by Kayla Olson
Alone: funny how you can feel that way while surrounded, constantly, by other people. How that sometimes makes the feeling even more pronounced.
Enough, I tell myself. Enough of this.
Time to do whatever I can to sort our issues out.
21
IT’S ONLY THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
I COME TO a sharp halt just outside Control, close my eyes, breathe, breathe. Shapiro will be happy to hear we’re alive, I tell myself. No need for nerves.
So why do I feel so anxious?
Why do I feel like my six-year-old self, playing dress-up in my mother’s uniform?
I open my eyes to find Haven staring at me, dead-on, six inches from my nose. The look on her face reminds me of one of the royals from the card deck.
“What?” I say, scowling, and she cracks up.
“It’s just—you—you looked so terrified!”
“I don’t see what’s funny about that.” I am terrified. I usually hide it better, I guess.
“I can make the call, if you want?” she offers, remnants of laughter still on her face.
It’s tempting—there’s a reason she’s the one who does our station-wide announcements, the face of all our communications. I sound too severe under pressure, I’ve been told. Really, I’m just measuring my words so they don’t come out wrong. The irony.
“No, no, I’ve got it,” I say. No part of me is looking forward to the call, but as our designated leader, I feel like it’s my official responsibility to take care of communication with Nashville. This isn’t just a morning announcement we’re talking about. Besides, the way she assumes I may need her to do it for me rubs me the wrong way.
“Okayyy,” she singsongs. “If you’re sure.”
I grin, tight-lipped, so what I’m actually thinking won’t slip out.
This lack of sleep is becoming problematic for my patience.
Zesi, Leo, and Heath are already inside when Haven and I enter the room. Zesi and Heath are on the rolling stools, both looking a little fidgety. Leo paces the room, runs a hand through his hair every few seconds. Leo rarely shows his nerves like this—most days, you’d have to look close to know he felt nervous at all.
Good to know I’m not alone in my uneasiness.
There’s a gleam to the countertop’s steel this morning, no trace of last night’s dirty mugs or coffee splatters. Zesi must have been the one to clean up, I’d bet my mother’s chair on it. He’s always been a bit of a clutterphobe. Also, I recognize a stress-clean when I see it—I do the same thing when I need to calm down.
Leo stops pacing when he sees me, and Heath rises from his stool. Both look like they’re about to go in for a hug, to hug me, but are each caught off guard by the other. We all end up rooted in place, the world’s most awkward quadrangle, Haven its fourth corner.
“So,” Leo says, eyes on me. “You’re good to go with what you’ll tell Shapiro?”
“Good on my end.” I avoid everyone’s eyes, Haven’s especially—I’m still technically working the words out in my head. “Zesi? What about communications? You’re all up and ready, too?”
“They couldn’t have made it easier,” he says, gesturing to the display screen. I peer down over his shoulder and see options for quick reply, voice, and video beside the log entry labeled Shapiro—Nashville.
“Great,” I say. “This is great.”
Suddenly, heat floods my cheeks like I’m standing in a spotlight made of pure sunbeams. It’s only a call, I tell myself, swallowing my panic. It’s only a call to the head of Earth-based station relations, only a call full of slippery not-quite-lies, of half-truths—unless I decide to tell him the full truth, which could be significantly more helpful, but still feels risky. Either option feels like a playing-card fortress that could collapse under the force of a single breath.
“Do you want us to leave so you can be alone?” Heath asks. “Would that help?”
The idea alone is pure relief. “Yes,” I say. “Yeah, I think that would help a ton, if you don’t mind.” I’m worried enough about how the call will sound to Shapiro—taking out the worry about how I’ll sound to everyone else is a weight off. “Thank you. I’ll catch you up right after.”
Heath, Leo, and Zesi file out, but Haven lingers. “You sure you’ve got this?”
She’s overdoing it today, and I feel more insulted than supported, but maybe that’s just me and my lack of sleep; maybe it’s just me projecting my fears that I’m not doing well enough quickly enough for everyone on board. Either way, it’s more motivation than ever to make it through this call.
“I’m fine, okay?” My words bite, sharp-toothed and snapping, and I only minimally regret them. Maybe they’ll save us in the future, make her think twice next time before she says something that makes me want to cut even deeper.
Haven backs away, hands up. To her credit, she doesn’t say anything more, but I know from experience that that’s worse, sometimes. I also know from experience that we’ll recover, that we just need some time to cool off. Her sleep was interrupted last night just like mine was—there’s a reason I don’t wake her up unless it’s absolutely necessary, and it’s that she doesn’t handle it well. She gets prickly.
Finally, it’s just me and the display screen, alone in Control. It’s time.
My finger hovers over voice. No way I’m choosing video, where Shapiro will see the fear on my face, and the cracks in my truth, too. I tap the audio-only option before I can take it all back, before I take Haven up on her offer. The timer starts counting, and the call connects before even two seconds tick past.
“Shapiro,” says a breathless, sleepless voice. “Shapiro here—Lusca, we thought you were dead.” Lusca is the official name of our station, but I’ve only ever seen it in written form, on supply order forms and carved into the wall just outside Control.
My voice catches at first, but I collect myself and force out the words. “We’re—we’re alive. This is Lindley Hamilton—”
“Linsey, Linsey,” he breathes. “I thought—I was sure—sure you were—”
His voice breaks, and now I’m extra relieved I can’t see his face, because I’m pretty sure what I’d see is the head of the space program completely breaking down. I almost wish he could see my face, though; I am not Linsey, and I really should correct him—should clear up the confusion, that I only sound like my mother—but—
But—
How? I can’t seem to get the words out, and even if I could, would they even be helpful? Would he crumble under the weight of knowing that someone he cares deeply about didn’t make it? Would Nashville crumble along with him, and maybe even the entire space program, already tenuous in its recovery after the virus hit so hard?
I can still be honest about the most important things—get his advice on the virus, request a supply delivery ASAP. It might actually work out better for us, now that I think about it, because my mother was a voting member of the board. I, obviously, am not. If any major decisions come down to a board vote, perhaps I can have a real say in our future, vote like she would have wanted to.
Still. Pretending to be my mother was not part of the plan.
My window is closing. I could tell the truth. I could tell him right now.
“I’m so sorry I couldn’t call before this morning,” I say, and with that, it is done.
At least the words I’ve actually said are true.
He’s speechless on the other end, but I know he’s still there. I can almost hear his tears. Do I really sound that much like my mother? I never realized it before, but I must.
And grief hears what it wants to hear, I guess.
Fortunately, he doesn’t linger on the personal. He has his moment, and then it’s on to the urgent. “Good, good,” he says, more to himself than me. “This means the quarantine worked up there and you caught it in time—virus spread like wildfire down here, Lins, it’s unbelievable. We’ve taken a pretty bad hit. I thought for sure you were—”
He cuts off, choked up on his
own fear, or relief, or both.
“But you’re not, you’re not.”
The silence stretches between us, and again, I’m tempted to fill it with all the things he really should know—but there’s no way the board would let us have a say in our own future if they knew all our parents, all our experts, were dead. There’s no way, not if their majority vote was finally all but unopposed. They’d trample Shapiro without a single look back.
“My apologies for letting your messages go so long unattended,” I say, putting on my best Mom/commander voice. I never heard her on these calls, only in station-wide assemblies and the like, but she had the tendency to be . . . overly multisyllabic. Not with me, of course. I’m not sure how casual she would have been with Shapiro. “We’ve been caught up with the quarantine, and unfortunately, one of the hardest-hit areas on board the station was Control—Lieutenants Black and Brady—hence our silence.”
My mind spins with strategy, trying to stay two steps ahead of my words at all times. This lie should be safe: it gives, at once, a reason for our silence and a reason for Zesi to pick up communications in the absence of our lieutenants, should he ever have to answer a call.
He mutters a curse. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he says, not a single trace of suspicion in his voice. “Very sorry indeed. What a loss.” I can almost hear him bowing his head.
He believes me. I’m doing this, I’m actually pulling this off.
Not that I enjoy having to.
“Have any other areas been so drastically affected?” he asks.
All of them, I want to say. But I dodge the question instead, saying, “We could use a shipment whenever your team has fully recovered, but otherwise, we’re managing.” Not too much, not entirely untrue.
“Good, good. Are you able to give me a current head count, just so we know what sort of damage we’re dealing with?”
I freeze, panic. I’ve just let him believe I’m my own mother—the commander—and that our quarantine has been successful. How can I give him a current head count without immediately backtracking? How can I ask his advice on how to deal with a mutation?
I may have made an enormous mistake.
“Just let me know as soon as you can,” he goes on, mistaking my panic for the confident silence of someone who’s neck deep in tracking down the requested data. “If you’ve lost any other critical team members, we need to know ASAP so we can make arrangements to get their replacements and their families up to the station, too—as well as the arrangements for relocating any members of Lusca’s youth community who find themselves unattached, now that the virus has had its way.”
My head snaps up.
That—
That sounds like—
That sounds like I’ve been right to fear the worst, like every single one of us is in danger of being relocated from the only home we’ve known for our entire lives. With the whole universe at our fingertips, it isn’t unthinkable that we’d want to explore it—but when we’ve lost so much already, and have so little left to cling to, I can’t see a forced relocation going over well with anyone.
Especially not those of us whose dream it is to stay.
And where would we even go? It’s only a small leap of logic before the board has the same idea I did, that they could send us to Radix to work with Vonn. That would be every nightmare come true—for us. For the board, it would be a brilliant, expedient solution. What’s best for everyone in the long run.
“Yes,” I say, just to say something. I’m starting to fray, will unravel if the silence stretches any longer. “Yes, I’ll get you a head count as soon as I can, but”—I squeeze my eyes shut, force the lie—“rest assured things are running smoothly up here.”
“Anything else I should be aware of?”
I clear my throat, dry my nervous palms on the crisp fabric of my pants. I’m not exactly sure how to approach the subject of Vonn without sounding one thousand percent panicked. I’m not sure how to say anything without sounding panicked. I need to ask about the shipment, and should probably put feelers out about mutation strategy—but the way this conversation has gone down so far has me hedging.
“In your most recent message, you mentioned sending intervention from Radix,” I begin. My voice is as even as I can make it; hopefully it sounds smooth and confident on Shapiro’s end of the call.
“Oh, yes—about that,” he says. “We’ve taken another look at the logistics of it all, and at our situation down here. Jack thinks it would be comparable in both time and expense to launch your supplies from here instead of from Radix.” Jack is on the board, according to hundreds of my mother’s venting sessions I wasn’t supposed to overhear. “Trajectory from Radix puts a shipment there at seven to eight days; ours would be less costly and we could get it to you in just under ten.”
Relief washes over me—this is good news, very good. Mostly. As long as we can, in fact, stretch our supplies that long.
“Don’t get me wrong, Vonn’s ready to go if you’re down to critical levels,” he continues. “But if you’re confident you can stretch what you’ve got, we’ve got you covered. Tell me honestly, Lins—do you have enough to last? Only you know how well you’ve rationed since the last delivery, but I’m worried you won’t have enough.”
It’s not even a full two weeks. I think back to my conversation with Natalin—about how we’ll be fine if we can just get people to eat what they need instead of only what they like.
We can do this. Eating vege-packs for a few days seems like a small sacrifice compared to being indebted to Vonn and potentially forfeiting our future freedom. Worst-case scenario, we find a way to get what we need from Nautilus instead.
“We . . . we should be good until your shipment arrives,” I say. I shut my eyes tight, hope for the best.
“Great, great,” he says. “I’ll let everyone know. We’ll shoot to get a shipment to you from here as soon as we can—I’ll confirm liftoff within the next day or two.” He sounds almost relieved. If I had said we were critically low, would he even have been able to convince the board to go forward with the faster delivery?
“Excellent,” I say, suddenly anxious to start wrapping this up before more surprises spool out of my control. “Thank you . . .” Would she call him by his first name, Julian, or some sort of nickname? He began all his messages with Shapiro, so I’m not sure. Too late for me to add a name now, though, so I just close with, “We’ve got everything under control.”
“Here if you need anything, as always,” he says. “And Linsey?”
He says her name with such kindness it puts a lump in my throat. “Yes?” I force out.
“Don’t forget to take care of yourself, okay?”
“You, too.”
And then it’s over.
Don’t forget to take care of yourself.
I’m not my mother, but we shared more than the sound of our voice: I needed to hear this every bit as much as she would have.
I sit, staring at the communications screen, the call log’s 07:08:43 still blinking up at me. If only I could stretch time, make each minute feel as eternally long as those seven did.
22
THERE IS NO AWAY
PRIORITY NUMBER ONE: I need to keep my people alive, and I need to give them a future worth living for. No one will ever love this station more than I do. I refuse to lose a single person more—I refuse to lose our home. Even if it means I’ll only ever be commander for this brief, terrible moment in time, before they replace me with someone far more experienced.
Everything in me wants to prove—to myself and to the space program—that I’m capable of stepping up and taking care of my people. If I were to tell Shapiro exactly how alone we are up here, and how desperate, the board would most definitely relocate us, possibly to the most horrendous place in the entire galaxy. We’d lose the only home we’ve ever known—our only tie to the past and, for many of us, our dream for the future.
That’s not how it will happen, though, not if I can help it.<
br />
So here I sit in my lab, digging for answers that could not only stop the mutation from spreading to our people, but also to those on Nautilus, since it’s our best option at replenishing our supplies, if things come down to that. I’m curled over my lab station, studying the Mila sample from earlier. Nothing about it makes any sense. I’ve stared at it for an hour now, breaking my brain over what could have possibly gone wrong in my test process, and what I could possibly do about it with nothing left of her to test.
The most sobering thing is, no amount of testing will bring her back to life.
It’s heartbreaking, when I take a step back from trying to study her death and remember the actual life lost—when I remove myself from the feeling that death after death is just our reality now, when I think of the individual people who are no longer with us.
Mila was nearly my age. We never spent much time together, but she knew Natalin well. She was friendly enough with Haven. Otherwise she kept mostly to herself, was never really involved. Still, our station feels incomplete without her. Even the absence of one quiet person can be devastating, it turns out. Added to the hundred who died before her—
I resist the urge to throw the petri dish against the wall, and only because I don’t need any more messes to clean.
I bury my face in my hands, try to ride out this useless surge of grief. After some time—a few minutes? half an hour?—there’s a knock at my glass.
Leo.
Instead of inviting him in, I join him in the corridor. We walk together, our footsteps and the hum of electricity the only sounds. I don’t ask why he’s come to find me, and he doesn’t ask anything I don’t feel like answering.
How does he do it? How does he feel so much like home, like the past I long for but will never reclaim?
And then a thought slips in so suddenly it stops me dead in my tracks: the mutation could take out any one of us. Leo could be next. Any one of us could be next.
“So?” Leo says after a while. “How did the call go? Are we good?”
A half laugh falls out of me before I can stop it. “Define good.”