Pitch Dark

by Courtney Alameda

  I hold my breath. Don’t move. Just. Don’t. Move.

  The others scatter, fleeing into the labyrinth. One tentacle shoots over my head. A woman screams. I grit my teeth at the sloshy, suckling sounds behind me, especially as the tentacle retreats, grasping a girl by the waist. As it sweeps back, dragging her toward the door, blood runs downs her legs and drips off her toes. She looks down at me. Coughs.

  Even through a haze of pain, I’d still recognize her anywhere: Faye.

  She reaches for me, but there’s nothing I can do for her or anyone now. I don’t reach back, or call her name, or so much as move.

  The tentacle yanks her away. I expect something to lash out at me, to grab me with toothy suckers and eat me alive.

  I’m not sure how long I sit in the aisle between servers, not daring to move, not daring to breathe. Unable to sit up any longer, I slide sideways till I can lean my head against the systems’ panels. The metal sears to the touch but I’m a supernova anyway, blazing bright in the universe at the end of my life. The servers’ lights twinkle like stars around me, and I am at their center. Floating. My pain fades, burned away by the fire raging in my veins, and a child’s nursery rhyme plays through my head: Estrellita, ¿dónde estás?

  A ping bounces through my bioware.

  Me pregunto qué seras …

  I see the ioScreen’s light, but my vision’s too blurry to read the words.

  En el cielo y en el mar …

  My bioware flickers. Shuts off.

  Un diamante de verdad …

  All the stars go out.

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  SPACE OUTSIDE THE MUIR

  TUCK

  An object in motion stays in motion, right?

  It occurs to me slowly that I leaped off the mecha at a bad angle. My knee glitched out on the jump. As the ship looms, I realize I’m not going to collide with the ship at all. I’ll skate past it by a few meters or so, and then spend the next few minutes tumbling through space till I either freeze to death or run out of air.

  There’s no stopping.

  No changing direction.

  No way to save my sorry ass.

  Screw you, Newton.

  “Alex!” I shout. “Hey, you there?”

  No answer. Last I saw him, he was fighting off that monster on the bridge.

  “Can anyone hear me?” I shout on the comms. My body heat drains out of my busted EVA suit. Oxygen, too. My EVA’s display blinks wildly at me, flashing a very short sequence of numbers that comprise the rest of the conscious time I have in this life. Two minutes, nineteen seconds.

  “Help!” I shout on the comms. But if either Alex or Sebastian can hear me, neither of them answer. Maybe they’re dead. Maybe we’re all dead, and trying to save this stupid, useless hunk of space garbage wasn’t even worth the effort.

  My teeth start to chatter. The cold drives long spikes of ice into my gut. I must be bleeding, but it’s too dark to see anything but the ship and the stars. I’ll be unconscious before I even pass the whole of the ship.

  After all I’ve been through …

  “Tuck,” Mom whispers.

  After everything I’ve survived …

  “Can you hear me, kiddo?”

  Thanks for the big middle finger, karma.

  Something warm and heavy wraps around my waist, dragging me back toward the John Muir.

  “Hang on,” Mom’s voice says. “’Tis just a flesh wound, right?”

  The stars begin to darken.

  Their lights blink out, one by one.

  Then they’re gone.

  PART FOUR

  THE COLONY

  Quisieron enterrarnos, no sabían que éramos semillas.

  They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.

  MEXICAN PROVERB

  USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500

  MEDBAY

  LAURA

  My fingers wander back to my new bandage at the hollow of my throat, as if I need to reassure myself the subjugator’s truly gone. I’m curled up in the medbay with a blanket, watching Tuck sleep off a surgery in which doctors reconstructed most of his abdomen. He’s the only patient in here without any family to keep him company—since the incident in the bridge, Aren’s been busy working with Dr. Morgan and my parents to salvage the John Muir, at least until help arrives.

  Apparently the ISG will make an exception to their “no dead zone” rescue policy if you’ve found enough virgin Earth dirt to save the human race.

  Mami enters the room, carrying a pair of steaming mugs. The bright hall light catches in her blond curls, and she lets the door swing closed behind her. “How’s Tuck doing, m’ija?” she asks, crossing the room to hand me a mug of coffee.

  I shift in my chair. “As well as anyone who had their intestines exposed to raw space would be, I guess.”

  She tucks the blanket tight around my body. “And you?”

  “Tuck had his guts ripped out literally,” I say with a defeated lift of my shoulders. “It was more … metaphorical for me.”

  Mami pulls up a plastic chair so that she can sit and face me. “Laura, I hope you know your family will never betray you.”

  “I do.”

  She puts a hand on my knee. “You should get some rest.”

  “If you wanted me to sleep, why did you bring me coffee?” I ask, looking at my reflection in the liquid’s dark mirror.

  “It’s my job to pester you to sleep more, even if I know you won’t.” Her soft smile lights up her eyes, making the tawny flecks in her irises glow with warmth. “If you won’t sleep, we should talk about what happened to you, and your subjugator.”

  I keep my gaze on Tuck, sipping the coffee Mami brought. The drink’s black with no frills, and it tastes earthier than anything I’ve ever had back at the Colonies. “Do you think this is what coffee tasted like on Earth?” I ask her, sidestepping her question. “I’m assuming the beans were grown at the park. I wonder where this type was originally from—Colombia, perhaps? They were famous for their coffee, weren’t they?”

  “I would suppose so, sí,” Mami says, hiding a smile behind the rim of her coffee mug.

  “Even the texture seems different from what we have at home.”

  “Claro, I don’t think it has anything to do with where the beans were grown,” Mami says, setting her mug down. She leans forward, taking one of my hands in both of hers. “Listen, once we arrive home, Dr. Smithson and her son are going to go to jail for a very long time.”

  “Did Dad find any significant damage to the Declaration of Independence?” I ask her, not wanting to discuss the subjugator, or the Smithsons.

  “No, but Laura—”

  “I figured he’d probably kill me for rolling it up and shoving it into a medieval quiver. It’s an international treasure!” I say, mimicking my father’s voice as best I can.

  “Laura,” Mami says, reaching out, grasping my chin in her hand. She gently turns my face toward hers, forcing me to look at her. “We need to talk about what happened to you.”

  I look away, not sure I have the words to describe the void that’s opened in my chest. Forty-eight hours ago, all I wanted was to be free. Now my body feels hollow, as if all my fueling fires have burned right through my core, leaving a husk of a girl in their wake. I can cope with the pain and exhaustion. The doctors are confident both Tuck and Alex will survive. The Smithsons are in custody—Dr. Smithson for implanting a subjugator in my throat, and Sebastian for shooting Alex.

  My subjugator is gone.

  But so is Faye.

  When I asked Dr. Morgan what happened to Faye, she replied, “The Queen Mother proved to be very difficult to control … she was made up of hundreds of the ship’s crew members, which means she had all their coglink chips integrated into her systems. All I could do was save your life, and Tuck’s.”

  It seems like an easy excuse, one I’m not sure I believe. Dr. Morgan had every reason to stand back while the Queen Mother killed Faye—after all, Faye and he
r father initiated the attack against the John Muir, nearly destroying Dr. Morgan’s work and killing her son. But I had every reason to want Faye taken alive.

  “I’ve won,” I say quietly, timing my breaths with Tuck’s digitally assisted ones for a few seconds. I don’t look at Mami as my tears brim and a small sob expands in my lungs. “I’ve escaped; I’ve survived. Fortuna y gloria, and our family will deliver the most important archeological find to the Colonies in centuries. So why does it feel like I’ve lost?”

  “Sometimes in life, we pay dearly for our victories.” Mami wipes a stray tear off my cheek with her thumb. She smiles, radiant, so easily able to hide her sadness. “What do we always say in the hour of grief, m’ija? El camino de regreso al mundo de los vivos no debe ser hecho resbaladizo por las lágrimas.”

  “The path back to the world of the living must not be made slippery by tears,” I repeat at her.

  “People are complicated,” Mami says softly, tucking my hair behind my ear. “We will mourn Faye and her father just as much as the others we have lost. We will remember their kindnesses, joy, and light, and not these last desperate moments of their lives.”

  “But how am I supposed to trust anyone again? First Sebastian, then Faye. Mami, I just … I don’t know.”

  Mami smiles, but there’s a touch of sadness in her expression, one I can’t quite quantify. She squeezes my hand, and glancing over her shoulder at Tuck, says, “I think you do, corazón. I think you already do.”

  UNKNOWN

  UNKNOWN

  DATE: UNKNOWN

  TIME: UNKNOWN

  TUCK

  I wake up centuries later.

  A machine beeps near my head. I reach up and scrub my face with my hand—my face is rough with stubble. Needles are buried in my wrists. The skin aches. Hell, everything aches. Guess pain’s a pretty good indicator that I’m alive.

  Silver linings, right?

  Shite.

  “You’re awake,” someone says, their voice whisper-soft.

  “Dunno if I’d call this awake,” I say, slurring all my words together. I blink, turning my face toward the voice. A girl sits on the chair next to me. I can’t see her face past the bright blue light, and wince.

  “Sorry, I’ll turn this off,” she says. The light disappears. She rises and sits on my bed. Her weight depresses the mattress. My stomach heaves with the shift in my equilibrium.

  I barely manage to say, “Gonna be sick,” and turn to vomit over the side of the bed. Classy, I know. It tastes like stale acid and blood. When I blink again, there’s a bucket floating under my face. “Frag me,” I say, flopping back on the pillows. I’ve barely got enough strength to wipe my face with the side of my hand.

  Flashbacks of waking from stasis pop across my mind.

  I might vomit again.

  “You survived a bad mecha crash, Tuck,” she says, getting up. A few seconds later, something cool rests on my forehead. “Your guts are still knitting themselves back together, and you’re suffering from radiation poisoning from exposure to space, too. Add the torus equilibrium adjustments, plus the inoculations against diseases you didn’t have in the twenty-first century, and it’s been a rough few weeks for you.”

  She sounds so much like …

  The cold compress clears my head. My eyes focus on the girl standing over my bed, one with long hair and brown skin like burnished gold.

  “Laura?” I ask. “You’re alive.”

  She nods, smiling. “I think that’s my line.”

  “Did I really just throw up in front of you?” I ask, scrubbing the bottom half of my face with my hand again. “Wait … it didn’t splash on you, did it?”

  Laura laughs. “No,” she says, looking down and smoothing the front of her white shorts. She’s dressed for summer, but some futuristic summer, wearing a loose-fitting tank top that shimmers around her body like she’s wearing water. Wait, that didn’t make sense. She’s covered, but the fabric …

  This is your brain on big drugs, kids. Any questions?

  “Just kill me now,” I say, pretending to roll my eyes up into my head. I stick my tongue out until she laughs again.

  I’ll never get tired of her laugh. Not as long as I live.

  “Glad to see your sense of humor survived,” she says, sitting in the chair beside my bed. She kicks off her shoes and draws her legs up, tucking them under her chin. Her skin’s still bruised in places, but she wears those injuries like badges of honor.

  There’s a small white scar in the hollow of her throat.

  Guess I know how that story ended, too.

  “How long was I out?” I ask, rubbing my eyes with my fingers. If I keep looking at her legs, my thoughts will take an ungentlemanly tack. The thinness of the sheet’s not doing me any favors. I’ve already embarrassed myself in front of her once; I don’t need my body to make it two for two.

  “Almost two weeks,” Laura says. “You slept through the very long distance call we made to the ISG, the entire intergalactic wormport back to the Colonies”—she counts these things on her fingers—“decompression, desalination, deep space quarantine—”

  “Okay, okay, I get it,” I say, rubbing my face with my hands. “I was out a long time. And the Muir?”

  Laura smiles. “Safe, or at least her contents are. Mami and Aren were able to repair the communications arrays and send an SOS back to the Colonies. When we told the ISG what they found, they wormported an entire deep-space construction team to the site, and built a special waygate just for the Muir.” She plucks at my sheet with her fingertips.

  “Damn, girl,” I say. “You saved the day. I thought that was my job.”

  “It was a team effort,” she says, chuckling.

  Overhead, the light comes from a cloud of simulated stars, lit up in a gaseous blue like the Milky Way. The ceiling’s one solid panel. White, not eggshell.

  We’re definitely not on the Muir anymore.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were Katherine Morgan’s son?” she asks after a quiet moment.

  “Do you really need to psychoanalyze me three minutes after I wake up from a coma?” I swear, looking at the ceiling.

  “Sorry.”

  “Are not.”

  She makes a face at me, scrunching up her nose and narrowing her eyes.

  “If you’ve gotta know … it’s because she left some big shoes to fill,” I say. “When we woke up from stasis-break, Mom wasn’t around, and I wasn’t Mom. People didn’t let me forget that, not for a second.”

  Laura scoots closer, chancing sitting on the bed again. This time, my guts don’t buck. “Your mother uploaded her consciousness into the John Muir to protect the ship, and you.” She smiles then, a sort of I know something you don’t know. “When you’re better, we’ll go through your mother’s logs. There are things you deserve to see.”

  “Sounds like a party,” I say drily, trying to sit up a little more. “Where are we?”

  “Home,” she says. She snaps her fingers twice, and one of the wall panels turns transparent. Out there, lights twinkle like stars. They’re concentrated strangely, collected in tall rectangles and in long streams of light …

  It takes my brain a few seconds to recognize what I’m looking at:

  A city.

  Civilization.

  People.

  I swing my legs over the side of the bed and try to stand. Bad idea. The world tilts. Laura catches me, steadying me until everything stands still. It’s only then I think to check whether or not I have pants on. Affirmative. They’re scrubs or something.

  We hobble to the window. My IV station floats behind us, silent. The city’s grand and stretches on for kilometers, the spiderweb of lights curving toward the sky.

  I never thought I’d see anything like this again.

  “This is the city of San Marino, in Nueva Baja,” she says, since I’m stunned into stupidity. She wraps her arms around my waist and says, “There are fifty million people on this colony alone, and every one of them
knows you helped save the John Muir. You never have to be alone again, not if you don’t want to be.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, I put an arm around her shoulders. Press my lips into her hair. Figure I’m done running from people, at least for now.

  “I have a surprise for you,” Laura says, reaching out and touching the window. A screen ripples into view, one with an interface that reminds me of the panels that shoot out of her wrists. Bioware, I think she called it. She pushes a few buttons, then squeezes my waist. “I shouldn’t be here when you talk to her, so press this button”—she points to a glowing blue square in the middle—“once I’m out of the room, okay?”

  “Talk to who?” I ask. Laura doesn’t answer, just kisses me on the cheek.

  “Do you want me to get you a chair?” she asks as she walks toward the door. “It might take her a few minutes to respond; she’s been working with NASA on the park transfer.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I grumble as the door swings closed behind her. I’m not sure, but I think Laura laughs at me as the door swings closed. I reach out and tap the screen.

  In that moment, I almost wish I’d listened to her about the chair.

  “Mom?”

  TWO MONTHS LATER

  CRUZ HOME

  SAN MARINO, NUEVA BAJA

  27 JUNIO 2435

  LAURA

  “What do you want to watch?” Tuck shouts as he rifles through Dad’s film reels.

  “Nothing with an alien in it!” I shout back, wandering down the adjacent aisle in my parents’ underground vault. I pause to examine the intricate white flowers on the Blue Vase from Pompeii, which rotates in a floatglass case. Calling this place a vault might be generous—it looks more like a rabbit’s warren, its twisting tunnels packed full of archeological finds. Shelves are heaped with artifacts from every era. On my left, an archway made of bookcases reaches over the door to a workroom, where my parents are working with other archeologists to restore the Winged Victory. A pair of Bastet statues from Egypt guard either side of the door … and probably keep the bookcases from collapsing, too. Ancient lamps stick off bookshelves, their wires unused, with newer, better bulbs stuck in their brackets. They cast cozy yellow light over the faux-wood floors. The furniture’s mismatched, wooden armoires clogging up corners, a chandelier from Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors hanging over a table made to look like Frida Kahlo’s Wounded Table. Pillars painted in vibrant teals, reds, lime greens, and oranges hold up the roof. Faye painted them, in better days, and created the mosaics that snake across the ceilings. Looking at them makes an ache swell up in my chest.