The Space Between the Stars

by Anne Corlett

  “No,” Jamie said. “You shot him. He’s back on Lindisfarne, hurt.” An idea flicked a quick fin in her mind. “He sent me to get you. He wants you with him.”

  For a moment Rena stared at her, biting her lip, and then her expression darkened. “He doesn’t want me. He never did. But it’s all right. It’s meant to be like this. All the dispossessed, the lonely, the broken, they’ll inherit the Earth.”

  “They won’t,” Jamie said. “They’ll be dead if you do this.”

  “Then they’ll have the void. The space between the stars.”

  Her gaze snapped past Jamie as Callan stepped onto the platform. Jamie felt a surge of relief.

  “You don’t need the void,” he said. “There’s plenty of space for everyone now. You could go anywhere. You’d never have to see anyone else if you didn’t want to.”

  Rena shook her head. “There’ll never be enough space. There’s too much filling it. All the stuff between us. All the words, all the hurt and broken things. We can’t spread our wings. We can’t stretch out. But in the void we’ll be what we should be. In the void we’ll all be angels.”

  She took a step backward, moving toward the control room. The gun was still slack in her hand. Behind Jamie, Callan shifted his weight, and she could feel him doing the same calculation she had. How long would it take to cross the space between them? How long would it take her to raise the gun and fire?

  Jamie felt her spine tightening at the thought of the bullet tearing into him. Don’t, she wanted to say, selfish and irrational. Please.

  Rena was almost at the door of the booth.

  “Rena.” Callan moved forward, stopping as she tightened her grip on the gun and pointed it straight at his chest. “It’s okay, Rena. We can work this out.”

  “I have worked it out,” she said. “It’s all part of a pattern. All those things I thought I got wrong, they weren’t wrong at all. They were all part of it.”

  It couldn’t end like this. After everything they’d been through, it couldn’t all end at the hands of a broken woman, high above the dark bulk of the North Sea.

  A broken woman.

  The thought rang a faint, offbeat bell in Jamie’s memory. What was it Rena had said?

  A broken priest. A barren woman.

  Jamie put her hand on her stomach, an almost physical sense of her lost baby racking through her, with a more recent memory following hard on its heels. Rena stumbling toward her just hours ago, arms outstretched and rage contorting her face.

  She raised her voice. “Why would God want you?”

  “What?”

  “If God has a plan, why would he choose you? You’re broken. You’re barren. God wouldn’t even let you have a child when you had one of his priests to father it.”

  “Jamie.” Callan’s voice was low with warning. Jamie’s heart was thudding. She knew the scale of the risk she was taking, but this was the only weapon she had.

  There was a muscle twitching just below the other woman’s eye, and she lifted her hand to swipe it away, as if it were a fly.

  Jamie stiffened. Rena had used her gun hand.

  She leaned into the attack. “If there were anything right or good in you, God would have wanted to make more in your image. He’d have given you a child.”

  “That’s not true.” Rena’s voice was shaking, that twitch growing more pronounced.

  “No baby wanted you,” Jamie pressed on, vicious and reckless. “You’re empty. You’re not real. If you were, you’d have had a child of your own. Someone would have loved you. No one ever did.”

  As Rena plucked at her face again, Jamie opened her mouth to continue her attack. Just at that moment a voice spoke from behind her. “Jamie?”

  Oh Christ, no.

  Rena’s gun swung around, and Jamie turned, following the line that the bullet would take.

  “Finn . . .”

  He was pushing forward, his brow furrowed and his hands upraised. She could almost hear the words echoing in his head.

  Be brave.

  “You don’t belong here.” Even in the heat of the moment, Rena’s voice was edged with contempt. “Get away.”

  But Finn was still moving forward, and, with a shock of fear, Jamie saw the other woman’s finger tightening on the trigger.

  No.

  Jamie didn’t remember moving. One moment she was frozen, her gaze locked on Rena’s trigger finger. The next she was between Finn and the gun.

  It was a funny thing, how long it took for the sound of the gunshot to make sense. Longer than when the same noise had broken her from sleep, just a little while ago.

  Or maybe it was a long time ago.

  She wasn’t sure, but her shoulder was aching and there was fire spreading down her arm. Someone was shouting her name, but their voice was a long way away, so it couldn’t be Callan, or Finn.

  Finn.

  Panic rose up, clawing at the base of her throat, making it hard to take a clear breath.

  Rena had shot Finn. That was the noise. Jamie tried to turn, but there was something hard and cold against her back. She tried again, but a twist of pain went down through her shoulder and into her chest, like someone turning a corkscrew in her flesh. She shoved the side of her hand into her mouth, muffling the choked cry of pain. She had to be quiet. She couldn’t remember why, but it had been important, just a moment ago.

  There was another voice, scratching at the edge of her hearing, high and monotonous, hardly seeming to leave room for breathing. As she tried to focus, it started to rise and fall, like an imam calling the faithful to prayer. If she opened her eyes—why were they closed?—she’d be able to see the tower—minaret, that was the word—pointing up to heaven like a bony-knuckled finger. She forced her lids open. There was something looming above her, blocking out a great patch of stars.

  Not a minaret. Too heavy.

  The turbine.

  Finn. The gun. Callan.

  Rena. The gun. Rena. RENA.

  With a lurch of disorientation, the world came back into focus. She was on the floor of the platform, pain raging through her shoulder. Finn hadn’t been shot. She had. And somewhere out of sight, Rena was wailing that she’d failed.

  Jamie shoved herself up, gritting her teeth against another shaft of pain. God, if she’d known it hurt this much she’d have been more sympathetic to Callan.

  Callan.

  He was at the entrance to the booth, blocking it, the gun safely in his hand. Finn was crouched nearby, hands clutched over his head. And Rena was crouching too, clawing at the rail at the edge of the platform, her eyes wide and staring.

  “Jamie.” Callan’s voice was shot through with relief, but he kept the gun trained on Rena. “Can you stand? The vial’s still in the loader and I’m a bit tied up here.” He flicked the gun toward Rena, whose wailing had sunk to a low, incessant mutter. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.

  Bit late for sorry. But as Jamie clambered painfully to her knees, her shoulder burning, she could see that Rena had her head tilted back, her slack gaze aimed up at the stars. Her apology wasn’t for what she’d done. It was for what she’d failed to do.

  Getting onto her feet was going to be the thirteenth labor of Hercules, and Jamie couldn’t face the attempt. She crawled over to the loading mechanism. A small vial of clear, innocuous-looking liquid was resting in a steel cradle.

  The stopper was still in place.

  Jamie waited for the leap of elation, but all that came was a dull-edged relief. A metal case lay on the ground beside the loader, lined with foam and holding three other vials.

  “Is it sealed?” Callan’s voice was tense.

  “Yes.”

  As she reached for it she had a flash of panicked certainty that it would slip from her fingers and smash on the platform, or that she might suddenly lose her own mind and hurl
it over the side to splinter on the base of the turbine. The world contracted, as if she were shrink-wrapped into the moment. Slowly, with shaking hands, she slid the vial into the empty slot in the case and closed the lid.

  “Got it?”

  Jamie slumped back against the cold metal flank of the loader. “Got it.”

  She closed her eyes, thinking how comfortable the floor was. Really, she could just nod off right here. No one would mind.

  “Jamie.”

  Callan’s yell yanked her back to herself.

  Rena was crouched on top of the railing, balanced improbably, like a tightrope walker about to stand up, spread her arms, and smile at her audience. No. She wasn’t balanced. She was tipping sideways, almost rising to her feet as she fell, arms outflung, lips stretched around words that the wind whipped away.

  Callan swore, lurching across to the edge.

  “She can’t swim,” Jamie said, then remembered a more urgent danger. “The rocks . . .” She scrabbled at the edge of the loader and managed to get her feet under her, but Callan crossed the space between them in just a couple of steps. “Don’t,” he said, pushing her back down, gently but firmly. “Don’t look. It’s over.”

  • • •

  It took Callan almost half an hour to get them down from the platform. Most of that time was spent trying to persuade Jamie to attempt the stairs. Her T-shirt was soaked with blood, and her dragging tiredness had given way to a bad-tempered truculence. She couldn’t for the life of her work out why Callan couldn’t just let her go to sleep. Finn stood looking back and forth between the two of them, like a child with bickering parents. Eventually, Callan’s failing composure cracked, and he swore at her before manhandling her to her feet.

  A combination of fury at his high-handed method and pain from her shoulder pushed back the fug long enough for her to stagger to the stairs. Callan led the way down, with Finn bringing up the rear, and Jamie sandwiched between the two of them. When she snapped at Finn to give her room, Callan rounded on her.

  “If we give you room, it’s just more space for you to fall.”

  They had to stop several times during the descent as she bounced off the wall or lurched heavily into Callan. At one point she found herself sitting down on the edge of a step, with no recollection as to how she’d gotten down there.

  “Nearly there,” Callan said at least three times, but the stairwell kept twisting downward until Jamie was gripped by a resigned certainty that they would never reach the bottom, that the world had rearranged itself while they’d been up on the platform, and the steps now plunged down into the bowels of the Earth. When he grunted and said, “Last step, careful,” she felt nothing but a faint skepticism, until her foot jarred down onto the unyielding concrete, sending a jolt of agony through her.

  Callan was at her side at once. “Okay?”

  “Hardly,” she bit back. “I’ve got a bullet in my shoulder. Forgotten what it feels like?”

  “Not the kind of thing you forget. Anyway, you don’t have a bullet in there. It went straight through. Lucky for you, because I suspect my extraction skills aren’t up to the standard of yours.”

  “Great.” She leaned on him and let him help her down the steps to the boats. The sea was turning from black to silver-gray as the first thin cracks of dawn spread themselves across the sky. “So I’ve got a hole right through me.”

  “Could be worse.”

  “How?” she said, teeth gritted against the pain.

  “Sure you want me to answer that?” He nudged her toward Rena’s dinghy.

  Jamie clambered in and settled herself on the floor with her back against the rowing thwart and her eyes closed. “Can you remember what you’re doing?”

  “I’ll wake you up if we hit Norway,” he said, waiting for Finn to shuffle along the bench toward the bow before casting off.

  CHAPTER

  30

  Dominic came down to the harbor to meet them, catching the mooring rope and looping it through a ring on the little jetty. His face was calm, but Jamie could feel a tremor in his hand as he helped her off the boat.

  “Rena’s dead,” Callan said. “We’ve got the vials.”

  The monk made a quick, jerky gesture, as though he was thinking of crossing himself, but then he stopped. “Thank God.”

  “Lowry?” Callan asked.

  Jamie felt a rush of cold, like she’d been plunged back into the dark ocean. She’d forgotten Lowry. The confrontation on the platform had blocked out everything else. She waited for the monk to say, He’s fine, he’ll be fine. The moment stretched out, and then Brother Dominic shook his head. Callan rubbed his face and said “Shit,” very quietly, and then “Sorry.”

  There was a bitter edge of guilt to the grief that surged up around Jamie. She should have stayed, tried to save him. In the space of a couple of heartbeats a whole alternative scenario unwound. It was so full and clear that she felt a leap of hope. Lowry, carried by the monks into the refectory, laid out on the table. A trauma kit appearing from somewhere. No anesthetic needed—he was unconscious. And anyway, she found the bullet on her first attempt, and the bleeding eased straight away. They all looked at one another and smiled in relief, and then Lowry opened his eyes and said, “How long was I out?”

  “You couldn’t have done anything.” Brother Dominic was watching her. His voice was gentle. “His heart stopped.”

  She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. She’d never realized how close to hope regret really was. The hope that things might have been different, that somewhere else, in the vast, unfathomable universe, she’d saved Lowry, and still stopped Rena, and it hadn’t been a choice of one or the other. This wasn’t how stories like this were supposed to end.

  End? The voice was so clear that she opened her eyes to see which of the men had spoken. And then she realized it had been Lowry’s voice. Nothing ever ends. There’s always the next breath and the next.

  Her next breath was ragged and painful, but it still filled her lungs with cold, clear air, and he was right; another followed it, and another, all the way back to the refectory, where Brother Xavier was praying over Lowry’s body. The old preacher looked peaceful enough, a not-quite smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, but Jamie couldn’t quite make herself believe that this slack, abandoned skin had once been filled with Lowry’s wit and wisdom. And, as it had turned out, shame and regret.

  She breathed through gritted teeth while Brother Dominic treated the bullet wound and covered it with a sterile dressing. She breathed all the way back to Belsley, Callan steering a cautious line along the coast. And when all the explanations were done and a little of the color had returned to her stepmother’s gray, worried face, she sank into her bed and breathed her way down to a deep, troubled sleep, where dreams crowded close and Rena’s voice said, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, over and over again.

  • • •

  When she woke, the sun was already high in a clear blue sky.

  Her stepmother looked a little brighter today. “Needs must,” she said. “Can’t have two invalids in one house. Finn would be run ragged looking after us.”

  “Where is Finn?” His name brought an echo of the fear Jamie had felt as he moved toward the gun.

  No. That’s over.

  “Down on the shore with Callan. They’ve both been in and out, asking about you.” She smiled. “He loves you, you know.”

  Jamie’s heart twisted hard.

  “I don’t know whether he’d understand it if you put it in those terms,” her stepmother continued. “But don’t make the mistake of thinking that his condition means he doesn’t feel things every bit as strongly as the rest of us.”

  “His condition . . .” She stopped. “You mean Finn.”

  Her stepmother gave her a concerned look. “You don’t look quite with it. Why don’t you go back to bed?”

&nb
sp; Jamie shook her head. “I need some fresh air.”

  • • •

  Callan was on the harborside, stirring a metal bucket with a stick.

  “You’re up,” he said. “Took your time.” But she’d seen his quick glance, checking her over.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Mixing concrete. We can put the case in it, then sink it off the coast.”

  Jamie nodded slowly, turning to look out at the sea. “And what about next time?”

  “Next time?” Callan gave her a faint smile. “Next time I’d appreciate more warning if I’m expected to help save the world.”

  She shook her head, impatiently. “I mean what about all the other viruses and chemicals in labs all over the world?”

  “Rena was a one-off,” Callan said. “Most people don’t wake up one day and realize they want to destroy the world. But you’re right, I suppose. We’re living from one deadly disease to the next, or from one god-bothering megalomaniac to the next, for that matter. But we always have been. We just weren’t so aware of it. All we can do is get on with living and worry about things if they happen. Yes, the human race has left all sorts of deadly stuff scattered about the place. Biohazards, chemical poisons, radioactive waste. We can’t erase those things from the world any more than Rena could pull down the turbines.”

  Jamie nodded, thinking of her grandfather’s plastic sculptures. “I know. I just thought it would feel different. Safer.”

  “What would?”

  “Saving the world. Winning.”

  “You don’t save the world,” Callan said. “You only ever buy more time.”

  “You’re upbeat,” she said with a small smile.

  “More time,” he said. “That’s upbeat enough, isn’t it? It’s not so long since we all thought we were out of time. The next big thing could be a thousand years away, and we’ll be long past worrying about it.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “They can’t expect us to be around to stop the apocalypse every time it comes calling.”

  Was it really as simple as that? She wanted to believe him, but she had the sense of trailing ends, as though the thread of her life had frayed and finally broken.