Blood Crown (10 page)

“This is a ship, darling. Surely you know there is no escape for you.”

I don’t care. I run to the transport and practically shout “Support!” before I realize that I’m not wanted there. But I am descending downward and the support level, even populated with people who don’t want me, is the safest place I know.

The transport opens and the first thing I see is Minn at our sink, her back to me. Tam and Sher are at their sink, and Cook is shouting orders at the top of her lungs so she can be heard over the roar of the cleansing air.

I don’t even try to hear what Cook is saying, choosing instead to dash to Minn. I touch her arm and when she lifts her head I can see a pink welt in the shape of Cook’s spoon on her cheek. There’s a moment, a breath, and then Minn’s arms are around my neck.

“I thought you were lost, gone for good,” she says. I am stiff in her embrace, unsure what to do. Just as I am about to return her hug, she drops her arms and steps back.

This has been the strangest twenty-four hours of my life. I need time alone to think, to make sense of what it all means. And now Minn has hugged me. She worried for me. My arms hang suspended in the air for a breath too long, disappointed that I didn’t get a chance to hug her back.

“What happened to you? How did you escape?”

Minn expects the worst, fears that I was pushed right into the guard's arms, or to the Elite.

“I didn’t see anyone. They were all gone.” A small lie doesn’t matter if it puts Minn’s worries to rest.

Minn’s mouth drops open in a small “o” and her hand flutters at her neck. “Thank the stars.”

“Girl!” Cook shouts. “Get to work!” I’m sure she’s speaking to me, so I turn to the sink and Minn and I begin our normal routine of cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. And this time I watch my pace so that I go just a hair slower than Minn—not enough that I fall behind, but not so fast that I call attention to myself. But then the unthinkable happens.

There are no more dishes or pots to be cleaned. Not even fake ones.

Minn and I look at one another, then Minn turns her air off and so do I.

Tam and Sher have finished before us. They lean against their sink, hands clasped in front of them, looking around with eyes big and round with fear. I notice then that they are wearing their gray shifts, I’m the only one still in the ridiculous slip of cloth. I may as well be standing there naked and for the first time I feel self-conscious.

All around us, the other kitchen staff finish their tasks only to discover there is nothing more for them to do. Soon all of us are standing, unsure of ourselves. Unsure of what this means. We don’t speak, but we make eye contact. Another first for me.

We hear the steady hum and thrum of the ship as if it’s a living, breathing thing—which to me, it has always been. But things have changed and it’s that change that frightens me.

After a great deal of waiting, we are still doing nothing and the guards have not appeared to usher us back to our rooms. Finally Cook throws her spoon down onto the counter with a loud
thwack
and stomps into the kitchen’s small office. After a moment the rest of us file out of the kitchen and head to our rooms.

The guards don’t come to shut us in or turn out the lights. Frightened, we don’t talk, though a few whispers move the air, barely more than breath. Eventually we sleep.

I dream of Father. He touches me between the eyes, just as I did to the fallen Elite in the dining hall. His touch sends a wave of energy coursing through me, like liquid heat that pours into me from his finger and travels to every part of my body. With the warmth comes knowledge: The ship’s language; an understanding of the molecules that make up the solid things around me. I feel the warmth build strength in my arms, making me strong and capable. I start to laugh, but then the warmth turns to icy cold and when I look again it isn’t Father who touches me, but the Elite leader.

“You are being decommissioned,” he says with a grim smile. “You are no longer needed. Humans could never be greater—not even with our lifeblood feeding your existence. You are nothing to us. You are cattle. You are the grit beneath our feet. You are dead.”

“Wake up, Sera. You must wake!”

I hear Minn’s voice, feel her touch before I’m able to peel my eyes open. When I do it’s like forcing two magnets apart and the light burns my eyes. I throw my arm over them, desperate to block out the too-brightness. “Is it time to go to work?”

But I can tell it’s not, because out of the corner of my eye I see women and girls huddled together all around. “I don’t know,” Minn says. “The guards still haven’t shown up. We slept, and then we woke, but nothing’s changed. The door stayed open all night, and the lights stayed on.”

She puts her hand on my arm. The barest of touches. “You were crying.”

“No, I’m not.” I take my arm from over my eyes to prove it to her.

“Not now. Then. In your sleep. You were crying in your sleep.” She looks at me and I can’t tear my eyes away. “You cried out for your father.”

Now I drop my gaze. To my lap. Over Minn's shoulder, to the door. I wish I was in my cell, on the cot by the freezing outer wall of the ship. “No, I don’t have a father.”

I don’t know what’s gotten into Minn because she’s barely said two words to me in the nine years I’ve known her. I always thought she hated me, thought she was a timid little thing. But now I’ve seen her stop a person—a
thing
—from hurting her, run away from an Elite, defy a guard and stop me from hurting another. And she hugged me.

“What do you remember?” Her voice hovers in the air above my head and the voices in the room quiet. I wait and wait, but they are more patient, or maybe I am just desperate to be heard. Soon I find myself talking.

“I don’t remember much,” I say. “Mostly it’s just dreams, but I don’t know if they’re real, if they’re memories, or if they’re just fantasy.” I try to shrug, but it doesn’t work. So I roll onto my side, away from Minn, and curl into myself.

She lies down behind me and smoothes the hair at my neck, her fingers grazing my skin as she gathers up loose strands. It feels so good. So good to be clean, so good to be touched, so good to belong.

“I dream I live in this beautiful place where I have baths every day and my father brushes out my hair and ties it back in a perfect bow. I have clean, lovely dresses to wear. Toys to play with. Father never leaves me. He is with me always. Playing with me, teaching me, scolding me when needed. He lets me ride on his shoulders.

“Sometimes a man and woman come, but while they bounce me on their knee and chat with me, and Father says I should be happy to see them, I really just want them to go away. They are boring and make me feel strange and it’s much more fun with Archi—” I breathe in a sharp breath, suddenly unsure of my memories.

They are jumbled up in my mind. The man and woman are Mama and Papa. And I nearly called Father by another name—a name that now escapes me. My eyebrows draw together as I try to reason through this new line of thought, this new thinking.

Minn’s touches are constant and pull me through the tangle of emotions. “What happened to him? Your father?”

“I don’t know.” The answer is automatic, mechanical. “Something bad happened, I don’t know what. The lights were flashing and the ship was screaming. Father—” I reach up and touch my neck, under the hairline as a memory flies by too quickly for me to catch it. I shake my head and drop my hand. “He made me hide in the shadows while he spoke with . . . a man . . .” My hands are tangled together, pressed to my stomach as I stare, eyes wide open at my memories.

“Then there is a sharp pain and he shoves me into a dark, dank tunnel.”

“I was so cold,” I say, and then I think . . . I had never been cold before that moment.

I shrug my shoulders. Minn’s fingers pause for a moment, and I think she’ll stop now, she’ll pull away. But she doesn’t. I sigh as her fingers resume their stroking, working through tangles in my hair.

“And then what?” she asks.

“And then I’m in the kitchens and it’s loud and scary and I hide behind the crates of produce until Cook finds me and sets me at the sink. Sets me beside you.” This last I’ve said so quietly I wonder if Minn even heard, but her fingers stop and it seems she holds her breath. She heard me.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“You have no need to be sorry.”

She is still and quiet for a very long time. A few whispers have picked up around us and I think our conversation is over. It’s the most talking I’ve ever done and I feel strangely vulnerable, exposed. Minn, and everyone else who was listening, now knows as much about me as I do.

I can’t stand this exposure, this nakedness, so I sit up and dig around the bedding until I come up with a shift. I don’t even care if it’s mine, I just pull it over my head, over the flimsy shift I wore to serve the Elite. “I’m going to go check on things.” I climb over the women lying between myself and the door and step into the hallway. I look both ways, but there is no one. Not a single guard in sight.

I walk the empty hallway, passing the men’s room on the right a short way down the hall. They watch me pass, gathered together in much the same way as the women. They track my passage, but they don’t speak, don’t smile. I’m certain they all think this is my fault. And for all I know, it is.

That Elite seemed to know me. But he thought I was dead. How could that be? I know I’ve never met him, though there is something in his voice that seems familiar. I think maybe it’s because he’s the same as my father—an elite android, not the drones that sometimes come to check on us. I feel the cold dream-touch of Father’s finger on the bridge of my nose and I shiver.

The kitchen is ahead of me, lights shining, and even before I get to the door I know something is wrong.

The first thing that is wrong is the crates. Every single one is missing. The walls are bare. The counters and tables are bare. Drawers are pulled out from the wall—all empty. There’s not a single scrap of food left. I step around the small wall that juts out and separates the cleaning part of the kitchen from the preparation part.

Cook lies on the floor, her bloodshot eyes staring up, unseeing, at the ceiling. Blood radiates out from her like a fan—and I am standing in it. It’s thick and congealed, not fresh. However she died, whoever killed her, she died hours ago—maybe not long after we all went to sleep.

Almost as an afterthought I notice the giant butcher knife protruding from between her breasts. One hand lies near it, as though she’d held it, or tried to free it, before her strength left her. One might think she killed herself, but this is murder. I know because there’s a word written in the blood at my feet.

Serantha
.

The lights pulse yellow for hours and I’m beginning to think we’ll never be released from this pod. Maybe it is a prison—maybe all of my soldier companions are guilty of some crime or another that has relegated them, along with myself, to this jail cell.

So I catalog the incoming data from Sera’s symbiants—a task I have performed thirteen times over the last eleven hours.