I don’t need to look at it to answer her. “It’s the Eldest Robe.”
Amy looks confused, and I remember—she’s never seen it. I wore it once, when I announced the planet to the ship, but Amy wasn’t there. She was afraid of the crowd, and rightly so.
“It’s a heavy wool robe that the Eldest wears on special occasions,” I say. I can picture it in my mind: the surface of the planet embroidered on the hem of the robe and stars stitched on the shoulders.
Stars stitched on the shoulders.
“Elder, The Little Prince!” Amy says, excited. “Remember? The illustration showed a king—the Eldest is like a king, isn’t he?—and Orion marked the heart of the robe—a robe with stars on it.”
I stare at the statue. It was made of concrete, by the Plague Eldest himself. If there was a secret about the planet, it would have been a secret the Plague Eldest kept. He was the one who started the Eldest system, he was the one who decided not to land the ship on the planet when we arrived. Of course he had to have had a reason for why he didn’t land Godspeed—and what better place to hide that reason than within the concrete of the statue?
“It all fits,” Amy says, wonder in her voice. “The clue, the last clue, the information about what is going on here—it’s in the statue.”
“In the statue,” I repeat. “In the ship, which is in orbit, in space.”
Amy sighs heavily. Knowing the clue is there doesn’t help us at all.
Movement on the side of the screen distracts me from the statue. Someone’s walking down the path behind the Hospital, through the garden. The path curves, and the person is momentarily out of view, but a moment later he stands in front of the statue.
Bartie.
He stops, tilting his face up to the metal sky. The camera is in the perfect angle to capture him. His face is lined with worry and sadness, with dark circles under his eyes and a new scar on his cheek. He’s haggard, and his hair looks unkempt. There is no sign of his guitar. Taking the leadership from me has not worn well on Bartie.
“What’s he doing?” Amy asks, staring.
Bartie looks as if he’s talking to the Plague Eldest statue. I remember how I always used to stop and stare at the worn face. The Plague Eldest’s open arms are benevolent, and his face is so blurred of features that I would imagine it looked on me with sympathy while I was trying to decide how to be the leader my people needed.
Bartie reaches into one of his pockets. I think for a moment that he’s pulled out a floppy, but whatever he’s holding is smaller than a floppy and darker. Black. A black square.
A black med patch.
Amy gasps.
And I know what Bartie’s thinking, why he’s come to the Plague Eldest.
The ship is dying, and he knows it. He’s trying to decide how long to wait before he distributes the black med patches. The ones that kill.
31: AMY
Elder doesn’t talk as he storms from the compound, heading back to the colony. I have to race to keep up with him. “Elder, wait!” I call under my breath. He slows down but doesn’t stop.
His back is rigid, his shoulders stiff. When I reach out for him, he jerks away. I grab his elbow and don’t let go, yanking him around to face me.
“We can save them too,” I say.
Elder barks in laughter, a short, bitter sound. We both freeze, looking to the forest, waiting for a ptero’s cry. But soon the soft noises of the night that I’d taken for granted return—a low, chirruping sound from a nocturnal bird, the almost inaudible shuffling of small animals on the forest floor. We haven’t seen much wildlife, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
“We can save them,” I say again, my voice lower.
“We can’t even save ourselves.” Elder’s jaw is hard.
“We’ve as good as solved Orion’s last clue,” I counter. “We have the communication bay at the compound. We won’t let them die up there.”
“Yeah?” Elder asks through clenched teeth. “And how are we going to survive the frexing aliens that are down here?”
My heart stills in my chest.
“There’s something out there, Amy,” Elder says. He looks over my head, into the black forest. “Something that killed off the first colony.”
“Pteros—”
“They didn’t program those biometric locks to keep pteros out,” Elder snaps. He’s right. Those locks were for something . . . something else. “Besides,” he adds, shooting me a glance and then looking away. “There are more than just pteros.” I know he’s thinking of that strange crystalline scale he found in the tunnel, and it frightens me, too. There’s a lot about this planet we don’t understand. A lot that can kill us. “Remember that footprint?” he asks.
I nod. How could I forget the sharp ridges of the three talons, as if designed to maim?
Elder continues in a hush, as if afraid of being overheard. “I thought I saw something in the forest, right before I was attacked. Maybe whatever it was controlled the ptero.”
An image briefly flashes in my mind: a bug-eyed green-skinned alien with clawed feet, one that watches us and waits until we’re most vulnerable to attack.
I don’t want to think about this. I can’t think about this. I’ve learned too much tonight. I turn away from Elder, and we continue back to the colony wordlessly, not stopping until we nearly reach my building on the edge of the colony. The world is silent now and dark. Elder steps closer to me, sweeping the hair I’d been hiding behind out of my face.
“Stop,” a low female voice commands. I start to turn and feel the hard metal cylinder of a gun in the back of my head. I drop Elder’s hand and lift my own.
“Amy?” the voice asks. The gun lowers. When I turn, I see Emma, dressed in fatigues, a semi-automatic in her right hand.
“Emma, you scared me to death!” I exclaim.
“Shh!” she says. “Or do you want the rest of the guard on duty tonight to come down here and see what you two idiots are doing?”
I glance at Elder. How much does Emma know?
“If you two can’t keep your hands off each other, then go to one of the buildings,” she growls. “Snogging in the middle of the night on the edge of the camp is likely to get you shot. I thought you were—” She stops short. “I thought you were an enemy.”
I narrow my eyes. What enemy is she referring to exactly? Emma doesn’t know what we were up to, but I have more than a sneaking suspicion she knows more than she’s telling us. She was with Dad, that first day, when he went to the probe and found a high-tech modern compound.
She knows just how much he’s kept hidden.
When neither Elder nor I say anything, Emma frowns. “You lot weren’t just out here to snog, were you?”
“No!” I say too quickly. “Emma, we were—”
She cuts me off with a wave of her hand. “I don’t care what you were doing, and I don’t want to know. But you’re smart, both of you, and I’m betting I can guess what’s up.” She glances behind her—in the direction of the compound. “Don’t go out at night,” she says, more sternly this time. “There’re things out there you don’t know about.”
Elder nods solemnly, then turns to go. Emma grabs my arm, keeping me in place. “Amy, this is important,” she says, her voice low and urgent. “You don’t want to hear this, I know you don’t, but you can’t trust—”
“Who’s there?” a voice—my father’s—calls out.
Heavy footsteps thump their way closer to us. Dad and Chris, both dressed in fatigues, approach. “Emma? What’s going on?”
Emma straightens, and whatever warning she was about to give me dies on her lips. “Sir. Found these two out here.” She pauses. “Kissing.”
There’s a little bit of a tattletale quality to her voice at this, but I’m actually glad she’s told Dad that I was out here making out. At least she didn’t say what she suspected we were doing—discovering the compound and Dad’s secrets.
Dad doesn’t look happy, though. “I’ll take Amy back up,” he growls. “Chris, can you escort this boy back to his building?”
“This boy can walk himself,” Elder snaps.
Dad stares him down. “There’s a lot you should be afraid of out here, at night, in the dark.”
Elder doesn’t flinch. “I know what to be afraid of,” he says. “And it’s not the dark.” He waits a heartbeat, then adds, “It’s not you either.”
Chris touches Elder’s shoulder, guiding him back to the colony, but Elder shoves past him.
Dad waits until Chris and Elder are out of sight and Emma is back patrolling the camp before he turns to me. “What were you thinking?” he says. I’m shocked at how angry he sounds. “It’s dangerous out here, Amy.”
“We were still in the colony,” I protest, because, as far as he knows, we were.
“And kissing one of them!”
This stops me in my tracks. The night is eerily silent now, the air very still.
“What?” I ask in a monotone.
“Amy, those shipborns . . . you shouldn’t be with them so much.” Dad starts pacing, just on the outside of our building.
“I dunno, Dad. I feel like Elder’s been a little bit more forthcoming than you’ve been lately . . . don’t you think?”
“They’re not like us,” Dad continues, ignoring my accusation.
“How?” I ask, my voice still cold.
“Just look at them! The way they all look the same. The way they all think a kid is their ‘leader.’ They’re . . . strange. Different. For God’s sake, Amy, the shipborns are not like us!”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” I say, louder than I’d intended. We’re going to wake up the whole colony. “They’re people. Good people.”
Dad shakes his head pityingly, and it is that, more than anything else, that cranks my rage up even higher. “Oh, Amy,” he says. “You weren’t even supposed to be here.”
Something clacks into place in my head. “Then why did you give me a choice?” I say, my voice growing louder and higher with each word. “Why even leave that decision up to me? You could have prepared me more. But no—you just waited until Mom was already frozen and then you freeze yourself, and you leave me, alone, to make up my mind on whether I should give everything up for you! And when I do actually do that—it’s the wrong choice! If you never wanted me to come, why didn’t you say so? Why did you leave it up to me at all? Why did you make it seem like I could make my own decisions when you never even packed any of my things for me? I’ve seen the trunks in storage—and the one with my name on it is empty!”
I’m breathing heavily by the time I’m done speaking, and my face is hot, and my fists are curled, and I don’t care.
Dad’s jaw works. “I’m sorry about that,” he grinds out. “I’d promised your mother not to try to convince you to stay, and I worried if I told you what to do, you’d do the opposite. I wanted you to be able to make a choice you could live with.”