“Why don’t you go, Em?” he says. “You can find food and water, bring it back for us. We can wait here in case the grownups come.”
Yong makes a pfft sound with his mouth.
“You’re a brave one, Aramovsky,” he says.
Aramovsky glares at Yong. “It’s not about bravery, it’s about practicality.”
Yong rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that’s what it is. Practicality. Then how about you go, Aramovsky? The rest of us can stay and be practical.”
Aramovsky draws himself up to his full height. He is much taller than the other boy.
“Don’t you tell me what to do,” he says.
Yong’s arms uncross. His hands drop to his sides, curl into fists.
“You volunteer others, but you won’t go yourself? Then how about I make you go?”
Yong smiles. It’s a beautiful smile, the kind that would make me want to follow him around all day from a distance, just to see what he does, see who he talks to. But his eyes…they radiate something else altogether. Aramovsky is taller and both boys are packed with muscle, but Yong wants to fight—Aramovsky does not. Maybe Aramovsky tried to use his size to intimidate, but it backfired on him and now he doesn’t know what to do.
“We stay together,” I say in a rush. “We aren’t making anyone do anything, okay?”
Aramovsky nods quickly. “Em’s right.”
Yong again stares at me. I get the impression I’m annoying him.
O’Malley tries for the tenth time to pull his top two shirt buttons together, even though he has to know by now his chest is too big for that. He gives up, instead keeps a hand pressed near his neck, as if he’s embarrassed so much skin is showing.
He looks at me.
“Em, why do you get to choose what we do? Are you in charge?”
There is no malice in his voice. He’s not accusing me of anything; he’s asking a question that needs to be asked.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Aramovsky points at me. No, he points at my forehead.
“Em can’t be in charge. She’s a circle.”
He says that like my symbol has significance. It does, I know it does—all our symbols have significance. We can feel it. But from the searching looks on everyone’s faces, none of us know what that significance is.
O’Malley shrugs. “If Em doesn’t make the decisions, then who does?”
No one speaks. We’re kids: someone is supposed to tell us what to do. That’s the way things are.
Finally, Yong breaks the silence.
“I’ll do it.”
His arms are crossed again, his head is tilted slightly to the right. He is a walking challenge, daring anyone to contradict him. Something about his presence promises pain.
“I’ll run things,” he says. “You all do what I say and we’ll be fine.”
I don’t think he should be in charge. Or Aramovsky, for that matter—something about the tall boy makes me nervous. But who am I to say Yong shouldn’t lead? Someone has to get us out of here, someone has to make decisions.
Yong stares at Bello, who looks down instantly. He stares at Spingate; she clears her throat, blushes again, then shrugs. Yong tries to stare at Aramovsky, but Aramovsky won’t even meet his eyes. I’m the next target for Yong’s burning glare. I try to match it, try to wordlessly stand up to him, but I can’t—I look away. Those fists of his…would he hit me?
I don’t even know if I’ve ever been in a fight.
Finally, Yong stares at O’Malley.
O’Malley stares right back; calm, not threatening, but not reacting to Yong’s intimidation, either.
“Em got out of her coffin on her own,” O’Malley says. “No one else did that. Then she freed Spingate. The two of them got the rest of us out. Without Em, we all might still be asleep. Or, worse, awake and trapped in the coffins.”
Yong frowns. He seems confused, as if he expected any disagreement to involve shouting and pushing, not simple reasoning. O’Malley isn’t even arguing with Yong, he’s simply presenting facts.
“So she got us out,” Yong says. “So what? She has no idea what’s going on. Getting us out of the coffins doesn’t mean she’s a good leader.”
O’Malley thinks on this for a moment, really considering it, then nods.
“That’s true, it doesn’t mean she’s a good leader,” he says. “But she didn’t panic. When Spingate called for help, Em helped her. Em told all of us what was happening and didn’t pretend that she knew more than she did. Don’t you think those are qualities we’d want in a leader?”
Yong says nothing.
I wouldn’t have thought those things made me a leader, but the way O’Malley pointed them out makes it sound so obvious.
Maybe Yong wants to argue, but there’s nothing to argue against.
“Whatever,” he says, and leans on a coffin. He looks away, taking in the aisle of dust as if it bores him only slightly less than we do.
Spingate walks to me, offers me the tool. She doesn’t need to say why—the leader should carry it.
“You can be in charge, Em,” she says. She looks at Bello and Aramovsky. “Don’t you think Em should be in charge?”
A tooth-girl wants me to lead? My blurry memories tell me that’s an impossibility, and yet I see it with my own eyes.
Bello and Aramovsky glance at each other. Her hand-over-hand fussing starts up again.
“Until we find the grownups,” she says quietly. “Em can be in charge until we find the grownups.”
Aramovsky clearly doesn’t agree, but he stays quiet.
I take the tool from Spingate. I smile at her. She smiles back.
O’Malley is staring at me. Those blue eyes lock me in, make me feel jittery. When he looks at me, does his stomach tingle the way mine does when I look at him? He defended me. Why? Does he really think I could be a good leader?
He gives me a small smile, then he shrugs.
“I guess it’s up to you, Em. What do we do now?”
What do we do? How should I know? I’m in charge, but I realize that in the whole exchange I never asked to be in charge. That doesn’t seem to matter—everyone is waiting for me to make a decision.
So I make one.
“First, we get out of this room.”
I walk to the archway. The others follow close behind. Yong waits until we stand before it, then he joins us.
The archway is made of rust-caked metal, covered in dusty symbols just like the walls and coffins. What I thought might be doors are two slabs of stone, pressed together so tightly the vertical line separating them could be mistaken for a thin scratch. I don’t see any handles, any way to open them.
“Promising,” Aramovsky says. “Your leadership is off to a wonderful start.”
I ignore him.
Spingate steps forward and wipes dust from the archway’s right side, revealing sparkling gemstones set into the flaking metal.
Her lips move. I wait while she thinks.
“It’s similar to the coffins,” she says finally. “I push these three red jewels—”
She presses them, one, two, three, each jewel moving down a tiny bit until it clicks.
Below the jewels, a small panel pops open. Inside are two holes, same as we saw in the coffins.
Spingate claps and jumps up and down, delighted with her discovery.
I look at her, amazed. “How do you know how to do that?”
She bites her lower lip. Her eyebrows go up, then she shakes her head and shrugs.
“I don’t know. It seems…kind of obvious, somehow.” She points to a row of three red jewels on the tool’s shaft. “Press those—one, two, three—then use it to open the door.”
I pause a moment before doing so. If this doesn’t work, if the doors won’t open, I have no idea what we do next. Some leader I am.
I press the red jewels: one, two, three. I slide the tool’s prongs into the holes, feel a small vibration as something locks tight. The tool has become a handle. I lift it,
feel an initial, wiggling resistance. I gradually increase the pressure until something hidden and frozen seems to break free, then the tool rises smoothly and clanks to a stop.
The floor shudders, the walls groan. A light shower of dust rains down from the ceiling.
A loud clang echoes through the air. The door-halves slide open a grinding fraction of an inch, making the entire room vibrate.
Outside our coffin room, the light is brighter.
The vibrations stop. The doors slowly open.
EIGHT
A wave of warm air caresses us.
Outside our open door is a hallway. The walls are white and smooth, but scratched and cracked in places. The ceiling seems to be made from some kind of pale, rough crystal that glows brightly. Like the coffin room, the floor is a field of soft gray.
Bello and Aramovsky hold each other, her head barely reaching his shoulder. Spingate takes a step behind O’Malley, who is watching me, waiting for me to act. Yong lurks in the background, still pretending to be bored as far as I know.
Someone has to go first.
I take a deep breath. I’m the leader, right? That means I have to lead. I pull the tool free.
When I step into the hallway, I am surprised that Yong steps out with me.
That smirk again. “Can’t let you have all the glory, can I?”
He pretended to be bored with us, but couldn’t let me be the first one out. Yong is strange. Or maybe he’s normal. I have no way of knowing.
The hall runs to the left and right, straight and true as far as I can see in either direction. And on both sides, more to the right than the left, bumpy things, all across the floor, just as coated in dust as the floor itself.
Those things are…
I think of Brewer, shriveled-up little Brewer.
Those things are…
I squeeze my eyes shut. My brain doesn’t seem to work. My thoughts feel clogged, my head feels…muddy is the word that seems right. I can’t put the pieces together. I don’t want to put them together.
As a group, the others step out around me. No one says a word.
Yong turns right, walks to the first pile of bumpy things. He reaches down and picks something up. Dust tumbles from it, tiny waterfalls of curling motes that hang in the air.
He’s holding a bone.
Long, white, with bits of dark material clinging to it—scraps of dried meat. It looks like he is holding a nightmarish club.
“It’s a femur,” Spingate says, her words a shocked sigh. “A human femur.”
Yong drops it. He looks down, slowly turns in place. He is surrounded by skeletons, by bones—piles and piles of them.
This hallway is full of dead people.
Hands on my arm: Bello, clinging to me.
“Em, this isn’t right,” she says. “Let’s leave this place.”
A great idea, if only I knew where to go.
Yong reaches for a round bump near his feet. His hands brush away the gray, then come up holding a human skull covered in tightly dried skin. There is no jawbone. Two empty eye sockets stare out.
He looks at it, adjusts it in his hands. As he does, the stiff flesh along the jaw cracks and crumbles, becomes a puff of descending dust.
And then I understand. The dust…it’s skin. Skin and muscle, eyes and brains and guts that have become nothing more than floating powder. Powder that was in my mouth, down my throat, powder that is all around me, coating everything.
What I thought was a sea of dust is an ocean of death.
Yong drops the skull, then runs back to us, to the safety of the group.
Bello cries silently. O’Malley puts his arm around her.
Everyone is looking at me again, waiting for me to tell them what to do. Even Yong. But I don’t know what to do. Who would? I have to think, have to figure out what makes sense.
The hallway really seems to go on forever in both directions. All along it are more archway doors that look like the one we just walked out of. Some of these doors are slightly open; dark spaces with who knows what inside. Others are still sealed shut, the stone gouged and chipped.
Now that I’ve seen the bones, I can’t un-see them. Up and down the hall, lumps in the dust.
Bones are everywhere.
Some are full skeletons. Some bones lie by themselves: cracked, broken, splintered. A few of them are blackened, charred—they were burned.
Bello’s silent cry shifts to a quiet sob. Something about her tears suggests weakness (crying doesn’t fix anything), makes me want to scream at her to shut up, to stop it already. But I know she can’t help it.
“Where are we?” she says through the tears. “What happened here?”
O’Malley still has his arm around her. If I was the one crying, would he put his arm around me?
He lets go of Bello and walks a few steps to Aramovsky, whispers something in the taller boy’s ear. Aramovsky moves to Bello. He puts his arm around her, pulls her in close. Bello rests her head against his white-shirted shoulder.
O’Malley walks to the skull. He picks it up, brushes off what little dust remains. A few crispy flakes of skin crumble away. He turns it in his hands, holds it toward us so we can see the top.
There is a jagged, roughly triangular hole in the curved white bone.
“Someone killed this person,” he says. “Hit him, or her, with something heavy. Maybe there was a battle.” He squints at it, then at us, at our heads, as if he is comparing the size. “I think these people were grownups. Grownups who slaughtered each other.”
How many dead people lie in this hallway? Maybe a hundred? It’s hard to tell with the parts scattered all over.
One of the dusty skeletons has something sticking out of it. Is that a handle? I walk to what was once a person, grab the handle and pull it free.
I stare at a flat, pointed piece of metal: I’m holding a knife.
If I put the bottom of the metal handle in the crook of my elbow, the knifepoint would reach to the tip of my middle finger. Where the blade joins the handle, two pieces of thin, strong metal stick out the sides. They are etched with tiny carvings of stepped pyramids and suns. At the very end of the handle, below where my hand holds the grip, is a flat, round disc ringed by tiny red gemstones, with another circle of the same stones inside it.
The circle-in-a-circle symbol: exactly like the one on Aramovsky’s forehead.
I’m holding the tool in one hand, the knife in the other.
Bello’s nose wrinkles. “Em, is that a sword?”
“Swords are bigger,” Yong says. “I think. No, they’re bigger.”
“Leave it here,” Bello says. “That’s for them. That’s for the grownups. We don’t need it.”
I want to drop it. Not because of her words, but because the knife frightens me. I don’t even want it touching my skin. This knife was used to kill. It was used to turn people—people like us—into nothing but piles of bones and puffs of dust.
The grownups killed each other. If any of them are still alive, will they try to kill us, too?
“We might have to defend ourselves,” I say to Bello. “We need it.”
She shakes her head. “We don’t need it. It’s a bad thing, please don’t bring it.”
Yong comes closer to me. His eyes are suddenly alive, burning with eagerness. He holds out his hand.
“Give the knife to me,” he says. “I’ll take it. You carry the tool.”
There is a hunger to his words, something…disturbing about his need. Just like I know it’s a bad idea if he leads, I know he shouldn’t have the knife.
“I’ll hold on to it for now,” I say.
He is standing in front of me, his back to the others. They can’t see his face, but I can. His upper lip twitches, twists into a sneer. His eagerness shifts, transforms. His heavy black hair hangs down almost over his eyes, eyes that blaze with hate.
“You’ll change your mind,” he says quietly. Then, in the faintest whisper: “Or I’ll change it for you.”
br /> Before I can respond, he smiles, turns and walks back to the others, leaving me alone with the skeleton.
I briefly wonder if I should tell everyone what he said, but I decide against it. We don’t need another argument right now. We need to follow Bello’s advice and get away from this place.
I look at the doors lining the hallway. Gouged, chipped, scratched. Were people desperate to get inside?
I see one set of doors that is slightly open. If we had come out of our room and turned left instead of right, this archway would have been a few feet down on the right-hand side. The space between the stone doors is barely wide enough for me to slide through if I turn sideways. Coming from inside that room, I see a dim, flickering light.
Does that room have more coffins? I walk toward it, past Bello and the others.
A strong hand lands on my shoulder.
It’s O’Malley.
“Em, don’t go in there,” he says.
He sees me looking at his hand, then pulls it away. His face flushes. He didn’t act like that when he put his arm around Bello.
“I have to,” I say. “There could be more of us inside.”
O’Malley closes his blue eyes for a second, swallows, nods once, opens them.
“Then I’m going in with you.”
Those words make my heart hammer so loud I wonder if he hears it.
I’m holding the knife and the tool. I thought the tool was a weapon at first—it’s not, but it will still work fine for that purpose.
I hold it out to O’Malley. “Take it,” I say. “In case there’s danger.”
Spingate gasps; she points at the tool.
“It’s called a scepter,” she says. “That word just popped into my head. The tool, that’s what it’s called.”
Scepter, tool, weapon…all I care about right now is that it is heavy and O’Malley can use it to smash things.
He takes it.
“I’m with you, Em,” he says.
His eyes…so blue…
I can’t look at him any longer, so I face the door. I walk to it and slide my body through the narrow opening.
O’Malley follows.
NINE
The room is dim, illuminated by a single flickering light high up in the arched ceiling.