found out that she was fencing meds from the sickbay. I suppose everyone has to draw the line somewhere.

  The dawn broke bright and cold, as though Adam, Isaiah’s pet computer prodigy, had designed it just for this occasion. I shook out my arms, imagining a thin film of dew clinging to the sheets. At least, I thought I’d imagined it. Erratic or not, these climate programs were getting more advanced every day.

  The thought was not comforting.

  I fiddled absently with my hair before tying it into a knot just above my neck. There’s only so much a girl can do without a hairbrush.

  “So today’s the big day, huh? You want me to work on it?” Helen’s voice was sharp and clear, and in the short weeks I’d known her, that had been the case at all hours of the day and night. I struggled out of sleep, and into it. But Helen was like a light that switched on and off as needed. I envied her that.

  “No, it’s fine. No one cares what it looks like, anyway.”

  The door to my cell opened, and I stood. What else could I do? The guards’ hands were rough, and I understood, then, that I was their enemy. I was naïve enough to feel a new kind of pain, something akin to betrayal, like this moment was the death of the strangeness in my heart that had, until now, kept me from rushing the nearest guard and turning his gun on myself.

  Instead, I let him force me into the wall.

  Helen let out a string of pain and bitterness disguised as profanity and rage, and I was reminded of another woman, just as hard, who’d had enough hurt for ten lifetimes and hadn’t let it break her. But I tried never to think too long about Meghan.

  “I’m fine, Helen. Wish me luck.” I tugged at my yellow prison scrubs, trying to make them lie straight, before finally feeling the cuffs lock into place.

  Helen’s voice faded into the stark corridor as the cell door slammed shut behind me. “Girls like us make our own luck, sweetheart.”

  The guards didn’t speak. Their silence throttled the intervals between clanging locks and scuffing boots.

  Guns. They were everywhere. I figured my old friend Isaiah had distributed them to every guard in the Remnant. I wished I could feel sick over it, the end of all our hopes for peace, but instead, I felt relieved. Central Command would be fully armed by now, too. There was too much at stake for the Remnant to retain its innocence.

  So maybe I was hard like Helen. There was a time I’d wanted to be like Meghan, a woman who’d saved my life back on Earth. She was strong, in her way, because she was able to love a stranger, to die for one, but I didn’t think I could be like her anymore.

  Rough hands made dents in my upper arms. I let them. You betrayed us, they seemed to say. I was guided around a corner so hard my feet left the ground. The pain felt right. We took you in. You didn’t have to become one of us, but you were.

  One of us.

  The guards halted their even pace abruptly before the door to the Commons, a room where once I’d danced a long tango on the arm of a king. I tripped, righted myself unsteadily, and offered a glare to the guard on my right. He returned it without flinching.

  You betrayed us.

  The massive doors swung open, instead of sucking into the wall, and the effect was a pale flash of nerves, which I silenced without much effort. The time for fear had long passed.

  They were right, after all. I had been one of them. I had betrayed them. I looked all around, craning my head over the shoulders of the men who forced me forward into the cold, crowded Commons, but Isaiah wasn’t there. To be fair, a king would have better places to be than his ex-almost-girlfriend’s latest trial, but it still stung.

  That was when I realized that I was his enemy, too.

  The last time we spoke had ended badly, to say the least. He’d forced me to steal something from Central Command—the life support program for the entire ship, called the Noah Board—and I’d taken it pretty hard. I didn’t want to be a thief anymore.

  I didn’t want to be a prisoner anymore, either, but here we were.

  The Commons was my favorite thing about the Remnant, other than the greenhouse. It was their gathering-place, where huge crowds gave full vent to their fears and frustrations, and life to their memories of Earth. But it was more than that. This was where they lived, and spoke, and created and danced and thought together.

  It was the beating heart of everything we might have lost when the Earth died.

  Right now, it was a courtroom.

  I heard only silence in the moments that followed the death sentence. I was not a leader, like Isaiah. Even if I were, I no longer had a people to belong to. No one’s fate aligned with mine. I wasn’t a soldier, like Eren, nor a budding scientist, like my brother. I would never be a decision-maker, like my father.

  My fate was sealed: I would simply cease to be anything. Maybe that was how it should be. A lifetime of prison, endless and white, made me think of drowning. Couldn’t these people see that I was dying either way? Hadn’t they known that I had loved them? A cold certainty swept through me.

  The Remnant knew exactly what kind of girl I was.

  A pair of enormous hazel eyes peered up at me, and I froze, found out. This kid was maybe seven or eight years old. Too young to understand so much, to know me at a glance. Too young for anything.

  A moment passed before I recognized her: Amiel. Adam’s sister.

  She was dirty. Not with actual dirt, as she might have been on Earth. But unwashed. Greasy.

  Unwanted.

  There was nothing surprising about any of that. I read her life in her eyes, and it was a familiar story. Children were abandoned back on Earth every day. In juvy, I had lived among them. By far, the majority of us had mothers at home who traded sleep for endless worry, then worry for resignation, and, at last, for some, resignation for rejection. But there were those the world had failed so completely that they did not cry at night, even on their first night. Why would they? No one cried for them. What home could they mourn, they who belonged to no one? I knew them, to the extent that anybody could know them, and I knew what it did to their souls. To their eyes.

  No, it wasn’t shocking.

  And yet, my breath caught in my throat.

  The guard nearest me reached for my arm, but he was distracted by the spectacle. It was all too much: the Remnant’s mortal enemy, sentenced to die before those she’d betrayed. He was as entranced as the rest of the crowd. I couldn’t blame him.

  I disarmed him easily, flipping the small weight of his gun directly from his hols
ter and into my fist.

  I reached the podium in the next instant, before the shock extinguished from his face. The judge’s shoulders were frail underneath her black robe, in spite of the thickness of her lower body, and they bent backwards with my weight. The gun—my gun, now—was cold against her neck, and she tried to shrug it away with her shoulder even as her hands splayed before her. Instinct told me to shelter myself behind the wooden platform, but I ignored it and forced her body to cover me instead.

  I was not a healer, like my mother.

  “Everyone stay back.” I locked eyes with the now-unarmed guard and nodded toward the door behind us. “You, open this door. No one else move.” I wrenched the judge from the platform, and she made a little sound when we hit the floor behind it, like she was afraid.

  She didn’t speak at all. I did not think of Amiel, whose eyes followed my every move, or even of West. I closed my mind to the coldness that stabbed through my heart. I’d never wanted to hurt anyone. I was trapped. I needed out, and this was the only plan I could think of. The judge stumbled, and I pulled her up, helping her to balance before pressing her through the door and into the hallway. I knew exactly what kind of girl I was.

  I was a criminal.

  Four

  There was only one place I could go: the dark, unplanned space that separated the sectors of the Ark at the outermost level, which people had started calling the Rift. Its construction had been unexpected and was thought to be the result of a misplaced wall, so the Rift wasn’t on the official maps.

  The Rift was technically controlled by the Remnant, but I was fresh out of other options, what with the kidnapping and hostage-taking and all. When we reached the entrance, I shoved the judge into the darkness as gently as possible, then threw myself in after, never losing my grip on her arm.

  “Just go straight,” I muttered after her. “Fast as you can.”

  She complied, haltingly at first, then with increasing steadiness. I had to be impressed. Not everyone could move that fast in pitch-black, although the gun may have had something to do with it. We’d gone maybe a hundred paces before she started talking. “Look, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

  A door opened somewhere behind us, and I gave her a frank look in the brief splash of pale light from the hallway. “Do I?”

  She pursed her lips. We kept moving.

  The sound of footsteps along the path urged me forward. It felt like ages before we got to the end of the Rift, where the entrance to the cargo hold was located, but the twisted knot in my stomach made me pause before forcing open the door.

  “You decide people’s fates. Have you ever had to accept one?”

  She gave me an appraising glance and tightened her mouth even further. “You could leave me here. I’m only going to slow you down.”

  It was tempting. I would never shoot her, after all, and sooner or later, someone was bound to call my bluff.

  But the sounds of the guards shuffling through the Rift made me tighten my grip on the gun. “I’m afraid not. Let’s go.”

  She looked from my face to the pistol, and I realized that I’d been careful not to point the barrel at her ever since we’d gotten out of sight of the guards. Not even when I waved her through the doorway. Judging by her expression, Judge Hawthorne had already figured me out. She knew I wasn’t going to hurt her if I could possibly help it.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t too fired up about being executed, either. It was like we were caught in an impromptu game of charades. I made a mental note not to take another hostage again, ever.

  But I did have a gun, and a hostage, and a death sentence, courtesy of my hostage, so my options were limited. Charades it was. I made my face stern and forced her through the door. “Chop chop, Your Honor.”

  She maintained an admirable inscrutability even as the door latched, locking us out of the darkness of the Rift.

  After six weeks in my cell, the vastness of the cargo hold was overwhelming, and I gaped up at the bins that held North America’s final exports: the physical remains of the civilizations we had created, then left behind to be swept away by the meteor.

  High ceilings, endless rows of brightly colored bins, and an excess of gravity added to the effect. At the other end of the hold, maybe a thousand yards away, was the stairwell that led up to the main decks of Central Command.

  When I cleared my mind, the first thing I noticed was that the locks on the bins had changed. The new ones looked a lot more techy and far less blastable than they used to. My plan—the only one that made any sense at all—was to try to break into a bin. Hopefully, one that had some food. From there, I could regroup and try to think through my priorities, maybe figure out a plan that didn’t involve going back to prison and my certain death at the hands of either government.

  Priorities. West. Six final weeks in the Remnant, and I was no closer to keeping my promise to my father that we would be a family again. The thought made my feet heavy, but I kept our pace as near a sprint as I could manage, hoping we’d eventually pass a lock I had a shot at cracking.

  The second thing I noticed was the lack of guards. That made no sense. Here were the physical remains of North America. Untold treasure lay behind the thin walls of the bins, not to mention supplies. More importantly, Central Command knew the location of the entrance to the Remnant’s dark space, so it only made sense that they’d want to guard it. But I was alone among the aisles. Blue faded into red, then yellow, and back again, with no sign of Command personnel. At some point, the locks changed abruptly. I stopped, skidded back a couple of bins, and took another look. Judge Hawthorne made a face, as though my change of pace inconvenienced her.

  “Well?” she said impatiently.

  How was she not out of breath? I was fairly gasping. “Hang on. I’m trying to plan.”

  “It doesn’t strike me as your strong suit.”

  It was official: I didn’t care much for Judge Hawthorne. “Oh, I don’t know, Your Honor. I’d say I’m doing better now than I was twenty minutes ago. Now move.”

  From where we stood, maybe a fifth of the way into the area, it appeared that the hold was divided into two kinds of locks. It’s the kind of thing you might not notice if you weren’t trying to break into something, but everything near the Remnant was one kind of tech, and this part of the hold had a wave of older-looking locks.

  “What’s going on here?” I waved an arm back toward the new locks.

  “Lockies,” she said. “Command sends out a team every day. So do we. The cargo hold is demilitarized as part of the ceasefire agreement between Central Command and the Remnant, but they still try to keep us out of as many bins as possible. We do the same.”

  “By… what, changing the locks?”

  She nodded. “They’re children, mostly. The governments make the locks, of course.”

  That meant that I had a significantly reduced set of options. I couldn’t possibly get past the newer mechanisms from either government. Older locks it was.

  By some miracle, we’d stayed a few aisles ahead of the advancing guards, who made no attempt at staying quiet. Why would they? The hold was huge, but the aisles were straight. It wouldn’t take long to clear them. Our lead was draining gradually away, like sand.

  We waited in silence for the row of soldiers to pass the aisle with the door, then slipped around the corner and doubled back. Judge Hawthorne made a fair companion. She kept quiet and moved fast in spite of her age.

  I fumbled the return to the door, hitting the aisle slightly too soon. But the pair of guards I’d been avoiding didn’t look back once they’d cleared the space, and I was granted a few short seconds with the lock.

  There was no possible way to break it.

  I had a gun, but its bullets only penetrated flesh, not the components of the bins, as I’d learned too well during a previous excursion to the area.

  Good thing I had a Guardian Level access card. Being a criminal had its benefits on occasion, not least of which was that
I had yet to miss an opportunity to pick the pockets of whichever guardian was escorting me at the time, assuming they were slow enough to let me. Normally, Jorin Malkin, the Commander’s lieutenant, would be out of my talent range, but someone had knocked him unconscious during the prisoner exchange, and I’m not the kind of girl who lets an advantage like that go to waste. Besides, I liked to think it caused him at least a little inconvenience when he noticed it was missing.

  If the Commander were smart, the card would be monitored instead of deactivated. I yanked the front of my shirt out and slid the card from the band of my undergarments. The judge gave me a dirty look, which I ignored. The lock popped open on the first swipe, and I threw open the door, marked “North America/Sector 7/Cargo Level/Bin 23/Generators.” We were greeted by metal boxes stacked floor-to-ceiling, with only a few inches between stacks. We didn’t fit.

  I grunted in frustration, pressing Hawthorne down the aisle to the next bin. The heavy footsteps halted, then resumed at a fast pace, looming closer. They’d heard me.

  The judge chewed the side of her face, looking nearly as nervous as I felt. It hit me that the sound of boots was as clear as glass, and I turned around.

  They’d found me.

  Four men at my six, with ten yards to spare. My heart thumped almost hard enough to make my hands shake with the mere force of its pressure, but I had years of practice with adrenaline like this. Experience won out, and my first swipe was good. The flimsy door sucked open. I swung Judge Hawthorne through by the arm and slammed my fist into the doorpad, then the keypad, in a single, frantic motion. There was a heavy wham as the lead guard hit the door an instant too late.

  I touched the lightpad and tried to take stock of the bin, but my nerves were getting to me. I couldn’t afford to keep breathing so hard. It showed weakness, and I had to stay in control.

  Breathe, Char, Breathe. Just not so hard.

  This bin was a sight better than the last and might even prove useful. Smaller crates lined a series of built-ins, and irregular wooden boxes were strewn around the floor. I wasn’t beaten yet.