by Erin Bowman
“Now, Amber!”
The medic pulled a blood transfusion field kit from the medkit and went to work. Soon there was a needle in Thea’s arm, her blood zipping through the tubing and into Coen. She held his hand through it all. Please stay with me, she begged. It’s like you said. I need you to stay. I don’t know how to do any of this alone anymore. Please stay. PLEASE.
His head lolled. His eyes struggled to focus on her, and it killed her to see him like this. “Thea,” he whispered. That was it. Just her name. She bent down, putting her forehead to his, cupping his face in her hands.
“Hang on, Coen.”
He was fading. She could feel him leaving her. His thoughts, his wants, everything—dissipating like fog, vanishing before her eyes.
“Don’t go,” she pleaded.
Then, like a rib snapping in her chest, their connection broke. The emptiness scorched her core and she gasped at the shock of it.
“No.” She was sobbing now, uncontrollable. “No.”
“I’m right here,” he said. His voice was strained, but stronger now somehow. “Thea, I’m right here.”
She pulled back. His heart had slowed to a healthier beat. The transfusion was working, but the silence in her head was endless.
Coen? she asked mentally, searching his eyes.
He remained silent.
“Coen?” she said again.
When he looked at her, she knew. It was written in his eyes, in the utter shock on his face. “I can’t reach you,” he said wearily. “I can’t hear your pulse.”
She threw herself at him, kissing him once, twice, again. She could pass it back to him. It was how he’d infected her, after all. She could do the same.
When he cringed in pain beneath her, she pulled away, searching his face. His brows were drawn, his eyes weary. He shook his head and the quiet was everywhere.
Coen’s world became a blur. There was an ambulance and stretchers and medical lights. Doctors. A fog that descended after someone mentioned the word surgery. The only constant through all of it was that Thea was gone. He couldn’t reach her, hear her. Couldn’t hear anything, really.
The doctors surrounding him were pulseless machines. Every light and color in the operating room seemed muted. And the very weight of his own body was unbearable. He felt like a shell of himself, a pathetic excuse for a human. The pain was so intense, seemingly endless.
When he came to after the surgery, she was still gone. The absence stung in his core. It was like leaving her behind on Kanna7 all over again, only this time, he didn’t even know where she was.
A pair of faces bent over his bed, blurry before coming into focus. It took him a moment to recognize them as his parents. “Coen,” his mom murmured, gathering him in her arms. Her shirt was soft and smelled of the fabric softener she always used. He smiled at the fact that he could recall something so inconsequential.
“Where’s Gina?” he managed.
“At Northside, across town.”
“How is she?”
His father laid his personal Tab on Coen’s bedspread. A picture of Gina filled the screen.
She didn’t look how Coen remembered her. The little meat she’d had left on her frame when he flew out for Black Quarry was gone. Now skin and bones, her complexion was sickly. Her collarbone was visible through her shirt, and the scarf he’d given her for her last birthday, deep blue with an octopus print, was wrapped around her head.
He gasped out a sob.
“She’s barely hanging on, but we spoke with a Trios official just this morning. There should be a settlement from your ordeal on Kanna7. We’d like to use some of the money for the treatment Gina needs.”
“Yes. Use all of it. Anything she needs,” Coen said. “Can I see her? I want to see her.”
His mother shook her head sadly. “You have another surgery scheduled for tomorrow. Maybe even a third, depending on how tomorrow’s goes. When you’re discharged, when they say it’s safe, it will be the first thing we do.”
Coen exhaled heavily, tears building in his eyes.
A salary from Black Quarry hadn’t provided the help Gina needed, but the contagion, in a way, had. All he’d suffered—all he’d endured—would be worthwhile if the settlement was enough to buy Gina the care she needed.
Coen’s mother brushed hair from his eyes and he drifted into a dreamless sleep.
Everything had gone to hell.
After watching the shuttle plummet to Eutheria, Nova had been called back to the Paradox battlecarrier. She’d considered avoiding the order and chasing after her friends, but the Trios’s military ships were finally flying into the vicinity and she hadn’t wanted to get blown from the sky.
Back on the carrier, news was awful.
Most of the drop pods had been destroyed. The few to make it on-planet were being rounded up by Eutheria’s local GDC branch and quarantined. Occupants proven to be healthy would be released. The others, terminated.
The entire flux drive crew—both Paradox’s and Casey’s fleets—was berated by Trios officials.
You should have alerted the Union, not staged a rogue mission.
This flux drive tech isn’t tested to UPC standards. You had no business jumping to our airspace.
A deadly outbreak that could have killed an entire system is completely on your hands!
It was on the Radicals’ hands, Nova maintained, but this was exactly why Paradox had acted as it did. There was no way of knowing if any of the officials berating them now were Radicals themselves. If they were, the only reason they’d helped was because of the contagion. Everyone had their own motives, and no one could accomplish those if they died.
Xenia Station eventually failed. The force fields blinked out and equipment flew from the docking bays, sucked into space. Paradox’s and Casey’s fleets were permitted to land on Eutheria. In part to avoid the various debris now in orbit around Eutheria, and also to make room for the GDC cleanup crew that would sweep the station.
Once on-planet, Nova sought out Naree Sadik. “You’re going to see Thea, right?” It was a question, even when Nova knew the answer. The woman had waited so long to see her daughter. If they’d survived that crash—and whispers around the battlecarrier suggested they did—Naree would be making demands to see her. “I want to come with you.”
“Don’t you have your own family to reunite with?”
Nova thought of her mother, who’d kicked her out of the house over a year earlier. “Thea and Coen and Amber are more family to me than my own blood. I guess that happens when you’ve been through what we have together.”
Naree gave an understanding smile and arranged for a car.
“I keep thinking about all those people on Xenia that we failed,” Nova said as they sped for a GDC building in downtown Hearth City. “We jumped to the station to contain things and look what happened.”
“It didn’t go as planned, but imagine what might have happened if we didn’t jump at all. The contagion would have gotten loose. People would have raced for the drop pods. And no one would have been there to stop them from traveling to Eutheria. The outbreak would have been disastrous.”
“But I jumped Coen and Amber into Xenia. That’s what caused the station to fail. The radiation. All those deaths are on my hands.”
“Once people started falling sick and attacking each other, people would have raced for the drop pods anyway.”
“But the station wouldn’t have failed. Maybe we’d have been able to save some of them.”
“And maybe if I never helped Sol make the flux drive, none of this would have happened. Thea would have grown up with a mother. Maybe she wouldn’t have taken the Hevetz internship, or become a host, or released the contagion while fighting for her life on Paramount.” Naree Sadik gave Nova a hard look. It was the kind of look she was used to getting from her own mother, and she wondered if all parents had this expression wired into their DNA. “You see why you can’t go down this route, trying to find the source of blame? I
have blamed myself for Thea’s predicament for years, but Sol is just as guilty. The world is a complicated place, Nova. People are complicated, too. Throw us all together and you get one horrible mess.”
The car rolled to a stop.
“Coen’s been taken to a Hearth City hospital. Apparently he suffered some pretty substantial injuries, but he’s been cured of Psychrobacter achli.”
“Cured?” Nova gaped. “How?”
“I don’t know those details yet, only that GDC took multiple blood samples from him and tried infecting those samples with various strains of Psychrobacter achli taken from the infected who made it to Eutheria via drop pod.” Nova must have looked startled because Naree added, “Don’t worry. Those subjects have been terminated, and it’s common practice for the GDC to maintain secure samples of any contagion of this magnitude. Regardless, Coen’s results are good news. It means a treatment—a cure—is possible.”
Nova was still gaping at the programmer, trying to make sense of this turn in events. Dr. Tarlow hadn’t managed to save Sullivan on Achlys. Nova’s cousin was dead, but now a treatment seemed possible? It broke her heart and also made it swell. It had been so long since she felt any semblance of hope, of safety.
Naree unbuckled and opened the car door. “I’m going to see my daughter. You’ll understand when I ask for a moment alone?”
Nova nodded. “I’ll see Amber first.”
Thea sat in a debriefing room, trying to make sense of everything. Coen had been cured.
It was something in her blood. It had to be.
Maybe each iteration of Psychrobacter achli was different. Once it found a home in a host, multiplying and spreading, maybe it mutated slightly, becoming unique to that person. Thea’s blood had successfully infected the teens Burke brought to Kanna7 because no version of the contagion existed in their system. But with Coen, another host . . . Maybe their unique versions of Psychrobacter achli had, for a lack of a better word, canceled each other out—destroyed each other.
Thea had cured him.
When she looked at it scientifically it wasn’t all that surprising. Antibiotics were created by finding an organism with a natural resistance to a certain bacteria, then isolating the right antibiotic compound and producing it on a large scale to be used as a drug. Thea was that organism. Her universal blood, already a host to Psychrobacter achli, had been the cure for another host.
It should have made her happy. An antibiotic could be made with this knowledge. Any host could be cured. Anyone infected by the disease might stand a chance as well, depending on how quickly antibiotics were administered and how fast they worked. There would be months of research and testing ahead of Galactic Disease Control, but it could mean protection for Eutheria and the entire UPC.
Because of this promising possibility, Thea told the GDC and Trios authorities everything. She left nothing out.
Black Quarry. Hevetz Industries. The Radicals. Kanna7 and Casey and the showdown on Xenia.
Still, she felt numb. She’d weathered the silence in her head for six weeks already. She’d never expected to have to do it again. And this time it wouldn’t come back. Even when she was eventually released and allowed to visit Coen, he’d still be distant. She could stand right before him and not know what he was thinking. She’d never hear him in her head again.
She hadn’t realized how intimate it had been, how truly close they were, until it was gone for good.
“There’s someone here to see you,” the official questioning her said. Thea couldn’t remember his department. After the first three interviews, they’d all started to blend together.
She nodded numbly.
The man left.
A woman took his place.
“Are you the last one, because I really—” Thea fell silent when she looked up.
“Althea?” The sound of her voice triggered a million memories. Thea had already experienced this once with Coen as her proxy, but being on this end of the experience was beyond words. She leapt from the seat, threw her arms around her mother, and cried into her chest.
In that moment she cried for everything. Their lost time. All she’d weathered on Achlys and Kanna7. The broken bond. She didn’t care if her mother’s first impression of her was that she was weak and a child. Thea wanted to be exactly those things. She wanted to relish the feeling of this embrace. Above all, she wished she was still naive enough to believe that her mother could fix everything.
Nova was permitted to step inside the windowless questioning room only if she put on a suit.
“I’ve been in close contact with her for weeks and I’m not sick,” she snapped at the GDC officer. “Neither is anyone on Casey. I’m not putting on a damn suit. I want to see her.”
“You have to keep your distance, then.”
“Fine.”
The officer opened the door. Nova stepped through.
Amber straightened quickly, chair skidding back. Her strawberry hair hung at her chin, limp and flat from the theatrics of the past day. Her cheeks were flushed with heat, but her shoulders sagged slightly, like the effort to hold herself tall was draining. There was a bandage at the crook of her left arm, an empty IV rack in the corner of the room. She’d suffered radiation poisoning, according to the GDC officer.
Nova wanted to say how sorry she was for the missile that took down Amber’s shuttle, but Naree’s warning about trying to find the source of blame echoed in her head. It hadn’t been Nova’s fault, not truly. Powell was flying. Someone else had fired the shots. Nova had done her best—done all she could—and it hadn’t been enough. Sometimes, that was just the way of it.
She wanted also to say that she was sorry for being an ass on Casey. It seemed so petty now, to hold Amber at a distance because of jealousy or envy or whatever it had been.
“I’ve never been good at needing other people,” Nova said, knowing she had to start somewhere, “and I needed you a lot. During the coma, the healing and PT, getting off Kanna7. I needed you so much and it went against everything I pride myself on.”
“I know.” Amber’s voice sounded smaller than Nova remembered. “I needed you, too, though. You were right about my suit and Xenia. I suffered some pretty bad radiation poisoning. I think I only survived because of the . . .” She gazed at her front, as though she could see the contagion pumping through her veins.
“Right. Well, it’s good to need someone,” Nova said.
“Is that what you’ve figured out?”
“Yeah. Of course. I mean, it’s good to not need need someone, but it’s nice to have backup. To know someone else will be there for you when the time comes. I always thought I was attracted to the wrong people. Turns out I was just picking people who didn’t want to need someone else, too.”
“Oh, I don’t need anybody,” Amber said, smiling. “I love lonely, depressing solitude.”
She winked, and that’s what did it.
Nova strode forward, closing the space between them. She’d clamped a palm over Amber’s mouth and kissed the back of her own hand before the GDC official had caught up and pulled Nova back.
Amber just stood there, smiling as she touched her lips.
“Do you realize how stupid that was?” the official roared.
“I’ve never been the best with quick thinking,” Nova said. “That’s Amber’s area of expertise.”
“Thea’s pretty good, too,” Amber admitted.
Nova shook her head, laughing. “Forgive me for favoring you.”
Thea was allowed to visit the hospital after three days of interrogation. In reality, they’d wanted to keep her there for another two, but her mother had put her foot down. Sometimes it was nice to be a minor, Thea reasoned as the escort car combed the busy Hearth City streets. There were perks to having a guardian who could fight battles on your behalf.
When she stepped out of the car to face the hospital, her stomach was unsteady. The sun was brilliant and foreign. Too bright. She hated that she’d adjusted to artificial light
ing in the past months, that a brilliant blue sky and thick humid air felt strange.
Thea walked through the automatic doors and into the lobby, where a receptionist told her how to find Coen.
“Do you want me to come with you?” her mom asked.
Thea shook her head. She had to do this alone. Or, as alone as she could, given the two GDC officials who now followed her everywhere.
“I’ll wait in the lobby.” One of the officers put a finger to his ear, then leaned in and whispered something to Naree. Her smile vanished. “Turns out they have a few more questions for me back at GDC headquarters.”
“Go on,” Thea said. “I’ll meet you there.”
She watched her mother hustle off, one of the officers ushering her to the exit. The other trailed Thea to the elevator, then down Coen’s floor. She kneaded her hands as she walked, feeling skittish. Heartbeats were audible from each room she passed, some weaker than others, and Thea was stung again by the realization that Coen could no longer hear this symphony of life. She couldn’t give the gift back to him even if she wanted to. Her mother had explained how additional tests had been run on samples of Coen’s blood.
Coen wasn’t just cured. He was immune.
She planned to be the same one day, when the right treatment was developed. It was too dangerous to live like this, posing a constant threat to others. Even now, Thea was forced to wear a mask in the hospital despite the fact that the contagion wasn’t passed by air.
When she reached Coen’s door, she paused. What would she say? What if everything was different? Maybe the only reason they’d even been close was because of the bacteria—their bond.
She knocked before she could lose her nerve. No one answered. Pushing the door open, Thea edged her way inside. The bed was empty, but he couldn’t have checked out. He’d had his final surgery just yesterday, the receptionist had told her. Maybe something had gone wrong—maybe there were complications the woman hadn’t known about.
“Hey.”