Now I do.
A vast, sprawling land spreads out before me. In front of us, it looks as flat as flat can be, but the farther out I look, the more I see the curve.
I feel like a tiny insect standing inside a hollowed-out log of the largest tree to ever grow on Omeyocan.
Winding roads and paths stretch down the cylinder’s length, curve up and away to either side.
Large fenced spaces full of black cows, so far away they are little moving dots.
People riding horses.
Rectangular fields of crops: wheat, corn, tomatoes.
Spin nudges me, points to a nearby field of green plants.
“Those are turnips,” she says. “Kalle is going to think she died and went to heaven.”
Forest, too, rectangular swaths where the trees are green, not yellow.
Sprawling blue lakes.
Clusters of houses—villages.
Off to the left, a wooden silo painted red, and next to it, red with white trim, a barn. Around the barn, fenced-in black pigs.
A farm…something about a farm, something important…
Above me, a bright line of energy stretches down the length of this bizarre place. I feel its heat on my face. This line must act as the sun, spreading light across this curved landscape. The line is bright enough that I can’t see past it, to where the cylinder’s curves meet high above.
Yong laughs at our amazement. His laugh isn’t like Brewer’s, like the sound of broken bones scraping together, or harsh and evil like Matilda’s—Yong’s laugh is rich and full of life.
“Welcome home,” he says.
Marcus takes a few steps ahead of me, turns, spreads his arms out wide.
“Look at it,” he says. “For twelve centuries, the Flatland has sustained our people. The gods provide.”
Yes, a “god” provided this. I wonder what Marcus would think if he knew what that god looked like.
If what Brewer says is true, the Xolotl once supported over forty thousand. With the New People, the Springers and us, we are at most sixty-five hundred—there is no reason we can’t survive here, flourish here.
Barkah hops past Marcus. The Springer king gawks at the expansive space. I wonder what’s going through his head.
Finally, he turns to look at me.
“Hem…your home?”
“Our home,” I say. “For all of us, together.”
He goes back to gawking. Lahfah hops out to join him. Their tails intertwine. Together, they stand there, trying to see everything all at once.
Victor puts an arm around me, shakes me out of pure excitement.
“Just look at this place! Em, you did it.”
He jogs to Barkah and Lahfah. The three of them start dancing together.
Dancing.
Spingate takes my hand. Her smile is warm, loving, apologetic.
“Victor is right,” she says. “You found a way.”
She sounds different. She looks different. We are only a few hours separated from our ordeal on the planet, yet the hate, animosity and fear she’s carried for weeks has finally drained away.
We may never know why some of us were more susceptible to the Grub’s influence than others. All I know is that, finally, I am looking at the girl I knew. The real her.
I am looking at Theresa Spingate—my best friend.
“I still have to pay for what I did,” she says quietly. “I’ll never forgive myself.”
I think of how Aramovsky stopped me. Spingate killed Bello—I would have killed Spingate and her baby.
“We’ll figure it out,” I say. “We can’t take back the things we’ve done. All we can do is move forward and make the best life we can.”
I hug her. She hugs me back. I smell like smoke and blood and war. Spin, somehow, still smells clean. We’ve been through everything together. Maybe she’s not her full self, not yet, but once we leave this planet far behind, I know she will be.
I see a horse ride out from a village and gallop fast toward us. On it is a teenage boy wearing a robe like Marcus’s, but in black.
Barkah and Lahfah flick their wrists left, then right. White stones glow. Victor takes aim with his rifle.
Yong holds up a hand. “Don’t shoot. He’s not attacking, he’s a runner from Victor. Our Victor, I mean. Old Victor. Damn, this stuff gets confusing.”
“You can say that again,” Young Victor says.
The boy reins the horse to a stop before us.
“Victor needs you all at the war room,” he says. “The other ship, it’s changed course…it’s coming toward us.”
We ride black horses through the corridors. Horses, on a starship. It reminds me of being on Fenrir. I feel a pang of loss for that brave animal.
The horses gallop down the hallways, hooves clacking on stone. When people on the Xolotl need to get somewhere fast, this is how they do it. Yong quickly explained the ship used to be full of small vehicles and something he called a “tram,” but even the replacement parts for those things wore out centuries ago.
Such a strange place the Xolotl is.
We ride through a stone door into a larger room. Flags hang above the door. We saw a similar room a year ago, but it was dark and the floor was covered in grease.
Golden pedestals are set up all over the room. There are more Grownups here, as well as people wearing black togas. Teenagers run to us, take the horses’ reins, help us down, then lead the animals away.
Three of the pedestals are close together in the center of the room, their displays combined to make an image almost as big as that above the red well.
Old Victor, Bishop, Farrar and Gaston stand around those pedestals, staring up at a glowing Omeyocan, the familiar red dot of the Xolotl, and the dreaded green dot that is the Dragon. A blue line arcs between the two ships. In the middle of that line, a counter that reads 0:17:34:22. The last two digits are seconds, ticking down as we watch.
“Dragon is on an intercept trajectory with us,” Gaston says. “It’s coming fast.”
“What’s the countdown represent?” I ask.
Old Victor adjusts pedestal icons. The image above zooms in on the Dragon. It’s fuzzy from this distance, but I can make out a long tube mounted on top of the massive copper cylinder.
“They have a Goff Spear,” I say.
Gaston nods. “Not exactly like ours, and it’s mounted on a different spot on their hull. That means the Grub probably didn’t provide that weapon design. Humans came up with it on their own. So did the Wasps. There’s no doubt, though—it serves exactly the same purpose ours did. It’s a ship-killer.”
“The timer represents how long it will take the Wasp ship to reach that weapon’s can’t-miss range,” Old Victor says. “When the timer hits zero, if they fire their Goff Spear, we have no chance of stopping the round from connecting.”
Seventeen hours, thirty-four minutes and counting.
I’ve hated Matilda since I first learned of her existence, but never so much as right now.
“We have to take the bridge,” I say.
Bishop slowly shakes his head.
“Her area is sealed off by meter-thick blast doors which are guarded by beam-cannons in armored turrets,” he says. “When Old Victor said they’d been trying to get in there for centuries, he wasn’t kidding—we couldn’t get to Matilda in seventeen days, let alone seventeen hours.”
He rubs his fingers into his forehead. He’s slouching. Bishop is not the kind to easily admit defeat. If he says we don’t have enough time to get to Matilda, we don’t.
I refuse to accept that. “There has to be another way.”
Yong shakes his head. “There isn’t. I told you that when you came aboard. Bishop now sees the same thing. You will not get what you want by force. She wants one thing, and one thing only.”
Me. She wants me.
“No way,” Gaston says. “That monster will not get my friend.”
I look around the room, desperately hoping someone has an idea, even a bad one
. No one does. Not Bishop, not Spingate, not Gaston, not the Grownups. I see rage and frustration, but no answers.
My chest feels tight. It can’t end like this. There has to be a way. There has to be.
“Then we talk to Matilda again.” I point to the green dot. “We need to make her understand what’s coming for us.”
Yong speaks softly, patiently. “She understands just fine. She’s forcing us to decide right now—she gets Em, or everyone dies.”
He doesn’t sound surprised, or even concerned. Yong is ready for death. Life is just a show to him. No matter how the plot varies, he already knows how the story will end.
“But Matilda will die, too,” Spingate says, desperation bleeding from her every pore. “The witch has to know that!”
Old Victor nods. “She knows. Her power base is gone. She only has about thirty people still with her. We control most of the ship. This is the only chance she will ever have to get Em. She’s willing to risk death to take it.”
I look at the countdown clock: 0:17:32:26.
“Will the Wasps try to board us?” I ask no one in particular. “Like they did with the Goblin?”
Gaston throws up his hands. “Why would they? The Goblin was used as a sacrificial lamb so they could launch landing craft. There’s no purpose to capturing the Xolotl—they’ll just blow us out of the sky.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Spingate says. “Wasps control Omeyocan now. Why even bother with us?”
Someone answers her, but I don’t really hear it. As the others talk, I close my eyes, try to get my head around the pieces of this new puzzle. Maybe the Wasps destroy anything they find, no matter where it is. Or maybe the Grub is making them come after us, driving them into a frenzy to satisfy its bloodlust.
The Grub…
It can’t defend itself against all attacks, my false father said.
The Goff Spear cart on the plaza…
Several puzzle pieces form in my thoughts, and just as quickly, they snap together, fitting perfectly.
“They know. The Wasps know we have nukes.”
Conversation stops.
It was my decision that doomed us.
“The Wasps saw what the Goff Spear could do,” I say. “The first thing they would have done was search the Observatory for it, see if they could use our weapon against us to take out the Xolotl. The cannon is huge, it’s not hard to find. They got the hatch open, they saw the hexagonal shape of the barrel. They realized it’s the same size and shape as the cart on the plaza. The empty cart. It doesn’t take a gear to figure out we took Goff Spear rounds with us.”
Gaston hangs his head, covers his eyes with his hands.
“It might not even be that complicated,” he says. “We had the damn things hanging under our wings. The Wasps on the ground probably saw them. Em is right—it doesn’t take much intelligence to figure out what we’ve got.”
Bishop looks confused. “But why does it matter? Why are they coming after us instead of just letting us go?”
“Because the Wasps will do anything to protect the Grub,” I say. “If they think we have nukes that could kill the Grub, they’ll destroy us to make sure we can’t launch them. And they won’t let us leave, because we might come back someday. They need to kill us. Right now.”
The words sink in. Maybe the Wasps haven’t figured out we have nukes and are coming for us anyway, or maybe they are coming because of the nukes. There is no way to know.
“Why they’re coming doesn’t really matter,” our Victor says. “We can’t outrun them, so we fight. Our ship against theirs.”
His progenitor looks at him, red eyes swirling. “The Xolotl has been in a battle and taken heavy damage. Their ship has not. That probably gives them a significant firepower advantage. They’ll chew us up from a distance, or sit back and launch boarding craft after they take out our point defense.”
Brewer’s words flare to life: Destroy them with what? The six decrepit Macanas that Vick Tick Tick wastes his time with?
Vick Tick Tick…Vic Tick Tick…Victor.
“The Macanas,” I say. “Can they defend us against attack?”
Old Victor shakes his head, making his mouth-folds flap.
“We have six ancient interceptors left that might still fly. We think the Wasps, as you call them, still have eight of their combined atmospheric/exospheric fighters. Any one of their craft is easily a match for three of ours.”
I close my eyes. The cold void is reaching out for me, digging in with invisible claws. Our chance is slipping away. We’ve come through so much…I’ve come through so much. This isn’t fair.
“We have to repair the Xolotl’s Goff Spear,” Gaston says. “Borjigin and Zubiri can help.”
“We’re old, not stupid,” Yong says. “Our halves and gears spent decades trying to repair it. Too much of the barrel is warped. The cannon cannot be fixed. I’m sorry, but this isn’t a movie or a play—there is no convenient third-act rescue that gives us an easy solution. This is real life.”
I feel like I’m sinking.
This isn’t fair…it isn’t fair…
If we fight, we lose.
We can’t run, because Matilda controls the ship.
I told her she didn’t have any power.
I was wrong—she has all the power.
And just like that, I understand that it’s over.
I look at Bishop. He looks at me. My question to him is unspoken, yet crystal clear. Some of my friends will understand that what comes next is the only way. Some, like Gaston and Spingate, I imagine, will fight it. But before I commit, I need to know Bishop is with me. I need to know he understands.
I need to know he will be by my side.
As the others talk, I silently wait for Bishop’s answer.
He shakes his head, ever so slightly. Then, he closes his eyes. He lowers his head.
He nods.
I turn to Yong. “Can you contact Matilda?”
His red eyes bore into me. “I can.”
If my people are to survive, there is only one choice left.
“Then call her,” I say. “I’m ready to talk.”
I stand in a small, dusty room with Xander Gaston and Theresa Spingate. She holds baby Kevin like the universe might come alive at any moment and try to rip him away from her. She ran to get the child, I think, because even if she doesn’t accept reality yet, a part of her knows this will be the last time he sees me.
There is no furniture in this room. It happened to be close to the room with the pedestals. I absently wonder what this space was once used for. I know what it is used for now—to say goodbye.
I spoke with Matilda. Afterward, I gave everyone specific orders about what would happen next. Bishop didn’t argue, even though it was easy to see this is killing him. Gaston threw a fit, insisted that I talk alone with him and Spin. I’ve never seen him act like this, so angry and frightened at the same time. He all but dragged me here.
He doesn’t want to lose his friend.
“It’s the only way,” I say. “If I don’t do this, we don’t get the control codes. The Wasps will destroy us.”
Gaston burns with fury. If his rage could be channeled into a weapon, we could destroy all who stand against us.
“I won’t allow it.” He’s speaking with the voice he uses in combat, the voice of the captain, the voice of a leader who won’t be questioned. “Tell her, Theresa.”
Spingate is crying. She isn’t even bothering to hold it back. Tears line her face, each wet streak tracing where her nose meets her cheek, then flowing to the outside corners of her full lips.
“You can’t let Matilda overwrite you,” she says. “We’ve seen what happens. It will be the end of you.”
I nod.
“I know. There’s no time for debate. It comes down to one person’s life against the lives of sixty-five hundred.”
Gaston and Spin are canvases painted in anguish. It hurts so much to see their pain. I wish there was something I could
say to make them feel better. How strange: I’m the one sacrificing my life, yet I feel the need to console them.
“I forbid it,” Gaston says.
I put my hand on his shoulder.
“It’s not your choice to make. It’s mine.”
Spin shakes her head. Her lower lip quivers. Tears drip from her chin, land on little Kevin’s nose. She wants to talk me out of it, but she knows me better than anyone ever has—she knows I won’t waver from this decision.
“Godsdamned bullshit!” Gaston’s tears come now, sudden and intense, half-strangling his words. “There’s thousands of us, and only a handful of them! We have weapons. You said we had to conquer the Grownups and take the ship, so let’s do that, now!”
I pull him close. I hold him tight.
“I love you,” I say to him.
Sobs shake his body. This man can command starships, can stand firm and orchestrate death on a grand scale, but here he has no power.
“Total bullshit,” he says. “I don’t want you to go.”
I pull away. His tears cool on my cheeks.
“Goodbye, Xander. You’re a good man. My life is better for having known you.”
I move to Theresa. She’s slowly shaking her head.
“How did this happen?” she says. “If you want us to fight, Em, we will fight. You are my friend—I would rather die than let you go.”
There is steel in Theresa Spingate. I have seen her face down horrors, both alien and human alike. I have seen her stand up for what is right while everyone around her screams at her to shut up, to cave in, to go along with the wrong decision because that’s what the crowd wants.
I hold her tight. I feel little Kevin between us, sleeping soundly.
“You are my friend,” I say. “You were the first person I saw. I love you more than words can say. You need to let me go, let me do this. For you. For us. For Kevin. For everyone.”
I feel like someone is dragging a jagged blade across my heart. I fear the end. I will never see these people again.
Spin reaches up with one hand, cups the back of my head. She pulls me closer.
“We never asked for any of this,” she whispers. “Why can’t they just leave us alone?”