Beyond Our Stars (16 page)

The next questioner was up. An older woman with frizzy hair who looked vaguely familiar. “I think what we all need to ask ourselves is what connection the girl has to these creatures. They talk to her, that much has been
admitted
. So why are we not wondering if she's completely under their control?” The woman I now recognized as the loon who'd been in that first meeting with the Thirteen swiveled around dramatically. She pointed a shaking finger at me. This wasn't the first time someone had looked at me funny. I knew they whispered about me.

“I think I have to leave,” I whispered to Chance.

He grabbed my hand as I stepped over him, “We'll all go with you.” The rest of our group nodded.

I appreciated that. It really was better that I left with a group and didn't sulk out of the room by myself like I had something to hide. I could hear the Chief saying, “Hope is not a target in this. She is as much a victim as any of you.”

We reached the doors of the auditorium and I sprinted down the hall to get away from that room, to feel free for one moment.

“Damn it,” I said. I didn't know why that one Local had picked me.

Weeks, Pilgrim, Chance and the others caught up to me in the deserted corridor.

“If this goes on much longer they'll call for Legacy's execution,” Gaia said.

She was right. But that might not even work, and even though I was angry it felt wrong.

“We have to do something,” I said.

“What can
we
do?” Weeks asked. “We can't do anything.”

I sighed. What
could
we do? A bunch of teenagers, all of us so beaten down by our experiences. I led everyone out of the ship and over to the tree that was my place. They all knew where it was now and some of us perched on the plank, some on the ground, staring at the sky and ignoring the endless rumbling in our stomachs.

I flopped down in the dry grass thinking about Legacy. It was a darker night, and I thought the planet's seasons must have been changing. It was even cooler now and I could see a few stars.

I sat up. “There are so few of them…”

Then an idea began as a spark in my brain and I searched, trying to make it take shape. Suddenly, it exploded into a fire and ignited everything in its path. “There are so few!” I exclaimed to the others.

“What are you talking about?” Chance asked. The others were sitting up to watch me.

I rubbed my face. “We need to tell the aliens that there are only a few of us left.”

I was met with bewildered faces.

“Because they don't know that,” I said.

I saw understanding dawn on Chance's face. “They don't know what happened on Earth. They know nothing about us. For all they know there's another wave behind us, a whole planet of people looking to take over theirs.”

“How do we tell them anything?” Cairo spoke up in his halting English. He still had difficulty explaining himself in our language on occasion. Cairo had been living on our ship for years and he still messed words up. Even if they could possibly speak it, which didn't seem likely, I couldn't teach the CR-3ans English in a few days. They'd been watching us for months now and didn't know a single word. Maybe because they thought our human languages were beneath them, maybe because their speech simply didn't work like ours, I didn't know.

“I can draw it,” Weeks said quietly. I turned my head to him. I remembered his drawing from the slamming final.

“Draw it?” asked Marseille.

“Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it would work. But if they can see this spot, then we can show them things, if they're still watching. I could draw it.”

“You really think this could work, Hope?” Chance asked. “Telling them that there's only
us
left?”

His question left me cold. “We can't tell anyone else.” I said. “Some people might think this isn't a good idea.” I looked around the group. People might not want the aliens to know. But we had nothing, so why not show the CR-3ans that?

A faint sound pierced the darkening night sky. It was soft from where we were but…it sounded like the warning alarm, like the one I'd heard blaring through the halls of Reflection when we'd landed.

“What is that?” Gaia asked, sitting up on the plank in the tree.

I took off toward the noise, the others scrambling after me.

As we neared I saw some of the engineers exit the Reflection and run toward the jail. There were groups of people gathered everywhere and they seemed to be arguing. Chance grabbed the arm of someone nearby.

“What's happening?”

“They broke Morgan out.”

“How?” Chance asked.

“During the meeting. The guards were shot. They're dead.”

“Grab those blankets, too,” I told Chance and pulled my long sleeve uniform over my head. It was hours after the meeting and Morgan's jailbreak.

Morgan was being hidden somewhere. They'd left Legacy behind. Chief hadn't ordered a search party yet. There was nothing we could do about Morgan.

Except for one thing. We'd split up to gather supplies. Weeks was getting his drawing stuff, we were getting whatever food we could, and stuff to keep warm.

Chance and I were in my quarters now and I reached down and piled my own blankets high in my arms and waited for him. I couldn't see above the pile of fabric.

“Hey, can you press the code and open the door?” I asked, trying to balance the blankets. I felt warm hands gliding up my thighs.

He scooped my hair from my neck and began kissing me softly, his hands on my hips.

“We have things to do,” I reminded him.

“I'm in the middle of something,” he murmured.

“Chance…”

“Almost done,” he said, continuing to nuzzle my neck. I was considering dropping the blankets and being
very
late when he suddenly pulled away.

“All right, let's go,” he said.

“Cute,” I grumbled. He'd been doing this ever since we got back together. Taking small moments to kiss me and touch me. Then he'd make me come after him.

“Oh, she's playing like she doesn't like it now? The look on her face says otherwise…” Chance said, his eyes daring me to contradict him.

He was right, I'd always been addicted to him. And it was even worse now that we were back together. I wondered if everyone could see it, and tell what I was thinking.

“I'm waiting on you,” he called me from the hallway with his pile of blankets in his arms.

I shook my head.

We met back up at the tree house at the perfect time for watching the skylights. Right after midnight, and for the next few hours, the lights intensified and rippled and merged, soaking the sky with color.

We put out blankets as beds in the dry, crunchy grass and Chance and Cairo made a small fire. Weeks had a large paper drawing tablet, lots of colored pencils and some tubs of paint.

“I brought the pencils and paint in my backpack when we boarded. Had to fight a guard to bring the paper on, too,” he told me when he saw I was looking.

“You paint?” I marveled.

“Not really so much as I draw, but I'm thinking of an idea so I brought it along in case.”

I gave him an appreciative look. My friend of many talents.

Boston had his copy of Time magazine that he'd brought in his backpack with him aboard ship. It was a photo of a mudslide covering a huge expanse with the tops of skyscrapers poking through. He showed us some of the other pictures inside, of natural disasters across the U.S. and the world. The mood of our little group changed quickly.

The issue of Time was the magazine's last, right before the Earth went into its downward spiral. Others had brought photographs of family members who had died, and some had pictures of devastation near their homes.

Tonight we brought anything that reminded us of life back on Earth and it wasn't much, only had what we'd managed to bring aboard ourselves. It would have to suffice.

Weeks spread one of the large, thick sheets of paper over a broken piece of crate on the ground. He took the Time magazine and started sketching.

The rest of us put the food into a pile and started to rummage through it. A can of beans, a can of rice soup, a few very stale, funny smelling crackers, and three pieces of fruit from the CR-3an's crops. They were already turning bad.

While Weeks did his work some of the others began to share their stories about what they'd brought. Faith and Gaia had a photo of their parents. They'd died in a Tsunami off the coast of Britain on vacation. The girls had been home with a babysitter. They didn't get to have a funeral.

Marseille had a newspaper clipping of her hometown in Arizona before the damage showing happy people at a local event for children in the park. She remembered going to it with her mom. Marseille didn't know the name of the disease that had killed her mother. Hospitals were abandoned long before the very end.

Boston revealed empty hands. “All our stuff got destroyed, so I don't have a picture of my Mom. But she left when I was just a kid, I have no idea what happened to her.”

“So you're an orphan?” I asked. That was odd. I'd thought Boston must have a parent even though I couldn't remember seeing him with one, because I thought his quarters were on a family deck.

“No, but me and my dad, we're not real close. He spent most of his time with Morgan.”

I stared at him. I took a deep breath. “Your Dad was in that meeting.”

“Yeah. He asked me to go. He's friends with Cole, too.”

“So you and Legacy, that's because of your fathers?”

Boston gave me a frustrated look. “They wanted us to be friends. They're
all
friends, Hope. You don't know how long this has been going on. Since way before we landed. They thought whoever was in power would basically be king of a new planet. They don't want it to be Chief. They want it for themselves.” Boston sighed. He rubbed a hand over his close shaven head. “I thought they'd stop when the planet was already inhabited…”

“But instead they're using it,” Chance finished.

Boston nodded. “Yeah.”

“Do you know what Morgan's plan is?” I asked.

He shrugged, meeting my eyes. “No. But whatever it is, I don't think it'll end well.”

We were all quiet.

“You worried about your dad finding out what you're doing?” I asked.

Boston looked back at the fire. “I do what I think is right. It's not for anyone. It's for me.” He turned away from us and started putting kindling on the fire to get it going stronger. I knew he was done talking.

Chance didn't want to share much. His parents had died, he and his sister had made it out. That was it.

“Grim?” I asked softly. I wasn't even sure I should've let him come out this late, but I didn't want him to feel like he was different. He seemed like a baby compared to the rest of us though.

Grim turned his face to the side in hesitation and then tossed a piece of paper out onto the blanket in front of him.

It was also a drawing. It was Earth, but the land was burning and pieces of the continents were missing like they'd slid into the sea. The ocean was tinged a dark gray and the glowing orange and red of the land, like lava, portrayed an idea of what had happened to the world we left behind.

“You made this?” I asked him. He nodded without looking at me. Weeks stopped what he was doing and grabbed the paper from me. It was a good idea, but crude compared to what Weeks was creating.

“Excellent,” Weeks said, nodding at the picture. He stood up and climbed our tree. He jumped back down with a thud, holding the big folded sheet we left up there.

“Help me spread it out,” he said, throwing the sheet to catch the air. We grabbed rocks to weigh it down securely.

Then Weeks sat down and pulled out his paints and brushes. He began to work, glancing at Grim's drawing. Grim peeked up at me, a bashful grin on his face.

“Do you want to tell your story?” I asked him. I had heard it before, but thought I thought he might want to tell the others. His story was a lot like theirs. I guess that's why we'd never done this before, shared the details. Because we all had a story and it was a painful one. Even if you had your parents, your friends, relatives, siblings, and the rest of your life were still gone.

Grim shook his head no. I moved on to Cairo. I was interested in what he'd have to say, it still made no sense to me that he was aboard the Reflection even though I knew he'd spoken next to no English or Spanish at the time, and there were other vessels with common ship languages he
had
known that had taken off from our campsite.

“My father was on another ship,” he said simply. He had a dad?

“Why aren't you with your father now?” I asked, sympathy filling me as I pictured him torn from his father's arms.

“Chose Reflection,” he answered. He looked into the fire, hissing and crackling at our feet.

“With no one you knew on board?” I asked.

He hesitated. “I knew Marseille,” he said, “from the camps.”

He'd met Marseille in the camps? So he abandoned his father and everything familiar to him, and purposely chose to board the Reflection for five years?

We all exchanged looks. “Marseille said she would teach me English and French,” Cairo said.

I was surprised, but I had a better understanding now. It looked to me like a thirteen-year-old Cairo had fallen in love with a little girl named Marseille, and left his life to follow her. And yet in all this time they still weren't together.

“But where's your Dad?” I had never even heard Cairo mention this.

“He boarded Hindsight.”

Hindsight was one of the ships that had gone missing.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

Cairo gave a head tilt. The Specs lowered their heads for a moment in silent commiseration.