by Page Morgan
The sound finally stops, and my ears ring. Right now, while I’m up here on the ship, there are people down there running for their lives. I think of the monitoring podiums and the screens flashing with images of destruction and chaos. I feel lucky and guilty and furious all at the same time. The sensations push against the insides of my ribs and the underside of my skin, making my temperature rise.
“Are you everywhere?” I ask.
The module comes to a bouncy stop and the doors open. Rowan holds out an arm, gesturing for me to step out first. I roll my eyes. How gentlemanly and cordial.
“The Volkranians. Are you only here, over the city, or everywhere?” I ask with an edge of impatience.
We step out of the module and into a hallway of glaring silver walls. Like the enormous atrium the elevator had brought us into earlier, the ceiling here is an arch of glass, with gold crossbeams running through it. The sky outside is still a bright autumn blue and completely cloudless. Not a single plane to be seen.
“There are cityships everywhere,” Rowan answers.
He leads me down the shiny corridor. Matte, gunmetal gray panels dissect the glaring walls every twenty feet or so.
I stay on his heels. “So, the whole world is under attack? You’re just planning to wipe us out? We’ll fight, you know. We have bombs. We have weapons.”
“Even your most powerful atomic bombs are guided by computer systems that Volkranians now control.”
He isn’t bluffing. Rowan states this as if it’s a tired fact. Old news. At least it is to him.
“If you drop those on us, it’ll ruin the environment for decades. Maybe even a hundred years,” I say. “Your new home will be toast.”
He glances at me. “Toast is a popular breakfast item on Earth.”
“It’s also a saying,” I reply with a roll of my eyes. “The planet will be damaged.”
Rowan shakes his head. “We are not going to use your bombs, Penelope.”
He stops in front of one matte panel. A red laser shoots out from a small, head level peephole and travels the length of Rowan’s face. The door slides open, and he walks inside. I follow over the threshold and come to an abrupt halt when I realize where we are.
A bedroom.
The room is compact. Crisp and minimalist. The furniture is all the same shiny, glittery metal that adorns the rest of the cityship, and the floor is black and glossy. There’s something that looks like a bed, and beside it, a tall, thin window juts out far enough to provide a kind of window seat. A desk is covered in bits of wire and metal and gears, like Rowan had been taking apart a clock before leaving earlier.
“What are we doing in here?” I ask, eyeing the bed. The linens are so white and well tucked that human mothers everywhere would probably stand up and applaud. There is a single kidney bean-shaped pillow, dented in the very center. Evidence that a head has rested there. Apparently, Volkranians sleep.
As the panel door to the corridor slides shut behind me, Rowan approaches yet another panel door to the left. It opens automatically, exposing white walls and a mirror inside, and underneath the mirror, a bowl. It’s a sink, I realize. Beside that is something that looks curiously like a urinal.
Apparently, Volkranians also have bladders.
Rowan’s exosuit emits a low chime, and the armored chest cracks apart in the center and spreads. Each side opens wide and shuffles the bulky plates back, one on top of the other until Rowan’s actual body becomes visible. The arms of his suit split lengthwise and come apart, too, yawning open like a clamshell. The exosuit folds in on itself until Rowan easily steps free of the boots.
He’s wearing a black nylon-looking jumpsuit underneath and slim boots. The exosuit had given him at least five inches of height, but he’s still intimidatingly muscled and tall.
“Personal chambers are the only places on the cityship that aren’t under constant sound and visual surveillance,” he answers as he begins to unclasp the fastenings at the top of his jumpsuit. As the black fabric falls away, a white shirt underneath, a la Fruit of the Loom, comes into view. “And I also have to use the facilities.”
He steps inside the bathroom and pushes something on the wall. The door panel shuts. I back up, past the reduced exosuit, now standing on its own in the middle of his room and go to the window. The rooftops of New York City are far below. Black transport pods swarm the sky underneath the cityship, firing streaks of white light. Deadly electricity scars the air, and below, hoards of ant-like forms move through the grid of streets. They’re people. My people. All of them, even strangers.
I shouldn’t be up here with the enemy. I should be down there, with them, even if it means getting fried to a crisp. Hot tears prick my eyes, and I pound the window with my fists.
The bathroom door slides open with the sighing noise of an air compressor, and I turn away from the window.
“Tell me what you saw at the water treatment facility,” Rowan says as he steps out. He’s cleaned the deep purple streaks of blood from his face, and oddly enough his split eyebrow looks scabbed already. He’s finishing with the top buttons of his suit, his fingers fastening the clasps nearest his translator collar, when he meets my eyes, which still sting with tears. His fingers slow on the clasps, and his eyes flick to the window. As if he knows what I’ve been watching below, he averts his stare and continues with the clasps.
“That guy back there,” I say, blinking away the tears. “The one with the white hair and purple eyes.”
“The warden,” he says. “What about him?”
“That’s who I saw. He’s the one who killed the other Volkranian.”
Rowan stops fastening the last clasp. His hands aren’t the only things to go still. His eyes, the constant slow churning of blue and green clouds, freeze. His pupils dilate into onyx pinpricks. “You’re mistaken.”
The pale alien—the warden—is important to Rowan. I see it instantly.
“I’m not wrong. I saw him. And he saw me.”
Rowan closes the gap between us. My calves smack again the window frame, and I plop down on the slim seat.
“You witnessed him kill another Volkranian?”
I nod.
“Did you see the face of the other Volkranian?”
I nod.
“This was in the base level of the water treatment facility, immediately after you ran away from me?”
I nod again.
He steps back. The seat is cold, like the window of an airplane, so I stand. Rowan stares at the white bed and kidney bean pillow, his dark eyebrows furrowed in thought.
“Do you think it has to do with the guy who tried to kill you?” I ask. Which makes me remember something. “Wait—did you even tell any of them about the chloromagnate?”
Not once had Rowan taken the vial out of his pocket and referred to it while we’d been in the control room with the fleet commandant.
He surfaces from his deep concentration. “No. I did not. The fleet commandant was under the impression that the chloromagnate had been deployed.”
“And you didn’t tell him it hadn’t been.” I frown. “Why?”
Rowan goes to the desk, and a drawer slides open. All he had to do was reach for it like he intended to open it, and swoosh, out the drawer came.
“The guard I eliminated in the room of lockers said something about the chloromagnate that concerned me,” he says, rifling through the contents of the drawer.
I don’t bother to correct him this time about the ‘room of lockers.’
“What did he say?”
“That it isn’t being used in other landing locations around the planet. That we are the only ones who have been given orders by our fleet commandant to alter the chemical makeup of the human water supply.”
He takes something small from the drawer, small enough to fit in the closed palm of his bear paw of a hand. He slips it up his sleeve.
“You mean the Volkranians invading other cities and countries aren’t changing the water supply?”
�
�That is what the guard said.” Rowan starts for the waiting exosuit, but then he stops and turns, as if he’s thought of something. His eyes scour my neck and forehead. “You are bleeding.”
I touch the gash on my forehead and cringe from the sore sting. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You said you wished to be clean.”
Rowan gestures toward the panel door leading into the bathroom. I stare at it a moment before walking forward with hesitant steps. The panel slides open just as it had for Rowan. I go in, feeling his presence directly behind me. He’s followed me in. The door shuts behind him, sealing us inside the small bathroom together.
I glance around, a flutter of nervous energy in my stomach. I should be nervous. This is an alien ship, and I’m a prisoner. But the clench of tension in my stomach and chest isn’t because of those two things. It’s because I’m standing in a bathroom with an alien guy, and I’m currently staring at the urinal he uses every day. It looks more like a bicycle seat up close. And so, of course, now I’m picturing him straddling it. I squeeze my eyes shut to erase the image. Involuntarily, my mind skips to Tana on the dock that morning, seconds before the electric flare struck her. My hand reaching for her. Her body shivering uncontrollably.
My eyes fly open, and there’s a boulder in the middle of my throat. Tears prick and sting again.
Rowan steps around me and reaches for a length of white cloth on a shelf beside the sink. He holds it under a shiny metal pipe and what looks like normal water streams out automatically, dampening the cloth. I blink away tears, trying not to think of Tana and what happened on the dock. Instead, I look at the bare white wall above the sink. I clear my throat to get past the fist there. “There’s no mirror.”
“We do not use them,” he says, holding out the cloth.
Without the mirror, I feel strangely blind as I dab the cool cloth on my forehead. I’m glad to have something shielding my hot, stinging eyes though. “Why?”
I wince as the cottony fabric tugs at the numerous scrapes caused by the exploding glass window on Broadway. I pull the cloth away; there’s a surprising amount of dirt and blood.
“Physical appearances do not matter,” Rowan answers.
It’s a profound concept, and I’m more than a little awestruck.
“But…don’t you just sometimes want to know if you have something in your teeth after you eat?” I ask.
“Volkranians clean their teeth after every repast.”
I make one last swipe with the cloth over my chin. “Meal. We say meal. But it’s great to know we’re being attacked by aliens who appreciate good dental health.”
Finished, I set the cloth on the counter. Rowan immediately picks it up again. He runs it under the faucet and squeezes out the excess water before bringing it back up to my cheek.
“Do not move,” he commands. I suck in a breath as he touches the cloth to my jaw. I must have missed a spot. Easy to do when there’s no mirror.
He gives my chin a nudge and angles my head to the side. Rowan touches the skin just above the pulse in my neck.
“You have a shard of glass in this wound.”
“I’ll get it out later,” I say. “Can we just leave?”
I want to get going, off this ship and back to my mom. I also need to start thinking about what we’ll do after. This cityship isn’t going anywhere, and those transports are going to be sent out again and again. We’ll need shelter. Food and water. Untainted water. Maybe for a long time.
But if other cities aren’t having their water supplies tainted...why is New York?
Rowan sets down the cloth and passes his hand over the white wall. Another drawer opens, and I hear his fingers rifling around.
“I can get it out now,” he argues, and the next thing I know, he’s wrapping his hand around the nape of my neck to hold me still.
He takes a step closer and slants his head, as if to get a better look at the shard. I tense up now that he’s touching me in a way that isn’t him just dragging me around by the arm, caveman-style.
It has to be a tiny piece of glass if I haven’t even noticed it yet, and let’s face it, the many little throbbing slices on my neck are nothing compared to being electrocuted. Keeping it in there isn’t going to be the thing that kills me. Why is he helping? Because he’s ‘honor-bound’?
That’s when it clicks.
“Did you tell the fleet commandant about the fight between you and that other guard in the locker room?”
Rowan regrips what looks like a pair of tweezers between his fingers. “No.”
“Because you would have had to tell him why the guard was after you.” For the chloromagnate that he was supposed to have deployed.
The first hint of a mutiny would have been exposed, and Rowan was trying to keep it under wraps.
“But then...what did you tell him I’d done to help save your life?” If he hadn’t told the fleet commandant about the guard in the locker room, he hadn’t told him the truth about my “rescue.”
“That you helped me escape a mob of human agitators.”
Rowan brings the tweezers to my neck, and there’s a sudden, sharp sting. I flinch and stare up at him. “And he believed you?”
“I have never lied to him before. He trusts me.”
He continues to dab my wound with what had once been a pristine white cloth, while holding the back of my neck.
It’s so quiet I can hear him breathing. The small gusts of air fan down the slope of my forehead and nose. My lips catch his breaths. They part, instinctively, and I roll my eyes as far up as I can without moving my head so I can see him. He stares at my neck with a fierce grimace.
“Do you feel guilty for lying to him?” I ask.
“Yes. Lying is dishonorable.”
“So is killing innocent people. You killed my best friend,” I whisper. “She didn’t do anything to you, and one of those transports just…cut her down. Like she was nothing. Well, she wasn’t nothing.”
His fingers slowly release my neck, and he steps away. “The transport pilots were following orders.”
“You had orders that you didn’t follow. Those pilots chose to kill.”
He drops the stained cloth into a wire basket under the countertop, and instantly, the bottom of the basket disappears. The cloth is sucked into a black hole before the basket bottom reappears.
“I will wait while you finish,” he says. When I glance up from the laundry chute basket, he’s leaving the bathroom, the panel door sliding closed behind him.
I wish to hell that I could have slammed it shut instead.
Chapter Nine
A minute later, my pulse has calmed a notch, so I concentrate on the bicycle seat urinal, sorting out how I’m supposed to use it. I can still feel the press of Rowan’s fingers at the nape of my neck, though, so I roll my shoulders to try to shrug off the sensation.
Concentrate, Pen.
I actually have to mount the thing in order to do my business. And the fact that I’m peeing in an enemy alien spaceship thousands of feet above the city is just as disorienting as the fact that Volkranians apparently don’t use toilet paper. Or if they do, they don’t keep it out in plain sight.
I quickly scrub my hands underneath the faucet and dry them on yet another folded white cloth that gets slurped away the second I toss it in the wire basket.
There’s something like a comb on the counter, so I use it to work through the frizzy tangles of my hair. Finally, I exit the bathroom and find Rowan waiting by the other panel door. He’s back inside the armored exosuit, his helmet in his hand.
I expect another order for me to follow him into the corridor. Instead, he takes in the changes I’ve made in the bathroom since he left and surprises me.
“You look clean.”
“Um.” I touch my hair, self-consciously. “Thanks.”
“Should I have said you look pretty instead?”
I gape at him like an idiot. He’s being serious.
“No. I mean, not if you don’t
think I am.”
Rowan cocks his head. “You are what humans consider pretty.”
I start to blush, and then try to beat it back. It doesn’t matter what he says, or what he thinks. “How do you know what humans think?”
“I’ve studied the many cultures of your world, including your people’s obsession with physical appearances.”
“Riveting stuff,” I mutter. “So, what, Volkranians don’t think about looks at all?”
He swipes his hand in front of the panel door. It zings open. “We do, but we do not pay compliments on appearance. It is considered crude.”
I walk to the door. “So according to your social standards, you’ve just insulted me?”
Rowan glances back. “Did it feel like an insult?”
I shake my head. No. It had felt a little like the sensation of his breath catching on my lips before—thrilling in the most disturbing of ways.
He takes a right down the corridor, back toward the pneumatic module. I hurry after him, the panel sealing his bedroom back up the second my ankles clear the threshold.
“Are you still going to drop the chlor—”
Rowan spins around and his eyes spark. Like a fuse box overloading, they flash a warning. Right. I’d forgotten about the monitoring system on this ship. I’d been about to ask him if he still plans to drop the chloromagnate, even though the guard claimed the other cityships weren’t. He probably will. He’ll most likely reunite me with my mom, as he’s honor-bound to do, and then head back to the treatment plant and complete his task. Goodbye, drinking water.
Within twenty-four hours, New York City and its surrounding boroughs will be screwed. The first thing I’ll have to do once I’m back with my mom is go find as much bottled water as possible. After that...well, I have no idea. If the water in other cities isn’t being tainted, maybe we’ll head up to Connecticut. That’s where my dad is, though I’m not sure even my mom knows how to find him at whatever insurance conference he’s attending. A worry for another time, I guess.