“Don’t move. Just stay still.”
I’m floating, unaware that I’m aware until those words.
Now, now I can feel the pulsing in my temples, the ache over my whole body, the hard, unforgiving surface beneath my back.
My lungs demand a deeper breath, and I suck air in, only to lose it all in a coughing fit that makes my skull feel like it’s going to explode.
I curl onto my side, dimly recognizing that my head is pillowed on something softer than the floor.
“Claire,” Kane says. His hand moves over my hair gently. “Can you hear me?”
Opening my eyes takes work. It’s too bright for me to see much before I have to close them again. But I recognize the interior of LINA’s airlock.
I made it. Rather, Kane made it.
“Take your time,” he says.
Except I can’t. We don’t have time to take.
I peel my eyes open again, letting them water until they adjust to the brightness, which isn’t all that bright except compared, it seems, to the dimness of almost dying.
When I can look up, I find Kane leaning back against the wall of the airlock, looking as exhausted and filthy as I remember but with the bright spark of intelligence and awareness that he was missing when I last saw him. The door to the LINA stands open behind him. My head is in his lap, the helmet cast off to one side.
“What the hell happened?” he murmurs. Whether to me or himself, I don’t know. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get you. I didn’t know that you needed help. I didn’t even know for sure that it was you on the other end of the tether. I was trying to … understand. It was like waking up after a dream. I was here, on the LINA, but that’s not what I remember…” He sounds lost, confused.
I want to ask him what he remembers, but if he can be spared some of those memories, maybe he would be better off.
“When I saw you trying to pull yourself back to the LINA, I realized you needed to come back, so I started the winch up, but—”
I push against the floor with my hand to sit up. The pounding in my head makes me wish I’d died. But I’m upright, at least.
“Hey, hey, slow down,” he says. “You’re in no condition to—”
I start to shake my head and immediately regret it. Nausea swirls over me. “The Aurora is set to go up. Rigged charges. Timer.”
He stares at me. “LINA’s main engine is online, but I don’t have helm control.” He pauses. “Did we … no, we took it apart. I remember that.” He’s piecing events together.
I hate that he’s going to have to relive horrible moments that I wish had never happened in the first place. But that’s assuming we survive long enough for him to do so.
“I know. Do we still have maneuvering thrusters?” As far as I’m aware, our thrusters should still be operational.
Kane frowns. “Yes.”
“I know it won’t get us very far but—”
His expression shifts from uncertainty to determination. “The LINA is shielded more heavily underneath. If we can angle ourselves away from the blast, that’ll offer a little more protection.”
I nod, and he pushes to his feet to run for the bridge.
I’m slower to follow, but I get there. I pause, though, in the galley, looking at our sad collection of Aurora artifacts. The two Tratorelli sculptures, Speed and Grace, and the emergency beacon plucked from space at Voller’s insistence with Nysus backing him up.
It wasn’t worth it. None of it was worth it. Max may be gone, and the device soon to be destroyed, but that won’t stop Verux from doing—or continuing to do—exactly as they have been doing for years. Chewing up lives and spitting them out.
On the bridge, Kane is strapped into Voller’s seat. Likely marking the first time those safety straps have ever been used, given Voller’s predilection for letting them dangle to the floor instead. The memory of Voller spinning around to say something on the verge of offensive, while grinning and daring one of us to object, makes my heart hurt.
As it is, I half expect Nysus’s voice over the intercom, giving me some random fact about the flammability of the varnish on the Aurora’s real wood panels. And Lourdes’s chair feels conspicuously empty. Her headphones still rest on the communications board, where she last left them. It’s as if she’s just stepped away to make her tea and will be back any second. Oh God, I wish that were true.
I strap in, and Kane and I watch as the thrusters adjust our position and move us away, slowly, incrementally, from the Aurora. Every meter feels like a hard-won step toward safety.
But when I check the cameras, we’re still too close, far too close.
“Do you think—” Kane begins, but he doesn’t get a chance to finish.
On-screen, the Aurora fills briefly with bright light, as though all the power has been restored and inside, passengers are once more dancing, talking, drinking, and living.
But it’s only for a second. Then the light expands and the Aurora fractures and vanishes in the burst of the explosion, like a shadow in a sudden noonday sun.
There’s no sound, but the force of the blast rolls out toward us and hits hard.
My body slams into the side of my chair, my upper arm pinned between my own weight and the reinforced arm of the chair.
The bone gives with a break I can feel, and I scream, bracing myself for the last few seconds of air and life before the LINA cracks open like an egg.
Instead, we’re spinning endlessly. Alarms wail, smoke from somewhere flooding the bridge.
But we’re alive. For now.
“Claire!” Kane shouts.
“I’m okay,” I manage.
Through the smoke, he’s a vague shadow, struggling and moving. Our spinning gradually slows. Kane must be trying to pull us out of it with the thrusters.
Then, the grav generator kicks back in, and the world of the LINA settles back around us with various thuds and crashes.
“Claire.” Kane fumbles with his restraints and manages to get free to kneel next to my chair.
He sucks in a breath sharply at the sight of my arm. I can’t look at it, but it must be bad if he can tell just by looking.
I hold my good hand up, my broken arm protectively against my belly. Cold sweat breaks out over my skin with the movement. “I’m fine.”
A lie I promptly prove by leaning over and vomiting all over my bridge.
“No navigation. No comms. Limited life support and supplies. Maybe we should have just stayed on the Aurora. Dying would have been quicker.”
I’m talking mainly to distract myself from Kane splinting my arm. After helping me out of the chair and moving me to the galley, where I can sort of lie down on one of the bench seats, Kane gave me an injection of something. But whatever it was, it’s not enough.
He’s gentle, but I’m gritting my teeth against the pain.
At least the smoke has cleared, and so far, our battered hull seems to be holding. The two Tratorelli sculptures are in heavy marble chunks on the floor where they fell, and the emergency beacon is tipped over onto its side. In any other circumstance, a damage assessment would be a top priority, but right now, I’m not sure if there’s a point.
“No,” Kane says to me, his brow furrowed with concentration as he wraps a stabilizing bandage around my arm. “At least here, we have a chance.” He looks up at me. “You did the right thing.”
His words tear a hole right through me, right through any defenses I have left.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt. “I’m sorry for dragging us into this. I’m sorry for leaving. I don’t even know why I did. Why didn’t I bring you and Ny with me on the escape pod? Or each of us in our own, I don’t … I just don’t understand.” I shake my head in frustration. “I don’t remember.”
His movements slow and then stop. “You didn’t drag any of us into it. We all agreed, remember?” Apparently he does. That part, at least.
“Over objections,” I remind him.
“When has any group of five people agreed to do anything without objections?” he points out.
“Still, I’m responsible, I shouldn’t have—”
“Claire, I don’t mean this in a cruel way, but you’re not that good of a team leader,” he says, a tired smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. “If we hadn’t thought the risk was worth it, we wouldn’t have gone. Period. Each of us had our reasons.”
“But I left.”
“You did? I don’t … None of it seems real.” He pauses, pain flashing across his face. I don’t know who he’s remembering, Lourdes, Voller, or Nysus. But it’s someone we’ve lost. “It was, though?”
I nod and then clear my throat to say, “Yes. It was real.”
He’s quiet.
“A ship found me in one of the escape pods from the Aurora, a little over two months ago. The last thing I remember is waking up on the bridge next to Lourdes’s…” I can’t say it. “Next to Lourdes,” I finish. “I don’t even remember leaving.” Shame wells in me at the confession. “I had a skull fracture, but it’s healed, I should be able to remember, but I can’t. That time is just … gone.”
He resumes wrapping my arm. “And you think you left us to die. That you ran to save yourself. And you blocked the memory because of that.”
A tear leaks out from one of my eyes, and I turn away so he doesn’t see. “Yes.”
He makes a thoughtful noise. “Has it dawned on you yet that you probably left to save us? To get help?”
I lurch upward, or try to. He puts a hand on the center of my chest to push me flat. “Why didn’t I take you and Nysus with me, then?” I demand. “We all could have fit, easily.”
He’s silent for a long moment, and I feel a surge of gritty satisfaction. Finally, he believes who I am.
“I don’t remember everything,” he says finally.
And the little bit of hope left in me dies, turns to ash.
“But I know at that point it would have been hard to tell which situation was riskier,” he says. “The ship with food, oxygen, water, and functioning engines, or a twenty-year-old escape pod with limited capabilities and supplies, and no maintenance for more than two decades?”
As soon as he says it, I can see his logic. I can almost hear the discussion. In my mind, I would have been the logical one to take the risk and go for help, the one without the technical or mechanical know-how needed to keep the Aurora (mostly) functional until help arrived. I would have argued for that.
But this is all speculation. Kane doesn’t know anything for sure.
I open my mouth to object but he beats me to it.
“I don’t know what happened,” Kane says. “But I know you. And no matter how hard you tried to pull away from us, to keep your distance, you would never have left us behind. You were scared of being hurt, but you’re not a coward.” He finishes wrapping and tapes the end in place.
“But—”
He pushes back to look at me. “If you can’t trust yourself, can you trust me?” he asks, his gaze meeting mine without hesitation.
I freeze, but he doesn’t back down, just watches me steadily, waiting.
“Yes,” I manage, my voice creaky with the effort.
“Good. Then maybe you can put energy toward figuring out how we’re going to survive this and you can tell me everything I don’t remember while we’re at it.” He offers his hand to help me sit up.
I take it, the warmth and responsive pressure of his fingers against mine, such a contrast to hours earlier that I don’t want to let go.
So I don’t.
Kane glances down at our interlocked hands but says nothing. A faint smile, however, curves his mouth.
“I can tell you what I remember,” I say, trying to ignore the heat in my face. “But I don’t have any grand plans for escape.”
“You’ll think of something,” he says calmly.
I roll my eyes. “This might be a little beyond me. We can’t fix the engine without parts that are currently in a million little pieces somewhere back there.” I gesture vaguely in the direction of the Aurora. “No one knows where we are. Verux assumes we’re dead, which is probably a good thing. Someone may eventually come check out the explosion, but we have no way of communicating our location to ask for help. And we’ve got nothing to…” I pause, my gaze falling on the tipped-over emergency beacon.
The one Voller had insisted on pulling in and having Lourdes deactivate so no one else could track the signal to the Aurora’s location. The one Nysus insisted on as a keepsake. The one that’s still in perfect condition amidst the hunks of marble around it.
I take a deep breath. “Okay,” I say reluctantly. “I have one idea.”