“Oh, I like where this is going!” Zurri nodded toward Han. “Make that robot thing do it, he’s way too heavy for me to drag. I don’t know how to spin up that machine, the Servitor forced Paxton to kill it before he thumped him.”
“Don’t use LENG on him.” Senna shook her head. “Just let him think things over. We can decide what he deserves later. Or the station agents can. I just want to get out of this horrible place.”
“Fair enough,” Han agreed, typing away again. The clanking, shining Servitor seemed to jump to his every command, stooping over Paxton and easily gathering him up, dumping him inside the room with the chair and stars before shouldering the door closed and spinning the bar of the lock. Han held up Paxton’s chrome VIT. “I’m keeping this, though.”
“Good,” Senna said. “It’s evidence.”
“Come on,” Zurri said, hobbling with her, shoulder to shoulder down the clinical lab corridor and toward the black door leading out to the gallery. “We’re going to a weeklong spa after this, Senna. God better raise Ibiza back out of the sea just so we can go party there.”
“Wait.” Senna detached from Zurri at the door, shielding her eyes from the sudden flood of light shining in from the gallery ceiling. Her eyes slid from the chandelier to the walkway overlooking where they stood. “There’s one more thing.”
“We don’t have time, Senna—” Han tumbled out of the black door, Servitor Sixteen at his side like a bodyguard.
“Tell the shuttle to wait, there’s one more prisoner here we need to free.”
34
Paxton grew hungry before he grew thirsty, but then the thirst got bad. His throat felt like sandpaper. Someone would come eventually. Nobody forgot the smartest man in the universe. He could just imagine Glen gloating over this moment, or his first wife, Sandi. Then again, Glen and Sandi hadn’t been gloaters. Still, he imagined them chuckling at his demise. No, not demise, inconvenience.
Someone would come. Someone would save him.
Nobody just forgot the smartest man in the universe.
He didn’t like the dark. Hated it as a kid, hated it just as much as an adult. At least he had the star field, although he was pretty sure he had made out where the clip looped. Annoying. He kept compulsively reaching for his VIT, but there was just an itchy wrist, a bit skinnier than the other one from a life of wearing that thing on his arm.
Every item in the room had been thrown at the door, but it was solid. Glen had been the one to make sure it was that intense. Maybe that soft fucker had been right to worry about LENG. It had all gone to shit, but Paxton would recover. He always did. What he really didn’t like was that Glen might be right, and that Glen might win. Worse, a couple of total idiots had outplayed him. Paxton would give the win to Glen, because if Senna was telling the truth, then it was his irritating soul stuck in the tech making all this go to hell. The altruistic weren’t known for getting revenge, but then, maybe once LENG sucked Glen’s entire mind away, it had changed the man’s soul somehow, and the darkness of that machine had melded with Glen’s goodness, and this was the result—the kind of odd poetry his old partner had always enjoyed.
I didn’t know it would kill him, did I? Maybe I hoped it would. A gun firing its own bullets, I didn’t even go near the trigger.
What a sad end. What a sad, stupid end. But poetic, at least.
No, this wasn’t the end, nobody just forgot the smartest man in the world. Someone would come for him, even in total isolation, there had to be a way. This was his Eden. God didn’t die in Eden.
He knew the thing had come before it appeared. The second they had opened that weird metal orb and pried the LENG sphere out of it, he sensed a change in the Dome. There was a presence. There was always a presence. That idiot Scooby gang should have fired up LENG and roasted his brain until it was a shriveled, charred peanut, but they chose dumb, pointless mercy over the killing blow.
Clever isn’t the same as ruthless.
Something ruthless had come. He couldn’t hear the machine, the bassy, chest-rumbling churn of LENG when it was all warmed up and ready to sizzle. But somehow, the thing had come for him. In a way, it felt inevitable. There was comfort in that, maybe.
There was comfort in it until it arrived.
I am LENG, it warned him. I am the Vestige. A billion lives and a dozen planets are in me, and now I will consume one more being.
The machine isn’t on, Paxton insisted to himself, huddling against the wall across from the star field. I’m hallucinating.
The shadow grew itself from the floor, stark and black and vaguely human as it absorbed the light of the star field. Nothing reflected across it; the light, in fact, seemed repelled by its presence. As it neared, its fingers grew longer and longer, lengthening and sharpening in anticipation of the feast.
I am the Vestige, it told him. And I have come to take.
EPILOGUE
Someone had left a bouquet of white silk flowers on the floor near Tony’s grave. Zurri couldn’t decide why she had come, or whether she wanted to spit or cry. She had done both when, on the shuttle rocketing away from Ganymede and the Dome, Senna had handed her an odd, engraved metal orb. A moment later, a man appeared to her, handsome and kind, with dark hair and golden eyes, and the most inviting smile. He pressed his thumbs against her closed eyes, and everything Paxton had taken from her came flooding back.
It hurt. It burned. God, it burned.
She saw the halo of fire bursting around Tony’s head. She saw him leering over her bed. She saw the Servitors that careened into her condo, initially mistaking her for the perpetrator, him the victim. They hit them both with sedation darts. SecDiv settled the lawsuit with her, but she still eviscerated them in the press. She saw the headline again, of Tony making bail, of his hideously early release. Of his slap on the wrist. She saw him burst into flames, smelled his burning flesh, and the urge to cry and spit rose in her once again.
In the end, she didn’t regret taking it all back into her mind; now she just had to figure out what to do with it. Tony’s family could only afford a modest plot on the station, a warehouse-like building in Sector 5, where people were cremated and then put into drawers. They would shoot you into deep space as a solid rock, but that cost money.
No words were said. She found her mind strangely, comfortingly empty as she left the Sector 5 Public Cremation and Cemetery Services building. Empty, that was what she had wanted from Paxton, from the drugs, from the jam-packed schedule that never let her so much as peek at her past or her thoughts. She was finding empty a different way now. It only worked some of the time, but that was all right. Outside, beneath a glittering pink holographic tree, Senna and Han waited for her. Han wanted to go see real trees in the university district, so that was their next stop.
“Ready to go?” Senna asked. She was in her same shapeless sack dress, this one candy red. No matter how Zurri pushed, the girl never seemed to outgrow the sartorial finesse of a circus clown. It was hard to rib her too hard when she carried around the probable fragment of a black hole in her tote bag. They hadn’t yet figured out what to do with the Vestige, but they were working on it. Zurri had a feeling it would be hard, very hard, for Senna to let it go. Without it, without Glen or Efren or the Vestige or whatever one wanted to call it, they would have wound up trapped on Ganymede forever. It had set them free, but only after it had taken from them.
Zurri didn’t see it as the benevolent force Senna did. She didn’t like the way her mind seemed always to bend toward it.
“I’m ready,” Zurri said. “Trees next?”
“Hell yeah, trees!” Han shouted, handing her the Mega Slurp he had been holding on to for her. He fell back into whatever game he was playing on his VIT as soon as custody of the almighty Slurp was relinquished. A little AR corgi, shabby and blinking constantly in and out of existence, trotted along beside him. A gift from Han’s brother. It glitched just as Zu
rri glanced at it.
Senna fell into step with her, silent for a while. Perfect, virtual cherry blossoms drifted through the air, fizzling out, an AR trick, as Zurri reached up to catch one. They fell like a gentle pink snow, collecting in drifts that scattered and disappeared whenever someone happened by. More would come, and more would be scattered, and for a little while it made a very pretty picture.
“Are you all right?” Senna asked, clutching the tote bag with the Vestige close to her hip.
“No,” Zurri said, smiling faintly. “But I will be.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would first and foremost like to thank Anne Sowards for pushing me hard on this project, even when it was a tough ask. I’d also like to acknowledge her patience and generosity throughout the process of realizing Reclaimed. To my agent, Kate McKean, thank you for remaining my rock during one of the toughest years of my publishing and personal life. I must also acknowledge the research and work of Priyamvada Natarajan, whose work on supermassive black holes inspired many aspects of this book. Thanks to Marcella Waugh and Alex Cautley for their consulting and research assistance. And finally, I want to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the entire team at Ace—without their support, guidance, and artistry, this piece would not have been possible.
Photo by Colin O
Madeleine Roux is the New York Times bestselling author of the Asylum series, which has sold in eleven countries worldwide, and whose first book was named a Kids’ Indie Next List pick. She is also the author of the House of Furies series and has made contributions to Star Wars, World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons. A graduate of the Beloit College writing program, Madeleine now lives with her beloved dogs in Seattle, Washington.
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