by James Welsh
***
2185 AD
It was the night before the starling frigate launched from Earth, a day Mystery thought would never come. They may have been on Earth for just a few days, but being back home awoke a dark tension between Mystery and her friends. The launch pad located just a mile from one of the rare forests on the continent, Mystery was hoping to hike the woods one last time, but no one wanted to go with her.
Mystery tried to read the silence from Akilina and Avis, but it took a while to translate. It wasn’t until the night before the launch, as Mystery twisted sleepless in her bed, that she pieced it together. Ysabel must have told them her side of the story about the rescue. Ysabel had infected her friends, spinning a spider’s web of threads about how Mystery must have sabotaged her ship somehow. Mystery didn’t know if the theory about her friends catching this sickness from Ysabel was true or not, but it was the only one that made any sense. Hopefully their hibernation during the years-long trip to the Volans colony would wake them from that delusion. Maybe they’ll arrive at Volans as different people.
Mystery was so lost in her thoughts, she didn’t hear the knock at the dormitory door. She also didn’t hear the sound of the door opening, then footsteps powdering the floor. She didn’t notice anything until a hand reached out of the darkness and tapped her on the shoulder. Mystery lunged over and grabbed what felt like a floor, while using her other hand to turn on the light. As light washed the room, Mystery realized that she wasn’t holding Ysabel by the throat. Instead, it was a wide-eyed courier, who was holding a message.
Her face scarlet, Mystery let go of the courier’s throat. “Sorry about that,” she mumbled, sitting up in her bed. “I thought you were…”
“Oh, no, no, no, it’s okay,” the courier managed to say with a rubbery tongue. He massaged his neck, the skin already bruising. “It’s what I get for delivering a message in the middle of the night.”
“Why are you delivering messages in the middle of the night?” Mystery asked, rubbing her eyes.
“It’s an urgent message – from Eatonville in the Washington Division,” the courier said, handing her the message. “Security forces there found some kids claiming to be your nieces.”
“So you read my message?” Mystery asked, annoyed, snatching the message.
“I read your message, you tried to strangle me – I’d say we’re even,” the courier shot back. The couriers were just as grating on Earth as they were in the colonies.
As Mystery read the message, her world slipped out between her fingers. The security forces found two girls stumbling alongside a creek that ran down from Mount Rainier. The girls were at first frightened, and fled down the riverbed until the guards could catch them. After some questioning, they said their names were Tondra and Brava, that their parents were Koralo and Fleur Joyce, and that both of them had died on the mountain. When one of the guards demanded why they ran at first, the girls admitted that their parents taught them the world was evil and to trust no one but family. The one girl, Tondra, said they had an aunt named Mystery Joyce – they had never met her, but their mother told them all about Mystery. With the parents gone, Mystery was their last guardian. If she didn’t claim them, the charter would enslave them, the solution they had for every orphan they found, and there were a lot of orphans in today’s world.
“So?” The courier asked.
“So?”
“Are they your nieces or not? I have to send them a response soon – I don’t know how much longer their security chief is going to wait before shipping them off to work in the factories.”
A long pause haunted the dormitory.
“Well?” The courier asked impatiently.
“Yes, they’re my nieces.”
“Are you sure?” The courier asked, noticing the hesitation in her voice.
“Yes, I’m sure. Now go and tell that slaver of a security chief they’re under my name,” Mystery snapped.
As the courier left the room, Mystery laid back in bed, flicking off the lights as she did so. The courier had not closed the door the whole way, though, and light from the hallway seeped into the dark room. But it wasn’t the light that kept her awake. She was now an adoptive mother to two girls she had never met. She would have to send back what money she would make at Volans to keep her daughters alive and free.
And she didn’t even know why she was doing this. Mystery had never slept with a man out of fear of being chained down with family. She remembered her childhood and how her father would come home exhausted, not from work but from knowing there were souls he had to feed. If her father did not have a family, there was no telling where he would have gone. He could have gone to the Alaska division or maybe to one of the rumored sanctuaries just to the east. But wherever he would have gone, he would have been alone and happy – Mystery knew that much.
She twisted in her bed and sobbed into her pillow. In just a few years, she would be trillions of miles away from Earth. But even then, she would feel the pull of its gravity.
Draco
2197 AD
As his foot slipped on the rung, Dr. Kevin Bends learned just how well drinking and ladders mixed together. His body fell faster than his breath did, but his experiment in terminal velocities lasted just a moment. As soon as he started falling, his sober instincts grabbed hold of the ladder, breaking the fall and wrenching the tendons in his bad shoulder at the same time. He swayed awkwardly in the air for a few seconds, his legs clanging out a hollow song against the metal rungs, before he found his footing again.
If anyone was looking at Bends inside of that moment, they would have thought how much he looked like a bird who had forgotten how to fly. But to Bends, he was just another actor standing in position over the trapdoor – it looked wrong but felt right. He continued his climb up the ladder, looking down with every rung. Darkness was climbing up after him, and his instincts took over again and pushed faster.
To Bends, the ladder felt impossibly tall, almost ready to splinter under its own height. He believed in this so powerfully, that if another soul pointed out that the ladder was actually just twelve feet tall, he would have ignored them. And if they had also pointed out that Bends, who was just a few inches shy of seven feet tall, would have only had a short fall if his hands slipped on the rungs, he would have ignored them still. The ladder, which ran perpendicular to the cave wall, stopped at an opening in the stone. Bends hopped off the ladder and onto the ledge, impressed that he did not fall backwards into the abyss that was just beneath him.
There was what looked to be a solid wall of rock in front of him. But Bends took out a magnetic card, ran it across the wall, and watched as the rock slid open. Similar to the control pads onboard the starling launches, the lock hidden inside of the rock was iron and sensitive to the magnetic strip on his card. There was a reason why magnets were a symbol of the colony’s rich and powerful, and why if one of the poor were caught with a magnet, it meant death by gunfire. As Bends stepped through the opened doorway, he could hear the squeak of the ladder retracting behind him – it was the warm sound of security, like the rustle of a blanket.
Bends ran his fingers through his hair – as bright as a crow’s feathers – and called out to an empty house, “Home, I’m honey!”
Bends stumbled through the room, his unsteady feet dancing on the pressure plates that were slipped just beneath the floor. The plates activated a flickering crown of light that was fitted to the ceiling above him, casting the room in broken amber. Everywhere Bends looked, shadows were dancing on the stage of the walls, like some twisted-ankle ballet. Bends kept meaning to go to that engineer to fix the lights – but the engineer was always away, working on the drills that orbited Carina. Even in the future nothing worked.
Bends made his way across the stuttering room, yelping a little as his foot bounced off the leg of his desk in the corner. He had lived in that little house for so long, he could walk it blind. The fact that he bumped against the desk was surprising – it was almo
st as if someone had purposely moved the desk three inches to the right. But that would have been impossible, since the desk was carved out of the cave’s stone and so it was fused to the floor. But Bends didn’t want to reason it away.
He unlocked his porthole window with slurred hands and looked out over the colony. His cliffhanger home was one of several that bordered one of Janus’ many underground aquifers, Lake Bohemia. The lake was twenty feet deep and just over three hundred feet wide at its longest point. The water had never tasted dirt, having been cleansed by rock for millions of years – as a result, the water was nearly invisible to the casual eye. Lake Bohemia pumped its blood through an artery – which the colonists named Canal Christina – that ran straight like an arrow until it hit its target in the center of the vast cave. It was there that Canal Christina drained into the Dives, a round well that drank water instead of surrendering it. On the other side of the cave was an even larger lake, Lake Henlopen, which also pumped into the Dives by means of two channels, Canal White Clay and Canal Brandywine. Even from a distance, Bends could hear the waterfall’s gurgle as the three canals poured into the well like wine into crystal. Some of the colonists complained that the noise kept them awake, but Bends had always found it soothing.
On the banks of the canals were longhouses, each of which was carved out of Janus’ stone. The only part visible of each longhouse was the roof, with the rest of the structure rooted under the soil of rock. The curve of the longhouse roof camouflaged it against the ground, making it look more like a hill than a home. The only thing that gave away each longhouse was a series of windows and glass doors. Brave little lights shot from the glass and into the tapestries of dark that hung from the cave’s walls and ceiling.
From where Bends stood, each light looked like a star, and the entire scatter of lights looked like the constellation of redemption. He thought this only because that meant he stood above their helpless hope. Their distant laughter was as flickering as their lights, and it would not be long before the dark wash from above drowned them back down again. He had felt pinches of pain inside of himself for his entire life, and their joy felt more like the poison than the cure.
Inside of that moment, Bends thought he heard a rustling behind him. It was as if a wind had walked in, but there was no wind in the colony. Aroused from his daydreams, he spun and peered into the pulsing darkness, his fists clenched, his face a rush of red. He couldn’t tell where the lights stopped flickering and the shadows started moving. And he heard breathing – Bends was so throttled he didn’t even realize that the breathing was his own.
“Who’s there?” Bends demanded, stumbling backwards as he spoke. He hit the ground hard, but he didn’t notice. “I know there’s someone here! Answer me!”
The only answer he got was the lights dimming even more than before, until the room was a shade of black that Bends had never seen before. A sudden memory surfaced in his brain, of a textbook about whales that lived long ago. He wondered if this was what it was like to live in the stomach of the whale. Most people would have screamed – but Bends could only laugh.
“Jules, is that you?”
***
2196 AD
“Now, Mr. Khunrath,” Dr. Bends asked, not bothering to look up from his report, “before we begin, have you been experiencing any unusual symptoms as of late?”
“Well, I’ve got some sores on the inside of my mouth,” Jules Khunrath offered.
“Let’s see now,” Bends said. He set down the report and walked across his office to Khunrath, who was sitting at the foot of a lounge chair. Khunrath, who was short and slim like a walking stick, shrank in the shadow of the towering Bends. The doctor motioned for his patient to open his mouth, and he peered inside with a little flashlight. Right away, he noticed a trio of clear ulcers on the inside of Khunrath’s bottom lip. He also noticed that Khunrath’s teeth were somewhat stained, and he asked, “Have you been drinking coffee?”
“Well, I don’t know if the stuff they serve here could be called coffee, but yes,” Khunrath laughed. It wasn’t much of a joke, but it was the funniest that Khunrath could get.
“It is likely that hot beverages are the cause for the sores,” Bends said, putting his flashlight away. “If the sores persist more than a few weeks, ask me about them again.”
“Well, okay,” Khunrath said, not as satisfied with the diagnosis as Bends was. “What about this cough?”
“Cough?” Bends repeated.
“Yes, sir. I’ve had a bit of a bad cough for the last week. Is it something to worry about?”
Bends shrugged. “Well, you could either have a cold or a tumor in your lungs.” He chuckled at Khunrath’s look of alarm and continued, “In all seriousness, though, it’s more than likely a cold – or perhaps a reaction to dust or some other particles you’ve been exposed to as of late. I’ll need to run another test or two to be certain, though. I’ll schedule something for you for next week.”
“It’s all about waiting, isn’t it?” Khunrath asked. “It’s all about waiting for a few weeks and hoping for the best? We can fly spaceships across the galaxy, but we’re still taking medical advice from medieval times?”
“Well, yes.”
“Oh. I guess I just have to take your word for it,” Khunrath reasoned, absentmindedly scratching the scalp beneath his long, dark hair. “If you can’t trust your life to a man of medicine, then who can you trust?”
“Those are my thoughts exactly, Mr. Khunrath,” Bends nodded, although not as convinced as Khunrath was in that statement. The truth of the matter was that time was not the only medicine he had. It was just that Bends enjoyed seeing his patients squirm and wither for just a bit longer before finally giving into his oath as a doctor. There was just something in a sick patient’s eyes – their wide, white, praying eyes – that felt so beautiful. And when Bends finally healed a soul, he felt crushed doing so – like taking a knife to a painting. It was why Bends made sure that Khunrath left his office feeling just a little bit worse than he felt before.
His next patient was Anzhela Khunrath, Jules’ wife. Bends had not had the chance to meet Anzhela yet – she was a recent transplant to the colony, having arrived by starling frigate just a few months before. It was only natural that her arrival would be met by a whisper of rumors. Khunrath had insisted that she had always been his wife, and he had only had her come to the colony once he knew his work there would be long-term. The more cynical theory, though, was that Anzhela was a mail-order bride, courtesy of the charter.
Whatever the reasoning, though, there was no controversy over her beauty. The moment that Anzhela walked into his office, Bends felt the first needles of weakness he had felt in a long time. Her skin was richly lathered with bronze, and she had black licorice hair twisted into a bun. Her eyes were brushed with the color of dirt, reminding Bends of an Earth he only vaguely remembered. As she walked past a shocked Bends and into the office, she turned and smiled like a lighthouse. “Dr. Bends, is it?” Anzhela asked sweetly.
“Um, yes, yes it is,” Bends said, trying to find his voice as he closed the door behind him. “And you must be Mrs. Khunrath.”
“I am.”
“And how has your day been going so far?”
“It’s been a good day,” Anzhela beamed.
Bends tried to find some eighth note of sarcasm behind her smiling eyes, something which he had developed an ear for over the years. There was no bitterness behind her mask of comedy, but there was no naivety either. It was as if Anzhela had absorbed the sadness of humanity and still found hope in people. But her optimism was not contagious. If anything, Bends raged on the inside – she had no right to her joy, and Bends burned to graffiti her with his sickness. In just a few moments, Bends went from thinking she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen to being the ugliest.
Bends repeated the same routine with Anzhela as he had with her husband. He picked up his clipboard, his pen at the ready, and asked, “Now, Mrs. Khunrath, have you experien
ced any odd or unusual symptoms lately?”
Anzhela, who by now was sitting like a queen at the edge of the lounge chair, her legs crossed, her hands clasped together on her lap, shook her head. “No, I haven’t, thankfully,” she said serenely.
This only filled Bends with more fury, but he hid it well and strained a smile. “That’s great news! Now, let’s get on with the checkup, shall we?”
He checked her eyes, but her seeing was perfect. He checked her ears, but her hearing was perfect. He checked her heart, but her beat was perfect. With each step, Bends boiled more and more until he wanted to scream in frustration. She was a statue hammered out of the hardest metal, and there was nothing Bends could do to crack the surface and show her just how flawed she really was. He flipped through the records on his clipboard, expecting to see some major surgery from her past that would prove him right. Surely she must have slept on the operating table at some point. But there was nothing.
It was then that the monster inside of Bends tugged on the puppet strings of his arteries. He pointed to a machine at the far end of his office and said quietly, “Come with me.”
A curious Anzhela followed him to the device, which was a shallow bathtub filled with a cardinal red gel. The tub was connected by cable to a nearby computer, which hummed as Bends booted it up. “So what does this thing do?” Anzhela asked.
“It’s a virtual biopsy tray,” Bends dryly explained. “It can digitally map a body surface for signs of tumors, both benign and malignant. The sensors in the tray are sensitive enough to detect a single cancer cell, without the risks that x-rays pose.”
“And the red gel?” Anzhela wondered out loud. “What does that do?”
“It helps increase the image quality for the sensors,” Bends said simply. He omitted part of the truth: that it was also infused with nanites – robots on the molecular level – that actively scrubbed and purified the gel. Bends wanted to see if Anzhela would be squeamish about dipping herself in gel that other people had touched. But there was no fear in Anzhela’s eyes, which angered Bends once more.