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

definite familiarity between the Captain and her father. Clearly the men had been friends. The most troubling thing, though, was that Waverly had never known her father had anything to do with the discovery of phyto-lutein, the drug used to stimulate the women’s ovaries and create the next generation of the Empyrean crew. Her father had been a botanist, not a fertility specialist.
    But of course, phyto-lutein must have come from plants. Where else did any medications come from? And if her father had been part of the team that discovered the miraculous compound, why would Regina hide it? It didn’t make sense.
    Waverly looked pensively at her mother’s old com station, which was draped with scraps of material that had overflowed from the sewing table next to it. She cleared away the fabric and turned on the computer. A smell of burned dust filled the room, and Waverly realized that this machine had not been used since well before the attack.
    Waverly searched back through the ship’s logs, cursory records of every day since the beginning of the mission almost forty-three years ago. She scrolled to the date of the air-lock accident that had taken her father’s life and read the entry.
    Air lock 252 malfunctioned during routine maintenance mission to repair particulate damage to radio antenna 252. Dr. Galen Marshall, Dr. Melissa Ardvale, Dr. James McAvoy were sucked out of the lock in resulting explosive decompression.
    That was all?
    It was the most serious accident to have occurred on the Empyrean. There ought to be more written about it.
    Her fingers hovered over the keyboard, poised to start a search for any and all information about the accident, but this was precisely the sort of thing she didn’t want to think about, so she tucked the strange photo under a pile at the bottom of the box. Waverly spent the rest of the night sorting through old photos, arranging them in piles until her eyelids were impossible to hold up.
    The next moment, it seemed, she awoke on the couch surrounded by photographs. Her limbs felt loose and weak, her head bleary. Her stomach rumbled from emptiness, and she stood and stretched.
    She frowned as she looked over the piles she’d made, then quickly stuffed them into the box in no particular order. With everything going on, the last thing she needed was to be digging around in the ancient past. Besides, she needed a good breakfast. She had a tractor to repair in the cornfield—probably a busted gear shaft—and then she had to change the lubricant on three separate combines, all in different parts of the ship. It was a lot of work, and she was already tired. Plus, judging from the stress in her knees and the ache between her shoulders, Kieran had ordered another increase in acceleration. The excess gravity was getting to everyone, but no one complained. More than anything they wanted to catch up to the New Horizon and get their parents back. If they had to wear out their joints in the pursuit, so be it.
    As she dressed, her mind turned back to that photo of her father with Captain Jones, and that cursory report about her father’s death. It seemed as though details about the accident had been covered up, by Mason Ardvale, the Captain, even her own mother. Waverly left her quarters in a fog, walked with arms folded, head down, gaze on her own feet, remembering something Seth Ardvale had said to her before the attack: Friends of Captain Jones lead complicated lives.
    She was so preoccupied she never saw the slip of a boy who left the doorway opposite hers to follow her down the corridor.

 
    THE PAST
    Kieran stood over the lifeless form of Max Brent, staring at the drawn, cold face. The boy looked as though he’d been molded from gray plastic. Deep circles ringed his eyes, and his purple lips were pulled back in a mask of pain. A film of dried spittle had collected in the corners of the corpse’s mouth, and the artificial gravity pulled on his skin so that it collected in wrinkled bunches