It’s happened once before.
When Ophelia was sixteen, walking out of Marchand-Brighton Academy, bags in hand, for her first semester break, a man approached her on the sidewalk.
He was an up-and-coming journo-streamer, she found out later. At the time, she had assumed he was an older brother of one of the other students, or even an assistant on pickup duty. Early twenties, probably, dark coat, red-and-white-striped M-B scarf around his neck.
Lugging her bags, she walked past him without a second glance, her attention focused on finding the car her grandmother had said she would send, among the idling autocars at the curb.
“Lark,” a man’s voice called from behind her.
Her heart stopped for a moment, hearing that name again, and she stumbled, her toe catching a rough patch in the concrete. Down she went, duffel bag and backpack scattering to either side, along with her precious orchid, the one she’d resurrected from near death after a girl down the hall had thrown it out. Now the purple glazed pottery was in fragments, shattered around her, and the delicate white leaves of the orchid were smashed against the ground.
The man rushed over to her, hand extended to help her up. “It is you,” he said, crouching next to her.
Still on the ground, she scooted away from him, heart crashing around in her chest like an animal frantic for escape, her hands and feet going numb.
“Field Bledsoe,” he continued triumphantly, blue eyes lit with excitement. “Bloody Bledsoe. That’s your dad. I’ve been looking for you for four years! Everyone thinks you’re dead, but I knew it. I knew it!”
Her classmates milling about on the sidewalk, saying good-bye to each other, waiting for their parents, started to notice. Started to stare.
The man went on and on about transport receipts, security cam footage, wrong cargo hold weights, and illegal cold sleep facilities. Then he finally seemed to notice her lack of response.
He sucked air in through his teeth. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I’ve scared you. Hey, look, I don’t mean any harm.” He held his hands up in innocence. “My name is Alex Linley. I’ve been working on this story since that first rumor about the Tarrytown making an unscheduled stop at Goliath right after the news broke about Blood—” He stopped himself. “About the incident,” he finished awkwardly.
Movement in the distance caught her attention. To her relief, Samson (not his real name), one of her family’s private security personnel, stepped out of a car halfway down the line and charged toward them. The bright blue glow of the active QuickQ in his eye told Ophelia he was in contact with someone—her uncle, most likely.
The man glanced over his shoulder to see Samson barreling toward them, and he stood, face pale.
“It’s all right, Miss Bray. I’ll get your things. Why don’t you get in the car?” Samson said, in a way that was somehow both comforting and menacing at the same time.
As she bolted for the car, she risked one look back. Alex was listening intently, frowning, as Samson pressed a piece of paper into his hands.
At the time—and for years later—she assumed Samson was giving him money. A link, perhaps, to an untraceable account. She might not have had all the details about how her Bray family operated, but she’d certainly seen them use money to make problems go away.
It wasn’t until her early twenties, during graduate school, that it occurred to look him up. Alex Linley.
He was—still is—listed as missing.
Lark Bledsoe. Ophelia draws in her breath sharply. It feels like Lark is a whole other person, someone Ophelia used to know.
She doesn’t really remember her, being her. When forced to consider it, she has memories of her childhood, normal memories. Hide-and-seek with other children, using service access ladders to avoid detection; snitching an extra flax cookie from the meal line; school lessons followed by a required shift in hydroponics or the crèche. But it’s like those things happened to someone else, with Ophelia just watching from a distance.
Other memories, however, feel far too close.
Little Bird, where are you?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says to Birch now, her voice barely a croak.
He straightens up. “Sure you don’t. I don’t know how you did it, but I’m betting that Bray money helped a lot, didn’t it?” Birch folds his arms over his chest, one hand still scratching his arm, even through the fabric of his jumpsuit. “Nothing like what I had to do get out of the Avaris system after Pinnacle fucking dumped us off there. Blacklisted to keep their secret, no way out, no other jobs, no money.”
The first half of her parents’ story is like something out of an old fairy tale. The neglected daughter of a wealthy queen falls in love with the honorable but poor miner who is fighting for his struggling town.
Substitute CEO for queen and space station for town, and you’ve got the gist. Ophelia’s mother was sent as a “Pinnacle representative” in a “good faith gesture” to quell rumblings of unionization with the Carver system mining stations—Goliath, Sampson, and Jericho.
The second half of their story was where the narrative twisted, jumping genres into one of those jump-scare, splatter-gore, nightmare fests starring a human monster named Bloody Bledsoe, good people who die for no reason, and the villain-adjacent who manage to escape with minimal harm.
Ophelia has dedicated her life since then trying to make up for it, trying to make up for them. Not just her father but her mother as well.
“Do you have any idea what it was like after the Brays swooped in to rescue their own and left the rest of us to burn our dead? Do you know how long that took? How many of them rotted in station storage while we waited for permission to take them to the ore processing facility? To destroy them like waste material?” His face distorts with rage. “I had to help my mother scoop my brother’s remains into a bag.”
Ophelia fights the mix of shame and anger that always rises in her when it comes to her family—either side, both sides. The Brays had despised the connection to her father even before he … did what he did.
Murdered almost thirty people, including men, women, and children, you mean?
But the Brays were just as bad, in an entirely different way. She doubts her uncle had Alex Linley killed. Too messy, too risky. More likely he was dumped on some desolate work camp colony with an implanted ID change, a fantastical story about the Brays, and no way to get home.
It feels like corrosion creeping up and down your skin. Like being made up of already damaged parts and struggling to make sure you’re functioning as you’re supposed to.
I have control of my actions. I make choices for myself. I am not my family.
It’s the mantra Ophelia created for herself years ago, after she took her very first human psychology and behavior class at the academy.
Genetics are not destiny. Neither is environment. The two together pack a powerful punch, but … I have control of my actions. I make choices for myself. I am not my family.
How much guilt is too much? How much is not enough? What can I do to make things better? Questions that continue to haunt her every single day.
But the one thing that will not make things better is for this to come out. She’ll be fired, her license revoked, and possibly jailed for the lies her family told, the crimes they committed. There will be no more helping anyone. And the innocent in her family—there are a few, her sister, Dulcie, namely—will be destroyed.
She struggles to draw in a deep breath against the rising panic, and her vision pulses with black spots. But the medikit on the table to her right, almost in reach, catches her eye. Meds. Drugs that might make Birch forget … or fall asleep and never wake up again.
What is wrong with you? No. No!
Ophelia tears her gaze away from the medikit. “Birch, I need you to listen to me,” she begins. “I—”
Birch’s focus slides to a point behind her and, eyes widening, he takes a step back from her.
She flinches, imagining who he might see behind her. A full-blown hallucination of his brother? Or, oh God, her father? Birch said he’d dreamed about him.
The space between her shoulders prickles with awareness, as if the tiny hairs on her skin can detect a vision of the dead standing behind her, a sharp blade in hand.
Unable to stop herself, she spins around in her seat to look.
In the doorway, Severin raises his eyebrows at her. “Everything okay here?”
How much has he heard?
“Sure thing, MC,” Birch says easily. “Just the doc and me having a discussion about getting more sleep.”
Ophelia glances back at Birch, stunned by how normal he sounds now.
Then again, he must have some skill with deception. Montrose would never have knowingly hired anyone from Goliath for an R&E team, even if their pettiness tempted them to ignore a blacklisted status from Pinnacle. Not now that the medical community understands ERS a little better. It’s too risky. Too many years of exposure to “less-than-ideal” conditions and “outdated” equipment and procedures. In other words, Ophelia’s family company dumped their employees out there and then refused to upgrade to better, safer tech. As long as those teams were still pulling in ore from the asteroid, never mind that it meant up to six months a year in cold sleep as teams traded on and off.
No need to provide food or housing for dozens at a time. Just stuff everyone back into cold sleep when they are done with their thirty-day cycle. Wake them back up when they are needed again. What was innovative at the time is now deemed incredibly dangerous.
“Right, Dr. Bray?” Birch asks, drawing her attention back to the conversation. The emphasis on her last name is unmistakable, as is the veiled threat.
“Right,” she says, her voice too thin.
Severin looks to Birch and then back to Ophelia, evaluating. “He’s good to go, then?”
The second she tells Severin something is wrong, Birch is going to out her. She can feel it. But she can’t ignore what’s happening here, either.
“He should take it slow,” she says finally, standing and facing Severin. Do your job, Ophelia. “And I’d like to get a blood sample to run through the med-scanner first.”
“Not necessary,” Birch says sharply.
“He’s bleeding from his gums,” she says to Severin. “Likely a sign of severe anemia, and it’s possible his T3 levels are low, which can exacerbate certain conditions.”
“I’ve been taking my iron tabs,” Birch protests.
“All the more reason to just check it out,” Severin says evenly, before she can respond.
“Fine,” Birch snaps.
It takes less than a second to gather the needed drop of blood and set the med-scanner to work. She gives Birch gel-bands for his hands, her own hands trembling. “If that itching gets worse—” she starts.
“It won’t. Can I go now?” he asks Severin, without even looking at Ophelia.
Severin steps out of the way and waves him forward through the door to the corridor.
“You’ll let us know?” Severin asks her, as soon as Birch is gone.
You could be putting Severin’s life at risk, along with everyone else’s, by letting Birch go. Tsk, tsk. What happened to “Better safe than sorry”? How very Bray of you.
“Of course.” Her voice comes out crumbly and thick, and she drops into her seat as he steps back into the corridor.
She closes her eyes. Bloody fucking Bledsoe. No matter what she does, she will never escape her father’s legacy, her mother’s response. She might have survived that horrible day, that horrible event, but apparently it will continue to linger like the ghost she should have been, no matter what—
“Everything okay, Doctor?”
Startled, she twists around in her chair to see Severin lingering in the doorway, frowning at her in concern.
It loosens something tight within her. “Do you ever feel like you’re not enough?” she asks, the words escaping without her permission. Exhaustion has taken down her filter. “Like you’ll never be able to do enough to make up for the past, for what you can’t change, no matter how hard you try?”
His expression hardens. “I didn’t come here for a counseling—”
He thinks she means Ava. “I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about me,” she snaps. “You know what? Forget it.” She pushes to her feet.
Severin hesitates, fingers drumming a rhythm on the doorframe. “Yes,” he says, after a moment. “But I think if you let the past haunt you, if you can’t accept it, it’s that much harder to make better choices in the future.” He regards her warily, as if expecting her to slap back at him in some way.
But she nods. “That sounds good,” she says, and she means it. But she’s not sure she believes that’s possible. Accepting the past, not being haunted by it. She’s not sure he believes it, either.
“Good night, Doctor,” he says, starting to turn away.
“Ophelia,” she says impulsively. Julius is wrong—she does want to be known, just for more than her family, her history.
Severin pauses. Then he says, “Ethan.”
Her cheeks warm, and for once it’s not from embarrassment or frustration. “Good night, Ethan.”