“Don’t!” Cassie choked through her tears. “Please – I’ll be OK. I’m just relieved and scared and happy…I didn’t mean to cry.” Her words hicupped over one another as she used the grimy sleeve of her suit to brush the wetness from her eyes.
I did as she asked, not moving, not wanting to make things worse for her, but the tears were still falling. “Come here,” I pleaded – needing her to be with me now.
Throwing the blankets aside, she hobbled stiff-legged towards me across the short distance. I shuffled backwards as far as I could in the bunk, staying on my left side so that she could crawl in beside me. Lifting the blanket, she gently moved my left hand towards the pillow, putting it out of the way. In her other hand she took the wires and tubes still connected to me and moved those behind my head.
As she eased in beside me, I pulled the blanket over us both and closed my right arm around her, dragging its tube with it as I moved. Underneth her neck I slid my left arm tighter around her, lifting it to meet my right hand on her back, and pulling her against my chest.
Ouch. I winced at my own movements.
“Ribs?” she guessed.
“Yeah,” I agreed, grimacing again as I sucked in a breath.
Cassie pressed her face into my shoulder and I wondered if she might be crying, but then she spoke. “I think you broke three. Two on the left side.”
That sounded about right, from how I felt and what I remembered happening. “I know,” I whispered back. I didn’t want her dwelling on this – worrying about me. It was obvious that she’d done absolutely everything possible to treat my injuries and –
I was distracted as Cassie fidgeted in my arms, suddenly rubbing her hand against her forehead as though she had a headache. “Are you really OK?” I asked.
“Just a bit of a headache. I was pretty dehydrated.”
Dismissive of herself as ever – nice to see nothing had changed there! I rattled the IV in my right hand. “Me too, I guess.” From the looks of it, Cassie had focused on helping me, and maybe hadn’t taken too much care of herself. I must have been in really bad shape…I remembered the darkness, the empty nothing spaces I’d drifted through…I had been dying. She brought me back to life.
My gaze rested on her face as she pulled away from my shoulder. When I found her eyes, I let myself drift seeing only the beautiful green-gold colour and wondering at how it was possible we had made it to this place – wherever we were.
At length Cassie spoke, breaking the silent bubble around us. “How do you feel?”
“Not too bad, to be honest…nice job on the finger splints by the way.” I smiled once more at the same memory of Cassie’s insecurity about her academic ability. “You would have made a good medic. If it had been real.”
“I think real starts here.”
“You’re right,” I agreed.
We lay still and quiet for a while, there was no where else I wanted to be, than here with the amazing young woman I had my arms wrapped around. It was not a time for thinking about the past or the future, about where we were or how we got there…This was a time just for us and I lost myself in the wonderful peace that being with Cassie brought me.
* * *
A new wailing jolted me and I cringed as my chest pulled. Perhaps we’d both fallen asleep again, I felt sluggish. Cassie leapt from my arms and lunged across the room towards the circular console, slamming her hand against the screen to deactivate it. The screeching stopped and for a moment she stood with her back to me, steadying herself. She looked dizzy.
“What was that?” I asked, realising now that each of the alarms had been set by Cassie for some purpose. The last one – she told me – had been for her to check my drip and rotate me in the bunk to help my healing ribs.
“Do you fancy a little experiment?”
That didn’t sound like it meant something medical for me…and I wondered what she was planning.
An experiment?
“Always,” I grinned.
“This pod is designed for waste disposal,” she began, helpfully answering one of the major questions I had and hadn’t actually asked yet. “It’s programmed on a rebounding course from the space station that completes after seventy-two hours.”
We had escaped from the space station – completely – on a small waste craft. That was a relief, because part of me had wondered – given the familiarity of our surroundings and the medical equipment – whether Cassie had just found somewhere for us to hide within the SS Hope. We might still have been surrounded by those creatures…did Cassie even know that they weren’t human?
Not the right questions for now, I warned, trying to focus. That wasn’t why Cassie had set an alarm or was telling me we were inside a waste pod… We were travelling through space, having escaped on this pod and it would re-bound back to the station in seventy-two hours, according to its programming.
“How long have we been on here?” I asked, guessing what Cassie needed me to experiment with. We had to override the programming to take control of the pod.
“Just over thirty hours,” she bit into her lip nervously.
“You gave me a long rest,” I realised, understanding once again how far Cassie had come for me, what she might have risked in focusing on me.
“You needed it. I’m sorry if it was too long.”
I shook my head at her. The last thing she should be doing was feeling guilty. “It’ll be fine.” I told her, already preparing myself to get up. “Just help me get to the control panel and I’ll see what we’ve got to work with.”
After everything we had been through to get out of the SS Hope, there was no chance I was going to let a programming issue get in my way. Forty hours…I would make it be enough time.
Chapter 25
“Where did all this extra stuff come from?”
My head was shoved deep inside one of the pod cupboards and I was marvelling at the amount of food in there. Stepping back, I closed the door and opened the next, finding more compact packets of dehydrated food, perfect for a long journey with limited cooking equipment.
Cassie lay behind me on the single bunk the pod had – not necessarily a drawback – in her hands she held the portable viewing screen I’d stolen from The Clinic. Although it was not connected to the Hope’s systems now, it was able to connect to the databases on the pod, where I had found a huge amount of useful – but unexpected – data. There were star charts and documents on physics, the likes of which I’d never seen in our classes before. There was plenty to help me learn navigation skills, if we were to use the pod to try and get anywhere useful, rather than just float around in space until our food ran out.
“You mean the food?” Cassie said, raising her head.
“Uh-huh, food,” I grunted, “and the medical supplies, spare astro repair kit, extensive star charts and navigation data, advanced water and air processing systems…It’s as though the pod was specifically equipped to support a long journey with passengers...”
“And…?”
How could she not find that strange, especially after everything we had been through with The Collective. “And…this is a waste pod primarily. An unmanned waste pod…”
Even though I left my sentence open ended, Cassie didn’t add anything. I sighed and closed the door, not bothering to open another. I didn’t want to push her too hard – we’d not even talked properly about what had happened to us both in the time we were apart on Hope… But, I also needed to try and work out how this had happened. At the end on the station – I remembered only small glimpses of it – but Cassie said that one of the creatures had helped us get out. When I pictured him in my head, my tarnished memories told me that he was the same man who had visited me…the only one who seemed to show any sympathy for what was happening to me…
I didn’t want to push her, but I still needed her to see what I was trying to work out. Opening another cupboard I found it filled with medical supplies: saline pouches, plasma and blood packets, bandages and basic tools. “The
re’s so much stuff here.” I said. “Like it was planned or something – it feels…wrong.” I couldn’t admit to Cassie that my deepest fear was that this was just another false world of theirs, and we’d been tricked into it.
“He must have done it.” Cassie insisted, talking about the man who helped us. “He told me he didn’t agree with what the others did to you and he wanted to help us get out.”
I shook my head – still inside the cupboard – it seemed Cassie credited him with doing a lot for us, but without really being able to explain the motivation for his actions.
“Doing this would have taken time – and planning,” I said finally, closing the door and turning back to Cassie. “How could he have known what we were going to do, if he wasn’t part of their system?”
I waited for a long time, but she didn’t answer me. I knew now that we had both realised the creatures on the SS Hope weren’t human. When I’d reprogrammed the navigation system after just three hours, we’d had plenty of time to catch up.
Although neither of us had gone into too much detail about how exactly we had come to the same conclusion, Cassie had told me about disecting the body-suit, as she called it, of the man that I had killed in the apartment. Her discovery explained a lot about why I had been unable to hurt them physically, as well as why they were so much stronger than us. Their one point of weakness – the throat – was some kind of insertion point, where they entered the suit in their natural form. For my part, Cassie had guessed some of what they had done to me, because of the injuries. I didn’t share with her the other tortures, it would only make her feel worse and it was not her fault. There was no one to blame in all of this, except for them. And that’s why I was having such a hard time understanding why Cassie seemed able to trust one of them so easily after everything that had happened.
“I’d seen that man before,” I said. Even though I didn’t specify, I knew that Cassie would know who I was talking about. “He came to see me when they were holding me in the other place. That MAN was different to the others – I knew it, I could feel it when we met – but he did nothing for me. He left me with the others. Left me to die.”
Why do you trust him so much?
Cassie closed her eyes. Guilt swallowed me whole and I found half of me wanted to take back what I had said. It was obvious I was forcing her into a place she couldn’t stand to be – how could I be so selfish? Unfortunately, the guilt also made me angry with myself. Perhaps if I’d pushed Cassie harder, pushed myself harder, when we were in the Family Quarter, we might have escaped before The Collective had time to hurt us both? My questions didn’t stop – I couldn’t make them, because part of me wanted to know the answer more: I would risk causing Cassie pain, if it meant I could protect her better…
She still hadn’t spoken.
“Do you think it’s a trick?” I asked.
“No.” Cassie finally replied, tears catching on her lashes, her answer almost too soft to hear. “No.” She repeated more definitely and she looked up at me, through the unshed tears. “I think it’s real. He wanted to get us out.”
“Why? Why us?”
Cassie sighed and in that moment I knew that she had an answer. There was a reason she trusted him so completely – I couldn’t comprehend what – but it was obvious that she did.
“He did it because he knew my mother. My real genetic, human mother. He had wanted to protect her from the others in The Collective, but he failed and that’s why he wanted to protect us.”
There was silence as I processed what Cassie had said. This small piece of information only raised more questions and there was only one thing I knew with any certainty. Cassie turned towards me, I wondered if she was going to say something more, but interuppted before she could. “He didn’t want to protect us. It was just you. He wanted to get you out.”
Cassie opened her mouth then closed it, twice, without words coming out. I didn’t want her to feel guilty, whatever the connection was between her and the creature, I didn’t want her to feel that I resented the fact that it wanted to protect her and not me.
“Cassie, I need you to know something.”
She didn’t move, just sat frozen, her eyes fearfully intent on my face.
“I might not understand why that creature acted the way that he did.” And I’m not going to ask you, I’ll wait for when you’re ready to tell me, I added to myself before continuing. “But, I’m glad it was you. If I had to go through that again, so that you could get out, I would.”
“I would never have left without you,” Cassie murmured, her voice was soft but imbued with honesty. “I could never have left you. And I never will. We cannot be apart again – you can’t put me before yourself as you did on Hope – no matter what happens to us.” At first her expression was determined, as she re-lived the memories that fuelled her words. Then, something changed in her eyes: replacing her resolve with two emotions I never wanted to see on Cassie’s face: anguish and fear.
“Losing you again would kill me,” she whispered.
In three long strides I was beside her, leaning over and pulling her close with my good arm. Cassie’s face tilted up to mine and I could see my own pain reflected in her beautiful emerald eyes: she meant every word she said.
“I will not let anything hurt you,” I promised. Making a vow to myself that I would not live without Cassie…that I would die to protect her.
“I will not let anything come between us,” she replied, grit hardening her words.
I knew that Cassie was contradicting my promise with her own, and I marvelled at her. No wonder that creature had chosen Cassie. She was so powerful, how did she not see the strength inside her that I did? She was strong enough for the two of us. Strong enough to survive anything – I was sure of it.
Falling in love with Cassie had given me a taste of life – what it was really about. Her presence woke parts of my spirit that I don’t think had ever existed until she stepped into my world. Everything – even going through the pain and horror of our seperation – was worth it, to be with her.
Cassie wouldn’t understand. I didn’t doubt that she loved me, but it wasn’t the same. She had changed me – altered the way I looked at myself and the world around me. I could not imagine my life without her, because without Cassie, I didn’t live. I never had.
Staring into her face, I wondered about what the future held for us, now that our lives weren’t being planned hour-by-hour, from birth to death. This was our chance, wasn’t it? Our first real chance at life: to live without controls and lies. I would do everything in my power to make it happen, for us.
“You and me,” I vowed, unable to keep the smile from my face. It sounded so perfect...sounded so possible...
“Always,” Cassie agreed reaching her hand into my hair and pulling my face to meet hers.
* * *
Beep-beep-beep.
I reached across and switched off the alert that was telling me we had been onboard the pod for seventy-one hours. Swallowing thickly, I glanced down at Cassie who was still asleep on my shoulder, before settling back against the pillow. My eyes were wide open, just as they had been for the past few hours while Cassie slept soundly in my arms.
In an hour’s time we would have to eject Joel’s body from the pod, to maintain the illusion that the pod was completing its normal function removing waste. When I re-programmed the navigation systems the day before, I had found a transmitter that appeared to connect back to the main systems on Hope. It hadn’t proved too difficult to send a false message through the system back to Hope, indicating that the main navigation system of the pod had corrupted and would not rebound now due to the error. We would have to release Joel’s body from the pod, just in case it was being monitored, then I would set the pod to drift onwards along the same course, before letting the transmitter connection drop an hour or so later, suggesting that a total malfunction had occurred. My entire plan was based on knowledge of The Collective’s technology I had found in the file system
on the pod. It was just one more thing to add to the list of things that had been put here to help us.
Cassie sighed softly and rolled over, cuddling closer into me. She opened one eye, before closing it immediately.
“You’re awake again,” she muttered.
“Just thinking,” I kissed the top of her hair, dodging the accusation in her tone. “The seventy-one hour alarm just went off, but I didn’t want to wake you yet.”
“Oh. At least you weren’t just watching me sleep again – that was getting creepy.”
“Ha-ha. You’re a funny girl.” I smiled, just managing to maintain a deadpan tone.
Cassie smiled, her eyes still closed. “It’s funny because it’s true.”
“Smarty pants.” I kissed her hair again, my mind already drifting.
Even though we had talked about what would happen with Joel, I had not been able to bring myself to tell Cassie about what I had been forced to watch happen to him back on Hope. They had been friends – spending all that time together at The Clinic – it was hard enough for her as it was, without me adding to her pain. And so I kept my secrets, just as she was keeping hers.
Since we came aboard the pod, Joel’s body had remained in one of the small compartments dotted around the walls, where waste was stored. Except in our case, we had found most of the other spaces filled with supplies and equipment, rather than waste – yet another helping hand from Cassie’s mysterious benefactor…
We lay together in silence for another twenty-minutes and I wondered whether Cassie might be dozing again. “We’ll need to get started soon,” I prompted her, easing my arm out from beneath her neck and rolling out of the bunk.
Standing up I shivered as my feet touched the floor. It was cooler on the pod than it had been on Hope: the systems on the craft were not as powerful or particularly oriented towards human transportation I supposed, we should count ourselves lucky that it had an air handling unit and a basic gravity system.
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