by Alex Thomson
We walk the short journey through the tunnels, from my cabin to theirs. Brenda offers me her hand, and my fingers slot into hers. I can’t help but be reminded of walking these tunnels with Bess, as we trundled behind Messrs Lee and Reynolds, hunting for Lily.
I dart a glance at Brenda’s silky brown hair, and reassess my comparison of the Bees with the woman in the photograph. She was beautiful, true, but it was a beauty that looked as if it’d been designed by a computer. The Bees (who, to some extent, were designed by computer), have a more real, raw, imperfect—yes, Hell-ish—beauty. I do love little ironies like that: they make life worthwhile.
Brenda pushes open the door of her cabin, and in we go. I haven’t been in here for a while. Hasn’t changed since last time, but what do you expect? Bess and Beatrice are sitting on their bunks, cross-legged. Brenda sits down with me, and squeezes my hand. “Here we are, then,” she says. “Just us girls together.”
I try to smile back at her. The Bees always make me feel clumsy and awkward, especially when I’m with more than one of them.
“So,” says Bess, “what are you going to ask us about?”
“Um…” I say, “Beatrice—you were with Lily in Banana, weren’t you, driving back to base? It was a few hours before she died.”
“Yes, I remember,” Beatrice says.
“How did she seem? Did you talk to her or anything?”
“Sorry, I didn’t talk to her. And with hoods on, you don’t get much idea how anyone’s feeling.”
“Was she talking to anyone else?”
“I think to Mr Lee a bit. Then we arrived here, and she was first off, hurried inside. I never saw her again.”
“And Brenda,” I say, “you were out in East 3 with me. Did you see anything weird, anyone doing anything unexpected?”
She shakes her head. “We were out taking measurements the whole time, with Reynolds. He wandered off once, he said to check how the Jays were getting on, came back about an hour later.”
“Okay, Bess,” I say, changing tack. “You’re with Ashton, right? Do you know why he wears glasses?”
For the first time, the Bees look baffled.
“His glasses?” Bess says. “You know, they like to distinguish themselves from each other.”
“Right—but… any reason why he has glasses in particular?”
“I have no idea.”
“All I mean is—”
“Leila,” Brenda interrupts, at my side. “Have you got a plan ready? For when you catch the killer?”
“Not exactly,” I say, thinking of Mr Ortiz, sneering at me with his where’s the prison and his little jury.
“We’re not on Earth yet,” Brenda says. “You can’t expect Earth justice here.”
“What are you saying?”
“This is a frontier land. So frontier justice.”
“And if you find him,” says Beatrice, “you’d better get your justice in first. Because he wouldn’t hesitate to kill you, if he’s already killed Lily.”
“He?”
“Oh, come on, Leila,” says Beatrice. All three Bees are leaning forward now, and I feel a rush of happiness at being part of this gang, and also a pang of regret for my five missing sisters. “It wasn’t a Bee, you can guarantee that. We girls have to stand together. I don’t know which of them it was—a Jay, maybe, or an Overseer—but you make sure you’re ready, to do what you have to do.”
“But how?” I say. “I don’t have any weapons. How could I do anything to hurt one of them?”
Beatrice grins. “There’s weapons everywhere,” she says. “Look at your poor sister’s hood. You just have to find them.”
“Can you help me?” I ask in a small voice.
“Find out who it is first,” says Brenda. “If it’s an Ay, you can hardly expect us to help. But anyone else—you come to us, we’ll help you out.”
I should have interrogated everyone ages ago. Fascinating, some of the stuff you unearth. I want to ask them how they handle the 6-Bees-to-5-Ays conundrum, which is embarrassing, but I’m already embarrassed by the whole situation, so I plunge in: “Do you remember Avery?”
Brenda looks amused. “Avery? Of course, how could we not? We see his brothers every cycle.”
“Sure—but just a few hours ago, I was trying to sleep, and I had this clear memory of him and Andy having an argument. About Barbara. Avery was saying Andy had slept with her, but Andy claimed she had tricked him.”
“You’d have to ask her,” Brenda says.
“You were there,” I say to Bess. “Do you remember?”
“Memories,” says Bess. “I wouldn’t put too much faith in memories, Leila. Don’t blindly believe what you think you remember, or what they tell you. The only things you can trust are right in front of your eyes.”
She shuffles towards me, on her haunches, and reaches out a long, pale arm. She grabs my ankle.
“This is solid truth, Leila, right here.” She shuffles nearer, and puts a palm on my left cheek. “And this. The only reality you can put your faith in.”
I’m sat in a sandwich of Bees. The tension in the cabin is excruciating—the air around me seems twice as dense as before.
“Right,” I say. “Got it. Truth. Reality. But—and I don’t want to be too literal-minded—some things you can’t reach out and touch. I mean, that’s why I’m asking everyone questions.”
The three Bees smile back at me blankly. Bess purses her lips, and I notice Brenda has too.
“How does it work?” I say. “What I’m trying to say is, how does it work, with you and the Ays? Six of you, five of them. I just want to know. Maybe it doesn’t matter—you can say it’s none of my business.”
“We manage,” Bess says, stroking my arm.
Seriously, no one on this bloody colony is capable of giving a straight answer.
7
NAUGHTY
EITHER I’M VERY gullible or everyone else is very convincing. Every time I interrogate someone, I end up changing my mind. I spoke to the Jays, and ended up convinced that an Overseer had killed Lily, and we were all going to rise up in revolution against them. But half an hour with the Bees, and my suspicions have fallen on the Jays; and I’m examining cutlery in the Community cabin, weighing up whether I could use a blunted knife to get vigilante justice.
At that moment, a Jay enters, carrying a sheaf of instructions. I drop the knife back in the drawer.
“Hello,” he says. “Jolly here.”
“Yeah,” I say, wandering over to the Rota. The torn half-page is pressed against my hip inside my boiler suit, but I don’t need to bring it out yet. All I need to do is find its match—a torn half page in the archive. What that will tell me, Earth knows: if there was anything interesting in it, why didn’t Lily rip the whole page out? So there must be some sign, some reminder, which will explain what my sister was up to. I flick through the pages, hundreds of pages, slowly so I don’t miss what I’m looking for. I can feel Jolly’s eyes on me.
It really is a staggeringly dull record of our lives on Hell, little black marks in little black and white squares, non-stop movement from base to sites to base. A giant, tedious chessboard, with no checkmate ever in sight.
Nice. I like the analogy, and nearly share it with Jolly.
The lines and marks are beginning to blur, and I have to blink hard twice to stay awake. I’m starting to get concerned—there’s no sign of any torn page, which doesn’t really make sense. I slow right down for the last fifty pages, but… nothing.
Curious. Very curious. All I can assume is that the other half was ripped out too. But by whom? By Lily, and hidden in a second stash somewhere in the depot? Why separate them, though? Or had somebody else already ripped out that half, and Lily just took the second half to find its twin?
I start again, riffling through the pages, figuring that I must have missed it during my blurry ‘chessboard’ moment. At that point, Mr Ortiz and two Ays—Aaron and Alistair—come in. Ays are just what I want to see, my last
interviewees, but these are the wrong ones. I need to talk to Ashton, the owner of the glasses that Lily decided to nick; and Andrew, who was cross about Lily sticking her nose into the Ays’ business.
The three men are grimy, they look exhausted, even Mr Ortiz. They start to prepare some food, and Mr Ortiz sends a sour look in my direction.
“What are you doing with the archive, girlie?” he says.
“Just checking where everyone was when Lily was killed,” I reply.
“Why are you halfway through the archive, then? You should be on the top page.”
The two Ays have stopped to watch, and Jolly pipes up from his corner: “What is this, classified information? Do we have to get permission to read about our own movements now?”
Mr Ortiz jabs a finger in Jolly’s direction. “You want to fucking watch it, mister.” There are bright red spots on his cheeks, visible among the stubble and dust.
“Watch what?”
“We’ve let things get way too lax here,” Mr Ortiz says. “There’s going to be a reckoning, mark my words.”
“Take it easy,” Jolly says.
“You don’t tell me to take it easy. One of these cycles, I’ll wipe the smirk off your face, off all your runty little Jay faces.”
Jolly is impassive. Mr Ortiz snatches up his pouches, and leaves the Community cabin. The Ays return to their food, and I mouth thank you to Jolly, though he is engrossed in his instruction manuals again.
I wander over to talk to Aaron, in the baseball cap. “What’s up with him?” I ask.
“Damn Jays,” Aaron says, glaring at Jolly. “Always stirring the pot, causing problems.”
Ays and Jays have the most dysfunctional relationship on the asteroid. It’s not hard to see why. To the Ays, the Jays are beta males who have to use machinery instead of their muscles; they’re the weasel-tongued charmers who make the Bees laugh; they’re the unruly mavericks who laugh at the Ays and wound their pride. Out in the tunnels, they work together reasonably well—in silence, but slotting together in their different roles. But here on the base, they steer well clear of each other. It’s another reason why a rebellion is implausible—I don’t think they could ever put aside their mutual dislike.
“Still,” I say. “Mr O’s not usually in quite such a cranky mood.”
Alistair, clearing away the rubbish of his pouches, speaks: “A lot of funny things going on lately. Mr Ortiz doesn’t like it.”
A snort from Jolly in the corner, which Alistair ignores.
“Funny things?” I say.
“Your sister, for one thing,” Alistair says bluntly. “I know you’re the most upset by it—but the rest of us are worried too.”
“See, our brother’s death,” Aaron chimes in, “no doubt that was an accident. Sad, but not worrying. Someone killing your sister, though—that’s worrying.”
“Right,” I say. “Well, you can tell Mr Ortiz that’s why I’m asking all these questions—I’m trying to solve this.”
Aaron grunts.
“Okay,” I say. “So what other funny things?”
“Things going missing,” Alistair says. “A place this size, shouldn’t happen. Mr Ortiz—not happy.”
“What, his taser?”
“Yeah, his taser. But you’ve also got Ashton’s glasses. Who would steal a pair of glasses?”
Awkward.
“And Mr Reynolds’ key,” Aaron says. “Went missing for two cycles. Funny things going on. I don’t like it either.”
I didn’t know about that. “What do you mean, two cycles? It just went missing, then reappeared?”
“He just found the key again in his boiler suit. But I saw him searching that boiler suit with my own eyes, when he first lost it, in the airlock—and it wasn’t there, no way.”
“When was this?”
“Seven or eight cycles ago,” he says. “Mr Reynolds, he was just relieved to find it again. But Mr Ortiz… it worries him.”
“What exactly are you boys so worried about?” Jolly says, rising from his chair and wandering over. “Big lads like you, running scared ’cause a few things have gone missing?”
Aaron gives him a scornful look. “Good Earth—we ain’t scared of anything, pretty boy,” he says. “All I know is we got to sit tight for six hundred cycles, hold it together. And we don’t need you, or anyone else, stirring the pot.”
For once, nobody seems inclined to stomp out at this point in the argument. So the three of them get back to what they were doing, in a simmering, angry silence.
In the meantime, I check the Rota, to find out where Ashton and Andrew are—my last two interviewees. Both are on a work shift—Ashton will be back in four hours, Andrew in eight hours. I make my way back to my cabin, and bump into Mr Lee in the spine tunnel.
“Leila,” he says. “Mr Reynolds isn’t too happy about the amount of swag that’s piling up in the depot. I know it’s been difficult lately, but it might be a good idea to keep him quiet, no?”
“I’m sorry, I…”
“Look, how about the two of us go now? Make a start on it together? We’ll have to make some changes to the Rota, with just one Ell—everyone will have to pitch in to help you. But for now, this will keep people happy.”
I agree—I’ve got four hours to kill before Ashton’s return. So the two of us, we go to the airlock, we suit up and climb on board Cabbage. We get to the depots, and Mr Lee doesn’t make a big deal about the work: he just gets on with it, sorting and lifting and packing crates. The time passes slowly. I’m thinking about what the Ays said, and how there’s a lot going on here that I don’t know about, bubbling under the surface. And really, it’s a surprise we don’t have more fights and what Mr Lee would call “unpleasant scenes.”
In a way, it’s quite a relief to get back to the mindless work. Lately, it’s been too much excitement for me to handle. The grief, the drama, the conspiracies: that’s why I’ve been buzzing the whole time and unable to go to sleep. There’s a thought—I used to pride myself on how placid I was, how I could let my mind go blank. Is that just ’cause I was bored out my bloody mind, tranquilised to within an inch of my life?
Well, regardless, a bit of tedious sorting is just what I need right now. A comedown from the last few cycles. And occasionally, my gloves scrape against serrated rock edges or my arms strain at the weight of a crate, and it reminds me I’m alive.
With Mr Lee’s help, the depot is looking in a much better state after a few hours; there’s still a lot of testing to be done, but superficially it’s a big improvement, certainly enough to keep Mr Reynolds happy. I plead tiredness after a few hours, and Mr Lee takes me back to the Base. Banana is already back, which means Ashton is too. I de-suit, and make my way to the Ays’ cabin, where Ashton is getting ready for a sleep shift.
“Ashton,” I say. “Can I have a word?”
“All right,” he says. “But not a long one. I’m knackered.”
“Thanks—so what I want to know is: what happened to your glasses?”
“My glasses? I thought this was supposed to be all questions about Lily?”
“It might be. It’s a curious event, no clear explanation.”
Ashton looks at me critically. “Are you sure you’re cut out for this, Leila?”
“Is it possible you lost the glasses off-base?”
“Nope. I always take them off when I suit up, and leave them in the airlock with my other clothes. That’s when someone must have nicked them.”
“But why steal glasses? Who would do that?”
“Come on, Leila,” he says. “Who likes practical jokes? Who doesn’t need a good reason for anything? It was one of the Jays, wasn’t it? Trying to wind me up.”
I know it wasn’t the Jays—but maybe it’s not the glasses per sethat were important to Lily, they were a means to an end: a reminder, pointing to Ashton, to say… what exactly? Is this the killer in front of me?
“Go back a few cycles,” I tell him. “Just before Lily died. You were here on the b
ase, weren’t you?”
“If the Rota says so.”
“You can’t remember?”
Ashton sighs, and clasps together two meaty hands. This close, I can see all the bruises and cuts that freckle his arms. “I don’t know about you,” he says, “but I go on shift, I dig some swag, I pull it out. I come back to base and recover, I relax. Then I go and dig some more swag. One cycle is pretty much the same as any other.”
“But there’s got to be more to it than that,” I say. “Otherwise, what’s the point of living at all?”
“I’ll leave that question to the philosophers.” He must sense my frustration, because he puts a hand on my forearm (a thin, jaundiced twig, dwarfed by his olive-brown fingers). “Look, Leila,” he says gruffly. “I know you must be hurting ’cause of your sister. I lost a brother too, remember? But all we got to do is sit tight for the next six hundred cycles. We don’t want anyone stirring the pot, you know?”
It is the exact same phrase Aaron used. Is it a line that Mr Ortiz fed to them all, or have they come up with it themselves, parroting it to each other in the echo chamber of the Ays’ simple world?
Who cares—the point is, there must be a reason why Lily singled out this Ay, and stole his glasses as a memo, to draw a big red circle around him. What’s so special about him?
“You’re with Bess, aren’t you, Ashton?” I ask.
“Yep.”
“You ever been with any of the others?”
He frowns. “Earth, no. I wouldn’t do that to my brothers.”
“All right, then.”
“Are we finished?”
I guess we are.
SO NEXT UP is Andrew. I pass the time waiting for him to return in my cabin, not feeling in the mood for the company of whoever might be in the Community or Leisure cabins. I have taken to sleeping in Lily’s bunk, and I rest there now, swaddling myself in the blankets. There’s a vague Lily-smell here, a kind of fustiness that is not unpleasant. I lie there, motionless, eyes flickering around as I try to spot some other sign Lily left—maybe marks scrawled on the ceiling or the bunk.
