Reclaimed

by Madeleine Roux

  Of all the cruel things Preece Ives had done to her, maybe the cruelest was not killing her like he had done the others. After that much death and tragedy, everyone on Earth and the stations and the colonies wanted a scapegoat.

  They got Senna.

  “He’s not all bad,” Senna whispered. She sensed, in fact, that Agent Tiwari had a soft spot for her, that he could tell she was brittle, and that one question too far, one step over the line, and she would crack and break. Maybe for good.

  She opened the package and wrapped the monitor around her wrist. Even lightweight and cushioned, it felt odd on her wrist, more like a shackle than a fashion and technology accessory. Agent Tiwari had chosen the popular rose-gold model.

  “Damn. That’s nice, my model isn’t nearly as flash,” Marin said.

  “You can have it.”

  “And get tracked by SA for the rest of my life? No thanks.”

  Senna smirked. “I think that ship has sailed.”

  “Maybe, but this will all blow over eventually,” Marin told her, squeezing her shoulder again. “You and I won’t forget, but everyone else will move on. I guarantee it, you’ll be shocked how fast people stop caring.”

  The flat front surface of the VIT resting on top of her wrist lit up as soon as it touched the warmth of her skin. A greeting in twelve languages appeared in white text on a black background, then dissolved to let her know that no unlinked AR implants were detected in the vicinity, asking if she would like to proceed with setup manually.

  “Maybe this is a good thing,” Senna said with a shrug. “If I get into Paxton Dunn’s program, I’ll be on Ganymede, and I’ll miss you. At least I can use this for messaging, since I don’t have my own terminal.”

  Marin grinned with her blue teeth and raised her cup. “That’s the first silver lining you’ve found in a while.”

  The VIT, as it turned out, was already registered to her, and it only took a few quick password inputs tapped out by hand to link the tech to the messaging address Marin had helped her create. New emails were waiting, blinking, a faint, happy chime indicating as much.

  “Another alert from Tiwari,” Senna snorted. “They’re never going to let the implant thing drop, and they’re going to start fining me if I don’t comply.” Fining her money she didn’t have. Her eyes roamed the short distance to the other unread message, and her heart felt like it was expanding in her chest. No. It wasn’t possible. Already? “But maybe I can outrun them . . .”

  Marin scooted closer, trying to crane her neck and see the little interface on Senna’s VIT. She smelled like blueberries and hairspray. “What do you mean?”

  “There’s an alert from Dunn’s office,” Senna whispered, hardly believing it herself. “They’ve already approved me for the experiment. I’m going to Ganymede, Marin. They want me to leave this week.”

  5

  Zurri had sent the rider ahead with what she required on Ganymede, now all that remained to be seen was if playboy hermit extraordinaire himself Paxton Dunn had listened.

  Lying on the reclining seat in her private cabin, Zurri began to have her doubts. She had dealt with his kind before. Whatever Dunn’s definition of luxury was, he would assume Zurri shared it. Typical billionaire, typical male. If there was someone out there with higher standards than hers, she had yet to meet them. His being absurdly rich didn’t mean anything. Plenty of wealthy recluses lived in performative squalor, choosing to stay on Earth in the flood or desolation zones, acting like their “modest” homes weren’t, in fact, state-of-the-art bunkers with emergency protocols for immediate airlift in case anything really went wrong. They liked to act out the rugged fantasy, and to her it seemed gaudier than just showing their privilege plainly.

  So far, Dunn hadn’t disappointed. It was obvious he wanted her in the program, and badly. His invitation to join the experiment in earnest on Ganymede had come through less than two hours after her initial consultation at the little office on Tokyo Bliss. They had cleared out everyone except for one receptionist for her visit. The cruiser he (or more likely, his people) had arranged for her transfer from the station to the Ganymede satellite had been adequate—the temperature controls fixed at a languid twenty-five degrees Celsius, a cashmere robe and fluffy slippers made available, and her private cabin came stocked with more actual champagne, green tea, activated nuts, and frozen cacao-and-spinach-smoothie pucks than she could possibly consume over the length of the flight.

  A refreshing detox IV and meditation tracks kept her company for the launch, a technician—provided gratis by Dunn—joining her in the dark, warm room to provide a microneedling treatment of her own plasma, a light dermal infusion, and then a chilled antibacterial mask to help with the swelling. She would arrive on Ganymede fresher than a hydroponic daisy. When her facial was done, the technician strapped Zurri in for the more jarring, dangerous FTL portion of the trip, and left to buckle up elsewhere.

  While Zurri drifted to sleep to the sound of gongs and fingertips whispering musically across copper water bowls, she wondered if the other program participants were on her same transfer. She wouldn’t see them, of course—Bev had made it abundantly clear that Zurri was not to be transported, treated or housed with the other patients, the trade-off for Zurri signing what Bev described as “an NDA that made a noncompete modeling contract feel like a breezy beach read.”

  Zurri had promised to skim the NDA herself, and meant to on the trip before she fell asleep, but the gongs were so soothing and she was exhausted, so the NDA would have to wait until she arrived on-site. Of course, Bev had warned that if anything wasn’t up to Zurri’s standards once she reached the Ganymede facility, it might be too late to pull out of the experiment. The NDA and contracts had included information about the frequent, turbulent storms on Ganymede. Flights in and out, even just shuttle drop-offs, were tightly regulated and subject to last-minute cancellation if weather shifted.

  With one foot inside the private ramp to the shuttle, Bev had apologized until she went hoarse. “I’m awful, Zurri, the worst. I should be going with you,” Bev had said, wiping mascara tracks off her cheeks. “I know you won’t admit it, but you’re fragile right now. You shouldn’t be alone. You need someone.”

  “You let his call through,” Zurri had pointed out, adjusting her oversized sunglasses and pivoting toward the ship. They were beginning to call general boarding, and as a policy, Zurri wanted to be settled before the corridors were flooded. A fan could be in the crowd, and she didn’t need that. “You let his call through and now I’m supposed to have second thoughts? What do I pay you to do exactly, Bev? Change your mind? Inconvenience me?”

  “You’re right. Of course you’re right. I just thought Dunn would let me come with you is all.” Bev sniffled and fanned at her own tearstained face, and Zurri was struck by the possibility that Bev was crying because she, too, wanted the exclusive experience of meeting Dunn face-to-face. Her tears were for lost opportunities, not Zurri’s fragility. Bev hurried on. “But you’re not fragile, are you? You’re strong. I know you’re strong. And this is good, right? It’s like a retreat. I would leak it but Dunn would sue me into the next galaxy.”

  “Let me work on him,” Zurri told her with an easy smile, swinging her bag onto her shoulder. She only carried a single, shell-shaped handbag. Her larger bags had already been brought aboard by a porter. “A little press for him, a little press for me. Everyone wins.” She softened, because in the end, Bev wasn’t terrible, and if Dunn really could change Zurri’s memories, then this was more than just a win, it was possibly a new lease on life. “Stop crying, Bev. It will be fine. I’ll contact you when I’m at the facility, all right? And I’ll make sure to take plenty of pics. You never know, something might leak.”

  She winked at her assistant, and Bev gave a squawk of a laugh. Then it was time to go, quickly, while things felt easier and Bev had managed to smile through the ghoulish black-and-tan streaks o
f her eye makeup and foundation.

  Lying on the transport, Zurri blinked up into the darkness. Maybe she ought to glance at that NDA. It was lights-out in the cabin, but an encrypted copy of the NDA and contract had been downloaded to her VIT. Bad on the eyes, she thought, to read in the dark. Did she really want to be confronted with the 187 unread emails lurking in her inbox? If she spotted something annoying in the NDA, it would just make her more anxious, but maybe she ought to be informed, that was the adult way to approach it . . . And then the hard, heavy kick of the FTL came and the whole ship thrummed with gathering energy and Zurri lost the urge to look. After all, they had launched, the time to change her mind had come and gone. The flight accommodations were nice enough, and more than that, she wanted to go.

  What she hadn’t told Bev was that Dunn could be housing them in a tin shack on the moon to run this little experiment and she probably would have said yes. Tokyo Bliss Station felt claustrophobic. She was done with her same condo and her same life, and her same routine and her same ass-kissing staff, and her same nightmares and the same constant, low hum of anxiety that only drugs like Rapture and U4ya could obliterate. Sometimes, she remembered that her life was only real to herself. Nobody else on station levels one through ten could even imagine it. Their dreams could extend far, she thought, but not that far. Doors were open to her that simply did not exist to others. A cyber-utopia level in one of the AR domes was the closest they could come, but even the programmers designing those things didn’t know what she had access to—food, clothes, drinks, drugs, condos, vacations, flights, cosmetic procedures that were too expensive for anyone, but free for her. She had worked so, so hard to be able to afford anything, but now, at the tippy top, she didn’t have to pay for any of it.

  Pure accumulation. A numbing drag. But Tony . . . Tony had made the numbness go away, punched a hole right through it. She was shockingly alive again and feeling things, and she knew she couldn’t go back to the numbness, but the new world of constant pain was impossible, too.

  There had to be a middle—had to be—a place to exist between nothingness and too muchness.

  What she didn’t tell Bev or her therapist or her friends was that when she had walked onto the set of Daily Bliss to record her segment, she had noticed things tearing at the edges. It was like a bad trip. She could see the film of excitement and worship and fame peeling away at the corners. It was like a veneer, a sticker, and it could come away from where it stuck to reality and trap her beneath, vacuum sealing her inside, all of it suffocating and isolating.

  Zurri told herself to go to sleep. Commanded it. She hated being awake for FTL travel, but her mind wouldn’t stay quiet. Her anxiety spun up, jumping from thought to thought, memory to memory. In the early days of her modeling career, a start-up on the station had offered her the chance to experience their new full-body laser resurfacing treatment. Ordinarily, it would’ve cost way more than she could afford at the time, but they just wanted an endorsement in exchange for the service. Zurri had found herself lying down in what felt like a sandwich press, like the old-time suntanning beds from the 1990s Earth vids. The treatment itself wasn’t wholly unpleasant, but she hated the sensation of being trapped in there, and after forty-five minutes the timer never chimed, so she pushed on the edges of the lid and it wouldn’t budge. Nobody heard her screaming and struggling for fifteen minutes while the laser kept firing against her skin and the panic rose, a pulsing, living thing in her throat that threatened to grow until she choked. Buried alive. Burned to cinders. She was going to die. What would it feel like to die by a million fine lasers? Would it smell? Would it be like roasting in an oven?

  Finally, when the staff let her out, she had cried on the floor in between bouts of screaming at them. After her skin healed, her manager at the time told her to give the endorsement anyway. She did.

  Maybe, she thought, Paxton Dunn could snip that memory out of there, too, while he was poking around in her brain. She closed her eyes, hoping to sleep. Halos of fire burst around the edges of the darkness, and she smelled burning flesh.

  Zurri groped for the attendant assistance button hidden on the underside of her armrest. The technician from before came running back into her cabin, but Zurri could just barely make her out in the darkness. Everything on the ship trembled, and she saw the woman struggle to keep upright. She wasn’t even supposed to be out of her seat and unharnessed, but she broke the rules because it was Zurri.

  “Get me something that will put me to sleep,” Zurri muttered, feeling her jaw clench. Just like the gift Paxton Dunn promised, this would be a quick taking away. “Something strong,” she added. “Now.”

  6

  As was too often the case, Senna heard Preece’s words in her head, narrating her present with whispers from the past.

  “Every single day,” he liked to tell her, “you’re taking one more step toward a column of fire. Death is the fire. Every act of selflessness, every moment of service, is how you forge the armor you will need. Give enough, do enough, be enough, and by the time you’re inside that fire, you won’t feel a thing.”

  She saw him everywhere, and nowhere. He wasn’t a ghost haunting her so much as a gray wash painted across her life. Everything came to her through the filter of his influence. She saw him then as the drop shuttle approached Ganymede, detaching from the satellite in orbit and plunging her at heart-stopping speed toward the surface of the swirling, grayish marble below. His hair had been that color, once vibrantly blond but gone gray early, his beard the same dull and wispy shade.

  As the drop ship neared the surface, her stomach twisted. Any space travel made her nervous—the last time she had been in a ship, it was hurtling toward annihilation. Alone in her assigned cubicle, Senna squeezed her hands into fists and told herself the shaking and rocking of the transport was normal. Storms on the surface. Ice and wind. The transfer from Tokyo Bliss Station to the Ganymede satellite had been comfortable enough. Senna forced herself to stay awake, staring around at the other passengers wedged into coach alongside her—if she didn’t fall asleep, then she couldn’t wake to a shuttle full of dead bodies.

  She was the only passenger to stop off at the Ganymede satellite. Not a popular destination, it seemed, and she couldn’t help but wonder if that meant she was the only person so far admitted to the experimental program there. For some reason, she had expected there to be a few other passengers on her flight joining the experiment, but she had been told repeatedly that it was an exclusive opportunity, maybe the other candidates hadn’t done well during the mapping phase.

  Senna shook out her wrist, still adjusting to the idea of the VIT gleaming there. For her entire life, she had been told that such things were evil, not to be trusted. Phones and tablets and computers and VITs were a distraction, isolating humans from one another, taking up all their time and focus when they could be helping one another. It was a big fat joke, Preece told them in the compound, conveniences meant to connect us, but in the end it only drove us further apart.

  Believing it was easy when they ventured outside the compound on the station, and she watched pedestrians either squint down at their wrists or blink off into the distance, past one another, their eyes focused on the hundreds of neon augmented-reality advertisements vying for their attention.

  “Security bioscan complete. Passenger identity verified, guest protocols engaged. Welcome, Senna Slate, you are now entering the Nysa Shelf, destined for Merchantia Solutions Corporation testing facility Altus Quasar-1277, classification alpha, common name the Dome,” a pleasant, automated voice informed her. “Arrival is imminent; do not tamper with your safety harness until we have reached the moon’s surface. We are one hundred and twelve hours into the Ganymede time cycle, DT or Dome time sixteen twenty-six. Please enjoy your stay.”

  Senna had read about timekeeping on the moon during her flight from the station. A typical day cycle on Ganymede took just over seven Earth days to complete,
but inside Paxton Dunn’s dome complex, normal day-night cycles were observed, the environment artificially simulated morning, afternoon and evening sun, going so far as to shorten or elongate them for seasons, with added variation for cloudy and sunny days. A similar system could be found on Tokyo Bliss Station and any well-established colonies. That was a relief. She couldn’t imagine having to endure a single day that took an entire week.

  The shuttle itself was small, very small, hardly larger than the evac pod she had used to survive the Dohring-Waugh crash. It seated a dozen passengers in individual, upright, closet-like cubicles. Strapped in at an angle, one could choose from a few programs about their destination, or the news in several languages, or animated soap operas. Senna had chosen silence, obsessively listening for any sign of distress, any hint that they were going down . . . A small, circular window to her left gave her a view of Ganymede speeding up toward them. The craft rattled mercilessly, making her teeth clatter, but no alarms sounded, and the shuttle rapidly decelerated, almost floating with momentary, balletic grace before rocking against the ground.

  A field of pure, silvery white greeted her, mist swirling against the window. For a moment, it looked as if they had touched down in a bowl of steam, with no hint of civilization for miles and miles . . . But then she noticed the fog dissipating, blasted away from a single, perfect dome structure across the open space of the landing zone. It glowed, clear and bright, like a bead of water clinging to the edge of a silver ornament. Whenever the skirt of mist gathered too close to the Dome, some propulsion system dispersed it again, revealing the structure defiantly, as if it were in constant conflict with the icy winds threatening to swallow it up.