Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  Her arrowhead drops a centimeter. “You speak English?”

  Thank God people in the future still do. “Sorry, did you expect Martian?” I snipe back, walking toward her. She pulls her bowstring taut. The bow’s wood creaks, and the thing must be a thousand years old if it’s a day.

  “Nobody speaks Martian,” she replies. “We haven’t managed to terraform the planet yet.”

  “It was a joke,” I say, checking my impulse to roll my eyes. “And would you put that down, please? I’m not going to hurt you, and you’re not going to shoot me.”

  “Says who?” Her accent’s different, softer, and more melodious than English used to be. It sounds as if some of the consonants in American English have merged with Romance-language equivalents, probably Spanish and Portuguese. English sounds prettier rolling off her tongue than it does mine.

  I reach out, putting my finger on the arrowhead. It nips my skin as I push it down, taking the bow with it. “Says the guy who just saved your ass from a pack of mourners.”

  She tsks. “Last time I checked, I saved yours. What are those things?”

  “I’ll get to the mourners in a second,” I say, tugging my balaclava down. I’m spitballing here, but only a crash would’ve caused the shite heap of trouble we’re now in. “Because let me tell you, my partner’s dead because of you and your rogue ship.”

  Hey, that’s only sort of a lie.

  The girl’s eyes widen. “The crash wasn’t my fault,” she says, voice shaking. “This ship’s priceless, I would never have done anything to harm it—”

  “So it was a crash?” I ask.

  She nods.

  “What happened?”

  “A hacker seized control of my parents’ ship and drove it into yours.” Her gaze flicks away, just for an instant, making me wonder if she’s lying. “I would never do anything to threaten your ship, I swear.”

  “Yeah, okay. Relax.” I let go of the arrowhead, trying to shake the impression that she’s pretty. No, more than pretty: The sun itself seems to radiate from her, glowing from every centimeter of her brown skin. There a keen intelligence in her eyes, and the muscles in her arms and back betray the toughness beneath her exterior. But what gets me? Her hair’s black as obsidian at the crown but melts into a rich brown at the tips. It looks soft as feathers, especially the long curls cascading from her ponytail.

  I haven’t seen long hair on a girl in ages. The women on the Muir keep their hair short for water conservation.

  No doubt I make her nervous. Hell, if I were her, I’d make me nervous. I must have ten centimeters and at least thirty kilograms on her. Not to mention her great-great-double-dog-dare-you-great-grandparents are younger than me. Unless humanity’s figured out immortality, her greats are very, very dead.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  She looks me up and down, easing a step backward. Those big brown eyes of hers narrow a few millimeters.

  “Okay, sorry, I’ll go first. Been a while since I’ve met anyone new,” I say, putting my palms up, trying to look as nonthreatening as possible. “The name’s Tuck. I’m a member of the John Muir’s original crew. Four hundred years ago, our ship was hijacked and jettisoned into deep space. We woke up from stasis twenty-two months ago. Well, some of us did.…”

  Her bow lowers a little bit with each word, along with her jaw. Her lips make a perfect little O shape.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You were born on Earth?” she whispers. “Not here, on the ship?”

  “If I say yes, will you put the bow down?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be much of an archeologist if I shot and killed a human relic, now would I?” she says, replacing the arrow in its quiver and stringing the bow around her chest. She pulls her hair away from the bow, letting the ends rest on her left shoulder.

  “Human relic?” I ask, rubbing the back of my neck with one hand. “Next thing, you’re going to be telling me I belong in a museum.”

  “Most ancient history does,” she says, arching a brow and putting her hands on her hips.

  “Oh, so I’m ancient now?” I ask. A grin tugs one corner of her mouth. “I promise I’ll be much more interesting outside a museum, Dr. Jones.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she says, extending her hand. “Laura Cruz. My family runs a raiding outfit that searches for the lost Exodus ships—”

  “Ships? As in plural?” I ask, only half-distracted by how good the name Laura sounds when pronounced with a Spanish accent. Focus, man, and not just on those lips of hers. “There were more ships lost than the Muir?”

  She nods.

  Nobody’s ever knocked the wind out of me with a nod. I sink down on one of the panic room’s cots.

  I didn’t know other ships were jettisoned.

  I didn’t ever think there could’ve been others.

  “The John Muir is the first Exodus-era ship we’ve found with survivors,” Laura adds. “After so many years lost to deep space … you’re a statistical impossibility. I can’t believe I’m here, looking at you.”

  I know that much is true: before the ship’s crew went into stasis, Mom calculated our chances of ever waking back up again. I’m not much of a numbers guy, but a lot of zeroes after a decimal point meant we were fragged. I had no idea other people ended up like us. Stranded. Lost. Without hope. And to know they didn’t make it, when we did …

  Well, some of us, anyway.

  “How many of your crew survived the stint in stasis?” Laura asks.

  I shake my head. Shock slurs her words together so bad, they almost don’t make sense. I try to focus on something in the room. Anything that will ground me, anything to keep me from sparking. Or exploding. The Exodus ships were Mom’s greatest achievement. We thought the jettison of the John Muir was a personal vendetta, a singular attack on the scientist who saved humanity and its great treasures.

  To know that other ships suffered our fate … and that help came too late … it’s … it’s …

  It’s shit.

  “Are you okay?” Laura asks.

  I pinch my nose between my thumb and forefinger. The small ridges in the bone—the place where I took a rogue soccer ball to the face—grind under the pressure. I don’t know how to express the fury knotting in my chest. There aren’t words for it, dammit. And I’m not talking about it with a stranger. “I’m just glad my mom’s not around to hear this.”

  Laura’s quiet for a moment. Then the cot creaks as she sits down next to me. She sets her bow on the floor. “Why? Was your mother the captain, or a navigator or engineer aboard the ship? Maybe … a politician who helped fund the project?”

  I wish. Things would’ve been simpler if the woman had been less ambitious. I chuckle, but it sounds hollow even to my ears. “Not exactly.” But I don’t exactly want to talk about Mom, either.

  Mom and I had a difficult relationship back at home; she, the brilliant polymath trying to save the world, and me, the son still trying to grow up in it. The kid who preferred doing things with his hands rather than looking at equations. The theories Mom scrawled on retro chalkboards—Einstein-style, she called it while dusting the white stuff off her fingertips—eventually went from castles in those chalky clouds to ships in the stars.

  Sob story aside, there’s a real good reason I don’t talk about Mom anymore. If I mention the name Katherine Morgan on the coglinks, or so much as say the word Mom in the park, her whispers start up. I’ll be deep in the ship. Running tunnels. Fixing old wiring or repairing a duct. And then, Tuck, listen …

  Can you hear me …

  You … to the bridge …

  The rest of Mom’s words would fade in static, unintelligible. One thing’s for sure—my mom’s dead. Beyond the echoes in my head, the ones nobody else seems to hear, she’s gone. We don’t know if she woke up before us. We don’t know if she never went into stasis in the first place. We’ve never found a body, or any remains we could identify as hers.

  I don’t think Mom’s left me a me
ssage—I think my brain refuses to accept she’s gone, most days. I just hope she’s not one of them.

  Rising, I cross the room for the hand-crank generator on the wall, pumping till the room’s lights come up. Laura shields her eyes. I turn toward the lockers along the other wall. They’re rusted old things, the metal gritty against my fingertips. The first one creaks when I open it, setting my teeth on edge. We’ve stocked panic rooms all over the ship with basic survival supplies—everything from flashlights to energy bars and first aid kits. I shudder as my hand brushes against a dekapen.

  Holly, I’m so sorry.

  “Tuck?” Laura asks, tilting her chin down as she eyes me. I know what she’s asking of me—she doesn’t have to say it in so many words—but I’m not talking about Mom with a complete stranger. Nope. Nuh-uh. Not even a girl as cute as Laura Cruz. Not even with the power out and the coglinks down. For all I know, Mom’s ghost haunts this ship Ringu-style and I’ll find her crawling out of one of the ship’s sludge wells, one of these days.

  Assuming we have more days left.

  “I can only imagine what it must be like,” Laura continues, trying to draw conversation out of me, “making contact with humanity after all this time in deep space.”

  That’s not a conversation I’m about to have, either.

  “You hungry?” I ask, tossing her an energy bar from inside the locker. She catches it easy, turning the package over in her hands. “I heard your stomach growling a second ago.”

  “This had an expiration date of … four hundred years ago?” she says, eyeing me.

  I unwrap half a bar and shove the end in my mouth, grinning. “They’re still good, or at least goodish, like Twinkies. Never go bad,” I say around the bar. Kneeling, I rifle through the bottom of the second locker, looking for a spare stiflecloth cloak. The energy bars taste like reconstituted powdered rocks with some tree bark mixed in. But trust me, the flavor’s better than getting ganked by a mourner.

  “What’s a Twinkie?” she asks, tugging at the bar’s wrapper.

  “And you call yourself an archeologist.”

  “I don’t have my PhD yet,” Laura says absently, examining the chalky bar. “I’m still a uni student.”

  The educational system of the future must be amazing, because there’s no way Laura Cruz is any older than sixteen. “And what’s a Twinkie? Good hell, Laura. Ghostbusters? Zombieland? Die Hard? Twinkies are in all those movies. Don’t you people watch the classics?”

  “It’s Lao-ra,” she says. “Not Law-ra.”

  I chuckle. “My apologies, Lao-ra. It’s been a while since I’ve taken any Spanish.” Or eaten a Twinkie, for that matter. Or seen Ghostbusters. For whatever reason, Mom didn’t upload that one into the Muir’s entertainment systems.

  “And I am an archeologist,” she says, managing to break into the energy bar’s packaging. “Or at least, I will be in a few years. I know a lot about your world and culture, as the pre-Exodus rise of Pitch Dark has been the topic of a lot of my theses in high school and college.”

  Theses? Frag that, my mom used to write theses for fun.

  “Pitch Dark?” I ask, but it’s a miracle the words sound like anything more than the lumps of “food” in my mouth. The bars are even worse than I’d remembered, ugh. “What’s that?”

  “The terrorist organization responsible for jettisoning your ship,” she says softly.

  I freeze, swallowing hard. My hand slips on a pile of small boxes and spills some of the locker’s contents. A box of flares falls out, the sticks bursting free and rolling across the floor.

  For years, the bastards who did this to us have been nameless. Faceless. The people who destroyed my mother’s work and killed thousands—I refuse to believe the mourners are still alive, really—have a name.

  Pitch Dark.

  What a stupid name for a terrorist organization.

  If you’re going to run around destroying my life, at least do it with a little panache, good hell.

  I want to know “Why?” and the word bubbles out of me like a croak.

  Laura stretches her legs out in front of her, crossing her arms over her chest. “Because they don’t believe humanity should get another chance. For four centuries, Pitch Dark has blocked our attempts to terraform Mars, bombed strategic Panamerican colony locations, killed influential leaders, and poisoned our soil. I’m certain there were terrorist sympathizers involved in crashing my parents’ ship, the Conquistador, into the John Muir.”

  I crouch down, starting to collect the flares off the floor. “Why would they do that?”

  “Because if the soil on the John Muir is still viable, even a single sample could allow my country to terraform a new planet.” She pushes off the cot, crossing the room to crouch next to me. “The Panamerican torus colonies were never meant to survive four hundred years—”

  “I could’ve told you that,” I say, chucking my wrapper to the ground. “The guy who designed them? Real douche bag. Mom hated … I mean, I saw him on the news a few times. He was a know-it-all blowhard who stole other people’s work and passed it off as his own.”

  Shitty save there, man.

  Laura looks at me a little funny. I’ve lived my whole life around hyperintelligent people, so I’m good at spotting their cogs turning. Little signs that indicate they’re thinking. Mom had a thousand-mile-long stare. Aren walks around snapping his fingers. Laura’s nostrils flare a little bit, as if she’s scenting something. The skin at the corners of her eyes tightens as she examines my face. She doesn’t believe me.

  She’s too smart to believe me.

  But for some reason I don’t understand, she doesn’t call me out for burying the truth, either. She reaches forward, gripping my shoulder. The action paralyzes me. I want to jerk away, to tell her not to touch me. But it’s hard not to get drawn in to the intensity of her grip. The earnestness of her voice.

  “We’ve got to find a way to save this ship or whatever portion of Earth it contains,” she says.

  “Yosemite National Park,” I say.

  “What?” She blinks at me as if I’ve just said something in actual Martian.

  “The terrarium. It contains Yosemite National Park,” I repeat.

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  PANIC ROOM

  LAURA

  The words Yosemite National Park conjure up a few dim memories from my twelfth year, when my father and I examined some of the Americas’ more important natural landmarks: Iguazu Falls of Argentina and Brazil; the Galapagos Islands; the geysers and pools of Yellowstone; the Torres del Paine of Chile; and Half Dome of Yosemite National Park.

  I remember how Half Dome stretched so impossibly high off the valley floor, its sheer, straight cliff plunging at a ninety-degree angle toward the ground. To think humanity found a way to wrap such a massive natural wonder inside a starship and transport it off-planet … it’s still so remarkable, it feels like magic. Impossible, but we did it anyway.

  “Is the park’s soil still viable?” I ask.

  “If by viable, you mean do plants and shite grow out of it?” Tuck asks, taking an extra rucksack from the locker and tossing it on the ground beside me. “Yeah, it’s viable.”

  “No manches.” I release his shoulder, letting my forearm rest on my knee. But soon I’m shaking, trembling with the thrill of knowing I am living history, with what the ship means to my country. If Tuck isn’t lying to me, the John Muir could change everything for Panamerica. We could win back our future. We could blast the creeping twilight back and watch the sun rise over a new era of human development.

  We could survive the present we’ve been dealt. We could move forward.

  My whole body palpitates as if I’ve had too much caffeine to drink. I rise and begin to pace, trying to shake off my jitters. My head’s light, as if it’s been pumped full of air, and I can’t tell if it’s the thrill or the strange shift in pressure caused by the anechoic foam on the walls.

  “We have to find a way to get your ship back to th
e Colonies,” I tell Tuck. “We have to find a way to get her home.”

  “What, so you can be a hero and have a parade?” he asks.

  “I’d be a heroine, and no,” I say, with an emphatic shake of my head. “This isn’t about me, but about all the people hoping and praying for a miracle back at home—”

  “And why’s it my responsibility to save them?” he asks. “My world’s been gone for a helluva long time, Laura. I’m not sure it’s worth fighting for a new one.”

  “Don’t you understand?” I say, stepping forward and grabbing him by the shirtfront. His eyes widen. “This isn’t about what you want, or what I want. It’s about what millions of people need to survive. They don’t deserve death just because you and I are afraid of what’s out there—” I gesture toward the panic room door. “The John Muir might be my people’s last chance. Our people’s last chance.”

  I find myself breathless, heaving, and surprised by the passion in my words.

  “You are human, aren’t you?” I ask.

  “Sometimes, I’m not sure anymore,” he says. Silence shoulders its way between us, awkward. Thick. Tuck shifts his weight, examining me for several tense seconds. “And I’m not afraid of what’s in the deepdowns,” he says finally. Too quickly.

  “Is that so?”

  “Death doesn’t scare me.” He holds my gaze for a long, uncomfortable moment, and it’s only then I realize I’m still gripping his shirt. “But caring about other people? Yeah, that scares me a lot. And I don’t want to care about what’s in here.”

  I draw back from him, as if his words burned my fingertips. What does that mean? When I try to form a response, I stammer until he rolls his eyes and says: “Fine. Just come with me to get the ship’s power back on, okay?”

  “Deal,” I say.

  He tosses a folded black square of cloth at me. I catch it in both hands. It’s a packet of nubby fabric, one identical to the one Tuck wears on his back. It billows from my hands as I unfold it, the hem hitting the floor without a sound.

  “Put that on,” he says. “It’s a stiflecloth cloak and hood.”

  Stiflecloth? “Where did this come from?” I ask, finding the neck and tugging it on, losing myself in yards and yards of stiff, unfamiliar fabric. It smells a little musty, probably from sitting in a storage locker for too long. “The fabric, I mean. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”