Under Falling Skies

by Kate MacLeod

  At the other end, Warrior caught her arm to whisper in her ear. “Keep an eye out. It might just be a cat in here, but it might be more. Don’t take this lightly.”

  “I won’t,” Scout promised. “Do you really think there’s a person down here? Or more than one, like a hit squad sent to take out Ruth or something?”

  “I wouldn’t be that dramatic,” Warrior said dryly. “I have been getting a sense of a . . . wrongness.” She sounded almost embarrassed to have landed on that word.

  “A wrongness?” Scout repeated. “Like a gut instinct?”

  “More like something messing about at the very edge of my sensor’s range and capabilities. It’s unsettling. Just—err on the side of yelling over doing nothing. Got it, kid?”

  “Got it,” Scout said, then reached down to give Girl’s side a quick pat. Shadow was sniffing the air intently. Scout wasn’t sure if it was a good or bad thing that he seemed eager to lead them deeper into the dark to the right.

  The space near the little door was open, but further along the wall were more shelves covered in crates and loose equipment. In the center of the space was larger equipment—farming and mining machinery, Scout guessed from what little she recognized. It was all covered in a thick blanket of dust, here and there disturbed by Tubbins’s paw prints pursuing other, smaller paw prints. Sometimes the object would just be a thresher or something standing all on its own, its features softened under the blanket of dust, but other times there would be a thresher covered with rolls of tarp, crates both covered and uncovered, shapeless canvas sacks. Like someone had backed up a truck and tossed out everything they had been keeping in their shed and just left it here.

  “If someone is in here, they picked the perfect place to hide,” Scout said. “They could be anywhere.”

  “Can the dogs smell people? Like, track them?” Ottilie asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never used them for that before,” Scout said.

  The hangar seemed endlessly huge, although the further in they went, the more they had to take a winding path between heaps of junk. Ottilie played the light over everything before stepping around any of the junk piles. Occasionally they found more animal tracks on the floor, but mostly the only thing disturbing the dust was their own feet.

  “I was about your age when I first met Ebba,” Ottilie said to Scout in a low whisper. “We met at school, a boarding school in the city. The town I grew up in, Wayfarer Crossroads—it was pretty tiny. Of course it’s all gone now, nothing but a crater. Most of the people who lived there worked at the manufacturing plant, and there weren’t many kids. I tested kind of bright, so I got sent to the city to study. But the kids there considered me a hick. I got teased. You know how kids are.”

  Scout didn’t say anything. She hadn’t been to a school since her family died, and her line of work didn’t have her interacting with other kids much.

  “But Ebba, being a Space Farer, was more out of place there than I was. And she had a tough time. She was part of a test exchange program, an attempt at bridging the gap between our two cultures. It was probably already too late for such things; the drought and rationing had already started before we even met. I think when we first became friends it was really because we had no other choice. No one else would have us. But it became a lot more than that. And so quickly.”

  Scout felt a sudden, startling pang. She had never given it a moment’s thought, but hearing Ottilie say the word, Scout realized she had never really had any friends. Well, she had, back in the city when she was young. All dead now. But since then? She was friendly with people in the towns she worked in or traveled through. People who owned the food stands she frequented or flophouses she stayed in knew her on sight and were always happy to see her and swap stories. But that wasn’t like having a friend.

  As if sensing her thoughts, Shadow picked his nose up from the dusty floor to look back at her. Scout smiled back at him. Dogs totally counted as friends. And she and her friend had never been apart.

  “We were at school together for six years and had plans to get a place together after. I was going to find a job; Ebba was going to keep studying, because at that time that was the only way a Space Farer could stay planetside. I mean, we always knew that our future was one of uncertainty and we couldn’t really plan for more than a step at a time.”

  She stopped talking to examine a particularly elaborate mountain of loose junk, shining the light into every nook and cranny before continuing on. “We never did get that place. The war happened first.”

  “But you met up again after the war,” Scout said. “That’s a happy ending.”

  “I certainly thought so,” Ottilie said with a humorless laugh. “For years and years I thought so. That war, being apart for decades, not being able to see each other, growing older . . . Ebba still looks good, doesn’t she? She looks just like she did the day I met her.” She shined the flashlight over her scarred hands, the corded muscles of her forearms under the sun-damaged skin. “I didn’t hold up as well. But she doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “You can’t let that Liv woman poison what you have with her words,” Scout said. “She said some things to me too, secrets meant to hurt. She’s crafty, like a fairy-tale character, knows just how much truth to tell to make you believe the lies.”

  “But Ebba admitted it.”

  “You know her heart.”

  “I thought I did.” Her voice was raw with pain. She had let her anger go and it no longer masked her deep hurt. Scout desperately wished there was something she could do or say to help erase the last fifteen minutes of their lives. But there was nothing.

  “I guess the only real question is, can you forgive her?” Scout asked. Her own feelings had changed. Ebba had seemed so kind, even to strangers, and yet it was entirely possible she had been part of the chain of command that had destroyed Scout’s hometown and killed her family. Just the possibility and she couldn’t look at Ebba the same way. How much worse was it for Ottilie, who knew for certain just what Ebba had done?

  “I have to,” Ottilie said with a ragged sigh. “I don’t think I have a choice. I don’t have a life without Ebba. But I don’t know how I can do it.”

  Scout realized the two of them had stopped searching, were just standing and talking as the dogs pulled at the end of their leashes, anxious to continue.

  Then they started barking, both at once, like someone had flipped a switch from “calm” to “complete panic.” Scout dug her heels in, gripping the leashes with both hands as the dogs jumped and pulled.

  “What is it?” Ottilie asked, her voice all but lost in the chaos of dog noise. She shined her light all around, but neither of them could see what had set the dogs off.

  “Wait!” Scout yelled. “Shine the light back up there!”

  Ottilie took a moment to figure out what Scout was asking for. She had been passing the light over the hunched remains of a broken-down rover, but while moving it to the next pile of junk, she had briefly arced it up toward the ceiling far overhead. She put the light back up, deliberately, then found what Scout had only half seen.

  A hatch in the ceiling hanging open, the bottom of a ladder just in sight. Ottilie moved to stand directly under it, shining the light up the long shaft.

  “No one could jump up there from here,” she said, loudly enough to be heard over the dogs.

  “And the dust under it wasn’t disturbed,” Scout said. “But something spooked these two.”

  Ottilie kept shining the light around, her motions more and more jerky as the dogs kept barking and she kept not finding anything. Scout saw she had that object back in her hand, the one she had taken from the bag while Warrior went to confront Viola, the one she had quickly slipped out of sight when Viola had put her gun away. She spun back to Scout to hiss, “Get those dogs to quiet down!”

  Scout reeled in the leashes until she had each dog by the collar and dropped down to one knee as she whispered calming nonsense. Shadow stopped barking first. His bark was mo
re yip-like, shrill and annoying. Girl kept barking her deep, hellhound woofs, still too loud but not so painfully shrill.

  Then Shadow was suddenly tense again, and Scout followed his line of sight to see Ebba approaching out of the dark. She was lurching about, hands waving in front of her, and Scout guessed her night vision wasn’t up to the near-total darkness of this room. Her face was contorted in fear, but that fear faded into almost a smile as she finally met Scout’s eyes, as if realizing she had succeeded in following the sound of barking to find the two of them.

  Ottilie was facing the other way, shining the light up at the shaft. With Girl’s continued barking, she had no idea Ebba was approaching.

  “I think the top hatch on this thing is still open,” Ottilie was saying. “I see the sky.”

  Ebba’s still-waving hands brushed against Ottilie’s back, just a whisper of fingertips over shoulder blade, but Ottilie was badly startled. She dropped the flashlight and it spun away across the floor, lighting up mostly their legs in a series of flashes as if from a pulsar. Scout couldn’t see what was happening but she heard Ebba cry out, then saw her legs buckle and her knees go down into the dust.

  “Ebba!” Scout cried, scrambling back to her feet.

  “Ebba?” Ottilie said, dropping whatever was in her hand. Scout couldn’t make out any details in the still-rotating light from the flashlight, just something the size of her palm, something flat on the side that had hit the ground and sharp spikes thrusting up into the air. Spikes that dripped with blood.

  “What have you done?” Scout wailed. She wanted to rush forward, but so did the dogs. She held them back as Ebba, already on her knees, hands pressed to her belly, fell to one side. Ottilie lunged forward to catch her shoulders before her head hit the concrete.

  “Ebba,” Ottilie said again, pressing her own hand over Ebba’s two. The blood gushed through all those fingers, unstoppable.

  “Why?” Ebba said, more grief than pain marring her features. “I never meant . . .”

  But she had no more words in her.

  16

  Ottilie let out a cry of such raw grief Scout felt tears spring to her own eyes.

  She remembered her parents standing in the doorway to see her off, her baby brother bouncing up and down in her father’s arms. She had stopped at the end of the street to look back one last time, certain they would have gone back inside to all the work that never ended inside the bakery, but they had been watching her still.

  That had been her last glimpse of them: her mother’s hand raised in a farewell salute, her father laughing as he pulled strands of his beard from her brother’s sticky grasp. Her brother’s baby giggles had echoed after her even as she turned to pedal away.

  Ottilie’s grief brought that all back, the sight but also the way the smell of baking bread had permeated the alley, the undertone of composting green matter from the bins that stood beside each doorway. She could even remember the distant feeling of the sun on her shoulders, muted by the dome above.

  Scout was on her knees, no longer holding either leash. Shadow stayed close to her side, licking at her face as she fought back tears. Girl was sitting halfway between Scout and Ebba in Ottilie’s arms, looking back and forth and thumping her tail uncertainly. She didn’t know what to make of the mood in the air.

  “Scout.”

  Scout jumped at the sound of her name, rubbing at her cheeks as she got back to her feet. Nothing there but Shadow’s saliva, but still she felt ashamed. “She didn’t mean to do it,” Scout said as Warrior looked over at Ottilie rocking Ebba in her arms.

  “Ebba let go of me in the dark,” Warrior said. “Took me too long to notice she wasn’t there. I doubled back but couldn’t find her. Were the dogs barking at her?”

  “Not at first, I don’t think so,” Scout said, looking around for the fallen flashlight. It was some distance away, so instead she just pointed into the darkness over Ottilie. “Do you see? There’s a hatch.”

  Warrior moved to stand underneath it and Scout picked up the ends of the ropes and guided the dogs to the fallen light, but she stopped as a sudden thought hit her. “Is that safe?”

  “Safe enough for me. You should probably stay back, though.”

  Scout stepped a leash-length back from both Warrior under the open hatch and Ottilie with Ebba in her arms.

  “Did you see anyone?” Warrior asked, her head still tipped back to look up the shaft.

  “No. No sign of footprints in the dust, either. But something had the dogs barking.”

  “That goes all the way to the surface,” Warrior said.

  “That’s what Ottilie said.”

  Warrior looked down at Ottilie as if just then aware she was there. “We should take her back, get her calmed down. Get her to walk with you, I’ll carry Ebba.”

  Scout put a hand on Ottilie’s shoulder. She just buried her face into Ebba’s neck and sobbed.

  “Soldier,” Warrior said sharply, and Ottilie stiffened but fell silent. “We need to move out.” Then, more gently, “Let me carry her for you.”

  Ottilie sniffled once, then again, then sat back to lift Ebba up towards Warrior. She couldn’t manage more than sitting the body up, but Warrior bent and took Ebba gently into her arms, rolling her close until her head was resting on Warrior’s shoulder. Almost as if she was sleeping.

  “Let’s go,” Warrior said, leading the way back across the hangar.

  Scout waited for Ottilie to get to her feet. She stumbled back down twice, as if grief had made her drunk, and once she was standing she was far from steady, sort of leaning back and forth as she stared at the dust from the floor clinging to the sticky blood on her hands.

  “We’ll wash up inside,” Scout said, putting both leashes as well as the light in one hand to grasp Ottilie by the elbow and guide her after Warrior.

  “Why did she sneak up like that?” Ottilie asked.

  “It was noisy, distracting,” Scout said, but Ottilie didn’t seem to hear her.

  “She thought I did it on purpose, didn’t she? When she was dying—what she said. She thought I was getting revenge. Didn’t she?”

  “I don’t know what she thought,” Scout said, but she had the sinking feeling that Ottilie was right. She was afraid Ottilie was about to collapse into tears again, but the older woman just nodded and let herself be led.

  When they reached the locker room, they found Warrior had already laid Ebba out on one of the plastic benches and draped a long white towel over her, covering her face but not her feet. Scout could see the bulge where her hands were folded together over her stomach. The towel was slowly turning a brownish pink as it soaked up the blood. Scout steered Ottilie away from it, guiding her to the sinks.

  “I think she’s in shock,” Scout whispered to Warrior as Ottilie dutifully washed her hands all the way up to the elbows.

  “I think you’re right,” Warrior agreed.

  “What happens if she snaps?”

  “She’s angry with herself. She won’t snap and turn violent, if that’s what you’re worried about.” But she wasn’t looking at Ottilie, she was looking back toward the maintenance door.

  “Should we block that with something?” Scout asked.

  “No,” Warrior said. “No need.”

  “But what if there is someone in there?”

  “Then they have lots of ways to get into this part of the way station,” Warrior said. “Through the parts Viola hasn’t shown us. If there is someone out there, and they have been evading my detection, they can sure evade Viola’s too. Blocking that door isn’t going to stop them. In fact, I’d prefer if they do come after us that they use that door. That would be most convenient.”

  Ottilie turned off the faucet, then took a towel off the top of a stack on a shelf over the sink and began methodically drying her hands. Then she followed Warrior and Scout with the dogs back into the main room.

  Clementine was sitting at the table drinking coffee from one of the bar mugs and eating one of the ready
-made meals that had been scattered across the floor the night before. Scout couldn’t tell which it was, just a tray filled with some sort of glop in a possibly tomato-based sauce. Clementine ate bite after bite with the deliberation of someone making a series of check marks on a to-do list.

  Liv had moved her chair as close as possible to the doorway to the communications room and seemed to be trying to see the screens beyond. As she leaned forward, her elbow strayed too close to the doorway protection grid and it glowed an amber warning until she sat back again.

  “Viola up?” Warrior asked.

  “Who knows. Couldn’t find the Space Farer?” Liv asked.

  “We found her,” Ottilie said. She was looking at her own hands again, turning them over and over as if some speck of blood might still be there, nestled among the freckles and age spots.

  “Where is she?” Liv asked.

  “Dead,” Warrior said, putting her hands on Ottilie’s shoulders and steering her to a seat at the table, then going behind the bar for the bottle Viola had been drinking from the night before. She filled one of the mugs halfway, then crossed back to the samovar to top it off with coffee before pressing it into Ottilie’s hands.

  “It was an accident,” Scout said, although whether she was talking to Ottilie or Liv she wasn’t quite sure.

  “An accident,” Liv repeated skeptically.

  “We need to get Viola out here,” Warrior said, looking at Ottilie slumped motionless over the mug for a long moment before lifting the mug to Ottilie’s lips herself.

  “She didn’t leave us with a way to summon her, sadly,” Liv said. She frowned in disgust as Ottilie sputtered over her swallow of coffee and liquor, letting it run down her chin to stain her jumpsuit. The little rivers of liquid traced snaky paths that seemed to deliberately avoid every spatter of Ebba’s blood.

  “What time is it, anyway?” Scout wondered. It felt like it was still night, but like it had been nighttime for eighteen hours at least. Disorienting.