by Lydia Kang
Hands. Two hands, clawing, fighting their way, trying desperately to pull on the floor. One hand shoots out, gains purchase, and drags out the rest of Portia, whose red eyes have gone nearly black from sheer panic.
She screams unintelligible Prinnia words, sees us, and screams again. “Run away!”
Hana and I freeze for one moment as we watch her hands scrape the floor, and she is dragged viciously back into the room.
“Portia!” Hana screams. She puts the knife into her other fist and runs. “Let go of her, Cyclo!”
Part of me wants to run away, to hide, to curl up into a ball and wish with every molecule of my body that I had never disobeyed my father that day when I was six years old. The day I skipped school and instead went to the scavenging yards on Ipineq and stole my first chunk of gadolinium. If only I’d been a better son, a better brother, I wouldn’t need to be here, and God, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is Portia is dying, and it’s been a long time since anything was about me. It’s never been about me, not since I stepped onto this goddamned ship.
I gallop forward, just as Hana runs into the room and I lose sight of her. My feet pound the soft floor, one, two, three, four. Ten steps later, I’m there.
So this is what hell looks like.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
HANA
Cyclo has her.
Portia is suspended in the air, each of her limbs corded thickly with Cyclo’s matrix, as she tries to pull her apart. Her biceps and thigh muscles bulge with resistance, her face a mask of twisted pain, teeth clenched as she tries to fight. Her face is ashen from exhaustion. She sees me, and her eyes open wide, pleading.
“Kill me!” she shrieks. “I can’t get to my necklace! I can’t reach it!” She screams again, and through the translucency of the matrix, I see the fabric around her legs dissolving. Her skin starts to bubble, and the purple color of Prinnia blood seeps into the matrix.
I run forward with my knife, yelling. “Let her go! Let her go, Cyclo! You can have me back, just let them go!” I slice my knife into the matrix around Portia, freeing one of her bloodied legs and an arm. Cyclo starts to back away a little. My heart soars to think we could free Portia. Fenn grabs my arm.
“Give me the knife! I can reach higher and try to cut her free!”
I hand Fenn the blade, but Cyclo has molded his feet in place, and he has to slash them free before reaching up to hack at the tendril around Portia’s left leg. It goes free, swings for a moment, before Cyclo shoots out a thick column of blue to capture it again.
“My hand! Release my hand!” Portia yells at Fenn, growling and clenching her jaw. “And I can reach my pendant!”
The suicide medicine. Of course. I keep clawing and pulling at Portia’s encased, bloodied feet, and Cyclo retreats from her body, knowing I’m near. She isn’t attacking me—I wonder if it’s because she literally has her blue hands full of Portia and has to concentrate her energy. Even the weak tendrils she uses to try to keep Fenn from moving are thin and tired. Cyclo’s deciding where to budget her energy, and she’s focusing only on Portia now.
Portia roars above me. Fenn tries to jump and slash at the thick cord of blue around her arm but misses. Portia screams, and Fenn and I watch with horror as her left arm dislocates from her shoulder with a sickening pop. The skin of her shoulder is stretched taut. Cyclo isn’t relenting. Portia’s face is awash in pain and sweat, and her body goes limp. She’s losing her will to fight. Cyclo is tearing her apart.
“Stop! Stop it Cyclo! Stop!” I scream, over and over, but she doesn’t listen.
Cyclo is not listening to me.
She’s tasted blood and energy, and she’s ravenous for more. Whatever good we did with giving her those liquid formulas is nothing to this. Cyclo is bloodthirsty, and we can’t stop it. Fenn backs up near to the wall to give him room, and bolts forward, jumping at the last moment.
The knife in his fist slashes upward and to the right, and Portia’s good arm is freed. The blue matrix around her freed arm falls off and hits the ground, and now she hangs from her dislocated shoulder.
“Cut her other arm free!” I yell, but Cyclo’s matrix has formed a full cylinder, too thick to cut through, encasing her legs and rising up her torso. Portia looks at Fenn, and then at me. Apology rests in her red eyes as she reaches for her necklace.
The suicide medicine.
“No, Portia!” I yell, but Fenn grabs me from behind.
“It’s her choice!” he hisses. “She’s suffering, Hana!”
Portia’s hand clutches at the dangling pendant around her neck, easily flicking the back of the locket open. She grasps it between her thumb and fingers, closing her eyes. The poison should work within seconds. And then her pain will be over.
I close my eyes, feeling Cyclo ooze over my feet. I kick her away. I hate her. I hate that she’s done this. I hate that she could do something so horrific. When I open my eyes, Portia will be gone. I feel Fenn’s hand on my shoulder for the briefest of seconds before he lets go. He gasps. Portia must be dead. She must be. I can’t bear to open my eyes and see her.
And then Portia screams.
My eyes fly open, and I see her shrieking, shrieking like a being in the worst torment I could imagine, except I don’t have to imagine.
“It’s not working!” I cry out. “Why isn’t the medicine working?”
“Goddamn it!” Fenn roars.
Portia is still suspended, still alive, face contorted with pain. Cyclo encases her body until only her face is still open to the air, until she muffles her last scream with a thick layer of throbbing red gel. Fenn dashes forward and stabs the gel right where her heart is, but the tip of the knife embeds a full inch away from her body. Fenn’s knife can no longer touch her, no longer save her from the torment.
“No!” Fenn cries as Portia’s body begins to disintegrate and dissolve before our eyes. Fenn yanks the knife out, and an agonizing wail comes from his throat.
I can’t watch.
I grasp Fenn’s arm and pull him toward the door. He’s dropped the knife, and I grab at it, slashing tendrils that try to capture Fenn’s feet, my feet, my arms. Fenn is faltering, barely able to stand up.
“Fenn. We have to get out of this quadrant, now!”
He doesn’t answer but fumbles to his feet and shuffles through the corridor like he’s lost. I pull him along, yelling all the way to keep him moving. Every second feels like an hour, every step a mile. But soon we are no long slashing at Cyclo’s attempts to glue us down and entwine us again, and the colors of the floors and walls get darker.
I cannot believe what I saw. I cannot believe what Cyclo has done to me, to Portia.
But it’s real. And what’s more, the suicide medicine, the one thing the crew had to ensure a painless death on their terms—it didn’t work.
Oh God, why?
“I can’t stand to be on this ship right now,” Fenn says. He pulls me around the quadrant, and I realize that we’re headed for the Selkirk, still embedded in Cyclo’s side by the southwest quadrant alpha.
Inside the ship’s bay, I collapse onto the cold, titanium floor. Fenn crumples next to me, eyes glassy and staring, not believing what we’ve just witnessed. There’s no way Doran will make it in time to save us. Fenn absently paws at his neck and pulls at the pendant.
He flicks open the back, which has a tiny poison warning symbol in it. He pulls one of Gammand’s handheld monitors out of a pocket in his pants and holds it over the tiny depression where the poison is supposed to be.
He blinks and waits.
“Placebo,” he says finally. “There’s nothing in here.”
Fenn covers his face with his hands and cries.
So it’s true. The suicide medicine necklaces were nothing but placebos.
ReCOR wanted the crew of the Selkirk to die o
n ReCOR’s terms, not their own.
My eyes are dry. Maia’s light sets in the window just opposite us as Cyclo turns and turns, and I wonder if there will ever be starlight in my life again after what I have seen.
Chapter Thirty
FENN
I didn’t realize I’d passed out until I woke up.
It’s almost pitch black, and so very cold. I blink, trying to reorient and extricate myself from these terrible nightmares that still gnaw at the edges of my consciousness. Until I realize, with a dread like I’ve never had before, that they weren’t nightmares.
Portia.
Gammand.
Miki.
Gone.
My eyes adjust to the darkness. Hana isn’t here. I’m still in the exit bay of the Selkirk. I stand up, joints creaking and muscles angry with overuse.
“Hana?” I call. Faintly, from somewhere deep within the Selkirk, her girlish voice calls back.
“Here, Fenn. I’m in here.” She still sounds so young, but there is a raspy tiredness to her voice like she’s just aged fifty years. I limp past the bay and head deeper into the belly of the Selkirk. On the left, I pass the storage areas, and on the right, the regular living quarters and the engine room. I remember all these places like it was a long, long time ago. As if I am walking through a museum of my life and everything I see is a relic and a wreck. Finally, I reach the bridge.
Hana is sitting in the captain’s seat, which seems far too large for her. She sits with her knees clasped to her chest, staring out into space, where the rest of the Alcyone nebula looks absolutely magnificent, despite the fact that inside it’s collapsing. Kind of like Cyclo. Kind of like us.
I sit next to her in the copilot’s chair and find myself laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Hana asks. She doesn’t look at me, just keeps staring straight ahead into the bleak recesses of starry sky.
“Portia. I remember how she was so good at driving the Selkirk. And when I got a little too snide, she flipped me onto my back to teach me a lesson.”
Hana looks sideways at me and smiles a little, but it disappears fast. She goes back to staring out into space.
“Just sitting in the bridge here—it’s the farthest I’ve ever been from home,” she says after a long silence.
“I’m not so sure you should call Cyclo your home anymore.”
She bites her lip. Her hand goes to something on her lap. A book.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a book of short stories. Can your holofeed recognize the infrared spectrum?”
“Yes, why?”
“I can see in the ultraviolet spectrum, but I have this feeling that Mother hid something in here. On the opposite end of the light spectrum.” She hands me the book, and I thumb through it. It’s well worn, a book in a foreign language. I touch the holofeed chip in my forehead and ask it to do an infrared screen. Hana goes to my side and puts her cheek against mine, so we can see together if there’s anything.
Hana inhales sharply.
It’s writing. In English. Laid atop the printed characters—Korean maybe—in ink so diluted that the writing is hazy and faint.
400221.78
Sol 649
Today, I did something I shouldn’t. I am the most selfish being on this ship, and I am risking her life and mine with my ego, my need to make something like me, but better. She is only one cell old today, and I have already hidden her in Cyclo, in the walls of my chamber, where Cyclo is feeding her the necessary gestational embryonic fluids I’ve stolen from the incubation lab.
Today, I have made the best and the worst mistake. She is only one cell old today. One. I will call her Hana. And I will call myself her mother, but what I am really is a monster. I know what I must do to keep her secret.
I am a monster.
“A monster?” Hana says. “Why would she think of herself like that?”
“Well, what kind of a person would make a human, just to keep them locked away for their whole life?” Fenn asks quietly.
Hana shakes her head and flips the pages. “This is the day I was born.”
400221.358
Sol 655
Hana is born today. She is terribly ugly. Wrinkles everywhere, a cry that makes me want to bite my own tongue, with a nearly full head of cocoa hair but that shock of white by her forehead. I don’t know anything about rearing infants. I hold her, and she is so soft, so fragile. I’m terrified. Usually I send them to station one, where the director takes charge of the newborns. Thank goodness Cyclo knows. She takes Hana in almost as soon as she’s born, for her first oral feeding. I only hold her for an hour at night before we both go back into Cyclo’s matrix to sleep. If not for Cyclo, Hana would be discovered and destroyed according to protocol.
Hana’s eyes fill with tears. She flips forward, to her sixteenth birthday, about a year before the evacuation.
Cyclo’s degeneration has finally begun. Waste storage is at max capacity. Solar energy production is decreasing rapidly. We are tentatively planning our evacuation and recruiting for the terminal data crew. At some point, her degeneration will be exponential. I am finding that Cyclo is keeping Hana longer than I ask for, and she tells me that Hana has been optimally fed, when in truth, I know that cannot be. Our heme stores are gone, and Cyclo cannot possibly give Hana the amounts she needs, but Cyclo tells me I am wrong. Cyclo does not disobey; it is not possible for her to do so, and yet this has become a source of investigation by the engineering crew, who are also finding aberrations in their measurements vs. what Cyclo tells them. It is as if the ship does not want to admit that she is failing.
Speaking of failures, I will have to tell the crew about Hana. The sooner, the better. But I find that 16 years is a long time to lie. One learns to lie about everything, to the point where telling the truth is impossible. But I have time.
So her mother knew even then, but she didn’t say a word to Hana, or to the crew. I flip to the last entry, the entry where we’ll find whether she ever planned to tell them about Hana.
400237.009
Sol 108
One of Cyclo’s vacuoles has leaked and flooded a portion of the core. It is not a critical systems breakdown, but we will evacuate in approximately two weeks, enough time to leave in an orderly fashion. But today is the day. The day I tell the world that I am a liar and a thief. That I have loved someone so much I’ve given up my future career and likely my legal parental rights. I’ve kept Hana to myself too long. Today is the day I will tell them.
It will give Hana two weeks to meet the crew and say her goodbyes to Cyclo. Cyclo asked me today what my agenda was. She has been watching me in a way she hasn’t in the last few weeks. She noticed that I was nervous and upset. So I told her. Not that I was telling the crew about Hana, but that she was dying. Cyclo says she knows. And she said she was thankful that she would not die alone.
I don’t know what she means by that. Surely she understands what an evacuation is.
And then she asked me if I would tell them about Hana. I was surprised she would ask. Cyclo does not usually ask me questions; it ought to be the other way around. Normally I would report this behavior, but it’s about Hana, so I cannot.
But I am tired of lying. And I owe Cyclo the life that she’s given to me these past twenty years, and to my daughter.
So I told her the truth.
That is the last entry.
Oh God. I read the time and date. It was one hour before Dr. Um died. Two hours before the Calathus was fully evacuated. She told Cyclo that the crew would learn about Hana, and that they would leave Cyclo to die alone, with a terminal data crew from the Selkirk climbing aboard her like ants on an earthen carcass.
She didn’t want to die alone, so she killed Hana’s mother, so no one would know about her.
So they would die together.
Hana push
es the book away, and I drop it to the floor, trying to steady her. I blink my holofeed off and watch as Hana’s eyes unfocus. I know what she’s thinking—imagining her mother being murdered, her mother’s blood spattered across the hospital bay. I think of Gammand, and how he was torn to pieces. Was that what happened to Dr. Um, too?
“Cyclo got what she wanted,” Hana whispers. “A secret, all to herself. Just as the crew abandoned her forever.”
I have an overwhelming desire to hold her so tight that we both pass out and forget the hell we’re going through. She seems to know what I’m thinking because, though she keeps staring forward, she reaches out her hand blindly to find mine.
“They knew Cyclo was murderous,” I say. “And they dangled the Selkirk crew like bait when she was starving to death and angry. So the next Cyclo they make won’t do the same things. They needed to learn about the devil so they could fix all its faults for the next, new, more expensive version.” I pause. “I didn’t want to die like this.”
Hana releases my hand, her face furious. “I didn’t want to die like this, either.”
“Cyclo won’t kill you. Don’t you see? She’s had ample opportunity to do that. Cyclo wants to kill everyone but you. She wanted you all to herself.”
“She’ll keep me until she dies, and then I’ll die with her. Cyclo’s killing me, too.”
After a few minutes, my hand feels emptier than it’s ever felt in my whole life. When she stands, I’m sure she’s going to leave me here alone so she can process whatever horrors she has in her head. But instead she walks over to my chair and sits in my lap. She curls her legs onto mine, leans her head on my shoulder, and wraps her arms around my neck.
“I’m so angry, Fenn. And so very tired,” she whispers. “I want to live. I only started to learn how, and it’s all over soon. Even if I’m the last to live, it won’t be long before I die, too.” Her hand grazes my jawbone and slips behind my neck, pulling my face closer to hers. Her pupils are huge in the darkness, a void so big that they look entirely black. She kisses me, and it’s unexpectedly hungry and raw. My arms go around her and squeeze her tight as I kiss her back with equal ferocity. I dig my hands hard into her waist and pick her up. She wraps her legs around my waist, and I lower her to the rough floor of the cockpit as the starshine streams in through the windows. My hands become saturated with her tears and mine as I cradle her face in our never-ending kiss. But I don’t let go. I won’t. I’m afraid I’ll lose her right here, right now, if I let go for one infinitesimal second.