Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  The griefer slams through the window after me. Getting stuck. The broken glass cuts large red canals in the monster’s milky flesh, its tentacles bulging and bleeding, throat sac swelling, jaw dropping open, cheeks splitting. Bloody saliva drips off its jaws and onto my face and cape. Hunks of glass stick out of its shoulders and back like icy spikes.

  I push off the side of the tram, sprinting for the armored tram on track four. It’s nothing like the other trains on the tracks—the tram looks more like a midmodern tank than a train. Tuck’s fighting up top by the cupola entrance, punching a mourner. I strip off my bow, take aim, and shoot an arrow through its skull. It tumbles off the tram, getting caught in the spikes. I dodge another mourner, yanking another arrow from my quiver and slamming it into the creature’s jugular. Blood spurts over my hand.

  “Laura!” Tuck shouts, hopping halfway down the tram’s ladder and extending a hand to me. “C’mon!”

  I charge forward, clapping my hand into Tuck’s. He yanks me up the ladder, pushing me up to the roof. I drop through the tram’s open topside cupola, collapsing to the floor. Breathing hard.

  Through the tram’s dingy windows, I watch the griefer fight free from the train car’s window. He tumbles to the ground, stands, and makes eye contact with me while tugging a long, spear-shaped shard of glass from his arm.

  Tuck leaps into the tram after me, swinging down with the cupola hatch. With a quick, midair twist of his body, he locks it in three places. Thick steel clamps reach up and chomp over the hatch to hold it closed.

  Leaping past me, Tuck scrambles for the train’s cockpit. “Hang on!” he says, jamming his fingers into a button on the tram’s control board.

  The griefer leaps atop the tram, beating at the cupola with his fist. The metal rings like a gong.

  “Not today, asshole,” Tuck says as the tram lurches forward.

  The pain from my broken toes hits me. Hard. The torment stabs up through my heel and bleeds through my thighs. Heat gurgles in my stomach and rockets through my chest. I vomit, half choking on the bile and a sob.

  I drop my bow, which clatters to the floor. I inch away from the puddle made up of nothing more than a chalky energy bar and stomach acid. The smell burns my nose. The world spins and bucks, as if I’m drunk-dumping in deep-space flight training again. Through the haze of nausea and pain, I see a few pieces of glass wedged into my feet. Blood’s pooling on the floor. I sling my quiver off my back but clutch it tight to my chest, hoping its precious cargo is still intact.

  The train picks up speed, plunging into the blackness of a tunnel. Overhead, claws screech against the tram’s roof. The sound hits me like a blunt shovel being jammed into the side of my head. Two heavy bumps hit the tram’s roof, then nothing.

  One last roar tears after us, fading as we pick up speed.

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  LOCATION UNKNOWN

  TUCK

  Once the tram’s rushing forward and the griefer’s roar becomes a memory, I rush to Laura. She slouches against the tram’s back wall, sobbing. Blood and vomit smear the floor around her. Tears collect in her lashes. Her shoulder’s gashed, her big toe’s got a compound fracture, and broken glass studs the soles of her feet.

  But frag me, she’s alive.

  Breathing, too.

  She wipes bile off the side of her mouth. Sweat sticks long pieces of her hair to her temples. A flashback of Holly grabs me by the throat. I shake it loose, shake it off, and sink to the floor beside Laura.

  “Hey, you made it, you’re going to be okay.” I remove her cloak and balaclava, ball it up, and press it into her torn shoulder. I place her good hand over the makeshift compress. “Hold that there—that’s good. ’Tis just a flesh wound, am I right?” I know she doesn’t get the reference, but saying those words in a Pythonesque voice still brings a shaky smile to her face.

  “How long till we get to safety?” she asks.

  “Fifteen minutes,” I say. “The tram’s operating on partial power.”

  “Ay, ay, ay,” she says, gulping down a big breath. Closing her eyes, she rests the back of her head against the wall. Her fingertips curl against the hollow of her throat.

  “If you want painkillers—”

  “It’s not the pain that’s bothering me,” she says.

  Propping one of her feet in my lap, I pick slivers of glass out of her skin. “How do you say ‘liar, liar’ in Spanish?”

  “It doesn’t matter what language you say it in,” she says through gritted teeth. “Trust me, I’ve had worse.”

  What could be worse than this? Her feet are wrecked. A fractured bone in her big toe juts out of her skin, a white shank coated in blood. Glass hunks glitter like rubies growing out of her skin. Small tufts of insulation cling to her wounds.

  If I’d been injured this bad, I would’ve pussed out back on the train.

  “Anybody ever tell you that you’re a badass, Laura Cruz?” I ask, plucking a chunk of glass from her foot. I flick it under a nearby seat.

  She shakes her head, lower lip trembling.

  “Well, they should. I’ve never seen someone outrun a griefer. All I’ve got in this first aid kit is a mild painkiller. Do you want some?”

  She nods. I drop the pills in her palm, then spend the next few minutes picking glass out of her skin, before bandaging the wounds as best I can with the first aid kit in the tram.

  “You going to take those pills?” I ask her.

  “Maybe with a little water.”

  “Oh, duh.” I hand her my canteen.

  The lights flicker overhead, glitching. Laura glances up at them as she swallows her pills, exposing her throat. In the hollow between her collarbones, something moves beneath her skin. I narrow my eyes.

  That was too big to be a pill.

  Gently, I place a finger on the nub in the hollow of her throat, smearing blood on her skin. A bone-hard mass rests inside the tissue. Her chin snaps down and her eyes widen. Before I can pinch the thing between my finger and thumb, it sinks deeper into her flesh. Laura gasps in pain. Air whooshes through her windpipe, but the thing’s gone.

  “What the hell is that?” I ask.

  Laura takes her hand from mine, curling her fingers back into the hollow of her throat. Defensive, almost.

  She parts her lips to speak. Pauses. Then purses her lips.

  She tries to say, “It’s what’s really bothering me, a s-s-s … I-it’s, I should say…” But she chokes on the words. Her throat convulses. I brace her good shoulder with one hand. When she coughs, tremors shake her whole body. Each breath sounds like someone’s using sandpaper to scour the inside of her throat—hoarse and painful.

  “Breathe,” I say. Her eyes are bloodshot from the violence of her coughing fit. The big V-shaped tendons stick out in her throat. Her jugular veins throb under her skin.

  What the hell’s going on? I wonder.

  “I still can’t … can’t talk about…,” she says, gasping. “It … it won’t…” Whatever she’s trying to say gets interrupted by more coughing.

  “Stop, stop, stop,” I say. The sight of her like this—gasping for breath and injured—kindles the anger in my chest. Something tickles in the back of my mind, some old memory of Aren. In a past life, he worked for the CIA an as engineer. He left the agency when they asked him to build “parasitic tech,” a sort of device that could be used to infiltrate and monitor a target with or without their knowledge. Not a very democratic request, eh? he’d asked me then.

  I’m certain tech’s gotten better in the last four hundred years. Smarter. Whatever’s in Laura’s throat doesn’t allow her to talk about it; however, there’s a second of lag before it’s able to shut her dialogue down.

  So I just have to game the shutdown.

  “Let’s play Twenty Questions,” I say, once she’s breathing normally again. “It’ll take your mind off the pain for a while. I’m going to ask you a bunch of yes-or-no questions. Blink twice for yes, once for no, fast as you can. Don’t think
. Don’t elaborate. Okay?”

  Laura cocks her head and wrinkles her nose, but says, “O-kaaay.”

  “Here we go—do you like pizza?”

  She blinks twice. Yes.

  “With pepperoni?”

  One blink. No.

  “You monster,” I say.

  She half laughs, wincing. “I’m a vegetarian!”

  “Hey, no talking! Do you play soccer?”

  One blink. No.

  “Is history your favorite subject in school?”

  Two blinks.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  A scarlet flush burns across her cheeks. One blink.

  Score.

  “That was a rude question,” she says.

  “Was not, and you’re breaking the rules again—” Though I’ll admit the question had a personal motivation. “Do you have siblings?”

  She blinks twice.

  “Older?”

  Twice.

  “Younger?”

  Twice.

  “Ooh, a forgotten middle child,” I say with a grin.

  She makes a face, wrinkling up her nose and pursing her lips. “Nobody gets forgotten in my family.”

  “You’re really bad at following game rules, huh?”

  She bats her eyelashes at me.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Do you have a good relationship with your parents?”

  Two blinks.

  “Lucky. I loved my mom, but she was a workaholic and I didn’t see her much. Do you speak two languages?”

  One blink. Which means she speaks more than two languages, since I’m guessing she’s fluent in English and Spanish.

  “Three?”

  One blink.

  “Four?”

  Two blinks and a grin.

  “Damn, that’s impressive.” Then casually, so coolly, I ask, “Is there a piece of parasitic tech in your throat?”

  Laura blinks once. On the second blink, her eyelids freeze halfway down. Her face twitches as she tries to force her eyes closed, tears forming on the lower lids.

  “Good hell,” I say softly.

  She seems stuck for a few seconds, and then looks up at me. Despondent. Afraid. Two emotions I’ve known every damn day of my life since the jettison. I’ve never been good with sympathy or empathy or any of the pathies, really. At least according to Mom.

  It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I don’t know how to articulate that I care.

  Show, don’t tell, Tuck, Mom snaps at me in my memories. You don’t have to say anything. Do something.

  Gently, I ease down beside Laura. I put an arm around her shoulders. Gathering her cloak up from the floor, she presses it to her chest, shivering. I tuck the edges around her. The tram’s fragging cold, but I’m not sure that’s why she’s shaking.

  She rests her head on my shoulder. My muscles lock up. Warning bells go off in my head—if you don’t want to care about her, don’t touch her.

  But I’m not stupid enough to think I don’t already care for this girl. Or stubborn enough to deny I want to touch her, either. Who wouldn’t want to be close to someone like Laura Cruz? Smart, quick-thinking, and tougher than almost anyone else I know. So I relax, drawing her closer, but careful to keep my hand away from the injury on her shoulder.

  My HUD blinks, notifying me that Aren’s initiating a private chat. “Tuck, you there?” he asks.

  “Yeah?” I respond.

  “Just checking in—you’ve been quiet for a while now.”

  I lean the back of my head against the tram’s wall. “We’re on our way to the park now. The tram system’s been rebooted. Keep it to tracks four and five on the t-Two and t-Three levels, though. Everything else’s busted.”

  “Dejah didn’t tell me the trams were back online,” Aren says, confused. “Hold on, let me change to a public channel to include her.”

  My coglink beeps, the sound echoing through my skull, as Aren opens our chat channel to include the ship’s AI.

  “Dejah, are you listening?” Aren asks.

  No answer.

  I frown. “Dejah? Hello?”

  “Dejah, can you hear us?” Aren asks. When Dejah fails to respond after a few seconds, Aren swears. “Now what?” he almost growls through the coglinks.

  “When was your last communication with her?” I ask. I hadn’t been paying attention to Dejah, too busy trying to keep from getting ganked by the griefer and his little mourner buddies.

  “Ten minutes ago, right after I met with the captain and officers of the Conquistador,” he says. “Could they possibly have done something to the ship’s systems?”

  “You mean besides crash their fragging ship into us?” I reply. “I don’t know. Odds are we have an enemy in their ranks. Laura—the girl I’m with—claims the ships were crashed by a hacker.”

  “Do you trust her?”

  “Yeah,” I say without hesitation. “If she wanted to harm the Muir, she had a hundred chances in the deepdowns. She saved my life. Twice.”

  “Okay,” Aren says with an implied sigh. “I’m going to see if I can figure out what happened to Dejah. In the meantime, get your ass back here.”

  “We’ll be at the park platform in ten. The girl needs a medic. Bad.”

  “Understood. See you there.”

  Once Aren signs off, I rub my face with my free hand. I’m frustrated. Dejah doesn’t “disappear.” She doesn’t go offline. Dejah is the Muir’s heart and soul. She has access to 90 percent of the ship’s functions. And for the last twenty-two months, she’s been our only link to the bridge—the ship’s foredecks have been overrun with mourners since stasis-break.

  We curators haven’t stepped foot on the bridge since.

  Without Dejah’s support, there’s no saving the John Muir.

  “Tuck, do you realize you’re grinding your teeth?” Laura turns her face up. “I’m sorry, but it’s annoying as hell.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “But it sounds like the other curators located the rest of your crew and got them back to the park. We’ll be there soon.”

  Laura presses her lips together, looking down at her busted toe. She tries to wiggle it, sucking in a tight, pained breath. “Promise me one thing?”

  “Anything,” I say.

  “When my enemies come for me, remember how much I wanted to save this ship.”

  Her words wobble. A single tear escapes down her cheek. I reach down and wick it off with my thumb.

  “At the risk of sounding hella retro,” I say, “anyone who tries to hurt you will have to deal with me.”

  Laura snorts. “You’re right, that did sound hokey. But”—she kisses me on the cheek—“thank you.”

  I don’t know what I’ve just signed up for, but I do know for sure:

  If this girl’s got enemies on this ship, so do I.

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  DEEPDOWN TRAM

  LAURA

  I can’t believe Tuck, of all people, noticed the enemy under my skin.

  I wince. Every time the tram shifts, pain bursts through my shoulder and sparks in my foot. I breathe through it, like Mami would tell me to do. At least some of the adrenaline’s draining out of my system, leaving my limbs, mind, and heart heavy. We’re safe enough for the moment, but I don’t know what I’ll find when we get to the park.

  At the very least, Tuck knows about my subjugator.

  Nobody on the Conquistador ever realized what was wrong with me. Hosting a subjugator isn’t like suffering from an illness or malady; there aren’t widely publicized “warning signs” the population is told to look for in a victim. And the device’s AI adapts too quickly for most people to realize it’s present at all.

  Speaking of my parents … I shift my left arm out from between my body and Tuck’s side, shaking my wrist to wake up my ioScreen. It shoots out of my bioware node, startling him.

  “What the hell?” Tuck asks, sticking his fingers through the screen. Blue light gilds his skin. “What is that thing?”


  “It’s an ioScreen,” I say, selecting Mami’s ping message and typing out a reply: Lo siento, Mami. I’m safe, and I think I’ll see you soon. Once I click send, I continue: “For privacy reasons, only the bioware user can interact with and see the information on their personal ioScreen. You can see my screen’s light and shape”—I frame one side with my hand—“but you won’t be able to see what’s on the display, unless I decide you can.”

  “And the screen comes out of here?” Tuck asks, tapping the bioware node on the back of my wrist.

  “Correct,” I say.

  “That’s some serious Skynet shit you have going on.”

  “Says the boy with a chip in his head.”

  “Touché.”

  I turn my attention from him as Mami replies to my ping:

  ¡Dios mío, m’ija! I’ve never gotten a ping that’s made me so happy! I read these words and smile to dam up my tears. Are you okay?

  Somewhere aboard this ship, my mother lives and breathes. If Mami’s okay, and my family’s okay, I’m okay.

  Yes and no, I reply. I’m alive, but I’ve got broken toes and a few nasty cuts.

  Where are you?

  I type: On a tram with one of the ship’s crew members.

  You’re on your way to the park? she asks.

  I think so, yes … who made it? Who’s still alive?

  My mother doesn’t respond immediately, and something dark and nauseous gathers in my gut as minutes pass. When my bioware pings again, all Mami says is: I think it’s better to have that conversation in person, m’ija. I’ll see you soon. Te quiero.

  Te quiero, Mami.

  Mami’s answer makes my heart ache worse than cracked bones or cuts that turn my flesh into slavering, gory mouths. I know, without question, that people I love are gone.

  I rub the hollow of my throat with my thumb, anxious. My fingers itch. I want to ping everyone I know and ask them if they’re okay. From the messages on my screen, I know Dad’s alive. My brother Gael, too. Alex and Faye. A few of my tías. But I don’t have pings from my little sister, my grandmother, or several of my cousins.