'Driftwood'
She was awake even before the sounds began. From the neighbouring cells, she could hear the confusion, the shouting, the clattering of heavy boots on metal floors. She sat cross-legged on her bunk, listening as the chaos drew closer.
When it started, it had begun from three floors down, she was sure of it. Those plated steel walls made any sound easy to trace, if you listened just right. And Marlow Cohen had spent many a long night in the orphanage of the Ark, just listening. The clamour had travelled across the first floor, and begun on the second within the hour. She had waited a long time for them to draw near to her cell in the highest solitary wing, and it had given her plenty of time to prepare. Not that she had needed it. She had only a handful of belongings in that small, bare cell, and she had woken up with them already tucked into her jacket pockets.
A pained shout and a slam of a door told her that they were three cells away. She touched the inside of her jacket for the hundredth time to make sure her deck of cards was still there. She felt them move reassuringly against her fingers, and she took a deep breath to ground herself. If someone had told her a few years ago that she would be sat in Sky Box solitary confinement, about to embark on the greatest journey of her life, she would have laughed them away. No one had believed it, the day she was arrested, and none more so than she.
They were two cells down. A pair of authoritarian footsteps marched past her door, dragging a third pair of feet, lifeless, across the floor.
She checked her back pocket, which held the tools that nice guard had given her, the one who'd taken a shine to her on the day she'd been escorted, smiling, into the prison wing. The tools weren't sharp, but they still served their purpose. They would certainly come in handy where she was going.
A thud came through the walls. They were in the cell next door, and her heart pounded along with the fists of the prisoner they were dragging from its depths. She was vibrating with a serene energy, a feeling of anticipation and excitement that began deep within her bones. Perhaps her body knew somehow that it was going home.
Her door flew open with a crash. They had come for her, just as she knew they would. She rose up to meet them before they'd even hustled their way inside. Two guards approached, their weapons crackling with electricity, and one remained outside the cell, refilling a syringe with an iridescent serum.
Marlow raised her chin to face them as they flanked her on either side.
"Prisoner 510. Marlow Cohen?" the shorter guard barked.
She nodded. "That's as close to my name as you're going to get. So how does this work?"
By way of a response, both of them grabbed her by her upper arms and forced her towards the door. The guard with the needle was flicking the point with a gloved hand. She knew where that was going.
As she emerged out into the sterile lights of the prison corridors, Marlow could see others being dragged from their cells in reflections of her own situation. Except, in the case of the others, there was fear, confusion, and even the occasional act of violent resistance. Those who insisted on the latter were brought swiftly to their knees by a sharp jab of those glistening needles. "Is the tranquilizer really necessary?" she asked.
The stern man with the syringe was already brushing aside her yellow hair to expose the skin of her neck as he said, "All prisoners are to be sedated. Those are the orders."
"Even the prisoners who are prepared to come willingly?"
"No exceptions. Hold her still," he added to his comrades, though she was hardly struggling enough to warrant such a command.
There was a woman on the prison floor, dressed in the uniform of a superior officer. She held a clipboard and was barking orders at the guardsmen, orders which they soon jumped to obey. Marlow gestured towards her and smiled sweetly at the stern man. "Well I'm sure your commander would be pleased to know you're wasting valuable resources on compliant prisoners. How many of those shots will you have left after this? Less than a hundred? I'm sure you're making each one count."
That gave him pause. The men glanced at one another and then in unison at their superior. "Alright." The needle disappeared. "One sign of trouble and I'll break your knuckles."
The thought of that wasn't too appealing, but Marlow wasn't planning on testing his credence in any case. The vice grip on her arms eased off, but they weren't done with her it seemed. In place of the syringe, the man produced a thick metal cuff with a small display and an interior dotted with tiny needles. Wordless, he clamped the bracelet around her right wrist. That, she hadn't been expecting. It pulled her attention for a moment, until the pain began. She briefly wished she'd accepted the sedation - at least then she wouldn't have felt all those tiny points burrowing their way into her skin, melding themselves with her flesh and veins as though they had always been a part of her. A tiny light began to flash on the upside of the wristband to mark its task as complete. It blinked in time with her heartbeat, and watching it quieted her mounting concerns as she was led roughly to the open door of the ship.
Most of the others were already inside, unconscious and strapped to their chairs. She only had a moment to scan the crowd for the face she was hoping to see, before she was wrestled into her own seat, bolted haphazardly to the circular outer wall. The blood-red harness was fastened over her shoulders and across her chest. The seat itself was not made for comfort, and she tried to adjust her position once the guard had walked away, but she was held down too tightly. Everyone in her immediate vicinity was unconscious, all of them sharing the same dosed, dreamless sleep she had so narrowly avoided. Despite the burning in her wrist, she was glad she was awake. She didn't want to miss a moment. The journey she was about to make was one that was dreamt of by almost every inhabitant on the Ark, herself included. For her entire life, she had wished for it, never daring to believe it would actually happen, and yet… here she was. And here he was, somewhere. He wasn't one of the dozing faces around her, but there were other floors on this ship, and no matter what, they would be making this journey together.
The guards that had brought them there soon made a swift exit, and the hiss of sealed air told her that the doors were closing. She peeked around the over-sized headrest on her seat, to steal one last glance at the artificial lights of the space station she knew she would never see again. No regrets, she told herself, and with all her being she meant it.
The silence that fell was a false one. The low thrum of the dropship's engines were a whisper compared to the roar of the Ark's many life support systems and crucial generators, but the hum began deep in the cavernous heart of the ship, and Marlow breathed with it, a long steadying breath to dispel the anticipation of the drop.
Suspended thousands of miles in the higher reaches of nothingness, the capsule full of sleepers released from the belly of its mothership. Finally, the girl everyone called 'Driftwood' was drifting out in space. Her stomach rose as her body fell, and she closed her eyes just long enough to dispel the queasiness. The floor beneath her rattled and shook, and still the dreamers slept on. Being the only one awake to witness their free-fall to Earth made it seem nothing but a fever dream, the kind she remembered having during long, cold nights in the orphanage. There had been no one to comfort her then, either.
One by one, the eyes of the other juveniles began to flutter open. Next to her, a small girl awoke and cried out in fear, a sound echoed by the other unwilling passengers as they felt themselves plummeting through the atmosphere.
"What's going on?" the young girl screamed, turning her huge, questioning eyes on to Marlow.
None of them had been expecting this, not like she had been. She wanted to reassure the girl, but before she had chance to reply, a screen flickered to life high upon the wall. An image of the Chancellor appeared, with an expression of heavy responsibility on his aged face. His voice reverberated around the dropship as his message was played simultaneously on all of the floors.
"Prisoners of the Ark, hear me now: you've been given a second chance. And as your Chancellor it is my hope that you see this as not just a chance for you, but as a chance for all of us, and indeed for mankind itself. This ship is bound for earth."
The shouts that echoed back were a confusion of terror and elation. The girl was afraid, and Marlow reached out to grip her hand as best as she could. Her tiny fingers grabbed back, though her eyes never left the Chancellor's recorded face.
"We have no idea what is waiting for you down there," he continued, gravely. "If the odds of survival were better, we would have sent others. But frankly, we're sending you because your crimes have made you… expendable."
Some of the others seemed indignant, but Marlow was under no illusions. The Ark's attitude to its young criminals was one of the myriad reasons she was happy to leave it behind for good. And she, with no family to protest their treatment of her, was the most expendable of them all.
"If, however, you do survive, then those crimes will be forgiven, your records wiped clean."
That was it. That was what she had been waiting to hear. She cared nothing for her own criminal record – a little civil disobedience would hardly dampen her prospects. But for him, that clause was life-saving. She held on to it in her heart, clung on to it with desperate, hopeful fingers. The others were clamouring too much for her to hear the rest of the pre-recorded message, and she stared hard at his lips to try and read what he was saying. She caught 'base', 'supplies', and what looked like 'Mount Weather', before the shaking of the ship became so intense that it started to disturb the video quality.
"What about all the radiation down there?" the young girl looked to Marlow as though she had all the answers in the world. Tears were running down her rounded cheeks.
"It must have gotten better. Otherwise they wouldn't send us," Marlow lied as hard as she could, and gave the girl's hand another squeeze. "What's your name?"
"Sascha," the girl sobbed, raising her voice to be heard over the chaos around them.
"You're going to be fine, Sascha. We'll all be fine."
A few of the others had managed to get themselves free of their chairs, but their idiocy quickly backfired as the ship hit Earth's atmosphere and accelerated rapidly. The escapees were launched against the walls with a sickening force. Marlow braced herself against the pressure that began to threaten at her skull.
The screen flickered back to life for one final death throe. "Your one responsibility…" the Chancellor's distorted voice commanded. "…stay alive."
With a lurch, the parachutes deployed. The dropship pulled up, and its passengers screamed in unison. Marlow was convinced she was going to be sick. The smell of smoke hit her nostrils and she realised the ship was burning up. An image of fire flashed through her mind and she wished hard for it to be over.
"How much longer?" Sascha cried, sounding pained.
"Not long now. Just a minute," Marlow estimated. As long as the old tin can could stay together for just that long, they would make it. Sparks flew from the ceiling as lights blew. The big screen cracked and spat glass on to the prisoners below. Sascha's grip on her hand felt like it might break her fingers, but she didn't even think about letting go. Hoping against hope, blind to what was happening outside, she pled for safety.
Without warning, the ground met them. The impact made her very bones shake, and her ears rang with the hollow sound of struck metal. The dropship creaked, losing what power remained, and leaned as it settled into the earth.
"Did... did we make it?" Sascha murmured into the uneasy quiet.
Marlow nodded in response, on the brink of disbelief herself. She unfastened her harness slowly, hands aquiver. Sascha seemed even worse for wear, so Marlow reached over to help her do the same.
The risk-takers from earlier unfurled themselves from the walls and floors, hobbling on to broken feet. Some of them didn't get up at all. Marlow's own legs felt like water as he rose from her seat, and for a moment she struggled to find her balance. The descent had been harder on her than she had anticipated.
"Are you alright?" she asked Sascha, crouching carefully to check her over for wounds.
Sascha's brow was damp with sweat and sticky tracks of tears reached down to her chin, but otherwise, she was unharmed. Marlow held out a hand to help her up.
The others rushed by, congregating at the mouth of the large metal door that would lead them to the outside. Marlow heard someone call out a warning about radiation, but they were promptly ignored, the excitement of the group reaching its eager peak. The door was opened, and the light spilled in.
Marlow was forced to shield her eyes right up until she was stood in the huge doorway, the small frame of Sascha at her side. The sunlight was brighter than any of the artificial light she had lived beneath for all of her seventeen years. When she inhaled, she felt like she was breathing for the very first time. The air was so crisp and clean, not recycled and pumped through ancient machinery like she was used to. The other prisoners jostled her as they ran by, and spilled out on to the grass below. She lead Sascha cautiously after them, not knowing where to put her eyes.
Earth had no start. It went on infinitely in all directions, running for miles in stretches of verdant green, and reaching up into the true blue of the sky above. There were no ceilings, no walls, nothing to anchor her down in the midst of the beautiful chaos. Every sliver of the ground was unique, its own living, growing life, probably just as complex as hers. Each impossibly tall tree held more history in their wooden bones than Marlow could even comprehend. To think of the Ark after this? It practically formed bile in her throat.
Marlow could never go back.
She stood there taking deep breaths, and just knew – knew that she'd rather die here, have her skin eaten by the very soil and worms beneath her, than return to that excuse of a home. Marlow's lips curled into a smile. And they said Earth was a wasteland, she thought. Hot radiation, or not - this is better than living where you never belonged.
"Isn't it beautiful, Sascha?" She turned to the young girl, but she was already gone. Marlow caught sight of her half-way down the metal ramp, running into the arms of a much older boy. They seemed more thrilled to see each other than the majestic sights around them. Marlow smiled softly, but she felt a deep ache in her heart.
"If only he was here," she sighed. She couldn't help but imagine him standing beside her right in that moment. If there was anything that could leave him speechless, it was definitely this.
Marlow snapped back to reality. The epiphany of Earth had taken her away for the moment, but then she realised: he must be here. Her eyes darted around, a slight doubt in her gut as she scanned past all the unfamiliar faces.
Marlow made quick pace, dipping and sliding between the chaotic crowd of now free criminals. Suddenly her hands were being pulled, and some boy she didn't know was twirling her around and cheering before running off to twirl someone else. Dizzy, she planted her feet in the soil until her vision focused back, the form of a lanky young man emerging from the blurry colors and shapes the world had become. Marlow blinked long and hard. There was only one person who held themselves like that, with an unexplained command of any space he resided in.
Marlow took a few steps closer, and the boy turned. Her blue eyes met his gaze. "Alfie," she said, almost to herself.
He was finally free.