Then it lets me see the rest. The hallway is littered with what I want to pretend are tiny bundles, curled in on themselves. My Scela body has stolen my ability to vomit, but the feeling is still there, a churn in my stomach, a taste in the back of my mouth. Suddenly it’s horrifically clear to me why Key snapped at me over the Aeschylus earlier. This is how she felt—trapped in airless silence, surrounded by the dead, and utterly powerless.
I will kill Yasmin. I don’t care that it doesn’t change anything. I don’t care if the early breach was an accident. She thought this was the way to get the Fleet on her side. She deserves to die in the most painful way possible. The thought burns through my mind as I wander down the corridor, unsure of what to do next. It burns as I notice the overseer woman, her eyes open and red with burst blood vessels, and feel a jolt of sick satisfaction that she didn’t make it to the shelter in time.
It burns until it consumes me. Until I’m nothing but fire and rage and pain.
Until I find my sister’s body, crumpled against a wall just twenty feet from the breach shelter doors.
By the time I feel like I can move again, the rescue shuttles have arrived. Breach-suited Scela and humans move soundlessly through the streets, headed for the shelters to start evacuations. A message linked into my exosystem a few minutes ago, broadcast to every Scela on the ship. The Reliant’s damages are beyond repair, it announced impassively. Everyone’s being evacuated from the shelters and relocated to other ships. Seventh District ships, of course.
My exo keeps urging me to join the teams working to move people to safety. Breach-suited Scela are unfurling tunnels that attach to the shelter airlocks and pressurize, creating an artificial vascular system, a safe path to get the survivors down to the Reliant’s intership deck, where the rescue shuttles wait. I fight the impulse, sharpening my will against the order until its hum fades from the back of my neck. It would be smarter to help. Less likely to incur suspicion.
But none of it really matters anymore.
Instead I wander through the streets, following a slight tug from one end of the exosystem. Praava and Woojin are both trapped in shelters elsewhere for the time being. Aisha’s the only other one on the outside.
I’m the only one who can go to her.
So I go.
I drag my feet. I don’t want to look her in the eye. It feels so silly to think that when her grief and pain is in my head already. But something about seeing her makes it real, and I can’t cope with it being real.
I can’t cope with what we’ve done.
Because this is our fault. Completely ours. If Aisha hadn’t been so desperate to pay off Yasmin. If I hadn’t believed that the Archangel was a person worthy of being when all along she was just a pretty puppet in Fractionist hands. If both of us hadn’t gone looking for the coordinates in the first place.
We dragged Woojin and Praava into a bloodbath far worse than the one aboard the Aeschylus. The marshal put her faith in us to carry out this mission, and instead we’ve ensured the deaths of thousands. The General Body could punish Marshal Jesuit as this tragedy’s originator, and what would happen to her daughter then?
As I mount the stairs to the sublevels, my head starts to ache from the weight of my fury. I want the Fractionist leaders to answer for what they’ve done here. Once again, I find myself doubting the conditions of a breach. Yasmin said we had thirty minutes. We took her word for it and found ourselves with only ten. It could be an accident—a charge detonating prematurely that forced them to trigger the rest of the breach.
Or it could have been intentional. Nothing gets people going like a martyr. I’ve seen that enough in the way the Fractionists look at me now. Maybe it’s given them ideas.
And who knows what their next move will be?
I swallow back the bitterness in my mouth. Will there be another Kronos? Another Aeschylus? Another Reliant? What other ships have to suffer before our feet hit solid ground?
I trudge down a set of narrow stairs and round the corner into a scene I’ve seen over and over through Aisha’s cameras. There are so many of them, each of them so small, so still. I raise my eyes from the bodies of the children and find the one living thing in this hallway. Aisha’s slumped against the wall, her legs sprawled out at careless angles. Her head is bent, and as I get closer, I see that she has her fingers carefully wound in the hair of the girl next to her. The child is facedown, her red hands matching those of every other kid in this corridor, but I know it’s Malikah from the numbness that radiates out of Aisha’s exo.
There’s nothing I can say, and nothing I should. Instead, I cross to her other side and sit, my back sliding down against the wall, my shoulder inches from hers. With a nudge into her headspace, I listen to the feedback from her audio processing. We’re still in a vacuum, with no air molecules between us to carry the sound, but inside her suit there’s air enough to carry the gentle brush of her massive, enhanced fingers over the limp strands of Malikah’s hair.
For a moment our thoughts go quiet, both of us listening, as if that little noise is the only thing in the universe.
She didn’t want to wear the scarf, Aisha whispers in my head. She didn’t see the point of it. But she felt so guilty seeing me wear mine—I think it made her feel like she wasn’t mourning our parents enough. So she started wearing her own too. The morning I left, she was wearing it, but I guess sometime between then and when we visited Yasmin, she decided to stop. I should have asked her about it. She has such beautiful hair.
Aisha pauses, her fingers going still.
I had just started thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, not wearing the headscarf. That it was a chance for me to move on. Leave behind that chapter of my life. And now…Though she can’t physically cry, a bubble of emotion that feels like a sob wells up, stealing away her thoughts.
I wait, still listening.
Now I think I need to start wearing it again.
I bow my head, rushing through the whole of my experience for something that might not be useless to say. I can’t recall a loss like hers, and I shiver at the thought that this isn’t the first loss of this kind she’s had to endure. Her parents, her sister—and her little brother is on the plague ship. The universe has a track record of taking everything that’s ever mattered to her, no matter how hard she fights against it.
My own experience is nothing in comparison. What have I lost? Myself, I suppose, but that doesn’t really count. I still have some semblance of myself, even if the General Body ripped out the core of the Archangel. My parents are alive, healthy, and probably better off with me in Scela metal.
I don’t have siblings. Growing up, I didn’t even have friends who had siblings. It’s a First District thing—if you want to reproduce, you’re supposed to have one perfect child. You don’t get do-overs. There’s pride in having one child, raising them the right way, and having them alone carry on your legacy. It keeps the population low, so more people can fill the frontend starships and diversify the genetics. In the backend, it’s different. There’s more risk, I guess. Factories like the dyeworks can take people at any age, so the families here are bigger to compensate.
Aisha was right. I don’t get family. Not the way she does, not the way she feels. I can dip into her thoughts, pull out every emotion that passes through her, and it still wouldn’t be enough. I can feel her hurt, but even with her guidance, I can never fully understand it. That much is clear by the way I tried to use her parents’ deaths to motivate her just a few hours ago.
I’m going to have to do a whole lot better.
So instead I lean. Let my body slump to the right, just enough so that my shoulder is pressing into hers, and through the system I will her to understand what it means. I’m here. I know what you’re feeling, though I won’t pretend to comprehend it. I’m not going anywhere.
And Aisha leans back. Her head rocks to the si
de, limited by the support struts of her rig and the inflexibility of her suit, but she manages to set it sort of on my shoulder, and I set my head on top of hers in turn. In her exo, I feel Malikah’s hair slide between her fingers as she lets go. There’s a dark emptiness growing in her. A massive absence. That I understand. That I know how to handle.
You just build yourself back around the holes, I tell her. It’s nowhere as simple as that, and I don’t think I have it entirely figured out myself, but it’s a start.
Her cameras roll, taking in the rest of the hallway, the rest of the children. I could have saved so many more, she starts, a count rising in her system as she identifies the individuals. If I’d been in the habitat instead, I could have—
Stop, I think forcefully. No one else was giving these kids a chance. You did. That’s what matters.
Aisha’s jaw pulses. You know what’s messed up? If this had gone the other way, if I had saved her…I probably wouldn’t care about how many we let die. I would have been so relieved that the rest of it wouldn’t have mattered. I feel like I care more about the rest of them because my sister’s among them. I hate knowing that about myself.
I shutter my cameras. Family makes you stupid. But I don’t think that stupidity’s a bad thing. I mean, yeah, it put us in some bad situations this week. It got…It got people killed, is what happened, but that’s not useful for either of us to hear. It’s so easy to be apathetic. To tell yourself that you don’t care about anything and you won’t do anything—I mean, look at me. There was so little I cared about before today that when the slightest inkling got in my head that I could matter to something and something could matter to me, it drove me into all this.
Actually that doesn’t sound too great either. There’s no way to win when caring about shit gets people killed. A burst of my frustration jolts into the exosystem, strong enough that it shoves some of Aisha’s grief aside. I’m tempted to unleash more, to distract her from the hurt that overtakes her. But denying her this moment, when her pain is freshest, would be cruel.
Our exosystem seethes with Aisha’s urge to take her vengeance on Yasmin and the rest of the Fractionists. They’ll be revealing their next move soon. It probably starts with the footage of the Reliant’s destruction, footage we’ll be at the center of. But it’ll give us a sense of where we stand and what our next move is going to be.
Because we can’t stand by and follow orders like we were made to. Not when our Fleet is steered by leadership that would vent part of a ship to stop a protest. Not when it’s being influenced by a group that would vent an entire ship to swing the public’s opinion. The four of us have seen this mess evolve. Have helped it along unknowingly. And as long as we can avoid the willpower that might compel us to do otherwise, we have to try to stop it before it rips the whole Fleet apart.
I don’t really know where we start. Despite who I was, I’m kind of new at this, and it shows. I let the question drift into the system between us. Aisha takes it in and digests it. They can’t get away with it. Neither of them. Not the Fractionists and not the General Body, she thinks. Not while I still live. Not while my brother…
Another swell of emotion.
He’s still alive, I know it. He’s so strong. I mean, I know for little kids it’s supposed to be much harder to beat the plague. But I just can’t be the only one left. After everything I gave…Her hand drifts back down to Malikah’s hair, but she stops herself just short. If she lets herself get dragged back into the past, she’ll be useless. I can’t forget him. I can’t stop fighting for him just because I lost her.
On the distant edge of the exosystem, I feel Woojin finally being freed from his breach shelter as rescue squads reach him. He picks up the orders being broadcast and chooses to follow them, seamlessly joining the flow of Scela escorting humans out to the intership deck. With his body occupied, he reaches out in the back of his mind and finds us. There’s a moment’s pause as he takes in the situation that surrounds us, the way we’ve settled, and then he thinks, And you two gave me and Praava so much shit.
Oh, fuck off, Woojin. Our system fills with the soft warmth of Aisha’s quiet, hesitant amusement, and that more than anything convinces me. We’re going to make it through this. We’ll start somewhere.
Aisha nudges my head with hers. We’ll start by getting up, she says.
And that’s exactly what we do.
I see the last of my sister when the rescue crews wrap her in a sheet. They only have so much material, so she’s laid side by side with seven other dyeworks kids, their raw, stained hands pressed into each other. A worker bundles them up with slow reverence.
Prayers for her soul’s journey pour from my lips. A proper Ledic burial service isn’t possible, and a dull ache builds in my chest as I wrap my head around the fact that these little words are all I can give Malikah in the end. My eyes feel too heavy. The exo wants me to forget that I have them, wants me to just use my cameras for everything I need, but they haven’t yet built a camera that can cry, and that’s all I want to do right now.
I’m sick of being trapped in this suit. Sick of the recycled air being pumped into my helmet, sick of the way my footsteps don’t make a sound, save for the creak of my feet inside the boots. I’m tired of these empty halls, the cold, hollow husk of my birthship. It doesn’t feel like it’s gone, but the vacuum is a constant reminder.
We’ve lost ships, historically. Most recently the Kronos to the Fractionists, but before that, there were others. More, in the early days of the Fleet, before we figured out how to preserve our vessels over hundreds of years of flight. But when the Kronos was destroyed, it was so fast. The FTL drives burned and warped the ship, and then it just wasn’t there anymore.
The Reliant is still here, and that’s the worst part. It feels like it should be fixable. Like maybe there’s a way to go back to how things were. But it’s beyond repair, according to every assessment that flickers through the exosystem. The Fractionists knew what they were doing when they blew out the hull in all the critical areas. They hit the auxiliary supplies. They ensured there would be no backup to restore the ship’s atmosphere once it was gone, and no point in doing it with the hull so badly damaged. They must have studied the ship for so long with that one purpose in mind, and the thought of it adds to the churn of my stomach.
The Reliant will continue to drift with the Fleet for as long as we keep our current course. On our next adjustment, we’ll leave it behind.
We reunite physically with Praava and Wooj in a rescue transport on the intership deck. They sit side by side, their heads hung, in the part of the passenger bay designated for Scela. The tragedy has overtaken everyone’s priorities, and thankfully no one has questioned our presence on the Reliant—they’re just relieved to have help. The rest of the ship is stuffed with humans. So many living. No dead. Relief pulses through me.
It seems like there isn’t any room left, but more appears when the dyeworks children arrive. There are a few shrieks of delight, and I have to force myself to turn away from the sight of families coming back together. Even with my exo suppressing my physical responses, the phantom sensation of bile creeps up my throat.
Steady, Key pushes into my exo. Not in a cruel way, but as a reassurance. Part of me wants to warn her not to go soft. We need her sharpness, her brutality, that purpose that carried us through the void jump. But I can’t deny that I need softness, even if it’s from the most surprising person in the squad. I let her know that I appreciate it.
That’s everyone, Praava says once the last red-handed child leaps through the airlock. A countdown starts in our exos as the shuttle makes ready to depart. Three other ships on the intership deck are making similar preparations. Out the window, I watch the other Scela deployed to rescue the Reliant board their ships. We’re the only ones on this transport.
The shuttle maneuvers into its launch tube. As the engines behind us spin up to
a teeth-rattling rumble, we strap into our harnesses. My stomach turns, but after leaping clear across the Fleet, a shuttle ride is nothing.
Then the screens in the shuttle start to glow. Confused murmurs run through the passengers, but our exos already know exactly what’s happening. A Fleet-wide cast blasts into our system. Only this time instead of the Chancellor addressing the Fleet for Launch Day, it’s my aunt’s face flashing in front of us, popping up on every screen. For a moment my rage swells so much that I have to fight back the urge to smash every cast device in this shuttle, my own exo included.
Yasmin looks shaken. To all the humans, it seems like she’s devastated, but the four of us pick up on something more in her expression. She wasn’t expecting this. The early breach must have been a mistake. She didn’t mean to kill so many.
And yet she did. I watch carefully as my aunt decides exactly what she’s going to do about it.
Yasmin lifts her sorrowful eyes to the camera and starts to speak. “Citizens of the Fleet. Just three weeks ago, a horrible tragedy rocked our formation. Portions of our proud Fourth District starship Aeschylus vented, and hundreds of lives were lost. The General Body would have you believe that the Fractionist movement, which was organizing on the ship at the time, was responsible for this event. The General Body is lying to you. They breached the ship with the express purpose of disabling our movement. They didn’t care that it would cost innocent lives. Those lives, to them, are just the cost of maintaining control.”
Hullmetal Girls Page 24