In the Red

by Christopher Swiedler

  “Did you know any of them?” Lilith asked, visibly shaken.

  Michael pointed at one of the women. “I met her once at my dad’s office in Heimdall,” he said hoarsely. “She helped me with a calculus problem.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lilith said.

  Michael fought a sudden urge to vomit. Lilith shouldn’t be apologizing to him. He couldn’t even remember the woman’s name. He didn’t know the other people at all. And right now the only feeling he could summon was relief that none of them was his father. They deserved better. His hands trembling, he found a second white sheet and laid it out over them. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  “Whatever happened, it didn’t happen in here,” Lilith said. “Someone must have brought them here after the accident. Who was that? And where are they now?”

  They walked up and down the corridors on the second level, inspecting each room briefly. Everywhere they looked, they found signs that whoever had been here had left in a hurry. A screen in one office had been left on, and in the next room down they found a half-eaten cookie. Michael racked his brain to figure out what could have happened, but he couldn’t come up with a rational explanation.

  “Michael,” Lilith said, pausing in one of the doorways. “You need to see this.”

  Inside was a desk with a keyboard and screen, sitting in front of a window that looked out onto the slope of the glacier. In the center of the room, a chair for visitors lay on its side. A few pieces of paper with what looked like geometric calculations sat on the desk, along with a framed photo showing Michael and Peter in the neighborhood swimming pool.

  “This was my dad’s office,” Michael said.

  Was. Because his dad had left. He’d evacuated with the others, hours ago, and now all that was left in the station were corpses.

  Ever since the magnetic field had failed, Michael had been convinced that all they needed to do was get here and everything would be okay. He’d been sure that his dad was looking for him. But now . . . they were alone.

  Numbly, Michael picked up one of the pieces of paper from the desk. It looked like a basic trigonometry problem. Why had his dad been working on this? And why had he been doing it by hand, instead of using his screen? Michael looked at the problem, and its answer appeared in his head, almost unbidden. Congratulations, he told himself. You can solve trigonometry problems in your head. Too bad you don’t have any useful skills.

  The floor rumbled again. Lilith put her hand on his arm. “Michael . . .”

  “Do you know my dad’s favorite thing to talk about?” he asked. “Someday. It’s like it’s the only thing he thinks about. Someday I’ll be cured. Someday I’ll go outside with him again. Someday I’ll go into the Service, like him.

  “Except I’m probably never going to be cured, because lots of times, suit anxiety doesn’t go away completely. Did you know that?”

  “That’s what I’ve heard,” Lilith said quietly.

  “So why won’t he ever talk about what I can do now? Why won’t he talk about what I’ll do if I never stop having panic attacks?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe he’s trying to encourage you. Or maybe he’s scared. Or maybe he’s just a complete and total idiot.”

  Michael snorted. “Maybe.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “I’ve had a lot of experience in the idiotic dad department. Want to hear a story?”

  “Sure,” Michael said, surprised.

  “Have you ever heard of the Florida Keys?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “They’re islands not too far from Miami, close to where my dad lives. When I was a kid, he promised me someday we’d take his boat and go sailing there, just the two of us. But every summer, there was some reason why we couldn’t go. He was too busy at work, or there was going to be a hurricane, or whatever.

  “So when I tell my dad that my mom and I are going to move to Mars, he gets all excited. He shows me these articles about the big lake in the Hesperia colony, where apparently you can actually sail a boat.”

  “I’ve heard about that,” Michael said.

  “He says that he’s going to come visit and take me sailing. He says that maybe he’ll even move here permanently. But for months, he keeps having all these problems with his visa. He complains about how complicated they make it, how you have to supply all these forms, how they keep rejecting him for stupid things.

  “A few weeks ago, I decide to surprise him by doing the application myself. I’m going to finish all the paperwork so that he can come here this summer. So I spend hours filling out all of his information, and then finally I get back a response that I’ve entered the wrong home address.

  “I think, that’s stupid, there’s no way I got that address wrong. I went there every weekend for five years, right? So I do a little research. Apparently there’s a lot you can look up, even from two hundred million kilometers away. Like, for example, you can find out that last year your dad got remarried and moved in with some other woman and her kids, and he never even bothered to tell you.”

  Michael raised his eyebrows. “Seriously?”

  “Well, that’s the thing, right? It seemed too crazy to be true. I’m thinking, maybe there was just some mix-up with someone else with the same name. So like an idiot, I go looking for photos. It doesn’t take long to find them, including a great one of him and his new bratty-looking kids, sailing his boat down in the Florida Keys.”

  “Wow.”

  “Even after all that, I still wasn’t convinced. I needed to hear him say it, I guess. So the other day when he called, I asked him about it.”

  “The other day?” Michael asked. “You mean, when I came over to your house?”

  “Yeah,” Lilith said. “Feels like forever ago, doesn’t it? I showed him the photos, and finally he admitted that it’s all true. He’s married, he’s got stepkids, and they go sailing all the time. And the best part? He actually never even started his visa application. Everything about that had been a lie from day one.

  “My mom is furious. She wants to go back there, show up at his new house, and punch him in the face. I’m mad, but you know what’s funny? I’m not mad at him.

  “I’m mad at myself—because some silly eight-year-old-girl part of me still thinks someday he’s going to show up here and say, ‘Hey, sweetie, let’s go sailing.’”

  She clenched her jaw tightly and stared down at the floor. Not knowing what else to do, Michael reached out and squeezed her hand. “I don’t think that’s silly.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess we’re both pretty stupid then.”

  The desk rattled as another tremor ran through the station. Lilith straightened up and took a deep breath. Suddenly, except for an almost imperceptible hoarseness in her voice, she was back to her usual, imperturbable self. “As much as I love reminiscing about idiotic fathers . . .”

  “I know,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  9

  “SO I FIGURE that if we’re going to get out of here, we need to find an exit that isn’t blocked by umpteen million liters of water,” Lilith said. “And the lower floor is the only place we haven’t looked.”

  As they climbed down the stairs to the basement level, the air grew noticeably warmer. The stairwell led to a large tunnel that had been bored out of solid rock. Just to their right was a cargo airlock that led back into the glacier. An error light on its control panel showed that the other side was filled with water, just like the other airlocks they’d found.

  Without saying anything, they made their way down the tunnel until it ended in a room that was a cross between a garage and a laboratory. On one side of the room was a large set of doors that were slightly open, leaving a narrow gap that let in a gleam of reddish light from the setting sun. Tools and wrecked equipment were everywhere, and the floor was covered with glass and bits of debris. In the center of the room was a metal shaft about three meters across that descended into the rocky floor. The air above the shaft quivered and shimmered with heat
.

  “This is the magnetic inducer,” Michael said.

  “I think you mean it was the magnetic inducer,” Lilith said, looking around at the wreckage. She stood near the shaft and peered down. “So this thing reaches all the way through the planet?”

  “It only goes down a few kilometers. There’s a—”

  “Weird quantum reaction with the other one at the south pole,” Lilith finished. “I remember now.”

  “I don’t understand what happened,” Michael said, picking up a bit of debris. “Something obviously exploded. But what? Why aren’t there any signs of a fire?”

  “Does it really matter?” Lilith said. She flipped the switch that controlled the outer doors, but nothing happened. She picked up a long metal bar and wedged one end into the narrow gap between the doors.

  “Well, why did everyone evacuate, then? Once the station depressurized, the worst danger was over. Why didn’t they try to repair the damage?”

  “Maybe they were just lazy,” Lilith grunted, pulling at the metal bar. “Dunno. Can you give me a hand?”

  Michael imagined his father standing here a few hours ago, surveying the damage. As the officer in charge, he must have been the one to make the decision to evacuate. But why? What was he afraid of?

  His eyes fell on a desk screen that lay on the floor. He picked it up and set it back on a nearby table. The screen displayed a series of temperature measurements taken at one-minute intervals. Most of the values hovered around minus seventy. He scrolled back further, and the temperature readings spiked up sharply, going from freezing to boiling and then dropping back down again.

  His heart beat faster. Someone had been monitoring this data right before they decided to leave, so clearly it was important. But what was it measuring?

  The display refreshed and added another point to the graph. He blinked in surprise. The data was still being collected. He traced his finger down the last few readings. They quickly climbed from minus seventy to minus thirty, minus ten, and ended with the latest point: five degrees above freezing.

  Lilith repositioned the metal bar and yanked on it with both hands. She’d managed to open up a gap about twenty centimeters wide. “Could really use some help here,” she growled.

  Sweat trickled down Michael’s neck. It was getting uncomfortably warm in his suit.

  Warm. Suddenly it all made sense. The melting of the glacier. The “explosion” at the station. The evacuation afterward. Michael pulled up the temperature reading on his wrist display. Five degrees above freezing—the same as the last point on the graph.

  The screen was monitoring the air temperature in this room.

  He looked up at Lilith. “We have to get out of here!” he said. “Now!”

  “What do you think I’m trying to do?” she snapped. She tried to squeeze herself through the gap in the doors, but it was still too narrow.

  A cloud of steam and water vapor began to rise out of the shaft. Michael could feel the sudden heat, even through the insulation in his suit. He grabbed Lilith’s arm.

  “We don’t have time!” he said, pointing at the shaft. “It’s happening all over again. We have to get out now!”

  When the inducers had failed, they hadn’t just turned to dormant pieces of metal. They were still reacting with the energy from the flare, and without anywhere else to go, that energy was being turned into heat. Far below the station, that heat was turning ice to water and then to steam. Just like earlier this morning, the pressure from the steam was rising to unimaginable levels. And just like then, it would soon reach a breaking point, and the steam would explode through the only route available: the shaft of the magnetic inducer itself.

  That was why his father had evacuated the station. Not because of the first explosion. Because of the second explosion that they knew would be coming.

  The floor of the cargo bay trembled violently. Water vapor poured out of the shaft and spilled across the floor like smoke. A low roaring sound came from the depths of the shaft, growing louder and louder with every second.

  Something seemed to click in Lilith’s mind. “Go!” she shouted, dropping the metal bar and pushing him toward the door.

  Side by side they sprinted along the corridor, dodging past scattered piles of equipment and debris. There was a high-pitched squeal as a cloud of steam burst through the cargo bay doors and into the passage, scalding their backs and shoulders. They ran up the stairwell and into the common area. The superheated air swept past them and out through the shattered window with such force that they had to grab one of the support columns to keep from being knocked over.

  Michael looked out over the edge of the shattered window. Ten meters below him, a small footpath had been carved into the side of the cliff. But to get there, they’d need to climb down a near-vertical rock wall. He clutched the windowsill so hard his hand started to cramp. Everything around the ice cap seemed to be expanding, like a scene printed on a sheet of rubber that was being pulled in all directions. The horizon spread out, farther and farther, until Michael was just a tiny speck of dust floating in an infinite nothingness. He dropped down to the floor, hardly noticing the shards of plexiglass that pressed painfully against his knees.

  I can’t do it

  The wind roared around him. His grip on the edge of the window loosened. The yawning void in front of him seemed to be pulling him forward.

  I can’t

  The nothingness called him: let go, drift away, be swallowed up. There was no point in fighting anymore.

  do it

  “Yes, you can,” Lilith said, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Michael—look at me!”

  She was shouting at him, but her voice was soft and far-off, like a tiny light flashing in darkness. “I’m right here! You’re okay. But we have to climb down. Do you understand?”

  His eyes focused on her, and the world snapped back into place. The wind roared and the floor of the station trembled. Pieces of plexiglass rattled and slid off the edge and tumbled down the mountainside.

  “I’ll give you one guess,” she said.

  He stared at her in confusion. One guess?

  “About which girl has a crush on you.” Her voice was casual, as if this were the most normal thing in the world to bring up right now. She helped him lie down on his stomach and slide out toward the edge. “That’s it. There are lots of footholds. It’s an easy climb.”

  Michael knew she was lying, but he willed himself to believe her. He slid his feet out and felt for the spot where the outside wall of the station met the rocky slope. Inch by inch he lowered himself until only his fingertips were clutching the ledge. He angled his head and tried to look down, but she grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t look!” she shouted. “Now are you going to make that guess, or what?”

  Was she actually talking about this right now? He needed to focus on the slope in front of him and the yawning void below him, both of which were infinitely more important right now than middle school crushes. But like a muscle twitching in reflex, his brain called up a name from his class.

  “Gwen Mackenzie?” he heard himself say.

  Lilith helped him put one foot into a crevice a half meter down the slope, and they both found new handholds. When they were secure again, she leaned toward him and shouted into his ear. “Gwen Mackenzie has as much personality as a two-by-four!”

  “I guess,” he said. “But she’s got a nice smile.”

  “You’d be better off kissing a poodle!” With graceful agility, she climbed down a little lower and helped him find another foothold.

  Over and over they repeated the process: stretch a foot downward, find a new spot, rest and reset. Each time Michael found a new handhold, he told himself that it didn’t matter how far he’d come or how far he still had to go—right here, right at this spot, he was safe. He kept his mind focused on the mechanics of climbing and tried not to think about the vast emptiness surrounding him. A step, and then another step, over and over, like a dance in slow motion, un
til the footpath was only a few meters below them.

  “That’s it,” she said. “We’re almost there. Just keep going like this, and—”

  There was an enormous bang like a thunderclap, and a moment later a blast of superheated air rushed over their heads. The wind howled, clawing at them with a million tiny fingers. Michael tried to grab a nearby rock with one hand, but it tore loose from the mountainside and he tumbled downward. He hit the ground hard, the impact knocking the wind from his lungs like a punch to the gut. Lilith landed beside him and rolled toward the edge of the path. Michael reached out reflexively and caught the shoulder strap of her air vest. Her legs swung out into the empty air and she dangled there, her fingers scrabbling for a handhold in the dirt. Michael heaved backward and pulled her up slowly, until finally she collapsed on the trail next to him.

  “Thanks,” she gasped.

  He nodded. “You too.”

  The wind roared around them, pushing them in every direction. They held hands and walked along the narrow path. Twice Michael lost his footing and might have fallen if Lilith hadn’t been there. The sunlight had faded to almost nothing, making it hard to see more than a few meters in any direction. A near-constant rumbling came from deep within the ice cap, and rocks and debris tumbled past them every few seconds.

  Finally the footpath merged with a much wider, rutted roadway. After a hundred meters, it flattened out and started to wind through the hills and valleys at the base of the ice cap. Several times Michael stumbled with exhaustion, but he pressed on, determined to get as far away from the ruined magnetic field station as possible.

  “Did you see that?” Lilith asked, jerking to a halt. “A light—over there!”

  Michael squinted in the direction she was pointing, but all he saw was darkness and dust. “I don’t see anything.”

  “There’s something there!” she insisted. “I saw it!”

  He paused. It was safest to stay on this roadway. If they got lost in the darkness, it might be impossible to find their way back. And the solar flare was going on, which meant they had to find some kind of shelter before sunrise. But if Lilith really had seen a light . . .