Salvaged

by Madeleine Roux

  It had been like that after Glen, too, a never-ending series of twisting passages she walked in her head, each of them leading to a different outcome, each of them placing blame firmly at her feet. There were so many warnings. Angela had told her to dump him and get out. And when he snapped, when he proved everyone right . . .

  It came to her like a flash. Edison standing there on the other side of the barrier with hooded, sad eyes, and her own words looping back toward her, and the way he had relaxed once she said it to him, like a huge weight had been torn from his body.

  You didn’t ask for any of this to happen, and it’s certainly not your fault.

  She breathed in, she breathed out. The words felt like something she could believe in, so she did. Blame was a labyrinth that never ended, and she wouldn’t get lost in that maze again. Couldn’t. She had survived Glen and she would survive this. Rosalyn glanced over at Misato, a woman she would have liked to meet under any other circumstances.

  “I had to run away from something,” Rosalyn finally answered. “I needed some distance. Or perspective. I don’t know.”

  “How’s this for perspective?” Misato asked with a snort. “Bet you’re wishing you hadn’t run away. I can’t imagine it was anywhere near as bad as this.”

  “No, just different,” she murmured. “A different kind of hell.”

  “You’ve been through hell? Good. Then you might just be tough enough to help me untangle this mess.”

  Rosalyn held back a weary sigh. “And what does that look like?”

  “For now? Getting rid of Piero. Disabling Rayan. Keeping Edison halfway human. Sound okay?” Misato had led them through the snaking tunnels of the ship, down a steeply curved ramp and to another closed, circular door on the lowest level of the ship. The collection rovers were in a bay nearby, with the only other entrance hatch besides the one she had initially entered through with Walters. Rosalyn brought up the schematics of the Brigantine on her AR and nodded. Starboard observation was just through the door and around a quick right-hand corner.

  “Sounds like something, and that’s way better than nothing,” she agreed. “Which is what I got.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Misato teased, but Rosalyn could hear the edge in her voice, the tremor of nervous energy. “You got anything new for me, JAX?”

  The Servitor remained quiet, and no lights flickered in his head or body.

  Misato shouldered up to the rounded door, hefting her makeshift weapon and nodding once. “Then we go for Piero, hit him hard. We have to stop him before he disables our comms.”

  JAX sidled up to the door panel and disengaged the seal, allowing them into the corridor beyond. It was still and mostly dark, the only light emanating from the strands of turquoise Foxfire glittering along the ceiling, thousands of little eyes watching them, measuring them, twinkling with what felt like anticipation.

  27

  Piero still remembered exactly what Io looked like as the transport descended. Like a moldy golf ball. Like a burnt pizza with all the cheese scraped off. It didn’t look friendly or like home, and his skin itched with nervousness as they breached the atmosphere and the transport rattled hard enough to make his teeth clack.

  His nose had been pressed against the cool observation window for an hour. Mamma sat next to him, legs primly crossed, her high heels on the bench next to them. Traveling was a luxury, she told him, so it was important to dress your best. Her long, tanned legs were drawing glances from other passengers. Some were there for short trips; others were destined to stay. A small blond girl Piero’s age had tried to show him a game with AR creatures you could chase and keep as pets, but Piero didn’t have the expensive tech headset it required. He wanted to cry, but shoved her instead.

  “Don’t look so cross,” Mamma said as he glowered out the window.

  The naked pizza moon was getting closer and closer, and he could see the faint outline of the colony boundaries, the great pulsating dome that protected the new cities from the hostile atmosphere of the sulfurous moon. They had learned all about Io in school. Chinese was the most common language spoken and Piero’s Chinese was very bad, almost as bad as his English. Signorina De Luca had called the colony un miracolo. A miracle.

  The great silvery grids of the colony grew sharper, ripples cascading along the protective dome, a swirling mist buffeting against the city limits, as if an army of ghosts tried constantly to storm the gates. What was visible of the ground through the mist was teal and orange, deeply pitted and hilly, but the colony sat on a carved-out rectangular depression, as if some giant had come along to scoop out a flat place for his sandcastle.

  No trees. No sandboxes. No stray dogs or old men playing dice. He would miss those old men, their red noses spotted with age, their hats always tilted against the roaring sun. And he already missed the dogs, with their wet, curious noses always pushing into his pockets, looking for sweets.

  “Nǐ hǎo, wǒ de míngzì shì Piero,” he mouthed to the window, fogging it. He practiced again and again. It was the only phrase he had ever spelled perfectly on a test.

  “Mamma,” he said softly, not wanting the blond girl and her family to overhear.

  “Yes, darling?”

  “When do I get a better headset? The VIT Fives have been out for ages.” In the window reflection he saw his mother sigh and bend down to rub her swollen ankles. He wished she wouldn’t; the other passengers kept staring at her when she did that.

  “You will waste your time with it. You will just play games all day and never study,” she said.

  “I won’t. It isn’t fair, I need it for English, for Chinese. The Fives do all the translating for you, you don’t have to try at all!” he cried, forgetting that he didn’t want to draw attention to their fighting. To their poverty.

  Mamma gave one of her sweet, indulgent laughs and leaned back on the padded bench, reaching up to comb his messy curls with her fingers. “We will ask Domenico for one when we are all settled, mm?”

  Domenico. Her lanky, gray-eyed lover. Piero hated the man and his ugly gold watch, his paisley shirts. They were old-fashioned and gaudy, just like the man himself. He always smelled of too much garlic and played football terribly, stumbling over his flat feet and blaming it on his shoes.

  “Never mind,” Piero whispered to the rapidly approaching ground. “I don’t want one.”

  His forearms had been resting on the back of the bench, but he pulled them away, running his nails nervously back and forth over the pleather cushion, scratching and scratching until his mother tsked him and slapped his hands.

  What was he doing? Where was he? Where was Mamma?

  Piero looked at his hands. Were they even his anymore? He could barely feel the bunches of cord in his hands, green and warm, fresh from the insides of the ship. Starboard observation sketched itself in around him, dark, lit with soft yellow filaments above the panoramic windows and the familiar blue growth that pulsed in harmony with his heartbeat. He felt it there and all around him and in the man trapped in a clear prison to his right.

  The ship. The Brigantine. Somehow, Mother had lost control of him for an instant, but instead of reality he had slipped far, far into the past. Parts of him still existed then, but those parts and his whole belonged to the cluster. They had work to do. They had problems to solve. The salvager had inadvertently helped them, but now she and the as-yet-unclaimed Edison and Misato plotted against the collective. Wayward, naughty children. Of course, they would be subdued in time, but the cords in their hands, the comm network, took priority.

  “I know you can hear me. Listen to me, you little shit, let me out of here right now. Let me out.”

  It was a stroke of genius, the brig, the only compartment on the ship that a captain’s code could override from the outside. Two threats neutralized, two to go. He—they—felt almost giddy, on the verge of a breakthrough. The beautiful bright fungus coveri
ng the ceiling seemed to trill, flashing faster and faster, signaling their shared excitement. It was a sensation but also a verse that filled them, spurring, exciting, a fragment of something greater that kept Piero’s hands busy with the cords, twisting, snapping, breaking, breaking. Faster and faster . . .

  Mother liked to make up rhymes for him, so he made up some of his own. The knife in the hand goes stab, stab, stab. The blood in the veins goes spill, spill, spill . . .

  Piero had given Tuva the pills to save himself, and giving a pill or two wasn’t so hard. He wasn’t a killer, but Mother was changing him. Everything was different. Killing Tuva didn’t sit right with him, but choices had to be made. He wasn’t going back to Io. He wasn’t taking another shit job with shit money. Merc work hardly paid the bills with military-grade Servitors coming online. His contact at ISS had been clear—the package would be at CDAS, and it needed to be transferred to a vessel, any vessel, and studied. If Piero could just do that, just put the package into a controlled space and record the results, he would be set for life.

  But not if that Norwegian bitch intervened. Not if she ratted him out before he opened the first canister.

  On CDAS a mask and vaccine tab had been left with the package. The mask seemed redundant, so he skipped it, and took the vaccine. Bad choice. Big mistake.

  Mistake? But now you have me. Now you have your family, your mother. My heart, they’re coming. They’re coming. The women. The betrayer machine. They’re coming.

  Faster, faster. The Foxfire marked their steps, an alarm ringing from the corridor around the corner to the very core of his body. There was a delay, but only a slight one, so he stood, hands full of warm, wrapping cords, and waited, verse and song louder than the shouts, just as much words as drums pounding in the deep dark of him.

  The knife in the hand goes stab, stab, stab. The blood in the veins goes spill, spill, spill, and Mother says it’s time to kill.

  More verses. More drums. His head and hands pounded. He was ready.

  28

  Before they pushed into the starboard observation room, she took one last nip from her flask of coffee. Synthetic arabica was all she had left, and even that was running low, but it was better than nothing. Besides, she just needed the taste memory, not the real deal.

  Your supplies won’t last forever. We’re coming. Mother is close now, but you know that.

  “Shut. Up.”

  “Sorry?” Rosalyn stared at her blankly, her little multi-tool held up like she was going in for a heist. Comical, but at least she looked ready.

  Misato held up her own weapon, larger but no less ridiculous. “Nothing. JAX, you go in first. Get up some speed, charge him. You’ve got fresh batteries from Rosalyn, so you should be able to give him a good wallop. I just need him distracted.”

  You just seem distracted, that’s all.

  That voice. Misato blinked hard. This time it wasn’t her mother. Maybe the Foxfire had sensed that wasn’t working, that Misato had never been close to her parents. It was like being inside herself twice, a nested doll, experiencing the present but also the past. Something about that phrase had dredged up a memory that fell around her close, a tight curtain of vaporous thought. She was back in Musk Hall, prepping for a bioengineering exam she hadn’t studied for enough. That was okay, she’d wing it like she did most times. This shit just clicked for her. Systems. Patterns. The logic of the body and the machine had a symmetry that she liked.

  Jenny was different. Jennifer, her Jennifer, younger by almost a decade and bright as hell. She was like Rayan, too smart for her age, and too naive. It was never going to last between them. Misato was hungry for deeper space and deeper mysteries, and Jennifer was gorgeous, smart but shallow. Not shallow shallow, just shallow when compared to what lay beyond the ever-expanding human boundaries. Misato hadn’t lived well past one hundred to hole up in a condo on Tokyo Bliss Station and watch younger, hungrier people get what she wanted. Setting up the Io colonists had been the adventure of a lifetime, but she had more than one lifetime in her, she was sure of that.

  Coffee. Jenny drank her coffee black, strong and acid, nasty enough to strip the varnish off a rocket. Fake sunlight poured in through the channel of overhead “windows” in the massive library, a loving re-creation of the now-lost Osaka Station. It was half of a low glass pyramid attached to a more traditional ten-story data library. The air in the main study area was always cool and swirling, kicking around the warmed dust smell of hundreds of busy computers. All around them, students typed away, hunched over their tablets and keyboards, eyes red with weariness.

  But there was no tablet in front of Misato, just Jenny’s hands wrapped around a steaming silver canister. Her hands were heavily tattooed, Jupiter on one, Mars on the other, exquisitely rendered and as colorful as the actual planets. Two formulas were inked across her knuckles, coffee on the right, ethanol on the left.

  Misato watched the letters and numbers deform as Jenny drummed her fingers on the canister impatiently. She needed answers, Misato just needed to look at her. So pretty. A star girl, born in a man-made paradise, never seeing Earth or the Philippines of her mother or the Netherlands of her father. Maybe one day, Jenny would say, maybe one day we can go to Amsterdam together and get high as fuck, wander the canals, eat a stroopwafel or some shit, you know, be romantic. Her black hair was pulled back in a dizzying twist of tight braids, a little dusting of stars tattooed under her left eye.

  So pretty.

  “It’s not about . . .” And here Jenny squinted, eyes sliding to the side as she read what was open on Misato’s AR display. They had linked displays months ago. “Cortical Dynamics Underlying Implant-Related Seizures, is it? It’s me. It’s us. It’s this bullshit again.”

  “I love you, Jenny.”

  “That’s a cop-out.” Jenny was thirty-eight, but she may as well have been a decade younger than that. Age didn’t seem to touch her face, as if even her own cells sensed changing that perfect dark skin would be a crime. “Love. Blugh. Okay, genius, get back to work. I’ll stop distracting you.”

  She pushed back her chair and leaned over the table, then crawled up onto it, bridging the distance to plant a sloppy kiss on Misato’s cheek.

  “There’s a poetry thing the JAXA kids are doing. I’m already late,” Jenny said, giving a fluttery wave. Of course she would want to see Japanese astronauts reciting poetry. “I’ll ping you later.”

  “Okay, I love you! Bye.”

  The smell of coffee, rich and homey, lingered. Jenny never pinged. Maybe she knew Misato was going to leave anyway; maybe she just found someone else. A poet. Someone who had all the time in the world to eat stroopwafels. That wasn’t Misato, but now she wished it was.

  “Misato? Hey! Am I losing you? Please stay with me.”

  Vaguely, she felt someone digging in her pockets. The curtain lifted and there was Rosalyn with her huge hazel eyes that always looked so worried and her bald head. Rosalyn waved the coffee flask in front of Misato’s face but she pushed it back.

  “I’m fine . . . I’m . . . We should go. We’re wasting time.”

  “What was that?” Rosalyn pressed. “Did the Foxfire say something?”

  “No,” she said. “It was just . . . I thought I saw a ghost. I’m fine now, let’s go. JAX? Breach the room.”

  They ought to take their time, or at least form a better plan. The time for pep talks had passed, and Misato was spooked. What the hell was that? She had vivid dreams occasionally, and strange visions when she dozed and the Foxfire directed her unconscious imagination, but that was like a total split from reality. The coffee had smelled so close, the steam from the canister warm, Jenny’s sharp perfume twining around her again for one lovely moment . . .

  JAX moved with unnatural speed, uninhibited by the limitations of human mobility. He dropped into an odd crouch and then onto all fours, dashing forward with quick, jerky movements
. He wasn’t designed for military purposes, but his chassis and head were hard enough to drop anyone to the ground at full speed. Misato urged Rosalyn forward with a nod, and together they turned the corner, five meters or so behind JAX’s opening salvo.

  Starboard observation was as dark as the rest of the ship, not helpful for Rosalyn but no disadvantage for Misato. Her eyes now seemed well suited to the darkness, immediately homing in on Piero, standing just as he had been on the security camera footage. JAX shot toward him, flying across the floor like a four-legged bullet. In the brig, Edison let out a shriek of surprise, both palms flattening against the clear shielding. JAX met his mark, but Piero was ready, hunching down at the last second, bracing for impact and then throwing his shoulder into the Servitor as it hit.

  Misato had been right about one thing; JAX really was made of strong stuff.

  The Servitor ricocheted off Piero’s shoulder with a sickening crack, then continued on, barreling with total momentum into the clear, tall rectangle of the brig. Then came another crack, a louder one, and a high metallic sound, likes two knives scraping together. The clear sheeting couldn’t take the impact, splintering and caving in at three distinct points, then falling, collapsing inward. Edison threw himself backward against the wall, flattening himself to avoid the sharp edges.

  Piero’s shoulder hung loose in its socket, but that seemed to bother him not at all. He righted himself at once, smiling with his ragged wound of a mouth. JAX’s blow had knocked his arm out of alignment and torn away most of the muscle, revealing the shards of slick white bone beneath. It seemed even starker and more naked, bathed in the glowing blue threads that also hung in shreds around his arm.

  But he didn’t come for them as Misato expected. Instead, he turned, surprisingly adroit in his mangled state. He had stripped to the waist at some point, his jumpsuit in tatters, the broad planes of his chest torn clean of human flesh, and the bright blue strands pulsed quickly, mimicking whatever adrenaline flooded his body.