Saving Mars

by Cidney Swanson

Echoes of Lucca’s threats, the obvious ones and the veiled ones, replayed in his mind. It doesn’t matter, you see, whether you pick it up or not. Someone will, in the end. Clearly, it didn’t matter to her purposes whether or not Pavel agreed to become the next Head of Global Consciousness Transfer. Lucca would select (and use according to her purposes) the successor for the position, even if Pavel refused the job.

  He thought of her other threat: to condemn an entire test-group to manual labor sentences if he chose to refuse her. It was criminal. Unthinkable. How could he have so blinded himself to her character? Pavel felt suddenly exhausted. He sank into a squashy and dilapidated armchair he’d kept from his first home. He remembered his father reading stories to him in this chair. Stories where there were good guys and bad guys and no confusion as to which was which. But Pavel felt confused. And hungry. And tired.

  His thoughts drifted back to the girl with red hair. Where was she now?

  It didn’t matter. He couldn’t help her. Lucca had him trapped.

  His mind retraced the same dead-end paths over and over. You’ll think better with something in your stomach, he told himself at last. He’d skipped breakfast and lunch and hadn’t eaten much last night, either. And he’d skipped sleeping, mostly. Well, he wanted the chance to say goodbye and thank you to Talia. Rising, he crossed to a wall-screen and keyed in an order for food.

  A few minutes later, Pavel heard Zussman’s obsequious knock at his door. Opening it, Pavel asked where Talia was.

  “I’m afraid I had to let her go,” said Zussman.

  “Why?” demanded Pavel.

  “I don’t like to say, sir,” said Zussman. “Shall we leave it at … didn’t live up to expectations, sir?”

  Pavel stared at the platter of eggs, cold ham and cheeses spread before him. “Thank you, Zuss. I’m sorry I troubled you. I could have come down if I’d known …”

  “Not at all, sir,” said the butler. “Will that be all, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  Dark thoughts clouded Pavel’s mind as Zussman closed the door silently.

  “She fired Talia for no reason,” he murmured, pressing one hand against his forehead.

  But he knew the reason. Knew it with certainty. His aunt had fired Talia as a way of showing Pavel that she would follow through on her other threat as well. He stared at the platter of food and found he no longer felt hungry.

  Pavel would let Lucca think she’d won, but only until he could come up with a way to outwit her. Gathering the tray, he carried it downstairs where Lucca was completing a conversation—an angry conversation—by conference call.

  Pavel placed the tray upon the counter, carefully putting away every item himself, waiting for his aunt to remark that the work was beneath him. But she’d evidently decided against engaging in further arguments.

  “I’ll go to the hospital,” he said.

  She smiled, but the expression just missed her cold eyes. “There’s my bright boy. Doctor Suleiman will be expecting us.”

  “I’ll go alone,” he said.

  Lucca pressed her thin lips together. “Very well.”

  “And I want you to make sure Talia finds another job. A good job. It’s important to me that we start this new portion of my life on the right footing.”

  “Easily done,” said his aunt. “You’ll find, Pavel, I can be very reasonable. So long as you are reasonable.”

  Her words sent a chill whispering across the back of his neck as he turned to go.

  “Make me proud,” she said. The words sounded simple. Pavel knew they weren’t. He anticipated her follow-up words before he heard them.

  “I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” she said.

  And I on you, thought Pavel.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  AN EXPERIENCED PHYSICIAN

  Jessamyn awoke to a mechanical buzzing sound. After a bleary moment of thinking herself in her snug Galleon quarters, she jolted upright. How long had she slept? As she struggled to read her chrono-tattoo, cold terror filled her belly. She’d lost thirteen hours! She shook her head to the side.

  “Ethan!” The earpiece reported the same whirs and beeps as before.

  “We’re finally awake, are we?” asked a new nurse, bustling into the room. “You slept right through the other times I buzzed your door. Let’s just see that arm, shall we?”

  Gently, the nurse turned Jessamyn’s cocooned arm and pointed to a soft green light. “Monitor says your cast is ready to come off.” She smiled brightly, as though this were exceptional news.

  “Good,” murmured Jessamyn, certain it wasn’t at all good.

  “Doctor will be here in a minute. Would you like pain medication for the removal?” asked the nurse. “It tends to grab every little hair on your arms when it comes off.”

  “No,” said Jessamyn sharply. “No meds.” She needed her wits about her.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” said the nurse. “You’re not going to get an experienced doctor on this shift. I strongly suggest an analgesic.”

  Jessamyn wondered if she could buy some time. “In that case, I’ll wait for an experienced physician.”

  The nurse gave Jessamyn a half-smile. “I’m sorry. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but once Security gets involved …” She shook her head. “From their perspective, it looks highly suspicious, your having no identification, unable to recall your physician’s name, no relatives who can vouch for your identity. In this kind of climate, security gets to scan you as soon as it is medically possible.”

  Jess felt her stomach lurch. She wasn’t ready—she hadn’t worked out a plan yet.

  “The doctor will be with you shortly,” said the nurse, walking to the door. “And dearie? Your fourbody is lovely. Now see that you take good care of it.” She winked as she left the room.

  Jess hopped off the table, opening drawers, cupboards, searching for anything she might use to overpower the physician when he or she arrived. She didn’t recognize most of what she saw, and what she did recognize looked useless.

  “Gauze,” she muttered. “Great. I can mummify my doctor.”

  Then she remembered her pack and grabbed out the med-patches Pavel had given her. She was just reading through the labeling, searching for one marked as a narcotic, when she heard another door-buzz sound.

  The door swung open, revealing a young man. Jessamyn gasped when she saw his face.

  It was Pavel.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  THE WORLD SEEMED TO SHRINK

  Pavel.

  That was her first thought. But it was followed quickly by an absolute revulsion for the practice that landed a new person inside a body that looked so kind, felt so familiar. Her mouth pinched; her face hardened into icy planes.

  That is not Pavel, she told herself, it’s his body with someone else inside. She couldn’t look at his face—yesterday the face of a friend in an alien world. Within a space hidden deep inside, she grieved, realizing how very much she would have liked to have been his friend. The boy who would never have the chance to pilot among the stars. The boy who, even now, must be struggling to figure out how to live inside someone else’s fifty-four-year-old body while she sat in a room with the body he no longer called his own.

  “Did you let them scan you?” asked Pavel’s voice.

  His exact voice! Jessamyn had expected it would sound different when worn by someone else.

  She swallowed. “I’m not ready to have my cast removed. Allow me to go home and I’ll retrieve … proper identification.”

  “Jess?” said not-Pavel. “Jess, it’s me, Pavel.”

  She glanced at his name tag.

  His eyes flicked to the name as well: Junior Doctor Yu-Arno. “Oh, that. It’s a complete scam. You were right about not telling my aunt anything.”

  She maintained her silence. Icy. Wary.

  “C’mon, Jess. You’ve got to talk to me. Are you in trouble? Who do the secures outside think you are?”

  Whoever he was, he seemed t
o know who she was.

  In a whisper, she spoke. “You’re not Pavel anymore.”

  His smile turned grim as he passed one of the silver instruments from the tray over her left arm. “Yeah, well, turns out I am. My aunt fixed the exam. She’s … She’s not who I thought she was.” His voice dropped. “I should have seen it years ago.”

  Jessamyn’s cast, cradled against Pavel’s arm, responded to the gadget in his other hand. The white layers unwound themselves, pinching each small hair on her arm as the nurse had promised. She winced.

  Pavel’s eyes filled with concern. “Sorry about the hair-tweezing. I didn’t want to medicate you.”

  “It’s nothing,” she said. And compared to the pain of seeing Pavel, but not knowing if it was Pavel, the pinching on her arm was nothing.

  “Five questions, Jess. I got my apprenticeship after five questions out of a potential nine-hundred. It’s like she wasn’t even trying to hide what she’d done.” Pavel grabbed the last strands from Jessamyn’s forearm as the cast fell away. “They cheat the system. Lucca and all her colleagues. They’re not transferring me because I’m too valuable to them inside this body.”

  “Prove you’re Pavel,” said Jessamyn.

  “Um. Okay.” He licked his lips, stared at the wall behind her. At the floor. At the ceiling. “I loaned you my bike yesterday. A 400 series. You drove it.”

  Jessamyn shook her head. Not good enough.

  “Shizer, Jess. What do you mean, ‘prove I’m me?’”

  “Terran Security could be … using your body to get information from me. You all think I’m a terrorist trying to blow up this hospital. Don’t you.” She didn’t inflect the last words as a question.

  Pavel gazed at Jessamyn’s arm, still cradled in his. He ran his free hand gently along her pale, thin arm. “I don’t think you’re an inciter, Jess. I believed you when you said you came here from …” He stopped speaking and formed the name with his mouth, soundlessly: Mars.

  A tightening in Jessamyn’s stomach warned her that this was either very good or very bad. Her own voice a bare whisper, Jess asked a question she thought only the true Pavel could answer. “Tell me what you want to do when you retire.”

  His mouth curved up on one side. “Last night I told you I wished I could re-open space for travel. Right now, though, all I can think of is how I want to help you. Help your people. Keep you all from starving. That would be a tragedy of—” He paused, searching for the word. “Of … tragic proportions.”

  Jess grunted a small laugh.

  “You eat butter like it’s food,” said Pavel, taking her hand in his, “And decorative kale, too. And you kissed me at midnight.”

  Their eyes met. Jess felt a flutter in her stomach that had nothing to do with escape.

  “You had a brother you loved very much,” whispered Pavel.

  Loved? Jess struggled for breath at his use of the past tense.

  “I’m so sorry,” murmured Pavel. “I tried to intervene … to slow things or delay his transfer … but politicians got involved and …” He broke off, brows pulled together, gazing at her arm. “Those extra years on his body are too valuable. They’re spending time re-mineralizing his bones, replacing his blood, and then they’ll release him to someone important. Probably the viceroy, from what I hear. Your brother’s under special guard. It’s not going to be possible—I’m so sorry.”

  You will not cry you will not cry you will not cry. And she realized she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. She was frozen, like Mars’s soil. She was made of ice. No tears would melt from her.

  “How do I get out of here?” she asked in a low voice. That was all that mattered. Her broken heart was inconsequential. Only getting food back to her starving world mattered now. “Help me escape.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Pavel said. “Your face is plastered all over screens in the hospital with ‘Is this your patient?’ written underneath. As soon as I noticed, I came, saying you were my patient.”

  Turning, he used his scan chip to open a drawer with wicked looking blades. Blades Jess would have wanted, minutes ago.

  “What are you doing?” asked Jess, looking suspiciously at the sharp blade.

  “Replacing your chip with one from general reclamation,” he said, squeezing a line of green-goo across her wrist, exactly where Brian Wallace had inserted her chip. “Feel this?” he asked, pinching her wrist.

  “No,” said Jessamyn. “I can’t feel anything.”

  Pavel nodded. “A bunch of us did this when we were twelve. Told you I was a law-breaker,” he said, grinning.

  Jess didn’t return the smile. She couldn’t.

  “Reclam-chips are only good until the next database update,” continued Pavel. “They happen twice a day. You’ve got one good scan, for sure. We’ll use it to get you past the security officer out there, but I wouldn’t suggest using it a second time. I’m going to remove your right hand chip as well. You don’t want to have two chips if … if anything goes wrong.”

  Jess nodded her permission.

  A fine line of red bloomed in the wake of Pavel’s knife. He grabbed a swab from the counter which stopped the bleeding. Choosing a pair of micro-tweezers from the tray beside him, he retrieved the chip from the incision site.

  “Here it is,” said Pavel, removing the dangerous chip that tied her to Harpreet and Ethan and the satellite facility.

  Pavel set the reclam-chip on a computer. “Are you still good?” he asked in a low murmur. He ran his fingers along the screen like she’d seen Ethan do a thousand times. The familiarity of the motion sliced like a wound through her chest, and she had to look away.

  Pavel grunted in satisfaction and took Jessamyn’s wrist once again.

  “Why are you helping me?” she asked as he inserted the reclamation chip and sealed her skin.

  “Your planet deserves a chance,” said Pavel. “I can’t trust what my aunt would do with the information that Mars Colonial is alive and well. So that leaves me to help.”

  There was a something too-casual in the way he said it. Recognition sparked and bounded in Jessamyn’s heart: He’s doing it for me. He just didn’t want to admit it aloud. Jess understood. What was the use of putting words to her own feelings for Pavel? Their worlds divided them.

  He reached for her right wrist and repeated the removal procedure. Then he grabbed a device Jess thought looked familiar.

  “A heat-healer,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “We used to use them—the first Marsians used them—to remove wrinkles.”

  “And now you don’t?” asked Pavel, erasing the scar from her other wrist.

  Jess shook her head. “Wrinkles mean you’ve survived. And you’ve got to be smart to survive on Mars.” She reached up to the space between her brows, on the bridge of her nose. “I think I’ll get my First Wrinkle here. Soon.” She pushed away the thought of celebrating the occasion without her brother.

  But the thought of Ethan opened a tiny door through which desperate notions crept. Crazy rescue schemes. Impossible ideas. She imagined herself throwing smoke-bombs down corridors. Disabling the power grid for the hospital. Using armor-piercing weapons to take down the secures guarding her brother.

  Jessamyn gave herself a mental shake. She didn’t know how to do any of those things. She couldn’t even pick the right hospital gown for a successful disguise. If she tried to strong-arm herself to her brother’s side, she’d end up dead. Or captured. Either way, Mars would starve because Crusty couldn’t guide the ship back home alone.

  She had to leave her brother and the others. They were trapped on Earth, but Jessamyn would be free, thanks to Pavel. She couldn’t throw that freedom away. The realization cut deep, deep inside her, sundering what felt like tendon from bone.

  You will survive, she told herself. You must.

  “I was so worried,” said Pavel, “When I saw your brother’s body still here and no sign of you.”

  Jessamyn pushed aside the feelings of
tenderness Pavel’s words awakened within her. Twisting forward, she jumped off the bed and tested her wrist. She couldn’t tell that her arm had been hurt earlier. She had a second chance.

  “Jessamyn,” said Pavel. “Please tell me you know a lost cause when you see it.”

  He meant Ethan, of course. She nodded, her heart fracturing yet again at the thought of leaving her brother. There seemed to be no upper limit to the number of times a heart could be re-broken.

  “I’m going home,” she said simply.

  He fumbled inside a shirt pocket. “Take this,” he said, presenting her with a plastic stick. “It’s a bit old-fashioned, but it works as good as a scan chip for getting you a transport from the government motor pool. I’m messaging Aunt Lucca that I’m flying down to the Cape of Good Hope this morning. Log a flight plan that direction and then you can change course later.”

  “The Cape of Good Hope,” said Jessamyn, nodding. She liked the way the words sounded—she needed hope.

  “I don’t want to know where you’re really going,” Pavel added quickly.

  Her mouth pulled into half a smile. “Because you’re worthless under Equidima.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “I’ll see you out of the building.”

  The two moved toward the door, side by side. Pavel raised his hand to deactivate the door lock, but before he could touch the pad, Jessamyn took his face in her hands and kissed him, hard. All the world seemed to shrink down to the one place where her lips crushed upon his and she wanted to live in the moment forever.

  But she pulled away and pointed to the door lock pad, eyes bright with unshed tears.

  Outside the room, the security officer on duty was someone new.

  “Stop!” he barked. “I need a chip scan on this unidentified person.”

  Jess’s heart sped up.

  Pavel, hands on his hips, looked the security officer in the eyes. “My patient would be happy to provide that,” he said calmly.

  As the officer scanned Jessamyn’s ID, her heart pounded wildly—she was sure the secure would detain her. But he merely nodded to indicate she could leave now. With Pavel at her side, Jess walked away free. She felt the warmth of Pavel’s kiss lingering on her lips. But as she rode the elevator at his side, in silence, the wet-sweet taste of his mouth faded. By the time they reached the exit doors, the kiss seemed a lifetime away. It was something that had happened to a girl Jessamyn knew once.