Biome

by Ryan Galloway

  Atkinson jerks Dosset backward by the neck, making his head bounce up and down sharply, horrifying and unnatural. I find myself shouting, moving again, Noah with me, and we try to pull Dosset away. But Atkinson uses the body as a shield, dragging it, limp, too limp, Dosset’s face quickly shifting from pale to purple.

  Finally, I get a grip on Dosset’s arm, and then Noah as well. I’m not much help, weighing so little, hanging on like a feather in a storm. But with the combined mass of all four of us we go over, a hysteria of shoving and fists and pulling—and the noise and the noise and the noise—and I manage to get the inoculator into Atkinson’s forearm at last.

  His hands shudder and release, and Dosset falls away.

  “Why?” I scream at Atkinson, raving. “Why did you do that? What is wrong with you?”

  I hardly know what I’m saying. My whole body quivers as beside me, Noah tries to unwind the cords. But Dosset’s eyes are vacant. My mind can’t understand it.

  He can’t be dead.

  Atkinson is whimpering something.

  “What?” I demand, gripping him, fevered.

  “I never t-trusted him to let us be free,” he says, looking up at me with his cloudy eyes again, shaking with a palsy. Already he’s growing faint. “I n-never trusted him. So I called him here. And I set the bombs to go off in twenty minutes.”

  My mind is stuck. All I can think about is Dosset’s body lying next to me in the grass. That it might only be a body now. I can’t make sense of anything, least of all Atkinson’s words.

  “He’s not breathing,” Noah shouts up at me, his face near Dosset’s mouth. “I can’t get a pulse.” And then he begins chest compressions and emergency breathing, and I fear I might throw up. I turn back to Atkinson.

  “What are you talking about?” I choke, shaking him by the shoulders. He cowers like a child beneath me.

  “The detonator,” he whispers. “It was a fake. The b-bombs are on a timer. I set them for twenty minutes. Twenty… minutes.”

  And then his eyelids flitter and close.

  Everything seems to stop. I look up, his words bridging a connection that my mind has been too battered to make. Atkinson telling Dosset that he had twenty minutes. Using Dosset’s own motivation to bring him close enough for this. To make him vulnerable.

  I don’t have space for words or movement, just a second to feel numb fireflies filling my lungs and throat, dotting my vision like embers. I see Noah placing his hands on Dosset’s ribs, beginning another round of compressions. Dosset’s horrible face, swollen and blue. It’s a moment of perfect clarity, ingrained.

  There can be no erasing this. The white eyelashes, the weight of the pollen, the clinging jumpsuit, the blotched skin, the cracked lips, the breathing that comes so heavy, the breathing that comes no more.

  It all catches up with me at once.

  “Noah!” I scream, starting toward him. “We’ve got to—”

  That’s when the bombs go off.

  From behind the force takes me, lifting me off my feet and throwing me with the power of a jet engine. It feels like I’m airborne for an eternity.

  I find myself in the grass, the world shaking under me. I realize that all I can hear is a faint ringing, like a far-off alarm, meaningless. I try to sit up, but my vision swims and I find myself lying back in the grass, nausea wringing my gut.

  When I manage to steady myself and look up, I see Noah. Far away, his face streaked with his own blood, staring dazedly at the world around him. Cool air rips past me, drying icy tears on my cheeks. It’s strangely refreshing. Then, just as in the Polar Biome, I see the reason.

  Burned trees like charcoal prongs, licked by tongues of fire. Scorched grass and flowers, bowed and flattened around a sunken crater. The pillowy dome canvas riven, a gaping fissure streaking upward in a jagged line, and the dissonant sight of swirling dust and the red-white rocks of Mars.

  It feels as if I’ve been transported to a different world, my brain unable to link what I’m seeing now to the glade of a second before. I’m numb and dizzy. I can’t understand any of this. It isn’t real.

  Again I turn to Noah, but now he’s lying facedown in the grass, unmoving. No, no, no, no, no—my heart lurches, and I crawl on my hands and knees, trying to reach him.

  Then I see them: the white coats. Doctors running, two kneeling by Noah, and I shriek at them to leave him alone until my throat aches. But I’m still too far away, my world still ringing with cold silence. The doctors see me, and then there are more of them, all around.

  Hands are lifting me easily, carrying me away. I thrash and twist, but I have no strength left. I see them take Noah. As I’m spirited off, all I can think is that he can’t be sedated. He won’t be able to breathe.

  The hallways go by in a white, senseless flash. When I reach the Sick Bay I’m laid out on a surgical table. Doctors whirl above me. I can barely keep my eyes open. Did they give me Verced? I don’t know. I can’t remember.

  The world feels distant and cold. All I can think is that it’s over. If Dosset is dead and the bombs have gone off, then we won. Didn’t we?

  “It’s over,” I whisper.

  And that’s my final thought. My vision blurs and the world goes still as the darkness opens like a flower.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Dreams are meaningless. That’s the official scientific theory. Involuntary, random blips on an electroencephalogram. When I was a child, they sometimes brought me joy. Or adventure. More often, they caused me terror.

  And all of it meant nothing.

  Nerve endings. That’s what it all comes down to. Billions of rooted synapses, like trees entwined in erratic soil. Lightning strikes every millionth of a second, the charges scattering across the gaps and down a spinal braid.

  I once learned that lightning almost never hits the same place twice. Three times, four times—the odds are astronomical. It would be nothing short of miraculous for repeated bolts to strike the same spot.

  So what miracle brought us to this place? That the human brain can not only experience these flashes of brilliance, but change them as we see fit? How wasted on people who regard it as a thing to be controlled.

  How wasted on me.

  This is my unconscious reverie, floating between wakefulness and sleep, where I’m not quite able to get it straight. All these troubling thoughts that keep spinning around my head on an axis, over and over in sickening orbit.

  Dosset is surely dead.

  And I could have saved him.

  I can see the exact moment that he died, when Atkinson ripped the oxygen tubes from his nose and wound them around like a garrote. When his feeble neck probably snapped, jarred by a single, swift motion.

  And I wonder—is this cryosleep? Is this what I’ll be seeing for the rest of my life? A lucid, continuous loop of a gruesome murder?

  A murder that I contributed to. If not for me, Atkinson would have simply disappeared. And I would’ve vanished with him. If I’d acted sooner, I might have inoculated him before he was able to end a life.

  Next, I see Noah lying motionless in the grass. And I know that this, too, is my fault. Then it all fades to black, and lazily, carelessly, the sequence begins again.

  I wonder if Dosset’s death changed anything. If the doctors will just erase my mind, not knowing what else to do. If Terra tried to take control, or if our shaky truce was simply an act.

  Maybe this nebulous state is a kind of punishment. Maybe they’ve decided to leave me here in an endless theater of horror. Torture for all the pain I’ve caused.

  Because really, it is torture. To not only see all your mistakes so vividly, but to be forced to relive them. No hope of moving on. No way to change or begin again.

  Voices echo in the corners of my mind, though I don’t know whether they’re dreams or memories. At times I feel a pressure in my wrist, a dull pain in my arm, a tickle of air across my forehead. But when I strain to open my eyes, I drift away, lost in a swirl of dust.

  D
ust, dust. We all live in a world of dust.

  In the end, how much dust can a body make? Little specks of death. Measuring life in millimeters. Dancing in a careless bar of sun, one last twirl before they join the rest in the layered waste of existence.

  Though in a certain way, I guess dust is evidence of the new life that we’re making. Every single day, we shed the past and start again.

  Everyone but me. Now my life is only memories.

  Like saltwater, wakefulness bears me up. When I fully rise from my stupor, I find myself in a white bed with a curtain pulled around. All I can hear is the distant thrum of an oxygenator, more labored than I remember, like the wheeze of tired lungs. Someone has dimmed the ceiling tiles to a twilight glow.

  I move to stand, but my wrists are caught by restraints.

  “Hello?” I say in a rusty voice hardly above a whisper.

  As much as I’m able, I crane my neck to see beyond the moth-like tremble of the curtain. But I can’t reach far enough.

  What day is it? What’s happened since the bomb went off? Was the Revision carried out? I still remember everything, so they can’t have erased my mind—yet.

  Maybe again, as with Noah, they’ve had to wait until I’m healthy enough to endure the procedure.

  When I try speaking again, my voice is a little louder.

  “Is anyone there?”

  I hear a clatter, then quick footsteps. Abruptly Chloe is at my bedside, looking down at me, catching her breath in relief.

  At first, I can’t believe it’s really her. But she’s sitting on the edge of my bed, and she’s wrapping her arms around me. I can’t think of anything to say, I’m so overwhelmed. Then my disbelief abruptly dissolves into tears of relief, and she runs her fingers through my tangled hair, whispering softly.

  “Oh, Lizzy,” she murmurs. “It’s okay. Shh, it’s okay, it’s over. You’re safe now.”

  I laugh, pulling back to look at her. It feels so good to hear her say those words that I just keep laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” She puts a hand to my forehead in concern.

  “Nothing,” I say, wiping my nose. “Just… you. Always trying to comfort me.”

  “Someone has to bring you up for air,” she says with a small smile. She looks weary. And changed in some way. Maybe a shade of innocence gone from her eyes.

  My last memories come flooding back, and I suddenly realize that she’s here with me, when last I knew she’d been locked inside the Helix.

  “Wait, Chloe… what… what’s going on?” I drop my hands. The buckles rattle as they fall. “Why am I tied down? What happened with—”

  She shushes me, beginning to pull the straps free. “We had to keep you still. You kept thrashing in your sleep, and we were afraid you would pull the tubes loose.”

  “Tubes?”

  It’s then that I notice them connected to my left arm. A deep blue liquid flows around a yellowed bruise and into my body. “What is that?”

  “Visce… Viscerect?” she says uncertainly. “It’s to speed up your recovery. The doctors said you lost a lot of blood.”

  One arm free of the restraint, I begin massaging my wrist to get some feeling back into it. “Dosset’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Chloe nods gravely.

  “Atkinson broke his neck when he tried to… to choke him. He was frail, we all knew.” The way she looks at me, it’s as if she’s studying me. As if she hasn’t seen me in weeks. “Lizzy, what happened in the glade?”

  The memories move in like a black cloud. Having just relived them so frequently, I’m surprised by the way they fluster me.

  “I… I think that after we returned to the colony, Atkinson decided that Dosset could never be trusted. So he set a trap for him. And Dosset fell for it.” I tug at the sheet, rubbing the cotton between my fingers. “Dosset brought me with him into the glade on purpose. He thought he could use me against Atkinson. I think he wanted to prove that, even without the EMP, he was still in control. Maybe he wanted to prove it to me. Maybe just to himself.”

  Again I see it so vividly in my head. The oxygen tubes. The hysteria. The bomb. I shrug off a shiver, curling my knees to my chest.

  “I tried to stop them,” I say quietly. “I thought if I could make them see what they were doing, if I could make them understand each other, it might change things. But it didn’t. They just did what they wanted anyway. Nothing I said made any difference.”

  “Oh, Lizzy,” she says softly. “It wasn’t your fault. They were very misguided men.” She sighs heavily. “No wonder Noah wouldn’t talk to me about it.”

  I feel a weight lift off me.

  “Noah? Is he…?”

  “Don’t worry, he’s fine. They gave him Viscerect as well, after the explosion caused his nose to bleed again. Thankfully, it was only a hairline fracture to begin with. He woke up a few hours ago and has been helping with everything.”

  “Everything?” I ask, sitting up. The motion makes me woozy. “Chloe, how long have I been asleep? And how did you escape from the Helix? What’s—”

  “Relax, Lizzy,” she says soothingly. “You’ve got to take it slow.”

  “Okay. How long have I been out?”

  “Almost twenty-four hours. Zonogal said the sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, and blood loss had put you into a state of exhaustion. But we’ve been having people sit with you around the clock, just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  Beyond the partition, I hear a door slide open. A moment later the curtain is thrust aside with a rattle, and a bespectacled cadet blinks at the two of us.

  “Elizabeth,” Romie says with visible relief. “You’re awake.”

  “Am I?” I ask, glancing between them. “Because I’m not totally convinced.”

  “I’d be willing to provide evidence if you require,” he replies with a grin. He casts an eye at Chloe. “I apologize for intruding, but I have a few, um, logistics to discuss with her before this evening. Do you mind if I steal her?”

  “Of course,” Chloe says, rising primly. “I’ll… catch up with you later,” she tells me, giving my palm a squeeze. Then she hurries off with a sway of the curtain.

  Romie’s grin drains away like water through a sieve.

  “I apologize,” he repeats awkwardly. “I don’t mean to rush you. But there are things that we should probably discuss.”

  “Are there?” I ask. The familiarity of his directness might be comforting if it wasn’t for the concern etched on his brow. “I was hoping to talk about a few things myself.”

  “No doubt. Per doctor’s orders, I’ve been told you must eat. Are you able to walk?”

  His words remind me of the conversation Noah and I had, just hours ago in this very room. Only this time it isn’t déjà vu.

  “I can try.”

  Romie disconnects the Viscerect drip, and I swing my legs off the bed, testing my weight. My knee feels better, though it’s still a little stiff. I change into a jumpsuit behind the curtain while Romie waits. Then he guides me out through the frosted doors, back into the world of the living.

  The colony feels jarringly normal. Or almost normal. As we make our way to the Xeri cafeteria, we pass a gathering crew holding blue produce buckets, and I can’t help but notice how tired they look. And how they stare. Not necessarily with pride or admiration. They look at me as if I’m an alien.

  Self-consciously I tuck my hair behind my ears and hurry on.

  In the cafeteria, Romie points me to a table in the furthest corner of the room. I’m alone for less than a minute before he returns with a dish of root vegetables and greens, topped with printed grains and chicken. He doesn’t seem in a hurry to talk, and since the smell of food has awakened my hunger, I pick up a spoon and dig in.

  “Not too quickly,” he advises. “Or it could come back up.”

  I obey, but in a moment his caution is unnecessary. My stomach must’ve shrunk over the past week of hardly eating, because I’m full almost instantly. I push
the bowl away and get a good look at him as he picks at the edge of the table.

  His eyes are puffy and swollen, a sure sign that he hasn’t slept. I’m reminded of Noah’s bruises.

  “You look tired, Romie.”

  “I am,” he admits. “But there is a great deal to be done. After lengthy deliberation, we’ve decided the best course of action is to deconstruct the biomes and repurpose the canvas. But I think that’s talk for later.”

  “What’s the talk for now?” I ask. “Maybe you could tell me how you got out of the Helix? Or why I needed a babysitter while I recovered?”

  He adjusts his glasses and bobs his head.

  “Of course. I apologize. Terra was the one who insisted you be watched over. I believe she wanted to ensure that the doctors didn’t try anything.”

  “Like altering my memories?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” he replies. “As I understand it, after the bombs went off, Terra took charge of the cadets… though to be honest, I have no idea how she managed it. Yet, once she had their support, the doctors surrendered immediately. Perhaps they would have resisted had circumstances been different. But with the biomes rapidly depressurizing, they must have seen little point. Sedating cadets in a power struggle would only mean fewer hands for gathering seeds.” He leans back in his chair. “The entire colony has been on task, working through the night, attending to the most sensitive habitats first. It’s an incredible undertaking.”

  “But we did it,” I say, almost afraid to speak the words aloud. “We actually did it.”

  “More or less.”

  “And we’ve been working together. With the doctors.”

  “Yes. We outnumber them five to one. They are rather at our mercy.” He looks up, his eyes tracing a strand of ivy that hangs near our heads. “As for Chloe and I, we were released from our holding cells because of Terra.”

  I try to imagine Terra giving orders, demanding that the doctors surrender. It’s actually not very hard to picture. But despite our vulnerable talk in her pod, in my heart I still feel a bit uneasy about her being the one in charge.