At the end of the corridor was a big, important-looking door. It was closed, but there was no sign on it. No lock, either. On the one hand, it was important-looking, so if I went through there there might be people in there who I couldn’t talk my way around. On the other hand, my Grandma would have to be behind an important-looking door somewhere, right? Maybe even that one. But I had no way of knowing.
I could still just leave, and try to do more research, but I’d come up with a fake keycard and I didn’t know how likely it was that the treegrave would notice that and tell someone. It mustn’t have noticed yet, or it would’ve sent someone after me, but maybe it reviewed the security cameras and stuff later? It would have to check the security cameras around somewhere so important, right? It couldn’t let just anyone into the treegrave and not notice.
Before I could decide what to do, a door behind me opened and two people came out. I recognised Turin, tall and gangly and with a bright orange armband on kes jumpsuit now and an orange headband. The orange looked horrible with the green. Behind kem was a large man with big arms and scruffy hair that would’ve been floating into his eyes if it wasn’t held back by his orange headband. His jumpsuit was grey, which went with the armband and headband a lot better.
“Kat? Are you lost?” Turin asked me gently.
“Who are you and what are you doing here, kid?” the man asked.
Reimann’s shift! They’d found me out. I widened my eyes. “I’m Kat. I’m looking for my brother – ”
“You were fooled by this, Turin?” the man sniffed. “This kid’s like, five years old.”
“She’s a bit small, but some teenagers – ”
“Aren’t that small! She’s nine at the absolute most. How old are you, kid?”
I clenched my jaw and glared at him.
“That’s what I thought.” He reached out and grabbed my arm roughly. “Alright, we – ”
“Saro! Be careful!”
“Stop being such a wuss, I didn’t hurt her.”
I pulled out of his grip and had do grab a wall rail to stop myself from drifting back too far. “If you don’t take me to my grandma, I’m going to tell everyone that you let me up here,” I told Turin. “And you’re a security guard, right? You’ll get in trouble.”
Saro raised his eyebrows. “You hear that, Turin?” he drawled. “You’re going to get in trouble.”
He didn’t sound scared. Turin didn’t look scared. Maybe it wasn’t a big problem that Turin had let me up the elevator. Maybe this kind of thing happened all the time.
But there was no way that I’d be able to sneak back up again. They would tell my mum, and I’d never be able to see if Grandma was okay.
“I’ll get you in trouble, too!” I told Saro. “I’ll tell them…” What could I tell them? I had to think of something! I had to see Grandma!
“Don’t worry, kid, we’ll take you to your grandma,” Turin said gently as Saro snatched my keycard. “Just come back to the elevator with us.”
“Hey, this is a security card,” Saro said, sounding surprised. “A ring card, not an elevator card, but still. How did you get this?”
“Where is your grandmother?” Turin asked.
“She’s in the treegrave,” I said.
Turin and Saro exchanged a look.
“You just said you’d take me to her,” I told Turin, but I knew it wouldn’t work. And it didn’t. Turin smiled gently.
“She’s very busy,” ke told me. “I’ll take you to your family and you can talk with them about it. Where do you live?”
“I’m going to tell everyone you let me up,” I told kem. “And I’m going to tell everyone that you got me the security card,” I told Saro. “It’d be so much easier to get it from a security guard, wouldn’t it? I’ll tell them that you gave it to me. You’re both going to get in so much trouble.”
Saro’s eyes narrowed. He grabbed my arm again, even more roughly, and yanked me toward the elevator. “Listen, kid, we don’t have time for – ”
I tried to pull away from him, but he held me too tightly. “And then you won’t be a security guard any more, and you won’t be able to do anything, because I bet you’re too stupid and old to learn how to do anything else!”
Saro stopped pulling me towards the elevator. And let me go.
“Well,” he said, “that would be a problem, wouldn’t it? I’d hardly want to lose my job.” He started heading back down the corridor, away from the elevator. “Come on then, let’s find this grandma of yours.”
“Saro! What are you doing?”
“Just what she said. You don’t want to get in trouble for letting her up, do you?” he said this is a kind of mean way, like he was making fun of me. I didn’t think I could get them in trouble, from how he was talking. But then, why did he want to help me? “Besides, you just promised her you’d take her to her grandma, didn’t you? We should keep our promises.”
“Saro, what is wrong with you? You can’t – ”
“Let a relative visit? Of course I can. Happens all the time, you’ve been through security briefing.”
“Yes, with clearance! With people who know what they’re doing, with parents who know their children can handle it or leave them at home! Not like this!” Turin was whispering, like ke didn’t want me to hear the conversation.
Saro was not whispering. “Oh, you want her to fill in the paperwork? You’re worried about getting in trouble? About us losing our jobs and being too stupid to get other ones? It’s just a risk we’ll have to take in order to help – what’s your name, kid?”
“Her name is Kat.”
“Very doubtful. What’s your real name, kid?”
This wasn’t going well. Saro was mad at me, but helping. Turin seemed to be trying to protect me by not helping. Was it dangerous to see Grandma? Was it something worse than I thought, something so bad that it would be hurtful to see? That couldn’t be right. I had come because I was worried that she was dead; if I didn’t see her, I’d keep worrying about that. Seeing her couldn’t be worse than that.
But they didn’t know that I thought that she was dead. I’d just said that I wanted to see her, so maybe they thought that I thought she was fine, and so seeing her would hurt me.
Which meant that something was wrong. And that something might still be that she was dead. I had to find out, even if Turin didn’t think it was a good idea.
“My name is Taya,” I told Saro. “My grandma’s name is Tera.”
“There are a lot of Teras on the ship,” Saro said as he lead the way to the big door without a sign. “Do you know her citizen ID?”
“No.”
“Well, do you know your citizen ID?”
“Saro,” Turin hissed just as Saro was about to open the door. “That is enough!”
“Enough? We haven’t helped your dear little friend Taya yet.”
“How can you possibly be this petty with a child? A little girl hurt your feelings and – ”
“I’m not little,” I said firmly.
“See? She’s not little. Either report me to command or go back to the guard post.”
Turin didn’t go anywhere or report to anyone. Ke just crossed kes arms and narrowed kes eyes at Saro, who ignored kem and pushed the door open.
The three of us walked through, and I became even more confused. Because there was a ramp. Leading up.
“Where does that go?” I asked as we moved toward it.
“To the treegrave,” Turin said. “The old ship, the one built by Earth.”
“We’re already in the treegrave,” I pointed out. “We took the elevator up.”
Saro scoffed, like I’d said something silly. “We’re in the administration tunnels. The elevator to the treegrave lands in the memorial tunnels. It’s for tourists and pilgrims. Full of water and dirt and not enough pull to keep it away – can you imagine the admin and maintenance staff walking through that every day, tracking that shit through rooms of electronics and compheads and shit? Everything would be breaking constantly. No, people take the elevator to the admin tunnels for work, right under the treegrave. And that,” he said, pointing up the ramp, “is the treegrave. Sector 21.”
“But,” I said as we walked up the ramp, “the elevator goes to the treegrave for tours and stuff, right?”
“That’s right,” Turin said.
“So, how can it go to these administration tunnels? That would be so much work, having to keep rebuilding the elevator to put the top of the shaft somewhere else!” Unless it was a different elevator, but Turin had just said that it was also for tours, so…
“They don’t have to rebuild anything,” Saro said. “What makes you think that the elevator has to go all the way to the top of the shaft?”
“Huh?”
“An elevator can stop and open up without being all the way at the top or the bottom of the shaft,” Turin said. “If you validate it with a tour guide keycard, it goes all the way to the top and opens in the treegrave. If you validate it with an admin level keycard, it stops a it below the top and opens onto the admin level.”
“Wow,” I said. “You could build corridors all the way down to the ring! Just a big disc of tunnels!”
“You could, but there’d be no point,” Turin said. “The inertial pull would get lighter and lighter with each level up, and we already have enough low-pull space. It would take so many building materials that it would be better just to make the ring thicker, and have more space at a comfortable pull.”
We reached the top of the ramp. We were in another corridor, a much wider one, which was scary because of the sideways inertial pull and almost no pull down. I grabbed a rail.
“There’s no trees here,” I said.
“As it should be,” Saro snorted. “They should wipe out that stupid forest and me done with it.”
I gasped. “But it’s important!”
“It’s a bunch of dirt and water in the heart of the ship, is what it is. And a magnet for curious people with too much time on their hands to crowd the elevators all the time to traipse up for a tour of it. A menace and a danger with no practical benefit.”
No practical benefit? It was history! The aspen tree that had been planted to commemorate Aspen, who had inspired the First Crew to leave Earth and spread humanity among the stars, had given up themselves to the ship and become the first mind of the treegrave. A forest that was a single tree, and many, appearing different but all connected, like humanity.
But before I could say that, Saro lead us around a corner and into a big building.
The building was at an angle. Well, the building wasn’t, but the stuff inside it was. It had been set up so that the ship-right wall was the floor, since that was where most of the inertial pull was pulling us. It was a tall building, or I guess a long building, or… ugh, directions were so confusing up here.
“Alright,” Saro said. “Let’s go find this grandma.”
Except something was wrong. I leapt back up to grab the doorway, ready to pull myself back into the corridor.
“Taya?” Turin asked.
“I think,” I said, “that you’re trying to trick me.”
Derin Edala 