by Harper North
“Lie down!” I turn to everyone, waving my arms, but people are already obeying. I didn’t do the convincing.
“Cia! Mom!" Sky looks frantically around until he sees them a few beds away.
"We're fine!" Cia shouts, lying down. "Lay down already!"
"For now. I’ll take this one.” Sky rushes past me and toward the next pod. He climbs in, sinking into the strange fabric, and almost vanishes. Cia’s in hers. Starla races for another. None of the lids have closed yet. This vehicle might be waiting for everyone to get settled. Betty drops into a bed on the other side of the room.
Maybe the pods are death and the program doesn’t want us to know until it’s too late, but I’ll take a peaceful death over a deadly virus or getting crushed.
Tossing my pistol down, I climb into the pod. The material molds to my body, cold and lifeless. People still shout, but slowly the shouts turn to whispers and whimpers. I watch the ceiling overhead. Everyone’s scared.
Outside, the rumbling increases. More screeching follows. The whole outside chamber’s coming down. And the virus. That might be out there by now, waiting to kill.
I hold back the tears brimming at the corners of my eyes. Emma didn’t have to do this.
Only she did. The weight of what her grandfather did must have filled her with so much guilt, forcing her to try to make things right. It’s not fair.
The outside doors to the Elevator slide shut with a hiss.
The lid of my pod remains open. What if this whole program is broken and we all lie here, waiting for the end? But we have no other choice. We’ve done all we can.
A new hum fills the Elevator, like the whole thing is ready to take off, and I try to lift my head, but then the glass dome lid of the pod comes down over me and closes me inside with a hiss. I jump, turning my head to see that the same has happened to Sky and everyone else. He’s blurry, his hand on the glass of his dome.
Silence falls.
I press my hand to the glass, and then something sharp sticks into my other arm, the one still buried in fabric. I writhe with the sudden pain, and my heart races as something burning enters my arm and spreads up toward my shoulder, toward my heart. I bang my head into the top of the dome, pulling at whatever’s injecting me. I’m turning into icy fire. Poison. Death.
Beside me, Sky writhes in his pod.
If everyone’s taking poison, I can’t hear.
I sink into the fabric, which grows colder, sucking the heat from my body. The burning sensation spreads through my chest, making it hard to breathe, and then through my legs. My toes. I just want the pain to stop and for death to come already. Curling my fingers into the cushion, I grit my teeth.
A white, cold vapor explodes upward from the edges of the pod, filling my glass coffin. Frosty claws and fingers spread across the inside of the glass before vanishing behind white curls and clouds.
I hold my breath as survival instinct kicks in. All reason leaves me. I kick at the glass, but my legs slow and the glass refuses to budge. I’m weakening. A cold deeper than anything I’ve ever experienced crushes me from every angle, leaving no escape.
I breathe in.
And the whole world turns to gentle grays as my muscles all relax. It’s not a bad place to be. It’s peaceful, and time doesn’t exist here. Seconds, or maybe it’s days, drift past lazily.
My thoughts slow to stone.
I am stone.
CHAPTER 16
“COMMENCE WAKING PROCEDURE.”
The sound is alien. What do those noises even mean? Something in the back of my head tells me that those collections of syllables are supposed to mean something, but as I reach for that in the foggy expanse of nothingness, even that flees.
I am a void. A slate.
“Initiate warming.”
A tiny pinprick appears, a yellow stab of pain… somewhere. Do I have a form? I must if I can feel. Warmth begins to spread through my awareness, and I remember that I have an appendage. An arm. Something that feels like a needle has poked into my flesh, which feels stiff, but as life itself enters my body, I flex more, smaller appendages at the end of my arm.
Fingers. The word explodes with meaning and memory.
I take a breath, what feels like my first in ages.
What happened?
But only silence and darkness answer, and my thoughts slowly swirl, trying to come together. I have a body. A torso. Legs. Even toes. And I can move them. As the minutes crawl past and the warmth spreads through me, I realize, bit by bit, that I’m separate from the darkness I’ve called home for both an eternity and no time at all.
The air I breathe is frigid but warms with each breath until it no longer hurts my lungs. Yes, I have those, too.
Another, tiny flash of pain follows as something retracts from my arm. I wince, skin now soft, and flex my right arm. I’m lying on some sort of soft stuff.
Fabric.
The pod.
A dim memory forms, of me lying in a tiny, cold chamber with frost invading from every angle. How did I get there?
A groan escapes my lips.
My eyelids flutter.
When I open them, everything is a blur. Something lifts from overhead, letting pleasant air wash over me. Other groans fill the space I’m in. My legs jerk on their own and flail, like they’ve forgotten how to move. Oh, I have knees. They can bend. Muscles spasm and protest, but the stabs of pain pass and I can flex them easier with each motion.
I’m lying in the pod. The last thing I remember is climbing in while the whole world was collapsing around us. I’m here with dozens of others and I’ve been lying here, frozen, for who knows how long.
“Please be careful rising,” the pleasant voice continues. “You will be disoriented from your trip.” It’s a computer voice, a man’s, probably meant to reduce panic.
Then my mind makes the connection.
The Elevator. We boarded to flee the end of the world, and here we are, still inside of it, and other than the groans and shifting of my fellow passengers, things are quiet. I blink, and the film that seems to cover everything begins to thin and lift. My eyes are remembering how to work. I’m still in the pod, but the lid has lifted. A bit of condensation evaporates from the open lid, the remains of the frost that encased me.
Cryo-sleep, my enhanced brain informs me.
The Elevator froze us for whatever trip it took us on, and we’re not dead.
“Sky?” My voice is raspy, like my vocal cords are still coming online. “Sky?”
I sit up, back protesting and popping. I figure my body hasn’t moved for a long time. Weeks. Maybe even months.
The world tilts. I’m surrounded by stirring bodies, pale light, and white walls. Sky slowly sits up in the pod beside mine. Lids have opened everywhere. The air fills with humidity as the last of the melted frost turns into vapor.
“Fin.” Sky forces a smile at me. “What happened?”
He looks the same as he did before we got into these things, only his clothes are wrinkled and slightly damp. As if a coating of frost has just melted off him, too.
I pick at my top. Yeah, same thing for me.
“The Elevator froze us. That must mean... that must mean we went on a long trip.” My words skip in and out, but at least my ability to speak is coming back.
Sky rises, shaking. I get up, too, and we link hands. His fingers are flushed, almost like they’re recovering from a dip into super cold water. So are mine. Our pulses beat together, slow.
“Cia?” he calls.
“Over here.” She rises from her own pod beside Starla. Not too far from her, Lacy and Talen lean on each other, having already gotten up. Someone coughs. We’re in a field of Dwellers, Originals, and former EHC ops.
“Emma?” Betty staggers around the Elevator, searching.
Emma.
I take a breath as my throat closes. Someone will have to tell her the truth, and I hope it’s not me. That Emma gave her life to get us here—wherever here is.
“W
here are we?” Sky asks.
"I don't know." I reach for my pistol, an automatic response, and feel naked when I realize it’s not there. But the feeling passes. Since the Elevator has no windows, I don’t know where we are.
The cryo-sleep tells me we must have gone far.
What if we’re—
“Please disembark carefully,” the computer voice says.
And slowly, the metal doors to the Elevator slide upward.
I balk, waiting for the falling rocks and the radiation we left behind, but instead, there’s a corridor that seems to go around the entire Elevator. It’s lit with gentle floor lights.
The Elevator has docked with something.
Elias looks at me, lifting an eyebrow. “We have no choice but to explore now,” he says.
Cal glares at him but remains silent.
People mutter. No one’s sure about this.
I clear my throat. “Well, Elias is right. What choice do we have? We must be somewhere safe. Maybe a facility on the surface or in the ocean. Going back isn’t an option now.”
“We don’t know what’s out there,” an EHC op says.
I reach down for that hope inside. We have to have it now. Edward Nejem wouldn’t have constructed all this in secret for nothing, would he? “I know we don’t but standing here isn’t going to get us anywhere.”
Beside me, Sky smiles.
Staying hand in hand with him, we lead the way.
The corridor also has no windows, just a large, open door that appears to go somewhere else. Cool air blows in from a large space beyond, a space that’s quiet except for a faint whirring, like a small piece of machinery is working.
“This might be cool,” Cia says behind us.
Slowly, others emerge from the inner chamber. The quiet is eerie. Everyone’s just waiting for the truth. We might be in the ocean, having traveled to some incredible depth. But why would that have taken so long? Maybe my mind’s still waking up.
Sky and I turn the corner, walking down a wide corridor that connects whatever we’ve docked with to something bigger. A huge space, enclosed in part of a glass dome, spreads out beyond. I glimpse beds of black dirt—crop beds ready for planting. Corridors leading to other parts of this new place. Pale lights that shine brighter as Sky and I enter the room, as if this place has detected our presence. Others gasp as they walk in behind us, and I watch a small robot, one that looks like a foot-long red shell on wheels, that happily rolls around the room.
“Fin,” Sky says.
I blink, getting my bearings.
Sky taps me. “Look up.”
“Huh?” I do as he says, and the sight drops my jaw.
We’re not in some underwater base at all.
I don’t quite register what’s outside at first. It’s dark, mostly, but an enormous ball of brown, red, and tan lines, all disorganized like running paint or ink, takes up most of my view. My gaze lands on a huge, reddish oval among the strange colors. I’m looking at an enormous, gaseous planet, a place with nowhere to land. A star—could it be our own sun?—peeks out from behind the gigantic world, but it’s smaller than I remember.
All at once, I understand.
It’s the faded sky from the paintings back in the Exodus Facility. The faded pictures back there were showing this planet, a planet that we’re now orbiting.
No, not quite. There are several other worlds, smaller, rocky ones, orbiting the massive planet. One that looks like a ball of colorful ice, complete with lines that look like long, straight folds, looms large ahead of and below us, and as I grasp the entrance as people crowd behind us. I watch as the world, just a large moon around this new planet, slowly swings into view. We’re in orbit around an ice moon, probably somewhere in our distant star system.
“How?” Elias blurts, pushing past us. He keeps his gaze on the sky. “This place must be a hundred years old. We boarded an elevator. It had cables. It couldn’t have—”
“Unless it took us to orbit and docked with a ship?” Cia asks. “An elevator to space might be possible if there’s a counterweight floating in orbit, and the cables were made out of, say, carbon nanotubules.”
Sky snaps his gaze to her. “Are you getting Noble class enhancements? That’s not fair.”
“Maybe,” she says with a grin. He ruffles her hair.
I stand aside in shock. My heart races. I figure this gardening area is just one part of the orbiting base, and that there are others. There must be supplies here. Food. Hope.
“Welcome to the Europa Jump Station,” the computer voice says, echoing through the whole chamber. “The next stage for humanity, and a new beginning.”
People scatter, faces skyward, and mutter. The air fills with nerves. Uncertainty. My heart races as the implications sink in. Cia walks ahead, kneeling in front of the little robot. It zips off, vanishing between two gardening beds.
A tower of computer screens in the center of the room burst to life, displaying everything from text to touch screens to a map of this planetary system.
Cia runs over, tracing her finger along one of the screens. “I was right. We rode an elevator to space, and then it docked with a ship that’s been in orbit around Earth for a long time. It sent out a beacon, and then a system of solar sails activated—”
“Sis.” Sky lets go of me, running over to her.
I follow. People keep muttering around us, voices rising. This is sinking in for everyone else, too, and I sense chaos ready to erupt.
Elias cuts in front of me. “Let me see.” He leans over another screen, blocking my view. “We’re in orbit around one of Jupiter’s moons. This is a station meant to start more exploration around this solar system. And then the stars. Wow. I never knew this existed.”
“We have a space program here,” Cia says.
“What?” I’m on autopilot. All my life I’ve just wanted to escape the underground. Now I have, but I never imagined it would be like this.
“Yeah.” Cia whirls, eyes sparkling with life. “This base is equipped with the means to make more ships and explore these other moons.”
“Whoa.” I sway, but Sky peels away from his sister and catches me.
“I’m in shock, too,” he says.
“What’s going to happen? People never get along for long,” I say.
“I don’t know.”
I swallow as people fan around the room, scattering. The Originals stay in their own groups, and the EHC ops in theirs. No one seems to know what to do.
But I’ve still got a promise to keep to Sky.
I pull away from Sky and step up onto one of the gardening beds. “Everyone!” I shout. “Listen. I know we’re all confused. We’ll call a meeting and talk about all this. But I think we’re going to be fine so long as we stay calm. None of us can let what happened in the past happen ever again.”
All heads turn to face me.
Cal eyes an EHC op and glowers at me, like he doesn’t believe it.
We’re going to have some hurdles, but I have to believe we’ll get over them. I get down from the gardening bed and link my hand with Sky’s. He nods. Maybe the others will take our lead.
Slowly, we head back up to the giant glass window. Leaning on Sky, I relish the feeling of not having to have my pistol ready. It’s incredibly peaceful.
No one speaks. Lacy and Talen walk up behind us.
The vast sky spreads out above us. Jupiter. Its many, many moons, each one its own world. And then the stars. The giant planet’s blocking out the sun right now, leaving a vast canopy of them visible. There are thousands. Maybe millions, or even more.
Could we reach them someday?
Sky and I walk over to the window, along with the others. Though nerves still ripple through the dome, a good tingle spreads over my palms and races down my spine. People whisper to each other. Worry still hangs in the air like a claw ready to strike, but within those whispers is wonder. The future is unknown and scary, but it’s ours.
“What can we do out here?”
I ask.
Sky kisses me on the cheek. “We’ll have to find out. Together.”
EPILOGUE
5 Years Later
THE ALARM BEEPS softly, and then louder and louder the longer we ignore it, until eventually it begins to emit a metallic screech. Groaning, I roll out of bed. The sound will only stop when one pair of feet touches the floor. And somehow that pair always winds up being mine.
Now that I’ve stopped the noise, I twist around and give Sky a good shake. He grumbles and turns toward me, snaking an arm around my waist. Rolling my eyes, I pry his arm off me and stand up, tugging on his hand.
“Come on. Today’s the day.”
Smacking his lips and blinking his eyes, he crawls out of bed, immediately wrapping me in his arms and hooking his chin over my shoulder. His beard tickles my neck, and I shrug him off, but I can’t resist kissing him, even with his morning breath. The short beard turned out to be a surprisingly good decision for his already handsome face.
Now that the floor has registered both our feet, the lights slowly rise, revealing our tiny but cheerful-as-it-can-be room. We left the walls white for the first year, but then we started going nuts, so we painted them a soft yellow, a color that reminds us of the surface world on Earth. Turns out the Europa Jump Station has all sorts of amazing technology in its basement, including nanobots that can create paint in any color from raw materials.
But our room is small, just enough for our bed and not much else. It’s like the hundreds of other rooms for the people of this station. This habitat isn’t meant for humans to stay in permanently, though it is possible. It’s just meant to be the first stage for something far greater.
And after five years, we’re ready for that something, whatever it might be. While our time here has been amazing, mainly because we’ve managed to avoid violence and settle into a routine, it’s beginning to feel like life in the mines. Get up, go to work, take a break, sleep. And that needs to change today.