The Vela: The Complete Season 1
Page 36
A silvery spider sat on their chest.
Niko screamed and brushed away the mechanical spider, scrambling to sit up. They had forgotten about Cynwrig’s spiders. After everything that had happened, they had forgotten one of the worst parts about her.
The general held one in her hand, and it walked across her fingers, back and forth, back and forth. “It’s a pity, really,” she went on. “They even said they wanted to negotiate with us for your release. Isn’t that something?”
“My brothers would never negotiate.”
“Unless it’s for you, apparently,” Cynwrig mused. “But you know I can’t negotiate until I get what I want.”
“Which you won’t get.” Niko eyed the spider on her hand hesitantly. They had to remember that Cynwrig couldn’t torture them. It was against the Trust. This was just a scare tactic. One that wouldn’t work. Besides, what could her little spiders do, anyway?
A lot, the small voice in the back of Niko’s brain replied.
“I don’t have anything, anyway,” Niko went on, just to sell it.
The woman cocked her head. “I think you’re lying. After she subdued you, my lieutenant found that you had destroyed the lab’s hard drive. Now why would you do that if not to cover something up?”
“What would I cover up?”
“I don’t know. The thumb drive you used was empty, and we couldn’t repair the hard drive in the end. So you either found something too precious to copy—”
“Or I found nothing, and I destroyed it because I was angry,” Niko snapped. “I think it’s the second one, General. There’s nothing. Uzochi left nothing. No blueprints, no instructions, no prototypes—nothing. We’re stranded, General, and we’re all going to die.” The last part made Niko’s voice waver because, even with the coordinates, there was still a very good chance of that.
Cynwrig sat back in her chair. She was silent for a long moment, considering Niko’s words. The spider crawled up her arm and perched delicately on her shoulder. Its beady red-lens eyes watched Niko unblinkingly. And very faintly, Niko began to hear a sound—they didn’t understand what it was at first—but then they remembered. The click-click-click of tiny legs scrambling across a metal floor.
They stiffened, ready to bolt out of bed—
But it was too late.
General Cynwrig fixed them with her icy gaze. “I don’t believe you.”
Spiders poured out from the crack between the wall and the bed and rushed up their body, crawling, clicking, digging their sharp feet into their skin. Niko tried to brush them off, but as they did more came, grinding, biting, scratching, until they covered every inch of their skin. Niko fell over onto the bed, paralyzed, until the spiders swarmed over their eyes and blocked out the light, too. The last thing they saw was the general smirking over them, as if she had won.
And that was all there was—the click of metal and the chattering of tiny mandibles and darkness. They couldn’t move. They could barely breathe. And everything was dark, so dark. Dark like the nothingness of space, like the pinpoint of the universe where their father’s ship had been—and suddenly not. The kind of darkness that haunted their nightmares.
The spiders encased Niko in a cocoon of metal bodies, and there Niko existed.
For how long, they didn’t know.
But they felt warm lips press against their ear, and the hot breath of General Cynwrig hushed across their cheek— “You will tell me what you know, but you will understand why you should fear me first.”
Then nothing.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Nothing but the numbers in their head. Breathe. Think. Remember the numbers. In order. Forty-seven thirty-six four three-hundred and seventy-two nine ninety—and the rest, all hundred and twenty-three numbers, over and over again. In the dark.
But the thoughts began to creep into their head.
Why did Asala leave me?
Why did she kill my father?
Why didn’t she kill me, too?
And then—worst of all—Why am I always left behind?
Left behind by Asala, who disappeared through the wormhole, and left by their father, gone to some other place through a rift where they cannot follow. Left by everyone they ever cared about. Everyone they let into their lives. Left by their brothers, who went on to marry or join the Khayyami military.
Leave the guilty behind, Niko had once said to Asala.
And so they were.
The truth was, they had come to terms with dying on a frozen planet. They knew they would—either of the weather, or dehydration, or malnourishment. They would watch the sun blink out, and then that would be that. The cold would come.
The cold came for everyone in the end, anyway.
That wasn’t why Niko searched for the last six months to find some way through the wormhole after the Vela. They searched because they wanted an answer. They wanted to face Asala and ask: “Why did you leave me behind?”
And Niko knew, out of everyone who had left, Asala would be the only one who respected them enough to give them a true answer.
After Niko got their answer, they weren’t sure what they would do—maybe destroy that sun, too. Maybe make it so no one could be left behind again, because there wasn’t another way to go forward. You couldn’t be left behind if there was no future to fight for, after all. That was the cruel, twisting part of Niko they didn’t want to admit was there. It had been festering since their father died, and over the last six months had only grown into a ravenous thing deep inside of them. It wanted to see Asala suffer.
It wanted to make Asala pay.
Which was why they had to survive this darkness. They had to remember the coordinates. They had to face Asala again, and ask that question, and watch the hope bleed from her eyes as they ripped her future away from her.
And in the darkness, that ravenous, deep-pitted monster smiled.
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The Vela
Text © 2019 by Serial Box Publishing.
For additional informatio
n, write to the publisher at Serial Box Publishing, 115 Broadway, 5th floor, New York, NY, 10006.
Serial Box™ is a trademark of Serial Box Publishing, LLC.
ISBN 9781682107935
This literary work is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, incidents, and events are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Written by: Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, SL Huang, and Rivers Solomon
Cover Illustration by: Hector Mateo Pino
Produced by: Lydia Shamah
Executive Producers: Molly Barton and Julian Yap