Still kicking herself for antagonizing Severin, Ophelia shuffles into the central hub. Exhaustion burns in her muscles, adding sway to her posture. After standing still in the airlock, her body has stiffened up. Fever-like chills spill across her skin in waves.
The med-scanner is in a crate somewhere, but she doesn’t need an official diagnosis. A cold sleep hangover, the teams call it. Too much exertion, too soon after cold sleep. With protein, iron tabs, and rest, she’ll be fine.
Inside the central hub, most of the crates they hauled in earlier have been shifted to one side, organized, and stacked. It’s brighter in here, too. The lights overhead beam down solid and steady.
Someone has set up a table and six chairs in the center of the space. It should make the hub feel livelier, fuller. Instead, the lone table amplifies the emptiness around it. It’s easy to imagine dozens more tables and chairs in this space, the warm sound of conversation and laughter and humanity filling the air. The contrast to reality, then, is a bit bleak.
Suresh and Birch are on the side closest to her, facing each other with some kind of fabric game board between them. Shiny pieces, like flattened marbles in blue and yellow, lie in sporadic places across the board, glinting in the light. Though she’s fairly sure that some of the tokens are replacement parts—unless a 316 hex bolt and nut combination is somehow a part of this game. Suresh is studying the board with the intensity of someone disarming an explosive for the first time in the middle of an earthquake, while Birch fidgets with a scrap of paper, folding it and refolding it.
Liana is on the other side, head tilted back, her feet propped on another chair and her eyes closed.
Their helmets lie cast aside on the table, their suits unfastened and sagging around their waists.
“Doc.” Suresh greets her, though his gaze remains fixed on the game board. “Sit down before you fall down.”
Without a word, Liana opens her eyes, straightens up, and then waves Ophelia over to the chair next to her, across the table from Suresh and Birch.
Ophelia makes her way over and drops into the chair. She sets the iVR case by her feet, legs trembling, light-headedness swirling. Anemia. Something about the cold sleep process starves the red blood cells. Completely recoverable but not pleasant, especially not at first, after the iron booster from the tank wears off.
Her breathing sounds too loud, too rapid in the silence of her helmet.
“We’re good,” Liana says, enunciating carefully so Ophelia can hear her through the external mic. She taps at the space in front of her face where her helmet would be. “You can take that off now. It’ll be easier.”
Ophelia reaches for the fasteners to unseal her helmet, and then hesitates. She’s not sure why. They’re all sitting with their suits sagging around their waists and their helmets off. It’s not like there’s a gotcha in the waiting this time.
Confusion crinkles Liana’s brow, then shame flashes across her face before she smooths out her expression. She shrugs. “Or not. It’s up to you.”
Guilt tugs at Ophelia. The tank stunt wasn’t Liana’s idea, and it was just hazing, a phase they’re hopefully past. Plus, if she’s going to do better than she has with Severin, now is the time to start.
She pulls her helmet off, the cool air touching her skin and slipping into her sweat-dampened hair. It smells stale in here, vaguely metallic, and kind of bitter, like old sweat, scorched metal, and resentment.
Ophelia sneezes four times in a row, her nose burning.
“Sorry, Dr. Bray, the maid is off this week,” Birch says with a sneer.
“Ignore him. The filters are still working to catch up. Lots of dust.” Liana wrinkles her nose.
If it’s like other sealed environments, not much of it, if any, is dust in the sense of planetary dirt, pollen, bacteria, and the like. It’s more likely a combination of lint, hair, and, of course, the dead skin cells of the previous team, once the air settled after their departure.
That information is generally not well received by people who are used to fresh air and living in the open. To Ophelia, though, it smells like home.
The unexpected and unwelcome pang of nostalgia makes her eyes water.
But she’s so tired, she can’t work up the energy to berate herself for the reaction. Now that she’s sitting, it feels like she might not ever have the strength to get up again.
“No, no, motherfucker,” Suresh says in sudden revelation, shaking his finger at Birch. “What you did, that was not a legal move. Don’t try that bullshit with me again.”
“What?” Birch says, a protest of innocence. He lifts his hands, a tiny paper bird now perched on his finger.
“We’re not playing by your weird-ass level seven rules or whatever,” Suresh says with a scowl. He shoves a piece back toward Birch. “Go again.”
Liana rummages in an open crate stashed under the table. “Here. This will help.” She tears the plastic top off a protein booster and hands it to Ophelia.
Ophelia shimmies out of the top half of her suit as best as she can, to free her hands—the effort making her limbs feel even heavier—and then takes the booster.
When she squeezes the contents into her mouth, the first taste of faux peanut butter and banana activates her gag reflex—too sweet, and way too grainy, like someone ground up plastic bananas and mixed them with glue that had once shared shelf space with a moldy bag of peanuts.
But she puts her hand over her mouth and forces herself to swallow.
Suresh tsks at her. “Woman up, Doc. The soy meatloaf one is way worse.”
Liana pivots in her seat to face Ophelia, tucking her legs up under her in a calisthenic move that would be impossible for most in an envirosuit. “Can I ask you a question?”
Steeling for more questions about her family or her lost patient, Ophelia takes an extra second to force down another gritty swallow and then nods.
“How does the iVR system work?” Liana asks.
Ophelia blinks, surprised.
Liana tips her head toward the shiny case on the floor. “I’ve heard it’s…” She pauses. “Creepy. Invasive.”
Ahh, okay. “Like reading your mind?” Ophelia offers. It’s not the first time she’s heard this.
Suresh and Birch are ostensibly focusing on the game, but they’re a little too quiet now, presumably listening in. Ophelia wonders how much of this fear is behind their resistance to her presence. No one likes to think that their mind, the last bastion of privacy, is going to be invaded, even if it is for their own good.
“It doesn’t do that. It can’t,” Ophelia says firmly. “It’s basically the same system you’d be prescribed back on Earth at one of our clinics, just upgraded for portability and faster results. All it does is draw on memories that you choose, and your QuickQ data, to re-create a sleeping environment. That’s it. Good sleep is the basis for ERS recovery, and we’re hoping to show that by instituting healthy sleep hygiene at the start of the mission, it can work as a preventative measure as well.”
“Okay.” Liana draws out the word, sounding less than convinced.
“It helps your circadian rhythms normalize, no matter what the light or”—Ophelia gestures toward the airlock doors and the perpetually gray twilight outside—“lack of light might be trying to tell your body.”
Whether it’s the temporary lift from the protein booster or Liana’s interest in the iVR system, Ophelia is feeling more energetic. She leans over and grabs the case.
“Here, I’ll set up a temp profile for you so you can check it out.” Ophelia pulls the tablet from the case. The narrow headsets inside, six of them, gleam in the overhead light. “Think of it like a waiting room for sleep. You’re going to visit and relax, and then you drift off to sleep, just like you normally would. Or even more easily than you normally would.”
Studies have shown that sleeping in a familiar setting increases sleep quality, which reduces stress, which in the end improves crew communication and harmony. And all of that, combined with regular counseling sessions and medications, if needed, hacks away at their odds of ERS. Not that she’s going to get into that now.
Ophelia walks Liana through a quick version of the standard recall questions for the purposes of establishing baseline settings. Ophelia’s own setting is her cramped office at work on the Montrose campus—her safe space. Or it used to be, anyway.
Then, just as Ophelia would back at home, she demonstrates the flexibility of the band, which fits lightly on the temples, rising above the bridge of the nose. It’s not meant to block vision so much as provide an easy connection to the QuickQ implant and remind the wearer that they’re meant to focus on the images provided by the system, not their actual surroundings.
“Close your eyes,” Ophelia encourages.
Liana does so with far less hesitation than Ophelia probably would in her shoes, and the system activates with a faint, cheerful chirp. Then Ophelia waits.
After a moment, Liana sits up sharply, surprise straightening her spine. “Oh.”
Ophelia grins.
“It’s the lanai at my tutu’s house,” she says, a little too loudly. The headset is using the same pathways that her QuickQ implant relies on for communication, so whatever she’s seeing and hearing is overriding her current surroundings. Her hand reaches out, touching something that isn’t there. “My cousins and I used to sleep over all the time. I can hear the ocean.” Wonder transforms her face, smoothing out the baby lines of worry in her forehead. “The stars are coming out. I almost expect her to come out and tell us to settle down.” She glances over her shoulder abruptly.
“It can’t re-create people yet,” Ophelia cautions her, raising her voice to match Liana’s. Otherwise, Ophelia knows from experience, her voice will sound too much like a whisper of breeze or a voice murmuring in the distance. “It’s too much processing power, and our brains are still too good at detecting AI impersonations when it comes to people we know.”
“That would be weird anyway,” Liana concedes. “She died when I was eighteen.”
Slowly the tension drains out of Liana’s frame, her shoulders relax, her hands unclench.
Elation surges through Ophelia. No matter how often she sees this, the first step in making someone whole, making someone better, is always such a high. This is what she’s here to do. Why she’s alive. It’s not enough to make up for everything, no resolution for the greater karmic debt tagged on her account—nothing will be—but it’s progress.
“Do you want to try it?” Ophelia asks Suresh, who is eyeing them from across the table.
Before he can answer, though, Birch jumps in. “Better real nightmares than fake bullshit,” he mutters. “Your move,” he says to Suresh, waving his hand over the game board.
Ophelia turns her attention back to Liana.
But Liana tips her head to one side, blinking several times and waving her hand in front of her face, before focusing on Ophelia. “What happened? It went dark.” She reaches up to pull the headset free.
Damn. “Wait. Let me grab the chargers.” The headsets were supposed to have been in dormant mode, but it’s possible that months in storage have drained them. Or maybe they’re still a bit buggy.
She glances around for the bright green bag among the neatly stacked and piled crates and cases. “Where is—”
“Your stuff is in your office, Doctor,” Birch says, making no attempt to hide his snideness, as Suresh grins at her.
And suddenly, without even asking, Ophelia knows exactly which module they’ve assigned as hers. The one with the fucking empty suit on the floor.
Suresh holds his hands up in surrender. “It’s the farthest one out on that side, for privacy. Commander’s orders.”
Uh-huh.
“I’ll be right back,” she says to Liana. She gets up, careful not to entangle the arms of her suit in her chair.
“Hey, Bray,” Suresh calls before she’s gotten more than a few steps away from the table.
Ophelia looks back at him.
He holds his helmet up. “Remember, for when you come back. This is just my helmet. Not my head.”
Birch snickers.
So even without Severin telling on her, they still knew. That she’d fallen for the suit prank, that once again she’d proven herself an outsider, unworthy.
“Suresh,” Liana says sharply, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment on his behalf, or possibly Ophelia’s.
Ophelia’s temper flicks to life. Who left? That’s what she wants to ask Suresh. With such anxious attachment issues, her immediate inclination would be Mom. But the desperate need for approval and use of humor even for negative reinforcement just screams “distant father.”
The words are right there, on the tip of her tongue, and she can just imagine the stung expression on Suresh’s face if she released them. How good defending herself would feel; how it would feel even better, making him shut the hell up.
But …
The vivid memory of sitting outside the headmistress’s office settles over her. The uncomfortable wooden chair digging into her spine, the hastily sealed cuts on her fingers throbbing. It was her first year at Marchand-Brighton Academy. They were very intent on putting the “old school” back in “school.”
“She has no control over her temper. She just exploded on that poor girl.” The voice of Mx. Royce, the headmistress, drifts out through the closed door, worry and fear two taut threads.
The poor girl in question, who was most definitely not literally or figuratively poor, had been slashing the sleeve of Ophelia’s uniform with tiny manicure scissors when Ophelia sat in front of her in class. Occasionally drawing blood in the process.
And Ophelia kept getting written up for dress code violation and being charged for new shirts.
She can still hear the snip snip of the scissors through the expensive fabric. The sting of the metal against her skin. The frustration of keeping her mouth shut, trying to be what her mother and grandmother wanted her to be. And knowing no one would believe her even if she told them what Anberlyn was doing.
She didn’t remember turning and grabbing the scissors from Anberlyn, though the injuries to her hands spoke for themselves.
She definitely did not remember stabbing the sharp end of the nail scissors into Anberyln’s shoulder—right, approximately, where she’d insisted on making her mark on Ophelia’s clothing.
It was just … one minute Ophelia was gritting her teeth, working to ignore Anberlyn and memorize key dates related to the first colony uprising on Europa. Trying not to long for a home that no longer wanted her.
And the next, blackness. Literal dark dots flooding her vision. When it receded, Ophelia was standing over Anberlyn, hands bloody, while Anberlyn screamed on the floor.
In the confusion that followed, the scissors became Ophelia’s—never mind the fact that she was not the one with the overgroomed and manicured nails—and the attack unprovoked.
“I told you, Regency.” Ophelia’s grandmother made no attempt to lower her voice to her mother, seated in the chair next to hers, delight and fury as prominent in her tone as the fear was in the headmistress’s.
Anberlyn was fine, left with a pinpoint of a scar, which she had reshaped to look like a star for her first body-mod (of course) and a story. In the end, she did Ophelia a favor, ensuring that others would leave her alone. And the donation Ophelia’s grandmother made went a long way toward soothing Marchand-Brighton’s “concerns.” Ophelia suspected her grandmother had selected that school for that very reason.
But Ophelia will never forget the look on her mother’s face when she exited that office, the way she stared at Ophelia like she was a stranger and, more terrifyingly, too familiar at the same time …
“I’ll keep that in mind, Suresh,” Ophelia says calmly.
The look of disappointment on his face is almost as gratifying as letting loose on him would have been. Okay, not really, but it’s not nothing, either.
Ophelia makes her way back to the module in question. The suit that caused so much trouble is now jumbled up outside the door, along with a scattering of detritus now swept up in a pile—to be disposed of, most likely.
Her belongings, including her bag of personal items, are neatly stacked inside. She immediately locates the bright green bag and snags it, resisting the urge to check to see whether her personals have been opened or searched. She has nothing to hide in there, and if that helps them trust her, fine. Curiosity is natural in this situation. So is, perhaps, deliberately provoking a response, to an extent. It reasserts a feeling of control.
On her way back into the corridor, motion near the floor catches her eye. Ophelia steps back automatically. Rat.
Rats were the second interstellar travelers, right alongside humans. Where humans go, rats follow. Sometimes, even now, they outnumber the official residents on farthest-flung space stations and outposts. But there haven’t been people here in years.
This time, though, it’s a dog. A digi-foto of one anyway, resting on top of the pile of discarded belongings that have been swept/gathered up outside the door.
In the foto, a dog with golden hair rushes across a wide expanse of grass toward a handsome man with a beard. The man is crouching to greet him, only to be knocked over with canine enthusiasm and his own laughter. Again and again, each time resetting to this perfect moment in a life. Turning on the lights inside the hab must have given the solar receptors enough juice to start up once more.
The thin paper is cracked and torn in the corner, revealing the wafer-thin circuits in the page.
Could this be Delacroix? He of the abandoned suit? Did he leave behind this, too? Is he … dead?
There’s no mention of that in the mission briefing.
Beneath the digi-foto in the pile, she catches the glint of metal. Crouching down, she sets the chargers aside temporarily and picks through pieces of shattered polymer, discarded meal-pak containers, dust bunnies, and wispy tangles of unidentifiable fluff that resembles the shredded insides of a pillow.
She finds the source of the gleam, pulls it out, and holds it up to the light. The “it” in question is a delicate silver band in an intricate filigree design. The edges are soft with wear, the metal scratched and worn. It’s small, though, designed for someone with strikingly petite hands. Ophelia doubts it would even fit over her first knuckle.
It looks like a wedding ring.
Lost or left behind?
She frowns. R&E teams are often rewarded for austerity measures, at Montrose at least. The fewer items they take and/or come back with, the less fuel is consumed, and those savings can add up in a rebate for the team.
But this?
A photo and a ring are such small things, personal things. Things that wouldn’t take up much space or add much weight. Things that wouldn’t intentionally be left behind.
More likely they’ve just been forgotten. Right?
That uneasy feeling, the same one that came over her when they first closed themselves in against the storm, returns. Tiny hairs raise themselves along her skin like flags of alarm. In spite of herself, she glances over her shoulder.
Nothing but shadows between the gaps of the overhead lights.
Still …
She doesn’t want to be back here by herself. Even the echoing canyon of the central hub feels more welcoming than this space.
After a moment of indecision, she tucks the ring inside the outer pocket of her suit. Perhaps she can figure out who it belongs to and return it to them, once this assignment is finished.
When she stands, the air displaced by her movement washes over the pile of debris, and several of the dust-menagerie make a run for it, revealing something she’d missed before.
It’s small and white, smooth, with peaks and valleys and a curly upper edge. Familiar. She crouches down again and reaches for it, without thinking.
Then it clicks.
That familiar something is a fat white molar. A human tooth, right there on the ground.