Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  When I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to punch that angel right in his shiny face.

  Even the gods have abandoned us out here.

  The other curators drew straws for the second spot for this trip. Nobody wants to tunnel run with the guy with the half-baked death wish. Everyone blames Mom for getting us deep-sixed, for not stopping the hacker who jettisoned us. I know better. Of all the things I remember from before—not much, to be honest—I remember my mother’s work ethic best. And all she ever wanted was to save the world.

  All I ever wanted to do, though, was live in it. Make some movies about it, maybe. See, heroism on the silver screen’s a different sort of thing than it is in real life. When you’re watching a movie, someone else is dragging their partner’s corpse to a safe room, hoping the monsters don’t find them first. When you’re watching a movie, someone else gets hit in the face with the arterial spray of the curator who didn’t duck behind the tunnel rib quick enough. When you’re watching a movie, you’re not the one wresting the bloody knife out of the hand of the girl who just flayed her own leg, confused from listening to too much mourner-song.

  In fact, being a hero is a shite job, which is why I stopped running the tunnels with other people.

  Then Holly Ayakawa pulled the short straw.

  Aren made me promise I wouldn’t do anything stupid on this run. Translation? Not to do anything that’ll get Holly killed. Let’s get one thing straight: I might have a death wish, but I’m not taking anyone with me. Especially not Holly. She’s fifteen. A violinist, I think? Or maybe she plays guitar, I don’t know. Something with strings. Plus, she’s the only curator left on the ship who speaks fluent Japanese. A lot of the engineers left their logs in Japanese hiragana. I don’t trust Dejah to translate them.

  And postscript? I’m not an asshole.

  Edit that: Not a complete asshole, at least.

  Not all the time.

  A red light blinks on my HUD in the upper-right periphery of my vision. “Here we go,” I say. That tiny light blinks whenever our coglink chips pick up the mourners’ subsonic calls. It’s a mod I engineered to keep our curators safer in the tunnels.

  “Dejah?” Holly asks, checking in with the ship’s AI. “You there?”

  “Changing channels to the t-Two floor now,” Dejah says. Her voice pitches and falls in all the right places, but not even Mom could make Dejah’s AI sound fully human. “How can I help you, Holly?”

  “Do you have a visual on any mourners near our position?” Holly asks.

  “I’ll scan the tunnels. One moment, please,” Dejah says. We wait for ten seconds. Twenty. Why does anyone say one moment when they really mean shush? Then: “There’s a large mourner pod half a kilometer aft of your position, moving steadily toward you.”

  Dejah uploads her live video feed onto my HUD. The mourners stalk through the tunnel. Blind, except for their echolocation. Once human, their locomotion has now evolved to support their top-heavy rib cages. They walk on their knuckles like apes, their clothing in tatters, skin bleached pale. In the vidfeed’s low resolution, I can’t tell how many of them are out there. The tunnel walls look like they’re made of writhing white flesh.

  “Have they heard us?” Holly whips back, facing my side of the tunnel. She pulls her hood over her head. It shadows her face. Her skin’s pale as bone. I could reach out and trace the blue veins in her cheeks, if I didn’t have a strict no-touching-people policy. Touching makes you care. Touching fills up the emptiness. And that empty air in my chest is all I have left to burn.

  “I am 95.75 percent sure they have,” Dejah replies. “The pod is in the process of changing direction.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” I snap.

  “I detect a tone of sarcasm,” Dejah says. “You know Dr. Morgan did not program me—”

  “To read and respond to sarcasm,” I finish for her. “Blah, blah, blah. I know, Dejah.” I tug my balaclava mask over my mouth and nose. Our garments are made of black anechoic platelets—stiflecloth. Our clothing deflects the mourners’ searching trills, but not their killing blows. The trills function like echolocation, drawing our shapes for their blind eyes. The best defenses against them are stillness, silence, luck …

  And in a pinch, a well-aimed knife.

  A howl unfurls, a shredded, tortured sort of song. The crew calls them mourners because their shrieks sound like someone sobbing at a funeral. Even at this distance, their cries grate against my exposed forehead like sandpaper.

  “Guess that’s an affirmative,” I say to the girls. “Let’s move.”

  “There’s a tram station less than a kilometer ahead of you,” Dejah says, her calm, nonchalant tone jarring against my rising panic. “I have a visual on a weeper. Get out of the tunnel.”

  “Ooh, a weeper,” I say to them. “Things are getting interesting.”

  “Shut up, Tuck!” Holly snaps.

  We leave the dead bodies for the mourners and sprint for the station.

  Curators run barefoot to keep our footsteps whisper quiet. We’ve been trained to underpronate each step, so the fleshy outsides of our feet hit the ground first. Over time, the impact will shred the cartilage in our knees and ankles. I’ve got huge calluses on the soles of my feet. But rough skin, bum knees, and bad hips are better than being flayed alive.

  Holly’s stiflecloth cape streaks out behind her as she runs. The girl’s good, fast, and silent. I’m not as quick. For one, I’m bigger. Two, I tore my right ACL playing center halfback on Earth. That’s soccer, for the uninformed. I remember scraps of playing sports, of getting injured. My leg’s never been the same since. Anytime I run, there’s always a twinge of pain under the kneecap.

  The injury feels like it happened hundreds of years ago. Four hundred-ish, to be more or less exact. And when the Muir got deep-sixed and shoved in a random corner of space, the whole crew chose hyperstasis. We woke up centuries later for no apparent reason. One percent of us exited stasis with raging headaches—most of the kids, teens, and younger adults. The other ninety-nine percent came out sounding like a bunch of whales gargling glass.

  Stasis stole something from everyone:

  It burned the memories from our heads.

  It stole our stories, our humanity.

  Our families, too.

  In most cases, it ended our lives.

  We don’t know how it happened—none of the stasis engineers survived. You know, the people who could tell us what went wrong with the pods? On top of that shite heap, nobody’s been able to breach the mourner nest infesting the bridge, which means we don’t have access to the ship’s logs, either.

  Some of the curators believe that an alien substance contaminated our stasis tubes, creating the mourners. Others think it was an act of God. Aren, however, once told me it wasn’t aliens or God or any paranormal shit like that.

  It was us.

  Long story short, when humanity tried to restore Earth’s failing atmosphere, the plans backfired. Royally. We poisoned the planet’s air, thus accelerating the rapid deterioration of the ozone layer. People lived under big domes while scientists like Mom scrambled to find a way to save our stupid-ass species, but the domes took time to build. People breathed that poisoned air for months, sucking it straight into their blood and bones and brains. They died by the hundreds of millions.

  One evening—after Aren and I had returned from a repair job on the Muir that almost killed us both—we sat on the lodge’s deck and watched the ship’s solar rings set. He handed me one of his home-brewed beers, his knuckles all scraped to hell, a cut still scabbing over one eye, and said, There’s something you should know about them.

  About who? I asked.

  The mourners. Aren glanced over his shoulder, making sure no one else was in earshot. Dr. Knowles … told me something today. Said she’d connected the mourners’ mutated DNA back to the contaminants in the Earth’s atmosphere. They’re not aliens or zombies, just our own mistake.

  Well, that was one hell of a
mistake.

  Then again, human beings did find a way to kill an entire planet.

  Halfway to the tram station, Holly stumbles. Screams. The pure, crisp note echoes through the tunnels, along with a metal crack!

  Ah crap—

  Holly crumples to the ground, clutching her right foot. A rusted spike impales her flesh, broken off the track. The blackened sole of her foot dimples around the metal. The puncture’s clean through.

  One.

  “Omigod … omigod…,” she sobs aloud.

  Two.

  On instinct, I fall over her and cover us both with my cape. I clap a hand over her mouth. “Shut up, shut up, shut up! It’s okay, you’re okay, I’ve got you. Breathe.”

  Three.

  A tornado of shrieking rips up the tunnel. I swear I feel my eardrums flex against the sound. FYI, that doesn’t feel good.

  Holly bites down on my hand, screaming into the flesh. The pain’s sharp. Blood gushes from my skin. Sweat scales my forehead. We’re screwed now.

  I keep us pressed against the ground. At this distance, the stiflecloth blocks us from taking additional damage. The procrete tunnel floor’s chilly and rough. We’re lying on a bed of junk, on broken glass and rusted bolts and screws. Where’d all this crap come from? Why haven’t the cleaning bots swept it away?

  “The pod is a kilometer away,” Dejah says in my head. “Leave the girl.”

  “What?” I snap. “When did Holly become ‘the girl’?”

  “You know protocol, Tuck,” Dejah says. In my head, the words A lame curator is a dead curator echo in Aren’s voice.

  “No, no, no,” Holly says. “P-p-please no, don’t leave me, I’ll be good. I don’t want to end up like those dead people back there. I’ll be quiet—”

  “C’mon, Holly. I might be a jerk, but I’m not that much of a jerk.” I toss the cape off my head and tap the corner of my HUD eye twice. It switches the viewing mode over to infrared. The dim tunnel light disappears. In the distance, small red-and-green shapes lope toward us. Some of the mourners run up the walls, using tiny suckers on their palms to attach themselves to vertical spaces. Farther back, green infrared light rings the whole tunnel.

  Damn, the whole place’s lousy with the bastards.

  “It’s the alpha pod,” I think. The big one, made up of some two thousand individuals. In a pod that large, mourners aren’t our only problem. Do the math—for every hundred mourners there’s a weeper. For every five hundred, a griefer. These bastards take advantage of the Muir’s extra-dense air and weaponize it via their shrieks and screams.

  You see—and I’m not going to get too scientific here, because in case you haven’t noticed, I’m about to die—sound moves through all matter in waves. Mourners pitch their voices to sharpen those sound waves, which turns the air around you into a weapon, so that when the waves hit the human body, they cut. They flay. They blast out your organs, or make your eyeballs explode like zits under pressure. Mourners can use their voices to cause blunt-force trauma. Some have voices that travel through walls and make people hallucinate and harm themselves.

  Lovely, right?

  Mourners make up the bulk of every pod. They’re quadrupeds and awkward as hell, running about half as quickly as your average curator. Imagine a hairless, skinny-ass gorilla with the ballooning throat of a frog, and you’ve got the right idea. Remnants of their humanity cling to their bodies—tattered flight suits, jewelry sometimes. Their voices have a max trajectory of around twenty meters, depending on the individual.

  Weepers are their bigger, badder cousins, ones with ropy muscle, a fifty-meter scream radius, and claws. Neither is very smart. I’ve seen both types disembowel grown men, lop off heads, and tear organs from still-living bodies.

  Then there’s the griefers.

  Griefers are invulnerable, powerful, and smart. Bipedal, too, making them as fast as most curators. Armored with thick, fingernail-like platelets all over their bodies, they can’t be harmed by blunt weapons. Our ion saws require close combat. Those are out. Nobody wants to be in arm’s—or tentacle’s—reach of those bastards. Griefers use a full spectrum of vocalizations, capable of cutting off a limb or bursting an organ in your gut. Humans are their toys. They live to hear us scream.

  Even healthy, I wouldn’t try to outrun a pod this large.

  Well, maybe if I was alone, dammit.

  What a rush.

  I switch my HUD’s function to a ship schematic by tapping my tear duct instead of the outer corner of my eye. The HUD edges every element of the tunnel in green. Machinery and ductwork hidden in the walls appear in blue. Malfunctioning equipment is highlighted in red, making the maglev tracks look like the crimson highway to hell. The electric wiring looks spotty, too, which explains the flickering lights. Our HUD lenses are hooked up to the AI and allow curators to identify problems with the ship in real time. We lifted this tech from the ship’s original maintenance crew.

  Desperation rising, I scan the nearby tunnel until I spot something: a derailed, unarmored tram. The massive carriage lies in the black shadows, smashed against one of the walls. Well, that’s where all the garbage on the ground came from. The dead guys uptunnel must’ve been using it to get around, because the tram’s not one of our armored ones.

  “The pod is now a quarter kilometer away,” Dejah says. “Leave the girl, or die with her.”

  I throw my stiflecloth cape off Holly. Scooping her into my arms, I rise. “I’m not leaving her behind, Dejah.”

  “I think that means you are a fool,” Dejah says.

  “Better a fool than a puss-out,” I say. “Someone left me behind when I was little. Swore I’d never do the same.” I ease past a field of shattered glass. The tracks shake underfoot, the mourners’ calls growing closer. Holly presses her face into my neck, her eyes hot with tears. Least she’s quiet, least she’s light. One more whimper could end us. So could one shard of glass.

  In the deepdowns, our lives depend on such small things.

  I approach the derailed tram, inching around its shattered windshield. Most of the windows are intact. If we can make it inside, we might be able to huddle under the seats, wrapped in our cloaks. Maybe the mourners will pass us by.

  I’m not afraid to die, but with my track record, I’m afraid Holly will. Maybe that’s why I’m nervous. Or why my hands are so slick with sweat.

  “Fifty meters,” Dejah says. The monsters’ feet and fists pound the ground. The shattered glass tinkles, dancing across the floor. In seconds, the mourners will be close enough to sense our heartbeats. Close enough to kill.

  We need to hide.

  The light weakens near the tram. One lone bulb hangs loose from the ceiling about ten meters away, sparking. Dying. Holly’s breathing ratchets tighter. She touches the outer corner of her eye twice, watching over my shoulder. “Vanguard’s here,” she says.

  “Get inside and wrap up in your cloak,” I say. “Keep it quiet.”

  I place a bioluminescent flare inside the tram’s windshield, then duck past the toothy, busted-out glass. Inside, I ease Holly into the aisle. She crawls into the tram, favoring her impaled foot. I follow her, helping her hide behind the last seat.

  “Don’t move,” I say, draping her cloak over her head. “Do your chi breathing exercises to handle the pain, got it?”

  “Okay.”

  I can tell she’s trying hard not to cry. Wish I could get her out of here.

  Glass crunches behind me. I freeze, balanced against the side of a seat. My heart slams up against my ribs. Fear curdles between my teeth.

  Carefully, I turn my head.

  If my bones creak, that’s it. Player One down.

  A mourner stands in the broken glass outside. My flare casts its white skin in sick green light. Pale flesh bubbles over its eye sockets, blinding it. Ropy, powerful muscle rustles under its dry, flaky shoulders. A black, fleshy sac sags against its throat.

  Relief burns through me. It’s not Mom. Every mourner I see, I have this moment
of panic in which I expect to see my mother’s face on a monster. But this time, it’s not her. One day it might be, but not here. Not now.

  The mourner’s throat swells up like a frog’s, its mouth cracking open, ready to scream.

  One.

  “Nice try, Tuck,” Dejah says. “I suppose now you die.”

  Two.

  But Holly won’t survive without me.

  To my own surprise, I reply, “Not today.”

  Three.

  The creature screams.

  SS PANAM-I2715 CONQUISTADOR

  SHIP’S HALLS

  LAURA

  My fingers twitch, my brain screaming at the nanomechs in my blood. Every second I spend with this stupid pendejo nukes my chances of reaching the bridge—

  “Imagine finding you here, all alone.” Sebastian takes my arm, yanking me down the hall.

  I glare at him, stumbling when he tugs at me. “Yeah, I can’t imagine how you managed to find me.” It’s not like he can’t track my subjugator, after all.

  “Drop the sarcasm. We need to talk.”

  “I have nothing to say to you—”

  He jerks me to a halt. Shoves me against the wall. The metal is so cold it feels like pressing my back against a block of ice. When I fight, Sebastian says, “Stop, Laura.” The words stun my muscles and bones. My breath bursts out, merging with a sob of pain. My heart beats on my rib bones like a fist on cage bars.

  Stop, Laura.

  I hate what those words do to me. I hate what he does to me. While the hijacking lasts only a few seconds, my emotional response is violent and lasting. It leaves me with the sensation of maggots chewing through my abdomen and spilling out on the floor, as if something inside me’s gone rotten.

  Nothing I’ve experienced replicates the feeling of losing my independence—no shame quite like being treated as a commodity, a puppet, a thing to be used up and discarded.

  I can’t even glare at him. My right eyelid twitches when I try.

  The Smithsons will pay for what they’ve done to me. I will make them wish they never stripped me of my will, my voice. They forget they’re dealing with a hacker, a girl who lives to find loopholes in systems. They’ve written off my talents because I’m young. Pretty. They think hacking’s a cute pastime for me, and not a tool I can use to bring them to their knees.