Chapter 5
We sleep in Lee and Bessie Jaye’s guest room, in two little single beds they made for us when we were kids.
Max is still not speaking to me much, so I don’t notice when he falls asleep.
I just know I’m awake and listening with every bit of ears I’ve got for the screaming of any new gods coming out of the trees outside.
But all I can hear is the night birds singing to each other through the open window.
Tick, tick, they say. I learned in a zoology module it’s because the T sound and the CK sound they learned from humans are best for an echo back from the little bugs they eat.
All our night birds here use echolocation.
That’s why there are none in the city. Too loud, too many metal shapes.
The night sky over it is empty of everything but light and all the bugs night birds aren’t killing.
I know there are other animals out there, not least the rine we saw running from the god. But they’re quiet tonight. So quiet I can’t sleep after hearing the bustle of the city through my walls for the last week. I sit up and look out the window and into the sky.
So many stars. So many you wouldn’t believe.
All those suns out there. All those planets.
Most of them just rocks or gas, I know, or too freezing or too boiling to have life.
But not all of them. Professor Kilfoyle’s lessons give us all the science and all the numbers, and though there’s no one who can prove it, those numbers say there have to be more places like this one out there.
Of course, there’s Old World, where we came from, though even the second set of settlers have been here so long, more than half of us were born here.
Older people don’t talk much about Old World, just that it was awful and polluted and violent and didn’t have much of a future, though even the ones who remember it firsthand were in cryo-sleep for the sixty-seven-year journey, so who even knows what’s left of it these days?
Probably nothing anyone here would recognize.
But if there’s here and there’s Old World, there must be other places where some kind of plants grow and some kind of animals live and maybe some kind of people who talk to each other. Or things we can’t even imagine and that we’ll never know exist.
That’s the hard part, isn’t it? All those wonders out there.
All that incredible stuff we’ll never see and never know enough to even guess at.
How do people live like that? How do you live knowing that your world is the tiniest sliver of everything out there?
That it was only an accident that made you born here?
That out there, somewhere, might be some place where you fit in perfectly?
Max mutters in his sleep. Then he gets louder, and then he’s sat up in his blankets, making a short yell and blinking like he doesn’t know where he is.
It’s dark, so I grab my comm from the side of my bed. Bad dream? I type.
“Amazing guess,” he slurs. “No wonder you’re in upper school.”
All right, eff off then.
He takes a breath. “It was the Noise dream.”
Bad?
I hear him swallow in the dark. “So bad you can’t even believe it, Ben. Just . . . makes you feel worse than you ever thought you could.”
Is it really every night? I type. Why didn’t you ever say?
There’s only silence in the darkness at this.
Because if I don’t have them, I wouldn’t understand?
More silence, so I know it means I’m right.
I’m just left out of this, then?
“Be thankful,” he says. “You wouldn’t want this.”
And I think to myself, You don’t know what I want. But I don’t type it.