“You should,” the monster says. “It’s a big ship, but there is nowhere to run.”
“If we run, you will hunt us. If we kill you, then—”
“Then you are forever free,” the monster finishes.
She knew what I was going to say, yet I’ve never spoken those words out loud. I’ve only thought them. A new strain of anxiety swirls inside me, a sense of foreboding and despair. The mud is sinking, retreating, a hard knowledge is solidifying…it’s almost here, almost here and I don’t want to know I don’t want to know.
I scream at her, a three-word roar so loud it could shake the stars themselves.
“Who…are…you?”
“You still don’t know? Amazing.”
The truth erupts, stabs through me like a thousand spears shredding my flesh. I finally understand my fear, and I know why this thing is death.
I recognize her voice, because it is mine.
“My name,” she says, “is Matilda Savage.”
THIRTY-FIVE
The monster is me.
I am the monster.
I want to shout out that this thing is a liar, but there is no point. At the core of all that I am, I know she is telling the truth.
How can this be? How can I be in two places at once? How could I look like that?
Everything goes black. Falling. I feel Bishop’s hands around my waist, lifting me. I must weigh nothing at all, it seems so easy for him. My feet find the floor. I stand on my own, woozy, head swimming.
I look for my spear.
Aramovsky is holding it. He’s smiling. None of this bothers him. In his mind, the way things are is the way his precious gods want things to be.
“Go back up the ladder, Em,” he says. “It’s all right. I’ll handle things from here.”
Bishop reaches out fast, tears the spear from Aramovsky’s hands. Bishop hands the spear to me.
Aramovsky doesn’t stop smiling. Perhaps Bishop isn’t the only one who wonders who would win a new vote. That’s what Aramovsky said. At the time, I thought he was saying Bishop would win.
But maybe he wasn’t thinking about Bishop at all.
Matilda speaks; her voice drowns out all thoughts of Aramovsky.
“We don’t need everyone,” she says, now calm and loving. “If you and the ones we do need put down your weapons, fulfill your obligations, then the ones we don’t need will be allowed to live.”
She wants me to agree to this?
“The ones you don’t need get to live,” I echo. “Which means the ones you do need…die?”
“None of you will die,” she says. “Not that any of you are alive to begin with. At least this way, some of you get to carry on with your excuse of an existence.”
Bishop snarls, shakes his head. He won’t give up any of our people, and neither will I. Not to this vile thing, not to anyone.
“We refuse,” I say. I will fight her, fight for my own life, fight for all of our lives, but I’m reeling, in danger of going as insane as Brewer. My voice is harsh and defiant one second, softly begging the next. “How can I be you? I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t,” Matilda says. “You’re not old enough to understand.”
“Just tell me!”
It’s hard to know what her facial expressions mean when she doesn’t have a human face, but she seems to be getting annoyed.
“Brewer woke you,” she says. “He did it to hurt me, to hurt all of us. That bastard. Every moment you are awake, girl, it puts my life at risk. Every piece of information you learn, it puts my life at risk.”
How can that be? How can my learning something be a danger to her?
We stare at each other, two Matilda Savages locked in a battle of wills, the same will, separated by whatever magic made this happen. She needs me, yet I want nothing to do with her. No, that’s not true—I need to know what this is all about, and she can tell me.
“If you want me to consider your offer,” I say, “then explain how it’s possible you and I are the same person.”
She sighs, a sound like ripping paper. “I accept, but we aren’t really the same person. I am a person—you are property. This ship traveled from a place to which we can never return. We left there to find a new home, a new world. We knew the journey would take centuries. To survive the trip, our bodies were permanently modified. They cannot be changed back. We were remade as you see us now.”
“Ugly,” I say before I can stop the word.
Matilda nods. “Yes, the process made us ugly. It also brought constant pain, pain we have endured for longer than your unfinished mind can comprehend. When we started the trip, the Cherished began cultivating copies of their bodies, making what we call receptacles. These receptacles were modified to survive on Omeyocan, the planet below.”
Omeyocan.
Brewer didn’t tell us the name of the planet. Omeyocan…the word is a song that makes my brain tingle and my throat tighten. It is where we belong.
She also used a word that Brewer said earlier: the Cherished. Is she part of that group? Are we? I don’t think it matters. If we can get to Omeyocan, we can leave this all behind.
“Receptacles grow very, very slowly,” Matilda says. She’s talking to me like I am a child, or stupid, or both. “When we arrived here, we were to transfer our thoughts and memories to the receptacles so that we could live on the surface without disease, immune from Omeyocan’s subtle poisons that would have slowly killed us.”
I look at the planet hanging in the starry blackness.
“So why didn’t you do the transfer?”
“On the way here, there was a…let’s call it a disagreement,” she says. “Some people had to be taught a lesson. Brewer was one of those people. The bastard tricked us, found a way to lock you away from me. You were supposed to come out of the husk two centuries ago, when your body was twelve years old—just as the scripture requires. But you didn’t come out, because of Brewer. Your body kept growing, becoming older and bigger than it was supposed to.”
My reality is crumbling. I was in that coffin for two hundred years? No, that’s the extra time I was in there. That’s why our clothes are too small—they would have fit the twelve-year-old me. And it’s why they are so big on the people who died as little children. Had those kids stayed alive, they would have grown into their uniforms. But many, like the other Brewer, didn’t get that chance.
You are the person who murdered me, he said.
Now I understand. My skin crawls anew at the sight of this evil thing before me.
“You killed the Brewer boy in our coffin room. He was just a child.”
Matilda scoffs, a sound like gravel scattered across a hard floor.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she says. “Not a child, a receptacle. Nothing more than a shell waiting to be filled. You, little leader, are my receptacle. Understand now? You’re not a person at all. Brewer has held you hostage for centuries. He said that if we came after him, he would destroy my receptacle the way I destroyed his. He must be dying. He woke you up out of spite, so that I could know my chance to be born again was fading away forever. He did it to hurt me, to make me suffer. But he made a mistake. Now that you are out, he can’t simply press a button and kill you in your husk.”
It’s all so much, too much.
“Brewer said he protected us.”
Matilda laughs. “Did he? No, it was his threat to kill you that kept me away all these years. But now his leverage is gone. I can finally have the reward I was promised.”
What she says is impossible. Yet, once again, I know she is telling the truth. I am her reward, like some animal to be given away as a prize. But she said I wouldn’t die. Would this process fill in my missing memories? Would it end the madness of not knowing who I am? My parents…I might finally remember my parents.
“If you transfer your thoughts, what happens to me? Would I know what you know?”
Matilda pauses. “In a manner of speaking, yes. We are the same person. The transfer would ma
ke us whole.”
She’s not lying, but she’s also not telling me all the truth.
“It would make you whole,” I say. “I asked what happens to me. If you do your transfer, what happens to the person I am?”
“You are not a person! You are—”
I shake the spear at her. “Then make another copy! You can’t have me! You can’t have any of us!”
The red eyes fade to a reddish pink. She visibly calms herself. The loving voice comes back—does she think she can soothe me the way a parent soothes a little child?
“We can’t make more receptacles,” she says. “The process takes centuries. Mental maps, synaptic connections, baseline memories that form neural pathways—if these things aren’t a match, if the foundation isn’t identical, then the transfer can’t overwrite.”
Overwrite. The word instantly terrifies me. The word is worse than death, worse than murder. If Matilda gets me, my body will live on, but who I am—what I am—that will be erased.
I was created to be destroyed.
“So if I’m you, why can’t I remember? I know how to speak and read, but my past is all muddy, all blanked out. Why?”
“Because you don’t really have memories,” Matilda says. “Language, math, science, skills…those things are the framework of a mind. It is our experiences that make us what we are. Individual identity forms in the way we perceive things, the way we react, the way we feel. The knowledge your brain received while you were in the husk provided the biological scaffolding needed to support who I am. You’re a shell, little leader. I am the yolk. You were made so that I can live. You’re my only hope. Come and merge with me now so we can be as we were meant to be.”
I thought she was a monster because of the way she looks, but her evil goes far beyond appearances. She wants to make me vanish. She wants it to be like I never existed at all, and she’s trying to make that sound like it is a beautiful thing.
I shake my head. “I refuse.”
The colors in her eyes darken, spin faster.
“You don’t understand,” she says. “You’re not old enough to understand. I am your progenitor and you are my receptacle—you can’t make your own decisions!”
Maybe she knows more than I do, more than I could ever learn, but she doesn’t know me.
“You’re wrong, Matilda. I’ve been making decisions since the moment I woke up. And I’ll keep making them. I think I get it now—the longer I live, the better the chance that you’ll die. And you should have died a long time ago.”
She is so angry she shakes. I see a bit of fluid leak down the left side of her face, a thin rivulet that gathers in one wrinkle before overflowing it, oozing down to the next.
“What about the ones we don’t need?” she asks, obviously fighting to control her rage. “Don’t you want them to survive, little leader? Their progenitors are already dead, so they can’t be overwritten. Come to me willingly, and they will live. If I have to hunt you down, I will kill them all, each and every one. I will torture them first, tell them that their agony is because of your selfishness. I will—”
“You will never get me.” The words come out like grinding glass. Matilda had her life, and she can keep it—my life is mine. “You won’t get me. You won’t get any of us.”
She leans forward until her furious red eyes fill the air above the pedestal.
“I’ll find you. Brewer held you hostage, but that is over. Come to the orchards, girl. You will come or I swear by Tlaloc that all of your friends will suffer.”
That name again…
“Tlaloc,” I say. “I remember that name. Who is it?”
Matilda leans back. “You’re lying. You don’t remember that name. You can’t remember things like that, it’s not part of the process.” She’s more agitated than angry now. She seems worried. “Do you remember anything else?”
I do. I remember the smell of pork chops. I remember how it felt to be mocked and ridiculed. I remember that Tchaikovsky was a musician. I remember the trip to the farm. But if Matilda is this upset about that name, Tlaloc, telling her more could make her panic. She wants me to come to her: that gives us a little bit of time, time we probably won’t have if she comes after us instead.
“Not really,” I say. “Hints of things, vague emotions, but…I don’t remember anything.”
Matilda’s sigh of relief makes her face-folds flutter.
“That’s good,” she says. “Brewer obviously made mistakes in the process, but it is not too late. The longer you are away from me, the more memories of your own you form, the more likely the overwrite will fail and we will both die. Come now and I promise you that I will be humane to your friends.”
Humane…the same word I used when Bishop and I killed the pig. More wisps of memory filter in from that trip to the farm. The farmer told us that when they slaughtered the pigs, they tried to do it as quickly and painlessly as possible. He called that “being humane.”
Kill them fast or kill them slow, the pigs all wound up dead. That’s all we are to Matilda…livestock.
She is a monster, a thousand-year-old abomination. She wants me to fulfill my “destiny,” a destiny defined by her.
“We are not your property,” I say. “Our lives are our own.”
The ugly thing shakes its head.
“Sooner than you think, hunger and thirst will drive you to me anyway,” she says. “Throw down your weapons, come to me now, and at least your friends will live. If we have to hunt you, they will all die. Last chance, girl—what is your answer?”
In that moment, I know that if I ever come face-to-face with Matilda, I will kill her.
We are the Birthday Children, and we will find a way to survive.
“My answer is never,” I say. “And one more thing—you always were a bitch, Savage.”
I look over to El-Saffani, point at the three pedestals.
“Break those, then follow me.”
I turn my back on Matilda and walk to the ladder. I hear her screaming at me, saying something about how I must listen, how I must obey, how I’m not old enough to really understand.
I start up the rungs, leaving behind the sounds of destruction.
THIRTY-SIX
We run downhill.
We run past the severed arms, the mangled bodies, the piles of skulls.
The more I know, the more all of this makes sense.
Brewer is one of the monsters, one of the Grownups, one of the “Cherished.” Maybe those are all the same things. His copy, his receptacle, died—murdered by the woman that is me—leaving him stranded in an ancient, twisted body. A journey of over a thousand years, and at the end he will simply wither and die. He has no hope.
I might go crazy, too.
We reach the intersection where our two tribes met. We turn left. We are again tiny insects crawling in the long, straight hallway that runs along the inside of a giant cylinder. We are heading back to our people.
What happened on this ship? Some people do not approve of being sacrificed, Brewer had said. There was a revolt, a war. Many died. Did everyone on this ship have a copy? Was everyone promised a new life on Omeyocan?
The answers don’t really matter. Choices have consequences. The Grownups made choices that destroyed their lives. Our choices are yet to be made, our lives are yet to be lived—if we can get away from here.
We run and run and run. Matilda’s monsters will start hunting us soon, if they aren’t already. We have to get to our friends before her kind gets to them first.
Brewer didn’t tell us where the shuttle was. He didn’t have time. Matilda pushed him out somehow, or maybe broke his pillar, I don’t know. He was toying with us, though, and in his toying was a hint—I know how to find the shuttle, and, hopefully, we will also find Bello.
Before, I wasn’t sure if I should be the leader. I’m sure now. Among all of us, I am unique. I think, I don’t simply react. I make decisions when doing so is hard. I know what it means to kill. I will make sure we do wh
at must be done, even if I have to force those who disagree with me into cooperating. I’m going to get my people out of here and get them out alive—if they want to vote for someone else when we’re all safe, that’s fine with me.
The Grownups divided their tribe and fought each other. I will keep our tribe unified, and we will fight as one.
I make so much noise when I run. Gaston does, too, and also Aramovsky, the three of us huffing and puffing, our feet slapping on the floor. I wouldn’t have noticed except for the silence of the circle-stars. I can barely hear Bishop even though he is twice my size and is right next to me.
Before long, I see the dark spot on the floor where Yong’s life leaked out into the dust.
But something is different.
The hallway on the left, the dark one where O’Malley and Aramovsky took Yong’s body…it is brighter. And we were careful to move around the bloody slush—now it is trampled as if a dozen people ran through it.
I hear voices coming from the intersection. No one should be here. Everyone should be in our coffin room, protected by Coyotl and Farrar.
“Bishop, someone is up there.”
He nods. He heard it long before I did.
“Get ready to fight,” he says.
Are Matilda’s monsters already here?
El-Saffani slows, waiting for us to catch up.
Voices filter from out of the once-dark hall, but they aren’t the hissing obscenities of the Grownups. These voices sound normal, like ours, but strange. Higher pitched. Excited. Loud.
We move closer to the intersection, just a few steps away now. My clumsiness and the noisy feet of Gaston and Aramovsky must alert them: a person turns the corner and stares at us, wide-eyed.
A young girl with dark brown skin.
She’s wearing a clean white shirt, a red tie, a red and black plaid skirt.
The clothes fit her perfectly.
I slow to a stop. So do Bishop, El-Saffani and the others.
The girl’s mouth hangs open. A skinny boy turns the corner and joins her. Then another. And another little girl. Uniformed children quickly fill the intersection, gawking at the gray-skinned adults carrying bones as weapons.