Salvaged

by Madeleine Roux

  42

  A hush fell over him, and everything was quiet. The hospital smelled like pain and antiseptic, a smell he would always associate with death. He wouldn’t step foot in a hospital again unless it was life-threatening; just one whiff of that air and he wanted to run.

  “Eddie, baby, you’re here!”

  “Of course I’m here.”

  Edison looked down at his mother on the hospital bed. He had brought her a special blanket, one he had shipped from their house on Earth. It was crocheted with little blue and orange flowers, and cheered up the dreary white and gray sheets folded over her legs. Diana, shriveled, small, spoke to him through her oxygen mask.

  “You’re awake,” Edison said, frowning. “But you’ve been asleep for months . . .”

  “It’s you,” she said, patting the bed by her knees. “You woke me up. Where are Candace and Joey?”

  “He doesn’t like it here.” Sitting next to her, he could feel the scary thinness of her leg through the blanket. He ran his hand over the blue and orange flowers. “It upsets him.”

  “It upsets you, too.”

  Edison didn’t say anything, swallowing around a lump.

  “But you come to see me, it upsets you but you come to see me,” she said, smiling as much as she could through the mask. “Because you love your mother, baby. You’ve always been such a good son.”

  A nurse came in, sighing, consulting an overstuffed clipboard. Her name tag was blank, and when Edison tried to look at her face, it was nothing but a smudge, a blur. He squinted, but she never came into focus.

  “Something isn’t right,” he whispered.

  “Mr. Aries? I think you should leave now,” the nurse said, her voice warped, almost a garble. But he knew what she said, and what she wanted.

  “I’m staying with my mother.”

  “That’s right, baby. You stay here with your mother.” Diana reached for his hand, and he took it, cradling the baby-bird lightness of it carefully in his palm.

  “It’s time for you to go,” the nurse said, never putting down her clipboard. “Now.”

  Diana sat up, struggling, leaning toward him. She smelled sour and dusty, her hair badly in need of a wash. “Don’t let her take me, baby. Don’t let her kill your mother.”

  “What?”

  A nurse wouldn’t do that . . . It was his decision. Of course it was his decision. But his mother had woken up, hadn’t she? The life support could be taken away. They would run some tests, of course, make sure she was in good enough shape to get off the oxygen, but then she would be better.

  He stared at the nurse for a long time, trying to make a face out of the fuzzy space where a nose and mouth should be. Soft, strange noises came from her, as if something were stuck in her chest, a hiccup, but louder and more like a voice. He strained to hear it, but nothing became clear, and then he saw her darting forward, toward the bed. Toward the machine.

  “No!”

  Edison lurched for her, taking the nurse by the shoulders and wrestling her away, down to the ground. She was tall and strong, but he fought her back, pinning her to the floor. The bizarre, muted cries from her chest became louder. His head ached, hard, almost blinding, and he cried out, then fell to the side, feeling her knee slam into his crotch.

  The nurse jumped swiftly to her feet, scrambling toward the machine.

  “It’s not your mother! It’s Angela. It’s not your mother!”

  Edison froze, trying to stand, and hearing, at last, the strangled words caught in the nurse’s chest. She was close to the machine now. She was going to unplug his mother. Kill her. But if she was awake and well, why would it matter? Why did she need the machine?

  “Don’t let her touch me! I don’t want to die, baby, I don’t want to die. You wouldn’t kill your mother . . .”

  Diana’s face, wet with tears, shimmered under the oxygen mask. He could remember when that face was full and healthy, when her shoulders were more than desiccated knobs. This was a memory, but it was all wrong. All wrong. He knew how it went. He remembered the way his hands shook and then became strong as he reached for the machine himself. His mother wasn’t there anymore. She had died a long time ago.

  “Stop!” he shouted at the nurse, grabbing her by the waist and pushing her to the side. “I have to do it. Me.”

  “No, I’ll help you. We can do this together, all right? Together. It’s a mercy, we can’t leave Angela like this, we can’t let her hurt anyone else. That’s not who she was, she was a good friend, a good person, and she wouldn’t want to stay like this.” The nurse looked different then, familiar. Beautiful. He trusted her big hazel eyes, and he nodded, knowing her again. The knowledge made him feel strong. Rosalyn.

  “Help me,” Edison whispered. Rosalyn stood out from the rest of the room, richer in color, realer and more vivid than the faded memory around him.

  Diana thrashed on the bed, rising up, clawing at him, no longer a frail woman but a skeletal creature of talons and flashing teeth. Blue. She was explosively blue, and her sharp hands lashed out toward him. Rosalyn shifted to block her, trying to hold her hands still while Edison struggled to reach her life support.

  “You wouldn’t kill your mother!” she screamed and screamed, tearing at Rosalyn’s side. “I’m your friend . . . your friend. Everything went to pieces, Rosalyn . . .” So he was no longer the focus of her anger, Rosalyn was. He watched the salvager brace herself and shut her eyes tight, but Mother—Angela—went on shrieking and pawing at her. “Don’t take this away from me. My children . . . All of this was mine, my project. I gave up everything for this, don’t take it away!” They pierced, her screams, fracturing his headache into a million stabbing pieces, but he went to the machine himself while Rosalyn held Mother at bay.

  “Do it, Edison.” Rosalyn opened her eyes, finding his.

  “I’m your friend!” the creature on the bed wailed. “I’m your mother!”

  He found the display on her life support. He knew this memory.

  “You’re not my mother.” Edison blinked through the pain in his head, gazing at the pitiable creature writhing on the hospital bed. The little crocheted blanket fell on the floor. All the hate had gone out of him, and all the fear. “I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  —

  Light shot in every direction. Edison opened his eyes to find Misato and Rosalyn staring at him, both with mouths open, their hands reaching out toward him.

  His head felt better. Clearer. The pain lingered but gradually slipped away. A pile of blue ash scattered across the desk in front of him, and with it came a wave of nausea. The tendrils of iridescent turquoise spreading from the desk, from the woman that had been there but was no more, blackened, shriveling up like charred leaves.

  “You fought back,” Rosalyn whispered, unblinking. “You helped me fight Foxfire.”

  “Mother,” Edison rumbled. “She was . . . the first one. Angela. Alpha. Mother. The first one infected. I don’t know what happens now.”

  “You and Misato tried to stop me, but then something changed,” Rosalyn told him, standing and backing away from the cloud of spores dancing above the desk. “Then you just . . . snapped, and went for her. ‘Help me,’ you said. Poor Angela . . . She gave up her entire life on Earth for this, and look at it. A nightmare. In her last message to me she said they were going to change medicine, she must have thought the Foxfire’s regenerative properties could be isolated, but this . . .”

  “The road to hell,” Edison murmured, not bothering to finish the idiom.

  “There are no intentions good enough to justify this,” Rosalyn replied.

  “Worry about her later; the others, the ones that were totally consumed, totally her children, they’re angry,” Misato said, biting her lip. “Very angry. They’re untethered now. Nothing is controlling them. Not Mother. Nothing. They were listening to her but n
ow it’s all a panic,” she said. “Can you hear it?”

  Edison did, the distant buzzing that became a roar.

  “There’s nothing human about them anymore,” he said quietly, sadly.

  Misato jumped to her feet, squaring herself in front of Rosalyn. “I destroyed JAX’s hard drive before you could get here. Mother told me to do it and I . . . I couldn’t resist her. You’re the record now, Rosalyn. Go. One of the engineers tried to trigger the reactor breach before the Foxfire took him. Mother—Angela—was furious. I can finish it.”

  Misato turned, staring straight ahead, in profile to Rosalyn from where she stood near Angela’s desk. “They are mindless now, monstrous. They’ll try to stop you, but Edison can get you to the evac pods.”

  “You’re both coming with me,” Rosalyn shot back stubbornly. “This can be over. She’s gone now. That has to mean something.”

  But she knew she was outnumbered. Edison was giving Misato’s shoulders one last squeeze before continuing on, arriving at Rosalyn’s side to take her gently by the forearm. He slid an arm around her waist, saying softly, “The worst thing you could do right now is argue.”

  “Then I’m doing the worst thing. We can all fit in an evac pod.” Rosalyn jumped to see over Edison’s shoulder as he hid Misato from her view. “Misato? Come with us. Come with us.”

  She heard the engineer give a husky laugh. “It can be brave to run, Rosalyn. Don’t forget that.”

  43

  It was impossible to find the edges of her relief. At last, all the voices in her head were silent. She couldn’t sense Edison, or the seething mass of thoughts and feelings assaulting her from the concentrated hive of the cluster. It was just input from her eyes, her ears, her nose, and the jarring silence of her own mind.

  If left to ponder it, she might consider it lonely, but there was no time for reflection. She didn’t watch Edison as he dragged Rosalyn away. In the end, the salvager went freely. That was good. Misato would have forced her on the pod if she had to, but she trusted Edison to do the right thing. They had shared half a mind for so long, she could practically guess each word before he spoke it.

  That left the reactor. The remaining Foxfire-infested humans were in a frenzy. They were far, far gone, not a shred of human thought remaining in their minds. The jittery, crazed ramblings she had heard from them when she was still connected through Angela left her skin cold. It was hunger. Fungus needed nutrients, after all, and the cluster had spread through the station too quickly, consuming everything, leaving very little for food. They wanted her for food, of course, and Edison and Rosalyn. She would make sure they understood not only true starvation, but destruction.

  At first, the hive had contained an exquisite beauty. Lost in the labyrinth of voices and opinions, Misato couldn’t see it for what it was—life, in all its messy, scattershot determination, out of control. Life wasn’t always some magical, mystical thing to be protected and cherished; sometimes it was simply greedy expanding chaos, a teeming, overwhelming force. The Foxfire had grown wild, shoveling food and people and knowledge into its mouth like a toddler left unsupervised at a buffet. A mother desperate and hungry for more children.

  She could still feel the bite of the warmed plastic in her fingers as it broke in two. Unforgivable, she thought, even while controlled by Foxfire. She knew better. That was their research, their thoughts, their experiences, their knowledge, gone in a blink, and if Rosalyn did not survive, then nobody would be warned. Even with Angela gone, Misato felt instinctively that Foxfire would find a way to survive. Life was tenacious that way.

  The reactor access was less webbed in gooey blue strands. She reached it through the maintenance elevators, grateful for the breach opening access to all doors and hatches. It was a given that if a breach warning went out, nobody was going to stay to loot the place; they would grab their loved ones and bolt for the pods. Radiation was probably already spreading through the station, and she wondered if that hadn’t contributed to the intense mutating nature of the cluster.

  Purely academic, useless thoughts, she chided herself. Focus. She found the engineer that had tried so valiantly to obliterate Angela and her cluster. She was still as a statue, standing at the manual flow controls out on the platform near the plated core itself. The desperate thing hadn’t even bothered to put on a suit, exposing herself to dangerous levels of radiation. Clearly, she had thought it worth the risk, and Misato agreed.

  She couldn’t help but feel a pang of sadness for this woman. Misato climbed out onto the platform, the great humming, thrumming plated core spinning in hypnotic intervals. It was the kind of sound that, if heard from a distance, would put one to sleep nicely. A rhythmic pulse. A steady, comforting whir. Now it was too loud to be of any comfort, like the blurred blast of a drum vibrating through her chest as it turned. So close, she heard the almost imperceptible problem, the slight out-of-kilter hitch to the turn. The engineer had tried to force the core out of its gravitational trap, but stopped just before the alignment triggered total meltdown.

  Misato took her time, measuring her steps, never peeling her eyes away from the flow controls. These would almost never be used, and probably hadn’t been touched since the station’s construction. But the maintenance hub would never allow her to attempt station-wide sabotage; in fact, the engineer had been forced to use a power hammer to wedge a gap in the safety railing separating the maintenance tower from the far-more-precarious walkway. The platform leading to the shielding and the controls was wide enough but shook from the massive, spinning core, juddering as if a bullet train were passing by. She approached the engineer, her skin hanging in red, irradiated clumps from her face. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open, as if she could not believe she had come so far and failed.

  The CDAS security badge hanging around her neck read DESHAWNA ADAMS.

  “Good work,” Misato told her. “I’ll finish up here.”

  The controls were already unlocked, a USB key dangling from the side of the LED screen. The core breach alert blared inside the station again, but so near to the core the sound was muffled, a distant warning, and not for them. This was not where someone went to escape unharmed. She closed her eyes, wishing she could summon her connection to Edison. Had they made it out okay? Regardless, she knew what had to be done, but she would feel a lot better knowing Rosalyn was safely away. And if she wasn’t? Well, there would be nothing left of their story to tell. This core was going to kill them all, and the Foxfire with it.

  Misato froze, listening to a coughing wheeze from over her shoulder. She turned, Deshawna listing forward, sucking air with trouble through her drooping mouth and the holes torn through her neck by the radiation.

  The Foxfire had kept her alive. It was monstrous, not Deshawna, but what the infestation had done to her. Slow radiation deterioration was enough; this was a second, worse punishment. Misato grabbed her, feeling the brittleness in her bones, the wet, sloughing slide of the woman’s skin as she touched it. But Misato had the strength of determination behind her, and hauled Deshawna forward, pushing her hand over the flow controls, the LED screen flashing, screaming warnings at them as their fingers moved across the display.

  There was a sudden ping as the core shifted, scraping the metal plating that contained it, knocking loose a casing that zipped over their heads, lodging with a metallic clang in the maintenance tower behind them.

  It was starting.

  Misato had no idea how long it would take for the breach to destroy Coeur d’Alene Station; she only knew that she and Deshawna would go first. She let go of the woman, watching her fall to her knees and then over onto her side. Misato sat with her, feeling the platform rattle and bounce, the key chip falling out of the control screen, plunging down before being whipped into the erratic orbit of the core. Watching it disappear, she felt a pit open up in her stomach, a longing she hadn’t expected or wanted. She could have retired. She didn’t need
this last adventure.

  There was never any guarantee of another side, of more adventures. There was only the flood of last-minute regrets and the taste of Jenny’s lip gloss, the last memory she wanted. The only memory she needed.

  Deshawna looked like she was at rest, curled up, the remains of her hair blowing in the draft of the core. And so Misato lay down next to her on her back, folded her hands over her chest and closed her eyes. She could feel Jenny’s hair sliding through her fingers as she settled her head on Misato’s chest to sleep. Their cats, Charlie and Wrex, wove between Misato’s legs with their warm, slinky bodies, wrapping themselves around knees and ankles until at last contented, huddled safe beneath the covers. It was so, so warm. Her skin itched, and if she touched it, she feared it would fleck away like ash.

  “Okay,” she murmured to the hot spinning fires above. She was warm and safe, her work was done. “I love you, Jenny. Bye.”

  44

  The thick, strange tentacles bursting through the office door sagged, leaving a gap wide enough to see through, wide enough to show the field of rigid, waiting obstacles in their path. It was like they had thrown a matchstick into a beehive, and now all the riled, furious insects wanted to act, wanted to sting.

  “There’s too many,” he heard Rosalyn whisper at his side.

  She hadn’t spoken since he held her back from following Misato, and her bitter, silent fury had wounded him as much as seeing his friend go. He didn’t have time to explain to her that this was how it was always going to happen, that they both knew it, and that surely she had run this scenario in her head enough times to see that they were knee-deep in the cluster’s final moments. That she hadn’t really counted him and Misato among the cluster’s numbers touched him, but made this all-too-predictable betrayal harder. But Misato would fulfill her promise, and now he had to fulfill his. What he knew and Rosalyn didn’t was that no matter how many of the dying cluster’s sentinels remained, he would get her on that evac pod.