The Widow

by Love, Aimee

  When the hot water hit me, I felt all the cares and troubles of my journey slip away down the drain. Showers aboard ship had been of the chemical variety, leaving me technically clean but far from satisfied. What’s worse, they were communal, with each gender sharing one large stall. Even in the middle of the night, you were forced to rush to keep from being interrupted. This was nirvana. I washed my hair and every part of my body, rinsed off, and then did it again just to be sure. I scrubbed my grungy onesie inside and out and then, because I was pretty sure they would kill me soon if I didn’t, I reached around and stripped the blisters of medication from the small of my back. It would take days for my body’s natural processes to re-establish themselves and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  The hot water clearly wasn’t endless. It turned tepid and then cool so I shut it off and wrung out my hair.

  There was no towel and my only clothing was soaking wet, but the onesie was designed to dry quickly and I decided to just climb back into bed until it had done so.

  I opened the door and froze. Three men were standing in the center of the room, talking. They turned as soon as they heard the door open and I just stood there like an idiot and let them stare.

  “We can come back later,” Julian finally said.

  His words unglued me and I walked across the room as casually as I could manage, ripped one of the coarse, homespun sheets off of the bed and wrapped it around myself as many times as it would go.

  “Damn,” Sebastian muttered in mocking disappointment.

  I shot him a look of pure venom.

  My attention was caught by the man who stood between them. He was new, which was interesting, but there was something in his look that would have caught my eye even in a crowd. Julian looked slightly ashamed at having stared, Sebastian looked openly appraising, and the new man? His expression said indifferent, but his eyes said something else. His eyes said ‘hungry’.

  “I’m Titus,” he said, taking a step toward me and offering me his hand. “I must say it’s a great pleasure to finally meet you. When I first gave the approval for you to be sent for, I had no idea of your being such a lovely addition to our little family.”

  Sent for? Well, if that phrase wasn’t designed to put in my place I didn’t know what was.

  I took his hand and smiled sweetly, deciding to be deferential for now, though it went entirely against my nature.

  He took my hand in both of his and shook it slowly, then raised it to his lips and kissed it.

  Oh so suave, I thought, loathing him instantly. If Sebastian was a thug, then here was his crime boss. Smooth, calculating, and much too important to get his own hands dirty.

  “I wanted to come and give you my personal assurance,” he told me, dropping my hand and stepping away. “Once this period of confinement is over, a place will be made for you here. I know you must be conscious that your acceptance among us was based solely on your husbands position as one of our most prominent citizens, but I will do my best to see that, although you’re an outsider, you aren’t slighted in any way.”

  That was what he said. What I heard was, “You aren’t one of us. You never will be. Staying in my good graces is the only thing that can save you from being left to die alone on the ice.”

  I wanted to spit in his face, or at least glower at him menacingly, but instead I looked up at him adoringly. When you grow up in a state orphanage, hiding your true feelings and manipulating people becomes second nature. In my case, adult life had done nothing to break me of the habit.

  “I cannot thank you enough, sir,” I said earnestly. “I’ll do everything I can to keep you from regretting your kindness.”

  He preened. Julian looked a touch jealous, but gave me a small nod of approval. I was glad they were both so focussed on me because beside them, Sebastian was turning bright red from the effort of not breaking into laughter.

  “Excellent,” Titus said. “Give her anything she requires.” And with that, he turned and headed down the ladder without so much as a backward glance.

  Julian followed him down, but Sebastian stayed a moment, shaking his head and looking amused.

  “Anything I can get you?” He asked.

  “Breakfast,” I told him curtly. “And a chair.”

  “You can’t sit on the bed?” He asked.

  “I can call Titus back and ask him for one if it’s too much trouble for you,” I said, putting my hands on my hips and cocking my head to one side. The motion made my sheet slip a scandalous inch and I had to clutch at it to keep from giving him another show.

  He chuckled.

  “A chair it is,” he agreed easily. “And here I thought you weren’t going to fit in.”

  I wasn’t sure quite what he meant, but I knew he didn’t intend the statement as a compliment.

  Quince brought my breakfast a little later, scrambling up the ladder one handed like a monkey. He set the bowl down on the floor by the bed and then went back to the hatch and pulled up a chair. It was a flimsy plastic thing, very scuffed and worn, but I thanked him profusely before he left. I hadn’t intended to sit on it anyway.

  I sat cross legged on the floor and drank the soup down. It was much too salty and thick with overcooked lentils, but I hadn’t eaten in I knew not how long and it tasted delicious to me. I finished every drop and licked the rough clay bowl clean before putting it down.

  Suddenly, looking around the near empty room, the full weight of my confinement settled over me. What was I supposed to do with myself all day? I decided to put the chair to its intended use.

  Pulling it over to the side of my little box of a bathroom, I placed its back firmly against the wall and stood up on it. Grabbing the lip of the bathroom ceiling, I heaved myself up and examined my perch. I’d expected it to be filthy, caked with hundreds of years of dust and cobwebs, but it was spotless. Either the people who cleaned it were much more thorough than I would have been in their place, or the lack of insects and dirt on the planet kept it naturally sparkling. Either way, I was relieved, since I had nothing to clean it with myself.

  Short as I am, I couldn’t stand. There was only about four feet of clearance between the top of the bathroom and the main room’s ceiling, but I could sit in relative comfort and at just the right height to look out of one of the small, round windows that ringed my room.

  I’m not sure what I’d expected, other than snow and ice, but what I saw took my breath away. The storm had completely cleared and far from the abandoned derelict I’d imagined when I saw it the night before, the original colony was spread out below me, bustling with activity.

  Some of the buildings were easy to identify. There were a dozen huge greenhouses covered in thick, translucent inflatable bubbles to protect them from the weather. I could see figures moving around inside, tending the plants, but they were too far away to discern any details.

  The manufacturing plant was also easy to spot by its bulk. Steam billowing from a stack on its roof told me it was still functional, but I couldn’t see inside to know what they were making or what they might be using for power. The Colonial Board listed, among other things, a power satellite as part of the original shipment here. It also said that that satellite hadn’t been functional in a very, very long time.

  These people didn’t have the ability to achieve orbit, let alone fix a complicated satellite, and if there had been any kind of backup, surely it would have been mentioned. I puzzled over it for a few minutes, wondering if they had found some way of generating power from the tides, until I was distracted by a clutch of children engaged in a fierce snowball fight.

  It was hard to track who was on which team, as they were all dressed the same, but I rooted for the ones defending a makeshift fort and the morning passed quickly away.

  Someone coughed, startling me. I looked down into my room and saw Sebastian standing
there with a bowl.

  “Lunch?” He asked, looking grim.

  I hopped down sheepishly, aware that I was in trouble but not really understanding why. It wasn’t as if I was going to catch any germs just by watching, and nobody had told me not to climb onto the bathroom ceiling and look out the windows.

  He handed me the bowl and grabbed the chair from against the wall. Walking over to the hatch, he looked down to make sure no one was standing below and then dropped the chair through.

  “Why?” I asked, ashamed at how petulant I sounded.

  “Because the people out there might not enjoy the sight of you sitting on your ass while they struggle to put food in your precious little mouth,” he told me.

  “I wasn’t watching the workers anyway,” I said defensively. “I was watching the snowball fight.”

  He sighed.

  “Quince!” He barked down the hatch. “Go wake up Marcus and tell him his pupils have escaped again.”

  I heard the door downstairs slam as Quince hurried out. I hoped the kids didn’t find out who’d turned them in. I certainly didn’t need a passel of tiny enemies bent on revenge.

  “Anyway,” I told him. “They know I’m quarantined. It’s not as if I wouldn’t help if you’d let me.”

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “A noble sentiment I’m sure,” he said snidely, “but you’re missing the point. They don’t know you’re quarantined. They don’t even know you exist and there’s a good chance they‘d be mad as hell if they did, so if you could keep your face out of the window, that’d be great.”

  “They don’t know I’m here?” I asked, amazed. I would have thought that after two hundred and fifty years of isolation, an outsider would be welcome. Didn’t they wonder what had been going on out there all this time? Weren’t they curious about advances in science and technology? Politics? Sports? Anything?

  Only, of course, they probably already knew more than I could tell them. It was stupid of me to continue to think of them as isolated. Although I had no idea how they’d done it, they’d made contact with the outside. That much was evident from my presence. Contacts had to have been made, black market trades of humanitarian supplies for credits, credit storage, a whole long chain of people to arrange my passage.

  “Titus didn’t see fit to tell anyone until he sent us out onto the ice to fetch you,” he informed me, breaking my train of thought.

  At least I now had a reason for them to keep me circling out on the ice when I’d first arrived. I’d been right, they had been waiting. Waiting for the storm to drive everyone inside and cover my arrival. “My husband knew,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “And look what happened to him.”

  I wasn’t about to be cowed. As soon as he was gone I slammed the hatch shut, went over to the bed, and dragged and pushed it until the entrance was covered. Getting up onto the bathroom ceiling was considerably more difficult without the chair, but nothing I couldn’t manage. I found that the bathroom door’s handle made a perfectly acceptable foothold.

  Once up, I settled in at the window, this time with more of a sense of purpose. Not wanting me to be seen was an obvious lie. Even from the inside, I could see that the windows were frosted with a reflective coating. No one outside could possibly see me. That could only mean that there was something outside they didn’t want me to see.

  I pressed the bone behind my left ear with my middle finger, turning on my implants. If I was going to get in trouble for spying, I might as well make it worthwhile. And he thought my watch was a big deal. Feh.

  I played with the settings until the magnification was perfect and the people hurrying from one warm building to the next, previously the size of my finger, were now as big as life. I scanned every building, every person, uncertain what I was looking for but sure I’d know it when I saw it and determined not to give up until I did.

  Dinner was announced by a thud and a loud string of cursing. I switched off my implant and dropped down.

  “Did you need something?” I called down.

  “Yes,” Sebastian yelled up. “I need you to Open the fucking hatch!”

  I smiled.

  “Sure,” I said. “One sec.”

  I pushed the bed over a few feet and lifted up the hatch.

  “Dinner time already?” I asked sweetly.

  He threw the bowl up, splashing soup all over me. Chunks of potato and a grayish meat clung to my face and hair, but I didn’t care.

  He pulled himself up the ladder and loomed over to me, furious.

  “What do you think would happen if it had been Julian or Titus trying to get up here?” He shouted at me, inches from my face.

  “I think I’d let them up and explain sweetly that I didn’t like the idea of coming out of the shower naked to find a group of strange men waiting for me. Since someone abandoned my luggage out on the ice, I don’t have anything to put on while my single piece of clothing dries. I’m sure they’d understand.”

  He was clearly still fuming inside, but couldn’t think of anything to contradict my innocent logic.

  “Sorry about the mess,” he said, though he clearly wasn’t.

  “That’s okay,” I told him. “I was looking forward to another shower before bed anyway.”

  “Enjoy it,” he said with a sudden and extremely unsettling smile.

  After he’d left and I’d replaced the bed over the hatch, I found out why. I wrapped myself in my sheet, pushed the bed aside, opened the hatch and stuck my head down into the lower room.

  Quince was absent but Sebastian was laying on one of the beds, his arms crossed behind his head as if he’d been expecting me.

  “Problem?” He asked, grinning.

  “There’s no hot water,” I told him, though I was sure he already knew that.

  “Yeah,” he said with mock regret. “I probably should have warned you. The pump that brings the hot water up here only runs every three days and I think you might have emptied the tank this morning.”

  I sighed.

  “When will it be full again?”

  He shrugged elaborately.

  “I think it was filled the day we got back so…”

  Two more days.

  As I took my frigid shower, I comforted myself with the knowledge that he’d left the clay bowl on my floor and if I broke it into shards and sharpened one I might be able to creep down in the dead of night and slit his throat.

  The next morning, when I moved the bed aside so Quince could bring me yet another bowl of soup, Sebastian followed on his heals, tools in hand. He closed the hatch, sat on the floor beside it, and began to unscrew the hinges with painfully slow, angry twists of his screwdriver.

  When he was done, he pulled off the hatch and turned it sideways, dropping it down into the room below.

  I sat on the bed drinking my soup, squash this time, and pretended to ignore him.

  He stood up and came over, looming above me silently until I finally gave up and acknowledged him.

  “What?” I snapped.

  “Move,” he ordered.

  I got up and walked into the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. I sat on the lid of the commode and listened while he disassembled the bed.

  I heard a crash and cracked the door, hoping to see him laying in a pool of blood, but he looked fine. He was lowering the beds slats one by one down the ladder. I heard another crash.

  He shook his head, seeming more amused than angry.

  “Switch with me,” he called down.

  Quince appeared from below and Sebastian went down.

  I pulled the door open wider and waited. As soon as he turned his back to me I darted out as quietly as I could, snatched the screwdriver from the pile of tools, and hurried back to the bathroom with it. I didn’t have a plan e
xactly, but I liked the idea of having something long and sharp in case our little war escalated further.

  I was trying to figure out where to hide it when the door was yanked open. Sebastian leaned against the frame casually, one hand extended for the tool.

  “What were you going to do with it?” He asked. “Unscrew a window and escape? You’d freeze in five minutes and even if you didn’t, there’s nowhere to go.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of stabbing you in the throat,” I told him, slapping it into his palm.

  He laughed. If only he realized how serious I was at that moment.

  I pushed him out and pulled the door closed, then turned on the water, directing the blast at the wall so I wouldn’t get wet. I wanted to be alone, and I knew even he wouldn’t dare come in if the shower was on. When my mind had settled, I turned it off and went out. The room was bare and depressing, with only the mattress left on the floor, but folded neatly at its foot was a pile of clothing. I picked it up and examined it. Loose trousers and a pull over top, obviously second hand. At least they were too small to be Sebastian’s. Quince must be responsible, I realized. He must have heard me telling Sebastian that I had nothing else to wear and brought me a set of his own.

  I flopped down on the bed, grateful that at least I seemed to have made a friend. My head hit the pillow and I felt a hard lump there. It seemed a change of clothes wasn’t the only thing my little benefactor had left me. Reaching under it, I fished around and pulled out the screwdriver. Stabbing Sebastian with it was probably a bad idea, but I knew it would come in handy just the same.

  Julian came that afternoon and found me lying on my mattress, staring up at the ceiling.

  He looked around at my barren room, aghast.