I didn’t move quickly enough. Harley lunged at me and threw the full force of his fist against my jaw. My teeth snapped over my tongue, and I tasted blood. I let myself fall away into the mud and cowered behind my arms.

When I dared look again, Harley was staring up. One hand still held hers, his thumb going methodically over her cool, lifeless palm, back and forth, back and forth.

“Why did she leave me?” he whispered to the painted metal sky above us.

Because this wasn’t an accident.

It couldn’t have been an accident.

Kayleigh loved the pond. Loved to swim with the koi. She’d dive under with handfuls of feed in her grip and uncurl her fingers underwater so the shy fish would dance up to her and nibble from her hands. She could hold her breath longer than anyone I knew. No one could catch her when she swam, not even Harley, who always tried.

Kayleigh couldn’t have died by accident. Not in the water.

I stared at what was left of her.

Pale yellow square patches lined the inside of both her arms. Doc’s med patches—the ones that made you fall asleep. This—this was what killed her. Not an accident. A choice. Kayleigh put herself into a watery bed and made sure she would never wake up. Suicide. We knew it must have been suicide. She’d been talking about how much she hated living, trapped on this ship, for weeks. Months. Just little things, a comment here, a snide remark there. Nothing we noticed. Not until—

My eyes drifted from her body to the lapping, almost-still waters behind her. I looked farther, over the reeds and lotus flowers on the far edge, my eyes skimming across the bright green new grass.

Where they crashed against a metal wall.

A hard, cold, relentless metal wall, studded with rivets and stained with grease and age. My eyes burned as I followed a seam in the wall up, up, curving higher up, until it met with the bright solar lamp in the center of the ceiling. Above that, I knew, was the Shipper Level, and above that, the Keeper Level.

And beyond that—beyond tons and tons of impenetrable metal—was a sky I had never seen.

A sky Kayleigh had never seen.

And she couldn’t live without the sky.

Chapter 22

22

AMY

ELDER FINISHES HIS STORY AS WE ENTER THE CITY. I WANT TO say something to comfort him, but this memory happened years ago, and there’s nothing to really say, anyway.

I’ve never been this far into the City before. The whole Feeder Level looks different now, in the middle of the day, even though there’s not that much difference in the solar lamp between morning, when I used to run, and day—this false sun doesn’t move across the sky, doesn’t paint the horizon with pink and orange and blue.