SEVENTY-FOUR

 

 

SOMETHING WAS WRONG. Pa wasn’t talking anymore. Just staring. Was Émile still talking? Pascale had a bad feeling. She stopped shifting the camouflage netting with Gabriel-Antoine on top of the Causapscal-des-Vents. The roof was treacherous now with uneven and slippery knotted cable fragments and she stumbled twice reaching Pa.

“Pa?” she said, touching his shoulder.

He turned his face her way. The dim light of the HUD reflected in tear lines. He was speaking but she couldn’t hear anything. She made the hand sign for channel switch. Pa came onto their common channel. His breathing was uneven.

“What is it, Pa?”

George-Étienne took her shoulders and hugged her tight.

“I’m sorry, Pascal. I’m so sorry.”

“What?” Pascale said desperately. “What is it?”

The habitat beneath them shifted, up, then down, as it rode over the turbulence of a pressure cell.

“Marthe is gone,” he said in a cracking voice. “Venus took her.”

The words stabbed deep in her chest, injecting a profound, spreading ache. Someone gasped on their family channel. Pascale wanted to move, to look to see the truth in Pa’s face, but he held her too tight.

“What?”

“A storm took her.”

The light around them became more polarized, colors shifting out of perception. The sound of the wind vibrating the cables around them hollowed, becoming watery and distant, not matching the sight of them before her eyes.

“When?” she said. He still wouldn’t let her go. Pa was shaking. Pascale’s eyes stung.

“I don’t know.” His voice shook like his body.

An hour? Less? More? Her body might still be falling. Terminal velocity got slower and slower near the surface. But that didn’t matter. If she was deep enough for terminal velocity to slow, she’d be cooked through already. It was a stupid thing to think about now.

Marthe had helped find the real Pascale. Marthe had been going to rescue her. And now she was gone, tumbling through the clouds, the haze, and the terrible open space over jagged basalt. Marthe was carbonizing now, blackening and boiling in a suit flaking away with heat, incinerating. Marthe would never touch the ground. Only some of the metal weave of her suit and the faceplate and her bones would arrive, blackened beyond recognition, added to the blasted ugliness of Venus’s surface.

Pascale’s eyes were wet. She stood straight. Pa let her go. Behind his faceplate, his beard was wet and steaming where its wiry volume pressed against the faceplate. Marie-Pier was behind him.

“I’m sorry, Pa.”

He nodded and sat abruptly. Marie-Pier sat beside him and put her arm around his shoulders as a speckling of sulfuric acid rain began falling around them.

“How do I tell Jean-Eudes and Alexis?” Pa whispered hoarsely.

“I’ll help you,” Marie-Pier said.

Marie-Pier’s children had no father. Had she told them their father was gone? The way Pa had told her and Jean-Eudes that Chloé and Mathurin were gone? Pascale turned. She couldn’t look anymore. She stumbled on the netting and Gabriel-Antoine caught her.

She must look like a mess. It didn’t matter. They couldn’t really be together, could they? Gabriel-Antoine wanted a boy. Pascale was a girl, just in disguise. Her eyes were wet, but the world prickled, pregnant with a rain much harder than what fell around them now. Her thoughts flitted everywhere. To the habitat they would disassemble. To the nervous kisses she’d given Gabriel-Antoine. To seeing the sun above the clouds, hostile and overbright. To seeing the stars within Venus. Thinking of everything but Marthe.

Gabriel-Antoine signed to change channels. She did. He took her hands.

“I’m so sorry, Pascal. I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to say.”

The wind swayed them.

“She told me to be gentle with you,” he said.

The stabbing in Pascale’s chest deepened and her eyes burned. “She did?”

“She threatened me if I ever hurt you.”

A lonely sob slipped out of her like a hiccup. Pascale tried to pull one hand away.

“She made me promise to take care of your heart.”

“Why?” Pascale said. The question sounded like a whine in her ears. Tears spilled fast.

“She loved you.”

Another sob emerged. She yanked her hands free. “I don’t want this now! This isn’t what I want to hear.”

She stumbled around him, stepping high over the debris and the cables and wires. Pumps emptied the carbon dioxide from the habitat, giving it buoyancy again to take the strain off the support cables and the trawlers above. How long? She and Gabriel-Antoine had rough ideas of how to cut apart the Causapscal-des-Vents, Marthe’s home, but they would need to crawl around its inside and measure and weigh and take everything out. It was stupid. It was all stupid and useless.

Pascale took a wrench out of her tool belt, to check the torque on the nuts holding in the cleats along the roof of the Causapscal-des-Vents, but the wrench was too small. The metal of the cleats and the plates around them were already beginning to corrode. The acid down here was harsher, more concentrated and hotter than anything the Causapscal-des-Vents ever saw under the bright sun. Pascale knelt, not sure what to do with the corrosion.

Gabriel-Antoine knelt beside her. His hand was on her shoulder. Her shoulder. Marthe had helped find her as if Pascale had been trapped like a fairy-tale princess under a spell. And now Marthe the questing knight was gone. Burnt up. Pascale was crying now, so much she couldn’t see the corrosion, couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Gabriel-Antoine’s arms were around her, pulling her to sit on his lap.

“Come on, cher,” he said.

She clung to his arms through glove and suit as she shook and sniffled and cried. Gabriel rocked her.

“She brought you and me together,” he said quietly. “She brought all of us together. She invented the House of Styx. She made us a family so we could live your dream of the stars. What she gave us will change Venus.”

Spongy orange clouds were slowly darkening to red around them as the wind carried them away from the sun.

“She won’t get any of what she made.”

“She would want us to enjoy it though,” he said. “She would want us to reach the stars on the other side.”

Pascale slumped against Gabriel-Antoine’s chest. When Pascale was little, Marthe and she had talked favorite colors. Pascale had been choosing between green and blue. Marthe had described a particular purple that existed nowhere except in the vaporous haze at forty-sixth rang, a product of the low angle of sunset light scattered through two atmospheres of sulfuric acid and carbon dioxide. Marthe’s favorite had struck Pascale as a kind of proof of magic all around them, on the edges, hidden in common things. Pascale had found the color, after looking for it. She couldn’t remember it anymore, and in the reddening vapors around them, it was like the memory of that happy wonder had dissolved.

“I don’t feel like enjoying anything right now.”

“Me neither, cher.”