6

 

 

HE LIVES HALFWAY ACROSS the sector, on a small planet whose only inhabited continent counts itself as one of the losers in the Colonnade Wars.

He’s lived there for nearly two decades—and it’s a sign of how out of touch we are that I actually had to look that information up.

My father’s house is a maze of glass, stairs, and steel. From the outside it seems haphazard, rooms on top of rooms, but from the inside, it has a wide-open feel, like the best cruise liners, designed not to take you to a destination but to help you enjoy the journey.

He built his house in the center of a large blue lake, so at night the water reflected the skies above. If those skies are clear, it seems like he is in space, traveling from one port to another.

He doesn’t seem surprised to see me. If anything, he’s a little relieved.

I arrive in the middle of the afternoon and he insists I stay there. I nearly decline until he shows me the guest room. It is at the very top of the house, glass on all sides except the part of the floor that covers the room below. The bed seems to free-float between the blueness of the lake and the blueness of the sky.

The sun—too close to this planet for my tastes—sends light through the glass, but environmental controls keep the room cool and comfortable. My father shows me where those controls are so I can lessen the gravity if I want.

It takes me a while to realize that my father’s house is modeled on the station that houses the Room of Lost Souls. We meet in the center room—the room that would be the Room of Lost Souls if we were on that station—and he offers me a meal.

I decline. I’m too nervous in his presence to eat anything.

My father is no longer the man I remember, the man who cradled me when I got out of that Room. That man had been in his late thirties, tall and strong and powerful. He’d loved his wife and his daughter, making us the center of his life.

He’d commanded ships, built an empire of wealth, and still had time for us.

He abandoned everything to figure out how to get my mother out of that place. His businesses, his friends.

Me.

Which makes it so strange to see him now, essentially idle, in this place of openness and reflected light.

He still looks strong, but he hasn’t bothered with enhancements. His face has lines—sadness lines that turn down his eyes, and pinch the corners of his mouth. He has let his hair go completely white, along with his eyebrows, which have become bushy. His mustache—something I considered as much a part of him as his hands—is long gone.

He makes our greeting awkward by trying to hug me. I won’t let him.

He acts like he still has affection for me. He does make it clear that he has followed my career—as much as he can through what little I make public.

But he has respected my wishes—the wishes I screamed at him the last time I ran away from my grandparents—and has stayed out of my life.

“You sent Riya Trekov to me,” I say.

I can’t sit in the chair he’s offered me. I’m too restless in his presence, so I pace in the large room. The glass here opens onto the other rooms. Through their glass walls I can see still more rooms, and at the very end, the lake. Looking at it through all this glass makes it seem far away, and not real. It looks like a holograph of a lake, the kind you’d see on the distance ships of my childhood.

“I figured if anyone could help her, you could.” His voice is the same, deep and warm and just a little nasal.

I shake my head. “You’re the one who has done all the research on the Room.”

“But you’re the one who has dived the most dangerous wrecks ever found.”

I turn toward him then. He sits in the very center of the room. His chair is made of frosted glass and the cushions that protect his skin are a matching white. He looks like he has risen from the floor—a creature of glass and sunlight.

“You think this is like a wreck?” I ask. “Wrecks are known. They’re filled with space and emptiness. They have corners and edges and debris, but they’re part of this universe.”

“You think the Room isn’t?” He folds his hands and rests his chin on his knuckles.

“I don’t know what it is. You’re the one who has spent his life studying the damn thing.”

So much for trying to hide my bitterness toward his choices.

He grimaces, but nods, an acknowledgement that my bitterness has its reasons.

“Yes,” he says. “I’ve studied it. I’ve traveled to it countless times. I’ve sent people in there. I’ve repeated the same experiments that have been tried since it was discovered. None of them work.”

“So why do you think Riya Trekov’s device will work?” I ask.

“Because I was with her on one of the missions,” he says. “I watched people she paid go in and come back out.”

“Empty-handed,” I say.

He nods.

“Yet she thinks someone can bring her father out.”

“She might be right,” he says.

“And if he can come out, so can Mother.”

“Yes.” The word is soft. He lifts his chin off his folded hands. The knuckles have turned white.

“If you believe this and you think I’m the one who can bring a lost soul out, how come you didn’t ask me to do this yourself?”

“I did,” he says. “You turned me down.”

I snort and sink into one of the nearby chairs. He’s right; he did contact me. I had forgotten it among his many summonses, all of which I ignored. But this one had been his last, a long plea explaining that he not only had a way into the Room of Lost Souls, he had a way to survive it.

“You used to say you never wanted me to go back in there. You discouraged me from even going near the place, remember?”

I had been fifteen and full of myself. I’d run away from my grandparents half a dozen times. They were in constant mourning for my mother, and believed I was no substitute. It was pretty clear that they blamed me for her loss.

The final time, my father came after me, and I told him I could get my mother. I was the only one who’d come out alive. He owed me the chance to try.

He had refused.

I left him—and my grandparents—and never contacted any of them again. Although he kept trying to reach me. And I kept glancing at, then refusing, his messages.

“I couldn’t risk it,” he says. “We barely got you out that first time.”

“Yet you recommended me to go in when Riya Trekov comes to call. Because she has a way out or because you don’t care any more?”

His cheeks flush. “You didn’t have to agree.”

The chair is softer than I expect. I relax into it. “I know,” I say, giving him that much. “Her plea interested me.”

“Because of your diving,” he says.

I shake my head. Because I have nothing left. But I don’t say that.

“I recommended you because you’re trained now,” he says. “Of everyone I know, you have a chance, not just to get out. But to get out with something. You’ve become an amazing woman.”

I no longer know him. I can’t tell if he’s being sincere or if he’s trying to convince me.

He’s still a man obsessed. I wonder what he’ll do if he recovers the remnants of Mother. Her “soul” or her memory or even her self. He’s lived for decades without her. If she’s still alive, she’s spent double her initial lifespan inside a single Room.

I came here to find out one thing. So rather than debate the merits of my experience or the point of his obsession, I say, “Tell me what happened. How did we end up at the Room? How did we lose Mother?”

“You don’t remember?” he asks.

The lights, the voices. I remember. Just not in any detail.

“My memories are a child’s memories,” I say. “I want the real story. The adult story. Mistakes and all.”