Mercury's Orbit

by Lia Black

  “Uh, yeah.” Sean forced a little laugh and tucked the scribble into his pocket, hoping the guard didn’t notice how badly his hand was shaking.

  Sean got into the cab, his heart beating so quickly, he thought he might pass out. Fortunately, the driver was familiar with Sean and his route by now, so he didn’t have to say anything. The paper in his pocket was warm, like a living thing, and he couldn’t let go of it. Mercury had been scribbling—broad slashes and random, agitated strokes—there was no way he could have produced this as far as Sean could tell. Had he done it in the thirty minutes that Sean had been waiting in the day room? No, it had to be a page from a coloring book or maybe something the class coordinator had lying around. By the time Sean arrived home, he had nearly convinced himself that this was, indeed, the case. But hope was like an invasive vine, finding its way to any crack, even after Sean had viciously cut it back and sealed the wall.

  He pulled off his coat, taking the folded paper and leaving his coat in a pile on the floor as he headed to his desk, switching on the bright overhead lamp. He carefully unfolded the paper and stared at the drawing, and the longer he stared, the more it became clear. Numbers. Hidden in the daisies and the weirdly-shaped eyes of the fairy and the frog were numbers. On the bottom of the drawing was a date, not unlike a date someone would use to sign a piece of artwork, except the date hadn’t happened yet. It was two days from now. Sean sobbed through giggles that bordered on hysteria. He’d heard Mercury say it: Sunset. There was no longer a question in his mind.

  “I’m not reading too much into this,” he told himself as he extracted the numbers. He tried adding them, but derived no meaning. He even went as far as to change them to the letters they represented in the alphabet and came out with nonsense, no matter how they were arranged. It was well past midnight now and he was exhausted and disheartened. Maybe it really was nothing, just his heart wanting so desperately to believe that he’d taken this as a miraculous and magical sign. “Fuck.” Sean dragged his hand over his face, then stitched off the light. Abandoning his normal bedtime ritual, he stripped out of his clothes, leaving them, like his coat, scattered across the floor, and got into bed. Tomorrow—or today, actually—was an in-service day—it happened once a month where the facility checked things like the fire alarms and practiced drills to make certain everything was working how it should. That meant no visitors until after lunch. Considering he’d been up half the goddamn night looking for a four-leaf clover in a pile of weeds, it meant he could sleep in a little.

  He was just beginning to drift off to sleep—that heavy, place of empty comfort—when his mind caught onto an idea that had him up in an instant and heading to his datapad. Sean gathered the numbers once more and entered them into a search field. It took a little bit of patience and re-arranging, but after a few minutes, he got a viable hit. Latitude and longitude. He laughed until he cried. This was so fucked-up, he was so exhausted in every way that one more disappointment—one more false sense of development—would finally break him. He took a few moments to try and catch his breath and shore his resolve for yet another wave of disappointment before taking the leap and entering the numbers into a map.

  “Fuck. Holy…holy fuck…” The map index put the pin right on the Amberlee Spaceport. Out in the middle of almost nowhere, it was a little-used facility that Sean thought had been decommissioned years ago. In fact, he was surprised that it was still standing, but the satellite image, up to date as of a few hours ago, showed a white rectangle on the map.

  “Goddamn it Mercury, if you’re fucking with me…” Sean felt like he might be sick. “Okay, there’s a place, there’s a date…but what’s the time?”

  Sean looked at the drawing again, paying attention to everything, looking for some kind of code or an extra set of numbers. His eyes kept straying to the crude scribble of the sun, then realized what he thought were dark puddles the frog and purple fairy were standing in were actually shadows. “Jeezus Christ, Mercury…if you’ve been pretending this whole time I’ll kill you myself.” The Sun was placed in respect to what would be the azimuth and elevation in the drawing—something every military pilot was taught in the rare event that navigation controls ceased functioning. Something Mercury had asked him about that day in the hotel. The shadows under the figures were angled to portray a time within an hour or two after noon. Sean clicked off the lamp and sagged into the back of his chair. He had mentioned flying over the islands on Streatos 31 ABb, the planet Mercury had dubbed “Sunset”. He had the latitude and longitude for a spaceport on Earth. Was this just the fantastical logic of a damaged brain? Mercury was in a secure facility with round the clock staff keeping tabs on every patient. There was no way any of this could actually come to pass.

  Sean sighed and dragged himself back to bed. His bones were made of lead and even the three steps to get there felt like he’d spent hours walking up a sand dune. Later he’d go to the facility and see if Mercury’s demeanor had changed at all. Maybe this would turn out to be a flash of insight or memory fragment that meant Mercury was starting to get better. That would be enough.

  42

  Sean left the house a little later than he’d meant to so it was around noon when he got into the cab that would take him to see Mercury. However, they didn’t make it far. Six blocks away from their destination, they ran into a police barricade.

  Sean sat back against the seat, pretending not to hear the conversation between the cab driver and the CSD officer who’d flagged him to a stop.

  “This area is on lock-down until further notice,” the officer was saying. As expected, the cab driver asked why and the cop told him: there had been a possible security breach at Hidden Meadows.

  “Escapees?” Sean whispered.

  The driver asked the same question a few seconds later.

  “Three, we think. They won’t get far. This should all be cleared up by tomorrow.”

  The CSD officer had no way of knowing if that’s where they were headed without the driver saying so, and the driver had said nothing, so there was no reason to question him any further.

  “Sorry,” the driver said through the partition as he turned the cab around. “Looks like I have to take you home.”

  “It’s fine,” Sean answered, but the cops words kept playing through his brain.

  Three. Unless there had been several good actors among the residents, Sean would guess that Mercury had left an opening wide enough—literally or security-wise—for others to wander through in order to make it seem accidental. If Mercury remained at large, Sean had little doubt he’d be receiving a visit from the CSD this evening.

  Sean spent the next several hours trying to occupy himself to contain his nervous energy. This was really happening. According to the news, the breach had been triggered by a malfunction during a routine fire drill. A power surge that caused an actual fire and set off numerous other alarms before shorting out the system entirely. In the confusion, the perimeter security had failed for a moment—long enough to let three residents wander off. Two were caught almost immediately. The third, still unaccounted for, was Mercury Fie. Sean knew that CSD police would be coming to see if Mercury might have made contact with him.

  It was around eight-thirty in the evening when CSD paid him a visit. Sean had been smart enough not to pack a bag or do anything that made it appear he was leaving. They had no search warrant, but Sean let them in anyway. They knew him and he recognized them—maybe not from working together directly, but likely a training session. They were apologetic, uncomfortable, as he made small talk and let them glance around his tiny efficiency. It was blatantly obvious that Sean was the only one there. The only closed door in the unit was the bathroom and a quick visual sweep confirmed it was empty. He let them see that he was worried, because he was. Mercury could still be caught, or he could die from the cold, or a million other tragedies. Or, he could simply vanish, and Sean would never know what had become of him.

  By the time the officers left, Sean was confi
dent that they didn’t see him as a suspect. He spent a few hours packing a small bag, and figuring out how he was going to get to Amberlee without anyone tracing his steps.

  Sean barely slept. He was full of adrenalin. Spit and vinegar, his dad used to call it. This was really happening, and while Sean was excited, he was also riding the edge of anger. If Mercury had been playing with his mind and heart all of this time, he wasn’t sure he could take it.

  Instead of taking a cab, he took a public transport to a town an hour away, blending in with the anonymous masses. The stop was roughly three miles from the Amberlee Spaceport. Sean walked across the broken stretches of unused concrete roads where dry grass poked up jagged between the cracks. There was a dusting of snow that skimmed across the surface each time a light breeze blew across the open fields.

  He arrived a few minutes after one o’clock and his heart sagged. Sean had brought the drawing with him, and he held it up against the horizon as soon as he came upon Amberlee. The Sun’s azimuth and elevation matched the position in the sketch, but the spaceport appeared abandoned. There was no sign of anything but the broken shell of another failed corporate cash grab.

  The Amberlee Spaceport had been an ill-fated attempt a decade ago to become a shopping destination instead of just a spaceport. Corporate real estate bullshitters had convinced some greedy dreamers that the nowhere town of Amberlee could be a major point of light in the Milky Way Galaxy if they combined a spaceport with a mall. Two years after its opening, it floundered and the investors cut their losses—leaving promises and contracts unfulfilled. Because there was no other reason to visit the town of Amberlee, and very few residents were the type who traveled, the station fell into decay. Apparently, that hadn’t changed. Weeds had ruptured the parking lot; a sinkhole had filled with rainwater and become a frozen, muddy pond. The colors on the marquee proclaiming the station a “Retail Destination” had faded to washed-out pastels, streaked with rust. From the second story docks, brown vines hung dormant, their leaves withered and dry. When the wind blew, Sean could hear a faint whistling as it found its way in through gaps in the boarded up windows.

  His breath came out in a cloud as he exhaled. The roof on the west side had collapsed, so odds being what they were, if Mercury were here, he wouldn’t be on that side of the building.

  The structure had been built with an underground garage, then a shopping mall on the first floor and docks on the second. It wasn’t very large, which meant that its ability to become a “destination” was all ready limited to ten mid-sized vessels, each one holding a maximum crew compliment of twelve.

  Sean walked around the building, looking for a way inside. The front doors were chained with a cheerful little sign that said: ‘Remodeling! Excuse our Dust!’

  There was a metal emergency staircase that went up the side of the structure. At the top, he found a sliding door that had fallen loose from its track, leaving enough room for him to squeeze inside. Noises came from above and echoed all around him; something slapping at the windows and walls. Birds, which had made this their winter home, had gotten spooked when Sean came inside; flapping and flying blindly inside the cramped space until they found an opening higher up. He held his hand to his chest as his heart tried to crack through his sternum. After catching his breath, he began to make his way up the popping and creaking metal stairs.

  There were thick panes of glass on the building side, smudged with bird shit and years of dust. He could make out a few gaping storefronts, their black maws exposing the emptiness inside.

  The interior door for the port was open when Sean reached the top. He slipped inside, mindful not to disturb things any more than he had to.

  The girders popped and groaned with every light breeze outside. He moved past the section of collapsed roof, which left the rest of the docks open to the elements. It was dark, but fairly easy to see that the bays were all empty.

  “Of course.” Disappointment gripped his stomach, pulling downward and making him feel sick. What was he expecting? Since he had nowhere else to be, he decided to wander around. Maybe the rest of the roof would collapse and crush him, or maybe he’d fall through the floor, break his legs and get picked apart by birds. It didn’t really matter at this point. There was no one and nothing he’d be leaving behind.

  He walked around the intact perimeter until he came to the north-east corner. There was something there—some large shape that added to the darkness—filling up the space. Sean had nearly missed it, mistaking it as shadows. It reached up nearly to the high rafters, shrouded by black tarps. He moved closer, looking up at the hulk, and tugged experimentally on the edge of the tarp.

  It came off—tore actually—on the one side. Sean coughed as a cloud of dust rose from it and filled his lungs. His eyes burned as he tried to blink through the film and see what was underneath.

  It was a ship. A fucking war bird. It gleamed gold, the high-gloss sealant on it caught the muted winter light and cast iridescent rainbows across the surface. Sean’s pulse beat in his throat as he tugged away more of the fabric, turning his face to avoid the dust. Emblazoned in sparkling purple letters on the side was: Precious-1.

  Sean had the sensation of somebody moving up from behind a moment before he heard the voice. “Nice, isn’t she? Unfortunately I don’t have a pilot. Know one?”

  It was a voice he hadn’t heard in well over a year. A voice he thought he’d never hear again. It was a voice deep enough to be male, but high enough to be female, echoing slightly in the mostly empty space. Hearing it set his blood to a low but building simmer.

  He was turning before he realized it, and he grabbed him—grabbed the man who had been all but dead for the past eighteen months—and shoved him into the landing gear of the crouching vessel.

  “How long?” Sean shouted into his face, tears burning his eyes as he gripped Mercury’s thin arms. They felt fragile, the bones too close to he surface. “How fucking long have you been okay?” He felt sick, the war between anger and joy had become something thick and oily inside of him. He looked into Mercury’s face, as pale and wan as he’d been the last time he’d seen him, yet now those amethyst eyes were bright with life. Sean leaned forward and their lips met, Sean’s passion, relief, every feeling he’d been holding in since that day that Mercury had shot himself came rushing out. He pressed Mercury’s body against the metal support with his own, feeling the sharpness of bones between them, even through the layers of clothing. Sean’s anger bled out with the kiss, leaking with the tears that ran down his face. He broke off slowly, feeling drained. He closed his eyes, dropping his head forward.

  “I’ve missed you.” Mercury whispered, his breath stirring Sean’s hair. “When I saw you, after I woke up, I didn’t know you, but I felt...safe. I struggled every night to remember your face, because I thought it would be the last time. But every day…you came back to me.” Mercury’s breath hitched. Sean raised his head and noticed that Mercury was crying as well. He touched Mercury’s cheek, still cool, and Mercury reached up, holding Sean’s hand there. “And then I remembered.”

  “The seizure,” Sean said. “What happened? I thought you were gone.”

  “I was re-learning to speak, to connect those pieces so I could communicate…and testing to see if I could still manipulate electricity.” Mercury let out a shuddering breath.“I’m so sorry that I made you wait so long for me. You are the only person I never wanted to hurt.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Sean told him, rubbing the pad of his thumb over Mercury’s lips. Still soft. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I’ve never needed anybody, but I know I need you. I’m trying to…to make a new destiny, and I want you to be part of it.” Mercury’s mouth quirked in a wry smile and he sniffled.

  “You heard that, huh? Of course. You need a pilot,” Sean laughed lightly, then sobered when he realized that his first response towards Mercury was anger. “I’m so sorry I…”

  “No,” Mercury shook his head. “Don’t ever apologi
ze for how you feel. These feelings…I’ve never experienced them like this…they’re awful.”

  Sean laughed and hugged him. “It gets better. Trust me.”

  “I do, Precious. You’ve never lied to me,” Mercury’s voice was a hum. “We’d better get going,” he said as Sean released him. “If we want to head towards Sunset…before sunset. I’m a fugitive again, and this time you really are aiding and abetting.”

  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  Sean and Mercury worked to pull off as much of the fraying tarp as they could, not speaking, not needing to, though Sean’s heart was beating so hard he could feel it through his pulse-points. Whenever he glanced at Mercury, Mercury was looking back and offering a smile. It seemed surreal, like a dream, one Sean hoped to never wake up from. Once they’d entered the ship together, Sean moved to the bridge to acquaint himself with the controls. The interior was just what he would expect from Mercury, everything shiny and new, everything with more colors, softness and sparkles than necessary, except for the pilot’s seat. It was black, sculpted for comfort, so completely out of place that Sean knew Mercury must have done it for him.

  Sean slid into the seat, running his fingers over the control panel as he felt Mercury slide up behind him. He started the engines and they sang out like soprano-tuned chimes. The ship was facing the collapsed portion of the roof; it was going to be just enough space for Sean to thread the needle and get them into the air.

  “Thank you Precious, for coming with me on this very grand adventure,” Mercury said, hugging him from behind.

  Sean took his hand and brushed a light kiss across Mercury’s knuckles. “This adventure’s over Merc. Time to go home, maybe start a new one. Buckle up.”