I sat in front of the door for two days, talking to him while he grew sicker. Crying silently while he screamed from the pain and begged me to kill him. I told him stories, I told him lies, I told him the only truth I knew: that I would love him forever. I stayed with him until he took his last, gasping breath.
After that, living was little more than a habit. I became lost in my grief. I got careless. I wasn’t looking to die, but I didn’t care much for living, either. A couple of weeks after Nico passed, I allowed myself to become cornered in an airlock. There were no suits, no spare oxygen tanks, and only one way out. I’d seen what happened to folks who were caught by the living dead, and I didn’t want to die that way.
My idea was to open the hatch, blow the zombies into space without being blown out myself, and repressurize the airlock before I suffocated.
The first part of my plan worked. The second part, not so much.
NOA
WE HAD REGROUPED IN THE med suite because dying was exhausting and I didn’t want Jenny to overexert herself. “This is some bullshit,” Jenny said.
“I agree.” I was sitting as far from Ty and DJ as I could in the small room, trying not to stare at DJ but finding it difficult to avoid. I didn’t know who he was anymore. I wondered if I ever had.
DJ held up his hands, trying to regain control of the room. “I know it sounds ridiculous—”
“The part where you were living on a space station full of zombies?” Jenny asked. “Or the part where we’re all on a program and I’m not the star?”
“I promise everything will make sense when I finish, but I’ve still got a lot to tell you.” The DJ speaking now lacked the confidence of the DJ I’d spent the last few months getting to know. But I also sensed from him a feeling of relief that he didn’t have to hide anymore.
“I thought Ty was a hell of an actor,” I said. “But you clearly win the award for best performance in a drama.”
“Noa—”
“Was anything real? Was our whole relationship make-believe?” A thought occurred to me. The room contracted, breathing in and out. “Was that his outfit I woke up on this ship in? Did you dress me in your dead boyfriend’s clothes?”
“Christ, DJ,” Jenny said. “That’s sick.”
“I’m not Nico,” I said.
DJ hung his head. “No. You’re not.”
I didn’t know what to say or do. I wanted to run dramatically from the room and fling myself out of the ship, but that would have killed me and I didn’t want to die. It seemed I wasn’t the only one unsure what to say. Jenny was uncharacteristically quiet as well.
It was Ty who finally broke the silence. “Please don’t stop, DJ. You dying was the best part of that whole maudlin story, and I must know what happens next.”
“We should’ve gagged him,” Jenny said.
I glanced at the cabinets along the wall. “We still can. I’m sure there’s something in here we can use.”
Jenny swung her legs over the side of the bed and came to sit beside me. She leaned her head on my shoulder. “Do you want DJ to go on? We don’t have to do this now.”
I caught DJ’s eye. Telling the story seemed to cause him at least as much pain as it caused me to hear. So I nodded. Partly because I needed to know the whole truth. Partly because I wanted DJ to hurt.
DJ
THE SECOND TIME I WOKE up in space, I was resting on the bottom bunk of a barracks-style room that I was sharing with at least fifty other teens. I opened my eyes gasping, struggling for breath and not understanding why there was oxygen and why I could breathe. My last memory was of suffocating. Of dying. It took a moment to realize I was no longer in a vacuum. I wasn’t even on Arcas. I was thrilled to be alive, but confused about how. Thankfully, in that, I wasn’t alone.
I got up and wandered around. The overhead lights were too bright. I stumbled into a girl, who shoved me back like I’d attacked her. Kids were shouting questions into the air and flinging accusations at one another. The smell of violence filled the room the way the sharp tang of ozone heralds an oncoming storm, propelled by confusion and fear. I began herding some of the younger kids toward the walls to get them out of harm’s way.
Just when it seemed like the chaos had reached a tipping point, a sharp screech cut through the noise, and we were all suddenly too busy shielding our ears with our hands to worry about anything else. A hologram of a woman in her mid-thirties appeared at the front of the room, and the alarm stopped.
“Hi! I’m your host, Jenny Perez, whom you probably remember as the precocious kid detective and bestselling author Anastasia Darling on the award-winning mystery entertainment program Murder Your Darlings. If you’re seeing this, then you have died. Sorry about it!”
One of the boys I’d gathered around me—he looked twelve or thirteen—broke into tears. I didn’t think crying was going to do anyone much good, but I couldn’t fault him for doing it. If there was ever a situation that called for crying, we were in it.
“Welcome to the Fomalhaut Processing Center. On the surface is Fomalhaut High School, where you will attend classes, dances, and sporting events, and go about your typical teenage lives, during which time you will be assessed by Production. Your performance will determine your next placement, so do your very best!
“Refusal to participate is not an option and will earn you a spot at the Jenny Perez Reeducation Arts and Crafts Camp. Rule breaking of any kind will not be tolerated and will result in punishment. Teachers will be watching at all times, and they’re not nearly as pleasant as me. But if you do what you’re told, and put on a great show, you just might survive.
“I’m so happy we understand each other. Now, you have one hour to clean yourselves up, get dressed, and prepare for your first day of school. Good luck, students. You’ll need it!”
The hologram hadn’t explained much. If anything, I had more questions after her speech than I’d had before. But punishment sounded like something I wanted to avoid, so I followed Jenny Perez’s orders and suggested the others do the same. I took a shower. I found my schedule when I looked at my hand. There were clothes in my size in a footlocker with my name on it by the bunk I’d woken up in. I put on the first things I grabbed. I fell into the crowd and took the escalators to the surface for school.
It was surreal. I didn’t know where I was, but it looked like Earth. Blue sky, trees, clouds. Even the school buildings seemed like they’d been lifted right out of a TV show. But this wasn’t a program. Each of us remembered dying, we were all being held against our will, and our teachers were robots.
My first period was an orientation for new students where my Teacher played a video to show us what happened to anyone who broke the rules. All I’m gonna say about that is I’m glad I hadn’t eaten breakfast. What they did to anyone who got injured or sick was equally bad. Instead of punishment, they were sent for reconstruction.
I was determined to stay out of trouble, especially after a kid in my second-period class lost it, and a Teacher came in and dragged her away. Jenny Perez hadn’t been exaggerating.
For the rest of that day, I went to my classes, but I don’t remember what happened during any of them. I couldn’t help wondering if I’d died and gone to hell. The idea didn’t seem less rational than anything else I could come up with.
But I wasn’t in hell. I realized that when I spotted Nico on my second day as I was walking to third period. If Nico was there, maybe I was in heaven.
“Nico?”
When Nico saw me, he dropped his books and sprinted across the quad, shoving aside anyone who got in his way. He threw his arms around my neck and kissed me. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed since I’d last seen his beautiful smile, but it felt like it’d been forever. I melted into Nico’s arms. I cried. I sobbed so hard that other students stopped to stare.
“Hey,” he said, brushing my hair back. “Hey, it’s okay. We’re both here. We’re alive.” He kissed my forehead and led me to a quiet hall. “I need you to pull it to
gether. I’ve got to get to moral philosophy, and while Production doesn’t mind a good crying scene, they don’t care for ugly crying.”
No one cried uglier than me. My face got splotchy and my eyes bloodshot. But Nico had to understand that I was crying because I was happy and because I was scared and because I’d been there when he’d died. A maelstrom of conflicting emotions was threatening to overwhelm me.
Nico kissed me again. “We are going to be okay.”
I wanted to believe him. “What do we do now?” I asked. “How do we escape?”
“Quiet,” Nico said. “I’ll find you at lunch, but I have to get to class. You’d better go too. You don’t want to be punished. Trust me.” Before I could stop him, he slipped into the stream of students heading away from me and was gone.
Losing Nico had been the worst trauma I’d ever experienced, and that included being trapped on a space station with zombies. Finding him again was like finding a lost piece of my soul. I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the morning. It was apparently so distracting that a Teacher threatened to punish me if I didn’t stop.
True to his word, Nico tracked me down at lunch and told me he wanted to show me his favorite spot. He led me to the football field and under the bleachers. The moment we passed into the shadows, Nico kissed me until I couldn’t breathe. He wrapped his arms around my waist and kissed me like our last kiss had only been practice. He kissed me like someone who had believed he would never see me again. And when he pulled away, he had tears running down his cheeks.
“What’s going on, Nico?” I asked. “We were on Arcas and you died. I died.”
Nico brushed his lips across my knuckles. “How did you go? You didn’t get sick, did you?”
I shook my head. “Cornered in an airlock by zombies. I blew the hatch, figuring I could pressurize it when they were gone, but I guess that didn’t work out so well.” I looked around. “Or did it? Where are we?”
“I don’t know where we are, but it’s not real.” Nico huffed like he was frustrated. “It’s real in that it’s actually happening, but it’s part of a program. Sort of. Production is watching us, but only so they can decide where to use us next. They’re not actually broadcasting what happens here.”
Nothing Nico was saying made sense, and he was talking so quickly that I had to wait until he took a breath to speak. “What happened to us on that station felt pretty real to me.”
“We were secondary characters on a program called Outbreak on Arcas. Our only function was to die.” Even as Nico was saying it, I could tell he didn’t quite believe it either. “Production keeps recycling us. We get assigned to a program. When we die or outlive our storyline, they bring us to a school where we wait for our next assignment. Then they rewrite our memories with whatever character they’ve decided we’re going to play, and it starts all over again.”
“I remember my parents,” I said. “And school.”
“Those aren’t your memories.” Nico held on to my hand like it was an anchor. “There’s more.” He kept going without giving me time to absorb what he’d already said. “I’ve been talking to people, and I think they also do something to us that slows down our aging. I heard a rumor about a student who might be in her early thirties, but they just assigned her to play a high school freshman.”
My knees were too weak hold me up. I sat on the dirt, not caring what might be in it. “So this Production just wipes our memories clean and pops in some new ones?”
“It’s slightly more complicated than that,” Nico said. “They can’t change our fundamental personalities, but they can swap out our memories with memories harvested from other students and create new backstories to make us more interesting.”
“I’m not real.” It was too much to process. I felt like my brain had disconnected from my body to protect itself. “None of this is real.”
Nico was crouching beside me. He cupped my chin in his hand. “You’re real. My feelings for you are real. None of this changes that.”
“How can it not?” I asked.
“Because we are who we are now.” Nico kissed my forehead, lingering. “I love you. Do you love me?”
I nodded, unable to speak.
“Then that’s what matters.”
My entire body shook as I fell into Nico, just holding him. He was alive, which was everything I’d wanted after he’d died. But I felt like we were in the eye of a hurricane, death and destruction swirling around us.
“What do we do?” I still had a lot of questions about the school and Teachers and who Production was and how they abducted us, but those could wait.
“I’m working on that,” Nico said. “Security is tight, and I don’t know where we are. I suspect we’re on a planet or a very large ship. With your computer skills, we should be able to learn more. But we have to be careful. If Production catches us—”
“Punishment?”
Nico nodded. Fresh tears welled in his eyes. “I missed you so much.”
“No one’s ever going to separate us again, Nico. I swear it.”
Over the next few weeks, Nico and I settled into a routine. We were inseparable except when we were in class. Nico had gotten to know a few of the other students and had tried to piece together the puzzle that was our lives, but there were still bits missing that we worked together to fill in.
We learned that Fomalhaut High School was a way station where students were kept when they weren’t on an active program, during which time Production evaluated them for their next assignment. Every student we spoke to had come from somewhere strange. Joon had been surprised to wake up in a castle and discover she was a wizard in training, Carlos had been a rogue grim reaper, and Sophie and Lydia had been twins on opposite sides of a violent and bloody competition to be named their high school’s valedictorian. But most of the students at Fomalhaut High were there because they’d died on their program. Gloria had been the girlfriend of a young woman whose best friend was a girl named Charlie, who was destined to save the world from an unspeakable evil. Gloria had been stabbed in a random act of violence. Alfie died when he fell through the ice trying to reach his best friend, Winter, on whom he’d had an unrequited crush for years. Nara had died when their car was run off the road by an assassin who had mistaken them for someone else. Then there was Lexi, who’d sacrificed her life to help a vampire regain his conscience. Most of the stories were similar. Most students had been secondary characters who, at best, had died to serve as the emotional motivation for someone else, or at worst, had died for no real reason at all.
“This is where they bury their gays,” Nico said after I told him about Lexi. We were eating lunch under the bleachers because, other than the showers, it was the only place we were safe from the prying eyes of Teachers and Production. “We’re disposable to them. Nothing but filler bitches.”
It did seem that everyone at Fomalhaut had been a background character in someone else’s story, but that wasn’t my biggest concern. “Who is Production?” I asked. “How’s any of this legal?”
Nico snorted. “Legal? Are you planning to demand a lawyer?”
“No, but—”
“I don’t care who Production is or about exposing their big evil plan. We need to remain focused on escaping this nightmare.”
Nico was right. Escape remained our primary goal, and he’d come up with a plan. I’d finally managed to gain access to a computer and had learned that we were on an asteroid. The top level was the school, with a dome to hold in the atmosphere and provide the illusion of sky; the second level contained a mall, where students socialized after classes; the third level included the barracks where we slept; and the lower level was heavily secured—students were not authorized to enter. While digging through the computer, I also found out that ships regularly docked with Fomalhaut, dropping off students who died on their programs and transporting students who’d been reassigned by Production to their new shows. Sometimes the ships remained docked for a few days. Nico figured our best chanc
e off the rock was to steal a ship while it was empty. But that was easier said than done. Production monitored our movements, and the loading docks were located on the lower level. We wouldn’t make it down the escalator before being intercepted by a Teacher. It seemed an impossible task, but Nico was undeterred.
“How are we going to do this?” I asked.
Nico leaned his head against my shoulder and sighed. “I don’t know, but we’re smart. We’ll figure it out.”
I frowned at him.
“Fine,” he said. “You’re smart.”
Even if he was right, I wasn’t sure I wanted to escape. Our life wasn’t perfect, but we had each other and I was scared of risking that. It had been different for Nico because he’d died first. He hadn’t been the one left alone on Arcas. He wasn’t the one who’d had to listen to the person he loved suffer in agony as they died. Even when he woke up at Fomalhaut without me, he at least had the comfort of knowing that I was alive. Losing Nico had carved that fear into my bones. It had left indelible scars on my heart. I could think of nothing worse than losing Nico again.
Nico was never going to give up, though. He just wasn’t wired to quit.
Besides, eventually Production would assign us to a new program, and I doubted they’d keep us together. They’d rip out our memories and fill our heads with new ones, and the next time I saw Nico, he wouldn’t recognize me. I’d been serious about never leaving him again, so I redoubled my efforts and eventually found the solution.
Buried deep within the command structure of the operating system that controlled the entire facility was a maintenance program that would reboot all of the robots simultaneously. The upside was that it would clear the way for Nico and me to get to the docks, find a ship, and steal it. The downside was that we would only have two minutes to accomplish our task.
I wanted to tell some of our friends. Help as many of them escape as we could. Nico convinced me that it would be difficult enough with just the two of us, but that we’d definitely fail if we had to shepherd ten or twenty or thirty others. Our best bet was to keep the plan to ourselves, escape, and then find a way to help those we’d left behind. We only made one exception.
A Complicated Love Story Set in Space Page 25