“Order school eat!” Ophelia bleats. Her voice is not her voice, too soft, too dreamy. And not saying what she wants.
She claps a hand over her mouth. No, no, no. What is happening?
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Ethan says gently. Then he turns and calls over his shoulder. “Kate!”
Terror pierces Ophelia, cold blades tearing inside. She’s not as lost to it as Liana or even Birch seemed to be. But possibly only because she’s still awake. For now.
Kate appears in the corridor. “What is taking so long? The med-scanner should be—” She stops abruptly as soon as she sees them. “What are you doing? What’s wrong?”
“We’re losing her,” Ethan says quietly.
“No, I’m still here. I don’t know what’s wrong,” Ophelia insists. But more nonsense spews forth from her mouth. Her lips, teeth, and tongue feel like strangers, no longer obeying her commands.
Kate stares at her, mouth open slightly.
Ethan moves to grab Ophelia’s arm, but acting on impulse, she darts sideways, farther down the A side corridor, out of reach. Her limbs, for now, are doing as she asks. But that’s no guarantee for an hour from now, or even five minutes.
Her breath catches hard in her throat, a whimper escaping before she can stop it. I can’t. I can’t do this. Be present and feel my mind deteriorating around me. This is her nightmare coming true. Losing control of herself and still being dimly aware of what’s happening.
“Ophelia, I’m not going to hurt you,” Ethan says, his voice low, hands out in front of him as if he’s approaching a feral animal. “I just want to make sure you’re not going to hurt yourself, right?”
Part of her wants to roll her eyes at him. She understands him perfectly well. But he has no way of knowing that because she can’t tell him that.
She can’t breathe. Her lungs are tight, like they’ve turned to solid stone. Incapable and impervious to air.
What am I going to do? She shifts her weight from foot to foot as Ethan approaches slowly, cautiously. She knows what not to do, as unhelpful as that might be at the moment. Sleep will only make it worse. Birch, at least, had some awareness, but Liana …
Wait. She stops moving. She’d avoided giving Suresh a sedative because she didn’t want to lose him to the towers, to whatever this is. She hadn’t considered what would happen if she attempted the opposite. If their sleeping minds give this thing some kind of an advantage over them, then what would happen if she made herself, well, more awake?
Ophelia turns on her heels and heads for her office, where the medikit was the last time she saw it.
Fortunately, it’s still on her desk.
Ethan and Kate follow her at a safe distance.
“What is she doing?” Kate asks, as Ophelia rummages in the kit.
“I don’t know. Be ready to grab her if she’s got the scalpels,” Ethan says grimly. “Ophelia, just come with us and—”
“Grass. Chair sky benediction. Chair sky benediction!” She shows them, with trembling fingers, the ampule.
“A stimulant, I think,” Ethan says to Kate. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says to Ophelia. “It’s supposed to be for extended—”
She presses the hypo against her neck. A cool sensation rushes beneath the skin and then sweat instantly bursts out all over her skin, along with chills. Her teeth chatter.
“It’s in the frontal lobe, the language center,” she tells them, tremors racking her body. Her heart is pounding like she’s running sprints. Uphill. “But I can still understand everything. Ethan, I’m still me.”
Gibberish again.
Ethan cocks his head to the side, looking at Ophelia intently. Then he turns to Kate. “Can you give me a second?”
She folds her arms across her chest. “Not a great idea, Commander.”
“It’s fine,” he says. When she doesn’t move, he straightens. “Kate. Now, please.”
Commander voice. It’s effective.
She scowls at Ophelia. “I’ll be right outside.” Then she pivots and stalks toward the door, making a show of stopping just over the threshold.
Ethan edges closer to her, hands still up, but he seems more certain now. “I need you to come with me. Someplace safe. If you can understand me, you know why I have to do this. I can’t risk you hurting yourself or us. And…” He hesitates. “With your history, with what you’ve told me, I need to be cautious.” The compassion in his gaze, meshed with implacable kindness, makes Ophelia simultaneously want to cry and to dig a hole in the ground and vanish forever.
Bloody Bledsoe strikes again. But she understands. She would insist on nothing less.
She’s never felt more tainted, more damaged, in her life, though.
Ophelia takes a chance and tries nodding.
Relief spreads across Ethan’s face.
“I knew you could understand me. We’re going to prep the lander, get Suresh in place, and then I’m going to come back for you. We’re all getting out of here. Okay?”
“If it’ll even let us leave,” she says bitterly. “It might just yank that stuff right out of us the second we break atmosphere. We’ll end up nothing but puddles of black goo inside a crashed lander.” Which might, for that matter, be exactly what happened to any remnants of the Pinnacle team, assuming there were any.
Ethan’s eyes widen. And it takes her a second to realize what she’s said. Actually said.
Excitement courses through her veins like electricity. “That made sense! You understood me!” Ophelia doesn’t wait for him to respond. She has no idea how long this limited window will last. “Listen, you can’t sleep. Don’t even let yourself get drowsy. Our conscious minds seem to be able to hold it off somewhat. But probably not forever. Use whatever we have of this to stay awake, at least until you’ve made it to cold sleep.” She holds up the remaining doses of the stimulant.
“It’s fine,” he says, waving away her words. “You’re fine. You can—”
Ophelia takes a step back from him, much as it kills her to do so.
Ethan frowns. “What? What’s wrong?”
“You were right. I’m too big of a risk. Right now, I have control. But there’s a good chance this is temporary,” she says. “It’s in my head. I can feel them … waiting.”
Several emotions flicker across his face before he lands on one. The Commander is back.
“We need everyone, Doctor. You can’t just—”
“Not this time,” Ophelia says.
He opens his mouth to argue.
But Ophelia has one last card to play, her worst fear and her largest vulnerability simultaneously. “Don’t let me hurt anyone. Please.”
Ethan and Kate determine that the bunk room Ophelia shared with Kate and Liana is the best place to serve as Ophelia’s temporary holding cell. The farthest from the towers and the easiest to clean out.
Ethan walks her over through the central hub. Suresh watches silently from his table/gurney. Someone must have filled him in.
“It’s going to be fine. We’ll be right back for you,” Ethan says, as Kate finishes shoving all of their personals, including Ophelia’s, into the corridor. Eerily, it reminds Ophelia of how they found the hab when they first arrived. All those personal items discarded, left behind.
Ophelia nods, almost afraid to speak now, to find out that the ability is gone again.
Kate steps back, giving her plenty of space to enter the module. The only things left are the beds themselves. Even the sheets and blankets are in a heap in the corridor.
Kate is sweating, and her eyes are glazed. She’s struggling against the influence of the towers, just like everyone else. But she meets Ophelia’s gaze, openly hostile, as she swings the door shut, and suddenly Ophelia doubts very much that anyone will be coming back for her, if Kate has her way.
She doesn’t blame Kate. Learning that you’ve been working side by side with the daughter of the most famous mass murderer in the last thirty years, and that said daughter is now experiencing hallucinations of her father, is probably more than a little frightening, not to mention infuriating. And it’s safer for all of them if Ophelia is not on the ship. Trust is essential. It only takes a few seconds to disrupt a cold sleep tank and turn the prank that Suresh staged into reality. And someone always has to be the last one in. Kate doesn’t trust Ophelia, and now Ophelia’s not sure she would trust Kate.
Ophelia doesn’t know whether Kate will succeed in convincing Ethan. If she does, Ophelia hopes she won’t be aware of being left behind. Starving to death or bashing her head against the door to try to get out sounds like an awful way to die.
Outside the bunk room, the door lock clunks into place, and Kate’s face vanishes from the porthole window.
Ophelia makes herself back up, away from the door. Hovering won’t make it open any faster, if it opens again at all.
Though it was never a large space, the bunk room feels cavernous with just her. No snoring Kate or Liana asking her questions.
Out of habit, Ophelia drops back onto her lower bunk. Her hands are sweaty, her heart still racing.
Figure, what, a few minutes to gel-cast Suresh’s hand, make sure it’s holding. But then they have to work out how to get the glove over his hand. And his suit hasn’t been charged. Ours haven’t been charging long enough.
But even when that’s out of the way, they need to get Suresh to the lander and strapped in. Then, only then, would they come back for her.
So at least an hour. Maybe more like two.
And every second that ticks by is one less second that she has control of herself. Her father, he will be back. She can feel it. As if he’s standing just at the corner of her vision, where she can’t see him but senses that he’s there.
He used to do that sometimes. Sneak up on Ophelia and her mother. On a good day, it was to surprise them with an earlier arrival, to present them with unexpected gifts from the latest shipment of supplies, orders he placed in secret.
On a bad day, Ophelia and her mother were being too loud, using too many of the rations, enjoying themselves too much without him. And it was his job to make sure they stayed in line; as union president and a crew leader, he had a reputation to maintain.
Some of that, she now knows, was the ERS-fueled paranoia that people were plotting against him. Some of it was not.
Ophelia has always blamed herself for not speaking up, for not getting help for her mom and for herself. In that tiny security office, the station officers hammered at her. Did she know something was wrong? Why didn’t she say anything? Was she aware of how many people had died?
It dawns on her now, though, that even if she could have gotten over her fear of her father’s retribution, who would she have gone to? Who would have believed her or thought it was anything more than overly stern parenting?
A kid who says that their father is acting strangely, lashing out, and talking about a mysterious cabal of “them,” when the parent is a respected member of the community and seemingly still holding it together at work and outside the home—who is going to act on that?
Nobody. So even if, at eleven years old, she’d had the foresight to recognize that something was wrong and gathered the courage to speak up … it probably wouldn’t have done any good.
It wouldn’t have done any good.
It wasn’t her fault.
The realization—and the fact that it took this situation for her to finally reach it—makes her want to laugh.
Ophelia holds her hand over her mouth to keep it in.
There’s no small amount of irony here. The thing her father feared, the paranoid delusion of the people around him being possessed, is actually what’s happening here. And that is what it took for her to truly accept that she wasn’t at fault.
Outside, she hears the muffled sounds of voices and movement. The whine of the antigrav sled being adjusted. They must have figured out the suit issue.
There are extras, it occurs to her. Birch’s. The temporaries.
Kate and Ethan are getting ready to take Suresh to the lander.
And leave you behind, Lark, her father whispers. But you don’t have to be alone.
That pressure-like sensation in Ophelia’s head, the anticipation she had told Ethan about, feels like a wave hanging over her, just waiting for peak height before crashing down and drowning her.
When Ophelia visited the locked facilities, the patients who’d experienced complete psychotic breaks, lost from this world to one that ERS created for them, were more sad than frightening. They could be treated, at least.
But the ones who just vanished within themselves, who broke and couldn’t connect with any world anymore, the so-called coma ward … visiting that floor always took more from her. The vacant gazes. The impatience of even the most well-meaning aides. Bodies that needed to be turned and rotated. Chins that needed to be dried of silvery strings of saliva. Food that needed to be spooned in until they forgot or no longer cared to swallow.
This isn’t the same. But it feels close enough that the horror is more than reminiscent. There but for the grace of God, except maybe God isn’t feeling very graceful at the moment.
Ophelia turns her wrist over, examining the veins just beneath the surface. Blue, faintly raised. Pumping blood and foreign contaminants into every millimeter of her body, past even the blood–brain barrier. Her own workings turned against her.
She wonders if that’s what made Birch dig into his own skin. The desire to be free of it on his own terms.
Ophelia shakes her head, which is feeling thicker by the moment. They’re coming back. Ethan said he would come back.
But you know that he’s not. You know that you’re not worth it. You’ve never been worth the trouble. You know that, Little Bird. You talked him out of walking away from Liana, someone he cared about. Why the hell would he bother with you?
Her father appears once more, his booted feet at the edge of her vision. Like they did when he was searching for her to “cure” her. Peering through a crack on the side of the HRU, she watched him pace up and down the corridor, white sparks dancing in her vision because she was too scared to breathe.
Now Ophelia scrambles back on the bed to stand up, half hunched, the mattress knocked askew beneath her feet. She keeps her eyes down, away from him. Not real, he’s not real.
“Little Bird,” he croons. “I’m the only one who cares, Lark. Come to me. I can save you.”
This version of her father, the one who sounds gentle, kind, and sad for her—as opposed to the wild-eyed, bloodied option—is harder to resist. It’s a direct arrow to the part of her she’s worked hard to deny—she loved her father, even though he killed people. Even though he hurt and scared Ophelia and her mom. Ophelia still wanted to love him. And she didn’t know how to untangle those feelings, so she just pretended they didn’t exist.
And that’s been fine. Mostly.
Until now.
He holds out his hand. So familiar to Ophelia—blunt, squared nails, calluses on the palm. The same hands that held a tablet to read to her, the scarred knuckles that she used to poke at, asking where each mark came from. The same hands that lifted her off her feet, dangling her by the shoulder joints, demanding to know if she’d taken the candy that Mx. Solomon offered at school because we don’t fucking take charity.
Tears burn her eyes, and her nose starts to run. Wouldn’t it be better to go with him, just accept what’s coming to her?
“I can’t get out,” Ophelia says, her voice choked.
“Sure you can,” her father says easily. “Go to the door. Call for them. I’ll help you. I’ll help your friends, too,” he adds. “None of you have to be alone anymore.”
A fleeting sensation of that white warmth, the comforting glow Ophelia felt at the towers, returns briefly, and longing hits her like a punch to the lungs.
“I’m so tired,” she whispers to him. Tired of hating him, tired of loving him, of trying not to do either in her drive not to be him. Or be a Bray. It feels like no soft place to land, and there’s only so long she can glide.
“I know, sweetie. Come on,” he says. It’s almost a coo, but she can hear the impatience growing beneath it. You only get one chance with him in a good mood; if you delay too long or show any reluctance, the good mood and the offer evaporate like a drop of water on a heated griddle. Gone in a puff of violent smoke.
Ducking her head lower, she steps forward on the mattress and starts to get down.
The mattress shifts beneath her feet, realigning itself in the frame. As Ophelia reaches for his hand, though, an odd chatter of metal interrupts, breaking through the buzz in her ears that she hadn’t noticed until right now.
Clink, clink, clack.
Close by. Not outside. She frowns.
Outside in the hab, maybe in the corridor, voices are raised, Ethan and Kate shouting at each other. But Ophelia can’t tell what they’re arguing about.
“Lark,” her father snaps.
Ophelia snatches her hand back, and her shoulders hunch, her body acting instinctively to make itself a smaller target. She turns, trying to track the sound she heard. It’s wrong, somehow, and she’s not sure why …
Then she spots it.
On the floor, almost hidden under her bunk, still rocking back and forth on its rounded handle, a shiny tool. No, not just a tool. An instrument.
One of the missing scalpels from the Kellerson pack just fell out of Ophelia’s bed frame.