by Nadia Afifi
During the scuffle, the holomentic machine fell over. Its many parts scattered across the floor. The small disc on which the imagery was stored had dislodged from the reader. Trembling with shock, fighting the urge to vomit as the man’s blood swelled in a black puddle across the floor, she felt a moment of clarity fight its way through an enveloping fog of terror.
Grab the disc. Find Rozene.
Amira crawled forward on her knees and elbows, swiftly grabbed the disc and jammed it into her pocket.
“They’re here, inside!” Parrish shouted.
Shouts rang out from the prisoners’ quarters, accompanied by thundering footsteps. Someone grabbed Amira by the arm and dragged her onto her feet. Shouts, gunfire, glass breaking. Forcing back her fear, she ran, dodging loose wires and blown fuses as they sprinted down the stairs toward the shuttles. The prisoners above them rattled the bars, yelling incoherently. When she slowed for a moment, a pair of rough hands shoved her forward in the direction of the outreaching hallways.
Zero gravity returned when they left the rotating harbor. Amira grabbed a rail along the wall, momentarily disoriented, as frantic shouts echoed behind her. Something pressed against her ribs on her left side. The barrel of a handgun.
“No rescue for you,” the masked Cosmic growled. “Move!”
She pulled herself along the narrow corridor as fast as she was able, recalling a space orientation class in which the teacher asserted that guns do, in fact, work in zero gravity. Her arms burned from the effort but fear kept her grappling across the pathway’s horizontal ladder, fear and the realization that she had to leave this station and find Elder Young, even under the barrel of a gun.
When she reached the end of the corridor, Amira ducked through the airlock into the shuttle to find Barlow already secure in his seat. The armed guards and Parrish followed behind her. It was incredibly compact, with five passenger seats in a circle and two pilot seats in front. One of the guards pushed Amira into the seat next to Barlow, who, judging from the cut on his forehead, had also attempted escape.
Parrish and the second guard sat in the pilots’ seats, hastily flipping switches and turning dials as a chorus of shouts echoed down the corridor. Amira’s heart quickened at a familiar voice.
“Hurry!” Parrish yelled as the airlock door began to close.
The engine started, heating the ground below their feet.
As the door closed, something powerful slammed against it. It flew open. Hadrian barreled in through the airlock.
“Save me a seat, kids!” Hadrian shouted, surveying the scene with triumph.
The guard who was not co-piloting sprang into action, leaping out of his seat with his pistol drawn. Relief, temporary and powerful, gave way to fury. Amira stuck out her foot for a sharp kick, sending him hurtling sideways. Hadrian grabbed the guard’s arm, the pistol’s muzzle pointing and waving toward the ceiling as the two men wrestled in midair.
“Don’t fire it, you’ll kill us all!” Parrish cried in alarm as the two men battled for control of the gun.
The door locked and the shuttle separated from the Carthage.
The Carthage was shrinking steadily through the narrow rear window, but a second shuttle on the end of a docking bay was also departing – Hadrian’s team in pursuit.
Hadrian gripped the guard’s throat with one hand and used the other to slam the man’s arm against the wall. The gun slid from his fingers, drifting out of reach. Amira leapt for the gun when a loud bang shook the spacecraft. A second bang followed, and the lights went out. Amira let out a small cry, startled by the sudden darkness.
“Call them off!” Parrish yelled at Hadrian.
“They’re only shock propellers,” Barlow said from his seat. His voice retained its mild, calm tone. The dark outline of his head remained motionless. “A warning to scare us. An ISP agent is on board and there are far too many valuable people in here for them to shoot us down.”
“Don’t get too confi—” Hadrian began before the craft shuddered.
Light returned and the shuttle shook even harder, making Amira’s teeth and eyes rattle in her skull like the engine of a dying car. Suddenly, the shuttle tilted. It swayed and veered sharply to one side, sending everyone who was unfastened crashing against the walls.
“It’s not them,” Parrish said, running his fingers down the control screen hurriedly. “Something was damaged when the shock waves hit. This is not good – secure yourselves!”
Another jolt shook the craft again and they all fastened into their seats, the pistol abandoned in the air. Amira gripped the sides of her seat. Her insides sloped and churned in time with the swaying shuttle. She forced her eyes shut and clamped her jaw too tight to scream.
“Entering atmosphere,” a mechanical voice intoned from the cockpit. Amira watched thin flames leap up hungrily around the shuttle window upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. The vehicle accelerated, continuing to shake as it dove through the sea of clouds below them.
Everyone gripped the sides of their seats, uttering soft prayers or curses. Hadrian’s eyes darted wildly around the shuttle before he slammed his fist aggressively against the wall. Only Barlow seemed calm, or as close to it as possible under the circumstances, his hands folded on his lap and eyes closed as though in deep meditation.
“This moment has already happened and this moment has yet to happen,” he said. “All things are possible, every outcome probable. I am dead and alive at the same time.” A Cosmic prayer, a last rite.
Amira’s face contorted in terror. Tears leaked out of her eyes and rose as salty orbs into the air.
“Hang tight, love!” Hadrian yelled.
The shuttle tilted again. As it fell sideways, the outline of a lake glinted through the window above Hadrian’s head. The craft maintained its speed, approaching the ground fast – too fast.
Panic consumed the shuttle. Hadrian yelled something unintelligible at the pilots. The guard fumbled for something under his seat and Hadrian unfastened his safety belt, careening sideways.
“Brace yourselves!” Parrish shouted from the pilot’s seat.
Amira moaned weakly as the craft stalled and descended in a sudden, sickening drop. They were falling and spinning at the same time, glued into their seats by the powerful centrifugal force, careening toward the Earth. Then, as quickly as it happened, the craft stabilized and descended at a steadier pace. They were too close, far too close to the ground. A package was thrust into Amira’s hand. She looked up to see Hadrian strapping a parachute around his shoulders, managing a wink. She followed suit, fumbling desperately at the clasps with shaking fingers. She struggled to recall the steps from a basic shuttle emergency seminar at the Academy, so long ago. Her ear throbbed, and she realized it was still bleeding. She felt a hot trail of sticky blood down her neck.
Shouts and screams accompanied the roar of the dying shuttle. Amira could not see where they came from or what the other passengers were doing. All she saw was the rocky surface through the crack of the window, drawing closer and closer. Someone pushed at the ceiling to open the top door and screamed. She reached for the door next, pressed her fingers against the metal and drew them back quickly when melting heat ran down her fingers. Terrible shrieks followed, which she then realized were her own. She crouched on the floor, cradling her burnt fingers. Hadrian swung at the latch with a large red object, and Amira stood upright in preparation, but her knees buckled under the force of the descent. The ground was close now, close enough to make out the individual trees on the hills. She gripped the deployment cord on her parachute. Though she never prayed, she silently hoped it wouldn’t fail her.
This is it. She couldn’t die yet. Not here and now, under rushing heat with screams in her ears. Before she had a chance to truly live. Before she could save Rozene and start again.
The top of the shuttle tore open and a dizzying gust of air rushed thr
ough the narrow space, sending equipment and objects flying in every direction. Amira was suddenly airborne as she twisted past sky and earth in a terrifying spin, her feet struggling to find solid ground to land on. She was falling.
The dusty terrain stretched before her and her fingers found the latch on her parachute. A gust of air whipped her face; her body jerked back. Her world went black.
Chapter Fifteen
The Holy Country
Amira crawled out from underneath the parachute into harsh sunlight, coughing up dirt. The left side of her face was caked with blood from her wounded ear. Every part of her body hurt to varying degrees, but she shakily rose to her feet to prove to herself that she could indeed stand, alive and relatively intact.
Taking several deep breaths, she surveyed the immediate scene. Parrish’s coordinates hadn’t betrayed them too far; she stood in the American southwest. She recognized it in the color of the soil, the gentle coating of sagebrush over gravelly rock and sand, and the dryness in the air. The terrain was hilly, with treeless mountains the color of rust in the distance.
A trail of black smoke, rising in spirals into the sky, revealed the location of the shuttle several hundred feet away in the shadow of the hills. She jogged toward the wreck.
Amira saw the first casualty as she neared the wreckage – one of Parrish’s armed guards, his face mask partially torn off, lying with his legs in grisly contortion across the sand. A small pool of blood leaked from the center of his body, his pale mouth agape in dull surprise. The heat from the wreckage warmed Amira’s face; the hot air burned her nostrils.
Amira heard a loud, retching cough and spun around to see the other guard lying on the ground, spitting up thin strands of blood. Most of his red uniform had been charred away. Hideous burns covered his arms and hands and black skin slid down his fingers. She grimaced but knelt beside him to check his pulse. His eyes met hers and widened with fear. His pulse was fast but faint.
“I’m going to look for a first aid kit,” she said, getting up. Rummaging through the torn gap in the shuttle, careful to avoid the still-hot metal and the body hanging outside, she grabbed a small case with the red symbol across its cover, miraculously intact.
By the time she returned, he was dead. She pulled back the remains of his mask gingerly, revealing a young face. This had been the one who grabbed her and taunted her in the Carthage. She knew it, somehow, but could not find any satisfaction from his burned, broken body, lost to this plane of existence.
She searched the wreckage for Hadrian, pushing and kicking smoldering debris aside, but found no trace of him. Her stomach lurched at the thought that there may only be traces left to find. Hadrian had his parachute on before the shuttle tore apart – perhaps he had landed elsewhere, as she had.
Parrish and Barlow were also nowhere to be found. Given the violence of the crash, they were equally likely to be dead or alive. In any case, she would need to locate Victor Zhang’s house and find a way inside, preferably not alone.
The sun began to slip behind the high ridges in the distance, turning the sky a glowing pink, when Amira reached the base of the nearest mountain for shelter. Early dusk brought with it a cool breeze, and Amira pulled her hoodie tightly around her head. Her ear ached but had stopped bleeding. Under the shelter of a singular juniper tree, she cleaned up her ear with the first aid kit, calmed the burns on her hands and planned her next steps.
Amira reached in her coat pocket and found her Eye, which she had not worn since removing it in the Carthage. She carefully placed it back in her right eye, blinking several times as the cold silicone slid along her lens.
For about a minute, the Eye did not respond, and Amira wondered if it received too much damage on the descent back to Earth before the unsettling greeting, “Welcome, William Young,” appeared in the corner of her vision. She immediately called Lee.
Lee? Are you still there?
Lee’s exasperated voice boomed into her ears.
“Amira, where have you been? We lost you on the way to the Carthage. D’Arcy’s been freaking out.”
“I lost the signal,” Amira said. “Something on the station switched the Eye off, but never mind. I’m back on Earth now.”
A silence spanned several seconds, while the teenager presumably processed the information.
“Do you know where?” Lee asked.
“I may need your help.” Amira pulled up a satellite map on her Eye, which placed her location in southern Utah, close to the Arizona border. Lee let out a low whistle.
“You’re in compound territory, Amira,” Lee said. “The heart of the Holy Country.”
He was more accurate than he realized. In the aftermath of the chaotic escape from the Carthage, Amira realized that she knew the strange, geometric house in the Trinity man’s memory – she saw it years ago, the day she evaded tear gas and rubber bullets to encounter a strange house across the valley, and disassociated for the first time. The house turned out to be Victor Zhang’s.
“Lee, I need you to look and see if there’s a house nearby,” Amira said. “They’re keeping Rozene in Victor Zhang’s house in the desert, which is—” She screamed when a cold hand gripped her arm.
Hadrian. He stumbled forward, haggard but elated. Scratches lined his face and his ISP jacket was coated in a solid layer of dust.
Terror turned to joy. Amira threw her arms around his neck and let out a muffled sob of relief.
“I see the strong survived,” he said, clapping a hand on her shoulder before grimacing. “That was quite a ride, eh? Is that Lee you’re talking to? Lee, can you hear me? You better be running those updates to my servers! And take the trash out.”
“Sounds like Hadrian’s ok,” Lee said drily. “I’ll review your current location and let you know if I find any houses in the area.”
Amira and Hadrian faced one another, Hadrian bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“Have you seen any of the others?” Hadrian asked.
“The two security men are dead. I found them by the crash site. Haven’t seen Alistair Parrish or Barlow anywhere.”
Hadrian sat down under the juniper and winced slightly as he stretched his legs out in front of him. He had no obvious injuries, but despite his manic posturing, he was clearly exhausted and shaken by the crash. He lunged forward, retching.
“What’s happening?” Amira asked, startled.
Hadrian looked weaker than she had ever seen him. His eyes carried the same hollowness as on the night they listened to Victor Zhang die. He tried to speak but only managed a thin rasp. She searched the first aid kit and pulled out a small bottle of water. Hadrian took a deep drink and leaned in toward her ear.
“Got any stims in there?”
“Stimulants? Really? Is that why you’re the way you are most of the time?” Exasperated, Amira rummaged through the first aid kit again before finding one, the same medication she had injected herself and Rozene with in the Soma.
Hadrian’s face came back to life as she pulled the syringe needle out of his arm. He stood up again, his eyes alert to their surroundings.
“Any sign of the others?” Amira asked.
“I saw Parrish on his parachute landing east of here,” he said. “Haven’t seen Barlow.”
“Yes, about Barlow,” Amira said. “Tell me more about him.”
Hadrian looked up at her with a cryptic smile, but Amira had reached the end of her patience.
“He did something to Rozene in the Soma,” Amira snapped. “Then he had you use me to get this Tiresia. The two of you are buddies for some reason and I don’t care why, but I want to know who he is and what he’s up to.”
“You’re making some mighty big assumptions, love, by saying I’m mates with Tony Barlow,” Hadrian replied. “But we go back a-ways, that much is true. As to your questions, I’ve been trying to learn the same thing, ever since Victor Zhang
disappeared. Here’s what I know – Barlow is gifted, a true talent, but also rogue. Bit like me, in a way. A Cosmic, but doesn’t follow the party line, it seems. He’s one of the most senior scientists up there, as you can tell by the company he keeps, but he doesn’t wear the Aldwych Council badge or the black coat – on purpose, I reckon. Barlow prefers to be behind the scenes. Oh, and one more thing – he’s one of the few names with full access spaceside. Meaning the Osiris, where he always goes when he comes to NASH.”
Osiris, the shadow station. The notoriously secretive research done there was information that few in space, even NASH security figures like Hadrian, knew much about. It made sense, Amira thought, with Barlow’s unexplained presence on the Pandora project that he was in a position of influence. He was also clearly in opposition to other Cosmics, refusing to give Parrish the mysterious Tiresia, although he had somehow persuaded Parrish to change direction on the Carthage. What was Barlow’s goal and who would stand to gain if he reached it?
They strategized further under the last gasps of sunlight. Hadrian’s men had followed Parrish’s shuttle closely when entering the atmosphere, but appeared to have lost the trail. His team should be searching for them, Hadrian informed Amira, but could not be counted on for backup. The sky cloudless and empty above them, an old unease settled in Amira’s stomach. Back in the Holy Country, even the dry air felt hostile, draining strength and confidence from her. Amira tried to shake off the suffocating apprehension. She left this place a child. A lot had changed since then.