by Ann Aguirre
Of the two of us, I’d taken the more intensive interest in Leviathan physiology, an offshoot of my fascination with Nadim. So I called up the system that monitored his physical condition. It was basic, and the diagnostic did show me the location of the debris projectiles that had penetrated him, but it gave me no sense of scale.
“Can you find out more?” Bea asked.
“Not through the console.”
I’m doing this to help, I told myself as I sat down and closed my eyes, flattening my palms on the floor. That contact resonated between us, so the thrum of his energy trembled through me. Something sparked in my head, and the vibration passed between us in a feedback loop of theta waves like the tap of a tuning fork with each moment that I focused. Matching frequencies, he’d said. I quieted my mind, blocking out everything else.
Nadim, asleep, was a haunted house. I could sense him somewhere on the fringes of my awareness, a shimmering silvery light, but here, in his skin, everything was shadows.
And in the shadows, blackened wounds that bled smoke.
“He’s got two large injuries,” I heard myself say aloud, but it sounded like someone else’s voice. “One above us, on his dorsal side. It goes down through the skin and into muscles. The area’s exposed into space. He’s bleeding.”
“Bleeding?” Her voice seemed fainter, farther away as I mentally moved closer to the site of the wound. Splitting my consciousness like this, it was more than disorienting; my head hurt like back in the old days, though maybe that was an echo of Nadim’s pain too. Ghostly flickers of anguish crawled over my skin: side, sternum, ankles, shoulder, off and on like a water tap.
“It’s not as bad as I thought. I don’t think he can control his right side until those muscles heal and the tear closes up. But it’s mending on its own. Leviathan bodies can heal faster than ours.”
“And the other wound?”
“It’s not as large,” I said, “but . . .” My mind drifted, pulled by the shimmering afterimages of pain that still lit the nerves, and saw a foreign object lodged inside him. In the strange vision I had here, it looked like all spikes and angles, but I thought it was one of the jagged pieces of planetary debris.
Worse, it was stuck very close to a thick, throbbing membrane that served as filtration for his respiratory equivalent, according to the studies I’d been doing. I came out of my trance for a moment and accessed the data console again.
Leviathan didn’t have a single pumping mechanism for their blood, but they did have critical junctures. This was one of them. Damage to it would be very dangerous. Maybe fatal.
I had the eerie impression that the organ was moving. It sat within a large, empty space, but I could sense it steadily expanding to fill that space. If it shifted much farther, it would jam up against the sharp rocks that had never seen the softening effects of wind or water. And those edges would slice that membrane right open. Maybe, in time, softer tissue would form, pushing the foreign matter out, but it wasn’t happening yet, and it couldn’t happen fast enough. Not if we intended to try to fly Nadim out of here with any kind of precision.
We might kill him if we tried. Or even if we did nothing.
Dropping the connection left me weak and dizzy. I stammered my findings to Beatriz, shivering as if I’d crawled out of a cold river. She grabbed a blanket and put it around my trembling shoulders.
“Well. That was something they didn’t cover in the manual.”
“I . . . we can talk about it later. If we survive.”
Her mouth compressed. “This isn’t the time, but yeah. We’ll have words.”
I remembered how Nadim had kept me warm through the night and wondered just when he’d dropped off to sleep. Maybe our very closeness had lulled him into it. Guilt had an ugly rust-red color to it and a bitter taste on my tongue.
As I shivered, a warning flashed on the console: EMERGENCY INTERVENTION REQUIRED. Follow Leviathan care protocols set forth in Appendix A-17.
This time, I didn’t even need to reach for my H2 to understand my mission.
“We have to get that rock out of there,” I told her. “It’s below us, off to the left. I can find it, but . . .”
“But what?”
“It’s not one of the areas he’s let us go into before. Not fitted out for human habitation.” I struggled up to my feet. “I’m going to need a skinsuit.”
Bea didn’t argue about it; she ran and got one, and I stripped down and put it on. It melted onto me, gray and then swirling with colors, as if it wasn’t quite sure how to camouflage me. I settled the hood and mask on and felt a momentary panic as it molded to my face before starting to process air in a cool, constant flow.
“How are you going to get to it?” she asked me.
“The waste system,” I said. “It links up after the filters with natural venting, and then I can get from there into his circulatory system. I think I can fit through the waste tubes. But—” I didn’t like the idea, but I said it anyway. “I’m going to need the medical kit. I’ll have to cut into his blood vessels.” Quickly, I activated a holo of his full biosystem. Lines of light appeared, a complicated 3D maze that twisted and wrapped around itself, branched off into sections and groupings. Each blood vessel seemed large enough for a human to pass through. That didn’t mean it was safe. “I’ll get as close as I can to the site before I get into his bloodstream.”
If Nadim were awake, he would have been able to adjust the atmosphere inside himself, maybe even eject the rock fragment on his own.
But Nadim wasn’t awake, and he needed me to do this.
Beatriz stopped me as I picked up the portable med kit. I thought she wanted to talk strategy, but she grabbed me by the arms and looked me right in the eyes. “Zara, this is dangerous—”
“Better for me to go. I can—I can feel my way better than you can right now.”
“Because he’s connected to you,” she said. “In a way he isn’t to me.”
“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you, Bea.”
“I know. I can feel he does. But—not like he cares for you.”
I wanted to stop and tell her about the sensations from the time I first came on board, about the Leviathan DNA grafted into my own to stop my brain from destroying me. About the joy of it, and the terror, and everything. But I couldn’t. We were all going to die—all three of us—if we wasted time right now.
So I hugged her close, and she hugged me back, and I said, “I’m coming back, and when I do, I’ll open up on all counts. I swear.”
“You’d better.”
I flashed her a grin. “Come back?”
“And tell me everything,” she said. “I’m holding you to it.”
“Keep us alive until I get there.”
She stepped back and nodded, and I saw the Beatriz she’d become these past few days—calm, steady, relentlessly capable.
I wished I had her focus. All I had was nerve, and now, I was going to have to use it.
Med kit and H2 attached to my suit, I began the long, dirty crawl through the waste tunnels. We’d done a good job of keeping them clean, so it wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been, plus the skinsuit insulated me from the smells and tactile nastiness of it. I unlocked the filters, slipped through, and Beatriz, who’d followed in her own biohazard suit, replaced them with a whisper that I thought was a prayer.
That left me crawling alone in the dark through incredibly narrow tubing that flexed when I pushed at it. It was exhausting and slow; I had to keep fighting my own clumsiness and checking the map. I had no sense of direction here, and Nadim’s injuries echoed loud inside me. I had to close him out; his pain threatened to drain what little energy I had left.
It seemed to take forever before I reached a spot close to the damage. I took a laser scalpel from the med kit, turned it on, and made one quick, cauterizing cut to slice open the tube.
Red-edged pain shot through me, as if I’d taken the scalpel to myself, and I had to bite my lip not to yell; I didn’t
want to panic Beatriz, and answering questions would distract me. I could feel—even though I’d muted the connection—that the problem of the sharp, protruding rock so near Nadim’s fragile organ was growing more urgent, the damage more severe. No time to waste.
I slithered through the wound I’d inflicted. I’d intended to close it up with the same cauterizing laser, but there was nothing to stand on beneath, nothing to hold on to; coming out of the tube, there was just a long, sloping organic wall curving into the dark.
I had no choice. I let go, bounced, rolled, and landed in something thick, gooey, and—when I lifted my gloved hand to the light—silvery, with weird oily rainbows shimmering on the surface.
Nadim’s body suddenly shuddered, hard, but it didn’t feel like another impact; I didn’t sense anything hitting him or injuring him again. It was more like a reaction to me being here, where I wasn’t supposed to be. He had antibodies, the way humans did, and they’d detected me. Would the bond we’d made protect me? I couldn’t be sure.
“Nadim,” I said aloud. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can, I’m trying to help you, okay? I swear, what I’m doing is to make you better. So please, uh, don’t kill me. All right?”
I so badly wanted to hear him say, “Acceptable,” in the dry, amused tone he so often used to respond to my attempts at humor. Yet there was nothing but the echo of my voice through a vast, dark chamber, and the knowledge that he was depending on me.
I trudged on through the dark, trying not to step in the rivulets of silver again, and then quite suddenly, the floor dropped off and down another sharp slope—into a lake of the silver stuff. Well, a pond, anyway. How deep, I couldn’t tell.
I checked the H2 again on its wrist mount, then closed my eyes and tried to figure out where I was relative to the rock that needed to come out. As I opened them, I realized that the wall opposite me, shimmering pearl pink in the light attached to the side of my mask, was moving. Slowly expanding toward me, pushing the silvery liquid in front of it.
I was in the right place. This was the membrane I’d sensed, and somewhere under that liquid was that damn rock. If I didn’t move it, right now, it would slice through that wall like a laser scalpel, and . . .
Nadim would die. Then we’d be trapped aboard a drifting, dead ship, all systems down until there was nothing to breathe or the cold got us first. Three frozen corpses, drifting on into the dark.
Kicking off, I landed on my back and slid down the wall, straight into the silver fluid. I hit it with what I thought would have been a splash, but it was thicker and heavier than water, more like liquid mercury. I disappeared underneath the surface without a ripple.
For a second I panicked, because I was sure I was going to drown in Nadim’s blood, but the skinsuit, though it seemed to tighten hard around me, coped with the change. Air continued flowing, less than before, or maybe I was just breathing too fast. The liquid felt heavy. I wasn’t buoyant, like I’d have been in water; moving was a huge effort, and I couldn’t see a damn thing. The light on the side of my mask provided a dim, ghostly glow, but it didn’t even penetrate past my nose. If I wasn’t careful, I’d never figure out which way was up, much less where I needed to go.
Calm down, I told myself, and shut my eyes. I could visualize myself now as a weird shadow over the misty shape of Nadim’s insides. Ahead of me, maybe twenty meters away, I could see the denser, sharper shape of that rock.
The moving, expanding tissue came terrifyingly close to those cutting edges. I had to move, and I had to do it fast.
I pushed off, struggling against the thick, muffling liquid. One step, another, another. Then I reached out my hand and brushed something solid.
Something that cut cleanly through my skinsuit, and Nadim’s thick blood glided in. Cold. The cold quickly turned into a burning sensation, and I was afraid of exactly what this stuff would do to me, but there was no time to think. I was swimming in it and the debris was a hand’s breadth from cutting into a major circulatory junction. I wrapped both hands around it and heaved, hard.
It came unstuck from where it had embedded itself in his skin and muscle. Heavier than I’d expected, and yes, sharp, so sharp that I was bleeding as it sliced through skinsuit and skin alike, and the crippling, searing cold of Nadim’s blood made me shriek wordlessly, then pant in agony. The debris had blown in through his thick outer skin to lodge here, and I could feel the wound track still grooved in the flesh near me. I pushed through the blood, weight clutched in both hands. When I reached the wound track where it had entered, I realized his body had already started healing and sealing up the hole.
The wound was too small to push the fragment back out now.
I couldn’t feel my fingers, and trying to find the laser scalpel was hard enough. But then turning it on and using it to slice open a wider hole would be far worse.
I braced myself, took in a deep breath, and ignited the laser. Fast, do it fast, I thought. Then the laser made contact with Nadim’s healing flesh, and the pain roared and dragged me under, a red tsunami of anguish that made me scream and shake and keep cutting. Mercy wasn’t an option now; the only way through this for either one of us was to bear it, scream through it, try to stay conscious under the numbing impact of the knowledge of the pain I was causing him.
I shut the laser off when I had a rough hole hacked all the way through to the thin membrane that covered the outside of Nadim’s body.
I shoved the rock into it, still screaming. My throat felt raw, and I tasted metal. I was hurting myself, but I didn’t care, because at least we were hurting together.
The rock’s razor edges sliced the membrane, and it tumbled through, even as the vacuum of space sucked a bright spray of silvery blood after it—with some red human droplets that froze instantly—out into the black. Ruby jewels, frosting with ice crystals, mingling with still-liquid Leviathan blood out here in the ultimate wilderness. Nadim shuddered, and the pain flashed in such a spike that I lost the ability to scream at all.
Vacuum pulled at me, but the agony drove a wave through the liquid at staggering speed. I slipped, and the slick silvery lake of blood flowed over me in a disorienting flood.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Breaking Out
I DIDN’T KNOW where I was. I was down, floating, lost . . . and then, as the pain gradually began to recede, I heard someone talking to me. Just a voice at first, with no meaning.
Then Beatriz was saying in my ear, “Zara, get up, you have to try! Come on! I can see where you are, and you need to get up and out of there! Please!”
I fumbled around. There was no sense of up or down anymore, and I was floating blind . . . but then my shoulder brushed something. It was soft, and yielding, but it was also strong.
And it pushed me forward.
It took me a few seconds to get my brain operating again and to remember the pink membrane that had been moving toward the sharp edges of the debris. It was shoving me, and now, I felt a solid surface under my feet. I put my back against the membrane and let it push me on. The surface beneath my feet rose sharply in a curve, and I scrambled up, flailing for purchase. If I wasn’t careful, it would crush me against the slope. I’d slid down this wall. Now, half-enveloped by Nadim’s expanding tissue, I fought my way back up again.
As I came up out of the blood and rolled onto the flatter surface, I realized I still couldn’t feel my hands. They didn’t hurt anymore, at least.
Actually it felt like they didn’t exist.
“Bea?” I gasped. “Bea?”
“I’m here! Zara, you did it, you got it out. He’s going to be okay. But you need to come back now. You have to.”
“I can’t feel my hands.” My voice was shaking. I didn’t want to look at what was happening to me. What had already happened to me.
“We can fix that when you get back,” she said, and her voice was calm, clear, just what I needed. “I’m going to guide you, all right? Can you see your H2?”
I clumsily lifted my
left arm and tried to look. The screen was gummed with silver blood. I tried wiping it off, but it only smeared. “No,” I said. I was so tired. I just wanted to sit down and rest. “I can’t. I’m going to lie down now.”
“Don’t you dare!” Bea’s voice thundered at me, and I remembered all the authority figures who’d ever yelled at me. Underneath all of that was my father’s voice. I wanted to lie down just to spite them . . . and then the tone changed. “Zara, please. He needs you. I need you. If you quit now, you’re not coming back, and you belong here. With me. With us.”
That sounded like someone else now. It sounded like all the people who’d cared. Who’d loved me, despite all my cracks and flaws. My mother. My sister. Even Derry, sometimes.
It reminded me of Nadim too. And reminded me of just who Bea was, the angel who could sing stars out of the sky. I could hear music in her.
So I sucked in a shaking breath and said, “Help me.”
“Okay, you can’t climb back up. I want you to go straight ahead . . . now a little left . . . a little more . . . Stop. Reach up, there should be a kind of ledge there. Pull yourself up.”
“I can’t. I can’t feel my hands.”
“You can.”
Bea’s certainty made me reach up, and I did feel . . . something. A distant pressure, maybe. My body remembered things my mind didn’t. I went up. Then I kept going, walking blind, turning and twisting, an exhausted stumble into silence where Nadim should have been. At least he wasn’t hurting anymore. But what did that mean? If he wasn’t hurting . . . Panic chewed at the corners of my mind; I didn’t let it take root.
I’m not supposed to be here. I hope I’m not contaminating him with my blood.
“Okay,” Bea said. I could hear a change in her voice. Hope, and something else too. “You need to listen to me now, Zara. Don’t move, okay?”
