The Ark. Laura Nolen Liddell

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СКАЧАТЬ brows deepened, and his eyes slid away from my face to focus on a place behind me, as though his real daughter might still emerge from the crowd.

      “Where’s West?” I asked.

      “Your brother couldn’t be here.” My father’s voice was strange, like listening to a once-familiar recording that had grown warped with time.

      “What happened to your head?” My mother’s voice was exactly as I recalled: piercing and unhappy. “You’re bleeding. Let me take a look at that.” I flinched as she reached for my face, and she echoed my reaction back to me. “I’m not going to hurt you. It’s going to get infected, the state you’re in.”

      “Not if I die first.” My words had the intended effect of shutting her down, but it didn’t feel like I wanted it to. Regret and fear crowded together in my stomach, and I looked away from her. “So, why couldn’t West be here?”

      “For Pete’s sake, Charlotte,” my father began, but Mom cut him off.

      “His OPT had to leave.”

      “You’re not all on the same one?”

      “No, we are,” Dad said, and it was Mom’s turn to look away. I stared at her anyway, trying to figure out how they were all going to be together, but West wasn’t here. In this room. “It’s been hard for him,” Dad continued. I flicked my eyes up toward my father, still confused.

      “Michael,” Mom whispered.

      “It has. It’s been hard for all of us. She should understand that.”

      “It’s just not the time.” She turned to me. “But he wrote you a note, sweetheart.”

      My mother had not called me sweetheart since I had called myself Charlotte. Dumb, I stared at the torn envelope in her hands. I snapped back to my senses when I saw the attention it was getting from the rest of the room. They were definitely watching us.

      My father noticed it too, and stiffened. “We can’t stay here any longer. You were ninety minutes late, anyway.”

      Mom wrenched herself from my father’s grip and wrapped her arms around me. I fit my face against her collarbone, exactly like I had as a child. Her voice in my ear was no louder than the slightest whisper. “I never gave up on you. I should have told you that.” Her arms moved down my back, and her grip tightened. “I’m so sorry, Charlotte.”

      Everything I had planned to tell them—everything from I never meant to hurt you to please don’t forget me— curdled into a cold wad in my chest, and died in my throat. I tried to breathe in, but I heard myself make a sound like a gasp instead. “Mom. Please don’t leave me here.”

      She jerked a little, as though something had knocked against her, and I didn’t feel her breath going in or out anymore.

      “Excuse me, Senator,” a voice barked. I opened my eyes to peer over my mother’s shoulder. An armed guard stood a few paces away.

      My father reached around my mother, so that for the briefest instant, he was holding me, too. But then he closed his fingers around her wrists, and pulled her arms away from me. “Goodbye, Charlotte. I can’t help but feel responsible for…” he began, then stopped.

      I watched them leave, feeling numb, like floating underwater, before sliding the folded paper out of its nest. It was my brother’s handwriting, but not as I remembered it. He’d be thirteen now, not seven or eight, as I always thought of him, so it took a moment to confirm that the lighter, sharper letters were his.

      I’m sorry.

      Yeah, I thought. Me too, kiddo. Me too.

      No one stopped me on the way back to my cellblock, and I was doubly thankful to find it as empty as before. When I slipped West’s envelope into my back pocket, my fingers closed around something sharp and hard. My mom must have put it there.

      I pulled the object from my pocket as soon as I was sure I was alone. It was a dark metal card with a single silver band across the top. Raised symbols covered the band, and in my stupor, I ran my thumb over them twice before I realized that they were words.

      Stamped across the top of the card was the phrase “North American Off-Planet Transport—Admit One.”

       Three

      My whole life, I felt trapped. I hated the constant pressure to maintain the appearances that were so crucial to my parents’ lifestyle. I resented every choice they made on my behalf: stuffy uniforms at private school, mind-numbing ballroom lessons at junior cotillion, forced smiles at charity events. No matter where I was or what I was doing, I was never where I wanted to be, and nothing I did made sense, even to me. I baffled the hell out of my parents. But all I wanted was to feel some kind of freedom, some kind of escape. Escape never came.

      So my first stint in juvy, at the ripe old age of twelve, was hardly a big adjustment. It was actually more like a relief.

      For the first time, I was surrounded by people who didn’t care what I did with my hair or who I hung out with or where I was going, which was always the same answer: nowhere. I was a lost cause, and in here, no one questioned that or tried to change it. Once I got in the system, the only life I could ruin was my own. And everyone here was fine with that.

      I knew for a fact I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Why else did I see the same kids coming in and out of here, for so many years that we had our own holiday traditions? Heck, last year, I had a Secret Santa. I had given myself a name, and they called me by it. So don’t tell me I didn’t belong here.

      Except that now, I had to get out.

      Standing on the floor of my block, dwarfed by the rows of cells above and around me, I felt, for the first time, like a rat in a cage. And the cage had become a death trap.

      I pressed the starpass deep down into my shoe, inside my sock, where no one could lift it off me without my knowing it, and tried to think. There were no more guards to bribe or threaten. After the meteor was discovered, and the Treaty of Phoenix was signed, everyone who enforced it, from soldiers to street cops to prison guards, was guaranteed a spot on one of the five Arks. Keep the walking dead from rioting, and you get to live. I could hardly blame them; it was a brilliant solution. How else could you get nineteen billion people to die quietly while half a million others escaped to the stars?

      I didn’t exactly have a key to the outside, since like I said, getting out had never been a big priority for me. But I knew someone who might.

      Isaiah Underwood was a year older than I was, but it might as well have been fifty. He was legendary in our circles, not because he was the only juvy we knew who had escaped, which he was, but because he came back. Deliberately. I vaguely remembered the day he’d gotten out—alarms, total lockdown, the usual drill. Normally the missing prisoner was just hiding someplace halfway clever, like the laundry or whatever. But when Isaiah left, we stayed in our rooms for two straight days, and they never found him. They finally had to concede defeat and let us out.

      I was between stays when he came back, but I’d heard the story a hundred times. Months had passed. Someone else had been placed in his cell. Everyone on his row was at СКАЧАТЬ