We woke up when the lights flickered back on, squinting painfully at each other through the glare. At some point during that long night, we’d found our way to Abdi’s bed and dragged it back over to mine. Lying on the camp beds wasn’t the most comfortable thing ever, but it beat the heck out of sitting on concrete.
And, okay, not that it’s any of your business, but no, we did not go all the way. Neither of us had any form of protection handy, and the whole thing was so weird and new. We weren’t ready.
Besides. As much as I liked the touching and the kissing, it was the talking that was most important that night; it gave us the most comfort and support. We talked about everything, until Abdi couldn’t even mumble replies to my slurred questions, and I followed him into sleep.
Everything, that is, except what we were going to do in the morning.
But morning, or its artificial equivalent, had come, and we had to deal with our situation.
“I should move the bed back,” Abdi said quietly. “I don’t want them to separate us.”
I nodded and combed my fingers through my hair, trying to get it in order while he shifted the evidence of our nighttime tryst.
The Inheritors of the Earth came in, five of them, all men, Conrad leading them. He eyed us both.
“Can you hear me?” he said, slow and loud.
“Yes,” I told him, and he nodded, looking relieved.
“Food and water will be brought to you,” he said. “In the meantime, if you need to relieve yourselves, come with me.”
You’ve probably never been escorted to a toilet, with one guard waiting outside the door and another outside the tiny window—I know, because I climbed up to check. I can tell you, it’s not much fun. It was good to see daylight and breathe fresh air, but other than my escorts, I didn’t see another living soul; they must have warned everyone else to stay inside. Here and there, bumblebees swam lazily through the air.
I would have liked them, but they reminded me of the flock of bumblecams that had haunted me, which, in turn, made me think about Bethari filming the ranks of frozen refugees. I was desperately afraid for her and Joph, and was pinning all my hopes on Zaneisha having the ability and inclination to do something to help them. Abdi and I couldn’t do a thing unless we escaped, and I was running low on ideas of how to accomplish that.
There was a chemical toilet set up for us behind a privacy screen when we got back to the cellar. I guessed that it might be a while before we got to go outside again.
Rachel brought food down to us on a tray. Cold roast beef sandwiches, a couple of apples, a pitcher of water.
“How long are we going to be down here?” I asked.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” she said, and then blushed, looking stricken.
“We won’t tell,” Abdi said, giving her his small, careful smile. I bristled a little bit, then hauled myself back.
Rachel was looking troubled. “Those children,” she said. “Those murdered children. Are they real?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “They’re real, and they’re secret. The Father knows, but he hasn’t told. We want to make sure the secret is known, Rachel. That’s why Abdi has to escape. I can stay. It’s me you need.”
She jerked away and joined the men at the other end of the room.
“Too far,” Abdi said critically.
“Worth a shot,” I told him, and bit into my sandwich.
When Rachel came back to collect our plates, she was biting her lip. “The Father is back,” she whispered. “I heard Joseph tell Mrs. McClung that he wants to see you after you’ve eaten.”
I should have been afraid. I know that now. But at the time, I was eager to have it out with my mysterious foe. Maybe I could persuade him to tell the world about what we’d found. He wasn’t a supporter of cryonics; surely he wasn’t in favor of freezing refugees.
Abdi’s expression didn’t reflect my anticipation. “Be careful,” he said.
I smiled at him, and Rachel looked modestly away from whatever she saw in my face. “I will,” I told him. “I mean, really, what can he do?”
You’d think that by that point, I’d have learned to stop asking those kinds of questions.
The Father was shorter than I’d thought.
Other than that, he looked just the same as he had in the tubecasts: dark eyes, pale skin, a strong, clean-shaven jaw. His hair, which had been covered by a hat in the ’casts, turned out to be an indeterminate brown.
The thing that a tubecast could only faintly convey, though, was the sheer power of his presence.
I felt it like a fist in the face when I walked into his office, my Inheritor guards on each side, and those dark eyes fastened intently on mine. I’d thought Tatia had strength of personality, but the Father had her beat without a fight.
“Tegan Oglietti,” he said, each word measured and precise. “Are you ready to return to the grace of God?”
“If by that you mean top myself, no, not so much,” I said. I’d wanted to sound brave and angry, but in the face of his charisma, I sounded childishly petulant.
The guards made shocked noises behind me; the Father waved them out with a trace of amusement around his mouth. The door closed with a thunk; there’d be no escape that way. I was very aware of the knife in my pocket, but that was a chancy last resort. It would be better to persuade him to see my point of view, if I could.
The Father placed his chin on his folded hands and regarded me. I leaned back, as nonchalantly as I could, determined not to break the silence first. But he was accustomed to this sort of power play, and I wasn’t very good at being patient.
“How did you know about the Ark Project?” I said. “The Inheritor who Gregor shot—he mentioned it. You knew, too, didn’t you? What does it have to do with me? Why did you want me to know about it? And why haven’t you exposed it?”
He said nothing.
“They’re killing people! Doesn’t that bother you?” I was trying to sound reasonable, but sarcasm crept in. “I guess it’s okay, since you want me to die.”
“You are already dead, Tegan.”
“I was. Now I’m alive. Isn’t that the part you guys object to? If you don’t think I was really brought back to life, then you’ve got no reason to hate me.”
“We do not hate you, Tegan. We object, in God’s name, to the abrogation of his holy privileges, and those of his son. Without God’s grace, no true resurrection is possible. Thus, you are not truly resurrected. Your every breath is a mockery to the God with whom you claim to hold faith.”
“I do hold faith,” I said. “It’s you who’s got it wrong. Look, maybe you don’t understand. I can explain the revival process; you’ll see that it’s pure science, not—”
“Tegan,” he said, interrupting me so firmly that I actually shut up. “It is you who doesn’t understand. Would you like to learn about the other half of the Ark Project?”
My argument caught in my throat. Other half?
“Yes,” I said, almost whispering. “I would.”
Unlike his flock, the Father used computers.
This hypocrisy shouldn’t have surprised me—he had to have made those tubecast appearances with something, after all—but when he opened the wooden cupboard to pull out his equipment, my jaw dropped. Another computer was balled into the corner, and after a moment, I recognized it. Bethari’s computer, the one with the footage.
“That’s mine!” I said. “What happened to ‘Thou shalt not steal’?”
He ignored me, settling back into his chair and opening the computer. “Why do you think you were brought back, Tegan? Do you think it was out of mercy? Did you think they took pity on your youth and beauty?”
“I think they wanted to test the science, and my donation form let them study the aftereffects,” I said. “I’m not naive.”
“You are,” he said, and spun the computer so that I could see. “Why would they test on you? You know they already have thousands of bodies upon which they can practice their debased corruption of a miracle.”
My breath caught. Of course they did. If they were freezing refugees anyway, why not carefully shoot them first and use those bodies to practice reviving trauma victims? There was absolutely no reason to use me in particular.
“Your father was a military man, was he not?”
The abrupt change of subject caught me by surprise. I said nothing, but he kept going, unperturbed by my silence. “So was mine. He was a general when the Ark Project was first proposed at the highest levels of government. He retired soon afterward, but he maintained his contacts, even as he rediscovered his faith. A few of the Inheritors of the Earth have always known what this earthly authority intended. Several of our young men have made great sacrifices, joining the enemy forces to maintain our watch over their efforts.”
“You sent spies.”
“The word is inappropriate to soldiers of God.” He whipped the computer around. “This, Tegan, is the Ark.”
It took a moment for my eyes to make sense of what I was looking at—some sort of vast structure in a hollow space, like a massive silver egg, partially cracked open. There were girders and plating and machines. And people, tiny as ants against the immensity of the structure.
“This is the prototype of a starship,” the Father said. “It is being built in a secret military installation beneath Mount Ossa, right here in Tasmania. If all goes well—and my sources suggest it goes very well—it will be rebuilt in space. This first stage is nearly complete.”
I gaped at him.
“The Ark Project is designed to send people from Earth to colonize other planets, similar enough to ours to sustain human life. But these will be long journeys.”
“Centuries long,” I said, stunned at the scope of it.
“Perhaps thousands of years. No one lives for so long unaided. And the governments of this world have little trust; they will not believe their followers can bring up successive generations to be obedient to their vision. What if they forget their mission? What if they lose their science, grow to believe that their entire world is the starship? No. Better to freeze your elite colonists. Have some awake at given times to crew the ship. Have them sleep when their shift is done. Inch closer to the new world. And once they arrive, wake the sleepers in the hold, to labor on the land.”
It was nightmarish. It was sickening. And it was all too possible.
That’s how the British had set up their Australian colonies, after all, with waves of indentured laborers, prisoners compelled to work out their sentences in a land so distant it might as well have been another planet.
And today’s refugees were all illegal immigrants, breaking the laws of Australia simply by being here.
The government and army could do it. If they threw out the last two hundred years of human-rights progress, they really could.
The Father spread his hands when he saw the understanding in my face. “And they will never give a thought to the blasphemy they have created. Now, tell me, Tegan Oglietti. Why did they raise you?”
“Because I’d been dead for a long time,” I said. It was unfolding out before me, like a composition I’d heard only in fragments. Now the whole score was becoming clear.
“Yes,” he agreed. “A hundred years dead, and they raised you, healthy in body and stable in mind. Or healthy and stable enough, at any rate, to proceed. You see? There was no need for us to interfere until you were revived.”
It finally explained the mystery I’d pondered, why they’d bothered with someone prepared for cryorevival so long ago. It explained the battery of psych tests and intellectual tests—even the way they’d let me go to school. They wanted to see how well I could adjust.
And I’d performed for them like a trained dog.
Operation New Beginning had nothing to do with dead soldiers. It had never had anything to do with dead soldiers. It was about allowing the elite, the powerful, and the wealthy to escape to a new world, from the mess they’d made of this one.
I stared at the Father, and I hated him for telling me the truth at last.
“I thought you cared about the sanctity of life! You say you don’t kill people, but you just let all those refugees die!”
“They would have died anyway, of starvation or disease.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps lived, according to God’s will. It is bringing them back to a semblance of life that desecrates God’s sacred will, and that blasphemy I must expose. I have always had faith that my father’s fears were well founded.”
“Marie said they couldn’t make starships,” I said. “She said the technology wasn’t there yet, that the ships would cost too much, that people wouldn’t stand for their governments’ doing it.”
“Indeed. So they have done it in secret, because they are full of hubris and greed,” he said, and laid both hands flat upon his desk. He did it with terrible gentleness; I could see he wanted to slam them down, and the self-control it took him to be soft scared me even more than the anger he was suppressing. “They do this, because they are not content with the one world God gave us to rule over.”
“How do you know?” I demanded.
I was remembering Trevor Dawson’s face when I’d challenged him.
What is the Ark Project?
Humanity’s last chance, he’d said, and ranted about ocean anoxia.
The end might not come for some time. But this project had started over sixty years ago. They had been looking to the future, to their children’s escape route.
Humanity’s last chance.
Maybe it was just a way to justify the project to himself; maybe it was the only way he could cope with knowing what he was doing. But what if he was right?
“What if they’re doing it because this world is dying? You’ve got a computer. You must have seen the climate news, the drying rivers, the rising oceans. You know that things are getting worse, not better.”
“God will not allow it,” the Father said. “The world will end as the prophets predict, not by any tools of man.”
“How stupid are you?” I demanded.
The Father hit me in the face.
It was an open-handed blow, almost contemptuous, but with enough force to snap my head around. I was completely taken aback, with no chance to put my basic training into motion. Zaneisha would be ashamed of me, I thought. I got to my feet somehow, and stumbled to put my back against one of the side walls, fists up in case I needed to use them. The Father sat there watching me, his anger carefully put away again. It wasn’t fake. He genuinely hated me, blasphemy in person, mouthing defiance against him. But he’d pull the rage out and use it only when he needed to, like a weapon.
A weapon.
I still had the knife in my pocket. It was all I could do to stop myself from grabbing for it. He was bigger and stronger than I was, and it was too chancy. I needed to wait for an opportunity. I shifted my weight and felt the knife move against my thigh.
“So,” I said softly, “you want me to kill myself because you want to prove I’m unstable, is that it? You want to scuttle the Ark Project by proving that someone from a hundred years ago can’t make it?”
“I want you to reunite yourself with God,” he said. “I will reveal with your body the blasphemy these secularists seek to perpetuate. And when I do, my people under the mountain will rise up and destroy the Ark starship.”
“You’re going to use my dead body as a signal for sabotage? Why don’t you just leak the news?”
“It is God’s will,” he said simply. “You are the first; you must return to him.”
I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I am so tired of being used. The army tried to do it, Tatia tried to do it, and now you’re trying to do it. I’m a person, not a symbol, not property, and not a prop. If you want me dead, I can’t stop you, but I won’t make it easier for you, either. Dirty your own fucking hands.”
“Murder is a sin,” the Father said flatly. “And you are not a person. You are an empty shell mouthing excuses in an attempt to delay the inevitable, and I will not allow you to continue.” He raised his voice, pitching it to the office door. “Bring in the boy.”
My heart squeezed painfully as they brought Abdi in, Conrad and Joseph on either side.
“Tegan,” Abdi said, his eyes going straight to my face.
“I’m all right,” I lied, ignoring the stinging in my cheek.
“Say your good-byes,” the Father ordered, and allowed himself a smile at my outrage.
“What?” Abdi demanded.
The Father ignored him. “My followers have been much too kind to you, Tegan Oglietti, misled by their soft hearts.” Conrad and Joseph shifted, looking abashed.
“This is what will happen now,” the Father said. “You will be imprisoned underground. You will be given sufficient food and water to maintain yourself, no more. You will speak to no one, hear from no one, see no one, for there will be no light for you. Once in a while, I will come, and ask if you are done with this charade of life.”
I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, a muffled drum. I’d fight it. I could hold out. Maybe Abdi would escape and lead a rescue, maybe Rachel would have a crisis of faith and help, maybe the army would storm the compound and release me.
The Father’s voice was very soft and utterly relentless. “And how long do you think you can last?”
Not long enough, I thought dully. The army thought I had escaped, and they knew I had no reason to trust the Inheritors; they’d never look for me here. Rachel was too loyal to her people to assist me, and they’d be watching Abdi closely. There would be no rescue from outside. There was no way to fight from the inside.
I could resist the Father for a time. But eventually I would give up.
And giving up, I would die.
“Now say good-bye to your friend. Forever.”
With an inarticulate yell, Abdi Taalib, that caring, studious musician, flung himself across the Father’s desk and tried his very best to strangle him with his bare hands.
It was a futile effort; Conrad and Joseph were shocked but acted swiftly, pulling him off the Father and giving him a couple of punches to the head for his trouble. But they were fully occupied trying to deal with Abdi’s frantic struggles, and the Father was leaning back in his chair, watching him with wide eyes. It had probably been a long time since anyone had tried to smack him around.
For that moment, no one was looking at me. Abdi had given me the opportunity I needed.
Slipping the little knife from my pocket, I moved behind the Father and placed its sharp point against his throat. He froze immediately, but the others were still fighting.
“Stop,” I said. It didn’t entirely sound like my voice. “Stop, or I’ll kill him.”
I promised to tell you the truth.
And the truth is, I think I would have done it. I’d never felt that kind of hatred before, not for Dawson or Tatia or Carl Hurfest. Not even for the sniper who accidentally shot me on the steps of Parliament House.
But I felt a killing kind of fury for the Father, who told people God said I wasn’t a person, who refused to recognize that I had a story of my own, who let refugees die until it suited him to intervene. If things had gone wrong, I would have slit his throat with no hesitation, thou shalt not kill be damned.
I don’t know whether Joseph and Conrad could see that, or if they just weren’t prepared to take the chance. They immediately stood away from Abdi, holding their hands up in plain view.
“Abdi, can you find something to tie them with?”
“Uh,” he said. His eyes were wandering slightly.
“Abdi!” I snapped. “I need you.”
He pulled it together. “Tie them up. Right.”
“This is foolish,” the Father hissed.
“Try the cabinet,” I said, ignoring him. Well, half ignoring him. I might have pushed the knife in just a little deeper. The Father sucked in a breath and shut up. “Bethari’s computer is in there.”
Abdi shoved the computer in his pocket and rummaged around until he came up with some sort of flexible metallic strips. Conrad and Joseph both looked resigned as he made them kneel and wrapped the strips around their wrists and ankles.
“Please,” Conrad said. “Please don’t hurt him.”
“That’s going to depend on you, isn’t it?” I said. “I don’t owe you any favors. You were going to lock me underground!”
He flushed and looked away. I didn’t have a lot of sympathy. He might have felt bad about it, but he’d have done it.
Abdi tied the Father’s wrists, too, and then looked at me. “The boats?”
“Yes. I think he’ll be able to turn off the burglar alarm, don’t you?”
“I do,” he said, and glanced at the Father. If anything, he looked even less forgiving than I felt. “I should take the knife. I’m taller.”
That made sense. I let him take control of it, sliding out from under his hand. I grabbed the Father’s computer, with its footage of the starship, took a deep breath, and looked around the office. There was nothing else we needed, and speed might be our best ally. “All right. Let’s go.”
I stuck my arm under the Father’s and heaved, counting in time with Abdi. It was awkward, but we got him out of the chair and into the doorway.
“If you come after us,” Abdi said, looking directly at Conrad and Joseph, “if we run into any trouble, we’ll cut his throat and push him over the side.”
“No, no,” Joseph whispered. “No trouble.”
We’d have to trust their fear. I closed the door behind us, and we set off. Once outside, Abdi moved the knife to the Father’s back. I was absolutely certain he couldn’t reach the heart with that small blade, but it didn’t matter. The Father could hardly run, encumbered as he was, and this way we wouldn’t murder him by accident.
Besides, whatever curfew had been placed on the other Inheritors was still in effect. Cows were wandering the high pastures untended, and the buildings were quiet. There were more boats in the harbor, fishing boats that must have been brought in.
“Where is everyone?” I asked, and Abdi pushed the Father’s wrists up his back until he answered.
“They are in silent contemplation of God’s will,” he gasped. “You hell spawn!”
Abdi shoved his wrists higher.
I smiled. “It doesn’t matter what he calls me, Abdi. He’s a stupid, insignificant person under the delusion he speaks for God.”
The Father choked on his own rage. I helped Abdi get him down onto the boat deck, and then it came to the moment of truth.
I don’t think the Father was a coward, exactly. But I think he weighed his options and decided God would rather have him guiding his flock than dead at the hands of a thirdie atheist and a soulless husk. He deactivated the burglar alarm, and the computer banks hummed into life at Abdi’s touch.
“All right,” Abdi said absently, and guided the boat free from its berth. I grinned at the movement.
“And what are you going to do with me?” the Father asked.
“Can you swim?”
“And if I said no, devil’s child? Would you toss me in to drown?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Can you swim?”
“Yes,” he growled.
“Take us out a little way, Abdi,” I said.
“I’m coming up with you,” he said, and his voice brooked no argument. In the end, I sawed through the Father’s wrist bindings with my little knife, and we both shoved him over the rail before he had time to recover. The sound of his belly flop was immensely satisfying.
I watched, for a little while, just to make sure he hadn’t lied. He could swim, with a strong freestyle stroke that would get him back to shore all right. He would definitely call for help, maybe mobilize their fishing fleet to follow us. But we had a head start.
Abdi had gone back into the cabin, and I followed him, clinging to the back of his chair as we picked up speed. “Will we get caught?” I asked.
“This boat’s got some heavy-duty electronic shielding,” he said. “And the navy isn’t worried about people breaking into the mainland from the South.”
That was true. It was the North that caused the problems, the North where refugees were crossing in increasing numbers. Not in fancy cloaked vessels, but in anything that would float. And as a reward for their bravery and perseverance, they were caught and held in the camps.
It was the North where they killed those people, storing them in cryocontainers and waiting for a time when they could be resurrected to a new and distant world—if they could be resurrected at all.
It was a beautiful afternoon, the sun glinting on the water. I didn’t want to break the peaceful silence, especially when Abdi put his arm around my waist.
But I had to.
“Abdi,” I said, “let me tell you what the Father said about the Ark Project.”
After I’d shown him the footage of the starship, Abdi was silent for a long time.
“The refugees could be volunteers,” I said weakly. “They could have chosen this to get out of the camps.”
“Seven-year-old refugees, choosing between the camps or freezing. Some volunteers.” He shook his head. “The only real difference is that these slavers won’t have to worry about their cargo dying on the way.”
I winced at the starkness of slavers.
He noticed. “You want to use another word? ‘Pioneers’? ‘Explorers’?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just… they’ve done it all before. Take condemned people and ship them to a new land to work. Send poor kids over to make up labor shortages. Oh, and kill or drive off the people who are already on the land and steal their kids, too. Tell yourself that it’s all for the best, that you’re making a bright new future.” I swallowed hard against the bile in my throat. “I just thought… I thought we’d learned better. I thought we’d stopped making this sort of horrible mistake.”
“People are still people,” he said gently.
“I know. You’re right. But I… my dad was in the army. They told me I was helping soldiers. My guardian, Marie, she has no idea about any of this; they were using her, too. I feel sick.”
Abdi put one arm around my shoulders and steered with the other. “I’m sure your father was a good man,” he said steadily.
“He was. He wouldn’t stand for this. We have to get the word out. I can’t believe there won’t be any change, if people just know.”
He tugged me in a little tighter and tucked his chin over my head. “You’re optimistic.”
“I have to be,” I said. “Or why not just give up? Protest and people speaking up has worked—it honestly has, in so many ways. Equal marriage, gender rights, religious tolerance—some things have really changed for the better since my time, Abdi. This could change, too.”
“I’ve seen too much to take that on faith,” he said. “But, Tegan, I hope you’re right.” After a second, he began to sing “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”
Awful as it might seem, I started to laugh. Harassed by the press, trying to get away for some time together, spreading the word about peace—John and Yoko hadn’t had it easy, even before John took off for his months-long Long Weekend of debauchery.
But they’d still been able to joke about it.
I sang along, and for once, I didn’t mind that my voice was rough and creaky. Me and Abdi, we sounded good together.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with us, to us. But we had that, at least, and it was much more than nothing.