Salvaged

by Madeleine Roux

  Oh?

  “You don’t have form, not . . . human form. You’re just spores, some kind of network bound at a molecular level but also a telepathic level. I don’t have to understand the nuances of that to know you aren’t a human woman,” she said. “So it’s either a trick, or there’s something here I don’t yet understand.”

  You were always the smartest one.

  “Ha. Nice try. Flattery is an old tactic, and even we simple Homo sapiens know that.”

  “What are you doing?”

  Misato had been so distracted by the exchange that the intrusion made her gasp. Snapping her eyes open, she reoriented, relaxing again when she realized it was only Edison. He stood at the entrance to the lab, and she must have looked awfully strange, wedged in the corner, facing the wall, a box placed before her as she knelt.

  Standing, she brushed at nothing on her pants and turned to face him. “Putting some things to rest,” she said. “How’s Rosalyn?”

  Edison drew in a deep breath and fiddled with his glasses, as he always did when he was anxious. “Shaken. Angry. I left her alone to clean up.”

  “You should talk to her.” Misato bent down and picked up the box with Rayan’s things, then returned to the crew lockers and put the crate in his. Then she went back to the drafting table where she had left her coffee, and swigged it. This time it was mixed liberally with vodka. “I think she could use a little kindness.”

  “We could all use that,” Edison said. She held out the cup to him and he took it. He drank without sniffing, then coughed. “Jesus, that’s strong.”

  “I needed a little something after . . .” Misato blinked and shook the cobwebs out of her head. “When you dream, do you see a blue woman? Can you smell lemons?”

  Edison nodded, seemingly unfazed by the question. They had all compared notes at the beginning, but then Rayan locked them in seclusion, and that triggered private battles with the demons within. Misato had heard the others go mostly silent except for the occasional bout of rage as they tried to get Rayan to let them out.

  “Yeah, it freaked me out. But she—it—always tries to look like my mother. Why?”

  “Just something I’ve been thinking about,” Misato said softly, retrieving her cup from him and sipping it. She let her mouth rest on the lip and glanced up at him, noticing a new, ugly bruise spreading along his jaw under his beard. “Why would it look human? Why would it be a woman?”

  Shrugging, he faced the drafting table and passed his hands lightly over Rayan’s favorite place to work and the laminated scientific notations Rayan had left behind for them. Some of his observations were even written permanently onto the table. Edison had changed into a fresh uniform, and the tight shirt clung to his muscled shoulders. She wondered if the Foxfire made him continue his exercise or if it was his own impulse, another way to remain more human. “Sympathy, I think, or trust. Better the devil you know, right? Mother figure is less threatening than a form we can’t empathize with.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s good,” Misato agreed. “But then why is she blue? Why the lemons? My mother smelled like jasmine. That’s not familiar. Why take a similar form for us at all? My childhood was not like yours, mm? This thing is intelligent. It learns. By now it should know to appear as something pulled from our fondest memories.” She sighed and joined him in his shrugging. “Or I’m full of shit, and this leads nowhere.”

  “When I’m awake I see my mother, when I try to sleep it’s the blue woman. I don’t know what that means, Misato, but Rayan was clearly very busy,” Edison observed. He picked up a plasticky card. It was reusable and shiny, but the marker on it wasn’t faded or smudged. “Nanomechanical oscillations,” he read. “Organic anchor theory? What’s that?”

  “Plants can communicate on the smallest molecular scale with vibrations, the closest thing on Earth to telepathy,” Misato explained, sidling up to him and peering at the card in his hands. She pointed to it. “But this? OAT. I’ve never heard of that. I was a hobbyist biologist compared to Rayan.”

  Edison seemed to unfocus his laser-blue eyes, but Misato recognized it as a person consulting their AR display. He would be searching his hard database for anything on OAT. Quickly, however, he shook his head and put the card back down, making sure to replace it in its original spot.

  “Not much,” he said. “Most of the linked studies are on crackpot archives. SpaceAsk, I Want to Believe, all the usual suspects. Still, something to look into. I can do some reading later.”

  “Please do,” Misato replied, offering him another sip from her mug. He took it, but more gingerly this time. “I’d like to think Rayan helped us beat this thing. Or, you know, outrun it long enough to see it destroyed.”

  “That’s the idea.” He winced from the strength of the vodka. “You all right? I know you and the kid were close.”

  She took the cup with both hands and padded quietly to the lockers, then opened hers and fetched a bottle of the good stuff. Not vodka, of course, that wasn’t his style. She remembered nights of cards with Edison sipping a few fingers of whiskey, his ring finger tapping rhythmically on the glass. That was his tell. Misato brought him the bottle and leaned against the drafting table.

  Vodka was her drink of choice, but she opened the whiskey and took a swig herself before offering it to him.

  “Does that answer your question?” she asked.

  “I should’ve done more,” Edison said to the bottle, holding it close to his chest. “This thing . . . It eats away at what’s good until all that’s left is the deep dark shit you tried hard to forget.”

  Misato put a hand on his shoulder, not knowing if it was appropriate or not, but sensing he needed it. He seemed to sag under her touch, or maybe relax. “Then make something else good; I don’t want to know what happens if it gets you. We owe it to Tuva. To Rayan. To whatever little part of Piero wasn’t monstrous. We’re all that’s left of the fight.”

  “And Rosalyn,” Edison said with a sad smile.

  “Yes, and her. You and me and her, that’s something good. Try not to forget that.”

  34

  There had been five little stones in the memorial garden for the crew; now three actually belonged there.

  Rosalyn had spent as much time as she could stomach scrubbing out her old suit and blasting the new one in the decontam chamber. At some point, she told herself, she had to leave cold storage. The tedium kept her focused, kept her from listening over and over again to her father’s messages, old and new, and it saved her from sinking into her mother’s texts and Angela’s.

  She ate, chewing and swallowing the food without tasting it, then pulled on the fresh and clean-smelling suit they had given her. God, she had to laugh. She could just imagine Edison and Misato carrying her to the room, trying not to breathe in the toxic-to-them diffused and decontaminated air while also making sure she was all the way inside with her new gear.

  At first, it seemed like a no-brainer to just sit there and read old messages on her display. But the idleness of it, the quiet, made it easier for the demons to come for her. She couldn’t shake the feeling of Piero crawling on top of her, his slavering ghoulish face and silver eyes, the sense that history was repeating itself all over again. Music wasn’t doing much either, because she felt paranoid without full control of her senses. And there was a soothing quality to the sound of the thrusters churning away, the Brigantine leaving behind the coordinates and the Salvager 6 and her last chance at escape.

  Rosalyn wiped at her eyes before the tears even came back. She was locked in now, really locked in, determined to see this thing through and wipe Foxfire out for good. But it was lonely, waiting there with ugly thoughts lurking in the shadows of her mind. That was probably how it felt to be infested with Foxfire, always on the verge of turning the wrong mental corner, surrounded in your own body and head.

  A small icon blinked on her task bar. An unread mess
age. Well, it wasn’t exactly a mystery who it was from, but Rosalyn was curious all the same.

  Hey. You up?

  She rolled her eyes and composed a quick response.

  Yes. Don’t be vile.

  It was a legitimate question, he replied. You were pretty crashed out before.

  Pardon me for that, we all almost died.

  She watched the little ellipses scroll and scroll, disappointed in herself for wanting him to reply quickly. Eventually the icon blinked again.

  I have whiskey, he wrote.

  I’ll be right there.

  Josh Girdy could hardly blame her for drinking on the job at this point. Rosalyn double-checked the seals on her new suit, acclimating to the slightly different design. These were made for experimenting in labs and collecting samples, and were therefore lighter and less unwieldy. It was still Merchantia issue, however, and similar enough in style to work in similar ways. She stretched, testing it out. They were all standard sizes, and at a guess this one probably was made for someone petite like Misato. A bit tight. It had come with fresh oxygen filters, but she knew she would be compulsively checking the levels anyway. She hopped into the decontam pod and blasted herself one more time for good measure, then left the room and resealed it as quickly as she could.

  A shudder rattled her as she prepared to turn and go down the corridor. The Foxfire was still everywhere, glowing with unnerving, slow pulses. She could still see Piero’s hideous blue skull of a face in the shadows, hovering there, a disembodied threat. No. He was gone. He was gone and she wasn’t going to let the lingering trauma keep her from a stiff drink.

  Fight back.

  The floor buzzed underneath her feet, the reassuring vibrations of the thrusters carrying them toward CDAS. Not that their destination was at all a pleasant thought, but she preferred movement to the idle, sitting-duck feeling of drifting through space. This was their plan coming to fruition, she reminded herself, even if it didn’t look the way they had originally imagined. With her AR synced to Edison’s, she could keep tabs on the flight time and ETA. At their current level of fuel dedication and speed, they would reach CDAS in approximately forty-eight hours. Two days. A lot could change in two days. She only hoped Edison and Misato could hold on, that she wouldn’t run out of filters, and that the Foxfire wouldn’t find new and scarier ways to sway their minds.

  She had started filling the time as best she could, trying to make herself useful, finding small comfort in dreaming up a solution to the Foxfire still gripping Misato and Edison. A dream it would remain unless she could get her hands on the kind of lab she had used on Earth. Engineering implantable chips was her forte, and in theory, she didn’t see why the same technology couldn’t work to combat the spread of Foxfire. Without proper tools, she could only sketch and plan so far, but it was something. Something.

  A stupid, errant thought entered her head as she called up the schematic and navigated back to the spare storage room Edison had made into his bunker. The stupid thought was this, that maybe she was part of the solution to that precarious forty-eight hours. She was, after all, the only uninfected member of this ragtag crew. Maybe the untouched nature of her humanity was a weapon of sorts, something to use when the call of the Foxfire grew too irresistible. That was easy, in a way, because she liked Misato, and she liked Edison, too. It had shocked her, how cold it felt to be faced with his death, and how much relief she felt to find that he and Misato were relatively unscathed.

  Relatively. There was no telling what was happening on the inside, Rosalyn reminded herself, a fact that she would need to pin on her task bar just in case the whiskey stirred up dangerous thoughts.

  When she reached the storage area, she was surprised to find no sign of Edison. There was even less sign of Foxfire. She noted little traces of dirt on the floor, flecks of something grayish, but he had managed to scrape the ceiling and bunk area clean. An extendable sweeper and an automated cleaning drone sat just inside the open doors. The growth of Foxfire along the ceiling crept up to those doors but went no farther. Whether it was symbolic or practical, it made her feel more welcome. Safer.

  Rosalyn poked her head inside, peering around. Nobody.

  “Hello?” she called. “I’m here for the whiskey party?”

  Nothing.

  She dared to shuffle inside, finding that the dimmers had been switched to a pleasing level, just warmly lit enough to see, but not blinding or glaring. A work tablet was open on his “desk” and she approached it, hands behind her back, leaning over to find a series of handwritten poems done with a stylus. His handwriting was disarmingly artistic, with big, fine loops and a definite slant to the right. Smirking, she read over a few of the verses, then flicked the screen to the left to see more. It was a bit voyeuristic, but that feeling was swiftly quelled. The poems were childlike. One digital tablet simply read, frighteningly enough, TEETH.

  “Sorry, I stepped out.”

  Rosalyn jumped, then spun and tried, pathetically, not to blush. “I was definitely not prying.”

  Edison shrugged and strode purposefully toward her, setting down a full bottle of single-malt whiskey and a tumbler. Only one, she noted, a little sourly.

  “I’m only embarrassed that it’s so bad.”

  Rosalyn glanced over her shoulder at the tablet. “You’re a closet poet?”

  “I’m not,” he said, tapping the side of his head. “She is. Mostly children’s rhymes. Basic stuff.”

  “Oh. Oh, that’s . . . weird, actually.”

  Edison peeled the foil off the top of the bottle and yanked the cork out with his teeth, spitting it into the corner. The cleaning drone, a small, flat disk with three antennae, came to life and chased down the errant cork, sucking it into its round body before going back to sleep.

  “Weird? A grown man sitting alone in his storage unit writing children’s ditties is weird, you say?” He poured out a measure of whiskey for himself and then reached into his pocket, pulling out a package of sealed cylinders filled with amber-colored liquid.

  “No, well, yes,” Rosalyn said, taking the cylinders he handed to her and staring down at them dumbly. “Weird because I recognize some of it. Your unwelcome guests are plagiarizing.”

  Edison paused at that, his eyebrows climbing slowly upward. “Are you sure? When I do it—when the Foxfire makes me do it—it feels like it’s organic, you know, original.”

  Lilting jazz music filtered through the intercom, something chosen from his AR display. She didn’t know the artist, but it was relaxing to have the silence filled, even if this all was beginning to feel ominously like a date.

  “It’s definitely not original.” Rosalyn took the tablet and showed it to him, running her finger under one of the lines. “This I know from my childhood. It’s Shel Silverstein. And this? My best friend, Angela, knew some of these ones, bits of it. She would read it to her kids over vid calls at work.” Her eyes widened. “This next one? That’s Maisy Teng. My mom had a first-edition Maisy Teng signed and under a locked display. She’d read it to me before bed when I was a kid. I never got to touch it.” She blinked a few times and put the tablet down. “And if that isn’t a metaphor for our relationship, then nothing is. What are these, by the way?”

  “I found them in Piero’s junk,” Edison explained, tossing the tablet aside and taking her by the shoulder, turning her gently to the side.

  “Wow, well then I definitely don’t want anything to do with them. Probably laced with poison. What are you doing?”

  “Relax, they’re brand name. It’s just an injectable; you can use them in the suit port. These capsules are compatible with our lab wear, in case you get hungry or thirsty in the field. They link into the suit from the packaging, totally clean.” Edison held up one of the sealed capsules for her to see. “You cool?”

  “Yeah,” Rosalyn mumbled. “Yeah, I’m cool, I’m very—ow! Jesus. You didn’t say
it would sting!”

  “Sorry. Thought it would be better to just get it over with, you know, rip the bandage off.”

  “Warn me next time, geez,” she wheezed, rubbing at the closed port on the side of her hip. Then she opened her eyes wide, the direct injection of alcohol making her head spin. “That’s . . . effective.”

  “Which means I need to catch up.” Edison grabbed his glass and lifted it, then clinked it lightly against her helmet visor. “Cheers.”

  “That’s not funny,” she told him. “I don’t even get to taste the stuff.”

  “And that’s a shame because it is oooh. Very smooth.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Rosalyn waved him off with a grin, taking the tablet again and pacing away from the table. She couldn’t let this go. It was too odd, too specific. “Why would Foxfire know these poems? Are you sure you don’t recognize them?”

  Edison didn’t follow, leaning against the table and swirling his cup. He put one arm across his middle, just under his pectoral muscles, which had the uncomfortable result of showing off his physique. Rosalyn squinted down at the tablet diligently.

  “Maybe I heard them when I was a kid and I just don’t remember. Foxfire could be digging through my memories, whether they’re ones I’m aware of or not. Rayan took a ton of notes on it, creepy stuff, tracking the way it all changed, the way Foxfire tried different things to get to him. Not the most pleasant thought.” He shivered and chased off the shake with some whiskey. “Childhood is nostalgic. Powerful.”

  “Mm-hmm,” she agreed. “Which means it’s dangerous.”

  “I know some of this, like the ‘Are you sleeping?’ song. My ex-wife would sing that one to her kid when he had nightmares.”

  Rosalyn coughed softly. “You were married?”

  “Yeah, you?”

  “No . . . no, never. Close, maybe, but it was a disaster. My mother was really pushing for it, I know she always wanted to plan a wedding.”