The disappointment crests like a wave, all hope and possibility of companionship slipping away in the undertow. She feels it roaring straight for her and immediately knows that if she lets it in, she will be paralyzed. She makes a split-second’s decision: No!
Ana has no idea what kind of person she was, or is, but one thing she does know right now: Loneliness and self-pity are not only self-indulgent but dangerous. You have now arrived on Paradox. She’s maybe alone, definitely damaged, possibly deranged—but she’s here. On this alien planet.
She has no one to rely on but herself.
Ana turns back toward the door. As she starts to push it open, a sound outside makes her pause. It’s a grinding noise, a MRRROOOOAR and a GRRRRRRAH, like a dozen bulldozers moving across torn-up ground. It’s loud and harsh, digging into her ears like claws, like hungry things—and somehow Ana knows that whatever is out there, it’s alive.
The walkway below her is shaking, and suddenly she’s fighting to keep her balance; then the door whips out of her hand, and through the opening she sees a rush of brown like a moving mountain. There’s a gust of stale air, then a bloodred maw and jagged teeth as tall as fence posts and a throat that goes down down down like a slide to hell.
Ana tumbles back onto the grille walkway. Her head crashes against the footrest of the chair. The door bangs shut. Her left hand flies to her right hip with practiced fluidity, and suddenly there’s a dagger in her hand.
Outside, the noise is a roar is a bellow is a dull throbbing moan and then gradually it’s all but gone.
Long minutes tick by, uncounted except for the staccato rhythm of Ana’s breath and the pounding of her heart. Still shaking all over, Ana finally sits up and drags herself to her feet. Her fingers tremble as she slides the dagger back into its sheath, trying to figure out how she has managed to whip out a deadly weapon with all the ease of ripping open a candy bar. She explores her vest and discovers reinforced pockets containing a short-handled serrated blade and a slim steel pistol.
She’s obviously more than ready, but for what? For that thing?
She stands up and puts both hands on the door handle. The continued silence outside, and the comforting bulk of her weapons, bolsters her courage. She thrusts the door open.
Nothing.
Just dust and dirt and watery sunlight, as far as her eyes can see. No slavering mouth, no nightmare monster waiting to pounce.
Ana feels a flicker of doubt. What did she see, exactly? She thinks of how recently she’s woken up, thinks of her broken mind, all those memories she must have had that don’t exist anymore. And now she’s seeing monsters?
She rubs the back of her head and feels the tender spot that’s already rising into a lump where she slammed into the chair. Did she black out for a few seconds?
Squeezing her hands into fists, Ana starts down the narrow staircase as it rocks in the dust-heavy blasts of wind. She studies the landscape. It’s empty—and desolate and untamed in a way that sharpens into a raw, spare kind of beauty. The vast basin she’s in looks as if it’s been scooped out of the sky. The cliff disappears into the distance off to the edges of her vision in both directions. Flat ground all the way, and a cliff on every edge. Ana is one tiny speck in a giant bowl-shaped crater.
The emptiness is overwhelming, but it’s also reassuring. There’s nowhere a creature that big could possibly hide.
It must have been just in my head.
The ground at the base of the stairs is firm under her feet. She bends down and presses her palm into it. Zigzag cracks run along its sun-warmed surface. Patches of thin, yellowish grass tuft up here and there. She traces one of the cracks with her finger. Is there water under the ground somewhere? The air is breathable, obviously, but how habitable is this place? This planet.
Ana circles the rocket and ducks underneath the staircase leading down from her door, moving toward a certain spot on the hull, moving toward something specific, though she has no idea what. She closes her eyes, and in her mind sees a spark, hears a loud ting of metal striking metal. When she opens her eyes, her palm rests flat on the side of the rocket at shoulder level. She slides her hand over.
A.
A single capital letter scratched into the red paint. A for Ana.
Is it juvenile to autograph what has to be a multimillion-dollar spaceship? Undoubtedly. Ana wonders what kind of person she was to be comfortable defacing equipment like this, but at the same time she can’t suppress a smile. She didn’t know, didn’t remember any of this, but once again, her body did. It’s just another sign that there is still hope for her past, however deeply it might be locked inside her.
Then something catches her eye that she’d missed the first time around. On the hull under the staircase is a keypad.
She considers the display. There are letter and number buttons, and a blank screen half the size of her hand that looks just like the fingerpad that unlocked the door to her compartment. The display tickles something she can’t remember, but when she stops trying to see herself in the memory, the knowledge is suddenly there.
Ana’s fingers dart over the keypad, tapping out a ten-digit sequence of letters and numbers; then she presses her index fingers against the center of the screen. She holds them there for a moment, then pulls them away, and the mechanism begins to vibrate. With a chirp and a burble, the panel around the screen begins to shake.
She scrambles out of the way. For a second she has the panicked idea that this is the start sequence, that the rocket will take off without her and leave her stranded here on the planet. But then the rocket’s base, right above the thrusters, splits open at the middle. Two wide drawers swing out in either direction.
The drawer closest to Ana contains a giant backpack, nearly as tall as she is. When she peers inside, Ana finds pockets bulging with all sorts of food and expeditionary supplies. The other drawer is empty, nothing but a hole as big as a broom closet. She thinks about the empty chamber above her, the unfurled staircase. Has her mystery companion been here, too? If so, where did he or she go?
With a sigh, Ana lifts her pack out of the drawer and rolls it onto the ground. The surprise and relief of finding something is gobbled up by the understanding of what her find actually means. It’s like the notice at the end of a ride that says, Goodbye! Come again soon! Only far less cheerful. And without the come again. It’s telling her she’s going to be here on this planet for a good long time. The idea is a logical one—you don’t cross space on a day trip, after all—and yet seeing this concrete proof brings reality crashing down on her. She’s here, alone, for the foreseeable future. With no memory and no idea of what happens next.
Lifting her eyes to the horizon, Ana looks toward the distant cliff at the basin’s edge. The wind gusts, blowing dirt into her eyes. As she brings her hand up to shield them, she hears a very faint tick, tick, tick. It’s the same sound she noticed when she first woke up.
She slides up her sleeve. There’s a band on her right wrist, a wide strap that’s in the place where a watch would be—but it is very clearly not a watch. It’s made of a slim, bendable pleather that’s tight but not constricting. There’s no face on the band, just a dark gummy portion that might be a screen. But the greater part of the band is taken up with a row of pale numbers that are moving and changing in time with the ticking—
00:26:43:02
00:26:43:01
The numbers are counting slowly down. Ana watches them, fascinated, registering immediately that they represent the seconds of her life, passing one by one.
00:26:43:00
00:26:42:59
00:26:42:58
She could almost swear she knows what this thing is for, but the knowledge is floating somewhere just outside her grasp. It’s obviously a countdown—but to what? What happens after the almost-twenty-seven hours are up? She thinks back to the letter from the mysterious J. R. Pritchett. Be mindful of the countdown, it said.
Ana groans. Putting the puzzle aside for the moment, she studie
s the rest of her band—circlet, that’s what it’s called—running her fingers over the surface. She’s not surprised when once again her fingers know just what to do.
She presses a finger into the center of the tiny screen and a pencil-thin beam of white light fountains up. The light diffuses into a prismatic rainbow stretching flat across the back of her hand. Etched in the light is a rough outline of a bare, rocky land with a cliff in the distance. She lifts her hand toward the horizon and discovers that the display exactly matches the land formations she sees ahead.
Now what?
Ana moves the fingers of her other hand into the band of light. She splays her fingers wide, then slowly draws them together in a pinching movement. Zoom out, she thinks.
Immediately the cliff in the display shrinks in size until she has a bird’s-eye view of an oblong crater. There’s even a label: CRANIUM. Right in the center is a flashing red point. Leading away from the point is a red-dotted line that crosses the Cranium and follows a path studded with labeled land formations: the DEAD FOREST; the high, rugged TIMOR MOUNTAINS; some kind of wide sandy stretch; then the banks of the MARAQA SEA. On the shore of the sea is a large red X.
A map. She’s looking at a map, directions for her journey.
The rocket is planted right in the middle of the Cranium. By lining up the map-screen, Ana now knows exactly which direction she has to go.
Follow the preset path, the letter said. So here she has it.
Ana scans the land ahead of her and finds a landmark on the distant edge of the Cranium—a clump of reddish boulders that looks like a painted campfire from this distance. That will be her guidepost on this first leg of the journey.
She turns off her map display by pressing the little screen, just as smoothly as if she’s done it a million times before. The numbers on the edge of the circlet are still ticking, counting down, and the knowledge makes her chest tighten. Twenty-six hours, and then what?
Experience, her instructions told her. Discover. Survive.
She doesn’t know how she’s going to do any of those things, but one thing’s no longer a mystery: she knows where she’s going, and she has a specific path to get there. For a girl with a gaping hole where her memory used to be, it feels like luxury indeed.
There’s nothing left now but to get moving.
THREE
00:26:19:02
The pack towers over Ana like a second head, but once she has it firmly in place on her back, it’s not nearly as heavy as it looked. She quickly settles into a brisk walking pace. The only tricky thing is the wind, which seems to think she’s a kite and keeps trying to blow her away. Ana imagines herself puffing up and drifting—up, up into the purple-pink sky—imagines a long string anchoring her to the cracked earth. She twists her head around to look at the suns. The one overhead isn’t that bright; it’s like looking up at a fluorescent lightbulb. But the other sun is blazing. She’s glad it’s rising to her back, though at last glance it does seem to have edged slightly up on the horizon.
Tiny dark specks are dotted all across the sky—reverse stars or something, like a mismatched X-ray of the universe. She wonders if one of those pinpricks off in the millions-of-miles-away distance is her own sun. She wonders if there are other people on this planet—and if any of them have their heads back, too, studying the sky.
At the waterfront, she reminds herself. If there’s anyone else living on the planet, that’s where they’ll be. At the red X.
She walks.
Once she thinks she hears a grinding sound in the distance, and she freezes in momentary panic. She thinks again of that roaring mouth, the horrible flash of brown lumpy body. No. It wasn’t real. She settles the pack more firmly on her shoulders and walks on—
and on—
and on.
Minutes and hours fly away, but the crater’s edge seems no nearer; only the constantly changing numbers on her circlet give her any sense of time and progress. And the lonely rocket, shrinking away behind her. Ana keeps her eyes on the distant crop of boulders, like her feet are on the imaginary dotted line, and trudges on.
Then, up ahead, something catches her eye. It’s a sort of twinkling, like speckled sunlight on a waterfall, she thinks. Like hundreds of tiny liquid mirrors. Whatever it is, it’s long and thin like a sheer scarf suspended in the air and carried along by the wind. Ana tries to go around it, but the backpack makes her clumsy, and for a second it’s all she can do to keep her balance, and then—
Sssssssssss
The glittering strand of light slides over her body and covers her like the spray of a hot shower, like comfort, like coming home. She falls over some invisible edge and—
What a crazy, crazy day … it’s gone by in a flash and my to-do list is longer than it was this morning. I’m bone-weary. Pushing up the white sleeve of my lab coat, I check my watch. Five forty-five! Already?
I can’t wait to head home. Tonight is the last game of the playoffs, and Brian will be waiting. We said six o’clock for pizza, but I’ll have to put him off until seven. At the earliest.
My eyes drift from my watch to my wedding ring—it still looks weird to see it there. I wonder if one day I’ll be so used to it that I won’t even notice. No way. It’s too perfect. Like my life. Except for all this prion madness, of course; but we’re so close now to figuring it out, and even if the worst happens … No. I won’t let myself think of that. I just need to finish up here and get home.
The phone rings, and I snap back into work mode. I’ll call Brian later, just as soon as I get a second to catch my breath. Scribbling a reminder on a yellow sticky note with my right hand, I grab the phone with my left.
“Yeah?”
“Bailey, what’s keeping you?” It’s Jackson, of course. “We haven’t gotten the readouts yet. Are we getting any insight from the PX37 trials? Talk to me!”
Talk to him? Right, if he’d just shut up for a second. “Listen, Jackson, it’s next on my list. I’m working on all cylinders here, but Tang is out with the flu and it’s just me.”
Jackson is silent for a moment.
“The flu?”
“That’s all it is,” I say. “Doctor’s sworn statement. Tang will be back in tomorrow.”
“Forget it,” Jackson says. “Let him go. It’s not worth the risk.”
“But—”
“Damn it, Bailey, you of all people know what’s at stake here! You wrote the report! Get rid of Tang and get me the information. I’m sending over some new tests that need to be run, too. Anticipation sensors and modulation adjustments. We have to figure out what’s out of place.”
“But I—”
“Readouts, on my desk. I need you on this for as long as it takes.”
And he’s gone, leaving me glaring down at the receiver like I could vaporize it with a look. I groan, lean my head forward, and hide behind my hair for just a second. So much for the playoffs and pizza with Brian. I reach over to hang up the phone—
Gasping, Ana finds herself facedown on the ground, her cheek pressing against the hard-packed dirt, pinned by her backpack’s heavy weight. She struggles to a sitting position, rubbing her cheek and feeling the fine imprint of the rocky soil on her skin.
What just happened?
Wincing at a throbbing pain her temples, she turns and looks behind her. The gossamer strand of light is twisting away, but it seems smaller now, and fainter. As she watches, one little mirror at a time blows away like dandelion puffs on the wind until soon there’s nothing left.
Nothing but the memory of what she saw.
Ana looks at her hands, the sleeve of her coarse gray jumpsuit, and her tan fingers, plain and unadorned, and sees again the creamy skin from the vision and the shimmer of the diamond ring as she turned it from side to side. There were yellow curls tumbling over her shoulders … Ana reaches up and touches short-cropped hair along her scalp, shorter than the length of her fingers, so short she doesn’t even know what color it is.
But she’s almost su
re it’s not blond.
The experience she just dropped into, or lived, or whatever that was—it felt as real to her as everything she’s felt since leaving the rocket. It’s rock solid. And yet …
That wasn’t me. I could swear to it.
But then who was it?
Maybe there is a settlement somewhere on this planet, and some trick of the atmosphere is projecting these strands out into space. But strands of what … experience? Memory? Mental projection?
Or maybe the real Bailey lived somewhere millions of light-years away; maybe that strand came the way of the stars, toppling head over tail to land on her through some quirk of time and space.
Ana has no way of knowing. And somehow, she is not entirely sure that she wants to know. For now, this experience is hers, and she hangs it in the empty closet of her mind like a memory of her very own, like the first fancy dress in a wardrobe she thought might be empty forever.
As she gets to her feet and walks on, she thinks about how real those moments felt—even more real, somehow, than her present. There’s an ache inside her, a longing for the fullness of Bailey’s world, however briefly visited.
Jackson, she thinks, scowling. And Brian, with a smile for her own bare fingers. She replays the scenario over and over, the thoughts keeping her company in the emptiness of her own mind as the minutes tick away.
At long last she approaches the crater wall. Looking at her circlet, she sees it’s been three hours since she left the rocket. The overhead sun is pretty much in the same position as when she first started out, while the brighter sun has fully risen and is inching upward into the sky.
Inside her jumpsuit, Ana’s body is slippery with sweat. She pauses to let the wind cool her down as she considers the cliff wall. It towers above her, at least twenty-five feet high. She notices herself gauging the crevices and footholds scattered across the rock face—apparently, she has some familiarity with rock climbing—but those spots are few and far between. The thought doesn’t trouble her; instead she feels a quickening of excitement in her chest at the prospect of the climb.
Paradox Page 2
