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“What does this mean?” I ask. “How did the ship change after the Plague?” I knew the Plague Eldest had renamed the levels, reallocated some of the rooms, and reserved the Keeper Level for the Eldest and Elder, but that’s all. Or at least I thought that was all. That hidden star screen must have been hidden for a reason . . . .
Orion leans in closer. “See, that’s what interested me, too. Look. ” He reaches up and taps the “After Plague” option. A diagram brightens the screen: a cross section of the ship, a big circle divided into levels. There’s nothing unusual there. The top floor is marked “Keeper Level. ” It’s simple and vague—there’s just an outline of the rooms that Eldest and I occupy. Underneath that, the Shipper Level is more complicated, with space set aside for the engine room and the command center, as well as all the research labs used by the scientists. What is now the Feeder Level takes up more than two-thirds of the chart. The diagram is old; it shows the buildings that were a part of the ship’s original design, including the Hospital and the Recorder Hall, where we are now. But it doesn’t show the new additions made since launch—the grav tubes, developed two gens before Eldest, aren’t on the diagram. Instead, there’s a set of stairs connecting the Feeder Level to the Shipper Level, which were torn down when the grav tubes were made.
My eyes drift down. “Was this what you were talking about?” I ask, pointing to the unlabeled part of the diagram under the Feeder Level. “It’s probably just electrical stuff, or pipes, or something. ”
“I thought that, too,” Orion says. “But look. ” He taps the screen and goes back to the main menu, then taps “Before Plague. ”
The same chart shows up, but everything’s labeled differently now. The Keeper Level is now labeled “Navigation,” just like on the plaque I saw on the screen hidden under the ceiling. The Shipper Level is sectioned off into three portions: technological research (where the labs are now), the engine room, and something called a “Bridge. ” That’s not far off from what we have now, just different words for the same things. It’s the Feeder Level where things really start to change. The left side, where the City is, is marked “Living Quarters (inclusive)” and all the rest of the Feeder Level is labeled “Biological Research. ” Biological Research? That’s what they used to call goat herding and sheep shearing?
But it’s what’s under the Feeder Level that really fascinates me. What was blank space on the other diagram is now all filled in. It’s like there really is another level of the ship below our feet, a level I never knew of, one that has, apparently, a genetic research lab, a second water pump, a huge section marked “Storage—Important” and a very small area labeled simply “Contingency. ”
“What is this?” I ask, staring at it. “I know they changed the names of the levels and moved some things around after the Plague, but this? This is more than just rearranging. There’s a whole other level. ” What I don’t say is: Why didn’t I know about this already? Why didn’t Eldest teach me? I already know the answer: because he doesn’t think I’m ready or—worse—he doesn’t think I’m worthy of knowing the secrets of the ship.
“They changed a lot of things after the Plague,” Orion says. “There was no Eldest system then. ”
I know this much, at least. Everyone knows about that. After the Plague killed off around three quarters of the ship, dropping our numbers from over three thousand to little more than seven hundred, the Plague Eldest took control and remade the government into the peaceful, working society we have now. In the gens since then, we’ve rebuilt our population to over two thousand, developed new tech like the grav tubes, and maintained the peaceful society the Plague Eldest originally envisioned.
But I hadn’t known just how much he changed the ship, or what all of those changes meant.
“Don’t you want to know what’s down there?” Orion asks, staring at the fourth level.
And now that he’s said it—yeah, I really do. “Here, let me see that. ” I push Orion out of the way and tap on the wall floppy, searching. It takes me a few minutes, but then I find what I’m looking for. “Let’s see what the designers put there,” I say, grinning in triumph.
A blueprint flashes on the screen, but it’s much more complicated than the diagrams of the ship’s levels. I squint up at the lines, trying to trace pipes and electrical wiring and separate them from the walls and doors. The image is so big that I either have to zoom in and scroll, or zoom out and squint.
“I don’t understand any of it,” I say finally, throwing my hands up.
“I started with the elevator. ” Orion scrolls the blueprint up, and suddenly I recognize the building whose blueprints I’m seeing. The Hospital. He points to the fourth floor. “There’s a second elevator. ”
“There’s no second elevator!” I laugh. I’ve spent my share of time in the Hospital, and there’s only one elevator there.
“At the end of the hall, there’s another elevator. The blueprints don’t lie. ”
“All the doors on that floor are locked,” I say. I know. I’ve tried them all. And they’re not locked with biometric scanners—I could get past those with a swipe of my thumb. No, those doors have old-fashioned Sol-Earth locks, made of metal. Harley and I once spent a week trying to break in until Doc caught us.
Orion’s shaking his head. “Not the last door. That one’s open. And there’s a second elevator there. ”
I laugh again. “There’s just no way. If there was some secret elevator leading to a secret level of the ship, I’d know. ”
Orion just looks at me. His silence is an accusation: Would I really know?
Eldest has kept things hidden from me before. Maybe there is another level.
7
AMY
I HEAR SOMETHING.
A creak. My door is open, my little morgue door is pulled open, and it’s brighter here, I can see a tinge of light through my sealed-shut eyelids, and now something, someone is pulling out my glass coffin.
Something makes my glass coffin lift up; there’s a sensation in my frozen stomach like being pushed on a swing, and I try to hold on to the feeling, assure myself it is real. Did they lift the lid off? I can hear—I can hear!—muffled cadences of speech through the ice. Growing louder! The sounds are not just vibrations through the ice, they’re sounds! People are talking!
“Just a little more,” a voice that reminds me of Ed says.
“The ice melts quickly. ”
“It’s the—” I don’t catch those words—a whooshing sound washes over me.
