The ship was unlike anything she’d ever seen. It was all hard, gleaming surfaces, straight lines, sharp corners. So unlike the planet of Gle’ah, where nothing was hard, and nothing was straight—where the plains swelled and dipped and the grasses bent this way and that with the wind.
They went through a hallway and came into a big room with a long, gleaming table in the middle. The table was covered in strange, foreign-looking instruments.
“What’s this?” Kiva asked.
“The lab,” Matthew said. “This is where we analyzed the blood samples that we got from you yesterday.”
Kiva picked up a flat piece of glass. There was a picture on the glass, like the pictures artists from the village sometimes drew in the dirt or on the walls of the huts. Except that this picture was moving—a thousand tiny black dots, vibrating this way and that. Kiva felt Matthew holding his breath while she held the moving picture in her hands. She set it back on the table and he breathed again.
Kiva moved into another room with sleeping berths set into the walls. “And this?”
“Sleeping quarters,” Matthew said.
Kiva raised her eyebrows. “Which one is yours?”
Matthew nodded up. “Top bunk.”
Kiva kept walking. She went back through the laboratory and craned her neck around a corner to see a small room at the back of the ship. It was dark inside.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Oh, that … that’s nothing.”
Kiva looked at Matthew and set her jaw. “Show me.”
Matthew sighed and walked in ahead of her. He flipped a switch, and a dim light came on, revealing three long, narrow platforms, each with a clear box on top of it.
“What is this room?” Kiva asked.
“This is where … ,” Matthew began, then paused. “It’s where we stayed during our journey.”
“How long was your journey?
“One hundred years … I mean, about one hundred seasons.”
Kiva gasped. “One hundred seasons in this little room!”
Then she paused, closed her mouth, and studied the smooth skin of Matthew’s face. What he was telling her didn’t make sense.
“But you’re so young,” she said. “I thought you said you were my age.”
“I am,” Matthew said. “It doesn’t work that way. It’s like … How can I explain this?”
Matthew looked down at his feet. Kiva waited.
“We slept in here for most of the journey,” he said. “Dunne, Sam, and I. We were … we were frozen. In ice. You have ice on Gle’ah?”
Kiva nodded.
“The ice kept us from getting older. You see? So when we arrived here at Gle’ah, we woke up—”
“The same age as you were when you left,” Kiva cut in, finishing Matthew’s sentence for him.
Matthew nodded, and Kiva returned her gaze to the clear box where Matthew had spent the last one hundred seasons—frozen, unaging.
“But if you spent one hundred seasons flying from Earth to Gle’ah,” Kiva said slowly, thinking as she spoke, “then life on your planet went on without you. While you were frozen, time just kept going.”
She looked up at Matthew. His eyes were buried in a flinch, but Kiva could see that they were glistening. He didn’t say anything.
“Why did you come here?” Kiva asked.
Matthew turned away and coughed. “I told you,” he said, unable to hide the quaver in his voice even though he spoke loudly into the small room. “Our mission is to find a new—”
“That’s not what I mean,” Kiva said. “I mean, why did you come here? There are people back home, aren’t there? People you care about? People who love you? Why would you leave them behind?”
Matthew breathed out. “My mother,” he said. “She was sick, and we didn’t have the money to get her better.”
“Money?” Kiva repeated.
“It’s like, it’s a thing that you have, a sort of made-up thing, and you trade it for other things. But we didn’t have enough to buy a cure for my mother, and there was pay for anyone who agreed to go on this mission, so—”
“You mean there was a cure for your mother’s sickness, but you couldn’t get it for her because you didn’t have enough of this made-up thing? This is the way things work on your planet? Why don’t people put a stop to it?”
“I know it must sound horrible to you,” Matthew said. “And it is horrible, really, when you sit down and think about it. But I guess most people never really think about it. When it’s all you’ve ever known, you kind of get used—”
His voice caught in his throat and he stopped talking for a moment.
“Anyway, I had to do it. My mom, she’s done so much for me. I had to at least try. For her.”
Kiva nodded slowly. “I understand. I understand what it is to give your life over to other people. To make it into something else to please them.”
“Is that what being Vagra feels like? Giving your life to the Vagri? Making it into something else to please them?”
“Sometimes. When I’m in the village, I can hear their voices all the time. I’ve learned to tune them out and really listen to only one voice at a time—but they’re always there, chattering away inside my head.” Kiva paused, breathed out through her nose, and swallowed. “All their hopes, all their fears. Their expectations. They want me to be so much—so much more than I am. I can’t be the leader they want me to be.”
Kiva felt Matthew’s hand on her arm, and she jerked her gaze up with surprise to look at him. Matthew flinched, took his hand away, and took a step back, his expression chastened. Something inside Kiva wilted—he’d only startled her. She hadn’t meant for him to stop touching her. That wasn’t what she’d meant to happen at all.
“You seem like a good leader to me,” Matthew said. “If I were one of the Vagri, you’d be exactly the kind of Vagra I’d want.”
Kiva smiled.
Matthew looked once again at the empty cryochambers and gritted his teeth.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I can’t stand this place.”