Reclaimed

by Madeleine Roux

  “Good night,” he told Zurri firmly, refusing to budge.

  “Senna, are you going to be okay if I go?” she asked, ignoring him.

  “Sure,” Senna said around a yawn.

  Zurri narrowed her eyes and shook her head, backing out the door with her eyes locked on Paxton’s. The smallest, strangest smile appeared on his face. I’m watching you, she thought. One of us has to.

  20

  Paxton couldn’t shut down the experiment and make them leave, he just couldn’t. Not that he wanted to stay on a secluded moon base where people were dying and creepy shadows roamed the halls, but what Paxton said was true—this was new tech, new tech developed in secrecy in a dangerous location. It was insulting to assume Anju hadn’t known and accepted the risks of coming onto such a project. Han wasn’t superstitious, or religious, or stupid; there would be an explanation for the shadows he and Senna had noticed. Probably just a side effect of the therapy. He should probably tell Paxton about it—they were the guinea pigs, and their feedback had to be invaluable.

  And he wasn’t going to let some ridiculous, benign hallucination chase him away from his dream.

  He knew Paxton was impressed with him finding the earring and returning it. Sure, it was a sentimental gesture, but it still had meaning, right? And anyway, Han was pretty sure Paxton had given him a quick, approving glance. Fatherly. Han struggled to remember what that even felt like, the pride of a father. Come to think of it, he couldn’t produce his father’s name. Weird. His memory just needed time to heal. He knew he had a dad, or at least a donor dad, but it was like the assumption of oxygen—of course it was there, it had to be, or Han wouldn’t be breathing and alive.

  Another side effect. All of this was data, crucial data, and accordingly he consulted his VIT and opened a fresh notes file and began logging all the observations he wanted to share with Paxton. He would get another one of those knowing little looks, and just like a bar filling up in a video game, Paxton’s approval would rise.

  “You’re on Ganymede with Paxton Dunn.” Han rounded the corner away from Senna’s apartment, backtracking down the hall to where his rooms were, head down as he typed furiously on his VIT. “Don’t lose sight of that, man . . .”

  “And what an action-packed prospect that has turned out to be, mm?”

  Han stopped short, nearly barging headfirst into Efren. Stumbling back, he dropped his VIT midsentence and stammered out an apology. They had only met briefly in the courtyard, and Han wasn’t sure how he felt about the stranger, who seemed largely to avoid everyone else. Han couldn’t imagine what he was doing at that time of night in the guest wing. Was he the one gesturing to Han on the balcony? Was he the one leading him up to the gallery just before Anju died? Senna had suggested he might have something to do with the accident, but Paxton’s explanation dismissed that, and it sounded like nobody in particular was to blame.

  “Oh, hey,” Han followed up after his muttered sorry. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here looking for you,” Efren replied simply, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. Given that he was waiting almost directly outside Han’s door, it perhaps was. “Because Paxton is about to put this wing into lockdown, and I don’t agree with that decision.”

  Han frowned, exhausted, emotionally a little brittle and wrecked, and squinted at the man. He dressed like a futurist preacher, or something out of a grimdark comic vid, but his face and hair made him look like he could be one of Han’s web language tutors. “Someone died, it’s probably just a temporary security measure.”

  “Maybe,” Efren countered. “But Paxton is a grown man, you can stop doing his work for him.”

  “For him? What do you mean?”

  “He’s a powerful man, he doesn’t need you to stick up for him when he’s about to deprive you of your liberty,” Efren said, sighing. “Your liberty, and potentially so much more. I realize there has been a loss, but none of you is responsible, correct?”

  “Correct,” Han said slowly. Lockdown. That did sound bad, but surely Paxton had his reasons. Han didn’t know why he should listen to this guy over the man who owned and operated the entire facility, and who so far had been pretty cool and generous.

  “So why would you need to stay locked in your rooms?” Efren pressed. He was leaning toward Han ever so slightly, as if this answer did greatly interest him.

  “Maybe it just . . . I don’t know. Maybe it isn’t safe to have us wandering around right now.”

  Efren snapped his fingers and pointed. “Maybe it isn’t safe. Now we’re getting somewhere. If it wasn’t safe for Anju, why would it be safe for any of you?”

  “It was an accident,” Han said flatly. “What happened to her was an accident, Paxton looked over the security footage.”

  “Interesting.” Efren dragged out the word, tapping his thumb thoughtfully on his lip. “Then that footage still exists on server storage somewhere, just waiting to be found. Listen to me, young man, and listen closely, Paxton is going to notice that you’re not in your rooms very soon, and if he’s going to put you all into captivity, then I think you deserve to see that footage for yourself, don’t you agree?”

  “I . . . guess.” Han shrugged. “Well, yeah. Yeah, it isn’t fair to keep us locked up when we didn’t have anything to do with it. It’s not like I’m going to go outside and try to repair anything. And Zurri sure as hell isn’t, either.”

  Efren nodded, smiling crookedly. He reached over, but stopped himself from patting Han on the shoulder. Instead, he turned and began to walk back the way Han had come. “Do you know what undoes all so-called great men?”

  “Old age? Tax evasion?”

  “Ha!” Efren snorted. “You really are clever. No, Han, it’s hubris. Now then, good luck finding that footage. If anyone can, it’s you.”

  Han shuffled closer to his door, watching his own name light up across it. “I could tell him that you’re doing this. That one of his employees is trying to undermine him . . .”

  “I sincerely hope you do,” Efren called back, strolling away. “What was that inane chestnut of Paxton’s that always got quoted? Ah yes, ‘If something gets you out of bed in the morning, then it should keep you from bed until it’s done to the best of your ability.’ Just keep that in mind. Your hero said it, so it must be true.”

  * * *

  —

  Zurri waited with her door half-open, listening for the moment Paxton left. She heard his footsteps vanishing down the corridor and out of the guest wing about twenty minutes after they had been shooed from Senna’s apartment. Those girl code hairs had gone up on her neck, and she wasn’t going to ignore it. She had a strict policy against fixing wounded birds masquerading as people, but they were all vulnerable, they were all having their minds tampered with; Senna wasn’t necessarily a friend, but Zurri didn’t see the harm in checking on her before bed.

  It was a miracle the girl had lasted this long outside her cult compound. They hadn’t prepared her for anything in there, Zurri was realizing. Pairing a thrifted, oversized jacket with a Bethany Li couture piece demonstrated that pretty clearly. In a distant, wistful way, Zurri envied her naivete. It had to be refreshing to know so little about the outside world, to hear the name Bethany Li and think: Who? Maybe that was why Paxton had fixed his eyes on Senna and not her—Senna was practically raised in total isolation. She had a strange, interesting purity, utterly sheltered from the reality of Earth life and real station life, all but grown and reared in a lab.

  Paxton would never want someone worldly like Zurri, someone who would absolutely call him on his shit.

  Zurri whispered, “Genie? Can you let Senna know I’m here?”

  “You have been instructed to return to your rooms,” Genie replied, at obnoxiously full volume. Zurri glanced up and down the hall. Still clear. “Please follow outline procedures, normal scheduling and access will resume
at Dome time eight a.m. Lockdown precautions are now in effect.”

  “Lockdown? Uh-uh. No thanks. Get her for me, okay? It will only take a minute,” Zurri insisted, glaring up at the invisible guardian, assistant, doorman and butler. At least real bouncers could be bribed. “I just want to see . . . We’re all shaken tonight. I wanted to make sure she’s all right.”

  “She’s fine.”

  Zurri closed her eyes and groaned. To her left, Paxton swaggered back down the corridor, Anju’s earring in his hand, his thumb running across it worriedly, as if he could mark his print into it.

  “Clearly we got off on the wrong foot, Zurri,” he said, glibly apologetic. “Let me take you to your rooms, we’ll open an egregiously expensive bottle of whatever you want, and if it amuses you, go ahead and pour it down the drain. Otherwise, we can share it and I’ll answer all your questions. By the end of the night? Well, by the end of the night, I think we could even be friends.”

  “I’m not your friend,” Zurri said, swiveling and cocking her hip to the side. Even in flats, she was taller than him, and she could tell by the way he almost pulled something straightening his neck that it bothered him. “I’m nothing like you, Dunn.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. You’re rich, I’m fuck-you rich. You’re famous, I’m an icon. Our great purpose is to be the inspirers, to make the masses think: ‘One day I’ll be just like them.’ But they’ll never be us, will they? You were born with beauty, I was born with vision. We serve the same function.” His hand pivoted back and forth between them as he talked. Zurri felt those hairs on the back of her neck go up again. Danger. Paxton held up Anju’s gold earring with both hands and gradually bent it until it was halved. “You just need to learn to be more . . . flexible.”

  She didn’t care about Anju one way or another, but that seemed crass. “Man, you’ve got mental problems. That woman died tonight. Your employee. Your responsibility. She died.”

  Paxton tossed the bent earring up in the air and caught it, repeating the motion a few times as he considered her words. “Did she?”

  Danger.

  Zurri’s room was the opposite direction, and she decided it was time to go, and if lockdown kept him the hell out of her rooms, all the better. Something in her right peripheral vision moved swiftly, blurry fast. She saw a mass of brown curls and the hint of a smile, and then a hand lashed out to take her by the shoulder.

  Brea. She had come up behind her silently while Paxton distracted her. For once, she wasn’t wearing heels. Zurri jabbed with her elbow but Brea seemed to anticipate the move, sidestepping easily before jabbing something at her. The zap from a black tool in her hand hit Zurri in the sternum, and she felt the world spin as she collapsed, held and dragged before everything went dark, before she even hit the ground.

  21

  Senna set up her easel facing the mural of the sea. As soon as she smelled the hard hit of the turpentine, her head swam with nostalgia, the sweet and the bitter.

  “These are my personal paints from London,” Preece had told her, pushing a metal basket toward her across the mess hall table. On the compound, they used one huge room for eating and sleeping, shoving the long cafeteria-style tables and benches to the side at night and rolling out their sleeping pads. “When these are gone, they’re gone,” he had warned.

  She was sixteen then and had never painted a single thing in her life, couldn’t name a single painter, had never been to the university district to see a single gallery exhibit.

  “You can paint whatever you want,” Preece had added, showing her the brushes, the tubes of paint, the little vial of turpentine needed to clean the paint-soaked bristles or thin out the pigment. “Whatever you see, whatever you feel, whatever you dream, paint it, as long as it’s true.”

  Every year on her birthday she received a few more canvases. Nobody else was allowed such an extravagance. The others, now washed-out faces on copycat bodies in her mind, received extra food or sometimes replacements for their worn-out clothes. Never cake or ice cream or any sweets at all.

  “I could waste money on unhealthy frivolities,” Preece would tell them whenever someone whined about the restrictions. “Or we could all eat next month, the choice is yours.”

  What he said was true. Senna laid out the paints on the coffee table behind her, and unscrewed the cap on the tube of black paint, drawn to it. Marin had tried to get her to use a tablet to draw and sketch, but Senna needed the tactile feel of the brushes, the sound of them swishing across the canvas, the scent of the paints and all the slight variations in their texture and application. It was also true that some of the other brood members began to resent her for the gift of the paints. It was often whispered that Senna was his favorite, a petty exaggeration that Senna never allowed herself to believe.

  Until, a few years later and losing control of the children he had raised, Preece hijacked a passenger transport headed to Mars and . . . and . . .

  Senna fell forward against the canvas, brush in hand, paint sweeping across the blank square as she felt the void LENG had hollowed out push back. It had its own form, the gap in her memory, not empty but solid as a shield. Impenetrable. She had almost managed to stumble up to a memory, but now the pain was incredible, and she closed her eyes, mentally backing away.

  Coward.

  It was gone. Whatever it was, she had to let it be gone. It was terrible enough to bring her to this place, isolated and dangerous, and ask a stranger to rip apart her memories and patch them back together. Anything that bad deserved to be respected and left alone, like a bristling beast growling out its warning song from the back of a deep, dark cavern.

  She couldn’t remember falling asleep on the floor, or dreaming, or waking. Sometime later, the ambient lights set for night, Senna crawled to her feet, dried black paint smeared across her hands. Stumbling back a few steps, she took in the image on the canvas. Her painting. It was the silhouette of a tall, lanky creature, no eyes or features, just oozing tendrils for fingers.

  The shadow.

  So Han had seen it, too. Zurri had, too, she suspected, but she also assumed the model was too proud or embarrassed to admit as much. Senna wanted to assign it to the treatment, but she couldn’t do that.

  I saw it the minute I arrived. It’s always been here. Senna considered its presence in her bedroom, the yawning pit of fear that had opened up under her as she watched it watching her from the doorway, darkness living outside of darkness, formless and yet with its own intrinsic density.

  She amended her thought. No, it hasn’t just always been here. It’s always been.

  * * *

  —

  Han mouthed along to the lecture as it played through his vid console, a gamer’s delight of candy, cheese-coated crisps, a rainbow of mochi and a sixty-four-ounce Mega Slurp of sugar-free soda waiting to be devoured on the coffee table beside him. How Paxton had managed to get actual Mega Slurp cups from Earth, he didn’t know, but the mad lad had done it. Even if it was just for nostalgia points, Han could respect it.

  Which is why he wanted to find nothing. Uncomfortably, he hoped his third attempt to gain access to Paxton’s Dome security systems failed.

  Why are you doing it, then, if you’re sure Efren is full of shit?

  Good question. Han hovered between two extremes that were both extremely his brand—total devotion to his mortal god, Paxton, and a strong desire for the truth. It was why he enjoyed hacking in the first place. Exposing truth, exposing scandals, letting all the muck and grit and dirt come to the light . . . that was a noble pursuit. The want of truth was, in itself, a good thing. It was part of what made him like Paxton in the first place, when he first discovered his inventions and his philosophies years ago—he didn’t parade around on red carpets on the station or on Earth, models dripping from his arms. There were rumors that he had been married twice, and those relationships dissolved quietly, the women amply paid, locked into
NDAs and never heard from again. No juicy tell-all vids appeared, and Paxton remained quietly on Ganymede, minding his business, pursuing his solitude and his science.

  That was what Han wanted to be—a man left alone with enough time, money and peace to listen to the wisdom of his dreams, and then turn that wisdom into invention. Even if it was something small, he wanted to be a contributor, not just a consumer. In his short lifetime, disease-dissolving coatings had been developed for implanted chips in the body, Paxton had built his reality-defying facility on Ganymede, there were even whispers of first contact, just a fungal spore, but even that was something astonishing.

  He could do astonishing things, too, staying in an astonishing place, mentored by an astonishing man . . . But those things had to be proven true. Han didn’t like the uncertainty Efren had planted in his mind. He needed to know that he could trust Paxton’s word, that this lockdown was just a silly precaution, that what had happened to Anju really was just a sad accident. The lecture played on. A classic. This was Han’s psych-up music, the quick, precise voice of another of his idols, acclaimed chef turned travel vid host turned astrophysicist Cecilia Fan, giving a lecture two years ago at Yang Hall on the station, filling to capacity the university’s largest venue.

  “. . . and once we had eyes on that troublemaker, that naughty little gremlin”—that part always made him chuckle, and her audience joined in on the recording—“a once-putative theory became amazing, undeniable fact. Now we had proof of trans-Neptunian objects whipped into a frenzy by a black hole. A black hole no bigger than a kumquat.” She paused there to approximate the size for the audience, and there was more laughter and then applause as Cecilia pulled a funny face. Han wasn’t looking at the vid screen, but he had it committed to memory. “How much could that really do? you ask. Oh, just a lot. It can do so much, my friends.”