“Hi, Mom,” he whispered. Zurri’s hand touched his shoulder, and he almost crumpled. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”
“How can I assist you, Han?” Of course it was just Genie, but still. Still. Why had he ever wanted to run from this? Why would he want it gone?
Because it hurts. Because it hurts in places I can’t even name.
“I need to get a message to the satellite.” He stumbled through it, but found his way. Using his keyboard, he called up the server list, finding an absolute treasure trove of unsent notes from him, Zurri and Senna. His blood ran cold at the titles of some. GET ME OUT NOW, BEV was prominently at the top. Some were flagged for a storm warning, saved on local storage until a connection to the satellite could be reestablished, but the most recent messages just hadn’t been sent. Paxton was holding them all back. “We need a shuttle here,” Han added. “For three.”
“Three,” Zurri said with a smile. “Glad to have you on board, kid.”
“Satellite comms established. Shuttle link available,” his mother—Genie—informed them. Her voice, each time, was a jolt to his system. “Next available arrival time: Dome time thirteen hundred hours. Would you like to secure this flight?”
“Crap,” Han muttered, shooting her a look. “That only gives us about an hour. The next shuttle isn’t scheduled to arrive until tomorrow. An hour. Do you think that’s enough time?”
Zurri slid her palm across her face and glanced toward the door. “It will have to be.”
32
“I love this color on you.” Paxton reached across the deliberate foot of space between them and tugged on the edge of her left sleeve. It was just a boxy old dress, nurses-scrub blue and faded.
“Oh!” Senna tucked her hands behind her back, worried that if she didn’t, Paxton would notice her compulsively pressing her nails into her own palms, scoring them with deep half-moons. “Thank you. It’s so dull next to Zurri’s clothes. I wish I had her style.”
“Pfft, don’t say that. You don’t need it,” Paxton insisted, leaning against the railing, his left hip tucked against it. “You have natural beauty. No makeup. Nothing artificial. No surgery. I was into pastel punk girls for a while but it’s just more of the same. I like this—you. Us bubble kids have to stick together.”
Senna willed her heart to stop racing. How long would it take Zurri to convince Han to help them? What if she couldn’t do it? “Bubble kids? I didn’t grow up in isolation.”
“Sure you did.” Paxton smoothed a hand over his hair, but the dark curls sprang back. “All of you did, you’re all lonely. You just came to it differently.”
Is that why you picked us, she wanted to ask, because nobody would object to us leaving our lives behind for this place? Is that why you picked me? Because you think we’re the same? I’m nothing like you.
“I’m not lonely,” Senna insisted. “I have Marin and Jonathan back on the station. Zurri has her fans, her staff, nobody becomes famous on their own.”
Paxton’s brows went up. She held her own wrists until they ached, realizing she had blundered into a sensitive spot. That was what Efren had mentioned, that he hadn’t risen to this level of power and fame and influence alone.
“Well, nobody but you,” she added quickly, hating it.
That made him grin again, an easy look. The beast placated. “Why did you run from me before?”
“When?” She batted her lashes, playing dumb.
“Before. You know what I’m talking about. Why did you run?”
“All of this is so overwhelming,” said Senna frankly. Maybe if she kept the lies close to the surface, he wouldn’t notice her struggling. “I woke up in your bed this morning. I don’t remember how I got there. That’s frightening. You know that’s frightening, right, for a woman? You never want to feel that way. I don’t wake up in other people’s beds, at least, I don’t think I do.”
Paxton put his hands up as if in defeat. “Whoa, whoa. Jesus! Nothing happened, Senna. If it did, trust me.” He winked. “You’d remember.”
She swallowed a bubble of vomit. “Sure.” She tucked some hair behind her ear. “That makes sense.” It didn’t. “You must think I’m so naive, but I’m just . . . scattered. The treatments are disorienting.” And constant. And the drugs . . . Only minutes had passed and she knew it. How much longer, Zurri?
“What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the bench. He had noticed the painting.
Senna blanched. “It’s . . . something I was working on. It just came to me.” Blinking hard, she heard a deadened voice come back to her, though the owner of it was gone, zapped away by Paxton’s “miracle” tech. No warm feelings flooded her, so maybe the forgotten person was someone she truly wanted taken away. “Someone once told me I had a gift, that I dreamed even while I was awake, even if I didn’t know it. ‘Percolating,’ that was the word they used.” Pausing, she felt herself try to sink back into memories that weren’t there. Even if it was deep, dark water, she wanted, just then, to sink into it. “At least I think so.”
“I’m glad you’re getting use out of the paints. That’s a limited edition Rembrandt set. Ancient history now. Only about two hundred were made. When I saw you had applied, I did some digging, had this brought from my da’s storage on the station.” He pushed off from the railing, sauntering toward the bench.
“That quickly?” Senna asked.
“Things move fast when I want them to.”
She went still as he leaned over the painting. His smile, an instant ago so broad and cocksure, shriveled into something twisted. A snarl. The blood drained from his face, and Senna felt gears in her head spinning in mud, stuck and useless. What was he seeing? It was Efren, but Efren could vanish. He was just a figment, she had assumed, another confusing side effect of the LENG treatments. But then he did know Paxton, didn’t he? Intimately. The pieces didn’t fit. It was like trying to push two north magnets together.
“How—” Paxton placed his own finger over his lips and made a strangled hmf sound. His head swiveled to regard her. “What an incredible imagination you apparently have, Senna. When did this percolate in your little head?”
“You’re angry with me,” she whispered, backing against the railing.
“No,” Paxton corrected, holding out his hand for her to take. She knew she had no choice. This was her assignment, to distract him, but she knew, as soon as their palms collided, that she had been handed a cruel and impossible task. “I’m fascinated. This is the most interesting thing you’ve ever done.”
With one hand he picked up the still-tacky painting, with the other he took Senna’s left hand, crushing it in his. She winced, but said nothing. He didn’t drag her down the ramp to the clinical labs and the LENG room like she expected. Instead he brought her, at a bizarrely cavalier pace, to his office. The black doors there hissed open, and they nearly collided with Anju.
“Hi there.” She stumbled back a step but caught herself. “Oh, Senna! Hi! Brea found your VIT, it’s on Paxton’s desk.”
“Tell Dr. Colbie to prep LENG, please,” Paxton said in passing, ignoring the rest.
Anju’s big eyes slid precariously to Senna. “There are no appointments scheduled today, Pax.”
“I’m aware of that. Tell her to prep it just in case.”
Just in case.
Senna took a deep breath, ready to play as dumb as she needed to, but that didn’t stop her heart from hammering up into her throat. She was going to choke on her own pulse, remembering that his bedroom was connected to the office. If she had to fight, she would, she decided. She would claw his fucking eyes out, if that was what was required. The doors whispered closed, shutting her inside with Paxton.
He let go of her, holding up the painting, examining it in the full light projected from the bright, marbled mass of color along the back wall of his office.
“Fascinating,” Paxton sa
id again. He laughed, harshly, and Senna put distance between them, going to the desk and picking up her VIT. There was hardly a scratch on it. “Of course it would make a difference. I should have known it would make a difference. Glen, you bastard. Is this your idea of revenge?”
Senna held the VIT to her chest, eyes on the door, trying to imagine a way out. Maybe the little wrist device was heavy enough to whack him over the head. There was also a small bust of his own head on his desk and—
Paxton dropped the painting, the wet surface leaving smudges on the floor. He was on her in the next second, long legs chewing up the ground until he was against her, over her, hand locked around her throat. The VIT fell out of her hands, clattering to the floor. Her vision blurred, her chest pins and needles as he forced the back of her head down onto the desk. With his free hand he reached for one of the digital frames, snatching it before smashing it against her face. Senna screamed, thrashing, too weak to slip out of his grasp.
“Is this your revenge, mate? Weak. You can do better. So can I.”
He relaxed his grip on her throat, but only a little. The frame moved back enough for her to make out the image—two men, arms around each other, goofy, boyish smiles. Paxton looked younger, no glasses, and beside him, rucked up tight to his side, was Efren.
“You’re seeing this man?” Paxton demanded. “How? How do you know about Glen? I wiped him from the news, deleted him utterly from history, from memory. How?”
“You’re hurting me!” Senna wheezed.
Paxton reared back, then threw her roughly to the ground. She scrambled on hands and knees away from him, but Paxton put his shoe to her back and pressed, hard, flattening her to the cold tiles.
“Glen Ferne is a dead man,” Paxton spat. “A soft, sad corpse. He was the best of us, smarter even than me. Brilliant. But he didn’t like LENG, wouldn’t use it. Hated it. We cracked open the vessel holding it and we both saw its potential. It spoke to us. This will heal people, I told him.” He pushed harder; Senna flailed. “He only thought it would hurt people. ‘It’s already hurt you.’ Risked his life flying to the edge of a black hole to recover the thing and he wanted to take it back. Can you imagine? Paxton Dunn does not stare the innovation of a lifetime in the face and turn away.”
So Efren was a ghost, or . . . or . . . Senna’s nails scratched in futile squeaks against the tiles. Her VIT lay at arm’s length. Desperate, she lunged for it. Maybe she could send a message, or at least turn on the vid chat for someone to see what Paxton was trying to do to her. She managed to just flick the edge of it, the VIT spinning across the floor, landing just inches from her face. The screen lit up, the pain surging through her back.
ONE NEW MESSAGE: ALL FOR ONE AND ONE FOR ALL, BITCH.
Senna sobbed. So close.
“Give me that,” Paxton grunted, his foot letting up long enough for him to bend down and scoop up the VIT. As soon as he was upright again, Senna rolled onto her back, just in time to see a strange, concentrated light flash across Paxton’s eyes, like the reflection of water, hot and white. He winced and batted at it, temporarily blinded.
“What the hell? Shit, it burns.” He hissed and stumbled.
Senna forced herself to breathe, even though it stung. Gulping for air, she pulled herself up by the legs on Paxton’s desk, finding the stone bust of Paxton’s head and hurling herself toward him. Her arms shook with shock and fatigue, but she managed to give him one good thump on the forehead. He moaned and crumpled onto his side.
The light bouncing across Paxton’s eyes grew and grew, first a pale shadow of a man, sparkling and bright, then resolving into a fully formed figure with human features. “Oh God,” she said, falling to her knees, clutching her legs and shaking with relief.
“So he showed you the picture.”
Senna gasped, sliding onto her back to find Efren there, standing just at the edge of Paxton’s shoes.
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t think so, no.” Efren—Glen—shook his head. “Are you all right? Can you stand? Can you run?”
“I don’t know.” Senna touched her chest, coughing. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was about to,” he said. “This is all a horrible mess. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“What are you?” Senna demanded. Beside her, Paxton gave a spasm, a stream of hissing air releasing from between his lips. Not dead, then. She didn’t know what to feel, whether to be thankful or just more afraid. “What do I call you? Are you his partner? Glen Ferne?”
“Efren,” he replied softly, kneeling. “Efren Leng. Glen Ferne. The Vestige. Whatever you like to call me you can, you’ve more than earned that. Glen tried to stop Paxton from using the Vestige, but he wouldn’t listen. He never really listened. Paxton fed him to LENG, gave over his entire mind, all of his thoughts, his memories, his very essence. Clearly, it did not have the intended effect. It didn’t erase Glen the way he wanted it to.”
“We need to get away from him. Zurri called the shuttle,” Senna whispered, every word a strain. “Han must have come around.”
“Then we need to get you ready to depart, don’t we?” He frowned and shook his head. “I wanted to protect you from all of this. What I am, parts of me are all of you, and Glen, and the shattered fragments of the civilizations pulverized by that imploding star. A crucible of pain and love and memory. If you want your memories restored, all of them, I can give that to you. The Vestige takes, LENG takes, but it also preserves.”
Senna sobbed again. “That’s possible?”
Efren (she decided that fit this strange amalgamation best) peered at her with his soft golden eyes and nodded. “We’re sitting on top of miles and miles of ice and oceans. Ice on top of oceans on top of ice on top of oceans. Anything is possible. It’s going to be difficult, Senna. It’s going to hurt.”
“I want it back,” she assured him, hot, needling tears spilling down her cheeks. “The good and the bad. Don’t leave anything out. I want to know what happened to me. I want to know what was taken away.”
“If you bring me to your friends, I can restore them, too,” he said.
“Then that’s what I’ll do.”
Senna watched his hands reach toward her.
“Close your eyes.” She did, and felt the light pressure of his thumbs resting on her eyelids. “Don’t forget to breathe, Senna. I’m sorry.”
Her mind had been quelled, even with just her vague, fractured memories of the compound; she sensed that all her life she had been quelled. But then everything was coming back, and hard. Merciless. There was an uprising, a swell, and the intensity of it startled her. Pins and needles over every inch of her body, a sensation like lightning across the skin.
The compound. The brood. The sea of faces flooded back into her, a tide of lost friendship and possibility. All those lives snatched away. And Preece, he returned, too, not gray around the edges and dull as she remembered him a moment ago, but Technicolor violence, the teacher, mentor, doctor, tyrant, murderer in all his complicated, tangled reality. She remembered Mina, her pretty oval face and narrow eyes, how they sometimes held hands at night when the lights went out, the touch hidden beneath their blankets, away from Preece’s prying eyes.
And the crash. There it was, around her, with her. That was what she had come to forget, the death of her old life, her unbearable birth into the new one.
“You can’t leave me,” she had whispered to Mina. They were holding hands when she woke up to her dead friends on the Dohring-Waugh. Mina was cold, and the numbness of it passed into her briefly. No, no, feel all of it. Be inside of it. This is what you came here to forget, but you own every moment of it.
Preece came to find her, and when she remembered it now, he was smiling.
“Senna,” she heard him say. “I didn’t know you were awake.”
“You killed them. You killed them. How could you . . . All of them. A
ll of us! Why couldn’t you kill me, too?” She had screamed, hysterical, stumbling across the bodies, tripping over them, until she could beat him on the chest with both fists. Carefully, Preece held both of her wrists, his white beard haggard and thin as he looked down into her eyes.
“We’re going, too,” he explained, calm and fatherly as ever. “We can hold hands,” he told her, “at the end.”
Senna tore her hands away from him, and fought. Her shoulder rammed hard into his chest, forcing him into the wall. He was old and frail, and somehow she had decided she wanted to live. In the evac pod, she wrung out her hands, the cool, dead flesh of Mina’s fingers lingering against her palms while she sped to safety, and the Dohring-Waugh made its doomed descent into the surface of Mars, killing Han’s mother and hundreds of others.
“He taught me everything.” Senna didn’t realize she could speak while Efren restored her memories. “He taught me how to read, how to paint, how to count. How to sing, how to cook. He taught me history, science and art. He taught me how to give of myself, how to be selfless.”
Efren didn’t respond, but Senna could tell he was holding his breath. Waiting. Was there more to say?
“He taught me everything,” she concluded. Maybe that wasn’t so, in the end she had fought back, and he never taught her that. So he hadn’t taught her everything and tainted everything, just most of what she knew. Some of it had hemmed her in, caged her. “Sometimes I feel like I was grown in the lab of his ideas. Maybe he taught me good things, but . . .”
Still, Efren said nothing. The memories flowed in; his hands grew warmer as they rested on her face.
Senna thought about what she had felt the first time Mina had held her hand in the compound. They weren’t supposed to do those things unless Preece said they could start to court, but Mina broke rules occasionally and Senna clamped down on all her good girl impulses to avoid tattling. When Mina held her hand, she felt like she expanded past the bars of her cage. She had felt it again, that expansion, then, as the grief poured into her through Efren’s hands.
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