by Kate MacLeod
When she was done washing her hands, she whistled the dogs to her side and headed back to the common room. At first it looked like Warrior was reaching inside Liv’s hover chair to cut her bonds. Scout was a little annoyed at how easily Liv had talked her way out of being tied up. But then she realized the jerky motions Warrior was making were nothing like the smooth motions of clipping off a cuff. The two of them were fighting over something.
The chair lurched, then both their hands were grappling up into the air, and Scout saw it: Warrior’s gun. Warrior must have been setting Liv free, and Liv had made a snatch for the gun.
Scout ran into the common room, the dogs close at her heels. “Why did you cut her free?”
“I didn’t,” Warrior said, pivoting her weight to drive her elbow into Liv’s jaw. Liv cried out, and Warrior took two steps back, the gun now firmly back in her own hands. But before Scout could take a breath of relief, Warrior’s whole body went rigid. The gun clattered to the floor. Warrior fell to her knees, then flat on her face. There was a tiny tinkling sound.
Scout looked at the small patch of blood in the center of Warrior’s back, the rapidly growing patch of blood. Then she looked up to see Clementine standing over Warrior’s body, Ottilie’s little knife in her hand, blood dripping from the blade onto the toes of her canvas shoes.
Clementine smiled.
21
Scout felt a moment of panic as the dogs charged at Clementine. It didn’t look like much of a knife, but it had been enough to take down Warrior. The dogs had no fear of it. But Clementine made no move to defend herself as the dogs jumped on top of her. The knife went skittering across the floor to disappear under one of the shelves. Girl and Shadow were both on Clementine, and the girl tucked her head in her arms close to her chest, drawing up her legs to curl into a ball. The dogs were probably biting her, but Scout couldn’t muster the empathy to care.
Liv said nothing, her eyes inscrutable as she watched the girl try to crawl toward the table. Instead Liv drew closer to where Scout still stood motionless, Warrior sprawled at her feet.
Then Scout finally dropped to her knees at Warrior’s side. The blood was spreading everywhere—so much blood for such a little cut.
“What is she?” Liv asked.
At first Scout didn’t understand the question. Then she saw the sparks erupting from Warrior’s knife wound. It looked like Clementine had been aiming for her kidney but had hit something quite different.
Scout turned Warrior over and pulled her into her arms. Warrior looked up at her, really looked up at her. Scout realized the tinkling sound she heard when Warrior fell had been one of her lenses shattering against the floor. Now one blue eye was looking up at her from between the jagged edges of the broken lens still clinging to her cheek. The other lens was scratched but intact. The effect was disconcerting.
“Scout,” Warrior said, her hand clutching Scout’s arm.
“You can heal from this, right?” Scout asked, wanting to press her hand to stop the flow of blood but worried what those sparks meant.
“Not this time, kid,” Warrior said.
“Oh, no . . . the cat. You gave your nanite to the cat,” Scout said. “It’s all my fault.”
“One nanite wouldn’t have made any difference,” Warrior said. “I can heal from almost anything, but not a direct hit to my power source. I’m draining away.”
“No—there must be something we can do,” Scout said, looking back over her shoulder to the closed hatch that led to Viola’s room.
“No time,” Warrior said, the hand on Scout’s arm squeezing weakly. “Listen, kid. Remember what we talked about. You said you were clever; you’re going to have to be more than clever to get off this planet. But don’t stay here. This isn’t the place for you.”
“You were going to take me with you,” Scout said. Not a question.
“I was going to take you with me,” Warrior agreed. Her fingers clutched one last time, then behind the broken lens the blue eye that was looking at her rolled back and Scout knew she was gone.
Scout laid her gently on the floor, then picked up Warrior’s fallen gun and tucked it into the waistband of her cargo shorts. Her fingers felt numb; her whole body felt numb. She didn’t feel like she was really there, more like she was watching herself move from a great distance away. Like she was watching herself the way she had watched Warrior when she first left the rover. A remote, untethered sort of feeling.
She knew it well. She had felt the same that day when the asteroid fell, and for days after. Her emotions would catch up with her soon enough, but for now she would just keep moving, keep doing all the necessary things in complete dispassion.
The gun tucked away, she turned back to the others. Clementine was sitting on the table, knees drawn up to her chest to keep her feet out of reach of the dogs.
Liv had disappeared. Scout couldn’t manage any feeling of surprise. She just turned to Clementine. With Warrior gone, there was no one left to convince her not to ask her questions.
“You knew,” Scout said. “You knew exactly where to hit her. Clearly you want us all dead. I have no idea why. Not sure I care. But I do wonder: Why am I still alive?”
Clementine stood up on the table, towering over Scout. The smile was gone, a welcome change, but her placid face revealed nothing of her thoughts.
Scout looked around until she found the knife under the shelves. Keeping one eye on Clementine, she reached under the shelving to fetch the blade and put it in her back pocket next to her own utility knife. She still had her slingshot, and of course Warrior’s gun.
She wasn’t sure it would be enough.
“I know you understand me. You might not be able to talk, but if you wanted to, you could communicate with me. You could answer all my questions. You choose not to,” Scout said.
Clementine just shrugged.
“Are we alone here? The two of us and Liv?”
Clementine shrugged again.
“Are you going to be killing us too? Why wait? Why didn’t you just poison us all the first night?”
Another shrug.
Warrior had said that she hadn’t untied Liv, and yet Liv and Clementine had both been freed. Had one escaped and uncuffed the other? Were they working together? “Is Liv in on it with you? Where is she now? What is she going to do?”
Clementine sighed. She gave Scout a long-suffering look, as if she didn’t mind the questions so much as being asked all the wrong questions. Well, those were the only questions Scout knew. She guessed Warrior had been right that it was futile to ask.
“Whatever. I’m going to check the monitors.” Scout went into the communications room, walking sideways to keep one eye on Clementine still standing on the table. The dogs stayed near the table, Girl making her customary low growling sound that built in intensity every time Clementine moved a centimeter.
Scout looked at all the screens. She saw Liv moving through the hangar, hugging the wall but still visible on all the cameras. Scout didn’t know where she was heading, or if she even knew where she was heading. Did she have a master plan, or was she just looking for somewhere to hide in her chair until the storm had passed? Scout called up a schematic of the entire station and looked for anything interesting in the direction Liv was headed.
Suddenly both of the dogs were barking like mad. Scout pulled the gun from her waistband and charged back into the common room. Clementine was still standing on the table, but she had something in her hand. She opened her fingers to show it to Scout. It was a palm-sized cylinder with a red flashing light on one end. She smiled that maddening smile again, then tossed the cylinder to Scout.
Scout flinched away, covering her face with her arm without lowering the gun. The cylinder made a small popping sound, and the air filled with a thick smoke. Coughing, Scout rushed up to the table, but Clementine was gone. The dogs were still barking, half in panic now. They didn’t like the smoke.
“Come, dogs!” Scout commanded. The two dogs came to her sid
e and followed her into the kitchen. The kitchen had a hatch, a door she could shut and lock from the inside. She slammed it shut and bolted it, then found a large tray to dissipate what little gas had flowed in from the other room.
If only the communications room had had a door. Being able to see all over the station would’ve been nice. But the kitchen was probably better. She didn’t think the hatch would be impenetrable, but she was sure that anyone trying to get in would make a great deal of noise. Enough to wake her if she should fall asleep. Certainly enough to wake the dogs. This was as close as she was going to get to safe for now.
Surely she and the dogs could wait out the storm here. They had food, they had water, they could make do with the plumbing. Just three more days.
But was she safe? Was there another door?
Scout went into the pantry where she had seen Liv and Clementine speaking before that first dinner. The room was lined with shelves filled with more MREs, as well as cans and packages of food she could cook. That would probably come in handy; whatever had killed Viola could be in any of the food in the kitchen. She hadn’t turned her back on Clementine long enough for her to poison that tray of food, she was sure of it. Clementine must have poisoned everything that first night. Scout would be sticking to food she could clearly see hadn’t been tampered with, food that would reassure her with the soft hiss of released vacuum compression when she opened it.
The pantry wasn’t large, and there was no second door. She looked up at the camera over the doorway. It was possible either Liv or Clementine could be watching her on the monitors in the communication room. But Scout didn’t think that would matter. Once they entered the common room and saw the locked hatch to the kitchen, they would know where she had gone.
Scout looked at the refrigerator that had been calling to her since she had first arrived. Row after row of gleaming bottles of jolo. More than she could drink in a week. Each individually sealed. Safe. And the last thing she wanted now was sleep.
Scout took out a single bottle of jolo and closed the fridge door, then changed her mind and fetched a second. She brought them both to a heavy chopping block that sat directly across from the hatch. She sat on the floor with her back to the block, the dogs settling in on either side of her. She set the second bottle behind her on the block and turned the first bottle over in her hands.
She didn’t really want it. Not like she had before. She was still numb; this apathy was part of that. She thought of Warrior with her broken lenses, lying on the floor in arm’s reach of Viola’s body. Their blood pooling over the floor was probably flowing together by now. Scout remembered that blue eye. She had imagined voids of darkness behind those lenses, but never eyes like those. The same intense shade of indigo the sky had been the day her family died.
Scout sighed, still handling the bottle without quite opening it. Even her most morose thoughts weren’t bringing the tears. She would just have to live with the numbness until it was gone. Perhaps it was better this way. Clementine would surely be back, and Scout didn’t want to be caught crying when she needed to be fighting.
She needed to be alert. She needed the caffeine and the sugar. She had to drink the jolo.
She wiped nonexistent dust from the neck of the bottle before finally popping it open and taking a long swallow of icy cold fizzy goodness. Her brain sang at the sweet rush of sugar, if a bit more muted than its usual opera to the glories of jolo.
Just three more days.
22
The buzz from the sugar and caffeine made for a very different sort of numbness. Scout sipped slowly at each bottle, not really aware of how much time was passing beyond the count of the empties she lined up against the wall. After ten bottles, she felt like she really ought to eat something—her hands were shaking from all the caffeine—but she was too tired to get up and find food.
She had gotten up earlier to give each of the dogs an MRE’s worth of beef stroganoff. They had licked the trays clean, but as per usual with dogs, they had pushed the trays all across the floor while accomplishing that. One was in the corner near the empty jolo bottles, but the other had slipped under one of the ovens, and from time to time one or the other of the dogs would sniff under the oven, smelling that last bit of rich gravy they couldn’t quite reach. Scout was sure it was maddening but couldn’t work up enough interest to get up and retrieve it for them.
She had just popped open an eleventh bottle and brought it to her lips when the lights went out. There was a long moment in total darkness, then a red light appeared over the doorway between the kitchen and the pantry. There was another red light on the other side, Scout could tell from the pattern of the inky shadows. She stood up and crossed to the hatch, trying to listen through the door.
At first it seemed far too thick to hear anything, and Scout’s hand moved to the bolt to open the hatch enough to peek out. Then she heard a crash, followed by more crashes, then complete silence.
Scout strained her ears to hear more—a voice, footsteps, anything—but the silence stretched on for minute after minute. At last she could take it no more. She slid the bolt back as quietly as she could, then turned the wheel until the hatch swung ever so slightly ajar.
“Come, dogs,” she whispered, pointing at her side. Shadow was there in an instant, but Girl was still cowering next to the chopping block. Scout let the door swing open anyway, stepping back a bit in case anyone was about to charge inside. But there was no one there.
The common room was also lit by red emergency lights. There was a burnt smell in the air that made Shadow sniffle, then whine. Scout thought at first that it was the remains of the smoke grenade, but it was too strong for that. She crossed the floor to where Warrior still lay on her side and knelt to take the light from Warrior’s belt. She shined it around the room, but there was no sign of anyone there besides her and Shadow, and now Girl hovering in the kitchen doorway.
But there was smoke curling in from the communications room.
Scout started to rise but then knelt back down again. She was going to need more than a light. And she was sure Warrior would want her to have whatever she needed. Especially if the alternative was Liv or Clementine having it. Scout took a deep breath, pushing back the voice in her head that said she was only telling herself what she wanted to hear, and reached for the clasp on Warrior’s belt to snap it open. It took a moment to get it out from under Warrior’s hips; she had forgotten just how heavy Warrior was.
When it was at last free, she belted it around her own waist. At first it hung too low on her hips, threatening to slip down to the ground around her feet, but then it started tightening, much like the cuffs had done around Ottilie’s wrists. Scout pulled the gun from her waistband as the belt settled around her waist, then tucked it into its holster at the back of the belt.
She looked down at Warrior’s still face. The broken lens was probably useless, but she might end up needing the other. She touched the edge of it, worried that she was going to have to claw it free, to dig into Warrior’s face with her nails, but it popped free at the first brush of her fingertips and she slipped it into one of the belt’s many pouches.
Light in hand, one loyal dog at her heels, she crept up to the communications room. The smell was definitely from an electrical fire, the noxious odor of melted circuit boards and wires. She saw the legs of one of the chairs thrusting out from the bank of monitors toward the center of the room, then saw where the seat was embedded among the smashed screens. Not a single screen was unharmed. But this wasn’t why the lights were off, Scout was sure. Why would either Liv or Clementine cut the lights, then stand here silently for so long before destroying the equipment? It made more sense that the electricity had been cut to the entire station from somewhere else, then whichever one of them had done it had walked or hovered here to make sure no one could get a signal out even if they restored the power.
There must be another place from where someone could control the power. A utility room of some sort.
Scout gasped aloud as a horrible idea struck her. Was the airflow off too? She looked around, found a vent, and put a hand in front of it. She could feel a faint stirring of the air and breathed a sigh of relief. It made sense; the emergency lights were on, there must also be emergency power to the air systems. Still, she wanted everything back on as soon as possible.
But where could a utility room be?
That could have been where Liv was heading when she traversed the hangar. In fact, the only other door Scout hadn’t gone through was the one on the other side of the barracks, the one to Viola’s private space.
Scout signaled for Shadow to follow her as she pressed on, past the communications room to the barracks. Girl whined for a moment, then ran to catch up, not wanting them out of her sight. Shadow glanced back at her, then turned his focus back to the corridor between the bunks. This room also was empty, save for Ruth’s corpse wrapped in a sheet in the bunk under where Scout had tried so briefly to sleep.
The only other way out was the hatch to Viola’s rooms. Scout wasn’t sure if it would be locked or not. There was a panel next to the door, the sort that controlled locks and room climate in the nicer places Scout had been. It was unsmashed but completely dark. Scout grabbed the handle on the door and gave it a push. It swung open and she stepped over a threshold into a small sitting room, just two chairs on either side of the hatch turned to face each other. Next to one was a basket filled with balls of wool and an assortment of knitting needles. Next to the other was a table that held a cup and saucer half filled with a brown liquid that smelled like tea.
It only took two steps to cross the room through another open hatch to a room dominated by a large, poufy bed. Perhaps the mattress was hard as a rock, but the comforters piled on top of it were each puffier than the last, and Scout had no idea what any one person could even do with such an enormous number of pillows. There wasn’t room enough to step inside without climbing up onto that bed. Definitely no room for anyone to be hiding, although she poked at the pile of comforters just to be sure.
