Adrift

by W. Michael Gear

  Whatever it was attempting, it must have gone wrong in Toni’s brain to leave him comatose.

  She stood, walked over, and stared down at Toni in his isolation tent. “What the hell are you? Why are you doing this?”

  This was miles beyond quetzal TriNA floating around in humans. This was the planned and well-orchestrated remodeling of an entire organism. Take the edema at the side of the boy’s throat. She could recognize the swellings now for what they were: gills. The perfect adaptation to an aquatic environment.

  Anna shivered in spite of herself. Wondered for a moment if it wouldn’t be to everyone’s best interest if she were to slip a plastic bag over the little boy’s head and simply let him die.

  “Anna?”

  She whirled. Almost jumped out of her skin.

  Sheena and Felicity stood not more than a meter behind her.

  How had they been so silent? Even with bare feet?

  Both had that weirdly vacuous stare. Weirder, both girls were naked. And both, to Anna’s horror, had the visible swellings of gill development along both sides of their throats. Felicity’s ended in red slits above her collarbone. Sheena’s swellings didn’t look too far behind.

  “What do you want?”

  “My throat is sore.” Sheena said, stepping forward.

  “It’s the algae.” Anna couldn’t help it. She backed up a step, her heart starting to pound. “Get away from me. You’re not human. You’re . . . things. Aliens.”

  “My throat hurts,” Sheena insisted, stepping closer. “Help me.”

  Anna—fear turning her stomach runny—backed into the counter. She had to get past the girls. Get down to the meeting. Tell the rest what she’d found. But, after all, these were just girls, right? And, in this case, unlike poor Bill Martin, she understood the threat.

  She nerved that old bitter snap into her voice. “You’re going to let me pass. Time’s come that the rest know what you are.”

  Felicity actually seemed to wilt, her right hand behind her back. Given the green tinge in her left hand, maybe she was embarrassed by her right? Was it further along in the transition?

  “You didn’t hear that, did you?” Felicity asked. “If you did, you’d know the message in the music.”

  “What music?”

  “The music our friends are singing in the Underwater Bay. It’s been changing ever since we digested Bryan and Tobi. Growing happier. It’s almost time. Want to hear the music?”

  A shiver ran up Anna’s back when Felicity started humming the tune to “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” Like the nursery rhyme was some innocent non sequitur given the fear she suddenly felt.

  “Sheena, make way,” Anna declared as she started forward.

  At the last instant, Sheena stepped aside, her large blue eyes fixed on Anna’s. Something about the girl—the incongruity of her red hair, the green tinge to her pale skin, and the swollen throat—to Anna it reeked of wrongness.

  “What about Toni?” Sheena demanded as Anna made two steps, Felicity still humming that damn song, blocked her way.

  Anna glanced back, seeing that Sheena had stepped over to stare into the clear plastic. Even as Anna paused, Sheena had reached out, was trying to pull the isolation tent from the countertop. The muscles swelled in the girl’s arms, and incredibly, the heavy plastic tent moved. It stopped when the tube that evacuated air to the incinerator pulled tight.

  “Hey!” Anna barked. “Leave that alone! Get your little alien fingers . . .” She stopped short. Not only should the isolation tent have been too heavy for seven-year-old Sheena to pull, but, damn, Sheena’s fingers were leaf green.

  Anna shook her head, panic let loose inside. “Let it go, Sheena. You can’t let him out. All of you, it’s over. I know what you are. I’m going down to tell the rest.”

  Sheena gave the isolation tent’s plastic one last tug.

  Anna could barely hear Felicity singing, “London bridge is broken down . . .”

  That’s when Toni sat up. Stared around. His black eyes seemed oddly focused through the clear plastic as they fixed on Anna.

  Sheena turned, head slightly cocked. “No. You’re not telling.”

  “Not by a long shot. As soon as I tell them . . .”

  The rustle came from behind. A fast patter of bare feet. In the polished stainless steel of the cabinet, Anna caught a shadowy reflection: thin, moving incredibly fast. It lifted something high, pulled it back, ready to swing.

  Felicity!

  Anna’d be damned if . . .

  The sharp pain in the small of her back coupled with an impact surprised her. The effect was so strange. Instantaneous. Anna’s hips, legs, feet. They just vanished. Went totally numb. She was falling, reached for the counter, snagged a tray of beakers. Her stunned brain couldn’t process why as she collapsed, hit hard on the floor. Glass was smashing and crashing around her, fragments clattering. Her face smacked painfully into the sialon, blasting lights through her head. The hollow thump of the impact barely registered in the shock and surprise.

  From behind, it made no sense as Felicity said, “Lumbar spinal column: Vital and armored.”

  Dazed, Anna stared at the base of the counters; the overhead lights gleamed like a thousand diamonds in the shattered glass that surrounded her.

  Felicity sang, her girl’s voice soft: “Gabarron has fallen down, fallen down . . .”

  Anna tried to get up, managed to pull her hands under her shoulders. Pushed up.

  “Got to do this right,” Felicity said from behind.

  Anna glanced up. Sheena stood over her, a scalpel in her hand. The little girl’s face was oddly blank as she said, “Neck: Blood vessels, windpipe, and spinal cord. Vulnerable and vital.”

  Anna tried to shove herself up again, but she couldn’t feel her legs.

  She filled her lungs to scream for help when Sheena leaned down with the scalpel.

  72

  The way Felix understood things, he was pretty much doomed.

  That morning, Mother had come to see him, crying the entire time, sobbing, asking absolutely stupid questions. Why had he done this? Why had he done that? Was it her fault? Was it Yee’s? Had Felix planned out Bill’s murder?

  That was stupid. Of course, Felix hadn’t planned to go and murder Bill. He felt bad about Bill, really bad, and would have bawled his head off if the Voice hadn’t told him that everything was fine. But it didn’t matter what he said, Mother had just gotten more and more hysterical. In the end, shaking her head, she’d blubbered, “I have to go. I can’t stand this.”

  “Mom?” he told her. “My throat hurts!”

  “I know, baby. It’s going around. All the children have it. Even the infants. Is that why you killed Bill?”

  “I wasn’t there. I only got there later. And the Voice said it was all right.”

  “The voice?” she asked. Felix had never seen such a panicked look in Mother’s eyes as she said, “I don’t know if you are my son, or some heartless monster that belongs to the algae.”

  “Mama? Please, I don’t—”

  “I can’t stand this.” Then, at the door, she’d raised her eyes and plaintively asked, “Please? Give me my little boy back.”

  She had closed the door behind her with finality.

  That had been an eternity ago.

  Since then, all Felix had for company was his cot, a can to pee in, and the sound of the air blowing softly from the vents.

  And the song. Didn’t matter that he was locked away on second level. He could hear it. Especially if he placed his ear against the wall or floor. The deep sounds came through the best. Low thrumming, clicks, a melodic rising and falling of vibrations. The higher sounds were harder to hear, hovering just at the edge of perception.

  “You will hear it clearer . . . soon. You will live surrounded by the Song, floating within it,”
the Voice had told him.

  Felix’s throat really hurt, was swollen on the sides, but the Voice insisted this was normal. And when Felix started to worry—because it really did hurt—the Voice would show him images of underwater. Felix would be drifting along under the surface with the Song all around him, with mottled patterns of sunlight shooting beams through the aqua water. Being weightless, either floating or propelling himself ahead with light strokes of his hands and feet, filled Felix with a tingling sense of ecstasy.

  All in all, the effect was magical. Until the Pod, his entire existence had been Crew Deck on Ashanti. As much a miracle as the Pod had been, the boat ride out to set the buoy had filled him with wonder. Now the visions in his head of endless freedom, of drifting where he would go, and never being contained within walls, intoxicated him.

  But how was that going to happen?

  “Soon,” the Voice reassured him.

  His stomach growled, and he wished he had something to drink.

  At the thought a tickle ran through his fingers, and he lifted them. In the overhead light, they had a greenish hue. Sort of like they’d been stained with stuff from the hydroponics tank.

  More than anything, though, he was lonely. All of his life had been spent with people. Either crowded into the quarters on Crew Deck, or here with Sheena, Felicity, Tomaya, and the rest of the children. When he wasn’t with them, he was with Mother and Father, or one of the adults. Being alone was space scuz. It made him half-sad, half-desperate.

  If it wasn’t for the Voice, he’d have cried, kicked at the door, and screamed to be let out. Somehow, with the Voice’s calm reassurance inside him, this wasn’t so bad. As visions of drifting in water and light filled him, he could just let himself go.

  Before his new hearing, he’d never have been able to discern the sound: tapping on the door pad as someone entered the code interrupted his dreamy eternity of water.

  The lock clicked, and the handle turned before the door swung open.

  Sheena and Felicity stood there. Both were naked, feet bare. The first thing Felix noticed was that Sheena was covered with blood spray. And he fixed on Felicity’s swollen neck, and the two red streaks just up from her collarbone. Sheena, too, had the swelling, and only the faintest hint of a red line above her right collarbone. Somehow he knew that she’d get one on her left, too.

  Felicity’s eyes were vacant, and she was softly singing, “Gabarron has fallen down, fallen down.”

  “Come on,” Sheena called. “The grownups are in the cafeteria trying to decide what to do.”

  “I’m in trouble. I’m supposed to stay locked in here.”

  “We know,” Felicity told him as she broke off from the song, her voice slightly hoarse. “But the Song says we need you. You know which monitor controls the cameras in the com center.”

  “You’re all bloody,” Felix told Sheena.

  She looked down, blinked, and with a shrug, started down the hall.

  Felix climbed to his feet and stalked out into the hallway; he mechanically took Sheena’s hand, feeling how sweaty it was. How his own began to perspire. Felicity took his other hand, their grips wet and clammy. Just holding hands, feeling the touch, was almost electric. Sheena and Felicity had joined hands. For long moments they stood there, the three of them, holding hands and just feeling . . . good.

  And then better . . . and better.

  The Song was louder now that he was out of the room. He could hear it, welling up from the stairs, rising from the Underwater Bay. Could feel the presence building, sending the Song through the very walls of the Pod.

  “It’s the Song,” Felicity told him. “It tells us what to do.”

  Sheena and Felicity had closed their eyes, a happy look on their faces that matched the joy in his own chest. His blood pumping, running up his arms, sent a warmth spreading through his head. With the warmth came the knowledge that this was the way it should be. That, from here on out, it would always be like this.

  Nothing in Felix’s life had ever felt this wonderful, not even the boat ride. He, Sheena, and Felicity—all the children—they’d be blissful. Fulfilled. One and all.

  An electric pulse flowed through him, sent a jolt of physical pleasure like he’d never known through his body. The magical tingle burst through his hips, up his spine, and down to the souls of his feet. He stiffened, gasped for breath, heart pounding as waves of delight rolled through his body.

  At the same time, Sheena and Felicity tensed, gasped in delighted response. He could see the surprise in their eyes, and Sheena even blushed pink in her neck.

  Talk about zambo!

  He had no clue how long they stood there, hands clasped in harmonic bliss. He shared Sheena’s pulse, the excitement trembling up her spine, and Felicity’s electric joy as she took each quivering breath.

  In that moment, he suddenly understood the Song: We are one.

  Like they were seeping into him as he was seeping right back into them.

  Time to go.

  Breaking contact caused him to almost cry out.

  Sheena was blinking, stared at him as if she’d lost something precious. Felicity reached up, traced the line of his cheek with a blood-darkened green finger. All of their hands had turned a bright blue-green.

  “Come on,” Sheena told him in her I’m-impatient voice. “We have to let our friends out.”

  And with a frown, Felix understood that yes, they did. The Song said so. Nothing would be right until all of the friends were out. Only then could any of this make sense. Everything was a big question. All that mattered was solving the problem, making sense of the Pod, of the Voice, and the people.

  “Soon” Felix told them. He started down the hall and slowed enough to glance into the clinic. Surrounded by broken glass, Anna Gabarron lay on her stomach. Some kind of small ax had been buried in the small of her back. The woman’s hand was stretched out, as if asking for something, the fingers curled in a questing gesture. Her normally hard dark eyes were vacant, oddly dull. The lips were bent, crooked where they’d been pulled across the floor, and a pool of blood was still spreading from a gaping cut under the angle of the jaw.

  Neck: Blood vessels, windpipe, spinal cord. Vulnerable and vital.

  A bloody scalpel lay discarded in the pooled blood.

  Funny, wasn’t it? How fragile a human body was?

  The isolation tent had been sliced into ribbons, and Felix could see Toni, his eyes blinking, sitting inside the ruin of slashed plastic.

  Both Sheena and Felicity had that blank look in their eyes. Like they’d gone away. Neither moving except to breathe. He remembered how he had felt as he stood over Bill Martin’s body. The Voice was probably telling them that it had to be done, as it had once told him.

  Felicity, still blank-eyed, walked into the room, heedless of the broken glass, and reached around behind Gabarron’s body. She gripped the ax handle with her bloody hands and wrenched it loose from the dead woman’s spine. Then she turned and walked vacant-eyed to the hallway, stopped, and stood there.

  From the remains of the isolation tent, Toni watched the entire event with large, dark eyes. He kept doing weird things with his face, twitching his lips, baring his teeth, scrunching his eyes. And he was making intricate gestures with his arms and hands. Felix caught a glimpse of the boy’s throat, and finally got a good look. Tony had red slits at the base of his neck and over each delicate collarbone. His skin was a peculiar shade of green, as if he’d been dipped in dye.

  The girls in the hallway stood there. Like they’d just turned off.

  “Hey! Hello.” Felix waved his hands in front of Sheena’s and then Felicity’s eyes. Neither reacted until he pushed Sheena, and she bumped Felicity.

  “What are you doing?” Sheena asked, blinking, as if realizing where she was.

  Felicity stared stupidly down at the ax where the blade still dri
pped blood. She seemed surprised to see it, confused even.

  “Where did you get that?” Felix asked. “Was it in the clinic?”

  “Mother’s lab,” Sheena said absently. “It’s for chopping bones and stuff. Backbone. Spinal column. Vital and armored.” Her eyes seemed to drift emptily. “The ax is for when we get to the com.”

  Felicity started forward, heedless of the bloody prints she left with her right foot.

  Felix figured she must have cut it on some of the broken glass.

  “What about Toni?” he called as Sheena started after Felicity.

  “He’s fine.” Sheena told him. “He’s all new.”

  “Can he get down?”

  “When he’s ready,” Felicity called back. “You coming?”

  Felix hurried after the girls, followed them into the com center. The various monitors were showing views of the landing pad, the deck, the cafeteria where the adults were all seated at the front table, Michaela at the head. Looked like the grownups were as serious as ever.

  Felix did a double take when he saw the Underwater Bay in one of the monitors. The entire floor, the sub, the UUVs, and most of the workbenches were covered with algae. When had that happened?

  Our friends. Something inside him began to glow with pleasure. Delight spread through Felix’s stomach, sent a thrill of anticipation through him. His hands began to sweat and tickle. He really wanted to grab Sheena and Felicity’s hands, share the explosive and remarkable surge of pleasure. Looking their way, they were smiling, staring at the monitor with as much excitement as he was.

  Soon.

  It all made so much sense. Of course. Just a few things to do now.

  “Got to break the com,” Felicity said with finality, and handed Felix the ax. “Then we can go turn the Song loose. Then we can be the Song.”