PERSONAL RECORD: DESIGNATION ZETA4542910-9545E
CTS THALASSA
478.2.7.02
Shortly after breakfast the next morning, my communications link chimed, and the Recorder-doctor berated me for taking part in such a scandalous, citizen-like thing as smuggling. Since I knew the charges were both false and intended to protect me, I found his concerns amusing at first, even though he failed to connect my purported misdeeds to a likely assignment to the Hall of Reclamation. After he started to scold me about my suit’s malodorous nature, however, I disconnected the link and refused to answer his four subsequent attempts to contact me.
When Alec and Zhen brought me lunch—soup and salad with fruit compote for dessert—Zhen was snickering.
“You should have seen it,” she said. “I went with Tia to the infirmary for her checkup, and that Recorder was arguing with Archimedes, demanding that you answer his comms. And the captain said”—she lowered her voice in a poor attempt at making her soprano a baritone—“‘I find it extremely suspicious you are so adamant about contacting a person suspected of the illegal trade of insect parts, especially since you are a doctor. After all, rare parts are often used in the manufacture of illegal drugs.’”
Her storm of laughter prompted a smile, which disappeared when a knock sounded at the door. Alec and Zhen were on their feet before it slid open. Quincy and two armored marines flanked Williams, who clutched a small sack to her chest.
Quincy set down a satchel and saluted me. The three men left, and the door slid shut.
Williams plopped her bag on the bed farthest from the table. “You were right about this. I found it before that Recorder did,” she said without any other greeting. When she held up a note, for a half second I thought she held mine. “It was where Edwards promised it would be.”
I blinked. I had forgotten I had told her about it.
Williams tore open the envelope and visually devoured it. Her hand covered her mouth, muffling her words. “His name is Connor. Connor Edwards.”
A knot swelled in my throat. “It is a good name.”
Alec stood and led Williams to take his chair.
“We had a pact.” She smoothed the paper flat. “I met him in Albany City when he returned for continuing education, you know. I was at a café, studying for exams. He bumped my table, spilling coffee all over my uniform, so he bought me a new cup. He’s been my friend ever since. We . . .” She raised dry but reddened eyes to mine. “You would understand there is nothing . . .”
Although staff had more freedom than Recorders, strong connections and attachments brought punishment. My heart ached. “Yes.”
“After the last trip, when we met you, we talked about the potential risks and repercussions. Max did not understand then, though he has an inkling now. He has always seen us as people, not merely staff, not as if we are a subspecies of human.” Williams scanned the paper one more time before carefully replacing it into the envelope. “Connor and I promised each other we would write notes if something happened. I left one for him, and his was exactly where he promised it would be. He told me his name, and he”—she sank onto the end of her bed—“writes that he wished things were different, that he had taken me out for dinner or to an antique bookshop. That he had bought me something other than one lonely coffee. That he was sorry he had let his fear of consequences steal . . .”
The lump in my throat made it difficult to say her name. “Williams,” I began.
“Elinor,” she whispered. “I wanted to be Elinor Anne Williams. My note was still there, so he doesn’t know—” Her breath hitched. “Connor doesn’t know my name.”
I could do nothing. Without the ability to read, I could not keep my vow to find Alec’s father or Jordan’s cousin. Now, I could not find Elinor Anne Williams’s Connor. My Edwards. I could do nothing—nothing—to ease these losses. I hobbled over to her side and held out my hand. She took it.
“I cannot promise to remember always, but I will try,” I said. “Elinor Anne, you should not give up hope.”
Alec and Zhen left soon afterward, and though Elinor Anne Williams sat there, shoulders hunched, fragile as thin glass, she did not cry.
I did.
That evening, she and I were finishing our dinner when Max entered the computer lab, set a datapad on the table between our cups, and angled his chair toward mine.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” He tapped the datapad. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, no matter what that Recorder said.”
A chill swept over me. The Recorder-doctor had betrayed my secret.
Williams glanced between us.
“But it is, Max.” My voice dropped. “Reading was part of who I was.”
“No, reading is part of what you do.”
Williams’s eyes went round over the rim of her cup. She set it down so quickly that juice sloshed onto the table. I handed her a napkin without looking away from the doctor who had saved my life.
“Max, you told me once each person has value, is unique. My abilities were part of my uniqueness, and now they are gone. Gone.” My voice broke. “I cannot even perform the katas from my childhood. And reading was the building block of everything I did. I cannot even help find—” I broke off, lest I hurt the woman beside me.
“I told you, you aren’t what you do.”
Williams leaned forward and asked softly, “What, precisely, has happened?”
I cradled my ginger tea with trembling hands, watching the overhead lighting’s reflection wobble on the golden liquid. “Since my final encounter with the roaches, I cannot read, except short single words in isolation.”
“Oh, my friend. You should have told us,” Williams exclaimed. “The sooner such things can be treated, the better.”
Whether or not she was correct, they did not understand. I set my own cup down. “When I was small, the Elders recognized my potential and declared my calling would redeem my gifting. My mind and my . . .” I fisted my hands, as if doing so would clarify thought. “Who I was? Was becoming? They were all I had that was truly mine, though I did not understand as much.” A shiver hit me. “I thought I lost everything when I lost my chip, but I was wrong.”
“You have us,” Max said.
“That is true.” I held myself tighter. “Nate, you both, Jordan, Kyleigh, Alec, and Zhen . . . my friends. You are immeasurably more important.”
“You still have us,” Williams said. “You cannot believe your friends would—”
My heart jolted. “You must not tell them!”
“Judge you for the loss,” she finished.
Max held up both hands. “If you don’t want us to tell them, we won’t.”
I wanted to tap, hit, even pound my thigh, but pain from the chip in my wrist prohibited the action.
Williams folded her arms tightly. “We understand loss.”
My shoulders hunched. “That is not all I have lost.”
“You have not yet lost your freedom,” she said. “And we are looking for a way to release you from the Consortium.”
“It is more than that. I not only have lost my abilities”—my throat worked—“I have also lost who I am.”
“You’ve always been more than a Recorder,” Max began, but he stopped when I shook my head.
A shudder grabbed me and would not let go. Williams fetched a blanket from her bed and wrapped it around my shoulders. They waited.
“I killed him,” I whispered.
They exchanged glances, and Max said with slow precision, “You saved Elliott’s life.”
“Not Elliott. That man.” I pulled the blanket close, but warmth eluded me. “I hear him die, over and over, in an echo sounding out of nowhere, and the image ricochets through my mind.”
Williams pursed her lips. “When you saved Yrsa.”
“Yes.”
“My problem,” I said, though I recognized it as simultaneously an obstacle and an asset, “is that I believe the fundamental truth of your claim. Whether stardust or creation, we are unique, but my careless order to retrieve the medic at all costs crushed a man from existence.”
Max reached across the table, his hand stopping a centimeter from my arm. “If you hadn’t . . . You know what they did to Elliott and Ross. They wouldn’t have allowed her to walk away.”
“I know. I would do it again, but how? What words would have been sufficient? Nothing. My orders to the drone might have saved the medic—”
“Did save,” Max appended.
I sighed.
Williams reached past me, reopened the flask of hot water, and topped off my cup of ginger tea. After pushing it in my direction, she said, “You did not intend his death.”
“I caused it.” I pressed my feet against the antistatic flooring, focusing on each bump, knob, or ripple in the material. “His death is so different from Lorik’s. While I abandoned the Elder to roaches, he chose to sacrifice himself in order for others to live. The man Skip called Cord—I will not say that he deserved to die, though I heard the marines say as much. He will never have the opportunity to change. I denied him that.” I took a sip of warm but weakened ginger tea. “Years ago—why is it, Max, that I can remember this, but labor over small things?”
He cocked his head at the sudden change in topic. “Probably the nanite shells.”
“Ah. I knew that.” I gulped down the tea, hoping the ginger’s spicy burn would warm me. It did not. “Years ago, before I attended university, I took a prerequisite literature course, and one disturbing story had a man proclaiming that ‘blood calls for blood.’ Williams, you read. Do you recall it?”
“I do not.”
Her unfamiliarity made no difference. “That is how it feels. As if he or his family are calling out for my blood in payment.” I returned the empty cup to the table, rotating it so the handle was perpendicular to the table’s edge.
Williams asked, “You seek absolution?”
The blanket slipped from my shoulders. “I find myself weighing the value of a soul over and over again. Perhaps I have summoned all this on myself. Perhaps I deserve to lose words. Perhaps I deserve even worse.”
Williams tugged the blanket up again. “Do not say so.”
“It has changed who I am.”
Even though Max leaned back against his chair, he seemed to draw closer. “The worlds aren’t static. There is upheaval and evil as well as growth and goodness. You have to trust that there’s more than what we see, directing our paths.”
“You speak of—” I glanced around for a drone that was no longer there. “Of Kyleigh’s unquantifiable God?”
Williams answered for Max. She lifted her chin and said clearly, “Yes.”
“But how would that mediate the wreckage here and here?” I touched my head and my chest. “If the value of a person remains the same? If we are each unique?”
“Forgiveness,” she said with quiet confidence. “Justice and mercy intertwine like . . . like DNA. But that debt of blood has already been met.”
I hunched my shoulders and fought, unsuccessfully, the need to rock back and forth. “This is not comforting.”
“Hold fast to hope, even when it seems tenuous and thin.” But Williams’s adjuration provided little reassurance.
“Even in the darkest of times,” Max said, “you must have confidence that what is painful now has been, and will be, met and answered. Circumstances help us grow. They can and will be used for good. It’s more than simply pressing on, though that’s part of it. Trust that something or Someone greater than us shapes the worlds. Nothing is wasted. And none of this changes the fact that who you are is not what you do. Your heart. Your choices. Those matter.”
Tears leaked down my cheeks. “But I am broken.”
“We all are.” Williams touched my arm, stilling me. “But as to your immediate losses, there are therapies, Max, are there not?”
The two issues were unconnected unless through some deeper link of justice, but I raised my head, nonetheless.
Max’s long cords of hair shushed over his shoulders when he nodded. “There are, to an extent. While I don’t know how to purge every single nanite cluster from your system, there are proven methods for repairing damage with follow-up therapies.”
My mouth fell open. “Are there?”
Max tugged at his ear. “The problem is they all involve being submerged in a tank for three ten-days, which cuts close to our arrival.”
“If I am in that Recorder’s care, no false claim of smuggling will save me from the Eldest.”
His nostrils flared. “Probably not. That’s why you’re in here, instead of walking about the ship.”
Williams finally took another sip of her juice. “Still, do not give up hope. Nathaniel Timmons is already working with the captain, Jordan, Max, and me, trying to solidify a way to free you.” She grimaced and stated my unspoken fear. “The Eldest is not . . . stable.”
“I met the Eldest a few years back,” Max said. “He seemed fair enough.”
I pulled the blanket tight around myself. “The Eldest is a woman now. She is close to Jordan’s age.”
His mouth pinched. “When did that change?”
“Five years past, and she is nearing the end of her service. The Eldests do not last long. It is how it has always been,” I said.
“You cannot return to her care,” Williams stated flatly. “And so, our goal must center on your future. I might not specialize in therapies, but I have medical training. We have three ten-days to help you regain strength, three ten-days to see if we can devise some therapy to help you recover. Three ten-days to find a way to set you free.”
Max set his hand on mine. “Thirty days.”
The intangible realities of justice, mercy, and forgiveness battled the burden of my errors, but the tangible demanded my attention as well. With the Recorder on board and a medical tracker in my wrist, thirty days seemed all too short.
But those thirty days were mine, even if the Eldest was waiting.