by K. Gorman
Karin said nothing.
“Right, well, let’s see how this thing is going.”
She flicked the inside of Karin’s elbow with her finger again and squinted down at it. Then, grabbing one of the needle kits from the counter, she swabbed the site, uncapped the catheter, and pressed it into Karin’s skin. The needle, larger than normal for shots, bit straight into the inside of her elbow, then relaxed to its resting angle. Dr. Sasha stretched a piece of white tape over its body to keep in in place.
They’d progressed to I.V. drips last year, rather than the regular series of shots she’d gotten before. These ones left bruises on the inside of her arm afterward, and they made her feel even sicker.
“Will I ever get better?” she asked.
This close, she could smell the scent of Dr. Sasha’s shampoo, and a bit of the chemicals from the dye in her highlights. She must have gotten them re-done recently.
“Of course you will, honey.” Dr. Sasha straightened to set up the I.V., its wheels rattling as she dragged it closer. “One day, you’ll be just like me, see?”
The tattoo she showed Karin had only two numbers on it, which made her one of the early patients of the program. But even though her broad smile had taken on a confident, reassuring edge, a twist of disloyalty slithered up through Karin’s stomach.
She’d long ago figured out that the doctor was lying.
*
Karin woke blearily, images from her dream crashing together and mixing in with the bright lights and sounds around her. She’d bunked down in the Mess alongside one of the edge tables. The faded yellow paint on the walls almost matched the color of the cinderblocks in the room and, as conversation carried over from close by, led by the strong voice of a woman, it sounded like Dr. Sasha was still talking to her.
Blinking, she shifted—and ducked as her head brushed against the bottom of a chair.
A hand found her shoulder. “Karin?”
Soo-jin knelt beside her, her head ducking to peek under the chair. She’d let her dreads out. Rough, bleached multiple times, and threaded through with string and beads, they fell down the front of her loose shirt like a mottled, faded rainbow, darkening toward their roots.
Karin blinked. Less people occupied the Mess than before, and many of the mattresses lay empty and pushed against the side wall. They’d ripped them from the crew cabins, figuring it safer to sleep in one place where everyone could keep watch for Shadows. As she looked around, the smell in the air changed from the stale, antiseptic scent of her dream to a muggy combination of body odor, soap, and cooking food. And she was pretty sure that at least one of those things was coming from her.
She grimaced. A shower, and a good change of clothes, would not go amiss.
Stifling a yawn, she turned back to Soo-jin.
“What’s up?” A quick check of the analog system clock on the other side of the Mess told her she’d been asleep for just under four hours. “Did something happen?”
“No. Just getting near Caishen is all. Figured you’d want to be up.” Soo-jin paused, her gaze lifting briefly to glance over the top of the chair she lay under, then returning. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired. Sleepy. Anxious.” She frowned. “Why?”
“You were talking in your sleep.” Soo-jin’s eyebrows twitched. “Bad dream, or was there a hunk involved that you don’t want to tell me about?”
“Does having a hunk automatically make a dream good?”
“Touché. So?” Soo-jin’s gaze caught hers. “You going to tell me?”
She must have been really talking if Soo-jin was pressing this much.
Stifling a yawn, she pushed herself up fully, ducking her head under the edge of the chair and folding herself into a cross-legged position. “It’s not really that interesting. Just a memory about the place I grew up in. They used to give all the kids injections every two weeks, sometimes more. This one had a brain scan, too.”
“Sounds like some serious mad science shit.” Soo-jin leaned forward, propping herself up on the heels of her hands.
“I’m pretty sure any medical treatment could sound like mad science shit,” she said. “They were kind of old school, though. Didn’t have as much tech as you’d find in a hospital on one of the Core planets.” She shrugged. “Just what they needed, I guess.”
“Old school mad science shit, then.” Soo-jin snorted. “Whatever they were doing, they must have got something right. You guys all had powers, right?”
“Yeah. Most of us, anyway. The ones who didn’t…” She swallowed hard, warding off a sudden memory. “Well, they didn’t stay very long.”
It had been normal, back at the compound. People came and went. Kids, too. Some would stay for a few years, then leave. Others, only a few weeks. For most of the time, Karin had assumed they’d gone to different facilities, or had been cured—the fix for that mythical disease Dr. Sasha had told them all about.
It had only been later, when things had started to spiral down, when the treatments had become less and less frequent and the facility’s air had turned rushed and harried, that they’d started to suspect something might be up.
Nomiki had figured it out first. She’d only mentioned it one time, but Karin remembered the clear, grim look on her face when they’d found out Brennan had gone away.
That was when Nomiki had started thinking of escape.
“Tell me about the powers,” Soo-jin said. “You’re the only one with light, yeah?”
“Yes. I had a different development program. Well, technically, each of ours was unique, but some ran more similar than others.” She raised an eyebrow and pre-empted the question forming in Soo-jin’s eyes. “And don’t ask me what the programs entailed, because I honestly don’t know.”
Soo-jin grinned.
“Maybe we can find out from that book your sister left. Or from your sister, when we find her.” Her face pinched together. “You know Marc was doing a search?”
“I think you said that before.”
“Okay, well, more specifically, Marc was having Cookie do a search.”
Karin straightened. “I remember now. He said something about Belenus.”
“Yeah, he got a ping from around there, but I think it was old.”
She leaned back, shoulder bumping into the back of a Mess chair. It swung with her, putting a line of pressure against her shoulders.
Belenus. Nomiki, what were you doing there?
“I’m guessing he didn’t tell you,” Soo-jin said.
“No, he didn’t.”
“I wouldn’t take it to heart. I don’t think he really found anything. Just some old news. You mentioned she was a mercenary?”
Karin snorted. “‘Assassin’ might be a more appropriate term.”
Soo-jin’s eyebrows shot up. “Geez. What’s her special power? Murder?”
“Something like that. They fashioned our programs from ancient deities. Hers was Enyo, the war goddess.”
“And you? Eos, wasn’t it? Who’s that?”
“A Grecian dawn deity.”
“That’s… kind of appropriate.”
“I didn’t realize fully,” she explained. “We left before my program completed.”
“For very good reasons, I assume.”
“Yes.” A muscle pulled tight in her neck as she stiffened. “For very good reasons.”
They’re taking our memories, Rin.
A low thrum sounded through the ship. Seconds later, the speakers crackled in the Mess. “Karin, could you come to the bridge, please? Thank you.”
Soo-jin glanced up at the clock. “They’ll be in range of Caishen, then. You ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.” She tossed the blanket from her legs and rolled it to the foot of her bed before leveraging herself up. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 18
The bridge teemed with people. Everyone on board had convened at the summons—which didn’t say much, considering the ship only held twenty-three people—but the
ones who designed nav decks and bridges did not mean for them to be spacious. Gathered in a loose semi-circle around the main frontal screen, they about filled the first two levels.
Karin and Soo-jin paused on the edge of the third, surveying the crowd. Most people wore shipboard gray, matching the mattresses and blankets she’d slept in, but a few familiar faces peeked out from among the bodies. Five days should have been enough to get to know everyone, but instead, only a core group had formed a friendship with her—Nick and Christops, of course, and Ronnie, who’d proven shy and timid at first, but with a penchant for practicality that had made her fast friends with Soo-jin. A few others, Arren, Marsa, Timmy, and Elizabeth, had formed a looser friendship, wandering over to chat.
The rest, however…
She wasn’t sure if it were Charise’s influence, or the human instinct to avoid oddities, but they had kept their distance. Managing ship operations and clean-up had been a good excuse for the first two or three days, but it had worn old by Day Five. More than once, she’d caught them muttering in a group, casting glances her way.
Like a stereotypic high school clique in one of the old shows she used to watch.
They didn’t mutter now, but she saw more than a few stares linger in her direction.
A holoscreen filled the front part of the ship, blocking the window behind it. Marked in blue and red, the colors splashed off the faces of those nearest to it, including Christops, who stood at an angle to the center with his arms crossed over his chair. Recovered from his stint as a Lost, he stood strong and solid, eyes fixed to the screen. The comms tone looped through the room, coinciding with a pulsing icon on the holoscreen. As she and Soo-jin dropped down to the next tier and came level with the second set of desks, the tone stuttered and vanished. The screen flickered.
A few seconds later, Hopper appeared.
She hid a grimace. At this magnitude, his face blown up to fill almost the entire two-meter screen, he was easy to recognize, and the camera didn’t do him any kindness. Not even the blur in their connection hid the thin, stressed lines that grieved into his face. Dark bags, tinted by the screen and the dashboard lights, mottled the skin under his eyes. His gaze shifted from side to side, as if he were reading.
“Hello,” Christops said, stepping forward. “We’re—”
“Where is she?” Hopper asked.
The crowd shivered, and a few turned her way, half-harried stares that quickly looked away.
She squared her shoulders, took a breath, and stepped forward. “Here, Hopper.”
His mouth tightened several seconds after she spoke. Not quite a live vid—they’d need to be a couple hundred klicks closer before they could manage that—but almost.
“Alliance has a poster out for you.” His gruff voice rasped toward the end of the sentence, and he cleared his throat, his eyes twitching to the side. “You, too.”
Karin glanced sideways. Soo-jin probably came into the frame. The comment didn’t appear to bother her. She stood as usual, arms crossed, a placid, apathetic expression fixed to her face. Her lips curled around the edge, but not enough to notice if one wasn’t looking for it.
“We didn’t break any laws,” Karin said.
He snorted. “Forgive me if I find that hard to believe. As I recall, you pointed a rather large gun in my station’s face last time we talked.”
“And as I recall, you were trying to force me to stay because I might be a witch.” She raised her eyebrows.
“Well, it turns out that you are—or was that part of your message a lie?” He, too, raised his eyebrows.
She took a long, steadying breath through her nose, trying to calm the rising nerves inside her chest. Around her, the bridge stood silence, watching.
“It wasn’t. I am. You were still out of line. Let’s move on.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “How many Lost do you currently have?”
“1,542. You planning on healing them all?”
She shrugged. “We got four days before that cruiser gets back. We’ll see how many we manage. What’s your biggest shuttle?”
He stared at her for a few seconds, face placid. Part of his lip curled back, not quite showing teeth. “We got a Skipjack 320. Seats twenty.”
Her eyes went up and to the left, doing the math in her head. “That’ll have to do, then.”
His lip curled back further. “You’re not docking, I take it?”
“No. I think you can understand why. Get the Lost in, as many as can fit. You can take up to three non-Lost station crew, yourself included. The Ozark will help check vitals and load them back in when we’re finished.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Load?”
“They’ll be unconscious for some time afterward. We don’t have that time to waste.” She forced a smile. “Not if you want to get through 1,542 people in four days.”
A muscle in his jaw moved, and they heard another voice speak on his side of the call, their words muddled. His eyes glanced away from the camera, presumably to the other person, then back again. “That’s ninety-one trips.”
She did her own math. “Twenty-three per day. It’s do-able.”
He nodded to the screen. “And you have proof that you can do this? That you can really do this?”
“I healed this entire crew.” She waved her arms around to encompass the group around her. “And if you don’t believe me, then come over on the first shuttle. See for yourself. Do we have a compact?”
His brows scrunched together. “A what?”
“A compact. A deal.” She shook her head. The Old Earth idioms were coming back. “Never mind. Will you be coming over, or are we just going to keep staring at each other through the screen?”
He grunted. “Oh, I’ll be coming over. Park close. Let’s make this as quick as we can.” His eyebrows raised as he regarded her. “Ninety-one shuttle trips is going to push it tight.”
“We’ll make it work,” she said. “Might have to do rotation. You got another shuttle handy?”
“Sure. Only one pilot, though.”
“If you’ve got any others among the Lost, bring them through first.”
“No shit.” He paused, then leaned forward. “Signing off, then.”
“All right.” She inclined her head. “See you.”
As the transmission cut, a solid, cloaking fear locked in around her shoulders. Her heart fluttered, small in her chest. Caishen appeared on the screen, looking more like a piece of random space junk than a functioning station at this distance.
Taking a flighty, shallow breath, she dragged her attention away. “How far out are we?”
“Seven hundred clicks. Be there in forty-five.”
Soo-jin shifted beside her. “I think it’s a trap.”
“You said that already.”
“No, I implied that it was going to be a trap. He can’t make a trap without knowing you’re coming.” She wrinkled her nose at the screen. Dreads once again pulled back from her face, the dark roots made a sharp contrast to her skin. Her eyes narrowed into slits toward the screen. “There’re a hundred and ten ways he can get you.”
“Is there anything else you’d have me do?”
“Other than duck and run—which won’t be possible now that he’s aware we’re in this tug? Nothing that’ll help.” Her lip curled back, much like Hopper’s had on the screen. “There’s a shrine on Deck Five. We could always pray.”
“Maybe my good deeds at Songbird will give me enough good karma to get us through this.” Karin turned the door. Forty-five minutes. Time to start prepping.
“Karma accumulates for the next life,” Soo-jin called after her. “We’re still screwed for this one.”
Great. Well, maybe I’ll get to be a saint in the next life.
Except saints probably hadn’t murdered people. And they probably also hadn’t been born from a test tube in some terrestrial lab.
*
Karin swayed from foot to foot, thumbs twining together as her gaze darted through the Mess. It was
the most logical place for this. Filled with fused metal chairs, they could easily tie down the Lost and heal them—but it brought back memories of Songbird, and a low, creeping tension had strung itself through her limbs over the last ten minutes.
Songbird had not gone well.
She swallowed hard, pressing back the rising panic. A shivery feeling had taken the top of her chest, making her breaths light, fluttery, and too fast. People from the Ozark milled around the tables. She spotted Ronnie by the door, a thin, overlooked figure in shipboard grays and spunky, short hair—she’d cut it at some point, relieving the shag that had grown during her time as a Lost—but she hadn’t spoken to her more than an hour. Marsa, an older woman toward the left of the room, caught her gaze when it darted past, and the corners of her lips turned up in an encouraging smile.
Well, at least one person’s rooting for me. She hadn’t seen Charise lately, though some of her clique had popped up to occupy the halls. Their last meeting had been amiable enough. No pointed looks or sharp comments.
Which either meant she’d acquiesced her position, or had something planned.
Karin knew which was more likely.
Jaw tensing, she ducked her head to pinch the bridge of her nose, pushing the thoughts away and warding off the tiredness that edged her mind. Four hours hadn’t been enough sleep, but she’d been finding it hard to get lately. The ship’s slumber rotation provided ample time for her, but she had still found herself wandering the halls, or lying awake.
A picture of the ruins flashed through her mind.
Gods, Nomiki. Where are you?
She pushed that thought away, too, the older, more volatile memories darkening her mind, and turned her attention back to the room.
Two exits, both in the same wall, with two doors that looped through the kitchen area behind her. Not great for escape, but, with the Ozark’s closed environment, there wasn’t exactly anywhere to escape to. With determination, and the resources they had on Caishen, Hopper’s crew could find them. And, with the Nemina nowhere close for another four days, they had ample time to try.
