Chapter 95 Launch

Okafor sealed us in herself.

She wasn't supposed to. There was a crew for it, four engineers in gray coveralls who'd come up on the cage lift after Crane went down, with a trolley of tools and a list. They started at the far end of the ring, with Squad One, and worked their way round. Hatch, check, seal, hiss. Hatch, check, seal, hiss.

When they got to Squad Eight, Okafor was standing in the corridor with her arms folded.

"I'll do these," she said.

The engineer with the list opened his mouth.

Okafor looked at him. Just looked. With the steel side of her face toward him.

He closed his mouth. He handed her the tool. And the crew moved on round the curve to Squad Two, and didn't look back.

She started with Toby.

He was sitting in his pod already, strapped in, very straight, with his hands on his knees and the tuning fork in the breast pocket of his suit, where he could get at it. She crouched down in the open door so her face was level with his.

"I've got the envelope," she said. "In my desk. Locked. Fifteen letters."

"Yes, Sergeant."

"I'll give your mother one every birthday. If I have to." A pause. "I'd rather give you the lot back, and stand and watch you burn them. I want you to know that."

"Yes, Sergeant."

"Sing to it," said Okafor. "The ship. If it gets too quiet. You're allowed."

Toby looked at her. Then he nodded, very seriously, as if she'd given him an order. Which she had.

She closed the door. Turned the wheel. The pod hissed, long and soft, from bottom to top.

She put her hand flat on the door for a moment. Then moved on.

Liam was not sitting still.

He was strapped in, technically. But his hands were moving and his feet were moving and his head was moving, and he was talking before she'd even crouched down.

"Three weeks," said Liam. "Three weeks, Sergeant. In this. I can't do it. I've worked it out. I've never sat still for more than forty minutes in my life, and that was in the infirmary, and I was unconscious for thirty of them."

"I know," said Okafor.

"So what do I do?"

Okafor thought about it.

"Count," she said. "Out loud. Anything. Your sister's freckles. Your mother's pies. Every regulation you've ever read." A pause. "When you get to thirty-one, stop and think about it. You found a way to get five people onto a roof. Find a way to get through three weeks."

Liam stopped moving.

"That's actually helpful," he said, sounding surprised.

"It happens," said Okafor. "Now and then."

She closed the door. Turned the wheel. Hiss.

Seraphina didn't say anything when Okafor crouched in front of her.

She sat very straight, with her chin up and her hands flat on her knees, and the air in her pod was already warm. You could feel it from the corridor. She looked at Okafor and waited, the way she always waited. As if whatever came, she'd take it, and not let anybody see it land.

Okafor looked at her for a long time.

"You've never asked me for anything," said Okafor. "In a year. Not once. Not a pass, not an extra blanket, not a day off the beam. Every other cadet in the cave has asked me for something. You haven't."

Seraphina didn't say anything.

"You're allowed to want things, Calder," said Okafor. Very quietly. "That's all. That's the lesson. It's the only one I never managed to teach you. So I'm telling you now, and you'll have three weeks to think about it." She stood up. "You're allowed."

Seraphina looked at her. Something moved in her face. Very small. Gone again.

"Yes, Sergeant," she said.

The door closed. Hiss.

Luna was last but one.

She didn't wait for Okafor to crouch. She stood up, in the pod, as far as the straps would let her, so that they were almost eye to eye.

They looked at each other.

"You asked the number," said Okafor. "On the first day. In front of everybody. You asked how many we expected to bring back."

"You didn't answer."

"No," said Okafor. "Because the answer was a number I didn't want any of you to hear." She was quiet. "Keep asking it. Every day. Of everyone. Of the Meridian. Of Command. Of your father, if he's on the link. Of yourself." A pause. "The day you stop asking is the day it gets smaller."

"Yes, Sergeant."

"And Windsor."

"Sergeant?"

Okafor looked at the left side of Luna's neck. At the scar. Very briefly.

"Your father came to see me," she said. "On Sunday night. After his dinner with you. He didn't say anything. He just sat in my office for an hour, in the dark, the way Trevor used to." A pause. "Then he said, she knows, and went home."

Luna didn't move.

"I thought you'd want to know he told somebody," said Okafor. "That's all."

She closed the door. Turned the wheel.

Through the little round window, I watched Luna sit down, very slowly, in her seat. And put her hand flat on the glass. And leave it there. And on the outside of the glass, very fast, very fine, white ferns came up. All the way to the edges.

Then me.

Okafor crouched in the door of my pod with the sealing tool in one hand.

I was strapped in. The scarf was round my neck, three times. Halloway's notes were in my thigh pocket, and Father's book, and the dusk, and two notebooks, and Hana's letter. Genny's diamond was over my heart.

I took out the handkerchief.

Gray. Plain. Folded over on itself, with the blood inside. I held it out to her.

"I used it," I said.

Okafor looked at it. She didn't take it.

"I know," she said.

The ring was very quiet. The engineers had gone round the curve, and the hissing was further away now, Squad Four, Squad Five. Okafor crouched in the door of my pod, and her face was very close, and I could see every part of it. The bone side and the steel side. The place where Father had joined them.

"I wasn't asleep," she said.

"I know."

"I saw you cross the corridor. I saw you put your hand on it." She looked past me, through the window, at the gray panel on the inner wall. "And I felt it stop."

I didn't say anything.

"I've felt it stop once before," said Okafor.

"It came down thirty-two years ago," she said. "Out there. On the plain." She didn't look at me. She looked at the panel. "I was a child. We all were. They kept it under guard for a year, and nobody could get near it, and nothing they did to it left a mark. And when the program had its first children, the first ones who could do things, they brought us out here in a truck to see if any of us could do what the guns couldn't." A pause. "None of us could. Most of us wouldn't go near it. But your father walked up to it. All the way up. Nobody told him to. And he put his hand on it."

The ring was very quiet.

"He was younger than you are now," said Okafor. "He stood there with his hand on it for a long time. And the whole wreck went quiet. Just for a moment. Everything. The wind. The ground. All of us standing there. Like the world had stopped breathing." She was quiet for a long time. "Then it started again. And he took his hand off it, and walked back to us, and his nose was bleeding, and he didn't say anything all the way back to the truck."

I didn't move.

"That night," said Okafor, "he sat on the end of my bunk, and he said, Maris, I couldn't change it. Not a grain." She looked at me. "And then he said, but it listened."

I couldn't speak.

"He never told anybody else," said Okafor. "Not the officers. Not your mother, as far as I know. Just me. Just that once." She took the handkerchief out of my hand. Folded it again, smaller. Put it back in the chest pocket of my suit, under the scarf, and buttoned the pocket. "And I've never told anyone. Not in thirty-two years. Not till now."

"Why now?"

"Because you're going somewhere I can't come," said Okafor. "And I think you're going to find out what it was listening for." She stood up. "And I didn't want you to think you were the first. You weren't. You're the second."

She reached up to her collar.

I didn't understand what she was doing at first. She unpinned something. Small. Steel. Three bars, in a V, pointing down. The chevron. Her rank. She'd worn it every day I'd known her. On field one. In the cave. In her office with the lamp off.

She held it out to me.

"Trust nobody above the rank of sergeant," said Okafor. "Your father said that. I've said it to you. I'll say it again." She put the chevron in my hand and closed my fingers round it. "So now you've got one you can trust. In your pocket. Wherever you are."

I looked at it.

"It weighs nine grams," said Okafor. "I asked your sister."

I put it in the thigh pocket, with the rest.

One thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine grams.

One left. I thought Genny would be pleased. Nearly exact. Nearly, but not quite, so there was still room.

"Count them," said Okafor.

"Every night."

"Not just the five. All of them. The forty. The ones on the ground already. The ones who've gone quiet." She looked at me. "Especially those."

"Yes, Sergeant."

She stood up. She closed the door of my pod. It was heavier than I'd thought. It swung slowly, on its big hinge, and met the frame with a sound like a word being said very firmly at the end of a sentence.

She turned the wheel.

The hiss came up from my feet. All the way up. Ankles, knees, chest, throat, the top of my head. And then the pod was sealed, and the world outside it went very slightly quieter, and very slightly further away.

Through the round window, Okafor stood in the corridor. She looked at the five sealed pods of Squad Eight, one after the other. Her lips moved.

I couldn't hear her. I didn't need to.

Windsor. Calder. Calder. Marsh. Dask.

And then she put her hand to her throat, to Trevor's bridge disc, and her lips moved one more time.

Six.

Then she turned and walked down the ring toward the hatch, and didn't look back, because she never did. And the hatch closed behind her, and the wheel turned, and that was the last time I saw Sergeant Maris Okafor for a very long time.

The link came on at half past eight.

A click in my ear. Then a hiss. Then the squad channel, the one we'd trained on for months, opening up like a door into a small room with five people in it.

"Squad Eight," said Luna. "Check in."

"Calder. Present. Still here. Can't feel my legs. Is that normal? Toby, can you feel your legs?"

"Marsh. Present." A pause. "I can feel my legs, Liam."

"Calder." Seraphina. Flat. "Present."

"Dask," I said. "Present."

"Windsor," said Luna. "Present." A pause. "Five."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"Six," I said. "Okafor."

A longer pause.

"Six," Luna agreed.

They counted down from sixty.

Not a person. The ship. A flat voice, without anything in it, that I think was a recording. Sixty. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. It filled the pod, and the link, and I suppose the whole ring, all forty pods, all at once.

I lay back in my seat.

I looked through the hull. Of course I did. I couldn't help it. Down, through the floor of the pod ring, through the decks below, through the fuel and the air and the forty kits in their cradles, through the tail of the Meridian where the human engines were, enormous, cold, waiting. Down through the black glass. Into the ground of Site One. Into the ash.

And then out. Sideways. Across the plain. Toward the dome.

I couldn't see it. Not properly. It was forty miles. Too far for anything but the shape of it, the great curve of the glass catching the sun, and under it a blur of towers like a forest seen from a long way off.

But I knew where the sixtieth floor was. I knew which tower. I knew which side. I knew there was a window on that side, facing east, over the dome, with a tall chair beside it.

Twenty. Nineteen.

I knew who'd be standing at it.

Ten.

Mother. In her blue dress. Without the frame.

Nine.

Genny. With her notebook open, and her pencil ready, to write down the exact time.

Eight.

Garnet. Probably on a chair. Probably waving. At the wrong part of the sky.

Seven.

Miss Pell. Behind them. With her spectacles on. With the hinge I'd put the flaw in.

Six.

"Mother," I said. Out loud. Into the link. I didn't care who heard. "Genny. Garnet. Miss Pell."

Five. Four.

Nobody on the link said anything.

Three.

And then, very quietly, Liam, in my ear: "Mum. Dad. Pip. Biscuit."

Two.

Toby: "Mum."

One.

Seraphina didn't say anything. But I heard her breathe in, very sharp, the way you do before you say a name. And I heard her not say it.

The engines lit.

I'd thought I knew what it would be like. We'd done it in the sim. Forty times. The shaking, the noise, the weight coming down on your chest like somebody sitting on it.

The sim was wrong. The sim was a toy.

The noise came up from the tail of the ship and went through everything. Not into my ears. Into my bones. Into my teeth. The pod shook so hard my vision went double, and then triple, and I couldn't see the window, and I couldn't see anything, and the weight came down on me like the whole dome had been laid on my chest, and I couldn't breathe, and I couldn't think, and somewhere in the link someone was shouting, and I think it was Liam, and I think it was a word Maura would have washed his mouth out for.

I felt us leave the ground.

Slowly. So slowly. The black glass falling away under the tail, a meter, and then ten, and then a hundred. The gantries going past, and the cranes, and the floodlights, all falling, falling, as if the world had decided to let go of us.

And it went on. The shaking. The weight. The noise. Thirty seconds. A minute. A minute and a half. I counted, because I count everything, and somewhere around ninety I started to think it was never going to stop, that this was what it would be, now, forever, three weeks of this, and that nobody had told us because nobody had wanted to say it out loud.

And then the hum changed.

Under everything. Under the engines and the shaking and the weight. The thing Toby had heard with his tuning fork, and Risa had felt through the floor, and I'd felt under my hand at twenty-one minutes past three.

It got louder.

Not louder. Deeper. As if something very large, that had been asleep and breathing slowly, had begun to breathe faster. Four beats a minute. Then eight. Then more.

And the shaking stopped.

All at once. The engines were still going. I could see them, through the decks, still burning, still roaring. But the shaking had gone out of everything, as if somebody had put a hand under the ship and was lifting it. Smoothly. Gently. Like a teacup.

The weight on my chest went away.

The noise went quiet, and then distant, and then nothing.

And the Meridian rose through the morning sky over the poisoned world in perfect silence, carried on the breath of the thing in its spine.

"Twenty," said Risa, in the link. Not on our channel. On the open one, the all-cadets one, that we were only supposed to use for emergencies. Her flat voice, without anything in it. "Twenty beats a minute. Twenty-four. Thirty." A pause. "It's awake."

Nobody answered her.

Nobody needed to.

I looked down.

Through the pod. Through the decks. Through the tail, and the engines still burning uselessly, like a candle somebody had forgotten to blow out in a room that already had the lights on.

The world was falling away.

The black glass of Site One, getting smaller. The plain round it, gray. The ash. Miles of it, going out in every direction, the color of nothing, the color of a fire that went out thirty years ago and was never cleaned up. The dead roads. The dead towns, little gray knots where the roads crossed. The craters, round and dark. The long bright scars of glass, here and there, where something had burned hot enough to melt the ground.

And in the middle of it, catching the sun, the dome. Small as a soap bubble. Small as a drop of water on a gray sheet. Everything I'd ever been afraid of and everybody I'd ever loved, under one curve of glass, on the edge of a dead world.

I looked for the sixtieth floor.

I couldn't find it. It was too far. It was just a glitter.

I counted them anyway.

And then, because I couldn't help it, I looked northwest.

Eighty miles. More. Too far to see anything at all. Gray, and gray, and more gray, and the ridge, a darker line, and beyond it—

Green.

A speck. Smaller than a speck. A single square of green in all that gray, so small I'd never have found it if I hadn't known exactly where to look. If I hadn't walked every meter of it. If I hadn't been born in the middle of it.

Father's field.

The filter was still running. Of course it was. Nine months in an empty house, and it was still running, and the wheat was still growing, and the square of green was still there in the middle of the dead world, like somebody had pressed their thumb into the ash and left a print.

I couldn't see the scarecrow. It was much too far.

But I knew where it was. In the middle. Where the rows crossed. In Father's coat, patched at both elbows. With Mother's blue scarf wound twice round its neck.

Standing in the field. Holding it.

Nobody to fix its coat.

Keeping it anyway.

The ship turned.

I felt it more than saw it. A long slow roll, as the Meridian leaned over from straight up toward the curve of the world. And as it turned, the pod turned with it, and above my head, in the nose of the pod, a little round port the size of a coin, that had never shown me anything in the cave but the rock roof, came round to face the sky.

And in it, the moon.

Low. Big. Pale in the morning. With a white spot on it, a little left of center, bright as a lamp.

My ice.

The lake I'd made from my bedroom window when I was small, before I knew any chemistry, because I'd looked at the moon for a long time and thought it should have some. Frozen. Still there. Catching the sun.

Lucas should put fish on the moon, Garnet had said. He promised.

I hadn't. Not yet.

The port went dark.

Shutters. Automatic. For the crossing. They came down over the little round window from the edges inward, like an eye closing, and the moon went with them. And then the door window went dark, and the panel on the inner wall went with it.

And then it was dark.

Just dark. And the hum, very deep now, very steady, all around me, like being held inside something that was breathing.

I counted.

Out loud. On the squad channel. Nobody asked me to.

"Luna. Liam. Seraphina. Toby."

"Here," said four voices.

"Okafor."

Nobody said anything. She wasn't there to say it. That was all right. That was the point of counting.

"Mother. Genny. Garnet. Miss Pell. Halloway. Hana. Risa. The forty." I took a breath. "Biscuit. The tea towel. The diamond."

"Wren," said Luna, very quietly.

"Wren," I said. "Juno."

"The thirty-four," said Seraphina.

"The thirty-four," I said.

Nobody said anything else for a long time.

And then Toby, very softly, on the squad channel, began to hum. The old song. The one Miss Pell had sung in the orphan hall, and Mother had sung in the field, and Garnet had taught him the last four notes of, the hidden ones, on families' day. Very low. Under his breath. In tune with the thing in the spine.

Nobody told him to stop.

Day 277. Written in the dark. By feel.

Okafor sealed us in herself.

Father touched it too. When he was younger than me. He couldn't change it either. "But it listened."

I'm the second.

Okafor's chevron. Nine grams. One left.

"Count all of them. Especially the ones who've gone quiet."

Liftoff. The engines. Then the ship woke up, and the engines didn't matter.

Risa: thirty beats a minute. "It's awake."

The dome. A drop of water on a gray sheet.

Father's field. A thumbprint of green. The filter's still running.

The moon. My ice. Bright as a lamp.

Then dark.

Toby's humming the song.

Three weeks.