“I hope so. But we need to act as if she wasn’t.” She turned to leave.
“Wait!” I cried. “You can’t just leave me here.”
“It’s the safest place for you,” she said firmly.
“But I want to help. My friends are still out there. Zey’s out there.”
Reyna turned back toward me and set her hands on my shoulders, her gaze boring into mine. “Eyvri, listen to me. There’s nothing you can do for him now. You’re not strong enough. If you go out there again, you’ll only endanger yourself. I can’t protect you and help the others at the same time.”
“I can’t just sit here,” I insisted.
“You can’t do anything else. Anyone could be infected by now. The theory is that the Flare is spread through physical contact. Every single member of the crew was at ranshai practice this morning. We have to assume everyone was exposed. The sooner you let me get back to the axis chamber, the sooner I can get control of the situation.”
“But what if you can’t? What if too many people are infected?”
“Then I’ll die,” she said, with a stark simplicity that snuffed out my remaining protests. “Along with everyone else. It wouldn’t be the first time the Fleet or the Echelon has lost an entire crew to the Flare.” She paused while I took that in. “But as long as you’re in here, you’ll be safe. That’s my primary objective, and I haven’t achieved it until I’m on the other side of that door. So are you going to keep arguing with me, or are you going to let me go?”
“Go,” I said, knowing no other response was possible.
After the door closed behind her, I wheeled around, made my way to the far end of the storeroom, leaned against the wall, and slid slowly down it to the floor. There was a horrible familiarity to my predicament. In a storeroom just like this one on the Pinion I had waited for Hathan to find Saresh and ask him to perform the Listening, or to turn me over to Vekesh. I hadn’t known then whether I could trust him. I knew now that I couldn’t trust anyone. Whatever gruesome drama was unfolding beyond the locked door, my role in it was to wait passively until the quarantine period expired.
What scene would greet me when I emerged three interminable days from now? Images chased each other through my mind, each one more vivid and twisted than the last. What would Reyna see when she returned to the axis chamber? Had the others managed to subdue Saresh, or had the madness already claimed new victims? Even in the absolute best case, in which Reyna was able to execute the Echelon’s protocol perfectly and place each member of the crew in isolation, the Flare had already set its stamp on us. I had seen one brother attack another. There was no way Saresh could take back the violence and cruelty he had shown Zey. Something precious had already been broken.
The silence pressed in on me like the stifling hush before a thunderstorm. I looked around my new prison. In one corner a few empty packing crates were stacked beside a hoverlifter. There was nothing else in the room, no furniture of any kind. It was going to be a miserable three days, physically as well as emotionally. I sat with my arms around my knees for a while, seeing in my mind the look on Zey’s face when Saresh called him a Blank. Then I took out my flexscreen and set it down on the floor beside me. Reyna had told me to turn it off. Nothing good could come of leaving it on; any message I received in the quarantine period would most likely be a ruse meant to lure me out of hiding. I knew Reyna was right. I also knew that I wasn’t going to follow her instructions. The flexscreen was my only conduit to the events taking place beyond the storeroom walls. I couldn’t bring myself to turn it off. Any message, however troubling, would be preferable to silence. At the very least, if anyone messaged me, I would know I wasn’t the only one left alive.
I sat for a long time in a kind of trance of horror, oblivious to the passage of time. The dark truth of what had befallen us was slowly sinking in. At first glance it had seemed—like the last days under Khavi Vekesh on the Pinion—too far-fetched to be credible. A sickness that drove its victims into homicidal rage? If such a thing had occurred on Divided by Stars, Zey and I would have dismissed it with laughter and derision. Yet this was real. I remembered Reyna’s words: entire crews had been lost to the Flare. It might surface only once in a generation, but the Echelon took it seriously enough to have a detailed protocol in place. And the more I thought about it, the less impossible it seemed. I was no medical expert, but I could call to mind a handful of analogous diseases on Earth. Syphilis produced psychosis in its later stages. A better comparison was rabies, in which aggression was the mechanism that facilitated transmission. What distinguished the Flare was its seemingly instantaneous rate of infection. Even the most virulent pathogens known to humans had incubation periods of days, not hours. Certainly not minutes. Perhaps that was what made the Flare so terrifying: the idea of an illness that leapt from one host to another like fire in a summer forest. By the time the first symptoms were recognized, the damage was already done.
Were humans susceptible? I wondered. If so, then by dragging me down the corridor, Reyna had effectively exposed me. Surely that thought had occurred to her as well. She must have decided that the need to isolate me from the others outweighed the risk of infection. And as the minutes dragged past, I felt more and more certain that either I hadn’t been infected, or the Flare didn’t affect humans. I felt sad and frightened. I didn’t feel angry or paranoid. I didn’t want to claw the walls or howl like a caged animal. I didn’t want to attack my crewmates. All I wanted, desperately, was for all of them to be safe.
Hours had passed, and I was growing cold and stiff on the metal floor, when my flexscreen chimed. I started. The signal indicated an incoming message, text only. I stared down at the little device like it was a venomous insect poised to strike. Instead of reaching for it, I brushed my fingers across the floor, opening an interface with the ship’s computer. The time stamp told me only six hours had elapsed since Reyna locked me into the storeroom. It was too soon. Whatever message I had just received, it was nothing good.
Still avoiding the flexscreen, I got up and walked a few circuits of the storeroom to stretch my legs and warm up a little. There was no internal temperature control in the tiny chamber. I didn’t think it was cool enough to present a hypothermia risk, but I was going to be chilled to the bone by the time I got out of here. I looked through the tray of food I had assembled in the galley, picked out a granola bar, and ate half of it. I contemplated the jug of water but didn’t drink any. I already felt the need to visit the sanitation room, and there wasn’t one. I decided to postpone that particular unpleasantness a little longer.
Having exhausted all the stalling tactics I could readily call to mind, I sat down cross-legged in front of the flexscreen again. With great reluctance I reached out and touched the edge of the screen with one fingertip. The orange letters that glimmered into visibility informed me that the message was from Zey. I took a deep, shaky breath. He was alive. It was more than I had known before. I forced myself to get up and walk away again.
I lasted another hour before curiosity drew me back to the flexscreen. Cradling it in both hands, I forced myself to confront the question: Beyond satisfying my morbid curiosity, what could I gain from reading the message? If Zey was infected, the content would be either disturbing or deliberately misleading. If he was genuinely in trouble and needed help, not that I had any way of distinguishing a real cry for assistance from a ploy, there was nothing I could do in any case. Reyna was right: set against even the weakest of my crewmates, I was hopelessly outmatched. If I stepped outside the confines of the storeroom, I would be putting my own life at risk to no purpose. And the alternative, to sit here and watch an unthinkable tragedy unfold via text message, would be a drawn-out and pointless form of self-torture. The most prudent course of action would be the one Reyna had advised in the first place: to turn off the flexscreen.
I wasn’t entirely powerless though. I might not be able to hold my own in a fight, but there were things I could do without leaving the storeroom. I wa
sn’t quite as inept at navigating Vardeshi computers as I had been when I arrived on the Pinion five months ago. I might be able to create a diversion of some kind. If there was any chance that I could offer Zey some kind of help, I owed it to him to try. In my place he would unhesitatingly have done the same.
I had made my decision, but even so, I felt deeply uneasy as I keyed in my code and read the waiting message. Eyvri, it said. I know you’re not allowed to tell me where you are. But are you safe?
He didn’t sound like someone in the grip of a hallucinatory rage. Still, I knew I had to be careful. I’m safe, I wrote back. You?
For now. I’m in an empty conference room on helix three. The next message gave the specific room designation. I hope your hiding place is more comfortable than mine. I think the ahtziri would have stuck me in the galley freezer compartment if she thought she could get away with it.
I’d grown accustomed to the nickname, but I found his use of it now somehow off-putting. Give her a break, I wrote. She’s just trying to keep us safe.
Sorry. I’m a little punchy. Weird day.
Yeah. After I had sent the word, I stared down at it. It was perhaps the most utterly banal syllable to which I had ever given voice, electronically or otherwise. But the things I wanted to say to him needed to be said in person. He had been degraded and viciously attacked by his own brother. Now he was sitting, like I was, alone in a locked room, waiting for the tide of inexplicable anger to run its course. There was no way to distill my shocked sympathy into a string of characters on a screen.
After a brief silence I wrote, Do you know who else is infected?
I had scarcely pressed the “send” command when his reply arrived. Hang on. Something’s wrong.
What? I sent back at once.
There was a long, ominous pause. Then he said, I think someone’s trying to force the door.
And at that instant, with uncannily precise timing, the door to my own prison hissed open.
I leapt to my feet. The flexscreen slipped out of my fingers and clattered to the floor. The corridor outside was dark, and I cursed myself for my thoughtlessness in leaving the storeroom lights on. I couldn’t see anything beyond the doorway. Hurriedly I turned off the light. Then I backed toward the corner of the storeroom, bent down beside my food tray, and picked up a steel canister of peanut butter, the only vaguely weaponlike object to hand. I crouched there for some moments longer, clutching my makeshift club and feeling absurdly primitive, while my eyes adjusted to the gloom.
Finally I was able to make out the section of hallway visible through the door. There was no one there. I went to the threshold, pausing to scoop up my flexscreen on the way, and tapped the control panel beside the door. Nothing happened. Cautiously I stepped out into the hallway. The doors on either side of mine were open too. A malfunction? I didn’t think so. Zey had said someone was trying to force his door. Maybe whatever that person had done had caused every door on the ship to open simultaneously. Whatever the cause, it was clear that my safety had been compromised. Squatting in plain sight in front of an open door didn’t strike me as a very good survival strategy. If nothing else, I should find a room with some furniture to hide behind. Or some better weapons.
I knew I had to move, and quickly. The question was where to go. If every door on the ship was open—as a quick glance up and down the corridor suggested they were—then I would be in danger no matter where I went. For whatever reason, Reyna’s protocol had failed. I was equally likely to run into an infected crewmate on my way to the cargo holds or the conference rooms. At least there was a chance that I had an ally waiting on helix three. My choice was no longer one between action and inaction, but between trust and suspicion. My instincts told me to err on the side of trust. I activated my flexscreen again and scrolled through the chain of messages. It certainly sounded like Zey, and Zey in his right mind, at that. I decided to head for the room he had specified. I didn’t have to go in. If the doors on helix three were open, I would hear the sounds of a struggle long before anyone there became aware of my presence. If the room was silent, I would assume that either it was a trap or I had arrived too late, and seek shelter elsewhere.
I disabled the sound on my flexscreen, went to slip it into my pocket, then hesitated. Should I call Reyna and tell her where I was going? Her mandate was to protect me. But we were more than seven hours into the outbreak. She herself might be infected. I decided the safest course was to keep silent for now. I turned in the direction of helix three and began to walk. After a few steps I stopped, took off my shoes, set them down in a recess where no one was likely to trip over them, and went on nearly silently in my socks.
At the first junction, I ducked into the secondary passageways. The Ascendant had these, just like the Pinion, and I had lost no time in committing their twists and turns to memory. As I made my way through the ship, pausing every so often to listen for voices or footsteps, I was forcibly reminded of my similar flight through the Pinion in search of Saresh. At least on that day, terrible though it had been, I had feared only imprisonment and a quick clean death. I hadn’t been afraid my companions would tear me apart with their bare hands.
I reached the entrance to helix three unscathed. Apart from the airlocks, I had not seen a single closed door. I knew the general location of the room Zey had named, and I got as close to it as I could via the secondary tunnels, but I would have to navigate a final open stretch of main corridor to approach the room itself. The thought of such total exposure was unsettling. Before moving out into the open, I hefted the peanut-butter canister thoughtfully, weighing it in my hand. Something said by Davnah, my Krav-Maga instructor, during my two brief weeks of training came back to me: a weapon in the hands of an unskilled fighter was more likely to be a liability than an advantage. The probability of my successfully landing a blow on one of my crewmates was minimal, while the probability of someone ripping it out of my grasp and clubbing me to death with it was exceedingly high. I bent down and placed the canister carefully on the floor. Then I took a deep breath and moved forward into the open.
I’d overshot a little and had to backtrack to find the correct room. I approached it slowly. When I’d gotten as close as I could without being visible from within, I stopped and listened. Silence. No voices, no sounds of a struggle. Zey was gone—if he had ever been here. Fear sent a cold prickle down my spine. I checked my flexscreen: no recent messages. Without hesitation, I turned and began to retrace my steps to the entrance to the secondary passages. Just before I reached it, my flexscreen buzzed. I nearly dropped it in surprise. The display showed an incoming call from Reyna. I stepped into the darkened room nearest me, picked my way through the workstations and stools until I was some distance away from the door, and answered the call in a whisper.
“I’m on helix one,” said Reyna. “Your room is empty. Where are you?”
Her tone of crisp command, together with my mounting apprehension, compelled me to tell her the truth. “On helix three. Zey messaged me. I think he’s in trouble.”
“Zey is asleep in his quarters. I checked on him on my way to you.” Her voice sharpened. “Eyvri, get out of there. Meet me on helix two near engineering.”
I pocketed the flexscreen and took one step toward the door. The lights snapped on. Blinking in the sudden brightness, I saw, standing in the doorway, the one person above all others I would have given anything to avoid.
His gaze swept the room and stopped on me. Something altered in his expression. There was a trace of a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He came fully into the room, paused, and tapped a command into the door panel. The door hissed shut. Two facts struck me at once. The first was that he had been able to close the door, while the panel in my storeroom hadn’t activated in response to my touch. Did he have some kind of special code or override? The second fact was that we were now alone in a room together. There was no doubt in my mind that he had locked the door.
He moved toward me, and my sense of wrongness i
ntensified. After all those days and weeks and months of working so closely with him, I knew his presence, the way a room felt with him in it. This was instantly different. His stride was normally brisk and purposeful, but his pace now was languid, almost a saunter. I reached into my pocket and took out my flexscreen. As casually as possible, I began to key in my code.
“What are you doing?” Hathan asked. His voice was level and quiet, no edge to it yet, nothing amiss other than the fact of the question itself.
Never quick to improvise, I searched for a plausible lie. “Texting Zey. I think . . . he might be in trouble.” My voice shook. I didn’t look up from my flexscreen, but my hands were shaking too, and he had closed the gap between us and drawn the device smoothly out of my hand before I had accessed the messaging menu.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Thanks.” I swallowed, staring at my flexscreen in his hand. He was doing something, typing, or appearing to type, with one hand. I took a slow step backward, then another, putting the nearest table between us.
“Done,” he said, and set the flexscreen down on the table, well out of my reach.
We were both still for a moment. I could feel his eyes on me, but I couldn’t return the look. Instead, I glanced at the door. I couldn’t stop myself. I needed to get out of here. Even without a message from me, Reyna would know when I failed to appear at engineering that something had gone wrong. She would come looking for me. I had told her I was on helix three. But she had no idea which room I was in. And even if she stumbled onto the closed door and understood its meaning, assuming my conjecture was right and Hathan had found a way to override the door controls, there was nothing she or anyone else could do to help me from outside. I was on my own.
He followed my look, and I saw it again, that glint of chilly amusement. “Something wrong?”
“No.”
He frowned slightly. “What did you say?”
I hesitated. “I said no.”
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