Chapter Four
FENN
She doesn’t answer me.
It’s a girl. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. She’s hiding halfway behind the doorway exiting the ship’s bay. The shock of seeing her competes with the shock of seeing a real, live bioship, with its flashing gold colors against the blue membranous walls everywhere. The girl has straight hair past her shoulders, black as the space between stars but with a startling white lock of hair above her forehead, which flows down in a stripe. Her eyes are brown, skin somewhat wan and sickly looking, like she’s eating the wrong kind of food. She looks Asian, like the grandmother I never met on Asyx Seven. Her eyes are unblinking.
A thousand questions in my head fire at once—why is she here? Who is she? Isn’t the ship supposed to be empty? But the questions collide with another weird consideration. She’s really pretty. An asinine consideration, because the last thing I should care about at the end of my stubby, short life is pretty girls, but I can’t help it. My face flushes with warmth as I take another step closer.
She moves back from the door, and I can see now what she’s wearing—a flimsy short robe, mid-thigh, rippling against her body. A tiny pearl pendant glimmers against the hollow of her throat. She’s barefoot, too. What an unfortunate choice of clothing, considering she’s on a ship in the process of crumbling around her.
She still hasn’t said anything. “What are you doing here?” I ask.
Nothing. The girl just stares at me. Maybe she doesn’t speak my language. Gammand has stopped behind me and joined the staring match.
“Who is that?” he asks me, as if I ought to know.
I haven’t moved on the cargo ramp. Someone stomps behind us—Miki, probably—and the girl sways backward as she eyes the growing cluster of people. Miki moves to my side, and the girl gets a view of her ropy forearms, seeming in awe of her silvery-blue skin and wide shoulders.
“No, wait—” I start, but it’s too late.
The girl turns and bolts, her black and white hair whipping behind her.
Miki shrugs. “They always run away from me.”
“Who’s they?” Gammand asks.
“Everyone,” she says, and lets out the signature sigh of the physically intimidating and chronically misunderstood.
Portia exits the craft and barks, “Why are you all standing here? We have work to do.”
“There’s a girl,” Miki says. Everything she voices sounds like a growl. “Here. On the Calathus.”
Portia looks about. “What girl? The ship is empty. Doran and ReCOR confirmed this.”
I smirk. “My sources say they’re wrong.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass, Fenn. Well, we’ll have to report that the crew accidentally left someone behind. I suppose she might have come on another transport, too, though we were told there is no sanctioned interstellar traffic in this area,” Portia says.
Gammand adds quietly, “Well, don’t just stand there, Fenn. Go get her.” He’s already turned his attention to recording our conversation and checking readouts from his own handheld data recorder.
Portia pokes me hard the shoulder. “Go,” she orders.
“Why me?”
“Because you’re in the way, and because that’s your job. You fetch things,” Portia says. She points a long finger toward the exit door of the landing bay. “Go fetch, Fenn.”
I roll my eyes. My first job here, and I’m only a glorified bird dog. But this isn’t about me anymore. It’s about Callandra and making things right for her. I think of her when she was three years old, with curly brown hair and a red mouth stained with brickberry juice. That was the first time she saw me, the first time her little hands reached for her big brother. Back then, I was the good guy. The sentiment didn’t last. I need to bring it back.
Right now, I need to obey.
I take a first, squishy step forward onto the Calathus’s bioskin floor. By God, this ship is really creeping me out.
“They say that the ship can see and hear everything you do.” Miki grimaces. “It can even taste you.”
Oh God. “Is it even safe to—”
“GO!” The entire group behind me yells.
“Fine!” I yell back.
I jog forward through the exit. There’s a door on the right and a long corridor on the left. Walking on Cyclo is like running on a really freaking huge hamster wheel—it’s spinning slowly and creating gravity, but you don’t walk on the flat plane of the ship. You walk on the inside edge. There are periodic corridors that go up to another level, with either steps or sliding handrails. Weird.
The right-hand door nearby is disappearing as a thin membrane closes toward the center, an open oval pinching shut rapidly. I hope it doesn’t grow teeth at the last minute, because I jump through the aperture just in time.
On the other side is a long, curving corridor, bright blue, with windows strangely set in the floor as well as the walls. I can see the Selkirk embedded awkwardly in the side of the Calathus, as if it were more of a crash landing than a docking. But I can also see the windows of the craft further down, just as the girl whips around a corner and into a corridor blinking bright green at the edges. But I’m close. Very close. If I don’t get her, ReCOR might rescind my contract, and then I would die for nothing. I can’t have that happen.
I dart forward, barreling down the hallway. There’s a door I didn’t realize was there, with another green, membranous aperture closing fast. I jump through it, and there she is. The girl is not a fast runner, thank the stars. She slows down to dart into a room that looks like someone’s living quarters, and that’s all I need. I leap forward, grab her small waist in both hands and we both crash onto the floor. The girl shrieks.
“Hey. Hey! I don’t want to hurt you. I just need you to stop running. We need to know why you’re here.” I feel the lie filling my head, even as I say it. “We…just want to help.”
The girl freezes, and her eyes go from squeezed shut to peeking at me—as if I am the brightest starlight she’s ever seen, and I’m going to burn her retinas out. I can feel her breathing, fast, quick, small-animal breaths, and her eyes study me. She says nothing, but licks her dry lips and keeps staring. This is actually the first time I’ve been this close to a human girl, ever, and my body just realized this. My neck is suddenly sweltering, and I feel a flash of heat down to my toes. God, calm down, Fenn. Calm down. Say something, at least.
“Do you…do you understand me? Krkshik?” I try a different language. “Brawna? Uh, how about Parlez-vous Francais?”
“Get off me,” she says in the smallest voice.
“Okay, so you speak English.”
“Get off me,” she repeats. After a beat, she raises her face closer to mine. She’s looking at my lips and getting closer and closer. What the hell is she doing? Is she trying to kiss me?
I squeeze her waist tighter, in case this is a ploy to trick me somehow, but weirdly I’m having trouble feeling my fingertips. A strange numbness starts to creep over my hands and up my arms and legs. The girl is still looking at my lips, but now she’s smiling.
“Never mind,” she whispers. Suddenly, she slips right out of my hands, which have very quickly stopped working. She wriggles away from me, and next thing I know, my knees are glued inextricably to the floor. I look left and right and see that the blue matrix of the room has risen up like goo and encircled my limbs. It hasn’t touched the girl at all, allowing her to scramble away from me. My body slowly melds downward, and the blood-warm floor starts to rise up against my cheek, near my mouth, coming close to my nostrils.
I yell, but there is only a tangled noise at the back of my throat. This ship, this goddamned gooey liquid thing, is trying to smother me. It’s going to kill me any second. All I can see is the wall and the floor rising over my cheekbones to eat me alive, when bare feet plant themselves in my field of vision, ever-so-slightly pressing into the soft floor.
“Help!” I holler. Before I can stop myself, I cry out, “Callandra!” My sister. God, I’ve only just got here, and I’ve already failed. Callandra, I’m so sorry.
“What’s Callandra?” the girl asks.
I gurgle in response. My chest is frozen in place, and I can’t take a deep breath.
The girl steps closer, and she studies the color flashes around me and through the goo encasing me. “I guess that’s a complicated answer. You should know, Cyclo is not trying to kill you.” Her voice is less high, more relaxed now. “She thinks you’re in distress and you need to calm down.” She stoops low, her hair tickling my forehead. “Were you really trying to help me? Don’t lie. She’ll know if you’re lying.”
The flashes of color come so quickly in the matrix around me, I can barely register them. A rainbow of hues, plus muted shades, too. I remember that the translators embedded in the walls of the ship aren’t working, so I have no idea what this goddamn ship is saying. Most of my body is numb. Somehow, this thing has managed to transfer some sort of anesthetic into me.
“Ah,” she says. Her finger touches my forehead, ever so gently. “Only partly lying. Hm. Afraid. And lonely, too, I see.”
Despite my weakness, I writhe violently. Damn it. No one has a right to read my mind if I don’t want it. This ship is seriously pissing me off, even though it seems to be obeying the girl like it’s some sort of humongous jellied pet of hers. She seems to read the distress in my eyes as the ship itself has gone back to a placid blue color.
“Let him go, Cyclo.”
At her command, I can feel the goo begin to retreat. My skin starts to prickle painfully all over as sensation returns. As soon as I can, I get to my knees, forcing air in and out of my chest. The blue matrix is still covering my lower legs. My whole body feels like needles and rubber. Finally, I can breathe normally. I don’t know whether to thank her or yell at her.
“What is Callandra?” she asks again, now that I can speak.
“Not what, who.”
“All right then. Who is Callandra?”
“None of your goddamned business,” I growl.
“Where is my mother, Dr. Um?” she asks.
Before I can grunt that I know nothing about her parental problems, a shout issues from down the corridor. My calves are still entwined with the floor when Gammand rushes into the room.
He takes one look at the girl standing there, and me half submerged in the ship, and aims a gun straight at the girl. Where the hell did he get a weapon?
“No! Wait!” I holler, trying to hold up my hand. But it’s too late. Gammand pulls the trigger, his face icy and calm, and I hear a pfft as something flies over my head. The walls and floor of the room flash a bright, blood-red color. At first, I think the walls are actually bleeding, but the color blanches to white. For one eternal second, the girl looks at me with an expression that chills me straight through, like somehow, I’ve broken a promise I never actually made. Like I just broke her heart.
And then her eyes roll up into her head, and she collapses onto the floor.