Alive (20 page)

I look in.

There are shriveled-up bodies, but they are much smaller than those of the Grownups.

Smaller than us.

Smaller than the ones we saw in the coffins with the torn lids.

So tiny, I easily could hold them with one arm.

Babies
.

Hundreds of little corpses dangle from the ceiling, so thick I almost can’t see the ceiling itself. They hang from chains that end in metal hooks slid through their rib cages. Cracked, dry skin has peeled away from their bodies, showing the bones beneath. Clumps of fallen flesh cover the floor like some horrid scattering of snow.

Seeing this makes my body rebel, makes me want to vomit. My stomach churns. I put a hand on my knee, try to catch my breath. This is wrong, so
wrong
.

How could people do something so evil?

“Told you,” Gaston says. “Next time I tell you something, Em, maybe you should listen.”

I nod slowly. Maybe I should.

He takes my hand and pulls me away. There is something about this boy that makes me know I can rely on him, no matter what. In that way, he reminds me of Latu.

We make the final right-hand turn. Not far ahead, the hallway ends in a white wall with a small plaque: a palm print embedded in a rectangle of dark glassy material. On the floor below it is a square of smooth, black metal.

Bishop points at the square.

“That’s the door,” he says.

I had assumed it would be stone, like every other door in this place. Unless that melted metal we saw earlier was a door, but we have no way of knowing for sure.

The handprint in the plaque, there is a golden symbol in it: the jagged circle. The same symbol that is on the foreheads of Gaston, Spingate and Beckett.

Gaston walks to the plaque.
Strides
to it, more accurately. He presses his palm to the handprint. The black door in the floor hums, then rises up on a hidden hinge, revealing a narrow tube leading down. A ladder runs its length, vanishing into deep shadow.

He crosses his arms. His smile is so smug it could make Aramovsky’s look humble by comparison. The time for being quiet and modest is apparently over: Gaston is back to normal.

“That’s how it goes,” he says. “It opens for me. Some people are more important than others, it seems.”

El-Saffani talks, the boy first this time, then the girl.

“Bishop tried it—”

“—then we tried—”

“—but it didn’t work for us.”

Bishop is glowering, waiting for us to finish. He doesn’t like the fact that Gaston can do something he can’t.

“What about Beckett?” I ask. “Did he try?”

Gaston nods. “It didn’t work for him, either.”

I thought perhaps the door recognized symbols, somehow, but if Beckett can’t open it, it’s not about the symbols alone. Is it something particular to Gaston? Or, maybe, particular to only certain people?

“I want to try,” I say.

Gaston again puts his hand to the print. The door closes. He gives a deep, comical bow and steps aside.

I press my hand into the depression, feel the cool material against my skin. Nothing happens.

Gaston holds the back of his hand to his forehead, pretends to be faint.

“Oh dear, our fearless leader is denied! Whatever will become of us now?”

He is so strange. We just saw butchered babies, hundreds of dead people—maybe
thousands
—and he’s making jokes? I want to shake some sense into him. But perhaps jokes are his way of dealing with this. It’s certainly better than how I reacted, which was to almost throw up.

Aramovsky walks to the plaque. He presses his hand to the glass.

The door hums: it opens.

Bishop laughs and shakes his bone-club. “Ha! I guess Gaston isn’t so special after all!”

Gaston’s face shifts from happy smile to glaring scowl. When he smiles, he is cute; when he looks like this, so hateful and furious, he is ugly both inside and out.

Aramovsky breathes out a sigh of delight. “The door opens for me because I am chosen. I
knew
it.” He looks at Gaston with an expression of deep respect, of acceptance. “As are you, Gaston. You are also chosen. I apologize if I offended you earlier, my brother.”

Gaston snarls. I would have never guessed something like this was so important to him.

I brought Aramovsky so he wouldn’t talk to the others while I was gone, so his words wouldn’t create more problems—now he has gained some kind of stature. I wonder if I will ever make the right choices.

The ladder waits for us. I want to get the bracelet and get away from this slaughterhouse, but I don’t want to rush things and make even more mistakes.

“Bishop, you said this room is haunted?”

He nods. His jaw muscles twitch. He will go down there with me, but he doesn’t try to pretend he’s not scared.

“You didn’t see ghosts or something,” I say. “Right?”

Bishop shrugs. I turn to Gaston.

“Well, Gaston? Ghosts?”

The small boy swallows. He’s no longer in a joking mood.

“The room is…
weird,
” he says. “It’s small and dark. You feel heavier, like an invisible hand is squeezing you, trying to make you sit. Our legs got tired fast. And we both felt like…like something was watching us. I wanted to get out of there. To be honest, Em, I don’t want to go back down.”

He’s asking without asking if he can stay up here. I would love to let him do that, but he’s the smartest of us.

“I need that big brain of yours,” I say. I tousle his black hair, trying to make light of the situation. “What if there are things down there that won’t work for anyone but you? Maybe there’s something you and Bishop didn’t see, something like the hidden panels in the archways.”

“Those things would work for me as well,” Aramovsky says. “Or perhaps we’ll find things that
only
work for me.”

He’s right. Besides, if I leave him up here with the circle-stars, who knows what he’ll tell them. I’m afraid of Bishop because he is big and strong. He could hurt me. I’m afraid of Aramovsky, too, but I’m not sure why.

“I’ll go first,” I say. “Then Bishop, then Gaston, then Aramovsky, then El-Saffani.”

The twins step forward in unison and start down the ladder before I can even say a word to the contrary. Maybe they’re just as afraid as I am, but if so they hide it well. Or maybe they are actually brave, like Latu was.

I look at Bawden and Visca.

“You two guard the door, okay?”

The two gray-faced people nod.

I start down the ladder.

I
hold the spear in one hand, use my other to grip the ladder rungs as I descend.

It’s easy at first, but it quickly gets harder the farther I go down. I understand what Gaston was saying about something pushing him: I feel
heavier,
like I’m progressively carrying more and more weight.

It hits me how clean this tube is. Other than some footprints on the uppermost rungs, probably from when Gaston and Bishop first came down, there is no dust at all. Has the door above me always been closed?

I reach the bottom. The circular floor is strange. Like the black door, it’s metal, a grate of some kind. I can see through it to a black, curving surface below. The curve seems to slope up equally in all directions, becoming curved walls that join together to make a curved ceiling.

Before, we were inside a cylinder. Now, we are inside a ball.

My eyes adjust to the darkness.

I see the body Gaston told us about, a long bit of light gray that stands out from the shadows. It is chest-down on the metal-grate floor, arms spread wide. The skin-taut skull is facing us, greeting us with an eternal smile. A once-white body suit drapes thin ribs, hides arm and leg bones. Splotches of different colors—faded red, yellow, grayish black—stain the fabric. The biggest stain is in the middle of the back, where the spear must have dug deep, ending that person’s life.

I see the “shackle” Gaston described. Yes, it is
exactly
like the one the scarred monster aimed at my face. It is on the corpse’s right wrist. The rod connected to the bracelet points out, parallel to the metal-grate floor.

A few steps past the corpse, I see the three pedestals Gaston described. Unlike the other pedestals we’ve seen so far, these are unbroken. In full light, they would be white; right now they are a pale shade of gray. Gold symbols line the round stems. Their flat, square tops sit empty. If we could figure out what is supposed to be on top of those pedestals, I think that would connect a few more dots of the puzzle that is this place.

I take a few steps: my feet feel like they are weighed down by thick stones.

“Gaston, why are we heavier?”

He starts to talk, then stops. That frustrated look comes over his face again.

“I think it’s similar to how we didn’t fall from the ceiling, but”—he looks at Aramovsky—“I really don’t want to argue with you about that right now.”

Aramovsky actually bows. “Of course not, my chosen brother. Please, continue.”

Gaston sighs and shakes his head. Maybe he liked the confrontational Aramovsky better than the friendly version.

“Anyway, it’s like my brain is trying to tell me why we feel heavier, but it doesn’t know where that information is kept. So many things are still…blanked out.”

That phrase,
blanked out
—it’s his version of the sludge-brain sensation I defined as
muddy.
Gaston’s word feels more accurate.

I look at the body. So gross. My stomach feels queasy again. I’ve seen worse things, far worse, but knowing this person was speared in the back makes me wonder if the same thing could happen to me.

I need to focus: what we came for is lying right there.

“I’ll get the bracelet,” I say.

Gaston kneels next to the body. “No, let me. The look on your face makes me think you might throw up. And if there’s one thing nastier than a corpse, it’s a corpse covered in puke.”

I’m more than happy to let him do it. I don’t want to even look at another dead body, let alone touch one.

Gaston tries to move the bracelet. The stained fabric has dried to it—he has to give it a little bit of a tug before the fabric pulls free with a crackling sound.

“Eww, gross,” he says. He gently slides the bracelet off the skeletal arm. He stands, starts to offer the prize to me, then stops and holds it close to his face.

“Uh-oh,” he says. “This can’t be a good thing.”

He points at the base of the long rod. The white jewel there is cracked in several places. A few small pieces of it are missing.

I reach out a fingertip, feel the broken lines.

“When the monster pointed his bracelet at me, the jewel glowed,” I say.

Everyone looks at the device in Gaston’s hand. We don’t know how it works, but it is obvious to all of us that this jewel is never going to glow again.

Aramovsky sighs.

“Brilliant work, Savage,” he says. “You dragged us all this way and what do we get for it?
Nothing
. Instead of going after Bello, we did this. She’s probably dead by now. Maybe we could have saved her if we’d acted quicker, but now it’s likely too late.”

He didn’t want to go after her in the first place. He wanted to abandon her to the monsters to please his “gods.” Why is he changing his story? Is he trying to make me look bad again?

Bishop is staring at me. His eyes narrow. He wanted to try to rescue Bello, but I wouldn’t let him. Now I understand—Aramovsky’s words weren’t meant to make me look bad, they were meant to remind Bishop that coming here was my choice.

Aramovsky is trying to turn Bishop against me. Not that doing so will take much effort, I suppose: Bishop was right, and I was wrong.

I wasted precious time. I split up the group for nothing. If I don’t fix this, they’ll replace me as leader. I can’t let that happen. I have to admit it to myself; I
want
to be the leader. I am the one who makes decisions. I know I’ve made mistakes, but I don’t trust anyone else to do a better job than I can. If we’re going to stay alive, if we’re going to make it out of this awful place, if we’re going to survive the monsters, I know our best chance is if I stay in charge.

Aramovsky sighs again, louder this time. The sound makes me want to knock him down. It must be so easy to judge the decisions of someone else when you sit back and do nothing.

He strides to the middle pedestal, runs his finger along the flat top. He looks at his fingertip like he’s checking for dust. He turns his back to the pedestal and smiles at me.

“We don’t have the Grownups’ weapon,” he says. “If it is a weapon at all, which we don’t know, because we’ve learned nothing. Bello is gone. Yong and Latu are dead. Perhaps Bishop isn’t the only one who wonders who would win a new vote.”

The middle pedestal begins to glow.

I take a reactive step back. The others do the same. Aramovsky realizes something is behind him, turns sharply, sees the glow and lunges away from it.

The glow increases, a buzzing cloud that hovers in midair. The light doesn’t come from the pedestal itself, but rather from the empty space above it. Dozens of black spots appear within that glow, spots that shift and change.

I point my spear at it.

Bishop and El-Saffani hold their bone-clubs toward it. Gaston scurries behind Bishop. Aramovsky hides behind me.

I want to run, but I stand my ground—by
choice
this time, not because my feet won’t obey. The glow is mesmerizing, almost hypnotizing.

The floating black spots swell and bloat. They meld together, merge even as the glow itself begins to fade. The shifting black shape forms a circle…no, an oval.

Inside that black form, two red dots take shape.

And then the image above the pedestal becomes clear.

I am looking at a monster.

And that monster is looking back at me.

T
he monster is so real I step back and bump into Aramovsky.

Only the head and shoulders are visible. Its black isn’t a color as much as it is an absence of light. Wrinkled, gnarled, leathery…
vile
. The thing is repulsive. Simply looking at it makes me want to destroy it, the same kind of instinctive reaction I’d feel if I saw a hairy spider crawling across my arm.

Bishop creeps closer to the pedestal. He pokes his thighbone at the face, tentatively, as if he knows the monster isn’t really there but he has to be sure. The bone goes right through, distorting the face in a little puff of multicolored sparkles. Bishop pulls the bone back; sparkles cling to his club for a moment, then dissipate into wisps of nothingness.

If Bishop can be brave, so can I. I step forward to stand at his left side.

The monster’s eyes swirl with many shades of red, from a rich almost-black to a bright flash that burns yellow. When it speaks, I see the jaw moving, but can’t make out a mouth behind those disgusting folds.

“Bishop, look at you,” the monster says. “Already with a weapon in your hand. Why am I not surprised? And what did you smear all over your body? You’re so frightening.”

A man’s condescending voice delivered in a whispering hiss, the sound of dust sliding across stone. It makes my skin crawl. Whatever this monster is, every ounce of my body screams that it should not exist.

Bishop glances at me. I see the fear and doubt in his eyes. If there was something to attack, he would attack it. Since there is not, he tilts his head toward the pedestal.

He thinks I should do the talking.

I stand up straight and try to look like a leader.

“How did you know Bishop’s name?”

The black thing’s head bobs a little. It makes a new sound, a sound like two bones scraping together. Is that…
laughter
?

“Even though I can’t see as well as I used to, there’s no mistaking his muscular body,” it says. “And the Bishop I know is seldom without a weapon. Some things never change. Never-never-never.”

A hand on my shoulder. Not one of support or threat, but to gently guide me aside, just enough for someone to lean in. It’s Aramovsky.

“Are you a god?” he asks the monster.

The monster stares for a moment. “I do not recognize you. What is your name?”

“I am Aramovsky.”

Wrinkled, withered shoulders shake, and again I hear that sound of scraping bone—the monster is laughing.

“Aramov
skeee,
way up in a
tree,
” it says. “I’m surprised you made it. Of course a double-ring would assume I am a god a god I am. I suppose I do have the power over life and death. By definition, therefore and wherefore, the answer is
yes
.”

I don’t know what a god is, exactly, but if gods do exist, they don’t look like this thing.

Aramovsky’s eyes are wet and shining. He is afraid, but also enthralled—he doesn’t see the threat that Bishop and I see.

I shake the tall boy’s hand off my shoulder, then step forward.

“You know Bishop,” I say to the monster. “And you know Aramovsky. Who are
you
?”

“Who am I? A god with a cod.”

He is playing with us.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “You are no more a god than I am.”

The red eyes flicker and swirl. “I do not recognize you, girl. What is your name?”

“Yours first.”

The wrinkled thing laughs. I want to drive my spear right through its face.

“I am Brewer,” he says.

Brewer
. Like the boy in our coffin room. Could they be related?

“I told you my name, girl,” it says. “Now, what is yours?”

I stand a little straighter. “My name is Em.”

The red eyes swirl faster. “Em? There is no
Em
in the command caste.”

“I am the leader,” I say. “We voted on it.”

“A
vote
? How interesting.”

The red eyes seem to look me up and down, then lock in on my forehead.

“You’re a
circle
?” He speaks that word with utter disbelief.

I say nothing. The monster stares at me for a long moment. I stare back, not knowing what else to do.

It makes a noise that might be a cough: a dry, rattling thing that pulls the narrow shoulders closer together. When that passes, the monster makes grunting sounds, like it’s trying to clear a throat that we can’t see.

Finally, it seems to recover. Its red eyes slowly swirl.

“I don’t know anyone named Em
,
” it says. “That doesn’t seem possible, unless…”

He looks off to his right. His attention is elsewhere for a moment, then the eyes snap back to me.

“Em? As in the
letter
M?”

How do I respond? Do I lie, like O’Malley would? I don’t know that a lie helps us any more than the truth, so I nod.

The monster leans closer.

“Are you…
Savage
?” His voice, full of both awe and horror.

Like the monster in the Garden, this one seems to know me. It is all I can do to contain my hope and excitement.

I nod again. “You know who I am?”

The monster leans away.

“I can’t
believe
it,” it says. “Yes, I know who you are, little circle. I know all too well. You are the person who murdered me.”