By now, I was used to the way people treated me up in Alta. They made space for a pilot, even a cadet. On the long street outside the base, the farmers and workers would give me friendly smiles or a raised fist of approval.
Still, I was shocked by the treatment I received in Igneous. When the elevator opened, people waiting outside immediately parted, letting me pass through. Whispers followed me, but instead of the harsh notes of condemnation I normally heard, these were awed, excited. It was a pilot.
Growing up, I’d practiced staring back when people looked at me. When I did that now, people blushed and averted their gazes—as if they’d been caught sneaking extra rations.
What a strange collision between my old life and my new one. I strolled along the walkway and looked up at the roof of the cavern, so far above. That stone didn’t belong there, trapping me inside. I missed the sky already, and it was so hot and stuffy down here.
I passed the smelting factories, where the ancient apparatus belched heat and light, turning rock into steel. I passed an energy plant that somehow converted the molten heat of the deep core into electricity. I wandered beneath the calm, defiant stone hand of Harald Oceanborn. The statue held up an old Viking sword, and had an enormous steel rectangle—carved with sharp lines and a sun—rising behind him.
It was the end of middle shift, so I figured I’d find Mother at the cart, selling. Eventually I rounded a corner and saw her ahead: a lean, proud woman in an old jumpsuit. Worn, but laundered. Shoulder-length hair, with an air of fatigue about her as she served a wrap to a worker.
I froze on the walkway, uncertain how to approach. I realized right then that I hadn’t visited enough. I missed my mother. Though I’d never really been homesick—my scavenging trips as a kid had prepared me for long times away—I still longed to hear her comforting, if stern, voice.
As I hesitated, Mother turned and saw me—and she immediately dashed over. She seized me in a powerful embrace before I could say anything.
I’d watched other kids grow taller than their parents, but I was much shorter than her—and when enfolded in her arms, for a moment I felt like a child again. Safe, snug. It was easy to plan future conquests when you could retreat to those arms.
I let myself be that girl again. Let myself pretend that no danger could reach me.
Mother finally pulled back and looked me over. She took a lock of my hair between her fingers and raised an eyebrow—it had gotten long, and now tumbled past my shoulders. The DDF haircutters had been forbidden me for the first part of my stay, and after that I’d just gotten used to it long.
I shrugged.
“Come,” Mother said. “That cart won’t sell itself.”
It was an invitation to a simpler time—and at that moment, it was what I needed. I helped my ever-practical mother work her way through her line of customers, men and women who looked baffled to be served by a pilot cadet.
Odd, how my mother didn’t call out, like other street vendors would. Yet there was almost always someone at the cart buying a wrap. During a lull, she mixed some more mustard, then glanced at me. “Will you go back to getting us rats?”
Go back? I hesitated, only now realizing that she didn’t know I was on leave. She … she thought I’d been kicked out.
“I still have the jumpsuit,” I said, gesturing—but her blank stare confirmed she didn’t know what that meant. “Mom, I’m still in the DDF. I was given leave today.”
Her lips immediately turned down.
“I’m doing well!” I snapped. “I’m one of only three pilots left in my flight. I’m going to graduate in two weeks.” I knew she didn’t like the DDF, but couldn’t she just be proud of me?
My mother continued mixing the mustard.
I sat down on the low wall running along the walkway. “When I’m a full pilot, you’ll be taken care of. You won’t have to sit up late at night rewrapping food and then spend long hours pushing a cart. You’ll have a big apartment. You’ll be rich.”
“You think I want any of that?” Mother said. “I chose this life, Spensa. They offered me a big apartment, a cushy job. All I had to do was go along with their narrative—say I knew he was a coward the whole time. I refused.”
I perked up. I’d never heard that before.
“As long as I’m here,” Mother said, “selling on this corner, they can’t ignore us. They can’t pretend their cover-up worked. They have a living reminder that they lied.”
It was … one of the most truly Defiant things I’d ever heard. But it was also so terribly wrong. Because while my father hadn’t been a coward, he had been a traitor. Which was worse though?
Right then, I realized that my problems went deeper than Jorgen’s pep talk could fix. Deeper than my worry about the things I’d seen, or my father’s treason.
I’d built my identity around not being a coward. It was a reaction to what everyone said about my father, but it was still part of me. The deepest, most important part.
My confidence in that was crumbling. My pain at losing my friends was part of it … but this fear that there might be something terrible inside me … that was worse.
The fear was destroying me. Because I didn’t know if I could resist it. Because I didn’t know, deep down, if I was a coward or not. I wasn’t even sure what being a coward meant anymore.
My mother settled down next to me. Always so quiet, so unassuming. “I know that you wish I could celebrate what you’ve done—and I’m proud, I really am. I know that flying has always been your dream. It’s just that if they were so callous with my husband’s legacy, I cannot expect them to be careful with my daughter’s life.”
How did I explain? Did I tell her what I knew? Could I explain my fears?
“How do you do it?” I finally asked her. “How do you put up with the things they say about him? How do you live with being called a coward’s wife?”
“It has always seemed to me,” she said, “that a coward is a person who cares more about what people say than about what is right. Bravery isn’t about what people call you, Spensa. It’s about who you know yourself to be.”
I shook my head. That was the problem. I didn’t know.
Four short months ago, I’d thought I could fight anything, and had every answer. Who would have thought that becoming a pilot would end with me losing that grit?
My mother inspected me. Finally, she kissed me on the forehead and squeezed my hand. “I don’t mind that you fly, Spensa. I simply don’t like leaving you to listen to their lies all day. I want you to know him. not what they say about him.”
“The more I fly,” I said, “I think the more I’ll know him.”
My mother cocked her head, as if she hadn’t considered that.
“Mom …,” I said. “Did Father ever mention seeing … strange things? Like a field of eyes in darkness, watching him?”
She drew her lips to a line. “They told you about that, did they?”
I nodded.
“He dreamed of stars, Spensa,” my mother said. “Of seeing them unobstructed. Of flying among them as our ancestors did. That’s it. Nothing more.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You don’t believe me.” She sighed, then stood up. “Your grandmother has a different opinion from mine. Perhaps you should speak with her. But remember, Spensa. You get to choose who you are. Legacy, memories of the past, can serve us well. But we cannot let them define us. When heritage becomes a box instead of an inspiration, it has gone too far.”
I frowned, confused by that. Gran-Gran had a different opinion? On what? Still, I hugged my mother again and whispered my thanks to her. She shoved me off toward our apartment, and it was with a strange mix of emotions that I left. My mother was a warrior in her own way, standing on that corner, proclaiming my father’s innocence with every quiet sale of an algae wrap.
That was inspirational. Illuminating. I got her in a way I never had before. And yet, she was wrong about Father. She understood so much, yet was wrong about something fundamental. Like I had been, up until that moment I watched him turn traitor during the Battle of Alta.
I walked for a short time, and eventually neared our boxy apartment building.
I stepped through the large arched gateway into the apartment grounds—and as I did, a couple of soldiers returning from shift parted for me and saluted.
That was Aluko and Jors. I realized after I’d passed. They didn’t seem to even recognize me. They hadn’t looked at my face; they’d simply seen the flight suit and stepped aside.
I waved to old Mrs. Hong, who—instead of scowling at me—bowed her head and ducked into her apartment and closed the door. A quick glance in the window of our one-room apartment revealed that Gran-Gran wasn’t inside, but then I heard her humming to herself up on the roof. Still troubled by what Mother had said, I climbed the ladder onto the top of the box.
Gran-Gran sat with her head bowed, a small pile of beads spread out before her on a blanket. With her nearly blind eyes closed, she reached out with withered fingers and selected beads by touch, methodically stringing them to make jewelry. She hummed softly, her face resembling the furrows of the crumpled blanket before her.
“Ah,” she said as I hesitated on the ladder. “Sit, sit. I did need some help.”
“It’s me, Gran-Gran,” I said. “Spensa.”
“Of course it is. I felt you coming. Sit and sort these beads for me by color. I can’t seem to tell the green ones from the blue ones—they’re the same size!”
This was my first visit in months, and—like my mother—she immediately put me to work. Well, I had questions for her, but I probably wouldn’t be able to ask them until I was doing what she said.
“I’ll put the blue ones on your right,” I said, sitting. “Green to the left.”
“Good, good. Who do you want to hear about today, dear? Alexander, who conquered the world? Hervor, she who stole the sword of the dead? Maybe Beowulf? For old times’ sake?”
“I actually don’t want to hear stories today,” I said. “I’ve been talking to Mother, and—”
“Now, now,” Gran-Gran said. “No stories? What has happened to you? Surely they haven’t ruined you already, up there in flight school.”
I sighed. Then decided to approach this from a different direction. “Were any of them real, Gran-Gran?” I asked. “The heroes you talk about. Were they actually people? From Earth?”
“Perhaps. Is it important?”
“Of course it is,” I said, dropping beads into cups. “If they weren’t real, then it’s all just lies.”
“People need stories, child. They bring us hope, and that hope is real. If that’s the case, then what does it matter whether the people in them actually lived?”
“Because sometimes we perpetuate lies,” I said. “Like things the DDF says about my father, as opposed to the things we say about him. Two different stories. Two different effects.”
Both wrong.
I dropped another bead into its cup. “I’m tired of not knowing what is right. I’m tired of not knowing when to fight, not knowing if I hate him or love him, and … and …”
Gran-Gran stopped what she was doing and took my hand in hers, her skin old but soft. She held it and smiled at me, her eyes mostly closed.
“Gran-Gran,” I said, finally—at long last—finding a way to voice it. “I’ve seen something. It proves to me we’ve been wrong about my father. He … he did turn coward. Or worse.”
“Ah …,” Gran-Gran said.
“Mother doesn’t believe it. But I know the truth.”
“What have they told you, up above, in that flight school?”
I swallowed, feeling deeply fragile all of a sudden. “Gran-Gran, they say … they say Father had some kind of defect. A flaw deep inside him, that made him join with the Krell. Someone told me there was a mutiny on the Defiant. that some of our ancestors might have served the enemy too. So now, now they say I have it. And … I’m terrified that they might be right.”
“Hmmm …,” Gran-Gran said, stringing a bead. “Child, let me tell you a story of someone from the past.”
“It’s not the time for stories, Gran-Gran.”
“This one is about me.”
I shut my mouth. About her? She almost never talked about herself.
She started talking in her rambling, yet engaging way. “My father was a historian on the Defiant. He kept the stories of Old Earth, of the times before we traveled into space. Did you know that even then, with computers and libraries and all kinds of reminders, we found it easy to forget where we came from? Maybe because we had machines to do the remembering for us, we felt we could simply leave it to them.
“Well, that’s a different topic. We were nomads among the stars then. Five ships: the Defiant and four smaller vessels that attached to it to travel long distances. Well, and a complement of starfighters. We were a community made up of communities, traveling the stars together. Part mercenary fleet, part trade fleet. Our own people.”
“Grandfather was a historian?” I said. “I thought he was in engineering.”
“He worked in the engine room, helping my mother,” Gran-Gran said. “But his true duty was the stories. I remember sitting in the engine room, listening to the hum of the machinery as he talked, his voice echoing against the metal. But that’s not the story. The story is how we came to Detritus.
“You see, we didn’t start the war—but it found us nonetheless. Our little fleet of five ships and thirty fighters had no choice but to fight back. We didn’t know what the Krell were, even then. We hadn’t been part of the big war, and by that point communication with the planets and space stations was difficult and dangerous. Now, your great-grandmother, my mother, was ship’s engines.”
“You mean she worked the engines,” I said, still sorting beads.
“Yes, but in a way, she was the engines. She could make them travel the stars, one of the few who could. Without her, or someone like her, the Defiant would be stuck at slow speed. The distance between stars is vast, Spensa. And only someone with a specific ability could engage the engines. Something born into us, but something most considered to be very, very dangerous.”
I breathed out, surprised and awed, all at once. “The … defect?”
Gran-Gran leaned in. “They feared us, Spensa, though back then they called it the ‘deviation.’ We were a breed apart, the engineers. We were the first people into space, the brave explorers. The ordinary people always resented that we controlled the powers that let them travel the stars.
“But I told you this story was about me. I remember that day, the day we came to Detritus. I was with my father, in the engineering bay. A vast chamber full of pipes and grids that looks bigger in my memory than it probably was. It smelled of grease and of too-hot metal. But there was a window in a little alcove, which I could look out of and see the stars.
“That day, they surrounded us. The enemy, the Krell. I was terrified, in my little heart, because the ship kept shaking from their fire. We were in chaos. The bridge—I heard from someone shouting—had suffered an explosion. I stood in the alcove, watching the red lances of light, and could hear the stars screaming. A little frightened girl by a bubble of glass.
“The captain called down. He had a loud, angry voice. I was terrified to hear the pain, the panic, in someone who was normally so stern. I remember still, that tone as he screamed at my mother, giving orders. And she disagreed with them.”
I sat there, beads forgotten, rapt. Barely breathing. Why, in all the stories Gran-Gran had told me, had she never given me this one before?
“Well, I suppose you could call it a mutiny,” Gran-Gran continued. “We didn’t use that word. But there was a disagreement. The scientists and the engineers against the command staff and the marines. The thing is, none of them could make the engines work. Only Mother could do that.
“She chose this place and brought us here. Detritus. But it was too far. Too difficult. She died from the effort, Spensa. Our ships were damaged while landing, the engines broken, but we also lost her. The soul of the engines themselves.
“I remember crying. I remember Father carrying me from the rubble of a ship, and I screamed, reaching back to the smoking hulk—my mother’s tomb. I remember demanding to know why Mother had left us. I felt betrayed. I’d been too young to understand the choice she’d made. A warrior’s choice.”
“To die?”
“To sacrifice. Spensa. A warrior is nothing if she has nothing to fight for. But if she has everything to fight for … well, then that means everything, doesn’t it?”
Gran-Gran strung a bead, then began to tie off the necklace. I felt … strangely exhausted. Like this story was a burden I hadn’t been expected to bear.
“This is their ‘defect,’ ” Gran-Gran said. “They call it that because they’re afraid of our ability to hear the stars. Your mother always forbade me from speaking of this to you, because she did not believe it was true. But many in the DDF believe in it—and to them it makes us alien. They lie, saying that my mother brought us here because the Krell wanted us here. And now that they no longer need us to work the ship engines—because there aren’t any—they’ve hated us even more.”
“And Father? I saw him turn against his flight.”
“Impossible,” Gran-Gran said. “The DDF claims our gift makes us monsters, so perhaps they constructed a scenario to prove it. It’s convenient for them to tell a story of a man with the defect empathizing with the Krell and turning against his teammates.”
I sat back, feeling … uncertain. Would Cobb have lied about this? And M-Bot said the record couldn’t have been faked. Who did I trust?
“But what if it’s true, Gran-Gran?” I asked. “You mentioned the warrior’s sacrifice before. Well, what if you know this is in you … that it might cause you to betray everyone? Hurt them? If you think you might be a coward, wouldn’t the right choice be to … just not fly?”
Gran-Gran paused, hands frozen. “You’ve grown,” she finally said. “Where is my little girl, who wanted to swing a sword and conquer the world?”
“She’s very confused. A bit lost.”
“Our gift is a wonderful thing. It lets us hear the stars. It let my mother work the engines. Don’t fear it.”
I nodded, but I couldn’t help feeling betrayed. Shouldn’t someone have told me about all this before now?
“Your father was a hero,” Gran-Gran said. “Spensa? Do you hear me? You have a gift, not a defect. You can—”
“Hear the stars. Yes, I’ve felt that.” I looked up, but the ceiling of the cavern was in the way.
Honestly, I didn’t know what to think anymore. Coming down here had only made me more confused.
“Spensa?” Gran-Gran said.
I shook my head. “Father told me to claim the stars. I worry that they claimed him instead. Thank you for the story.” I rose and walked to the ladder.
“Spensa!” Gran-Gran said, this time with a forcefulness that froze me on the ladder.
She looked toward me, milky-white eyes focused right on me, and I felt—somehow—that she could see me. When she spoke, the tremble was gone from her voice. Instead there was an authority and command to it, like a battlefield general’s.
“If we are ever to leave this planet,” Gran-Gran said, “and escape the Krell, it will require the use of our gift. The space between stars is vast, too vast for any ordinary booster to travel. We must not cower in the dark because we’re afraid of the spark within us. The answer is not to put out the spark, but to learn to control it.”
I didn’t reply, because I didn’t know what my answer to that should be. I climbed down, made my way to the elevators, and returned to the base.
