Ysa’s not moving. Her eyes are wide and staring, still unfocused. Just like Chen’s, just like Todd’s in the Dead Forest, but why here? What’s going on? As Ana watches, still moving back toward her as quickly as she can, Ysa sinks several more inches. The sand is now trickling into the tops of her boots, and still she’s going down. The sand around her body begins whirlpooling in on itself, sucking inexorably downward.
Ana hears shuffling behind her and knows that Todd has started working his way back to them as well.
“Ysa,” Ana says as she reaches her. “Look at me.”
Ysa’s eyes are rolling wildly in her head now, but Ana can see her making an effort to focus. The sand is nearly up to Ysa’s knees, and she seems to be sinking faster. Todd said the basin ended a couple feet down … how much longer until Ysa reaches the foundation? When she hits bottom, maybe she can just push off and propel herself back out.
Ana takes Ysa’s hands, and Ysa responds with a squeeze of her own. She starts whispering, and Ana leans in closer. “They told me not to jog alone after dark.” Ysa’s voice is electric with fear. “But the field by the high school always seemed so safe. It was just … the one time.”
The fear is real, but this isn’t some hallucination. This is something real she’s remembering.
“The bleachers … ,” Ysa whimpers. The sand is traveling up her thighs now. Where is that rock bottom? “He isn’t there and then suddenly he is … he … holds me down … my face is in the dirt. …”
Something real she’s … reliving.
The sand seeps past Ysa’s waist. Where is Todd?
“Lean into me,” Ana says, bending at the waist and holding on to Ysa’s arms. “Try to stay still. That way you’ll stop sinking, and Todd and I can lever you out. This place isn’t dangerous, do you remember that? You know that.”
Ysa barks out a laugh, her eyes clearing for a moment as she focuses on Ana. “You know? You don’t know anything, Ana Ortez.”
Ortez. “Is that my name?” Ana asks. “Ysa, is that my last name?”
“We weren’t supposed to tell you anything,” Ysa moans, “but now it’s all—” She jerks suddenly and thrashes her head violently to the side. “Dirt … in my mouth … and the weight crushing me. I can’t stand it!”
“Don’t move a muscle,” Todd whispers in Ana’s ear, and Ana relaxes just a bit. Todd circles around to Ysa’s other side and takes one of Ysa’s arms as the sand begins pooling around her chest. Ana takes the girl’s other arm, and they tug, once and then again, pulling at Ysa, who has stopped struggling altogether.
But who has not stopped sinking.
“Todd, what the hell is going on?” Ana says. “I thought you said the basin wasn’t deeper than two feet!”
Todd is shaking his head. “It’s not, Ana, I swear to you. I don’t know what’s going on, but this isn’t right. This shouldn’t be happening.”
“Well, what do we know?” Ana says, feeling the frantic edge of hysteria as the sand approaches Ysa’s neck. “We know nothing, Todd, because we have freaking amnesia! Ysa, come on—look at me.”
But Ysa is sunk deep into her nightmare, raving, lost. She lets out one last cry, then jerks back, yanking her fingers out of their grasp.
Her wide, staring eyes are the last thing Ana sees as Ysa disappears into a dark purple whirlpool.
FOURTEEN
00:03:03:18
For a long time neither Ana nor Todd can move. It all went wrong so quickly, it’s almost too much to comprehend. Chen’s death, and now Ysa’s … Ana feels as if something inside her has shattered beyond all repair. She keeps running over the scene in her mind, trying to figure out what she should have done differently. Surely there’s something, something she could have done to change the outcome.
Ysa!
The palpable fear in Ysa’s eyes still chills Ana’s blood. Ysa’s death was too eerily similar to Chen’s to be written off as chance. Yet there’s no obvious connection that she can see.
And something else … is it only a matter of time before she and Todd share the same fate as the others?
Ana realizes that Todd is shifting cautiously on the sand next to her. He extends his hand to her, but she brushes it aside. She doesn’t need help, not his and not anyone’s. All she needs right now is to keep moving. But no matter how fast she moves, no matter how far she goes, the one thing she can’t get away from is herself.
It’s so easy to look at the broken pieces of her life and assess who she is when there’s so little of it to review. And the more she looks, the more she hates what she sees: cheap muscle and a rabid need for control, a broken mind and a body constantly in motion. What good is any of that to her or to anyone else? What good did it do when she couldn’t save the people nearest her?
What kind of person was she, once upon a time, before everything went so wrong?
It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now except reaching inside herself and gluing those broken pieces back together into whatever she wants to make herself. She can’t waste any tears, not inside and not out. Rage will be her glue, rage at this planet and at whoever messed with her mind.
There are less than three hours left on the countdown, and as anticlimactic as meeting that deadline might be after Ysa’s and Chen’s deaths, it’s something concrete, something she can turn her mind toward.
The mission must continue.
She sets off across the dunes and Todd shuffles next to her. Above them, the stretch of bruised sky between the suns is shrinking steadily as Torus approaches Anum on its preset collision course. Well, not collision, exactly—though somehow, even that wouldn’t surprise her. Is there anything on this alien world that isn’t set to self-destruct?
Ana keeps to shallow, jerky movements, half-daring herself to trigger the sinking mechanism, half-believing she deserves the same fate as Ysa because she just stood there—stood there and wasn’t able to save her—while she died. Just like she couldn’t save Chen.
There’s some deep core of darkness in this planet, that much is clear. Again she pictures the terror in Ysa’s eyes, her whispered words. It was as if she was trapped in some horrible memory of her past.
As if she was being forced to relive the worst moment of her life.
Ana frowns and slows to a standstill. Chen’s face flashes into her mind again. What if what he was experiencing wasn’t just a hallucination—but a memory? He kept talking about—talking to—someone called Alex. Not the fire, he’d said. Just like Ysa kept raving about being trapped under the bleachers by some psycho.
It’s as if they really were back inside those experiences. Inside their memories. Is that even possible?
And …
“Todd,” she gasps in dawning realization. “Do you remember the story you told me from your past … something to do with a forest?” She can remember his words exactly, of course. That’s the thing about starting fresh; everything you put in the memory stores stays perfectly well preserved. But she wants to hear him say it. She has a horrible feeling that what Todd encountered in the forest was not just a random hallucination triggered by a deep-seated fear of the forest, but rather some kind of internal replay of his worst memory, too—just like Chen’s. And just like Ysa’s. Only he’d managed to survive it. She’d helped him survive it. Could that really be it?
But Todd is turning toward her, a strange glint in his eye. “Do you hear something?”
She pauses to listen. “Oh, no!” she cries.
The grinding is not close, but there’s no mistaking the sound drifting across the dunes.
“It’s different this time,” Todd says, and his face is a new shade of pale. “Do you hear that? It sounds like the wind, or …”
Ana hears the difference, too, but he’s completely wrong about what it sounds like. It’s more like glass … breaking glass? But there’s no time for listening or analysis. They need to keep moving.
And so they start off again, trying for haste even though their lives depend on keeping their movements smo
oth and easy. Swish, lean, step. Swish, lean, step. Any urges Ana had toward self-recrimination are long gone; now it’s just a focused fast-forward, slippery fear fueling their steps.
They make swift progress, the only sound their labored breathing and the gentle swish of their feet across the sand.
Wait … the only sound?
Ana stops and cocks her head. “Hey,” she whispers.
“It’s gone,” Todd says, slowing alongside her. “But who knows for how long? We should make as much progress as we can. There’s only two hours left to go.”
He turns and resumes his shuffle across the sand, toward the splash of ocean that is growing ever more visible up ahead.
Ana follows him, but in the quiet her mind worries at the problem of the worm. Why can’t they get away from it? “First the crater, then the mountain, then the sand dunes,” she says. “It’s always right on us. It doesn’t seem to be able to get through extreme land formations—maybe the dunes stopped it this time. But then it just goes and finds another way around. Todd, it’s just going to keep coming.”
“I have no idea what that thing is capable of,” Todd says. “I do know it’s getting more terrifying every time we meet it.”
“More terrifying,” Ana repeats. Because he’s right—this last time, there was something new about the worm that she hadn’t noticed before. “Todd, what does the worm sound like to you? What do you hear?”
He looks surprised. “Well, grinding, I guess. But this last time there was more—something dark and whispery, like the wind through the trees.” He shudders.
Of course. What Todd hears from the worm is the sound of the forest at night. The forest of his personal nightmare, the nightmare that tried to trap him? She remembers Chen, the first time he heard the worm, speaking of hearing fire. Was that what the worm sounded like to you, Chen? And she, Ana, hears breaking glass. And yet she has no memories.
Is this what’s kept her from the attacks that paralyzed the others?
And, more importantly, could there really be some kind of connection between the worm and those horrible fear-memories? The effects seem to eerily echo each other—and yet there’s no way she can reconcile them together.
“Come on,” Todd says, reaching for her hand. And this time it somehow seems right to shuffle closer to him as they swish, lean, step—moving forward, with the waves of purple desert at their backs and the vast sweep of everything they don’t know shifting and shaping itself like the sand under their feet.
By the time they reach the end of the dunes, Ana is so bone-weary she almost doesn’t register it when the sand just ahead of her gives one last shimmer before fading into mud-brown silt. She looks up, and her eyes fill with tears.
The sea.
Vivid green waves cascade over a rocky shore, stretching off into the distance as far as she can see. She takes the last step off the sand and her legs wobble under her.
Todd grabs her arm. “Steady,” he says. “It’ll take a few steps to adjust.” But he’s wobbling, too, and for a second they cling to each other, finding their balance on this newly solid ground. Ana is surprised at the joy that springs up inside her. Immediately she feels like a traitor. How can she be happy—relieved—at putting this behind her when the price was so high?
Her hands are trembling as she lifts her circlet and activates the map. The X is so big and close it’s practically glowing. The area around it on the map is colored in dull gray, and as she zooms in she sees that it’s labeled APEX. It’s the colony; it has to be! From the summit of Mount Fahr it wasn’t visible, but now, here it is—barely a half mile down the coast. In the misty spray rising off the ocean, she can just make out a dark bulk that looks like a stone wall.
It’s real, an actual human settlement they are this close to reaching. Ana looks at her circlet. Half an hour to go. They’re going to make it! She looks at Todd and they break into a run.
And that’s when she sees it, a dangling sparkle of light at the edge of her vision, drifting down just ahead of her.
“Todd,” she says, “do you see that?”
“What the hell is it?” Todd whispers.
This twisting, glimmering memory strand is smaller than the first two. It looks somehow loose and patchy, like it’s starting to come apart at the seams. Seeing it, Ana feels a moment of hesitation, remembering what she experienced last time.
Yet some part of her craves it. She can still picture Bailey’s world as she saw it hours ago, can still feel that deep connectivity of living inside that other mind, even so briefly. She’s desperate to know what’s happening to Bailey, to her world, sure—but it’s more than that. It’s like some part of her is fused with Bailey, as if she, too, is somehow living this other life.
She has to get back inside.
Ana changes course, dashing off to the side to follow the strand’s wind-whipped tumble. Behind her, Todd frantically calls, “Ana! What are you doing? You have to stop—”
It’s right above her now, all shimmery-bright, pulsing with otherness. Ana reaches her hand to the sky. She closes her eyes. There’s an icy gush as the memory strand pools around her fingers and slides down her body.
Ana tumbles into darkness.
Water … if only I could have a glass of water. Maybe that would help stop the coughing. But the blood … there’s so much blood everywhere. This thing is supposed to be inside my head, living in my mind. So why all the blood? Why all the shaking, the chills … oh, God, the coughing … it hurts!
This disease has spread so quickly. I have to update the report now that I know, now that I really know for sure where things are—
But I can’t seem to lift my head off my desk. Cool here, solid. Not even to look at my watch. Can’t do it. Is the night gone? Morning, too, maybe? I don’t know.
Brian! How is he doing? Haven’t spoken to him in …
I laugh suddenly. Jackson would let me go home now, wouldn’t he? Quarantine protocols be damned, I suppose, once the world starts coming apart at the seams.
But it’s too late now. I can hardly even lift my head.
Maybe it’s better this way, going out like this. So many gone already. Who would want to linger? Because of course no one’s going to survive this. We know that now.
But I will regret not seeing Brian one last time, not being with him as I … as we …
“Bailey!” Pat’s calling from his cube, up near the front of the room. His voice sounds like mine feels. Who else is still alive in here? The techs left hours ago. Is there anyone left but us two?
Oh, God. No! The trials are active. How could I have forgotten about that? It’s been hours since I last checked in. I have to … oh, God, they have no idea what’s going on here. I was supposed to be on call. But there’s no time, and I can’t—
“Pat!” My voice is even rougher than before. It’s coming undone; I can hardly understand myself. I drag myself across the room and look around the divider into Pat’s cube. He’s there, hunched over beside his desk. Long gray hair spiked up with sweat. Blood dripping down his face. And the look in his eyes … No. He won’t see tonight, either. We’re a sorry pair.
Always, the blood. Why does this sickness bring so much blood with it? It’s in my head, all in my head. If I could just have a glass of—
Wait … where am I? I’m there again … I’m back down under. So deep. High above me there’s the reflection of light on the surface of the water. I have to get up, get some air! I’m reaching, pulling as hard as I can. But my foot is caught, I’m trapped. I’m trapped!
“Mommy!” I want to scream. “Mommy!” But I can’t, I’m underwater and I need to breathe, I have to. I won’t be able to hold out any longer and my mouth opens without my permission and water crashes into my lungs and I’m drowning, I’m drowning, and it hurts but it’s peaceful, too, and my lungs kick one more time, trying to expel the water—
No. It’s not real.
That happened twenty years ago, and I didn’t drown, I was rescued. It’
s not happening. I’m in the office, I’m next to Pat’s cube, retching and coughing up even more blood.
But the fear … that was just as real as the first time. It’s the disease, I know that—it’s got me on a fear loop and I can’t seem to break out. They’re all connected somehow … the blood and the fear and the pain and …
I have to focus. I’ve got to get to the trials. I’ve got to find some way to—while I still—if I could just—
Ana’s eyes fly open as an electric jolt of panic courses through her body. It’s like she’s stuck her hand into a socket. Her body goes stiff and rigid, and for one trembling moment there’s no air in her lungs. …
And then she’s back. On the beach, heart hammering, rocky ground under her back.
It’s never been like that before. Always the experience fades out as the strand drifts away, but this time she watched, felt, was Bailey so horribly sick—Bailey dying.
Ana sits up slowly, shakily. Todd is standing above her, his face ghostly, his eyes wide and panicked.
He grabs her hand and helps her to her feet. “Ana, what was that? Did you black out? What happened?”
What is she supposed to say? I just slipped inside some stranger’s head and saw a room filled with death? I just saw—just was—someone named Bailey, lying on the floor, choking on her own blood, in some kind of nightmare world that’s maybe in the past, or maybe the future, or maybe all in my head?
She forces herself to smile. “Everything’s okay, I’m back,” she says, trying to keep her voice from wobbling. “I’m fine.”
“If you’re okay, we really need to …” As he glances over his shoulder, Ana can hear it for herself. The worm is back—but with less grind and even more glass than last time. She’s on her feet so fast her head starts spinning and she has to steady herself on Todd’s arm. Then they are off, stagger-running down the beach toward the dark walls of the colony that loom ahead, just up a little bluff.
Overhead, the space between the suns has narrowed to a gash. The sky is a shade of dull pink Ana has never seen before, a hard-biting glare that looks ominous. Somehow it’s a perfect fit for this planet as she’s come to know it, with its deep core of darkness—the other face of the planet, its true face maybe.
Paradox Page 10
