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apartment. The electric shock had bunched up the muscles on her right side, especially in her arm. She limped as quickly as she could to the girl’s room, which looked empty, but the door to the closet was ajar.
    Waverly opened it to find Serafina huddled in a ball on the middle shelf, hugging her knees to her chest, eyes screwed shut. She must have felt that strange tremor that went through the ship. Waverly placed a gentle hand on Serafina’s hip. The little girl opened her eyes, terrified at first, but she seemed relieved when she saw who had come for her.
    “We have to go,” Waverly said, and held out her good hand.
    Serafina took Waverly’s hand and followed her through the apartment and down the corridor toward the auditorium. Just as they entered the stairwell, the lights blinked out. Serafina’s fingernails dug into Waverly’s thumb. Waverly’s heart galloped from the shock she’d gotten. She thought she might be having a heart attack.
    The emergency lights came on, casting a dull orange glow over the metal staircase, and the girls started toward the auditorium.
    Waverly felt another shudder go through the ship—an aching groan in the metal itself. The air in the corridor started to move as though an invisible fan had been turned on.
    They turned the corner to see the auditorium, dimly lit. At first Waverly thought the other children must not have made it because there wasn’t a sound, a seeming impossibility if all two hundred and fifty children were really gathered into a single room.
    Slowly, Serafina and Waverly made their way toward the open doorway until they could see in.
    “Oh, thank God, they made it,” Waverly murmured.
    She saw Felicity huddled on the floor, surrounded by a dozen kindergartners, all of them focusing on a single point in front of them.
    When Waverly was about ten feet from the door, Felicity caught her eye. She shook her head, barely perceptibly, and held up one hand, telling Waverly and Serafina to stay where they were. Serafina stopped, but Waverly wanted to get a little closer so she could discern what Felicity was trying to say. She limped nearer to the open doorway and waved at Felicity to get her attention, but Felicity stubbornly would not look at her.
    Neither did Seth, whom Waverly could now see, looking angry—no, homicidal—in the corner of the room. He had his hand wrapped around one big-boned wrist, and he twisted the skin of his arm as though trying to unsheathe a sword.
    Waverly was about to back away from the doorway, ready to run away, when a man she’d never seen before appeared in front of her.
    “Well, hello,” the man said.
    Waverly blinked. She had never seen a stranger before.
    He wasn’t a tall man, and he had an ugly scar along the left side of his face that made a deep fissure when he smiled. He was holding an emergency landing weapon. Waverly recognized it from the training videos she’d watched in class. The weapons, guns they were called, were meant for use only in the unlikely event that there were hostile animals on New Earth. They lay locked in a vault in the deepest holds of the Empyrean. No one was permitted access to them.
    The man pointed the end of the weapon at Waverly’s face and shook it. “You know what this does, right?”
    Waverly nodded. If he pulled the trigger, a projectile from the gun would rip into her flesh and shatter her bones. It would kill her.
    Waverly looked again into the room and saw several strange men, about five of them, looking at her. She felt disoriented to see such unfamiliar features: brown almond eyes, chunky noses, white lips, chipped teeth. The men seemed about her mother’s age, maybe a little older, and they stood panting, waiting to see what she would do.
    The children crouched on the floor along the base of the stage, hugging themselves, hands gripping ankles, elbows on knees. They cowered away from the men.
    She tried to make sense of it: men holding guns in a room full of children. A part of her