Beyond Our Stars (20 page)

“No!” Pilgrim cried in a small, terrified voice.

They blocked my view, and I couldn't see my hologram anymore. The others were screaming, too.

Chance was furious. And then his face turned towards me as he looked away from what they all grouped around, and I saw tears streaming wildly down his cheeks.

“Hope!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. His body began to rock with sobs and his head slammed against the bars of the cell. “Let me out of here!” He shouted, fury in every syllable.

Faith sank down to the ground sobbing. Weeks pounded on the bars, staring at whatever was happening beyond my sightline.

But I knew. I knew what Chance was seeing. And when he finally crumbled, choking on sobs and screaming as he bent down to put his face in his hands, I could see behind him. The image of me lay bleeding, probably dead already. Blood poured out of her side and into a large puddle on the ground.

Chance screamed again, “I'll kill every last one of you!” His tears continued to fall and I could see his shoulders shaking. “You'll pay, every last one!”

Pilgrim covered his eyes with his hands and cried quietly. Gaia and Faith held each other, and so did Cairo and Marseille. Weeks still stared in shock. Even Boston had tears slipping down his cheeks.

Then silently, my image disappeared. The body was just…gone.

Chance stood back up, staring at the empty spot.

“What does that…” Faith started to ask.

I pounded on the invisible wall in front of me and yelled, “Let me out!”

The buzzing stopped as the field released me. I made a choked moaning sound and ran. Chance wheeled around and caught my eyes and I ran faster.

“Hope!” He yelled. I threw myself toward him and he wrapped his hands over mine around the bars. I pressed my body as close as I could and he lowered his head, pressing his forehead to the metal where my skin would have touched his.

“Hope,” he said weakly. Then, confused, he looked up. “Is this you?” a moment of fear raced through his eyes as he questioned which one of the girls he'd seen was the real one.

“Yes, me,” I reassured him. I registered the happy cries of relief from the group but kept my eyes trained on Chance. The others gathered around us. I kissed Chance's fingers that were around mine. But then I backed up a foot.

“Why are you all still in there?” I asked warily. We all looked around, waiting for the next thing, except for Chance who couldn't take his eyes off me.

Then the bars of the cell began to rise from the ground. The Specs rolled underneath as the bars continued to rise into the ceiling, until they disappeared. Then suddenly we were thrown into complete darkness again. Chance felt for my hand.

A light appeared. A dim white light in front of us. The small spot of light spun, shining a white light around on all of our faces. I realized I couldn't feel a floor below us. We were floating. Tiny shimmering specks started to appear all around us.

“Like stars,” Pilgrim said in a shaky voice.

They were. It was like we were in space, stars all around us. The glowing spot of light began to grow, and I felt afraid.

It spun and spun and grew larger, now bigger than all of us. But then the giant glowing shape began to change. Blue slowly seeped over its surface, and then there were some spots of green. It continued to grow, larger and larger.

“What the…wait,” I heard Weeks say.

He was watching the changing object as it grew, perplexed and mesmerized. But not afraid.

I turned back to the object.

The green began to take recognizable shape, and swirls of white appeared, and before the transformation was done I already knew what I was looking at.

The painting Weeks had made was coming to life and we were inside it. The image of our Earth grew and grew, and homesick stabs filled my chest. The white clouds moved and spun over the ocean and land below. I was floating in space, watching an Earth that looked entirely real and alive.

Then a second image began. A new globe that began in the same way the other had. With white and then blues and greens with patches of white.

“It's the same,” Pilgrim said, no longer frightened.

“I had to start in the same way, so I could layer over it. I had to have it perfect first, so I could change it and destroy it,” Weeks answered. I glanced over at him and he looked like he was in pain. It was too much, being this close. You couldn't hold it at arm's length and then fold it up and tuck it away.

Weeks was a true artist. This was like living what our world had gone through all over again. It was as though he were making the brushstrokes right now. I watched the Earth's destruction recreated slowly, bit by bit, color by color. My eyes translated the glowing hues as fire, eruption, mudslide, drought, disease, decay, and death. All painted for me, so I could watch an artistic expression of the demise of my planet.

The grotesque grayness and smoldering red was all that was left at the end. I had told the CR-3ans we were the only ones left. But I had also shown them what we had done to our own planet.

I suddenly felt a solid surface under my feet and the two rotating images above us vanished. The session ended and the lights came on. The doors to the Stack slid open. No Local waited outside.

“We can go?” Cairo asked as we all looked stupidly at the doors. Each of us was alive and unharmed. But now we knew that the Locals were paying close attention.

“We leave,” I said.

I don't think we'd ever walked that slowly back out of that tunnel. We didn't speak.

There was a crowd waiting but none of us could find words. We didn't have to explain because Chief had posted guards who were waiting for us and they quickly escorted us through the crowd to go and see him.

I walked into Chief Up's quarters holding Chance's hand. He had yet to release it. I met his eyes.
Let go
, I told him. He released his grip.

I told Chief about everything that had happened, glossing over the part about the representation of my death in place of the Local.

“It was meant to make us experience how they felt,” I told the Chief. He was watching my face carefully. “And it was very successful.”

“One of ours died too,” Chief said.

“Maybe they can understand that now. I'm hoping, at least, that there are some who are on our side.”

“More than the one we killed?”

I ran a hand through my hair. “I hope so. Either way I think I was right about surrendering. If the situations were reversed, if aliens had landed on Earth, wouldn't we expect a peaceful race to ask us for help? Wouldn't we keep them all confined until we were sure they weren't a threat? Test them? Would we let them keep their weapons? What would we have done?”

Chief considered me in silence. After a long moment Chief said with finality, “Maybe you're right.”

I let out a slow breath.

Please let me be right.

Now all that the Chief had to do was convince what was left of human civilization. This had to be a gesture from all of us.

“We've got him locked up on the second level,” an engineer said to Chief.

“Casualties?”

“One,” the engineer nodded.

“Damn it. Alright, thank you, you're dismissed,” Chief said.

I pressed to a back wall in his quarters, watching everyone talk.

“What about the others?” It was Abel. He thought Chief should jail more people, not just Morgan.

“No. It's done. I'm not locking anyone else up. I should never have threatened that.”

“And we're really going ahead with this plan?” Abel didn't look at all convinced.

“The people will decide.”

For the next few days, all day long, Chief had meetings with small groups. He called them to his quarters randomly from the ship rosters. The people spoke of how he listened to every idea and calmed fears. He posed surrender as a strategy that would gain trust and get food. A peace offering, not a defeatist retreat.

In contrast he offered every person who came to his quarters a gun. He told them they could start digging right now, he would provide the shovels. He gave them a choice.

But it turned out we
had
changed, as a people, because no one took him up on his offer.

There had been enough death and now people wanted to live. I hoped there was some kind of a parallel happening on the other side. That there were some of them willing to put aside violence and negotiate a peace.

I could never have convinced people the way Chief did. He knew instinctively that the way to get people to listen was to listen
to
them, and to phrase our plan as a fight. The fight to stay on Haven.

Unless I was all wrong.

We were gathered in Cairo and Marseille's quarters. She'd moved all her stuff into his room a few days ago.

“There's no doubt that what we saw was them communicating with us,” Marseille said as her hand drew lazy circle's on Cairo's arm. Looked like she hadn't needed my help after all. The two of them were sitting on ‘their' bed, as she snuggled between his legs with his back against the wall.

I refused to sit on the bed knowing what they'd probably been up to in here, and found a spot on the floor. With Chance by my side, of course.

It seemed like a long time ago that Chance had been angry and distant. And now his attention had turned from an intense and playful adoration to a desperate, longing need. Every time he looked at me I could see the fear of losing me in his eyes. When he brushed the back of my neck, it was with reverence and concealed anxiety. The many, many times I'd nearly died in front of him had become too much.

I didn't know how to help him. And I wasn't sure that I was done putting myself in harm's way yet.

“Hope?” he said softly in my ear as he moved my hair over my shoulder and moved in close behind me. We were crouched on the floor and he pulled me into the same position Cairo and Marseille were in. Only Cairo simply wanted to be close to Marseille, whereas Chance's embrace felt protective, like he wanted to be all around me like a shield.

“Do you want to get out of here?” he asked.

I did. Chance's protectiveness was too much, he was too worried, and I couldn't understand why he couldn't let it go even though I was perfectly fine. But it didn't make me stop wanting him.

On the contrary, it was intoxicating. He made me feel like nothing in the world mattered or could possibly matter as much as me. He loved me in a way that seeped from him and into my pores, a depth of love I hadn't known existed before.

We still hadn't crossed that line. We hadn't had sex, but it was building to that. And yet Chance kissed me like the world was ending and all he needed was that kiss. And so kissing was what we did, for hours on end.

I was about to answer him that, yes, I would very much like to get out of here, when a soft knock came from the door.

It was Billie, looking for Chance.

“Hey,” she said quietly when the door opened. It felt like she was purposely avoiding my eyes.

“I was wondering if I could talk to you,” she said to Chance.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, getting up and leaving the rest of us quickly.

The door slid shut behind him.

Weeks was absently throwing a small rubber ball so it bounced on the floor and then up to the wall and back to him. I watched him, wondering why he'd brought it onboard. Some of the things we saved showed our ignorance of what would be ahead for us. To me, they looked like small denials. That ball, my band T-shirt. We could commemorate the past, but we couldn't build our future to look the same. Nothing would ever be the same.

I heard someone crying outside. The heads in Cairo's little room turned in the direction of the noise. Sounded like Billie. She was crying? I got up.

But Pilgrim did too and he slid the door open before me.

“Are you okay, Billie?” he asked her.

She had a red face and tears spilling down her cheeks. She was clutching at Chance's shirt as he held her. She looked at me behind him. Her face became angry and she turned back to Chance.

“Just don't, okay? Promise me?” she sniffled and raised her small head to look up at him.

He rubbed her hair but his words faltered, “Billie, I can't, I mean I will but…”

“See! You can't even promise me. You already know!” she yelled, backing out of his arms.

Chance looked lost and Billie turned on her heels, pointing at me. “You! I'll tell you then. I can't believe I helped you get back into his life! You are not allowed to get yourself in a position to get killed! Do you hear me? Because he'll follow you! You know that. Don't make it so he has to save you! You don't! Just don't!” she was crying and screaming at the same time.

“I won't, Billie! Chance doesn't have to save me, I can take care of myself,” I said. “I'm sorry…” I was about to say for all the times Chance
has
been at risk because of me. But she didn't want to hear it.

“It doesn't matter! He'll put himself in harm's way before he'll let something happen to you. Don't let him, don't let him,” she was getting quieter as the words pulled some deep emotion from her. She sagged and seemed like she needed to sit down. But she pushed Chance away when he tried to help her.

Instead Pilgrim came forward and took Billie's slender arm in his hands. He let her lean against his shoulders. “It's alright, Billie. It's going to be okay,” he said soothingly. He put an arm around her and they walked away from us slowly. Billie let her golden head lay on Grim's small shoulder and he continued murmuring consoling words to her.

I didn't even know if they really knew each other.

“She thinks you'll try and save me,” I said, frowning.

Chance was watching his sister walk down the corridor with Grim, but he looked back at me. “She's not wrong,” he said, shrugging slightly.