Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel

by Jacqueline Koyanagi

  No other crew member seemed to hear the Axon the way I did, but I knew she spoke to them all the same. I saw it in the way they paused in their work when she sang, bending their heads toward a sound they felt not with their ears, but their bones. It was the only time real peace came over Tev’s face, rendering her achingly sweet. Probably wouldn’t have liked me thinking of her as “sweet,” but there was no other word for that softness in her eyes, the light sprinkle of freckles across her cheeks, the delicate way she touched the Tangled Axon’s controls. She loved this old Gartik. It was evident every time Tev’s eyes trailed along the vessel’s curves the same way mine did.

  It was okay to take quiet comfort in watching the captain, wasn’t it? Surely I couldn’t be faulted for being soothed by something that did no harm.

  I couldn’t help imagining what it would be like to watch Tev wake up on some sun-bathed morning on Woolera, her hair spilling over cheek-warmed pillows, face as content as in those fleeting moments of tranquility on the ship. What was she like when she wasn’t working?

  Daydreams like those made me maintain a conspicuous buffer of empty space between Tev and me. Hyperaware of the self-conscious shifting of our bodies while discussing my research into the device, I’d stammer and flush. My words tangled up in each other. Awkward apologies tumbled out of my mouth when I dared touch her by accident. My hand would disappear into my pocket, curl around the medication. I was never like this with women—not even when I was a kid. I just couldn’t seem to get it together around her.

  The most curious thing about Tev was the room she kept off the port side of the cargo hold. I’d seen her go in and out of it, but she always closed the door behind her, locked tight. When I asked Slip about it, she just shook her head.

  “That’s Tev’s room,” she said. “Keeps her grounded. Especially now, when all she can think about is Marre dying, and the Nulan government recycling the Tangled Axon when they catch us.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Girl, that’s not my place to say. Don’t worry about it.”

  So of course, I did. I imagined all sorts of things, from illegal cargo to an army of trained cats. The room’s unknown contents were a constant temptation, mocking me while I studied the device. I stood outside the door of Tev’s off-limits room a few times, listening. I passive-aggressively glanced at it while talking to Tev about my ever-fruitless research progress, hoping she’d give me some hint as to what it was. The most I’d gotten was a raised eyebrow.

  About three days into our journey toward Spin, Tev loosened my reins, letting me wander around the decks unaccompanied. I split my time between studying the object—gaze periodically flicking toward the closed door of Tev’s mysterious room—and memorizing the details of the Tangled Axon. The way the decks felt beneath bare feet. The weave and color of each charm hanging in the bridge and corridors, their purpose still unknown to me. The bite of each seam in the bulkheads as I ran my finger along them, learning even that small part of her. The sound of the crew members’ footfalls filling her, each distinct enough that I could eventually figure out who was coming long before I saw them. The ship’s acoustic signature reverberating against me. Subtle changes in her song when Ovie tweaked some minute setting in the engine room, and the accompanying ache in my fingers as I craved such intimate contact with her.

  Being there wasn’t just a means to an end anymore. Each sensation, each detail, was something magical gained that I now stood to lose.

  Marre occasionally wandered past me with hardly a sound, save her quiet shuffling and the dull buzzing inside my head. Every time, she peered at me but said nothing. She just left in a whisper of black hair and disappearing skin, honeycomb tattoo staring at me like a hundred empty eyes. Part of me wanted to follow her, tempted by the cloud of unease that surrounded her, like chasing a storm. But most of me shuddered at the thought of her skinless face flashing blood and muscle, and I thought better of it.

  Sometimes I woke up in the middle of my sleep shift, expecting her to be standing right there in her vibrating, flickering ghost of a body.

  Instead of sleeping, I slipped from my quarters and into the cargo bay, where I pressed my ear against Tev’s closed door and listened. I slid my hand along the metal and envisioned the oils in my skin sinking into the Tangled Axon, inviting her to become part of me, to exchange thoughts with me, that I might know her better—and her captain by proxy.

  I learned nothing, felt nothing other than the constant hum of the ship, and an occasional buzzing in my head when Marre haunted the cargo bay stairwell, watching. She always left without a word, the only indication that she’d been there the slight scent of honey she left behind, and the faint echo of her endless noise.

  Beyond my connection to the ship, loneliness sank in. Thoughts of my family tugged at me, stealing my concentration. Vivid images of Adul flashed in front of my hands while I tried working. The smallest things would trigger it without warning, paralyzing me. Wires sparking. A piece of metal falling, clanging against the floor. The color beige or cream or orange. When I wasn’t thinking of my parents or the Adulans, I thought of Aunt Lai. How much worse off was she, I wondered, stranded on Orpim with both her nieces in trouble? Had the enforcers sought her out? Was she safe?

  Even while living in such tight quarters, I’d never felt so alone. I’d have felt completely isolated, if not for the Tangled Axon herself.

  I didn’t reach out to Nova; she rarely came out of her room and didn’t want much to do with me when she did. She was still mad at me about leaving Lai, still unwilling to face her grief with me. She just knitted. Knit purl, knit purl, obsessed with that damn thing. Most of our rare conversations primarily consisted of her chastising me for wanting to associate with criminals, her project bobbing beneath her fingers all the while. It looked like a snowflake for a few days, then grew into a small blanket or shawl, glittering and undulating like a flattened star. When I asked her about the apparent similarities between her knitting and the light at the center of the device, she said she didn’t know, and changed the subject.

  We had little else to say to each other, so I spent less and less time banging my head against that particular wall. Worrying about incarceration was a bit higher on my priority list, anyway. In the end, Nova would or wouldn’t help us, and no matter what Tev believed about my relationship to my sister, there was very little I could do to sway her.

  But without Nova to talk to, and without making any progress deciphering the device, I needed something to occupy my time when I wasn’t working. Anything. I was tired of my mind being so full of grief and memory and anxiety, a cacophony of my parents’ deaths, the Adulans’ deaths, my own impending, slow death on a penal colony. I wanted to fill myself up with something else, with people whose stories were new to me, untarnished. Fill it up with life.

  So I made it my mission to find out something about each crew member, some point of connection that might weave a thread between us and help me find my place there. Maybe they’d regard me as more than just a dirtheel, more than “Nova’s sister,” more than another deteriorating body—if I could know them well enough to help them see it.

  I watched the rest of the crew with as much subtlety as I could manage. Ovie was the toughest to observe. He always noticed me peering at him while I feigned interest in some nearby object. Eventually he called me out on it when he caught me sneaking by engineering.

  “Alana.”

  His huge back curled over a platform at the far end of the engine room. I stopped. Electrical storms raged above us in a latticework of lightning, the Tangled Axon’s plasma heart burning hot and bright. Shades of her voice crossed over each other, whispering and singing.

  “Just come in,” he said. The engine’s crackling forced him to speak loudly.

  “How do you always know I’m there?” I shoved my hands into my pockets, fingers curling around the medication like a talisman. “Am I really that noisy?”

  “Your smell.”

  “Exc
use me?”

  He continued working on whatever occupied his attention; I couldn’t see around his body. “Your smell. You took a shower this morning and used that awful blue soap. You were talking to the captain before you came here. You’re nervous right now. Oh, and you had a nutrient bar for lunch.”

  “That’s a little creepy.”

  He finally turned to look at me. “What do you want?”

  I tilted my chin up at his workstation. “What are you doing there?”

  A long moment passed, then he turned back to what he was doing. “Watch if you want.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “What did I just say?”

  When I stepped closer and found a spot near the platform where I could wedge myself into the corner and sit, he extended his closed hands to me, then opened them. Metal rings spilled from his fists, falling into small piles on the table, joining hundreds more. Mostly silver, with a splash of color here and there.

  “Silver?”

  “Aluminum. Some niobium that’s been anodized using the ship’s plasma arcs.”

  I watched for a while in silence as he used pliers to open and close them one at a time, weaving them into repeating patterns. Heavy-lidded eyes focused intensely on the growing strand of interconnected rings, as if in meditation. Such large hands had made something so tediously complex; it amazed me. These must have been the charms I’d seen throughout the ship, the jewelry worn by members of the crew.

  “You made them. The necklaces and bracelets. You made them for the crew.”

  He grunted. I took it for a yes.

  “And the charms.”

  “They’re good luck,” came Slip’s voice from behind, startling me. The sound of the ship’s heart must have drowned out her footsteps. She joined us and rested a hand on Ovie’s back, raising her other wrist, where her bracelet dangled. “We haven’t lost a job yet since he made these for us, and no major ship malfunctions. Unless you count the device.”

  “That wasn’t the ship,” Ovie growled.

  “Do you guys buy that idea? Luck?”

  He shrugged. “Can’t hurt. Besides, making these helps me forget about the enforcers and Adul. Helps me focus on our family.”

  My neck and wrists suddenly felt conspicuously bare—another indication I wasn’t as at home as I’d have liked.

  Slip must have picked up on it. “You’ve only been on the ship for a little over a week.” She dug around in her pocket and pulled out a nutrient bar, unwrapped it, and split it into three pieces. We chewed our compressed crud while talking. “We’re family. That’s not the kind of thing you can just wake up one day and be part of. It takes time.”

  Was I so transparent?

  “Well in that case,” I said, watching the ever-stoic Ovie work. “Impenetrable fortress though this crew may be, how about you let me get to know you a little? I swear you’re like a collective brick wall.”

  She shrugged and half-sat on the platform, chewing. “What’s to know?”

  “There’s always something to know. You could tell me about your nickname.”

  I avoided looking at Slip as I asked it. I didn’t need to see her to know she was making a face at me. When she didn’t answer, I glanced up to see Ovie nudging her.

  “Fine, whatever.” She sat down the remnant of her nutrient bar. “I don’t have a medical license.”

  My hand drifted to my incision, horror rising in my throat. “You’re not a doctor?”

  “She’s a doctor,” Ovie barked, dropping his pliers and sending tiny metal rings flying. He turned to Slip. “You are a doctor. Rulings don’t change that.”

  She sighed and pushed the wayward rings back into an organized pile for him. “Tell that to the Nulan medical board.”

  “So why don’t you have a license?” I asked.

  “Fine, fine.” She shifted her weight as if grounding herself. “I did my residency in one of the rural settlements on Gira, near West Lake. When I finished, I decided to stay and teach. They needed someone. You grow up learning about the poverty of the workers there as some vague idea, something to pity, something that serves to throw your life into relief and inspire gratitude for your own blessings. You have no idea until you actually live there. I thought I had it bad as a kid. But this . . . ” She shook her head a little. “Anyway, pity was the last thing on my mind. I had a skill, they had a need. But it doesn’t matter to the board. Rules are rules.”

  Ovie let out a small whimper, but continued with his craft.

  “I couldn’t stand it. Half the time I’d heal wealthy eco-tourists of their mod-induced headaches. Folks from Orpim’s Eastern Hemisphere dropped money for high-end painkillers while kids two streets away from the hospital couldn’t afford basic medical care.”

  I felt like my ribs twisted into a knot around my lungs. What she said about the Girans hit too close to home, and it brought to mind the records I’d seen of Mel’s Disorder patients and their loved ones. When I discovered those recordings, they made me more determined to always be able to afford treatment. To live. To have the privilege of dying in a vessel accident or a bar fight instead of wasting away, trapped inside a body that wouldn’t let me walk, speak, or blink. A body that wouldn’t move.

  Without treatment, death happened fast. Two years from onset, maybe. People had started showing symptoms at younger and younger ages with no indications why. Treatments worked well enough for us to get by. Most people lived into old age, but the medication, like everything else, has never been free. Life was a privilege, not a right, apparently. Something you had to struggle for when you were unlucky enough to be born at the intersection of poverty and bad genes.

  On a penal colony, they probably wouldn’t bother with medication for something like Mel’s. I might last a whole two years, probably more like six months—most of it incapacitated and in unbearable pain.

  Stop it. You’ll work yourself into a frenzy. Think about something other than the enforcers roping in the Tangled Axon like a wounded burt.

  “You okay?” Slip said.

  I nodded. “Sorry, please go on.”

  “When I wasn’t treating tourists,” Slip said, “I’d see local patients who’d sold something valuable just to bring their children to the hospital.” She cleared her throat, tucked her hair behind her ears, and waited a moment before continuing. “Often only one of their children, even if they had more. The strongest, smartest, most promising kids got medical treatment—the ones with the most to offer their family and the community. Maybe two kids in a family would get treatment if they were lucky. Parents hoped they could glean something useful from the visit, something they could take home and apply to the other sick children and to themselves. There was a lot of illegal prescription sharing intra-household, but most of us pretended not to know.

  “Of course the hospital administrators refused every proposal for free clinics. One even had the audacity to say they should stop having so many kids—as if birth control were so easy to come by, as if families didn’t rely on older kids to help bring in income. Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. I started smuggling medication out of the facility and became a one-woman underground clinic, offering treatment for free.”

  My expression must have shifted, because she nodded at me and said, “Yeah, I know. Stupid.”

  “No,” I said. “Brave. You might be my hero.”

  She half-laughed. “It was great for awhile. Well, as great as something like that can be. I split my off-time from the hospital between dispensing medical advice and treatment, and tutoring some of the local high school kids in math and science with a few other doctors. Those teachers are spread way too thin. We helped the kids apply for scholarships to universities on Orpim. At least the tutoring stuff was legal.”

  “Someone found out,” I said.

  “About the illegal medicine? Yeah. A chick vying for my hours at the hospital.”

  Ovie growled.

  “I know it was illegal,” Slip said, “but I couldn’t help
believing she might not turn me in, even after she found out. I know it was stupid of me. I could have done a lot more for them if I’d been more careful, less trusting, or maybe tried to do something through legal channels, inside the system—”

  “No,” I said. “I get it. Heliodor’s not all that different from Gira. Growing up, my dad knew a guy who got into an accident at a mining facility and had to choose between treating his lacerated arm or re-attaching his foot.”

  “That’s just it,” Slip said. “I couldn’t be like that. I couldn’t just let people suffer. We take oaths! How can a doctor just watch and do nothing?”

  “So why ‘Slip’?” I asked, trying to keep the conversation light. I couldn’t handle much more sadness.

  “Oh, it’s dumb,” she laughed. “Like most nicknames. After my board hearing—where they ripped me apart, obviously—I slipped the chairman a note in his back pocket on the way out the door. It detailed his eight-year affair. His girlfriend was one of my roommates during med school, but he’d long since forgotten me. Thought I’d just let that one hover over his head for a while, even though I wouldn’t say a word to his wife. I’d never really ruin anyone’s marriage by sticking my nose where it didn’t belong, but I got a lot of satisfaction out of imagining him sweating it out.”

  I was laughing. “And that’s it? That’s where your nickname came from? Some note you slipped to the medical board chairman?”

  “Hey, I said it was dumb! During my interview with Tev I told her that story and she loved it so much she’s called me Slip ever since. I think she loved what it said about me more than the story itself.” She batted a hand at me playfully. “Girl, don’t look at me like that—I didn’t know it was an interview at the time or I wouldn’t have told her about it. We ran into each other at a bar in Heliodor. I was drunk and she had stories of her own. I think she was trying to hit on me until she decided she wanted to hire me. Turned out she could do both.” Slip grinned and took another bite of her bar. It was hard to imagine Tev hitting on someone, and just made me all the more curious about her. Which just made me feel guilty, sitting there with her girlfriend.