The Fall

Six

“All right,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”

“It’s ten feet to the hopper. It’ll take at least fifteen seconds to pop the hatch, then another thirty to seal it back.”

I gave him a blank look. “Dad. You can’t be seriously thinking of—”

“You hold his face, keep pressure on his eyes. Make sure his mouth and nose are shut.”

“Dad. No. No.”

“I’ll run ahead and get it ready. There’s still full gravity, and we should keep him in the fetal position as long as possible. As soon as it starts to open, I’ll be right back to help you move him.”

“You have actually lost your—”

He looked at me earnestly. “Even a dog can survive ninety seconds. A chimp can make it for two and a half minutes.”

“I do not want to think about how they figured that one out.”

“It’s certainly not safe, but like you said. The scientists on the EuroArk have been working around the clock on reproducing these drugs ever since Adam took over. They can probably help Eren. And I doubt he’s going to make it if we leave him here.”

“So put the skin on him. I’m not even slightly sick. My odds are way better.”

“That won’t work, Charlotte, even if I agreed to it. I can’t move three bodies by myself. And you will concede that Adam’s life is more important than any of ours. We can’t risk him.”

“For now, anyway.” I sat there, fully confronted with the truth: my father was right. It had to be Eren. “I can’t believe I’m agreeing to this.”

“It’s his best shot.” He paused for a moment, then added, “You’re a good friend to him, Charlotte. I’m proud of you.”

“All right, all right.” I stood up and shimmied into my skin, yanking it nervously over my shoulders. The flat oxygen pack settled around the top of my head, under the dome of my helmet, and the neck sealed itself without a hitch. Beside me, Dad did the same, then started working on Adam.

I popped back to the first-aid kit and retrieved a spool of surgical tape. Then I wound it around Eren’s mouth about a dozen times, making sure he was still breathing through his nose. I plugged his ears with skinwax from the burn section of the kit and taped his eyelids shut, then wrapped them tightly as well. Halfway through, I realized that my hands were shaking.

“Ninety seconds, you say?”

Dad gave me a sympathetic look. “More, for a person.”

“A conscious one.” My tongue felt heavy. “Forty-five seconds for the hatch to open and close.”

“Plus a little time to get Adam on board. And however long it takes for life support to boot.”

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

Dad looked at Eren, and I realized I was cradling his head and shoulders against my chest. “I don’t want him to die any more than you do, Charlotte,” he said, his voice slightly softer.

I pulled Eren closer. He was completely limp. “Yeah.”

“Did you see any rope?”

“Rope?”

“In the compartments.”

“Um. Yeah. Somewhere on that side.”

Moving quickly, Dad located the rope, produced a knife out of nowhere, and cut a long measure off. Then he wound it around Adam’s chest and over my shoulders. “You should take Adam,” he said, his voice strange. “We’ll move faster. I’ll hold Eren in position, with his knees up. He’s bigger. Less secure. It’ll take a lot more strength.”

I nodded, numb, and he secured Adam’s body onto my back, then wound his legs around my waist. “Hang on like this,” he said quietly. “It’ll distribute around your hips. Easier to manage.”

I wet my lips. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he repeated, lifting Eren against his chest. He rested a hand on the door to the hangar. “When this is open, the pressure differential will activate the airlock on the far side of the hangar. We think it’s wired so that the airlock’s activation will trigger an explosion, so move fast. Brace yourself. In five.”

Eren was curled against my father like a baby. His head was tucked against my father’s neck, his shins against my father’s forearm. I nodded.

“Four. Three. Two—”

There was a sick hiss as the distant airlock engaged its seal. I lumbered out onto the hangar catwalk, Adam on my back, following my father’s heavy-laden form. Behind us, the door began to close.

Seconds later, a gut-thumping POP followed by a deep, sudden rumble shook the hangar floor, and the walls around me reflected fire. At the hangar wall, mere feet from the dock, a bright orange flame came into view and quickly flattened into a deep, dark blue as the fire devoured the remaining oxygen trying to escape the hangar.

I stumbled, falling, and let go of Adam’s legs. The rope around us both went dangerously taut, driving my breath out of my chest. I hit the ground, and Adam’s weight thrust me down further, smashing my knees into the floor. The hopper was round and shiny, with a webbed net over half the hatch and long, black blades that looked like the feet of a particularly graceful insect.

It was also about a million miles away. I struggled to stand, but my legs were not nearly strong enough to lift us both after five years of puppethood, and I had to crawl the remaining distance.

When the ladder appeared in front of my face, I lifted my head in time to see my father force Eren through the hatch. I grabbed the highest rung I could reach and yanked myself up. Dad leaned down and pulled Adam up. He was still attached to me.

Surely an hour had passed since the seal had broken.

I willed my legs and arms to climb the ladder, then collapsed onto Eren as soon as I’d struggled over the lid of the hopper.

Above me, the hatch must have closed, but I couldn’t hear it. The floor of the hopper began to hum.

My father sat in the pilot seat, yanking the controls around, until the hatch was fully sealed. Then he ripped off his helmet and shoved it down over Eren’s head, flipping a dial on the ear.

“What?” I said, but he couldn’t hear me. I yanked off my own helmet and breathed in the recycled air of the hopper, nearly shaking with relief. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” said Dad. “He’s fine, probably. But the oxygen in the helmet is more concentrated. That’s what he needs right now, since we can hardly repressurize him slowly. Anything he had in his blood is likely depleted, or will be soon.”

“Oh,” I said, then drew it out a little longer, feeling fear and relief all at once. “Ohhh.”

Dad frowned at me, then shoved an airsick tube into my unsteady hands. “Make sure if you vomit, you get it all in that,” he said crisply, and began to cut the ropes off my back. Adam fell onto the footboard, and his helmeted head knocked into Eren’s.

There were only two seats in the hopper: the pilot’s and the one right next to it. So I went about pressing Eren into a sitting position on the floor. From there, I could try to lift him onto the seat using the safety straps as leverage. If memory served, we were in for a spin once we broke free of the Ark’s rotation, and I wasn’t about to risk him getting hurt any further. If Adam suffered a few broken bones, on the other hand, I wouldn’t exactly lose sleep over it.

“Charlotte. The seat is yours,” my father said. He was gathering the bits of rope from around my shoulders and using them to bind Adam in every way he could think of. Then he pulled Eren down on top of Adam and tied their chests together. “This will keep them from snapping their necks, but only barely. It won’t work as well for you.”

“Eren goes in the seat,” I said, angry. “He has more mass. He should be secured. For everyone’s safety.”

“I’m done with this argument, Charlotte. Buckle in.”

I set my lips, weighing my options.

Dad sighed. “I’m securing them both to the floorboard. No one’s going flying around the cabin. And if you don’t buckle up, no one’s going anywhere.” He crossed his arms and settled back in his seat. “Unless you’ve learned how to fly a spacecraft since we left Earth.”

I scowled. He looked out the window, the picture of patience. The flames had long since extinguished from lack of oxygen, and the hopper was like a cocoon, quiet and safe. And slightly cramped. My father wasn’t kidding.

I hopped into the seat, letting my glare deepen a little further, and grimaced my way through the process of untangling and securing the knot of safety straps. Dad gave a slight nod and shifted the controls into position.

The thrusters engaged when the final valve released, stabilizing us as we swung out into the darkness. Gravity lessened with every sweeping arc, and we slid smoothly into nothingness, surrounded by distant stars. Dad was a better pilot than I’d expected.

I let the vastness envelop me completely. For the first time, I felt that space was comforting. We—all of us—were so helpless. There was no rational explanation for our continued survival in the universe, and yet here we were, blanketed by the cosmos that should have killed us off generations ago.

It struck me that if we succeeded, we would be the forbears of a new race of people. In time, the generations we carried inside ourselves would come to fill Eirenea, and it was we who made their strivings possible. We who had escaped a doomed planet. We who founded a life on a barren rock on the other side of the solar system. They would teach the story of our journey for the rest of our existence. And who knew what things the human race would yet accomplish?

I glanced at my dad and knew that his mind was on the past, and my mother. For me, in that moment, it was all connected. She had given her life so that I could be here, and now, I was prepared to do the same.

“We’re going to make it, Dad. I think she always knew that we would make it.”

He said nothing, but spun the ship about and pressed us into the void.

Seven

The EuroArk was dark when we came in. I’m not sure what I expected, but the only major points of light were the docks. There were tiny pins of light at the tips of the other structures, but I couldn’t make them out. I squinted, slack-jawed, as we drew near. I couldn’t imagine the shape of the massive ship ahead of me. From where I sat, it looked exactly like the stars.

“Gotta be careful here,” said Dad, mostly to himself. “The cities reach farther out than the docks.”

I continued to gawk, wondering what he meant by that, until the rest of the Ark came to light. It was a dark ship in a darker sky, but from what I could tell, it was composed of several cube-like modules connected by a series of wide tubes and interspersed with smaller, more tapered tubes that held the docks.

“It looks like a jack,” I said, recalling a game I’d played as a child. “Knucklebones.”

“Yes, that was intentional, to preserve and insulate as many cultures as possible. So is the darkness. It’s mandatory for eight hours a night. Saves energy. Helps with the Lightness, too. Gets people used to power outages before they happen.”

The hopper eased toward the space between a protruding pair of cities, allowing me to gape at the vacant-looking windows in wonder. “They don’t have a nuclear generator? I hope you got your clearance ahead of time,” I said nervously, looking for weapons ports among the asteroid shields. “What do you mean, intentional?”

“The European Ark was engineered to minimize interdependency among the cities. The areas at the end of each strut operate separately, but the core city, right in the middle, has final say over everything. Kinda like the United States, before it was dissolved. And it adds surface area for the solar sails.”

“Minimize inter—but wait, isn’t the whole point of the Treaty of Phoenix that we’re all supposed to depend on each other? To stop everyone from going to war again? We’re all mixed together, so that no one group of people gets isolated. I gotta wonder what the Tribune thinks about that. It has the final say over everything, right?”

“That’s an untested theory, at this point. The Tribune has never done anything controversial enough to matter, so no one has ever challenged its authority. But it’s really meant to arbitrate disputes under the Treaty. It’s more of a legal recourse for the heads of the governments than an executive one. Its only weight is the strength of the other Arks, who’ve all agreed to abide by its rulings.”

“In theory.”

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