Everything that mattered happened in the dark.
It was eighteen in the morning, the deepest part of the black, with the promise of dawn another eight hours distant. This was when they brought in the suicides, the lunatics, the infanticides, the condemned: all the twisted and brutalized bodies that the day shift refused to process but management needed to clear.
In their long, stark white rooms, the butchers worked nimbly, silently, during the twenty-hour cycle of darkness.
The body they brought in that night was just another bruised husk, some mangled thing the techs hauled in under the ruinous glare of the organic over-lights. The worms were dying in the light casings up there, so the glow along the far edge of the operating room was pale lavender instead of white.
“Where did you find her?” Taryka asked the body techs as she ripped open the green slick that protected the corpse. She never did like the quiet between body dumps. Every new body the techs scavenged was another excuse for chatter, for the promise of human warmth—anything to prove she was alive in all this endless night.
“The docks,” said Paya, the elder tech. Taryka had worked with her for several cycles.
“Water? Port? Elevator? It matters,” Taryka said.
“Let her know,” Paya said to the new tech.
The tech sighed. He was just a kid, a couple months on the job. His partner was finishing up the body check-in on the big wall projection. Taryka saw already that he wouldn’t make it on the overdark shift. Living your life in the black was one thing, but living your life in the black of the overdark, reprocessing corpses, was another.
“Found it near the elevator dock,” he said, referring to his roll-up display.
“There are three in this sector. Which one?”
“It’s not on here,” the kid said.
Beneath the slick, the body was dry and desiccated. If they were anywhere near a desert, some forensic might have guessed it was a mummy right off, but enough elevators opened into vacuum now that the desert was the least likely way this body had met its end. The corpse lay curled on its side, elbows tucked, mouth yawning, feet crossed. It was naked, as one would expect. Bodies that came in this way were always stripped of valuables long before the processing crews found them. Especially if they died near an elevator where the throw-offs and castaways congregated.
“All right,” Taryka said. She reached behind her for the bone saw. There was very rarely a body in hand with a complete finder’s report. Why did everyone hate data entry so much? Taryka found it calming.
The boy tech turned away quickly. “That’s everything, Paya? Do I sign something?”
“No,” Paya said. Then, to Taryka, “I’ve checked the body itself against our database. Verified it’s not in the system. Must have been some off-station stray, not one of our own. It happens.” Paya tapped her forehead at Taryka. “You’ll have to check with the rest of the fleet to see if her code matches any strays.”
Taryka rolled her eyes, and Paya mimicked her. They both knew how likely it was to get anything useful from other ships. Each was like its own nation now, suspicious and insulated.
“May you find your way,” Taryka said.
“And you yours,” Paya said.
When they were gone, Taryka sighed, alone again in the stillness. She cracked open the body’s chest and studied the state of the organs. More or less salvageable, with some creative treatment. She began preparing her solution. During the dark shift, they sometimes bothered with an autopsy, but during the overdark shift, management expressly forbids it. It cut into profits, and at no gain. If they accidentally processed someone with legal funerary rights, it would cost them less to pay out than it cost the butchers to perform an autopsy on every wayward body that crossed the slab.
She turned the body over for better access to the kidneys and made a small incision to check their health. They looked good; they were easier to rehydrate. As she moved away to make note of it, she saw an indentation just above the left hip. Someone had been peeling at the skin. She rubbed at it, revealing the traces of an inked tattoo. They sometimes tattooed company bodies on the left hip, the bodies management imported from the lower levels as C-level executive administrative staff. Limited resources on the topside levels meant the new bodies that went up had to be signed in and accounted for at all times. And anybody they had imported from some other ship beyond the vacuum… well, those were even rarer. Those came over at great expense. This was most likely a lower-level refugee. But every body had to be examined, the particulates cataloged, the cause of death logged for the health-inspection authority. In such confined spaces, viral and bacterial contagions could spell the doom of the entire ship; every child grew up watching recordings of ships that had fallen to such contagions in the past.
Taryka grabbed a specimen slide and scraped quickly at the grit beneath the body’s nails. She stored it on the transparent slide and slipped it into the analyzer behind her, then switched it on.
“Taryka?”
She started and knocked the analyzer off. Turned.
Giati, one of the butchers who worked near reception, smiled at her from the doorway. A familiar round-faced man stood behind her dressed in formal doctor’s scrubs and a long white coat.
“Sorry, Doctor Divati is taking this one tonight,” Giati said.
“Have you started?” Divati said before she could speak. He was a pleasant man ordinarily, but tonight he was brisk. He pushed past Giati and went straight for the body.
“No, not yet. Just opened the chest. The organs are good.”
“Perfect, that’s fine. I’m taking this one. Have a class scheduled tonight. Last minute.” He pulled the slick closed. It hissed and melted and sealed itself. He smiled thinly. “Did you remove anything from the body?”
“No, nothing,” Taryka said.
“Wonderful. Perfect. Giati, excuse me.” He released the body’s carriage, and it floated free of the examining table. “I’ll be sure to have them send you the next one. Idle hands drive idle minds.”
Taryka forced a smile as she watched him leave, pushing the body out ahead of him. When he was gone, she slipped the slide from her analyzer into her pocket.
At the end of her shift, she dropped off her bundle of reconstituted organs, pulled off her slick, and showered. She stopped by Giati’s desk on the way out.
“Did they do an autopsy on that first girl? The one Doctor Divati took in?”
“Don’t know. You can check the file. Her tag is EV543-CG. He had me code it into the analyzer before I left.”
Taryka used Giati’s table slide to look it up.
Cause of death was listed as an overdose of violet gas, no signs of violence. A slow, cold knot of unease unfurled in her belly. She had seen no indication of exposure to violet gas. No reddening under the nails. No damage to the kidneys. No staining around the mouth.
“Walk me out?” Giati said.
Taryka nodded. They never left the compound alone anymore. Three of the staff were killed the year before during some food riot. When food was scarce, the body docks were one of the first places people looked for nourishment. They’d torn one of the butchers apart limb from limb and gnawed the face off another before security arrived.
She and Giati parted at the tube station. Taryka rode home alone as the gray light of another gray day touched the long, dim crescent of the horizon. Some days the dawns were blinding, but since the Nothing had blown out the world on the other side of the water bay, sunrises like that came a lot less often.
Inside her windowless flat, a skein of messages waited on the slide inside the door. She ignored them, pulled off her clothes, and sank into her bed at the center of the room. Somewhere distant, a chime sounded, reminding the faithful that today was another day of fasting. Fasting twice a week kept one more in touch with the body. And, of course, conserved protein and plant matter.
Taryka had never had trouble with fasting. Her sister had, though … right up until the end.
She woke in the dead of the morning, abruptly, from a black sleep. The room was completely dark. There was no sound. Quiet as a body dock.
Taryka’s mind swam with images of the desiccated body from her last shift, the tattoo forming and re-forming in her mind, rippling and then breaking apart before she could make out the image.
Why would the doctor lie? Who was she?
You have a fool mind, her sister always told her. A mind that cannot let it be. Just let it be, Taryka. Let it be.
Taryka pushed out of bed and tapped on a light. The worms in the glass stirred, and a wave of amber light spilled across her vision, made her squint. She rummaged through her pockets and found the slide specimen she’d taken from the girl’s fingernails.
She tapped the slide into her analyzer and turned it on. The machine made a soft purring sound. The report popped up on the desk next to her. She leaned over and studied it.
“What are these?” she asked, pointing to two sets of DNA codes.
“Blood samples,” the analyzer said sweetly. “The organic matter detected includes the blood of two distinct individuals. Also, there are chemical traces of amphorite, iron, and chitin larva.”
“Can you identify the individuals?”
“No matches available.”
“What stage are the larva?” Taryka muddled over the report again. Everyone inside their ship was cataloged in the DNA database. If there was no match, it meant the organic matter under her nails had come from two unregistered people from outside the ship.
“Three days and twenty-nine hours.”
“Can you match that to an area around the new elevator project?”
“Negative. That area does not contain chitin or amphorite.”
“Where does?”
“Numerous locations on the world utilize amphorite for their everyday needs, including—”
“I know, I know. What about the chitin? That’s water, isn’t it?”
“Correct. Large bodies of standing water serve as breeding grounds for chitin larvae, which turn into pupae in three days and adult flesh beetles in eight days.”
“How long does it take flesh beetles to devour a body?”
“It takes fourteen days for flesh beetles to strip the flesh from a body.”
Taryka pushed her clothes off a nearby chair and sat. Regarded the analyzer. “Is Paya up?”
“I have no immediate way of knowing this.”
“Call Paya.”
“Pinging Paya.”
Her display warmed but showed only the default orange-red glow of the default image.
“How are you awake this early?” Paya said.
“Did I interrupt you? You’re not using visual.”
“Not all of us look at good as you first thing in the morning.”
“I’ve discovered ...” She hesitated. Communications were always monitored. “I have something important to discuss with you, regarding a work project. Can you meet to break the fast?”
“No, today’s a fasting day.”
“Right. Tea, then?”
“Let the overdark fade a little more before dragging me out,” she said. “Couple more turns?”
“All right.”
They met at the only tea shop on their level. The restaurants and food vendors were closed in observance of the holy day. It meant the tea shop was busier, which Taryka found both soothing and frightening.
Paya sat, folding her bony body into the battered seat. Three generations of their ancestors had inhabited this space, used these same tools, bound by a single purpose. The wear and tear was showing now—in the ship, and in their own weary bodies. Paya was a generation older, thirty years Taryka’s senior.
“What’s so mind-blowing you couldn’t log it?” Paya said, hands curled around her chipped teacup.
“That last body you brought in last night—I did a cursory examination before it was hauled away. Doctor Divati was scheduled to do the autopsy, but … his results don’t match anything I observed and …”
“Oh boy,” Paya said. “I know that look.” She leaned closer, said, “Don’t do anything to get yourself banished.”
“I’m not. It’s just … a mystery. A bone that gets caught in my teeth. I can’t dislodge it.”
“Where are you starting?”
“You said there’s no record of her, maybe she’s a stray. But she had organic matter from two more off-ship as well. That means there was more than one. She wasn’t an anomaly.”
“They’re all anomalies. They should stay on their own ships.”
“We don’t know what it’s like out there,” she said. “It could be a matter of choosing a lesser evil.”
“Casting oneself off into the blackness between the ships out there … I don’t know.” Paya sipped her tea. She savored it every time; she was permitted only three cups a day to Taryka’s five. When Taryka once offered to give over one of hers, Paya had laughed and said, “When you’re old like me, you’ll get just as many. I had your advantages once. Life is a cycle. You enjoy your stage of it.”
“We’ve seen a lot more bodies like this in the last year,” Taryka said. “Our ship is a closed system, and yes, it’s had its challenges, but … where is all of this extra matter coming from? If these bodies are truly from other ships, then there must be some great war or plague out there that we don’t know about.”
“If it’s important enough, leadership will alert us,” Paya said. “It’s always been thus.”
“There was a tattoo,” Taryka said. She pushed over a crude drawing of it, what she could remember, that she had sketched onto a reusable tablet.
Paya squinted at the markings. “If it’s tattoos you’re interested in—and I know by this point that I can’t dissuade you when you go on your little crusades—you should talk to Makrolai in the upper promenade. She has quite a collection of old tattoos and markings. A scholar, really.”
“Thank you,” Taryka said, and poured the rest of her tea into Paya’s cup.
Paya sputtered, but Taryka just grinned and left before she could protest.
Taryka made her way down to the lower promenade. Asking after Makrolai, she was directed to a battered little modular living space that had been converted to a storefront. Most people used the front of their living spaces as public parlors where they traded, shared gossip, and exchanged handmade goods. Makrolai’s door was open to the public space. Bits of glass hanging from discarded bits of wires tinkled in the draft from the ventilation system. Streamers of red ribbon were tied around old pieces of wood fished out of the nearby pond.
“Hello?” Taryka said.
A rumpled old woman that Taryka had mistaken for a pile of rags unfurled herself from a big chair in the corner of the parlor.
“Don’t tell me your name,” the woman said. “Let me guess.” She hobbled to Taryka and took her palms into her rough hands. Squinted at her with bleary eyes. Her face was very thin; the layers of modified clothing made her appear far heavier than she was. She would have to observe the fasting days just like the rest of them.
“Paya says you know something of markings,” Taryka said.
The woman clicked at her. “Your name … the cant of your face. The nose, flared at the end, the slight rise in the bridge, yes … the soft jaw. I know those eyes, too, yes … I have seen your ancestors, girl. Your name is … Leimali?”
“No, I’m Taryka.”
“Damn,” the woman muttered.
“You’re Makrolai?”
“Seems so,” the woman said and collapsed into her chair again.
Taryka handed her the drawing. “I process bodies during overdark. One came in last night with a marking like this. You know where it’s from?”
Makrolai bunched up her mouth and peered at the symbol. “This marks the Others,” she said.
“The … Others? Those from other ships?”
Makrolai chuckled. “Other … places. That’s good enough.”
“I know we often get strays from other ships. I’m just very curious where she came from. Her body was removed from processing without a proper autopsy.”
“I expect it was. You’d find it a bit different from yours.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s one of the Others.”
“I don’t understand. There are only other ships. We are surrounded by darkness. There is no other place to … be Other-from.”
“That’s what they would like us to believe.”
“Who?”
Makrolai rolled her eyes. “It’s not worth getting into.”
“I want to know who this woman was.”
“I can’t help you.”
“But—”
“I’m a mad old woman,” she said. “That’s what they called me, when I spoke the truth. You want truth, you find it out for yourself.”
Taryka turned from her, listening to the tinkle of the glass mobile and the whir of the warm air moving across the promenade. She stared at the image on her tablet and heard her sister’s voice again: “You always meddle. This isn’t a world for meddlers.”
She wiped away the mark on her tablet. She went back to her flat and mediated for an hour. Flickers of the dreams from the night before kept bubbling up, jerking her away from awareness and back into the cold, hard world of thought.
Taryka went back to her analyzer. “Tell me when Doctor Divati has his shift today.”
“Doctor Divati is working the overdark.”
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome, Taryka.”
Taryka prepared for work as the darkness descended, and the overdark approached. There had once been painfully bright light in the ship, all the elders said. Light so bright it made you want to dance all day and celebrate all night. There was no overdark then. The overdark, the powering down, was a way to conserve energy across the ship. No one knew what or when their final destination was, but clearly, the leadership understood that to get there, they needed to ration and preserve what resources they had.
Taryka went about her work, processing the first body of the overdark, until Doctor Divati arrived. Then she quietly put down her tools and went to his office.
Divati beamed at her when she entered. “Taryka, to what do I owe this audience?”
“I have a question about an autopsy you performed.”
“Of course,” he said, but she saw a flicker of unease in his face. “Have a seat.”
“A body came in last overdark,” she said. “I ... I did some of the processing, before you had it taken away. She was not from here.”
“Certainly,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “We have many strays—”
“People from other places.”
“Indeed.”
“The processing I did was not consistent with violet gas. I believe an error was made in the autopsy.”
“Really? Well, I will look into that.”
“Doctor, I know that her tattoo was from … the Others.” She watched his face, trying out her bluff. He frowned for the first time, and when he looked at her now, it was more seriously.
“What do you know about the Others?”
“I know there have been more and more,” she said, “even as all of us here seem to be less and less. I must know what’s happening, doctor. She haunts my dreams. I fear a great wrong has been done here, and there are more great wrongs to come.”
“You are too young.”
“I will go mad, not knowing. The way my sister went mad.”
“Your sister had an unfortunate sickness. It was not caused by a lack of knowledge.”
“You know there is madness in us. You treated my sister. My mother. You owe me this one truth.”
“You want to know?” Divati said. “It will drive you mad?”
“I want to know,” Taryka said. “I will bring this to leadership.”
“That would be foolish,” he said. “They will kill you.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’ll take it to them.”
Divati mush have seen the resolve in her face, because he said, “Come with me.”
He took her down to the elevator near the flooded pond. They entered the elevator. She expected him to choose a level, but he did not. Merely stood there in the silence until the transparent door closed. Behind him, there was damage to the back of the elevator. Taryka could see through to the mesh beneath, the thin filament that protected the inner hull from the outer hull.
“She was not from here,” Divati said. “There are a few who know this. It may be that you should be among those few in this next generation—one to know the truth of things, so you can protect the others.”
“Where? The ships? That’s all there is, Divati.”
Divati closed his eyes and sighed. “It’s not,” he said. “There is more out there. Much more. We cannot let them know.”
“Let who know?”
“We can’t let them know that we have landed.”
Taryka felt numb. “Landed …?”
“Our ship has reached its final resting place. The people we bring in, the bodies … they are those who have settled here. We need them to replenish our organic stores.”
“When did we land?”
“A decade ago,” he said.
“You kept us … We are in the dark.”
“The dark is all we know. The light would kill our people. New bacteria, the radiation, and we know almost nothing about the microbiome here. You think you can just unload everyone on some new planet, when three generations have known nothing but deep space? You can’t.”
“But the ones who sent us—”
“We have learned how to live in this bucket,” he said. “The transition to outside … it could kill us.”
“But clearly some other ships have made it work!”
“We study them, these bodies, to see how they are adapting,” he said. “The results are … inconclusive. We can’t risk losing this.”
“Or your power,” she said.
“What?” Sharp.
“What happens to your power when people have a whole world to explore? What happens to your power when we can … leave? When we are no longer fast?”
“You’re naive.”
“This is mad.”
“It is practical. You understand, Taryka. You are the most practical of all the processors. You can help me with these studies. You can—”
“People need to know.” She thought about Paya and her three cups of tea. “People shouldn’t have to live this way for no reason.”
“People like being told what to do,” Divati said. “There is quiet here. Order. Safety. What’s wrong with that?”
Taryka firmed her mouth. What was wrong with it indeed? All these generations, all of her ancestors, Divati’s ancestors, sacrificing to get them to some other world, and here they sat, too terrified of the light to leave the darkness.
“I understand,” Taryka said.
“Do you?”
“I understand.”
“Good.” Divati took her hand. “Come now, you just need to rest. This is a great revelation.” He walked with her back to the processing center. The overdark was beginning to lighten; her shift was nearing an end.
“Here we are,” Divati said, guiding her to a seat. “Let me get you something, just a little something, for the shock—”
Taryka burst up from her seat. “No!” She tried to run past him. He hit her across the face with the back of an instrument tray. The shiny metal tools crashed to the floor. A spray of blood from her face arced across the front of his gown. Her gaze met his, and she knew in that instant that her instinct had been right: he was going to make her mad, put her away, silence her, just like Makrolai.
Taryka rushed out of the processing center as the rest of the level woke. She ran through the promenade, blood streaming from her face, shouting, “They’ve lied to you! We’ve landed! We’ve landed! We are free!”
Those around her recoiled. A few market vendors pulled down their awnings to shield their wares from her as if she were a threat to them.
“We have already arrived!” Taryka said. “Don’t you see? Don’t you know? There’s no vacuum of space beyond these walls! No ships out there! The strays live on the planet. There’s a planet out there, everything we were seeking. They’ve kept it from us.”
Paya ran up to her, took her by the shoulder. “Hush now, Taryka, you are exhausted. Where have you been?”
“I’ve seen it, Paya,” Taryka said. “We aren’t bound here any longer. We are free.”
Paya smiled and stroked her hair. “Of course, of course.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I have seen many who came to believe this, in my time,” Paya said. “It’s... a type of sickness. You are just a little ill.”
“You listen!” Taryka said and twisted away. “I’ll show you!” She ran. Several others followed, including Paya. Taryka ran to the end of the promenade and went down into the yellowing park, through the flooded paths where the pond overflowed its boundaries, and to the elevator. She picked up a great length of metal pipe near the pond worksite and unlocked the elevator.
There, where the metal mesh was rotten, she began to hammer at it with the pipe. Again and again, she hammered, until the mesh broke away. She peeled at it, revealing gooey, glistening flesh beneath.
“Stop!” Paya yelled. “You will kill us all!”
Taryka pressed the elevator closed. Paya banged on the translucent doors.
“This is all an illusion, Paya! All a lie!” Taryka dug her hands into the flesh beneath the metal. She took out great fistfuls of the stuff, gelatinous goo, the consistency of liquefied organs. A pool of the stuff started to form around her. A great stench began to issue from the wound, so great she almost passed out. Her breathing came ragged; sweat poured down her face. Eventually, the hole was big enough to crawl into.
She looked back. A large crowd had gathered around her. The order police were coming down the promenade.
Taryka crawled into the fleshy tunnel and continued her work. She dug with the pipe now, deeper and deeper. A tapping at the elevator doors. Raised voices. The order police would be through soon.
She jammed the pipe into the end of the tunnel. Resistance, then—the pipe slid forward, broke through. She gasped and yanked it out.
Until the moment the end of the pipe came free, she was still uncertain of what to expect: the vacuum and a cold, blistering death; some other world, its violet sky too bright to endure; or a wave of police, simply waiting for her to crawl her way to them.
What she did not expect was to pull the pipe away and see only darkness on the other side. Stillness. Nothingness. It was as if she stared into death itself, into the black during overdark.
Taryka threw away the pipe and used her hands to widen the hole, pushing the engorged flesh out past her feet as she propelled herself forward, ever forward, and slipped into the darkness of the unknown.