Killing Gravity

by Corey J. White

  I step back and release it, one hand poised to slap it away if it jumps at me. Instead, it just walks forward, sniffs the ground where my feet have disturbed the earth, and drops a mushroom down and smashes it into the wet soil.

  It’s farming. I watch it for a little while longer until I’m sure, then I walk on.

  The primate stops following me when the dirt beneath my feet changes back to the gelatinous-type earth, sticking to its farmlands.

  A few minutes on I almost miss its company, wishing vaguely that I’d brought Seven despite the risk to her tiny lungs. Then I see a bloodred mass up ahead, the color somehow seeping through the haze. It’s Mount Hamilton, according to the map I downloaded on the way to Ergot, but the locals call it Blood Mountain, on account of the fungus peculiar to that area staining the whole thing a deep red.

  The shopkeeper had said, “Once you see Blood Mountain coming out of the mist, you’re almost there. Put the mountain at your two o’ clock, then walk straight ahead. If you can.”

  I do as the shopkeeper said, and after a hundred meters or so I see what he was talking about. It’s not like a powershield that blocks you completely, it’s more gentle than that. If you stop focusing on Blood Mountain, suddenly it’s over to your left and you didn’t even realize you’d veered away.

  I sit down, and straightaway I can feel the dampness soaking through my pants. I eat some more jerky, drink some water, then stare out ahead. I wonder whether I’d be able to see the wall in front of me if I had some Squid drops, a shimmering mass of distortion among the trees and vines.

  I stand up, brush the mud off my ass, then reach my hands forward. I feel them dig into something thicker than the damp air, so I step forward and wrench my arms apart, like I’m opening curtains made of lead. My jaw tenses as I press forward, feeling the strain as I push through the psychic wall, tearing a hole in it with my mind.

  I’ve started making a sound behind clenched teeth—my training coming in automatically—so I crank the volume and push ahead faster. I plod one foot down hard and check for purchase before I shift my weight onto it, then repeat with the other. Just as I strain against it, the wall disappears. My body jerks forward and my ankle twists painfully as I topple over.

  “Fu—,” I yell, the word cut short as I hit the ground, hands up to break my fall. I land soft on the thick layer of moss and fungi carpeting the forest floor, but I slip as I push up from the muck and get a wide streak of mud across the visor of my rebreather. I pull it down and leave it hanging around my neck while I carefully pick myself up into a crouch, keeping my weight off the twisted ankle. The joint throbs, swelling already, and I hear my breath coming fast and loud as my body adjusts to the pain.

  I look up from my ankle and glance around. The shopkeeper was right about there being no trees growing here, but I wouldn’t call it a clearing. There are rocks stained orange with rust and covered in a dense, black moss, and fallen trees lie here and there, trunks too thick for me to see over.

  I know the ankle isn’t broken because my medical diagnostic suite would be blaring warnings at me, so I stand slowly, arms out for balance.

  “You should have paid extra for the hiking boots,” a voice calls out, mirroring my own thoughts. The words echo in the stillness, and though I haven’t heard her speak in fifteen years, I know it’s Sera.

  “Did you fucking trip me?” I call into the sky above.

  “I didn’t need to—the ground here is a hazard.”

  My hands are coated in blue-brown mud and green moss from breaking my fall. I wipe them on the ass of my pants, glad that I left my cloak behind for Seven to curl up on.

  “Why the hostility, Mars?” she calls out, but this time there’s less of an echo. I think I know where she’s coming from.

  I hold my arms apart, and my mind grabs one of the huge fallen logs.

  “You tried to have me killed!” I yell. I strike out, swinging the tree like it’s a twenty-meter-long club.

  I hear Sera oomph as the wind is knocked out of her, then a body flies through the air backward, disappearing into the mist. She’s quick though, and near instantly a rusted boulder hurtles close and splits my log with a sharp crack.

  I hear creaking and snapping behind me, and a line of trees at the edge of the clearing start to come down all at once. I can’t run, so I drop to a roll, grab another fallen tree, and hold it over me. The other trunks thud as they land on it, pushing my body down into the mud with the force.

  My arms burn and begin to shake. I reach deep inside, finding that well of strength the teachers taught us would always be down there, waiting for us, waiting for our need. I tap into it and I start screaming, except instead of the guttural sound I usually make, it’s the high-pitched wail of a banshee.

  I throw my giant cudgel high into the air, tossing aside the fallen trees like matchsticks. They disappear into the mist, and one by one they hit the ground out of sight, cracking loudly as they land.

  I stand up panting and inhale so I can yell something clever at Sera, but I hear a noise behind me, and when I spin around she’s right there. The last thing I see is her knuckles rushing toward my face.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I come to, and my head and foot are throbbing just off beat with each other. When I try to open my eyes, the right one doesn’t want to cooperate. There’s a migraine splitting my head just behind my left eye, but it’s less from the punch and more from the mental jujitsu. The migraine is familiar, almost like an old friend—one that you actually hate, but whom you keep seeing out of some misplaced sense of loyalty—but the black eye is a new sensation, and I can’t stop myself from poking at it and wincing in pain.

  “Good, you’re awake. Have you cooled off yet?”

  I look around the room, trying to find where Sera’s voice is coming from. The walls are made from a white plastic or synthetic fabric. They glow faintly, scaring the shadows away.

  “Where are we?”

  “This is my home. I hope you wiped your feet before coming in.”

  I don’t remember Sera’s sense of humor being so terrible, but I know she’s joking because half the floor is caked in mud and the other half is covered with an ancient threadbare rug, already being eaten away by Ergot’s mold.

  The furniture looks as though it’s made from the wood of the local trees, and the only visible metal in the prefab-kit home is the heater/oven standing in the far corner. That corner is the one place where moss and mold don’t grow up the walls in constellations of black spots—the heat from the oven one final refuge against the damp.

  The house is one of those portable, collapsible structures favored by nomads, the military, and, by necessity, refugees.

  Sera’s near the oven, slicing mushrooms. Even if the shopkeeper had seen her, he wouldn’t have recognized her from my description. Her hair is gray now—light gray, nearly white—and looks like it hasn’t been brushed since I last saw her, with one thick dreadlock forming in the back, and the rest of it unkempt and visibly knotted. Her skin hasn’t taken on the Ergot-gray yet, but it’s already paler than I remember her. The theta symbol still covers the back of her hand, moving smoothly down and up with the blade. The other arm is prosthetic now, coated in some sort of thick polyrubber to keep out the damp.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Knock you out? Because I needed to calm you down.”

  “Not that,” I say.

  “Are you hungry?”

  My stomach churns, but I say, “Answer the fucking question.”

  She tsks. “They didn’t teach us language like that at the facility. I’m not avoiding the question, Mariam; you’ll get your answers in good time. But first, are you hungry?”

  “Yes,” I say, quietly and begrudgingly.

  “I’m making mushroom risotto. It’s not great, I’ll admit that much, but the rice and the mushrooms will be fresh; can’t grow much else on Ergot.”

  She takes a few more minutes in the kitchen. Once the pot is on the stove, she c
omes over and takes a seat opposite me. Up this close I can see the lines on her face that go with the gray hair, and the dark pockets beneath her eyes. She looks older than she is, maybe old enough to be my mother, when there’s really only six years between us. She stares and smiles.

  “I want to know everything, Mars. Where did you go? How did you survive? Are you married?”

  I sigh and poke my swollen eye again. “I haven’t seen you in fifteen years, and you want to make small talk?”

  “I want to hear what I missed, even the dumb little things.” Sera gets up and goes over to a small cooler, then returns after a minute with two mugs full of a dark brown liquid.

  I take a sip and it’s gritty and sour, with the burn of strong alcohol. “I got out of hibernation and waited for you for a day or so. I was sure you were dead, but I still hoped, y’know? Figured they’d be searching for a homeless kid, a runaway, so I sold myself into an Orphancorp.” I drink some more of the fungus wine. “It was fucked, but it wasn’t as bad as the facility. They fed me, housed me, and they move kids around to keep them from forming any bonds, which kept me off the radar.”

  “Smart,” Sera says, still wearing the same placid smile she had on when she sat down.

  I shrug. “The facility taught us to survive, how to do whatever we needed to. I’ve killed a lot of people, Sera. I’m not proud of it.”

  She nods.

  “I saw you die,” I say, the venom in my voice surprising me. My eyes go to the floor, away from her face despite my anger.

  I hear fabric rustling and I look up. Sera’s lifted her tunic high enough that I can see her flat, ridged abdomen. She’s showing me four vivid pink scars—splashes of skin turned shiny by laserburn.

  “You did see me die, but they brought me back,” she says, lowering her shirt. She looks at me intently and I glance away, but my eyes are drawn back to hers. “It was peaceful there, being dead, I mean; it felt like a living nothingness.”

  “Like the inside of a wormhole.”

  “Exactly. They brought me back from that just so they could keep pushing me to the edge of death. At first they wanted me to talk, tell them where I’d sent you, but I didn’t. Eventually it simply became punishment.” She holds up the digits on her prosthetic arm. “They pulled out my fingernails. Do you know what that feels like? Do you know how hard it is to scratch without them? This arm’s great though,” she says, admiring it.

  “If you didn’t talk back then, why did you send a bounty hunter after me?”

  “She was only supposed to give you a message, sis—telling you to find me here. That’s it. How could I ever wish you harm? All I can guess is she put her feelers out once she had your name and found someone who was willing to pay more for you.”

  I’m about to ask something, but Sera holds up an index finger and goes over to the stove. After a couple of minutes she’s back with two plates of risotto.

  It smells good and is edible enough, but there’s an underlying bitterness to the local produce that reminds me of bile, that flush of hot spit that signals an unavoidable vom. I’m too hungry to be fussy, though, and I’ve already eaten half of it when Sera picks up with her story.

  “Between the two of us we could probably populate a cemetery planet,” she says, sounding like she’s idly musing. “When I escaped, I wanted to make sure they wouldn’t ever be able to stick things into me and cut pieces of me away again.” Now it’s time for Sera to hang her head. “I wanted to murder all of them,” she says, almost in a whisper.

  I start to speak, but she cuts me off.

  “I rigged the reactor to explode on my way out. I watched the facility detonate, watched the fire and debris spill out into space.

  “I stole a ship, and I sat there and watched all the carnage floating out into the void, and I thought about all the girls who had lived there, sis. All those girls are dead, and I killed them.” She doesn’t mention the soldiers, the scientists, the caretakers, and I don’t blame her. “That was the last time I cried. Nothing else seems worth crying over anymore.”

  My migraine is gone now, but I’ve got these weird bits of color floating in my vision.

  “They lost a lot of research and all the subjects that could help them piece it back together. All but you. And me I guess, but I’m already dead. That’s why they’re still after you.”

  The whole house starts to swim, and I lose focus on Sera’s face. My stomach is in agony, but I want to follow what Sera’s saying.

  “But why bring me here?” I ask.

  “To help you, Mars, help you get strong enough to fight them.”

  The bowl of risotto slips out of my hand and thuds onto the rug.

  “The shopkeeper—”

  “Dale.”

  “Dale . . . When he said people came here to pick mushrooms . . . he, uh, he didn’t mean for food, did he?”

  “I’m sorry, Mars. I wanted to tell you first, I really did, but we’d already wasted so much time fighting. Vomit now if you’re going to, because soon you won’t be able to choose where it ends up.”

  I stand up and the whole house swings wildly backward, then forward, sloshing around like liquid reality. I can’t really feel my legs, so I lift them up high as I stumble toward the door, not knowing where the toilet is in Sera’s tiny house.

  Outside I’m on my hands and knees, looking at a collection of mushrooms spotted with hollow purple circles, then I’m looking at mushrooms covered in risotto, then I’m looking at the inside of my eyelids, lines of . . .

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Red veins run through pink, jagged lines of life. They move, vibrating gently with a heartbeat, but not mine. The veins dance with a slow, solid thud that shakes my whole body. It’s my mother’s heartbeat, and it’s my mother’s warmth that envelops me. I am home. I am not alive; am I dead? I am not yet alive; I am not yet dead. I’m pushed out of my home, into the light. The sun shines and then it winks out, goes black and cold. Another sun lives and dies, then another. Galaxies form and I float among them; I am one of them. The universe dances gently along with a heartbeat, but it is not mine. The heartbeat goes silent and all is void. All is the lack of light, the lack of dark, the lack of even a line that separates the two like the edge of shadow.

  My father worries for my mother. My mother does not worry because her own fate is certain. She will die. She is dead. She has always been dead. She will never die. She will never live.

  I’m five years old and they tell me I don’t have parents, that I never had parents, that I was made in a lab, that I belong to them and if I don’t perform as they expect, they will do away with me. Briggs kills a mouse. Cleanly, quickly, with a scalpel across its tiny throat, and then he holds it up to make sure we know what “do away with” means, so we can learn their little euphemisms.

  Euphemisms gain strength by hiding the truth. Nothing is truth, nothing is reality, my mind contains multitudes, it contains universes, I contain multitudes, I am Mariam, I am Sera, I am every caretaker that ever had a hand in molding me, I am mold growing across every surface of Ergot. I am already dead because I want to die, because I have always wanted to die, because I don’t deserve to live, because I am a tool without purpose, a weapon without a target.

  I am a little girl. I have just emerged from a shuttle, held tightly in the arms of my sister. Held tightly in the arms of my Sera. Held tightly. My sister? Sera holds tightly on to me, and she whispers in my ear and she tells me that Daddy will be back for us, that Daddy will come find us, but I don’t believe her. Sera is my sister, and they separate us. They separate us by age and they tell us we do not have families, that we never had families. Sera isn’t my sister, because the tattoo on the back of her hand is different from mine. I forget her. I forget who she is. I train and I forget.

  Briggs is there, watching and grinning as men in white put needles in my arms and through my skull. There is only pain, only pain and the men. They use hypnotism to rewrite the code of my brain, but it’s not just hypnotism. They
’ve opened up my skull, and wires run out of the pink-gray matter-flesh and hang in loose parabolas and meet the floor and snake until they run into a machine. This machine talks to my brain, and this machine lies to my brain and makes me need them, listen to them, obey them; but I do not need them, I need them, I am alone and I need them, because I am just a tool without purpose, a weapon without a target, and I need them because they know how to point me. I will always come home and I will never come home, because I left it, because no one would ever want me, because look at me. Look at this child with no notion of self, no goal, just a desire to flee and an ability to kill if it is required, and it is always required because this whole universe is built upon kill, the first thing they taught me was kill.

  Mice were released into the section of the space station where our food was stored and prepared. The mice were released and they bred and they bred and ate bread and whatever else they could get their tiny little mouths around. They told us: you either kill the mice or the mice will eat your food. We won’t stop them; you have to, or you will starve. So we did. We would run around the kitchen quarters and we would laugh and giggle and squeal and we would search on our hands and knees and we would find the mice and we would turn their tiny bodies inside out—that’s what people say when there isn’t really an inside for the organs and the blood to stay inside of.

  They never said anything about the bodies, so we left them and we ran and laughed and giggled and found more mice, and soon the whole place smelled of death. We were a mouse holocaust and still we starved for a week while they cleaned the kitchens and the food stores and tried to get rid of that smell, though they never could, because the air can only be filtered and refiltered so much, and you can’t open the windows on a space station. We starved for a week, because even though we killed all the mice, we still didn’t deserve to eat, they said. We didn’t deserve to live, they never said, but it was there floating in the air above their heads.