Salvaged

by Madeleine Roux

  She stretched her arms over her head, no longer able to resist yawning. Before he had seen her trying to hide it, swallowing her exhaustion with big, rounded cheeks and a gulp. Her hands came down with a slap on the table and she leaned against it, head drooping.

  “It’s what Misato calls me. I have no idea why.”

  Edison chuckled, feeling the whiskey swirl heavily through his veins. He had avoided drinking recently, finding that the hangovers were brutal, as if he were experiencing them twice, once as himself and once through the Foxfire. He wondered if he would sleep, if he would dream of the blue lady, or if instead, by some miracle, he would dream of Rosalyn. The last human woman he would ever live to see.

  “You’re eminently nicknameable.” The words came out on their own, rather than staying put in his head where they belonged.

  She glanced at him sidelong and rolled her eyes at him yet again. “And you’re drunk.”

  “Guilty. And you’re exhausted.”

  “Guilty.” Another yawn, one that turned into a helpless laugh. “This is all . . . so much. But you’re right, knowing how Belrose is wrapped up in this mess would make me feel better, but it won’t speed up the trip to the station. I guess that means I should try to sleep, if I can. I’m still wiped. God, I wish I could fit a whole mattress in the decontam pod.”

  Edison watched her tap her fingers one last time on the table before she walked toward the rounded door.

  “Wouldn’t risk it,” he called after her on impulse. “We need to keep you healthy.”

  “Only half of you thinks that,” Rosalyn reminded him, but it wasn’t cruel.

  “The important half. The half you find devastatingly charming, mm?”

  She was through the door, just a vanishing silhouette, a shadow becoming a longer shadow, becoming nothing. “Ha! You wish. Good night, Captain.”

  Then she was gone, and he stood for too long watching the place where she had been. There were other minds in the cluster with him, but that didn’t keep him from feeling intensely alone. In a way, it was more isolating, because he didn’t trust any of the thoughts that came spontaneously, prone to finding they weren’t his at all. Did it matter? Was this him staring longingly after a woman forever trapped under glass, or was it Piero? Was it Misato? Was it an unknown and unseen person far away, someone receiving his tics and habits, someone walking around with an inexplicable hankering for single-malt whiskeys?

  Does it matter?

  The strangest thing had happened weeks ago, when they first noticed the effects of the Foxfire. A phantom flavor tickled across his tongue. Chocolate syrup. He didn’t have a sweet tooth, but his mouth was suddenly oozing with chocolate and he couldn’t explain it. A few hours later he opened the crew refrigerator to find a bottle of chocolate syrup hidden in the back, behind the more practical foods. A little piece of tape was over the label, reading M.I.

  It was like he had been right there, squeezing the syrup into his mouth in a moment of late-night weakness. He understood it now, but at the time he had felt insane. Psychic. When he found the bottle he made sure nobody was around and then swiped an ice-cold, sluggish drop of syrup onto his finger before tasting it. Horrid. Pure sugar. He spat it out, wondering how he had been tricked into enjoying it during that odd moment of transference.

  Edison stuffed the urge to take another swig of the whiskey. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the empty doorway. Was this just transference? If he saw those big hazel eyes up close, touched the light roughness of her shaved head, would he regret it? It could be just a trick of the Foxfire, some other heart in some other place skipping a beat, not his. Or it was the whiskey. Or the loneliness, or the certainty that any minute now he would lose the capacity for admiring another human altogether.

  Was it someone else’s ache masquerading as his own?

  Maybe, but he didn’t think so. He really didn’t think so.

  36

  The whiskey wore off and with it, her terrible urge to sleep. She tried to make a serviceable nest out of the two environmental suits and one of the cushions from a desk chair in cold storage, but the sticky material and the flat pillow only exacerbated how not cozy it all was. Anytime she shifted, the suits squeaked and stuck to her skin. Briefly, she considered kitting up again to get more of those alcohol injectors, but that felt like too much work.

  She stared out at the corridor, daring something to come for her. Her mother used to tell her, when she came screaming into their bedroom, convinced of boogeymen, that the best way to banish a bad dream was to meet it head-on.

  Imagine the worst thing that could happen and you’ll never be surprised.

  “If only you could see me now, Mom,” she whispered to the ceiling, then softer, “Jesus, Dad, what did you get yourself into?”

  The blue flowering growth outside the shield seemed dimmer, as if in mourning after the loss of Piero and Rayan. Rosalyn had met Misato briefly on her way back from the lab. The engineer was doing her best to patch up JAX, but it wasn’t looking good. They needed far more replacement parts than they had available on the ship, and she would spend the rest of the night trying to 3-D extrude replacements, though it wasn’t the best solution. His hard drive hadn’t fried, which was something, but that only guaranteed that he could be put into a new body and retain the information, images and data he had already processed.

  At that, the two women had exchanged a long look. When they had access to a signal again, they needed to get that information back to HQ. Merchantia—hell, GATE and the government—needed to know what had happened here so it never transpired again. JAX had recorded so much of the struggle, but Rosalyn couldn’t help but be thankful that he hadn’t been around to record the deaths among the crew. Nobody needed to see that. Rosalyn herself wished she could scrub it from her mind.

  She had left out the part about her family business potentially being in league with ISS, Beta Tech and Merchantia. And Piero. Rosalyn couldn’t make heads or tails of it herself; she definitely did not want to dump that mess into Misato’s lap until it made marginally more sense.

  Damn. She should have just gone through the trouble to suit up and get those whiskey capsules. It was the only way she was going to get rest, she thought, because she was too keyed up and too close to bad memories to turn her brain off. A sour taste filled her mouth, bitter and familiar—it was so like the nights just after Glen attacked her. She had tried every drug and every drink in the universe, even experimental ones, but nothing worked. Her nights were spent tossing and turning, dipping into twilight sleep only to come awake gasping and sputtering seconds later. Sometimes, after dawn, her body finally relented and let her grab a few thin hours of rest, but she never felt really awake, suffering on top of suffering, the booze and drugs giving her jarring hand tremors.

  And there was something more, something that bit at the back of her brain, a bug bite that wasn’t satisfied no matter how much she scratched. Because, really, she didn’t even know where to begin scratching. It was a puzzle app glitching out, and with no base image to use as a comparison. The blue woman. Her family’s company. Piero. The little fragments of poetry that she knew she knew.

  Rosalyn threw her arms over her head and inhaled deeply. Edison was right. It was stupid fussing over all of these clues when they were about to get back to where it all started. Even then, she had to prepare herself for the possibility that they might not learn anything at all. They would arrive and dock, and because they couldn’t communicate with the station, they would immediately be flagged as suspicious and probably escorted in. Then she would have to find some way to communicate that nobody was to come aboard. How would she even do that? Interpretive dance? After that, she had to convince the customs and quarantine agents that she wasn’t harmful, just the other two, but that they really, really with a cherry on top needed them to scan for a few specific serial numbers.

  It sounded crazy to her; what
would it sound like to them?

  And this was why she would never get to sleep. Endless questions. Endless plans to be made. Belrose Fucking Industries.

  She could not believe her father figured into it. Rosalyn had cut off contact with the man for months, true, but she still thought better of him in the big picture. Maybe he believed a scummy guy in accounting more than his own daughter, but that didn’t make him ethically questionable enough to play around with something as scary and volatile as Foxfire. She listened to his most recent message again, knowing it was no use trying to sleep, mining the little snippet of confession for whatever truth she could find.

  “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.”

  The one time she should have responded to the damned message and this was it. Why did he have to be so infuriatingly vague? He was afraid, that much was clear, and he ought to be, if he was in some kind of shady alliance with Merchantia and ISS. And God help him if he had some connection to the Foxfire samples. Charitably, she wondered if maybe he was being threatened or extorted. Or, another charitable thought, perhaps he simply had no idea what Foxfire really was. Xenobio samples were the most precious resource around for a tech company; maybe the flashing dollar signs had blinded him to what might be at stake.

  Imagine the worst thing that could happen and you’ll never be surprised.

  Okay, Mom, what’s the worst imaginable reason?

  In theory—in theory—if her father knew what the Foxfire was capable of, or what Merchantia researchers suspected it was capable of, then the most valuable aspect of the fungus was what? Its aggressive nature was not really marketable. But telepathy? That . . . that was priceless. As a scientist, she couldn’t even pin down the most marketable aspect because it was all marketable. And dangerous.

  Telepathy. Regeneration. The Foxfire had kept Rayan alive despite a mortal head wound; if that healing property could be extracted and controlled . . . something like that would change medicine forever. What CEO with a hungry board could resist?

  Her task bar chimed, alerting her to a new message. Of course Edison wasn’t asleep, he never would be. Well, she wasn’t exactly busy, so she opened the message and noticed the attachment. It was kind of sweet, even if she couldn’t download it. No signal. No network. She copied the title and searched her hard database, finding it easily among popular songs from the last five years. It had made a few “best of” jazz playlists. Rosalyn closed her eyes and put the song on repeat, then she composed one last message before trying to sleep.

  Thanks for the suggestion. If this actually works I might have to burn you for witchcraft.

  Not five seconds later his icon blinked with a new message.

  Can’t burn what’s already scorching hot. OH.

  Rosalyn snorted, shaking her head and draping one arm over her mouth, laughing into her forearm.

  You really have to let this go.

  This time his reply took longer. Why? Got big plans?

  She had to laugh, because if she didn’t, she would certainly cry. This wasn’t fair. None of this was remotely fair. Why did she have to go to the ends of traveled space to find someone that made her want to be in her heart and her mind and her body again? Why hadn’t they crossed paths on campus? In another universe, another reality, they bumped into each other in the cantina and she spilled her soda on him, he brushed it off and smiled, then introduced himself. When, after the first date, she tried to disappear, he let her, and then she changed her mind, messaged him, and they went on a real proper date. Forager in Little Paris on Tokyo Bliss Station. Or they stupidly went for ramen and ended up splattered and liquid-bellied. She would tell a best friend, almost certainly Angela, that he was hot, but not too hot, that he was the second-professor-you-got-a-crush-on kind of hot, not the first professor, because that one was who everyone crushed on, the guy who always ended up being a douchebag. The second professor was when you were older and smarter and realized how much you liked elbow patches on a blazer. Angela would say something like, “Oh, honey, you’ve got it bad,” and then they would laugh and laugh over their grapefruit mimosas.

  In another reality, the first time she saw his name wasn’t on a grave marker.

  You know why.

  This is for your own good, she thought. Our own good.

  Ten seconds . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . She had scared him off. Why did that fill her with so much regret?

  Then: A man can dream.

  Rosalyn nodded, hoping he stopped responding after her next message. She didn’t like how this felt. Like drowning a kitten. Like killing a good and innocent thing.

  So can a woman—time for bed I hope. Good night, Edison.

  * * *

  —

  She woke to a crack that split her dreams open like the heavy thunk of a cleaver. At first, drowsy and in the dark, she thought something had malfunctioned with the ship’s thrusters or that they had run into some kind of floating debris. But then she saw two glowing white slivers, eye height, and the face of the man she had just wished good night.

  “Edison?” she whispered, sitting up fast, head spinning, eyes adjusting too slowly. “Edison! NO!”

  His head slammed into the shield again, then his fist, right over the fissure Piero had left. Scrambling to her feet, Rosalyn tumbled off of the hazmat suits, kicking her legs out to untangle them from the twisted pile they had become. He wasn’t going to stop. He wasn’t himself. Her only defense was the suit, and then . . .

  And then?

  The multi-tool had gone into space with Piero. She had nothing. Nothing. Another crack, and the sound of spidering fractures racing along the barrier, threatening to implode. She had to think, clearly and quickly, and protect herself from what was coming headlong through the shield at any moment. Crying out to him, pleading, she shook out the newer lab suit and climbed into it, jumping to pull it faster up her body and over her shoulders, her fingers useless and shaking as she reached for the toggles and seals. This was it. Unless Misato came rushing to her aid, she would have her helmet ripped off and her lungs exposed to the spores.

  She heard Edison collapse against the shield, going limp. He was still upright, one fist resting above his head, his forehead bloodied and digging against the barrier. His eyes were still bright white, but tears tracked down his cheeks, darkening his beard.

  “Please,” she heard him whisper. Whimper. “Please . . . I just . . . Can I just talk to you? Can we just . . . just . . .”

  I and then we. He was slipping in and out of the Foxfire’s control. That explained the tears. Rosalyn knew it was reckless to ignore him, so she grabbed a pouch of food out of the decontam pod and tore it open, slamming it down, choking but eating anyway. Cold, gelatinous pork. She ate another, and a third, knowing it might be the last time she could eat at all.

  “You don’t have to hurt yourself like that,” Rosalyn said, closing the seals on her visor and swallowing desperately around a mouthful of bland mush.

  Crack.

  “You don’t have to listen to those voices!” she cried, racing to the shield. This was a better hope, she thought, her only hope. Cornered in the tiny room, she would never overpower him. She had seen what a beating Piero could take, and so she sided with compassion, gasping as she felt his head thump against the shield.

  “Hey!” Rosalyn tapped on the barrier. Then again. “Hey, look at me, Edison. Really look at me.” She watched the fissure closely. The diffusers were on, and if the milky air from her side seeped into the corridor, she would know the room was breached.

  Edison�
�s startling white eyes found her, his mouth turned down in a pitiful frown as he smeared his blood across the shield, struggling for air. “I don’t want to . . . I don’t want to—ach.”

  His head crashed against the shield again and a sob escaped his lips, a desperate prayer. Rosalyn felt her own tears coming on, a rush of heat behind her eyes so strong it stole her breath away. But she licked her lips, steadied herself, tapping her fingers on the barrier until he locked gazes with her again.

  “It’s okay, Edison, it’s okay. How does the song go? Here, I’ll try to hum it,” she said, the trembling in her voice giving away just how much she wanted to curl up in the corner and hide from him. Not him, the Foxfire. She could see him fighting it, hear the I and not the we. God, she had heard him hum that damned song so many times but the beginning eluded her. Softly, softly, she heard his low bass voice begin the horn’s line, climbing higher, then holding for half a second. That was it.

  “Yes, like that,” Rosalyn cried. She picked up the song, humming along, her voice higher, not quite in harmony with his but following closely. Blood dripped down the shield between them. Her fingers smoothed over the tight circles of the fissure, a noticeable dent there but nothing sharp. Nothing breaking through.

  Crack.

  The blow to his temple interrupted the song, but it only made Rosalyn hitch and continue, humming as calmly as she could, trying to keep the thread of the melody while Edison joined in again, just a rumble in his throat, hardly more than a growl.

  “You love this song,” she reminded him. “Dick Friday, right? You just sent me another one of his. I want to listen to it, Edison, but I want to listen to it with my own ears. Do you understand? Don’t come through this door. Don’t make me listen to that song with someone else’s ears.”

  She hummed again and she would do it for as long as it took. He looked as if he were falling gently to sleep, lulled away from the Foxfire’s call and toward the lullaby of the familiar song. His fingers touched the shield on the other side of the fissure, blood running along his skin, tunneling into the barrier.