However, after I killed those men, I made a stupid choice. Instead of running back the way I had come to get to med lab, I went looking for another escape pod. Surely there would have been another nearby, but the bays had been locked. Now, I was panicking like a child. From the med lab, the escape pod bay had been three lefts and two rights. That would have made it two lefts and three rights to get back. Choosing to look for more pods turned me around, and now, I had no frame of reference.
There was no one around. All of the people must have been looking powerlessly at the dragons outside the windows. Doomed people, the lot of them. Now, I was just as doomed they were. With a deep sigh, I sank down against the wall and sat upright in the unknown corridor. The frustration overwhelmed me, and I beat my fists against the floor.
I would die here.
Tiny, timid footsteps crept up to me then. I knew those footsteps. They had snuck up on me before.
“Trevor?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What are you doing here, Trevor?”
“Everyone’s acting funny. The dragons, they are flashing. They’re turning red. No one is talking.”
“Why didn’t you watch them?”
“Didn’t feel right.”
Thank goodness for the intuition of children.
“Trevor, I need your help.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know where the med lab is?”
“Yes, sir.”
I stood up and held out my hand.
“I need you to take me there, Trevor. Take me to the med lab, or the both of us are going to die.”
You had to hand it to that boy—he didn’t hesitate. He didn’t ask questions. Trevor took my hand and we started running through the empty corridors of the Goliath, four lonely feet echoing though the world.
Once we reached the med lab, I announced our presence loudly. No one answered or acknowledge we were there. I looked down at Trevor.
“Are there people here?”
“Yes, they are by the window looking at the dragons. They won’t turn around. None of them do.”
“Trevor, do you see a large, metal closet nearby painted red? It might have a white cross on it.”
“Yes, sir. It’s over to your right.”
We ran to it, and broke open the doors. I felt the hangers. There were four suits there. I grabbed the one with the longest legs for myself, and handed Trevor the smallest one. It would still be big on him, but it would do.
“Do you have anyone here with you? Family or anything?”
“Yes. My father. You met him probably. He’s Morgan, works on the ship. He’s in our room looking at the dragons too.”
I grabbed another suit down from the rack and handed it to him.
“You listen to me now. Run back to your room, throw a scarf or anything you can find over your father’s eyes, just like mine is.”
I pointed to the scarf around my eyes. I could almost feel him nod at me.
“Do that and don’t let him look out of the window again. Both of you put these suits on and run to nearest air lock or escape pod you can find. You must get off this ship right now.”
Just then, the ship shuttered. The feeling of steady floating progress stopped only to be accompanied by the creaking of metal. The Goliath moaned all around us, and the boy grabbed my hand in fear. I thought of his funny father, helplessly staring out of the window. He’d be missing a lot more than fingers soon if Trevor didn’t hurry.
“Is the ship being destroyed?”
“It will be. Now, get going. Run as fast as you can and get your father. You two need to leave.”
“What about you?”
“I’m getting out too. Now, go. Run!”
I heard him leave. His small foot falls echoed throughout the corridor and away from me. All I could do was hope he made it to his father, and they got out safely.
Now that I knew where I was, I knew where I needed to go. The air lock they had pulled Tio in was not far away. Two right turns and a long corridor that wound to a dead end at an air lock. I remembered.
I slipped on the survival suit as fast as I could, and left the med lab without so much as a mutter from the men at the window. As I exited the room, I briefly thought about getting one of them into a survival suit. They would probably have just tried to stop me, so I let them stay, enamored as they were at the window.
Running blind down a corridor is a lot easier when you know where you are going. I felt the curves before I reached them, and I managed to make it all the way to air lock door without slamming into any more walls. The metal of the ship creaked and groaned under some unknown pressure all around me like a tin can under a giant’s fist. There wasn’t much time now. I had to get out.
My heart raced as I opened the inner air lock door and stepped out onto the platform. I shut it behind me and flipped open the glass barrier to the right of me. I felt for the large round button that activated the thirty-second countdown before the outer air lock door opened. My hand found the familiar button, and with one brave motion, I pounded it with my fist.
The alarms sounded all around me. I fitted the suit’s helmet over my head and slid the lock across my neck from left to right, air locking the helmet in place. The countdown continued, and the room I was in began to depressurize. I always hated this feeling. It went against every human emotion to willingly stand in a room that was slowly losing air. I could feel myself getting a lighter and lighter. My heart beat against my chest, and my breaths became panicked without my telling them to.
“Ten, nine, eight, seven…”
My feet left the floor. Survival suits had no magnetic soles to their feet, so I was helpless to find the ground.
“Four, three, two, one.”
I held my breath and curled my body into a ball. The outer door opened in a whoosh, and I was sucked out into the terrible vacuum of space, blind, alone, and without direction.
* * *
Space was the most unnatural thing there is to a living being. The fact that we as humans managed to travel through it was an achievement worthy of the Gods. Space was the absence of light and air and everything living. Perhaps that’s why we were all so enamored with the dragons. Beings that were able to live in the vacuum of space? It was so unnatural and alien. How could we not be curious?
I floated there in the midst of the vacuum with no sense of direction, no clue where I was, and no way to signal anyone. I knew I was as good as dead, and I thought for a moment about why I had bothered to leave the ship at all. At least I would have died quickly on the ship as opposed to slowly suffocating in the nothingness. Survival suits could keep you alive for four maybe five days. Those would be the most agonizing final days of my life.
So, why did I do it? Why did I abandon ship like I did? Was it because I thought there was any hope of someone finding me the way we had found Tio? No. I didn’t really believe anyone would survive to find me. The odds of rescue were slim to none.
If I were really honest with myself, I knew the reason why I did this. It was the same reason I made this idiotic journey in the first place. Something told me the dragons could still tell me the truth. No person on Artemis or anywhere else could tell me where Decklin Crane’s boy had gone. I had asked. I had searched. The boy had disappeared into the wind, and my blood oath would live on until I found him. My only hope had been these dragons. I was so desperate I had pinned my last hopes on these alien beings to be able to reveal the truth to me.
Now, here I was, floating and forever lost in the deep vacuum of space. I was alone in the vastness of it all, still hoping for that last scrap of knowledge. I would probably die here in this suit. I would probably never be able to carry out my oath even if I did know the truth, but I had lived seven years wondering. That was another kind of Hell. I wondered every day about that boy, waiting for him to come of age and come after me. I had always half expected him to appear at whatever dig I was on all of the sudden and challenge me in the honor of his father. It had ne
ver happened, and the not knowing gnawed away at me.
I knew the moment the dragon enveloped me. The lack of air around me shuddered and I suddenly felt enveloped and safe. I can’t explain why I felt safe or what changed around me, but I just knew I was inside the amoebic creature. Before, I had been free floating in the ether of nothingness. Now, I swam in a soup of warmth. It surrounded me and hugged me.
It also began telling me things. The air around me pulled at my mind and invaded my senses. It whispered things to me in a wordless way that was beyond reproach. There were answers, glorious answers, and security all around me. I was so close to knowing it all, to being saved. All I had to do was remove my helmet.
“Wait, what?”
I said it to no one. The message had been wordless, but my response hadn’t been. It was a knee jerk reaction, but every instinct I had said unlocking my helmet would kill me. It was a human thing, to fear the vacuum. No air meant no air. I would surely die, yet the voice kept telling me to remove my helmet.
Suddenly, something Tio had said wriggled into my brain. She had rambled on and on about so many things. But somewhere in there, she had said, “You cut the throat, and they show you everything.”
At first, I had thought they were more of her ramblings, but cutting the throat was a military term. Soldiers who eject from their ships in survival suits often found themselves in this situation, floating helplessly and hopelessly in the vacuum. What do you do when you are forced to face the endless oblivion of space without hope of rescue? Do you wait to suffocate slowly over days, or do you slide your helmet’s air lock latch from the right side to the left and decompress your suit? End it fast and relatively painless or suffer in terror?
They called it cutting the throat for obvious reasons. It was your way out in the face of the horrors of the vacuum.
There came the message again to cut the throat and remove my helmet. I felt safe and secure, almost as if someone was holding me. Yet, my mind told me to be rational. Cutting the throat meant death, plain and simple.
“Cut the throat, and they show you everything.”
She had said that, and they had found her alive with her air lock latch flipped the wrong way. It was impossible. The entire thing was lunacy.
But the truth felt so close. I couldn’t explain it, I just knew the truth I had been wanting to know for seven years was just on the other side of my helmet. Hell, I was going to die anyway at this point, did it matter how? Maybe if I died getting a chance to know the truth, it would have been worth something.
Another swirl of security enveloped me and gave me the strength to decide. I would die, but I would die knowing the truth about my blood oath. I would die at least knowing that much.
I placed my hand over the latch on the neck of my helmet and took a deep breath. Everything in my mind screamed against what I was about to do. Fear slithered down my spine and made my hand hesitate a moment. My exhale caught in my chest as I cut the throat of my survival suits helmet in one quick movement. The suit hissed angrily at me, and I pulled my helmet off in a rush of sudden courage.
I didn’t die. In fact, I took a breath. None of this made sense. I was in the vacuum of space, floating inside a dragon, and I could breathe. My chest drew in several deep ones before I realized I wasn’t dreaming. The air was thick but breathable, and with every lungful, came a little spark of knowledge. Sudden flashes of understanding flooded my brain, and I thought I might pass out from it all. Tio was right, they did show me everything. Every unanswered question I ever wanted to know was answered. It was like turning on a light in the dark room of my mind.
Then, the truth about the blood oath came. I could see Decklin Crane’s face all over again as clear as the day I arrived at his home. The scene in that mansion played itself out for me as if I were watching the whole thing from above. I saw myself stumbling naked around that room, and I saw Decklin pacing around me. I watched myself kill him, and then I saw… oh God.
“Oh God, please no. Please, please, please, no. No, that can’t be true.”
It continued to show it to me, whether I liked I or not.
Chapter Twenty One
I awoke when something hard hit my back. It was metal—that was a certainty. At first I thought I might have floated into an asteroid, but no, it wasn’t that. The metal bits of my survival suit clanged in that distinct way metal did with itself.
After the horrible message, I had put my helmet back on and sealed it. I hadn’t wanted to hear anymore. Hours later, I finally drifted into an uneasy, exhausted sleep. A part of me had hoped I was dead. Death was such an easy out sometimes. Alas, whatever the Hell this metal thing was against my back woke me and proved I was not dead.
At first, I thought it was debris from the wrecked Goliath. However, it didn’t just bump me and move on with its path. It bumped me and stuck to me. I tried to move a little and found my metal belt and helmet were magnetically fused to the bulk behind me. That was curious.
It wasn’t until I felt the arms around me that I realized what was happening. I was being saved. Damn it all, I was being saved. The mass I was stuck to was an escape pod. All major ship escape pod had the ability magnetize their outer shell in the event they needed to pick up people in survival suits like me. They also had a few survival suits on board. I was being rescued, and I was pretty sure I knew by whom.
There was no point in fighting. The magnetic field disengaged me when the other person had their arms around me. They dragged my limp body to the back of the pod, climbing with the metal railings along the side, to the pods tiny airlock. Once inside, we waited for the outer door to shut and the room to pressurize. There was barely enough space in the room for the both of us to fit.
A bell sounded, alerting us the room was safe to breathe. I heard my companion’s helmet release the hiss of air as they pulled it off. Then, they reached for mine, cut my throat with no hiss, and removed it.
“Jeremy? Are you okay?”
It had to be Salem. It just had to be her. I didn’t say anything—I couldn’t. If I opened my mouth, I might kill her.
“Tio, I think he’s okay, but he won’t say anything. He might be unconscious.”
The rage boiled in my vein, and I struggled to sit in my place and stay limp.
“Check his pulse,” said Tio form the cockpit of the escape pod.
Two, shaky fingers pressed to my neck and found my pulse.
“He’s alive. I can feel it.”
Her touch made it harder to stay still. It flared a fire in my skin that was hard to control. I clenched my teeth hard.
“Salem?” asked Tio with a warning in her voice.
“Yes?”
There was a pause of tension in the air. Tio was reading me. She knew.
“Salem, run!”
Salem stood quickly, and the panic in the air set my fire ablaze. I advanced on her, and she ran further into the pod. She stumbled on the floor and scooted as far from me as she could, which put her back to the wall. I got on my knees and slammed both my fists into the wall on each side of her head, pinning her in place. Salem’s panicked breath reverberated with the echo in the pod.
“Jeremy! What are you doing? Stop this!”
“What is your name?!”
“W-w-what? You know my name.”
I punched the wall with my right fist, causing her to scream out.
“What is your real name?”
Trembling silence overtook the room.
Suddenly, the back of my eye sash had pressure on it, and there was a knife to my throat. Tio had come to the rescue.
“She didn’t know, Rabbit,” she said with serious malice.
“I want her to answer that.”
Salem gulped audibly.
“What is your real name?”
“Lillith… Crane.”
“You are Decklin Crane’s daughter?”
“Yes.”
All of the fight drained from me then. The truth had overwhelmed me and the rage had filled i
n the cracks. Now, everything leaked out of me like a colander. Tio felt me slacken, she let go of my sash and removed the knife. I removed my fists and sat back on my haunches. There was nothing more I wanted in this world than to curl up in a hole and die somewhere. I settled for scooting myself to the other side of the pod and leaning helplessly against the wall.
I heard her scramble to her feet and move over to me. She was shaking as she straddled my legs. It vibrated the very air around us. Salem, now Lillith, touched my shoulders like a timid bird was perching on each one. Lilacs overwhelmed my senses. Why did she always have to smell that way?
“Was this a game? Did you think making me care might spare you? Is that why you pretended with me?”
“No, I wasn’t pretending. I didn’t even know for certain until you told me your story.”
Tears choked her voice, and she fought them. I just felt numb.
“But you must have guessed?”
“Yes, but none of this was planned. You came into my home needing a haircut. There are not many blind men of the Shadow Class in the worlds. I care for you, Jeremy. Please know that to be true.”
“How can you be his daughter?”
“I never loved him. Never. He was cruel, and I was crippled during a hard birth. He blamed me for my mother’s death, saying I killed her. He wouldn’t even pay for the surgery to fix my legs. I had been stealing from him little by little for months. It was my first lesson in thievery. I was going to take the money and pay the doctors myself, so I could run away.”
I heard her sniffle as she moved closer. She moved her hands to my face and rested them there. She was crying, there was no hiding it now. Lillith put her forehead to mine, weeping like a child. I sucked in a breath to keep my emotions in check.
“The night they brought you, I was there. I had heard stories of his perversions, but I was only eleven. I didn’t understand. I followed him that night to watch. There was something important to me about seeing his evil. I saw you there, naked and helpless. I wanted to help you, but I was so small. Please imagine that room you told us about now. And now, picture behind a corner an eleven-year-old girl cowered there in leg braces. They had made such a noise when she walked she had hidden there hours before so she couldn’t have been heard.”
Vacuum (The Cataclysm Series Book 1) Page 9
