“No one’s died,” the man with the red armband said. “But you need to go back to your—”
I darted out of the doorway and ran down the corridor, the opposite direction from the two stationeers. I had no rational thoughts—only that I didn’t want to be in this arm of the station. I wanted to be far away. Back on Ekkeko. Back in Star’s End.
“Hey!” shouted the woman. “What do you think you’re doing?”
I ran faster, blood pumping on adrenaline and not much else. Up ahead, the hallway ended at a sliding metal door. The two stationeers were racing after me, feet pounding hard on the carpeted corridor, and I tucked my head down and didn’t stop.
The door slid open with a whisper, and Rena bustled out, carrying a first aid kit.
A red scarf was wrapped around her nose and mouth.
I was so stunned I skittered to a stop, veering off to the left and slamming up against the wall. Rena jerked up her head and stumbled backward. The kit banged against her thigh.
“Esme?” She leaned forward, eyes squinting at me over the mask.
The two stationeers came to a stop a few paces away.
“She left her room,” the man said. He looked flustered and embarrassed, like he’d been caught in a lie. “Just took off running.”
“What’s going on?” I whispered. I couldn’t take my eyes off that red scarf.
“Get back to your cabin now.” Rena’s voice was hard. “Lock yourself in. I fucking mean it.”
“Who’s sick?” I realized I was crying. I hadn’t noticed until then, but suddenly I knew I’d been weeping all this time, tears falling over my numb cheeks as I tried to run off a space station. I whirled around to face the two stationeers. “Why aren’t your faces covered?” I slapped my hand over my mouth and breathed in the scent of my skin.
“We’re on a space station,” the woman said. “The monitors haven’t picked anything up. It’s not spread on the air.”
“It makes her feel better,” said Rena. “If we’re covering our faces.”
My hand fell to my side. I turned back to her and I felt like I was moving in slow motion. The corridor was too narrow, the lights too bright, the air in the station too stale.
“Is it one of the twins?” My voice cracked.
Rena shook her head. I breathed a sigh of relief. “The doctor, then, Dr. Tristany—”
Rena stared at me and I knew I was wrong. I thought of Isabel clutching Daphne in the car as we drove across the countryside to the rocket, and I went cold all over.
Then Rena shoved the kit into the male stationeer’s hands and wrapped me in a hug. I pressed myself close to her. I didn’t care that the flu probably traveled by touch.
“Isabel was complaining of chills shortly after we arrived. A fever.” Rena’s voice was as steady as a metronome and without inflection, as if she were reciting from memory. I was distantly aware of the two stationeers slinking away, the man setting the kit on the floor near the wall. Rena stared at me over the blankness of her mask. “She was tired this evening at dinner, but I didn’t think—”
All this way. We came all this way to escape the flu and it just followed us into space.
“Dr. Tristany is hoping she can save the baby. The station is equipped with one of those portable incubators—”
“We were all crammed into that car together!” I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. “And the rocket. All of us. The twins. And you—”
The mask hid any possible reaction. “There’s no evidence that the flu is airborne. The station would have picked up on it.” A pause. “It’ll also alert us if your temperature goes above thirty-seven degrees. The twins aren’t showing symptoms. But you need to go to your cabin. Stay there.”
“Does it spread by touch?” I said. “Contact? It has to spread somehow. I don’t understand how going to my room—”
“It’s the only thing I can do to keep you safe.” She sounded so desperate my breath caught.
“What about the vaccine?” I said. “Is that what’s in the kit? Dad can stop this, right?” I was crying again, desperate for Rena to say yes. This was the role of a CEO in a corpocratic system. To use the company’s boundless wealth to protect its citizens. To provide vaccines when they were dying.
Rena stared at me in that harsh bright light. Then she said, “There is no vaccine, Esme.”
“There has to be,” I babbled. “That’s what the company does. He can’t just let us all die.”
“If there was a vaccine, your father would have inoculated the family. He wouldn’t hide a vaccine from you. Please. Go to your cabin.”
I took a deep breath. Wiped at my eyes. Rena stared at me, her eyes glittering. I nodded.
“Good girl.” Rena stooped down to pick up the kit. “I’ll come check on you as soon as I have the chance. Remember what I said—straight to your cabin, lock the door.”
I nodded. Rena scrambled down the hallway and I stared after her. She didn’t duck into one of the rooms like I expected but instead disappeared through the sliding doors at the opposite end. Heading toward another wing.
I had her instructions but I couldn’t move. Isabel was sick. She would be dead within a few days. The quarantine around Undirra City hadn’t protected us. Fleeing hadn’t protected us. Dad was wrong. We were the same as the villagers.
I forced myself to move, to walk back to my cabin. The walls buzzed but otherwise the station was silent. I didn’t see anyone else. There were no signs of that capricious invader.
I made it to my cabin and locked the door. For a moment, I could only lean up against the wall and stare at the crumpled sheets on the unfamiliar bed. Blood pounded in my ears. My stomach lurched.
I leaned over and threw up on the floor.
When it was over, I felt momentarily cleansed, as if someone had come and stripped away all my fear and panic. I crawled over to my bed and knelt on the floor beside it, dry-heaving. The room spun around.
Isabel was dying. She was, it seemed to me, already dead.
• • •
The next morning, someone knocked on my cabin door. I woke up with an aching neck, my body twisted at a strange angle.
The knocking started again.
I sat up, rubbing my neck, and stumbled across the room and pulled the door open.
Rena stood in the hallway, her hair hanging bedraggled around her shoulders, her eyes bloodshot and tired. Last night’s mask was gone.
“Your father asked me to tell you,” she began, and then she stopped, took a deep breath.
A heaviness formed in my stomach, cold like metal. “What?” I said, panicking. “What is it?”
She closed her eyes as she spoke. “Mrs. May Coromina died last night.”
Her words seemed to echo around the room. I didn’t know what to say. Of course she was dead. If you caught the flu, you died.
Isabel was dead. She was dead. We hadn’t been friends, but I didn’t want her to die.
“The baby, though—” Rena started.
I jerked my gaze up to hers. She blinked, gave me a halfhearted smile.
“The baby,” I whispered. The baby that wasn’t born yet, that was still a part of Isabel. She would be gone, too.
“We saved the baby,” Rena said.
The words didn’t make sense at first. I understood them individually, but all strung together, in that particular order, they sounded like a foreign language. But then I worked them out, and a lightness spread through me, disbelief wound together with hysterical giddiness.
She stepped into my cabin and closed the door behind her. “A little girl, of course. She’s in the incubator and Dr. Tristany is keeping close watch on her. She doesn’t seem to have any symptoms—” Her voice jerked and she pressed one hand to her mouth. “She’s breathing filtered air, just in case. The station monitors still haven’t identified the virus. If it is a virus. We don’t know.” Rena leaned up against the wall and took a long, shuddering breath. She was crying, tears shining in the corner of her eyes
.
“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I’ve been up all night, tending to her—at least the twins are asleep now. No one’s told them yet. I don’t—I hope your father—” She stopped herself, and I suspected she was afraid Dad would make her tell them.
I pressed myself to the wall beside her and stared at the doorway leading out into the empty corridor. While I’d lain gasping in my bathroom last night, Isabel had been dying, breathing in her last breaths, feverish and afraid. I wondered if she knew they saved the baby before she died. I hoped she did.
That thought, that Isabel might have died without ever knowing her baby was tucked into the incubator, was the one that drew out my tears. One moment, I was numb and empty, and the next, tears streamed over my face, silent and painful. I could hardly breathe. After a moment, Rena snaked her hand around my shoulder and drew me into her breast, and we stayed like that for a long time, weeping in the space station’s false light.
• • •
We did not stay long aboard the space station. I suspect the stationeers didn’t want us there—and who could blame them when we’d brought a planetside disease into their pristine filtered air? Of course, no one else got sick. No one in the family, and none of the stationeers, either.
And so we went slinking back to Star’s End. All of us except for Dad and Dr. Tristany and the new baby. And Isabel. They would fly down on a specialized shuttle in a few days’ time. Let the rest of us go first. I didn’t know what we’d find when we returned, and during the shuttle ride back to the surface—no one speaking, the twins knocked out with a sleeping pill—I imagined a million nightmares. The gardens trampled and burned, the house gutted. People dead. Of flu, of violence. Whenever I started to drift off to sleep, I heard the gunshots in the distance and the screams of the villagers and I was jarred back awake.
But the estate was fine. We rode in a normal car, along normal roads, back home, and there were no signs of destruction along the way. The palm trees still lined the drive, the gardens still flourished in the bright sunlight.
It was as if we had just been away on vacation.
The next day, I learned that three more people in the household had gotten sick, staff who had had to stay behind while we fled. Beata, one of the cleaning girls, had died immediately, as Isabel had, but the other two had lain in their beds for a long time, dying slowly and painfully. I didn’t want to think about it.
The message on my lightbox the night we fled had been from Laila, panicked and crying because her brother was showing symptoms. I contacted her right away. The projection shivered in the empty air as I waited for it to connect. “Please answer,” I whispered, my heart pounding hard in my chest. “Please. Please—”
And then her face appeared. Her skin was wan and pale, her hair greasy and tangled. She blinked at me.
“Esme?” she said, and lines appeared in her brow.
“You’re alive,” I gasped. “You’re okay.”
“I’m not okay.” She stared at me through the holo.
My whole body went numb. Blood rushed in my ears.
“Orlando is dead.”
The air whooshed out of me. Orlando. Her little brother. I’d only ever seen him as a blur in the background of her holo, only ever heard him shrieking and laughing as she tried to bat him away.
“Oh, Laila,” I said. “Oh God, I’m so sorry—”
“I thought you were dead, too.” She trembled. There was a hardness in her expression I’d never seen before. “You never pinged me back. And then I heard rumors about an evacuation.”
My cheeks burned. “Dad made me go,” I mumbled. I could barely look at her. “Not that it mattered. Isabel died too.”
That hardness vanished then. Her shoulders slumped. She looked away from the recorder.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
She nodded and wiped at her eyes. “Yeah. Me too.” She looked back at me again, and then she began to talk. In a dull, flat voice, she told me everything she knew. There had been twenty-five deaths before the flu burned itself out. Paco was okay, last she heard, still working with the underground to get information to the people. I should contact him, tell him what I knew. Nothing, I wanted to tell her. I knew nothing. She didn’t say anything more about Orlando. I didn’t even know if he got a funeral.
We stared at each other through our transparent screens, and I felt a wall go between us that had nothing to do with technology.
• • •
They burned Isabel’s body and the body of Beata during two separate ceremonies. I was not invited to Beata’s funeral, but I went anyway. The flu had wreaked havoc on the village and then disappeared like a bandit, but Dad didn’t lift the quarantine until the day of Beata’s funeral, the morning after he arrived home, my new baby sister still cloistered away inside a portable incubator. Early that morning, I slipped past the soldiers and down to the village ceremony. It was my first breath of freedom in a long time. The air tasted clean, no poison at all.
The village cemetery was located on the edge of town away from the ocean, heading inland. It was surrounded by banyan trees with long, draping roots, and I climbed up into one of the trees and perched among the branches to watch the ceremony. It was strange to see the staff in white, the women with their faces covered by rectangles of white lace. Beata’s ashes were in a simple wooden urn, and they buried that as the priest uttered prayers and incantations no one really believed in anymore. I was afraid of being caught, so I slipped out of the tree as people began making speeches.
I wanted to find Orlando’s grave, to see which flowers his family had planted for him, but instead, I just went home.
Isabel’s funeral was the next day. I woke up early and put on the only white dress I owned, and then I covered my face with a white scarf the way the women had at Beata’s funeral. When I went downstairs, Rena was waiting on the patio with Adrienne and Daphne, who wore matching gauzy funeral dresses and looked as if they didn’t understand that the world had almost ended. The priest was there too, a different one from the other funeral. She stood at a respectful distance, gazing out at the trees, and held the urn containing Isabel’s ashes to her chest. The bodies of the dead were always entrusted to the priests.
Rena took me in, my dress and my lower-class veil, and didn’t say anything.
Dad arrived fifteen minutes later. It was the first time I’d seen him up close since he came back from the space station. I almost didn’t recognize him. He was pale and his face so drawn that he looked like a skeleton. His white linen suit hung awkwardly on his frame, and his hair was lank and greasy.
“Is this everyone?” the priest asked gently.
“Yes.” Dad scowled at her. “I didn’t want to throw a fucking party for my wife’s death.”
The priest nodded like she was used to these outbursts. I thought that the real reason Dad hadn’t arranged for a proper ceremony was because he didn’t want any of his colleagues to see him looking so broken-down—looking so defeated. Isabel had loved parties and she’d always had lots of friends. Before the flu, she was always inviting them to stay at Star’s End. It didn’t seem right that Dad was keeping them from mourning her.
The five of us trudged down to the family cemetery on the northern end of the property. It was set on the edge of the woods that stretched out for miles, far beyond the perimeters of the estate. A gateway to the forest.
No one was buried there. Isabel was to be the first. After all, Dad had built Star’s End when he made his fortune; it was hardly an ancestral home for any of us. And I imagined that when he set aside the land for the cemetery, he thought he would be the first to inhabit it. The life-extension treatments were new then; he couldn’t have imagined he’d live as long as he had now.
A hole had already been dug in the ground when we arrived, the flowers sitting beside it. Dad stared at it like it was an enemy. The priest intoned the prayers, the same as the ones from Beata’s funeral, and Rena stood in a patch of sunlight with one hand on each of the
twins’ shoulders. Leaves and flower blossoms fluttered down from the trees and spilled across the soft, fluttering grass. It was a beautiful day, and that hardly seemed appropriate.
“Would anyone like to speak of the dead?” the priest asked, a cue I recognized from dramas and Beata’s funeral yesterday, the only other funeral I’d ever attended. Silence settled over all of us. If Dad had given Isabel a proper funeral, with all her friends, we’d have been there until sunset, listening to stories about her life. But as it was we all just looked at each other, waiting. Then Daphne darted away from Rena, chasing a butterfly, and Rena bounded after her and grabbed her by the arm. Daphne glared at her, and Dad glared at Daphne, and the priest shifted her weight and looked down at her feet.
Part of me wanted to say something, and part of me was afraid I’d say something wrong. I’d known Isabel for almost four years. Half of that time, I’d resented her for taking my mother’s place, and the other half, I ignored her. Dad looked afraid to speak, like if he did, we’d see how vulnerable he was.
Then Rena straightened up, clutching Daphne’s hand tight. She looked washed out in her white dress. Faded. She said, “Isabel was a good woman and a good mother.” She punctuated this statement with a curt nod. Daphne pulled away and ran into a shower of falling leaves. This time, Rena didn’t try to stop her. Adrienne followed behind her, the leaves catching in her hair.
They didn’t know. They didn’t understand.
Tears pricked at my eyes. I wiped them away. Dad glanced at me, stone-faced, then turned to the priest and said, “Thank you. We can take it from here.”
The priest wasn’t intimidated by him. “I’ll wait for you at the house. If any of you need to talk.” She looked at Dad while she spoke. He looked away, and her shoulder hitched a little. Then she left the cemetery. No one moved, no one spoke. Her footsteps crackled over the grass and then faded away.
“Rena, you take care of the damn flowers.” He wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. “I have some business to attend to.”
Rena nodded. Dad glanced over at me, although I didn’t know why. His gaze seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.
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