“This is the first of the new doses.” Her mother twists the vial over in her hands and in the background Letta hears the hiss of the doors gliding open. Her mother looks up over the camera and laughs lightly. Letta’s fingernails dig into her forearm. It doesn’t hurt, but it helps to distract her from the brightness in her mother’s face. How can someone go from this—laughing and working, completely normal—to the pile of ash Letta saw disappear into space?
How can anything matter, when we all end up the same way?
“Claudia,” her mother says, still smiling, “what are you doing here?”
Letta squeezes her eyes shut. She can’t do this. She can’t watch this anymore. This is it. This is the proof she needs. She feels a cold chill spread throughout her body, like clammy hands running over her skin, even though she’s sweating buckets. The knot in her stomach tightens; her breath comes in short little bursts through her teeth.
There’s mumbling in the back of the video, the microphone only picking up pieces of her mother’s speech, and Letta’s eyes shoot open. Her mother is cut off by the screen wavering. The sound turns to static and the image warps, turning her mother into some kind of grotesque monster, her face swirling into a blurry, black hole.
“Letta! Letta!” her mother wails from the twisting screen, her voice just as mangled as the image is. And just as sudden as it started, it stops, like calm waters after a storm in the documentaries she spent hours watching as a kid. Her mother stares, unblinking, out of the screen, locking steady eyes with Letta. Letta presses her hand so tightly against the edge of the screen that it cramps.
“She did this to me, Letta. To us. You are the rightful captain of the Elsinore and I should no more be dead than you. Don’t take anything she gives you. Stop her, Letta. Swear to me you’ll stop her!”
“I swear!”
Letta presses her forehead against the screen. The sensor recognizes the touch, and the image freezes before fading to black. There’s a lull where both Letta and Tia stare at the blank screen in silence before the video judders and loops back to the start. Letta raises a shaking hand and shuts off the screen. She blinks, her eyes pricking with hot tears.
“I don’t understand, Lett. What—what is this?”
“That’s not what it was like when I saw it earlier. It was… different.” Letta’s voice falters and she wipes her eyes quickly. It was harder to watch the video than she had thought. There has to be more to the video than that. Letta steps away from the screen, her hand aching, and collapses backward onto the couch, sinking deep into the pillows. She closes her eyes. Her brain throbs with exhaustion even though her heart is racing.
Tia sits at the edge of the couch by Letta’s feet and pulls Letta’s legs onto her lap, resting her arms on top of them. They sit like that for a few minutes, with no sound but their breathing and the generic whir and hum of the electronics in the room.
“I keep seeing her. Everywhere I go, she’s there. Watching me. Waiting for me to do something,” Letta admits, the quiet crumbling around her. She lays her arm across her face, blocking out the overheads.
“Your mother? Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Stop asking me if I’m okay. My answer’s not gonna change.” Letta lifts her head up to glare at Tia. “I’m not making this up. It’s her. I know it’s her. You watched the same video as me.” She props herself up on her elbows. “You saw her, right? You saw her talking to me?”
Tia sucks on her cheeks, nodding quickly. “When did this start?” she asks, her face fraught with uneasiness.
“Two days ago.”
It was late at night when she first saw her. Letta was just drifting off to sleep when her mother came into her bedroom. She was dressed for work, although it was well past midnight, and the lights in Letta’s room had dimmed to mimic the night on Earth. Her mother had sat at the end of Letta’s bed, and that’s when she noticed it: the blood leaking out from her mother’s ears, eyes, nose and mouth, blooming on the white uniform like flowers as it rolled down and dripped off her face. She remembers asking her mother what was wrong, and the long silence that followed as her mother did nothing but stare at her. No reaction, not even so much as gagging as the blood dripped from her mouth.
Letta had tried to help, but each time she moved toward her mother, she was always just that little bit out of reach, a millimeter out of her grasp. She had tried to access the comm system on her ID band but it—and the lights in the room—were disabled. She tried the door but that, too, was not working. She was locked inside.
It was only then that her mother opened her mouth, the blood pooled inside dripping out like syrup as she spoke. She told Letta that she’d been murdered, and that the killer was Claudia.
It had to have been real. How could she have dreamed something like that up before she even knew that her mother had, in fact, died? As reluctant as Letta was to believe it, her mother had to have been a ghost.
She saw her two more times after that. Trailing down empty corridors, the lights flickering as she passed them. What else could she do but follow?
“I think my mother’s ghost has been visiting me.” She waits, holding her breath, for Tia to burst out laughing. To tell Letta that she is insane. Instead, Tia places a firm hand on Letta’s leg. It feels like a tether connecting Letta to reality.
“If you say you saw your mother’s ghost, then I believe you.”
“You ‘believe’ me?” Letta repeats, incredulous. “Do you not believe yourself? Your own eyes? What did you see on the screen?”
Tia gulps and opens her mouth to speak, but Letta’s ID band vibrates, distracting her. She presses one of the buttons embedded just underneath her skin, opening the holo-screen. A new message. Letta groans as she reads it.
“Look,” she says, showing the screen to Tia. “Claudia made me an appointment with the Med Center tomorrow.”
“Well, maybe that’s a good thing,” Tia suggests. Letta scoffs.
“I think it’s time you left, Tia. If you see Claudia on your way out, you can tell her from me that I am not, under any circumstances, going to some useless doctor’s appointment.”
❦
“I cannot believe Claudia is making me go to this appointment,” Letta growls under her breath as she leaves the captain’s quarters, flanked by two guards. Claudia has upped the security detail since last night. Apparently she didn’t appreciate that little episode with Tess yesterday, because Tess is nowhere to be found now. Letta smirks at the thought. Maybe Tess really did get demoted.
She sees the elevator doors ahead closing and darts away from the guards.”Hey, hold the door!” She slips into the elevator and presses the button to close the door. The guards react slowly. By the time they’ve rushed after her, the door is sliding closed in their faces.
Letta laughs out loud, and the other person in the elevator laughs, too. She turns to thank him, but the smile fades from her face when she sees that familiar shock of red hair on top of a scrawny boy no older than she.
“Phell,” she says by way of greeting, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. Phell starts to wave at her and a thin book slips from his fingers. On impulse Letta jerks forward to catch it. She hands it back to him, reading the printed title. The words are instantly familiar.
“Hey, is that mine?” she asks, taking the small volume back and flipping it open to the first page. Her name is stamped on the inside, as well as the age she was when she first read it. A boring educational book filled with words she couldn’t understand and romantic poetry she couldn’t care less about. She’d probably donated it to the library years ago and forgot.
“Uh, yes. It was in that box of books you gave me. Remember? It was at the Genetic Partner Ceremony. You said it was your favorite book,” he adds, his cheeks slowly turning pink.
“No, I didn’t,” she says sharply. She opens the book to the first poem. “Why would this be my favorite book? Listen.” She begins to read aloud, “How doth I describe the impossibly sweet perfum
es of my love?” She pretends to vomit.
“You did give that to me,” Phell says firmly. “It was a good book. You can have it back now, though, if you want it.”
“I don’t want it, and I did not give this to you.” She pinches the first page between her index finger and thumb and rips it out, crumpling it up and throwing it at Phell. “I did not give this to you either.” She tears out another page and throws it at him. “Or this.” Another page ripped out, crumpled and thrown.
Phell flinches as it bounces off his head. He moves to press the button to open the doors and escape, but Letta jumps ahead of him, running her hand along all the buttons. The elevator begins its descent as Letta rips out another page. Phell is so close that she can smell him, a mixture of the scent of library books and the pungent stench that clings to everyone in his family. She grabs his sweater and shoves the crumpled paper down his top.
“Do not lie to me again, Genetic Partner,” she hisses, then loosens her grip. He twists out of her hands and backs away, smoothing his sweater. “What’s the point of Genetic Partnerships, anyway, if we’re breeding the likes of you? There’s no point at all. We should just get rid of them.” She thinks of her father and that purple card in his hands. “Most of them, anyway.”
The elevator dings and the doors open on Deck B. Letta marches out, the ruined book still in her hands, and walks straight into C.p. Pol.
“Oh, my—Leticia! Apologies. I did not see you there,” he booms, straightening his white uniform. “I see you and Phell have been chatting! What’s that in your hands, Leticia? Are you reading? It’s wonderful to see you indulging in old pleasures, right, Phell? I remember when Leticia gave you that book—”
“Stop. Just stop.” Letta cannot take any more of his senseless prattle. His voice is hammering out a new headache for her.
C.p. Pol looks taken aback. “Ah, yes, well, all right then. In any case, what is the book about, Leticia, dear?” he lumbers on, undaunted. Letta’s anger radiates off of her like a supernova about to explode.
“Why don’t you just read it yourself?” she retorts, and throws the book at his chest. Before it even hits the floor, she’s disappeared down the hall.
Before she realizes it, she’s arrived at the Med Center on the main deck. A med worker ushers her in quickly, and she’s made to undress in one of the small examination pods. The worker seals her clothes into a suction bag and slips it into the honeycomb of recesses along the lower part of the wall.
The white ceiling curves overhead, giving Letta the sensation that she is trapped inside a bubble. She’s never liked these rooms. The circular walls always feel like they’re closing in around her, squeezing her into a tiny ball. It doesn’t help that the room smells faintly of vomit and bleach.
She changes into the thin white shift the med worker left for her and sits on the examination table, scowling.
The swollen belly of the apprentice doctor, a heavily pregnant woman named Rosa, precedes her as she waddles into the pod. Her lab coat no longer closes over her, so she lets it hang open, exposing her rotund stomach in all its globe-like glory. She greets Letta cheerily and Letta grunts in response. Before, when Letta was training to be captain, she would have asked Rosa about her pregnancy; but why bother with niceties now?
“How have you been, hon?” Rosa says, opening one of the glass cabinets along the wall. “Claudia tells me you’ve been having trouble adjusting to the new order of things.” She roots around and pulls out a pack of slender syringes.
“It’s only been three days,” Letta reminds her. Rosa pauses, the syringe poised in midair. She squints at Letta, then slips on her glasses, which had been swinging on a metal chain around her neck.
“Are you sure? I could have sworn it was four… Oh, well, never mind. That’s just pregnancy-brain for you!” She laughs. “Now hold out your arm, please.” Letta obliges immediately, her body used to obeying orders. Rosa flicks the skin hard to make a vein rise and Letta winces.
“Now, that didn’t really hurt,” Rosa coos. She pushes the needle in, drawing the blood out. Then she removes the vial and places it into the Body Anomaly Detector. Letta recognizes it from one of her mother’s detailed tours. The blood pools on the floor of the small machine and begins to spin, the red liquid separating as the device tests it. It stops just as quickly as it began. Rosa reads the small bright screen, tutting and tapping her nails against it.
“Well, this explains your outburst yesterday.”
“How do you know about that? You weren’t even there.”
“Everyone’s heard about the girl who would be captain,” Rosa says, peering at Letta over her glasses. “Now, Letta. It appears you have a severe vitamin-D deficiency. This would explain your irritability, as well as any feelings of depression you may be experiencing. It’s standard on a ship with no natural sunlight for something like this to happen. That’s why we take the nutritional vaccinations, to combat deficiencies like yours. Though I’ve never seen levels so low before. When was your last inoculation?”
Letta shrugs sheepishly. She knows it was months ago. Rosa simply opens her patient records and quickly inputs Letta’s name.
“I have been taking oral supplements, though. My mom gave me some of hers,” Letta points out, though this is not strictly true. She only just started taking the pill about a week ago, after a bout of lightheadedness.
Rosa frowns and purses her lips. “They’re not really meant for sharing—four months?! You’ve not had a vaccination in four months?” she exclaims, reading the onscreen info. Letta’s face grows hot. She’s always managed to find a way to avoid the Med Center. There’s always something important to do on the days when Deck A residents have their assigned appointments. No one questions the captain’s daughter.
“Lida! Come in here, you have to see these vitamin-D levels! They’re unbelievable!” Rosa sticks her head out of the pod door, then turns backs to Letta. “She always turns the volume off her comm when she’s with patients, and she forgets to turn it back up.”
There’s a muffled reply and then Letta hears the slap of feet in the corridor. Closer now, Letta can make out the low, gravelly voice of Lida, an official doctor and Rosa’s Genetic Partner.
“What did you say, Lida? I can’t hear you though the walls.”
“I said, what are they like?” Lida replies, walking into the room. She is tying her dark hair back, and her lab coat is zipped up tightly on her straight-lined body. “Letta! Haven’t seen you for a while!”
Letta just nods and gives her a quick grin. Rosa gestures to the results and Lida leans in close to inspect them.
“My God, how are you not dead?” she gasps, then cringes, laughing awkwardly as Rosa jams a finger into her back. “Oh, poor choice of words. Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Letta replies. If there is one thing she’s looking forward to, it’s people not apologizing to her anymore. Or asking if she’s okay. Or forcing her to go to ridiculous medical examinations…
“Are you paying attention, Letta?” The voice is not the high-pitched squeak of Rosa, nor Lida’s deep tone. If anything, it sounds like her mother.
Letta jerks alert, her eyes darting around the room, searching for any reflective surface. If her mother appeared to her through a comm-screen, she could probably appear to her in the sheen of a scalpel, too. She could even be in the room right now. Letta swears under her breath. It couldn’t come at a worse possible time. There’s no way she can just run out of the pod after her mother if she chooses to lead her somewhere else. Her shift would be left flapping open at the back for all the ship to see.
“Ship to Letta! Are you awake, hon?” Rosa snaps her fingers in front of Letta’s face and Letta blinks, her eyes stinging. “Jeez, thought we lost you there for a sec!” Rosa says and elbows Lida in the chest. Lida nods solemnly, but she can’t hide that smirk on her lips. Everything is funny to these two when they get together.
“I’m going to give you a nutritional vaccination now. It’s a new
treatment, stronger than the usual ones, but I think it’s the best course of action considering your particular vitamin levels.”
“Oh, yeah,” Letta says, “I’ve heard about those new vaccs.”
Rosa and Lida exchange a furtive glance.
“You have?” Rosa asks, pushing her glasses further up the bridge of her nose. “I didn’t think Claudia had told anyone but the med workers. She only approved it for certain members of the general public yesterday.”
“Claudia? No, I heard it from my mother. It was in her logs.” Letta supposes it doesn’t matter who knows she accessed the Recording Room, now. If Rosa has heard about yesterday’s events, she’ll have heard about that, too; and if Rosa knows, then Lida certainly knows.
Rosa and Lida exchange another look and Letta clicks her tongue against her teeth, growing more irritated by the second.
“Will you stop looking at each other like that?” she snaps, then pauses briefly, considering. “Isn’t Claudia moving forward on these vaccines a bit… fast? I only heard about them from the Captain’s Log, and it wasn’t recorded all that long ago.”
“She just wants to move things along as quickly as she can. Get the ship back to normal.” Rosa grabs Letta’s arm, holding it straight.
“That’s what I keep hearing,” Letta mutters. Lida pulls out a new syringe, filling it with a thick, orange-colored liquid from a vial from her pocket. It looks just like it did in the video.
Rosa flicks the vein on Letta’s arm and Lida inserts the syringe, pushing the liquid in. It hurts at first, but as the syringe empties, the pain subsides. Rosa tapes a piece of cotton wool over the prick of blood.
“All done!” she says brightly as Lida disposes of the syringe, along with her gloves, down the chute to the incinerator. Rosa pulls off her gloves, too, throwing them into the chute before it closes.
“Now, then, would you like to talk about anything?” Rosa eases herself into the office chair and folds her hands over her baby bump. “Such as not getting chosen to be captain? I know that was something you’d wanted for a long time.”
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