by K. Gorman
Suddenly, the room felt boiling. Aware of his gaze on her, she shoved down the pinpricks of energy on her skin that threatened to crawl up her arms to her throat and make her say something stupid.
Fortunately, he went on before that became a problem.
“But, since you’re grounded, I figured I could round up the choicest pieces left over from the barbecue and grab us some beers from the base store.” He waggled the top of the bottle. “If you’re interested.”
“I’m always interested in food.”
Sol’s fucking child. Had she just said that? Always interested in food? She backpedaled. “And you, too. I’m also interested in you.”
Hells, just stop. Her eyes widened with embarrassment, and she gave him an awkward smile. “That didn’t come out right. Can I try again?”
“Sure.”
“So,” she said, stringing the word out with a careful slowness. “A date, then?”
“Yes,” he said. “A date. If you’re interested.”
“Dates are interesting. You said Soo-jin and Cookie are gone?”
“Yes.”
“And they’ll be gone a while?”
“Several hours, at least.” An eyebrow twitched, and he straightened a little, anticipating where she was leading. “Why?”
She hesitated, shy. Her right thumb played with a stray wrinkle in the sheets, pulling it against the side of her forefinger then letting it go again. It was a few seconds before she could face him again, and even then she couldn’t look him in the eye.
“Well, Marc, dates are lovely,” she started, cheeks and shoulder burning hotter. “But, just so you know, there’s only a few rare times that we’re alone on the ship, and I haven’t had sex in over a year.”
His breath caught. She was hyperaware of him, his quiet, the stillness of his body, the way his stare never left her. Her skin flushed hotter, and her jaw tightened, triggering a swallow in her throat. She held still, as if every fiber of her body were connected to a string.
“Is that so?” he said, his tone soft.
“Yes.” Slowly, she brought her head back around to meet his gaze, felt the shock of it ride through her, and swallowed again. “So, if you’re interested, you should kiss me.”
Chapter Seven
The dream didn’t start as a dream.
First, she was aware of her bunk, aware of the room around her, of the subdued night cycle and the dim lights that pulsed and drifted with the energy of her power, their dance and spill blurring the line between wakefulness and sleep.
Marc snuggled in behind her on the mattress, his large body wrapped around hers, one arm protectively slipped over her chest and his hand making a loose grip on her shoulder. His chest rested against her back, comfortable and warm, breathing in a soft rhythm. A cocoon of protection.
That sensation—the warmth, the light, the security, the love—followed her even as the dream began to shift, so that she was both there and not there at the beginning, both awake and asleep, both listening and unaware.
She accepted that. She’d gotten used to these dreams now. Part memory, part fantasy, and also part real. Some of them were more real than others, while some took on a life of their own.
A dampness seeped into the room, cold and different from the natural, subtropical humidity she’d grown used to around Kolkata, and the walls began to fade. Between one moment and the next, she went from lying on her bunk in Marc’s warm, secure grip to standing in a field of dead grass. The ruins from the site of the Earth compound stood up the hill, wreathed in fog.
Or—not fog. She wrinkled her nose as the acrid smell came to her. Smoke.
But whatever was burning must have been far away. The fields around her were dead and limp, all browns and blacks and yellows, but they were dead in a wet way. The earth under her feet was slick, and the grass plastered against it as if someone had been driving on it or there’d been a flood.
Cold touched her nose, and she held her breath and squinted her eyes shut as a cloud of smoke passed around her. Pieces of ash drifted like dandruff in the gray air, noticeable in the quiet. Apart from the slow drift of the breeze, and the smoke with it, the scene was utterly still. It was so quiet that, standing there, listening hard and tasting the smoke on her tongue, she could believe that everything, and everyone, in the world was dead.
Another cloud pulled over her, sudden and thick. Smoke stung at her throat. She coughed, squeezed her eyes completely shut. A shadow passed over her like the flit of a bird, making the world blink around her. The wind picked up, lifted. The air pulled upward.
When she opened her eyes again, everything had changed.
She blinked, taking in the forest—no, jungle—that had risen around her. She stood in a small clearing, the slant of the previous hill translated into a rough, bumpy loam of mud and dead leaves sitting at an angle that was slightly different from before, as if she herself had turned to the right during the switch.
Where was she? Not Macedonia, where the compound had been. Brazil, perhaps? She’d never been to the Brazil compound, but she’d heard of it. And it had contained ruins, too, another thing she had confirmed with Dr. Takahashi. She’d been told they’d abandoned it before she’d been born, but Layla had said differently and had done more than imply that she’d been from there. Dr. Sasha had been from there, too. And her crazy pocket-dimension laboratory had contained Brazilian signs inside.
Maybe they hadn’t abandoned it. Maybe the two locations had existed at the same time—an odd set of places, Macedonia and Brazil, but considering their experiments had been illegal in ninety percent of Earth’s remaining countries… perhaps not so odd.
The smoke had vanished, replaced by a warm humidity that she didn’t recognize. Earthy, but with a hint of something chemical in the air. Though she stood on the upper part of the slope, the trees around her seemed to tower up and eat at the sky. Looking around, it took her more than a few moments to spot the second set of ruins to the right, entwined around the bases of the trees.
These were different. Mossy and overgrown, one with a sapling molded around its width and tipping its base onto an angle, the stones held a darker hue and showed a different kind of weathering across their scarred surface than the ones that usually haunted her dreams. The designs were thicker, though, and deeper. Even from this distance—she was some twenty meters away—the lines were visible. She made out the beginning of a head, arms, maybe a spear. Faded, but further inset into the stone, as if these designers had planned for it to stick around longer. The full design was invisible to her, obscured by the plant life that guarded it, but if she just got closer…
“They weren’t made for us, you know.”
Karin jumped and whirled. Layla, the old Project Athena, had appeared behind her, the black snake-and-egg Eurynome tattoo flashing on her wrist, and her spunky black hair poking out of both sides of the winter cap she wore. She never changed, even if her heavy clothes were as incongruent with the hot locale as they were now—but then, why should she? She’d died over fifteen years ago.
The other dead children were back, too. They stood farther away, almost unnoticeable among the thick trunks and twisting branches of the forest, quiet and watchful. She’d started seeing them a month ago, and their population had grown as she’d remembered more and more faces from her childhood. It had been creepy at first—hells, it still was. They were just staring at her—but she’d gotten over it. With what she knew now, it was easy to see the connection between her dreams and her memories, even if her subconscious was making that link weird and spooky.
Layla was weird, too. As in life, she was the most prominent, and the one who spoke with her most. But she said some strange things. Like now. Karin frowned as she re-thought her way through Layla’s statement, attempting to put it in context.
“Then who were they made for?” She glanced back at the ruins. “Gods? Spirits? The unexplained?”
“Perhaps. But I think you misunderstood. I said that they weren’t ma
de for us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use them.”
Yeah… she definitely didn’t say that.
“Use them for what?”
“Transit.”
Karin snapped her fingers, pointing to Layla. “I knew it. They’re a portal, right?”
Layla blinked at her fingers. “Half right. More of an anchor point, I expect.”
She paused, taking the time to give the ruins a reassessment. The other children, most of whom she didn’t recognize, hung back. She’d decided they were memory fragments—faces she knew, but which didn’t hold the same prominence or familiarity as Layla did. She could name some of them, but for others… they seemed hard to look at. When she tried, their features slipped and shifted away from her attention, as if she couldn’t look at them directly.
But that was all right. She was used to dodgy memories now. Just another symptom of her past—a telltale sign that she’d received the third stage of her treatment plan, if only in part. The memories would either come back, or they wouldn’t. Not a whole lot she could do except wait and see.
Although… she could ask Dr. Takahashi. He seemed to think he could fix her. She’d done her best to avoid him, but the reports she heard were that he had turned his imprisonment into an obsession and rarely asked to leave the laboratory cell that he’d been provided. Too obsessed with going over the Eurynome treatment files with a laser-pointed comb.
And the two other doctors—Eric Lin and Shinji Tasuhada from Ajin Pharmaceuticals, the company that had sent the floating, sphere-shaped electrostunner bounty hunters after her—had spent a lot of time assisting him.
She shook her head. She wanted nothing to do with him and even less to do with her treatment.
“I don’t follow. Anchor point for what?”
“For us. For you. For everything.”
Shit. Guess she’d hit the part where Layla turned to vague riddles. She hadn’t been like this in life—had been the opposite, in fact, with a specific no-bullshit, practical attitude that had made them fast allies—but dreams, she found, were horrible to converse in. Either she woke up in the middle of the conversation, or the conversation itself took extreme, weird turns.
“For us how?”
Layla gave her a sideways look, her eyebrows lifted in a way they often did in these dreams, as if Karin had said something obscenely stupid. Then, reading something in Karin’s expression, they lifted even higher. “We’re not dead, you know.”
“No.” Karin crossed her arms. “You were just sent away. Euphemism for dead.”
Layla frowned. “No, really, we’re not dead.”
A breeze picked up in the trees, making the thick leaves rub and rustle together—she hadn’t noticed it had been so still until now. Branches creaked. A bird lit out from one of them, a flurry of wing beats. As she watched it race across the clearing and over the top of the canopy opposite, she caught sight of the corner of a cream-colored building through the trees beyond.
“You are fragments,” she said, distracted. “Neurological feedback from my brain. A side-effect from my brain’s natural random-thought-process reaching into my subconscious to retrieve the memories I’ve lost.”
“We were never lost, and we’re not dead,” Layla said, and the words twisted around in her thoughts, too close to the contemporary problem for Karin’s comfort—Lost had no business entering her dreams, thank you very much. “Don’t you know what this is? Don’t you know what we are?”
“You are neurological feedback,” she repeated. “A fabrication of my mind designed to reintegrate lost memory. It’s a documented and researched phenomenon.”
The dream began to shift around her. It usually did when she questioned things, the dream reality destabilizing as soon as her suspension of disbelief dulled. Clouds filled the sky where there hadn’t been any before, and for a second, everything seemed to flicker like an old filmstrip run through a projector. Layla glanced up at the new clouds as if she, too, knew there’d been a change, and when she turned her face back to Karin, she gave her a sad smile.
“No, we aren’t.” Her eyes had a pitying look as they took Karin in. “We are not dead. We’re here, waiting for you.”
And it was those last words that followed her as the dream slipped away, tumbling back into the darkness of sleep, and repeated in her head as she opened her eyes to her room on the Nemina, still wrapped into Marc’s arm.
She lay there for a few minutes, the sensations of her body returning in slow, steady movements. The night cycle lights kept the interior dim, coating the underside of the room with a yellow-brown glow that cast alien-like shadows from many of its features.
She rested her eyes on the other bunk, waiting for them to adjust—no need to use her power for this—and studied the fold and wrinkle of its blankets over the mattress. Part of the undersheet poked out at its foot. It had been Nomiki’s bed when she’d come aboard, and Ethan’s before that, but they were both gone now, and she still hadn’t lifted it back into the wall. A small pain twinged in her chest as she thought of Ethan and the questions that formed at the thought—where is he? Is he okay? Is he safe?—before she let them go.
Truth be told, the second bunk was too convenient to close back into the wall. Enough people wandered into her room for a chat that the bed had become an impromptu couch. She and Soo-jin often used it to watch netdramas, cuddled together under the same blanket when the ship was in space.
Marc groaned behind her, muttering a small word that she didn’t quite catch, and as he shifted, the whole bed seemed to move, too. As much as she appreciated him and his body, he had been maxing out the length limits of the Nemina’s bunks long before they’d tried sleeping together. When he turned over, taking part of the blanket with him, his knees hit the wall with a soft clunk, making his butt scoot back just enough to bump her up to the edge. Cool air brushed her newly exposed bare arm.
Her gaze still on the opposite bunk, she gave a snort. Then, after a moment passed and Marc didn’t wake, she extracted herself out from under the rest of the blanket.
Kicked out of my own bed.
She located her bra and undies on the floor, along with her socks, stepped into yesterday’s pants, then reached into her locker and pulled out the first shirt she found. A half minute later, she’d scooped up her netlink and stepped into the hall, letting the door slide closed behind her.
High fashion could wait until after breakfast.
The lights in the Mess spilled into the hallway as she walked up, and the clunk of metal against porcelain reached her ears. When she turned into the door, Soo-jin glanced up from the right side of the table, a bowl of milk and cereal in front of her, then turned her attention back to the netlink on the table.
Karin fussed around the cupboards, then, taking a cue from Soo-jin, she grabbed the bag of cereal from the counter and made her own bowl, accompanied by a steaming mug of fruit tea.
“It’s kind of nice being planet-side,” Soo-jin said when she’d sat down. “All of the milk in the world. From real cows.”
“Have you missed it?” Karin pulled out her own netlink and set it on the table, realizing briefly that now both her set up and her meal mirrored Soo-jin’s.
“A bit. I’m not usually much of a milk person, but I’ve been on a binge lately. I’m thinking about making muffins, next.”
“I vote you follow that urge.”
“Right?” Soo-jin shot her a smile, then returned to her bowl, digging her spoon in to chase the cereal against the side. “You know, my family was all super strict and annoying, but they made muffins.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I think it’s because of my grandma. She got the recipe in her university days, then never quite let it go. My parents were the strict ones. Didn’t let much of anything they deemed too Western in—but they made muffins.”
“At least you got that.”
“Yeah. Kind of wish she’d found a cheesecake recipe at university, though.”
Karin frowned dow
n, taking a moment to chase the cereal balls around her bowl, then thoughtfully crunched down on them. Soo-jin rarely spoke about her family, and then only in sarcastic references. This was the most she’d ever heard her say in a single minute.
“What do you mean by traditional?” she asked. “I mean, I assume it’s not traditional Earther stuff, but…”
Earther traditionalists were their own breed of crazy and came in many shapes and skillsets. Driven by whichever part of Earth’s history that caught their eye, they tended to isolate themselves and form cults on the outer planets—like the one on Amosi where the Nemina had gotten the guns from. By the way Soo-jin spoke, she had a feeling her family had latched onto a different type of obsession.
“My family is made up of a bunch of Korean ethno-purists who reject anything not immediately Korean or within Korea’s geographic cultural sphere—and especially anything they perceived as derived from Western culture, though they have a hard-on for Islamic stuff, too.”
Karin’s eyebrows shot into her forehead. “Ethno… purists?” She understood the term, although she hadn’t heard it before. “Is this a big system thing that I don’t know about?”
“It was big in some areas about fifty years ago, mostly around Nova Earth—and trust me, you didn’t miss much. The whole thing is garbage.”
Karin’s netlink buzzed, and a new message popped up on her screen.
Nomiki.
Soo-jin’s brows drew down as Karin scooted forward to squint at it. “What’s the word?”
“It’s Nomiki. She’s out of the meeting.”
Soo-jin choked on her spoon. “Sol, that’s a long fucking meeting. Have they been at it all night?”
Karin snorted. “Fuck if I know. Haven’t looked at this thing since before I went to bed.”
Though, judging by the message history, she hadn’t missed much. They must have been discussing things off the books.
“Yeah, you were busy.” Soo-jin shot her a grin and lifted her hand. “High five, girl!”
