Salvaged

by Madeleine Roux

  An image of Piero pulling himself along Misato’s knife floated across her mind and she retched, a thin stream of bile leaking out of her mouth and down the seam of the protective mask. She wasn’t sad to see him go. But was he really gone? Wasn’t his consciousness shared with Edison, with Misato? They had done so much to shield themselves from Foxfire and the others, maybe they could hold on a little longer.

  The chamber beeped quietly, indicating the cycle was complete. Rosalyn dropped the mask and tiptoed out and around, into the shower, turning on the hot water with a giddy sound. One small pleasure. One small relief. She smoothed her hands over her shaved head and leaned into the water stream, letting it scour the mess from her face and neck.

  She dreaded leaving cold storage, her little haven, but eventually she would need to confirm their course. As much as she wanted to trust Edison and Misato, as much as they had proved themselves her allies, she knew there was still an unknown element inside them. They could pilot the Brigantine straight to Tokyo Bliss Station and assimilate millions of innocent people. And anyway, she owed Edison an apology for snapping at him over the coordinates. She couldn’t say for sure, of course, but it seemed wiser to keep the remaining crew on her side. They would never really be friends, couldn’t be, but it would be far worse to see them become enemies.

  Edison accepted her linkup, and a tiny green circle appeared next to her pending message. Soon the thrusters would unlock, and they would be on their way to Coeur d’Alene Station. His icon on her display blinked and she pulled her face out of the water, reading his changed public profile. It was blank. No more dogs, jazz or whiskey.

  Ouch.

  Rosalyn shook her head and plunged her face back into the spray. Wise up, you moron, it’s better this way. Yes, better. Better to keep the crew at a distance. Better to harden herself now knowing what the inevitable was likely to be. Still, it stung, way more than she expected or appreciated. On a whim, as a starter apology, she opened her own public profile and added to it.

  Vomiting profusely into helmets since 2269

  Maybe it would help smooth things over. Maybe it would make him crack even a small smile after the horrors they had just survived. She stumbled out of the shower, kicking over her old jumpsuit as she did. The fabric pooled and toppled, and out came the syringe body and the badge Tuva had found.

  And something else.

  Rosalyn crouched, picking up the little hard-coded message her father had sent the day she left. She hadn’t listened to the whole thing, but now it seemed right. His indifference—his failures—couldn’t hurt her anymore. She had forgiven herself for everything that had happened with Glen. Staring down Piero’s madness, fighting him off, had felt like the best apology she could give to her old self.

  Sliding down to the floor, she adjusted the respirator and pulled on a towel, then sat in the dissipating steam, listening as her father’s voice pierced the whir and hum of the little sterile room.

  “Roz? Rosalyn . . . It’s your father.” She tensed, but let the message play through. “I wanted you to know that I miss you. And happy birthday, of course. Damn. I’m a day late, aren’t I? Bugger it.” The message cut out, then started up again. “Happy belated birthday, darling. I know we haven’t spoken in a long time, and I know you won’t come home, so I won’t ask. That makes your mother want to strangle me, but I won’t ask. There are just . . . things I needed to say.”

  Rosalyn braced, pulling her knees up to her chest and hugging them. The tears, the ones that never seemed to come when she was stuck in the space between screaming and sobbing, came freely.

  “Glen is out. I should have believed you, I did believe you, it’s just . . . his position at the company, what he did, what he knows about our books, if he turned on us, there would be an alphabet soup of agencies up my ass over it. I had to give him money, Roz, a lot of money, to keep quiet. When you went away I was happy, at first. I know how that sounds. But there are things we’ve done here, places we’ve gone, that were wrong. There’s tech we messed about with, samples we found, that we should have turned over to GATE right away. Maybe it’s better that you’re gone. Not because I don’t want you here, because I do, and not because I don’t miss you, because I do, but because it might be safer. But then, your mother tells me you’re with Merchantia now, so maybe not.”

  He let out a long sigh, and so did she. Then she covered her mouth with both hands, the sounds inside too big to let out all at once.

  “Didn’t you and Angela have the same birthday? I remember you two giggling together in the lab over it, over a cupcake. Red velvet. God, she’s gone, too. I don’t think we’ll see her again, she loved that project too much, but I shouldn’t have let her leave. This is what I mean, Rosalyn, there are things I can’t tell you, things I wish I could tell you, but then you would be in more danger. Just tell me you’re safe, all right? Give me a gift on your birthday. Late birthday. Typical me, I know. I love you, Rosie girl.”

  For a long time the message kept going, and she heard him breathing on the other end, loudly enough that he might have been right there next to her. Something had opened, a door she hadn’t expected to ever find unlocked. She opened her AR archive of messages, adding that one to the collection of notes from her mother, from Angela, from Saruti . . . Angela had reached out for months, even after her big move to the outer space campus, and then one day it just . . . stopped. Angela’s messages stopped just a month before their shared birthday, not that they could celebrate together this year. There wouldn’t be cocktails and cupcakes, but even a call would have been nice. Wiping at her mouth, Rosalyn sighed into her palm; she didn’t know if she regretted leaving Earth, but she mourned the bridges she had burned so recklessly in the depths of her pain.

  Rosalyn sat in the damp towel, staring into that open door in her mind, letting the light pour out and wash over her. Her father was still in the wrong, but it was more complicated than she believed. Or maybe not. She didn’t know what to think, or what she would’ve done in his position. The urge to talk to him, to understand, almost soothed away the brief surge of relief. She felt shaky with the acidic burn of fear in her stomach. Coincidences were piling up, too many to ignore, and she had to wonder if the timing of her father’s company merging with Merchantia was key. Josh Girdy suspected a cover-up. Someone had tried hard to divert Rosalyn away from the infected Brigantine. Other ships coding. Piero, or Danny, whoever he was, murdering a crewmate, lying about his identity, holding on to a dated note that lined up with the launches of doomed expeditions . . . Was it just resentment bleeding in that now she knew, or felt, that her father and Belrose Industries were mixed up in it all? It didn’t seem possible, but then, none of it did. She had seen things nobody could expect to see, survived things nobody would expect to survive, and the pieces twining together in her head made an awful kind of sense.

  Angela had left Earth with her own project, a dangerous one, one her father made sound like a suicide mission, but in every one of Angela’s unanswered messages, she made it sound like they were going to cure all the world’s ills. If only she could talk to Angela over lemon drop cocktails, she would know what to do, and that she was okay, alive, just working hard and video calling her kids, the same old Angela, mother as much to her test tubes as she was to her human children.

  She almost sent off a message to Edison, and then to Misato, but she stopped. They were in pain, too. A part of them was still human, and that part had to be grieving. Rosalyn stood and returned to the shower, standing under the hot water for a long time, wondering if she would ever speak to her parents again, or to Angela, or to anyone totally human.

  But maybe that was all wrong. Maybe it was more important than ever to stick by Edison and Misato, to find in them the humanity that was left and nurture it like a fragile seedling growing in a storm. It would be hard, knowing that it might be over for them soon, but a voice inside her said simply: Fight back.

 
; I can be your friend, she thought. Just don’t make me be your executioner.

  33

  Jenny had loved cults.

  Aum Shinrikyo, Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven’s Gate, Dohring-Waugh, the Lighted Path, Scientology. The psychology of it fascinated her. Utter devotion in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. Religion they both understood, if shakily, but cults were something different. Jenny sent Misato article after article, and snippets of video she found in the Musk Hall archives. Some of it was back in the days of film, and the grainy quality of the images added to the mystical allure.

  “All these people thinking they’re going to, like, hop on a comet and sail to enlightenment. It’s bonkers, right? But you have to respect it.” Somehow, they always landed back on this topic. Jenny had been particularly animated that night, gesticulating wildly as she alternately guzzled wine and cola and wolfed down sushi. “But didn’t we kind of do the same thing? Earth is an afterthought now. We hopped on starships and flew to a totally new reality. Shit, I wasn’t even born on a planet. If I could go back in time and meet one of these people, they would think I was, like, Xenu or some shit.”

  When the Dohring-Waugh fanatics hijacked a passenger ship and crashed it into the surface of Mars, Jenny was there to give Misato the play-by-play, even though every news stream covered it in painstaking detail. It hurt that Jenny couldn’t see how uncomfortable the coverage made her; the cultists had been convinced the Io colonies were going to become prisons, the colonists used as lab rats. The crash was their act of protest, or maybe they really thought they could somehow land on the surface of Mars with few supplies, no expertise and only sheer blind hope to save them.

  Misato humored her, and when the hurt passed, she even preferred Jenny this way. This was far preferable to her more morose moods. Banks of ceiling-high fish tanks surrounded them, suffusing their table in cool light, wobbly yellow and green lines undulating over their plates and cups. The waiter had disappeared long ago, not bothering to return since they had already paid the bill and were now just finishing off a massive tower of sushi rolls.

  “What would you say to them?” Misato had asked her, nursing her white wine.

  “Oh! Hmm . . . no . . . oh! Yes!” Jenny adopted a prophet’s posture, shoulders back, hand outstretched to her invisible followers. “Humanity will live among the stars, my glorious children, but not in your time or the time after. But fear not! You will be reborn, reincarnated into their bodies so that you may one day live in a dreamer’s dream. So for now, pull your heads out of your asses and live your damned lives already.”

  They both dissolved into laughter, Jenny’s so raucous she dropped a spicy tuna roll into her lap.

  “Shit. Still good.”

  With her newly dyed fuchsia hair and fuchsia lips, Jenny looked at home among the exotic fish. Misato admired her above her wineglass, content just to listen. Just to watch.

  “I could see doing it,” she then said thoughtfully.

  “Doing what?” Jenny asked.

  “Joining a cult,” Misato replied. The lights in the restaurant dimmed another notch, and Jenny wagged her eyebrows suggestively. Mood lighting. “They’re a part of deep belief. How are scientists any different?”

  “Well, for one, you can actually test your theories and see if they work. Have you ever tried teleporting to a comet? Not so easy.” Smirking, Jenny snatched another roll with her silver chopsticks.

  “But maybe we could. One day. Teleport to a comet, I mean. It only hurts us if we stop daring to wonder.” Misato was getting sleepy, and she wanted to crawl into bed soon with her two cats. “One hundred years ago a stable colony on Io was unthinkable. Now look at us.”

  “Sure, sure. You dream big,” Jenny allowed. “But you dream smart. Colonies are useful, aimless trips on comets considerably less so.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She fidgeted, restless, and downed the last of her wine. “It might be nice to just sit and look and have nowhere to be and nowhere really to go.”

  That’s how she pictured Rayan, sailing along on a comet of his own, taking a long and lazy tour of the stars. She had loved him, in an abstract way, in the way a teacher can love a pupil. Before the Foxfire, and maybe even after it, she saw so much of herself in him. He had a relentless, open mind and a thirst for understanding that rivaled her own.

  There was no incense, but Misato found a quiet corner in the lab, compiling and sorting the notes Rayan had made while studying Foxfire. Research was its own kind of meditation, and she couldn’t think of a better way to honor his memory than to look at what he had found. His notes weren’t particularly organized, and they became less so as time went on, the Foxfire making a messy scrawl of his handwriting by the end. Rayan had experimented on himself relentlessly, but nothing physical seemed to make for much of a change. She, too, suspected that once the spores were ingested, it was too late. More interesting were the complex charts Rayan had made tracking the mental progression of the Foxfire, taking careful stock of how frequently he felt himself hallucinating or losing control.

  The trend was clear, day by day the episodes increased, but he had found other connections.

  Worse today: Memory of my mother, her perfume, her wrinkled hands, Foxfire stronger then, electric, live wire at the base of my neck. The hallucination calls itself my mother now, uses her voice. Troubling. Fascinating? It’s learning our weaknesses.

  And then, the next day, a single circled note after his tally of hallucinations:

  This phenomenon is obsessed with increase. Children. Us.

  Misato waded further into his meticulous notes, tracking the time he attempted to lock them into separate parts of the ship, a clever effort to see if separation slowed the Foxfire’s power over them, removing the nearness that seemed to amplify its control, like a signal that grew stronger the longer they remained in proximity. And Rosalyn’s arrival was cataloged, too, an explosion of hasty, scrambled ideas . . .

  Someone new is here. Mother is louder and louder, she wants the salvager. Why so desperate? Ship is infected, time on Foxfire’s side. Why the urgency? I smell lemons all the time now, hear a distant laugh. My brain is on fire. Something has changed.

  Misato finished reading, allowing herself to feel the sharp sting of sadness when the notes trailed off for good, all but illegible. Standing, she gathered up the personal possessions Rayan had laid out on the drafting table, and placed them in a small, cozy storage bin. Tuva’s went into a separate bin next to his. She didn’t store the complicated biological notes Rayan had made, the ones that looked like another language to her. Those, she kept out prominently on the lab’s drafting table. If the Brigantine was ever found, she wanted that science, that potential understanding, easily found. Maybe whoever found their wreck could pick up the thread and unravel what Rayan could not.

  She closed the lid of Rayan’s crate and sat next to it, feeling the heavy mantle of loss settle on her shoulders. Even at her age, even after burying so many friends and family members and lovers, it still felt like a fluid going down the wrong passage, a knot in her throat, an endless hollowness in her belly. Her mother had been a Buddhist, not a very good one, but the rituals had given her comfort when the typhoon hit. Misato only remembered the ravaging aftermath because of the archive footage. She remembered the too-strong floral scent of the incense. When she grieved, she always thought she smelled burnt jasmine. She had never been close to her mother, but still, she grieved her, grieved the love that never seemed to grow between them, a garden planted but never tended.

  Misato was no monk and she didn’t know the correct order of things or the chants, but she lowered her head and closed her eyes and thought instead of having a conversation.

  “I know you have him,” she whispered, placing her palms on her knees. “Some part of him must still be with you.”

  With his mother, you mean.

  “
Forget it,” Misato muttered, opening her eyes. But Foxfire wasn’t done with her. When was it ever? The voice, which always seemed to come from every direction at once, filled her head loudly enough to hurt. Before it took the guise of her mother, until it realized that wouldn’t build any roads inland.

  We miss these talks. We know you are afraid of what they became, of what you saw . . .

  “Boo-hoo.” But she didn’t move, knowing that once the thing inside her became talkative, there was usually no shutting it up. Her coffee was all the way on the other side of the room, and besides, she was admittedly curious about where this was going. Usually their conversations were so confrontational, but this had a different tone. Rayan’s research indicated he was sure Foxfire was evolving, changing its methods constantly to outwit and seduce them. This seemed like another evolution and not even a subtle one. Perhaps it realized the aggressive method had backfired, turning Piero and Rayan into easily identified and therefore readily resisted threats.

  Misato vowed not to forget that.

  We are curious. When we have these conversations, what do we look like to you?

  This was new. Before, Foxfire almost always asked the same repetitive questions: Why wouldn’t she give in? Why didn’t she want to join the family? Why was she so foolishly stubborn? And on and on . . .

  Misato closed her eyes again, and at once the vision of the blue woman came to her.

  “A woman dressed in blue. Her skin is blue, too, and her eyes. She’s . . . covered in vines, or maybe those are her veins. I can’t tell. When I still slept I dreamed of her. That’s how I picture you,” she murmured. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”