by J. A. Rock
“So what?” Joele stops moving.
“He said to get rid of it. He doesn’t want to see it.”
“He killed it,” Joele says.
“To stop it suffering.”
“He likes killing them.”
In the silence that follows, Imms can feel the rage run off Joele like sweat and trickle down to where he hides. She is not just angry at B, not just angry at Silvers. Her anger is at everything. She is, in her way, as scarred as he is. She has invisible scabs on her back. Flesh-colored bruises on her ribs.
“What, you’re not talking?” Her words rattle. Joele is uncertain. She is desperate. Another second, and anger puffs her up again. She stalks to the chute, saying, “I’ll throw it in the fucking lake.” She yanks up the grate.
Imms knows he could drop. Down the chute, onto the ground. She’s not fast enough to catch him if he runs. But he lingers for a moment on the bars and watches as Joele’s expression lunges from startled to confused to hungry. She grabs him by the hair. He doesn’t make a sound as she pulls him through the floor and into the lab.
“What’s going on?” Vir asks.
Joele looks Imms over slowly. “I remember you. Didn’t get enough the last time we met?”
He wishes he could say something, something brave and clever, but his tongue is dry.
She steps toward him, arm out, and he kicks her shin, hard. She gasps. “Little fucker.” He tries to crawl under the table, but she hauls him up and shoves him again. He falls against the table, knocking his head on the steel corner. The room shrinks in his vision until there’s only black.
When he opens his eyes again, he is on his side on the table, his hands tied behind his back. Something clatters onto the surface behind him, and he twists, trying to see what it is. Joele has placed a small pile of wood and paper near his shoulder. She smiles at him. Not a nice smile. “You ever hear of natural selection?” she asks.
“Who’s askin’?” he whispers.
“It’s Mother Nature’s way of getting rid of morons.”
Vir is in the corner, writing in a book. She doesn’t look up.
“Can you believe this?” Joele asks her. “One actually came to us.”
Imms tries to kick again, but one of his ankles is strapped to the table.
“There’s something I want to try,” Joele is holding a very small box. She opens it and takes out a thin stick. “You know what fire is?”
Tin Star and Thunder Sam make fires every evening when they stop to rest. The Rough Riders use fire to burn a saloon. Fire is pure heat, and fire consumes. He nods.
“You’ve never seen it, though, have you?” She swipes the tiny stick against the edge of the box, and a yellow drop sprouts from its tip. It hurts Imms’s eyes to stare at it. “Fire changed everything on Earth,” Joele says. “Think what it could do for your people.”
She touches the burning stick to the small pile on the table. The flame catches the paper, flows along the strips. With a soft snap, it grabs the scraps of wood. It grows. Imms feels the heat next to his skin.
“I’m sure you’d learn to appreciate it,” Joele says. “It’s so cold here. Fire would keep you warm.” She watches him intently. The heat, dangerously near, makes something rise in him. His muscles jump with the flame.
Joele steps aside and rummages in a drawer. She returns with a thin glass rod. She sticks the end of it in the fire, and two sparks shoot into the air and vanish. Imms hears a strange noise, a sort of humming, and realizes it’s coming from his own throat. Joele withdraws the rod. Its end glows red for an instant. She presses it against his chest.
At first he feels nothing. Then, a rupture of his senses. He rolls over, thrashes. Joele follows him, holding the rod against his skin. Even when she removes it, the flesh still burns, and he tries to curl up. With one hand, she rolls him back to face her. She grabs the rope around his wrists and yanks it until he gasps. “Don’t move,” she says. She heats the rod again. This time when she puts it to his chest, he bites down on his tongue. He bites until he tastes his own blood.
“Do you hate me?” she asks.
The fire beside him is dying, but then it catches one last scrap of wood. The flame launches into the dark air around it, and Imms feels the heat inside him, so fast and roaring that he can’t think. He thrashes again, knocking the fire to the floor. The leather band holding his ankle snaps. He throws himself at Joele, wanting her gone. His body and hers crack as they meet, and she falls, Imms on top of her. Imms watches the flames, unable not to. They grab Joele’s clothes. They flutter up her arm. She wails.
Imms rolls off her and twists his arms until one wrist slides free of the ropes. He gets to his feet, his whole body still throbbing with the burn. They need to get outside. Vir remains in the corner, writing. She looks up, briefly, as the flames catch the legs of the table. Then she turns back to her notebook.
The fire leaps onto the counters. Glass tubes break and spew liquid. Joele grabs Imms’s ankle, but she doesn’t attack, only tugs gently as she grinds her burning shoulder against the floor.
Imms picks up a nearby sweatjack and tries to cover the flame on Joele’s shoulder, to put it out. But the jacket explodes, curling and squealing, and Imms tosses it aside.
Joele screams. Blood runs from her forehead into her eyes.
“Help!” Imms yells. He yells it again and again. He grabs Joele’s ankles and drags her to where he thinks the hatch is. Smoke pours into Vir’s corner. She coughs but doesn’t try to get away.
Joele struggles. Imms doesn’t let go. “Come on,” he tries to call to Vir.
He can’t find the grate, and Joele won’t stop fighting.
She’s strong. The flames wind around her neck and climb the braid of her hair. In the corner, Vir slumps. Her face rests on her open notebook. Imms lets go of Joele and puts his cheek against the floor. It’s the only way to get air. The smoke burrows into him, curls up in his lungs. He closes his eyes, then opens them again, drawing long, distorted shadows.
A familiar voice shouts from outside the lab. The main door swings open with a thud. Imms watches through a fence of flames as B enters and grabs Vir, pulls her from her chair. B notices Joele on the floor and yells something Imms doesn’t understand. Then he sees Imms.
Behind Imms, the table buckles, sinks. The lab cracks like bones. He closes his eyes.
He is by the lake. B is beside him. This is different from the first time he woke up and saw B. He won’t spit in B’s beard this time, but he doesn’t want B to know he’s awake yet, because B might take his hand away. Right now, that hand is rubbing slow circles on Imms’s stomach. It drifts up, across his collarbone. It finds his hair.
Imms can’t help opening his eyes to watch the lake. B says his name, and it’s all over, this peace. Flames grow around Imms’s mind, keeping the memory of the burning lab trapped there forever. He didn’t rescue anybody. The fire was his fault. If B doesn’t know that already, Imms will have to tell him.
B doesn’t take his hand away. He circles the burns on Imms’s chest. Imms doesn’t say anything. Maybe B will let him be quiet. That’s what he would like, to be quiet forever. To never say a word about fire or death. He draws a breath and coughs.
“It’s all right,” B says quietly. It’s not. Imms knows that.
He tests his throat to see if he can use it if he needs to.
It feels clotted, bruised.
B dips his hand into the lake. He scoops the glittering water, and lets it fall from his hand onto Imms’s chest. Imms sighs. B does it again.
“Go back to sleep,” B says. “I’m right here.”
But Imms can’t sleep, not with B right there. “Are the others—”
“Shh,” B says. “Sleep.”
Imms wakes and B isn’t in bed, so he moves his head to B’s side of the pillow and breathes in. The fabric smells like humans’ invented sweetness—cologne, soap, breath mints—and also like the ground and traces of old warmth gone stale and the air outside.
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He gets up and leaves the room, moving slowly. His chest aches.
Now that Joele isn’t here, he’s allowed to walk around the ship as long as he doesn’t disturb anything and eliminates only into the toilets. He goes to the kitchen. B and Grena keep fresh quilopea for him, not dried. He thinks of Lons. Is Lons eating? Then he remembers Lons is dead. So are Joele and Vir and even the man named Gumm, who joined B’s rescue effort but breathed in too much smoke. Now it is just Imms, B, and Grena.
Grena seemed happy to see Imms again. She has been rereading him Tin Star and Thunder Sam a little bit each night. She gave him a book of cryptowords—alphanumeric puzzles B says give him headaches. Imms loves them. Certain letters and numbers in the puzzles are circled, and when you’re finished, you unscramble the circled characters to form a message, usually the answer to a joke Imms doesn’t understand. Imms sits up at night solving cryptowords, sometimes falling asleep on the floor instead of joining B in the bed.
Imms finds B sitting on the floor near the main port. This happens often now, that they find each other without searching and sit beside each other without speaking. B stands as though he’s been expecting Imms.
“Come on,” he says.
B and Imms spend as much time as they can outside, near the water. The lake is the only place where the burns on Imms’s chest don’t bother him. When they are on the ship, Imms can’t stop touching the two welts, picking at them. They ooze clear fluid and won’t heal.
B puts his palm on the bright earth and watches the light get sucked into his skin. Imms sits beside him, but B doesn’t touch him. B’s different tonight—hard angles and brows hurled down, tension in his muscles. Yet an unfamiliar ease tunnels out of him like something buried alive.
“You couldn’t sleep?” Imms asks.
B is silent for so long, Imms gives up on hearing his voice. “I had to talk to Grena.”
“About the fire?”
“Mm.”
“Are the people you work for mad?” Imms knows B doesn’t like talking to the humans he works for back on Earth. B thinks they’re self-interested gluttons who wouldn’t know a golden opportunity if it kicked them in the nuts.
B shakes his head. “They’re pretending not to be. They have to be nice to the survivors of a tragedy.”
If ever there was a time to be sorry, Imms thinks this is probably it. The feeling is real. He is sorry. He regrets causing the fire. It makes him feel dull, empty, to think of Joele and Vir and Gumm dead. “I’m—”
“They have to be nice because the fire was their fault,” B says.
“What?” The fire was Imms’s fault. How could it be anyone else’s?
“Faulty wiring on the ship. The insulation on an exposed wire in the lab wore away. It sparked.”
Imms doesn’t understand, and he can tell B doesn’t expect or want him to. The fire started because of Joele, and the tiny wooden stick that grew a flame. Because Imms moved to get away from the glass rod.
B continues, “The last thing NRCSE needs right now is to be the face of another fucked-up mission. Luckily, no one on Earth will be paying much attention to tragedy or to me once they meet the real man of the hour.”
“Who?”
“You.”
Imms is more confused than ever. “I’m not—”
“You’re a hero,” B says. “You pulled me out of the burning lab. You saved my life.”
Imms worries B might be sick, or that his mind is gone, like Lons’s. “But—”
“That’s what I told NRCSE.”
“Why?”
He turns and stares at Imms. “Because I want you to come to Earth with me.”
The words land in front of Imms. They stare up at him, alive and pleading.
“Why?” Imms asks.
“You want to see Earth. Don’t you?”
Imms has imagined being human, living on Earth, since Grena read them Tin Star and Thunder Sam. But the fire swept those thoughts from his mind. He does not feel like much of anything now—Silver or human. He feels like the two bisecting wounds that cross on the left side of his chest and that come alive every time he moves his body. Like he is healing around damage, becoming something new.
“But why do you want me to come?”
“Because I don’t want to be without you.” B’s words barely avoid being trampled by his next ones. “If I brought you to Earth, people would be so interested in learning about you, they’d forget to treat you like a human. But if they think you’re a hero, if they think you saved me, we have leverage.”
“Leverage?”
“Something to remind people of if they start getting funny ideas.”
“I didn’t save you,” Imms says. “I didn’t save anyone.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
Humans lie. Imms knows this. The story of Tin Star is a lie. Tin Star is not even a real human. He’s a character. But Grena has explained the difference between lying and creating. Telling a story is an act of creation. Refusing to tell the truth to someone who wants to know it is lying. Maybe all B is doing is creating a story about Imms for the humans back home.
“What’s wrong?” B asks.
“Would we live somewhere warm, on Earth?”
“Where I live it’s hot during the summer. Cold in winter. Best of both worlds.”
Imms stares at the water. The burns shriek inside his skin. That’s Joele shrieking. And the unmoving water is Vir slumped in her chair. Flames crack and hiss, and they are B, pushing him away, telling him he’s a coward. Then B scoops cool water onto the wound, and the flames recede. The memories vanish.
“What would I do on Earth?” Imms asks.
“Do?”
“Humans have jobs.”
“I’ll take care of you.” B closes his eyes and tips his head back. He looks like he’s in pain or very tired.
“You want me,” Imms says softly. “You don’t like Silvers.”
“You’re different from the others. You feel things they don’t.”
Imms nods. He wants this to be the truth. He thinks it must be, because of the way it’s filling him and almost hurting him. Silvers don’t lie, but Imms imagines lies are thin, easily torn, while truth is so strong, it can’t be contained.
“That’s why I can’t just leave here and never see you again,” B tells him.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yes.” It is the only answer that makes sense. B wants to be with him. B, who hates Silvers, wants Imms.
B pulls him closer, without even checking to see if Grena is near. “It’ll be hard at first. But I’ll help you.”
“Okay,” Imms says. “Okay, okay.”
B takes Imms’s lip gently in his teeth, stopping any more okays.
Imms laughs. “Stop,” he tries to say around B’s mouth.
B releases him. “Why should I?”
“Because I’ll fix it so you’re eating fist through a hole in your skull.”
“When we get home,” B says, “we’re gonna get you some new books.” And then he has Imms pinned to the ground, pebbles in both their palms, and they create a long kiss, better than the fierce, hungry kind they’ve shared before. Imms forgets about the fire, about death, because there is a future waiting for him in a place no Silver has been before, a place Alone can’t find.
Imms imagines Alone is like the head of the Rough Rider Committee, Caldwell Six, who has a coat he opens to potential customers. On the coat’s lining are pinned Indian scalps, jewelry, and dead plucked chickens. He makes people buy his wares or win them in a game of cards, and once a child steals a chicken from Caldwell Six. Alone has a similar coat, full of moments that two people can spend together, breathing at the same time, touching, speaking, fucking. On Earth, those moments with B will be free.
Imms will not have to buy, win, or steal them off Alone.
B asks, “Want to hear how you saved me?”
Grena and B take Imms to the lab. It’s an even worse place now than
it was before. So many things are black, broken, and bent.
“The floors and countertops have a flame-retardant seal,” Grena explains. “Trouble was the chemicals that were out on the counters. Joele was working on preserving the—” she stops, then continues quickly “—the Silver’s heart from Project HN.”
The body they’d dumped out the hatch. Cuts where they’d chased the heart.
“The sweatjack too,” Grena says. “That shouldn’t have been down here.”
Imms hears a crack, sees a wall of flame rise from the black mound Grena’s pointing to. He backs into B, who takes his shoulders, steadies him.
“Did you get everything?” B asks. “The wood scraps? The matches?”
Grena nods. “So we just have to work on the story. I think I’ll use a wire from the lighting fixture—it’s right above the table. Close to the actual source.”
“Hard to fake an electrical fire.”
Grena shrugs. “The source area’s the trickiest. I’ll have to create a scorch pattern that makes sense based on the fire’s path.”
“How will you do that?”
“Rub the insulation off the wire. Then light it.”
“You’re going to set another fire to cover up the first one?” B frowns.
Imms cringes at the idea of another fire. He doesn’t want to be anywhere near the ship when they make this one.
“Do you have a better idea?” Grena asks.
“I don’t have any ideas. You’re the expert on this stuff.”
“It’ll be very small, highly controlled. The table we brought from the kitchen isn’t flame retardant, which is why it caught when the fire was knocked to the floor.” Imms goes rigid, expecting B and Grena to be angry at him, since he was the one who knocked the fire to the floor. Grena doesn’t even look at him. “So you have to figure, if a spark—”
“Let’s not keep Imms in here any longer than we have to,” B says.
Grena turns to Imms. “What we need is for you to remember as best you can what the fire looked like. Where did it start? Where did it go? What burned? Can you do that?”
Imms swallows. “I think . . .”
B jostles him in a way that makes Imms feel better. He looks around, wondering where Joele, Vir, and Gumm’s bodies are.
