I struggle to sit up, my shoulders throbbing, my skin too sensitive, my joints aching. I risk opening my eyes more fully and find that I am lying at the bottom of a hole that was once the pond. The hatch in the center is flung wide open. Bartie pulls me up so I can stand, and I peer down into the darkness. The tube from the auto-shuttle is securely locked in place. “I can’t believe that frexing worked,” I say, turning to Bartie.
He cringes. “Your eyes look like shite,” he says, but he’s grinning too, just as excited as I am. “I can’t believe you had enough chutz to do that!”
I look around the ship. It’s so much bigger than I remembered it, but at the same time, so much smaller. Everything looks exactly the same, but strange somehow. It’s as if I stepped into my bedroom, and even though everything is exactly where I left it, I can tell a stranger invaded my privacy.
“Let’s get you to the Hospital,” Doc says. “I have some eyedrops that might help. ”
“I’m really thirsty,” I say. I take a step and nearly fall over. Bartie grabs me by the elbow, holding me up, and even though I want to shake him off and tell
him I can walk on my own, I’m not sure I can.
When we get to the Hospital, Doc hooks me up to a saline drip, despite my protests that I don’t need it, and he shoots more medicine directly into the line. Then he hands me a small mirror so I can get a look at my face. There are bruises on my skin, and I can see little red strings of veins standing out. The whites of my eyes are completely red, as if they are filled with blood. No wonder Bartie kept mentioning them. Doc puts two thick, yellow drops of something in my eyes. It makes them burn, but he assures me it’ll help.
“Dismissed,” Bartie tells Doc.
Doc looks as if he’s about to protest, but Bartie’s face is unforgiving. I’d almost forgotten—Bartie is in charge of determining what punishment Doc should pay for the crimes he committed on the ship just before we left.
Doc carefully takes off his stethoscope and places it neatly on the table. He adjusts the medical instruments on the small table, checks my IV, nods once to me, and goes. Before he rounds the corner, two Feeders—they used to be butchers, before Bartie’s revolution—start walking on either side of Doc, escorting him . . . somewhere.
I wonder if that’s Doc’s life now—a prisoner, until he has the rare chance to work his medicine. Does he have an apprentice who will take over after him, making his one skill redundant?
That thought reminds me of Kit, and when I think of Kit now, all I can envision is the way she died.
I swallow back my questions about Doc and his punishments. That’s not important compared to the matter at hand.
Bartie pulls up a chair closer to me. “How did you know?” he asks.
“Know?”
“That the engine’s failing. That we can’t survive on Godspeed. ” Bartie states this with such sincerity that I know he’s already come to terms with it, and with the black med patches.
I smirk at him. “Knew you couldn’t handle the ship without me. ”
Bartie tries to laugh, but this is not something he can discuss lightly.
“It’s because of Doc,” Bartie says. “When he blew up the Bridge”—killing Shelby and the others, I think—“the engine was damaged. ”
“Damaged?” I ask.
Bartie nods grimly. “So you came to save us. ” There’s a tone of defeat in his voice, one that I understand all too well.
“The auto-shuttle’s big,” I say. “We can put five hundred in the transport boxes and the rest in the cargo hold. There won’t be much room for cargo, and in what room there is, we need to pack away every single bit of food we can. All our supplies on the planet were destroyed. Whatever we can take from the ship in terms of survival will make a huge difference for us all. ” I hesitate. “But you should know, the ‘monsters’ Orion talked about—they’re very real, and they are very good at killing us. Before I came here, I released nearly five hundred bodies to the stars. ”
Bartie doesn’t look at me when he says, “If it’s a matter of dying here or dying there, I think I’d like to at least see the world first. ”
“You didn’t always think that way,” I comment dryly.
Bartie’s gaze doesn’t flinch. “That was before I knew the ship would fail so frexing soon. ”
I explain everything to Bartie, from Orion’s dying words to the latest alien attack on the colony, my strength returning to me as the meds and fluids enter my system. I start with the destruction of the shuttle and the deaths of so many of our people. We continue talking as Bartie and I walk outside, to the garden. There are oddly few people here, but Bartie tells me that most tend to stay on the City side of the ship. There are too many dark memories leaking from the hatch in the hole that used to be the pond. People don’t like to be reminded of the choice they made, the friends they let go.
We stop at the Plague Eldest statue, and both of us stare at it silently for a moment.
“It all begins and ends here, huh?” I can’t tell what Bartie’s thinking of, but I’m remembering the way I used to view the Plague Eldest, as if he was the model of everything I should be, an ideal I could only aspire to. But then I found out I was made of the same stuff he was and that it wasn’t either of our DNA that made us the leaders we had to be for our ship.
It doesn’t matter now. The Plague Eldest statue is only made of concrete, not replicated DNA and broken promises. The statue’s face is worn away, rivulets embedded into his cheeks as if from tears. “He knew,” I tell Bartie. “The Plague Eldest. He knew whatever it is that’s down there. He must be the king Orion refers to with that clue, and the only thing missing from Orion’s puzzle is information about who the aliens are and what they want. How to stop them. ”
Bartie looks doubtful. “You got all that from a scribbled-in illustrated children’s book?”