Chapter Ten
FENN
I have the oddest dream. Odd, because it’s so real I could truly taste and touch and smell everything, all at once.
I dream of my home planet, Ipineq, where the grass is purple and fields of orchid-like chartreuse flowers stretch to the mountaintops of the Fifth Country. The sky is a golden-orange color from the iron rising from the dunes past the Dry Lakes. Callandra is still very little, long before the accident.
She’s small. Really small. At four years old, she has the body of an Earth toddler, but with the large cranium and wide open, understanding eyes of a child much older. She wears a fluttering dress of gray over her light brown skin, and her little legs are bowed from the extra gravity here, her hip joints already stressed in a bad way. Though human, her body isn’t adapted to living on Ipineq. In my dream, she doesn’t yet know that I’ll leave soon and will grow an entire foot in one year after I flee to become a thief in training on the fastest pirate ship in the Pleiades.
All she sees is perfection in her older brother.
“Look,” she says, pointing. “The trixxa gulls are migrating.” Long, spindly creatures with four-foot wingspans cruise the thermals high above us.
“Mom and Dad say you want to fly, too.”
Callandra shrugs. She won’t look me in the eye. That’s so her—not wanting to hurt my feelings. She says, “Mom and Dad say there’s no money for the pilot’s academy.”
“I’ll get you the money.”
“No, Fenn.” She reaches for my hand. “Stay with me, on Ipineq.”
But on Ipineq, I’m a failure. It’s why there was no money for Callandra—they’ve used it all getting me into home programs and out of a juvenile incarceration center. Home programs that, unfortunately, I’m failing out of because they are tedious and boring and I know everything already. Just not the way they want me to know it.
You must memorize the algorithm in this manner, they say.
I know a shortcut. There’s a bypass formula—
You must memorize the algorithm this way, they repeat.
But that’s so ridiculous, it’s a waste of time, why should I—
And then my holofeed tells me, in spectacularly flashing 3D red, that I now have earned two demerits for “Belligerence and Noncompliance.”
And I count the days until I can break another law and get the hell out of here. I’ll pay Callandra back. I know I will.
Callandra tugs at my shirt. “Fenn. It’s time.”
“Time for what?” I say, distracted. Annoyed. I was always annoyed at Callandra, though she wasn’t annoying. It was all me. Always me. I need to get out of here. God, I need to leave.
“It’s time, Fenn. Time to wake up.”
Wake up.
Wake up.
A hand clasps mine. Gently. Was it always there? It feels delicate but large, like a grown girl, but tugs insistently. Is it Callandra’s hand? Did she age in my dreams? But no, this is something far more real. And I begin to feel things I was unaware of.
A liquid-solid, body-warm, surrounding me. Suspending me. I want to breathe, but when I expand my rib cage, it only fills more with the same stuff around me. It’s suffocating, though I’m not short of breath. And there is something else.
A hand, soft and delicate, gently touching my shoulder. A shoulder that no longer hurts.
I open my eyes, and I see black and white hair floating just beyond my field of vision. I look down and see Hana blinking before me. She’s encased up to her shoulders in a vague, gelatinous sack of solid navy blue. As am I.
And then I remember it all—being attacked by the ship, the searing pain of burned skin, and then being sucked into the wall with Hana. Having my clothes tugged off me. The horrific feeling of oxygen starvation, squeezing my gut. Holding her arms around me—and I hadn’t let anyone embrace me in years. Her eyes, pleading for me to stop fighting. I’d finally calmed, and the feeling of asphyxiation disappeared. I must have fallen unconscious after that.
And miraculously, I am not dead.
I blink, which is such a weird sensation when encased in this gel. Blinking eyes and eyelashes aren’t meant to meet resistance. We’re deep within the matrix of the ship. I see the hard white bone-like endoskeleton about me. It’s a grid of holes that look like a dead sea coral or something. We’re suspended in a pocket of what feels like a hole of matrix-filled bone. Hana pulls slightly against my hand, only enough so that she can float to my side. It’s a slow dance, as we’re not in water. More like water in extreme slow motion. Her fingers stay threaded through mine. Somehow, I can see Hana perfectly well.
Her hair is floating, trapped in the gel around us, and it softly sways in front of her face. I release a hand from hers and push it out of the way so I can see her face better, and my fingertips brush her cheek.
She closes her eyes at my touch.
Suddenly, I want to kiss her so very badly. I pull a tiny bit closer to her, and she opens her eyes, looks at mine, looks at my lips. She doesn’t push away.
And just when we are only a fraction of an inch apart—a sudden and desperate air-hunger invades my body.
What’s happening? I’d only just gotten used to the idea that inside Cyclo’s matrix I don’t need to breathe air, when I’m hit with an urge to do exactly that, right now.
I push away and flail my arms, but she reaches out to grasp my wrist. My wounded shoulder and upper back feel tight, but there’s no pain. Hana seems to understand what I’m feeling. Her body glides ahead of me, and I’m kind of wishing she wasn’t wearing that bag of navy blue so I could peek at the curve of her spine and elsewhere. The beautiful elsewhere. There’s a brightness where she’s leading me, between arches and inner corridors of the ship’s skeleton. I start to get a knot in my chest from the lack of oxygen, and it tightens quickly.
Soon, I see her little kitchen coming into focus, and some garments that have been piled up near the wall. I recognize my work vest and pants, and my card of nanobots is lying neatly atop them. Good. Hopefully they’re still working. And hopefully the bot I launched inside myself has gotten some useful readouts, too. This was a psychedelic experience I’m sure Doran can’t wait to investigate.
Hana lets go of my wrist, and I’m left hanging behind her as I see her touch the membrane of the matrix, pop one hand and then the other through, before stepping lightly down. She emerges perfectly naked but quickly puts on some clothes as I draw closer. I hope she doesn’t turn around and just spectate while I emerge fully bare. That would be even more embarrassment than I can handle.
She turns abruptly to face away from me. Good.
One by one, I push my hands through the membrane, and it breaks, pulling away completely from my skin. It doesn’t leave so much as a residue behind. I get one foot out, and I’m gently lowered so I make contact with the ground. My face breaks the membrane, and I can feel the matrix withdraw from my ears, my nostrils, my throat, every square centimeter of my lungs. I gag and bend over, coughing. But it feels so good to be breathing air, instead of blue goo. I inhale and exhale deeply, as if for the first time. Before long, I get another foot on the ground, and the blue matrix is completely behind me. I collapse to my knees, coughing and shaking.
I snatch my discarded clothes, some still with acid stains and gaping holes from Cyclo’s attack. Hana has already put her clothes back on, and she’s standing facing away from me.
“I suppose it must be strange,” Hana says, her voice soothing. “You’ll get used to it.”
I yank my pants on, and once they’re up, I reach over to touch my wounded shoulder. The skin feels a little tender, but there’s skin where it had been missing before. And it still doesn’t hurt. Half clothed, I feel a little more human (which is maybe a funny thing to think—how much more human can you be than when you’re naked?), and I throw on my shirt and jacket, missing my right sleeve where the acid burned it off.
“I’m dressed,” I say, and Hana turns around. She runs up to me, and her hands hover over my bare shoulder without touching it.
“It looks so much better. Are you…how are you?” she asks. Her eyes are wide and fearful.
“It feels weird. And tight. But okay.” Our eyes meet, and we both look at the floor as if we’re both remembering that we were naked only moments ago. And holding hands. Awkward. And what’s more awkward is that I want to hold her hand again because I miss her being close by.
“I…I am so sorry,” Hana says.
“For what? For saving my life?”
“I’m sorry Cyclo did that to you. And I know you’d never wanted to go into her, but it was the only way to… You were going into shock.”
“I shouldn’t have pressured you about using the drone. I’m the one who should be sorry.” I offer a handshake. “Truce?”
“Truce.” She puts her hand into mine, but instead of shaking, she just holds it. She cups the back of my hand with the other. I like this better, actually. I take a step closer, wanting to say something, because that would be better than getting on with the business of dying.
“Hana, I—”
The walls flash colors of orange and red. Hana’s head turns to the door, as if Cyclo’s announced someone’s arrival. The door widens, and Portia, Gammand, and Miki run inside.
“What the hell happened here?” Portia says. “We’ve been trying to contact you for hours. You weren’t in any of the rooms. We couldn’t find either of you!”
Hana and I look at each other. And we both blurt out, simultaneously, “It was my fault.”
Three sets of eyebrows raise, and we explain. How I was going to put a drone in her, but Hana’s worry and refusal triggered an attack from the ship, and then I was hurt and in shock and going into Cyclo was the only way to get my pain under control, and now I’m healed and here we are. I say nothing, of course, about how we were holding hands throughout most of it, partly naked, and it was maybe the most unbelievable experience—aside from the whole acid attack thing—that ever happened to me.
“Fascinating,” Miki says. Her holo visor is on, and she holds out a sensor toward me. “An attack. And she healed you? So quickly? That’s faster than the top-of-the-line regenerative serums would have worked. At this level of decay, I’m impressed. We’ll have to see if it’s depleted her abilities in other areas.”
Gammand, Portia, and Miki all start chattering a parsec per second about the data trove this just caused, and how they might score more points by going above and beyond the data they’re required to at this point. Gammand yanks me by the arm, asking if I’ve downloaded the drone data from within my body, when Hana steps forward.
To be honest, we all sort of forgot about her for a few minutes.
“I have a request.”
“A what?” Portia asks.
“I need to contact my mother.”
“Well, we’re not allowed to—” Miki starts, but Hana’s not done.
“And a second thing. I need to access the data you’re gathering, so I can start working to boost Cyclo’s energy stores and help her regenerate the parts of her that are failing.”
Portia frowns. “This is expressly against our mission guidelines.”
“Your mission?” Hana says. She looks at Portia, then Gammand, then Miki and me. The floor flashes several colors, one after another, in a psychedelic display. “Your mission is not our mission.”
Before Portia can respond, before I realize what’s happening, a long tendril of blue drops down from the ceiling and sucks a small scanning device from Miki’s outstretched hands. Before she can even try to recover it, it’s stuck to the ceiling. Her face blanches a very pale blue, almost green.
Hana and Cyclo aren’t passive creatures. We can’t just do whatever we wish to them. She and this ship can sabotage our work in an instant. Mission over, incomplete. And our contracts will be obsolete. Our deaths will be for nothing. I mean, Cyclo could have killed me last night, though it was in defense of Hana. What if they felt really threatened?
“Doran,” Portia says. Her holo winks on, and after a moment of no response, his pale blue face shows up, and she swings the holofeed so everyone can see it. “You’ve been listening.”
“I have,” Doran says. “All right, Hana. What are your terms?”
“I want you to help me contact my mother,” Hana says.
He pauses. “Is that really what you want? You told us that she hid you, against protocol. You would be putting her in danger. She might be imprisoned for her actions. You might be eliminated.”
Hana bites her lip and tugs on her hair. She paces around the room as if waiting for the ship to color in with an opinion, but it stays blue. “Well,” she says, “I’m going to die anyway, won’t I? And I’m going to be part of your research and in your records. My existence already reveals what she’s done. Reaching out to her doesn’t change that. Does it?”
She asks this as if she’s really unsure, though her logic is sound. I want to tell her to stop questioning herself and just ask for what she wants, but I get the feeling she’s not used to saying what’s on her mind.
“You have a good point,” Doran concedes.
“There’s something else, too,” she adds. “I want your research to investigate how to save Cyclo.”
Doran’s eyes bulge at little at this. “No. Absolutely not.” Despite his words, I can tell he’s already on unsteady ground. She’s backing him into a corner.
My face glows with excitement. If Doran agrees, that means there’s a chance we could find a way for the Calathus to not die. I mean, our mission is to find out what the natural death process of the ship is. But if death doesn’t happen, and it’s not because of something we directly do—I mean, we’re just gathering info, and if this girl can turn things around—well, that means that I might live after all. And I might still fulfill my contract at the same time. I try not to grin like a little kid. Doran tries to keep his face neutral, and soon his expression is once again inscrutable.
“I’m sorry, Hana. I have my orders. I—”
A slight cracking noise issues above Doran while he speaks. Cyclo is starting to crush the data scanner right over his head.
Miki squeals. “That’s the only scanner I have! Doran!”
Doran’s hologram puts up both his hands. “Wait, Hana. Please. The crew brought limited equipment, and they need it!”
“Well, I need things, too,” Hana says.
I cross my arms, eyebrows raised appreciatively. This girl just got Doran (and, hell, all of us) by the balls and squeezed with a literal pair of alien pliers. I have to say, I’m damn impressed. I don’t think I’ve ever forced anyone to do anything I wanted. I mean, I’ve stolen a hella lot of stuff, but no one ever agreed to be robbed.
“Very well. We will do our best to help you,” Doran says.
“And the ship,” Portia adds hastily, glancing with a nervous red eye, left and right.
Cyclo drops the data recorder, just in time for Miki to catch it in her hands, exhaling with relief that it’s mostly intact.
Hana grins, wider than I’ve ever seen. “That,” she says, “is most magnificent.”
What a weirdo, this girl. But despite my feeling that she’s so very odd, part of me also misses that moment when I woke up to find her so close to me. How can you miss someone you’ve barely known for twenty-four hours?