Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  “The girl was the one who talked,” I said, but he wasn’t listening anymore. I settled back in my chair, which hummed comfortingly. If Adrian noticed, he didn’t say anything. We watched sports, bitched about our trainers, then his parents showed up and I went home. Griff didn’t leave the bathroom the rest of the time I was there. I called out to him as I left, but he only groaned in response.

  Back at my apartment, I programmed something to eat and tried to forget about the video. Laugh it off, like Adrian would. Focus on my own life, not some street scene taking place thousands of kilometers away.

  But it stayed with me. The crowd, the preacher, his speech, then the bodyguards, Sumati, the Peace Corp. . . . And last of all the girl with the golden eyes, the girl who’d called out in a voice so clear it was as if she was standing in the room with me—yet somehow it hadn’t made an impression on Adrian or, so far as I could tell, Griff. They hadn’t seen her, much less heard her. It was as if she was speaking only to me, looking out from the screen across all that distance with something to tell me.

  Like she was there for me.

  I knew it sounded crazy. But a voice inside kept whispering that there was something there, something I’d missed. Something I’d known before but forgotten, like a password you make up with your friends when you’re little and then drop out of your memory banks when you don’t have any more use for it. It danced on the edge of my mind, maddening when I couldn’t pin it down. I knew I’d have to come back and see the video again, see her again, if only to see if anything was there.

  Adrian thought I enjoyed the show, so he hacked in and let me watch a bunch of other times. I laughed along with him while he joked about Terrarists and Lower-life messiahs. I kept my mouth shut when he cheered the Peace Corp., when he shouted at them to take Sumati down. I didn’t say another word about the girl.

  But I saw her every time. I heard her speak. I waited to receive her message, but the TranSpeaker always died just before the words left her mouth.

  And the whole time she was talking in a language I felt I should know, her eyes never left mine.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Night

  The thing made of mist and shadows leaps at me, and it’s not made of mist and shadows anymore.

  A body, hard and fast as a bullet, slams me to the ground. My flashlight flies free. Something makes a scraping noise, like knives being sharpened. Then pain worse than anything I’ve ever felt impales my left shoulder, and I can’t help the scream that tears from my throat.

  Hot liquid coats my face. It burns. My shoulder blazes as if the muscle is being opened by a scalpel.

  The thing chatters in my face as it leans over to feed.

  Then the night explodes in a brief, bright flare, showing me a confused image of the creature that hangs above me, gunmetal-gray flesh and a face that’s all teeth. It emits a startled scream before flinging itself away and vanishing into the mist. I hear swift, soft footpads for a second, then all is still again.

  My shoulder’s on fire. I reach for it with my right hand, touch the stickiness of blood. I press hard against the wound, gasping at the pain. My eyes burn so much from whatever dripped in them, I can barely keep them open. I can’t see well enough to know how bad the shoulder is, but I know it’s bad. I wish my heart would stop pumping so fast, since I know it’s pumping my life away.

  Every movement I make feels like it’s going to rip my arm from my body. But I sit up, try to dig through my supply pouch for a bandage. The pain nearly makes me pass out, and with only the weak beam of the flashlight on the ground nearby to aid my burning eyes, I can’t find what I need. Sitting has made the blood pour down my arm onto my hands, and it’s getting too slippery for me to hold on to anything. I lie back down, feeling dizzy, the mist swooping unnaturally over my head. My brain’s moving in slow motion, my eyes squeezing shut. I press my hand against the wound, unable to feel the pain or pressure anymore. All I feel is cold.

  I’m going to die here. I knew it all along. Bleeding to death wasn’t on my original list, but that’s exactly what’s going to happen. And then the thing will come back and scavenge what’s left.

  The thought makes me struggle to stand. But my legs are rubber, and they collapse under me.

  I’ll never see Sofie again.

  I knew I’d never see her again the day we boarded the ships.

  Maybe I’ll see her on one of the worlds she used to speak of.

  There’s the sound of something scuffing rock. The thing’s back. I force my eyes open, try to raise my head to face it, but I’m too weak to do even that.

  A beam cuts the darkness, fog swirling overhead in the fan of yellow light. Then a voice. A human voice. Two.

  “Did you get it?”

  “Ran off, I think.”

  “Wounded?”

  “How the hell do I know?”

  “What are they?”

  “My friend, we’re in the middle of freaking nowhere. I’m afraid I didn’t ask the tour guide for a rundown on the local wildlife.”

  I try to call out. My throat is as weak as the rest of me, and all that emerges is a soft groan. The voices pause then resume.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “What am I, deaf?”

  “Is it the thing?”

  “If it is, our worries are over. Sounds half-dead.”

  I summon all my remaining strength and call out again. I know those voices, their banter, their back-and-forth. I can’t believe my luck. A thousand years and a hundred trillion kilometers from home, and it’s the two people I’ve known the longest on Earth.

  “Adrian!” I call out. “Griffin!”

  The footsteps stop, but the flashlight beam swings a wide arc through the mist. When it shines in my face, erasing what little I can see of the world, I hear their cries.

  “It’s one of ours!”

  “Gee, you think so?”

  The footsteps become louder. The light dances in front of my eyes, so painful I have to shut them again. Something falls to the ground beside me, a body. Hands prod me. I’m too numb and cold to feel them.

  “Holy—!” the one on his knees swears. “It’s Cam!”

  I squint, force a smile. I can’t see his face beneath the helmet and oxygen mask he wears. “Hey, Griff.”

  “You’re hurt.”

  “Been better.”

  “Can you stand?”

  “I’m not . . .” He gets his arm under mine, lifts. My legs aren’t there. I stumble and fall. Blood smears his boots. He doesn’t back away.

  “Adrian, get over here. Cam’s hurt.”

  The flashlight moves closer. I can’t see the face of the one holding it, but I can see his hand.

  “Hey, Adrian.”

  “Hey.” There’s a long silence, broken only by the sound of Griff’s heavy breathing.

  “Well, for God’s sake, don’t just stand there,” he says. “Help me out.”

  “We shouldn’t move him,” Adrian says.

  “Well, we can’t just leave him.”

  “I’ll stay,” Adrian says. “Go back and find my dad. Tell him you need a medkit. And a stretcher.”

  Griff says nothing, but I can hear his hesitation.

  “Get moving, Griffin,” Adrian says. “Take the light,” he adds, and the beam sails into the air, swinging wildly before settling. Griff must have fumbled it.

  “You sure you two—”

  “Move!” Adrian says, and this time Griff’s feet take off, fast, the sound getting softer before dying out completely.

  Adrian drops beside me. I can’t see a thing, but I feel his hands on my wounded shoulder. He’s putting steady pressure there, and it should hurt, but that entire side of my body is as numb as a stone.

  “How bad is it?” I ask.

  “Let’s just say you won’t be our starting second baseman this season.”

  “It’s my left arm.”

  “Then there’s still hope.”

  He�
��s silent, leaning his weight on me, using his hands to stop the flow. I can’t tell if it’s working. The world seems a little less distant, but my ears are ringing and I feel sick to my stomach. I wish I could see Adrian’s face, say something to him like I used to back on Earth. Some joke, something.

  Finally, I say the first thing on my mind, the last thing before I lose consciousness. “Where are we?”

  “We’re in hell,” he says, his voice ringing like everything else. “But you already knew that.”

  • • •

  I’m not expecting to wake up. Not on this planet, anyway. Not on any planet, really.

  But I do. I come to in brightness. There’s no mist, no nothing. This place is as empty with light as the other was with dark.

  A shadow falls on me. A body. I flinch, thinking it’s the thing from the fog. But it’s human. It speaks with a human voice, a concerned voice.

  “How are you feeling?”

  I can’t feel anything, and I think I’ve gone mostly blind. Could it have been some kind of acid that spilled in my eyes? “I feel . . . better,” I say.

  “Good,” the voice says. “The wound looked ugly. We weren’t sure about toxins. Can you sit?”

  Hands grip my back. I feel them but don’t feel them, like they’re separated from my skin by a wall of water. They guide me upright. I’m afraid I’m going to get sick, but then my head and stomach settle.

  “You’ll be fine,” the voice says. “Assuming we’re right about the toxins. Did you get a good look at it?”

  “It was dark. I saw . . .” Why can’t I see? “It was too dark.”

  “The nights are very dark,” the voice says. “The atmosphere, you know. By the same token, the days are very clear.”

  “Is that why it’s so”—I feel and sound stupid—“so bright?”

  There’s a short laugh. “I nearly forgot.” Fingers fumble around my face, and I realize there’s some sort of material stretched across my eyes, too lightweight to feel. Tape, maybe. A tearing sound gives way to varied light and shadow. “There.”

  I blink at the face in front of me. I don’t know him, but I recognize the silver-and-black JIPOC crest on his lab coat. One of the primary medical personnel who put us into deepsleep on Earth. One of many brought along to minister to Upperworld passengers numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

  “We found traces of an organic compound on your face,” the PMP says. “We’ve taken it to the lab for analysis. We were concerned about its effect on your eyes.”

  “My eyes are fine.” I blink again and realize it’s true.

  “And the arm?”

  I’m about to tell him my arm’s not there when I realize it is. It hugs my side, wrapped tightly in gauze and tape, and though it tingles a little, I can’t feel any pain. Drugs, probably. “Arm, eyes, both fine.”

  “But you didn’t see what attacked you.”

  “I told you, it was too dark.”

  He nods, sighs. “We know so little about this place. Officially, we’re not even supposed to be here.” Then he looks abashed, like he realizes he just said a no-no.

  I can’t help laughing. “Officially, was I attacked last night?”

  “Of course.” He purses his lips, his expression turning from embarrassed to offended. “I filed an incident report.”

  That makes me laugh even harder, which wakes up the arm enough to cause me the first actual pain I’ve felt since I came to. “What’s it say? Unknown assailant kicks teen’s ass at undisclosed location?”

  He bustles around me, which is probably his way of avoiding eye contact. “I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful. Until there’s a statement from Chairman Conroy, all I can say is that we have, officially, touched down on an unidentified interstellar location. Which,” he adds, glancing up for a second, “plain to see, may not have been our scheduled final destination.”

  Plain to see. Unless every reading we took on Earth set new records for wrongness, our scheduled final destination wouldn’t have rocks that are more like sponges, nights without moon or stars, swift things that shape themselves into hard-edged predators out of swirling mist. I’m about to say something else when he signals, and the auxiliary medical personnel I hadn’t noticed standing behind the head of the bed moves to put his hands on my left side.

  “Can you stand?” the PMP asks, supporting me on the right. With the help of him and his AMP assistant, I slide from the bed, which is cold and metallic like an examining table. It’s then that my muddy mind puts his words together, and I realize where I am: in the Executor’s sick bay. I’ve never been here before, but I’ve seen the video. Antiseptic white and endless rows of cubicles, enough for anything short of a major epidemic. We’re in one of the cubicles now.

  So the Executor did land. But—I’d laugh again if it wasn’t for the arm—not officially on the planet it was shooting for. And apparently with no better reading on where we are than my pod could supply. “How many of us made it?”

  The PMP looks surprised. “Your pod ejected at some point before the Executor touched down. But otherwise, the entire company arrived safely several days ago. We’ve been recovering passengers from deepsleep ever since. We were fortunate to have found you before . . . well.”

  Before the thing made out of mist finished with my arm and started in on my face. “Why would my pod eject if the others didn’t?”

  “Some sort of malfunction,” he says. “We’ve brought it on board for diagnostics. But so far as our records show, yours is the only pod that ejected prematurely.”

  “So far as your records show?”

  He won’t meet my eye. “We’re still tabulating the data. There’s been some trouble with the computers. . . .”

  I shake my head, trying not to laugh at the whole sorry mess. But really, what did I expect? As the trainers we left behind on Earth told us until we were sick of listening, anything was possible. “What about the other ship?”

  “The other ship?”

  “The Lowerworld ship,” I say. Sofie’s ship. “Has there been any communication with them?”

  He gives me a long, hard look before exchanging glances with the AMP. Then he says, “Maybe it’s better if you rest a while longer,” before leading me back to the exam table/bed. I consider resisting, but the truth is I’m too exhausted from three minutes of standing to fight him. Once he’s got me settled in and the AMP has done all the fluttery things with my arm that auxiliary medical personnel do best, he pulls a screen around a metal rod that circles the cubicle.

  “We’ll check on you again soon,” he says. “And I’m sure your friend Adrian will be able to answer all of your questions.”

  I’m about to ask whether Adrian’s coming to visit when he flicks the curtain closed and the two of them are gone.

  I lie back against the stiff regulation pillow, my good arm behind my head, the bad one taped rigidly at my side. There’s no way Adrian will answer my questions, no way Adrian will show up for me to ask them. He saved me out there in the mist, sure, but that was only because Griff was with him, only because he was caught off guard. There’s no way his dad will report on the Lowerworld ship, even when he’s ready to confirm what went wrong with the mission, where in the universe we are. There’s no way I’ll learn what happened to them, to her.

  Too many things can change in a thousand years. You can lose your best friend. You can lose your way across the galaxy. You can lose the girl you love.

  But I know, deep down, it doesn’t take anywhere near that long for those things to happen. Most of it can happen in a day. A minute. A heartbeat.

  By the time I left Earth, most of it already had.

  Earth, 2150

  Upperworld

  When I wasn’t hanging out with Adrian and Griff, training my ass off, or sleeping/doping off the effects of the training, I spent every spare moment trying to track down video of the golden-eyed girl I’d viewed for those few precious seconds of cross-world screen time.

  Which, it turned
out, was practically impossible.

  Unless they were expert hackers like Griff apparently was, Upperworld teens didn’t exactly have unlimited access to the worldlink. The only channels I could view were the regulated ones, and all they offered were the standard catastrology chatshows and Otherworld colonization banners and promos for CanAm and the rest of the Upperworld corponations (except UniVers, because there was some kind of hostile-takeover thing going on between us and them). The content on the Two Worlds sites told me nothing I hadn’t heard a million times before: how in the closing decades of the twenty-first century, the civilized world finally progressed beyond the sixteenth-century concept of the nation-state and put corporate know-how to the business of running society. There’d been such success with everything else—the incorporation of health care, education, defense, entertainment, transportation, construction, spaceflight, you name it—it made sense to go all the way. Corporations knew how to run things, always had. They knew how to make money work for the one percent who worked to make money. When the CEO of Can-Do Amortization wanted to tear down a bunch of firetraps and gentrify the neighborhood, he didn’t have to sit around waiting for the latest public opinion poll or cut some kind of lame deal with the CEO of Continental/Global Communications. He just did it. And it got done.

  Problem was, by the time the Upperworld corponations of CanAm, Exceptional Content, Uniform Versatility, and Medical/Territorial Risk Management finished cleaning up their own house, the corponations they’d commissioned to run the rest of the world—ConGlo, MexSanto, SubCon, Frackia, and MicroNasia—had spiraled completely out of control. Probably it wasn’t the Lowerworld corponations’ fault. The areas they were trying to administer were just too damn big. With a peak population of eleven billion by the start of the twenty-second century, the ninety-nine percent of the world’s people who lived in the continents of the Lowerworld had spent the past five hundred years burning up the planet, tearing down forests, driving most life-forms to extinction, dirtying their own water and everyone else’s, swamping the sky with toxic gases. The Upperworld did everything financially feasible to arrest the damage—built more prisons, deported illegals in the millions, put together articulation agreements to support the policing efforts of the Lowerworld corponations—but no go: Planet Earth was trashed, and it was only a matter of time before it became uninhabitable for us as well as them. A hundred years tops, the chief catastrologist calculated. So CanAm fortified the wall that had been built in the previous century between us and MexSanto, erected similar barriers around the few of our cities that remained, and with the doomsday clock ticking down, convened the Joint Intercorponational Panel on Otherworld Colonization (JIPOC) in a last-ditch effort to save the human race.