Chapter Fifteen

 

“We need to take off now,” I state, stumbling toward the cockpit, my hand on the wall to guide me.

“Sylvia needs to check you out,” Andrew protests, following me.

I press the communication link and Holden answers from the engine room. I smile at the sound of his voice—back where he belongs. “We’re taking off, Holden,” I tell him. “Be ready.”

I slump into the chair and begin readying Hourglass for takeoff. Apparently realizing it’s no use to nag me, Andrew sits down in the chair beside mine and watches as the engine hums to life and I set a course.

There’s nothing Prince can do to stop us now. I feel the metal shudder beneath me and with the flick of a switch the ship lurches and I feel it lifting off the ground. Andrew reaches for the control panel to steady himself, his eyes growing wider the farther up we go. I can see the ground below us from the screen on the panel and Andrew’s eyes are glued to it as Hourglass shoots up and up, picking up speed, hurtling through the air, and then suddenly...

You feel it. Like weightlessness, only freer, because you have momentum and an engine and a ship to propel you. We’ve left the atmosphere. We’re in space.

* * * *

Andrew is adamant that I have Sylvia check out my head. Nothing’s bleeding, and after about ten minutes, I felt fine, but he glares at me until I agree and we both head to the medical lab. Sylvia’s there checking out all the children on board and with a jolt I remember that they’re all here. With fighting Prince, Bella dying, and taking off from the planet, I’d forgotten all about them. My heart lurches.

Bella’s death still stings fresh in my mind, as I’m sure it does with everyone. I knew she wasn’t coming, and although I’d hated Prince from the moment I’d left the planet ten years ago, I still feel bad for him. The way we left him huddled in the forest, alone. I know he lied to everyone, and I know he tried to kill me, and wouldn’t have hesitated in killing anyone else on my crew...but the look in his eyes still burns through my mind.

Sylvia smiles at me and motions for us to sit down, so we do. While we’re waiting I strike up a few conversations with the children, learning their names and personalities, although it’s all achingly familiar. I knew these kids once. The little girl Prince impersonated pops into my head, and with a jolt I think that I might have left someone behind. But at the mention of it to the children, they say they’d never seen her before. The thought comforts me, but worries me at the same time. How many people—children—has Prince abducted over the years? How many kids have come and gone?

Sylvia eventually gets to me and after much frowning and clucking her tongue, declares that I’m fine, but should take it easy for a while. I comply, realizing her diagnosis could’ve been much worse, and head for the door.

The rest of the crew is waiting outside—Holden, Angelica, Jackson, and Gregory—brimming with questions and exclamations. I smile at them all, and ordinarily would’ve been irritated by their clinginess, but am so relieved to see them all together again, that I agree to have a long talk as we head to the diner.

We spend nearly two hours in there, with canned and prepackaged dinners, but barely touch our food as we recount our last few days. The guys tell of what happened to them after Prince took them, Gregory explains how Prince pretended to be one of the crewmembers to lure him from the ship, Angelica talks about staying on the ship alone with Sylvia, and then completely by herself when we executed our plan to kidnap Bella, while I go over details of my encounters with Prince and Andrew. We know most of this stuff by now, having swapped bits and pieces in the few seconds of spare time we’ve shared over the past hours, but just the fact that we’re all here together, that we made it back on the ship, that we made if off the planet, and we’re all alive, makes sitting here together better than anything else I could imagine.

Sylvia joins us eventually, filling us in on the children’s status. They all look good, especially being a few hundred years old, and she divided them up among the remaining crew quarters. It’s strange to think that all our rooms are full again. It hasn’t been this way since Dad was Hourglass’s captain. Sylvia seems to read my mind and shoots me a look across the table. Everyone else seems deep into conversation, still trading stories. But they’re stories I’ve already heard so I glance at Sylvia and we both get up and discreetly exit the room.

We walk slowly down the hallway in silence for a ways, not having a set destination, just trying to get away. I realize we haven’t had a moment alone in quite a long time. And when Sylvia is my “go to” girl for problems or anything I want to discuss, anything is a long time.

“I said it before and I’ll say it again,” Sylvia says. “Landing on that planet was a stupid idea.” She glances at me with a smile in her eyes, to show me she’s just teasing, but at the same time I’ve been regretting that decision since the moment we landed.

“I’m just glad we got out okay,” I mutter.

Sylvia nods. “You know...this planet...maybe something pulled you back. I mean, what are the chances of you stumbling across the planet your Dad found you on as a child? The planet, he couldn’t remember the coordinates of?”

I shrug, not ready to admit that that idea had been creeping up on me for a while. “And I wonder if we’ll forget it, too,” I add.

Sylvia looks at me, startled, like she hadn’t considered the idea before, but slowly her expression calms. “Maybe,” she agrees. “And maybe that would be better.”

I think of the time on the planet; the running through the woods, the fights with Prince, Bella dying, the fear, the anger, the hurt, and then leaving him there alone...and think that forgetting it all really would be a better ending.

“And look on the bright side,” Sylvia adds. “You’ve just got eight more crewmembers.” She laughs and I join in. “And you don’t even have to pay them.” There’s a pause while our laughter dies down. “And your sister back.”

I turn to look at Sylvia and for a moment I can’t say anything. “It’s strange to think of her that way.” I shrug. “I don’t even know what to think. I left her. On the planet. And I can’t even remember what happened.”

Sylvia nods from beside me.

“And now here she is and I have to learn about her all over again.”

Sylvia smiles, staring at me until I meet her gaze. “Well, now is a great time to start. You did what she wanted, right? You brought her with you.”

I smile.

“In a seven-year-old’s mind, what more could you ask for?”

I laugh, biting back the comment that she’s a whole lot more than just seven, but understand what Sylvia is saying all the same.

“Speaking of kids,” Sylvia says, her expression changing to suspicion. “I’d better go check on them. I mean...who knows, they could be tearing apart the upholstery or something equally as mischievous.” She laughs, and I feel bad for Sylvia having to take on the responsibility of eight random children, but she doesn’t seem to mind all that much.

I’m waiting for a few days from now. I’m sure the task will be delegated to someone lower in rank. I’m thinking Gregory.

I stand alone in the hallway for a moment, going over my conversations with the crew, and then thinking about Win and our lives ahead of us. And suddenly I realize that Andrew wasn’t with us in the diner, and I haven’t seen him since I left the medical lab.

I head to the crew quarters, seeing Sylvia and the children through a few doorways before reaching Andrew’s. I knock a few times, but hear no sound. Normally, with any one of my crewmembers in the situation of emergency or duty, I would just walk on in. But Andrew isn’t one of my crew and this isn’t anything urgent, so I walk away. Back down the hall, and then make a left toward the cockpit. It seems to be my default place. Just like it was for my Dad. It makes me feel like I’m becoming more and more like him every day. I still wish he was here and his lack of presence still jabs me like a hole in the heart, but I’m beginning to feel okay. Like I truly can be a leader—a captain.

If I can defeat a bloodthirsty monster on a planet that acted like quicksand to me and my crew, I can tackle anything.

I walk through the door and into the cockpit and startle as I see a figure seated in one of the chairs. Andrew swivels around when he hears my footsteps and then smiles. He looks different and after a few heartbeats I realize it’s his skin, his eyes, the blackness, the vines that snaked across his skin—they’re beginning to vanish.

“You weren’t in the diner,” I say, sitting down in the chair beside him.

He shrugs. “Didn’t feel...” He laughs. “I don’t know, you had a lot to catch up on with your crew.”

I nod, biting the inside of my lip. I know it’s going to take a while for him to feel completely at home here. Caught between the kids, his childhood, and the ship and crew that will lead him to his future.

I follow his gaze to the screen and then my eyes wander across the control panel, checking things over as a force of habit. And suddenly, with a start, I realize that nothing marks the map where we had been stationed only hours before.

The planet is gone. Once again.

I can’t say I’m all that surprised. It’s what happened to Dad after he saved me from Prince’s grasp, and it only seems natural that it would happen again. I wrench my gaze away, pretending it doesn’t unnerve me as much as it really does. Maybe it’s best that it stays hidden. I hope no one ever finds it again.

Andrew shifts in his seat. “And besides, I’ve never seen stars this close,” he eventually adds and then all of a sudden he laughs. “It’s funny, but I thought they’d be bigger once we got to space. Like you could reach out and touch them...” He trails off for a moment, staring at the screen where hundreds of stars glisten like glitter thrown on a little kid’s art project. “But they’re still just as far away. Like you’ll never really reach them all.”

As I stare at Andrew only feet away, looking at the screen like it holds both questions and answers, he suddenly seems small for the first time. He’d always been large, towering over me, knowing how to get from place to place, saving me from Prince in the forest what seems like ages ago. But sitting here in the cockpit, staring into the void of space and wondering at the things that nobody knows, he seems like a little kid.

“You know,” I say quietly. “My dad used to tell me that it was okay to be afraid of space. When I was little it used to bother me how big and black it was.” I laugh a little. “He told me that the universe is bigger than all of us, anything any of us could ever imagine, that we would never truly conquer it.” We’re both silent for a moment while Andrew seems to be taking it in. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s okay to be afraid of the unknown. Remember when you told me it’s silly to be afraid of the dark?” I ask. Andrew’s face scrunches up, like he’s ashamed of the memory, but I only laugh and he seems to feel better. “Well space is a little bit like that. You can’t see what’s out there and you don’t know what’s coming...but you’ll find out eventually.” I smile at Andrew and he laughs, seeming to like the analogy.

He stares down at the screen for a moment and then looks over to meet my eyes, sending something in my heart flipping summersaults. I smile back despite the unease at this weird little feeling in my stomach, the way the corners of my mouth grin involuntarily—this is something I’ve never felt before.

“So where to now?” Andrew asks me.

I bite my lip in thought and then shrug. I point to the screen. “Pick a star,” I tell him. “And I’ll show it to you.”