Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel

by Jacqueline Koyanagi

  I shook my head and drew the rosemary plant toward me, touching its leaves. “You’re too young to be talking like this.”

  “One day, you’ll feel it too.” Knit, purl. Her voice softened so much I had to lean in to hear her. “Only you’ll feel it when it’s too late. Your eyes will weaken. Your legs will start to hurt when you climb stairs. The space behind your knees will ache, like growing pains all over again, but this time you’ll know the feeling is your body stretching and reshaping, pulling itself apart to make room for death. You’ll fight it with medication like you always do, but she’ll still come for you. Memories will lose definition around the edges, smoothing over in places that were once sharp and precise. Your skin will seem to expand and deflate, wrinkling in places that were once like silk. You’ll feel as if you’re shrinking inside your skin, disappearing. You’ll get implants and upgrades, you’ll fill your body with scaffolding to hold it together, to buy time, but the truth will remain: you’re dying. You’ve always been dying. Life is a thin film, a veil between deaths.”

  Her words came from a kind of healthy privilege I couldn’t begin to process.

  “You’re being morbid,” I said. Antagonizing her was easier than trying to get her to see how much her beliefs hurt me. “Stop performing for me. I hate it.”

  She just kept knitting. “It’s not morbid to admit the truth.”

  “Why fixate on it?”

  “Because you can’t overcome what you don’t understand. If you understand that the moment you’re born, you’re already dying, then you can learn how to make yourself slight enough to take control of the process. You can relax the surface tension of your flesh enough that your soul can spiral out like vapor. You can control your passing into the next realm. You can choose your path instead of waiting for death to chew away at your body. That’s all you’re doing by chasing after medication and cures: buying time.”

  “So instead of ‘letting death chew away at your body,’ you starve your body so it chews away at itself?”

  Finally, she looked directly at me. “I don’t think you’ve heard me at all. I’m not doing anything to myself; this is for myself. I’ve tried creating a world of beauty to tuck myself inside, but that hasn’t done anything but hide me from the truth. Beauty just softens the blow of embodiment.”

  She smiled sadly, then resumed her work. Knit, purl. “I would think you’d know how it feels to be stuck inside flesh that doesn’t feel real, doesn’t show the world who you really are. At least you’ve had the chance to do something about it by living one of your dreams. You’re out here, aren’t you? Isn’t this what you always wanted, to be an engineer in the black? You’re luckier than you think. Some of us aren’t so fortunate as to find happiness in small things. Ascension is my ship to stow away on.”

  I’d wanted to see her grieve for our shared loss, but this was far worse. She wanted to run from it, straight into the afterlife.

  “Nova . . . ” I reached for her hand, but she pulled them both out of my reach, not missing a single purl.

  “I’d like to work on my knitting now.”

  “That’s really your answer, isn’t it?” I said, standing, staring down at her. I felt sick with everything she’d said. “To just sit here and knit some frilly thing for you to wear for your clients. You’re useless, Nova Quick, and you have no heart. You squander all your gifts. I’m ashamed we’re related. Go back to your own quarters.”

  I didn’t bother letting her reply or make a grand exit. I just left myself, the dull ache of guilt pinching at the pit of my stomach, competing with all my self-righteous indignation. Guilt that I’d lashed out at Nova because of my pent-up sadness. Guilt over my pride in the cargo bay that destroyed Tev’s room. Guilt that I wasn’t woman enough to talk to Tev myself, to bandage the wound I’d caused. Guilt about my parents.

  Guilt that I’d left Aunt Lai to fend for herself in a hostile city while I chased down Transliminal so I could beg for help from the same people who had killed her sister and brother-in-law.

  I didn’t know where I was going; I just stormed down the corridor, out of the crew dormitory and around the corner until I passed the kitchen, glanced at the bridge, and headed down a short stairwell to the lower deck. I bumped Ovie when I passed him and didn’t bother apologizing, not even when he growled and glared at me with those wolfish blue eyes.

  All that talk about death. My muscles itched. I needed to feel alive.

  Tev kept a small gym behind the cargo hold, and that’s where I ended up at the end of my furious wanderings around the Tangled Axon. I changed into a pair of clean gym shorts that were too small for me by half a size, but I didn’t care. I filled a canteen with water, threw myself onto the bench press, demagnetized the weights, and started lifting. I didn’t care that I didn’t have a spotter, didn’t care that I was already feeling Mel’s pinch at my nerves at the back of my calves, didn’t care about anything except getting to Spin and getting rid of that damned device and crossing the breach. I wouldn’t give Birke a chance to get to my sister. I’d get what Marre and I needed, and I’d take Transliminal down. Didn’t matter that I didn’t know how yet. I’d figure something out. Right now, I just needed to feel alive.

  I did as many reps as I could, waited sixty seconds, and then started again.

  I didn’t keep track of the number. I just lost myself in the feeling of being embodied, of burning my flesh into submission with every movement. The heat in my body rose as blood rushed in to supply my muscles with oxygen. Alive, alive, alive.

  A constant death was Nova’s reality, not mine. That wasn’t my truth.

  Sweat trickled down between my shoulder blades as I sat up. Muscles burned under my skin. Tight, twisting, real. Burning away the grief of my parents’ deaths, of losing Adul. Burning away the constant fear that haloed this ship. I climbed onto the floor and pressed my stomach onto the mat, palms flat, elbows bent. I waited, letting myself feel the texture of the material under my hands. The give of the foam beneath my weight. The smell of plastic and metal and old sweat. The salt of my own body on my lips.

  I pressed, feeling every muscle in my body engage as I ran through a set of push-ups. Lost in my workout, I didn’t hear Tev come in until the clicking and footsteps were right next to me. Her shadow fell over me and I scrambled, sat up, and grabbed a towel.

  She was wearing shorts too, exposing her legs. Silver metal, laced with some kind of dark blue plastic, comprised her left leg. Whoever had made it fashioned it after the shape of her other limb, so you couldn’t visually recognize that she had a prosthetic limb when she was wearing pants. Decent craftsmanship.

  “Hey.” I wiped my face, then sat back against the bench and leaned my elbows on my knees. “You want the equipment? I just need a second to cool off.”

  She looked at me, eyes flicking to my own exposed legs. It was quick, but enough to make me feel more flushed than I already was. She shrugged one shoulder. “It’s fine. Take your time.”

  Standing on the other side of the bench, she faced away from me as she started her stretches. I couldn’t help watching her move. Muscles twisted beneath her skin, and as she raised her arms to stretch each side, she exposed a band of skin around her stomach that set me on fire.

  Twisting to stretch further, she caught me looking at her. I turned away and took a swig of water.

  “It was an industrial accident.” She glanced at me again, then twisted the other way.

  “What was?” I said, as if I hadn’t noticed all the sound she made when she walked.

  “Oh please. My leg.”

  “Oh. I wasn’t looking at your—”

  She stood and did a few toe-touches. “Don’t lie. Everyone looks. I hate when people act like that part of me doesn’t exist when they know it does.”

  Stop being a coward, Alana. Reach out to her.

  I gnawed at my lip for a second. Gathered my tied-back locs, tossed them over my shoulder. Agonized over what to say and ultimately tried to decide which wou
ld be worse: to say nothing and prolong our forced silence, or to ask.

  Finally, I just went with it. “What happened?”

  She stood up straight and looked down at me. I held her gaze and gave her a little smile. What do you think of me? I wondered. Could you ever care about me after what I’ve done?

  “Sorry, that was probably rude—”

  “I’d rather you say what you’re thinking. I can’t stand insincerity.” That accent glided over me so smoothly I couldn’t stand it.

  Tev rubbed the back of her neck and sat down on the bench press, facing away from me. Anticipation wound tight inside me. Honestly, she could have recited Woolera’s prime ministers in alphabetical order and I would have been eager to listen at this point.

  “Okay. What happened?”

  “I worked on a mining and refinery vessel for a while right out of high school, about eighteen years ago.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I traveled half-way around Orpim before I found a crew that needed a deck hand. The captain told me, point blank, that every year they see more injuries on their ship than most cargo vessels see in ten. Only wanted me if I could stomach the work. I knew the risks when I signed up. But it was a way out and just about everyone thinks they’re invincible at that age, so you know how it goes. I took the job. Just did whatever they’d let me do to stay on the ship while I tried saving money to move up, maybe transfer. Dirty, dangerous work. Not as bad as albacite mining, but bad.”

  She looked down at her fidgeting hands. “Sometimes I still wake up in the middle of the night because I can hear the machinery grinding in my head.”

  She paused in her storytelling, just sitting there. It wasn’t in my nature to let a tense silence simmer in the middle of a conversation like that, but I forced myself to be patient. I felt lucky to be hearing her voice at all after enduring so much silence.

  Eventually, she continued.

  “I cleaned the off-rotation machinery, among other things. Whatever grunt work they threw at bottom-feeders like me. Anything to stay valuable. Keep a paycheck coming. It was going well at first. But yeah, some of that machinery? Death traps. You had to climb inside these big mineral processors to clean them, get all the grime and buildup off to prevent parts from breaking down.” She described the machines and the tasks with her hands, shaping them as she talked. “You turned it off and your spotter stayed at the control panel to make sure it stayed off while you shimmied down into the funnel of the thing. That’s where the processing screws grind the mineral to powder for distribution.”

  Sickness twisted inside my stomach. I didn’t want to listen to what was coming, but had to. I needed to know her, even if it meant hearing something awful.

  “There was an explosion at the other end of the ship.” She sniffed nervously. “I found out later someone had brought othersider tech on board and tried hiring a spirit guide to jailbreak it to mod his own implant. Caused a chain reaction.”

  She shook her head. “We lost ten crew members the instant it happened, but I didn’t know at the time. I was inside that processor. When the ship rocked from the explosion, my spotter lost his balance, fell into the control panel, and turned on the machine.”

  My stomach felt queasy just thinking about it. While she spoke, Tev’s eyes were closed, fingers clenching the edge of the bench, jaw tight. “I can still remember the sound of my foot, my ankle, my femur . . . they cracked as my leg fed into the machine. Couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds to eat up past my knee.”

  I must have looked distressed, because she glanced at me from under her bangs and then gave me her lop-sided half-smile and huffed a sarcastic laugh. “It’s okay. Don’t pity me. I hate that.”

  “No! I don’t, I promise. Just. I don’t know . . . ”

  She laughed in earnest this time. “Yeah. I know. Ouch, right?” She rubbed the back of her neck. “With an injury like that, your body goes into shock. I felt hot and cold. Almost started laughing. At some point, they turned off the machine and pulled me out. I don’t really remember. I knew I was losing a lot of blood, and I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to look down and know only half of my leg was there, and the other half was more meat than limb. It’s not something the mind wants to deal with all at once like that. Or at least mine didn’t.”

  She shook her head and looked down at her prosthesis. “I thought maybe if I just didn’t look at it, it wouldn’t be true. I wouldn’t be lying there, bleeding out. I thought if I just kept my eyes focused on the hands tight around mine, on the faces hovering above me, the moment would pass and I’d be whole again. If you don’t see it, it’s not really happening, right? If you don’t look at it, there are a million potential legs that could exist other than the mutilated one you know is really there. It’s only when you look at it that it becomes real.”

  I didn’t tell her that something about what she was saying reminded me of the way my sister talked about death, and that it frightened me. No matter how awful it was, I didn’t want her to stop talking.

  “You’ll do some pretty amazing mental gymnastics to convince yourself everything is going to be okay in a situation like that.”

  She stretched to the side, one arm over her head as she bent at the waist, obviously collecting her thoughts. All I could think about was how scared she must have been after the accident.

  After stretching both her sides, she finished her story.

  “At some point I knew I couldn’t pretend to be whole anymore. I don’t know how much time had passed, but there was a moment when I accepted I was really in trouble. The medical shuttle wasn’t going to bust its ass to get there in time for a junior crew member on a mining vessel. So I started thinking about all the things I’d never do without a leg. It didn’t even occur to me at first that I’d still be able to have a leg, just not the one I was born with. I didn’t think of that while I was bleeding out on the floor of that damned mining ship. Honestly, I thought I wasn’t going to make it. I’m still surprised I survived.”

  An ice-cold fist clenched my heart. Tev could have died. We could have ended up in a reality in which Tev didn’t exist anymore. In which we never would have met. She’d managed to insinuate herself into a space inside me reserved for my work and family and my own continued sense of self. Now it felt like I’d spent the past three silent weeks squandering something precious.

  “All I could think about was if I didn’t bleed to death, I’d never do much of anything, let alone captain a vessel. And that’s the only thing I wanted to do with my life. My family never set foot in the sky. Dirtheels, the lot of them, as much as I love them. They never had big dreams, never looked past Woolera. It was all burt droving for them. That’s all they wanted, so that’s all they’d planned for me.”

  “Maybe that was their dream,” I said, cautious.

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “Maybe, but it wasn’t mine. Living on the cattle station was like looking through dirty glass. I went out of my mind trying to feel connected to the station, trying to feel alive, but nothing worked. I loved the land and I miss it, but there was so much damned routine. Some of us weren’t made to live planetside.”

  I wondered if she’d been droving cattle the same time I was busy causing trouble in Heliodor.

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  She was looking at me now, those green eyes clear and confident even when talking about something so terrible. Her chain necklace caught the light.

  “We’re not so different,” she admitted. “When the Big Quiet is in you, I reckon nothing is going to stop you from seeking it out, even if it means stowing away.”

  “You just did it legally.”

  She gave me half a smile. “Says you.”

  I wanted to ask her why she was confiding so much in me. She didn’t have to tell me about her drover parents or her dream of becoming a captain for me to understand what happened to her leg. I wanted to read into it, to think she’d forgiven me, to believe she might even feel some sliver of affection for me. />
  Breathless, I waited for her next words.

  “It did take too long,” she said. “For the medical shuttle, I mean. I don’t remember them arriving, I was barely holding onto consciousness. I saw faces, lights, shadows. By that point I didn’t feel much, but it hurt when they jostled me. And I remembered one of the women on the medical crew wore too much perfume or something; it made me sick, and I kept thinking, ‘Do they allow that? Do they let medical folks wear perfume?’ It’s funny, the things you remember and the things you don’t. To this day I can’t smell that perfume, or anything close to it, without flashing back.”

  She rubbed her thigh just above the prosthetic leg, as if the memory pained her. “They couldn’t save it. Obviously. They said if we’d gotten to hospital faster . . . So now I have this leg and a mountain of debt. I’m still paying it off, eighteen years later.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “What, love?” She raised her eyebrows and pulled that half-smile out on me again. “You mean engineers get five-star medical treatment in Heliodor? You surgeons have good health insurance there? It’s all board-approved medication for blue-collar workers?”

  “Well, no—”

  “Exactly. I’m lucky I got what I did. My captain pulled some strings and got me a leg that wouldn’t hinder my work. I got right back to it once I healed up. I was just more careful.” She flexed her ankle, extending the leg. Click. “I’ve had to get it repaired and upgraded a few times, but it works. It’s shaped well enough that, metal aside, it feels like it’s mine. Makes people uncomfortable when I don’t wear long pants but whatever. I didn’t care about that sort of thing before I lost my leg and I don’t care now. So don’t feel sorry for me.”

  “I don’t.” I looked at her hard, willing her to believe me, because it was true. I couldn’t imagine ever pitying Tev Helix. She was gorgeous and strong and maddeningly sexy, neither in spite of her leg nor because of it. At least now I understood why she was so upset about the accident in the cargo bay, even beyond the damage I’d caused. It wasn’t really about the plants. Or at least not for the most part. I’d triggered her worst memories.