Until I called her a freak.

Frex.

“Everything okay?” Bartie asks, a hint of real concern in his face.

“Yeah,” I muttered. “It’s just . . . Amy . . .”

Bartie frowns. “There are more problems on this ship than a freak from Sol-Earth.”

“Don’t call her a freak!” I say, snapping my head up to glare at Bartie so violently my neck cracks.

Bartie leans back in his chair, throwing up both hands in a gesture of either defense or dismissal. “I was merely pointing out that you have more important things to worry about.”

My eyes narrow, reading the title of the thick book Bartie had been scrutinizing. On the cover is a woman with skin paler than Amy’s and a dress so wide I doubt she’d fit through the doorway. I read the title—a history of the French Revolution.

“Why are you reading that?” I ask. I try to laugh in a genial sort of way, but the sound comes out like a garbled snort. I look at Bartie with new eyes, wary eyes. A lot of time has passed since we would follow Kayleigh and Victria to the Recorder Hall and race rocking chairs across the porch.

And the French Revolution isn’t a topic I would have thought Bartie would study.

Was he interested in the frea—I stop myself from even thinking the word—was he interested in the unusual woman on the cover of the book? Or was he interested in the guillotine cutting off the king’s head? I mentally shake myself. I’m being paranoid.

“Food,” Bartie says.

“Food?”

He nods, pushing the volume closer to me and picking up a slender book bound in green leather. “I thought it was . . . interesting. That ‘let them eat cake’ bit—I wonder if they would have even revolted if there hadn’t been the shortage of food.”

“Maybe they were just revolting from dresses like that,” I say as I point to the voluminous swaths of silk pouring off the woman’s skirt on the cover of the book. I’m trying for levity again, but Bartie’s not laughing and neither am I—my mind is remembering the red line in the chart Marae showed me, the line that showed the decreasing food production. When the rest of the ship sees how quickly the food’s disappearing—that the ship is dead in the empty sky, and that soon we will be too—how long will it be till they, like the people in Bartie’s book, turn their farm tools into weapons and revolt?

Bartie doesn’t answer me, just flips open the smaller green book. His eyes don’t move over the letters, though, and I get the feeling he’s waiting for me to say or do something. I’m not so sure I’m just being paranoid anymore.

“Something’s going to have to change, and soon,” Bartie says, his eyes on the book. “It’s been building for months, ever since you turned them.”

“I didn’t—” I say automatically, defensive even though there was no real accusation in his voice. “I just . . . I mean, I guess I changed them, but I changed them back. To what they’re supposed to be. What they are.”