The Remnant

Thin wisps of flour rain down onto the brawl beneath for several seconds. We are all grabbing at the cake, gasping with laughter.

Our mother is strong. Stronger than I expected, and I feel my face being shoved into the fractured remains of the lowest layer of cake. I’m powerless to stop it. My defeat is complete.

West is next. He emerges from the forced faceplant covered in cake and wonder.

She has won, she has won. There can be no question. We dissolve into helpless laughter, and the pain of the year lessens its vice around my heart, and the horror of my first stint in juvy shrinks and retreats into the darkest corner of my thoughts. For the moment, it is harmless. I breathe, finally. I smile even though I’m not laughing anymore. The sensation feels foreign.

My arm is around my brother for the first time in far too long. My mother is holding us both. I find that my skinny legs can still fold in far enough so that I fit entirely on her lap, and I am warm. West and I regard each other from twin positions under her chin.

No one speaks for a while, but my mother finally breaks the silence. “Things have been too tense around here lately. We had a rough year. I know that. But you’ll never stop being each other’s family. You can’t ever stop loving each other.” And she is squeezing us both, gently at first, and then more and more tightly, until it is too much, too tight, and I have to hold my breath, and still I do not try to stop her.

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

The thing about war is that everyone knows where you stand. Lines are drawn; everybody picks a side, and boom. You’re fighting.

Except that for me, things were more confusing than ever. That morning, the morning of my sentencing, the four walls of my cell pressed in harder than usual. I was a prisoner of the Remnant, but only because I’d traded my freedom for Eren’s by turning myself over to the Commander, with the bright idea that he then hand me over to the Remnant to get his son back.

In my defense, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I’d needed to get back into the Remnant so I could find my brother, West, like I promised my father. Of course, I spent the next six weeks locked in a cell, and now, I was probably about to be executed. So my mission wasn’t exactly a rousing success so far.

On the other hand, it’s not like I had anywhere better to be. Because of my illegal status on the ship and my ties to the Remnant, I was a fugitive from Central Command. And although I’d saved his son in the hostage exchange, I was pretty sure the High Commander still wanted me dead in all possible haste.

I couldn’t judge him for that. The feeling was mutual.

The silver lining was obvious: he’d have a heck of a time trying to kill me in here, and I doubted the Remnant would give him the satisfaction anyway. The Remnant controlled its sliver of a sector with an iron fist, guarding the dark space that separated Sector Seven from Central Command as though their lives depended on it.

Which was absolutely the case.

I made myself focus on the slow, even breathing of Helen, my cellmate, until the time passed more easily.

Helen was a lifer, and over the course of several decades, prison had made her in its image. Convicted of one thing after another back on Earth, she’d had the criminal connections to find her way to the Remnant without the difficulty the rest of us had suffered. You’d think illicit organizations dedicated to saving the dregs of Earth would have higher standards, but no. The Remnant left the sorting of humanity to Central Command, which had dedicated itself to the task with an admirable fervor, which is how Command ended up with all the young, straight-and-narrow scientists and doctors.

By contrast, if you were alive, the Remnant believed you should have a shot at survival. All you had to do was find them.

Which is how the Remnant ended up with all the criminals.

Suffice it to say, no one around cared how Helen had gotten here, let alone whether she’d done hard time. The Remnant were way past that line of thinking. They’d been willing to overlook every mistake she ever made in her life, right up until they found out that she was fencing meds from the sickbay. I suppose everyone has to draw the line somewhere.

The dawn broke bright and cold, as though Adam, Isaiah’s pet computer prodigy, had designed it just for this occasion. I shook out my arms, imagining a thin film of dew clinging to the sheets. At least, I thought I’d imagined it. Erratic or not, these climate programs were getting more advanced every day.

The thought was not comforting.

I fiddled absently with my hair before tying it into a knot just above my neck. There’s only so much a girl can do without a hairbrush.

“So today’s the big day, huh? You want me to work on it?” Helen’s voice was sharp and clear, and in the short weeks I’d known her, that had been the case at all hours of the day and night. I struggled out of sleep, and into it. But Helen was like a light that switched on and off as needed. I envied her that.

“No, it’s fine. No one cares what it looks like, anyway.”

The door to my cell opened, and I stood. What else could I do? The guards’ hands were rough, and I understood, then, that I was their enemy. I was naïve enough to feel a new kind of pain, something akin to betrayal, like this moment was the death of the strangeness in my heart that had, until now, kept me from rushing the nearest guard and turning his gun on myself.

Instead, I let him force me into the wall.

Helen let out a string of pain and bitterness disguised as profanity and rage, and I was reminded of another woman, just as hard, who’d had enough hurt for ten lifetimes and hadn’t let it break her. But I tried never to think too long about Meghan.

“I’m fine, Helen. Wish me luck.” I tugged at my yellow prison scrubs, trying to make them lie straight, before finally feeling the cuffs lock into place.

Helen’s voice faded into the stark corridor as the cell door slammed shut behind me. “Girls like us make our own luck, sweetheart.”

The guards didn’t speak. Their silence throttled the intervals between clanging locks and scuffing boots.

Guns. They were everywhere. I figured my old friend Isaiah had distributed them to every guard in the Remnant. I wished I could feel sick over it, the end of all our hopes for peace, but instead, I felt relieved. Central Command would be fully armed by now, too. There was too much at stake for the Remnant to retain its innocence.

So maybe I was hard like Helen. There was a time I’d wanted to be like Meghan, a woman who’d saved my life back on Earth. She was strong, in her way, because she was able to love a stranger, to die for one, but I didn’t think I could be like her anymore.

Rough hands made dents in my upper arms. I let them. You betrayed us, they seemed to say. I was guided around a corner so hard my feet left the ground. The pain felt right. We took you in. You didn’t have to become one of us, but you were.

One of us.

The guards halted their even pace abruptly before the door to the Commons, a room where once I’d danced a long tango on the arm of a king. I tripped, righted myself unsteadily, and offered a glare to the guard on my right. He returned it without flinching.

You betrayed us.

The massive doors swung open, instead of sucking into the wall, and the effect was a pale flash of nerves, which I silenced without much effort. The time for fear had long passed.

They were right, after all. I had been one of them. I had betrayed them. I looked all around, craning my head over the shoulders of the men who forced me forward into the cold, crowded Commons, but Isaiah wasn’t there. To be fair, a king would have better places to be than his ex-almost-girlfriend’s latest trial, but it still stung.

That was when I realized that I was his enemy, too.

The last time we spoke had ended badly, to say the least. He’d forced me to steal something from Central Command—the life support program for the entire ship, called the Noah Board—and I’d taken it pretty hard. I didn’t want to be a thief anymore.

I didn’t want to be a prisoner anymore, either, but here we were.

The Commons was my favorite thing about the Remnant, other than the greenhouse. It was their gathering-place, where huge crowds gave full vent to their fears and frustrations, and life to their memories of Earth. But it 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.