This Splintered Silence

by Kayla Olson

  Honestly, I’d almost rather starve than accept interference of any kind from Vonn. Surely there’s some other way to stretch or replenish our supplies that doesn’t include our being indebted to him down the line? More than just our short-term relief, we have to consider the potential for long-term misery: if Vonn and the board eventually put their heads together and realize they can solve two problems at once by sending us out to Radix to replenish Vonn’s team, that’s it—that’s our entire miserable future, right there, and not even Shapiro will be able to stop it from happening.

  We are not experts like our parents were. Aside from Shapiro, we have no one left to defend our worth but ourselves.

  The infinite sea of stars curls in on itself, and for one silent, dangling second, I think I’m going to lose it. I steady myself, cradle my head in my hands. It’s too much, this. I can’t do it. I can’t do everything I need to do to keep everyone alive. Today has been too much, too much in every way.

  There are six of us, yes, six of us in this together. But they’re waiting for me. Leo, Zesi, Haven, silent and waiting for my word.

  If I can’t handle this, who will?

  I shift four mugs of old, cold coffee to the side. “Let’s get a fresh pot going,” I say. “Meet at my place in twenty, make sure Nat and Heath are there, too.”

  We never meet at my place, but with so much spinning out of control, I need to be somewhere I feel safe, steady. We’re going to handle this, handle everything, and we’re going to handle it on my terms.

  19

  LIKE A FALLING STAR

  LEO’S THE FIRST to arrive. He takes a long look at me, then breaks into a wide smile. “Look at us,” he says. “We look like we’ve been left to fend for ourselves on Mars or something.”

  His smile is contagious. Just when I forget how much I need him, he’s there, bright and beaming and warm. “Not that far off, really,” I say.

  “Not that far off except for everything.” He smiles again. Mars exploration never did take off, especially once they learned more about the conditions on Radix, how perfect it’d be for terraforming. Mars has been reduced to a primitive reminder of all we thought we knew—and how very little anyone actually knows, compared to the vastness of the universe.

  “How are you always this fresh, Leo? How do you do it? How do you not need sleep?”

  “How do you know you’re not sleeping now?” he says. “How do you know this isn’t a dream?”

  “I always wake up at the worst parts,” I say, purposefully taking him seriously. “I would’ve woken up a long time ago if this were a dream.”

  His smile fades, and he looks at me, really looks at me. “C’mere, Linds.” He pulls me in close, wraps his arms around me. They’re strong, and he’s strong, and it turns out I need this right now in a major way. I bury my cheek in his chest, he rests his chin on my head: perfect fit, as always. We’ve done this for years, ever since his height drastically outpaced mine. “We’re going to get through this, all right?” His chest rises, falls. “We are.”

  We.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s just—little things, you know?” Her chocolate. How everything in this place is always exactly as I leave it, because I’m the only one who lives here now. The stars outside our every window, a constant reminder of all I’ve loved and lost.

  “I get it,” he says. And I know he does. He was incredibly close with his father, and loved his mother to pieces. They were good people, the best. “I think it’s okay to think about them, you know? I think they’d want us to remember.”

  I don’t know how to think about those things without falling apart, is the problem. And if I fall apart, the station does, too. But I don’t say so—I can’t. I try, but the words won’t come out.

  Someone pounds at my door, startling us apart.

  “Helloooo?” Haven calls, her voice ever clear from the far side of the door. “A little help here? Hands are full of coffee!”

  I rush over to let her in, find everyone else close behind her. Haven and Natalin and Heath carry two mugs each, full to their brims. Zesi has a French press in both hands, each wrapped in a little neoprene sweater to hold in the heat.

  I shift things around on our—my—coffee table, make room for the French presses and mugs. Haven and Natalin curl into the love seat, a functional purple built-in that’s too big and too small all at once. The guys spread out around the table, each claiming a piece of the woven, rust-colored rug that makes our cork-on-concrete floor slightly more bearable. They leave my mother’s chair for me.

  The mood settles like a falling star, bright and brighter until it burns out to blackness. I take a sip of coffee, set the mug carefully onto the table. “It’s been a long day, and it’s late, so let’s jump right in,” I say. “I’ll follow up with each of you on an individual basis tomorrow—especially you, Natalin, I know the food situation’s looking pretty grim—but for now, we need to talk about Shapiro and the messages.”

  Natalin starts to protest, but I cut her off before she can derail me. “The messages present a number of issues,” I say. “For one, we’ve been silent so long they think we’re dead. We’re already low on supplies, and it sounds like they’re not planning to send us more anytime soon—even when they find out we’re alive, they won’t be able to, due to their pilot quarantine. I know this complicates the food crisis in a major way, Nat, so please be assured that isn’t lost on me.”

  I glance at her face, try to get a read on how irritated she is that I’m steamrolling her like this. She nods, lips tight, but doesn’t interrupt.

  “Making contact with Shapiro isn’t the hard part, thanks to Zesi’s breakthrough with our external comm system—our system seems to be working just fine, we simply didn’t know how to get into it until today,” I continue. “Problem is, we need to come to a consensus on what to tell him.”

  “How is that a problem?” This from Natalin. I knew she wouldn’t keep her thoughts to herself for long. “He thinks we’re dead, and we can easily tell him we aren’t. Zesi mentioned, on the way over, about some sort of shipment from Radix?”

  Leo catches my eye. Clearly, he gets my hesitation even before I spell it out. “It’s not just a matter of supplies,” he says. “I think what Lindley is concerned about, rightly, is supplies with strings attached.” He glances at me, and I give a small nod in thanks.

  Leo gets it, always. He’s well acquainted with my flashes of intuition, with how nine times out of ten they’re spot on. I only hope this isn’t the one time I’m wrong.

  “Sergeant Vonn and Lindley’s mom didn’t get along,” he goes on—understatement of the galaxy. How many times did we stay up until three-morning, just the two of us, Leo listening patiently as I spilled over with worry for my mother? Vonn and my mother were fundamentally different in every way imaginable—he, with his condescension and his insults that sliced like knives—she, with her wisdom and unwavering commitment to treating humans like humans.

  “That’s putting it rather mildly,” I say. “The only thing worse than Vonn attacking us? Accepting his help and finding ourselves indebted to him.” I take a deep breath, taste the words on my tongue before letting them out. “We’re up here on our own—Vonn will need a replacement team sooner or later. How long do you think it’ll be before they decide to ship us out to Radix in the name of ‘what’s best for everyone’?” I sharpen my tone so the words cut through any lingering notions of invincibility the others might have. “You know the board will side with Vonn if it comes down to it—they always do.”

  How many times have we heard what’s best for everyone to justify what they do? Only then, we were the everyone benefitting at others’ expense. The board thinks they own the entire universe, my mother always said. They think they can grind people into dust and suffer no consequences. For a long time, I thought she was speaking metaphorically, but then I overheard her one night, talking about how an entire shift of exca workers had died under the sergeant’s command. No virus responsible, on
ly Vonn—not enough water, not enough sleep, nothing but do more and do it yesterday.

  No one says anything for a good long minute. The fire dances in place. Zesi pours more coffee from the French press.

  “Do I need to remind you?” I say finally. “Vonn tried to poach my mother’s crew when he got in a bind, and she only barely won that fight—do I need to spell out how much worse it would be for us?”

  “It isn’t like Shapiro said we were going to go, like, work for him, though.” Natalin bites at her fingernail, something she does only when she’s the perfect combination of irritated and anxious. “He didn’t even say Vonn would come anywhere close to the station. Just his delivery people, right?”

  “That’s true, but—”

  “But what, Lindley? You really think his delivery people are going to drop supplies off and then, like, take us all hostage to become drudges out at the exca site?”

  My cheeks burn. “Not immediately,” I say. “But, yes, I think it’s a slippery slope. Accepting his help sets a bad precedent for the future.”

  “Refusing his help means we might never see our future,” she shoots back.

  “Look, I’m not disagreeing with you.” I straighten in my chair, try to keep my voice from rising. “I agree with you, in fact. Hence the problem.”

  “I am not going to stand by and watch the station starve just because you’re too prideful, and too afraid, to accept their supplies. That’s a lot of life on my hands, Lindley. A lot of death.”

  “Our hands,” I say. “Not just yours.”

  “Your hands.” Her eyes are steely blue-gray, never too tired to fight for what she feels is right. We have that in common. “I’ll go on record if it comes to it, tell the entire station whose decision it was to deny us access to food.”

  “We can make it work if we ration properly, right? If everyone could just get over themselves and eat what they need, not only what they like—”

  “We have to live in reality, Lindley. We can’t put our hope in what would ideally work—”

  “You’re expecting the worst out of our people,” I say.

  “And you’re proving me right.” She glares at me, eyes fierce through narrowed slits.

  “Wow, Nat, nothing like your bleak outlook on reality to make us feel better,” Haven says.

  Natalin sets her jaw. “It’s hard not to have a bleak outlook with a reality like this.”

  “Rather than dwelling on how terribly this could all turn out,” I say, doing everything I can to keep calm, “I think it would be most useful—for now—to focus on a plan B. You’re absolutely certain we don’t have enough food to last us?”

  “To last us how long? Not indefinitely, that’s for sure,” she says. “Probably not longer than late next week—maybe a day or two after that. Depending on how many more, um, die. Assuming Mila wasn’t a fluke.”

  My head pounds with the other crisis I’ve tucked away, the one I’ve thoroughly attempted to compartmentalize so it doesn’t tear my mind in two. Even if we manage to keep everyone from starving, who’s to say the mutation won’t take us out anyway?

  I close my eyes. Take a breath.

  “We have to think long-term, Nat,” Heath cuts in. “I agree with you that we need supplies, for sure. I think it’s dangerous to completely write off what Lindley’s saying, though. Can we come up with a third option? Maybe we can get supplies from Nautilus instead of Radix?”

  “That’s not a bad idea at all,” I say. Nautilus is tiny compared to our station—fifteen people, total—but since they’re so far out of the way, their shipments are infrequent and comparable to ours in size.

  “What if we’re carriers?” Haven says. “For the virus, I mean. Everyone on Nautilus came from Earth, right? Could we spread the virus, even though we’re immune to it?”

  “We don’t even know if we are immune to it now,” Zesi says. “Who knows what we might pass to them.”

  The thought of spreading the virus in a supply handoff hadn’t even occurred to me. If Vonn and everyone on Radix are still alive, business-as-usual, that means they never came in contact with CRW-0001 at all. We could infect everyone at the entire exca site if we spread it to one of their delivery people, kill a multitrillion-dollar endeavor just because we can’t stretch our food supply for another few weeks. As much as I dislike Vonn and his twisted way of getting the job done, there’s no denying his wealth of knowledge and experience. I may think him despicable, but it doesn’t mean I want him dead—to lose him could be disastrous for the future of humanity as a whole.

  A wave of nausea slams into me as I realize: these convictions I’ve drawn all on my own are deeply rooted in the very same what’s best for everyone ideology I so despise—there’s no way we can jeopardize the space program en masse just because we’re having a crisis. And I don’t know which is worse: the fact that what’s best for us falls on the wrong side of what’s best for everyone else . . . or the fact that it feels almost wrong to prioritize our own survival.

  What would my mother have done? Surely she would have protected me, along with her team and their families, if it came down to it. She would’ve found some miraculous way to save everything and everyone all at once.

  “What?” Leo says, nudging my knee. “What’s this look on your face?”

  “We’re just going to have to work with what we have,” I say. “We could infect everyone on Radix, not just Nautilus.” There has to be some way to save ourselves without jeopardizing the rest of the space team—without jeopardizing the future of humanity. There has to be.

  “They could wear hazmats, though, right?” Leo says. “We could scrub the air in the delivery chamber, make sure it’s clean? It might be clean enough already—no one’s been in there since the last shipment.”

  “I’ve never tried to scrub an entire chamber before,” Zesi says. “I’m not sure I’d be able to eliminate all traces of the virus, or if there’s any way to be sure our air-qual measuring systems are as precise as they’d need to be.”

  “Like I said, though, it might be clean enough already. It could work.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?” I counter. “Our entire station was compromised by a single delivery guy whose only contact was with that chamber. We make the tiniest mistake, and they’re done. That’s a lot more life at stake than just our station, Nat.”

  For once, she doesn’t argue. I feel no satisfaction at having the final word, though. This is a problem.

  “So what do we tell Shapiro?” Haven asks.

  The exhaustion is heavy in this room, sunken eyes on tired faces. I don’t know how we’re going to survive all of this, but I have to believe we can. Under different circumstances, I would have no issue with telling Shapiro the truth in its entirety—but it’s only a matter of time before the board finds out we’re running the station on our own, and that’s where I get nervous. They’ve only ever acted in their own interests. Why would they act in ours now?

  “We tell him only what’s necessary,” I say. “And it doesn’t all have to be true.”

  20

  ALONELY

  I WAKE TO an empty room at nearly eight-morning, disoriented from the coffee and the stress and the late, late night. The fire isn’t on anymore—Leo must have turned it off after I fell asleep. He and Heath stayed with me after the others went home, played a game of cards near the window so I wouldn’t be alone. I insisted I wanted to be alone, of course, but they know me too well. What I say and what I mean don’t always align. They can almost always tell the difference.

  I have a dull headache, the sort that comes from tucking too many thoughts away, and too many feelings. Water will help, I think. I hope. I fill my glass at our refrigerated dispenser, watch the water sparkle under the purple-white spotlight that turns on whenever it’s in use. It’s such a simple thing, that spotlight, but I’ve come to love it. It’s steady. It’s always been there, my whole life. If the light goes dark, I’ll just replace it with one of the hundred backup disks in ou
r supply drawer, and how easy is that? So easy. Easy is nice right now.

  The water helps, at least with clarity. Yesterday comes back in screaming color: if only all the problems, all the pressure, had evaporated overnight. I really should get going—I’ll need to get in touch with Shapiro before the next sixty-two minutes are up, and beyond that, I should probably deal with Natalin before her frustration spirals out of control. I’ve also been neglecting the lab for too long now already, and should really spend some time later poking and prodding at the failed test results Mila’s sample yielded. If I can approach the mutation from a different angle, somehow, maybe I can find a way to stop it before it claims its next victims. If we had a cure—or a vaccine—we could get supplies from Nautilus without fear of spreading incurable sickness.

  Should, should, should.

  I miss the freedom I had two months ago, when no one’s life depended on my ability to keep it together, or to keep up with all our rapidly multiplying issues and magically produce all the right answers at all the right times.

  The pressure . . . is . . . a lot.

  Despite feeling torn by the urgent need to fix everything, I force myself to slow down. Take deliberate sips of the water. Breathe deeply. I slip over to the window, where Heath and Leo left the playing cards stacked neatly on the floor. It’s been a while since I’ve actually played. Years, maybe. I pick up the deck, muscle memory working them into a bridge shuffle. The slap of card against card, the rush of air—it’s soothing, mindless. Something to break up the silence. I never deal them into a solitaire, never pause to see the mocking face of the joker staring back at me, or the royals, smug and smirking.

  Three minutes of shuffling and I can’t take it anymore, can’t bear to sit still for a second longer. I set the deck down, faceup, and see the queen of clubs staring back at me. Her eyes are sad, almost, but sort of serene. I tuck her into my back pocket, a reminder that it’s okay to be still, even if I can’t be alone.