The Remnant
Book Two of The Ark Trilogy
LAURA LIDDELL NOLEN

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First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2016

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Laura Liddell Nolen asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008113636

Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780008113636

Version: 2016-08-10

For Ava and Liam

I must walk without the sun, darkness must cover the path of my feet.

—The Pilgrim’s Progress

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Laura Liddell Nolen

About the Publisher

One

They came for me at dawn, and all I could think was, it is way too early for this.

And actually, it might have been. Adam’s programming tended to be erratic at the best of times, and downright scary at the worst. Looking back, I guess we should have been grateful. Surely any dawn at all, however cruel, is better than the endless night of space.

Hindsight, and all that.

“Charlotte Turner.” The judge glanced at me over the top of her delicate, silver-rimmed glasses. The crowd quieted down, just for a moment, in spite of itself, but when rough hands shoved me up onto the platform, giving the Remnant its first good look at me, the shouting cranked right back up again. Death to the traitor! and She’s a terrorist! Worse than the Commander! echoed through my mind. I stopped trying to make sense of the words, letting them roll over me like pebbles on a riverbed, until I heard one I couldn’t ignore: Throw her out the airlock.

Something like fear, or horror, made me tilt up my chin and square my shoulders. My tongue was nearly numb, so I turned up the corners of my mouth to keep from crying.

“I’m glad to see that we amuse you, Prisoner.” Her voice was warm and sure, like a kindly librarian, and sounded older than her face appeared. “You got any last words before we vote?”

“Vote?” I twisted around to look at her. Gray hair. Wrong side of forty, especially up here. Slightly heavy in her chair, but thin to the point of frailty around the shoulders. Nothing about her qualified her for a spot on the Ark. But then, this was the Remnant: the Earth’s last rebels. So she fit right in.

She returned the favor, sizing me up before responding. “On your sentence.” She raised her eyebrows, anticipating my reaction. “Life or death.”

From my new vantage point, I could see the upturned faces of the crowd, and I scanned them as fast as I could, a growing sense of desperation gnawing at my lungs.

No Isaiah, which stung. No Adam, thank goodness. There was the gardener, a withered old man who’d taught me how to grow potatoes, and maybe a couple hundred strangers, including a large group of feral-looking children whose faces I searched more thoroughly.

No West.

The thought of his face, his wide brown eyes, flared through my mind, and I felt a weird sense of disconnect, like trying to laugh and gasping for air all at once. It had been years since I’d seen my brother, and I was so close. I searched and searched, but the room grew smaller as my panic expanded, and I ran out of places to look before I found him.

I pressed my lips together. In my experience, these things tended to go a lot better if you dropped the act and showed a little vulnerability, but again, there was my brother’s face in my mind, so my ribs were like steel around my lungs.

The crowd shouted louder, and the sounds merged together in my mind, until all I heard was a single accusatory voice. I tried to imagine what that voice would sound like when it sentenced me to die.

I didn’t have to wonder long.

“Nothing at all?” The judge regarded me dispassionately. “Then I’m afraid it’s time for the sentence.”

“Your Honor, I never meant to betray the Remnant.”

“She speaks,” said the judge, and the other voice quieted to a low buzz. “Is it your position that your actions on the day of the Battle for Sector Seven were undertaken with the interest of the Remnant at heart?”

“I—no. But I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. I only wanted to save my family. I’d just started to belong here, and my family, my blood family, was still living in Central Command. When I found out what the Noah Board was capable of I—”

“Was? Where are they now?”

It was a good question. “I’m not sure, Your Honor. My brother joined the Remnant, but I haven’t seen him since…” my voice caught, and I stopped talking for the space of several heartbeats. When I spoke, it was in a low, even tone, my face carefully composed. “I haven’t been out of my cell for six weeks. And my father is… somewhere in Central Command, I think.”

“And your mother?”

My throat tightened again, and my volume was reduced further. “She died. On Earth.”

It was a common story, but her voice softened. “Charlotte Turner. You placed every life in our sector in peril when you betrayed us to the High Commander. You’ve been found guilty of high treason.”

“Wait. Please.”

“Please what, Prisoner?”

“Please don’t… throw me out the airlock.”

“I’ve been a judge for over a decade. In that time I have never found any particular pleasure in ruining the lives of the young people who come before me. But in your case, Miss Turner, I fail to see what you gained from ruining us so thoroughly.” She shook her head. “In any event, that’s not how we’d execute someone, surely. Airlocks. Honestly.”

“I did bring you the Noah Board,” I said, hopefully.

“You brought us a strike team straight from the Commander himself,” she said, referring to Eren’s failed mission to retrieve the program I’d stolen. I had the sense not to point out that Isaiah, the blind King of the Remnant, hadn’t given me much of a choice about whether to steal it, or that Eren’s father, the High Commander, had known about the theft way before I confessed. “If I were a different kind of judge, and this were a different kind of courtroom, this is the moment where I’d tell you that you’re young.”

She paused, seeing my expression.

“You are. And if things were only a little different, I would remind you that there is still time for you to consider what kind of girl you want to be. What kind of woman.”

Back on Earth, I’d gotten the same speech at more than one sentencing, albeit for lesser crimes than treason. It was the juvy defendant’s cue to appear remorseful. At least, in my case it was. I had no idea what kind of speech they gave the kids whose parents weren’t doctors and senators.

But the judge was right. Things were different now. Besides, I already knew what kind of girl I was. It was hardly the first time the issue had come up.

“Unfortunately, things work a little differently up here. Look around, Turner. These are the lives you tried to destroy.”

I saw no softness in the faces of those gathered. I read the judgment in their eyes. I was as much to blame as the five governments who’d left them to die when the meteor destroyed the Earth. If the Commander had won the Battle for Sector Seven, what would he have done with them? With their children? Only Isaiah, their so-called King, had saved them, and he wasn’t here to speak for me.

“Citizens of the Remnant. Survivors of the Earth. How do you find the defendant?”

The voice of the Remnant grew terrible and loud, so loud that my ears could no longer bear the pain. But the judge maintained her stature, allowing the noise to swell through the room and settle deep in my brain before she spoke.

“Charlotte Turner. You knowingly betrayed your people to our enemy and actively sought to effect the downfall of the Remnant. You have been found guilty of treason and are hereby sentenced to death.”

Two

I’m sitting in the kitchen, watching my mom ice a cake. Her knife slides up and down the straight edges, creating a series of perfectly even waves of blue frosting. Her other hand is spinning the base of the stand with surgical precision.

It’s mesmerizing.

West thinks so, too, and joins me at the counter. I’m mad at him for some reason or another, but I’m thirteen now, and turning over a new leaf, so I choose to ignore him. Even though he shouldn’t be here.

The cake is for him, for his birthday, and it’s a complete violation of family rules for him to see it before we light the candles, but apparently I’m the only one who cares about tradition around here.

Mom offers him a little smile, just enough to show the first hints of recently formed wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and he returns it in full force, his stupid teeth gapping in my face.

West loves birthdays. I guess all nine-year-olds do.

“Can I lick the spoon?” he asks.

Mom purses out her bottom lip, pretending to consider the request for maybe half a millisecond, and hands over the entire bowl of sugary, leftover goo.

I am given the knife.

My icing is gone in two licks, one for each side of the blade, and I shouldn’t care that West’s far more enthusiastic efforts have barely made a dent in his supply.

New leaf. I’ll focus on my mom instead. She’s arranging the piping tip over a plastic sandwich bag full of red frosting, and her face takes on a calm, easy focus as she pipes a series of perfect tiny stars around the top.

It’s going to be a beautiful cake.

“Want some of mine?” West asks.

I turn, mimicking my mom’s lower lip-pursing, and pretend not to care. “Sure, if you’re not going to eat it all.” I shrug a little, making the point. “Whatever.”

“Open up,” he says, and I can’t help but match his goofy grin. He shoves an enormous glob directly in my mouth, and I bite down. It’s more icing than I can hold at once, and I’m starting to giggle in spite of my newfound maturity.

“You’re getting it everywhere,” I say, or try to say, and reach for a dishcloth.

West only laughs.

I’m scrubbing away a tiny speck of blue from the countertop when a thick splat hits the side of my neck. I swat at it in confusion, and my fingers come away covered in icing.

I’m glaring up at West, about to make sure Mom saw what happened, when I realize that he’s as shocked as I am. We turn to Mom, who’s suppressing a snort.

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the idea of my mom voluntarily creating a mess of any kind when West fires back.

The glob catches half on her cheek and half in her hair, just below the ear.

She gives a little snicker. “You’re asking for it, buddy.”

Suddenly, West is covered in a thin stream of sticky red buttercream, straight from the piping tip. It’s simultaneously the strangest and the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. Without thinking, I reach into his bowl and launch the contents at my mother, who spares maybe one second to glance at her ruined blouse before reaching for the flour.

“Get down!” I shout, and we duck behind the bar together. The flour whispers by overhead, dusting us in a silent arc that ends on the floor far behind us, inches from the living room rug.

She has missed! We nearly choke with giddy laughter.

“We’re outta ammo,” I say, as soon as we catch our breath, and West nods seriously. “She’s got total access to the fridge, everything.”

“But we have the pantry,” he says.

“You sure about that?” our mother taunts us.

“Cover me,” I say, and roll toward the pantry.

I’m too slow. A blast of water catches me square in the back, and I’m completely soaked before I reach the door. I grab the first thing I can find, Cheerios, and rip open the bag in a frenzy. I toss it back to West, reserving a few handfuls for myself, and we begin pelting her in unison.

Some of the water has caught the cake, and for a moment, I regret everything. It was such a beautiful cake.

But then West goes flying over the top of the counter and jumps to land on the island, next to the cake.

“West, no!” I scream, but it’s too late. He shoves a fist way down into the delicate icing and lobs his sugary grenade straight at Mom. I follow him, grabbing for the flour at the same time as her.

The bag rips open, and the kitchen explodes into a feathery cloud of white.

Thin wisps of flour rain down onto the brawl beneath for several seconds. We are all grabbing at the cake, gasping with laughter.

Our mother is strong. Stronger than I expected, and I feel my face being shoved into the fractured remains of the lowest layer of cake. I’m powerless to stop it. My defeat is complete.

West is next. He emerges from the forced faceplant covered in cake and wonder.

She has won, she has won. There can be no question. We dissolve into helpless laughter, and the pain of the year lessens its vice around my heart, and the horror of my first stint in juvy shrinks and retreats into the darkest corner of my thoughts. For the moment, it is harmless. I breathe, finally. I smile even though I’m not laughing anymore. The sensation feels foreign.

My arm is around my brother for the first time in far too long. My mother is holding us both. I find that my skinny legs can still fold in far enough so that I fit entirely on her lap, and I am warm. West and I regard each other from twin positions under her chin.

No one speaks for a while, but my mother finally breaks the silence. “Things have been too tense around here lately. We had a rough year. I know that. But you’ll never stop being each other’s family. You can’t ever stop loving each other.” And she is squeezing us both, gently at first, and then more and more tightly, until it is too much, too tight, and I have to hold my breath, and still I do not try to stop her.

Three

The thing about war is that everyone knows where you stand. Lines are drawn; everybody picks a side, and boom. You’re fighting.

Except that for me, things were more confusing than ever. That morning, the morning of my sentencing, the four walls of my cell pressed in harder than usual. I was a prisoner of the Remnant, but only because I’d traded my freedom for Eren’s by turning myself over to the Commander, with the bright idea that he then hand me over to the Remnant to get his son back.

In my defense, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I’d needed to get back into the Remnant so I could find my brother, West, like I promised my father. Of course, I spent the next six weeks locked in a cell, and now, I was probably about to be executed. So my mission wasn’t exactly a rousing success so far.

On the other hand, it’s not like I had anywhere better to be. Because of my illegal status on the ship and my ties to the Remnant, I was a fugitive from Central Command. And although I’d saved his son in the hostage exchange, I was pretty sure the High Commander still wanted me dead in all possible haste.

I couldn’t judge him for that. The feeling was mutual.

The silver lining was obvious: he’d have a heck of a time trying to kill me in here, and I doubted the Remnant would give him the satisfaction anyway. The Remnant controlled its sliver of a sector with an iron fist, guarding the dark space that separated Sector Seven from Central Command as though their lives depended on it.

Which was absolutely the case.

I made myself focus on the slow, even breathing of Helen, my cellmate, until the time passed more easily.

Helen was a lifer, and over the course of several decades, prison had made her in its image. Convicted of one thing after another back on Earth, she’d had the criminal connections to find her way to the Remnant without the difficulty the rest of us had suffered. You’d think illicit organizations dedicated to saving the dregs of Earth would have higher standards, but no. The Remnant left the sorting of humanity to Central Command, which had dedicated itself to the task with an admirable fervor, which is how Command ended up with all the young, straight-and-narrow scientists and doctors.

By contrast, if you were alive, the Remnant believed you should have a shot at survival. All you had to do was find them.

Which is how the Remnant ended up with all the criminals.

Suffice it to say, no one around cared how Helen had gotten here, let alone whether she’d done hard time. The Remnant were way past that line of thinking. They’d been willing to overlook every mistake she ever made in her life, right up until they found out that she was fencing meds from the sickbay. I suppose everyone has to draw the line somewhere.

The dawn broke bright and cold, as though Adam, Isaiah’s pet computer prodigy, had designed it just for this occasion. I shook out my arms, imagining a thin film of dew clinging to the sheets. At least, I thought I’d imagined it. Erratic or not, these climate programs were getting more advanced every day.

The thought was not comforting.

I fiddled absently with my hair before tying it into a knot just above my neck. There’s only so much a girl can do without a hairbrush.

“So today’s the big day, huh? You want me to work on it?” Helen’s voice was sharp and clear, and in the short weeks I’d known her, that had been the case at all hours of the day and night. I struggled out of sleep, and into it. But Helen was like a light that switched on and off as needed. I envied her that.

“No, it’s fine. No one cares what it looks like, anyway.”

The door to my cell opened, and I stood. What else could I do? The guards’ hands were rough, and I understood, then, that I was their enemy. I was naïve enough to feel a new kind of pain, something akin to betrayal, like this moment was the death of the strangeness in my heart that had, until now, kept me from rushing the nearest guard and turning his gun on myself.

Instead, I let him force me into the wall.

Helen let out a string of pain and bitterness disguised as profanity and rage, and I was reminded of another woman, just as hard, who’d had enough hurt for ten lifetimes and hadn’t let it break her. But I tried never to think too long about Meghan.

“I’m fine, Helen. Wish me luck.” I tugged at my yellow prison scrubs, trying to make them lie straight, before finally feeling the cuffs lock into place.

Helen’s voice faded into the stark corridor as the cell door slammed shut behind me. “Girls like us make our own luck, sweetheart.”

The guards didn’t speak. Their silence throttled the intervals between clanging locks and scuffing boots.

Guns. They were everywhere. I figured my old friend Isaiah had distributed them to every guard in the Remnant. I wished I could feel sick over it, the end of all our hopes for peace, but instead, I felt relieved. Central Command would be fully armed by now, too. There was too much at stake for the Remnant to retain its innocence.

So maybe I was hard like Helen. There was a time I’d wanted to be like Meghan, a woman who’d saved my life back on Earth. She was strong, in her way, because she was able to love a stranger, to die for one, but I didn’t think I could be like her anymore.

Rough hands made dents in my upper arms. I let them. You betrayed us, they seemed to say. I was guided around a corner so hard my feet left the ground. The pain felt right. We took you in. You didn’t have to become one of us, but you were.

One of us.

The guards halted their even pace abruptly before the door to the Commons, a room where once I’d danced a long tango on the arm of a king. I tripped, righted myself unsteadily, and offered a glare to the guard on my right. He returned it without flinching.

You betrayed us.

The massive doors swung open, instead of sucking into the wall, and the effect was a pale flash of nerves, which I silenced without much effort. The time for fear had long passed.

They were right, after all. I had been one of them. I had betrayed them. I looked all around, craning my head over the shoulders of the men who forced me forward into the cold, crowded Commons, but Isaiah wasn’t there. To be fair, a king would have better places to be than his ex-almost-girlfriend’s latest trial, but it still stung.

That was when I realized that I was his enemy, too.

The last time we spoke had ended badly, to say the least. He’d forced me to steal something from Central Command—the life support program for the entire ship, called the Noah Board—and I’d taken it pretty hard. I didn’t want to be a thief anymore.

I didn’t want to be a prisoner anymore, either, but here we were.

The Commons was my favorite thing about the Remnant, other than the greenhouse. It was their gathering-place, where huge crowds gave full vent to their fears and frustrations, and life to their memories of Earth. But it was more than that. This was where they lived, and spoke, and created and danced and thought together.

It was the beating heart of everything we might have lost when the Earth died.

Right now, it was a courtroom.

I heard only silence in the moments that followed the death sentence. I was not a leader, like Isaiah. Even if I were, I no longer had a people to belong to. No one’s fate aligned with mine. I wasn’t a soldier, like Eren, nor a budding scientist, like my brother. I would never be a decision-maker, like my father.

My fate was sealed: I would simply cease to be anything. Maybe that was how it should be. A lifetime of prison, endless and white, made me think of drowning. Couldn’t these people see that I was dying either way? Hadn’t they known that I had loved them? A cold certainty swept through me.

The Remnant knew exactly what kind of girl I was.

A pair of enormous hazel eyes peered up at me, and I froze, found out. This kid was maybe seven or eight years old. Too young to understand so much, to know me at a glance. Too young for anything.

A moment passed before I recognized her: Amiel. Adam’s sister.

She was dirty. Not with actual dirt, as she might have been on Earth. But unwashed. Greasy.

Unwanted.

There was nothing surprising about any of that. I read her life in her eyes, and it was a familiar story. Children were abandoned back on Earth every day. In juvy, I had lived among them. By far, the majority of us had mothers at home who traded sleep for endless worry, then worry for resignation, and, at last, for some, resignation for rejection. But there were those the world had failed so completely that they did not cry at night, even on their first night. Why would they? No one cried for them. What home could they mourn, they who belonged to no one? I knew them, to the extent that anybody could know them, and I knew what it did to their souls. To their eyes.

No, it wasn’t shocking.

And yet, my breath caught in my throat.

The guard nearest me reached for my arm, but he was distracted by the spectacle. It was all too much: the Remnant’s mortal enemy, sentenced to die before those she’d betrayed. He was as entranced as the rest of the crowd. I couldn’t blame him.

I disarmed him easily, flipping the small weight of his gun directly from his holster and into my fist.

I reached the podium in the next instant, before the shock extinguished from his face. The judge’s shoulders were frail underneath her black robe, in spite of the thickness of her lower body, and they bent backwards with my weight. The gun—my gun, now—was cold against her neck, and she tried to shrug it away with her shoulder even as her hands splayed before her. Instinct told me to shelter myself behind the wooden platform, but I ignored it and forced her body to cover me instead.

I was not a healer, like my mother.

“Everyone stay back.” I locked eyes with the now-unarmed guard and nodded toward the door behind us. “You, open this door. No one else move.” I wrenched the judge from the platform, and she made a little sound when we hit the floor behind it, like she was afraid.

She didn’t speak at all. I did not think of Amiel, whose eyes followed my every move, or even of West. I closed my mind to the coldness that stabbed through my heart. I’d never wanted to hurt anyone. I was trapped. I needed out, and this was the only plan I could think of. The judge stumbled, and I pulled her up, helping her to balance before pressing her through the door and into the hallway. I knew exactly what kind of girl I was.

I was a criminal.

Four

There was only one place I could go: the dark, unplanned space that separated the sectors of the Ark at the outermost level, which people had started calling the Rift. Its construction had been unexpected and was thought to be the result of a misplaced wall, so the Rift wasn’t on the official maps.

The Rift was technically controlled by the Remnant, but I was fresh out of other options, what with the kidnapping and hostage-taking and all. When we reached the entrance, I shoved the judge into the darkness as gently as possible, then threw myself in after, never losing my grip on her arm.

“Just go straight,” I muttered after her. “Fast as you can.”

She complied, haltingly at first, then with increasing steadiness. I had to be impressed. Not everyone could move that fast in pitch-black, although the gun may have had something to do with it. We’d gone maybe a hundred paces before she started talking. “Look, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

A door opened somewhere behind us, and I gave her a frank look in the brief splash of pale light from the hallway. “Do I?”

She pursed her lips. We kept moving.

The sound of footsteps along the path urged me forward. It felt like ages before we got to the end of the Rift, where the entrance to the cargo hold was located, but the twisted knot in my stomach made me pause before forcing open the door.

“You decide people’s fates. Have you ever had to accept one?”

She gave me an appraising glance and tightened her mouth even further. “You could leave me here. I’m only going to slow you down.”

It was tempting. I would never shoot her, after all, and sooner or later, someone was bound to call my bluff.

But the sounds of the guards shuffling through the Rift made me tighten my grip on the gun. “I’m afraid not. Let’s go.”

She looked from my face to the pistol, and I realized that I’d been careful not to point the barrel at her ever since we’d gotten out of sight of the guards. Not even when I waved her through the doorway. Judging by her expression, Judge Hawthorne had already figured me out. She knew I wasn’t going to hurt her if I could possibly help it.

On the other hand, I wasn’t too fired up about being executed, either. It was like we were caught in an impromptu game of charades. I made a mental note not to take another hostage again, ever.

But I did have a gun, and a hostage, and a death sentence, courtesy of my hostage, so my options were limited. Charades it was. I made my face stern and forced her through the door. “Chop chop, Your Honor.”

She maintained an admirable inscrutability even as the door latched, locking us out of the darkness of the Rift.

After six weeks in my cell, the vastness of the cargo hold was overwhelming, and I gaped up at the bins that held North America’s final exports: the physical remains of the civilizations we had created, then left behind to be swept away by the meteor.

High ceilings, endless rows of brightly colored bins, and an excess of gravity added to the effect. At the other end of the hold, maybe a thousand yards away, was the stairwell that led up to the main decks of Central Command.

When I cleared my mind, the first thing I noticed was that the locks on the bins had changed. The new ones looked a lot more techy and far less blastable than they used to. My plan—the only one that made any sense at all—was to try to break into a bin. Hopefully, one that had some food. From there, I could regroup and try to think through my priorities, maybe figure out a plan that didn’t involve going back to prison and my certain death at the hands of either government.

Priorities. West. Six final weeks in the Remnant, and I was no closer to keeping my promise to my father that we would be a family again. The thought made my feet heavy, but I kept our pace as near a sprint as I could manage, hoping we’d eventually pass a lock I had a shot at cracking.

The second thing I noticed was the lack of guards. That made no sense. Here were the physical remains of North America. Untold treasure lay behind the thin walls of the bins, not to mention supplies. More importantly, Central Command knew the location of the entrance to the Remnant’s dark space, so it only made sense that they’d want to guard it. But I was alone among the aisles. Blue faded into red, then yellow, and back again, with no sign of Command personnel. At some point, the locks changed abruptly. I stopped, skidded back a couple of bins, and took another look. Judge Hawthorne made a face, as though my change of pace inconvenienced her.

“Well?” she said impatiently.

How was she not out of breath? I was fairly gasping. “Hang on. I’m trying to plan.”

“It doesn’t strike me as your strong suit.”

It was official: I didn’t care much for Judge Hawthorne. “Oh, I don’t know, Your Honor. I’d say I’m doing better now than I was twenty minutes ago. Now move.”

From where we stood, maybe a fifth of the way into the area, it appeared that the hold was divided into two kinds of locks. It’s the kind of thing you might not notice if you weren’t trying to break into something, but everything near the Remnant was one kind of tech, and this part of the hold had a wave of older-looking locks.

“What’s going on here?” I waved an arm back toward the new locks.

“Lockies,” she said. “Command sends out a team every day. So do we. The cargo hold is demilitarized as part of the ceasefire agreement between Central Command and the Remnant, but they still try to keep us out of as many bins as possible. We do the same.”

“By… what, changing the locks?”

She nodded. “They’re children, mostly. The governments make the locks, of course.”

That meant that I had a significantly reduced set of options. I couldn’t possibly get past the newer mechanisms from either government. Older locks it was.

By some miracle, we’d stayed a few aisles ahead of the advancing guards, who made no attempt at staying quiet. Why would they? The hold was huge, but the aisles were straight. It wouldn’t take long to clear them. Our lead was draining gradually away, like sand.

We waited in silence for the row of soldiers to pass the aisle with the door, then slipped around the corner and doubled back. Judge Hawthorne made a fair companion. She kept quiet and moved fast in spite of her age.

I fumbled the return to the door, hitting the aisle slightly too soon. But the pair of guards I’d been avoiding didn’t look back once they’d cleared the space, and I was granted a few short seconds with the lock.

There was no possible way to break it.

I had a gun, but its bullets only penetrated flesh, not the components of the bins, as I’d learned too well during a previous excursion to the area.

Good thing I had a Guardian Level access card. Being a criminal had its benefits on occasion, not least of which was that I had yet to miss an opportunity to pick the pockets of whichever guardian was escorting me at the time, assuming they were slow enough to let me. Normally, Jorin Malkin, the Commander’s lieutenant, would be out of my talent range, but someone had knocked him unconscious during the prisoner exchange, and I’m not the kind of girl who lets an advantage like that go to waste. Besides, I liked to think it caused him at least a little inconvenience when he noticed it was missing.

If the Commander were smart, the card would be monitored instead of deactivated. I yanked the front of my shirt out and slid the card from the band of my undergarments. The judge gave me a dirty look, which I ignored. The lock popped open on the first swipe, and I threw open the door, marked “North America/Sector 7/Cargo Level/Bin 23/Generators.” We were greeted by metal boxes stacked floor-to-ceiling, with only a few inches between stacks. We didn’t fit.

I grunted in frustration, pressing Hawthorne down the aisle to the next bin. The heavy footsteps halted, then resumed at a fast pace, looming closer. They’d heard me.

The judge chewed the side of her face, looking nearly as nervous as I felt. It hit me that the sound of boots was as clear as glass, and I turned around.

They’d found me.

Four men at my six, with ten yards to spare. My heart thumped almost hard enough to make my hands shake with the mere force of its pressure, but I had years of practice with adrenaline like this. Experience won out, and my first swipe was good. The flimsy door sucked open. I swung Judge Hawthorne through by the arm and slammed my fist into the doorpad, then the keypad, in a single, frantic motion. There was a heavy wham as the lead guard hit the door an instant too late.

I touched the lightpad and tried to take stock of the bin, but my nerves were getting to me. I couldn’t afford to keep breathing so hard. It showed weakness, and I had to stay in control.

Breathe, Char, Breathe. Just not so hard.

This bin was a sight better than the last and might even prove useful. Smaller crates lined a series of built-ins, and irregular wooden boxes were strewn around the floor. I wasn’t beaten yet.

I turned to the judge, who was cradling her arm pointedly, an accusatory look on her face. From what I knew of her, she had nerves like boiled leather, and a brain to boot. If she were twenty years younger, I’d have had a problem on my hands. “Hide in the back,” I told her.

“Oh, hiding? In the back?” she said. “What an impressive plan.”

I smiled in spite of myself. Maybe I liked her a little.

“You can’t shoot them all,” she said, clambering past the crates.

“I’m not going to shoot any of them,” I muttered back. “And keep your voice down.”

“It’s over, honey. They’re just gathering the rest of the troops.”

“This card is monitored. Central Command will send a team now, too.”

“So you are one of them.”

I looked at her. The suggestion was absurd, but I couldn’t prove it now. It was probably better to bluff, anyway. So I raised an eyebrow and motioned for her to get down behind a crate. I didn’t know if the Remnant would try to blast their way in or something. She complied, but not before shooting me a look so disapproving it could churn butter.

The lock on the door clicked softly a few times, but the door didn’t open, a process I found unnerving. Why didn’t they try to break the lock? Or the door?

It didn’t even matter. It wasn’t like I could go anywhere.

“Okay, we got her,” the guard in the aisle said finally. “Call it in.” Then he raised his voice to a shout, so that it was unmistakable through the thin tin and plastic walls of the bin. “Hope you’re comfortable in there. Might be a while.”

A while until what?

“I got nothing but time,” I shouted back. I thought I heard a snicker, but the door stayed shut, and Hawthorne stayed mercifully quiet, having made her mind up about me before we’d even left the courtroom. I settled down in the bin to wait.

Five

Time flies when you’re spending your last moments of relative freedom locked in a stuffy cargo bin with an equally stuffy elderly judge who’s looking forward to your execution for high treason, but has mercifully decided to stop berating you over your questionable life choices in the meantime.

Before I knew it, there was a rustle in the aisle outside the bin, then another click on the lock.

I considered threatening to shoot the judge, but to be honest, I didn’t have much of an endgame in mind, and I was a little sick of having her as a hostage anyway. Maybe I’d just threaten the next person to enter the bin and call it even.

“Don’t shoot.” I knew the voice before he spoke the second word. It was low and confident and laced with some emotion I couldn’t place. “I’m coming in, Charlotte. I’m unarmed.” Wait. Was he smiling?

I lowered the gun. “I’m not going to shoot you, Isaiah.”

He stepped fully into the bin, taking care to hold the door ajar behind him. As was his habit these days, he didn’t carry his white-tipped cane. In the Remnant, I’d assumed he simply hadn’t needed it, since he’d memorized the layout of the rooms he frequented. But now, I thought there must have been some other reason to avoid it. To avoid letting me see it.

“That’s a start, then.” He turned to the judge, still holding the door open behind him. “You may go,” he said.

She did, sparing me a final, judgy glare on her way out.

I returned it with my brightest smile, in spite of the darkness in Isaiah’s tone. “I think it’s a little late to talk about beginnings,” I said.

He tilted his head slightly, as though considering me. “Once, you let me show you the way out. I told you then you’d only find a bigger cage.”

I glanced at the upper corners of the bin. They were close enough that, if I stood on two crates, I could dust them for cobwebs. “Yeah, well, we’ve said a lot of things to each other, Ise. I’m never sure which ones still count.”

His smile faded in the silence that followed. The last time we spoke, he begged me to return to the Remnant with him, to be protected by him, and he’d called me his enemy when I refused. To be fair, the conversation before that one hadn’t gone much better. We’d been dancing around the idea of each other for a while now, but we could never nail down exactly what we both wanted. He’d once told me that he loved me. I still believed that was true.

But I had absolutely no idea what it meant.

I gestured around the bin. “At least this cage is mine. And it beats the hole you’ve kept me in for the last six weeks.”

He unclenched his jaw and gave me something like a patient sigh. “I had to make you see reason, Charlotte. Had to get my ducks in a row, too. You’re not in there anymore. You’re not dead, yet. I don’t have much to apologize for.”

I had nothing to say to that.

He continued. “So what’s next? You like it out here? You want to stay?”

“I don’t have too many options.”

“You don’t have any options at all. You can’t stay in my jail. Not after that nonsense with the judge. You’ll never make it through the appeal. You don’t belong with my people.”

“I’ll manage.”

“Like you are right now? I found you in less than an hour. How long do you think it will take the Commander? How long until you starve?”

“I’ll manage. Just because I picked the wrong—”

“Let me be more to the point.” He gestured to the bin. “I have you surrounded.”

“Ah. The perils of lock-picking in an enclosed space. I could write a book.”

“Let’s write that book, then, Charlotte. Jail. Not for you, though.” He ticked the words off on long, outstretched fingers. “So you fight. You’re looking at a stab wound, maybe a gunshot. The fight won’t last long. Then you’ll come quietly. You’ll be thrown out an airlock. It’s a pretty short book.”

I looked away. “Where are you going with this?”

“May I sit?”

I looked at him incredulously. “By all means. Big box to your right.”

He settled himself gracefully on a heavy red crate. “I’ve always been a believer in second chances. And it’d be a shame to let your skills go to waste.”

“Let me stop you right there. I’m not going to steal for you. Not anymore, anyway. Not after last time.”

“You just kidnapped a judge. When are you gonna quit pretending you’re so much better than me?”

“Better than you? Mr. King of the Remnant?”

“I found something I believe in. I’m not going to apologize for that, either. You’re just mad ’cause I’m right.”

“Oh, you’re really onto something there, Ise.” I shrugged at him and forced my voice down a notch. I had no idea why I found his words so irritating. “How’s this? I believe in not stealing anymore. Especially not for you.”

“We were friends for a long time.”

“Until we weren’t.”

“I didn’t have to be your enemy, little bird. I—” There was a long pause. “But you don’t hear the things I tell you. You think you know better. But this is the end. It’s me or the airlock. So maybe you’ll listen now.

“I said you have skills. I wasn’t talking about stealing. There’s more to you than that. You care about your family. I may not understand it, but I’ve always respected it. You want to belong somewhere. No, don’t deny it. You always have. ’S’why you got in with those clowns down below,” he said, referring to the group of thieves I’d run with back on Earth. “And you can be very convincing when you want to be. You keep a level head.” He looked thoughtful. “I can work with that.”

“Work… how? What did you have in mind?”

“My life… your life. I find I believe in more than just the people in the Remnant. I believe in the fact that we’re all still here. They did their best to keep us off the Arks, but here we are. We’re alive. We’re fighting.”

He rubbed his hands together, and it occurred to me that he was nervous. He was trying to convince me of something, and he actually cared how this turned out. Regardless of how he was acting.

“And I think that, in spite of everything that’s happened, deep down, you do too. You may not see it yet, but on some level, you and I are on the same side. And none of this would matter except for one last thing: we both believe in second chances. A clean slate.” He looked up from his hands. “You and me.”

I couldn’t even imagine what that might look like. He was right the first time: I was trapped. I couldn’t exactly waltz back into the Remnant on his arm. I was their enemy. “So, that would mean…”

“I thought about this a lot. It’s like, we betrayed each other. I’m not sorry that I used you. I had my reasons, but I could have gone about it differently. No one should have died.” He took a breath. “You have to forgive me, Charlotte.” He swallowed. “I’ve forgiven you.”

I frowned at him. “For what?”

He took a moment before answering. “For always choosing everything else instead of me.”

There was a slow silence between us.

My mouth hung open until I spoke, uneasily. “I’ll come with you, but I’m not your friend, Isaiah.” As much as I had once liked him, six weeks in his prison had given me plenty reasons to remain cautious. I shook my head. “I think you know that.” I paused, so that my last words hung in the air like poison. “And I don’t forgive you. For anything.”

He laughed, and the bin was full of the sound. It wasn’t a real laugh, and it didn’t sound like Isaiah. It lacked confidence. It was too loud. “So.” He clapped once and stood up. “You’re in.”

“It’s like you said, Ise. I don’t exactly have a choice.”

“Good enough for me. Let’s get out of here.”

I crossed my arms, still standing. “Where are we going?”

He shook his head. “Still not listening, are you? Don’t even pay attention at your own sentencing. The airlock, little bird. The airlock.”

Six

He was gone before I stood up, and I was left alone to wonder just what he was up to this time, and why he thought I could help. Possibilities piled themselves around me with no clear answer. Breaking into Central Command, which governed the vast majority of the North American Ark, to steal another program, maybe? Luring Eren back to the Remnant’s prison? My certain death in the void of space? He’d mentioned my family, but he was in for a big surprise if he thought I’d ever betray them.

I took a moment to scan the bin for anything I might be able to use. Sure, Isaiah and I were pretending to be friends again, as far as I knew. But I still had plenty of other enemies out there. Best to be prepared.

I already had a gun. Why Isaiah hadn’t asked for it was beyond me, but I sure wasn’t about to give it up without a fight. I ran a finger back and forth over the tape on a small plastic bin until it warmed slightly, liquidating its bond to the bin, then eased it off and used it to secure the gun to my upper thigh, making sure the safety was engaged. It wouldn’t hold for long, especially if I started running, but at least I could get to it easily. I found several crates full of identical rolls of electric wire, complete with wire cutters. I unspooled it greedily and wrapped several feet around my waist, high above the band of my prison pants. I looped one of the smaller wire cutters into the center of my bra and tucked its handle into my wire-belt, then pulled my shirt down over it.

There wasn’t much else worth taking. I couldn’t tell most software from scrap metal, so I sure as heck couldn’t make use of most of what was there, but I did find a few tiny computer chips sharp enough to pass for razors. I grabbed a few of those before leaving. I took one last look around the bin and nodded. I had weapons. Isaiah had been right: I wasn’t dead or back in jail. Yet.

Things were looking up.

Isaiah, it turned out, was waiting patiently at the end of a long, double row of Remnant guards.

I had never seen a Remnant guard in livery before, but these were dressed in black, Central Command-issued uniforms. The kind that blocked bullets. I spared a moment of appreciation for Isaiah’s people, who had probably gone to some trouble to procure them, while simultaneously suppressing a shudder at the memories the uniforms evoked. The result was something like an ungainly shrug.

If anything, it should have been encouraging. It meant the Remnant had conducted raids on Command supplies. It meant they hadn’t given up.

“Nice outfit,” I said to the first. She closed the bin door behind me without responding.

“You all right?” Isaiah asked me.

“Yep,” I said slowly, eyeing his army of personal guards. “Just fine.”

“Get the team out here,” he said to the guard nearest him. “Have it locked. Let’s go.”

The guard behind me took my arm, and I jerked away. “Hands off.”

She sighed and turned to Isaiah expectantly, giving me a clear view of the shock of bright red hair sticking out from under her cap.

“She’ll be fine, Mars.”

The guard lifted her hands in resignation. “After you,” she said tersely.

“Wait,” I said, studying her face. “I remember you.” She’d been at Isaiah’s side when he came to retrieve me from Central Command during the battle, to beg me to return to the Remnant with him. I hadn’t exactly come quietly, so to speak.

She raised an eyebrow. “Congratulations.”

Our little tussle had ended with her on the ground, unconscious, thanks in no small part to Isaiah, who’d turned on her at the last minute to keep her from hurting me further. I gave her a fake smile to go with her sarcasm. She did not return it.

As we wove through the bins, the guards flanked Isaiah and spread out ahead of him. They’d clearly had some practice with their formation. I tried to fall in with the ones right behind him, but they kept slowing down at the end of each bin, checking the aisles before allowing Isaiah to proceed through the intersection, so I kept nearly tripping. To make things worse, “Mars” seemed not to want me to walk directly behind Isaiah, so she kept placing a hand on my arm whenever he stopped. I kept right on knocking it away. She’d give a little snort, and we’d start walking again. It was all a little awkward, to be honest.

After about the fourth snort, Isaiah turned around.

“Why don’t you walk up here, Charlotte? Give me someone to talk to.”

“Sir, I really can’t advise—” Mars began.

“It’s fine,” he said shortly.

She sighed again, and I avoided shooting her a smug look as I sped up to take Isaiah’s outstretched arm.

“Hey, you think you’ve got enough guards?” I asked, not quietly.

Isaiah chuckled. “My jail must not be so bad, since you’re still telling jokes. They’re doing their job. This area is not under control, at the moment,” he said grimly. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Don’t you have a ceasefire?”

“It’s more than just that. There are lockies, some of which are ours, and another group we’ve tried to monitor,” he said.

“What other group?”

“We don’t know. Some kind of soldier-types. They come out at night. Probably just part of Central Command, but we can never prove it.”

We fell into step, and I remembered the way it felt to hold his hand back on Earth, when everything was dying all around us. I gave his arm a little squeeze, and he leaned in to me and spoke quietly. “You shouldn’t give Marcela a hard time.”

“I know, I know. She’s just doing her job.”

“Well,” said Isaiah, “Sure. But she’s not so bad, if you get to know her.”

“Pass.”

“All right, then. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I was still trying to figure out exactly what he had warned me about when we came to the end of the cargo hold. But instead of the dark space that led to the Remnant, we were someplace I’d never been.

The Ark was shaped like a huge, flat wheel, with the cargo stored in the large outer rim. The wheel was divided into sectors, like slices of a pie, and it spun as it traveled through space, which gave the effect of gravity. Unfortunately, the passengers who were farthest out experienced far more gravity than those toward the center of the Ark, the “sweet spot.” Every last member of the Remnant was an illegal passenger—a stowaway—and they inhabited the outer rim of Sector Seven. During the battle, Isaiah and Adam had cut the air to the rest of the Ark using a life-support program I’d helped steal: the Noah Board. If they hadn’t done that, the Remnant wouldn’t have stood a chance against Central Command.

The corridor was well-lit and industrial in nature, save for the patterned weave on the carpet beneath us. We were still on the thick outer rim of the Ark, where Central Command considered the gravity too heavy for living quarters. I guessed it had belonged to them, but like I said, the Remnant had secured it—and their continued existence—during the battle. Two of his guards rushed ahead with key cards, and a series of doors slid apart before us. Isaiah barely broke his stride before reaching the door of his choice.

We entered a small room with a thin metal platform, which Isaiah led me to.

“We’re gonna need a better grip,” he said, and pulled me toward him. His fingers found the wire around my waist, and he gave me a silent look through his dark glasses.

Four guards joined us on the platform, Marcela among them, and Isaiah reached past her to hold a thick cable at one corner.

“Ready, sir?” called a guard from the doorway.

“Let ’er rip,” said Isaiah.

I realized, too late, that we were standing on a sort of elevator, and it shot down into the black shaft beneath us before I was ready. I lost my footing, but Isaiah’s arm was solid around me.

I shrugged it off in a sudden surge of inexplicable anger. I hardly needed his help to stand up. When we passed the next floor, there was an instant flash of visibility from the light on its door, and I noticed Marcela’s arm hovering around my other side, carefully not touching me. I upgraded my opinion of her by a tenth of a point, then remembered her kick to my arm during our little scuffle several weeks ago and slid it right back down again.

“I really wish I could see the look on your face right now,” said Isaiah.

“I’ve been on an elevator before, you know.” I loosened my grip on his arm with considerable effort. “I just didn’t realize there was a floor beneath ours.”

“Not the elevator,” he said as the reason for the extra bracing became apparent. The platform jerked to an unsteady stop just below the bottom floor, throwing my knees forward and my center off-balance. Isaiah’s grip solidified around me at the same time, and I didn’t fall. “This.”

I inhaled involuntarily. We stood at the edge of an enormous room. It was brightly lit, and pale blue, except for a series of shiny white stripes down each wall. The stripes led to heavy black ports, each equipped with a tangle of code-based locks.

The floor was a series of black catwalks suspended over the outer hull of the ship. The main drag branched off at certain intervals, giving access to each port in the room, and of course the entrance. The platform had landed between levels, so that I was nearly at eye level with the floor. I made to climb up onto the walk, but Isaiah placed a warm hand on my shoulder, stopping me.

“Not that we’re going in that way,” whispered Isaiah. “But I hear it’s quite a view.”

“Oh no?” I asked.

“The platform stopped halfway for a reason,” he answered, pulling me down until we were nearly lying flat. A complicated series of shafts and wires spread before me, in sharp contrast to the bright, open room on the floor above.

They lay against the platform, barely able to squeeze into the space beneath the floor. I followed, my tongue thickening in my mouth, and stumbled again, harder this time.

“Careful,” Isaiah warned. “Tons of gravity down here, and we gotta crawl. Try to keep your neck relaxed, or you’ll tweak it. We need you in fighting shape.”

We went a few steps before I could manage anything resembling a normal crawl. Isaiah continued to talk, leading us toward a particular port on the wall. “Shoulda seen me, my first time down here. It’s terrifying.”

I had to agree, albeit silently. There was something about the crawl space beneath the floor that was even more off-putting than it should have been.

“Just over here,” he called back. “Few more yards. I think you’ll appreciate where we’re going.”

“Is that—” I bit my lip, nearly afraid to ask. “Is that an airlock?”

“Why, yes it is! She can be taught. It’s the side of one, anyway. But that’s not the important part.”

“The airlock isn’t important?”

“We’re in a hangar, little bird.” He slid delicate fingers across the panel before us, then jerked it suddenly. It came off in his hands, and he placed it quietly to the side. It was bigger than me. “Or underneath one, anyway.”

I swallowed, with difficulty. “And?”

“And maybe it’s time you flew.”

Seven

I stared into the space the panel had revealed. It was dark, but I could make out some wires, and beyond that, a control panel of some kind. “You got them to give you an Arkhopper?”

Isaiah gave me a withering glance through the shadows.

I blinked at the airlock, which I figured had to be part of a hatch. “You stole one?”

He looked at me patiently. “Not exactly. But you’re getting warmer.”

“You’re about to steal one?”

“Warmer.”

I looked from Isaiah to the hatch, avoiding Marcela’s openly amused expression. “I’m about to steal one.”

“Bingo.”

I sighed.

He pulled the white panel back into place and settled himself down in the narrow space so that he and Marcela were both facing me, their outstretched legs bordering mine on either side. “It’s strange to think about, isn’t it? This is the outer rim of the ship. We’re right next to space. Makes me feel fragile.” He curled his knees into his chest. “And heavy. That’s the gravity, though.”

I stared at him.

Marcela cleared her throat. “We’ve intercepted a series of communications between Central Command—the Commander himself, actually—and the Asian Ark. Apparently, he’s not so jazzed about continuing our little ceasefire.”

“So threaten to cut his air supply or something,” I said. “Wasn’t that the whole point of stealing the Noah Board?”

Isaiah wiggled his shoulders and settled a little further down, giving his neck more room to straighten out. From where we sat, barely underneath a walkway, we could see into most of the hangar above us. The flooring was only solid on the footpaths, giving the hangar the illusion of being suspended in space. “Yes and no. They update it; Adam rehacks it and overwrites their progress. Rinse and repeat. We can handle it.”

“Then why exactly do you need me to hijack an Arkhopper?”

“It turns out we have a weakness.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Like other than the fact that they have all the good weapons? And all the supplies? And all the trained soldiers?”

They ignored that. “We—the Remnant—are on the outer rim of the ship and confined to Sector Seven. All our efforts to penetrate the rest of the ship have failed,” said Isaiah.

“We don’t need to take the rest of the ship,” I said. “We just need the rest of the ship to leave us alone.”

“Command alone, we could handle,” said Marcela. “We have a strong enough grip on their tech that we can probably survive until we get to Eirenea. The problem is that we’re right up against the hull of the ship.”

I bit my lip, hesitant to be persuaded. Eirenea was the planet the Arks were trying to reach. The plan was to build some kind of electromagnetic field, then terraform and colonize it. Like a newer, smaller Earth. Even if everything went perfectly, we were still years away from reaching it.

She paused, watching me. “It would appear that the Commander has embarked upon a more… comprehensive strategy for our defeat. Thanks to Adam, we have reason to believe he’s going to ally with Asia. Convince them that we need to be wiped out.”

I considered that. “You’re saying they’re going to blow a hole in the ship.”

“The engineers took the possibility of projectiles pretty seriously,” she said. “There are ways of saving the rest of the ship if the hull is breached. But they didn’t take the Remnant into account.”

I nodded, understanding. “No one was supposed to live on the outer edge of the Ark.”

“We weren’t supposed to live at all,” she said. “And if they hit us, we won’t survive the blast. Especially not if the Commander disables the defense systems first.”

“One shot, we’re out,” said Isaiah.

“They’d never do that,” I breathed. “Asia would never intentionally…” I stopped. Fear was a powerful salve for the conscience. If the Commander had convinced Asia that we were some kind of threat to them, I wasn’t sure what they’d be capable of. And in my experience, the Commander could be very convincing.

“Oh, now,” he said. “Don’t look so upset about it. We do have a plan.”

“Ah. As long as there’s a plan.”

“And here he comes now,” said Marcela.

I looked around, but apart from the three of us, the crawl space was empty. “He?”

Marcela pointed through the floor above us. I squinted over the walkway and across the length of the hangar. A hooded figure swept into the room, accompanied by a change in the air, perceptible even from as far away as we were. As I watched, the guard on duty rushed toward him, but he held out a hand, and I saw that he was young: his hand was smaller and less muscular than Eren’s, or even Isaiah’s. The hand touched the guard, and the guard fell to the ground, writhing, and then was still.

The hooded figure barely noticed. He swept toward the panel on the wall, and the door closed. His face was shrouded, but if my creeping suspicion as to his identity was right, that door wouldn’t open again, no matter who was on the other side.

He turned toward us, and my guess solidified into ice: Adam.

Adam was a genius, a prodigy. Those were the only words appropriate to describe his fluency with the burgeoning technology of the Ark’s various systems, some of which he’d created himself, and nearly all of which he’d modified to suit his own strengths. I didn’t know much about his brief life on Earth, but, up here, the only family I’d seen of his was Amiel, his sister.

He worked for Isaiah. We’d done exactly one job together: the Noah Board.

At first, I’d liked him fine, in spite of the fact that he reminded me of myself, minus the tech proficiency. But during the heist, he’d killed without thought, and his methods were ruthless. It made him unpredictable. If you asked me, which apparently no one had, it was dangerous to work with a person like that. And not just to our enemies. To us. Surely Isaiah could see the need for limitations, for distance, with someone like that.

I shivered, allowing the weight of the ship to pull me down into myself. “Isaiah. No,” I whispered. “He can’t be controlled.”

“I don’t need to control him. I just need him to do his job. Sound familiar?”

“Yes, you do,” I said.

He approached at a leisurely pace, his hood anchored around his face for the length of the catwalk, and I felt my nerves set themselves on edge as he passed panel after panel on his path through the hangar.

Of course he was coming for us.

When he reached the panel above our hiding spot, he produced a long, thin black rod and swiped it over the controls. They zwipped and fizzled before going dark and rebooting. When the subsystem came back online, he pressed a hand against the biometric scanner, and we watched, breathless, as it keyed to his vitals. A moment passed, and the panel was his.

Only then did he turn to us.

He stooped to work an opening in the pipes around the catwalk, then assisted Isaiah through the floor and onto the platform in front of the hatch.

Marcela went next, giving me an appraising look as she accepted Isaiah’s outstretched hand. I popped myself up through the hole before anyone could reach for me.

Now that he’d taken control of the security systems in the hangar, Adam let his hood fall back to his shoulders. His face was as young and bright as I remembered. He flicked lightning-quick fingers over the panel, and the hatch popped open.

The airlock was exposed. It lay open at our feet, awaiting us, barely longer or wider than a body. We couldn’t access the Arkhopper without it, but the mere thought of crawling into it made my fingers go cold. I decided not to look at it. I couldn’t afford to take my attention away from Adam, anyway.

“Hi, Char,” he said, his voice softer than I remembered.

I gritted my teeth. What was the play here? “Adam.”

He smiled robotically. “Sorry about last time.”

Last time, he’d shot me, rather than let the mission fail. His intent to kill had been as plain as the nose on his unlined face.

“So,” he continued after my silence, “you and me. Together again.” There was an eagerness in his voice that belied his youth, but he showed far more restraint than I’d have otherwise credited him with.

“No.” I directed my response at Isaiah. “We’re not.”

Mars and Adam blinked. Isaiah’s face was outwardly passive. I continued. “I don’t want anything to do with him. Least of all now that the other Arks are involved.”

“Not all of them,” said Adam.

Isaiah spoke as though he hadn’t heard us. “This is a standard two-seat hopper. It can be piloted remotely, or with the manual controls. Pretty self-explanatory, from what I’ve heard. I’ll be in constant contact while you’re in transit.”

“Two seats? I’m not going. Not with him.”

A brief tension pressed Adam’s jaw forward, then he was calm again. Unreadable.

I swallowed. “He’s dangerous, Ise.”

Isaiah regarded me mildly. “He’s learning. And I thought you believed in second chances.”

“This is my chance to learn from our mistake: send him away.”

“Get in the airlock, little bird.”

My lips went numb. “No.” My voice was pathetically quiet.

Adam looked from me to Isaiah, eyes wide, but said nothing.

“Don’t make me threaten you,” said Isaiah. “It’s bad for our friendship.”

I wet my lips, unsure of myself, of everything. Except this. “Take my hand, Isaiah. I need you to understand me. I’m not doing this mission if Adam’s a part of it. And if you know me at all, you know this: you can’t make me.”

“I’ll go,” said Marcela.

We looked at her. My hand was still tightly wound around Isaiah’s.

She spoke again. “You need two people. I’ll do it.”

I took a breath and tried to think, but the airlock lay beside me like a grave. If we were trying to stop the Asian Commander, or whoever it was, from blowing a hole in the Remnant, Adam was nothing but a liability. To everyone. Whether or not I was there. I had to stop him from getting on the hopper.

“It should be me,” I said softly.

“I agree,” said Isaiah.

“Well,” said Marcela. “That’s settled, then.”

“But I… I have demands.”

Isaiah raised his eyebrows. “Demands. You. That’s cute.”

“I mean, yeah. You can’t just expect me to—”

“No, no. It’s fine.” He straightened up and nodded his head, like we were playing some kind of game together. “I’m actually curious about this. Let’s hear these demands.”

I took a breath. “Okay. All right. First, no Adam.”

“Noted.”

“And I want citizenship.”

“In the Remnant? You got it. Matter of fact, none of this is gonna work out otherwise.” He slung an arm over the top of the hatch.

“No. I mean, yes. The Remnant. But for my whole family. Not just me. I know you have my brother.”

Isaiah froze, his hand still on the door of the hatch, his chin slightly out.

“West Turner,” I said. “I know you know that’s my brother, Ise.”

He exhaled. “I thought this might come up.”

I made my voice firm. “Permanent, irrevocable citizenship for me, my dad, and my brother.”

“Actions have consequences.” He gave me a frustrated look. “For most people, anyway. I’m trying to build something here.”

“And a full pardon for all of us.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“No stealing.”

He tilted his head to one side. “No stealing unless you agree to it.”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay. Good luck with that. Also, no lying to me.”

“No deal,” he said flatly.

I looked up at him, surprised. “Fine. Then that one goes both ways.”

“Whatever you gotta do,” he said calmly. “That about cover it?”

I steeled myself. “No Adam. That one’s non-negotiable.”

He looked at me in stony silence.

“It can’t be done without Adam,” said Marcela. She sounded like she was suppressing some kind of incredulous laugh.

Let her laugh, I thought. She’s not the one I need to convince. I thought of the dead guards from my last mission, but I could no longer find their faces in my memory. All I could see was Adam, and the look in his eyes as he stepped over their bodies.

When I spoke again, there was iron in my voice. “You have to choose, Ise. Him or me.”

“You can’t do that,” said Adam. “I’m a part of this. You can’t—”

“You,” Isaiah said simply.

They looked at him in shock.

“You’re dismissed, Adam,” said Isaiah, without turning his head. “Thank you for your service.”

There was a tense moment, then a dark look came over Adam’s face. But instead of putting up a fight, he turned soundlessly and left the room. We watched him go.

“Okay. I think that’s everything.”

I made a move toward the hatch, but Isaiah blocked my way.

“Hey now, Charlotte. I have a few demands of my own.”

The hairs on my neck stood up slowly. “Like?”

“This mission. You do as I say—exactly as I say—we complete the objective, and we get back here in one piece.”

“I barely know anything about the mission.”

“I’ll explain it on the way. Don’t give me that look,” he said, correctly guessing my expression. “I’m not the one who can’t go a day on the outside without committing a felony.”

“You still worried about that judge?” I shrugged. “She sentenced me to death. I barely scratched her.”

“Uh huh,” he said, like he was waiting for me to finish a thought.

I was still for a moment, then narrowed my eyes in disbelief. “Wait a minute. Did you organize this whole thing on purpose?”

“Let’s just say I knew you weren’t going down without a fight. There’s a reason I chose to hold the trial so close to the dark space, in a room you were familiar with.”

I blinked at him. “You sentenced me?!”

“No, little bird. That part was real. You got there all on your own. I got you out. I had to get you away from the crowd, out of the system, in order to make this work. You were still mad at me. I know you well enough to realize there was only one way to do that.”

“Your entire plan hinged on me kidnapping a judge? What the heck kind of a mission is this, anyway?”

“You didn’t have to take it that far. Can’t say I really saw the whole thing coming.” He gave me a serious look, but spoke mildly. “But I figured you could handle yourself. The mission is critical. That’s all I’ll say for now. You’re not the type to be put off by a little danger.”

“No, I’m not. But if anything happens to me, if I don’t make it back… my family—”

Isaiah frowned. “I’d take care of them, Charlotte. I thought you would know that.”

“I’m just… trying to cover my bases.”

He shook his head. “They covered now?”

I paused, then gave a single nod.

“So let’s go.”

He leaned back, still standing in front of the airlock, until I reached out, afraid he was falling. At the last possible second, he bent at the waist and fell backwards through the hatch, leaving me gaping after him.

“Wait, you’re going with me? Not… her?” I blinked apologetically at Mars, still processing everything.

“You know what they say, Charlotte. You want a job done, you got to—”

“Avoid a land war in Asia,” Mars cut in, her voice like acid.

Isaiah chuckled from the darkness. There was ice in my spine.

“Wait! Send the agreement back to the Remnant, in writing.” I hesitated. “In case you don’t come back, either. All right?”

“Fair enough. Full citizenship for her family, if I don’t come back,” he said to Marcela. “Think you can handle that?”

They exchanged a look. Both appeared to be suppressing a smile. “I’m on it, King.”

“Thank you kindly,” he said easily. “Now. Let’s shake on it.” He lifted his hand up through the open hatch, and I realized I was gripping the edge of the airlock with the strength of four men. I stared at my fingers, willing them to release it, and fumbled for Isaiah’s hand.

He adjusted our grip to something like a handshake, and I caught the barest hint of a smile on his upturned face before he pulled me down into the airlock head first.

Eight

I slid into the hatch. He caught me before I hit the seat, and my hand was like a limp rag in his as we completed the handshake inside the Arkhopper. I was in a tiny, round glass cabin with two metal chairs. A complicated series of straps hung from the seats and was mirrored in the webwork around the glass. Marcela leaned in after me to buckle my seatbelts. I pursed my lips and turned away. The process took a long time, then was repeated with Isaiah.

“Thank you, Mars. Now show her the stuff so we can get out of here.”

Marcela turned to me and extended a hand toward the dash. “This is your helmet and a skin. You have four hours of oxygen. If they’re not sealed together correctly, your blood will boil as soon as the cabin loses pressure. Get yours on before you do his, or you’ll both boil. Not that anything’s going to happen.”

I tried not to let my rising panic show in my voice. From the look on her face, she was definitely enjoying this. “Who’s flying this thing?”

Isaiah laughed out loud. “You don’t think I can do it? Come on, little bird. Have a little faith.”

Marcela smirked. “Okay, time for your heads.”

Without further warning, she pressed my forehead back until my head was against the cushion behind it, then pulled the cushions around the side of my head, securing them with a heavy strap. If I was nervous before, now I was approaching outright dread. I couldn’t move my head at all. Sounds were muffled by the cushions, and my vision was almost completely obscured, save for a view of the dash in front of me. My breathing came harder, and my fingers curled into fists.

At the last second, Marcela turned back to me. “Try to keep your neck relaxed, if you can.” She slapped Isaiah’s headstrap into place on the velcroed side of the cushion. “I’ll have auxiliary control of the avionics until you get there,” she said to him. “Then I’ll transfer.”

The tightness in my chest pressed up against my throat. “To whom?” I squeaked.

“The Asian Ark,” said Isaiah, louder than usual, thanks to all the padding around our heads.

“That’s our big plan? We’re just going to pop into the Asian Ark and beg them not to blow us up?”

“Unless we lose pressure and boil first. Zai jian, Mars. Thanks for that image.”

In response, Marcela slammed the hatch shut. She met my eye through the glass for one final instant while securing the latch from the other side. She was still pretending to suppress her amusement when the port closed off completely.

“Hang on tight, all right?” said Isaiah. “You’re not going to like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Right now, we’re spinning. Whole Ark is. But when I hit the release, the airlock will open, and we’ll be free floating. Takes a minute to engage the thrusters, so we’ll still be spinning for a minute. Then there won’t be any gravity at all. It takes some getting used to.”

Apparently, Isaiah had done this before. Where had he gone that time?

I took a deep breath. “I’m ready.”

His long fingers spread out on the dash, delicately brushing the switches and buttons until they found a square yellow knob. “All right. Here we go.”

The pressure that had forced its way up to my throat was joined by the new sensation of my neck being pulled down into my stomach from deep inside me. The tension in my innards spread to beneath my belly. I heard myself make a strange, guttural sound, but I didn’t start screaming until the pulling and pressing reached its icy hands inside my head.

I was spinning. Heavy arcs of swinging motion overtook me in waves. I screamed louder and louder, until my voice broke. We were completely helpless.

A dull pain bit into my right forearm, and I realized Isaiah was trying to get me to hold his hand.

Then, gravity gave out, and the stars swung slower and slower around the clear pane of the Arkhopper. We went around and around, and the pressure forced its way fully into my skull, blackening my vision. The stars winked away. The dash went dark.

I kept screaming.

I knew I had to stop, but I couldn’t. Isaiah’s hand was frantic against my arm. He’s afraid for me. He’s worried.

Then, gravity released us completely, relieving me of what wits I still commanded. My body lifted from the seat.

I think I’m dying. I definitely wasn’t breathing. The world was red, with streaks of gray. My face felt cold. Everything was so cold, except my hand.

“Charlotte. Char, baby. Come on. You still with me?”

My throat tried to swallow, but failed. “What was that?! What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Isaiah was calm, except for an errant muscle working its way through his jaw. “I couldn’t hear Control.”

“No. Right.”

“Because of all the screaming.”

“Ah.” I looked at him, pulled a face. “Sorry.”

“Take my hand, Turner.”

I spread my fingers, and his fingers slid across my palm. I folded my hand to his. It occurred to me that this was Isaiah’s first order. I laughed. What a stupid waste of an order. The streaks of gray in my vision shrank hard, and the red was abruptly angry.

“Marcela. Come in,” Isaiah’s voice was tense. It made him sound like someone else. “Mars, you there?”

“I’m here, sir. Cabin lost some pressure right out of the airlock. Some kind of defensive mechanism, maybe, or something standard that we just weren’t prepared for. I couldn’t warn you because of… the noise. Life support is rebooting. You’re two minutes out, but there should be enough air to go on if she calms down.”

“This isn’t her fault, Mars.”

“I wasn’t—yes, sir.”

“Get us back on track right now.”

“Yes, sir. Eighty seconds.”

“Sign off, too. I don’t think she likes your voice.”

There was a moment of silence. My stomach seemed to float in a space all its own, only briefly knocking into my ribs and lungs.

“Char, you have to breathe slower. You gotta calm down.” He gave my hand a little squeeze, and I found I could make sense of his words.

I focused on nothing but Isaiah’s hand and its warmth against my own. It wasn’t the first time his steady grip had taught me how to breathe again. I squeezed him back.

“Hey. There you are.” His voice was warm, too. And tangibly relieved.

“Sorry ’bout that. Space is not really my thing.”

“You’re one stone-cold criminal, Charlotte Turner.”

“I’m so dizzy.”

“Just concentrate on your heartbeat. Make yourself slow down. And for real, stop screaming. I’m already blind. Don’t want to be deaf, too.”

“I don’t remember it being like that when the OPT docked.” I frowned. The truth was that I didn’t remember anything from when the Off-Planet Transport docked with the Ark. I’d been drugged, along with all the other passengers. “Was it that bad?”

Isaiah made a small noise. “It was worse. They had to slow the rotation anytime an OPT docked. When you woke up, they were already back in full swing. Planned it that way. Apparently a lot of people got the Lightness.”

“Lightness?”

“It’s a thing they call it when you don’t have gravity.”

“Why not just call it ‘zero gravity?’”

“No, that’s just the fact of it. The Lightness is about whether you can take the fact, or not. Some people plain can’t.”

On my second journey through space, I didn’t feel like talking anymore than I had on my first. But this time, I sat with Isaiah, not a wing full of strangers. He was a solid mass in the seat next to mine. He was a co-conspirator and a familiar comfort. For the moment, he was both a captor and a friend. It was a strange mix. In his hands, just out of my reach, he held everything I’d wanted since my mother died. I could not leave him, yet I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to. The Arkhopper stopped spinning, and the stars ceased flinging themselves around us.

The sky was full of them. I mean, full. The more I concentrated on the black spaces between the stars, the more stars I saw. They were everywhere. My spine lifted away from the seat behind me, pressing me softly toward the straps all around me.

I missed my mother. My grief over her death was a constant companion. It swept along the bins of the cargo hold, barely a step ahead of the guards. It roamed the halls of the Remnant, and lately, it had paced the floor of my cell, sometimes weeping at the loss of her, sometimes laughing at her memory. It lay in my bed at night, wrapping its long arms around my ribs, pressing them in and out as I breathed. At times it spoke to me in tenderness, reminding me that she had loved me. Now, it intoned mercilessly that she had died in this blackness, free from gravity forever. Free from light.

She should have seen the sight in front of me: an infinite flood of stars, each more subtle than the last, filling the voids as my sight adjusted to the dark, then blurring out with my tears until I blinked.

She loved the stars.

My grief raged against me only rarely these days, but as gravity released its grip on my body, it reached long fingers around my throat, threatening to choke me. In a strange way, sitting with Isaiah was like sitting with an older version of myself, a past I had never escaped, and I didn’t try to stop the few tears that fell. He’d seen worse from me. His hand tightened over mine, and my grief lessened its noose round my neck.

I did not squeeze him back.

At length, I spoke, but my gaze remained on the stars. “I’m angry, Isaiah. So angry. I don’t know why.”

He didn’t respond, but he didn’t take his hand away, either.

When the Asian Ark came into view several hours later, I found that I had slept. I pulled myself together. I had a long way to go that day and not a lot of information to work with.

I had found my father. My mother would be glad of that, glad that we were no longer angry at each other. But I had yet to find my brother, really find him, and I would never stop until I did. And it all started here.

This ship was massive and built like an enormous round cake with layers. Unlike the North American Ark, they’d engineered gravity via an electromagnetic field generated underneath each layer, and cancelled out, inches later, with every ceiling. It had a single discernable decoration: an enormous circular logo on the “roof” the size of several city blocks. As the pull of the oncoming Ark slid me back into my seat, Isaiah cleared his throat.

“So,” he said, “Couple of things. First, your new job description. You’re the Remnant’s ambassador to the Asian Ark, and fully vested with the authority that brings. Which might not be much, depending on how this goes. Second, you work for me. You represent me and everyone I work for. So don’t do anything hasty.”

“Ise. What on earth—”

“Tshh,” he said, shushing me. “The mission.”

I gave him a blank stare. “Enlighten me.”

“We are here to get official recognition from Asia.”

“We—the Remnant?”

I heard his smile, though I couldn’t see it. “Yep. See? You’re a natural.”

“Recognition as what, again?”

“A sovereign nation-state of the North American Ark.”

“Isaiah. You can’t possibly be serious that I’m the one you want doing this. And are we even supposed to—”

“You rather I picked Adam? He was eager enough. Can’t trust him, though. You’re the daughter of a senator. You’ve met foreign leaders before.”

“Yeah. When I was, like, eight.”

“You know the inner workings of Central Command, and you understand the Remnant: why it exists, how we do things. And you can predict how bad it’ll be for all that if the Commander takes us over.”

“Okay, but—”

“We don’t want to go to war. We just want to be left alone. And we can’t do that unless we have independence. And the more support we get from the other Arks, this one especially, the less likely the Commander will be to blow us all up, so to speak.”

“Actually, I’m not sure that’s a figure of speech,” I frowned as he strapped my head back onto the chair. “But why this Ark especially? You heard something?”

“Let’s just say I don’t trust them, either.” He stopped fiddling with the strap long enough to fix me with his blind gaze. “Keep focused, Char. Thousands of people are depending on us for everything. They need safety. They need justice. And they need to eat. As a separate nation-state, we’ll have the authority to fight back whenever those things are taken away from us, and more importantly, we’ll be in a better position to form alliances.”

“This proves my point, Ise. I can barely remember any Chinese from middle school. They do speak Chinese, right?”

“And Hindi, officially.”

“Officially. Right.” I shook my head. “That’s not much of a plan.”

“Adam reached out weeks ago and established a backchannel. There’s a big party tonight. The Commander will be there to state his case.”

“I take it we’re not exactly on the guest list.”

There was a pause, and I pictured him tilting his head, as though weighing his answer. “We’re not not on the guest list. Adam found us a contact: an ambassador’s assistant. They’re sympathetic.”

“As far as we know,” I sighed. “I don’t like our odds.”

“’S not the first Ark we’ve boarded without an invitation. This time, we won’t even have to hide once the party starts. You gotta remember, most people don’t want a war.”

“I haven’t even read the Treaty yet. Everyone keeps referring to the pre-OPT training that I kinda missed, what with being in prison. And, Isaiah, people go to school for years to learn how to be ambassadors.”

“You think you’re the only criminal we got? No one in the Remnant went to pre-OPT training. That was kind of the point, Char. We weren’t supposed to survive the meteor. Most of them don’t even accept the Treaty as valid, seeing as it planned for them to die. We don’t have years. And we don’t have a diplomacy program. Yet.” He let out a sharp breath. “But I will build this nation-state out of what we do have. And right now, that’s you.”

I sat in silence, focusing for a moment on assisting Isaiah with his own headstrap. “This leader thing looks really good on you. You know that, right?”

“I think a lot of that is going to depend on you, Ambassador.”

“I’m not talking about the outcome. I mean they’re lucky to have you right now.”

He clucked his tongue. “They?”

“We. Maybe.” I squinted at him. “Anything you’re not telling me this time? Like, I don’t know. Something critical that I’m really going to wish I’d known earlier, or something?”

The airlock before us opened, and our little ship found a harbor.

“Oh, there’s plenty,” said Isaiah. “Now, let’s go be diplomats.”

Nine

The hatch of the Arkhopper popped open easily, and we were greeted by silence.

The air was cold—too cold—and I suppressed the urge to hang onto Isaiah. As comforting as it would be, it was far better for us both to be ready.

“Should we … I don’t know. Just start running? Look for a place to hide?”

“They should be here any minute. We’ll stick around.”

I shivered. “May I suggest a new plan? Get me away from this airlock before someone flips a switch somewhere and we end up dying in space.”

“Tell me what you see. And get me out of this strap; I can’t find the buckle-thing.”

I fumbled around his wrists and legs, keeping my eyes on the hatch. If we were walking into a trap, I wanted to know as soon as possible. Not that there was anything I could do about it. “Okay, it’s dark,” I said in a low voice. “But the airlock opened on both ends of the port as soon as we docked, probably automatically. That’s the last strap—you’re free. There’s a little room on the other end. I guess we should get in there before it locks again. What’s his name? Your friend, I mean.”

“Her name. An. But I never met her. She was more friends with Adam, to be—did you hear that?”

I froze. His hand brushed my arm, beckoning me forward, and we slid through the port and into the little receiving room. We were both pretty good at sneaking anyway, but at that moment, we were like silent snakes. My metric was off, thanks to my stint in the Remnant, but it felt like we were in reduced gravity. Maybe it was lower on purpose, to help other visitors adjust to regular gravity after space.

I was still resisting clinging to him when we straightened out in the dark room and pressed the lock to seal off the Arkhopper.

“All right, your highness,” I whispered to Isaiah. “We’re here. What now?”

“They monitor everything. They know we’re here. Be patient.”

“Light?”

“If you must.”

I placed a hand over the lightpad soundlessly, then ended up pressing it a little harder than necessary when it didn’t respond. Finally, I slapped it in frustration, and the lights clicked on. My jaw dropped, then flapped shut.

We were surrounded.

Four faces popped into view, each staring openly, and I stopped breathing.

I gave in to my lesser judgment and reached for Isaiah, speaking to him in a whisper. “So, we’re—”

“Welcome, Mr. Underwood,” said the man seated directly before me. A woman stood next to him, and the room was flanked on two sides by uniformed guards. “Adam informed us of your change in plans.”

“Shan,” Isaiah said pleasantly.

He steadied his arm without forcing me off it, so that my hand was resting in the crook of his elbow. The motion was smooth, as though we’d planned it that way. Like he was escorting me to a waltz or something.

Like I wasn’t terrified.

He continued. “May I introduce Charlotte Turner, our newest ambassador. Charlotte, this is Shan Hui, Ambassador to the North American Ark.”

I cleared my throat. “Uh, they have guns pointed at us.”

Isaiah’s jaw tightened. “Ah.”

“Yep.”

There was an awkward pause while I collected my wits. Well, awkward for me. Everyone else in the room seemed perfectly comfortable, if oddly quiet. The others continued to stare at us, as though taking our measure.

“I must say, I am surprised to welcome you here in person, Mr. Underwood,” Shan said at last. “May I introduce An Zhao, my assistant?”

An bowed. “A pleasure.”

Perplexed, I imitated the motion, looking back to Isaiah for guidance. He appeared pleasantly relaxed, so no help there. I squared my shoulders and met Shan’s eye. After a moment, he stood.

“You have heard about our little reception this evening. I am pleased to inform you that the Imperial has decided that you should be allowed to state your case.”

Isaiah nodded. “Good.”

“I am afraid that, as you are here without permission, you will be detained until your appearance.”

Neither Isaiah nor I were inclined to respond to that, so Shan motioned toward the door. “If you please,” he said, and we preceded him into the hallway.

Now, our arms were positioned so that I was leading Isaiah. We couldn’t have choreographed it better.

Whatever grace I’d mustered up to that moment didn’t last long. As I passed the first guard, he grabbed me by the hips.

So I elbowed him in the chest.

“Hey!” said Isaiah.

“I’m afraid you are under arrest,” said Shan. “And while we don’t wish to restrain you, Mr. Underwood, we really must insist on searching Miss Turner.”

“No need. She has a gun. Probably a knife, too. Char, if you wouldn’t mind,” said Isaiah.

The men looked at me in silence.

I looked right back at them, but they didn’t budge, so I finally sighed and slid the gun out of the nest of wire behind my back and plunked it onto a nearby table. “All right. Fine. Here.”

Shan examined it calmly before pressing it into his robe and returning to his patient stance.

“It’s not a knife,” I said awkwardly, sticking my hand down the front of my shirt and pulling out the wire cutters. “There. Happy?”

“Certainly,” said Shan. He nodded at the guard, who produced a shiny set of silver handcuffs.

On hearing their familiar clink, Isaiah frowned.

“No,” I said. “No cuffs.”

“I really must insist,” Shan repeated. “For Miss Turner, pending our dispensation of your organization’s legal status.”

“She is a diplomat,” Isaiah said in a low voice.

“She has no official standing, Mr. Underwood, and neither do you. Furthermore, she just smuggled a gun onto our sovereign territory. Now, I’m willing to forego any reasonable security measures for yourself, but I really must in—”

“No cuffs,” I repeated, coating the room in a glare. I laid a hand on Isaiah’s arm to remind them of whom I’d showed up with, invited or not.

The two guards waited, expressionless, while the four of us wordlessly assessed the invisible power structure in the room. Shan glanced back at his assistant, whose expression barely shifted from the look of politely detached concern she’d adopted when the first guard assaulted me. Then he locked onto Isaiah, who, to my horror, didn’t seem half as outraged as I thought he should be. After all, I realized, he’d gotten what he wanted: a meeting with the Imperial. I kept right on glaring, for all the good it did me.

“Go ahead,” said Isaiah finally.

“No!” I shouted, my voice about eight steps higher than I’d intended. “Go to—”

“Remember our conversation, Charlotte?” said Isaiah. His jaw relaxed, but the tension had spread through his usually-smooth forehead.

The balance was weighed, and my vote was as consequential as a sack of feathers. Shan lifted my wrist off Isaiah’s arm with surprising gentleness and clasped the cuffs on as though they were a pair of delicate silver bracelets. I revised my glare to a slight frown. It usually hurt enough to leave a mark.

Didn’t mean I had to like him.

No one had touched Isaiah yet, which I supposed was a good sign, so I squared my shoulders as I was prodded forward through the door.

I nearly gasped at the sight before me. A bright red carpet led us out of the tiny hangar. I couldn’t help but notice the differences between my Ark and this one. In the North American Ark, only the Guardian Level could be described as decorated. Here, on the outermost edge of the Asian Ark, the path was already beautiful.

Shan stopped, expecting Isaiah to walk with him. Isaiah gave a nearly imperceptible twitch of his lower arm, signaling me to release him, and I realized I’d taken his arm yet again. As we walked, An fell into step beside me. For awhile, we walked in silence, watching the men converse, but unable to hear their words.

I began a mental catalog of everything I saw, so that I could repeat it all to Isaiah later, but I was quickly overwhelmed. The biggest immediate difference was the lighting. It was a trick of the eye, of course, but the lights appeared to be completely natural: open flames alternated with elaborately painted lanterns. The ceiling itself seemed to glow. It was white, along with the walls and the floor beneath the carpet.

The next thing I noticed was the calligraphy. On either side of the red carpet, rows of perfectly balanced symbols lined our path.

“Poetry,” said An, noticing the direction of my eyes.

“It’s beautiful,” I said honestly.

“You read Japanese?”

“I—no, not at all. But it’s very pretty.” I squinted at the symbols. The artist had pressed the brush hard, leaving the edges rough, in spite of the precisely equal weight he or she had given each word. This was a calligrapher who could easily have produced smooth edges, vanishing the mere idea of the instrument’s individual bristles, but had chosen otherwise. As I stared, I could almost feel the artist’s frustration. “It seems almost… angry.”

An rewarded my observation with another sweeping glance, landing this time at my eyes, but she didn’t comment on my thoughts directly. “Each culture has contributed literature to this path, which begins on the outer edge of the Ark and spirals continuously to the center. In many places, the inscriptions are still being created. It is the same on every level, but the words are different.” She gave me a sharp look. “We believe we have found unity in spite of our differences.”

This time, I met her gaze. “I see.”

“I am told you speak no Mandarin?” she asked, holding up a hand to stop me. A guard opened a panel in the inner wall, revealing a black stone tunnel lined with torches.

We turned into the tunnel as the conversation continued. It was perfectly straight, so that I could see almost to the center of the ship. “No,” I said. “My education was more… erratic. Did you bring much art from your continent?”

An considered that. “The construction of the Ark itself is art. A perfect circle. Each floor has precisely the same gravity as the others. Our homes are each the same, except the Imperial’s. He lives in the center of the guidao.”

“Guidao?”

“The spiraling path that reaches every room on a level. You are on a lujing, a path that cuts through the coil and leads to the center. The lujing are for official use.”

As we walked, we passed directly across the spirals of the guidao, its white and red scheme contrasting with the dark stone walls of the lujing. “This is beautiful, too.” I reached to touch a part of the stone and saw that it was made from actual stone, cut from the depths of the Earth. My handcuffs clinked, and I pulled my sleeves over them, wishing I could make them disappear.

We bustled down the hall, but I couldn’t help squinting at the stone. It had an iridescent shimmer, as though it were specifically responding to the light from the torches. On a whim, I reached up and touched an open flame, allowing my sleeves to fall back from my wrists, exposing the cuffs. They caught the light of the fire, which set the silver dancing. The flame was cold.

An spoke again. “The light is art. It comes from within the ceiling. It is not generated from a single point, but radiates through the rooms like a coil. At night, the torches burn brighter, and the ceiling is dimmed. I sometimes walk at night, just to see the flames.”

I nodded. “Well, I can see why it’s your favorite part. It’s very… peaceful.”

She smiled. “It is. Although, it’s not my favorite part. That is the water.”

“Is that in the coils, too?”

“It is beneath us.” She paused, considering her words. “Maybe I will show you tomorrow, when you’ve recovered from the party. It would be a good thing to show the other delegations as well.”

“Other delegations?” I asked, at the risk of sounding like a parrot.

“We’ve sent a signal to the remaining Arks. The others should be here soon. Each has a right to see how your case is stated. If one Ark goes to war, we are all affected.”

She had a point, but I couldn’t help thinking that the whole reason we were here was to put an end to any secret dealings with the Commander. I was sure the other Arks hadn’t been consulted about blowing a hole in a ship, no matter who owned it. I turned back to Isaiah, and he sensed my glare.

“How are you doing back there, Ambassador?” he asked, smiling.

“Oh, just fine. I’m especially jazzed about meeting all the other delegations.” Hopefully not in handcuffs, I added silently.

Shan gave An a helpless look, but Isaiah seemed not to mind. “Of course,” he said easily.

We reached a large wooden door, and I stepped back, expecting it to swing open, but Shan slid a keycard past the pad, and it sucked open, just like back on our Ark, revealing a wide, circular room with red walls and flooring.

“These are your quarters,” Shan said. “I regret that you will not be able to… explore during your stay. I am told that your Arkhopper contained cargo. Your things should arrive shortly.”

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