by Joe Hart
ALSO BY JOE HART
THE DOMINION TRILOGY
The Last Girl
The Final Trade
The First City
THE LIAM DEMPSEY MYSTERIES
The River Is Dark
The Night Is Deep
NOVELS
Lineage
Singularity
EverFall
The Waiting
Widow Town
Cruel World
NOVELLAS
Leave the Living
The Exorcism of Sara May
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Midnight Paths: A Collection of Dark Horror
SHORT STORIES
“The Line Unseen”
“The Edge of Life”
“Outpost”
“And the Sea Called Her Name”
COMICS
The Last Sacrifice
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Joe Hart.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503949898 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503949893 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503949881 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503949885 (paperback)
Front cover design by M.S. Corley
Back cover design by Ray Lundgren
First edition
To all those who have lost their pasts—may we remember for you.
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NASA transcript of . . .
NINE
TEN
NASA-transcribed audio . . .
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
Audio file transcript . . .
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
February 5, 2030.
TWENTY-THREE
Audio file transcript . . .
TWENTY-FOUR
CLASSIFIED
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
Transcript of recorded . . .
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
September 17, 2028 . . .
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ONE
Now
“Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .”
The voice inside Gillian’s helmet reverberated in her skull as the shuttle shook to life around her.
She braced herself, every muscle tense. Straining.
Overwhelming panic flooded her, thickened with regret. What the hell was she doing here? She wasn’t an astronaut. Wasn’t ready for this.
Gillian reached to her right, finding Birk’s gloved hand, and squeezed it. He squeezed back.
“Six, five, four . . .”
“Ignition.”
The shaking took on new life, rattling her teeth in their sockets.
“Three, two, one.”
The g-force shoved her backward in her seat and forward at the same time, the velocity something alive as the shuttle roared. Carson was still speaking in her earpiece, but she couldn’t understand him.
Everything was speed.
Pressure.
She heard someone moaning and realized it was Birk. She tightened her grip on him even as his slackened. Had he passed out? Concern was overridden by a new wave of force from behind and the sensation of someone stacking weight plates on her chest.
She had felt it before. The terror of losing all control.
They were leaving the ground.
TWO
Eight Years Before
They almost always held hands when they drove somewhere together, but tonight they weren’t.
It usually didn’t matter if they were on their way to a romantic dinner or running to their local grocery store for a late-night snack; they held hands. It was something spawned early in their relationship, a cute and exciting thing that gradually became a sentimental comfort. Kent would set his hand, palm up, on the console between them, and Gillian would lace her fingers in his. Six years of marriage had only entrenched the routine.
But tonight he hadn’t reached for her as they pulled out of the restaurant’s parking lot onto the highway.
Gillian looked across the Tahoe to where Kent sat in the driver’s seat. The clean lines of his features sharpened then muted in the wash of streetlamps they passed. What was he thinking? She had wondered this a lot recently, almost obsessively.
There were differences with him, subtle but there.
He would end his sentences in the middle, as if another thought overrode the current one, his face going slack, eyes distant. When she asked what was wrong, he would return to himself immediately, asking what he’d been saying, and after jumpstarting his memory, he’d be off again. But it wasn’t only the hitches in conversation. Last week when she’d got off shift early at the hospital, radiology being strangely quiet for a Monday afternoon, she came home to find Kent standing in the living room, gaze fixed on a fly crawling along the wall. She’d thought he was trying to swat it, but then the insect had taken flight and buzzed past her into the kitchen, and Kent remained motionless.
She’d watched him for several eternal minutes, a tingling unease building exponentially, before clearing her throat, which brought him out of the fugue. He’d smiled and come to greet her like normal, but there had been a strange expression on his face when he first turned around.
Almost like he hadn’t recognized her.
In the hours she’d lain awake on the nights since, she wondered how long he’d been standing there before she came home.
He was different, and she wondered if maybe it wasn’t because he noticed she was different now too.
Gillian cleared her throat. “You were quiet tonight.”
“Mmm?” Kent replied, not looking at her.
“I said you were quiet tonight.”
“Was I?”
“Yes. You’ve been quiet for the last few days.”
“Sorry. Been busy with work. The new client . . .”
She waited for him to say the client’s name, willed him to say it, tension growing in her with each passing second. Kent cocked his head, as if hearing a distant sound, then relaxed again.
“Intersect,” she said, barely able to get the name out.
“What?”
“The new client, Intersect Inc.”
“Yeah. What about them?”
Something in Gillian’s stomach plunged. It dropped deep i
nside her, deeper than she’d thought any feeling could go. A needling memory returned from earlier that day, the subject of an article she’d read in a recent med journal one of the physicians had left in the break room. The appearance of a new neurological disorder always made waves in the medical community, but this one was different. Losian’s, they were calling it, and it wasn’t only the symptoms that were terrifying; it was the susceptible population. The disease could strike anyone.
And now, riding in the car with the dark outlines of trees scrolling by beside the highway, a horrifying possibility formed like a bridge connecting over a gap.
“What’s today’s date?” she asked before she could stop herself.
“Today?” Kent said.
“The date today, what is it?”
A small smile formed at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t you know?”
“I forgot.”
“Well, it’s . . .” He glanced at the dashboard before returning his eyes to the road. “It’s seven forty-five.”
The fear on the other side of the barrier she’d been constructing over the last few weeks burst through, consuming her.
This wasn’t happening. Not to her husband. Not to their life.
She thought she might be sick for the second time that day.
“I think we need to make an appointment for you.”
“Hmm?”
“An appointment. Tomorrow . . . we need to get you into Dr. Danner.”
“What? Why? I feel fine.”
“You just told me it was seven forty-five.”
“Yeah?”
“I asked you what the date was.”
At last his gaze left the road and found hers.
And she saw he was afraid.
Just as quickly, the fear curdled to anger.
“I’m fine. I’ve been stressed out with the new client. They want all their IT done by the end of the month and . . . and . . .” She watched the shadow of his jaw clench in the glare of another car’s headlights. “And what’s his name asked me to help finish his basement too next week.”
“Greg,” Gillian said. “Your brother’s name is Greg.”
His face slackened. The anger left his eyes, its presence there like some alien parasite. She had seen him truly furious only twice in the years of their relationship.
Gillian reached a trembling hand out to touch his shoulder. It was warm and solid beneath her fingers, reassuring. Her husband—he was still there beside her. But was he really?
Stop. Keep it together.
“Honey, I think there’s something wrong with your memory. We need to go get it checked to be sure. I can oversee the tests and I’ll read them myself. But we have to have you see someone because this is starting to scare me.” She paused, unsure whether she was going to say the next part or if she should wait. She stood on a swaying high wire with solid ground nowhere in sight. “And I need you. We need you. Honey, I’m preg—”
It was in the moment she felt the passenger-side wheels leave the highway that she recognized the blankness of his stare for what it was.
Grass hissed beneath the undercarriage, and she yelled, reaching for the wheel that turned in his loose hands.
I should’ve been holding his hand, she thought before the ditch sloped sharply away and the Tahoe rolled.
Gillian came to on her side.
There was glass embedded in her cheek. When she raised her head, tinkling pieces dropped away to the roof of the Tahoe she lay on. And there was something wrong with everything outside the broken window: the whole world was turned on its head. Her door was shaped like a “V,” and a tree was lodged in its center.
She managed to lever her upper body away from the mangled door and the tree that shouldn’t have been there before the pain hit.
It was a hurricane that swept over her in an instant, almost all of it radiating from her right leg, and when she looked, she wished she hadn’t.
Because legs weren’t supposed to bend that way. Or that many times.
Gillian sobbed Kent’s name, even as the sound of a siren began to rise somewhere in the night. She looked through the tears that fractured her gaze, seeing him dangling from his seat belt beside her. He moved his head slightly, and a drop of blood ran upward from the tip of his nose toward his forehead, catching the light of some approaching vehicle so that she could see through it, how red it was. How red everything was.
And as her consciousness slipped away like silk being drawn through weak fingers, the siren in the distance became the heartbreaking cry of a baby.
THREE
Now
“Two Gs,” Carson said.
Gillian wondered briefly what their speed was, but the thought was swept aside as the shuttle became a tuning fork around them.
It was going to shake apart.
As violently as she was pressed into her seat, the vibration still managed to rattle her.
Her fillings hummed, and her vision doubled before straightening again.
Tinsel, who had been silent until now, sitting in front and to her right, made a high-pitched wheeze. “How long does this last?” the analyst managed.
“A few more minutes. You’ll be fine,” Lien Zhou, the command pilot, said brusquely.
“Three Gs,” Carson intoned.
How the hell did he sound so calm? He’d done this twice before, she reminded herself. With effort, she managed to turn her head to the left and look out the viewing port, catching a burst of color there.
Flames engulfed the shuttle, obscuring the view of everything outside the window.
FOUR
Two Months Before
She was thankful there was no one else in the lab attached to her office when she received the email because she was able to release the scream without worry.
When Gillian’s voice finished reverberating and faded away, she grasped the laptop and picked it up to throw it. She stood there at her cluttered desk filled with the last six years of her life’s work, and the only thing that kept her from hurling the computer like a discus was the recent picture of Carrie on the corkboard above the mess.
The little girl had Kent’s blue eyes and her own nose and chin. The delicate cheekbones and light-brown hair were an amalgam of them both. Kent had lived long enough to see her born but not long enough to see the beautiful girl she’d grown to be.
Gillian set the laptop down with a sigh and scanned the email again.
It was sad that she was almost used to a few words taking away all hope.
She read through the lines, read between them. Each was more vague than the last and sprinkled with handy deflecting phrases like “deferred allocation of funds” and “referendum on hold until further notice.”
So here it was at last. The day she feared would come. The culmination of her failings.
The seed of panic that had been planted at last month’s Senate meeting sprouted another root. She could feel it growing inside her, trying to blossom into the kind of sorrow she hadn’t truly felt in years.
Gone. Everything slipping away.
Gillian gritted her teeth, using an old meditation tactic she’d picked up in one of the countless self-help books she’d read after . . . just after. She closed her eyes and pictured a tumultuous sea, the waves crashing against one another, dark clouds roiling overhead, the water angry. Hungry. She imagined it all slowly calming, a gradual easing of weather until the surface of the ocean was flat as a mirror.
Quiet. Nothing disturbing the water.
She opened her eyes to the email, and immediately the sea in her mind was replaced with the image of the prescription bottle in the back of her bottom desk drawer.
The little pills inside. Their rattle always soothing her more than any meditation could. How easily she’d fallen back into the habit, after working so hard to leave it behind.
The door to the lab outside her office opened, and she came back to herself, wondering how long she’d been sitting there.
Gillian straightened a
pile of reports on her desk as a lumbering shadow slid across the floor outside her doorway before its owner appeared.
Birk Lindqvist, the largest man she had ever met. If he weren’t clean-shaven, Thor’s hammer would have looked perfectly at home in one massive hand. Besides being a modern-day Viking, he was also the most brilliant postgraduate who had ever set foot in her lab.
“Doctor, I brought a muffin for you from the cafeteria. I mistook it for chocolate chip, but it is raisin, so I apologize.” His native tongue’s lilt was still discernable despite six years in the university’s dialect melting pot. The huge Swede stepped into her office holding out a paper bag that looked comically small in his hand.
Gillian took the muffin from him and smiled. “You didn’t have to, Birk.”
“I was passing through, so . . .” He shrugged. “What’s wrong, Doctor?”
“Nothing. I was just doing a little cleaning.”
“You never clean.”
“Not true, I rearranged my bookshelf last week,” she said, gesturing to the stacks piled so precariously a stiff wind might topple them all to the floor.
“Yes, of course,” Birk said, raising one eyebrow as he studied the shelf.
“That sounded almost insolent, and I don’t accept insolence from postgrads like yourself.”
“Will you accept it when I have my master’s?”
“Absolutely. There’s an unwritten rule that advanced-degree holders have to endure disrespect from one another. In fact, it’s encouraged.”
Birk smiled. “Then I cannot wait.”
“Yes, well, until then, let’s get to work, shall we?”
She tried making her way past him, but he stood his ground, blocking her path to the lab. “Doctor, I’ve worked with you for nearly four years now. I’ve eaten at your home, watched after your daughter, and when the time comes for Justin and me to be married, you will be our guest of honor. You are an open novel. So please, tell me what’s wrong.”
“An open book.” She corrected the idiom automatically before letting her head droop forward, all the weight of the recent months falling on her at once. Lie or truth? It was an easy choice; he would find out soon enough. “Our funding’s been cut. I just got the email from the committee a few minutes ago. We have enough for one more month.”
When she glanced back up at him, the surprise and outrage she expected in his face weren’t there. Instead, he merely nodded. “I had guessed it would be soon.”
