Brightly Burning(2)
“I don’t know why you bother. There’s nothing to paint but gray walls and billions of stars.”
“I use my imagination. You should try it sometime.”
It took a solid forty-five minutes, but I managed to remove the extra bounce from everyone’s steps by returning the ship’s gravity settings to normal.
“See? Just in time to go teach the bright young minds of tomorrow,” Jatinder said, tossing me a soiled rag. I found a relatively clean corner and wiped my greasy hands off as best I could.
“I’ll see you next shift, Jatinder.” I rushed to get up to the school deck in less than fifteen minutes. Considering the Stalwart was several miles long and eight levels deep, that was no easy feat.
Having fixed the gravity problem at least, I moved up the decks more efficiently than I had on my way down, zipping through narrow corridors I’d practically memorized during my six years on board. Past residency wards U through Y, where officials long ago stopped caring about the colorful graffiti adorning the walls—?some of which was my own. The warm orange and purples of a sunset over Paris, a city I’d studied but was likely now a frozen ruin, blurred by on my left just before I hit the stairwell that would take me up, up, up.
I arrived out of breath but with a minute to spare, my adrenaline rush of joy dissolving with a fizzle as soon as I saw the look on George’s face. I knew that look. Someone had died.
“What happened?” I asked, ignoring the little flip my stomach did as George hovered close.
“Arden’s mom,” he said with a sigh. “It happened fast. Med bay couldn’t do anything for her.”
Of course they couldn’t. On the list of things that were always in short supply: water, air, spare parts, food, medical supplies. I taught Earth History, so I knew people used to live eighty, ninety, even a hundred years. Not anymore. Jatinder’s brother, Navid, was considered on the older side at the ripe age of thirty-four. George and I weren’t the only orphans on board, though we were two of the only single almost-eighteen-year-olds left. Half our class was already married.
George settled a large, warm hand over my shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “See you at dinner later?”
I nodded, and George smiled just a bit, making me melt. I turned, crossing with a slight hesitation over the threshold into the room. It was a morbid location on the best of days—?windowless, gray, illuminated by buzzing neon light—?and when death came to call, the gloom clung to the walls, seeping through the rivets like motor grease. The kids were quiet, a wholly unnatural state of being for their age, and the pupil who ordinarily would be the happiest to see me met me with red-rimmed eyes and a quivering lower lip.
“Oh, Arden,” I said, engulfing her in a hug. She sniffled into the slick fabric of my coat, and I glanced over at my thirty-odd pupils, sitting behind their communal-style desks with eyes politely averted. Enough of them had suffered the loss of a parent or family member that no one would judge a fellow student for crying in class.
What should I say? Surely not the platitudes they’d said to me, a seven-year-old shocked numb by the passing first of a father—?accidental death, on the job—?followed swiftly by a grief-stricken mother, by her own hand. Something about God’s will, and how at least now there’d be two fewer mouths to feed. While a pragmatic person, I wasn’t heartless.
“You can skip today’s lesson if you want. You won’t get in trouble,” I said gently, easing my way out of her grip and toward my desk. She nodded solemnly, retreating to a shadowy corner where the recessed lighting in the ceiling didn’t quite reach.
“Good afternoon, class,” I began with a deep breath, retrieving my lesson planner from the communal drawer all the student teachers used and flipping to where our last lesson had left off. “Who can tell me how a volcanic explosion can lead to an ice age?”
A hand shot up. Carter, one of my eagerest pupils, always reading ahead for the pleasure of it. Despite the melancholy, I caught more than a few kids rolling their eyes in Carter’s direction. I called on him, knowing failure to do so would send him into a tizzy.
“When a supervolcano explodes, all the dust it releases into the air blocks the sunlight,” he said. Competent enough for an eleven-year-old.
“That’s just one part of it,” I said, “but good job. And how long can an ice age last?” Carter’s hand flew up again, but this time I waited a beat longer. A boy named Jefferson took the bait.
“Ten thousand years?”
“Not the big one,” I said. “I was thinking more of how long this current one is predicted to last.” Because there was no point in making a roomful of children panic.
“Two hundred years,” a girl in the second row called out.
“That’s what we’re hoping,” I said. “And when it comes time to go back down to the surface, all your farming skills will come in handy.” I toed the Stalwart’s line perfectly, following the lesson plan they’d given me to a T, even if it made my teeth ache to push out the words. I knew an ice age caused by a supervolcano explosion could last a thousand years, and two hundred was a lowball estimate. “Your assignment for today is to write a short story about your ancestors who left Earth. What do you think they thought about the supervolcano? How did they find out about the evacuation, and what was it like to leave Earth behind and live in spaceships for the first time?”