Chương 56: Chapter 18: Confrontation

We didn't speak to each other on the way out of the laboratory. Flint looked like he was lost in thought and I didn't feel comfortable speaking in the presence of the former residents of lifeboat seven. I couldn't tell whether I was just feeling overwhelmed with information or I'd I was getting used to it, but either way I didn't feel the same fear I'd felt when I first went through the hallway. As we traveled through it I couldn't help myself from trying to imagine who they all were.

Each one of them had a life, a family, friends, a job, talents, hobbies. With each passing face I felt myself feeling angrier for them. They didn't deserve what happened to them. I could have never imagined the person who'd been hunting me back on earth had caused so much damage. She was probably chasing me because she wanted to finish the job. I looked over to the family of melodians as we passed by but I didn't want to linger.

When we reached the opening to the tunnels I saw Flint had thankfully cleared up whatever mess was caused when he removed the body of the unfortunate melodian who'd been working in the pipe. With the orange lights guiding us up through the narrow passageway, we found our way back up through the control room and out of the exploded sphere. With a few gentle thrusts, we made our way back toward the entrance to lifeboat seven. It felt strange to see the ship so empty.

I imagine when the cleanup started it had to have looked a lot like the hallways I'd seen, but across the entire surface. I took a few deep breaths as I took in the surroundings as best I could as I hoped I'd never have to see it again. My gaze was brought to the various sections of the ship, making me think about how deep down the floors went in all directions. I'd only seen a few hallways, I couldn't imagine the total number of people who'd died on the ship.

It felt like it would take lifetimes to explore the entire thing. Upon our return I saw the orange lights from the crew we'd arrived with were mostly gone, likely having already made the return trip. It didn't seem to matter as I followed Flint, bringing us up to a group that were following a trail of green lights in the direction of the entrance. Right as we got to the entrance we all stopped, waiting for a moment as another group was emerging from the opening.

Just like the other groups, all of their eyes were glowing white. They made their way past us, moving off to another section of the ship as the green team started making their way back in. Flint gestured for me to follow behind them. It was a tight squeeze, but nothing compared to the interior of the Artemis network. I paused for a moment, looking at the burnt shadow of a melodian who'd been standing in the airlock.

The spiral of the burn mark going along the front wall of the ship made me think it was from one of the engines when it broke off. If the engine had broken off and was still firing, the ship would have been spinning underneath it, but I couldn't imagine why anyone would be standing outside like that, let alone why there was a large yellow patch of blood on the floor next to it. I felt a poke at my back, telling me to keep moving forward.

We all made our way into the transporter, Flint waving me up to the cockpit like before.

"Hey" I said quietly, breaking the silence as he closed the door behind us "I forgot to ask, did you find what you were looking for?" He nodded "I did. Yeah. It looks like we were right."

"About Rosa?" I asked. Instead of answering directly, he pulled out a decently sized book.

"Here take a look" he said as he opened the pages. It was filled with a lot of charts and graphs along with blocks of text in between. He continued, "These are the records they were keeping on the gravity games."

"Okay so" I said, not entirely following what I was supposed to be looking for "remind me, what's the plan here? I think I'm a little lost." He nodded "So, originally, the gravity games were only on lifeboat seven. We didn't do them anywhere else. After the initial cleanup, we started doing them on eight. But we did it differently. They used to use these big parachutes for the landing on phase three. It was a lot slower.

That's how it started on eight, but the contestants kept getting better and we eventually figured out that we could just land on another ramp on the other side. It was a lot faster, but a lot more difficult, but as the players got better, that maneuver went from something only the highest skilled players would try, to the standard way of playing the game. At the same time, the players started to get more organized. They started living on the lower sections of the ship.

The outside explanation was that they wanted to live in higher gravity so they'd get stronger, but on the inside, the real reason, was because we wanted to be outside of Artemis's sight."

"What do you mean 'out of sight'?" I asked.

"The Artemis network only goes down to a certain level" he explained, "The melodians were never meant to live that far down, so they never thought to make the network stretch that far. Instead he uses those robots that you saw. They're the ones that do the tasks in the heaviest parts of the ship. But it turns out if a melodian lives down there, they can get used to it."

"Hmm… That makes sense. Yeah" I said. I'd noticed the listeners all seemed a lot stronger than everyone else I'd seen.

"Right so" he continued, "After a while, they started getting these… messages. They didn't know who they were from, but the messages were coming from someone who was trying to build up our numbers. They'd tell us where to look in the audience of the gravity games to find more potential players. That's how I was recruited. They got a message that said I appeared to understand the music better than most, so they reached out to me. Whoever is giving those messages wants us to grow stronger as a group."

I nodded, remembering our past conversation "And you think the end goal is to take down the Artemis network."

"What else could it be?" he asked.

"I don't know. But why did you have to see this?" I asked, gesturing to the book.

"Well, we had a suspicion it was Rosa, but we didn't know for sure and we figured she couldn't reach out to us directly since she's so close to all these people who are in charge of the lifeboat. She had to keep herself a secret. But when we started getting messages saying we needed to explore lifeboat seven, we figured that was her telling us to find this" he said, holding up the book.

"And what does that tell you exactly?" I asked, moving over to his side so we could both see the pages.

"I went back through the gravity games and found this" he said, going toward the end of the book. He pointed to one of the names on the leaderboards, right at the top spot "Rosa" he said, "she got first place here, then never played again." I picked the book up, moving back a page and noticed the same name in previous records but it looked like she only got first place once.

"What happened here?" I asked, noticing something odd about the game before her first place position. Her name was second on the list, but the thing that stood out was that everyone had similar times next to their names. I couldn't read the numbers, but they were all the same except for the last bits, which made sense if they were all making similar times. But oddly enough the first place person had an entirely different number next to their name.

"Oh, I didn't notice that" he said, pulling the book over to himself.

"Someone named 'red' but… That doesn't make any sense. I've never seen a number so low before" he said, looking a bit confused.

"Not even with the new numbers? After the new strategy?" I asked. He shook his head "No this… Is impossible. It's probably an error" he said as he flipped it to the previous page, "Yeah, this 'red' person barely qualified in phase two. I don't think this is accurate." The interior of the cockpit was suddenly filled with sunlight as we exited the large balloon surrounding lifeboat seven. We sadly were facing away from the earth, but the view was still spectacular. The narrative has been taken without permission.

Report any sightings.

"So where do you go from here?" I asked.

"Well, now that we know it's her, I think we can reach out. We were afraid to contact her before because if we were wrong, we'd be giving ourselves away" he said. We started moving into the shadow of the ship, the transporter bringing us up toward the middle where we'd originally exited. As we were going in, another ship left from the same spot.

It looked like they were running a constant stream of melodians out to clean up lifeboat seven, which I imagined would only go faster once they were able to pump oxygen back into it.

"Oh, you should…" Flint started to say as he reached out, closing my visor before reaching up and closing his own. We still needed to fit in with the other melodians as we exited the ship.

"Come on" Flint said quietly as he led me out to the main room once more. The other melodians were patiently waiting, their eyes all glowing as the ship came to a stop. A moment later, the doors opened, causing a large burst of air pressure to enter the small vessel. Flint was right, I'd gotten used to the lower pressure but it still felt a lot better once it was back. I felt like I could breathe normally again. Our group exited the little ship as another group passed by us.

The transport between the two lifeboats was surprisingly efficient, leaving little to no downtime between groups. As we entered the group moved through the large chamber we saw a white melodian waiting for the group on the other end. The melodians in the group's eyes started to turn off as we entered.

"Everyone doing well? No incidents?" Rosa asked. Nobody in the group said anything. After waiting a few moments, Rosa spoke up again "Great, take a break, we'll see you again in a few rotations." Everyone except Flint started making their way toward the exit. I figured I'd just stay with the group since I needed to find my way to Nori. It felt strange going down the pathway as the gravity slowly got stronger. It was different from lifeboat seven. In seven, it was zero gravity. Nothing.

But on lifeboat eight, even with us being close to the center of the ship, we were still rotating, which meant you had to work to keep yourself in the same spot. As we moved down the rotation was less obvious as the illusion of gravity took over, at first feeling like it was barely enough to pull us to the floor, but a short time later it started to feel like it was regular old gravity again, despite us still being extremely light.

Before we got to the elevators, Rosa passed me by with Flint quickly in tow, the book in her hand as she walked by. Flint tapped my shoulder, letting me know that I should follow. I wanted to go out to find Nori, but after all the time of being on lifeboat eight I couldn't pass up an opportunity to finally meet up with Rosa. Without a word she led us down an adjacent hallway from the elevators and into a small office.

It felt strange to walk in the super low gravity, I had a hard time not running into walls whenever we had to turn or stop. The office looked like it was sized for a melodian with the ceiling only giving us about a foot of space between it and the top of my ears. A large desk took up the middle of the room with two chairs on our side of the desk and one on her side. Against the far wall were a set of windows that looked out over lifeboat eight.

It was a similar view to the one I'd seen when I was with Nori but we were further up, closer to the center of the ship than what the forest reached up to. Rosa made her way to the other side of the desk, facing away from us as she looked through the book as the door closed itself behind us.

"Have a seat" she said, not looking up at us. It felt strange to be in her presence. Her voice was the first one I'd heard from the lifeboats and she was one of the few survivors from lifeboat seven. I wanted to ask her so many things. She was a lot older when the disaster happened, she remembered things from seven that nobody else did. I felt like I had so many questions swimming through my head I couldn't think of any to ask.

"So you're the one, right?" Flint asked. Rosa didn't say anything for a moment as she slowly looked up from the book, looking out over the lifeboat.

"Do you know how much work it was to gain their trust?" she asked in such a flat tone I couldn't tell what if she was angry or not, but she certainly didn't sound happy.

"Sorry, what?" Flint asked.

"You're too young to remember. But it didn't use to be like this. They didn't use to assert as much control over us as they do now" she said, closing the book and turning around to look at us. Although her tone was flat, there was an intensity in her bright pink eyes that I'd never seen in a melodian before, making me feel incredibly small.

"Do you have any idea" she continued "how much work it's taken to keep our two sides together? How much I've had to do to keep their trust? And all the while, your little… group… is trying to undermine all of it. For what? To take down the network? The one thing keeping the balance between our species in check? You want to destroy it. Fools. All of you" she said. She didn't sound angry, instead it felt like she was disappointed as she spoke with a harsh, chilling accusation in her tone.

"Wait… I'm sorry" Flint said, his voice wavering a bit "I thought… I thought you were the one in charge…"

"In charge? No. But I've been watching you. If it were up to me I would have disbanded the listeners a long time ago" she said as she sat at her chair.

"But…" I started to say, feeling a little confused.

"Yes?" Rosa asked, her gaze turning to me, somehow making me feel even smaller.

"I… Thought… I mean… I was told you didn't use the assembler… Don't you want to get rid of it too?" I asked, shivering a little. Rosa squinted her eyes a little "It's that kind of thinking that makes the mehcara afraid of us in the first place. We don't get rid of it by destroying it, we get rid of it by convincing the other melodians to stop using it."

"They fear us?" Flint asked, scratching his head. Rosa took a deep breath "of course they do. It was one of our own that destroyed lifeboat seven. She didn't use the assembler either. They fear one of us could do it again, which is why they restricted us so much more after they got the Artemis network back up. They fear us. Since arriving on Lifeboat eight I've been trying to prove to them that we can be trusted, that they don't need to control us. But you. The listeners. All you're doing is proving them right.

You're undoing all the work I've done and if they found out about what you were doing I fear there wouldn't be any way to come back from that."

"But…" Flint said, sounding even more confused "if you're not the one in charge, then who is?" Rosa stood up from her desk, making her way around it as she approached Flint. Flint shrank in his seat, trying to press his back further into it.

"You think I'd tell you that? Please" she said as she approached him. With a quick movement she reached out, grabbing him by the shirt and pulling him out of his seat, bringing his face right up to hers "Listen" she said, no longer trying to keep the anger in her voice from showing, "you go back to Gron. You tell him about this conversation. You and the rest of the listeners need to stop obsessing over me. I'm not your leader. You need to drop this ridiculous idea that you could stop the assembler by force.

The only way is by gaining their trust and we're not going to do that with your little group causing problems" she said as she brought his face closer to hers. I gripped the handles of the chair, partially thankful that it wasn't me she had her attention on, partially feeling bad for Flint for getting the brunt of the rage she was directing toward him.

"What you're going to do" she continued "is to play the games. Have fun. Enjoy yourselves. I don't give a shit. But you are NOT going to undermine everything I've worked for. You tell him that for me. Okay?" As she finished she pushed him away, causing him to stumble over the seat, falling back behind the chair.

"Both of you get out and don't let me catch you traveling out to lifeboat seven again" she said as she picked up the book from her desk, ripping the whole thing in half. I quickly got up, grabbing Flint's arm and picking him up as we both hurriedly left the room. We didn't say anything at first but as we walked down the hallway I could see Flint's frustration growing. As we got up to the elevators another group of melodians was coming back from lifeboat seven.

Flint led me in, cutting them off and standing at the door.

"Sorry, this one's taken. You'll have to get the next one" he said with a firm voice. The other melodians looked confused but didn't seem like they wanted to get involved, so they patiently waited as the doors closed. Before I could even say anything, Flint spoke up.

"How did you find that lab?" he asked, his hands clenched in a fist.

"I… What?" I asked, confused about the topic being brought up again.

"Who are you working with? How did they lead you there?" he asked before turning around, looking me dead in the eye "was I not supposed to have found you in there? What were you looking for?"

"Flint, I promise I didn't know…" I started to say.

"Ugh, whatever" he said, cutting me off as he hit a button on the control panel of the elevator as I felt it starting to slow down "Your story. It's a lie isn't it? You've been working with her" he said with a bit of venom in his voice as he referred to Nori.

"Flint I'm sorry I… I don't know what you're trying to say…" I stammered. He stepped forward, glaring at me as he flipped my visor open, looking me straight in the eyes as his other arm reached back behind me and in a single motion unzipped my bag as I felt him pull something out. He quickly stepped to the side as he pushed me out of the opening doors to the elevators. The sudden push caused me to lose my balance as I fell to the floor on the outside of the elevator.

I looked up, seeing Flint holding the processing core in his hand.

"I'd like to speak to Nori. You know where to find us" he said as the door closed.