Salvation Day

by Kali Wallace

  Everything I tried came up with the same response: ACTION PROHIBITED. I couldn’t get into the open transmission system. I couldn’t send an emergency or distress signal. I couldn’t even record a message to transmit via a private file transfer. ACTION PROHIBITED. Whatever Malachi had done to get the radio in the mainframe control room to work, it had not opened all the comm systems.

  Baqir bumped into my shoulder, caught the edge of the terminal to stop himself.

  “Drink,” he said. “We can’t get dehydrated.”

  He had found tubes of nutrient beverages in the kitchen. He tossed one to Xiomara and one to me. I remembered the flavor well: sweet orange, with a foul chemical aftertaste lingering on the tongue. It was what my father would make me drink when I was sick, or give to my mother when she had been working too long without stopping for a meal. The memories as much as the bitterness made me gag, but I forced myself to swallow. Baqir was right: we couldn’t get dehydrated. Our shuttle lunch had been a long time ago.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, looking at the screen over my shoulder.

  “I can’t send anything,” I said. “This is all I get.”

  Again: ACTION PROHIBITED.

  “Fuck,” Xiomara said. “Can we do anything about that?”

  “I don’t think so. Not from here.”

  “Let me try.”

  I moved aside; they were both more adept at computer systems than I was. They huddled over the terminal for a few minutes, but all they could get out of the system was the information that outbound messages were prohibited by order of a command override that had been issued by Captain Ngahere on the date 01.04.393.

  When the outbreak was still happening, something had first disrupted, then completely ended, outgoing transmissions from House of Wisdom. SPEC and Orbital Control had always assumed it was because of system damage or a cascading error due to the medical quarantine interacting with any number of unpredictable, uncontrolled shipboard actions. But what the system was telling us now was that the final silence had been intentional. Captain Ngahere had shut down shipwide communications, and she had done it on purpose.

  “How do we shut down a command override?” Baqir asked.

  Xiomara was frowning at the screen. “Why is there a command override? Why would the captain do that?”

  “Maybe to stop people from causing too much damage? If they were delusional and hallucinating, it may have been the only way she knew how to keep the systems protected.”

  I shook my head, although I had no idea if Baqir was right or not. We had no way of knowing what Captain Ngahere had been thinking at the end.

  “Look,” Xiomara said, indicating the screen. “The ship’s still accepting incoming messages. I wonder if we can . . . There’s an active transmission.”

  Baqir leaned over to look. “Is that SPEC? What are they saying?”

  Xiomara opened the radio channel. The voice of Adam Light boomed from the terminal.

  “. . . as though you expect us to tuck our tails and flee! As though we are as cowardly and weak as you are! But we aren’t. We are not weak. Every man on this ship is a thousand times stronger than your Councils servants in their uniforms, spitting empty threats at us, hoping to use our love for our family against us. But we won’t let you. We will not let you.”

  “Not SPEC, I guess,” Baqir said quietly.

  “You ask for surrender and offer nothing but a life of drudgery in return. We will not toil our lives away to feed your pampered children. We will not surrender our freedom to enslave ourselves to your goals! We will not send our families to become insects in your anthill of empty industry! We reject your offer!” There was the low roar of a cheer; he had to be speaking before a large group aboard Homestead. “You cannot imagine our strength! You cannot accept that we would rather die than surrender to the cruel yoke you call responsibility! You will not indoctrinate our children! You will not put the seeds of rot into their minds! Our wives and our children will not fall into your hands!”

  “He’s disgusting,” Xiomara said. She had sucked her own beverage tube flat already. “Wives and children? Does he think he’s a warlord from the Collapse?”

  More cheers, wild and raucous. I lowered the volume. Adam Light continued with more of the same. No surrender. No capitulation. Courage. Cheers.

  “They must be in contact with SPEC,” I said. “He wouldn’t be refusing to surrender if nobody had asked him to surrender.”

  “You don’t know that,” Xiomara said. “We don’t know anything about these people. We have no idea what they want. That story about wanting a place to live is bullshit. Nobody would come here for a place to live. They must want something else. Nobody’s that insane.”

  “I don’t think they’re lying about that,” Baqir said, “and I don’t think they’re insane.”

  His voice was quiet, but I knew from the way he was deliberately not looking at Xiomara that the feeling behind the words was anything but calm.

  “You can’t be defending them,” Xiomara said. “They’re murderers!”

  “I’m not defending them. I just don’t think they’re lying about what they want.”

  “But listen to him! If these people want to go to space that badly, why don’t they just become citizens like everybody else?”

  “It’s not that easy,” Baqir said.

  “It’s not that fucking hard of a choice to make. The Councils don’t allow slavery. They don’t indoctrinate anyone. You don’t really think that, do you?” Xiomara looked at Baqir, her expression baffled and angry. “You should be more grateful than anyone for what the Councils provide.”

  My breath caught, and Xiomara seemed to realize what she had said as soon as the words were out.

  “Grateful?” Baqir said. I knew that tone of carefully cultivated mildness. I had known it since we were twelve years old, the first year we met, two outcasts in a children’s hospital with far more anger and hurt than sense.

  “I don’t mean—”

  “You’re right, I guess,” he went on, still speaking so softly, not looking at Xiomara at all. “I know I would be dead if my parents hadn’t become Councils citizens. I also know that it took ten years for their application to go through.”

  Xiomara blinked. “Ten years?”

  “And I know that my brother and sister both died in the refugee camp while we were waiting.”

  “I didn’t . . .” Xiomara trailed off. Her eyes were wide. “But . . . families with kids, during the outbreaks, they were—”

  “Supposed to go to the front of the application line,” Baqir said. “I know that too. But then one of my grandmothers got caught stealing medicine from a camp doctor when my sister was sick, so the whole family was considered a criminal risk until her probation was up. She stole medicine for a baby.” For the first time, Baqir’s voice rose with a crack of anger. “And for that they put her on the same list as the fucking murderers and rapists and terrorists they’d shunted out to the wasteland to get rid of them. The whole family, even though my parents hadn’t stolen anything. So, no, Xi, it’s not that fucking easy. It’s never been that easy.”

  Xiomara stared at Baqir without saying a word. I knew the shock she was feeling. She didn’t know him well. During their brief acquaintance, she had only ever seen the mask he wore to hide his anger, the one that was so stunningly effective few ever saw beyond it. He wore it when anybody mentioned what a drain North American refugees were on Councils resources, needing so much support, so much education, so much training, so much special care before they could become citizens who could offer meaningful contributions to the global society. He wore it when self-important professors muttered about the danger of letting an unassimilated separatist boy into a Councils school and spoke to him slowly, warily, as though they were afraid he might turn into a snarling animal without warning. When students in our secondary school accused Baq
ir of starting every fight, when teachers had taken me aside and told me gently that I was doing myself no favors by letting Baqir copy my schoolwork—and never believed me that the reverse was always true, as Baqir was both smarter than me and harder working, and I was the one who would lash out at the least provocation. When the Leung Fellowship administrators interviewed him three times more than they’d interviewed me, and when I asked him what they’d wanted to talk about, he had only given me a crooked smile and told me not to worry, he’d make the cut, because they needed a refugee scholar to make their program look well-rounded. Through it all Baqir perfected that carefully bland mask, the face of somebody who was not angry, was not bothered, was not hurt, was not any of the things I knew him to be when he was unguarded.

  Xiomara could not imagine any life on Earth so terrible that even an abandoned slaughterhouse in space was better. She had never had to imagine it—nor had I, for all the horrors in my past. In moments when Baqir’s mask dropped away and the anger shone through as bright and terrible as any supernova, I kept quiet. I let him rage. There was nothing I could say. I could not imagine the traumas of his childhood any more than he could imagine mine— or had been able to, before we came to House of Wisdom. He no doubt had a much better idea of what filled my nightmares now.

  But of the three of us, only Baqir knew what was driving our captors, because his life had once been no different from theirs.

  “And just so we’re clear,” Baqir said, the calm returning with eerie alacrity, “I agree that that man is probably a fucking monster. And the people who brought us here are murderers. But I don’t think they’re lying about wanting a safe home, far from Earth. And nobody outside the Councils has any other way of getting into space.”

  Xiomara hesitated, then nodded. “Okay, but why—”

  A loud thump interrupted her. We all jumped, whirled around in panic, our eyes looking to the closed door to the corridor.

  “Is it locked?” Xiomara whispered.

  There was another thump. It didn’t come from the main door.

  It came from the bathroom.

  Dad, I thought, with a child’s panicked desperation.

  I didn’t realize I had spoken aloud until Xiomara said, “What? In there?”

  It was the sound of something hard hitting the inside of the door. A hard clank on impact, the faintest whisper of a scrape as it drew away.

  I stared at the door. Closed, these ten years, a door that had slammed again and again in my memories, waking me from sleep in a cold sweat of terror that I might find myself here again—

  There had been a knife in my father’s hand.

  A knife in his hand and a cut in his arm and blood soaking through his clothes. His eyes wide. His voice high and terrified. My mother had slapped him—watching from my bedroom doorway, I had gasped in shock. My parents were never violent. They had never hit me or each other, not once in my entire life. But that day Mum had slapped Dad, and for a second, the briefest, cruelest second, my father’s senses returned. The babbling stopped, and he looked at my mother, looked at me. He inhaled—as if to speak, but it was only a gasp, a breath. Without a single word, he had fled into the bathroom. He took the knife with him.

  Identification: Roy, Vinod

  Position: Chief of Botany and Horticulture

  Location: Personal living quarters 7.23-S

  Time of death: 17:37:04 01.03.393

  Cause of death: Hemorrhagic shock

  The bathroom door rattled again. Something hard dragged over its interior surface.

  “What the fuck is that?” Xiomara’s voice was rising, rising, a shout that stung my ears. “How can there be somebody in here?”

  “Jas,” Baqir said. “It can’t be.”

  “Can’t be what?” Xiomara said.

  “I know,” I said, or meant to say, but the words did not make it past my lips.

  There was something in the bathroom. It thumped against the door again, again. A faint cracking sound followed, like ice breaking.

  “Go,” Baqir said. He yanked at my arm, shoved Xiomara toward the main door. “Go, go, get the fuck out of here!”

  We scrambled across the room, clumsy and jostling each other in our panic. Xiomara hit the panel to slide the door open, then whirled around. “My helmet!” But her momentum was wrong, she turned too quickly and kept spinning, arms grasping for the door frame but failing to catch it.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, pushing her through the door, and Baqir right after her.

  There was another thump from the bathroom. The door shook, and as I watched, frozen in momentary terror, it began to slide open. My heart was racing and my mind was a constant refrain of no no no, but a part of me, the small shameful child hidden beneath the fear, was pleading: It might be.

  Ten years. It was not possible. The door was grinding open. Fingers pressed through the widening gap, fingers shriveled and dark, stiff, unable to curl around the edge of the door. Moving with agonizing slowness, the door opened a few centimeters, a few more. I saw the edge of a sleeve, the jut of a wrist. The hand twisted, and the motion tore at the flesh with a soft, wet noise, like meat halfway thawed.

  More of the arm emerged. Along the forearm were three deep gashes caked with dried blood, the skin and fat and muscle frozen but slowly thawing. It was my father’s arm. I had watched from the doorway to my bedroom as he made the first frightened cut, shouting frantically, Get it out, get it out, it’s in my veins, Amita, help me get it out get it out get it out. He had fallen quiet only when my mother slapped him. He had fumbled to shut the door, his hands bloodied and clumsy. Only when he fell silent did I hear the screams from outside our quarters. He made no sound as he opened his own veins. He had known what he was doing.

  There was a hand on my elbow. All I could hear was the thump of the impossible knock, the rasp of the opening door. Baqir pulled me into the corridor and took Xiomara’s helmet from my hands. The cold was shocking; I hadn’t realized how much the quarters had warmed.

  The rattle of the bathroom door stopped abruptly. I turned to look through the open doorway, hope and fear and nausea twisting together in my gut. I could still see the narrow gap into the bathroom, the smudged stains of my father’s bloody fingerprints, and the frozen hand, now unmoving. I watched it without blinking, my eyes stinging with cold and tears, willing the fingers to bend, and terrified they would. There was no sound in the corridor except our fast, ragged breaths.

  Then Xiomara gasped. “Ariana.”

  I spun around, swinging my helmet and headlamp as I turned. Ariana rounded a corner down the corridor, her space suit brilliantly pale in the crossing beams of light. Her short hair was stiff with ice, and there was a layer of frost over her exposed skin. She did not blink. There were frozen crystals on her eyelashes.

  “Ariana,” Xiomara said again. “Are you okay?”

  Ariana still had Henke’s gun, but it dangled uselessly by her side, as though she had forgotten she was holding it.

  “Ari, say something.” Xiomara started to move forward, but Baqir stopped her. “Ariana? Say something.”

  “How did she find us?” Baqir said. He was holding on to both of us now, one hand on my wrist and the other on hers. “If she followed us, they could have too.”

  The bathroom door rattled. Ariana turned her head sharply to look directly at the wall. She stared intently for a long moment, as though she could see through the barrier to the noise beyond. Then she moved her hand, the one that wasn’t holding the gun, raised it in front of her body and curled her fingers, grasping at something in the air. She turned her wrist and moved her hand to the side—

  I felt a thunderclap of understanding.

  She was miming opening the door.

  She was doing what the thing in the bathroom would be doing, if its flesh were pliable rather than half-frozen. She pushed the invisible door to th
e side; the noises from the bathroom echoed her motion. She tilted her head, watching.

  “Ari?” Xiomara said, her voice ragged with fear. “Can’t you hear me?”

  Ariana’s face was utterly devoid of emotion. It was as though the muscles that lifted smiles and turned frowns and furrowed brows had frozen in place, and there was nothing but a veneer of skin, empty of input from her brain. Her mouth was open and slack.

  “Ariana, please, say something. You’re sick, okay? We can help you. We have to.” Xiomara looked at me and Baqir. “Please, she’s not attacking anybody right now. She’s not hurting herself. She’s calm. We can help her.”

  The hope in Xiomara’s voice carved a fissure in my chest. Every instinct in my body, every memory I carried, they were telling me to turn and run. Ariana’s stillness would not protect us from terrible, bloody, deadly violence. But those instincts knocked up against the truth of what Xiomara was saying: Ariana was not attacking. She had followed us here. This was, perhaps, the second phase of the virus, the one I had never witnessed. I had only seen them go mad, lash out, harm themselves and others in delusional fits. I had not seen them follow people through a dark ship to float silently, eerily in a corridor. Xiomara might be right. Ariana had passed through the panicked, violent onset of the infection without dying. We might be able to save her.

  Then she spoke.

  “Vinod, what are you doing with that knife?” Ariana said.

  “What?” Xiomara said, startled. “What did she say?”

  I could not answer. The blood in my veins had gone cold.

  There was no recording of my father’s death. There was no visual or audio surveillance in the personal quarters. There had been no witnesses to my father’s final moments aside from my mother and me.

  Ariana spoke again: “Vinod, what are you doing with that knife?”

  My mother’s final words to my father. The question she had asked right before she slapped him. Right before he closed himself in the bathroom and died.

  I had never told anybody. Not my aunt, not the investigators, not Baqir, not anybody. It was an echo from the past that had always been mine and mine alone, breathed now on a cloud of mist from Ariana’s slack mouth and expressionless face.