Reclaimed

by Madeleine Roux

  She watched a sturdy, squat, self-driving rover trundle across the LZ, extending a tunnel to the shuttle, bumping it gently when the walkway sealed to the door and pressurized. Her ears popped, and the harness snug against her chest went slack. This was it. She was about to step out of the shuttle and into that rover, and then that rover would take her to the complex. Even with the Dome right there, with evidence of Ganymede being somewhat settled, she felt like an explorer embarking on a grand and terrifying adventure. She felt groundless, and terrified, and alive.

  The VIT on her arm, though almost weightless, felt like a hindrance. Okay, prove Preece wrong. Prove you’re useful and desirable, and not a tool of evil.

  Senna waited for directions, and lifted her VIT up, finding the message from Paxton Dunn she had saved. He had reached out personally to send the NDA and contracts, but also to invite her officially to the program. That was a huge deal, Marin said. The Paxton Dunn. She even showed the message to Jonathan, proof that the man was real.

  “Anybody could have written that,” Jonathan had responded, flippant, possibly offended. “It doesn’t prove anything.”

  But Senna chose to believe a real human being had sent the message. She liked it, and reading it over again calmed some of the roiling in her midsection. The shuttle rocked from side to side again, and at any moment she would need to board the rover. She didn’t know if it was time to crap her pants or vomit.

  Ms. Slate:

  It’s my absolute pleasure to tell you that your neural-mapping exercise was a success. I think you’re the perfect candidate for this experiment, really I do. Just fantastic. Obviously, the final decision is up to you, but I think we could help you out. From what Kris tells me, you’re carrying around a terrible burden. We can lighten the load for you, and I hope you’ll let us.

  We’ve put together a special team on Ganymede, the best of the best. We’re dealing with your memories here, and those are precious, so I personally ensure that the staff here are trained, discreet and dedicated. This isn’t something I say lightly, Ms. Slate—we’re going to change the world with our work here, and I’d love for you to change it with us.

  Between you and me? It’s honestly just cool as hell. Come check it out.

  Awaiting your response,

  Paxton

  Senna couldn’t put her finger quite on why, but she already liked him. Just an acceptance letter to the program written by Kris or anyone at the company would have been fine, but a busy, sought-after, famous billionaire scientist was personally inviting her to do something incredible. If he succeeded, if he could carefully excise the memories that paralyzed people, that drove them to self-harm and suicide and addiction, then he was right, he really could change the world. The universe.

  What kind of person would she be, she mused, watching the automated door to her cubicle slide open, without so much pain? Would she get up earlier? Attack the day with more energy? Would she take up a sport or start painting again? Maybe she would find love, or forgiveness, or even just the bravery to leave Marin’s apartment and explore the station. There were museums and arcades, places to shop, people to meet, things to smell and taste and buy. Maybe she would actually get to Earth, think about tracking down her ancestors . . .

  One step at a time, Senn, you’re not even off the shuttle yet.

  She stood and collected her nylon cross-body bag from the locked compartment under the window. There wasn’t much for her to bring. Preece had insisted they incinerate most of their possessions before they boarded their doomed flight, and Senna only had a few lipsticks and a hairbrush that Marin had gifted her, along with a single packed bag of clothes, also hand-me-downs from a local thrift place on the station. Senna didn’t know anything about fashion or makeup; none of it had mattered on the compound.

  The tunnel leading to the rover was wobbly, shivering from the constant, oppressing winds. She hurried and all but hurled herself into the little car, landing on a hard plastic seat with a belt sized for someone much tinier. Senna just gripped the handrails molded into the plastic and waited, then yelped softly as the tunnel detached from the cylindrical shuttle, and the rover began its gradual, bumpy drive back across the landing zone to the complex.

  A gray, mottled marble up in space and the same down on the surface . . . Here I am, Senna mused, on a moon a lifetime away from the station. All of this is technology’s doing. What would Preece say if he could see me now?

  Ugly things, she knew. Confining things. The same kinds of pronouncements that had kept her in a cage of thoughts for twenty-odd years. Preece Ives was a doctor and a scholar, a natural leader, a tall, erect man with the booming voice and commanding presence that made people stop and look when he entered a room. He had seen the devastation of Earth and then had gone to space, and up on the station he had witnessed a different kind of devastation.

  “You cannot build a paradise on God’s Earth or in God’s heavens” was part of his favorite speech, the one he gave to recruit. “Everything humans build is just a monument to greed and hubris.”

  Senna thought of them all as a family, but she knew what it really was: a cult. When the articles and blogs and takes started rolling out after the crash, Senna read them all. She couldn’t help it. She slurped them down like bitter medicine. Cult, cult, cult. Everyone said it, and it had to be true, even if the word always made her flinch. Preece started gathering the family to him when he still had the position and power of a pediatrician, and when he officially broke away from the hospital it took a long time for anyone to realize what he was really doing.

  “A monument to greed and hubris,” Senna murmured, staring out at the swirling silver mists. “That’s what you were building. A monument to yourself.”

  The Dome rose up out of the fog like a shining city, futuristic and unreal, something straight out of the vids or the arcades. It generated its own pretty light, glowing from within, like a little kid with a secret, like a promise poised just behind loose lips.

  The rover slowed down. They were approaching the pressurized doors. Unexpectedly, Senna could see dozens of exotic, leafy plants clustered on the other side of the barrier, the glass filmed with dense humidity,

  What would Preece say if he could see me now?

  Senna unbuckled her seat belt and told herself she didn’t care.

  7

  The portal to the Dome sealed shut behind her with a loud, pneumatic hiss, the light blasting from farther down the tunnel-like walkway making her pupils flare huge. A long, clear tube led into the Dome proper, and now, inside, she watched the icy mists breathe against the edge of the barrier separating her from the unbreathable atmosphere. She felt on the cusp and took tiny steps, clinging to her meager bag of personal belongings. Light at the end of the tunnel, she thought. What a cliché! But maybe she could’ve come empty-handed, because each small step felt like it was bringing her toward an unknown as final and strange as death.

  The tunnel rattled, hard, chips of silicate and ice peppering the barrier to her right. The storms. The information she had read on the flight over had mentioned the changing weather patterns on Ganymede repeatedly—raging gusts along the Nysa Shelf made travel to and from the campus dangerous, sometimes leaving Paxton Dunn and the Dome staff effectively stranded. So this was to be expected, Senna told herself. And then the sirens began.

  The tunnel went dark. True, cold fear swept over her, and Senna hugged her bag and herself tightly, hunching over as a strip of bright red LEDs crackled to life along the edges of the tunnel floor.

  “Please remain calm,” a disembodied male voice told her. “The facility is detecting extreme wind activity. Please remain calm and follow instructions.”

  Massive, curved shutters rose up around the tunnel, snapping together at the top and plunging her into deeper darkness. Senna winced from the nearness and strength of the sirens, the high wooooop-wip-wooooop sending shock waves from her ears to the back
of her neck. She decided it was safer to get away from the doors, even if they were sealed, and shuffled clumsily down the tube toward the Dome’s interior, the red strips of light on the floor leaving smudges behind her eyelids when she blinked.

  Even as the voice implored her, she didn’t feel at all calm. Larger chunks of ice slammed into the tunnel, the impact loud enough to rise even above the deafening sirens. She hurried on, and looked into the thick shadows ahead, wishing the little crimson strips on her left and right would illuminate anything at all. Instead, she stared into a yawning chasm. The way ahead smelled lush and wet, heady like the hydroponic vegetable fields on the station. More slabs of ice pelted the tunnel, driving her under the final archway and into a larger area. She sensed the walls and ceiling falling away, and when the emergency lights on the ground pulsed, she saw fragments of what lay all around her—plants and statues, things that might be pleasant enough in the daylight but that made twisted, untrustworthy shadows in the dark.

  Senna stopped, afraid to walk farther and trip over something. The automated voice hadn’t given her further instructions, and so she shivered, and winced, and waited. A shape up ahead became more real, a silhouette firming up, like a shadow detaching from the rest and giving itself sentience and form. It came toward her, vaguely human-shaped, hunched and moving quickly, with rapid, stuttering steps and then leaps. Senna began to back away, but then it was right in front of her, and it stole her breath away. The sirens. The red glow. It was happening again all around her—the death, the crash, the end of her own life as she knew it.

  What is this? What are you?

  This was a terrible, twisted thing, and not like any of the nightmares or traumas or human beings that had given her fear before. This came from somewhere else, a place without a name or a culture or an origin. I’m on a distant moon, far away from home, and a thing of no origin has found me.

  She opened her mouth to scream. Whatever it was, she wanted to be away from it. Every knowing sinew in her body told her to run. But where? Where could she go?

  A hand closed around her wrist and squeezed, and then Senna really did shriek.

  “Hey! It’s all right. Hey, hey, don’t panic! I’m here, I’m here . . .”

  It was a different male voice, lightly accented, warm and friendly. British maybe. He said those words, I’m here, I’m here, as if that would soothe her and have meaning. His hand was gentle and his skin humid. A light rose from his wrist, a flash from his VIT monitor showing his face. Utterly human and mostly unremarkable, not a thing of no origin at all, just a man with thick black glasses and wavy dark hair.

  “Jesus! Not the sort of welcome I had planned,” the man said, offering her an apologetic smile and ducking his head. “But that’s how it is here on Ganymede, yeah? Unpredictable.”

  Then he touched something on his VIT, and bright white light filtered through the space around them, illuminating what felt like a snow globe full of leaves and stardust. Senna was still shaking, ricocheting from terror to awe in an instant.

  “Paxton Dunn,” he said, extending his hand.

  It took Senna a moment to come back to herself. She flexed her jaw, slowly lowering her bag and staring at his hand, the hand that had touched her a second earlier. “I thought I saw something in the darkness . . .”

  “Just me, I’m afraid,” he said with a chuckle. Finally, she took his hand. “I’m sorry you had to get a scare like that right off the jump. The windstorms have been getting worse lately. We shored up the safety shutters before you all arrived, so there’s nothing to worry about. The alerts can be jarring, though, and for that I apologize.”

  Senna had liked his kind message inviting her to join the experiment, but now that Paxton Dunn was in front of her, she wasn’t sure she liked him. The man. It was a mean instinct, but her initial thought of him was that nobody really liked him. When he let go of her hand and smiled again, it never touched the corners of his eyes. His teeth were flat white and too even to be real. His heathered gray shirt had been tucked in all the way around except for one tiny corner that still bore a thumbprint in the fabric.

  “I’m Senna,” she murmured, tucking a strand of hair nervously behind her ear. “But you know that. I’m sure you know everything about me.”

  “Not everything,” he said, laughing again. “But quite a lot, yes. I hope that’s not creepy?”

  It is now that you said it that way.

  “No, no,” she said, still shaken. “I just . . . I need a moment, sorry. I don’t do well with the lights and the sirens.”

  “Jesus, of course you don’t. Of course! Anju!” he suddenly barked, making her jump. “Anju! Can I get some water for Ms. Slate? Where is that . . .” Paxton Dunn trailed off, turning a tight circle, putting both fists into his hair. He turned back to Senna, biting his lip with concentrated fury. “This is such a bad first impression. Mortifying. Jesus, mortifying.”

  The click-clack of high heels echoed throughout the expansive dome-like structure, tall and airy as a cathedral. Senna took a few gulping breaths, noticing that the tall, prehistoric plants and statues around her weren’t so menacing in the glaring light of a fully lit afternoon. Birdsong began to filter quietly and cheerfully through the space. The floor beneath her feet was tiled a turquoise blue and white, like something from a fancy vacation. A woman came flying around one of the bobbling, moistened plants, a slim cylinder of water in one hand, a tablet in the other. She had the perfectly coiffed and made-up precision of a highly organized person, like Marin but with more expensive shoes. Wearing a tight white two-piece suit, she had to take dainty, zigzagging steps in her pencil skirt.

  “There!” Paxton snatched the water out of the woman’s hand as if he had been waiting for six hours and not six minutes. The woman didn’t react, apparently accustomed to this sort of behavior. She waited patiently a step behind him, her huge, tawny eyes fixed on Paxton’s back, just below his shoulder blade.

  “Do you need to sit? We can take you somewhere to sit,” Paxton said, offering her the water.

  Senna looped her bag over one elbow and took the glass with both hands, watching it tremble in her grasp.

  “You’re overwhelming her,” the woman, Anju, remarked mildly. “Is he overwhelming you?”

  Nodding, Senna glanced away from Paxton, feeling somehow ungracious. He couldn’t control the weather. The storm hitting and triggering the alert system was just bad timing, and Senna felt suddenly sheepish for overreacting.

  “I’m not always this jumpy,” she promised softly, sipping the water. It helped.

  “It’s okay if you are,” Anju assured her, coming forward, dodging around Paxton and taking Senna by the elbow. Steering her through the wandering maze of tiles in the foyer, or lobby, or courtyard, she took Senna to a low slab bench between two free-form nude sculptures. A suspended walkway hung above them, seemingly floating there like magic.

  Senna collapsed, grateful to be off her feet.

  “He’s a genius,” Anju told her with a pinched smirk. “But not always the best with people.”

  “What was that?” Paxton had joined them, and rested his hands on his waist, gazing down at Senna with the same laser-focused energy as Anju. Senna couldn’t help it, she kept looking at the obvious place he had tugged on his shirt to make it look rumpled and messy by design.

  “Just girl talk,” Anju replied breezily, tipping back her chin. She was shorter than Paxton in her heels by about an inch. Her hair, a slightly deeper brown than her skin, was braided in an intricate design across the top of her head, not a flyaway or bit of frizz in sight. She looked at home in the killer heels, well-developed calves keeping her balanced on the stilts.

  If Paxton was messy by design, Anju, by contrast, could have been immaculate by design.

  “Anju is our staff coordinator,” Paxton explained, giving her a cool smile. There was an odd tension between them, as if Anju’s kindn
ess to Senna had annoyed him. Maybe he just liked being the hero. “We keep a limited number of MSC employees on campus. Need to know. Need to operate. That kind of thing. Only staff with my absolute trust are allowed to stay on.”

  “Picky,” Anju added with another smirk. “Or maybe we’re the best of the best.”

  “Not just the best,” said Paxton. “Perfect.”

  Another gust of wind rattled the Dome. The lights had come back on and the sirens had cut out, but the blast shield remained in place, surrounding the otherwise transparent dome in a black shell. Senna shivered and glanced toward the ceiling.

  “How are the other guests taking the alert?” Paxton asked.

  Consulting the holographic display tablet in her hand, Anju grimaced. “You’re about to find out. Zurri is headed this way.”

  “Zurri?” Senna felt herself perk up. “As in the model?”

  Paxton shot her another sheepish grin. She couldn’t imagine he actually needed the glasses he wore, since a man of his wealth could afford the nicest vision-correction surgery on the market. Were they functional, some kind of new, strange tech, or were they just an aesthetic choice? “If you’ve seen the news lately, then you can guess why she’s here.”

  “I did see,” Senna said softly. “It was awful. She must have been so frightened.”

  Just as Anju predicted, the statuesque model appeared, dressed in a melon-orange wrap dress and wedge sandals with clear straps. And as she came closer, Senna saw that Zurri was not happy. She rolled in like a storm cloud, lip quivering, eyes snapping to Paxton with a speed that made Senna shrink, and she wasn’t even the target.

  “This is bullshit.”

  “Zurri!” Paxton leapt to his feet, opening his arms as if to greet an old friend. The model froze, staring lasers. “You’ll have to excuse us,” he went on, shrugging. “The storms conspired against us. It wasn’t safe to construct a private wing for your stay. I’m afraid you’ll have to rough it with the likes of us.”