by Lena Nguyen
“I suppose you’ll set yourself up with a little garden of Eden,” Sagara said sardonically. “As if it’s that easy. You need ISF’s resources to colonize a planet. Or will your families eventually merge together and populate the whole thing? Will a new pocket of the human race form from your descendants alone?”
“We have the skills to make it happen,” Boone said, defensive now. “I’ll handle defense, Natalya can find resources, Wan Xu can build the biodomes, Chanur will take care of our people—”
“And Fulbreech will make maps,” Sagara said, with brutal amusement.
Fulbreech dropped his eyes. “I’m not going,” he said faintly.
Boone wheeled on him. “What is that supposed to mean?” he demanded. “You’re in way too deep to start having second thoughts now—”
“Stop it,” Natalya gritted out. “We can talk about this later.”
“How many ransom situations have worked in favor of the ransomers?” Park cut in then, desperate to keep them arguing. She could not believe they had concocted this ludicrous plan together. How long had they been conspiring? Why hadn’t any of them pointed out the absurdity of it all? “How many of those people ever truly got away?” she asked.
It was when Natalya was rounding to answer her that Sagara suddenly made his move. His hand flashed back and grabbed the muzzle of Boone’s gun, wrenching it away; at the same time, he turned and slammed the heel of his palm into Boone’s sternum with a strange, sickening little crack. Then, viciously, before the military specialist could catch his breath, he stamped his boot down on Boone’s instep—and snapped his leg.
Boone screamed and squeezed off a shot with the electrolaser. At the sound of it everybody ducked: Natalya flinched, her hand jerking, and Park wound her fist back and smashed it into the surveyor’s face, knocking her to the ground. She dove after her, grappling for the gun with slippery hands. Again she felt that same wild, sunlit strength—android strength, she thought in a rush. There was a brief struggle between the two of them—all limbs and punching and hot, furious breath—before Park knocked away the gun and sent it spinning off under a table.
Then Fulbreech was there, trying to separate them; Park hit him in the face, too, and the three of them tumbled around on the floor, scrabbling over each other like animals. Park couldn’t see Boone or Sagara in the red-hazed commotion; she could only think about finding the gun or bashing Natalya’s brains out against the floor.
Then another gunshot, which made them all curl defensively. There was a muffled exclamation, and then silence. When Park looked up, she saw Chanur standing there at the entrance to the bridge, holding her own smoking railgun. She was pointing it at the far corner of the room, where Boone was dragging himself up the wall, his leg dangling horribly, and Sagara was lying on the ground—bleeding.
“You shot him,” Park said out loud, stupidly. Chanur ignored her and motioned to Natalya with her gun, tight-lipped.
“Get up,” she said. “We’re taking them downstairs.”
The surveyor staggered to her feet and wiped her bloodied mouth. “Fulbreech hit me,” she said, spitting.
“It was an accident,” Fulbreech said, slumped down next to Park. He seemed dazed, winded, as if he’d spent the day playing a game he didn’t understand the rules of and was now tired out. “We were never supposed to hurt anybody—let alone kill. You told me that, Natalya.”
“You were a fool to believe her,” Chanur answered, unblinking. Park could barely recognize her; the physician suddenly seemed to stand much taller, straighter. She seemed somehow much more present than she had ever been, as if she had stepped into her body like it was previously an empty suit. She jerked her head at Fulbreech. “You stay here. We’ll talk things out in a moment.”
He lapsed into silence. Park wouldn’t look at him, but she thought, Don’t you dare, you fucking traitor. Don’t side with them. Defend us!
Fulbreech said nothing; out of the corner of her eye she saw him nod. Chanur turned to Park and pointed the gun at her. “Get up.”
Everyone moved in a weird, frozen silence after that, as if they had all been requisitioned to act out parts in a play, against their wills. There was a sullen, awkward tension; Park batted aside Fulbreech’s hand when he went to help her up. Boone hauled Sagara roughly to his feet, despite his broken leg—Park supposed that was the genetic augments at play, pumping abnormal levels of adrenaline through his system, dulling his pain. Park could see that Sagara was tense and silent, and that he had a lot of blood running down his pant leg. She hurried over to brace him up with her shoulders. No one else moved to help him: not even Fulbreech.
“Fucker broke my leg,” Boone growled, not looking at it. Park also didn’t want to look at it: his calf and foot were twisted at an unnatural angle from the rest of his body. She looked instead up into Sagara’s white face and said, “We need to stop the bleeding.”
“It didn’t hit bone,” was all he said in response.
Chanur motioned to them with her gun. “No talking,” she said. To Boone she snapped: “I’ll see to your leg in a moment. Stay here with Fulbreech and make sure we can still get off this goddamned planet.”
Then she turned back to Park and gestured for her to start walking. When Park glanced at her eyes, it felt as if she was peering into the depths of a pool with no bottom.
They were marched down the corridor to Deck B by Natalya and Chanur. The entire time Park’s mind raced with possibilities, looking for escape routes, some moment of distraction she could use to her advantage. But the strange, lightning-quick, nuclear energy had been drained out of her—and now she was saddled with Sagara’s weight as he limped against her, tight-lipped with pain. It seemed to her that he wasn’t even breathing. On the other hand, Natalya made little hissing noises as she walked: either from an injury or a barely stifled fury, a complaining desire to kill them. Park wasn’t sure.
The two women took them to the freezer the crew used to store perishable foods: a tiny, narrow space no bigger than a standard closet. When they reached the door with the little porthole, Park felt a heart-jerking moment of vertigo, a kind of double-vision. She paused, but then Chanur opened the door and shoved her so hard that she buckled under Sagara’s weight. She landed on top of him in a heap, heard him give a strangled yell of pain; he sat up immediately and glared at Chanur. Stone-faced, the doctor fished something out of her pocket and tossed it at his feet.
“We could get hypothermia,” Park said to her, trying to ease her weight off of Sagara—but there wasn’t enough room. “He could die in here.”
“You could both die,” Chanur answered, heavy-lidded and indifferent. “The specimen’s the most important thing. The rest of you are just an afterthought.”
“You trained for this, Park,” Natalya said then, her eyes alight with mockery—that special malice she seemed to have only for Park. “It’s just like Antarctica. Remember?”
Then she slammed the door in Park’s face.
Park turned to Sagara in the dark. “Let me see your leg,” she said to him.
“You should test the door,” the security officer croaked instead. But of course, Chanur was already locking it.
Park only looked up once as she was tending to him, back up at the porthole; and she saw that Natalya was still standing there, staring at her through the window like she was looking into the exhibit of an animal—or the windows of a madhouse. The faint pale light made her look like an inhuman shadow, a ghost haunting the doorway. It occurred to Park that she looked like a distorted reflection of who Park had been, standing and looking in at another cell, another prisoner, just the hour before.
Time is folded together here, Park thought. We are all just reflections of each other.
Images on the surface of a mirror that had been splintered apart.
* * *
—
It turned out that Chanur had been bluf
fing, after all, perhaps out of spite—she clearly cared about whether Sagara lived or died, because she’d left them with a single injection of Regenext: a kind of medical gel that sped up the body’s regenerative cell process. It wouldn’t knit together all of Sagara’s wound—he would still have to hobble—or even dull the pain, but it would at least stop the bleeding.
Sagara shook his head when Park tried to give it to him. “You should take it,” he said. He jerked his chin toward her head: the wound from Natalya’s blow had congealed into a terrible mess at the back of her skull.
Park shook her head at him in turn. “This is no time to be a martyr,” she said, checking his wound one last time. The railgun’s projectile had cleanly pierced the outer part of his left thigh, missing any major blood vessels. And there was an exit wound, which meant the projectile wouldn’t still be lodged inside of him when the Regenext started regrowing the damaged tissue. She uncapped the injection before Sagara could protest and added, “You’re the better fighter of the two of us—even injured. I need you in good shape if we’re going to get out of here.”
He hissed through his teeth when she plunged the syringe into his thigh. “Give the needle to me afterwards, then,” he said after a moment. Then he glanced up at the door; Natalya had vanished, apparently abandoning her post to tend to her own injuries—or schemes.
Park re-capped the syringe and handed it over. “I’m surprised Chanur left us with a weapon.”
Sagara deftly tucked it up into his sleeve. “She wasn’t thinking,” he answered. “None of them are. Amateurs, all of them—they’re not used to thinking of everyone as a potential enemy.”
She tried to smile at him, but the expression felt ill-fitting on her face, like secondhand makeup. It was the wrong shade, the wrong tone. “Not like you,” she said.
Sagara looked at her, but he didn’t smile back. “No,” he said, with something like sympathy in his tone. “Not like me.”
Park tried not to flinch. She knew he was thinking about her and Fulbreech—about Fulbreech’s betrayal. She couldn’t think about it. Barely believed it, even. How could he—guileless, easy-to-read Fulbreech—have been deceiving her all along? How could he have gotten such a thing past her? She remembered the argument he’d had with Natalya in the cafeteria, back on their first day on the planet: had she and Boone converted him to their cause then? Or had he been in their ranks all this time, since they’d left Earth, directed to befriend and beguile Park and keep her from noticing anything as the ISF’s orbiter?
The thought hurt more than the steady throbbing at the back of her skull, the cuts and bruises scoring her body. That his smiles had been false, his gestures orchestrated for reasons far more political than attraction. She felt as if she had swallowed a cigarette. As if it was traveling somewhere in her body, still alight and burning. As if she’d never be able to cough it out.
Sagara slid back until he could sit against the nearest wall; Park followed suit with the opposite wall, so that only their legs were touching, their boots touching each other’s thighs. Sagara leaned his head back so that his eyes only glinted at Park from under his eyelids, like the dark flashes of iridium satellites in the night sky.
“So,” he said.
She sighed, tucked her hands between her thighs. The freezer was cold, but not as frigid as she’d been expecting. “So.”
He nodded at her. “Why don’t you start?”
He made it sound so easy—as if there were a definitive origin point, one starting domino that had toppled all the others. She’d thought that, even, but Taban had said that was wrong. An ongoing environmental effect, he’d said. And how to describe that environment succinctly? Where could you start? The crew’s arrival to Eos? Taban—the original one—landing on this cursed planet to begin with? The formation of the Fold? The creation of the ISF and the conditions under which it would force people to rebel?
Or the creation of androids and space travel itself—all of it hurtling with terrible inevitability toward this final perilous frontier?
“You start,” Park said wearily, wanting to knead her temples—and then afraid to touch her head, as if it might fall apart like a broken melon. “I need to organize my thoughts. You knew about Taban all this time?”
Sagara looked at her, unembarrassed. “You mean the robot?”
“Of course I mean the robot.”
“I knew about the human,” Sagara said, with a hint of his old sarcasm. “He was the real reason why the crew was gathered to conduct this mission: an ISF merchant vessel received an emergency call from the human, along with some videos of what he had been experiencing. The merchant vessel bounced it back to ISF Corvus, who sent it to Earth, and then we were recruited—to rescue him, and to investigate his claims about the phenomena on the planet.”
Park shook her head. So that was why there had been such a rush to expedite the launch. And why there were no colony tools on the ship, after all. “But why keep that a secret?” she asked. “It’s not as if I would have refused to sign on if I’d known our real purpose—”
“ISF is never concerned about that,” Sagara cut in flatly. “We are replaceable, all of us. But they didn’t want any information leaks. On top of this being an undiscovered planet, there were clearly strange things going on here—even if what we were getting from Taban’s comms was just the ramblings of a madman. He should have died months ago, having run out of food. But he didn’t. We needed to understand how and why before we could unveil his story to the public.”
Park shuddered; at what point had the robot Taban replaced the human? Or had ISF been communicating with the robot the entire time, without realizing it, so deceived by the authenticity of his messages that they had never questioned his humanity? But the thought churned her stomach a little, so she kept silent on that for the moment. Instead she said, “So why did they need me? Why two psychologists?”
“Keller was always meant to examine Taban,” Sagara said calmly. “There was no telling what kind of psychological state he’d be in; what effect his experiences had had on him. She and Chanur were meant to study him, interview him, understand what was happening to him. You—”
“—were meant to monitor the rest of the crewmembers,” Park said heavily. “I see.”
And yet Keller had never even given her a hint, she couldn’t help but think, with something like bitter rage. She had never tried to prepare her. She had always let Park assume her role would be secondary, observational. She’d even smiled and encouraged the belief: You’re the one behind the scenes. I’m just here to coax it all out for you to examine.
Why? Did she feel no mercy toward Park, no pity over her ignorance about what was to come? Or was ISF’s stranglehold on her, too, so powerful that she could look Park in the eyes and lie to her only friend on the ship?
Goddamn her, she thought, balling her fists. Goddamn them all.
Sagara was watching her, his mouth twisted into an expression she couldn’t read. “It wasn’t only that,” he said. He had the tone of someone forging past something unpleasant. “Yes, you were to monitor the rest of the crew for signs of instability or delusion—symptoms of what we thought was happening to Taban. But you were also meant to be something of a control. We knew the effects of the Fold on Taban were at least partially mental—even psychic, if you would believe the theories Keller was spouting. Would awareness of it, then, color your responses, bias your observations, or otherwise affect your psyche? Would you be able to correctly recognize and diagnose any problems that arose from it without knowing what it was? Or was it something that had no effect on someone who had no awareness of it?”
She stared at him, aghast. “So, what,” she said after a moment, dry-mouthed. “I was—what, a guinea pig? Some lab rat who could write reports to them, so they could gauge if I was being influenced or not?” She wanted to pull her legs away from him, but the space in the freezer was too small. “And
everyone else knew?”
“Not everyone,” Sagara said. He sighed, and although his expression didn’t change, the sound was somewhat apologetic. “Not the non-conscripted. Reimi Kisaragi, Elly Ma. I was the only one of them who was aware.”
She pressed her lips together and glared at him. Sagara continued, his voice gentler: “Boone and the others must have been planning this little mutiny for a long time. They must have orchestrated it before they even left Earth. They most likely heard the reports coming from Taban and realized how important he was; how excited ISF was about the data on him and Eos. How momentous this expedition was supposed to be.” He fell silent for a moment. “They weren’t expecting to come here and find two dead bodies—and one robot who was claiming to be Taban himself. I’m sure there was chaos when they found out—they must have panicked, thought the whole thing was a wild goose chase. But in the end they decided to follow through with it anyway. They were in too deep—and the HARE was still a witness to all the things that went on here. ISF still wants it. So, human or not, they wanted to capture control of the ship and hold the thing for ransom. In exchange for their families, or supplies, or whatever stupid plan they were spouting up there.”
Park almost didn’t want to speak to him anymore, resentment simmering down in her throat like a fever—but curiosity urged her onward. “Do you think they planned to kill Wick all along?” she asked softly.
Sagara’s face contorted, just briefly. His tone, however, stayed level. “I don’t know,” he said. “Given their attempts to hack the ship first, it was probably a contingency plan at best. They probably planned to take him hostage along with the rest they couldn’t turn—you and me and the others. It was lucky for them the nightmares started, in a way—it meant that many of the people who might have resisted them got frozen, without any of us questioning it. Like Keller and Hunter and Ma. Kisaragi, they froze before any of this happened—they needed her out to take down the comms and cut us off—and it was just lucky for them that the rest followed. Otherwise, I would have been looking into her sudden illness much more closely. Everything happened to align for them.” He fell silent for a moment. “Fulbreech didn’t know about it. Their plans for Wick, I mean.”