“The girls are coming back,” Kieran said firmly.
“But how are we going to get them out?!” Tobin’s freckled face twisted in anguish.
Kieran had no answer. The boys were starting to understand the situation on their own: The adults weren’t coming back. No one had to tell them, but someone should have.
“Wait here,” he told the boys. He dragged himself across the ceiling and into Central Command. He found Seth Ardvale talking in whispers with Sarek, whose face wiped clean as soon as he saw Kieran enter the room. Kieran ignored both of them, pushed himself down to the com console, and tapped the call button for the engine room. It took a long time, and as he waited, he could feel Seth and Sarek staring at the back of his head. The vid screen flickered, and Kieran was looking at the face of Victoria Hand, Austen’s mother. She was barely recognizable. Her face was badly swollen, and the veins under her skin had burst to create frightening bruises.
“Kieran, this has to be quick—”
“Mrs. Hand, the kids here need to talk to their parents.”
“We can’t spare the time. We want to, believe me—”
“Victoria,” Kieran said firmly, “get all the parents to the video terminal right now. Otherwise the boys are going to try to come down there, and I don’t know if I can stop them.”
Victoria’s face went slack. What she said next came in a whisper, and tears spilled from her eyes. “We don’t want them to see us this way.”
“They know what’s going to happen, Vicky. They’ve figured it out on their own. They need to see you so you can explain. But also…” He paused. “Vicky, there are … a lot of … losses. In the port shuttle bay.”
She swallowed. “I know.”
“What do we do?” Kieran whispered.
For a second she only stood there, hanging her head. When she could finally speak, she said, “You’ll have to put the bodies in the air lock and blow them out. All at once.”
Horror spread through Kieran, but he found his voice. “Okay.”
“Can you do that, Kieran?” she asked gently. “I’m so sorry it falls to you.”
Kieran nodded. He dreaded the task with his whole being. But there was another task he dreaded even more.
“I’ve been able to make a list of … who they are. Who didn’t … make it.” Kieran could speak only with his eyes closed. “But their sons don’t know yet, and I don’t know how—” His voice caught on the words, and he couldn’t go on. “You’re a nurse, right? How do you tell someone…”
The woman stared at the screen, her eyes brimming with tears. “I’ll tell them.”
Kieran gathered all one hundred and twenty-two boys and lined them up, floating in the corridor outside Central Command. Tobin Ames and Austen Hand came along with the others and waited their turn quietly.
Everyone agreed that whatever boy was talking on the console should be left in privacy. No one entered or left Central Command except for the boy who was speaking to his parents. Sometimes Kieran could hear them wailing through the metal walls, but for the most part, it was a silent procession.
Arthur was one of the first to come out of Central Command. He had hooked himself onto one of the electrical conduits in the corner of the ceiling, and he hovered outside, looking sullen and lost. Kieran knew that Arthur’s parents were unaccounted for, so he hadn’t gotten any terrible news today. Kieran tapped his shoulder and beckoned him down the hallway. “I need your help.”
“What?” Arthur floated after him, keeping himself straight by hanging on to the upper conduits.
“Have you seen the vid screens from the port shuttle bay?” Kieran whispered.
“Yes.”
“Can you help me … deal with it?”
The boy blanched.
“You’re the only one I can think of…,” Kieran began. “I can’t go there alone. I know I’m asking a lot—”
Arthur cut him off. “I’ll do it.”
The ride down in the elevator was grim. When the doors opened onto the quiet corridor that led to the shuttle bay, Kieran felt such terror that his bones shook. He couldn’t make himself leave the elevator.
“They’re not going to be floating around, are they?” Arthur whispered. He hadn’t moved from the elevator either.
Kieran couldn’t answer.
Finally, the boys left the safety of the elevator and propelled themselves into the bay. At first glance it looked as it always had, and for an insane instant, Kieran hoped that somehow the bodies had already been taken care of, that he wouldn’t have to do this after all.
But no. This place was a crypt.
They were all around, so utterly still that they’d escaped his notice. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to see, and his mind had rejected them, wiped them away. But when Kieran made himself look, they were there, lying where they’d fallen. Waiting.
Dozens of shapes on the floor or hovering just over it, pools of blackish, dried blood spread underneath them. Staring eyes. Twisted limbs. So many. He saw Mrs. Henry, Mr. Obadiah, Lieutenant Patterson, Harve Mombasa. They’d been lying down here all this time, turning to clay.
His gorge rose to his throat, but he swallowed it. His body shook, his limbs felt drained of blood, but he squeezed his fists as he floated over them toward the air lock doors.
Arthur floated parallel to him, looking around at the inert forms, his expression dark, his skin pale.
“How do we do this?” Kieran asked.
Arthur’s eyes snapped onto his. “We’ll need a rope.”
They worked for hours, tying the bodies to the end of a rope and, using a pulley attached to the inside wall of the air lock, pulling the bodies across the shuttle bay. Arthur did most of the pulling, but it was Kieran who had to loop the rope around the dead crew members, trying not to look in their eyes, trying not to notice how they smelled. When he was finished with one he’d somehow maneuver to the next, and the next, cursing under his breath at the awkward way he had to move, horrified by how he had to hang on to the bodies themselves to keep from drifting away from them. Still, if it weren’t for the zero gravity, this task would be impossible for them.
As he lifted dead limbs, closed empty eyes, he made himself remember Waverly, the first time he’d gotten up the courage to take hold of her hand. It was during the Harvest Cotillion. There’d been beer and roasted vegetables with chestnuts and briny olives. The adults were dancing steps they remembered from their childhood on Earth while Waverly sat at one of the tables, eating the last of a strawberry upside-down cake she’d made for the occasion. Kieran had taken the seat next to her, pointed out Waverly’s mother dancing with Kalik Hassan, twirling and giggling. Waverly had laughed when her mother tripped, and he’d taken her hand and pulled her closer. She’d turned to him, surprised, and then she’d smiled.
Kieran felt inhuman by the time the last crew member was put into the air lock, as though the part that made him a person had died and had left behind a creature that didn’t think or feel. Arthur looked exhausted as he worked the controls, overriding the system that pumped the air out of the air lock. They had to leave the air inside or there would be nothing to push the bodies out and away from the ship. When Arthur had it all set up, his thumb hovering over the red button, Kieran put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“Shouldn’t we say something?” Kieran whispered.
“You mean like a prayer?”
The two boys looked at each other, blank. Kieran couldn’t think of what to do. It was Arthur who finally began. He sang, his voice a true tenor that filled the shuttle bay. After a few bars, Kieran joined in. He knew this ancient melody and those words. He realized as he sang how beautiful they were: “Blackbird singing in the dead of night. / Take these broken wings and learn to fly.”
When the song was done, Arthur pressed the button to open the outer air lock doors. The sound was explosive. Kieran looked through the window to make sure they’d all gone.
The air lock was empty.
Kieran and Art
hur were silent in the elevator on the way back to Central Command. When the elevator doors opened, Arthur drifted out wordlessly, looking wrecked.
Desperate for some comfort, Kieran drifted down the corridor to Captain Jones’ office. Kieran needed some idea of how to go on, and he had no idea where else to look. At first it felt wrong to be here, as if he were intruding. The room felt small and dark without the Captain sitting in his chair looking out the porthole. He hooked himself to the desk chair, and he ran his fingers over the smooth writing pad. He longed for the big man to come and tell him he was doing a good job, that he and Arthur had done the right thing. But there was no one to tell him that. He couldn’t even tell himself. He wasn’t sure he believed it.
Through the walls, he could hear the other boys crying their hearts out.
What could he do for them? They were lost and grieving. But if they fell apart, they’d never survive this. They would make some stupid mistake, like forget to clean the air filters or fail to check the water purification system. Then it would be all over. The boys needed a leader.
Kieran tapped at Captain Jones’s personal com screen and scrolled down the diary entries. He racked his brain, trying to think of an occasion like this one when the crew faced such terrible losses. The only comparable time had been when that air lock accident had sent three people spinning into space—the accident that took Seth’s mother and Waverly’s father. Kieran found the speech Captain Jones had given then, but it didn’t measure up to what was happening. Nothing in the Captain’s diary did, either.
One folder in the personal files struck Kieran. It was marked “Sermons.” There might be something here.
He scanned the titles briefly and found one called “When All Hope Is Lost.” He opened the file and began to read. It was a short speech, but it was beautiful, and by the time he finished reading, Kieran felt better. He thought the other boys would feel better, too.
Kieran transferred the sermon to a portable screen that he hooked to his belt, and he drifted back out to the corridor, now empty. The last of the boys had spoken with the parents or had learned about what happened to them if they were counted among the dead. It was over.
The loudspeaker was tethered next to the door of the dormitory, and Kieran took hold of it. He didn’t know how to get the boys’ attention. Calling them over seemed wrong somehow. So he simply began to read:
“Sometimes in our lives we must face the great lack. The nothingness of loss rears up and we have no choice but to bear it. What else can we do? We look outside our empty portholes at the enormity of Creation, pinpoints of stars that seem eternal, and we feel so small, so alone. Insignificant. How could anything we do matter in such a cosmos?”
Kieran heard snickering from the corner of the room where Seth and his friends hovered, but he paid them no mind. Some of the boys were looking at him through their tears.
“We do matter. To believe that our lives are meaningful is the essence of faith. We are not as large, or as bright, or as eternal as the stars, but we carry humankind’s message of love across the galaxy. We are the first. We are the world makers. Our nourishment is hope. Like the tender reed shaking in the wind, we will reach up to a new sun.”
Kieran paused before the last paragraph and looked up. All the boys were looking at him now. Many of them were crying openly, sending tears to float in the air of the central bunker like snow, but they were quiet. Even Seth was silent as he watched Kieran take command of the room.
“Humankind will not recede into the darkness. The journey is long, the mission is difficult, some say impossible, but we will prevail. There will come a time when children gather around a fire and look at stars unknown to us. They will remember our sacrifices. And our names will fill their songs.”
None of the boys spoke, but the room felt less stifling. Kieran attached the loudspeaker to the hook by the door and drifted down to his bunk. He slid into the blankets, zipped them closed, and, hugging the portable screen to his chest, he finally closed his eyes.
But his mind went on working, seeing the bodies, the blood, the pain in their faces. And now the rest of the adults were dying in the engine room. Would he have to do this again? There had to be a way to get the crew out of there. He couldn’t just give up on them. He wouldn’t.
He couldn’t sleep now, not with so much to do. He got out of his cot and began to walk to the engine room in perfect gravity. The more he walked, the longer the dormitory seemed. He looked around him, and every boy in every cot was Seth Ardvale, looking at him with those accusing blue eyes.
He was dreaming. He was still in his cot. He tried to get up again, but his limbs were paralyzed.
He must sleep. His body had shut down. He would sleep for a few hours.
The words of the sermon, our names will fill their songs, ran through his mind, soothed him. Before he dropped off, he wished that he could thank whoever had written it.
What had been the name?
Oh yes.
Anne Mather.
DECOMPRESSION
Kieran woke after a few hours, not quite refreshed but better able to function now that he’d rested. The other boys in the dormitory lay on their cots, still asleep, but a few had already unhooked and hovered near the ceiling. Now that the boys were accustomed to zero grav and the risk of injury was minimal, Kieran allowed them to hover as long as they wanted. He couldn’t prevent them from doing it anyway, and he’d learned it was best not to give orders that were sure to be disobeyed.
Kieran unhooked from his cot and kicked himself up to the ceiling. He pulled himself past the galley, where Randy Ortega was rehydrating dozens of breakfast rations, and across the large room, nodding at the boys who were awake in their cots below him. Groggy, he crossed the corridor and floated into Central Command, where he found Seth and Sarek and a few other boys huddled around a console.
“What’s going on?” Kieran asked as he rubbed sleep out of his eyes.
None of them answered, so Kieran pushed himself down toward the floor and looked at the vid screen over Seth’s shoulder. They were watching a view of the engine room, but there was no movement.
“What is it?” Kieran asked again.
Grudgingly, Seth said, “We can’t see anyone.”
“No one?” Kieran asked.
Sarek shook his head. “We can’t get them on the intercom, either.”
“For how long?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“When was their last communication?”
“It was a text, forty minutes ago.”
“Where is it?”
Seth handed Kieran a piece of paper. All it said was: “Engines back online at 08:30. We love you.”
“What the hell does this mean?” Kieran asked, his voice high.
“We don’t know what it means!” Seth snapped. The bandage on his head shifted, and his hand shot up to press it back in place. A bloodstain, brown around the edges but red in the center, marked the middle of the compress like a bullet hole. Seth’s hair was greasy, and his eyes were wild in the way they darted over the screen. The stress was getting to him, Kieran could see. He wondered if Seth had slept at all.
“Look! There!” Sarek pointed at the corner of the screen, where Kieran saw a human foot moving. It floated off toward the aft side of the engine room.
“Are there any other video links to that part of the ship?” Kieran asked.
“Only the air locks,” Seth said. “But the cameras are turned off, or covered up or something.”
“Why would they cover up the cameras to the air locks?” Kieran asked.
No one answered. They didn’t have to. The truth came to Kieran in an instant. “Oh no.”
With shaking fingers, Kieran engaged the intercom for the engine room.
“Stop what you’re doing. Stop it! I know you hear me!” he screamed. “And you think you’re being heroic, but you’re not!”
The other boys looked at Kieran, real fear in their eyes for once instead of anger. Even Set
h was wide-eyed, and his teeth gnawed at his lips, which had gone white.
Kieran waited for a response, then, after hearing none, he punched at the intercom switch again. “Here’s what’s going to happen. Whether you decompress the engine room or not, I’m bringing a shuttle around to dock with the air lock you’re about to open. So you may as well hang on for five minutes. Just five minutes!”
“What are they doing?” Sarek asked. His lips pulled away from his teeth in a frightened grimace.
A dark realization clouded Seth’s face. “They want to blow out the engine room.”
“Why?” screamed Sarek. “The engine’s all fixed!”
“To get rid of the radioactive gas,” Kieran said. And their bodies, he almost added before thinking better of it. He didn’t know how many of the adults were still alive. Maybe a few. Maybe all. They’d received what was probably a fatal dose of radiation and had decided to end it quickly rather than linger, but he wasn’t going to let them do it.
He released his harness and jabbed a finger at Sarek. “Stay on the com. Keep talking to them. I’ll contact you when I’m in the shuttle.”
Seth scowled. “You don’t know how to pilot one of those.”
“Neither do you,” Kieran said over his shoulder.
“I’m coming with you,” Seth said.
Kieran pulled himself along the ceiling to the central elevators and jabbed the button. The elevator door opened immediately. He pulled himself in and, without waiting to see if Seth had followed, pressed the button for the shuttle bay level. Seth floated next to him, bracing himself against the ceiling. Kieran studied Seth’s profile, trying to see him as Waverly might, but the exercise made him feel foolish at a time like this, and he turned away.
Seth seemed to read his mind. “You must be worried about Waverly.”
“I can’t think about anything else.”
“Me neither,” Seth said, his eyes steady on Kieran. “I tried to stop them. I want you to know that.”
“I know. I saw,” Kieran said quietly. He could hear the other boy breathing forcefully. Everything Seth did was forceful. “Thanks for trying.”