by Rachel Bach
“Going out?” I asked, though the answer was painfully clear.
“Just for a bit,” Caldswell replied, putting on his gloves as he walked past me and down the cargo bay stairs. “And you can stop making that face, Morris. You’re not coming.”
Relief washed over me. Neither my suit nor I like snow. But the feeling left just as quickly when I realized this meant the captain would be going out alone. I followed him down to the cargo bay while I tried to work out a way to tell him how stupid that was without getting yelled at. In the end, though, I didn’t have to say anything, because Rashid beat me to it.
“You’re not seriously considering going out in that, are you, sir?”
My new partner was standing at attention at the bottom of the stairs in his tactical armor with his pistols at his hips, every inch the good soldier, but the expression on his face was anything but obedient. “It’s thirty below with no visibility. That is killing weather. To take a child out in such—”
“I take my daughter anywhere I please,” Caldswell said without missing a beat. He walked to the cargo bay door and hit the button to release the lock before looking pointedly at me. “We’re meeting a contact. It shouldn’t take more than two hours. I want you to keep everyone on the ship and in position. Basil has orders to take off as soon as we get back.”
“Yes sir,” I said. That wouldn’t be hard. Other than Caldswell and whatever insane contact he was meeting out here, I didn’t think anyone would be crazy enough to go out in this weather. I was just glad we weren’t staying long. The ice was still pelting the Fool’s hull like it was the back wall at a firing range, and even though I could see on my suit that the ship’s internal temperature hadn’t changed, just knowing the snow was out there made me feel wet and cold to my bones. The sooner we left this place, the happier I’d be.
Rashid didn’t look like anything would make him happy, but he didn’t fight the captain again. When it was clear there would be no more questions, Caldswell hit the switch to open the cargo bay. The new door slid open with a soft rumble, and as the seal cracked, a blast of snow billowed in, dropping a foot of white stuff on the floor before the door had opened halfway. Caldswell shook his head at the snowdrift that was building in the middle of his cargo bay before pulling his scarf down from his mouth. “And clean this up!” he yelled.
“Yes sir,” I grumbled, cutting on my suit’s heaters. Rashid, whose suit was too thin to have heaters, made do with folding his arms tighter over his chest and glowering.
Caldswell pulled his scarf back up and marched down the ramp, which was already covered in a thick sheet of ice. His daughter walked behind him, fitting her feet into the large holes left by Caldswell’s boots. The cook went last.
By this point I was standing by the door with my hand on the switch, ready to close up the cargo bay and cut off the snow the second Caldswell’s group was through. Considering my position, I’d thought my intention was obvious, but the cook clearly didn’t understand that having three feet of snow in your ship was a bad thing, because he stopped on the threshold. He was so buried in coats, I could actually look at him without feeling too bad, and I used this temporary immunity to glare a warning. When he still didn’t move, I opened my mouth to tell him to get the lead out, but the words died in my throat, because that was when he turned and stared straight at me.
I was in my suit with my visor down, looking at him through my cameras. Even so, his gaze cut right through me, and the revulsion stabbed me like a blade. I looked away at once, furious. I hated when he did that. But though my head was turned, I could still see the cook through my side camera, and that was how I caught the way he was looking at me.
Once before, when I’d first woken up on Falcon 34, the cook had looked at me with a strange mix of loss and triumph. The look he gave me now was much the same, only there was no triumph this time. When he stared at me now, all I saw was sadness, like he’d lost something precious. I had no idea why he would look at me like that. He’d made it clear back on Wuxia that he hated me. But as his eyes bored into me, I suddenly had the strangest feeling that I’d forgotten something. Something important.
“Charkov!”
The cook and I both jumped, and I looked to see the captain standing at the bottom of the ramp, glaring murder. “Let’s go.”
The cook turned without a word, walking down the icy ramp delicately as a cat despite his heavy boots. The moment he was out of the way, I hit the door. But as the metal slid into place, closing off the freezing wind, I couldn’t help one last look.
The cook and the captain were both facing away from me now, walking off into the snow with Ren between them. But though neither man was looking at me anymore, Ren was. She was staring over her shoulder, her head turned straight toward me at a painful angle. When she saw me looking, her dark eyes pinned on mine, and she pulled her scarf down to shoot me a smile.
I’d seen Ren smile only once, back in the lounge when I’d first realized she could also see the floating, glowing bugs I’d thought were hallucinations. Now as then, her smile was terrifying, so much so that I took a step back. That only made Ren smile wider, and she watched me like a predator until the closing cargo door hid her behind a wall of steel and ice.
“I cannot believe he would take a child into such weather.”
Rashid’s voice made me jump. I’d been so caught up in Ren, I hadn’t realized he was right behind me until he’d spoken.
“What does he think he is doing?” Rashid snapped, glaring at the closed cargo door like he could burn a hole in it with his disdain. “I don’t care whom they’re meeting, it is suicidally foolish to go out in such weather.”
“The captain does as the captain does,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t even care about the weather anymore. All I wanted to do was go hide somewhere Ren’s smile couldn’t find me.
Fortunately, the crazy impulse passed, helped along by the fact that we had a cargo bay full of quickly melting snow to deal with. “All right,” I said, walking purposefully over to the closet where Mabel kept the big brooms. “Let’s clear this avalanche out before it melts and we have to deal with a flood instead.”
After his surliness, I expected an argument, but Rashid did exactly as I asked. We swept all the snow into a big pile at the bay’s center, and then, since opening the door again would only let in more, we piled the frozen stuff into ten-gallon buckets and hauled it over to the ship’s water tank. By the time the cargo bay was clear, our water was topped off and my arms were aching even in my suit.
But bad as I was, Rashid’s suit had no motors to help him. By the time we emptied the last barrel, he looked ready to fall over, so I sent him to the bridge to rest up and keep an eye on the external cameras. I should have gone back on patrol—this was still a hostile planet after all—but there didn’t seem to be much point to being on guard when we were sitting with no cargo on an ice ball that even scientists wouldn’t live on. But I couldn’t bring myself to slack openly, so I grabbed a mop and started swabbing up the water the snow had left behind.
I told myself I was performing a vital service for the safety of the ship. After all, if the floor was wet when the door opened again, it would freeze solid, leaving us with an ice rink. That was a nice cover story, but the truth was, the mopping was busywork, something legitimate looking that didn’t require real attention. That I saved for my footage of what had happened at the door.
My cameras had caught everything. I didn’t dare look at the cook’s face directly, even on a recording, but I didn’t have to. Just like when I’d woken up in the medbay, his expression was seared into my mind. I didn’t know why my brain cared so much about the stupid man, but it seemed like I was stuck with him. All I could do was shove the horrible feeling that I’d forgotten something aside and focus on what was really bothering me: Caldswell’s daughter.
The captain couldn’t have seen Ren’s smile from where he was standing, and from the way the cook had been watching the frozen gro
und under his feet, I was betting he hadn’t either. Her smile had been just for me, but why? What did the captain’s crazy daughter want?
I was alone in the cargo bay, so I raised my visor and glanced around surreptitiously. To my great relief, I didn’t see a thing. I hadn’t seen a glowing bug for a while, actually, not since the one Ren had also seen in the lounge. My private theory was that the knock on the head that had taken my memories had also fixed whatever it was that made me see the hallucinations, which would make it the only good part of the whole mess as far as I was concerned. Then again, whatever the things were, I knew I couldn’t see them through my cameras, so there was always the chance that they had been around and I’d just missed them. I had my visor up now, though, and I still saw nothing, but it was starting to be less of a comfort.
I leaned on my mop with a frustrated sigh. The more I thought about it, the less I understood why I found Ren’s smile so scary. Other than the night she’d smiled at me in the lounge, I couldn’t actually remember her doing anything threatening, but thinking about her definitely increased the feeling that I’d forgotten something. I ground my teeth, trying to force my stupid brain to remember. There had to be a reason I was so afraid of her; what was it? What had I forgotten?
I was still trying to figure this out when the hand grabbed my spine.
I shot bolt upright. From the lack of horrible pain, I knew there was no way a hand could actually be grabbing my spine, but that was exactly what it felt like. Five fingers and a palm, wrapped around the vertebrae just below my neck. I could even feel the fingers moving inside me, readjusting to get a better grip.
My shock had been enough to flip my suit into combat mode, but when my vitals flashed up, I didn’t see anything wrong. My suit had no breaches, and though the panic had elevated my heart rate, I was otherwise fine. I didn’t see anything behind me through my rear cameras either. I was about to flip my visor back down and do a full scan when a soft, feminine voice whispered in my mind.
Come.
As the word finished, the hand on my spine jerked, and I popped out of my body like a shucked pea.
CHAPTER 3
When the hand on my spine let go, I was no longer on the ship.
I wasn’t even in my armor, just the thin shirt and pants I’d been wearing under it, which was pretty sad coverage against the blizzard I was standing in. Snow was blowing so thickly I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of my nose. My legs were buried to the knees in it, and I could feel even more beneath my bare feet. For all of this, though, I wasn’t cold. I was pretty comfortable, actually, except for my right hand, which hurt like someone was squeezing my fingers in a vise. I looked down in alarm, jerking my hand back at the same time only to find I couldn’t. Ren was standing beside me, and my hand was crushed in hers.
I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in nine years of armored combat, but I was now officially out of my depth. The captain’s daughter wasn’t wearing the heavy coat I’d seen her leave the ship in twenty minutes ago. Instead, she was dressed in a white cotton hospital gown that tied at her sides. Her feet were bare like mine, but she was standing on top of the drift rather than in it, perched on the crested snow like a bird. Other than that, though, she looked normal: same blank expression, her dark hair hanging still just above her shoulders despite the howling wind. Even her eyes were focused with the same insane attention they had when she was playing her game, only now, instead of staring at a chessboard, Ren was staring at me.
I stepped back instinctively, and then yelped when her hand tightened on mine so hard my joints popped. The pain sent a clear message, and I stopped trying to get away, shuffling back to her side. The grip eased up with every inch I neared. By the time I was standing next to her, our locked hands were almost friendly.
I glanced down at thin clothes and then up again at the howling blizzard that wasn’t wet or cold. And then, because it was obvious that this was a dream, I asked, “What’s going on?”
Instead of answering, Ren just tilted her head, her dark eyes sliding past me. When I turned to follow her gaze, I realized we were no longer alone. Three figures were trudging out of the storm behind me, climbing a steep slope I hadn’t seen under all the snow. They were little more than shadows in the blizzard, but I could see enough to make out the shapes of two men and a child.
After that, it was pretty obvious. Caldswell, Ren, and the cook reached the top of the slope and walked past us without a glance. I watched them until they vanished into the snow again, and then I took a deep breath of the snowy air I couldn’t taste or feel and closed my eyes, trying to will myself to wake up. If I was dreaming, then I must have nodded off in my suit, which meant I needed to wake myself back up as soon as possible. If Basil caught me snoozing on the job, I would never hear the—
Watch.
I almost jumped out of my skin. The word wasn’t a sound. It was a thought, a sharp command that slid through my mind like freezing water, and my eyes popped open to see Ren staring at me.
Standing on top of the snowdrift, she was actually a little taller than I was. She used the height to her advantage, staring down at me until I couldn’t look away. When she had my utter and undivided attention, the captain’s daughter turned and started walking over the snow toward the trampled path Caldswell’s group had left, dragging me behind her.
It was awkward as hell trying to walk through drifts when the person you’re trying to keep up with could walk on top of them. I floundered in the deep snow, tripping over hidden rocks and holes every few steps. By the time we reached the path the captain and the others had trodden down, my legs were burning and I was out of breath. I was pretty damn sick of this dream, too, but I couldn’t wake up. I’d even tried stumbling deliberately in the hopes that the fall would do it, but all I’d gotten for my trouble was a mouthful of snow I couldn’t even taste.
By the time I gave in and let Ren lead me, we’d caught up with the captain. I hadn’t noticed before, thanks to the blizzard, but the flat spot we were standing on was actually a plateau nestled in the lee of a taller mountain. Caldswell was at the edge of the cliff where the mountain began to climb again, stomping down the snow in front of what looked like a metal door set into the rock itself.
I rolled my eyes. Leave it to me to dream about bunkers, but at least I’d dreamed up a solid one. The door was heavy enough to take a cannon blast, and now that I was looking for them, I could see little slits set high in the stone beside it, perfect for ventilation and shooting down at an enemy from cover. Not that there would ever be anyone to shoot at out in this wilderness.
When he was done clearing a space to stand, Caldswell walked up to the heavy door and knocked politely, like he was a neighbor come over to pay his respects. I didn’t think whoever was inside would be able to hear such a soft sound over the gale, but I was wrong, because the door opened immediately, the heavy metal slab swinging inward to reveal a large, dark room.
From where we were standing, I could see that the bunker stretched back into the mountain for quite a ways, but I didn’t want to see any more. The moment the lock on the door clicked open, a painful knot of dread formed in my stomach. Dream or not, I did not want to go into that dark room.
But my opinion didn’t matter. Caldswell was going in, and Ren, both the bundled up one I’d seen leaving the ship and the barefoot one with the death grip on my hand, was following him. I tried digging in my heels, but while I could easily have lifted the real Ren over my head even without my suit, dream Ren was strong as a cargo loader. I kept fighting anyway, straining with all my strength until Ren looked over her shoulder.
Don’t fight. Watch.
Her face was blank as always, her mouth still, but I felt each word like a slap across my mind. I was still smarting from it when she yanked me forward, dragging me the last few inches through the bunker door, which had already closed. We passed through the heavy steel like ghosts, and I found myself standing right beside the cook.
He was so close,
the fog of his breath mixed with mine. I gritted my teeth in preparation for the revulsion, but it didn’t come. Confused, I blinked hard and looked again, but the result was the same. The inexplicable nausea was gone.
For a moment, I felt elated, and then I remembered that this was a dream. Still, I wasn’t one to waste opportunities, real or not, and I took the chance to actually look at the cook properly for the first time.
To my surprise, he was worth looking at. Even buried under the coats, his body looked tall and graceful. His pale skin was reddened from the cold, but the blush only accented his sleek black hair and blue eyes. If I hadn’t caught him trying to kick me off the ship yesterday, I would have called him handsome.
I was so busy studying the cook, I didn’t realize the bunker was already occupied until I heard the scrape of boots on the cement floor. A man and a woman were standing on the other side of the bunker from the door where we had come in. They were bundled in the same heavy coats as the captain and the cook, and they held themselves like soldiers. Between them was a smaller figure so wrapped up in winter gear I couldn’t see anything until she raised her head. When she did, though, I wished to the king she’d left it down, because the girl standing between the strangers like a shy child between her parents was Ren.
Even covered in coats, there was no doubting it was her, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised. None of this made sense, anyway. Why not throw in another Ren? This made three of them now: Caldswell’s Ren, the barefoot Ren who’d been dragging me around, and the new girl.
No one else in the room seemed to notice my Ren. Or me, for that matter. They could clearly see one another, though, and none of them looked weirded out in the slightest by the two identical girls. In fact, the pair who’d been waiting in the bunker seemed more intimidated by Caldswell than his daughter. They snapped to attention the moment the captain looked up, and the woman, a tall, wiry lady with straight dark hair, gave him a sharp salute.