When Laisor strode in, everyone made a big fuss, but most of us left after saying hi. I headed off to a quiet corner of the garden while Mum and Dad fussed over kem and the younger boys asked about the ship. Nobody had fussed over Plia this much when she went on jaunts to other ships, I was sure, but then I had been a baby for most of those. So maybe I just didn’t remember.
After awhile even that calmed down, and Laisor came to find me in the garden. Kes flame patterned hair was dyed bright red, I noticed.
“Hey there, Taya! How’s your jaunt treating you?”
“Fine,” I said. “How was the ship?”
“Oh, it was amazing. Truly mind-blowing, really; you’ll love it when you go.”
I felt my fists clench by themselves. “I’m sure I will. Arborea – ”
“Oh, no; forget Arborea.” Laisor waved a hand. “Arborea Celestia is boring. Just the Courageous, but wetter.”
“What are you talking about? Their whole system is different! They don’t even have orphanages; they – ”
“Yeah, yeah; different people raise different numbers of kids than us. They have three smaller rings instead of one big one. Trees floating in water. Whatever. It’s all the same thing with different paint on it. No; the real experience is Vanguard!”
I frowned. Vanguard was a much smaller ship, and as such was good at moving stuff around. Arborea Celestia was way too far away to get to straight from the Courageous, so Laisor would’ve gone over on the Vanguard, but that wasn’t the point of the jaunt. The Vanguard was like the trolley that took me to the tour. What could possibly be interesting about it?
“Doesn’t the Vanguard have less than a hundred people? Not including its treegrave, of course.”
“Yep.”
“And no inertial pull?”
“There’s no rotation to make a constant pull, but you do get pulled around a lot. Since it’s actually going places and stuff.”
“Still though. It’s not a real ship. I mean I know it’s got a treegrave so it’s technically a fleet ship, but – ”
“Oh, little sister, it’s a real ship. You get on the Vanguard and you’ll see that it’s places like this and like Arborea that are fake.”
“Places like this are the whole point! We’re the backbone of the fleet! Vanguard is a storage room and a trolley service.”
“Places like this are just waiting around. Whole generations of people just waiting around. Oh, sure, lots of stuff happens inside the ship, but does the ship really affect the others in the fleet, beyond giving them something to point at and say ‘look, that’s where our people came from’? Vanguard’s out there moving stuff between ships, keeping everyone alive; if all the ships like Vanguard stopped working, the fleet would die out.”
“We’re not just waiting around! We’re preparing to colonise a star system!”
“Are we, though? We’re not going to be able to get close enough to the asteroid belt to do very much. We’re too big. The big important people on ships like the Courageous will have long meetings and make big decisions and then ships like the Vanguard will get in there and do the actual work, actually build something and make a difference.”
“That’s like saying that a brain isn’t important because the hands do the work!” I snapped. “Obviously, we need little ships, but to say that a particular one of them is better or more important than a ship like the Courageous or Arborea Celestia is nonsense!”
“You’ll understand when you’re older,” Laisor sighed, and normally that would make me even madder than everything else, but I could see the distant look in kes eye and I suddenly knew, for sure, that as soon as Laisor was old enough to be allowed to choose another ship, ke would leave us. I stayed quiet and Laisor wandered off through the garden, barely seeming to even see the plants.
Laisor was so weird.
But I had more important things to worry about, for now. By my next break between jaunts, I was ready. Dressed in a wrap in the complicated colourful sort of design that teen girls likes, with ribbons braided into my hair and two colourful bracelets on my arm, I took the trolley a couple of stops away and found an elevator. (I could have used the elevator near the playground, but I didn’t want to risk anyone recognising me.) My hand, clutching my Mum’s stolen keycard, was shaking. I made myself be still. I didn’t want anyone looking too closely at the card because even though I’d managed to steal the right paints from Auntie Shorin to get the colour of the blue stripe exactly right, the paints were shinier than the real thing and not completely flat. Anyone who looked too close would see that it was painted on.
But so long as I didn’t hand my keycard to anyone, I would probably be okay.
Blue shift was about to start. I waited. I waited until the crowds of five or six using the elevator at once went down to one or two at a time, and they looked like they were in a hurry, because they were almost late. (I had thought about trying to sneak in with a bigger group, but the people who worked up there probably all knew the people that used their elevator at around the same time, and would pay attention to strangers. A big group wouldn’t help me.) At just a few minutes before shift start, a tall, distracted brennan in a pale green jumpsuit rushed into the elevator, and I followed kem in.
I tried to look rushed and nervous, but not like I was hiding anything. My plan was simple – I would use my keycard on the elevator, and when it didn’t work I would get stressed and maybe cry a bit, because this was my very first day doing my jaunt with my big brother and I was already late and the key wasn’t even working, and if I did it right then the brennan would feel sorry for me and use kes key for me and be in too much of a hurry to get to kes job to be too suspicious or to stop me from running off at the top.
But I didn’t need to do any of that, because as I ducked into the elevator, ke glanced at the key in my hand and stuck kes own in the slot before I had a chance to.
Oh. Of course. Only one person in the elevator needed to actually use their key to make it move. I had a key and was obviously allowed up, so ke had no reason not to use kes own.
The elevator started to rise. We became lighter and lighter as we got closer to the treegrave.
The brennan smiled at me. “Hi there. I don’t think we’ve met.”
“I’m new,” I said quietly, shrinking into the corner.
“Ah. Well, I hope you have a good time. Your first jaunt up, right? You’re very young. My name’s Turin. I’m a security guard.”
“My name’s Kat,” I lied. “My brother works in Records.”
“Ah.” Turin smiled. “Don’t worry, Kat; the Administration halls aren’t scary. I’m sure you’ll learn a lot, and have plenty of fun!”
I wasn’t planning on going to any Administration hall, but I was planning to learn a lot.
We got lighter and lighter, and then the elevator stopped. “Do you need help finding your brother?” Turin asked.
“No, thank you,” I said.
Ke looked unsure for a moment, but then looked up at the clock in the elevator. Blue shift had started. “Alright, then. Good luck on your jaunt!” Ke planted kes legs in the back corner of the elevator and leapt out through the door.
I waited a few seconds before doing the same, more slowly. I had to be slow and fast at the same time. I needed Turin to rush off, and I needed to not look suspicious, but I needed to find Grandma as quickly as I could; the treegrave couldn’t pay attention to every kid running around every day, but once I got close, it would probably start paying attention and –
Something was wrong.
I hadn’t leapt outward into a sector full of trees and bugs. I was in a round, white corridor. It stretched on and on, with rails on the sides and the ceiling, and a few doors here and there. I was so startled, that I forgot that I was mid-leap, and when my feet hit the floor I bounced back up again in the low inertial pull.
A few other people were moving through the corridor, some in wraps but most in jumpsuits. Watching them, I saw what the rails were for – it was really hard to walk around with such low inertial pull, so they were using the hand rails to push themselves forward. Trying to look like I knew where I was going, I grabbed a rail and did the same.
Where was I? The elevators were supposed to go to the sectors full of trees. That’s where they’d gone the last two times I’d used one. Maybe the ship-right elevators went to the trees but the sector that the ship-left ones went to didn’t have trees, and instead went to this sector, in a narrow corridor for some reason? The doors I was passing must lead to bigger rooms. No, that couldn’t be right, because I’d taken a ship-right elevator to get here.
I had never taken this specific elevator before. Maybe some elevators went straight up to sector 15 and some were at an angle and went to a further-out or further-in sector. If it was only a little bit of an angle, maybe I wouldn’t notice that it was crooked when I got in. How much of an angle would there need to be to make the elevator go to a sector without trees? I didn’t know. Auntie Lia could figure that kind of thing out, but I couldn’t.
Well, that must be how it works, because this elevator hadn’t brought me to the same sector that the tours happened in.
I was lost. I didn’t know where the corridor I was in was, obviously, and I didn’t know what direction I was moving. When I left the elevator, did I go ship-left or ship-right? I couldn’t remember. Or even forward or backward? The corridor should be going left and right, I was pretty sure, because otherwise it would be bent so much I’d be able to easily see it, all the way up in the middle of the ship. But maybe I was wrong about that.
The doors had signs on them, but I couldn’t read them. I recognised some of the glyphs but not very many of the words they were in. I passed a room that had something to do with making, and another one that had something to do with water, or liquid of some sort, anyway. I was excited to recognise the word “Hospital”, but that didn’t help me because I didn’t need to go to a hospital.
Some other corridors did branch off of my corridor, and looking down them, they were curved. So they must be going forward to back, and the one I was in was going left to right. I must be going ship-right, because the ship’s deceleration was very noticeable with so little rotational inertial pull and it was pulling me ‘backward’, but that didn’t help me a whole lot. I was getting more confused because I must have travelled across at least a couple of sectors by now, maybe many sectors – it was hard to keep track. But I hadn’t run into any signs that I’d crossed into a new sector. Aside from some big vacuum doors every now and then, set up so that they would slam shut if the air pressure went down too much, the corridor just looked the same all the way through. But then, I guessed, it was a corridor. There was no reason to mark any changes between sectors.
I wanted to stop and think, but every time I did, somebody would come into the corridor and I had to get back to looking like I was going somewhere. Maybe one of the doors lead somewhere private? If I could find a bathroom or something…
I couldn’t see one, though. How was I going to find Grandma if I had no idea where I was?
Derin Edala 
My dear, you could ask for directions and say you were so nervous you went up the wrong elevator
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