by Darcy Coates
“I’m sure it would have.”
Something about how she said that—almost with a hint of arrogance—made Jen pause. Carly was watching her through half-closed lids, a smirk hovering around her mouth.
“You don’t have so much as a scratch on you.”
“I was lucky, wasn’t I?”
“The air isn’t breathable.”
“Are you sure about that? I swallowed it. It was fine.”
“So you think the scientists lied to us when they said it was toxic?”
“Yes.” Another slow, languid blink followed.
Jen pursed her lips. She had always gotten along reasonably well with Carly, but at that moment, she would have been glad to never see the other woman again. “I’m going to get some sleep, too.”
“Do you know why I was condemned to this hellscape?” Carly asked, and Jen froze halfway out of her chair. Carly’s smile widened, but it wasn’t a pleasant expression. “I know you’ve seen my work history. I’m beyond overqualified for a place like this. You probably think I did something really bad to end up here, don’t you?”
Now it was Jen’s turn to play the silence game.
“You’d be right.” Carly was speaking so quietly that Jen had difficulty hearing her. “Before this, I was in charge of a mineral processing plant. Big place, dozens of people under me. There was this one conveyer belt that was designed to crush rocks into gravel, and I took a walkway above it every morning on the way to my office.”
She glanced to the side, and her eyes went hazy as she relived the memory. “One man there—I don’t remember his name; Jon or James or something—tried to talk to me every morning about this idea he had. A way to streamline the plant. He’d follow me from the front door until I locked myself in my office. Tried to corral me every lunchtime, too. His plans were flawed and wouldn’t have worked in a million years, but no matter how often I told him that, he’d keep on, like a fly you can’t catch, chasing me every morning. And eventually, I couldn’t stand it any longer.”
Jen swore under her breath, and Carly smiled, her dark eyes flicking back to watch her companion’s face with relish. “You can guess what happened, can’t you? He was still alive when he hit the conveyer belt, but the crushers took care of that pretty quickly. He painted the floor red.” She laughed and licked her lips. “I told them he slipped. No one saw me push him, so they couldn’t accuse me, but they guessed. And they punished me in the most effective way they could: they sent me here.”
“Enough,” Jen said. She was shaking.
Carly had never spoken like that before. She was sometimes brash, rude or reckless, but Jen had never seen such maliciousness come from her.
“Just thought you’d like to know,” Carly said sweetly, before closing her eyes and pretending to sleep.
Jen turned on her heel and marched towards the bedroom. Her head was throbbing from stress and frustration. I need some time-out. A chance to centre myself, away from Carly.
The bedroom was dark and cool. She paused in the doorway, listening to Alessicka’s breathing from the bed at the back of the room, using the sound to reassure herself. She didn’t bother changing—she didn’t expect to sleep more than a few hours—so she crawled into her bed fully clothed.
Jen didn’t fall asleep for a long time. Images of the black pulsing creature kept drifting across her closed eyelids. She saw Carly, too bold for her own good, snatched into the air. Then the tendrils latched onto and tore off her faulty helmet. Jen heard her scream. She was running towards her, but the faster she tried to move, the less progress she seemed to make. A tendril forced itself into Carly’s mouth; she struggled against it then bit it, and ink-like blood burst from it to coat her face.
A loud bang pulled Jen out of the nightmare, and she sat up in bed, drawing in thick, ragged breaths. Sweat coated her body as though she’d just finished running a marathon, and her blanket had fallen to the floor. As she sat still, trying to rein in her thundering heart, she realised something was wrong: she couldn’t hear Alessicka’s breathing anymore.
A second bang and a drawn-out scraping noise came from the main part of building. Jen launched herself to her feet. Alessicka’s bed was empty, the sheets pushed neatly back into place. Jen ran for the hallway.
“Please no,” she muttered as she ran. “Please don’t be in there. Don’t be in there. Please.”
The noise had quieted; the rooms were so still that she could have been the only living person in Station 331 as she rounded the corner and opened the door to the control room.
The airlock door was open, and Alessicka was inside, slumped on the ground with her back to Jen, while Carly knelt in front of her. Jen froze as Carly looked up, a wide, unnatural smile stretched across her face. Their gazes met for a second before Carly’s eyes flicked to the open door.
They moved at the same time. Carly dashed towards freedom, and Jen lunged for the control panel. Jen was a second faster; her hand hit the flashing red button, and the airlock doors slid closed just in time for Carly to hit them.
“Damn it, Jen!” she yelled.
Jen pulled back from the panel, feeling terror and nausea rush through her. Alessicka sat crumpled on the ground, looking like a doll that had been propped up into an imitation of a sitting pose.
“What did you do to her?” Jen called. Her mind raced, fighting to think of a way to get the girl out, desperately hoping she wasn’t too late.
“She’s fiiiiine, Jen,” Carly said. She’d reverted to a complacent drawl as she paced back into view. “Aren’t you, Lessi?”
As if on cue, Alessicka’s body jerked. Slowly, like a puppet being pulled by strings, she began to twitch herself upright. It looked so unnatural that Jen wanted to scream.
“Lessi?” Jen asked as the girl rotated to face the window.
Allesicka’s face was slack, and her eyes were blank as she stared at a space somewhere behind Jen’s shoulder. Then she blinked, and her whole body shuddered. Her hands twitched up, her neck straightened, her back aligned itself, and a look of awareness returned to her face.
“Jen!” She clasped her hands in front of her chest, blinking quickly and giving the worried look she wore whenever she thought she was in trouble. “I’m sorry, Jen. I opened the door to give her some food, and we sat down to talk. I must have fallen asleep, and—did you lock the doors?”
“Yes,” Jen’s lips moved to say, but no noise escaped her.
Alessicka looked normal again. Completely normal. Yet Jen couldn’t erase the memory of her body, crumpled on the ground, as if the life had been sucked out of her…
“You can let me out now,” Alessicka said, hurrying to the plexiglass window and giving Jen a sweet, apologetic smile as she pressed her hand to it. “I’m really sorry. I know I should have asked you before going in, but she said she was hungry, and… I’m so sorry. Please let me out.”
“No.” Jen wanted to cry as she said the words. “You’re in quarantine now, too.”
Something flashed over Alessicka’s face—anger or maybe resentment—and was covered over so quickly that Jen doubted she’d seen anything. “Oh, Jen,” the girl said, her voice a tremulous whisper, “please don’t be mad at me. I was just trying to do the right thing.”
Jen turned away from the console so Alessicka wouldn’t see the how badly her words had cut.
On the day Alessicka had arrived on Station 331 to complete their three-woman team, Jen had realised the girl was too gentle and too young for a job that would entail years of isolation. As Alessicka examined the console station she would be in charge of, Jen had watched the woman’s hands flutter above the buttons with the anxious motions of someone who’d never been outside a simulation room before. She’d made up her mind to watch over her newest ward carefully. She’d told herself she could shelter her, protect her, and guide her until her contract was up. Then she could usher her into an easier, more enjoyable job on Perros. She’d failed. Whatever had happened to Carly had taken over Alessicka, and J
en hadn’t been able to stop it.
“Jen?” Alessicka called, and she sounded so much like herself that it was agony for Jen to leave the doors closed. “I’m sorry, Jen. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Jen grimaced then turned back to the window. Alessicka stared back, her smile apologetic, her doe eyes begging for forgiveness. Carly was near the back of the room, standing beside the shelves holding the equipment. She kept her eyes averted, seemingly trying to blend into the background, almost as though she hoped Jen would forget she was there.
Jen couldn’t let Alessicka out… but she didn’t want to leave her alone, either. She sat in front of the console, ignoring the girl’s curious gaze, and turned off the intercom. If she couldn’t hear her, she wouldn’t be so tempted.
As soon as she saw Jen wasn’t going to open the doors, Alessicka turned away and joined Carly near the back of the room. They sat together, Carly’s arm around her friend’s shoulders, in the same pose Jen had once sat with Alessicka when she’d been crying from homesickness. Jen ignored them.
The console recorded and stored audio for up to forty-eight hours. Normally, it was Alessicka’s job to retrieve it if they needed to check any of their patrol data, but Jen knew enough about the machine to fumble her way through it. She rewound it to a point just a few minutes before the door had been opened, and pressed play.
“Hi, Lessi,” Carly’s tinny voice said. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“No.”
“Neither could I.”
A few minutes of silence was punctuated by rustling noises. Jen imagined Alessicka sitting in front of the desk and Carly moving towards the window.
“Lessi, I can trust you, can’t I?”
“Yeah, of course you can.”
She heard Carly sigh. “There’s something wrong with Jen.”
“Wha… in what way?”
“The creature didn’t attack me, Lessi. It snagged my ankle and tripped me over, but it wasn’t dangerous. It was Jen who pulled my helmet off.”
Alessicka was silent.
“I didn’t want to say anything in front of her, in case it panicked her and she tried to hurt you, too… but I think she wanted me to die out there. She pulled the faulty helmet off and left me to suffocate. I guess she thought the plant would be a very convenient explanation.”
There was a thin sound; Jen thought it must be Alessicka trying not to cry.
“I’m so sorry, Lessi.” Carly’s voice was low and anxious. “I don’t know what to do. She’s locked me in here to divide us. Quarantine is just an excuse. Why would I need quarantining, anyway? I’m not hurt, and I’m not sick.”
Alessicka mumbled something Jen couldn’t make out.
“No. The creature was harmless. It was Jen all along. She doesn’t want me working here. She wanted to get rid of me. I can prove it to you; she left a bruise on my neck—come in, and I’ll show you.”
Alessicka mumbled again. It was a wonder Carly had been able to understand her.
“No, it’s okay. Just come in, and I’ll show you. Then we can figure out what to do. We’ll find a way to help Jen, I promise, but we’ll need to work together. We’ll need to be able to trust each other. You do trust me, don’t you, Lessi?”
The squeak of a chair being vacated was followed by the slick whoosh of doors being opened, silence for a moment, then the loud bang that had broken through Jen’s sleep. She heard a whimper, followed by another bang and a dragging sound. Then footsteps—her footsteps—raced into the console room.
Jen turned off the recording. She’d been so engrossed in it that she hadn’t noticed Alessicka and Carly had moved. They stood in front of the window, equally calm faces holding tranquil eyes that stared down at her. Carly raised her hand and rapped on the plexiglass. Knowing what she wanted, Jen turned on the intercom with trembling fingers.
“You don’t remember, do you, Jen?” Carly asked.
“What?” her mouth was dry. Their stares were almost hypnotic.
“You don’t remember attacking me.”
“Because I didn’t! The plant—”
“The plant was harmless. It tangled around my legs, and while I was trying to pull myself free, you grabbed me from behind. I screamed, and you pulled my helmet off, disconnecting the audio so I couldn’t get any word back to Lessi.”
“No!” Jen shouted, launching herself out of the chair to face them. “That’s a lie!”
“You’ve been acting strange for weeks,” Alessicka murmured. “I confronted you about it yesterday. Don’t you remember? You’ve been mumbling in your sleep and refusing to talk to us.”
“That’s… not true,” Jen stammered.
Alessicka’s gaze held her, mesmerising her.
“It is true,” Carly continued. “We’ve been so worried about you, Jen. It’s this place. This station. It’s too small and too remote for someone as strong as you. You’ve been gradually losing your mind for months.”
“No…”
“Yes,” Alessicka said. “And you finally snapped yesterday. You knew how wrong it was, how terrible what you were doing was, so your mind built a fantasy. A fantasy about a monster that tried to kill Carly… but it was you all along.”
Jen pressed a hand to her cheek and found it was wet. Her body was shivering. They were lying to her, she knew, trying to chip away at her resolve and make her doubt herself.
“Do you remember what you did to be sent to this station?” Carly asked. Her lids were half-closed, and her voice was a low, comforting murmur. “Do you remember?”
“I—I talked back to a superior—”
“No, Jen, you tried to strangle your superior. You always protested your innocence. Your mind washed it over. You couldn’t stand to think of yourself as a killer.”
“No—no—”
“What will the relief unit from Perros think when they arrive and find you’ve locked both of your team members in a room with no food or water?”
“But I haven’t…” Jen stammered. “We gave you food.”
Carly waved her hand at the room. “No you didn’t. It’s just your mind telling you that you did.”
Jen stared at the ground, the shelves, and the boxes, trying to find the packets of food and bottles of water she’d passed through the door. We did give Carly food, didn’t we?
“You see?” Carly said, her voice a sweet song in Jen’s ears, her eyes drawing the other woman back to drown in them. “You can’t trust your mind. But you can trust us. We want to help you, Jen. Let us out before the relief team arrives, and we can protect you, look after you… make sure no one hurts you.”
“Let us help,” Alessicka whispered. She was standing so close to the glass that her breath fogged it. “We want to help you.”
“It’s okay, Jen. Just open the doors.”
“Open them, Jen.”
“It’s okay.”
“You can trust us.”
Jen found her hand hovering over the red button that would unseal the airlock. Her body was shaking, and her head was foggy. Tears dripped off her chin as she stared at her teammates, the two people she’d relied on, cared for, and watched over for nearly three years. They smiled at her so warmly and so kindly that she knew denying them would be insanity.
Her hand pressed the button. The doors drew open with a gentle whoosh, and it felt good to give in, to stop resisting, and to stop fighting her friends. That’s what they were—friends. They walked through the doorway, came to her with open arms, and embraced her. The women held her still as she cried, stroked her hair, and told her she’d done the right thing.
Then Jen looked at Alessicka and saw a hairline fracture running down from her scalp, between her eyes, down her nose, and over her lips, chin, and neck before disappearing behind her shirt’s collar. Jen frowned at it, confused and mesmerised. It began to part, splitting open, peeling the girl’s smiling face back to show the pulsing, black mass inside her. Jen tried to pull away, but they held her firmly. She looked at Carly and saw she�
�d mimicked her partner; her skin was coiling back in on itself as the black tendrils reached out of their shell, tasting the air, and stretching towards Jen’s face…
Jen stood in front of her station, suited up to protect against the toxic air, as she watched the ship from Perros land. It kicked up huge clouds of red soil as it touched down, and even though she was wearing a helmet, she raised her arm reflexively to shield her face.
The ship’s doors opened, and three suited figures jumped out. Jen waved them over and led them into the airlock.
As soon as breathable oxygen had replaced the toxic air, they unlocked their suits. “Thanks so much for coming,” Jen said as soon as her helmet was off.
“That’s our job,” the team’s leader, a tall and wiry man, said. “What’s the problem?”
Jen watched as they unsuited. Their team was comprised of two men and a woman; they all looked tough and capable—exactly what she needed. “Long story,” she said as they hung up their suits, “but it’s been pretty crazy down here. Come in, and I’ll explain everything.”
The doors slid open, and they entered the main part of the station. Jen turned to smile at the assistance team as Alessicka and Carly, as quiet as shadows, appeared behind them. Jen didn’t need to give any signal; they all knew what needed to be done.
“Have you ever heard of bodysnatchers?” she asked, beaming at the three newest additions to their small colony as her sisters shed their human skins.
Author’s Note
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