Qualify

  “Gwen Lark and Dawn Williams.”

  He relays our names, then listens. After a pause he looks at me and says, “Okay, you’re Gwen Lark?”

  I nod.

  “You can go in, but just you alone. The other young lady, you wait here.”

  I frown, and Dawn gives me a strange look, then shrugs. “I’ll be here,” she says.

  And on that note, the guard buzzes me inside through the second set of glass doors, and into the back office area that contains a small cube farm consisting of about a dozen cubicles separated with short partitions, and then a long corridor with closed doors.

  I walk sullenly past several office workers and uniformed officers manning keyboards and special consoles and sitting at their cubicle desks. They stare at me briefly. Everyone’s wearing rainbow armbands on their grey uniform sleeves, which I’ve come to associate with Earth workers affiliated with Atlanteans. Not one of them has the metallic golden-blond hair.

  The guard takes me past them and we enter the corridor, and walk all the way to the end, past at least twenty doors on both sides, until we come to a dead end and closed double doors.

  An armed guard stands on duty at the doors.

  My guard nods to him, and the second man stands aside. The guard who brought me over takes out a card and scans it at the optical reader on the wall. The lock bleeps and the status light turns from red to green.

  The door opens.

  “Proceed inside,” he tells me.

  I take a deep breath and walk past the double doors.

  The room I enter is huge. It is more than three times the size of Office 512 in the AC Building, and it contains a similar computer surveillance multi-screen center lining one of the walls. Rows of screens stretch wall to wall.

  Along the perimeter of the other walls there is other tech equipment that I cannot really explain, because most of it is the strange shapeless lumps of Atlantean technology I’ve encountered before in the audio tests, except this is all on a grand scale.

  In the middle of the room, a large table takes up most of the space, and it is covered with what looks like burned and charred pieces of metal, plastic, and orichalcum. . . . Basically, it is what remains of the first exploded shuttle. Some pieces are bulky and large, most are small shards and lumps fused together. Four Atlanteans are in the room, dressed in white lab coats, moving around the table and engaging various equipment around the perimeter.

  The fifth is Aeson Kass.

  He stands with his arms folded watching them work.

  He looks particularly worn this morning, pale as if he hadn’t had any sleep. The hollows of his cheeks and jaw are darkened with a faint growth of stubble. His hair is slightly messy and even tousled on one side. And his eyes, dark lapis lazuli blue, are nevertheless traced with a fine perfect line of kohl that appears unsmudged and unblemished, as if it’s a natural part of his skin.

  Maybe the eyeliner’s permanent, and has been tattooed onto his face? I wonder momentarily and stupidly out of left field.

  He sees me in that moment and he frowns. “You? What are you doing here, Candidate Lark? What do you want?” His aggravated voice cuts like a knife.

  I take a few steps into the room, and my heart is beating so loudly I can feel it in my temples. Breathe, Gwen, breathe. . . .

  “Laronda Aimes is innocent,” I say. “Whatever you think she did, she did not do it. She is my friend, and she would never do anything as awful that might hurt other people—”

  “Silence!” he blasts me in a hard, implacable voice. “Whatever it is you think you’re doing, I suggest you reconsider, now. You should not be here. This is none of your business, and by being here you put yourself under question.”

  My jaw falls open. “What?” I say, and I am filled with outrage. “How does trying to help a friend implicate me? I am telling you, Laronda is completely innocent, and there is no way she is involved in anything stupid and awful that would ever hurt other people much less kill anyone, and undermine her being here in this RQC!”

  “How well do you know your friend? You have known her for what, six days? The evidence stands against her.” He lets his arms drop, takes a step and another, and approaches me. He stops directly before me and I stare up at him, at the terrible hard gaze, in all its intensity, trained on me.

  “I don’t need six days to know that she’s a good person,” I say softly, and my voice is breathless with anger. “There are just some things you know.”

  “How?” he says, staring down at me. The sheer power in him, it is a mountain. . . . The force of his gaze is making my lungs close up, choking me with the oppressive weight of presence. “With your gut? Your intuition? Your amazing ability to read minds? How well do you really know this Laronda and her motives? How do you explain the shuttle navigation chip component found in the pocket of her jacket?”

  “There has to be a good reason. She was set up! Someone planted this thing in her pocket to transfer blame onto her . . . it could be a random mistake, someone put it there by mistake, meaning to put it in someone else’s pocket, maybe? Or . . . or it could be—it’s got to be malicious—jealousy, rivalry, you name it! Someone trying to weed down the competition, the number of Candidates?” I speak hurriedly, scrambling for answers, because I sense that he is giving me this brief opportunity to speak, and I should be grateful. . . .

  “Or it could be she is working for a terrorist group, and she has been given a specific task, and she has carried it out.” He pauses for a moment, to glance at the worktable and the Atlanteans in lab coats. And then his gaze returns to me. “Do you know that we found one of the component chips cleverly attached to the underside of a delivery truck yesterday? We intercepted it before it had a chance to leave the compound. And this second chip in your so-called friend’s pocket was likely about to be smuggled out in a similar fashion.”

  “Have you caught whoever is responsible for the delivery truck thing?” I press on, hanging on to any option I can imagine. “Do you have actual proof Laronda was involved in that?”

  Aeson considers me and for a moment I sense a tiny pause of hesitation. “Yes,” he says. “We have the persons involved with the truck incident in custody. Two Candidates from another dorm, and they will be Disqualified and prosecuted. Both were linked via surveillance and advanced DNA and resonance scanning to the deliberate attempt to move the chip component. They were also linked to not one but two of your extremist Earth terror groups, the Sunset Alliance and Terra Patria.”

  I stare at him, mind racing, not knowing what else to say.

  “Enough,” he says abruptly, steadily looking at me then suddenly blinking as though coming awake. “This is far more than you need to know. I should not be telling you any of this, but apparently I’ve had a very long night and it’s affecting my better judgment. And you—you are missing your first period class, for which you’ve just earned a demerit.”

  “But what about Laronda? What’s going to happen to her?”

  He exhales tiredly. Again, a pause as he considers whether to speak, and merely looks at me. “Nothing is going to happen to her. She was found to be clean, no primary DNA match, no resonance match. She had nothing to do with it and she is going to be released in half an hour after some minor questioning while the last portion of scanning is concluded—mostly a formality.”

  “What? Oh!” I say in amazement, followed by anger. “Wait, why didn’t you just say so in the first place? I was going nuts here, and you could’ve just said you were letting her go! What is wrong with you?”

  Okay, that last part? I think I’ve just said too much—even I get it. And my voice, holy crap, I’ve seriously raised my voice at him, at Command Pilot Aeson Kass, the guy who pretty much holds the fate of this whole RQC in his hands. . . .

  Aeson’s lips part. I think I’ve managed to stun him sufficiently by my words, my insolent loud tone.

  But in the next second, there’s a beeping sound, a regular repeating audio tone, and i
t starts coming from the back of the room, from one of the Atlantean machines.

  Aeson turns in the direction of the sound.

  One of the lab-coat scientists goes over to check, and then looks around and stares at Aeson and me.

  He then approaches. There is a very peculiar look on his face. “There’s a match,” he says softly, almost hesitantly to Aeson. “Her voice—it just tripped the resonance scanner. She is a match.”

  And he looks at me.

  Chapter 25

  “What?” Aeson Kass speaks in a hard voice of amazement. Once again, he’s been stunned. “Check again! And then re-check the calibration—” And then he continues the rest of the sentence in an angry torrent of Atlantean language.

  Meanwhile, I am standing there in absolute confusion, and also filled with a sudden sense of inevitability.

  My voice. . . .

  Okay. . . . They’ve just found out something having to do with my voice. Which means, they have a means of knowing that I had something to do with the second shuttle landing? And maybe more? No, that’s impossible, how can they?

  But I have no time to think because in the next instant I feel the heavy pressure of his fingers on my upper arm, painful even through the thickness of my jacket. And now I am being propelled forward with great force. Aeson Kass holds me in an iron vise and all three of us walk to the back of the room, while the other Atlanteans gather closer.

  “What?” I manage to mutter. “What is happening?”

  But he does not look at me, does not answer, merely pushes me roughly before a large piece of equipment that at present is beeping every other second.

  The Atlantean scientist leans forward to adjust something on a console and along the lumpy metallic surface with multicolored lights. But Aeson moves him out of the way and takes over the equipment console. He presses things I have no way of describing—buttons, indentations, touch-surface maybe? And then he coldly turns to me.

  “Sing the tones that you hear, now.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Sing!”

  I hear a series of short notes. I take a breath and sing back what I hear. In the otherwise silent room, my voice suddenly sounds reedy and wimpy.

  As soon as I am done, the equipment begins to beep once again.

  Aeson frowns. He then does something to the machine, which resets the alarm.

  “Again!” he says.

  The machine plays notes. I echo them.

  The machine beep alarm goes off, unmistakably in response to my voice.

  There is a pause.

  Aeson then resets the alarm and slowly turns to look at me.

  “Candidate Lark,” he says in a dead voice, and his face, his eyes—they are terrifying. “You are under arrest for conspiracy, possible terrorist action, and murder.”

  In the next few minutes I am taken into custody by security guards—after being handed over by the Atlanteans, after having Aeson Kass give me no other glance as he turns his back on me, his bearing hard like stone, and his expression cold as I have never seen it before.

  My hands shake as I am led out through the double doors and into the long hallway. Somewhere in the middle of the hallway, the guards pause, and a door is opened.

  I am shoved inside, and it’s a small holding cell, with bright overhead lights, a small square table and two hard chairs. A surveillance camera points at me from each of the four corners.

  The door closes upon me and I am left alone.

  For the first five minutes I stand motionless, gasping for air. My hands—my whole body—I am shaking. Fine tremors fill me, and a numbing cold settles inside my gut.

  I put my hands over my mouth and press hard, feeling the inside of my lips against my teeth, while emotions fill me to bursting, and the pressure behind my eyes rises, forcing tears.

  I am rocked by a mix of anger, terror, an impossible sense of injustice, and behind all things, perfect despair.

  Yes, I can explain everything to them, or at least, try. I can tell them exactly what happened that night, what I did. How I sang like crazy and landed his shuttle by pure luck and accident. And how I saved him, dragged him out of that wreck, through the smoke and flames. . . .

  But they’re not going to believe me, are they? They are going to interpret everything I say as clever deception, just to cover up something else nefarious on my part.

  He is not going to believe me.

  He already has a certain misconception of me, or at least what I think is a misconception. Whatever it is, he thinks very little of me and my stupid big mouth.

  And oh, lord, what rotten coincidence! With Laronda being my friend, and even our beds being right next to each other, everything is now pointing at me as the culprit. Sure, how easy to think that I planted that damned chip in her pocket! And that all along I’ve been playing a clever little game, pretending to be earnest and whatever else they think I am—

  I take a deep shuddering breath.

  Then I sit down at one of the chairs. And I stare straight ahead of me at the neutral off-white wall, eventually falling into a sickly daydream.

  The four cameras, they are all pointing at me. I am being watched even now, for body language, for telltale signs of further deception and playacting. Anything and everything I say or do, even how I move, is going to be processed differently by them.

  It occurs to me also, Among other things, I guess I am now officially Disqualified.

  Half an hour later, the door opens and two Correctors enter the room. Pale metallic hair, unfamiliar faces, usual grey uniforms. One has a yellow armband, the other a red one.

  I start to get up from my chair.

  “Sit,” one Corrector tells me, as he himself sits down in the chair across the table from me.

  I sit back down.

  The second Corrector places a small tech gadget on the table surface.

  “Candidate Gwenevere Lark, you have been voice-matched to the shuttle incident site and materially to the outer surface of one of the shuttles.”

  “What does that mean?” I say.

  “As such, you are under suspicion for various criminal acts including conspiring against Atlantis, malicious tampering, and disrupting the lawful proceedings of the Qualification process.”

  “Before I say anything, am I entitled to a lawyer?” I whisper.

  The Corrector across the table from me pauses. “No,” he says in an impassive voice. “You are entitled to nothing. This is the jurisdiction of Atlantis, and you can only speak to answer questions, and it is your only option if you want to clear yourself.”

  I take a deep breath, and release it with a shudder. “Very well. I am innocent of any wrongdoing. And I am going to answer all your questions.”

  “Very well. Where were you on the night of the incident?”

  I tell them. I describe having dinner with a crowd of friends at the Arena Commons, then running around the big track, then finally walking back to my dorm. Although I am being honest, I manage not to mention Logan, at least not directly. Not sure why, but it just seems best that I don’t bring him into this.

  “So you were passing the airfield when the incident happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where exactly were you?”

  I describe my location the best I can.

  “What did you see after the explosion of the first shuttle?”

  “The second one was halfway above the trees. It did not rise far. It was flying all over the place, streaking across the sky. . . . Hard to explain, but it was fast.”

  “Would you say it was out of control?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please elaborate.”

  I frown. “I am not sure. It looked like it was moving aimlessly, I guess.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then it started sort of falling, directly at me.”

  The Corrector across the table from me pauses. He and the one standing next to him exchange glances.

  “Continue. What h
appened next?”

  I purse my lips and take a deep breath. “I started to run . . . I don’t know, it was kind of crazy, everything happening at once. . . . I ran, but it was still falling right at me. It was going to crush me. So I screamed.”

  “Go on.”

  “Then I had an idea. . . . It was from my Atlantis Tech class, about levitating orichalcum objects. I remembered the note sequence. So I started to sing.”

  The Corrector watches me in tense silence. “Impossible. . . . What did you sing?”

  I tell them the notes I used, a major sequence starting with F, then A, and C.

  The Correctors look at each other then stare at me.

  I stare back.

  There is a very long pause. . . .

  “All right. Assuming what you say is true, describe exactly what happened,” the seated Corrector says.

  “After I sang the sequence, the shuttle stopped falling and hovered over my head. I continued singing, because I was too afraid to stop. Then I moved out of its way. And then I sang the notes to make levitating objects come down. It came down.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, it just did. And then, just as it stopped a few feet above the ground, all the lights suddenly went out, and it went dead. And it sort of fell the rest of the way down. . . .”

  “And then?”

  I take another deep breath with a shudder. “Some kind of hatch opened. There was a stair that descended. And then there was a whole bunch of black smoke.”

  “Did you at any point attempt to call for help?” The Corrector watches me with an unblinking gaze that is somehow more horrible because it is so bland, so perfectly neutral.

  “There was no time. I saw people running in my direction but I didn’t think they would reach the shuttle in time. . . . So I went in.”

  “So you went inside the shuttle that you yourself brought down in order to finish what you had started—to kill the occupants? Or was it to steal more navigation equipment? Or simply to cover your tracks?”

  “No!” I feel despair and anger rising in me. “No, I went inside to see if I could help someone—anyone!”

  “What was—inside?”

  “He was inside! Your Command Pilot Aeson Kass! He was out—unconscious . . . in his chair, covered in blood . . . his head, the side of his face, his hair, everything . . . and there was a fire . . . burning in the back . . . near the floor, I don’t know . . .” I speak in quick chopped sentences, as an emotion I have no words for is rising up to choke me, and I have no air in my lungs. My hands are squeezed into fists under the table, and now I am shaking full body.