by Annie Bellet
“Stop,” I yelled. “You are under arrest for poaching and trespassing.”
The man snarled and drew a knife, staggering to his feet though I saw he favored the leg I’d kicked. He came at me faster than I expected and I hadn’t time to take a shot and put him down. I caught the knife swipe on my rifle, metal scraping hard plastic, and tried to kick him down again, aiming for the same leg.
He recovered from my block and slashed downward, his blade slicing into my suit before I could snap my leg back. I felt the sharp bite of the knife pricking my skin but the pain was just fuel. I threw my rifle into his face and grabbed his knife arm as he shifted to block. My weight came down on him, pulling us both to the ground, and we wrestled for control of the blade.
Then, with a scream that echoed the cry my heart had made when I read Ajax’s email that he was going into the Mist forever, the man stopped fighting. The hot scent of blood crowded through my mask and my lenses first aid program was trying to tell me my leg was bleeding and required attention.
I crawled off the man, leaving him gasping and clutching the knife in his chest. My first aid program helpfully told me his lung was punctured and he had less than a half hour to live. Light froth, probably pink but showing white in my modified vision, spilled over his lips as he gasped.
I pulled a skin patch from one of the sealed pockets on my suit and slapped it onto the cut on my leg. The cut was superficial, my first aid program didn’t even think it would need stitches, but now that I wasn’t fighting for my life the stupid thing burned like hell.
“How did you know where the relays were?” I said when I could breathe again.
“The... what?” the man gasped.
“The perimeter alarm things,” I said. Inside the Mist, only very short range communication technology would work. We had perimeter relays set up like a fence just on the edge of the Mist to warn us when someone crossed into the Chalice. Knocking out two relays left a hole in the fence. But the boxes were tiny and well camouflaged. Without the location in my lenses, I’m not sure I could have even found one.
“I need help,” the man whispered.
“I’ll get you help. I’ll carry you out of here. I have first aid tech. You’ll be fine. Just tell me.” The lies spilled from my mouth in a rush. The man was going to die. I almost asked him his name, but my heart felt all numb and twisted and I didn’t want to think about this man I’d killed. He would have killed me, I told myself. That eased the weird tightness a little.
I watched as cunning, uncertainty, and pain warred in his face. Pain won out.
“We paid a ranger.” His words jolted me. I’d suspected but not wanted to think about it, to look at the evidence in front of me. “Leon Devonsen. He promised no one would come for hours. Told us where the alarm boxes were.”
“Wait,” I said. I sub-vocally gave my lenses a command to record audio and visual and leaned in close to the man, focusing on his face instead of the oozing knife wound in his chest. “Repeat that.”
He did, choking out the words in a spray of froth. He told me what email they’d used and how to find the account numbers for the money, his eyes growing more desperate and his breathing more ragged. Anger and betrayal clouded over any guilt in me for interrogating a dying man.
Leon. That bastard. I didn’t like him, but he’d been a ranger almost as long as Ajax. He’d seemed solid, if too cautious and pandering to IPEC politics. I wanted to kill him, to take his scrawny white neck into my hands and shake him until his eyes bugged out.
In my rage, I almost missed the change in the dying poacher’s expression. His eyes behind the goggles shifted focus, looking past me and he seemed almost to nod. I shifted my weight and turned my head. It saved my life.
The poison dart from the third poacher I’d stupidly never sensed skimmed past the side of my throat, almost catching the edge of my mask, and chunked into the fern tree beside the dying man.
I threw myself sideways and rolled behind another tree. Coming up into a crouch, I dodged deeper into the Mist, running with only a thought of getting away. This recording had to get to Director Takamura. Leon had to pay for this betrayal. The Rangers were here to protect the Chalice, not plunder it. I’d joined IPEC to help save the new worlds we discovered from the degradations of human greed.
To betray all this now, especially after becoming station leader in the wake of losing Ajax, was disgusting. It was Leon shitting all over Ajax’s memory. My friend would have killed Leon himself if he’d been here.
But he wasn’t here. Ajax had left me to carry on, choosing the Mist over a life outside the Chalice. This place was his legacy and to protect it, I had to live.
I heard cursing somewhere behind me as I paused in my flight and crouched again, fighting to control my breathing. A skittering noise caught my attention and I held very still as a giant millipede twined up the trunk near my face. My lenses painted the crawly light green, its trail a faint green light that curved around the fern trunk like an ephemeral vine.
I pulled up the location program on my lenses. I’d fucked up in my mad run to put distance between the poachers and myself. Now they were between me and edge of the Mist. I didn’t know what kind of tracking programming they had, but I had left an easy to follow trail of footprints and broken fronds. I had to keep moving, had to find a way to get around them. Once outside the Mist, I could contact Oscar and send him the recording. It would be in the Director’s hands before Leon could get to me.
If I could get out. I was alone, injured, and had a small knife versus an unknown number of armed and dangerous, and now very angry, poachers. I’d definitely ruined their poaching expedition no matter what happened now, and that gave me grim satisfaction.
The first rush of adrenaline was fading and the pain in my leg became a constant ache as I tried to move silently through the fern forest. I heard occasional rustlings but if the poachers were still on my trail, I didn’t see them yet. I hoped it was just the one. The one I’d shot would be out for a while yet and the other would be dead about now. I wished I’d asked him how many were with him, but there was no point in dwelling on wishes now.
Shit. Rustling closer now, just a hint of it. Yellow flecks dotted the Mist just ahead of me. Fresh lemur trails. Chittering cries rang out in alarm and I froze, dropping into a painful crouch.
On the very edge of my sensor range, I picked up a hint of deep red, like old blood hanging in the Mist. My programs seemed to stutter for a moment in surprise before identifying the pheromone trail as ghost lion and pinging a warning not to cross the Mist. Ghost lions hunted by tracking things that crossed their heavy pheromone trails. I’d seen pictures of a dead one, a wide, cat-like head, covered in fine scales and tufts of short fur, with no eyes and a thick nose pad. Teeth the length of my fingers. A pony-sized body built to spring and stalk. The lighter gravity on this planet and the high oxygen content of the air allowed things to grow light and large. The ghost lion was a rare and perfect example of specialized evolution. They were never seen alive and only a couple had ever been found dead.
Aggressive. Deadly. The lemurs were reacting to the presence of the ghost lion, not of me or the poacher.
The poacher. I stood carefully and moved forward, careful to avoid touching any traces of blood red Mist. In the thick canopy over my head, the lemur fell silent. To my right, something rustled, my sensors telling me this movement could come from a human-sized creature.
The blood red Mist trail of the ghost lion, bright and intense in its freshness, lay between me and the oncoming poacher. I took a deep breath, hating the idea forming in my head. And yet, perhaps hating myself for not feeling that terrible about what I was hoping to do.
Ajax would have called it poetic justice.
That thought decided me. I mapped out a retreat and a hiding place behind a particularly large fern tree, and then I cried out, as though I’d fallen or hurt myself. As smoothly and silently as I could, I bolted for my hiding spot, flattening myself down between two
large exposed roots.
Sliding my knife from my boot just in case, I peeked out, watching the forest in the direction of the poacher. The ghost lion had to be near, the trail hanging in the mist between the trees was bright and fresh and above me the lemurs were deathly still and quiet, a chill hush dropping over the warm forest.
The poacher came into view, a dark blue shape flickering in the Mist. He was moving cautiously, his poison gun in one hand and a small device I guessed he was using to track in the other. I held my breath and prayed the Leon hadn’t sold them our tracking programs as well. If the poacher had the ghost lion’s signature, my trap wouldn’t work.
He didn’t. The man went from tree to tree, staying in cover, clearly suspecting my cry was some sort of trap. He crossed the red Mist without hesitation and paused by another tree, his attention focused on the device in his hand. In my lens vision, the red Mist clung to him, painting him like a target.
The ghost lion sprang down from the canopy in a shivering wave of motion that swirled the Mist like a stone thrown into a still pool. It landed on the poacher with a sickening crunch, its huge jaws catching the man’s head and tearing it free. I couldn’t look away. My body was screaming at me to run, to flee, but sick fascination held me there, my whole being warring between fight and flight.
The ghost lion turned its wedge-shaped head and seemed to look right at me, its huge pointed ears perked in my direction. Scales gleamed along its long body, its spine ridge of fur standing on end. The poacher’s blood dripped black from its jaws as it roared. In that long moment as the eerie sound reverberated through my bones, I accepted I was next. I watched my future death in that lion’s roar.
Then the ghost lion picked up the poacher’s body as though it were a toy and sprang away, disappearing into the Mist leaving only swirling red pheromones in its wake.
I knew then what Ajax had meant, knew that I, too, would never be able to see the world the same.
I don’t know how long it took my limbs to turn back to flesh from the rubber they seemed to have become, but when I could move again, I stumbled through the Mist, following the map in my tracker lenses, avoiding the red swirls that faded even as I left them behind.
* * *
Leon didn’t try to argue the charges once he saw my recording. Oscar had sent it to the Director before Leon made it back to the station. I guess they were waiting for him, though I missed it since in the ensuing chaos it took hours before anyone could come bring me in. He was arrested and taken off planet for trial.
They offered me his job. I told them I’d think about it.
“What was the ghost lion like?” Oscar asked me. We were sitting in the com room late the night after I’d returned. Clearly Oscar, in his omnipotent control of the station’s communications, had read my report even though it was supposed to be confidential. I didn’t really mind.
I sipped my tea to buy time before I tried to answer, cupping the warm mug. My leg still hurt, but the first aid program had been right; I didn’t need stitches.
“Huge,” I said, knowing that was a crap response. I thought of Ajax’s words. “Like looking at death, at natural power all distilled into one creature. For a moment when it seemed to focus on me, I just knew I was going to die, like I’d fallen off a cliff and was watching the ground approach.”
“But you didn’t die.”
I shook my head. “No. I flew instead of fell.”
And I finally understood why Ajax had refused to leave the Chalice, why he’d gone back into the Mist instead of off-planet to fade away. I knew he was still there, somehow, flying deep inside that iridescent world. A ghost in the Mist, a part of the Chalice forever.
* * * * *
Infinitesimal Mercies
Williams, Zion, four days old. Dana brushes her sweating palms against her scrubs and stares up at his x-ray films as her carefully planned future falls apart.
“Oh god,” she mutters, “I over-exposed a preemie.”
She’d taken over the mobile radiograph duties from Ryan after he ate something wrong in the cafeteria and went home looking like someone had regurgitated him. Ryan had gotten her the job here at Children of Mercy intensive care. He was the best rad tech she knew. So Dana hadn’t checked his settings. She could admit this, blame him, but she can’t imagine throwing her best friend under the proverbial bus. Besides, she should have checked the settings.
That is only the first problem.
The film doesn’t look right. It’s a good film other than being over-exposed, which makes the details blur, but it seems to be picking up artifacts in the lungs. The thin white bones stand out on the film but the dark lung areas aren’t as dark as they should be. Tiny pinpricks of white speckle the chest cavity, as though the baby breathed in superfine glitter. The baby had been so tiny, so weak, breathing on a machine. He hadn’t fussed at all when she’d taken his film. There was nothing that could have left an artifact like this here, just his little mottled brown chest fighting to expand.
Dana pulls down the film. She probably didn’t hurt the baby. It was half a miracle that poor Zion was still alive anyway, wasn’t it? A little extra radiation wouldn’t do much. She caught it before more than one baby got more than his dose. She doesn’t want to be another casualty in the latest witch-hunt over poorly trained techs in hospitals.
Dr. Lopez, the radiologist on duty today, doesn’t need to know. He’ll never even see this film if she just gets rid of it. She takes a deep breath. It’ll be fine.
* * *
It’s not fine. Showered, cup of over-sugared coffee in hand, Dana stands in her closet-sized studio apartment, the film that shouldn’t exist taped up on her window. The glitter anomaly in those itty bitty lungs bothers her. Digging her bare toes into the bamboo carpet, she picks up her phone.
“Checking up on me, Danyka?” Ryan answers his cell with a voice hoarse from vomiting.
“Don’t call me that,” she says. He’s the only one who knows she changed her name and he just won’t let it go. At least he doesn’t call her an Oreo like her sister does.
“I’m feeling like a wrung towel here, so?”
“What was up with your settings on the mobile unit?” Dana blurts.
“What? What are you talking about?” But he paused before the spluttered questions and she can almost hear him thinking.
“The settings, they were off a bit.”
“Probably that damn intern.” His breathing is still heavy but some of the tension comes out of his voice. “Sorry about that, I, uh, let her help me when I wasn’t feeling good. Should’ve said something before I left.”
Paula, the intern, means well and tries hard. They joke she has the personality of a golden retriever. She’s an easy scapegoat.
“It’s okay,” Dana says, already pulling the phone away from her ear. “I caught it. Feel better, okay?”
“You finished my rounds for me?” Ryan asks.
Something about his tone, the rushed feel of the question, hell, the whole weird vibe she gets from the conversation warns her.
“Not quite, sorry. Anyway, I have to get ready for work.” It’s a night for lies, apparently.
* * *
Dana slips back into the hospital. She has almost two hours before she needs to report for her second job, bartending at Lush, and she intends to make use of the time. The film might be an anomaly, an accident, something weird with the machine even though the three she took afterward, with proper settings used on different tiny babies, were just fine. Ryan’s weird tone worries her and she can’t let it go. In med school, her favorite professor had told her once that intuition was a doctor’s greatest ally, told her to listen to it like a best friend and keep it closer than a lover.
The radiology offices are dark, locked up for the night. She uses Ryan’s code to get in, figuring that he somehow created this problem. Whatever it is.
All the films go to Dr. Lopez or Dr. Turner before they get sent to whichever of the pediatricians or neonatologists ord
ered the films in the first place. Children of Mercy specializes in at-risk mothers and children. They have one of the best neonatology departments in the United States. If Dana had finished med school, she would have been salivating to get a residency here. The irony isn’t lost on her.
The offices feel strange at night. She’s never found hospitals cold or odd. Dana likes the cleanliness, the tidiness of things here, especially in Radiology. Everything in its place, the slight citrus and bleach scent of cleaning solution a comforting perfume in the air.
In the dark, however, the arms of the machines loom, casting odd shadows like broken limbs and the quiet is the quiet of abandonment, an oppressive silence that judges her as she slips into Lopez’s office and clicks on the little flashlight she brought. She knows it isn’t really the shadows judging her, it’s the fact that she’s doing something she shouldn’t.
“I don’t even know what I’m doing,” she whispers, using her voice to shove back at the imagined eyes hiding in the silence.
Dr. Lopez was here today. All the films taken should be in on his desk. Dana’s are, minus the mistake, all in their manila envelopes with patient name and code marked just as they should be.
None of Ryan’s are.
Dana checks Dr. Turner’s office. Turner is a large, blunt-faced woman with a pinched mouth and an easy laugh. She gets along fine with Ryan but in two years hasn’t quite warmed up to Dana, her manner brusque and professional but never friendly. Ryan told her it was because black women make Turner nervous. Dana hopes he’s joking.
The films for three babies, all preemies, are on Turner’s desk. Dr. Turner is old school, like a lot of the doctors over fifty. She works with imaging technology that advances all the time, but trying to get her to read records on a computer is an exercise in futility. Her desk is piled with charts covered in sticky notes. The three that contain films Ryan took that morning are in their own pile, with a big note that says “Attn: Dr. Aubrey Logan” on it.
Dana ducks her head out of the office and eyes the door to the unit. The hallway leading down here is still dim. Radiology is on the end, so no one should walk by. She risks it and flips on the light box. She slides one set of films out of the folder and sticks them up.