by Harn, Darby
I’ve always known.
Vidette paces the pebbled roof. “We need you.”
“I can’t let them use her to hurt me.”
“There was nothing else to the message?”
I bite my lip. “Nothing.”
“I don’t know, Kit.” Vidette’s lips tighten. “Could anyone have tampered with that thing since you’ve had it?”
“Who would tamper with it? How? It’s coded.”
“Someone is trying to manipulate you. They’re trying to get you off the board the best way they know how.”
“It’s from the space station, Piller said so. It’s her voice.” My chest tightens. All my thoughts constrict. “I’ve had this thing for awhile. She could have been in trouble, this whole time. She could be – I have to go right now.”
“Go,” she says. “I’ll keep watch.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
She smiles. “I won’t wait for you.”
All the fear and anxiety pent up within me releases and I rocket into the sky. Birds helix after me, biting at me, clawing at me to hold on, their tiny legs scurrying, skipping, seeking as if they want into the mosaic of my shimmer, as if they want to become something other than what they are. The birds fall behind. The air thins. I don’t need air. Steam plumes around me as I leave the warmth of the world. I don’t need warmth. The needle of my body becomes a noodle, my arms and legs loosened without gravity. I don’t need gravity. Nothing can hold me now, nothing can hold me back and high above the ground, so high the Earth is the water at the bottom of a well glittered with drowning fireflies, I find what I’ve been looking up for.
Space is this shiny kind of dark, like the vinyl of a record. A faint point of light manifests ahead. The light grows brighter, larger, until it resolves in the copper sheen of the Laputa’s massive solar panels. I want to scream. I can’t. I want to vomit. I can’t. Probably for the best.
Satellites streak above and below, so fast they blur. One or two close enough to wobble out of their trajectories as they snag in my magnetic field. Security drones swarm around the station. Decoy flares fire in all directions, hoping to confuse me but there’s no altering my course. The magnesium flares burn bright as they fall toward popcorn in a blue bowl and I crash hard against the station’s command module.
I tumble across the polyhedral arrangement of modules, my hands searching for anything to grab onto and I seize on the aluminum comprising the station. My momentum slows and I float along the exterior of the command module, until I come to the airlock. Once upon a time, I didn’t have the nerve to knock on a girl’s door. I’m always overcompensating. I twist the like handle until the hatch unlocks. Red light blinks inside. I lock the hatch behind me. Air floods into the small, sterile room and after a moment, that flashing red turns a steady green.
“That just happened,” I say.
I spin the wheel on the inner hatch. Again, red light flashes inside the station. Bleeding Jesus. What have I done? I’ve exposed the module to the vacuum. I close the hatch behind me, leaning against the door with all my weight. No green. There’s probably a manual in the archive I could have read.
Probably should have checked to see if there was a manual.
An electronic voice drones inside. “Intruder alert.”
Valene has to be somewhere within, holding her ears against the din. No matter what I do, I’m always trespassing on her. I’m always disturbing her peace. Why did I come; what did I hope to accomplish barging in on her like this. I came to save her life and no doubt a volley of GP security forces are about to be launched from the surface to investigate the breach.
I hurry through the tight, narrow corridor, navigating through a series of junctions, each one the same. Every exit is the entrance back into confusion, devoid of any sign of life until I come to the viewing deck. Framed pictures line the transparent canopy. Valene hugging her mother. She might be five. The two of us, a tangle of hair and arms and love.
The voice of the computer continues to blare its warning, competing with another, fainter, familiar.
“Kitty…”
Her hair is as long as the gown she wears. Skin as white. Words form on her lips and then dissolve, stillborn.
“Are you here?”
I bite my lip. “Val…”
I’ve thought a long time about what I’d say if I ever saw Valene again. Ever since she left, I’ve had the words memorized, greased and ready to go and yet they stick in my throat.
Valene stares at the restless light within my chest. “Do you have Christmas lights on under your clothes?”
“What? No. It’s… why did you think…”
Valene shrugs. “I thought it might be Christmas.”
“No…”
“I guess I’m not unwrapping anything.”
“Val…”
“This is my dream… I’m dreaming.” The world scrolls past beneath us, cities and lives and stories scrawled in webs of light. “Every ninety minutes, I pass in and out of night. In and out of a billion dreams. I think too much. I’m bottled in my own head. Pickled in my own thoughts. I’m imagining you.”
“I thought you might have forgotten me.”
“I think about you every day, Kitty.”
All that energy that borne me here exhausts. All my strength. Nothing is holding me now and I buckle. Valene floats toward me, her feet just off the deck, her arms open like wings.
“Don’t! Val, you can’t touch me.”
Valene sinks to the deck beside me, her hands curling, her words forming no bonds. “Why…”
Fingers of light claw at the underside of my suit, desperate to get at her, the solar, the electric, the inertial energy of the space station and fire glimmers in Valene’s eyes.
“Kitty, what’s happened?”
I curl in pain. “I’ve messed everything up.”
“I hear it,” she says, her hand hovering over my burning heart. “That sound, like from the ship. Tac a tac.” Valene takes my hand. Her heart aches through the tissue thin skin of the suit, ba-dumm, ba-dumm, ba-dumm and I have a heart again. A pulse. Steady. Regular. Mechanical almost. Not like Abi’s, manic, hurried, voracious and matched pitch perfect to the thoughts, the feelings, the chaos swirling inside me.
Light dapples the underside of the suit, rippling in patterns that mystify Valene. “Where did your heart go, Kitty?”
I don’t even know where to start. What to say. I just start at the beginning. Our beginning, twisted together in tragedy. The words come, fitful, but Valene listens. She never lets go of my hand as I guide her through every one of my wrong turns.
Valene looks down on the world. “I didn’t know.”
“Your father didn’t tell you any of it?”
“He doesn’t tell me anything. I get the news they give me and then I don’t even want that. It’s all misery. All pain.”
“Val…”
Her smile is brittle. “But it’s only my voice up here. I hear myself, Kitty. I never did before. I’ve been alone all my life, but I didn’t know how to be. I do now. I’ve learned to live behind walls and distance and I think of you, working alone and in the dark and in silence for so long and I see you have helped me. You are always so strong. So independent.”
I bite my lip. “I’m not strong.”
She shakes her head. “When my mother died… I was helpless. Smashed to pieces. You never broke.”
I clutch her hand, trying to hold on as we scream into night. “I was nothing. You saved me. You always save me.”
I brush away Valene’s tears, wanting to kiss them away and I know I can control this power. I know I can touch someone but I’m tired now. Weak. Wanting. Even now. Strange. There will be time. There will be time now we’re together. Nothing will ever separate us again.
“I’ve been so lost. Val. I’ve been so lost for so long and… even before I met you. I was vanishing. I was disappearing even then and I found someone else who was lost, and I thought… I don't know w
hat I thought. I’m sorry.”
She squeezes my hand. “I know.”
“I’m sorry I pushed so hard with you.”
“Shh. Kitty… I was in a terrible place. There was nothing anyone could have done for me. But if it hadn’t been for you…”
“I wanted to help you.”
“You did. You are. You’re here now.”
“Val. We can’t stay here. He’s going to come after you.”
Those brows draw together. “My father?”
“He threatened you. He was going to…”
Words mum on Valene’s lips. “People have been coming after me my entire life. Molly Swift. Dead Air. Reporters, worst of all. There’s nowhere else for me to run.”
I tug on her hand. “We have to go.”
“This is the safest place for me. For us.”
“But I got your message,” I say.
Valene blinks. “Message?”
“The buoy. You said you needed my help. I came for you.”
Valene pinches her lip. “I didn’t send any message, Kitty.”
Ba-dumm.
“I don’t understand…”
“I thought about it. It’s all I thought about for a long time, and then I thought… she has her own life. I should let her go. It wouldn’t be right to keep her with all these other things, just to fill all this space. You’re not some painting or sculpture. You’re not some piece of furniture.”
Ba-dumm.
“Then who…”
“I don’t even know how I could make a buoy work.”
“But it’s your voice. You said you needed help.”
Valene shakes her head. “It wasn’t me.”
The vast darkness of the Pacific envelops us. No light in the module but mine. Nothing illuminated but my own foolishness. Vidette warned me. I didn’t listen. I wouldn’t listen. Whoever sent the buoy expected me to open it right away. I didn’t, but they got their wish. I left the city, undefended.
“I have to get back,” I say. “Valene, we have to.”
“I’m safe here,” Valene says.
“I’ll protect you. I can finish the suit.”
She smiles. “I don’t need a suit, Kitty.”
Ba-dumm.
“Why not?”
Her smile broadens, a horizon without any limit, far beyond the borders I’ve observed. “I’ve learned to control it. It took me a long time, and I think I paid a price in my sanity, but I don’t think I was ever sane. How do you know, anyway?”
“How can you control it? You’re alone up here.”
Valene lifts me to my feet. “Let me show you.”
“You don’t need the suit?”
Valene leads me out of the observation deck into the habitation module. Faceless robots like those staffing the Blackwood Building walk the corridors past us, names scrawled on their chest plates in black marker. Snug. Flute. Snout.
“Are you hungry?”
I shake my head. “I don’t really eat.”
“You wouldn’t like any of it, anyway. It’s all these shrink wrapped, powdered mixtures of things that are meant to be food and they’re just clots of protein and vitamins and sometimes I mix them. Banana pudding Wellington. Or Pot pie stickers.”
“Do you talk to anyone at all, Val?”
“The computer. It’s too bad you didn’t bring any takeout with you. Doughnuts, maybe. I’d go for a doughnut right now.” Valene glides into a padded compartment, empty save for a simple cushion on the floor. “Computer, activate Session 1.”
Sound assaults me from speakers embedded in the walls, the deck, the bulkheads. All of them scream, screech and scrape at my ears so violently I think the walls will burst and so will our lungs in the vacuum of space. Valene sits still under the barrage, eyes closed, palms out with her legs crossed.
“Do you hear it, Kitty?”
I teeter to the wall. “What?”
“Mute channel 1.”
The barrage lessens. Ba-dumm.
“Mute channel 2.”
Ba-dumm.
“Do you hear?”
Ba-dumm.
“Mute all channels except for channel 42.”
The discord ends and there is only the sound of my heart filling the room,
ba-dumm
ba-DUMM
BA-DUMM
Valene opens her eyes. “It’s you. I recorded you. Do you remember? When we met? You took my hand, and I could focus. I close my eyes and the rest of it goes away. I couldn’t do this before, I didn’t have the space. The discipline.”
“Val…”
“I went mad a few times. But I did it. I’m not a prisoner of the sound anymore, Kitty. I’m free. I’m finally free.”
“Free…”
“Kitty?”
I slump against the wall, padded but there’s no cushion. “How long have you been able to do this?”
“A few months? I don’t know how long a month is here.”
All this time I’ve been thinking she needs my help. I’m the only one who can help her. I gave up everything. It was all for nothing. My pain. My hurt. Endless sleepless nights alone in the garage, piecing together the day I’d take my rest in Val’s arms. All my work. My life. My death. I burned myself away. My destiny was never to deliver an angel from heaven, but myself into the cold, blue ice of perdition.
“I didn’t think I’d make it,” Valene says. “I wanted to die, Kitty. I wanted to go into the airlock and… but I thought of you. Your strength. Your spirit. Your fire.”
“But… I wanted to be able to help you.”
“You did help me. You taught me how to let go. The way you were able to move on, after your mother.”
I sink to the deck. “What?”
“You had such courage. You carried on, with such grace.”
My hand falls against the cushioned floor and bounces off like the bird, off the window inside the apartment, again and again, crashing against his cage, unable to see it. Ma goes to open the window and I try and get up. I can’t get up.
“I never…”
Valene crawls to me. “What’s wrong?”
“I never… Ma… I never.”
“Let’s listen to some music.” Valene touches a panel along the wall. A cabinet containing a turntable eases out, along with a drawer of vinyl. “We can just lie together like we used to, listening to records. Are you still into Bowie?”
“Val…”
“I’ve come around on the Berlin trilogy. I still like the glam stuff best, though.”
“Can we just…”
“No, let’s read something instead.” Valene opens another drawer, this one full of books. “Would you read to me? I love your voice. It’s been my voice here for so long.”
“Val… why haven’t you come back?”
Her head bows. “I enjoy my peace.”
She’s earned it. God knows she has. Still. “I thought of you here, suffering… alone… and you were ok, all this time.”
The pages of a book splay open on their own in the weak gravity. Valene closes it, and places the book in my hands. “We’ve suffered enough. We’ve earned our peace, Kitty.”
I set the book aside. “We have to go back.”
“But we’re together now.”
I stand. “It’s all falling apart. The company. The city.”
“What can I do?”
“People will listen to you.”
Valene pinches her lips. “No one has ever listened to me.”
“They will. They will, please. People love you.”
Her eyes fall. “I didn’t choose this life, Kitty. I didn’t choose to be a Blackwood, or Empowered. My father didn’t want a daughter. He wanted an heir. A figurehead. A prop. I thought if I played along, he could be what I wanted. What I needed. I’ve never had a choice in my life. Until now.”
“What are you saying?”
Shadow falls across her face as the station breaks dawn. “I’m not going back, Kitty.”
I don’t. I can
’t. I can’t register this. “We need you.”
Valene takes my hand, still on her knees. “Do you need me?”
“Yes.”
“Then stay. Stay here with me. We can have our peace.”
That’s all I’ve ever wanted. Peace. A place I belong. A life on my own terms. “You can end all of this. Val. Your father… he’s a monster. You can come back. Take his place. GP can be what you want it to be. What the world needs it to be.”
Valene puts the book away. She closes the drawer, and stands. “And I’ll be what the world needs me to be. Just as I have been for my father. What’s the difference?”
“The difference is you’re a good person,” I say.
Her smile is pained. “Am I?”
“Val… was the earthquake… was that real?”
She looks away. “I didn’t deserve you. I don’t. Not for what I already had, and certainly not for what I had done.” Pain riddles her voice. The ache of failed promise. “And you’re right. My father is a monster. It’s no wonder he’s invisible. He doesn’t see anything. All my life I’ve tried to get his attention… cut my hair. Cut my wrists. Bring home girls. Boys. Show him up in public. You know with San Francisco, I thought I was throwing sand in his eye. Really, all I did was deepen his pockets. It doesn’t matter what I do, Kitty. It always benefits him. I want to do something that benefits me for once.”
Come with me, she said. Again and again. I didn’t listen. Valene never wanted to be in the world, but I held onto her, I held her down for months, making her suffer while I tried to find a solution she already had. The Valene I knew, the Valene I fell in love with, she was from the posters. The billboards. The myth I constructed in the basement of the garage, night after night, needing only a spark of power to bring to life.
“Is that wrong?” she says.
“No, it’s just…”
“Don’t you want to live your life, Kitty? Aren’t you allowed? Why do we have to be someone else’s savior?”
“But the people,” I say.
“I’ve learned a lot, up here. You can’t help everyone, Kitty. Especially if you can’t help yourself. My father has never learned this. The world suffers for it. Stay. Please.”
I clutch her hand. “I love you, Val.”