I, Cassandra

by E A Carter

  'I have something of a confession to make.' She leans her hip against the edge of the glass and folds her arms over her chest. 'I have a soft spot for Mars, and Cassandra was my greatest hope that beautiful planet could live again. I wanted to be there, with her, when she brought it back to life. I wanted to walk on that planet for myself, and see it through her eyes, as a guest. So during one of her days at the lab I embedded a little of myself into her consciousness. Just a touch, a mere—'

  I've stopped listening. I'm on my feet. 'How dare you.' My hands curl into fists. 'We are not your puppets.'

  'It would benefit you to hear me out.'

  'Fuck you,' I pull my arm back to strike her down, to wipe the smile off her face for good. She can go back to being a mountain for all I care.

  She catches my fist and holds it in the air. Her strength is brutal. I sense she could crush my hand in a heartbeat. I hold still and wait.

  Her eyes find mine. 'Cassandra is alive.'

  'What?'

  'And she is convinced you are gone. She has found another survivor.'

  She lets me go. I take a step back. Blue is alive. Every second she is not with me, she believes she is alone. Anything could happen to her. I force myself to focus. I need facts.

  'How can you know?'

  'Because I left a little of myself attached to her consciousness, I wanted to see Mars through her eyes. Instead, there was no Mars was there?' She tilts her head and looks at me, almost with indulgence. 'No, Cassandra had her own agenda and then the Delta Force Capitaine decided to play the hero, and so here I am, waiting to move on to my next adventure because of this diversion. A machine who loves a woman. A machine who waits ten thousand years for her and then misses her by a tiny margin. Of course I did not know where you were. All I could do was wait for Cassandra to wake up, and for you to arrive with the key. But if anything, I am patient, no?'

  I don't care about her patience. I want to know where Blue is. 'You said she found another survivor?'

  de Pommier nods. 'He calls himself Amadi.'

  Hope, ragged and raw shoves a path through me. 'Amadi knows I am here, he would have told her.'

  The tiniest flicker of a smile fleets over de Pommier's lips. 'It seems he has decided not to. Perhaps he has his own agenda. This world is a lonely place, now, no?'

  'It's going to get a lot less lonelier,' I vow, thinking of what I will do to that motherfucker. 'Where is she?'

  Her eyes unfocus. 'She is in Alpha VII.' She smiles, this time with pleasure. 'Ah, they have opened Miro's box, but they have not yet figured out how to activate her. Cassandra has just pressed her thumb against the pad, but not for long enough.' She sighs. 'So close.'

  de Pommier's eyes snap back onto mine. 'So, Capitaine, what will you do?'

  'It's obvious. I'm going to find her.'

  de Pommier arches a brow. 'And then, what?'

  I look at her like she's simple. 'What do you mean? I will be with her, protect her. Help her find a way to live in this place.'

  'You'll love her,' de Pommier whispers.

  'Of course,' I snap. 'What else?'

  'You are much more than a machine,' she says. 'To transform you into who you are now, it was necessary to make you like me.'

  That pulls me up. 'What do you mean?'

  'You are eternal. The only way you will end will be when the universe ends.' Her eyes meet mine, and she continues, soft, 'Like me.'

  I sink back onto the chair. 'No. You gave an order to decommission me.'

  She smiles once more. It infuriates me, this secret-keeping entity who has no true physical form. 'Yes, officially you were to be decommissioned three days before the end—which we now know was a lie. Unofficially, the Elites under my command were to put you in hibernation and bring you here. To me. Except none of that happened did it?'

  'Why the hell would you want to bring me here?'

  'I wanted Cassandra to cooperate and bring Mars back to life, and I knew the only thing that would make her do it was to give her hope—to give her you. I could show you things, many things, could make the wait for the end less brutal.'

  'You could have just left me here to be wiped out by the cataclysm.'

  'You cannot cease to exist, Capitaine, you will always rebuild. One way or another you will come back, even in the vacuum of space. And once Earth is consumed by the sun, there you will be. Again. It will be a very boring thing. Alone like that. No?'

  And then I remember. Almost five thousand years had passed from the time the cataclysm hit and I woke up. That's how long it took me to rebuild.

  I look up at her. She watches me, and waits.

  'You are a monster,' I breathe.

  'Go,' she says, and nods at the exit. 'Find her. I will wait for you.'

  'And after she is gone?' I look down at my hands, as my fingers curl into fists, and the crushing weight of a near eternity settles onto me.

  'You will grieve,' she says, quiet. 'For a long time.' There is pain in her eyes. 'I too have loved someone,' she says. 'I envy you right now, though I do not envy what you will face after.'

  I have nothing to say to that. I'm a man of action not words. I need to leave, to find Blue. Every second I am here is time lost.

  She picks something up from the glass surface, a small metal box and holds it out to me. 'This is for Cassandra,' she says. 'It will make things easier for her, for both of you. She will know what to do with it.'

  I tuck it into my pocket, the same one where I carried de Pommier's key for almost ten thousand years.

  de Pommier's eyes meet mine, and hers tell me things I don't want to know, that there is pain ahead, a lot of pain, an eternity of it. 'Be well, Capitaine,' she whispers. 'I'll be waiting.'

  I turn and don't look back. All there is now is Blue.

  TWELVE | CASSSANDRA VALLIS

  * * *

  'You going to take that with you?' I ask Amadi as he turns to leave.

  He glances back at the metal sphere. 'Why not,' he says. 'I've carried it around this long.' He picks it up but has nowhere to put it, so he just holds it in his hand.

  'Maybe it will wake up at some point.'

  Amadi scoffs. 'Not knowing my luck.'

  'I can help carry it,' I say. I nod at his hand. 'That doesn't look comfortable.'

  'The box was better,' Amadi admits. 'But you never know, it might come in handy some day for something.'

  He sets out. I follow him as he ploughs through the vines, swatting half-assed at the swarms of insects in his path. It's broiling hot. Before long I'm sweating in the muggy heat. Above, the midday sun simmers, a globe of liquid white against a sky a deeper blue than any I remember from my childhood.

  'It might be faster to cut straight through the city than to circle round,' he says as we reach the lean shade of a stand of trees and stop to catch our breath.

  I don't care either way and tell him. All I know is I hate the heat.

  'Does it get any cooler at night?' I ask, thinking of the season of darkness and its cold nights.

  'A little,' he says. 'You want to wait until later to go on?'

  I nod and sink down onto the vines, thinner here than out there in the heat. Amadi joins me and pulls a few of the vine leaves free. A dense, clear liquid coalesces on their stems.

  'Here,' he says, handing two of the large, flat leaves to me. 'Their sap is good. It quenches your thirst.'

  The sap tastes of nothing, but it's viscous and in a strange way hydrates me. Within minutes I feel better.

  'I wonder what else is in it,' I say. 'I feel like I have had a vitamin shot.'

  He shrugs. 'Who knows. Nutrients for sure, probably at a high level, and inorganic salts probably, but that's all I can remember from my biology class. Whatever it is, it's kept me alive until I figured out how to get protein.'

  I eye the sea of vines, 'And there's no shortage of it.'

  'Hell, no.' He laughs and rolls the sphere along his thigh. 'What I wouldn't do for a steak, though.'

  'I'd
kill for a roast chicken, and a slice of chocolate cake.'

  'Steak with béarnaise sauce,' he sighs. 'And a glass of red wine.'

  'An apple. That first bite, how it would crunch, remember that?'

  He closes his eyes and nods, a faint smile on his lips as he relives a life I know nothing about.

  We fall silent. I twist the leaves by their stems until they twirl round, like a fan, and wander through my memories, thinking how much I miss Ryan. How he carried me to the pod and looked at me as if he were memorising me as he settled me in place, a machine clothed in flesh—a machine capable of love. And now, he's gone. The ache in my heart grows until I can't bear it anymore. I toss the leaves aside and rub the tears from my eyes.

  'Actually,' I say, getting to my feet. 'Is it ok if we walk?'

  Amadi nods. 'I was just about to ask you the same thing.'

  We step back out into the heat and clamber through the vines, only this time I don't mind sweating my ass off. It's better this way, because it means I don't think.

  Out of nowhere, we come across it, somewhere near the centre of the city's ruins—a pod half-covered in vines. Cold even in the heat of the day. Amadi isn't happy about it.

  'I've been through this before,' he says as he clears the rest of the vines away and peers into its frosted window.

  'I already looked,' I say, 'you can't see anything.'

  Amadi doesn't say anything to that, but under his matted beard I can tell he's pissed off. I'm not sure if he's pissed off at me or the pod, or if he's just like this, a moody fuck. I decide to leave him to it and take a seat in the shade of a nearby cluster of trees. I'm tired, and ready to stop for the night, or whatever night is now. The going has been slow, and my jumpsuit is sticking to me in a gross way that makes me want to take it off, but not with him here. Instead, I pluck a couple of fat vine leaves free and drink their sap which continues to taste of absolutely nothing.

  Amadi is still at the pod, fists on his hips, deep in thought. He's left the metal sphere on top of the pod.

  'Maybe you shouldn't put that on the cold,' I say.

  'What?' he snaps, without looking back.

  'The sphere thing. Might be bad to put it on something cold out here in all this heat.'

  He swipes it onto the ground, as if he couldn't give a fuck either way, or maybe to shut me up. I decide to do just that until whatever's eating him passes. I hate moody men. Zee was moody, too. A total bastard. I learned fast how to deal with that. Stay out of the fucking way. Ryan was never moody, though. Not once. Or if he was he never showed it. I loved that about him. His steadiness. His solidity, inside and out. I felt safe with him.

  And now—I glance at Amadi glaring at the pod as if it has insulted him. Now, I'm stuck with this. Some spoiled, rich fuck from Alpha VII who's smart but also kind of a dick. Great. I eye the pod and find myself hoping there's another man in there, a better man. I don't think me and Amadi are going to make it for the long haul.

  'Fuck!' Amadi says, out of nowhere. 'I can't deal with this again.'

  He stomps back to me, his eyes dark as thunder. 'We have to stay,' he says in a tone that sounds as if he's blaming me for the pod being there.

  'OK,' I say, deciding now is not the time to explore his reasons. 'So . . . we're not going south to find islands and shit?'

  'No.'

  'Ever?'

  He looks back at the pod with something close to hate. 'Who fucking knows.'

  He lets out a long, thin exhalation. 'You remember what it was like to wake up, here, alone?'

  I look down at the wilting leaves whose lifeblood I have stolen. I nod.

  'It's the right thing to do,' he says and sinks down into a crouch beside me, his eyes on the pod, tension radiating from him.

  'We don't have to stay,' I say. 'I mean, we made it, so they probably will too.'

  He gives me a look that's utterly undecipherable.

  'Or we can wait,' I say and toss the leaves aside. 'It's not like there's somewhere we need to be.'

  He says nothing but I can tell he's pissed off. He keeps his gaze on the pod. I wonder who's in it. Maybe another one like him, rich and privileged enough to have been put under before the event.

  'What did you mean when you said you can't deal with this again?'

  He glances at me. I nod at the pod. 'You find one of those before?'

  'I've found quite a few of them before,' he says.

  'I mean one that's still active.'

  Silence.

  'And?' I ask.

  'And nothing,' he snaps. 'She didn't wake up in time.' He cuts me a warning look. 'Are we done now?'

  I meet his eyes and search for the answer in them but get nothing. His walls are high and it's clear he has zero intention of letting me find a way over them. I shrug and turn my attention back to the pod, its window glazed by an opaque layer of frost. There's no way to know who's inside, man, woman or child.

  She didn't wake up in time.

  She.

  And then it hits me. Maybe it was Adiana. He'd said she was dead. I assumed he meant she'd died before the end, now I'm not so sure. I'm learning he uses words in ways that make me feel like something important is missing. I wonder how long he waited but I know better than to ask. Instead, I get up, wander back to the pod and pick up the sphere from where it rolled to a stop.

  I find the indentation where my thumb fits and press it against it, liking the way it feels, as if it were made just for me. It's a stupid thought, but it makes me feel less alone from the world we left behind. I press against it a little harder just for something to do.

  'Let's see what we can find around here to start a fire,' Amadi says. 'It's not easy but I've done it before.'

  I let go of my hold on the indentation. Fire. Even though it's hot and humid, the thought of creating a fire weirdly excites me. I set the sphere down in the shade of the pod. 'So you can cook your beetles instead of eating them raw?'

  Amadi laughs, short and sharp. 'Hell no. They taste a lot are worse cooked.'

  'So you tried it?'

  'I've tried everything,' he says with a grunt as he gets to his feet. 'It's the only way to learn.'

  'Or to die,' I counter.

  'Or to die,' he repeats, quiet.

  And the way he says it makes me think he wouldn't mind if that happened. I know exactly how he feels. Maybe we could find something poisonous and eat it together. Then neither one of us would be left alone. I glance back at the pod and hope whoever is in there doesn't wake up in time either. I wish I had died in my pod, because waking up to this shitty, empty world sucks.

  Amadi keeps time with knots on a length of vine that he adds to at the end of each 'day'. According to his vine, we have been here for three weeks but it feels longer to me. It's gotten hotter, and we nap in the shade of the trees during the hottest parts of the day. Even in this heat, the pod remains closed and frozen. A faint bleat of blue from its panel tells us something, but neither of us knows what it is. Amadi thinks it means whoever is in there is still alive. I think it's an indicator to show that its power is functioning.

  'Obviously it's functioning,' Amadi says as we clear vines and pile them up into a three-sided shelter, which turns out to be cosier than I expected. 'We don't need a light to tell us that. We can see it's working.' But he says it with smile and it makes me laugh how he looks at me with something close to affection. Maybe he's not such a dick, after all.

  Surviving alone with the last living person in the world changes you. It gets domestic, fast. Once we cleared the space and lashed together the walls, he taught me how to weave vine stems into a lattice. Over the course of four days we crafted a roof for our shelter, woven close enough to keep out the rain, but open enough to let the smoke from the fire escape. He is smarter than I expected a pampered Alpha VII citizen would be in a place like this.

  Sometimes I wonder if he's an outlier like me, but he never talks about the past or who he was. All I know is his name is Amadi and he loved a woman called Adi
ana who's dead. Sometimes he says her name when he's sleeping, while I lie awake on the other side of the fire and miss Ryan so much I cry. Together we deal with our grief by crafting things out of the vines. Mats to sleep on; a basket to carry the sphere in; hats to give us shade from the sun. It's slow work, especially when some of the vines have barbs and you have to pluck them off one by one. He tells me the barbed vines are the female ones. I ask him how he knows. He says because there are less of them.

  I know what he's really trying to say: That women can hurt you, just like these barbs have hurt me. I let him have his unspoken analogy, even though I think he's wrong, and they are just different kinds of vines. Just like people, some are nice, some are shitty.

  We never talk about how much it hurts to go on, or how sooner or later we're going to fuck out of total loneliness. And after that? What? Pregnancy? Labour? Birth? Raising a child . . . here? I don't know. I can't think about it. So I just harvest the vines, strip away their leaves and barbs and think of things to make that will be useful to us once whoever is in the pod wakes up and we can get back to heading south where Amadi has said he hopes to find fish, or at least algae that will give us more nutrition.

  Despite him giving me a bad first impression, I've learned he's very good at solving problems. He sits and thinks for a while, or draws with his finger in the soil until he works out whatever it is he can't solve in his head and then does it. The day he made fire, he produced two rocks from his pocket to create sparks. He said it took him a long time to find them, in ravines located several weeks apart. It's this kind of tenacity that's kept him alive for so long. That and his determination to open the box.

  With all his new projects occupying him, Amadi has lost all interest in the sphere, so I keep it on my side of the shelter along with the other scant belongings I've crafted: my hat, my sleeping mat, and the basket I've made for the sphere. It might sound strange, but I am proud of my things, of my ability to make something useful out of almost nothing.

  This morning, I wake to find my period has started, my first one in this world, and my second since leaving London. Amadi is gone, probably hunting for beetles like he does most mornings, so I strip and sit naked in the shade and let my period seep out of me into the soil. It's a warm day, but in the shade the temperature is perfect. I position myself so the heat of the sun hits my abdomen and eases my cramps. It's quiet and calm, and the heat makes me drowsy. I close my eyes, thinking to rest them just for a minute. I don't want Amadi to come back and find me like this.