Annex Read online

  16

  Left or right?” Bo asked, kneading his eyes.

  He’d slept until he woke up hungry, an empty churning made worse by his Parasite wriggling back against it in response. Violet had already been awake, sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, and he’d guessed from her grimace that she was experiencing the same thing. He’d inspected his scraped-up palms, relieved to find they were already less tender. Then, because there was nothing else to do, they’d kept walking.

  Now they were at a split, the corridor forking off in two directions. Bo felt a growing frustration. They had gotten away from Wyatt, and they had gotten away from the pod, but now what? They were stuck wandering around up on the ship with no way to get off it. If the pod had taken them to the warehouses, at least he would be closer to Lia. Maybe he would have even had a chance to break her out. He knew how to use his Parasite now, knew better than anyone.

  But it wasn’t any use up here. Here, all they could do was pick left or right.

  Violet gave a tight shrug. “Right,” she said in a half whisper. She’d barely spoken since they got up. Bo guessed she was worried. Sometimes he caught her giving him a strange look from the corner of her eye.

  They went right. Before long the corridor started to slant downward, and it seemed to be narrowing too. Bo sped up a bit as the gradient changed. At least this was different. He wanted to get out of the thick warm air. He was sure he’d be able to think better, and maybe think of a way to get off the ship.

  He dug his heels in as the floor suddenly dropped out of sight. Violet nearly bowled him over from behind before he braced himself against the gnarled wall. The slope had turned to a ninety-degree drop. He peered over the edge and found himself looking down into a long dark hall. Everything seemed to be made of the same black metal, except for a massive vat directly under them. It was clear and it was full of rippling luminescent yellow liquid.

  Violet bellied out beside him. “It’s not that high,” she said hoarsely. “We could jump.”

  “Into the yellow stuff?” Bo asked, gritting his teeth. He felt a familiar helium sensation in his forehead. It was higher than the high-diving board.

  “Softer than the floor.” Violet paused. “You swim, right?”

  “Yeah,” Bo said. “In water.”

  “It’s not acid or anything,” Violet said. “I’ve touched it. Had it all over my hands when I was trying to hold on to the pod.”

  Bo had an unbidden flash of the storage unit, of plunging the knife into the pod’s wound, the spatter on his hands and wrists. He shoved the image away.

  “Okay,” he said. “I got first.”

  He straightened up on the lip and looked down. Suddenly he had a memory of the swimming pool in Niamey, from back before they left Africa. There had been a cement diving board coated in flaking white paint, nothing like the floppy green ones at the pool here, and because he’d been six years old it had seemed incredibly high. He’d stood shivering on the edge for ages until Lia coaxed him off.

  But in the past four months he’d done scarier things. He’d killed othermothers and run from pods and had a knife put under his throat. Bo touched his hand against his Parasite, feeling almost reassured by the ripple, then jumped.

  Cold air gusted his clothes and whistled in his ears; he locked his legs and shut his eyes just before he hit the surface. It was hotter than he’d expected. Not enough to scald him, but enough to make him claw his way back up to the surface as quickly as he could. He splashed his way over to the side of the vat and clung there. His heartbeat had settled by the time Violet dropped down beside him, then both of them clambered over the edge and slopped out.

  Bo tried to get purchase on the outside of the vat, but he was slippery and the side was smooth and he landed badly, sending a sharp shock of pain up his already-sore tailbone. Violet stuck hers, crouching low and then straightening up to wring out her hair. Bo got slowly to his feet. They were both drenched, sopping a puddle onto the metallic black floor. Violet blew a spray through her pursed lips.

  “Looks like we got peed on by a radioactive elephant,” she said.

  Bo wiped at his face. “Maybe we’ll get superpowers,” he said.

  She looked at him for a second, then at his stomach where his shirt covered the Parasite, and burst out laughing. Bo tried to stay straight-faced serious how Violet did for jokes, but he cracked. First he just grinned, but then he was laughing too, hard enough to toss his head back and see a whirlybird drifting right above them.

  He grabbed Violet’s shoulder, felt his Parasite rushing, the static sparking, ready to vanish it before it could swoop down on them with its needle or its claw.

  But the whirlybird wasn’t drifting. It was fixed to a rack that stretched the length of the hall, something he hadn’t been able to see from their vantage point inside the pipe. Its limbs were folded up under its flesh-and-metal shell. Inactive. Bo exhaled, let his Parasite calm down. The static trickled away.

  “Spares,” Violet said, looking up at them. There were more racks above it, all of them lined with the compacted whirlybirds. Hundreds of them, Bo thought.

  “I always wanted to smash one of these,” he blurted. “The whole time I was in the warehouse. I always wanted to wreck one. Especially the one that did my Parasite.”

  “Me too,” Violet said. She gave a little shudder and he could tell that she was thinking back to the same place, to the whirlybird hovering over her and unslinging its big scraping needle, to the feel of a tiny squirming thing burrowing through her belly button. The not knowing had been the worst part, Bo remembered. Not knowing if it was going to kill him or do something worse, the foreign thing that was suddenly part of him.

  He peered up at the whirlybird. He recognized the big needle, and the smaller one it used on kids to put them to sleep. He’d never had a chance to look at its tools up close. The claw that had scarred his arms, all those months ago when he tried to grab one on the way to supper, was folded up. Tucked beside it, he saw a tiny drill. He thought of the wasters and could guess what it was meant for.

  “Why would they clamp people at all?” Bo swallowed. “Why not just kill them?”

  Violet was quiet for a moment. “Nobody likes to think they’re the bad guy, Bo.” She looked at the whirlybird when she said it, not at him.

  Bo stared at the needle again. “Wyatt told me something,” he said slowly. “Before you showed up. He said they didn’t clamp anyone in the hospital. They killed them all. He said they put them down. Like animals.”

  Violet stiffened. “Lied a lot,” she said. “Wyatt lied a lot.”

  “Yeah,” Bo said. “I guess.”

  They wandered down the empty hall, staring up at the rows and rows of whirlybirds and not speaking.

  The ship didn’t have any doors, so far as Violet could tell. It seemed like one hall led to the next led to the next, all connected by vaguely keyhole-shaped archways. Sometimes the rooms were high-vaulted like cathedrals, all spikes and flanges up the walls, and other times they were low and crammed with humming, shifting machinery Violet couldn’t even begin to guess purposes for. Sometimes there were silvery pyramids and sometimes there were more of the cylindrical vats, bubbling full of their yellow fuel.

  So far as Violet could tell, the ship was also empty. She kept waiting to round the corner on a group of pods, or hear the whine of a whirlybird, or even see the spidery silhouette of an othermother stalking the corridors with them. But it was just them, wandering lost.

  There was a reason she hadn’t been speaking much. Her voice had broken earlier that morning, just for half a sentence, slipping past her with a bray that she knew sounded a thousand times worse in her head. Bo hadn’t seemed to notice it. But it put a thick black fear in her belly, worse than anything she’d felt over the last few topsy-turvy days.

  It took her back to nights in her bathroom at home, back before the ship came down, back before she was taking spiro. She used to lock herself in for hours, scour her body w
ith tweezers, shaking and red-faced as she found the hairs she hated, so much thicker and coarser and darker than they should be.

  If the deal was still there for the taking, she wouldn’t have to feel that fear ever again. The orb was warm and waiting in her pocket; she’d taken a spare second to wrap it up tightly in a sock before she jumped into the vat. She hadn’t looked at it yet—Bo’d woken up only a moment after she did—but it wouldn’t be hard to pretend she needed a piss and sneak away to some corner. Maybe it would give her directions to follow or show her where to take Bo.

  Then Bo would go to the warehouses, and she would never need to hunt for hormones again. She would be how she’d always been meant to be. She would plug herself into a beautiful dream and forget Bo ever existed. Forget him, forget Wyatt, definitely forget Ivan. Like heaven, they’d said.

  Bo’s stomach gave a noisy rumble that cut through her thoughts. “Think there’s food anywhere up here?” he asked. “Like the stuff the whirlybirds fed us. Right now I’d eat that.”

  “Doubt it,” Violet said. “We can start looking.” They were in another hall, this one low-ceilinged and lined with little alcoves on each side, like storage rooms. Bo broke off to check the right side; Violet took the left. The little rooms were all identical and all empty, until one up ahead caught her eye.

  The second-to-last storage room had a door, or something like it. A fizzing red screen seemed to ripple back and forth in front of it, stretching wall to wall and floor to ceiling, boxing it off. The red screen was translucent enough, but she couldn’t see anything behind it but shadows.

  As Bo came up to join her, she bunched the sleeve of her shirt into a knot and reached out with the very tip of it. Sparks flew, and when she pulled it back from the screen it was singed. She blew away the little wisp of smoke. Turned to Bo.

  “Guess we’re not allowed in that one,” she said.

  “Or maybe he’s not allowed out,” Bo said.

  Violet spun back, following Bo’s gaze, and nearly jumped. There was a tall bony man sitting cross-legged on the floor, where she was sure there’d been nothing but shadow a second ago. He was dressed all in black with an old-fashioned looking bowler hat on his head, and his hands, resting on his knees, were pale and spidery. His eyes were shut behind bruise-colored lids.

  Not storage rooms. Cells.

  “Why would they have a waster locked up here?” Bo murmured, peering at the man. “He must be clamped, right? All the grown-ups got clamped, you said.” His voice was excited.

  “All the ones on the ground,” Violet said. The man was gaunt like a waster, but his clothes were immaculate, and something else about him, about the way he was sitting so still, made her think he wasn’t one. “Maybe they kept a few free,” she said. “For experiments. Maybe they tried to put Parasites in some adults too.”

  “Should try to find out,” Bo said. “Shout something at him. See if he’s a waster or not.”

  “You shout something at him,” Violet said.

  Bo stuck out his fist and bounced it up and down, giving her a challenging look. “Best of five.”

  “You’re only going to lose again,” she said, grudgingly putting her own fist in. Rock-rock-scissors this time around, she figured. Bo was predictable like that.

  “Hello, children.”

  This time Violet did jump, and Bo flinched back almost as badly. The man was standing up against the fizzing red screen with his nose nearly touching it. He’d moved as quick and quiet as a cat; Violet hadn’t heard a single footstep. She put a hand to her rippling Parasite and tried to steady her breathing. This man wasn’t a waster. He was staring right at them, wearing a smile that seemed too wide for his mouth.

  “Let me out, please.”

  Violet’s first instinct was to back away, back away, run. Everything about the man was off, from his stretched-out smile to his strange toneless voice. But there was no way of knowing how long he’d been stuck up here on the ship by himself. Maybe it was stir-crazy, not crazy-crazy.

  “Let me out, please, children,” the man said again.

  “Who are you?” Violet asked. “How’d you get here?”

  “I am a prisoner,” he said. “They caught me. I was careless.” His face twisted into an exaggerated frown.

  “Did you never have a clamp?” Bo asked. “The thing they stick on the back of your head. To make you a waster. Did they never try to give you one?”

  The man was silent for a long minute. His black eyes flicked from Violet to Bo and back again. “No,” he said slowly. “They never tried to give me the thing they stick on the back of your head.”

  For a moment, even through the red blur, she could tell something wasn’t right with his eyes. They were too large, too dark, all pupil. She blinked and they were normal again.

  “How long have you been up here?” Bo asked.

  Violet didn’t wait for the answer. She grabbed Bo by the arm and jerked her head back the way they’d come. He gave her a questioning look, but followed. The man didn’t call after them, only stood, hands at his sides, watching until they were around the corner.

  “That’s not a real person,” Violet said in a low voice. “No way is that a real person.”

  Bo gritted his teeth. “Moves funny,” he admitted. “And how he talks. It’s weird.” He shot a glance over his shoulder, like the black-clad man might have followed them out of his cell. “You think he’s like the othermothers? Like, a better version?”

  “Why would they put him in a cell, then?”

  “To trick us.” Bo’s eyes were shiny, a little frantic-looking. “They think we’ll trust him right away. Automatic. Because he’s the first grown-up we’ve seen in forever who’s not a waster.”

  “That’s a lot of work for a trick,” Violet said. “They stuck him there just in case we walked by, or what?” She felt the weight of the orb in her pocket. “They would have to know we’re on the ship,” she said. “Also exactly where we are on the ship.”

  “So what is he, then?” Bo asked, sticking both hands on his head, looking unsettled.

  “Ask him.”

  “You ask him.”

  They went back around the corner one rock and two scissors later. Violet half expected to see the cell empty again, but the man was standing there how they left him.

  “Oh, hello again,” he said. “Will you let me out now?”

  Bo gave her a look. Violet scissored her two fingers together as a reminder of who’d won. She was glad it wasn’t her asking, just in case the man broke down in tears. Just in case she’d imagined the big black eyes, and forgotten how weird some adults could be, and he was just an eccentric dresser who’d been losing his mind up here on the ship for the past four months.

  “We know you’re not human,” Bo said. “So what are you?”

  The man’s eyes winched wide and he put his hands up, palms out, innocent. Then his stretched smile came back, and Violet saw something starting to wriggle out of his face, just above his cheekbone. What looked like a minuscule beetle burrowed out from his skin and clung there. She was narrowing her eyes to peer closer at it when the rest of his face burst into a mass of scuttling black metal.

  Violet recoiled; Bo yelped. The black metal rippled from the man’s face down the rest of his body, his suit jacket and long legs and pale hands all turning into a writhing, vaguely human-shaped tower of gleaming machinery. It slid back and forth in front of the red screen like a shadow come to life, slithering up the wall, across the ceiling, back to the floor.

  Then all at once it was the man again, legs and arms and body and head. The bowler hat was last, black blots of machine trickling up his face to form its brim. He stomped down on a stray bit that nearly scurried away, and when he lifted his foot, Violet saw only the smooth black sole of his shoe.

  “I am a saboteur,” the man said. “I was careless. Now I am a prisoner.”

  Violet had seen a lot of shocking things, but it still took her a moment to regain her bearings. She did not like
things that scuttled.

  Bo was quicker to recover. “So you’re not one of them,” he said eagerly. “You’re not on their side.”

  “No,” the man said. “I am not on their side. I sabotaged them.” He lifted his hat, exposing unfinished black skull, and gave a modest bow.

  “You didn’t sabotage them very hard,” Violet said dryly. “They’re still running everything. And you’re stuck in a little box.”

  “I did sabotage them very hard,” the man said, narrowing his dark eyes. “I destroyed all of the keys. Will you let me out now?”

  Violet swapped looks with Bo.

  “What keys?” Bo demanded. “To fly the ship?”

  The man gave him a long look. “Keys open doors,” he said. “I destroyed the keys that would have opened the door. They would have opened the door to bring the other ships through. Hundreds of ships. Instead, they are alone. I sabotaged them.”

  “Wait.” Violet nearly put her hand against the blurry red screen before she remembered and yanked it back. “They’re alone? This is the only ship?”

  She thought back to the end of the world, to the thick prickling fog that wouldn’t let them leave. She’d supposed that everything else had been destroyed, all the other cities and countries and continents, or else that all of them were trapped in their own gray day with their own black ship drifting in the sky, their own warehouses and pods and whirlybirds. Everyone stuck in the same scary dark fairy tale.

  “Of course,” the man said. “They were only sent to open the door.”

  “But they can’t,” Bo said. “They can’t bring any more ships, because you destroyed the keys, right?”

  The man stooped down slightly to Bo’s eye level. “I like you,” he said. “When you let me out, I will be your friend. I destroyed the keys. Yes.” His black gaze flicked down to Bo’s stomach, then to hers. She felt her Parasite wriggle. “But, as you know, they are growing new keys now.”

  17

  Back around the corner, but only because Violet insisted on it. Bo knew what they needed to do. They needed to let the man in black out of his cell.