The Remnant

Unwanted.

There was nothing surprising about any of that. I read her life in her eyes, and it was a familiar story. Children were abandoned back on Earth every day. In juvy, I had lived among them. By far, the majority of us had mothers at home who traded sleep for endless worry, then worry for resignation, and, at last, for some, resignation for rejection. But there were those the world had failed so completely that they did not cry at night, even on their first night. Why would they? No one cried for them. What home could they mourn, they who belonged to no one? I knew them, to the extent that anybody could know them, and I knew what it did to their souls. To their eyes.

No, it wasn’t shocking.

And yet, my breath caught in my throat.

The guard nearest me reached for my arm, but he was distracted by the spectacle. It was all too much: the Remnant’s mortal enemy, sentenced to die before those she’d betrayed. He was as entranced as the rest of the crowd. I couldn’t blame him.

I disarmed him easily, flipping the small weight of his gun directly from his holster and into my fist.

I reached the podium in the next instant, before the shock extinguished from his face. The judge’s shoulders were frail underneath her black robe, in spite of the thickness of her lower body, and they bent backwards with my weight. The gun—my gun, now—was cold against her neck, and she tried to shrug it away with her shoulder even as her hands splayed before her. Instinct told me to shelter myself behind the wooden platform, but I ignored it and forced her body to cover me instead.

I was not a healer, like my mother.

“Everyone stay back.” I locked eyes with the now-unarmed guard and nodded toward the door behind us. “You, open this door. No one else move.” I wrenched the judge from the platform, and she made a little sound when we hit the floor behind it, like she was afraid.

She didn’t speak at all. I did not think of Amiel, whose eyes followed my every move, or even of West. I closed my mind to the coldness that stabbed through my heart. I’d never wanted to hurt anyone. I was trapped. I needed out, and this was the only plan I could think of. The judge stumbled, and I pulled her up, helping her to balance before pressing her through the door and into the hallway. I knew exactly what kind of girl I was.

I was a criminal.

Four (#uedf41452-0d56-538b-8bd8-88a075fda840)

There was only one place I could go: the dark, unplanned space that separated the sectors of the Ark at the outermost level, which people had started calling the Rift. Its construction had been unexpected and was thought to be the result of a misplaced wall, so the Rift wasn’t on the official maps.

The Rift was technically controlled by the Remnant, but I was fresh out of other options, what with the kidnapping and hostage-taking and all. When we reached the entrance, I shoved the judge into the darkness as gently as possible, then threw myself in after, never losing my grip on her arm.

“Just go straight,” I muttered after her. “Fast as you can.”

She complied, haltingly at first, then with increasing steadiness. I had to be impressed. Not everyone could move that fast in pitch-black, although the gun may have had something to do with it. We’d gone maybe a hundred paces before she started talking. “Look, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.”

A door opened somewhere behind us, and I gave her a frank look in the brief splash of pale light from the hallway. “Do I?”

She pursed her lips. We kept moving.

The sound of footsteps along the path urged me forward. It felt like ages before we got to the end of the Rift, where the entrance to the cargo hold was located, but the twisted knot in my stomach made me pause before forcing open the door.

“You decide people’s fates. Have you ever had to accept one?”

She gave me an appraising glance and tightened her mouth even further. “You could leave me here. I’m only going to slow you down.”

It was tempting. I would never shoot her, after all, and sooner or later, someone was bound to call my bluff.

But the sounds of the guards shuffling through the Rift made me tighten my grip on the gun. “I’m afraid not. Let’s go.”

She looked from my face to the pistol, and I realized that I’d been careful not to point the barrel at her ever since we’d gotten out of sight of the guards. Not even when I waved her through the doorway. Judging by her expression, Judge Hawthorne had already figured me out. She knew I wasn’t going to hurt her if I could possibly help it.

On the other hand, I wasn’t too fired up about being executed, either. It was like we were caught in an impromptu game of charades. I made a mental note not to take another hostage again, ever.

But I did have a gun, and a hostage, and a death sentence, courtesy of my hostage, so my options were limited. Charades it was. I made my face stern and forced her through the door. “Chop chop, Your Honor.”

She maintained an admirable inscrutability even as the door latched, locking us out of the darkness of the Rift.

After six weeks in my cell, the vastness of the cargo hold was overwhelming, and I gaped up at the bins that held North America’s final exports: the physical remains of the civilizations we had created, then left behind to be swept away by the meteor.

High ceilings, endless rows of brightly colored bins, and an excess of gravity added to the effect. At the other end of the hold, maybe a thousand yards away, was the stairwell that led up to the main decks of Central Command.

When I cleared my mind, the first thing I noticed was that the locks on the bins had changed. The new ones looked a lot more techy and far less blastable than they used to. My plan—the only one that made any sense at all—was to try to break into a bin. Hopefully, one that had some food. From there, I could regroup and try to think through my priorities, maybe figure out a plan that didn’t involve going back to prison and my certain death at the hands of either government.

Priorities. West. Six final weeks in the Remnant, and I was no closer to keeping my promise to my father that we would be a family again. The thought made my feet heavy, but I kept our pace as near a sprint as I could manage, hoping we’d eventually pass a lock I had a shot at cracking.

The second thing I noticed was the lack of guards. That made no sense. Here were the physical remains of North America. Untold treasure lay behind the thin walls of the bins, not to mention supplies. More importantly, Central Command knew the location of the entrance to the Remnant’s dark space, so it only made sense that they’d want to guard it. But I was alone among the aisles. Blue faded into red, then yellow, and back again, with no sign of Command personnel. At some point, the locks changed abruptly. I stopped, skidded back a couple of bins, and took another look. Judge Hawthorne made a face, as though my change of pace inconvenienced her.

“Well?” she said impatiently.

How was she not out of breath? I was fairly gasping. “Hang on. I’m trying to plan.”

“It doesn’t strike me as your strong suit.”

It was official: I didn’t care much for Judge Hawthorne. “Oh, I don’t know, Your Honor. I’d say I’m doing better now than I was twenty minutes ago. Now move.”

From where we stood, maybe a fifth of the way into the area, it appeared that the hold was divided into two kinds of locks. It’s the kind of thing you might not notice if you weren’t trying to break into something, but everything near the Remnant was one kind of tech, and this part of the hold had a wave of older-looking locks.

“What’s going on here?” I waved an arm back toward the new locks.

“Lockies,” she said. “Command sends out a team every day. So do we. The cargo hold is demilitarized as part of the ceasefire agreement between Central Command and the Remnant, but they still try to keep us out of as many bins as possible. We do the same.”

“By… what, changing the locks?”

She nodded. “They’re children, mostly. The governments make the locks, of course.”

That meant that I had a significantly reduced set of options. I couldn’t possibly get past the newer mechanisms from either government. Older locks it was.

By some miracle, we’d stayed a few aisles ahead of the advancing guards, who made no attempt at staying quiet. Why would they? The hold was huge, but the aisles were straight. It wouldn’t take long to clear them. Our lead was draining gradually away, like sand.

We waited in silence for the row of soldiers to pass the aisle with the door, then slipped around the corner and doubled back. Judge Hawthorne made a fair companion. She kept quiet and moved fast in spite of her age.

I fumbled the return to the door, hitting the aisle slightly too soon. But the pair of guards I’d been avoiding didn’t look back once they’d cleared the space, and I was granted a few short seconds with the lock.

There was no possible way to break it.

I had a gun, but its bullets only penetrated flesh, not the components of the bins, as I’d learned too well during a previous excursion to the area.

Good thing I had a Guardian Level access card. Being a criminal had its benefits on occasion, not least of which was that I had yet to miss an opportunity to pick the pockets of whichever guardian was escorting me at the time, assuming they were slow enough to let me. Normally, Jorin Malkin, the Commander’s lieutenant, would be out of my talent range, but someone had knocked him unconscious during the prisoner exchange, and I’m not the kind of girl who lets an advantage like that go to waste. Besides, I liked to think it caused him at least a little inconvenience when he noticed it was missing.

If the Commander were smart, the card would be monitored instead of deactivated. I yanked the front of my shirt out and slid the card from the band of my undergarments. The judge gave me a dirty look, which I ignored. The lock popped open on the first swipe, and I threw open the door, marked “North America/Sector 7/Cargo Level/Bin 23/Generators.” We were greeted by metal boxes stacked floor-to-ceiling, with only a few inches between stacks. We didn’t fit.

I grunted in frustration, pressing Hawthorne down the aisle to the next bin. The heavy footsteps halted, then resumed at a fast pace, looming closer. They’d heard me.