I, Cassandra

by E A Carter

  'Well,' he says after a while. 'Let's go see if that pod is still active.'

  And with every beat of my nano-powered existence I hope it is. And that it's her. Blue.

  'Please,' I breathe to the distance as Amadi searches for a way down. 'Let it be you.'

  Amadi cuts a sharp look at me, the whites of his eyes a little too bright in the moonlight. He must have the hearing of a bat.

  'I hope it's whoever you need it to be, too.' He mutters as he rubs the back of his hand against his eyes. 'Otherwise,' he continues as he lowers himself down into the ravine, 'we will have walked all this way for fucking nothing.'

  It's another fourteen hours of arduous slog through a boggy marsh infested with tiny insects. It's hell, and my temper frays. I take it out on the knee-high prickly grass, and the swarms of insects, attacking both with a vengeance that is both futile and only makes me angrier. Amadi says nothing, just presses on, grim, the safe cradled against his chest. At last we reach the end of the marsh and drag ourselves up onto drier land. In the distance, a cluster of trees breaks the monotony of the landscape.

  Amadi lurches to a halt and nods at the thicket. 'It was in there.'

  A quick glance is all it takes for me to see it resting in the middle of the spindly trees, as if they grew around it, to protect it, or worship it. Amadi shifts the weight of the safe in his grip, looks down at his feet, says nothing. In the empty reach of the eternal darkness, the pod's silence roars. No bleat of light calls to us to announce the cargo of life within.

  I have prepared for this, Amadi had said it was on its side. Even so, it feels empty. I press on, alone. I need to know. I can't help myself. I will it not to be her pod.

  But with every step I take I sense it's her pod. It calls to me like a lodestone. The memory of when I lay her down more than ten thousand years ago returns. The slight weight of her in my arms, the way her eyes touched mine as she spoke her last words to me, soft, and trusting.

  See you on the other side.

  I haul the pod over and push the vines aside. The panel is silent. My eyes slide further down. Please. Let it not be—

  G-II-0493.

  A void opens inside me. I let myself fall into it. Silence engulfs me. It's over. She's gone. Numb, I press my fist against the lid, and brace myself. None of my training can prepare me for this, to find her lifeless, and lost to me, forever. My jaw so tight it aches, I haul the lid up and look down.

  An empty pod glares back at me.

  I stand and turn full circle, unseeing, as panic wrestles my mind to the ground. I don't know if she's alive, or dead, or on the brink of dying of hunger. This is worse than trying to find her pod. A thousand million times worse. She could be anywhere. She will think she's alone, she will believe I didn't come for her, or that I didn't survive all this. And it hits me, with all the force of a star collapsing into a black hole. I wasn't there.

  I. Wasn't. There.

  'Blue!' I bellow into the day made into night. Anguish claws at me, tears me into shreds. To be so close to where she was and to have lost her. It's unbearable. 'Blue!' I shout with all the force of my once-military voice, fuelled by fear, dread, and the ache of my love, burned to hell.

  In the distance, a startled rush erupts from the marsh, what sounds like hundreds of leathery wings against the air. Then, nothing.

  I look up, wracked with hopelessness. Through the sparse tufts of the treetops, the stars continue their relentless slide across the heavens, even though it's the middle of the day. How the fuck will I ever find her in this endless, overgrown wilderness? I won't. It's impossible. She will die and this place will bury her in its vines. I know I will never find her again.

  I close my eyes and in the constellation of my mind, my pole star dies.

  SIX | AMADI EZENWA

  * * *

  He doesn't know I remember him, at least as he was before he became what he is now. But I know Ryan Maddox, the Delta Force Captain. He was the one who ran the team that 'controlled' the breach in the barrier that black day I had to make a choice whether I would be responsible for the deaths of a million people, or not. I read the dossier. He was in the room when Akron gave me the mandate. I remember a soldier at the door. Silent, watchful. And very present. The kind of soldier GC loved. That was Ryan Maddox. Obedient and ruthless, willing to do whatever it took to get the job done. Not like me. I was a sell out. I did it to reach an impossible goal. And in the middle of it all, I lost everything. And now, here I am. Alone, with a machine that looks and acts like a man, who took part in the abomination we committed that day, who has just lost the last of his purpose and can never die. I never believed in karma, but it feels like that's exactly what's happening. No happy ending for either of us.

  I wait for him to return to me, search for the right words to say to alleviate his loss, but there are none. This place is hell. Anything I say to try to make things better will only make things worse so I choose to say nothing at all. He leaves the pod and crosses the distance, the only other one who exists in this world ten thousand years removed from the one we left behind. For a weird moment, loneliness consumes me even though I am not alone.

  He strides up, his face hard as granite. 'This is where we part,' he says. He holds out his hand. I take it. We shake.

  I don't want him to go. I don't want to be alone again. 'I'd rather we didn't,' I say. 'I have gotten used to your company.'

  'Well get unused to it,' he says, cold as ice.

  'I can help you search for her,' I offer, 'I know the land, maybe—'

  'I would rather not be anywhere near you.'

  I shut my mouth, remind myself under that suit of flesh, he's a machine and has the power to snap my legs with zero effort.

  His eyes meet mine, the moonlight making them sharp as knives. 'If you had only stayed,' he says. 'You could have helped her, protected her, until—' he looks away, the muscles in his jaw clench. He shakes his head.

  'Fuck it,' he breathes. 'If it were anyone but you, they would have stayed, but not you, the one who only serves himself.'

  'What do you mean by that?' It comes out sharper than I want, and I hate how defensive I sound. Like I already know the answer. I don't want to hear it, but I can't stop myself from picking at the scab inside.

  'You gave the order to kill a million men, women, and children,' he says. 'But you didn't do it to protect us, did you? No, you cut a deal you selfish fuck. You got a big promotion, citizenship in Alpha VII and the right to marry, and now, here you are. The winner of the pod lottery. The irony is brutal isn't it?' His gaze drops to the box at my feet and the line of his jaw hardens.

  I scramble to pick it up, in case he's considering kicking it into the marsh just to fuck me over. 'How can you know?' I ask. 'That was a Q Clearance conversation between me and de Pommier.'

  'Back at the ravine, you told me your father was the last US president. Everyone knows who he is, the man who put the stamp on who got to live behind the barrier and who would be left outside to die.'

  I open my mouth to say something, then shut it again. I have no idea what any of this has to do with him knowing about the conversation with de Pommier.

  He points at his temple. 'de Pommier's files. I have them all in here. Everything is in here. It's inescapable.'

  'And?' I rally, my defensiveness hardening into anger. 'It's a bit hypocritical to judge me considering you were there, too, shooting at them.'

  He glares at me. I regret my retort instantly. It's hard to not to react when he looks so human. I wait for him to hit me.

  'Fuck you,' he says. 'Just . . . fuck everything.' He turns away, and heads back to the pod. I think he's going to stop, but he walks right past it into the eternal dark.

  'Where are you going to go?' I shout at his retreating back.

  He doesn't answer. He just keeps walking. In five weeks I know he's going to hit a dead end, a mountain range not even a mountain goat could climb. I watch him until he vanishes into the distance.

  It's only
then I realise he never opened the safe for me like he promised he would. Now I have to walk all the way back to Alpha VII. Again.

  Fuck.

  So I'm alone once more. I thought it would be worse, but if he's my only option for company I'd rather this. I'm glad he's gone. I don't want to be with him, not when I know he knows what I did, and why I did it. I can't erase the memory of how he looked at me. The disdain. de Pommier might have thought little of me, but I never saw her, never saw that. This is the first time I have been judged for who I am: A coward, a cheat. A filthy opportunist. I thought I had paid for my crimes by losing Adiana, but I was wrong. My guilt continues to haunt me even after ten thousand years, through almost double the amount of time the entire record of human history existed. Of all the possibilities of one other survivor in this place, I can't help but obsess why it had to be Ryan Maddox.

  But it was him, and now it's just me, my box with its cat meant for Mars, and my mind raking over the coals of what I am. And I can't escape. I am a monster. I could have refused the order, been court-martialed, lost everything, and gotten myself dropped off on the other side of the barrier, but I didn't. I chose to kill those people to get what I wanted.

  After fourteen hours of slogging back through the marsh I come to the conclusion there is no scenario where I could have refused. There was no choice and Ryan is an asshole for judging me for what I had to do. He is guilty of his own atrocities. Just because I didn't stay at the pod doesn't make me selfish. For god's sake I waited for six months getting eaten alive by the marsh insects. How could I know when it would open, and why is it my responsibility all of a sudden to babysit pods? He was fucking hibernating. It's not like he was even trying to look.

  And he fucked off without opening the safe. He said he would open it when we reached the pod. A quid pro quo deal I had no choice but to take, as usual. All that's happened since we crossed paths is I have wasted a month of my life and been made to feel shit about something I had zero control over. If anyone is selfish, it's him.

  I'm glad he's gone. Fucking droid. He's not even human. I hope his power runs out.

  SEVEN | CASSANDRA VALLIS

  * * *

  It's cold. So it must be night. I've learned the drop in temperature is the only way I can tell the difference between night and what should be day. The jumpsuit I slept in for the last thousand years might have served its purpose while I was locked in deep freeze, but out here, under an endless dark sky, without the warmth of the sun, I feel the cold, and I'm tired of enduring the raw ache in my fingers and toes for hours at a time.

  Hunger is my constant companion, not just for food, but I miss Ryan—or whatever he became—so much it hurts. Sometimes I dream of him, of his body next to mine, back when we were in Alpha VII, as he held me in our bed with its clean, smooth sheets, and Miro curled up at our feet. Of course, I fucking cry when I wake up. Messy, ugly crying, but it doesn't matter because there's no one to see. I wish there was someone to see.

  I'd even be grateful to have the ugly brute Ryan was with missing teeth and a Slavic accent. That's how shit this is. It's worse than shit. It's worse than Zee. It's worse than The Jackpot and being raped by GC soldiers at the bar. It's worse than anything I can imagine. I hate it. And I know it's going to take a long and painful amount of time for me to die of hunger since I discovered I can keep down the fat grey grubs that burrow in the roots of the vines—unlike the other things I have tried to eat. Leaves, roots, berries: things that made me puke for hours.

  I start to cry again as I pick my way through the vines and streams, as I head nowhere in the hope of finding somewhere. Somehow the crying makes me feel less shit, even if it's pointless. Ryan said he would be here but he wasn't—which means something must have happened to him. He would never have left me alone in this. He got me out of London right under Zee's nose. He could handle this. But he's not here. Which means I am alone. And I don't want any of this. I wish I were dead. With Ryan, wherever he is. And Miro.

  I miss her so much it hurts. I feel guilty for feeding her all my sleeping pills but that's stupid because Miro would hate this place with its tangled vines and marshes and nothing for her to eat except worms. It's better that she fell asleep and never woke up. I fucking wish I had—that Ryan hadn't played the hero and ruined my plan to let it all end, and take us with it. But he did. Now I'm here and I don't know what the fuck to do.

  In the hugeness of this strange, empty world it feels like I am the only person on the entire planet still alive. I haven't seen any other pods, or any of the other survivors, as few as there would have been. Worse, I can't piece together how I ended up above ground when Ryan said he had taken me more than two kilometres underground the day it all happened. Maybe he brought my pod up to the surface for some reason, but there is nothing, literally nothing remaining of Alpha VII that I have found. And now I am left to put the pieces together except I don't know what the puzzle is or what the pieces are. It's just this.

  There are times, usually in the coldest part of the night, when I wonder if I am dead, or in a kind of cryo-coma, and this is my own personal hell. If it is, the god that made this place has done a good job. Nothing like waking up alone in a weird, dark jungle, and eating grubs to stave off the pain of hunger for eternity. Maybe this is my punishment for all the people I killed for Global Command—No. I have to stop thinking about it. It can't be hell. It's not hell. There will be an explanation. I know I can still bleed because I have cut myself enough on the barbs of the vines. Or, maybe we can bleed in hell. I crush the thought before it takes root and torments me for the next hours. It's not hell. I'm not dead. I just need to keep moving and find the city. It's all I can think to do, even if it feels hopeless. Once I find the city, or what's left of it, there will at least be something to remind me of what was—proof I didn't imagine it all as my thoughts have begun to whisper, a relentless siren song.

  I have no idea how much time has passed since I pushed my way out of my pod, saw this, and puked. It's been total shit ever since. That's how much time has passed: one, long, miserable, dark night either damp and warm, or raw with bite of cold and not another living thing in sight except thick swarms of minuscule insects, grey worms, and strange flocks of shy, bat-like birds the color of night.

  In the distance: a distortion in the mundane predictability of the horizon. There's the usual clusters of the spiked tufts of spindly trees against the starlight, but something else is there beyond them, something other. Something big and enduring that mocks the effort of the strange things that grow here.

  Hope slams into me so hard tears blur my vision. It's Alpha VII. I am sure of it. Or at least what's left of it. For all I know I have been walking in circles around it for days. Everything looks the same in this dark, overgrown world, but it doesn't matter now. I have found it. Home, at last. I run straight for it, as fast as the vines, bogs, and fucking insects will let me.

  EIGHT | RYAN MADDOX

  * * *

  There's no fucking volcanoes in Greenland. It took me less than a day to search through the thousands of terabytes I'd downloaded from Alpha VII to find an obscure report deep in an archived file on the viability of Greenland as a shelter of last resort.

  Two thirds of the way down a column titled 'Assets', there it was: 'No volcanoes.' And so it died, my sole remaining purpose. Even though I know it's hopeless, I continue to search for Blue. Every time I call her name and hear only silence in return, it hits me, the pain of losing her all over again. And yet, I can't stop myself, that maybe, just once, she will answer. It's been a week. I've called her name four thousand eight hundred sixty-two times. That's a lot of hurt.

  For the hundredth time I consider whether to drop back into hibernation and let the passage of time wear me down, but it's not enough. I want out. I'm tired of being passive. So I press on, fixed on a new goal, to get to what's left of Alpha VI and try to find de Pommier's vault in the hope there might be something—anything—I can use to end my existence. It's a lean hope
considering the state of Alpha VII, but I don't know what else to do with the time I have on my hands, and with each day that passes I feel more trapped by my fate.

  It pisses me off to think even Antarctica has volcanoes. I had to end up in the only place in the world without one. So here I am, heading southwest, with a key in my pocket more than ten thousand years old, that may or may not lead to anything. I call Blue's name again. Silence. As always. And the hurt comes again, fresh, as always.

  Twenty-seven days and nights of walking non-stop through vines, slogging through insect-infested marshes and scrambling up and down shale escarpments was worth it. I discover Alpha VI sits in a sheltered valley surrounded on all sides by ancient bedrock not even the cataclysm's fires could alter. Behind, the first sunrise of the year. I don't bother to look. All I can do is drink in the sight of the city, an actual city—or what's left of it. The sun's rays slide past me into the valley, picking out the details of a world lost to time.

  Sunk into its basin of igneous rock and surrounded by a vast plateau of bedrock, Alpha VI has escaped the onslaught of vines that plagues the far north. It simply sits there, a sterile ruin, as dry as the pyramids of Giza, untouched by the upheavals that obliterated Alpha VII.

  For the first time since I can remember, optimism ripples through me. As the daylight pierces the endless veil of night, it's clear even in its sheltered position, the city suffered extensive damage, but still stands, which means anything underground should still be intact.