No one spoke as the lift dinged into place. Silvan marched out, his shoulders straight. I began to follow, but then I saw how Aleksandra hung back.
“I’d like a word with your intended, Talmid Rafferty,” she said. Silvan’s brow lowered. I guess he was getting used to it, though—to people wanting to talk to me but not him—because he only sighed.
“Sure, be my guest,” he said, then left us in the lift. I watched Aleksandra listen for the fade of his footsteps. Then she let the door of the lift close and didn’t push any buttons. I was trapped in the tiny space with her. I stared down at the corner of the dark lift, fleeing her gaze.
“You can’t hide from me, Fineberg,” she said. Her hand touched the hilt of her blade. I braced myself—this was it, I supposed. Time for my own throat to be slit.
“No,” I agreed. “I can’t.”
But to my surprise she didn’t unsheathe her knife. Instead she only rested the heel of her hand there, letting out a deep sigh.
“We know what you did. Mazdin Rafferty’s illness is unmistakable.”
“I—” I began. Then I just closed my mouth again. Really, there was nothing to say. I’d done it, disobeyed the orders of the Children of Abel.
“Such a waste! It would have been easier to enact our plan without Silvan standing in the way. Boy fancies himself a leader. He’s bound to fight me for control of the ship at some point. I told them we couldn’t trust you. But Hofstadter insisted you had nothing to lose.”
“Told them?” I asked. “Do you mean . . . the leaders of the rebellion?” I tried to imagine who they might be—muscle-bound fieldworkers, maybe, conspiring between rows of corn. But Aleksandra just regarded me carefully, a smirk curling her upper lip.
“I meant my trusted advisors.”
I stared at her for a long time, feeling my heart drop into my gut.
“You lead the rebellion?”
Her confirmation was only a small, short nod—almost invisible. But unmistakable.
“I guess you could say that the women in my family have always craved power. Whereas the women in your family . . .” A hint of disdain twisted her mouth. “Well, you try, don’t you? Even if you always fail.”
She pressed a button. The door dinged open. But her words had settled into me like a stone. I reached up a hand, touching her shoulder.
“Please don’t kill Silvan!”
I wanted to stop her—to make her understand how harmless he was. I knew that I had no right. He was in their way—in her way. But, to my surprise, Aleksandra gave her head a shake.
“Watching you kill the brat would have given me some satisfaction. Oh, it burned me when she named him as her successor.” She gazed down the dark hallway, her pupils tiny pinpricks of determination. “But he’s not the one standing in my way, not really. Mother is.”
Aleksandra left no time for her words to sink in. She stalked off past me, disappearing down the hall.
I stumbled after her, past tiny windows that showed only a sliver of Zehava. Purple light mottled the floor. My steps were small—they had to be, because of my shoes—but hasty. At last I reached the sliding doors at the end of the hallway.
The doors opened onto a strange room, one filled with flickering panels and twinkling lights. Illuminated maps of the ship lined the walls, showing which systems were working and which had finally run down. The air was clouded with dust, and it smelled ancient, untouched. A soft stream of voices crackled through the silence. In my wine-addled state I didn’t yet understand them.
Behind a podium, lit blue in the alternating light, the trio stood—Silvan, Captain Wolff, and Aleksandra. The captain’s hair was twined in an intricate braid. She was dressed to the nines for our wedding today: dress boots, spotless wool, buttons bearing the pomegranate seal of the Council. My gaze flicked to Aleksandra. I had trouble believing it, that this woman, whose lean figure and proud posture were so like her mother’s, was preparing to strike her down.
As I fell into place by Silvan’s side, I heard Aleksandra’s hushed words. “Rioting has erupted in the dome,” she was saying. “They’ve taken over the grain silos and the labs. They’ll likely descend on the hatchery next.”
“They’re liable to kill themselves,” Captain Wolff replied, the corners of her mouth turning down. In her dismay her twisted face looked even uglier. “I want you to see to it that they’re contained. Minimize the loss of human life.”
Aleksandra turned and marched off. Her hard gaze flitted over to me for only the briefest moment and then away. She disappeared behind the sliding doors.
Captain Wolff stared down at the podium. It hardly seemed like she registered our presence.
“We should have anticipated this,” she said, “when the probes disappeared. We shouldn’t have sent the shuttle crew.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?” I demanded. My heart pounded out a wild beat now. Silvan turned to me from his place beside Captain Wolff.
“Mara told you, didn’t she?” he asked, his tone a touch impatient. “We’ve sent two now. They nearly reach the surface, but then the signal goes out.”
“Yes,” I said dully, “she told me.”
But my mind went frantic at the thought. The Children of Abel were wrong—Captain Wolff hadn’t destroyed any probes. She’d been telling the truth. They’d been lost, truly lost. Silvan was the one who finally brought me back to myself, pointing down at the screen.
“What’s that?” he asked.
An image, black and white and occasionally crossed by a frenzy of static, was projected on a screen set deep into the podium. The quality was so low that I couldn’t make out the image at first—only a dim impression of faces, people.
“That’s the shuttle crew,” Captain Wolff said. Her voice was low. There was sadness in it. “There’s Hannah Fineberg. I’d recognize her anywhere. I watched her grow up. Every Launch Day, her family had dinner with mine.”
Through the static I saw Hannah’s face take shape. She was sitting in the corner of the screen. There was something dark—blood?—smeared over her forehead. I listened to Hannah’s voice as it came thinly through the tinny speaker. She was repeating the same words over and over again.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” she was saying. “Zehava is inhabited. I repeat, Zehava is inhabited.”
“No,” Silvan said. He pressed his hand against the glass, smearing away the dust. “I meant them.”
That’s when I saw them—people, standing behind Hannah and the rest of the crew. But there was something wrong with them. They were too tall, or too skinny, or something. The movement of their bodies just wasn’t right.
I saw my sister-in-law, the mother of my niece, my brother’s wife, turn to the crewman beside her. She spoke to him. Someone jostled her. A figure stood hovering over her shoulder.
“The inhabitants are demanding that we leave the surface. Please send a recovery shuttle. . . .”
Inhabitants. The three of us stared at the figures, trying to make them out. Their eyes were wide set and lozenge shaped and black, pitch black, not a single sliver of white in them.
I’d seen those eyes before. Eyes as dark and as endless as the space outside the ship. They visited me every night in dreams. He had settled down beside me, his cool skin as fragrant as a flower. He’d watched me, and I’d watched him, and we’d felt safe together—whole.
I saw Captain Wolff stroke her jaw with her gloved hand. “Our biologists have long known that there was a possibility of life on the surface. But we thought—”