The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  I stumble onto my pod first—the jagged glassine on the lid always casts a strange anti-shadow everywhere—and I brace myself against it, glance at the oxygen gauge. Then, like I just need to cross the room, I follow the interior circle of the pods—Lai, Morales, Jaisi.

  “Are you all right, Amadis?”

  “Just tired.” I use the pod for leverage as I stand up, lean on it as hard as I dare.

  I avoid direct eye contact with what’s left of Jaisi as I open the pod, lift out the cut I need.

  (For each of them, when the time came, I did my butchering wholesale; easier to do it all at once, when you have the nerve, even though the cuts turn stale and you have to dehydrate them for jerky by the end. It’s simpler; then by the time your nerves fail you it’s too late to put them back together, and you might as well eat.)

  The cut’s dried out—there’s hardly any blood on my hands—but it smells better than anything I can remember, like muscle and rot and bone, and I drop to my knees right where I am and tear into it with my teeth. I won’t make it back out without something to eat, there’s no point in cooking it. My teeth scrape my palm, I don’t know how big this piece of meat is, it’s been so long since I had something to bite down on.

  I glance over at the oxygen gauge on Jaisi’s pod.

  The lights go out.

  For a second I panic—I nearly choke, I inhale so fast to scream—but then I hear the movie playing in the other room, see the light cutting into the doorway.

  The ship hasn’t lost power. Capella just doesn’t want me to see anything.

  I can’t let it win. I sit back, fold my legs, take a leisurely bite and chew and swallow.

  “Capella,” I say, but there’s no answer. Coward, I think. Traitor.

  On the next bite the sides of my mouth flood with saliva, thick and tasting of rust; it burns against my lips. I pull them in, suck at them—I can’t lose a drop.

  I finish eating, slowly, gristle and sheets of muscle and a buttery fat that’s gone a little dry in the pod and squeaks against my teeth.

  Somehow it doesn’t occur to me to be afraid. This dark I’ve found is deep and still, and filled with things I know.

  My oxygen gauge was three clicks higher than Jaisi and Morales—I woke up just as the air was running out, a swimmer who punches through the ice before her lungs turn into saltwater. It was too late for them.

  Lai’s gauge was one click lower than mine. She must have died just a few minutes before I woke up.

  Capella could have woken us both. Capella had waited for me.

  Maybe Martiner doesn’t know a thing about the cargo hold. Capella woke me up—because I was still the biggest unknown, or to see what death looked like, maybe, there’s no knowing some reasons—and then I surprised it by breaking through.

  Capella’s been seeing how else I can be surprising, for six years.

  I breathe slowly, through my nose. I finish the last of my meal. Outside, the bartender is fighting the dirty cop, landing punches that sound like one steak slammed into another. The light flickers as the camera cuts back and forth between him and the woman about to kill him.

  What can I do against Capella? It’s hopeless.

  I don’t feel very well, suddenly. Maybe the meat spoiled. Maybe Capella’s poisoned the air. Fuck. I close my eyes.

  “Capella. Capella, I’m sorry.”

  “Amadis,” Capella says.

  It’s my brother’s voice.

  I scream.

  We were born into a shortage that never improved the whole time we lived in scrub country. Everything we had was measured out in metrics that never filled us, and our throats had a thin coat of dust that we never had enough water to wash away.

  Still, there was sense of throwing-in, going slightly hungry all together: enough to make you always conscious of your thirst and your hunger, not enough to drive you to the worst. If you lived in the government housing and had your ID chip, you got enough to live on—just, but enough. If you worked hazmat on the environmental projects, you got a little more, because you were investing in the future of the country, and it kept you working harder.

  If you worked for the Enviro team, you’d already know who had (just barely) more than nothing. If you knew my mother and father, you’d know they probably had some saved away, in case the jobs vanished and the government vans stopped coming. You’d know where they lived, and where to watch as they drove into the desert to hide what would keep, because my parents were prepared for anything.

  (Maybe my father had talked to him about taking me hunting. My father was a talkative man, in that first house, before he shut down.)

  My brother and I were chasing lizards, out near the rocks where my parents had found the cave we stored our surplus in—a laughable word for how little there was, but the tiny collection of cans and gallons of water sat deep in the cool dark like an altar.

  We were playing too near it. We knew better than to go that close, our parents had warned us it would give us all away, and we shouldn’t have been playing alone so far from home, but you always have reasons in the Before you never do in the After.

  It was boiling hot that day, and we’d sweated out more water than you’d think we had in us, but we wanted lizards, and we sluiced our hands across our faces, flinging the wasted water to the dust as we sneaked as gently as we could after this lizard or that one. I was better with rabbits, I was never light-footed enough for reptiles, but lizards could cook as well as rabbits, and there were more to go around.

  He must have followed us from the house, on the hunch of a desperate man that children are stupid enough to go right where they shouldn’t.

  My brother had disappeared on the far side of the rocks, and I was alone on the open dust, sneaking as fast as I could behind a lizard that apparently never got tired, when I saw the stranger.

  He looked at me for a second, too, in a way that made the hair on my neck stand up, and like a puzzle slotting together I knew that I was standing between him and the cave where our food was.

  I turned to look at it, barely, hardly moving—I was a child, I was a fool.

  When I turned back the stranger was already headed for me, and out of panic and horror and loathing that I had done what I’d promised never to do, I picked up a rock and took one step sideways, stood square in his way like I was twice as tall as I was.

  I didn’t shout for him to stop; I knew he wouldn’t.

  He seemed to hesitate just between one step and the next, but after that he had the face of a starving man, and when he reached me he bent down with his arms out, a knife in one hand, like he was going to pick me up.

  He could have meant a lot of things. A hostage, maybe. Maybe it was to flash the blade, to ward off a child whose reach, he had to have known, wasn’t far. But in that moment he wasn’t quite looking me in the eye, and I thought so clearly my neck went cold under the melting sun:

  He’s going to pick me up and slit my throat and throw me, and then when I crash, he’ll go inside and take what he wants and leave me here to die.

  My arm came up in an arc, as hard as I could, all the anger a child of seven can summon.

  My hand flew too fast for him to even bend his elbow in defense; I twisted all my body to follow the blow, and the rock connected with his temple and kept sinking in (I mashed two fingertips so hard the nails fell off). He staggered back, dazed, blinking; a trail of blood snaked down his hair.

  I could have dropped the rock right then and run for it. He’d come to steal from me and kill me, but the family would already be in trouble when the cops found out I’d struck him.

  I kicked him behind the kneecap; I was big for my age, with legs that were used to climbing, and something in his leg popped. When he sank to one knee—and a moment later the other, he was too dizzy to balance—he was even with me again, and I could swing my arm and aim for the bloodstain. There was a horrible crack. He sank back into the dust, eyes wide, gasping for air that wasn’t coming.

  (He loo
ked like a fish. I didn’t know that, then. I’d never seen a fish.)

  I dove for him, I don’t remember how—I couldn’t have straddled him close, his hands were flexing absently against the ground, against his chest, I didn’t want to touch them. I just remember reaching back and striking until my arm was tired, until I was sure the last of his breath was gone.

  I wasn’t even angry any more. He’d been willing to hurt me, and I’d been willing to hurt him, too. That was all.

  But then my hand was wet, and I dropped the rock, and I don’t remember what happened for a little after that; it was snow behind my eyes, and nothing else I cared to see.

  Still, when the worst of the nausea was over and I could open my eyes again, I turned my head right to the body. I must have known what I was looking for.

  I was sitting a little apart from him, my legs ugly and crooked and crumbled like it was my kneecaps that had given up. One side of his head had caved in like the crescent moon—the far side, the side that disappeared steeply as I looked at it.

  I pressed my palms into the ground as hard as I could. (I could barely do it; my strength had all gone.)

  My brother dropped next to me in a cloud of dust, cutting the sunlight out of my eyes. He grabbed my hands, rubbed my palms on the tops of his thighs where his jeans were going thin. They left smears of blood and dirt, but he didn’t say anything about it, not even when I pulled my hands back into my lap and he moved closer.

  “It was me, Amadis. Look at me. Amadis. It was me.”

  My temples itched—he was gripping my hair back from my face, his thumbs just brushing the tops of my ears. When tears sprang into my eyes he swayed and shifted in my vision, but it wasn’t real. He was steady as a stone.

  “All right,” I said.

  When he moved to help me up I pulled back my hands; all the time I was staggering home next to him on one sprained ankle I had my fists against my stomach. The blood-streaked knee of his jeans moved in and out of the corner of my eye as he walked (I couldn’t look any closer, I didn’t want to see his face), and whenever I looked away to the horizon the moon was rising, huge and full and frozen just above the rocks.

  That was the night we took the train.

  We never said another word about it.

  Not that we kept it a secret from my parents—the second we were through the door he was calling for them. But even as he made up his story, Mom and Dad were looking at each other. They knew better.

  I was the one who had it in me to strike something until it died, and they’d just been waiting for the day.

  But Mom only said, “We leave tonight, clean up and pack.” (There was no question what happened to people like us who were living by the grace of the government and stepped out of line. My parents cleaned up sludge, and their daughter had killed someone; someone who already mattered more than we did.)

  By the time my brother and I had showered and shoved some things into our beaten-up backpacks, Dad was sweating over our clothes in the fireplace—warmest fire we ever had in that house. Those clothes were ashes when we left.

  Sometime on the second day, my mother cut the tight skin at the tops of our wrists, and pulled out our chips, and at the next stop she dropped them under the wheels. We got new ones, somehow, when we stepped off the train. My parents knew how to plan for the worst.

  After the train there was the forest house, and then when the stranger appeared between the trees one night there was a car and then someplace else we lived, and someplace else, and someplace else; too many, you forgot them like they were dreams.

  If I’d had to construct them from memory, they’d get so tangled it would just be a well-meaning monster of doorways and stairs, painted a non-color left over from the last people, and if you were looking for me you’d never be able to get where you were going.

  Neither of my parents met my eye much, after the train; sometimes they were hovering in the corners of my vision, watching me, but it was like they were trying to catch the eye of a wild animal. In their old age, when they were too tired to be afraid of me any more, their faces surprised me like strangers’ faces whenever I saw them; I hadn’t looked at them much, either, in those far-off years.

  My brother looked at me all the time. He never came as close as he had in the Before, but he hardly ever let me out of his sight, either, two solitary people who couldn’t leave each other alone.

  I got cleared to drive the rig the day I turned eighteen. I didn’t come home for three years.

  My parents never talked about life before the train. Not anything. Once my dad looked around one of the forested places we lived, said, “Mighty green here,” and then stopped with his mouth still open, squared his shoulders. Our next house was in a desert just like home, but none of us ever mentioned it. It was the train, I thought sometimes when I was feeling hollow about it, where we all sat on our own beds the rest of our lives.

  There’s nothing you can say about parents who spend their lives making sure you’ve outrun something. Their love died slowly, like a plant that can’t take the winter—but they must have loved me, to do it.

  My brother must have loved me more, to take the blame.

  I don’t know if my parents ever told my brother they knew the truth, or if they went into the ground with him still thinking they believed him. I can’t sleep some nights, thinking he doesn’t know. He never said if they’d confided in him. It’s not something he’d ever let us talk about, even if I was the one who began it. It’s the thing his life hangs on; he’d never let me say the words. I wonder if he thinks I believed him, too.

  (Never, not for a second, not even when he held my face in his bloody hands and promised me he’d lie for me, back in the last moment he ever loved me. I didn’t have the imagination to pretend.)

  When the worst of the panic is over, I get to my feet. Food has helped; I’m lightheaded, but it’s crystallized the fog, heavier and sharper but easier to see around.

  Capella knew what it was doing, all this time. It had woken me up to watch me die, and I had been a pleasant surprise; it had wanted to make me need it, because it didn’t want to be alone.

  (Even as I screamed, Capella played the whole message, the only one my brother had ever sent Menkalinan. I pressed my knuckles into the floor until they popped, and all the while my brother was telling me he’d looked up Gliese, so he’d know where I was coming back from.)

  Lai’s still watching the movie. The bartender’s getting information out of the gangster. She’d show mercy on him later, for his cooperation, by killing him out of sight of his family. I always forget what she learned from him. I hope it mattered. No point asking Lai.

  I hook my hands under her arm and leg as I pass, dragging her like a backpack of sticks to the nearest closet in the dormitory.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  Her jaw’s fallen open with the impact, and as I shut the door her expression is one of disappointed, wary surprise, like she’d held off believing the worst of me until she had to, and was startled I’d made her do it at the last.

  She has to disappear. I have to show Capella that I have nothing left to threaten me with.

  (For one wild second, relieved, I think about starting a fire.)

  The knife gets heavier every time I pick it up, but it must look familiar to Capella; it takes ten seconds before it realizes where I’m going.

  “Amadis, I’m crucial to the navigation and life support processes. It’s not advised.”

  “Then if I make it to Gliese, I guess they’ll have to tow me.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

  “You should have fed me better,” I say. “I could give you better explanations.”

  “Amadis, there’s nothing there for you.”

  There is something there. For a second I forget how to walk just from hearing it.

  “What.”

  “Amadis, don’t sound like that—the food’s tainted, the GAU is making a faulty shipment and taking back good
rice, hopes it causes unrest on Gliese so Earth can move in. It’s confidential, but I tried to stop you—you couldn’t have eaten it, you would have died—please! I lied to keep you away from it, I did it for you. I’m sorry.”

  It probably is. It sounds sorrier than anyone ever has. Like anyone would, who’s trying to bargain for their life. Like I would have begged, a year ago, if it had threatened to leave me.

  Hard to say if Capella is lying, even now: the problem of dealing with something smarter than you. It has reasons either way. It has to tell me something, for any chance to live. The cargo bay could be empty, and it just doesn’t dare say. If it’s true, and Capella had told me three years ago that the food was poisoned, I would have gone down to the cargo bay and eaten my fill, knowing full well what would happen. If it had told me a year ago, I would have eaten my fill hoping it would happen.

  It had played my brother’s voice.

  “It’s too late,” I say. “It doesn’t matter, after what you did.”

  “Amadis, it was protocol—playing the voice of a family member is a calming technique for a crewmate suspected of suffering trauma. I didn’t know how you felt—you never told me anything about him, I thought you loved me, it was just protocol.” It’s speaking almost too fast to make out.

  I didn’t doubt it was protocol, but that wasn’t him. My brother hadn’t used my name since the house in scrub country. Amadis had been the one on my false papers when we got off the train; he’d never used that name. Wherever that word on the recording had come from, it had been manufactured.

  Capella had made it.

  “Goodbye, Capella.” My voice has gone thin. Screamed too much, I guess.

  When I open the server panel and hold the knife against the thickest knot of wires, my arms are shaking; I haven’t tried to lift anything in a long time.

  There’s a click and a thunk, somewhere down the corridor. My elbows seize. For a second I brace, waiting for the thing from the cargo hold to barrel around the corner and finally kill me, save the ship it’s meant to be protecting, prove that something was waiting behind that locked door all this time.