I left him. Oh my God, I left him. Maybe Nysus, too.
Vomit scorches up my throat and out of my mouth onto the floor before I can stop it.
Reed jerks his chair back in disgust, and Max stands. “Excuse me? We need some help over here.” He sounds calm, unsurprised.
Two attendants, one male and one female, rush over with such alacrity it feels as though they must have been hovering nearby, expecting to be called or to eavesdrop. Or both. The man addresses the floor with a bottled solution; the woman wipes a towel roughly over my face and bare feet, pulling the towel away from my hands when I try to take it to do it myself. What kind of harm could I do to myself or anyone else with that?
“It’s a repeating message on an old emergency channel from the Aurora herself,” Max says. “Very similar to the one on the automated beacon you described hearing in the first place.”
The distress beacon that someone on the Aurora had had enough wherewithal to deliberately set off, despite the insanity around them. Despite taking the ship off course and beaching it without so much as a call for help. Which in the sea of illogical and outright insane things surrounding the Aurora still stands out as odd.
“We’ve attempted communication, of course. No response,” Max says.
“There might not be,” I say after a moment, still dizzy with the revelation. “Lourdes must not have had time to finish the upgrade. How … how long ago was this message received?”
“Ten days ago,” Max says. “It’s likely been cycling for longer than that, but no one thought to check the old emergency channel at first.”
Until someone, somewhere, believed at least that part of my story.
Ten days. “You think he’s alive,” I say. I left them. Oh God, I left them. The words just keep beating into my brain, over and over again.
But if they were alive, why would I have left them? How could I have left them? And if I left them alive, why am I seeing Kane, like Lourdes and Voller? Granted, my visions of him shift and change, unlike Lourdes and Voller who show me the same thing each time. I’ve never seen Ny at all. But that had made sense to me, in that he would be as reluctant to show himself in death as he had been in life.
“It’s possible,” Max hedges.
“Or,” Reed interjects, “Mr. Behrens recorded the message before you left, before you decided to eliminate any loose ends.”
The urge to launch myself at him, to knock him out of his chair and pound my fist against his face, is overwhelming. I clench my hands, feeling the imaginary sting of split skin on my knuckles. Living in the Verux group home for so many years had been good for a few things, primarily absorbing—sometimes painfully—the life principle of do no harm but take no shit.
This time, though, a bubble of fear stops me. Not fear of Reed. Or even of the attendants and their syringes. No, it’s the idea that Max could change his mind. I don’t want to return to the Aurora. Just the idea—let alone the eventual reality of it—makes me feel like I’m falling endlessly through space, whipping around in nauseating circles, losing track of any handhold or chance to stop my descent.
But the thought of Max retracting his request, of being left behind while strangers search for survivors, for my crew.
“I’ll go,” I say, the syllables sounding nonsensical, just noise escaping my throat.
“Good.” Max sounds satisfied, but oddly more than that, almost proud of me, in a paternal sort of way. “You’re doing the right thing.”
That’s the second time someone has said that to me in recent memory. Maybe this time it’ll turn out to be true.
“And you won’t be alone. Reed and I will be there to supervise and maintain safe conditions to the best of our ability,” Max adds.
“We’ll be watching,” Reed says, clearly meant more as warning than reassurance.
Their words barely register with me.
I shake my head. “But I would never have left Kane. Or Nysus or any of them. Not by choice.”
Max reaches over and pats my shoulder. “I think it’s impossible for any of us to know what we would or would not do after experiencing what you’ve been through. On the Aurora.” He lowers his voice. “And on Ferris. Surviving is nothing to be ashamed of, Claire.” He gives me a smile touched with gentle pity.
Except it clearly is. Oh God, it is. The captain goes down with her ship. Leave no one behind. By surviving, I’ve violated every implicit code of leadership. Of family. And I don’t even fucking remember it.
Maybe that’s why you don’t remember it. You don’t want to.
“I’ll be in touch with more details soon,” Max says with one last pat on my shoulder before he stands. His worn shoes squeak with the movement.
Reed follows his lead, packing away the tiny speaker and swiping through the air above the table to turn off his keyboard.
They start to leave.
“Max,” I call after him.
He turns back, eyebrows raised in question.
“If I’m going to do this, I need…” I lick my dry lips, all too aware of the remaining taste of acidic vomit in my mouth. “I need you to tell them to pull back on the drugs.” I tilt my head toward the attendants, who are standing nearby. The cushion of medication, blunting my emotions, hazing my thoughts, it’s been the only thing getting me through each day. But the parade of pills—and occasional injection—have made me a slower, duller, more manageable version of me, even as they have eased the pain of living.
“I need to be … myself again.” The idea offers distant horror, like a smoking wreck on the horizon. But if this gambit is to have the slightest chance at success, I can’t take the risk of being even a little bit removed from reality. Look what happened the last time, when I was in possession of all my faculties. Or, the majority of them, anyway.
Max eyes me for a long moment. “I understand,” he says finally. “I do. But I think you can understand why we are grateful for your help and yet … not inclined to take that risk.”
It’s a slap, but one I feel only minimally. Thanks to the drugs he is refusing to lift.
“You need to maintain your equilibrium,” Max says. “The treatment plan is helping you do that. This will be a difficult situation as it is. We don’t need to make it more … challenging for you.”
Reed shoots me a triumphant look over his shoulder, and then they leave.
The attendants are on me immediately, shuffling me to my room to change out of my sweat-soaked and vomit-spattered pajamas.
Their hands are not unkind but swift, impersonal. I’m so used to it now, I barely notice.
Perhaps Max is right. Maybe the pills are helping, keeping me level. Maybe if I didn’t have them, I wouldn’t be able to stop screaming.
Or maybe it’s simply easier for Max—and everyone—if I’m more manageable. Maybe it’s safer. For them.
I don’t know.
Either way, when the male attendant presses the small cup in my hand, full to rattling—like one of those extinct snakes on Earth—of medications, I take it. After what I said to Max, he’s watching for resistance. But I know better than to show it. I tip the cup against my lip, letting the pills land against my tongue, the bitterness immediately triggering a wash of saliva and the desire to choke them down to end the sensation.
But in a moment that I fear that I’ll second-guess later, I manipulate the pills under my tongue and along the side of my gums, and fake a pained dry-swallow.
“You need water?” the attendant asks.
I shake my head. And then I open my mouth, per routine, to show that I’ve been obedient and done as required.
Satisfied that I’m not demonstrating any form of resistance, he—also per routine—barely glances at me.
The female attendant shuffles me toward the bed, and when they both have their attention on pulling back the sheet and prepping the night restraints, I spit the dissolving pills into my palm, clenching my fist to keep them hidden.
My heart is pounding as they help me into bed and wrap the fabric around my wrists. Not from the fear of getting caught, I realize, but from what will happen, during a long night of nothing but me and my unmedicated mind. What will I see? What will I remember?
I’m not sure which is worse.
The pills are still stuck against my skin inside my fist and for a moment, I’m tempted to confess. Tempted to bend my head toward my hand as close as I can to try to get them to my mouth and for a deepening of the blissful oblivion they offer.
Instead, I wait until the attendants leave and then I tuck my hand beneath the sheet and shake the pills loose onto the bed. They fall, rolling across the mattress to settle near my leg or bounce the other way, captured between the layers of bottom sheet and top sheet. This ploy will not last more than a day, once they change the bedding. I hope that will be enough time for Max to get me out of here. But mainly, I hope it’s not too much time—I don’t know how long I can hold it together without those pills. Too many hours of unmedicated madness and no one’s going to let me go anywhere.
It turns out, the ward is not an easy place to sleep when you’re not drugged into oblivion, even if everyone else is.
Vera whimpers across the hall. Someone, somewhere, is shouting. Then a rush of footsteps head in that direction. No one bothers to check on me as they pass. There are rounds through the night, though, probably. I would think so, though I have no memory of anything like that. Once again, my mind is failing me. But at least this time, I understand the cause of it.
I shiver at the idea of such vulnerability, bound to the bed and completely out of it, while someone stares down at me.
Sweat coats my skin as withdrawal begins. I squeeze my eyes shut. It would be better if I could sleep through most of this.
But my eyelids refuse to stay closed, even though there’s nothing to look at. The room isn’t dark with dim light from the hall seeping in through the partially open door.
My gaze bounces around my small room, from the plastic visitor’s chair across from the bed, the three-drawer bureau on the wall at the foot of the bed, to the Tower-owned-and-installed art panel above the bureau. The normally serene lake scene, with the weeping willow branches swaying gently in the breeze, looks ominous, threatening.
A low moan comes from nearby, and I jerk my attention away from the lake to the visitor’s chair.
The man, dressed in gray pajamas like mine, is seated and bleeding from his wrists, the wounds horrible gashes. His fingers loosen and drop a twisted and sharpened bit of metal, perhaps a bracket from the bureau drawers. It hits the tile floor with a soft clink.
My breath catches, and then I realize that I’ve been waiting. For him. For them.
He looks at me, through me, and then vanishes.
A moment later, a woman walks by outside my door, calling for someone. “Tallie? Are you here?”
I can’t see her, but when no one rushes to respond to a resident up and out of bed in the middle of the night, I am left with the conclusion that she, also, is not really there. A former resident, like the suicide in my chair?
When I lived on-planet last, in the Verux group home, on overcrowded and under-resourced Earth, it was difficult. So many people, and with them, the others who no one else could see. But I learned to ignore it … and to run when I couldn’t.
But here, at the Tower of Peace and Harmony—what bullshit wishful thinking—there is nowhere to run.
I pull hard against the restraints, but they have no give. Not that I have anywhere to go, to get away, even if they did.
An old man shuffles into my room, passing through the wall on my left. His hospital gown is white, bearing a large Verux logo on the left side of his chest. Not like any of the clothing I’ve seen distributed here.
He pauses, seeming to see me, and a chill ricochets through my body.
“Marja?” he asks, then continues without waiting for an answer. “I’m sorry. I didn’t have a choice. You know that. Don’t you? I didn’t know the engines were overheating.”
I can’t respond. I don’t know what to say.
But it doesn’t seem to matter. He turns away from me, heading for the opposite wall, and I see the back of his head and shoulders, all blistered, blackened, and burned.
He passes through the wall and vanishes. He’s not impeded by the constructs of the physical world, so I can still hear him giving his speech, to whoever is next door, whoever he thinks is Marja. Hallucinations, spirits, whatever you want to call them, their noise isn’t stopped by walls, doors, or burying your head under a pillow. Even earplugs are useless. The sounds are inside your head, which has nothing to do with actual vibrations hitting your eardrum. Getting out of range is the only solution.
Earplugs. Something about that niggles at me, a familiarity that I can’t quite seem to latch on to.
“Marja!” He sounds closer now. In the hall maybe? He must do this every night. Or maybe even throughout the day.
I shudder against the sweat-dampened and sticky sheets, imagining him approaching me while I’m awake but completely unaware.
My chest feels tight, the sensation of the walls closing in on me. So many of them, invisible but still here, crowding in on the living. That’s why the LINA had never bothered me. Yes, it was small, but that limited all the occupants. The fewer people around, the fewer sightings I’d have.
A flash of motion in the upper right corner of the room catches my attention, and I crane my head in time to see Voller saluting me, raising that drill. The spatter of the blood sounds so much louder in the quiet dimness of my room.
Before he’s vanished completely, Lourdes appears, her sightless eyes trying to track, her head cocked as she searches. I don’t understand.
A whimper rises in my throat. I don’t know if I can survive this without the pills.
My fingers scrabble against the sheets, searching for them. But they’ve scattered out of reach.
The visitations, from familiar faces and not, continue. Some of them touch me, cool hands brushing against my skin when I cannot escape, cannot move away from their grasping fingers.
Others simply walk through me as though I’m not there, which is sometimes worse. The shudder and soul-deep coldness that comes with the reminder that the solid sanctity of your body is an illusion.
The whispers in my ear, the shouts of despair, the weeping reaches a cacophonous level, drowning out even the loud buzzing in my bad ear that has returned.
A scream bubbles to my lips; only the barest restraint keeps it back. Hot tears trickle down my face, and I can’t reach them to wipe them away.
My mother’s hand brushes my cheek. Be careful, love. I hear her in my head. A hallucination, a ghost? I can’t tell anymore, if I ever could.
Kane appears at the foot of the bed, hands on his hips, his shirt bloodied beneath his open jumpsuit, but the sight of him is a relief. He is brighter, in bolder colors than the Tower ghosts. They seem to fade around him.
He smiles at me, that warm but worried expression I’m well familiar with from him, and suddenly, I’m no longer strapped in a bed but standing next to him, in a dimly lit suite on the Aurora, after everything went to hell. Literally, perhaps.
Recognition clanks in me, like an off-key note. This is … this is a memory. I remember this.
In a moment, he’s going to reach out and touch my chin. And instead of the caress of cool phantom fingertips, I feel the rough, calloused warmth of his hand. “Are you sure?”
Then the old man ghost reappears, walking right through Kane. “Marja?”
Kane vanishes and in a dizzying moment of reorientation, I’m back in my bed again, strapped in. Sure about what? What was Kane talking about?
The man in my visitor chair moans and drops his makeshift knife, and once more, I hear the spatter of Voller’s blood hitting the floor. Another memory or something else?
Memories, visions, hallucinations all jumbled up in my head until I can no longer tell the difference? How will I know what’s real? And this is here, in the Tower, not on the Aurora, where it will surely be worse.
I can feel myself spiraling, my breath racing in and out. Keep it together, Claire. Keep it—
“I don’t understand,” Lourdes says, right near my ear. The whisper of her exhale feels cool against my skin. Memory or visitation? I can’t tell. I can’t fucking tell. Will the rest of my life be like this, either locked up and drugged to the gills or seeing things that may or may not be real?
Panic bursts in me, then, like a river overflowing a dam.
And I scream.