by Hugh Howey
But the barrel doesn’t waver. Not a fraction of an inch. I don’t contemplate this thing so much as marvel over the fact that I’m not contemplating it. I marvel that I’m so quick to choose the wrong side. This is my legacy, choosing the wrong side. Scarlett knows. She knew before she got here. It’s why she came. She knows I didn’t set off that bomb on Yata because I couldn’t kill all those unborn Ryph. How did she know? How does she know I never killed the Lord who gutted me? Why is she here if she knows I’m a traitor? A traitor with medals and a big fat lie.
The light over the airlock goes green. Holy hell, we’re taking on a bounty hunter. Maybe he’s as big an idiot as he seems. Or as bad a shot as he is a pilot. The inner door slides open. I crouch behind the ladder, for a little protection and to rest my forearm on a rung and steady my aim. Scarlett is coiled like a spring by the door. As soon as it opens, I see the animal. I can’t shoot. I yell instead for Scarlett to DO IT! and the blanket twirls in front of the warthen. There’s a mad shriek from the animal as it gets tangled up. Scarlett yells for me to shoot it, then something bounces into the room and there’s a blinding flash and a deafening roar.
I lose my footing and stumble back from the blast, covering my eyes, but it’s too late. I can’t see. I fire a shot toward what I hope is the door, and the blaster kicks in my hand. I hear the sizzle of a bolt striking steel. A miss. The world is a red haze with black splotches. A form appears in front of me. Someone grabbing me. Taking the blaster away. It’s over.
“Get down,” Scarlett says. She’s beside me. It’s her with the gun. My vision is clearing, and I hear a blaster go off—a bolt strikes the ladder near my hand, the metal sizzling against my palm. I dive to the side as another round hits nearby. I think Scarlett and Mitch are firing at each other. The animal’s muffled shrieks tell me it’s still tangled. When my vision clears, I see Scarlett holding her arm, smoke rising from a charred wound, Mitch using the airlock as cover and firing at her, and the animal getting free, shaking off the blanket, and crouching as it prepares to lunge.
“Fifty mil alive or dead,” O’Shea yells around the corner. “Your choice which.”
He sees me and narrows his eyes. He knows. Knows I’m on the wrong side. I can see the headline: Hero Betrays Federation; Abets Known Terrorist. Mitch raises his gun at me as the warthen uncoils with a growl and launches toward Scarlett.
I don’t know why I think to do this, what part of my subconscious is yelling at me to jump, but it’s some part that knows Mitch O’Shea is not a good pilot and probably spends no time away from gravity, that he has a weak stomach. I’ve only got one good ankle and one free arm, but it’s enough. I leap. The blaster round misses. I hit the kill switch taped to the ceiling. The panels in the floor are shut off. Gravity goes away all at once.
O’Shea lurches and retches as his organs spring up inside him. The warthen glances off Scarlett, and both go rebounding. The animal’s shriek turns into a confused whimper. O’Shea is turned around and cartwheeling in the airlock. I worry about him getting to his ship, where the grav panels are still on. Grabbing the ladder as I rebound from my jump, I brace my feet against one of the rungs and coil my legs. I’ve done this a thousand times down the weightless arm to the GWB, barely needing to course correct against the wall. I don’t have a gun, but I’m a bullet. Shoving both legs straight, I take off with terrible speed. O’Shea sees me. Tries to swing his blaster around, but it sends him spinning the other way. A bolt lances past me. I crash into him, knocking his air out. But I send us both toward his open ship and gravity.
Mitch goes through first and is sucked toward the deck, lands with a clatter and a clang. All that gear. I land on my shoulder and feel it pop back out. The world turns white for a moment, stars blooming and then receding in flashing streaks. Something rolls across the deck. Something round. O’Shea levels his blaster at me. I roll as far from him and the loose grenade as I can. There’s a blast, a flash of heat against my face, and I think for a second that I’ve been shot. But when I look his way, I see O’Shea is mangled. Killed by his own grenade knocked loose in the fall. His body reminds me of so many of my friends. The lifeless, confused gaze, staring off into the distance. They all look the same. Like there’s nothing to see there.
• 5 •
Back through the airlock, I embrace the weightlessness. I can’t imagine what Mitch felt when the gravity went off. Even when you’re used to it, when you feel it a dozen times a day, every time I go down to the GWB to get a buzz, there’s that odd sensation of every nerve in my body going from a downward tug to . . . nothing. Like cresting a hill in a speeding car. Or nosing down in atmo. The vertigo is intense if you’re not used to it. For poor Mitch O’Shea, it was his end.
The warthen is twisting and howling in the zero g. I see Scarlett bracing in the corner of the room, a few feet off the floor, taking aim with her blaster.
“Wait!” I shout.
The blanket is hovering above the deck. I gather it on my trajectory toward the ladder. There’s all kinds of debris floating about. My walk suit. Tools. The roll of tape. I send the blanket floating toward Scarlett, and it moves like a wraith through the air. She gathers it. “We just need to get it through the airlock,” I tell her.
She nods. Knows I need this. Knows me well enough. The blaster is holstered. I pull myself up the ladder with my free hand. The pain in my shoulder and ankle are distant, muffled like my hearing from the shock grenade and the explosive blast. The cat is whimpering. Doesn’t seem so ferocious now. Scarlett opens the blanket and kicks off toward the animal, manages to take it from the back. I push off and hit the switch on the ceiling, bracing myself for the fall. There’s a clang as the tools hit the deck, and then a series of oomphs as the three of us follow suit. If my ankle wasn’t broken before, it feels like it now.
Scarlett looks to have landed on the animal, which is lying still. Barely moving. She drags it in a bundle of fabric toward the airlock, wrestles it through. I limp over and key the door. Before it slides shut, I see the warthen extricate itself and dash off into the ship. The fight is out of her. Or maybe without a master to obey, she has no target. Either way, she’s trapped on the ship until I figure out what to do.
I sag against the wall, exhausted. Scarlett tries to catch me. My shoulder screams out. My foot won’t take any weight. Her hands are on me, her face so close, her lips so familiar, my mind still stunned and racing. She starts to say something, starts to thank me, to tell me she loves me, that we can end all wars, that we can make life, have children, move to sector one, be heroes together—
When her eyes widen in pain. And I see inside those windows into her soul, and I see that she is a good person, deep down, just as the life leaves her. Just before her body sags against mine, nothing left to animate it.
Stepping through airlock Charlie is the bounty hunter in black. She has a whisper gun in her hand. It’s pointed right at me. A woman I loved is in my arms, dead. I’m next. I know this with all the certainty of gravity planetside.
The bounty hunter walks to within a pace of me. I’m half pinned under Scarlett’s weight and half pinned by my injuries. I can’t move. I can’t even resist. I’ve wanted to be dead for so long that I open my arms to the concept, to the idea of not existing. I want it. I feel my entire being open up to the cosmos, wanting all of it to pour inside me, for the emptiness to fill me up, to burst me back into the atoms I’m made of, to be the tinsel and debris of that cargo, all scattered through space, unknowing and unfeeling.
The bounty hunter pulls the blaster from Scarlett’s holster and flings it across the module. She grabs Scarlett by the collar and pulls her off me. The woman in black is fiercely strong. She keeps the whisper gun aimed at my head as she drags Scarlett across the deck and through the airlock.
The door closes.
I never heard her come. I barely hear her leave. A light goes from green to red above the door. Scarlett is gone, and I haven’t been arrested, haven’t been killed, and I’m angry
as hell. Depressed and angry as hell and full of conviction. Conviction. The missing ingredient. The energy to do it. To finally do it. And nearby, an animal that wants to kill me. So it’s not my weak-ass hands refusing to pull the trigger.
I work my way shakily to my feet. Need to do this before I change my mind. Need to embrace my dark secret, the desire to be ended, the unwhisperable, or they’ll lock you away. I key open the airlock to O’Shea’s ship. “Come and get me!” I shout. The remains of the warthen’s owner are ten paces away. I stumble through the airlock, toward the ship, hoping to be eaten. The animal turns the corner, and I brace for a world of searing pain, of claw and tooth, of white-hot mercy, but I just feel it brush against me. I open my eyes, didn’t realize I’d closed them, and turn to see a tail whisk around the corner. I stumble back into the module, confused. The warthen has a food pack in its mouth. It goes to my walk suit, which is back to a heap on the floor, turns twice in a circle on it, and lies down, chewing on the pack, protein paste going everywhere.
All of this is sensed at a distance. I’m too focused on my dark secret. My new conviction. I hobble toward the other airlock, where Scarlett disappeared. I key open the outer door, step inside the lock, and shut the door behind me. In the tight confines, I think I can smell her. She just passed through here. Was alive moments ago. Now is dead and gone. Her hope has been wiped from the universe.
I wanted to tell her my dark secret. I was so close. More time together, and I would’ve confessed. I would’ve told her how I come here every night before I go to sleep, how I stand in one of these airlocks, how I close the door behind me, and how I think about the vacuum of space on the other side.
Every night, I do this.
Without fail.
There’s an emergency override code that’ll open this door even if there’s no atmo on the other side. It’s for going on space walks. We’re supposed to do one every day. I never have. I only come in here with my suit off. To breathe my last. To end the nightmare.
Leaning against the wall, I enter the first three digits of the override code.
My finger hovers over the fourth.
I’ve done this every day I’ve been here. Every single day. But this time I want it. I can’t go on.
Three numbers sit on the little screen, waiting.
I touch the fourth.
I touch it, but I can’t press it.
I never can.
I sag to the ground, sobbing and broken, hugging my knees.
Bad things come in threes—but then they stop.
And start all over again.
Table of Contents
• 1 •
• 2 •
• 3 •
• 4 •
• 5 •
• 5 •
