Obscura

by Joe Hart

  There was the crunch of bone, and Diver quivered and was still.

  Orrin’s shoulders heaved with exertion, and his face was flushed as he turned to her. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she croaked. “I think so.”

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  “We have to get out of here.” She struggled to her feet. “They’re killing everyone.”

  “Who is?”

  “The crew. Everyone who’s addicted to shifting.”

  “Addicted?” Orrin shot a look at Diver before jerking his head toward the elevator. “We need to see my father.”

  Oh God.

  Gillian tried forming the words but stopped herself. It would tear Orrin apart.

  “We have to get to one of the landers,” she said, stooping to pick up Guthrie’s key.

  “The landers? Why?”

  “Easton, he was going to—” She swayed, dizziness sweeping over her.

  “Whoa,” she heard Orrin say as she stumbled forward. His hands found her shoulders as she fell, and she reached out, fingers snagging the neck of the T-shirt he wore.

  There was a roaring in her ears, and her vision doubled before coming back to normal. “Sorry, I—” she started to say but stopped.

  A yellow-brown tendril extended up the skin of Orrin’s chest toward his neckline. Below it she could see the deeper purple of the bruise’s center on his breastbone.

  And in that moment, she was back in the ship’s airlock, seeing the space suit coming alive.

  Kent’s rotting face behind the visor, his hands trying to grasp her.

  Swinging the steel pry bar around and feeling it connect with his chest.

  Gillian shoved herself away from Orrin, barely staying on her feet. “You,” she whispered.

  His face fell as he glanced down and readjusted his shirt, covering up the place where she’d struck him weeks ago.

  “You really weren’t supposed to see that,” he said, and started toward her.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Gillian backpedaled, mind reeling.

  Something brushed her foot, and she nearly fell on top of Diver’s body.

  “Gillian, please,” Orrin said, walking toward her with his hands out. “Just listen.”

  She shook her head, eyes flitting to the right where the elevator waited and left toward the docking bay. She feinted to the right and lunged left, but Orrin was already there. Of course, he knew she couldn’t go back to any of the levels. There was no one left to help her there.

  “Stay back,” she said, retreating several steps, surprised when her back didn’t meet the wall.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  She was in the entryway to elevation control, the short hall behind her. No way out.

  Gillian turned and saw the scanner beside the door, swiped Guthrie’s card across it.

  “Gillian, don’t do this. Hear me out,” Orrin said, coming closer. “You don’t understand.”

  The door slid open, and she slipped through.

  “There’s nowhere to go.”

  The door closed, cutting Orrin off.

  She was in a transition area perhaps twelve feet square. Opposite the hallway entry was another door without windows but plastered with the same warnings she’d seen in the corridor.

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

  ABSOLUTELY NO METALLIC MATERIAL BEYOND THIS POINT

  She didn’t read the rest, only scanned the key again on the inner door.

  There was an unbearable pause; then the door whisked open.

  She caught a glimpse of something small streaking away from her, trailing liquid, before the pain stampeded up her leg and into her brain, brilliant and blinding.

  The titanium plate.

  The thought was swept away as she fell screaming through the doorway and landed in a heap. Gillian reached to her shin, sure her leg would be gone from the knee down. It was still there, but her jumpsuit was ripped and wet with blood from where the plate had torn free of her leg.

  The inner door slid shut. In a few seconds, the outer door would admit Orrin.

  She needed to move.

  She rolled onto her hands and knees, getting her left leg under her before trying to stand. The pain was molten as she put weight on the other leg, and fresh blood wept from the cuff of her jumpsuit. She could walk.

  The room she was in was round, everything lit by ropes of light strung across support girders twenty feet overhead. She limped along a 360-degree platform with an open center looking down into a pit at least seventy feet across. Below, interconnected veins of glass tubes surrounded what looked like a gigantic inverted top. Pulses of light ran through the tubes intermittently, and it was then she noticed everything in the room was made of either plastic or glass.

  Of course. The magnet would pull anything else down to its center, destroying the room. She could feel a strange tugging behind her eyes, like the beginning of a migraine, as she hobbled to a tall plastic cabinet beside the guardrail overlooking the pit.

  The door opened, and she caught a glimpse of Orrin stepping inside before ducking behind the cabinet’s width.

  “Gillian,” he called. “I’m just going to talk now. I know you can hear me.”

  She risked a look around the side of the cabinet. Orrin was standing in front of the doorway, gazing across the magnet opening. Several feet from where he stood was a small puddle of her blood and a spattered trail leading directly to the cabinet.

  She ducked as Orrin turned his head toward her.

  “I want to apologize for what happened on the ship. No one was supposed to be awake. Tinsel’s death was going to be an accident, a malfunction of his stasis unit. But then you were there.” There was the scratch of his footsteps, and Gillian gauged the next place she could hide: a lower bulwark of thick glass stemming from the opposite wall.

  “I figured I’d have to kill you too, but when I saw you struggling with the hydros, I thought of a way to avert that. And sorry for scaring you in the airlock. I wore the suit in case you saw me. I never intended to run into you. To be fair, you got the better of me. You actually broke my fucking sternum with that bar.”

  The volume of his voice changed enough so that she was sure he was looking the other way. She hurried as fast as her leg would allow to the bulwark, glancing once over her shoulder. Orrin had his back to her and had taken a step in the opposite direction.

  Gillian slid to a crouch behind the thick glass, biting the neck of her jumpsuit as fresh pain rolled up from her leg.

  “I thought framing you was kinder than killing you,” Orrin said. “I’m not like some of the guys I knew during deployment. Never liked killing.”

  She could see him through the dense glass, his form distorted and nightmarish.

  He turned to look in her direction and paused before kneeling. “Looks like you’re hurt. Bet you had some kind of metal in you. From the crash, right? I read about you after our little run-in. Have to say I respect what you’re doing. Fighting the good fight.”

  He rose and started toward her.

  There was another cabinet a dozen feet away, and she crawled to it, gasping at the shocks of pain with each movement. Her rosary fell free of her jumpsuit collar, and she silently sent up thanks it was made from wood instead of metal.

  “I respect you, Gillian. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Your daughter. She’s dying, right? I’m sorry, I truly am. And I’m sorry shifting doesn’t automatically repair damaged cells. Otherwise, we could just run sick people through the machines, right? It would be a miracle.”

  Gillian tried controlling her breathing. It sounded so loud to her, she was sure Orrin could hear it too. Ahead there was a shallow conduit channel cut into the floor. If she could hide inside it until Orrin passed, then she might be able to get back to the door and out of the room before he could catch her.

  “But see, we already have a miracle,” Orrin continued, his voice closer now. “What shifting does, it’s amazing. You don’t know ho
w many days I suffered knowing I could’ve saved those men. Saved my friends. It was like acid eating away at me from the inside out. Dr. Pendrake helped, but there’s only so much someone else can do. I tried pills, booze, fighting, fucking. Nothing kept the memories away.”

  Gillian clamped a hand down on the wound, trying to stanch the blood, and slithered forward, sliding headfirst into the conduit channel. She fit. Barely. The ridges on the bottom of the channel bit into her stomach and thighs, and she squirmed ahead and tucked herself inside, turning over to her back once she was fully hidden.

  “Until I shifted,” Orrin said from somewhere very close.

  She held her breath. Could he see her? Was there enough blood on the floor for him to see exactly where she’d gone?

  “I could tell right away something was different the first time. A little piece missing from the pain. So I did it again and again, and each time I lost a little more of that day.”

  There was the scuff of his boots on the platform almost even with where she was lying. Sweat trickled across her temples and into her hairline, maddeningly itching.

  “Course, you can’t control what it takes. I’ve forgotten things I wanted to remember, like my mother. My fiancée. But I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. You have no idea the relief of not waking to a living nightmare.” His voice broke, and she realized he was crying. “What I told you the other night at the bar? It’s like it happened to someone else. There are bits and pieces that seem real, but mostly it’s like a dream I had years ago. I was only able to tell you all those details because of my journals and the notes Dr. Pendrake took during our sessions.”

  There was a long pause, and Gillian felt her entire body tense as Orrin’s shadow fell across the railing above her. He was standing only feet away. He knew where she was. He was only toying with her.

  “I still remember killing him, though. And Dennis. They were both my friends.”

  The shadow swayed.

  Then receded.

  He was moving away.

  “But what caused all this is why I’m here. Look at the decisions people make. The Earth is war-torn and polluted to the point we need to leave it forever. I mean, that’s insane. They say those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I say that’s bullshit. Humankind has never learned from the past, we hold grudges. We remember, that’s why there’s violence and hatred. That’s why there’s wars. It’s the most vicious circle ever created.”

  His voice receded more, and Gillian slowly sat up, peering over the rim of her hiding place. Orrin was nowhere in sight.

  “But how can you hate if you don’t remember?”

  This was her chance. His voice had grown fainter, and if she had to guess, she would put his position almost directly across from the entrance to the room.

  She eased her upper body out of the channel, biting back a cry as she bumped the wound on her leg. The room was near silent now. She listened, hoping to hear movement or his voice.

  Nothing.

  The door was thirty yards away. Go or stay? Run or move cautiously?

  Still no sign of him along the grid work that made up the platform.

  Gillian ran.

  She limped as fast as she could. Each time her right foot came down was a surge of pain. The path ahead was still clear. A glance over her shoulder told her Orrin wasn’t there either.

  Gillian gripped Guthrie’s key card, ready to scan it at the door.

  Something snagged her hair.

  She screamed, twisting and beginning to fall.

  Orrin held her up from behind, wrapped an arm around her throat, and dragged her backward. She flailed, kicking her feet off the ground, but he was too strong. His arm tightened, cutting off the carotid arteries in her neck.

  Her vision swam.

  Then the pressure eased.

  “Your daughter’s dying, Gillian,” Orrin said in her ear. “She’s forgetting you right now. Forgetting everything you are to her. Wouldn’t it be easier to do the same?”

  Gillian let out a short cry and thrashed again, but Orrin only cinched the choke hold until she neared the ledge of unconsciousness before slackening the pressure.

  “Imagine a world without memory. No tragedy would last. Every sin forgiven. Even death would lose its power.”

  She took several breaths, trying to calm the manic spike of her thoughts. She couldn’t get away from him. Not by brute force. There had to be another way.

  “You want everyone to end up like Diver out there?” she said finally, trying to work her fingers beneath his forearm.

  Orrin made a dismissive sound. “He was a junkie. Weak. Couldn’t control himself.”

  “Everyone else can? It’s addiction, Orrin. I know it when I see it.”

  “That’s exactly why I thought you would understand. I didn’t do this for the rush of being remade. I did it to forget. You can’t tell me you want to remember your husband fading away and dying. When your daughter dies, you’ll do anything to forget.”

  Her eyes burned, and it had nothing to do with Orrin’s choke hold. “It wouldn’t be just forgetting that I lost my husband or my daughter,” she said. “I wouldn’t remember what I had with them. And nothing’s more important than that.” A tear slipped free of her eye and fell to Orrin’s forearm.

  “I really liked you, Gillian. I hoped you’d see it differently,” he said. There was something in his voice that sent a fresh bolt of panic through her. Regret. He was finished talking.

  Gillian tried pulling his arm away from her throat, but the choke sunk in deep.

  Immediately the corners of her vision frayed. She kicked, her feet sliding out from under her, but Orrin held her steady, slowly applying more and more pressure.

  “I’m sorry, Gillian.”

  Her hand began slipping free of his arm but caught on something draped across it.

  The vestiges of her consciousness forced her fingers closed around it.

  She gripped the rosary’s cross like a dagger and drove it backward over her shoulder.

  The closing tunnel of her sight expanded as Orrin cried out and his arm loosened around her neck.

  Gillian slipped free of the hold and turned, gagging and coughing.

  The cross had caught him on the bridge of the nose and slid to the right, gouging a flayed path to the inner corner of his eye. Bloody tears ran down his cheek, and his opposite eye blinked furiously in response.

  Seeing the railing behind Orrin, she staggered forward, gathering speed.

  Gillian slammed into him and shoved with every muscle in her body.

  Orrin stumbled, and his lower back met the guardrail. His arms pinwheeled, but the momentum was too great.

  For a second he balanced on the railing, teetering as one hand snagged hold and he struggled to right himself.

  Gillian stepped forward and pushed him the rest of the way over.

  Orrin slammed into the other side of the guardrail and spun away, his scream aborted in the shrieking shatter of glass a moment later.

  There was the angry buzz of high-amperage electricity and a puff of smoke before the entire room shook. She stepped to the rail and looked down.

  Orrin had landed on the interwoven glass conduits far below. His body was already charring, folding in on itself like an insect beneath a magnifying glass. Electricity jumped in ragged arcs from the ruined glass tubes, licking out and across the face of the huge magnet.

  The room shimmied again, and she nearly lost her balance.

  An alarm sounded, shredding the air.

  She ran.

  The pain in her leg was secondary now. She expected it, focused on it to keep the panic at bay.

  She waved Guthrie’s key across the scanner as the floor dropped several inches then rose again. The door opened, and she fell through it. As the inner door began closing, a tongue of crackling electricity wove up and out of the magnet pit like a charmed snake and connected with the ceiling before running outward in an inverted waterfall of light.


  Her hair stood up on her head, pulled tight by the static in the air, and the tension behind her eyes ratcheted to another level.

  Pulling herself up, she managed to scan the second door, the delay before it opened beyond agonizing. When the hallway appeared, she expected a dozen crew members to be waiting there, but there was only Diver’s body and the massive circle of blood around it.

  Gillian stepped into the hall, glancing toward the elevator before turning away. There was still a chance in the lander. If she could get inside, maybe she could detach and at the very least get another call for help out.

  She made her way down the hallway, hands aching for some kind of weapon as the alarm continued to bleat, a quick tempo matching her heart. As she approached the entry to the decon station, there was a click, and the door swung out toward her.

  Without thinking, she dodged sideways and hugged the wall as someone emerged slowly. She sagged with relief.

  “Easton,” she said.

  The mission specialist whipped toward her. His face was coated in drying blood, a long laceration across the side of his scalp still seeping. In one hand he held a six-inch stainless-steel knife.

  “Doc, holy shit! Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “So are you.”

  Easton looked past her down the hallway. “Where’s everyone else?”

  Even in the midst of everything, a lump still formed in her throat. She could only shake her head.

  “Everyone?” Easton asked.

  She nodded.

  Easton visually deflated, his shoulders rounding. “Who did it?”

  “The crew. Orrin was the dealer.”

  “I know. Bastard hit me with a stool. Where is he now?”

  “Dead. We need to leave. Something happened to elevation control.”

  “I know. We’re losing altitude and falling into orbit.”

  “Are the landers ready?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “What?”

  “They’re both gone. Must be on the surface, and whoever left them shifted up from there.”

  Gillian’s heart sank.

  The hallway shook, vibrating painfully up through her joints as Easton jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Listen, from the readouts I saw in there, we’ve got maybe ten minutes before impact. Elevation control must still be partially functioning, but it won’t hold for long. We need—”