I’m going to leave and walk around the station until I find another bar as grimy as this one.
Then I’m going to go inside, and I am, mostly likely, going to get drunk. Because she mentioned the Room, I’ll have my nightmare tonight. I’ll have the nightmare for the next week, maybe more, and I’ll curse her.
But mostly, I’ll curse the Room of Lost Souls.
“You should help me,” she says softly, “because I know what the Room is.”
I start to get up, but she grabs my arm.
“And I know,” she says, “how to get people out.”
~ * ~
FOURTEEN
How to get people out.
The words echo in my head as I walk out of the bar. I stop in that barren corridor and place one hand against the wall, afraid I’m going to be sick.
Voices swirl in my head, and I will them away.
Then I take a deep breath and continue on, heading into the less habitable parts of the station, the parts slated for renovation or closure.
I want to be by myself.
I need to.
And I don’t want to return to my berth, which suddenly seems too small, or my ship, which suddenly seems too risky.
Instead I walk across ruined floors and through half-gutted walls, past closed businesses and graffiti-covered doorways. It’s colder down here—life support is on, but at the minimum provided by regulation—and I almost feel like I’m heading into a wreck, the way I used to head into a wreck when I was a beginner, without thought and without care.
What I remember of the Room and what I dream about it are different. If I actually try to remember the Room, I get only a few sensations. In the dream—the nightmare—I’m in the middle of it, feeling it, but not really seeing it.
What do I remember? Not much. I remember thinking it looked pretty. Colored lights—pale blues and reds and yellows—extended as far as the eye could see. They twinkled. Around them, only blackness.
My mother held my hand. Her grip was tight through the double layer of our spacesuit gloves. She muttered how beautiful the lights were.
Before the voices started.
Before they built, piling one on top of the other, until—it seemed—we got crushed by the weight.
I don’t remember getting out.
I remember my father, cradling me, trying to stop my shaking. I remember him giving orders to someone else to steer the damn ship, get us out of this godforsaken place.
I remember my mother’s eyes through her headpiece, reflecting the multicolored lights, as if she had swallowed a sea of stars.
And I remember her voice, blending with the others, like a soprano joining tenors in the middle of a cantata—a surprise, and yet completely expected.
For years, I heard her voice—strong at first and unusual in its power, then blending, and mixing, until I couldn’t pick it out any longer.
I didn’t know if that voice—mixing with other voices—was an aural hallucination, a dream, or a reality. Sometimes I thought it both.
But it sneaks up on me at the most unexpected moments, sometimes beginning with just a hum. The hum sends shivers down my back, and I do whatever I can to silence the voices.
Which is usually nothing.
Nothing except wait.
After three days, Riya Trekov finds me.
I’m having dinner in Longbow’s most exclusive restaurant. The food is exquisite—fresh meat from nearby ports, vegetables grown on the station itself, sauces prepared by the best chef in the sector. There’s fresh bread and creamy desserts and real fruit, a rarity no matter what spaceport you dock on.
The view is exquisite as well—windows everywhere except the floor. If you look up, you see the rest of the station towering above you, lights in some of the guest rooms, decoration in some of the berths. If you look out one set of side windows, you see the docks with the myriad of ships—from tiny single ships to armored yachts to passenger liners.
Another group of windows show the gardens with their own airlocks and bays, the grow lights sending soft rays across the entire middle of the station.
On this night, I’m having squid in dark chocolate sauce. The squid isn’t what Earthers think of as squid, but an ocean-faring creature from one of the nearby planets. It has a salty nutlike taste that the chocolate accents.
I try to focus on the food as Riya sits down. She’s carrying a plate and a full glass of wine.
Clearly she had been eating somewhere else in the restaurant, on one of the layers I can’t see from my favorite table. But she had seen me come in, and somehow, she thinks that gives her permission to join me.
“Have you thought about it?” she asks, as if she made an offer and I said I would consider it.
I can lie and say I hadn’t thought about any of it. I can be blunt and say that I want nothing to do with the Room of Lost Souls.
Or I can be truthful and say that her words have played through my head for the last three days. Tempting me. Frightening me.
Intriguing me.
At odd moments, I find myself wondering how I would view the place, after all my years of wreck diving, after all the times I’ve risked my life, after all the hazards I’ve survived.
“You have,” she says with something like triumph.
Of course I thought of it. I dreamed of it. Only the dream has changed. I force myself awake as my mother’s voice blends with the other voices.
I continue to eat, but I’m no longer savoring the taste. I almost push my plate away—it’s a crime not to taste this squid—but I don’t.
I don’t want Riya Trekov to see any emotion from me at all.
“You have questions,” she says as if I’m actually taking part in this conversation. “You want to know how I found you.”
The hell of it is that I do want to know that. Hardly anyone knows I survived the Room of Lost Souls. I can’t say that no one knows because the crew on my father’s ship knew. And I have no idea what happened to all of them.
“I have people who can find almost anything,” she says.
People. She has people. Which means she’s rich.
“If you have people,” I say with an emphasis on that phrase, “then have them go to the Room themselves and have them ‘recover’ your father.”
Her cheeks flush. She looks away, but only for a minute. Then she takes a deep breath, as if she needs courage to dive back into this conversation.
“They don’t believe that anyone can get out. They think that’s as much a myth as the Room itself.”
I don’t know how I got out. My memory is fluid, and try as I might to recover that moment, I can’t.
When it becomes clear that I am not going to confirm or deny what happened to me, she says, “Your father is still alive.”
I jolt. I had no idea the old man had made it this long.
“Have you ever asked him about the Room?”
I haven’t, mostly because I never had the chance. But I don’t tell her that. Instead, I say, “You spoke to my father.”
She nods. “He’s happy to know you’re still alive.”
I’m not sure I’m happy to know that he is. I prefer to think of myself as a person without a family, a woman without a past.
“Quite honestly,” she says, “he’s the one who recommended you for this job. I first approached him, and he says he’s too old.”
I slide my plate to the edge of the table to hide my face as I do the calculations. He turns seventy this year, which is not old at all.
“He also said you have all the skills I need for this job.” She hasn’t touched her food. “He says he doesn’t.”
That much is true. He’s never gone diving—at least that I know of. He captained a ship, but in the old-fashioned way—not as a hands-on pilot, but as a planet-bound owner who told others what to do.
We were on some kind of pleasure cruise, I think, when my mother and I wandered into the Room. Or maybe we were moving from one system to another.
; I honestly don’t know. I don’t remember and I never asked him.
He wasn’t around much anyway. After Mother vanished into that Room, he dumped me with my maternal grandparents and went in search of the very thing Riya claims she found: a way to recover people from the Room of Lost Souls.
“It makes no sense that he has refused to help you,” I say as a bus tray arrives, sends out a small metal arm that sweeps my plate into its interior, and then floats away. “He’s always wanted a way into the Room.”
“He says the problem is not the way in, but the way out.” She finally picks up her fork and picks at her now-cold food.
A chill runs through me. Does my father speak with that kind of authority because he has sent people in after my mother? Or because he’s thinking of what happened to us all those years ago?
“And yet you claim you have that way out.”
A serving tray appears with an ice cream glass filled with red and black berries separated by layers of cream. My coffee steams beside it. My standing order. I shouldn’t take it, but I do.
“I do have a way out,” she says.
“But you can’t find anyone stupid enough to test it,” I say.
She lets out a small laugh. “Is that what you think? You think I need a test subject?”
I take a sip of my coffee. It’s slightly bitter, like all coffee on Longbow station. Somehow the beans grown here lack the richness I’ve found on other stations.
“The way out has been tested. Going in and returning is no longer an issue. What I need is someone with enough acumen to bring out my father.”
Something in her tone reaches me. It’s a hint of frustration, a bit of anger.
Her people have failed her. Which is why she’s coming to me.
“You’ve done this before,” I say.
She nods. “Six times. Everyone survived. Everyone is healthy. There are no residual problems.”
“Except they can’t find your father.”
“Oh,” she says. “They have found him. They just can’t recover him.”
Now I am intrigued. “Why not?”
“Because,” she says, “they can’t convince him to leave.”
I take a bite of the berries and cream. I need a few moments to think about this. I still feel as if she’s conning me, but I’m not sure how. Or why she would do so.
“Why did he leave?” I ask.
She blinks at me in surprise. She clearly didn’t expect curiosity from me.
“Leave?”
“You said he didn’t show up for the treaty signings. That he essentially missed the end of the war. Why?”
She frowns just enough so that I realize she’s never considered this question. She’s been looking at her father as someone—something—she lost, not as a person in his own right. Oh, he has history, but it’s history without her, and therefore not relevant.
“No one knows,” she says.
Someone always knows. And if that someone is no longer alive, the answer would probably be in the records. Something this modern is easy to trace; it’s the old stuff whose history gets lost to time, like the Dignity Vessels, that can be difficult to figure out.
She’s finally hooked me, and she probably doesn’t even know how. I don’t want to return to the Room for my mother—I barely remember her, and what I do remember is vague. I don’t even want to return to face my own past.
I want to solve this mystery Riya Trekov has unwittingly presented me with. I want to know why a famous man, a man who won some of the most important battles of an important war, disappears before the war ends and winds up in a place he knew better than to approach.
For the first time in years, the historian in me, the diver in me, senses a challenge. Not like the old challenges, the ones that cost me so many friends and colleagues.
But a new challenge, one that will threaten me alone.
One that has the risk I miss combined with the historical mysteries that I love.
I try not to let my sudden enthusiasm show. I ask, as coldly as I can, “What are you paying?”
Her eyes light up. She seems surprised. Maybe she thought she’d never catch me. Maybe I am her last hope.
She names a figure. It’s astoundingly high.
Still, I say, “Triple it and I’ll consider the job.”
“If you can get him out,” she says, her voice breathless with excitement, “I’ll give you one hundred times that much.”
Now I’m feeling breathless. That’s more money than I’ve earned in two decades.
But I don’t have a use for the money I have. I can’t imagine what I’d do with a sum that large.
Still, I negotiate because that too is in my blood. “I want it all up front.”
“Half,” she says. “And half when you recover him.”
That’s fair. Half would provide me a berth at Longbow and all of my expenses for the rest of my life. I’d never have to touch the rest of my money, the stuff I earned these past few years.
“Half up front,” I say, agreeing, “and half when I recover him—only if you pay all expenses for the entire investigation and journey.”
“Investigation?” She frowns, as if she doesn’t like the word.
I nod. “Before I go after him, I need to know who he is.”
“I told you—”
“I need to know him, not his reputation.”
Her frown grows. “Why?”
“Because,” I say, “in all the hundreds of theories about that Room, only one addresses the souls trapped inside.”
“So?”
“So haven’t you wondered how a man like your father got lost in there?”
I can tell from her expression that she hasn’t considered that at all.
“Or why the name of the place—in all known languages—is the Room of Lost Souls? Are the souls lost because they entered? Or were they lost before they opened the door?”
She shifts slightly in her chair. She doesn’t like what I’m saying.
“You’ve thought of this before,” she says.
“Of course I have.” I keep my voice down.
She nods. “You think he was lost before he went in?”
“I have no idea,” I say, “but I plan to find out.”
~ * ~
FIFTEEN
By the time I arrive at my berth, the money is in my accounts. That surprises me. I thought, after our conversation, that Riya would back out. She doesn’t want to know her father as a human being. She wants only the image of him that she built up through her lonely childhood. The war hero who vanished. The strong man who got trapped.
Not a sad survivor who might have gotten lost long before he opened a door into a forbidden place.
Still, she has paid me and she has given me free rein.
I sit at the built-in desk and move the money to all of my accounts. I’m going to have to create some new ones before I leave so that my holdings are diversified. Before I do that, I pay for this berth for the next five years.
I warned Riya that the recovery could take a long time. She wants it done right. After I heard her tales of the previous attempts, I knew that part of the problem was that she hired thieves and ruffians and risk takers who specialized in cross-system possession recovery.
She hired disposable people who usually committed snatch-and-grabs. People who didn’t care much for her mission or their own lives.
People who wouldn’t be missed.
In that, they were a lot like me.
Riya and I finished the negotiations as I drank my coffee. She showed me the device her people had used to get out of the Room. I examined it. It looked unusual enough.
But she wouldn’t give me its specs until I was ready to go to the Room.
I was fine with that. It gave both of us an illusion of control: me, the ability to say I was done before I went into the Room; and her, the belief that I had no idea how to use what she had shown me.
We made a verbal record of our negotiations. Both of our a
ttorneys would work together to make a formal agreement that we would sign within the month.
She seemed nervous and uncertain, while I was nervous and happy. If someone had asked me before we started the negotiations who would feel what, I would have said that I’d be the uncertain one while she would be happy with all that we’d done.
I fully expected her to terminate before I arrived in my berth.
Instead she paid me.
I finish transferring the money. I contact and pay my attorney, notifying her of her obligations in drafting this agreement.
Then I lean back in my chair.
For the first time since I’ve come to Longbow Station, balancing my chair on two legs does not satisfy me. The berth—with its built-in desk, view of the grow pods, and slide-out soft bed—no longer feels like home.
I need to move. I need to get out of here.
I need to spend the night on my ship.
By modern standards, Nobody’s Business is a small ship, but by mine, it’s huge. The Business can fly with a single pilot, but it’s designed for twenty to fifty people.
When I was wreck diving, I’d fly with ten or fewer, and to me, that felt crowded. I’d close off the lower levels and lock up the cargo bays.
Sometimes I forget all the space I’m not using. The main level has the bridge and auxiliary controls. It also has the lounge, where I’ve put most of my viewing technology so that I can review dives. There are six cabins on this level as well, including mine.
The captain’s cabin is two levels up. I never use it. My cabin is the same size as all the others. It looks the same, as well, except for the hardwired terminal that I use when I don’t want anyone hacking into my work.
Most (but not all) of the other systems on the Business are networked, and I’m up-front with any crew that I hire that I watch the systems diligently. If they put something on the system, from a virus to a piece of information, it’s mine. I’ve learned a lot that way.
The Business is docked in the permanent section of the station. I pay extra to keep her systems disconnected from the station’s systems. I also bribe the officials to keep an eye on her, to make sure no one enters illegally.
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