The Remnant - Laura Nolen Liddell

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was more than that. This was where they lived, and spoke, and created and danced and thought together.

      It was the beating heart of everything we might have lost when the Earth died.

      Right now, it was a courtroom.

      I heard only silence in the moments that followed the death sentence. I was not a leader, like Isaiah. Even if I were, I no longer had a people to belong to. No one’s fate aligned with mine. I wasn’t a soldier, like Eren, nor a budding scientist, like my brother. I would never be a decision-maker, like my father.

      My fate was sealed: I would simply cease to be anything. Maybe that was how it should be. A lifetime of prison, endless and white, made me think of drowning. Couldn’t these people see that I was dying either way? Hadn’t they known that I had loved them? A cold certainty swept through me.

      The Remnant knew exactly what kind of girl I was.

      A pair of enormous hazel eyes peered up at me, and I froze, found out. This kid was maybe seven or eight years old. Too young to understand so much, to know me at a glance. Too young for anything.

      A moment passed before I recognized her: Amiel. Adam’s sister.

      She was dirty. Not with actual dirt, as she might have been on Earth. But unwashed. Greasy.

      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

      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

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