The Fall

I willed my legs and arms to climb the ladder, then collapsed onto Eren as soon as I’d struggled over the lid of the hopper.

Above me, the hatch must have closed, but I couldn’t hear it. The floor of the hopper began to hum.

My father sat in the pilot seat, yanking the controls around, until the hatch was fully sealed. Then he ripped off his helmet and shoved it down over Eren’s head, flipping a dial on the ear.

“What?” I said, but he couldn’t hear me. I yanked off my own helmet and breathed in the recycled air of the hopper, nearly shaking with relief. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” said Dad. “He’s fine, probably. But the oxygen in the helmet is more concentrated. That’s what he needs right now, since we can hardly repressurize him slowly. Anything he had in his blood is likely depleted, or will be soon.”

“Oh,” I said, then drew it out a little longer, feeling fear and relief all at once. “Ohhh.”

Dad frowned at me, then shoved an airsick tube into my unsteady hands. “Make sure if you vomit, you get it all in that,” he said crisply, and began to cut the ropes off my back. Adam fell onto the footboard, and his helmeted head knocked into Eren’s.

There were only two seats in the hopper: the pilot’s and the one right next to it. So I went about pressing Eren into a sitting position on the floor. From there, I could try to lift him onto the seat using the safety straps as leverage. If memory served, we were in for a spin once we broke free of the Ark’s rotation, and I wasn’t about to risk him getting hurt any further. If Adam suffered a few broken bones, on the other hand, I wouldn’t exactly lose sleep over it.

“Charlotte. The seat is yours,” my father said. He was gathering the bits of rope from around my shoulders and using them to bind Adam in every way he could think of. Then he pulled Eren down on top of Adam and tied their chests together. “This will keep them from snapping their necks, but only barely. It won’t work as well for you.”

“Eren goes in the seat,” I said, angry. “He has more mass. He should be secured. For everyone’s safety.”

“I’m done with this argument, Charlotte. Buckle in.”

I set my lips, weighing my options.

Dad sighed. “I’m securing them both to the floorboard. No one’s going flying around the cabin. And if you don’t buckle up, no one’s going anywhere.” He crossed his arms and settled back in his seat. “Unless you’ve learned how to fly a spacecraft since we left Earth.”

I scowled. He looked out the window, the picture of patience. The flames had long since extinguished from lack of oxygen, and the hopper was like a cocoon, quiet and safe. And slightly cramped. My father wasn’t kidding.

I hopped into the seat, letting my glare deepen a little further, and grimaced my way through the process of untangling and securing the knot of safety straps. Dad gave a slight nod and shifted the controls into position.

The thrusters engaged when the final valve released, stabilizing us as we swung out into the darkness. Gravity lessened with every sweeping arc, and we slid smoothly into nothingness, surrounded by distant stars. Dad was a better pilot than I’d expected.

I let the vastness envelop me completely. For the first time, I felt that space was comforting. We—all of us—were so helpless. There was no rational explanation for our continued survival in the universe, and yet here we were, blanketed by the cosmos that should have killed us off generations ago.

It struck me that if we succeeded, we would be the forbears of a new race of people. In time, the generations we carried inside ourselves would come to fill Eirenea, and it was we who made their strivings possible. We who had escaped a doomed planet. We who founded a life on a barren rock on the other side of the solar system. They would teach the story of our journey for the rest of our existence. And who knew what things the human race would yet accomplish?

I glanced at my dad and knew that his mind was on the past, and my mother. For me, in that moment, it was all connected. She had given her life so that I could be here, and now, I was prepared to do the same.

“We’re going to make it, Dad. I think she always knew that we would make it.”

He said nothing, but spun the ship about and pressed us into the void.

Seven (#ulink_76503c55-bdfe-5b93-ad4e-a77998314864)

The EuroArk was dark when we came in. I’m not sure what I expected, but the only major points of light were the docks. There were tiny pins of light at the tips of the other structures, but I couldn’t make them out. I squinted, slack-jawed, as we drew near. I couldn’t imagine the shape of the massive ship ahead of me. From where I sat, it looked exactly like the stars.

“Gotta be careful here,” said Dad, mostly to himself. “The cities reach farther out than the docks.”

I continued to gawk, wondering what he meant by that, until the rest of the Ark came to light. It was a dark ship in a darker sky, but from what I could tell, it was composed of several cube-like modules connected by a series of wide tubes and interspersed with smaller, more tapered tubes that held the docks.

“It looks like a jack,” I said, recalling a game I’d played as a child. “Knucklebones.”

“Yes, that was intentional, to preserve and insulate as many cultures as possible. So is the darkness. It’s mandatory for eight hours a night. Saves energy. Helps with the Lightness, too. Gets people used to power outages before they happen.”

The hopper eased toward the space between a protruding pair of cities, allowing me to gape at the vacant-looking windows in wonder. “They don’t have a nuclear generator? I hope you got your clearance ahead of time,” I said nervously, looking for weapons ports among the asteroid shields. “What do you mean, intentional?”

“The European Ark was engineered to minimize interdependency among the cities. The areas at the end of each strut operate separately, but the core city, right in the middle, has final say over everything. Kinda like the United States, before it was dissolved. And it adds surface area for the solar sails.”

“Minimize inter—but wait, isn’t the whole point of the Treaty of Phoenix that we’re all supposed to depend on each other? To stop everyone from going to war again? We’re all mixed together, so that no one group of people gets isolated. I gotta wonder what the Tribune thinks about that. It has the final say over everything, right?”

“That’s an untested theory, at this point. The Tribune has never done anything controversial enough to matter, so no one has ever challenged its authority. But it’s really meant to arbitrate disputes under the Treaty. It’s more of a legal recourse for the heads of the governments than an executive one. Its only weight is the strength of the other Arks, who’ve all agreed to abide by its rulings.”

“In theory.”