Reclaimed

by Madeleine Roux

  Who did I go to the koi pond with?

  It didn’t help that the sirens and lights kept on, and Han wanted to turtle his head down into his shoulders to escape the noise. And the light kept . . . mocking him. He didn’t know how it could mock him, but it did.

  “Genie said to stay here,” Han groaned, tossing up his hands and letting his head fall back loose on his neck. That sent his gaze spinning across the ceiling and then to the walkway above the gallery. He noticed a shape up there, a person, and wondered if maybe it was Zurri.

  “Hey!” he called. “Zurri?”

  It wouldn’t be Senna; she and Paxton were still in his office. The silhouette was far away, but tall and thin, so maybe it was Zurri after all. It waved back to him, then beckoned. When he glanced down again, the light was gone. Han took the ramp up to the second level, slowing his gait a bit while he crossed in front of Paxton’s office. Just in case. But the doors didn’t open. He kept going, wondering who had been up on the balcony waving to him. The small light was already mostly forgotten.

  “Hello?” he called. “Who’s up here?”

  The flash of lights and the emergency glow along the floor were enough to see by, but it wasn’t much. Han reached the spot where the silhouette had been, but they had left and moved on. From up there, Han had a clear view down to the black door of the lab offices. Brea hadn’t reemerged. His eyes swept the gallery on his level again, and the bridge in the Dome that faced it, then to the right, and the corridor that wound around into an area he hadn’t explored. He noticed the figure moving along the far end of that corridor, back again, moving swiftly away from the tall window to his right that offered a scrolling a view of the Ganymede ice wastes. The figure hugged the wall to the right, moving west, avoiding the ramp that curved down into the leafy maze and toward that unexplored area of the compound. On his VIT map, this area was reserved for staff. He saw the shadowy silhouette begin to disappear again up ahead and plunged after it, feeling as if he were chasing a ghost.

  Similar to the opposite side of the courtyard, the overlook he ran through led to a hall. On their side of things it split into the dormitories, but here it burrowed deeper to the western side of the second floor. They passed a single door on the left side, Han’s proximity making a sign across it glow faint white and read STAFF ONLY.

  Han noticed something shiny on the floor, illuminated by the pulse of lights outlining the walkway. Genie warned everyone to stay in place again as Han bent down and picked up a single gold earring—a wide, hammered hoop.

  Footsteps approached from behind, fast, and carrying the signature sharp click of the heels the staff wore. He spun and collapsed back against the door as Dr. Colbie and Brea raced by, the doctor’s blond hair uncharacteristically disheveled. Neither of them paused to acknowledge Han as they hurried down the corridor. Carefully, he followed, the cold earring cradled in his palm. The two women stopped at the end of the hall, standing in front of a waist-high transparent railing. Here was the edge of the facility, where the outer shell of the Dome itself was visible, the thick, curved wall encased in the safety shutters protecting them all from the storm.

  Shuffling up behind the two women, Han found himself stumbling into an ongoing argument. Something was wrong. Dr. Colbie tapped furiously on the face of her VIT, glancing up toward the Dome wall, another snarl of blond hair falling loose around her neck.

  “—this protocol is level eight, I have the authority,” Dr. Colbie was saying heatedly.

  “It is day two, the patients are still in a disoriented state, how will this look?”

  “Search your fucking database, abnormal debris is exactly what you think it is, if she’s out there . . . if she’s out there . . .”

  She?

  That was when they noticed him creeping ever closer and both shut up abruptly, Brea offering him a tired “what can you do?” smile. “Han,” she cooed. “These are unusual circumstances, can I escort you back to your rooms? You will be more comfortable there while we handle this situation.”

  “What situation?” he asked, frowning. “What’s going on? Is it the storm?”

  The facility rocked. Lightning cracked above them, startling Han, and he closed his fist, hard, the earring jabbing into his hand. When he opened his palm and looked down at it, a bead of blood welled there, smeared across the gold. The earring had a clamp instead of a sharp hook, jewelry made for someone with unpierced ears.

  “Han?” Brea prompted, taking him by the shoulder.

  “What was that sound?” he asked, a little dazed, the sirens making mush of his brains. He let his head fall loose again and stared up at the curved ceiling of the Dome, high above, and watched as the security shutters gradually began to lower, massive industrial petals that gently stacked as they retracted, revealing the stark white mists of Ganymede.

  “What’s going on?” Zurri had arrived, appearing down the corridor in stilted, slow-motion frames, the flashing lights revealing and deleting her with each step. “Can you shut that thing off? It’s giving me a migraine.”

  She had changed into a thick robe, fluffy and so white it glowed in the uneven darkness of the sirens and alert.

  “They’re lowering the shutters,” Han told her, pointing. “Severity level nine.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Zurri demanded, coming to stand beside him and folding her arms across her chest.

  Brea’s smile looked brittle enough to snap in half. “If the two of you could return to your rooms—”

  “The fuck I will, what is severity level nine?”

  More footsteps, these decidedly without high heels. Paxton rolled in like a storm, thundering down the hallway with leaden steps, glasses crooked and mouth ferociously tight as he elbowed Brea, Zurri, and Han out of the way and went straight after Dr. Colbie. The doctor remained at the end of the hall, eyes glued to the ceiling as the shutters revealed more and more of the transparent Dome outer structure.

  “Could’ve overridden this from my office but I wanted to see the circus in person,” he grunted, clamping a hand down on the doctor’s left shoulder. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Is everything okay?” a mouse-quiet voice asked. Senna. Han’s vision blurred a bit as he whirled to look at her. He felt a pressure build behind his eyes the closer she came and the more of her face he could see. But it passed, and then she was huddled close to Zurri, shooting furtive glances at him and then farther down the hall toward Paxton.

  “Nobody will tell me anything,” Zurri muttered. “It’s absolutely ridiculous. Mayhem.”

  “Brea, get them out of here!” Paxton thundered, blindly gesturing over his shoulder at them.

  “All right, all right, you heard the man.” Brea pretended at a laugh, attempting to herd them with both hands. Han allowed himself to be pushed a few steps, but as soon as she got within spitting distance of Zurri, the model clucked her tongue.

  “Touch me and I will sue you into the next galaxy, bitch.”

  “The scanner has to be wrong,” Dr. Colbie was saying while Paxton grabbed her by the left wrist. She cried out, her arm wrenched at a nasty angle while Paxton himself slapped her right hand away and fiddled with her VIT screen. “It has to be wrong. Did you see? Tell me you saw it.”

  “It’s day two, you absolute moron,” Paxton hissed. “You will not ruin this for me.”

  The shutters paused, hesitating, and a creak like the complaining of ancient trees rippled through the corridor. Then the petals began to unfold again, and the shutters inched back up to protect the Dome barrier again. An insistent, piercing beeping began, rising from Paxton’s VIT, accelerating, fluttering like a heart beating wildly out of control.

  Brea had gone still, and Han felt Zurri and Senna holding their breaths, as if they all knew and didn’t know what was coming, and dreaded it.

  “Can’t this fucking thing go any faster?” Paxton scre
amed, raking a hand so viciously through his hair Han was shocked a fistful of tufts didn’t tear loose.

  The beeps were one sound now, on top of one another. Han squeezed the earring in his hand again and held his breath, too.

  About sixteen feet of unshuttered barrier was still exposed when the mass hit the Dome barrier, hard. It smacked into the transparent, curved edge near the very top, impacting with the muted thump of a bird diving into a window. Quiet for them, dulled by the thickness of the barrier, but Han felt the crunch of it in his bones. Cold that cruel did unfeeling things to the body. He couldn’t make out much, not with the speed of it all and the spike of fear and adrenaline, but he knew he saw a suit meant for exterior exploration, white and padded, and he saw dome strike Dome, the helmet just a hundred spider-webbed cracks glittering with frost, and behind those fractures, a still-living face, screaming silently before the storm picked up Anju again and carried her away.

  19

  “Just another thing to forget,” Zurri sighed, snapping open the Talpraxem bottle and shaking out two into her palm. The tiny pink ovals glistened under the kitchen light, but Zurri waited to toss them back, angling into her chair while her fellow inmates stared holes into the table. The storm warning sirens had ended, though the facility remained shrouded in gloomy half light.

  “It’s horrible,” Senna murmured, emerging from the darkened hall and returning to the kitchen. She had changed into a sack of a T-shirt dress with her same long coat over it. Zurri couldn’t blame her for wanting to immediately change out of a dead woman’s dress. “Just horrible.”

  “You knew her for twenty-four hours,” Zurri told her. “You’ll manage.”

  “I can still be upset!” she replied, voice muffled as she pulled her knees up to her chest and nestled her chin into them. “It can still be sad.”

  “Something weird is going on,” the boy said, dropping a blood-smeared earring onto the table.

  “You think?” Zurri was tempted to swallow the Talpraxem, but it didn’t seem like the prudent thing to do until official word came down on why one of the Dome employees had just pancaked against the facility exterior. She shivered, then checked to see if either of the other two had noticed her discomfort. Nope. Senna was still buried in her legs, a human egg balled up in her chair, and Han was too busy fixating on the earring. The other woman’s apartment was about as cutesy as she expected, themed in a soothing ocean theme with a big mural in the living room and sea glass set into the table.

  “I hate this place,” Zurri sighed, letting the pills clatter onto the table.

  “Go on,” urged Senna, staring across the table at Han. “What’s weird?”

  “Besides people flying into the windows like confused birds?” Zurri stood up and crossed to the refrigerated box, helping herself to an aluminum cylinder of white wine. The Talpraxem was for later, but she didn’t have to spend this time with them completely sober.

  “Let him talk,” Senna murmured. “Go on, Han.”

  The kid hesitated, dark eyes hovering on Senna’s face as if he maybe didn’t want to tell her specifically, then took a steadying breath and shrugged his bony shoulders. “I saw something tonight. A . . . shadow thing. I thought it was Zurri, but it couldn’t be, because she showed up later and it was definitely ahead of me. Leading me somewhere.”

  “I’ve seen it, too,” Senna assured him. She had gone pale, and flinched when Zurri opened the wine with a crisp crrrack. “The shadow was in my room; it was watching me sleep.”

  “I don’t know about you two, but I can’t take three more days of this,” Zurri muttered, taking a long sip. The wine wasn’t going to put a dent in her anxiety. She didn’t want to say that she, too, had seen the shadow, or thought she had, glimpsing it briefly, when the storm made the power flicker. “Locked down until further notice, can you even believe that shit?” She rolled her eyes. “Dunn is going to wish he never built this place when I’m done annihilating his ass to the press. He’ll have to call it off now. He can’t keep this experiment going when someone just died.”

  “He can’t do that.” Han tore his eyes away from the earring. “He can’t.”

  “Kid, I know you’re his fan club president or whatever but this is serious,” Zurri told him. “I want an explanation from him and then I want out.”

  “You can’t,” Han pointed out. “The storms.” Then he tapped his VIT with two fingers. “None of my messages are going out. Even if Paxton wanted to send us home early, he can’t. You saw what happened to Anju, do you want to climb in the rover right now?”

  She made a face and dumped the rest of the wine down her throat. “I just know I don’t want to be here anymore. I’m not going back in that LENG room, I’m staying right here. I mean, Christ, can either of you remember what goes on in there?”

  “No, I can’t picture it,” Senna replied, pouting out her lower lip. “Does this feel like what you expected?” Senna asked.

  Both Zurri and Han shook their heads no.

  “There are . . . blanks. I can feel the voids. It’s like my head is going to burst whenever my thoughts wander in the wrong direction, or if I try to remember my time in the LENG room.” Senna played nervously with the ends of her oversized coat, and she could sense there was more coming as the woman chewed and chewed it over. “There’s another man in the facility, I’ve only seen him once, but I didn’t see him tonight with everyone else. Do you think . . . do you think maybe he had something to do with Anju?”

  “I met him, too,” said Han, spinning the earring slowly with his right forefinger. “He seemed nice enough.”

  “Hold up, there’s another person here? Why haven’t I met him?” The door chimed softly as Zurri’s voice rose and Paxton stepped into Senna’s apartment, rubbing at the weary line etched between his brows. “Perfect,” she said, standing. “Maybe you can explain what the hell is going on here.”

  “Thank you for being patient.” Paxton stood in the hall, a few feet from where they had gathered at the table. He seemed particularly intent on Senna as he pursed his lips and then announced, “We’ve reviewed the security footage. It looks like what happened this evening was a terrible accident. Anju logged a concern with one of the north-end shutter depots, a thermal regulator failed, and ice jammed up the track. Our maintenance suits have clip-in systems to prevent something like this from happening, but it looks like her clip failed or the wind was too powerful for it. I’m just . . . I apologize that you all had to see that. As you can imagine, we’re reeling. Anju has been part of the team here since the early days, and we’re all going to miss her.”

  “How awful,” Senna murmured. “I’m so sorry, Paxton.”

  Zurri frowned. She knew vague corporate speak when she heard it; it had been spouted at her thousands of times whenever some intern fucked up and made a shoot run hours too long, or a hungover director slept through call time. “What was your assistant doing out there? Don’t you have maintenance Servitors for that?”

  Switching to rubbing his eye under his glasses, he said quietly, “We all wear a lot of hats around here, Zurri. Maybe you can save the accusations until after we find a way to recover her body. If . . . if we can at all.”

  Silence. Han and Senna wilted, convinced. Zurri wasn’t so sure. She watched Paxton carefully, vigilant for any signs of deception. Annoyingly, he just looked tired, impatient to be away from them. That scanned, at least.

  “Are you calling off the program?” Senna finally asked in a tiny voice. To Zurri, she almost sounded hopeful.

  “No,” Paxton replied firmly. “We can resume in the morning. I know we’ve all had a bad shock, but Anju believed in what we’re doing here as much as I do. She understood the dangers of working at a facility like this, the dangers of pushing the boundaries the way we are.” His voice shook with real emotion, but Zurri forced her eyes not to roll. “I just ask that you all stay in your apartments for now, while th
e staff shifts gears. Sixteen will deliver any food you might need, and your updated schedules will be sent to your VITs.”

  At that, he gave Senna one more furtive glance, which she was too distraught to notice. What was up with them? Zurri stowed it for later.

  “Zurri? Han?” he prompted, dismissing them.

  She stood in her own time, subtly collecting the two Talpraxem and hiding them in her palm, then taking her mostly empty can of wine with her to cover the movement. While she rounded the table, Han swiped the earring off the table and brought it to Paxton, presenting it to him with what felt like a tacky flourish.

  “Senna says this was Anju’s. I found it on the floor.”

  “Thanks, Han,” Paxton murmured, taking the earring from him and slipping it into his pocket. “And I understand that this could affect your healing and progress here, so if anyone would like to update their neural maps to include tonight’s tragedy, that can be arranged.”

  Called it.

  “Classy,” Zurri muttered, passing him in the hall.

  “I’m simply offering,” Paxton replied, cold.

  It didn’t seem like he was following them out. Zurri let Han leave first, lingering a little in the doorway. The protective hairs on the back of her neck were standing up, the ones that recognized a fellow woman in need.