Cold eyes met mine. Measuring me. His gaze was direct and unsettling, a stare that said, I dare you to challenge my place here.
Like a wolf.
Eventually, it was too much. I looked away.
The moment I did, the mood shifted so suddenly even the air seemed lighter. “We don’t need to be wasting time talking about it.” He stood and offered me his hand. “Everything looks good in here. Time to suit up and play doctor outside.”
I grabbed his big, warm hand, and he helped me up with a pat on my back. The kindness was almost too much to bear; it made room for the grief to rush in.
“Do you need my help putting it on?” I said quickly.
“Slip will meet us there. We’re both going to need help.”
“Both?”
“Yeah, don’t get too excited,” he said.
“Does the captain know you’re letting me onto the hull?”
He huffed another laugh and shook his head, gathering his locs in one hand to toss them over his shoulder. “Do you think anything happens on this ship she doesn’t know about?”
“But I thought you didn’t want me to—”
“Didn’t anyone teach you not to question a good thing? Time to suit up.”
He turned around and walked out, and I could have sworn I saw the faint outline of a tail.
“Just step into the boots,” Slip said with a mischievous look, like she was asking me to skydive.
Empty footwear awaited my feet in one of three chambers built into the wall. I eyeballed the magnetic boots while I pulled the forest of my hair up into the closest thing to a bun I could hope to get, which was really more like a pile of ropes on my head. I took a deep breath, inexplicably afraid of what awaited me on the hull. I’d never been outside.
“You two don’t really need my help, hon.” Slip grinned. Her bracelet glittered in the light as she adjusted my hair. “I just wanted to see your oogly eyes when you’ve got nothing but that thin second skin between you and the silence. Most untrained folks can’t handle more than a few seconds, maybe a minute, on the first go. Everyone gets skysick. Universe is too big.”
That was enough to urge me into the bio-skin chamber. Don’t tell me what I can and can’t handle. “I’m good. I’ll be fine.”
She laughed. “We’ll see when we record you. First-time spacewalks are fantastic blackmail material. You should see Ovie’s—”
A low grumble rolled out of him from the next chamber over. He eyeballed Slip while piling his locs at the back of his head, pinning them in place with an army of clips and bands. A small smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. A thin thread of tension ran taut beneath their easy friendship, making me wonder what more there was to it.
“Well,” Slip said, winking at him but still speaking to me. “You get the idea. Everyone freaks out.”
“I was born to do this,” I said.
“Uh huh. I’m just saying, that’s what everyone says.” She gestured at my arms and legs. “Don’t let it crease. You don’t want your elbow to pop out. Not to mention, you’ll be just a magnet away from floating away into deep space.” She made a popping sound with her mouth to emulate the demise of my elbow, then laughed and closed the door.
I rolled my eyes, though inwardly I was grateful for her easy humor. I know both she and Ovie were helping me avoid my sadness; I’d never forget the kindness. Especially when they had Marre to worry about, let alone the grief of two sisters who were near strangers to them.
I stepped into the boots. They immediately shrank to fit my feet. Keeping my legs locked and my arms straight out to the sides, I waited. The laser scan read my body, and a few seconds later, an electrospinlacer wove the second-skin body suit around me. I imagined the Tangled Axon spun gossamer across my body, a thousand tiny spider legs clicking and whirring to produce the barrier that would keep my flesh intact in zero-g.
A plastic smell inundated me. I closed my eyes and let my imagination wander to distract me from that awful popping sound Slip had made with her mouth.
Shimmering fibers clustered together across my body, layer upon layer thickening to create my new skin. I felt the next wave of diamond-strong threads strapping me in like synthetic muscles, strategically placed so I’d still be able to move freely while maintaining the life-sustaining one-third atmospheric pressure and thermal regulation around my body.
I’d read reports about this on the net more times than I could count. Tried imagining what it would feel like. Now here I was, being remade for the Big Quiet. Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of it. Like being wrapped up and reborn.
It occurred to me—and not for the first time—we shouldn’t be able to do this. Humans shouldn’t be able to walk around on the hull of a metal box in the dead of space. We shouldn’t even be in the silence at all; we should all be dirtheels, earthbound and staring skyward. But we aren’t. We have ships and suits, and we carry our lives into the void, trusting them to nothing more than the integrity of our ingenuity and craftsmanship.
I didn’t care what Nova said about flight: that’s real magic.
It was all such a rush that I had to coach myself to calm down so I wouldn’t fidget. I knew the second-skin suits were old news, but feeling myself strapped into my own silhouette, snug and safe, was nearly the most exhilarating thing I’d ever experienced—second only to stowing away. All these conflicting emotions made me dizzy and tensed my muscles, provoking Mel’s to poke me in the back and remind me that it was still part of me, still creeping along my limbs and fingers, waiting. A familiar, threatening ache had already begun to spread beneath my shoulder blades.
Think about the suit. Think about the here and now.
I marveled at what was happening to me. Sure, maybe the tech was a little outdated, but the beauty of being a newcomer even on an old spacecraft was everything shone as if it were fresh. Everyone else these days wanted to generate those Transliminal Fields for spacewalks, but there was something comforting about relying on the suits. Tech made by us, our people, not conjured by the look-alikes from next door. It was daring and human and exquisitely terrifying.
“Arms,” Slip said over the chamber’s intercom, startling me out of my thoughts. She lifted her arms a couple of times to demonstrate what she was asking me to do.
I raised them higher so the life support system and power supply could be applied over the suit—a thin padding fitted on over the contours of my back. Finally, the visored helmet was lowered over my head and sealed with the skin.
The chamber door opened and I joined Ovie, who waited for me near the airlock door. Even with his enormous body, he looked sleek, sheathed in the same gray material.
“Ready?” he said, voice projecting directly into my helmet.
I gave him a thumbs-up.
“Don’t get dizzy,” Slip said, still wearing that shit-eating grin.
“Yeah, yeah.” I acted annoyed for banter’s sake, but excitement burrowed in my chest like a wild animal. I’m going to walk on the most beautiful spaceship I’ve ever met. In the silence. Right now.
I could never tell my parents about it.
No. I shoved the feelings down. Focus.
We opened the first airlock door and stepped inside, closed it. Ovie wiggled his fingers at Slip, and she placed her palm on the window. He placed his on hers, on the other side. The doctor’s full lips curled into a smile—not sarcastic or teasing, but soft and sincere—and she nodded at him. Ovie nodded back, and before I knew it, the exterior door opened and we were maneuvering around our emergency cables, moving outside.
In the black.
Ovie motioned for me to lock my magnetic soles onto the hull. I complied while fighting the urge to look out beyond the ship. They said you shouldn’t do that the first time, that it would make you get sick inside your helmet. But who was I kidding? I knew I’d do it. What if this were my one chance to see the Big Quiet up close? Even with Ovie’s and Slip’s kindness, nothing guaranteed my place on the ship. Tev could ti
re of me and hurl me headfirst at the nearest space station.
I looked up along the hull, letting my eyes drift slightly to the side, taking in the darkness.
It took every bit of my self-control not to cry. Here was the universe I had dreamed of since childhood. Here was the source of all the things I cherished, all the life in the cosmos, all the possibility that unfurled from each moment. Here was existence.
So many stars. I imagined the gods of old myth taking turns punching rivets into the universe to hold it together. Nothing about this experience unsettled me the way Slip said it would, except maybe the mild claustrophobia of being inside the helmet. But the expansiveness of the black, the vertigo? I didn’t mind. It felt like my soul was ballooning out to meet . . . everything. It reminded me that, failing body or no, I was alive.
They’re out there, now. Everywhere. The Adulans. Your parents.
Tears welled up in my eyes. I silently cursed them, unable to wipe them away.
I wished I could see more. The sides of the helmet encroached on the view, limiting how much I could take in from any given angle. Some dark part of me wanted to rip it off and go out in a gasp of awe.
Most beautiful of all was the Tangled Axon herself. Ribs of plasma circled her thrusters in bands. It was strange not hearing the buzzing and popping I was so used to from working at the shipyard, but the sight alone was arresting against such perfect darkness, with the stars beyond like drops of mercury. We all grew up knowing there was no sound in space, but until you’re surrounded by it, until you’re wrapped in that non-noise, there was no way to comprehend it. The absence of sound is a thing unto itself.
“Alana,” Ovie said, his voice projected through my helmet. The sound tore through the wall of silence, shattering my nerves. He gestured ahead of us. “There.”
I followed where his hand was pointing. A shimmering plateau of green and silver was stuck to the hull, about as large as Ovie’s waist—which is to say big, but small enough that we could probably manage to haul it inside on our own.
“How can something so small destroy a planet?” I did my best not to choke on my words, though my eyes kept burning. I was certain I’d dream restlessly for months—all those beings choking, dying, and floating lifeless in a dissipating atmosphere, while my parents screamed inside the crushed space station.
“We’ll figure that out when we get it inside.”
For an hour, we worked on the device while it shimmered like an oil slick in hues of green. The work was gloriously tedious—exactly what I needed to keep my mind from wandering to places it shouldn’t. Tendons burned inside my hands, sore from exhaustion and the disease. The muscles in my back turned to steel cords anchored to my spine. For the first time, I was grateful for the pain. Something physical to focus me away from the dark headspace in which my mind wanted to dwell. I ignored what discomfort I could and channeled every part of myself, all my energy reserves, into the work.
Ovie and I were an impenetrable machine of concentration. Seamless.
Eventually we peeled away the lower layers of the device’s architecture, which served largely as a secondary securing mechanism. Once we’d taken care of that, it looked like a squat mushroom or maybe an enormous contact lens connected to a platform. Cables attached the center of it to the hull, but they’d been routed directly through the ship’s body and into the engine.
I knew what this was.
“I know this!” I said, tapping Ovie. He waved me off, but I insisted, gesturing as wildly as zero-g would let me. “I know this mechanism! If we take it off, it’ll destroy the engine, but—”
“Fuck. Who would do this?”
“I don’t know, but don’t worry. I used to do this to my sister’s shuttle when she’d leave for the guild. Gave her plasma arcs a putrid green tinge she hated. My prank was a lot simpler than this, but I think I can disable it.” I paused, swallowing my anxiety. “If you’ll give me a chance.”
Finally, he turned to look at me, really paying attention now. Scrutiny burned between us. I could almost feel it heat the metal under our boots. His gaze was rough and immutable, challenging me again, and I somehow understood that he knew no other way to look at a person. For Ovie, to look was to see through, to dissect, to assess. In this case, to determine whether the risk of allowing me to participate in something so high-stakes was worth it.
Eventually, he gave me a terse nod.
My fingers pushed through the strain and worked like scalpels, rerouting wires and fastening security mechanisms to trick the device into believing it was performing functions it wasn’t. Where it connected to the hull, I patched over it with deceptively steady hands. I couldn’t tell Ovie that I doubted my ability to pull this off. Don’t get me wrong, I was confident enough or I wouldn’t have suggested it, but insecurity crept into my chest all the same.
They didn’t have to know. They couldn’t see me steadying my fingers, willing my body not to show signs of fear. Nerves coiling and uncoiling all the while.
A click and a release. The device floated gently above the hull, placid and thoroughly unmoved by its courtship with the Tangled Axon.
When it didn’t explode, I exhaled. All the pent-up tension made its way to my hands, shaking them uncontrollably, so I placed my palms flat on the hull and remained crouched. This wasn’t just exhaustion; I was late taking my meds. Mel’s hated tardiness.
Just let it pass.
Breathe evenly. Ride out the pain wave.
Ovie collected one side of the disengaged object, and I stood and took the other. We nodded at each other before making our way back to the hatch.
At the entryway, I paused. “Wait. Please.”
Ovie complied, but I could tell he wanted to get moving.
Gazing out into the black, I could have sworn the universe breathed. I expanded and contracted with it, filling with the light of the stars until my skin grew thin with the tautness of it. I was a pulsar, a red giant, a nebula; I was everything and nothing. Everything I’d lost was swimming inside me. My own mortality seemed irrelevant then, even with Mel’s tapping me on the shoulder. All I knew was I didn’t want my death to be heralded by a loss of motor function, by garbled speech, by fingers too gnarled with pain to appreciate a ship’s contours. That wasn’t who I was.
This was me: part of the black. When it was my time, I wanted to be given to the silence. Let her rush in and fill me until I burst into stellar dust. Let me join my parents, the Adulans. Let me be with them.
Before I knew it, Slip opened the inner airlock door, and we moved inside, the device shining between us like an emerald. We set it down and I immediately released the helmet, pulled it off, shook my head. Damn, that thing was claustrophobic.
My hair had to look ridiculous—more cephalopod than locs. My shoulders ached. Hunger gnawed at my stomach. Joints burned. Even the spaces between my fingers throbbed with soreness.
Slip gave me a quick smile. “Good work out there.” I felt heroic and couldn’t help but grin back.
“Ovie, Slip, Alana,” the captain said over the intercom. “You’re needed in the infirmary. Now.”
“Slip?” Ovie said, eyebrows knitting together. “What happened?”
Her face and shoulders were rigid as she helped us out of our helmets, moving quickly. “Just come on.”
My smile and feeling of heroism were short-lived. Something was wrong.
“Nova?” I said.
Ovie touched Slip’s arm. “What is it, Helen? Talk to me.”
“Let’s just get you out of these.”
“My sister,” I said, pushing my way toward Slip. “Is my sister okay?”
“It’s not your sister.”
No one said anything as we worked to remove the suits. Heat flushed my face as the Mel’s pain began eclipsing everything else; brain fog was taking over. Between the trauma of Adul and having had my concentration twisted to a fine point for so long, the day had taken its toll on my body, and I needed my medication. Combine that with the an
xiety I’d felt outside clinging to my spine like a constantly firing electrode, and I was ready to collapse. I dressed as quickly as I could.
Slip had the grace to notice my discomfort; she smiled and thank us for our efforts, patting me on the back. “Tev will be grateful, hon. I’m sure the Axon is too. It’s just . . . ” She shook her head. “Just come with me.”
We followed, silent save our boots tromping down the corridor, passing a few charms attached to the bulkheads. We ducked into the infirmary, where Nova paced near the far wall in a flutter of gold gauze, sparing us only a glance. Part of me wanted to go to her, while another knew better than to crowd a grieving Quick woman. Instead, I remained close enough to be there for her if needed, but focused my attention on staying coherent, staying conscious despite the pain.
I’d been so used to the sterile hospitals in Heliodor that the dismal condition of this infirmary shocked me. Frankly, the room looked no different than the corridors or quarters, all metal bulkheads and exposed beds. No Transliminal Fields to quarantine patients here. I’m sure Slip knew what she was doing with what resources she had, but I couldn’t help thinking it would be a good idea to not need surgery out here in the black.
Slip was busy drawing up injectables near a row of metal supply cabinets. Two empty exam tables sat parallel in the center of the room. Tev hopped off the one closest to us and patted it, glancing between Ovie and me.
“You two, on the tables.”
“Captain, what’s happening?” he asked.
Nova finally broke out of her ruminations and hurried to me. “Alana. They’re—”
Tev snapped her fingers at Nova to quiet her—frightfully effective, actually—then gestured to Ovie. “Pull up a net news stream.”
“What about security?”
“Marre has our comm link riding under a nearby transport’s.”
“Alana,” Nova whispered, skin pallid. “Auntie Lai.”
I went dizzy. “What about her?”
“They’ll come after her . . . ” She clasped her hands together and tucked them under her chin, pleading with me. “You have to fix this.”
Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel Page 10
