Edge of Dark

by Brenda Cooper

  Frieda said, “Thank you,” quite solemnly. Then she looked at Charlie. “Tell me if you catch one.”

  “I will.”

  Charlie helped Nona into the skimmer and used his foot to start it up slowly, probably trying to avoid the wind of the motor washing back on the gleaners. He took them back out through the broken metal gates, and Nona turned her gaze away from the shattered city and back toward the water. “Do you think the robots are from the Edge?”

  “No. I think the gleaners are just scared. We’ll probably get fifty reports of scary things every day for a while.”

  “But you will look?”

  “Probably. I don’t always to get to choose my assignments. I’ll report this and turn in the pictures, though.”

  Something felt changed between them, as if they had been moving together and now they were moving apart. Maybe because she was leaving? It shouldn’t bother her—he was a hired guide. But it did.

  They passed through the sea-gates and flew along the low cliffs of the old seashore and then down to the beach. Medium-sized waves washed over the tide pools. She leaned out to take a picture.

  A pop and then a roar startled her. A force thrust her out of her seat. Something soft slammed her in the face, molding around her, trapping her. It closed up and over her, forcing her out of the skimmer, pillowing her arms, capturing her camera.

  The bottom of the skimmer fell away from her.

  She fell, turning over and over—sand-sea-sky-sand-sea-sky.

  She screamed.

  The ocean smacked the force that enclosed her into her face, snapping her head into something soft and tearing the breath from her lungs.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  NONA

  Something slapped her back and then let go, the sky and clouds pinwheeling through a clear but oily surface that smeared the view above her like a child’s painting. She bounced again and again and then rested on the top of the ocean, rising and falling with the water under her.

  Surely she should be dead or in pain. Instead, she felt stretched and slightly bruised, but all right.

  She had been plucked from the sky and dropped, and she was all right.

  A huge bubble encased her and something like a hundred little bubbles supported her inside of the bigger bubble. Maybe far more.

  She remembered being violently encapsulated as the skimmer fell apart around her, being certain she would die.

  It must be a safety thing, like an escape pod for a ship, only built for a planet.

  How could someone find her in an ocean?

  Would they?

  Where was Charlie?

  The bubbles in the big bubble both cushioned and trapped her. She moved her head as far as she could. She found the line between sea and sky and a smeared tan that must be beach but didn’t look particularly close. If Charlie was in a bubble, she couldn’t see it.

  What if he hadn’t been saved? Maybe part of the skimmer had hit him, or he had gotten stuck and drowned.

  Did air pass through the material? It must. She smelled salt.

  She tried to change her direction so she was sitting up, but the ball rolled, reacting to her actions. Her right shoulder hurt and her left toes were cramped. She managed to wriggle the toes into a better position, sending needles of awareness up her nerves.

  Shifting her weight caused her to bob, but nothing she did really changed the direction of her perspective or the direction the bubble was moving.

  The ocean had a mind of its own.

  Charlie might know if they had been shot or if the skimmer had simply broken. She didn’t think it had broken. The only possible choice was for Charlie to be in a bubble as well. He must be behind her where she couldn’t see him.

  He had to be.

  The smear of land grew thicker.

  She ran through the things she’d read about the ocean here, and the other things Charlie had told her or shown her. The long fish. Hundreds of other kinds of fish, some bigger than humans. Maybe thousands of kinds of fish. Jellies that could sting. Algae fit for human consumption that looked just like algae that could kill her. Charlie had shown her something he called a pod rock that looked just like a rock but stung anything that put weight on it. The ones they’d seen in the tide pool had been too small to hurt a human, but he’d said they grew big enough to deaden a walker’s foot.

  Earlier, she had told Charlie that the biology here seemed less about eat and be eaten than she’d thought, but now she realized she was wrong. If anything happened to the bubble, there were a hundred things that might eat her. Maybe a thousand.

  She drifted, trying to keep her mind free to associate, to maybe think of a way out or a useful thing she could do. Any useful thing.

  Her butt and legs felt cool and the sun warmed her face and chest right through the clear material. Sweat dripped down her neck.

  How strange. In space, water was a shield and a necessity and sometimes rare. There were no fish, no sharks, and only the ultrarich had ways to immerse themselves in water. Satyana could have afforded to, but she wasn’t given to visible excesses. Her only obvious mod was her too-blue eyes, and her wealth went to ships and singers and influence.

  Maybe now she wouldn’t see Satyana again. Suddenly, she wanted to.

  The bubble bobbed more enthusiastically, making her stomach lurch.

  The land grew slowly larger.

  She remembered the waves and how Charlie had to save her from the edge of them. She felt sick at the idea of going in through the surf.

  A wave grabbed her and lifted her. The bubble twisted so she tipped and looked only at sky again for a long moment and then raced down the back side of the wave, turned now so she saw the blur of the next wave coming at her rather than the beach.

  She rose and fell again, as if the waves played with her. Again. Again. She faced the sand when one broke under her, foaming seawater washing the sides of the bubble before falling away and leaving her on sand.

  The next wave picked her up again, pulled her out to meet another wash of water that sent her further up the beach.

  Again; only this wave was smaller.

  Then the ocean seemed finished with her and the bubble. Birds wheeled above her, crying out, white and grey and black and sand-colored lines against the sky. She noticed thirst and hunger and that she had to pee.

  Her right hand and the sore shoulder were trapped almost straight. Tendons and muscles ached from being held so long in unnatural positions. Her left arm had a few centimeters of play up and down at best. She drew in a big breath and pulled it hard toward her body. She got it halfway before the breath rushed out of her and her arm snapped back to where it had been. She panted, recovered, waited. Tried again. This time she managed to hook a thumb in her pocket, and the air bubbles around her arm re-positioned themselves so that her hand was stuck in its new position. She fumbled along her belt to the buckle and undid it, turning a normal movement into a victory. Pulling the belt free from her waist took a hundred tiny movements. But now she had the metal spike of the buckle. She fisted the buckle and poked it at the bubbles.

  They moved aside.

  Nona sobbed in frustration, her body too dry for tears. She would kill for water.

  She forced her hand down to the bubbles she was sitting on, the ones distended by her weight. One of those popped and then another.

  A slow assault on one recalcitrant bubble after another brought success. As she gained room, she got better at using her weight to help pop the little bubbles. She made enough space to stand, and then threw herself at the outer bubble. It accepted her and her belt-buckle tool, hugged her and rolled so that she landed flat on her face.

  She scrambled up—still enclosed—and tried again. No good. Her hands were slippery with sweat, the bubble hotter now that the cooling sea no longer cushioned it. But her clumsy fall had taught her how she could move the bubble without falling into it, using mincing tiny steps and her hands. She tried walking it toward an outcrop of rocks, falling over and ov
er. In one fall, her hand landed on an uneven part in the bubble, a place that seemed thicker. She pushed on it. Nothing. She reached the rocks and found a sharp one, rocking the bubble back and forth. It started to fall in on her.

  She ran her hands around it, searching for the puncture, found it, ripped it open with the belt and then with her hands, stepping out into a cool breeze.

  She stopped right there and peed in the sand, the small comfort giving her strength. Then she dug her camera out of the sodden mess, grateful to find it was dry.

  She looked along the beach and then out at the ocean, searching for Charlie. Light glinted on something far out that might be a bubble, but she couldn’t tell.

  Water.

  She looked away from the waves, expecting to see the broken sea gates they’d flown through into Neville. Sheer walls of a cliff-face greeted her, scraggly trees clinging to the sides and thin grasses greening it here and there.

  Growing things meant water. She found a thin stream of a waterfall hugging the cliff before falling into a thin depression in the sand. She stumbled toward it and cupped her hands and drank, again and again, and then she splashed cool, fresh water over her face.

  When she turned back, Charlie was miraculously coming in on the waves the same way she had, but further down the beach. She ran stumbling toward him and stood just out of the water, watching the surf carry him in. His bubble was bigger than she was, taller.

  Charlie had curled into a fetal position inside of it, surrounded by the cushioning small bubbles. He wasn’t moving. She couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. She tried to tug the bubble up onto land. It was so wide that trying to hold it just left her with splayed out arms and no real purchase. She got behind it, her feet soaked by the thin water of the spent waves, pushing, rolling.

  Inside, Charlie’s body rolled with the bubble.

  She pushed him above the high tide line, sweating.

  He wasn’t moving.

  She looked for a rock that would make a knife, but raced back to retrieve her belt. She stabbed at Charlie’s bubble until a thin tear opened and air rushed out. She slid her fingers in, felt hot air escaping on her face as she ripped and tugged at the slippery surface, her hands pulling free when she didn’t want them to. Her heart pounded with fear. He had to be alive! She practically threw the ripped side of the bubble and the first few of the interior bubbles away into the sand, and then laid her hand on Charlie’s chest.

  It moved. He breathed. One side of his face was purpling into what would eventually be a winner of a bruise.

  She shook him gently.

  One eye opened. He groaned.

  Even that small reaction heartened her. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. Where are we?”

  “On a beach. We rolled in on the waves.”

  He seemed to just be remembering. “The skimmer.”

  “Can you move?”

  He held his hand out to her and she leaned backward, pulling him up. He groaned, wincing, and then stood unsteadily. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “That I put you in all of this danger.”

  There was some truth to that. “Do you still have their pictures?”

  He fumbled in his pocket and nodded.

  “Good. If I’m going to almost die, I want it to be for something.”

  He had water clipped to his belt. He drank it all down and she showed him the thin waterfall. They both drank more.

  Are you okay?” she asked him, putting a hand up to touch the bruise on his face.

  “Yes.” He let her touch him, not flinching or backing away, but also not moving into her.

  She dropped her hand and took a step back, looking up at the unbroken cliff. The beach they were on didn’t have an obvious way out that wasn’t over the water. “Do you know where we are?”

  He stared out at the waves, his brow furrowed. “The current must have taken us south. We’ll be found. Soon.”

  “So what happened?” She pointed at the lumpy broken bubble on the beach. “What are those things?”

  “Safety mechanisms. Think of them as a life raft.”

  “What’s a life raft?”

  He laughed. “Boats have little boats people can get away on if the big boat sinks. These are kind of like that, except they have to protect you from a fall if a skimmer fails.”

  “What happened to the skimmer?”

  His face closed. “I’m going to find out.”

  They waited on two rocks near the stream, close enough that their thighs touched. The sound of water washed over her, waves to the front and the trickle of the long, thin waterfall behind her.

  She took his hand, and he let her. After a while he squeezed her hand back and stood up. “I promised I wouldn’t do this.”

  “Promised Satyana?”

  His face was answer enough. That made her want to hold his hand more; a surprise. The last few years she had focused only on Marcelle and on death and on the things she resented or that seemed to be in her way. Now she was far away from all of them and having adventures, and she resented nothing, not even the promise that Satyana had extracted.

  Charlie wasn’t the kind of man she could force. She breathed in the salt air and the fabulous, loamy dirt that clung to crevices in the rocks and grew bright flowers. “I may never be in the middle of so much nothing again,” she mused.

  “That would be a very sad thing.” He gave her a tender look that suggested he wanted to hold her, but instead he turned and walked away from her, heading down the beach and looking up at the cliffs from time to time as if searching for a path.

  It didn’t matter. She wasn’t sorry for being bold.

  She still had her camera. She wasn’t going right back to the university, but if she ever taught again, the pictures would give her some standing. Staying busy helped her ignore her rumbling, hungry stomach and Charlie as well. He was on his way back up the beach toward her when she heard the skimmer.

  Jean Paul landed on the beach in the dry sand above the seaweed-littered tide line. He and Charlie hugged and slapped each other on the back with open palms.

  Blessedly, Jean Paul had brought sandwiches and fresh water. They ate right there on the beach, sitting on three separate rocks. Charlie told Jean Paul about the gleaners and the pictures and the flash of light he thought he saw before they took off.

  “You think your ride was sabotaged?” Jean Paul asked as they climbed into his skimmer.

  “Probably. Hard to find it and look now.”

  “We should go back by the city, check where you last were.”

  “You won’t find anything,” Charlie said. “My tracks. I walked all the way around the skimmer making sure it hadn’t been messed with.”

  “Humor me.”

  “Suit yourself.” It was friendly banter, warm. It made her think of her and Chrystal back in school, of the comfort of being around someone you’d known for a very long time. Jean Paul flew smoothly, the machine rising and going back over the ocean. She saw that they were pretty far from Neville; walking would have been tough even if they had found a way up the cliff. The gleaners were probably gone by now anyway.

  She sat in a back seat behind the two men and drowsed until the skimmer descended.

  “Shit.” Charlie, who she hadn’t ever heard curse.

  She pushed herself up and peered down. Three bodies lay flat on the dirt, pools of dark blood around them. Frieda and the tattered man and Cat-eyes. Not far from where they’d been standing when she last saw them.

  “You were right,” Charlie said to Jean Paul. “We did find something.” His voice had gone cold. “I might as well have killed them.”

  “You’re alive because you took the new skimmer. This one doesn’t have air bubbles.”

  “Why?” Nona asked, maybe about the skimmers, maybe the bodies, maybe anything. She felt shocked all over again, like she had when she fell from the sky. She had thought the Deep was a dangerous place, but this . . .

&
nbsp; Jean Paul answered one of her imprecise questions. “Whoever blew up the skimmer wanted to keep information from getting out of here.”

  “The pictures?”

  “Probably.”

  Jean Paul flew circles around the bodies until Charlie let him land. When Nona went to climb out, Charlie put a hand up to stop her.

  She looked him in the eyes. “I’m not a child. I want to see.”

  He hesitated, nodded. Grim.

  Outside, a wind blew and she had to hold her hair and walk into it to reach the bodies. Frieda had been shot in the chest and lay on her back, eyes wide and staring up. The tattered man lay near her, an arm reaching toward her but not touching. She reached Cat-eyes first and touched his cheek. It had grown cold. One hand had been flung up above his head and the other crumpled under his back awkwardly. She tried to cover the bloody hole in his stomach with a scrap of his shirt, but the wind picked it up. She tried again and then gave up. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, even though none of it was her fault. “I’m so sorry.”

  She took pictures. She had never seen death like this, never seen life cut off unexpectedly and brutally and on purpose. She had trouble holding her camera still.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHRYSTAL

  Chrystal took a cube of food from a tray carried by one of the humanoid robots. Soulbots. If she hadn’t been so tired coming here, she would have recognized the uniformed women right away. Not because she had ever seen one, or even a picture of one. But how could any human work for such monsters?

  The transport had come back once and dropped off a young couple who had worked in one of the same shared labs Chrystal and her family used. It didn’t come back any more after that. They had slept on the cold floor, dropping from exhaustion, talked out. More than once, so Chrystal had lost all sense of time. They had plentiful cube-food and water, and nothing else. No clean clothes, no showers.