by Dan Rix
Discouraged, I rummaged through the side pockets.
My fingers brushed a plastic edge. I slid out a lanyard attached to an identification card, which I studied as I uncapped my water bottle. Issued by Vandenberg, the card gave him security clearance for something called Space Launch Complex 6. I tilted the Fiji bottle back and took a long drink. The liquid pooled heavily in my stomach. I flipped the ID card over and tossed it aside. Maybe inside the tin of shoe polish—
The lid popped off, and my thumb gouged into the waxy, foul-smelling paste. Eugh. Still feeling uncomfortably full from the water, I wiped the polish off on the legal pad, caking the stuff onto the paper and leaving thick black fingerprints.
And letters.
I lifted my hand back, scarcely believing my eyes. Where I’d wiped off my fingers, imprints of letters showed up. Curious, I took another dollop from the tin and smeared it across the pad. More ghostly words formed as if by magic.
The waxy shoe polish was rubbing into the indentations of what had been written on the previous page. Using my fingertip as a paintbrush, I rubbed polish into every last corner, at last revealing the palimpsest’s message.
Much of it was illegible—too many overlapping letters, incomplete sentences, unfamiliar acronyms—but one phrase stood out at the top of the page.
Project Trojan Horse
Chewing my lip, I readjusted and tucked my legs under me. The motion rocked the liquid back and forth in my stomach, unleashing a tiny wave of queasiness. Project Trojan Horse . . . I’d seen that before. In John Lacroix’s office—
My stomach spasmed painfully, unleashing a wave of violent shivers. Gasping, I clutched my abs and scrambled to the edge of the bed, crumpling the forgotten legal pad under my palm.
I barely made it into the master bathroom in time to puke. My stomach clenched and unclenched, and everything I had just drunk came right back up.
“What the hell?” I wheezed, coughing into the bowl.
“It’s turning,” said a voice behind me. Sarah stepped into the bathroom, and a towel landed on my back.
I spit out more sour saliva and mumbled, “What?”
“The water . . . it’s turning. Food is too, I think.”
“Turning?” I dragged the towel across my mouth and wiped the moisture from my eyes before looking up at her. “What do you mean turning?”
“Turning bad,” she said grimly, perching on the edge of the Jacuzzi tub to watch me. “Like everything else here. Something about being on this planet is causing the molecular structure to decay. That’s my guess.”
“But . . . but we have a year’s supply, right? You said we had a year’s supply.”
“If this was Earth, yeah.” Her hand went to her neckline, to a tiny vial attached to a leather necklace, which she absently rubbed between her fingers. “This isn’t Earth.”
“But last night it was fine. Last night . . . what did we drink last night?”
“It’s still mostly good,” she said. “The parts that aren’t, your body doesn’t absorb, and after a few days you start to feel the bad stuff sloshing around in your stomach. You have to vomit it up. Lately it’s been building up sooner, you have to drink more . . . it’s turning faster.”
“How . . . how long do we have left?” I said, remembering my first day here. I touched my stomach under my shirt, feeling nauseous all over again.
“Until it all turns? I don’t know. A month. Less. What I do know is the human body can survive three days without water. Three days.” She released the vial necklace and held up three fingers. “That’s all you get. Seventy-two hours. And half that time you’re in excruciating agony, too weak to function. It’s torture. We need another source of fresh water.” She stood up. “Which is why I’m building one. Come on, I’ll show you.”
“It extracts water—real water—from any of the contaminated sources here,” Sarah explained, grunting behind a handcart as she wheeled the hulk of twisting pipes and cylinders down Major Connor’s sloped driveway. Freshly welded beads of metal clung to the joints like caterpillars, gleaming in the noon sunlight. She set the machine down and wiped her brow.
I stared in awe. “You made this?”
“Wasn’t like I was working on my thesis.”
“So what’s wrong with the water?” I asked. “Why can’t we drink it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, gazing out over the city—Major Connor had an amazing view. “Chemically, it’s almost identical to real H2O, but something’s missing, something fundamental.”
“Yeah, that’s what it seemed like,” I said. “When I was first here. Like it was something else pretending to be water.”
She nodded. “It’s everything here. Wood doesn’t burn, food doesn’t have calories. The bonds don’t have any energy. I don’t even think the stuff is made from atoms on the periodic table. Whatever it is, it’s something very strange and perverted. Fortunately, it’s not the whole planet.”
I looked at her. “It’s not?”
“Take a deep breath,” she said, demonstrating herself. “What is that?”
“Air,” I whispered, catching on. I hadn’t thought about that.
“Oxygen,” she said with a crooked smile. “Honest-to-god oxygen. It’s real. If it wasn’t, we’d be dead within two minutes.”
“I’m so glad I found you,” I said.
“Want to know what else?” she said, pointing up at the sky. “The sun. That’s real light, real heat we’re feeling. And heat comes from the fusion of hydrogen—real hydrogen—which means there’s a real sun up there burning real hydrogen. Real hydrogen, and real oxygen. And what’s water made out of? Hydrogen and oxygen—H2O.”
My gaze fell to her machine. “Yeah, but how are you going to get hydrogen from the sun?”
“We don’t have to get it from the sun. Hydrogen is everywhere. It’s all over the universe. There’s a constant rain of it from outer space, and it’s combining with oxygen high up in the atmosphere and forming water vapor, which eventually settles down to the surface. You couldn’t keep water off this planet if you tried. Every body of water on this planet should contain trace amounts of drinkable water. We just have to separate it.”
“And you think you can do that?” I asked hopefully. “How would you even know? I mean, if it looks the same and acts the same and tastes the same . . .”
“The fake stuff doesn’t have any chemical energy. It can’t have any chemical energy. That’s the difference. So you give it energy. You electrolyze the water, separating it back into hydrogen and oxygen, and the fake water will be unaffected because it’s not even made of hydrogen and oxygen. All you have to do is gather the hydrogen and oxygen and turn it back into water. That’s what my machine does. It’s so simple it’s painful.”
“Wow, I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of that,” I said, rolling my eyes. “So where are you going to get the electricity?”
“Another one of Major Connor’s gifts.” Sarah pointed to the sloped hillside in front of the house, where she’d laid out an array of glittering blue-green solar panels. “It’s powered by sunlight. All we have to do is plug it in.”
“Can we test it already?” I was getting thirsty again, and I didn’t want to drink from another Fiji bottle knowing it was probably contaminated. Turning, as she’d said. Plus, I wanted to get back to searching for a way home.
Sarah was a physics genius. She would know how to get us out of here . . . wouldn’t she?
“I’m going to run a hose from his swimming pool,” she said. “We’re going to need a lot to get even one cup of water. It’ll take some time to set up.”
“Sarah, you’ve been here for three weeks, right?”
“Almost.”
“And you’ve . . . I mean, I’m assuming you’ve figured out how to get home. You know how t
o get home. To Earth.”
“Right,” she scoffed, “and I’m just hanging out here because I wanted some alone time.”
“No, I know, I get it, you’re still here—obviously—but you’re working on it, right?”
“Let’s just see if this works, okay?” She knelt to fiddle with a valve on the side of her machine.
Evading the question.
“Sarah, uh . . . we will be able to go home, right? I mean, we’re not going to be stuck here forever, are we?”
“Forever’s a long time,” she muttered, reaching behind a pipe.
“But . . . but there’s a way to get back home, right?”
She said nothing.
“Sarah?” My voice quivered.
“We can survive,” she said firmly. “Today. We can survive today. And when tomorrow comes, we can survive tomorrow. One day at a time. That’s all we can do—survive one day at a time. That’s what matters.”
“Stop, I don’t want to hear that. There’s got to be something. Dark matter . . . whatever teleported us here, there’s got to be a way back.”
“Well, I don’t know it, Leona,” she said. “I’ve looked. I’ve looked everywhere. There is nothing here but dirt and death and decay. The dark matter channel that brought us here, it doesn’t have an opening on the other end. It was a one-way ticket.”
“Then we’ll keep looking,” I said. “There’s got to be something. There’s got to be a way.”
“You just got here,” she said, her voice strained. “You just got here. You’ll see.”
“I have to go home,” I said flatly.
“Leona, I’ve looked everywhere. I’ve tried everything.”
“No, you don’t understand—” I glanced left and right, quickly growing frantic. “I have to go back. I need to go back. There’s . . . there’s something I have to do, it’s . . . I just, I need to go home. I can’t stay here. Someone needs me.”
“Boyfriend?”
“No, not my boyfriend. I could get over my boyfriend. I don’t even have a boyfriend. It was something I did, something really horrible, and no one knows I did it . . .” The words got stuck in my throat.
“I’m listening,” she said.
Might as well get it out.
I took a deep, shaky breath. “It was at the beginning of summer,” I whispered. “I’d just gotten my license, and it was dark, and . . . and it all happened so fast, I didn’t see her, I didn’t know what to do.” A tear slid down my cheek. “She was just standing there, and I tried to stop, but then she was dead, just lying there, bleeding, and . . . and I didn’t know what to do, so I put her in the trunk . . .” I swallowed, my throat dry. “No one knows I did it. No one ever found out. I need to go back, because I need to turn myself in, I need to make things right, please—” I bit off my words, stunned at what I’d just said.
I’d confessed.
I’d just confessed.
The first time I’d ever told anyone. Only Megan shared my secret, and we’d vowed never to tell. Now the secret was out.
I held my breath, waiting for Sarah’s response.
She straightened up and wiped her palms off on her overalls, leaving grease stains. “Ashley Lacroix,” she said grimly. “I know.”
Chapter 12
My jaw fell open. “You knew?”
“I did,” she said.
“You mean, you actually knew? Like, before I told you just now? How did you know? Did Megan tell you?”
“It wasn’t that hard to figure out,” she said. “It’s all you and her ever talk about. I wasn’t trying to overhear, but I was a ghost. I was completely invisible. You guys had given me the dark matter, so I followed you around hoping you’d reveal a clue or something, some way to get it off.” She hesitated. “I followed you that night you led her brother to the corpse. I saw her.”
My heart had gone still. “You think I’m a monster, don’t you?”
“No, just an irresponsible teenager who made a very regrettable decision in the heat of the moment.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “You mean hiding the body?”
“Next time, you’ll know better.”
“But I didn’t know better,” I said. “That’s the thing. When it actually counted, I didn’t do the right thing.”
“I know. I’m not arguing with that.”
“Yeah, but isn’t that what makes someone bad?” I said, trying to get her to admit it. “It’s what they do in the heat of the moment, not what they think they’re going to do or what they hope they’re going to do, it’s what they actually do, because that can’t be faked, right?”
“If that’s what you believe, then good luck being happy.”
I stared at her. “You don’t believe that?”
She shrugged.
“I bet you would have called the police.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a lot older than you are. I’m twenty-two. You’re sixteen.”
“Oh, come on, you would have called the police when you were sixteen, too,” I said hotly. “It makes no difference.”
“Probably. I was a good kid.”
“See, that’s my point. I can pretend I’m nice and all, but when something really bad happens—like what happened that night—then I’m not brave, I’m not heroic or honorable or good, I’m a fucking coward, and all I did was prove it.”
Sarah frowned. “I don’t see how that proves anything.”
“I hid Ashley’s body because all I could think about was how I didn’t want to go to jail and how it wasn’t fair because it wasn’t my fault. I had the chance to do the right thing, and I didn’t do it.”
“Morals are learned, Leona. You learned your lesson—I’m assuming—so you’re a different person now.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s what I did that matters. That’s what defines me, not what I’m going to do.”
“Well, would you do it again?”
“Do what again?”
“Hide the body,” she said. “Would you do it again?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
She nodded. “You don’t trust yourself.”
“Sarah, I murdered someone.”
“No, you killed her on accident. It was an accident, Leona. It’s not that one mistake that defines you.”
“It was manslaughter. I shouldn’t have been driving anyone else, there were drugs in the car, I was speeding—I was at fault. One hundred percent my fault.”
“See, the fact that we’re even analyzing this right now means you’re missing the point. Are you a serial killer? No. Do you derive pleasure from killing? No. Are you a psychopath? No.”
I glared at her and felt my cheeks flush. “I just . . . I don’t agree.”
“Whatever,” she said, waving me off to resume tinkering with her water generator. “I feel like I’m talking to a brick wall.”
I dug Ashley’s diary out from where I’d hidden it under my blankets and collapsed on Sarah’s air mattress to read it down in the bomb shelter, still trembling from our conversation, which had reduced me to a mess of quivering nerves. Why did it bother me what she thought? So what if she wasn’t judging me?
I didn’t know what to feel anymore.
Last night, I’d felt so close to Ashley. I needed that again. I needed to hold on to her memory, to feel what she’d felt, to hear her whisper secrets in my ear. No matter what Sarah said.
Ashley had led me to the diary for a reason, because there was something in its pages I needed to understand . . . a clue, a hint, the answer to a riddle. Forgiveness, maybe.
And we needed her help to get home.
Her entries continued where I’d left off.
May 7
I keep trying to take the
invisible stuff off, but when I’m asleep it puts it back on me. It’s like I’m two different people, and I’m in control during the day and it’s in control at night. I’m stockpiling food and water in case I get stuck there again. I’m just not going to sleep. Ever. If I never sleep, it won’t be able to take me.
May 12
I’m sooooo tired. It’s been five days and I haven’t dared to sleep a wink. I’m fighting it so hard. I feel like I’m floating in a gray fog. I look in the mirror and my eyes look haunted. Emory’s really worried about me. I’ve been painting every night to stay awake. I can paint a lot between when everyone else goes to bed and when they wake up, and it’s really quiet and still out there, but my pictures are all morbid. But even if I never sleep again, it’s better than that other place. I’m so tired.
May 15
I’m back in that other place. I call it the dark world now. I must have fallen asleep at some point. I wish I could just curl up and die.
May 29
It’s been two weeks since I’ve seen another human. I miss my mom and dad. I miss Emory. I hate this. I hate this dark world. The voice is evil and it’s keeping me here for longer and longer each time as its prisoner. I ate the food again. WARNING: Don’t eat the food. It changes you. I couldn’t help myself, I was so hungry and it kept telling me not to, but it was all a trick, like when Mom uses reverse psychology. It wanted me to eat it. Now I have to stay here even longer. What if I get stuck here forever? I’m really scared.
I wanted to reach back in time and hug her, comfort her. I actually missed her. How could you feel this close to someone you’d never met?
We were in this together.
June 9
There’s something else down here. A little shadow man. It says it wants my soul.