by Kali Wallace
She leaned over his shoulder, arm braced on the terminal to hold herself in place. “Our vision has not changed, Malachi, even if you and Zahra have lost sight of it. Our duty is clear. We will rendezvous with Homestead. Shut down the security web.”
A moment of quiet, then Malachi said, “Done. It will take a few minutes for the drones to return to their hull docks, but the web is disabled.”
“Contact them now.”
Malachi hesitated. “Orvar is dead. I don’t know who—”
There was a crack as she slapped his cheek. “Do not stall. Contact Homestead.”
Malachi touched his face where she had hit him, then reached for the terminal. He stilled with his hand centimeters above the surface.
“Panya,” he said softly.
He grabbed her wrist. She looked down. There was something moving beneath her skin. It looked like a small, round stone pressing up from the inside, rolling along her forearm toward her elbow.
There was a moment of stillness—a second in which nobody breathed—then everybody was moving at once.
Dag swung his weapon away from the hostages toward Panya without the slightest hesitation. Malachi twisted Panya around, jamming her arm up behind her back and slamming her face down onto the communications panel. The force of the blow was enough to stun Panya for a moment; she released the gun from her other hand. I darted forward to grab it. Panya shrieked and kicked at Malachi, trying to fight and flail.
“Let me go! What the fuck are you doing? Let me go!”
Malachi held her tight. “You’re infected.”
A look of pure shock overtook her face. “I am not!”
“Panya. Listen to me!”
Then Dag was beside him, taking hold of her other arm, dragging her away from the terminal. She was screaming and thrashing, spluttering with fear as she shouted, “Let me go! Dag, don’t believe him! Help me!”
For a second, only a second, Dag hesitated. It was enough. Panya wrenched one arm free and swung at him, but she missed Dag and struck Malachi’s cheek instead. Dag grabbed her arm and tried to wrestle it back behind her. As she cursed and fought, spittle pinked with blood sprayed from a bitten tongue or split lip. Malachi spared a second to wipe his face before reaching for her again.
“No!”
The shout rang across the bridge. It was Bhattacharya, with Xiomara echoing the word a moment later, but before I could even react, Ariana slammed into Malachi from the side. She caught a chair and turned to launch herself toward Malachi again. Her expression was slack, her mouth slightly open, her eyes unblinking.
The woman was gone. The virus—parasite—whatever it was—had returned.
Ariana’s shoulder struck Malachi in the center of his chest, knocking him away from Panya. He twisted swiftly and grabbed for her, hands raking over her short hair and face, seeking leverage to hoist her away.
“Don’t hurt her!” Xiomara screamed.
“The shock weapon,” Bhattacharya said. “Use the fucking shock weapon!”
Dag wrestled Panya away from Malachi and Ariana with one hand, reaching with the other for the suppression weapon tucked into his belt. He had Panya’s arm twisted behind her back, and she was shouting at him to stop, to let her go, but Dag ignored her. Her gun was warm in my hand. I didn’t know who to aim it at. The other suppression weapon, the one Panya had shown us, was across the bridge, spinning toward the ceiling.
Ariana broke free of Malachi’s grasp and reached for his neck with both hands. Dag raised his arm, and there was a loud snap. Ariana jerked, her entire body tense. A spiderweb of blue light rolled through her, just beneath the skin.
For a second—long enough for Malachi to shove her away, no longer—she was completely, utterly still. Her eyes wide, her mouth open, the eerie blue light fading, every limb stiff and motionless.
“It worked.” Panya was breathing heavily. “It worked. Let me—”
Ariana whirled around so quickly she became a blur of motion. She raked her hands across Malachi’s face and took hold of his ear, moving even more swiftly than she had been before.
Dag fired the shock weapon again, but this time it had no effect on Ariana aside from the briefest flutter of blue light. Her face was still blank; she didn’t even blink as Malachi struck at her face, grabbed her wrist, trying to break her hold on him.
“Are you going to stop making a fuss now,” Ariana said flatly. “Are you going to stop making a fuss now. Are you going to stop making a fuss now.”
“No,” Xiomara said, breathless. “No.”
Ariana and Malachi turned and turned in a circle, neither one breaking free, neither letting go. When Ariana’s back was to me, without thinking, without letting myself reconsider, I lifted the gun, and I fired. The shot spun me backward; I hit a console with such force it sent waves of pain through my battered back and legs. Malachi and Ariana moved at that same moment, still locked together in a desperate struggle, and the shot missed Ariana by centimeters. Panya screamed as the projectile sliced across her upper arm. Behind her an eruption of red blossomed on Dag’s chest.
The projectile exploded on impact. It tore Dag’s arm from his shoulder and propelled him backward through the open door of the glass room, dragging Panya with him. A cloud of his blood enveloped them as they bumped into the floating tangle of corpses.
Malachi caught Ariana’s jaw with a lucky blow that shoved her away from him. He grabbed the nearest chair, twisted to give himself leverage, and kicked her solidly in the back before she could recover. The force of the kick pushed her through the doorway; she thumped into Panya and Dag.
Dag’s heart still pumped blood from his wound, but weakly, weakly, and there was no light of awareness in his expression. Panya, trapped between them, her screams now fallen to whimpers, tried to push Ariana away.
Ariana grabbed her by both wrists. “Are you going to stop making a fuss now,” she said.
Panya spit in her face and kicked at her legs. “I’m not infected! Get her off me! Get her off me! Zahra! Help me!”
But even as she was screaming and fighting, splattered with Dag’s blood and bleeding slowly from the wound on her arm, there was a ripple of movement on the curve of her shoulder, along the line of her collarbone. The small bead elongated to a short, squirming line.
Malachi moved toward the panel to shut the door, wiping a spray of blood from his face.
“Malachi,” I said, my voice shaking. I raised the gun.
He looked at me. “What? Zahra, what are you—”
“You’re covered with her blood.”
“I know, I know, but you need help.”
“She broke the skin on your arm. She spit in your face.”
“I know,” he said again, more urgently. “We need time. I can—”
Panya screamed. She thrashed at Dag’s body, her arms whipping through the cloud of his blood, and she was screaming, screaming, and somehow through her screams I could make out what she was saying: “It’s coming out, oh fuck, it’s coming out!”
From the wound on her arm, a silver tendril reached into the air. It was thin and flexible, gleaming with a metallic shine beneath the glistening red blood. It looked like a wire, but it moved like a living thing, a reaching, searching thing, twisting and bending as it slithered from the bloody scrape on Panya’s upper arm.
Another one joined it, sliding from the mess of blood and skin, slowly, as though it was nosing its way into unknown territory. They could have been threads or hairs, they were so fine, so uniform, but they moved with purpose. Surrounded by so much blood, by so much death, they seemed so tiny, so slender. Their silver bodies caught the light as they bent and turned.
Another thread rippled beneath Panya’s skin, racing along her neck and jaw, over her fine cheekbones and toward her eyes. Her screams cut off with a strangled gasp. Her eyes widened—something silver and br
ight flicked across the blue—then her entire face went slack.
I moved without thinking, kicking toward the door—I had to close it, had to stop them from escaping that room—but Malachi was closer than me, and faster. He spun himself through the door, caught the frame to turn and grab the inside panel. He punched in a command. Panya and Ariana watched him expressionlessly, with no indication they comprehended what he was doing.
“Are you going to stop making a fuss now,” Panya said, and Ariana echoed her a second later, their words just offset from being in unison. “Are you going to stop making a fuss now.”
Panya launched herself at Malachi, surprising him with a solid blow to the back. There was a loud thump as his head struck the glass wall, but he recovered quickly to shove her away.
“You have to contact SPEC,” he said, dodging Panya’s grasping hands. “Zahra!”
“Are you going to stop making a fuss now,” Panya said, raking her fingers along Malachi’s arm and shoulders, clawing and grasping. There was no expression on her face. The silver worms that had crawled from her arm were wriggling back in, the ends of their tails whipping as they burrowed into her veins. “Are you going to stop making a fuss now. Are you going to—”
Malachi pulled Panya’s head back by the hair and slammed it into the wall. Then he did it again, and again, hitting Panya’s head into the glass until she stopped fighting. Her face—her beautiful face, her fine cheekbones, her sky-blue eyes—it was all a mess of blood from her split lip and gushing nose. Malachi shoved her away and kicked over to the door again, dodging Ariana’s attempt to grab him, and jabbed hurriedly at the panel.
There was a metallic clank as the door closed and locked. He tapped a series of commands, then smashed his fist into the control panel just as Ariana was reaching for his neck.
“Zahra! You have to contact SPEC. The security web is off. They can come get you. Do you understand?” He ducked away from Ariana again, reaching for the shock weapon still clenched in Dag’s hand.
“I—yes!” I answered, but I was shaking my head. “The radio— is it—”
“They’ll be trying to contact us,” he said. “The ship is yours now.”
“But they won’t—”
“Make them listen,” he said. He fired the suppression weapon at Ariana, but once again it had no effect. She grabbed his free arm and pulled him toward her, not even flinching as he kicked her solidly in the abdomen. “You have to tell them about what’s here.”
“I know,” I said. A single silver thread had emerged from the bloody wreck of Panya’s face. It twisted and curved, dancing through the clumps of blood.
“No, listen to me, you can’t let them . . . You. Bhattacharya.” Malachi thumped his hand on the glass wall. “Don’t let them cover this up. Any of it. Tell your aunt everything. Do you understand?”
Bhattacharya nodded shortly. “Yes.”
“Don’t let them make you lie like they did before,” Malachi said.
Bhattacharya nodded again.
“Zahra.”
I swallowed. I was still holding the gun, and my hand was sweaty, my fingers aching with tension. I could fire at the glass. I could get him out. Maybe it wasn’t too late. A bigger shock, help from doctors, from somebody, maybe—
“Zahra, I’m so sorry. Make sure they know the truth. You deserve that. I never meant—”
He stopped suddenly. One hand clutched instinctively at his neck. His lips moved, but there was no sound emerging except a hoarse rasp. His eyes went wide and he looked around quickly, one arm still anchored by Ariana’s unbreakable grip. He kicked the wall to give himself momentum, reaching with one hand for the gun at Dag’s belt. In the blink of an eye, he turned it on Ariana and fired. Her chest ruptured in a ragged wet burst.
Then, just as quickly, Malachi turned the weapon on himself. One second the muzzle was pressed to the bottom of his chin. The next his head was gone.
After the crack of the shot, the only sound that came from the glass room was the gurgling, wheezing rasp from what was left of Panya’s ruined face. All around them, in a slow, elegant dance, silver worms twisted and twisted in clouds of blood.
The hostages were silent, stunned. Nassar had his uninjured hand clamped over his mouth. Xiomara was at the wall, hands pressed to the surface, mist surrounding her fingers where warm skin met cold glass.
“She’s gone,” Bhattacharya said quietly.
“I know.”
“It’s only the—”
“I know,” Xiomara said. Her breath fogged the glass. “I fucking hate those things.”
Three strangers, and a gun. I looked down at the weapon in my hand. It was identical to the one I had used to kill the man on the shuttle. SPEC Security use only, highly restricted, these weapons and their ammunition had been difficult to acquire, in some ways harder than the false identities that got us aboard Civita Station and Pilgrim 3. SPEC wanted people to want to go to space; they did not want anybody to go armed. Before today I had never killed anybody. I could tell myself that I had never meant to, but I had no strength left for the kind of slithering lies that had carried me for so long. I had always known people might die. I had simply told myself they were less important than our dream. We had all repeated it, around and around all of our plans and plots, nodding at ever more vehement exhortations until every doubt was quashed.
They were all gone. Everybody I had chosen for this mission, everybody I had brought to this hateful place, they were all dead. We had failed to claim the ship, Homestead was still heading into danger, and I was alone with three strangers who had no reason to listen to anything I had to say, and every reason to hate me.
All I had were the words of Dr. Summers in the laboratory. Proof that my father had not done what the Councils claimed he had done. I could clear his name. I could restore the memory of who he had been to the world, and to Nadra and Anwar. But I could not do it alone. The world would not listen to me, not after all I had done.
I looked at Bhattacharya, trying to see the broken boy who had not cried at his parents’ funerals in this dirty and exhausted man. It was hard to remember why those images of him had once filled me with such rage.
I passed the gun from one hand to the other and flexed the fingers that had been gripping it so tightly. They noticed the motion, my former hostages, and all three reacted. Bhattacharya moved himself in front of his injured friend. Xiomara scowled deeply as she turned to face me.
“Oh, fuck you,” she said tiredly. “Haven’t you done enough?”
I turned the gun to grasp it by the muzzle, and I held it out to Bhattacharya. He didn’t move.
“The virus—parasite—it came from UC33-X.”
Bhattacharya said, “We know.” He was watching me closely.
“We found a log entry from Dr. Summers in the lab where it—where it was released. She tried to tell them. Everybody. She left a message.”
“Why do you care?” Xiomara said. “What do you want?”
She sounded scornful, as though she could not believe I could provide an answer. But what else was there left to want? Everything I had yearned for, a home that was a sanctuary, a place in the stars, a window where I could look upon the universe with Nadra and Anwar beside me and know they were well, it was impossible, it had always been impossible, a barren dream with no more chance of lasting than a desert thunderstorm, every violent crack of thunder fading even as it reverberated from the flanks of the mountains.
“I only want people to know the truth,” I said. “And to stop Homestead from coming here. That’s all.”
Finally, carefully, Bhattacharya reached to take the weapon from my hand.
JAS
The silver threads danced, gleaming with blood, slow, searching, reaching out from their dead hosts. The motion of one thread was tugging Ariana’s arm and making her fingers bend. Another made the muscles in Panya’s
cheek twitch. The parasites moving through each body looked, on the outside, like puppet strings tugging from the inside.
I didn’t know what to do with the gun, so I tucked it into my belt.
“We could kill you right now,” Xiomara said to Zahra.
“Xi,” Baqir said. His voice was weak, barely more than breath. He needed medical help, more than we could provide, and soon.
Xiomara looked at me, looked at Zahra, then said, “If you do a single thing to fuck us over . . .”
“I won’t,” Zahra said.
“What was that guy talking about, don’t let them cover it up?” Xiomara asked.
“Malachi was . . .” Zahra swallowed. “He was a SPEC agent. I didn’t know until today.”
“That’s not possible,” Xiomara said. “SPEC wouldn’t have let this happen. They would have stopped you.”
They weren’t looking at the dead anymore, but I could not stop staring. Thin lines rippled beneath their skin, moving like shadows along Malachi’s arms, under the rainbow spikes of Ariana’s hair, along the curve of Panya’s neck. It was easy to see now what had been moving my father’s body behind the bathroom door, and why it had been so much clumsier than Ariana when she was under the parasite’s control. There was no life there, no thought, no sentience. There was only that elegant silver worm trying to manipulate the clumsy husk of its dead host.
“They didn’t want to stop them,” I said.
I tore my eyes away from the dead to find the living staring at me.
“SPEC has wanted to come back here for years, but the Councils keep shutting down any proposal for another attempt,” I explained. “Maybe some people decided to try anyway.”
“What do you mean? In secret?” Xiomara said.
“I don’t know. It’s possible.”
“Malachi thought it was too,” Zahra said.
I was trying to think about it as Aunt Padmavati would think about it, looking at every angle, every shadowy gap between what was known in secret and what the public believed. There were factions within SPEC, as there were in any sprawling governing commission, and among them were those who certainly believed that another mission was worth the risk. They had been thwarted many times by the Councilors, like my aunt, who did not want House of Wisdom to claim even one more life.