The sound of screams from somewhere deeper in the ship sends a jolt through me. The distinct rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire follows, shattering my hesitation and waking me from my temporary paralysis.
My plan, such as it is, is working.
Even though I was expecting this result, hoping for it, the terrible noises of the stoic and resigned security team members losing their grip make me shiver. I glance around the bridge warily, anticipating the appearance of another death reenactment. But everything is dark and still. Which we should take advantage of, while we can.
“Come on,” I say to Reed and Kane, forcing myself to sound more confident than I feel. “We need to go.”
When I look behind me, though, Kane is where I left him, sitting near the piles of pulled-out wires at the navigation control bank. His face is newly slack, and his hands are limp at his sides. I can’t tell if he heard me or not. I can’t tell anything about him at all.
Dread pools in my stomach. At least before he was talking and listening. To people who weren’t here, granted, but this new stillness … it’s wrong.
Instinct screams at me to DO SOMETHING.
I push past Reed to kneel beside Kane.
“It’s me,” I say softly.
No response. Not even when I take his hand in mine.
Kane blinks, swallows, breathes—slowly, shallowly—but his gaze is unfocused, untethered. It’s as if he’s simply … gone.
My vision blurs with tears. Taking away the dampeners was too much for him.
“Hang in there, I’m going to get you out of here. I promise.” I squeeze his hand in encouragement, but his fingers remain loose against mine.
“I just need you to get up. Please,” I whisper.
But he doesn’t move.
“Get up!” I beg him. I cannot, will not, leave him behind. No matter what I did before.
Desperation builds in me to a pinch point. I stand up and pull at him with all my might, leaning away from him for leverage.
“Please!” The word comes out raw and painful, closer to a shout. At this point, I’m not even sure who I’m asking. Kane. God. Fate. Whoever owes me one.
Finally, his legs move. Erratically at first, folding and unfolding as if a puppeteer is momentarily confused about which string does what. And then he stands.
It looks more like muscle memory than an actual decision. Still, it feels like a miracle in the moment, and a sob of relief escapes me. I use the back of my free hand to wipe at the tears on my face.
I’m not letting go of Kane. With my hand locked tight around his, I pull him toward the doors, and he follows.
“Darrow, let’s move it,” I say to Reed.
Only then do I realize that he’s been too quiet. Too many opportunities for him to mock and sneer have passed by without comment.
When I look over, Reed is frozen in place, staring in terror across the bridge.
I know that stare. Too well.
“Reed.” I snap my fingers. “Come on.”
“Do you see him?” Reed whispers.
“I don’t see any—”
“My father, he’s right there.” He pauses. “He’s angry with me.” Reed sounds confused, wounded.
I move to face him, but his attention remains on the specter of his father.
With my free hand, I jerk his chin down, forcing him to meet my eyes. “He’s not there. It’s not real. Your father is back on Earth.” Exactly where we need him to be if we’re going to survive this mess. “None of this is real. I need you to keep it together.” I cannot drag Reed along unwillingly, screaming about his father, through this ship.
Reed rubs at his chest. “But I can feel it. I can feel how angry he is.” A paranoid whine enters his voice. His gaze flicks from me back to his father.
I pinch his cheek, hard enough to leave a red mark.
He yelps, and then glares at me.
“Then you guys shouldn’t have made the MAW five-hundred-whatever work so well,” I say through clenched teeth.
He blinks down at me and then back across the bridge.
“He’s gone,” he says, stunned.
“He was never there. Remember that. Most of what you’re going to see from now on is not real.”
He nods but looks less than convinced.
As soon as we reach the hallway, me leading the way, pulling an unresponsive Kane at my side and Reed at the back, I realize my mistake: in my rush, I forgot the work light on the bridge.
It’s so dark out here, I can’t see my hand in front of my face.
Fuck.
Maybe that will make what comes next easier, if we can’t see it.
Maybe not.
I feel for the wall and start forward. “Stay close,” I warn Reed. “If we can move fast enough, maybe we can avoid…”
Becca appears ahead of me, laughing and dancing in her nightgown, waving me forward.
No, apparently not.
I do my best to ignore her, keeping my hand firmly on the wall, moving it along the textured wallpaper and the smooth doors as we go. If I were to give in to distraction and simply follow her, it feels possible that we might somehow be lost in here forever. Like those fairy-tale children without their bread-crumb trail. Like when I followed Becca into the quarantined hab.
Becca vanishes unexpectedly.
And my step hitches for a second.
“What’s wrong?” Reed demands, bumping into me from behind.
“Nothing. I—”
Heavy blows land against the smooth wooden door currently beneath my fingertips. From the other side. The door shakes in its frame, moved by the force.
Instinctively, I pull my hand away as if the surface is hot.
Let me out! Let me out! I won’t hurt them again, I promise … A man’s voice, but it holds such shrill notes of hysteria and unhinged laughter that it sounds barely human.
“Do you hear that?” I ask on instinct, even though I know better.
“I don’t hear anything,” Reed says. “I can’t fucking see anything either.” He sounds more annoyed than scared now, but his tone shifts, then, growing bitter. Mean. “Which is exactly the way you want it. So you can be in charge.”
“Shut up, Reed.” I don’t have time for this.
I tighten my grip on Kane’s hand and start forward again.
The voice, along with the banging, stops as soon as we move on.
But this time, dread curdles in my stomach. If the pattern holds, that only means that something else is coming.
An instant later, cool breath moves against my cheek, as if someone is standing right next to me, about to whisper in my ear.
I nearly turn, expecting to see the frightful but familiar vision of my mother, but a deeper instinct in me speaks up. NO.
The fear—of what I’m not seeing, what I might see—nearly stalls me out, and sweat breaks out across my forehead.
How long is this hallway? Shouldn’t we be close to the end by now?
Or can I even trust my perceptions?
I grit my teeth and keep lifting my feet, one in front of the other.
The first chilly tap on my shoulder is rapidly followed by a second and a third. Like a single fingertip pressing against my skin lightly.
It’s only when I feel the sensation roll down my back that I recognize it as water droplets.
The drops come faster and faster, that cool breath against my skin, as if someone soaking wet is leaning close.
He held me down. Put my face under the water. I don’t know why. She sounds distraught, confused.
The female passenger frozen in the tub, the princess. I remember her. Her vulnerable form curled up in a protective, fetal posture in the tub beneath the ice.
I should have killed him first.
Those words come with a sharp tug at my cheek, followed by the sting of broken skin.
I gasp involuntarily, my hand releasing Kane’s and flying to my face. Was that … did she bite me?
My fingers come away from my face damp and warm. Possibly blood. Maybe sweat. I can’t tell. If the ghosts can hurt us …
We will never survive this.
I fumble for Kane’s hand and start us moving again. “Faster,” I tell Reed over my shoulder.
“You know they’ll never believe you,” Reed says. “Verux and my father. They know what people like you are all about. Greedy. Selfish. Always after whatever you can take that you don’t deserve.”
Anger flickers to life in me, hot and sharp.
“And you … you just want to make me look bad,” he continues, his voice pitching lower suddenly, from indignation to fury.
A memory of my first sight of the atrium flashes in my head: all those people gliding endlessly overhead. The Dunleavy sister with the purple hair in the bathrobe with a knife strapped to her wrist. The man with the belt around his neck, the end of it still wrapped in another passenger’s hands.
In the cabins, Anthony Lightfoot and Jasen Wyman, the two men who’d beaten each other to death with camera equipment.
Paranoia is one of the symptoms Max rattled off. No wonder the passengers killed each other.
“Reed, I just want to get off this fucking ship. Stay focused,” I say, working to keep my voice calm. If I get agitated, that’s only going to amp him up further. “You’re letting it get to you.”
“You want me to think that, don’t you?” he demands. “But I know better. I’m seeing things more clearly than I have in a long time. In a long time!”
Okay, yeah. Reed is losing it. I wish to God I’d thought to put him in front of me, instead of letting him trail behind. In the fucking dark.
It’s work not to hunch my shoulders protectively. It feels as if a glowing target has been painted over my back, daring Reed to charge forward.
But there’s nothing to be done about that now, except to get us out. Ahead, the darkness seems a bit brighter, indicating that we might be nearing the stairway to the atrium level and the working lights that Diaz’s team was in the process of setting up. I don’t know that light will help anything, but it sure as hell will make it easier to see what’s coming.
I think.
Soft sobbing comes from nearby, perhaps a few feet away. Brokenhearted, devastated crying, punctuated by deep gasps. It sounds … real, more so than anything else we’ve heard.
Instinct tells me to slow down, but I resist that impulse and keep walking.
It’s just a device, a weapon, vibrations against the eardrum causing strange effects. That’s all.
Except it’s not. Device or no device, a lot of people died here in a variety of horrible, violent ways. If any place should be haunted, it’s this ship. So is it any surprise there’s a bunch of angry, confused spirits trying to make themselves known?
Even more than that, though, it feels as though the ship has taken on a life of her own, a conglomeration of the spirits trapped within and yet something more. An entity in and of herself. And she doesn’t want to let us go.
I shake my head at myself. Now who’s letting this place get to her? Paranoia, Kovalik. It will bite you in the ass, if you don’t watch it.
“Are you crying?” Reed asks, scoffing.
“Keep moving,” I say, startled. Is he hearing the same thing I am? Real or not real, then?
As we get closer, the volume of the crying increases. It sounds as if we’re going to stumble over someone—her?—in a second.
Maybe … maybe one of the security team members fled up here from the violence and chaos below.
That thought is enough to make me hesitate, to slow for just a second as my fingers brush past the smoothness of a door.
Which is all that’s needed.
A cold hand locks bruising-tight around my left ankle as I prepare to take a step, throwing me off-balance.
My arms pinwheel frantically and I lose my grip on Kane as I try to catch myself.
I can’t fall. She’s waiting.
The woman from under the bed. I don’t dare look down, but I know it’s her. Her mouth and ears stuffed with cloth, her eyes blindfolded and yet she sees …
Before I can restabilize, Reed crashes into my back with a grunt.
We go down hard, in a tangle of limbs.
Immediately, I scramble to free myself and stand, anticipating the icy touch of her hand again. Perhaps against my face, reaching for my eyes …
But before I can get very far, another hand grasps my leg—this one, though, warm and very much alive. Reed yanks me back toward him. The carpeting burns against my palms as I scrabble to stop my backward progress.
“What are you—”
“I knew it,” Reed says, the words tight through his clenched teeth. “You’re trying to be the hero, and you want me to play the fool. But I’m not going to do that. Do you hear me?”
I kick out at him, but on my stomach, it’s virtually impossible to connect solidly. “Listen to yourself, that doesn’t make any sense. I need you to talk to your father. I need you to—”
He wrenches me from my stomach onto my back and drops his body weight down to hold me in place.
Immediately, alarm bells in my head ring.
I lash out at him with everything I’ve got, but I can’t see a fucking thing. Electric pain ricochets up my knuckles after one particularly wild swipe; I think I caught his chin.
But other than one quick, sharp intake of breath from Reed, there’s no reaction. He’s too lost in his paranoid landscape.
He leans down, putting pressure on my upper arms with his elbows until it feels like the bones might shatter, and I cry out involuntarily. Tears gather at the corners of my eyes.
Kane. He’s right there. But there’s no sound of his approach.
“You like that?” Reed demands, leaning close enough that flecks of his saliva hit my face with his words. “Not so tough now, are you?”
Abruptly, the pressure against my arms vanishes, and a desperate exhalation of relief is building in my throat, demanding release. But I force it down, refusing to give him the satisfaction. Fucking Reed Darrow.
Then his hands close around my throat.
My body panics, reacting faster than my mind, which is still locked in disbelief that this is actually happening. My back arches up, trying to buck him off. My hands fly up to pry at his fingers, and then—finally—my brain engages. I push my feet against the floor in a half-remembered self-defense move from my Verux training days, desperate for leverage.
But Reed is so much heavier than he looks. His grip around my neck is unshaken and grows tighter. My pulse throbs frantically in my head and behind my eyes, the oxygen shortage starting to sink in.
All around me, I can feel them watching me, leaning close for a front-row seat to another death. The blinded woman from under the bed. The cackling man who wanted to be released from his room. The formerly frozen girl from the tub who bit my cheek.
They’re waiting for me to join them. One more victim of the Aurora to join the hundreds more in this endless fucking parade of the dead.
I scratch at Reed’s arms, but his environmental suit protects him. With effort, I lash out in the direction of his face and catch flesh under my nails. His hands loosen but only for a second.
Bright starbursts of color light up the darkness in front of my eyes.
You’re going to die here.
My vision should be growing darker, but instead, one of those brilliant starbursts explodes into color, light, and sound.
In a flash, I can see the ship as it must have been. The smell of “new” in the freshly varnished wooden panels in the hall, the perfume of those rare flowers on display, and laughter mixed with the faint clinking of glasses and the low-level buzz of voices.
I sit up—pain gone, Reed forgotten—and watch three women come toward me. All of them are dressed in formal gowns, returning from an event. Perhaps in the ballroom or atrium on the level below. The beautiful woman with dark hair seems to float down the hall in a creation that appears to be nothing more than layers of pink netting—which seems familiar somehow, though I can’t, in this moment, pinpoint why.
The youngest of the three, her hair dyed metallic silver to match her dress, carries her shoes by the straps, swinging them carelessly at her side. A bright gold chain dangles from her neck to her narrow waist and at the end, an old-fashioned key, worn as prominently as a diamond. A Dunleavy, the younger of the two. I recognize her, though she looks so different … alive.
These two split off first, entering their rooms, leaving only the final member of the trio, dressed in all black, her blond hair caught into an elegant upsweep. As she moves closer to me, I realize she’s not in a dress, but a sleeveless tuxedo-like creation with black lapels and a flash of white at her chest, leading to a bell of split skirt.
The captain. Linden Gerard. She’s heading for the bridge. Her forehead is creased in a frown, and she’s pressing her fingertips at a spot between her eyebrows, her fingertips turning white with the pressure.
You’re just tired. That’s all. She whispers it to herself over and over again, until she’s even with me.
Then she lowers her hand from her face to stare down at me.
Except she’s no longer Captain Gerard, she’s me.
My own face stares down at me, and I stare back, hypnotized.
Help me. Help us, we mouth. Her hands flutter at her sides for a moment before flying up to her neck, as if she’s choking herself.
A flash of a white lab coat, then, and dark hair at the corner of my vision.
Claire!
My mother. When I turn to track her movement, she’s gone. Everything is gone. In that moment, I’m back on the floor in the absolute darkness of the hall, Reed’s grip tight around my throat.
My hands have fallen away from him to rest at my sides; I’ve given up.
The pressure in my head feels like it’s going to spray pieces of my skull everywhere in a matter of seconds. So, it takes me longer than it should to realize that my arm is resting on something bulky and rough. I can picture it suddenly: durable canvas with the LINA’s name stitched in bright red, the letters fraying a little from frequent handling.
The tool kit.
I fumble, my fingers numb and nearly unresponsive, until I manage to lock on to the textured plastic handle of a tool. A screwdriver.
With the last bit of energy I have, I haul my arm upward and toward the side of Reed’s face, pointy end of the screwdriver out, aiming for his temple.
The strike doesn’t have much force behind it, but I feel the metal blade scrape sideways past something soft, meeting minor resistance that gives way, until it’s stopped by a solid wall of what feels like bone.
He screams, and his hands vanish from my neck. “My eye!” He half crawls, half falls off me.
Rolling over to my side, I suck in air, coughing and choking, each breath slicing through my raw throat, like inhaling shredded glass.
“I can’t see! I can’t … you bitch!” Reed sounds closer to hysteria now, never mind that he can’t possibly know whether I’ve blinded him or not, given that it’s as dark in here as it ever was. “I’m going to … you’ll pay … it’s just the beginning…”
As he continues mumble-shouting, I haul myself to my hands and knees and crawl away from him, my damaged throat pulsing like a second heartbeat but still functional.
I have to stand. I have to run. We have to run. In his current condition, I have no doubt that Reed will kill me if he gets another chance. Kane, too, if Reed comes across him.
Dizziness washes over me the second I’m mostly vertical, and I have a moment of swirling vertigo, intensified by the darkness. I can’t see if I’m falling, which way is up or down, and my body is sending me panicked signals about the ground coming up fast.
I thrust my hand out, automatically, seeking something to hold on to.
My fingers brush over rough fabric, warmed by human skin beneath.
I jerk back before my brain clicks in. Reed is behind me, still ranting beneath his breath. And the ghosts I’ve encountered—so far anyway—don’t hold body heat.
Kane.
I reach out again, finding his back and then his shoulder. I follow the line of his arm down to his hand, to his familiar calloused fingertips.
It is him.
My relief is so powerful it almost chokes me. A lump swells in my throat, and tears of pain roll down my cheeks.
Just as before, he won’t take my hand but allows me to take his. So I do.
And we run, me pulling him along, as fast as I can, in the dark. It feels like running out in blind faith, knowing there’s a drop-off into nothingness but not knowing where.
Every step feels like our last one.
I’m frantically trying to remember the gentle curve of the corridor, the exact position of those decorative tables.
I find one of them painfully with the edge of my hip; as I stumble past, the vase of dried and dead flowers wobbles on its base and falls, with a crash as loud as an explosion.
Behind us, Reed’s mumbling cuts off with a snarl. Pounding footsteps ensue. And pursue.
Fuck.
Limping now, I tug at Kane to keep moving. The broken glass crunches beneath our feet, giving Reed our exact location. If he’s coherent enough to listen for that and figure it out.
But the darkness ahead of me is getting lighter, I’m sure of it. Though, not as bright as it should be, given the number and intensity of the lights I saw Diaz’s team setting up.
We burst past the retracted bulkhead doors onto the landing for the Platinum Level, near the spiral staircase to the atrium below. The empty pedestal that formerly held Grace (or Speed) at the top of the stairs is a welcome and familiar landmark.
And about the only one.
As we hurry toward the spiral staircase—I don’t want Reed to catch up to us at all, but on that thing, with nowhere to run or hide, would be guaranteed death—I look down toward the atrium.
For a moment, my vision blurs and I see the atrium, bright and cheerily lit, dozens of passengers crisscrossing the space. Some of them are in formal dress, coming from the ballroom; others are in swimwear or robes from the spa. A small group of them sits, laughing and talking, on the as-yet-unmarred leather sofas. No signs of blood and mayhem, as they toast each other with flutes of champagne.
The Aurora, in one of her last moments of normal. Before First Officer Wallace turned on that device and doomed them all to hell.
I blink and the vision disappears, leaving only the dimly lit atrium full of death.
More death now.
Work lights have been turned over or smashed by bullets. A couple of them are still sizzling and sparking. And among the passengers’ bodies, several new corpses dressed in familiar environmental suits.
Fresh blood, red and alarmingly bright, is smeared across the floor. And trails across the room toward the corridor in fat droplets that increase to mini-puddles before I lose sight of it.
This is where the screaming and gunfire came from earlier, then. At least some.
Good. I fight against the swell of gritty satisfaction in me, unnerved by it. I didn’t want anyone to die.
But if it’s them or us, I know whose side I’m on.
Practical, pragmatic, ugly. Maybe I’m more the child of Verux than I realized. Then again, I didn’t sign on to die for the cover-up story, and I sure as fuck didn’t start this.
Diaz kneels at the front of the carnage, shoulders slumped and staring blankly out at her people. What’s left of them. Her helmet is tipped over on its side on the floor next to her, the light shining at an odd angle against the opposite wall. Her sidearm hangs heavily in her hand, seemingly forgotten, her arm at her side. Her chest rises and falls beneath her suit. She’s still alive.
I hesitate. Is she so lost in whatever she’s seeing, distracted by her loss or hallucinations or both, that we could slip past? Or …
Before I can do anything, even make a decision about what to do, Diaz’s head jerks up sharply and she raises her weapon to aim at me.