The Remnant. Laura Nolen Liddell

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      “I’m so dizzy.”

      “Just concentrate on your heartbeat. Make yourself slow down. And for real, stop screaming. I’m already blind. Don’t want to be deaf, too.”

      “I don’t remember it being like that when the OPT docked.” I frowned. The truth was that I didn’t remember anything from when the Off-Planet Transport docked with the Ark. I’d been drugged, along with all the other passengers. “Was it that bad?”

      Isaiah made a small noise. “It was worse. They had to slow the rotation anytime an OPT docked. When you woke up, they were already back in full swing. Planned it that way. Apparently a lot of people got the Lightness.”

      “Lightness?”

      “It’s a thing they call it when you don’t have gravity.”

      “Why not just call it ‘zero gravity?’”

      “No, that’s just the fact of it. The Lightness is about whether you can take the fact, or not. Some people plain can’t.”

      On my second journey through space, I didn’t feel like talking anymore than I had on my first. But this time, I sat with Isaiah, not a wing full of strangers. He was a solid mass in the seat next to mine. He was a co-conspirator and a familiar comfort. For the moment, he was both a captor and a friend. It was a strange mix. In his hands, just out of my reach, he held everything I’d wanted since my mother died. I could not leave him, yet I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to. The Arkhopper stopped spinning, and the stars ceased flinging themselves around us.

      The sky was full of them. I mean, full. The more I concentrated on the black spaces between the stars, the more stars I saw. They were everywhere. My spine lifted away from the seat behind me, pressing me softly toward the straps all around me.

      I missed my mother. My grief over her death was a constant companion. It swept along the bins of the cargo hold, barely a step ahead of the guards. It roamed the halls of the Remnant, and lately, it had paced the floor of my cell, sometimes weeping at the loss of her, sometimes laughing at her memory. It lay in my bed at night, wrapping its long arms around my ribs, pressing them in and out as I breathed. At times it spoke to me in tenderness, reminding me that she had loved me. Now, it intoned mercilessly that she had died in this blackness, free from gravity forever. Free from light.

      She should have seen the sight in front of me: an infinite flood of stars, each more subtle than the last, filling the voids as my sight adjusted to the dark, then blurring out with my tears until I blinked.

      She loved the stars.

      My grief raged against me only rarely these days, but as gravity released its grip on my body, it reached long fingers around my throat, threatening to choke me. In a strange way, sitting with Isaiah was like sitting with an older version of myself, a past I had never escaped, and I didn’t try to stop the few tears that fell. He’d seen worse from me. His hand tightened over mine, and my grief lessened its noose round my neck.

      I did not squeeze him back.

      At length, I spoke, but my gaze remained on the stars. “I’m angry, Isaiah. So angry. I don’t know why.”

      He didn’t respond, but he didn’t take his hand away, either.

      When the Asian Ark came into view several hours later, I found that I had slept. I pulled myself together. I had a long way to go that day and not a lot of information to work with.

      I had found my father. My mother would be glad of that, glad that we were no longer angry at each other. But I had yet to find my brother, really find him, and I would never stop until I did. And it all started here.

      This ship was massive and built like an enormous round cake with layers. Unlike the North American Ark, they’d engineered gravity via an electromagnetic field generated underneath each layer, and cancelled out, inches later, with every ceiling. It had a single discernable decoration: an enormous circular logo on the “roof” the size of several city blocks. As the pull of the oncoming Ark slid me back into my seat, Isaiah cleared his throat.

      “So,” he said, “Couple of things. First, your new job description. You’re the Remnant’s ambassador to the Asian Ark, and fully vested with the authority that brings. Which might not be much, depending on how this goes. Second, you work for me. You represent me and everyone I work for. So don’t do anything hasty.”

      “Ise. What on earth—”

      “Tshh,” he said, shushing me. “The mission.”

      I gave him a blank stare. “Enlighten me.”

      “We are here to get official recognition from Asia.”

      “We—the Remnant?”

      I heard his smile, though I couldn’t see it. “Yep. See? You’re a natural.”

      “Recognition as what, again?”

      “A sovereign nation-state of the North American Ark.”

      “Isaiah. You can’t possibly be serious that I’m the one you want doing this. And are we even supposed to—”

      “You rather I picked Adam? He was eager enough. Can’t trust him, though. You’re the daughter of a senator. You’ve met foreign leaders before.”

      “Yeah. When I was, like, eight.”

      “You know the inner workings of Central Command, and you understand the Remnant: why it exists, how we do things. And you can predict how bad it’ll be for all that if the Commander takes us over.”

      “Okay, but—”

      “We don’t want to go to war. We just want to be left alone. And we can’t do that unless we have independence. And the more support we get from the other Arks, this one especially, the less likely the Commander will be to blow us all up, so to speak.”

      “Actually, I’m not sure that’s a figure of speech,” I frowned as he strapped my head back onto the chair. “But why this Ark especially? You heard something?”

      “Let’s just say I don’t trust them, either.” He stopped fiddling with the strap long enough to fix me with his blind gaze. “Keep focused, Char. Thousands of people are depending on us for everything. They need safety. They need justice. And they need to eat. As a separate nation-state, we’ll have the authority to fight back whenever those things are taken away from us, and more importantly, we’ll be in a better position to form alliances.”

      “This proves my point, Ise. I can barely remember any Chinese from middle school. They do speak Chinese, right?”

      “And Hindi, officially.”

      “Officially. Right.” I shook my head. “That’s not much of a plan.”

      “Adam reached out weeks ago and established a backchannel. There’s a big party tonight. The Commander will be there to state his case.”

      “I take it we’re not exactly on the guest list.”

      There was a pause, and I pictured him tilting his СКАЧАТЬ