by Loren Rhoads
She drifted off again, to be woken by the agony of her cramped limbs. Her head ached with thirst. How had she miscalculated?
She heard Jain moving around again. He banged on the outside of the console, trying to force it open. He sounded desperate to contact his family and find out when they were coming.
Fear shivered over her. She had no room to maneuver, no way to escape. If he ever got the panel pried open, she would be an easy target.
To get away from the nightmare, Raena turned over on her bunk. She pressed her face into the cool bulkhead between her cabin and Mykah and Coni’s. Someone behind her on the bunk muttered something, snuggling into her, nuzzling her shoulder. The warmth of that body made the nightmare evaporate. Raena breathed deep, completely at peace.
It couldn’t last, of course. Insomnia chewed at her and she couldn’t find sleep again. She hesitated to flop around in bed and disturb her companion.
Climbing out was awkward, but she decided that was the kindest choice. Let him sleep. She peeled the coverlet off, tucked it behind her, and slid out of bed. In the darkness, she dressed quickly from force of habit, slipping her boots on last of all.
Then she crept out of her cabin into the Veracity’s passageway. She heard voices in the cockpit and headed that way.
Rather than finding Coni and Haoun discussing the media coverage of the latest jetsail race, there were two humans she didn’t know sitting in their chairs. They looked up at her inquiringly. “Did you want something, Raena?”
“Sorry.” Raena rubbed her face. “Wrong turn. Looking for coffee.”
She backpedalled quickly and retreated to the galley. Mykah bustled around in there as usual. He nodded to her, but stood out of the way as she poured a cup of coffee.
After choking down a sip of boiling liquid, she gasped, “Where’s Coni?”
“Who?” He seemed shocked by the very sound of the name, like he’d never heard it before. Mykah looked at Raena, dark eyes narrowing. “Are you feeling all right?”
“No.” Raena stumbled to the table, where she half slid, half fell onto a stool. Her thoughts moved around in her head gingerly, probing every cranny and crevice. How do you recognize when you’re in a dream, she wondered. If you could smell the meat browning on the stove and taste the scalding coffee and feel the blister forming on the roof of your mouth, wouldn’t that mean you were awake? How, then, to explain the utter wrongness, the falseness, of the reality around her?
“I just made that coffee,” Mykah apologized. He brought her a cup of ice water. “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you. I didn’t think you were going to drink it straight down.”
He has no idea, Raena thought. Absolutely no idea. Nothing has changed for him.
The wrongness suffocated her. She felt trapped, the way she’d felt in the tomb when the soldiers had closed the slab on her, sealing her inside, when the blackness had enfolded her like a swarm, shutting away light and sound and air, the rattle of her heartbeat in her head loud enough to drive her mad.
The worst question was: who had been in her bed when she woke up?
Raena stood suddenly, startling Mykah. She bumped the table with her hip, knocking over both the mug of coffee and the glass of water. The stool clattered to the floor behind her. She bounced off the doorframe hard—felt it, that would leave a bruise—and crashed into the wall in the hallway, fighting to stay on her feet, to keep moving despite the shadows closing in. She had to make it back to her cabin. Who had that been in her bed?
Her right hand went hesitantly to her collar. Then she yanked the neck of her sweater open, stuck her fingers inside, searching her skin between the shoulder and the swell of her left breast.
It was gone. The starburst scar where Thallian shot her with the shock capsule was gone. He’d never taken her captive the final time. She’d never killed him.
That realization threw her backward. Her body jerked, jolted out of the … memory? Dream? Hallucination? Insanity?
Mykah caught her as she went down. “You’re okay,” he promised. “You’ll be okay. Coni, come help us in the hallway.”
He looked the same: same dark brown skin, same crazy topiary hair, same concern in his eyes. But he knew his girlfriend’s name now. Raena thought: I must be back from wherever I had been.
Had she been dreaming? Sleepwalking? The nightmares had never overtaken her when she’d been so certain she was awake.
Mykah eased Raena down onto the floor where she sprawled, feeling the comfortable solidity of the deck beneath her. She wished that the world around her felt as solid. Would she slip back into the hallucination at any moment?
If she hadn’t killed Thallian, was she still on the run from him? What if he had been snuggling her beneath the blankets in her bunk? Maybe it wasn’t her cabin at all. Maybe this transport still belonged to the Thallians. Maybe she still belonged to Jonan.
Raena felt the seizure take her limbs. Her eyes didn’t close and she didn’t lose consciousness as her body beat itself against the floor. She wanted desperately to black out, to cease thinking, to stop worrying. Any respite would have been gladly received. She would have even welcomed death.
“Coni!” Mykah shouted. “Haoun, Vezali, come! Now!”
Haoun appeared first, sprinting out of the cockpit. He grabbed Raena up in his arms. She felt the comforting strength of him, smelled the strange reptilian scent of him, as Coni opened Raena’s cabin door. Haoun carried Raena in and set her gently on the bunk, despite the way she arced and thrashed in his arms.
The narrow bunk was empty, she noted. No extra body warmed it for her now.
Vezali slithered onto the mattress beside Raena and held her down. Her tentacles were incredibly strong, despite the velvety softness of their grip. One tentacle encircled Raena’s head, holding her skull so that she didn’t thrash herself into a concussion.
“What happened?” Coni demanded.
“I don’t know,” Mykah said despairingly. “I heard her stumble into the wall in the passageway. When I came out of our cabin, it looked like she’d grabbed a live wire or something, just galvanized. I was running toward her when she went down. Then this started.”
Haoun’s hands were cold on her ankles, holding her legs to the bunk. Raena was so grateful to them, to all of them, that she started to cry. Tears spilled from her eyes, rolling ticklishly down to puddle on the bed.
Gradually the seizure abated. Vezali didn’t let her go, but it felt more like a hug now than being restrained, affection and support that Raena desperately enjoyed. Her body ached like it hadn’t in years.
“Ka—” she managed to gasp out. It was impossibly hard to make her lips form the name, to make her tongue spit it out. It took a couple of tries to get it all out. “Kavanaugh,” she said at last. “Tarik Kavanaugh. Old friend. Call him. He will help.”
Coni nodded to the others and went to make the call.
Raena saw Mellix watching from the doorway and closed her eyes, embarrassed.
Mykah found the carafe of sleeping drops on her desk and brought it over. “Did you take this just now?” he demanded, staring into her eyes to gauge her recovery. “Maybe you had a bad reaction.”
Tentatively, Raena nodded and wiped her face with her hands. “Take it away, will you? I’m scared of it now.”
Haoun stepped back from her, then tsked at the bruises his hands had left on her ankles. “Don’t know my own strength.”
“It’s okay.” Raena gave him a smile. “I think you saved my life.” She turned her gaze to include Vezali in that, too. “Can you stay with me for a little while? Until I get to sleep?”
“I’ll stay with you then, too,” Vezali promised. Raena felt more tears welling up in her eyes and blinked hard to hold them back.
“Do you need anything else?” Mykah asked.
“I’m afraid to take anything else,” Raena said. “Can you find a way to keep me from wandering?”
“We’ll see what we can do.” Mykah grabbed her hand suddenly, gave it a sq
ueeze, then followed Haoun out.
“How do you feel?” Vezali asked gently.
“Like I’ve been run over by a tank,” Raena said. “Thank you for keeping me from snapping my own neck.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way. You’re welcome.” Vezali withdrew her tentacles, but didn’t get up off the bed. She grabbed the coverlet at the foot of the bunk and pulled it upward, passing it from tentacle to tentacle as it came, so she could tuck it around Raena, so gentle it was almost maternal. “Do you remember what happened?” she asked quietly.
“It’s complicated,” Raena said, then sighed. “It’s been happening for a while. And it’s been getting worse. It started with bad dreams. They were like I was reliving a memory—but that’s not unusual for me. My memories often turn up as dreams. I think it’s from spending so many years in the dark, without new input for my brain to make dreams out of. It’s trained itself to keep itself entertained by picking over old memories. Anyway, my dreams started to change. They’d begin like the memories I remember, the true memories, but then something would happen. Almost always Gavin Sloane would show up, and the dream would spin off into a new, unfamiliar direction.”
“That doesn’t sound too awful,” Vezali said kindly. “Sloane is someone you know?”
“He was the man who bankrolled the looting of the Templar tombs. He’s the reason Kavanaugh found me and let me out.”
Vezali bobbed her eyestalk, as if she was putting the pieces together now.
Raena felt a rush of affection for her and smiled again. “Gavin was my sort-of boyfriend before I met you all. He thought he loved me and wanted to keep me safe, but I thought that killing Thallian would be the only way I could really be safe. And as much as I like Gavin, he’s so much older than I am. Especially now, since I came back from the tomb. I didn’t want to be responsible for getting Gavin hurt because he’d grown old while I didn’t. So I left him behind on Kai.”
“And you didn’t look back.”
“Not until these dreams started. I like Gavin well enough. He’s not a nice man and I find that kind of interesting. But my sister loved him, really stupidly loved him, and the whole triangle thing was not working out well for us. So I went my way and let them go theirs.” She stopped, shook her head, and said, “There’s nothing for me to go back to. I don’t want Gavin taking care of me. I want to be free—on my own—for a change.”
Vezali chuckled. “We’ve kind of gotten off the topic.”
Did we? Raena wondered, but of course that had to be true. She said, “The dreams started getting more and more violent. I got so I tried to exhaust myself so I’d sleep without dreams. That didn’t work, so I asked Mykah for some sleep medicine. I took it for the first time earlier tonight and dreamed that the Templars never died. This last dream was even more disturbing.”
She paused, unwilling to go on.
“Did you have one just now, before the seizure?”
“I thought I’d gotten up,” Raena said slowly, dreading the memory and dragging out the telling of it. She had to know, though, if it was safe to think about it again, if—by simply thinking about it—she would induce a seizure again. Better that she experiment now, here in her cabin, lying down, while she had company, than find out later when she was alone.
She forced herself to continue the story. “I thought I’d gone to the cockpit, but it wasn’t Coni and Haoun I found there. There were two humans I didn’t know. They knew me, though. So I went to the galley, where Mykah was cooking. But he said he was in his cabin, not the galley … so I don’t know where I really went, or who I really spoke to.”
“I understand you’re upset,” Vezali said in the same quiet voice, “but is the problem that you were sleepwalking? Or is there more to it than that?”
Raena thought back over what she’d said, trying to figure out why the dream had panicked her so badly. Finally she decided, “At the end of the dream, something made me check my scar.” She pulled her collar down to display the starburst of scar tissue where the shock capsule had entered her shoulder.
“When I got into Thallian’s city, when almost everyone was dead or had fled to the surface, Thallian shot me with a shock capsule. His robot doctor removed it while I was his prisoner, before Eilif helped me escape. Just now, in my dream, the scar was gone. I understood that meant that I’d never fought Thallian, never killed him. And I wondered if that meant he was still out there, if I was still running from him, or if he was on this ship right now. If the shuttle still belonged to him. If I still belonged to him.”
Goose flesh shivered up over her, but she didn’t feel a seizure coming on again. When she was sure she was safe, Raena added, “Still belonging to him: that’s the worst nightmare I can imagine.”
Vezali nodded. “But you’re on the Veracity now. You’re safe.”
“Here,” Raena said. “Now. But even though I knew that dream wasn’t right, I couldn’t break out of it. I couldn’t wake myself up. It had all the sensory details of real life. I’m scared, Vezali. If I can’t tell the difference between dreams and waking, if I’m up roaming around, interacting with the ship and people who aren’t there … What if I’d thought I was opening a door and I opened an external hatch? What if I thought I was defending myself and I hurt one of you? I’m scared I’m going crazy.”
“I’m not the expert on humans that Coni is,” Vezali said, “but I’ve read that, usually, crazy humans don’t have any idea they’re crazy, right? They think they are acting in a perfectly logical way.”
“Maybe,” she hedged. Thallian had been the most deranged person she had ever met, and he certainly had strongly held justifications for all his delusions.
“By that logic, you are sane as long as you wonder if you’re going crazy.”
“Oh, good. I feel much better, then.”
“Glad to help.” Vezali stroked her face. “Do you want to rest?”
“Do we still have the restraints onboard somewhere?” Raena asked. “Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to pin me down while I’m sleeping.”
“I’ll lock us in,” Vezali said.
“What if I …”
“At full strength, I would be afraid of you,” she said gently. “I think I can take you in this state, beaten up by insomnia and half asleep.”
“You’re probably right.” Raena yawned. “Still, be careful. I would hate it if anything happened to you.”
“So would I. I’ll err on the side of caution.” They lay quietly, but clearly sleep was afraid of Raena now. She asked, “Can you tell me a story? Something to take my mind off of all of this?”
Vezali eased a wisp of hair back from Raena’s face with the tip of one tentacle. “The stories my people tell wouldn’t make much sense to you,” she said.
“I don’t even know where you come from.”
“It’s called Dagat. It’s mostly water, but we’ve built cities like mountains that climb from the ocean floor up into the sky.”
“Is it lovely?”
“In its way. The skies turn a variety of colors I’ve seen nowhere else. I’ll go home some day. When it’s time to die.”
Raena folded her arm under her head, gazing at Vezali’s eyestalk, which was as much of a face as the tentacled girl had. “How will you know when it’s time to die?”
“Someday I’ll wake up and crave children. Then my body will become female and I’ll find another of my kind and we’ll mate. And I’ll return to my home ocean to lay my eggs. I’ll watch over them and protect them and eventually they’ll hatch. Then my children will devour me.”
Raena twitched involuntarily. Vezali caressed her face with a tentacle tip. “Mind off your troubles now?” She sounded amused.
“Things are in perspective,” Raena said. “I thought you were female now.”
“That’s all right. I’m not offended. After I left home, I learned fairly early that most people were going to fit me into a gender construct already familiar to them.”
“If it’s not too person
al a question, what do you consider yourself?”
“When I was younger, I fathered children. Now I’m between genders. The translator would call it gynandromorph. You can think of it as neutral. Someday I’ll become female.”
Raena nodded. “I’ve thought of you as ‘she,’” she apologized. “I judged you on the pitch of your voice and I’m sorry.”
“‘She’ is fine,” Vezali said. “Some of my favorite people are she. I’m honored to have them count me in their company.”
Raena smiled again. Her body ached from the seizure, from Vezali’s protective embrace and Haoun’s grip on her legs. She closed her eyes, but sleep would not come back.
What if she was going crazy, like her mother had?
The thought iced Raena’s blood.
She didn’t know much about her mother’s madness. She’d been a child, trying to make sense of the only life she knew. Only after she met Ariel did she learn that all humans didn’t hate all nonhumans. Ariel actually had nonhuman friends, people she loved and trusted, people who were kind to Raena, even though she was a slave.
Inside the relative normality of Ariel’s circle of friends, Raena learned to recognize that her mother’s rages and sobbing jags, her screaming outbursts and rabid bigotry, were not normal. Something had broken in Fiana and she never—in the ten years Raena was with her—got the help she needed.
Raena didn’t know when her mother’s madness had started. Fiana’s parents were musicians. They’d lived a roaming life, performing wherever they could. Raena wondered about them now. She’d never known their names, but surely she could find them. Maybe they were still alive. Maybe, for that matter, Fiana was, too.
Raena thought that if she survived this—whatever it was that was happening to her now—perhaps she would look them up.
In the meantime, she would have to find her own answers. Whatever was going wrong in her head, it did not manifest like her mother’s madness. For that, she was grateful.
Vezali heard Raena’s breathing even out at last. Bit by bit, in twitches and tremors, the tension went out of the little woman’s body. Vezali continued to hold her closely.