by Gorman, K.
"No, no—don't get me wrong. I'm glad you're here. I just can't figure it."
Ah. She settled in. They'd had different variants of this conversation over the past few weeks, and she'd deemed his curiosity benign. Her position here was a little strange, given her skillset. If she'd wanted, her degree could have gotten her a more secure, and much more high-paying, job in any of the three governments’ transit sectors.
That she'd hired onto some back-alley scrounging startup?
Yeah, it was weird.
"I told you," she said. "I don't like Big Brother that much."
"You must really not like him, coming down here with us." His eyebrows scrunched together, and he took another swig of his beer, swirling the remaining liquid around in the bottle when he was finished with it. "How long's it been since we hit a relay feed?"
"Five days." Anticipating his next question, she took a quick glance at the holoscreen. "We're due to hit the next one in three."
"Soo-jin will be happy. I’ve never seen a girl so attached to feeds.”
“You clearly haven’t been to the inner planets, then." She rocked her chair back a bit, checking the engine's progression on the read-out.
"Enlil doesn't count?"
She snorted. "Compared to the inner planets, Enlil is practically bucolic."
"Maybe I should consider a trip, then. See the sights. You think the Alliance will let us peddle there?" He leaned forward to squint at the map, as if its projection of the closest planets, and their planned route, might provide an answer.
"I don't see why not. Unless they take umbrage with your history." She indicated the Fallon military tattoo on his arm. "You could always wear long-sleeves if you're worried."
She'd always meant to get more of its story out of him, but it always felt like a touchy subject to her, especially given her reluctance to share her past. The Fallon government had once been part of the Alliance, but had broken away. From what she’d heard, lots of bad blood existed between it and the other three, as well as plenty of border conflicts carried out on moons and asteroids and, once, famously, in a patch of empty space—but that had been years ago. Things had quieted down.
He shrugged.
"They'd see my history the second they looked at the ship's registration." The bottle shifted in his hand, and he glanced down at its base, checking its level. "I was stationed on Penati. Not exactly a concern for the Alliance."
He swirled the bottle once more, then tipped it up in a salute. "I think I'd better hit the sack. Day's catching up. You all right out here?"
"Fine," she said with a small wave. "Have a good sleep."
"Thanks. You'll have to tell me about the inner worlds more, sometime." He tipped up the bottle at her again as he turned. But, before he left completely, he paused at the door, a finger in the air as if he'd forgotten something. "Oh, one more thing. Karin?"
She swung the chair back around, catching his gaze as he half-turned back. "Yes?"
"Don't mind Soo-jin. She mouths off sometimes, but she doesn't mean anything by it."
She gave him a small smile. "Don't worry. I'm not as fragile as I look."
He snorted. "You can say that again. Good night."
"'Night."
The walkway outside groaned as he stepped out, and she heard the tell-tale brush of his hand as he trailed it along the corridor's chipping paint, a habit of his she'd noticed after the first few days on board. When the door to his cabin hissed shut, she checked the engine readout on the holoscreen again, then let her head fall back onto the chair's back cushion, rolling the toe of her shoe against the floor to make the chair rock.
Seven minutes and they could lift off. Add another eight to break atmo, then two to guide them onto their programmed track, and she could finally leave the bridge.
Her bed couldn't come soon enough.
Chapter 3
The ruins told her it was a dream. She’d left them behind long ago, over seven years now, when they’d escaped through the gate. They were a frequent appearance when she slept—at first alarmingly so, but, as time wore down her fears, the terror their sight evoked had ebbed.
Tonight, they seemed little more than an echo.
There were five of them, standing still under a blue, late summer sky, their weathered stone sides immune to the wind that threw the rest of the overgrown field into ripples and sways. Faint lines carved down their surfaces, making them seem like somehow more than simple hunks of old, straight-cut stone, but time had worn them down so much that their design could only be guessed at.
Karin knew. She’d spent many years trying.
She took a step and flexed her hand, the same wind that swept the field brushing over her skin, and then she frowned as the smell of sun-baked grass and late-season wildflowers came to her, too—as did the feel of rough, hard-packed dirt beneath her feet.
The dreams had never been this lucid before.
“Can you feel it?” a voice asked.
She jumped. Time never moved right in dreams. In the few moments she’d been noticing her hand, the early afternoon had turned to evening. Her sister could have been there for a few hours, or only seconds.
“Miki?”
She shivered, the wind suddenly cold. Sunset bathed the stones in orange and shadow.
Nomiki stood beside her, lit by the same light, her attention on the stars now peeking through the edges of twilight.
“Something’s coming.” Nomiki took a step forward. Her dress fluttered in the wind, black trim on white. She had a strong, smooth face, tanned skin. Her dark eyes flashed with the horizon's dimming tints of orange and ochre as they narrowed. “Can’t you feel it?”
She lifted her arm. As she pointed, part of her sleeve slipped down.
A shot of adrenaline rushed through Karin as she recognized the tattoo they’d both had lasered off back on her sister’s wrist, its black ink grossly dark against the paler skin.
She stumbled backwards. The dream had moved. The sun and its light had gone. Everywhere was dark now. Stars littered the sky above them, cold and distant. Dull pain smacked into her ankle—like she’d hit it against part of her bed, back on the ship.
The dream tripped, lost its grip. She felt herself slipping down, falling between—
Suddenly, Nomiki came in front of her. Her face filled Karin’s vision. Warm breath fell across her cheeks.
“You’re gonna have to stop hiding if you’re to survive.” She grabbed Karin’s arm hard, fingers like steel around her wrist. “You’re gonna have to use this.”
She sliced a small knife across Karin’s forearm. Light bled out, as cold and distant as the stars above.
Karin snatched her arm back. “What the hell?”
But the dream was already moving again. Like the shift of a camera lens in a movie, Nomiki was already half a field away. Karin’s white blood glowed on the knife she held, lighting part of her face as she stood beyond the stones.
Karin started after her, stumbling on the hard, rough-packed earth. Wind buffeted her face, her arms. Long strands of grass smacked into her legs.
“What do you mean?” she yelled. “What’s coming?”
In answer, all her sister did was look up.
*
Karin awoke with a jerk.
Darkness smothered her sight. For the first few, confused moments, remnants of the dream fought with her recent memories—the smell of summer grass, the hard-packed earth against her feet, the familiarity of the bed, the red, analog-styled numbers of the cycle-clock on the side table next to her bunk. Clammy sweat cooled on her skin, making the bedding stick like a trap. As she struggled with it, she noticed that her arm hurt, too. In the exact same place that dream-Nomiki had cut her.
Must have hit it in my sleep, she thought. Then my brain tried to explain it logically in my dream. That’s why Nomiki attacked.
She slumped back on the bed as the logical part of her mind activated, the memories of the dream washing over her.
Not like sh
e hadn't had nightmares before. Gods knew there'd been plenty of those. Bad dreams were her brain's rather inadequate way of dealing with all the trauma she'd been through. Today's work must have hit some trigger-point or the like—maybe something she'd seen down below, or the disruption of her normal schedule.
The brain was a random-thought-generator, creativity its domain.
Nomiki wasn't usually involved, though.
She shifted, rubbing the ache on her arm, then froze as her fingers touched something warm and wet.
"The hell?"
Karin jerked her head down, frowning into her quilt. As she detangled the sweat-coated sheets, her eyes widened at the light that suddenly appeared, splattered across her arm like liquid starshine.
At the same time, a form on the other side of the room moved.
She sucked in a breath.
It was a man—or, at the very least, a very life-like, man-shaped shadow. Tall, with edges that blended into the room's already significant darkness, he stood against the wall with no definition to him, only darkness. She couldn't see any features, not eyes or the rumples where clothes might be, or—heck, were those arms?
She stared, heart racing. It must be a trick of her mind—a piece of clothing hung against the wall in an unfortunate way, personified by the part of her brain that looked for reasons to be afraid of the dark.
For several long seconds, she watched him, wondering exactly that.
Then he moved again.
Karin yelled out, jerking from her bed. The bedding lumped around her calves and she kicked it loose, throwing the top part of it at him when he lunged. Light flooded the room from her arm as she pulled herself out of bed. She half-crawled, half-flung herself over the side table and searched for a weapon, or anything, to hit him with.
Her fingers bumped against the hard edge of her suit's helmet. She reared back and swung it blindly behind her. It connected with something solid.
Then it jerked out of her hand… to land in the corner and roll against the wall.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the sheets she'd thrown earlier fall to the floor. The man straightened, dwarfing the room as he came to his full height. As she got her first good look at him in the mercurial glow that still shone from her arm, her heart stopped.
He was black, head to toe—and not just dark-skinned like Marc, either—but black. As if someone had taken a piece of the darkest parts of space, put it into a man-shape, and left it in her room. He had no clothes, no features, not even a defined edge. A three-dimensional rendering of shadow.
But—maybe it was a trick of her eyes, or a twinge from her subconscious—she definitely got the sense of maleness from him.
He seemed to regard her for a moment, turning his head her way and pausing. She took a step back, bumping her heel into the corner of her storage crate. Blood roared in her ears as she groped her hand along the wall, looking for something else to fight with.
But this time, when the Shadow man lunged, she had nothing. Not even the sheets.
She stumbled backwards, knees buckling as she smacked into the crate again. A strangled yell left her throat as she fell back, and she clawed at the air as the Shadow loomed above and overtook her. She slammed hard against the metal top. The air jumped from her lungs in a solid whumph.
Her yell turned into a whimper.
The Shadow loomed above her. Its hands pricked her body, an uneasy sensation neither cold nor hot. It felt like they were going inside her throat, the same way radiation or anesthesia might, trespassing her skin, pushing through her tendons and muscles, touching her blood. Blackness smothered her sight.
She struggled, tried to kick out, but an amorphous weight pinned her down.
A sob crumpled through her lungs. She gritted her teeth and kicked again and again. Tears pricked her eyes as the thing’s hand moved up through her jaw, its long fingers pushing toward her brain. Its head hovered directly above hers, the place where its eyes should be boring a hole into her awareness. Fingers smothered her mouth and nose.
Then, in her struggle, something shifted.
Light pricked through the blackness. The white droplets on her arm still shone, dimmer than before, but persistent.
She brought her hand up. Muscles shaking, she pushed energy into the light. It shivered at her touch like water under a full moon, waxing, growing. The thing's hand moved into her eyes. A fingertip brushed through her skull like the touch of a feather. She cringed, pulled away. Then she pushed back.
Light exploded from her skin.
The black thing shrieked.
Suddenly, it was gone, off of her. Her sight returned.
She could breathe again.
She coughed, scrambled to her feet, squinting as her eyes adjusted. It seemed like she'd lit a tiny sun in the room. Light flooded every surface and corner, pure white and blinding. Most of it came from her arm—the cut on her wrist that dream-Nomiki had inflicted—but some of it had spread. Drops of it splattered across the walls. Others hung in the air like motes of glowing dust.
The Shadow stood against the far wall, its humanoid form horribly delineated between light and dark, the edges of it still inexplicably blurred. As the glow ebbed, fading back toward the mercurial dimness it had when she'd awoken, the thing seemed to regard her again, its attention more serious this time.
Then the door hissed open. In shock, she watched as it slipped out and fled down the corridor. It made no sound, but it cast a shadow that shifted across the floor and up the walls.
The door stayed open for a few seconds, then shut again.
She was alone.
Chapter 4
Karin stared at the door, breathing staggered and shallow. The thing might have left, but that did nothing to lessen the adrenaline spinning through her body—or the mire of thoughts snapping through her brain.
What the hell had that been? Part of the dream? She glanced around, then dismissed the thought.
No. That had been real.
She shivered, remembering the feeling of the thing's hands around her neck—through her neck—and then forced herself to straighten. Her knees almost buckled under her as she dropped down from the crate she'd been on, and her bare feet hit the cold floor with a hard smack.
The light still glowed. She spared it a lingering glance, taking stock of where it had fallen. Then she picked the sheets up from the floor and wiped the inside of her wrist off on them, getting rid of the stuff still on her.
The light, she could deal with later. So long as she kept the door shut, nobody would see it.
But that thing was still on the ship.
It needed to go.
She strode to the end of the room and picked up the helmet she'd thrown, hefting it in her hand. Then she headed for the door.
The running lights made a soft glow in the hallway, dimmed and tinted red to coincide with the ship's night cycle. Once out of her room, the sound of the engine grew louder to her ears, a heavy, subsonic hum that made almost everything vibrate. Without anyone's body temperature to heat it, the air felt colder outside. The difference pricked at her skin.
Forcing her breath to be slow and shallow, with eyes wide, fingers shaking where they gripped her helmet, she stepped into the corridor, expecting an attack.
Empty.
Suns. That thing had been real, right?
Movement farther down the corridor made her jerk. She snapped her head toward it, then stopped dead.
Cold fear froze her lungs.
The Shadow stood in the darkness of the ship’s main junction, its body half-blended in with the cycle's dim lighting. After a few seconds' stare, it turned and moved down the path toward the leftward cargo hatch, vanishing beyond the corner.
Her nerves jumped. For a moment, she couldn't move. She stood rooted to the floor, fear turning her muscles to lead.
Then she took a hard breath, straightened, and squared herself to the corridor. Her fingers tightened on the helmet.
Whatever this was—whate
ver bizarro bullshit from her past that had, somehow, managed to find her—it ended now.
Before the others found out.
She took a step forward, vowing to find herself a better weapon before she fought the thing. A wrench, maybe. There were always some of those long-handled ones around. If she put it back after she used it, no one would know—
Metal thumped behind her, making her jump. As she whirled, a strangled cry came from behind the wall, muffled by the metal.
Karin's gaze jumped to the next cabin door.
Soo-jin.
Her gut twisted as a new thought flashed across her mind.
Were there more of them?
She backed up. No. The woman was just having a nightmare. She'd had them before. Karin had heard her more than once during the night cycle, thrashing about.
A second yell came, raw and panicked. Vulnerable.
Something crashed inside.
Karin lunged forward and slapped at the door panel. She pushed past as it hissed open, shoving herself inside.
A Shadow being loomed over the bed, its back to her. Soo-jin lay half-pinned, kicking hard, trying to turn away. It had its fingers around her throat and another hand moving toward her face.
Karin cracked the lip of her helmet against the back of its head.
The Shadow recoiled with a shriek that ripped through her mind.
Part of it brushed her as it jumped away, a feathery touch of shadow that, like the other one had been, felt neither cold nor hot. It whispered across her skin like soft fur and shivered along the marrow of her bone.
She chased the thing with another swing of her helmet, narrowly missing its arm as it jerked out of reach.
In the corner of her eye, she caught Soo-jin righting herself on the bed. The woman jumped to her locker and opened the door, fumbling for something inside. Karin sidestepped to block the Shadow's escape, then lunged with another helmet swing.
"Get down!" Soo-jin yelled.
Karin dropped. Something flew over her shoulder.
The knife struck square in the Shadow's chest, its metal glinting in the cabin's lighting.
