Brightly Burning

by Alexa Donne

  “Because I’m giving it to you,” Hugo said. “Rori doesn’t have access to most of it for performance reasons. It’s a vast archive, and I don’t want it clogging up her programming. Or having her morph into an evil supercomputer.”

  “Very funny, sir,” Rori chimed in, reminding me she was always present, always listening.

  “But there is a way to search through everything, view files, transfer books and documents to your reader.” Hugo led me through the maze of servers to the back of the room, where I found a desk tab the size of a window. “This is connected to the servers in this room, so you can search by category, historical period, document type, keyword . . . and it’s a bit antiquated, but all you have to do is connect your reader to the desk tab and manually drag-and-drop any books you want onto it.”

  He turned the tab on so he could show me. It was slow to start up, and the interface that greeted us seemed ancient—​boxy graphics and busy colors—​but parsing through it seemed easy enough. I started by popping the term MI5 into a search box, and hundreds of results came up, sorted by which category they fell under. I clicked into the nonfiction folder and found dozens of historical accounts of British intelligence.

  “I’ll add your bio markers to the door scan,” Hugo said, “so you can come down here whenever you want.”

  Tightness seized my insides, shock and awe and gratitude bubbling up, making me warm all over. “This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me,” I croaked out, surprised to find myself on the verge of tears. It would be too mortifying to cry in front of Hugo; I faked a cough so I could wipe my eyes, compose myself.

  “It’s not a big deal.” Hugo shrugged, like he’d just given me a handkerchief.

  “But it is,” I insisted. “You’ve given me access to something precious. Something few other humans will get to touch in their lifetime.” Books. History. Art. Hugo’s trust. The weight of the last bit brought heat to my cheeks that I was glad he couldn’t easily see. I cleared my throat. “Is this what Xiao and the others keep referring to when they say most of what’s down here is cold storage?”

  “Oh,” Hugo said, clearly taken aback. “Yes, I suppose so.” Now he was the one clearing his throat. “I hadn’t realized Xiao or anyone would have talked with you about it.”

  “Oh, well, I asked was what down here, and above decks. I was curious.”

  “You are a rather curious sort of person, aren’t you?” Hugo stated. I couldn’t tell if he thought this was a good or bad thing, however. “Anyway, it’s getting late.”

  It was all Hugo had to say; I followed him up to our quarters and made with hasty goodbyes. I had a sudden urge to draw. I turned on my tablet to find the last project I’d been working on—​that portrait of George. It was funny. I missed him—​he was my closest friend without a doubt—​but I no longer felt the harsh pangs of unrequited love. They’d diminished into a gentle hum, barely present unless I purposely tried to tap into my angst. It had been a silly, misplaced crush.

  I opened a new document, began to sketch a new face. Strong nose. Heavy eyebrows, usually furrowed in thought. Lips quirked in judgment—​or interest? Blue eyes that burned like cold fire. I stayed up far past bedtime finishing him, blackening the page with the charcoal brush, capturing all his shadows and light. Eventually I was too weary to go on, but the portrait was nearly done. I fell into an exhausted sleep, Hugo’s face flashing against my closed eyelids.

  Chapter Eleven

  I woke to a different Hugo. Or, more accurately, I met him at dinner.

  “Thank you for joining us, everyone,” he said, standing up from his chair and addressing us like an assembly. “Very rarely do we all gather in one place to break bread. Mari actually left her dungeon!”

  All eyes turned to Mari, who grimaced and tilted her head in acknowledgment.

  “Albert has prepared quite the spread,” Hugo went on, “and everyone should help themselves to some wine.” He topped off his glass and then passed the decanter to his left. “Except you, Jessa.” The table obliged him with polite laughter. Then we dug in to the food, which included pot roast and mashed potatoes. We ate in silence until Hugo started speechifying again.

  “I thought we might engage in some thanksgiving,” he said. “Each of us say what we’re thankful for. I’ll start by saying how grateful I am for each and every one of you. I know without a doubt that the Rochester has the best crew in the galaxy.” I was used to Hugo being chatty, even a bit flirty, but this was sappy in a way Hugo wasn’t.

  Then I realized that Hugo’s eyes were glassy, his brow lined with perspiration. I glanced around the table to find others had noticed it too. Hugo was intoxicated. Well . . . more than he usually was. Xiao shifted uncomfortably in her chair, sitting straight-backed as if ready to spring into action, should it be required. Orion stifled a laugh, as if drunk and effusive Hugo was the most hilarious thing in the world. Jessa was, thankfully, clueless in the way only a ten-year-old can be. And Lieutenant Poole’s expression was dark, concern radiating off her in waves. It was a look I’d not seen on her. Maternal.

  We went around the table in turn to appease Hugo, rattling off things we were thankful for, while he clapped enthusiastically for each one. That got Jessa’s attention.

  “Hugo, why are you acting like such a weirdo?” she asked.

  “Jessa, don’t be rude,” I scolded.

  “I’m fine!” Hugo slurred, taking a swig from his glass. “Just happy to be home,” he said. No one pointed out he’d been home for weeks. “And we have wonderful new crew, like Stella!” He leaned over conspiratorially and failed at whispering to Officer Xiao. “She likes books.”

  My face burned hot, and I averted my gaze from meeting anyone else’s by fully engrossing myself in my food. Everyone who wasn’t Hugo united in an unspoken agreement to eat as quickly as possible, with Orion bravely being first to make a break for freedom.

  “I should be putting Jessa to bed now,” Orion said, and for once Jessa didn’t protest. Hugo had oscillated from buoyant to dour by that point, frowning at them as they went. Albert and Mari quickly followed suit, but when I tried to stand, making excuses to turn in to bed early, Hugo was having none of it.

  “Noooo.” He stood up from his chair, stumbling a step and grabbing onto the table for support. “We have a standing reading appointment. I still expect to see you in my study in ten minutes! Xiao, see that she makes it.” Making sure to take his glass with him, Hugo strode as confidently as he could out of the dining room, wobbling just slightly at the door.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, dazed as I watched him go. Xiao threw a meaningful look at Lieutenant Poole, who shrugged.

  “You might as well tell her,” Poole said. “She’ll have to dance around it for the next two hours. And with that,” she said, taking a serving of pot roast for the road, “I am off to see if I can find any of that liquor stash the captain’s obviously got himself into. Good night.”

  Xiao took a minute before explaining. “The captain’s behavior . . . I’m not excusing it. But today is a difficult day for him. For all of us. Today is the fifth anniversary of the day Hugo’s father died. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  I did, with a cutting clarity.

  “Following my previous brief, please refrain from topics related to the captain’s parents, today especially. And stop him from drinking much more, if you can.”

  I trudged with hesitant feet to the study, unsure which brand of Hugo I would find there. Bright and zippy, or grumpy and morose? I caught him on an upswing.

  “Stella!” he exclaimed as soon as I walked through the door. “My little sleuth. I have a book for you!” He bounded over to a bookshelf in the far corner of the room, extracting a hardbound volume and gleefully handing it over.

  “And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie,” I read off the cover.

  “She’s my mother’s favorite author,” he said. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, referring to his mom in the present t
ense.

  “Thank you,” I said, sitting in my chair as usual, hoping he would do the same, but instead he danced over to the sideboard to refill his glass. “Hugo, I hate to say something, but—”

  “You’re totally right!” he cut me off. “I shouldn’t drink alone. How rude of me.” He thrust a glass into my hand, and I took small, careful sips where Hugo did giant gulps.

  “Where do you get this stuff?” I asked, trying for innocuous conversation. “On the Stalwart we had some vile backroom hooch, but your supply is of such high quality.”

  “This is from the Islay, the fleet’s whiskey ship. I didn’t take you for a connoisseur of fine spirits,” Hugo quipped.

  “Oh, I’m not. This just doesn’t taste like jet fuel, so I assume it’s good.”

  “Tell me more about the Stalwart. And the Empire. About your life before the Rochester.”

  “What do you want to know? My life story isn’t that interesting.”

  “I don’t believe that. Why did you transfer from the Empire to the Stalwart? There must be a story there.”

  Oh, was there. Given the topic of the day, I wasn’t sure it was the best story to tell, but Hugo prodded me on.

  “I left the Empire because my family didn’t want me anymore.” I hadn’t ever said it out loud—​I was too diplomatic for that, I told myself—​but there it was. After that, it all came pouring out of me, like the tears I’d stubbornly refused to shed all those years ago.

  “I joined my aunt’s household after my parents died, when I was seven. She didn’t really want me, but my uncle, who was my mother’s brother, insisted. But then he died too.” I found myself choking on the words, so I took a serious draw of liquor to fortify myself. There was no point in crying over it now. My poor uncle had been gone for nearly a decade at this point.

  Hugo politely remained mute, neither offering platitudes that would make me uncomfortable nor avoiding my gaze. I appreciated it.

  “She kept me around as long as was fashionable,” I continued. “She didn’t want to be seen as kicking out an orphan right away, you know? The other ladies showered her with such praise for taking me in from the poor part of the ship. But when I was eleven, after the Kebbler virus, the fleet enacted the Orphan Transfer Program, and she jumped at her chance. I’m sure she told everyone I volunteered to go. The Stalwart needed warm bodies for their farming pipeline and, as it turned out, junior ship-engineering apprentices. So that’s where I ended up.”

  “I was curious about that, actually,” Hugo said, hopping up to go to the sideboard again. This time he brought the decanter with him, refilling my glass before I could protest, then topping off his as well. “Why ship engineering? It’s not a common field for women, for one, let alone one from the Empire.”

  “And yet you have a woman ship engineer. Two now. So how uncommon is it?”

  “Fair point. But Lieutenant Poole . . . her gender is incidental. Her father had a daughter instead of a son, and the position of ship engineer has been passed down from generation to generation on the Rochester, so, ipso facto, Lieutenant Poole became our engineer.”

  “I can tell a similar story,” I said. “My father taught me everything he knew, up until he died. I’m sure if he’d lived, there would have been enough talent on board the Empire that I wouldn’t have necessarily taken his place. But who knows?” I shrugged. “Maybe I would have wanted to take his place. On the Stalwart, however . . .”

  “You didn’t like your job?”

  “I didn’t like being on a ship that’s rumored to be next in line to be decommissioned,” I put it bluntly.

  “Cheers to that.” Hugo raised his glass to mine. Just when I thought perhaps Hugo wasn’t so drunk after all—​he seemed perfectly composed insofar as he was speaking in complete, cogent sentences—​he said, “So tell me how your parents died.”

  “That’s a bit morbid, don’t you think?” I scoffed.

  “Oh, come on, I’m allowed a bit of latitude for morbidity today. It’s my anniversary. I know they told you.”

  Busted. I didn’t bother denying it. So I told him about my dad, how he’d been crushed by a machine part on a Monday in October, his broken body vented into space on Tuesday. And my mother fell into a deep depression—​not her first bout of it, but certainly the first that I recognized for what it was, with my father no longer around to mask her symptoms from me. How, despite that, I didn’t recognize how bad it had gotten, and that on a Thursday that November, I found her dead in our quarters.

  I left it at that, sticking to the facts. Hugo didn’t deserve the burden of hearing about my guilt, or my regrets. George’s voice echoed in my thoughts: You were only seven. It’s not your fault.

  “Thank you for telling me,” Hugo finally said. Then with a deep breath, he began to tell me his own tale of woe. “Five years ago, my mother murdered my father. She threw him out of the airlock.”

  It was far more brutal than I’d been expecting, but I paid him the same courtesy he’d given me. I didn’t say anything, and let him go on in his own time.

  “I don’t know how to explain it. She just . . . lost herself. I was fourteen; Jessa was five. I’ve never told Jessa the details; she just thinks they died.”

  He didn’t have to explain any further. Killing another human being was a capital offense in the fleet, so I could only imagine what happened to his mother. Flushed out an airlock herself, I reckoned. Hugo fell back into his drink, while I went ahead and tried my best to finish mine and give And Then There Were None a try. The prose was engaging, if old-fashioned, and I couldn’t help but dwell on the fact that this was a murder mystery beloved by an actual murderer. It lent an additional weight to each word and phrase.

  I noticed Hugo had finished his drink and was now pacing before the window, his silhouette dark against the glow from the stars outside. I got up to join him, driven by tingly warmth that spread from my toes to the tips of my fingers, the alcohol at work in my blood. I was light as a feather, Hugo like the wind, buffeting me in his wake.

  “Hugo, I’m so sorry,” I said, touching his shoulder, sighing with relief when he neither jumped at the contact nor shook me off. He turned, honoring me with a crooked, halfway smile.

  “Thanks. It’s nice to talk to someone who can understand.”

  My heart felt like it had burst wide open, and my body moved on instinct, encircling him in a hug.

  He was stiff. Unsure. But that only made me grasp harder, because if I pulled out now, it would make it too obvious how awkward this was. Hugo relaxed, just the tiniest bit, leaning into me. And then with a rush of clarity, I realized what I was doing—​hugging the captain—​and immediately was reined in by my better judgment. I pulled back.

  “I am absolutely toasted,” Hugo said, swaying on his feet. “We should turn in a tick early, I think.”

  I nodded, tamping down any disappointment I felt and following him with numb feet from the study and to our quarters. Luna, who must have lurked outside our bedrooms waiting for us to return, circled my ankles with a purr, following me to my door, clearly choosing me as his companion for the evening.

  “Luna, you turncoat,” Hugo muttered without much heat.

  “Good night, Hugo,” I said as I stepped through the door, poking my head back out to catch one more glimpse of him.

  “Good night, Stella. Sweet dreams,” he returned, bidding me adieu with a small wave.

  Once the door shut, I did not allow myself to wallow in my dizzy-headed space. I made haste to the bathroom, where I gulped down three glasses of water. Uncanny how two months ago, such water consumption would have been unfathomable. Life aboard the Rochester—​a macabre wonderland.

  As I turned in to bed, not for the first time I wished that Hugo would bend his rule about not taking books from the study. I wanted to dive back into Agatha Christie but instead settled for an oldie but a goodie, relying on Harry Potter and the whirlwind of the Triwizard Tournament to engage and tire me. Harry had just taken a bath wi
th the golden egg, and my eyes started to flutter as Snape confronted him on the stairs.

  Then . . . a laugh.

  I heard it—​I definitely heard it. A human laugh. Not a cat. I looked to the cat I had with me, who arched his back, hissing at the door. Luna agreed. There was something out there.

  Putting down my reader, I catapulted out of bed to the door, pressing my ear against it. I waited—​ten seconds. Then twenty. Then, screw it, I hit the OPEN button, holding my breath as the door slid open.

  The hallway was dark. It was likely close to midnight. I stepped out into the blue haze, the black finish of the ship’s interior reducing visibility to nil. I counted the space between breaths, staring into the black, willing something to announce itself. But nothing did.

  I retreated into my chambers, half convinced I was going mad. After forcing myself to calm, I fell back against my pillow, determined to find sleep.

  An alarm blared in my ear, too loud, too close, setting my heart into a gallop. My eyes clicked open, the room spinning, the bed seeming to vibrate beneath me. “Rori, what is it?” I sat bolt upright, looking for an explanation.

  “Stella, I am sorry,” Rori said, calm and contrite as always. “I cannot rouse the captain. There is a fire in his chambers. Emergency fire protocols will go into effect in one hundred and twenty seconds.”

  Emergency fire protocols? On the Stalwart, that meant whatever room was affected by fire would vent its contents into space, in order to seal the wound and save the rest of the ship. Which meant I had . . .

  “Emergency fire protocols will go into effect in one hundred and ten seconds,” Rori updated me.

  Less than two minutes to save Hugo’s life.

  Chapter Twelve

  I bolted up from bed and to my door, slamming my hand against the OPEN button and rushing into the hall. The blue emergency lights glowed eerily as always, with not a hint of the true emergency going on just a few feet away. They should be screaming red. I sprinted to Hugo’s door, but of course it was closed.