Salvaged

by Madeleine Roux

  “Shhh, shhh,” she repeated, and it had the unintended side effect of soothing her, too, banishing the fluttery panic in her chest.

  White became pale turquoise, which became light blue, then darker, then the hue she had come to consider “normal.” It would have to be enough. It was certainly better. Rosalyn felt one hot, fat tear escape, rolling over her cheek and splashing at the bottom of the visor. Her helmet clinked quietly against the shield as her humming grew less and less, until it was just a wisp on her lips, a heavy breath.

  “Are you all right?” she murmured. Their fingers would have met if not for the shield.

  Edison looked up, a swipe of blood across his forehead and nose. The tussle with Piero had broken his glasses on one side. He had repaired them, but now they were bent again.

  “I should be asking you that.”

  It was bone-deep relief to hear his true voice again, husky, hoarse, but human.

  “What happened?” she asked, watching him wipe at the blood and tears on his face. “You were fine in the lab and then—”

  “It’s you.” He cut her off, not meanly, but with a shuddering sigh. His eyes were wet again. “It’s you. The Foxfire is . . . trying to use you against me. It thinks it can, I don’t know, dangle you joining the cluster in front of me like some sort of prize. It’s disgusting. First my mother, now you . . . Whatever I care about is just turned against me.”

  Rosalyn flinched, but didn’t move her hand, and Edison was still. “Edison . . .”

  “You don’t have to say anything. You’ve been pretty clear about what you think of me.”

  “No, I haven’t been,” she said. “But I don’t think hope is a luxury we can afford right now. I run every scenario over and over again, and it doesn’t look good. Maybe in another life. Maybe . . . God, I don’t know, maybe if we get to CDAS and they greet us with champagne and a perfect cure for you and Misato.”

  Edison pulled his lower lip between his teeth and glanced away, his forefinger working against the fissure nervously. “It wasn’t the song.”

  “What?”

  “The song. It helped, sure, but it wasn’t the song that brought me back,” he said.

  She wanted him to go on but he didn’t. He didn’t need to. Rosalyn felt a lump rising in her throat, sharp and unavoidable. “What if I’m not there to help next time?”

  “I don’t know,” Edison admitted. “But I’ve tried swallowing this down deep, and it doesn’t seem to be working out so well. I won’t speak for you, and I won’t tell you what to do, but me? I’m going to try running toward the light instead of away from it.”

  Rosalyn tipped her head to the side. “I’m the light in this metaphor?”

  “It’s not perfect, I admit. I didn’t exactly have time to workshop it, okay?”

  “Take a step back,” she said. “Please.”

  Edison put both hands up, rolling his eyes, not at her, she knew, but at himself. “I get it. I’ll leave you alone. No need to ask twice.”

  “Just a step.” She reached for the door panel. “You are terrible at following directions.”

  “I’m the captain, I’m usually giving them.”

  The shield lifted, wisps from the diffuser spreading into the corridor before she crossed into the hall and shut the door behind her. She reminded herself that she was being incredibly stupid, and then reached for his hand, holding it lightly in her gloved palm before he returned the gesture, twining his fingers in hers.

  “I guess there’s something romantic about tragedy,” Rosalyn muttered, glancing up at him.

  “Stop it,” he said, but he was half grinning.

  “Hey, tragic endings can be beautiful. Here.” She poked her left forefinger against the shield, approximating above her cheekbone. “One,” she said. “Just one.”

  “Just one,” he repeated gently, as if saying more might spook her. He leaned down and down, crossing the distance with what felt to her like reverence. Maybe she imagined it, but Rosalyn let herself.

  The kiss fell light as a snowflake on her visor, the only evidence it had ever happened the slightest smudge and the roses in her cheeks.

  “The perfect start,” Edison whispered, backing away into the darkness, “to a tragic ending.”

  37

  Misato stood in front of the cockpit display, inputting Rosalyn’s credentials to keep the thrusters burning. She increased their fueling rate, impatient to reach CDAS. The time they spent as a crew on the station had gone by in a flash. Leaving the confines of the ship was always a treat—better food, new people to talk to and more room to stretch the legs. But Piero had been in such a rush, convincing Edison that it was better to pick up their allotted samples and supplies and keep moving. He was security, he said with his usual bluster, and CDAS wasn’t officially a Merchantia property. It was a neutral station, technically in Canadian waters, but parceled out to different research, development and corporate entities. For the right price, anyone could rent space there to work in antigravity labs or to test orbital reactions, and Piero didn’t trust it.

  “The Wild West,” he had said, antsy, fidgeting in the cockpit. “You know what the Wild West is? It’s like that. Not a good place, you don’t want to spend too much time hanging around here.”

  That seemed like an exaggeration, but Misato caught the vibe in the station that nobody really cared who they were or why they were there. Everyone kept to themselves, their uniforms branded with whatever corporation they were associated with. She had at least gotten enough time to grab some half-decent grilled chicken and a glass of wine.

  After they left, she hadn’t given the station much thought, but now the opportunity to return consumed her. It was unnatural, this preoccupation, manifesting not from her own psyche but an indirect feeling. Foxfire. Edison had described the sensation to her once, saying it was like passing by an advertising node and having a cheeseburger pop up in your AR display. Ten seconds ago you didn’t want that cheeseburger, but now you couldn’t help but crave it.

  Hamburger, hamburger, hamburger. Relentless.

  She sat in one of the swiveling chairs and placed her palms on her knees, trying to remain at ease, but it was not so simple. The Foxfire inside her felt . . . effervescent, like tiny bubbles rising through champagne. That same giddiness echoed in her own breast. She hadn’t felt the invader inside her react that way to anything. It had experienced a kind of joy or anticipation when Piero and Rayan fell under its influence completely, but that held a sinister edge. This was something else, and, inexplicably, it frightened her more.

  Misato closed her eyes, falling into herself. It was a technique she learned with Jenny at a meditation retreat. The suite on Tokyo Bliss Station had been painted an inviting sky blue, puffy white clouds drifting through the lobby via their AR integration. Soft, twinkling sitar music filtered down from the ceiling, and attendants dressed in crisp white robes glided out to meet them. Everyone who worked there was so serene, composed, as if nothing could jar them out of a benignly smiley mood.

  “It’s a good day,” the woman said as she came to her and Jenny. A helpful cloud popped up above her head, spinning, the name Solaris printed across it. “When you join us here, friends, every day is a good day.”

  Solaris gestured to the open hall to her right, past the registration desk. They had reservations, so they were allowed to walk right on through.

  “Kuh-reepy,” Jenny muttered as they went. “Her name is Solaris, because of course it is.”

  “Give it a chance,” Misato chided.

  The guru led about twenty of them through holotropic breathing exercises in a brightly lit rotunda. Most meditation seminars Misato had attended were held in dim rooms filled with enough pillows to make a nap seem like a good idea. But this rotunda was almost blindingly yellow, the lights and walls a cheerful buttercup color. They sat on hard mats after their breath work was done.
She heard Jenny snigger as the guru, her long hair braided to her waist, began chanting.

  “Are they going to turn the lights down? My eyes hurt.”

  “It’s part of the experience,” Misato explained. “You have to fight against it, keep your eyes closed so completely that no light slips in.”

  Jenny sighed. She hated it.

  Misato didn’t know what to think. She had never tried to sit in direct sunlight with her eyes closed for that long. After a while, she noticed the red, glowing nature of her closed eyelids, as if her skin had become a lantern, lit from within. The chanting became rhythmic, mesmerizing. She went back a second time without Jenny there to distract her and found it easier to fight the bright light, to venture so deep inside herself that even the floor beneath her and the chanting disappeared.

  Meditation never worked for Jenny because she could never quiet her mind. Misato agreed it was extremely difficult to master, but after a while she developed a way to turn off the thoughts and questions that normally plagued her. What’s that bump on my leg? What should I make for dinner? To turn it all off she pictured a black wall that stretched in every direction, and a glossy black pool at her feet. She walked slowly toward the wall, timing the guru’s chants with her steps, clicking off the thoughts in her head like light switches until everything was blank and dark. Then she would sit in that void until ideas offered themselves up.

  Misato had found that the same technique worked, unexpectedly, with Foxfire, but instead of leading her to a void, it led her to an empty room where she could face the voice inside her head with greater clarity. And there, they conversed.

  She hadn’t tried to talk this way with her parasite since the incident with Rayan and Piero. It was too painful to consider, and she didn’t trust herself not to simply explode with rage instead of listening and responding with deliberate composure.

  But the excited buzzing in her head and body told her it was time to investigate. While everyone else fought the Foxfire, she had hoped to negotiate with it. So far, neither method produced encouraging results, but all things being equal, she would prefer to fight this battle with open ears and compassion. Losing gracefully was a victory of a kind.

  This time, when she returned to the blank room, she found it occupied. That was new. A function of losing Rayan and Piero? Or did it have to do with their proximity to CDAS? She cleared her mind. The meditative state would break if she allowed in too many rushed questions.

  “I’ve seen you before,” Misato told the figure calmly.

  It was the blue woman, though she appeared blurry, as if being viewed through a lens smeared with gel. The woman said nothing, floating an inch or two above the black floor, her arms loosely at her sides. Her skin and hair were cerulean, her body not fully concealed but draped in a light cloth that billowed around her.

  “You’re from my dreams,” she added. “Our dreams. We’ve all seen you.”

  No reply.

  Misato hazarded a few more steps toward her, but the farther she went, the blurrier the woman’s image became. There were no foolish questions in meditation, and so she asked, “Are you God? A vestige of God? Or are you my own creation, a way for my mind to process the abstract? Fungus doesn’t look like much to us. Is this form supposed to be more familiar?”

  Nothing.

  It would be easy to get frustrated and stop, but Misato had been successful in luring the Foxfire into conversation before. Forbearance, she thought, patience would see her through.

  Misato tried walking faster toward her, but as soon as she came within touching distance, the blue woman transformed, becoming first a liquid blob and then a body again, but it was Rayan. He looked whole. His eyes were a soft, inviting brown.

  “It isn’t really you,” she said sensibly.

  “No,” Rayan, or the image of him, agreed. “We are part of the cluster. Our image, our actions, and the knowledge gained before my departure. We’re all her children.”

  She could feel her temper rising. Departure. That certainly was a word for it. He wouldn’t have wound up floating in outer space, dead, if not for what the Foxfire had done to them all.

  “You’re excited about something,” Misato observed. Even this figment squirmed with expectation, fingers curling and flexing, a playful smile on his lips. “Things . . . are going well for you.”

  “Yes,” he replied simply. “We are closer now. We will all be with her soon.”

  “I don’t think so,” Misato said. She found it best to keep her voice level; any hint of aggravation or despair chased the Foxfire away. She couldn’t help but wonder if this monotone, calm medium was somehow conducive to the organism, that human emotion created an unstable or untenable environment. Rayan believed, and she did, too, that not all of its structure was purely physical—its ability to send signals telepathically must make it extraordinarily sensitive to changes in mood.

  “We have proved you wrong before.”

  “You have,” she allowed. Rayan stood in one place, visibly trembling with enthusiasm. “But your methods are changing, which means we must be resisting successfully. You were thoughtful, then friendly, then aggressive . . . What will you be next?”

  Rayan blinked and when his eyes opened he had multiplied, until a row of copies stretched out on either side, for infinity. His smile became tranquil, beatific.

  “Multitudinous.”

  Then he was gone. Misato waited, reining in the urge to scream in frustration. This was nonsense. Foxfire was already everywhere in the ship, its ability to spread easily observable. Multitudinous. Minutes passed but Rayan did not return and neither did the blue woman. Misato breathed deeply and emerged from the meditation, sighing as she dropped her head into her hands. What a waste of time. She should’ve been studying Rayan’s notes instead of playing hide-and-seek with unseen monsters.

  There was a soft tap on the door outside the cockpit, and she swiveled in the chair to find Rosalyn waiting there, dressed in the shiny white Merchantia lab suit.

  “Is now a good time?” she asked.

  Misato nodded, beckoning her forward. The salvager had a tablet in her hands, a standard-issue work pad given to everyone on the crew. Rosalyn’s eyes drifted to the flight display behind her, scanning quickly side to side.

  “I thought I heard the thrusters kick up. Was that you?”

  “This needs to end before I go nuts,” Misato replied. “I’m tired of waiting around on this ship. Anything is better than waiting to be consumed.”

  “Did you ever try that AR adventure at the Dome? They had a great one with dragons on Mars, and all these characters you could team up with,” Rosalyn said, going to the cockpit chair next to her and sitting down.

  Misato let out a chirp of laughter. “Red Mountain Runner,” she said fondly.

  “Yes! God, I was absolutely obsessed with RMR, I think I played it sixteen times. I had to see all the endings,” she replied, shaking her head. “And, uh, see all the romances, too.”

  “I did the same thing,” she said. “Who was your favorite? I liked Kali’rahn.”

  “She was completely epic, for sure, but I had a soft spot for Dantis.”

  “Ahhh.” Misato fluttered her lashes. “The classic hero. He usually died in my runs.”

  They both laughed, and Rosalyn leaned back in the chair, gazing up at the ceiling. “I would cut off my left arm to be in the Dome right now, fighting space orcs.”

  “What made you think of it?” Misato asked. “Besides finding yourself in this hellscape with us . . .”

  “Just something you said, you know, about being antsy, about just wanting to get this over with. Whatever this is.” Rosalyn pulled her head back down and leaned across toward Misato, turning the tablet around. “Before I tried RMR for the first time, I asked a friend who had gone through it for spoilers. I wanted to get the good ending the first time; it gave me massive anxi
ety to think about messing it up.”

  Misato took the tablet, chuckling. “Shut up, I did the same thing! My girlfriend forgot to retrieve the protective amulet for Janie and had a total party wipe in the foothills. She was a ball of anxiety until she got to go back and do it over again.”

  “I would be, too,” Rosalyn snorted.

  “But you’re not here to talk RMR strategies, I take it.”

  “Correct.” Rosalyn sighed, clearly reluctant to switch topics. Then her brow turned down fiercely with concentration, and she woke up the tablet she had brought, opening a writing app.

  “It’s recording me,” Misato noticed, pointing at the little red camera light shining in her eyes. “Security measure?”

  “Yup. It’s Piero’s. He was up to something serious with you guys. I looked through some of his code and searched his username. It’s tied to . . . well, my old company. My family owns Belrose Industries, and he has the same sort of employee ID we all used. I have no idea how this all fits together, but I can’t stop thinking it all connects. Anyway, I’m not much of a coder, so I thought maybe you could take a look, see if any of it makes sense to you.”

  Misato stared unseeing at the screen for a moment. That was a lot to process. Of all the crew in the cluster, Piero had always felt the most remote to her, closed off. Now it was obvious why. He was holding in a secret, maybe many, and trying to keep them from finding out.

  “I . . . sure. Tuva’s death makes more sense now. He was protecting something big.” Misato took the tablet, squinting down at the tiny rows of code. She increased the text size and dug in, going quiet for a long time. It wasn’t awkward; Rosalyn let her work without seeming bored or impatient. In fact, she turned to the flight screen and seemed to be inspecting the way Misato had increased thruster usage while maintaining the lowest rate of fuel burn-off.

  [pe_BRIT0711007@ip-72-39-

  181-61 ~]$ poe.sh -a -P