Alight (The Generations Trilogy #2)(2)

A boy walks through the curved opening, shuffles down the middle aisle toward us. It’s Gaston—he’s holding my spear.

He’s still wearing his red tie, which is embroidered with a yellow and black circle of tiny images, the word MICTLAN in white letters at its center. His white shirt is mostly clean, mostly untorn. I glance at my own too-small shirt, ripped in a dozen places and splattered with blood. My shredded plaid skirt barely covers me.

Gaston offers me the spear. I take it, then he clutches me in a hard hug.

“Em! We did it!”



I return the hug. It feels so good to hold him.

“You did it,” I say. “You flew us to Omeyocan.”

He steps back. His smile—part charm, part arrogance—is as wide as ever: Gaston is impressed with himself.

Despite his joy, it’s clear he also has had no rest. His black hair hangs down his face, partially hiding his eyes.

“It was amazing,” he says. “Once the pilothouse lights hit me, I remembered my creator’s training from when I—I mean he—was little. Some of my blanked-out areas seemed to clear.”

I don’t know how that’s possible. I have “blanked-out areas,” too. We all do. When our brains search for memories we know should be there, they usually return only whispers and echoes. We were never meant to know anything for ourselves. We are receptacles, shells, created to house another person.

If he can “remember” how to fly, maybe our blank areas aren’t permanently blank, like Matilda told me they were.

Gaston and Spingate look exhausted. I’m sore and scratched, bruised and beaten, but I don’t feel tired at all.

“How long did I sleep?”

“Only the two hours it took us to land,” Spingate says. “The shuttle told us the coffin gas does something to our brains, lets you sleep far deeper than you could on your own. We can take it in the pilothouse, too. You’d still be sleeping if I hadn’t told the shuttle to give you the wake-up injection.”

That sting in my neck. Not a knife, not a snake, not a bite…just a needle. I think about Brewer, how he tried to use a coffin needle to murder me, then I push that thought away. We don’t need to worry about him anymore—we’re home.

“What’s it like outside?”

Gaston’s little hand reaches over to Spingate’s. Their fingers lock.

“We don’t know,” he says. “It was dark when we landed. The shuttle had a preprogrammed landing path that took us down a big, circular hole of some kind. Maybe to protect us from wind, I’m not sure. It was nighttime when we flew in, and there was heavy cloud cover.”



He says cloud cover like he’s proud of the words, like it was an obstacle that not just anyone could overcome.

“So you haven’t been outside at all?”

Spingate shakes her head. “You deserve to be the first.”

They waited for me, out of respect. I don’t know what to say.

“I’ll go with you,” she says. “The shuttle says the air is safe for us.”

For us, but not for the Grownups who made us. We were designed to be able to survive down here. And in that lies our safety; even if the Grownups could reach Omeyocan—which they can’t, because this was the last shuttle—this planet’s very air would kill them.

Spingate holds up her left arm. Her forearm is wrapped in a sheet of gold, intricately carved and studded with black jewels. It reminds me of the bracelets the Grownups used to kill El-Saffani, but somehow I know it’s not a weapon.

“Gaston found this in storage,” she says. “It’s called a bracer. I can use it to scan for things that could hurt us, things like microorganisms or toxins.”

She speaks those words the same way Gaston said cloud cover—new, important words that she is proud of knowing.

There’s no reason to wait any longer. We have nowhere else to go. The Birthday Children will survive on Omeyocan, or the Birthday Children will die here.

My stomach lets out a loud growl. An instant later, I wince at the pain—I’m so hungry it hurts.

“We have food,” Gaston says. “The deck below has storerooms full of tools, clothes and lots of food.”



“What’s a deck?”

“A floor,” Spingate answers. “Except on a ship, it’s called a deck.”

It never occurred to me this shuttle had more floors.

“Show me,” I say.

We walk to the rear of the coffin room. The back wall is red, like the side walls. Up close I see the thin, almost invisible outline of a door. In that door is the faint shape of a handprint with a gear symbol in the palm.

Gaston presses his hand to the print. The door silently swings inward, revealing a metal staircase spiraling down. We descend. Ten stairs below is another door—the handprint here is also a gear. Spingate leads us in.

The corridor looks long, perhaps as long as the shuttle itself. There are doors on my left marked STORAGE 1 through STORAGE 6, and on my right labeled LAB 1 through LAB 3. At the end of the corridor is a door marked MEDICAL. The storage rooms have handprints with gears and half-circles. The labs, only gears. Medical’s handprint is a circle-cross.

“We didn’t have time to look at the labs,” Gaston says. “Just the”—an eye-scrunching yawn pauses his words—“just the storage rooms.”