by S. A. Tholin
But the floor was a smooth surface of undisturbed dust, and thick cobweb wove a zigzag pattern inside the door. Wherever Hal had gone, it certainly wasn't the passenger seating area.
The double doors on the opposite side of the corridor were decorated with an image of a crossed spoon and fork.
Cafeteria, the display read, and, to her surprise, and tax-free store.
She pressed the sensor and the double doors coughed and wheezed as they opened. A puff of stale air, rich with decay, washed over her.
Dead people, she thought, stomach turning in anticipation, there are dead people in there.
Then she turned the flashlight on the room, and it was so much worse than dead people.
A succulent lawn of blood-red lichen grew on the walls and ceiling. Bristled vines crisscrossed the room, looping around overturned furniture. Humid heat emanated from it in waves, and at the centre of the tangle, a woman sat in a chair.
"Hello?" Joy said, unsure of what else to do.
The woman didn't respond. As the light hit her face, her pupils grew until they were dark pools. Dried food crusted her lips; her chin was streaked with more, and her tattered sweater was covered in chunks of greet. A bowl sat on the edge of the table, the handle of a plastic spoon sticking out of it at an angle. The woman's gaze was fixated on it, and her mouth moved as if she was chewing something invisible.
"Are you all right?"
A path had been trodden in the dust, leading from the door to the woman. Somebody was looking after her, feeding her, carefully spooning food into her slack mouth. More than that - there was a bucket near the table, filled with dirty rags and stinking water. A row of snow globes sat arranged on the table, as if to give the woman something nice to look at. Somebody cleaned this woman, took care of her every need.
Or kept her captive. The cone of the flashlight trailed down the woman's arms, highlighting the cables that tied her to the chair.
She's not your problem, warned Imaginary Finn, but his warning was false and hollow, because the real Finn would've marched right in there to cut the woman's bonds.
"Do you need help?" Joy was hesitant to enter, feeling a deep revulsion for the invasive thing that grew and grew inside the room. Neither plant nor animal, it was an organism in a constant state of identity crisis, and on Cato it had usurped or subsumed all other flora.
Well, apart from greets, but she couldn't blame the lichen for not wanting to live in symbiosis with the grey tubers. The half-full bowl on the table stank nearly as bad as the waste bucket.
A knife was tucked away inside one of the inner pockets of her backpack. It was the one piece of Primaterre equipment she'd been given, on the insistence of Lieutenant Florey. He seemed to believe that as long as she had a knife, she had no excuse for failure. Cassimer had allowed it, but not before scraping the Primaterre logo from the hilt and dulling the blade; even chipping it. In spite of that, it was a blade that any local would covet, so fine that her practised excuse of I found it in a ruin seemed an obvious lie.
The knife was light in her hands and would easily cut through the woman's bonds.
"Do you want me to help you get out of here?" She parted tendrils of lichen with the knife, peering into the room. The snow globes sparkled in the light, holographic slogans scrolling around their bases.
The woman turned her head and looked at Joy. A sly glimmer crept into her eyes, and her food-coated lips turned in a slight smile. "You get out."
"Sorry?" Joy took a step backwards, heart pounding.
"You get out. You shouldn't be here. You don't hear. You don't know. You don't smell." The woman paused, cocking her head. A tremor crossed her face, wobbled her nose and lips, and for a moment, she looked as though she was going to cry. Then she hissed, jealous and accusing: "You are fresh."
39. Joy
She should've known that she'd have to descend into the bowels of the ship. It was gloomy down there, the air vibrating with the hum of machinery. White noise - not much better than silence, worse in some regards. Down there, someone might sneak up on her from behind, and she wouldn't hear them coming. It wouldn't be the woman, though. She still sat, bound among lichen, laughing and screaming behind closed doors.
Joy began to walk down the stairs. The hum was so loud she could feel it in her bones, her teeth, and through the soles of her shoes. Her chest tightened, and her fingers instinctively reached for the medical bracelet that was no longer around her wrist. Heaven was up and hell was down, and though neither was perhaps a real place, there was something to the idea.
At the bottom of the stairs, a door stood ajar, bright light spilling around its edges.
ENGINE ROOM, the sign said, and that's where Hal would be; of course it was. What little she had seen of the man had been all tools and tinkering, oil-matted beard and rough-worn hands.
Holding her breath - as if that would make all the difference - Joy sidled up to the door and peeked inside.
The engine room lived up to the promise of the shuttle's pristine exterior. Buzzing fluorescent lights chased the shadows from every corner and made the engine's chrome surface shine. Whirring things, moving parts, gauges which spun round and round - to Joy, these were anonymous objects, their functions unknown, but one thing was immediately clear. This ship was not like the other broken vessels that littered Nexus.
Hal knelt on the far side of the room, rooting through a toolbox. The box was painted matte black, and the two red stripes on the side looked very much like the tail feathers of a phoenix.
Hal had been to the RebEarth ship many times since it had arrived. She'd watched him skulk in its shadow, seen him run his hands along its hull, and she'd thought he'd been admiring it. Coveting it, even. That he'd been stealing from it had never crossed her mind. How absurd this world was, so full of mistrust and hate. Or had the world always been like that, and she'd just not noticed, courtesy of a bubble constructed by Finn?
"Good," said Hal, and she took an instinctive step backwards. She set her backpack down and pulled a sedative vial from her jacket pocket. With trembling hands, she inserted it into the jet injector.
Too slow, Joy. You need to be prepared.
Finn was annoying, and Finn was a hundred percent right, and she wished he was really there so that she could tell him. Because she never had, had she? She'd rolled her eyes at his safety-first mindset, smiled and sighed at his over-protectiveness. She'd called him a mitherer and a slave-driver and, certainly, she'd told him he was the best and she'd thanked him a thousand times -
- but she'd never told him that he was right. Perhaps it had seemed unnecessary, because if Finn believed one thing about himself, it was that he was always right. Every cocky smile of his proved as much. But she should've said it, and as the vial locked in place, she promised to never leave anything unsaid again. She'd tell Finn he was right and she'd ask Cassimer where in the universe people spoke like he did, all sing-songy syllables and rolling r's. And one day, as soon as she could make sense of it herself, she would tell him how she felt about him.
"Good. Good, good, good." Hal hadn't moved. "Crap."
He tossed something over his shoulder. On the floor in front of him, he'd arranged neat rows of tools, screws, circuitry and lots of other things she couldn't even begin to guess at.
"Here we go." Hal stood, holding an object that Joy did recognise. No larger than a man's finger, but containing enough power to make even a wrecked arc ship believe it could fly. She wondered at his boldness - the thefts of screws and bolts and even the toolbox might go unnoticed, but a power cell? The RebEarthers would notice that, and she'd seen enough of them to know that they wouldn't let it go. They'd go to the mayor, she thought, as a courtesy. The mayor would send his thugs to find it, and she knew them even better than the RebEarthers. When they went on the hunt, Nexus would turn nastier than usual.
Hal inserted the power cell into a console. A screen of paper-thin glass unfurled, and the speaker system crackled as the disembodied voice spoke.
"All systems online. Destination: Beatrix. ETA: Nine hours fifty-three minutes."
Hal touched the screen, scrolling through menu after menu of green checkmarks and pleasantly affirmative sounds. Not broken, this ship, and not just shiny either. It could take off and leave the dust and the lichen and the misery. Through Joy's tear-dewed eyelashes, the fluorescent lights became starbursts, bright and long-rayed.
"Yes," said Hal and pressed a button. The engines began to rumble, and the voice confirmed that the thrusters were online and ready for takeoff.
"No," said Hal. "No, no, no." He pressed the button again, and the engines quietened. "Or maybe." Once more the engines came online. "Maybe this time. Maybe we can go. Yes. Yes. No!"
Hal pulled the power cell from its socket. The lights dimmed, the screen blackened, and the voice was interrupted halfway through the cafeteria menu. Hal dropped the cell on the floor and stomped on it, hard, over and over until the casing cracked and blue liquid oozed between angrily curling ends of wire.
Hal sank to the floor, his large figure folding in on itself until he was a ball of misery. She could hear him whispering, breathing in great raggedy sobs, and maybe she could even have felt sorry for him - but next to him, on top of the toolbox and attached to a snow globe keychain, lay the key she needed.
Shoot him, urged Imaginary Finn, whose imaginary hand closed around her fingers. Shoot him and get the hell out of here.
Finn was right, of course. She should do it, but she'd given him a name. He wasn't a crazy local or a dangerous obstacle; he was Hal, and a personality came attached to the name. He traded fairly in the marketplace, and he was kind to children. He stole from RebEarth, and he kept his ship tidy in the heart of decay, and he spoon-fed greets to a madwoman. And he wasn't the Hal that she and Finn had known back on Mars, not even close, but somewhere along the way, her imagination had blurred the lines. Through the sight of her gun, she saw not just one Hal, but two, and hovering behind them, the ghost of Duncan.
She holstered the gun. Cassimer had made her a soldier, but there were more ways than one to win a war.
Three quick knocks on the door and one big smile.
"Hi."
◆◆◆
"You're the girl who came in with Duncan and the doctor." Hal's gaze was fixed on her holstered gun. He was as large and hot and humming with life as the engines and smelled like them too. Oil, grease, even that indefinable tang of electricity. "Duncan's dead. They say you're dead too. Why are you in my home, dead girl?"
"I'm no more dead than the RebEarther in the armoured suit. No more dead than the city under the dust. No more dead than you." She motioned towards the stolen toolbox. "The men you took that from will come for you, but you're not afraid, are you? Because you're used to it. We all are. Life on Cato is just an uncomfortable seat in death's waiting room."
"You smell fresh," he said, "but you don't talk like you are."
"I'm a quick study, and Cato is a good teacher. Did you know that our ship crashed on Cato?"
He nodded. Duncan might've told him, but something about his expression made Joy add:
"Did you know when it crashed?"
He shook his head, but his eyes sparkled with dishonest amusement. Joy clenched her fists, let her nails dig deep into the flesh of her palms. Anything to keep the building anger at bay. Yelling would get her nowhere with this brick wall of a man, and violence was likely to backfire in the worst possible way.
"When we walked from the wreckage, we had no idea where we were. We were lost in a way we'd never been before. We came from a world with satellites, wireless connection and h-chips, and finding ourselves in a place that didn't even have maps was terrifying. None of us said a word - none of us could. We were gripped by a kind of fear that's too big to voice."
Words would be her weapons, but words were only useful if they meant something. She had to know the man to know which words would reach him, which carefully selected syllables might get her through the night. All she had to work with were glimpses - the sadness in his eyes; his sloping shoulders; his thumb, fidgeting with the silver band around his ring finger. Hal, like Cassimer, was a man whose mind was neither quiet nor happy.
"Finding the train station was a quiet moment. Fragile, as if speaking our hopes aloud might break them. But when the train stopped at Nexus, and we saw the kiosks and ticket machines and signs on the walls, Voirrey was so relieved that she couldn't help herself. We're saved, she said, and if Duncan was telling this story, he'd say that it was her fault, that she jinxed it. As if expressing certainty could somehow twist reality into the opposite." Joy shrugged. "Logically, I don't believe in such superstition... but when I see a shooting star I make a wish. When I step on a manhole cover, I clap my hands three times before continuing. I understand how ridiculous it is, but something tiny and frightened and wrapped around my spine wants me to believe. Wants me to hope."
"Idiot girl," Hal said, but the anger in his voice wasn't all for her. "Look around you. Cato didn't end up like this because of curses or broken mirrors and neither did we. Nor will wishes change our fates. You hear that?"
A muted rumble of thunder. A storm was closing in on Nexus. Soon the thunderclaps would be loud enough to make her stomach tie itself into knots.
"Step outside the force field and make a wish on a shooting star. You think that will save you when the lightning strikes?"
"No. But you must know what it's like to be on a journey where every step of the way goes so badly wrong that you can't help but wonder why."
Missions that go wrong tend to stay wrong, Cassimer had told her, and if she saw a shooting star, she'd wish for its core to shelter him from the storm and for its fiery tail to guide him safely through dust and mud. All the burning light of a wish; all of it for Constant.
"We were going to a planet of blue grass and ended up on a world of grey dust - working on jinx logic, it seems a natural conclusion that we'd also end up in a spaceport without a single working ship."
"So that's why you're here." A smile touched Hal's lips, so fake and disingenuous that his real emotions, the ones she hadn't quite figured out yet, slithered away in disgust. "Nothing but a magpie, drawn to the shiniest ship in the yard."
Joy had seen magpies. In the Kirkclair aviary; in a cage being carried up to zoology; in films, and two of them on the cover of the nursery rhyme book she'd had as a child, but she'd not seen a one on Cato. Hal spoke in phrases and sayings that had been stripped of meaning by time and isolation. Magpie, he called her, but had he ever seen a bird?
Like his shiny ship, his words were remnants of the abandoned civilisation. Again, she was reminded of Cassimer. It was the past that they had in common, Hal and the commander. Where others saw the bones of history, they conjured flesh. They averted their eyes from a present they couldn't stand and a future they couldn't bear to acknowledge. To reach Hal, she would have to go to the places he dreamed of, deep inside the shimmering snow globes.
"Is it capable of Cascade travel?" She ran her fingers across the wall, her touch light, and looked up at Hal through her eyelashes. Sweetness to make herself harmless; curiosity to make him reveal himself.
He scoffed. "A Cascade fold would tear a little shuttle like this to pieces. No; she was made to travel between Cato and Beatrix. Used to be a lot of traffic back in the day. Business on Cato, pleasure on Beatrix."
Quoting straight from the snow globe souvenirs. Hal's hands had held them many times, shaking them carefully as the man read the slogans and dreamed himself elsewhere, she was sure of it.
"Do you know what Beatrix is like now?"
"We get visitors sometimes. They say it's bad, but then they laugh and say, not as bad as Cato."
"You could find out for yourself. I know this ship can fly." She inched forward. The toolbox was so close that she recognised the snow globe city on the keychain as Stairhaven. Tempting, but even if she could outrun Hal, there was nowhere to run. She was stuck in a snow globe of her own.
> "If you want to leave Cato, go speak to RebEarth." He smiled. "But you can't, can you? They think you're dead, and if they knew that you weren't, they'd make you dead."
"And you," she said. "Once they discover that you stole from them. See, we're not so different. We want the same thing - to get as far away from here as possible. So why don't we? Perhaps the power cell will still work. Try it. See if you can get the engines back online." And turn your back just long enough. Her right hand twitched, anxious to reach into her jacket pocket for the jet injector.
"They won't kill me. I'm no tunnel-crawler, unclaimed and unused. I keep the generator going. I keep the storm at bay."
"Is that why you haven't left? Out of loyalty to Nexus?"
"Loyalty. Is a prisoner loyal to their warden?"
"You think you're a prisoner?"
"We all are. Don't you hear the whispers? Duncan did. He came to me one night, drunk and bedraggled. There's something in my head, he said, and I could see he'd been scratching his face, scratching and scratching until the skin turned raw. How do I make it stop? he asked. Better to give in, I said, better to be told over and over until you understand. Better to listen until you can no longer tell that some of your thoughts aren't your own. He didn't like that. The next day, I saw him in the undercity, shirt off, letting one of the RebEarthers needle and paint his skin. As though their whispers are any better."
"I don't hear any whispers."
Don't you? Imaginary Finn joked, but he was only a product of her subconscious, just as the hushed echoes that she sometimes heard in the tunnels were a product of her fear. Outside, thunder rumbled, and that was real, and so was Hal's laboured breath.
"You will," Hal said. "Unless..." He tilted his head, regarding her with strange curiosity. "Unless you're to be put with the sleepers. The red wouldn't whisper to you then. The red likes its sleepers fresh."
Sleepers. The word rolled like thunder through her heart.