Spark: A Sky Chasers Novel by Amy Kathleen Ryan Read Free Book Online

back and shaking his head. He was awake again.
    When the elevator arrived, Seth dragged the boy into it and pressed the button for the infirmary level before jumping back into the corridor. As the doors closed, he said again, “Remember to tell them, Max!”
    Max nodded at Seth as the elevator doors closed between them.
    Seth jogged for the outer stairwell, his mind racing. All along he’d thought the thruster misfire had been a diversion Max had set up to hide his escape from the brig. But what if their escape was the diversion? What if the misfire, and pushing the Empyrean off course, what if that was the real point, and whoever did it wanted to cast blame on Seth and Max?
    Who would do this?
    Seth disappeared into the freezing air of the outer stairwell.
    He never knew that by the time Max Brent’s elevator reached the infirmary, the boy had lost consciousness.
    That night he was deep in a coma.
    By morning, Max was dead.

 
    GALEN AND EDDIE
    Waverly dragged herself back to her quarters after a long day taking apart a tractor engine, looking for the reason it wouldn’t run, finding nothing, and putting it back together again. She’d gotten nothing accomplished, but it had taken all her mental power, and that’s all she wanted.
    With nothing else to do and nowhere to be, she went back to her empty apartment. The door closed behind her with a final-sounding thunk. She hung her tool belt on the hook by the door. One day the heavy tools would pull that hook right out of the wall. Repairing it would give her something to do at home other than brood …
    … And wonder where Seth Ardvale was. Surely he would contact her eventually? If he did, she should know ahead of time what she would say to him, how she would act. But her mind was a blank. Too much had happened. She didn’t know Kieran anymore; she didn’t even know herself. Who could say what this new Waverly would do if Seth Ardvale came knocking?
    After she got dressed for bed, she made herself a cup of chamomile tea, then went into the living room to drink it. She lovingly touched her mother’s abandoned loom, paused for months now on the same aqua-colored stripe of an elaborate wool blanket, half-finished. The wool smelled earthy and clean, and the rough texture was comforting against the tender skin of her wrist.
    “You’ll finish it,” she whispered, and set her tea down on the dining-room table, where she knew it would leave a ring. She didn’t care. There ought to be some proof that a human being was living here.
    She went into her pitch-dark bedroom and plopped onto her mattress, stared at the black outline of the Raggedy Ann doll that had sat in the rocking chair opposite her bed since she was a baby. The doll used to frighten her when she was a little girl. She never liked toys that were meant to be children; there was something morbid about them. But now the doll was Waverly’s favorite thing to look at as she fell asleep, because her mother had made it for her.
    Waverly screwed her eyes shut, tried to block out her last conversation with Kieran, the dark way he’d looked at her from over his tented fingers. They’d reached a sort of détente, but she saw the calculating way he watched her leave his office. Some strange alchemy had changed him into someone who placed her on the outside, in the enemy camp, as if he’d never known her at all.
    But then, hadn’t she come to feel that way about him, too?
    It was useless; she’d never sleep like this. She got up and went into the master bedroom, where she turned on the light. Her mother’s double bed had remained rumpled and unmade ever since the day of the attack. Looking at the messy room helped Waverly believe that her mother would come back someday to straighten the bedclothes, hang her nightgown on the hook by the door, put her rouge and lip balm in the top drawer of the dresser, dust the framed picture of Waverly that hung on the wall.
    She wished she could talk to her mother about Seth.