They changed Sartoris’s sheets in silence.
* * *
—
The days were interchangeable. There was little else to do in those dark corridors but revisit old spaces. She and the doctor went from room to room, and back again, until the rooms no longer resembled rooms but boxes briefly inhabited. Nia wondered if this was what Nurse did when she was stranded in the fringe, and wished she could ask her old friend what the best way was to pass the time when one had nothing left.
There was a day when Royvan touched Nia’s arm. They were passing each other in the causeway when he reached out. It was an invitation of sorts, Nia could tell that much from the desperation in his eyes. But she brushed him off, in no mood to entertain, and she swam into the next room, not looking back to see his shamed expression.
Breath was a struggle.
With each day it was more difficult to concentrate.
Royvan pulled the suits from the lockers and they used the spare oxygen tanks to breathe. They hooked Sartoris to a mask. The oxygen would prolong their survival for a little while, but they had only so many tanks.
Time was marked by the emptied canisters, and their bodies. Royvan’s beard grew into a wild bramble. Nia’s hair returned to the thick afro it once was when she was a child. Neither saw the point in grooming anymore. Or talking. As the number of canisters dwindled to the single digits, the two of them spent less time together. They found their own quiet spaces in the ship, where they could retreat into memory in private. Nia stayed in the boy’s hatch, floating above his unmade bed, his blanket wrapped around her as she shut her eyes against the familiar warmth and smell, while Royvan stayed in Sonja’s hatch, remembering the lights-off they spent together, the rough tumbles, and the hours after, when he would open his eyes and discover that she had never fallen asleep but had stayed awake all night, whispering the names of those she had lost in war. He had never understood the exercise. It seemed to him a pointless self-haunting. But it was only now that he realized the use of it as he said her name, again and again; it was not a haunting at all, but a call for company. A way to let her know that he would be there soon. He sighed. Hooked Sartoris to the last of the oxygen canisters before he prepared two syringes. He made one for himself and one for Nia, should she decide to follow. He slid the needlepoint into his arm, hesitating for a moment before he flooded his veins with the cocktail, the chemicals flipping the switches in his brain, one by one, bringing down the curtains, with Sonja’s name the whispered encore on his lips. Nia did not leave the boy’s room. She never learned of what Royvan had done, not as she drifted among the clothes and linen and instruments, and groped at the last handfuls of air left in her suit, her thoughts of the boy who fell from the sky, until she saw it coming—the long road that led out of her body. Her brain now singing a high-pitched tone.
Let this last leg be easy, she prayed.
* * *
—
A quartet of men and women levered open the airlock and flashed their torchlights into the dark of the causeway. They found the two survivors, both of them unconscious, and pulled them from the ruin.
It was not luck that brought the salvagers, but Vaila, who had made a second call the day she warned Umbai of the boy’s power. She knew with grim certainty that the Debby would not emerge unscathed from the encounter, and so, as a final gesture of goodwill to her soon-to-be-former captain, she notified the Kerrigan Salvage Fleet of the possibility of a derelict that could be found at these coordinates, at this date, and that they would have to act quickly if they wished to find the ship before the other salvage fleets she had notified found it first. The Kerrigans saved what was still of value. The cache of rifles. The fine wooden desk in the captain’s quarters. The musical instruments from many planets. A shirt from a bureau that one of the salvagers thought would look good on his partner back with the fleet. The rest of it they left untouched, and they dialed up the temperature of their scoring blades and swarmed the derelict until the whale carcass was a skeleton, and all of its flesh, that valuable metal, was bound and brought back to the hauler, which folded into the Pocket, its destination the home fleet.
It was in a private booth of an unfamiliar medica, where Nia woke with a light in her eyes, and a voice asking if she could remember her name.
When she was able to walk again, the Kerrigans brought her to the requisitions office and presented to her what they had saved—the last of her effects. She was silent as she walked past the paltry collection. The gang of rifles, a haphazard pile of shirts and tank tops, a few dress pants. One wooden desk. She stopped before the musical instruments. Crouched till her knees touched the floor. Weeping, as she held in her hands the wooden flute, bought for five iotas, from a small shop on Macaw.
III
12
The New Resource
His name was the first thing they took. He was the same as the eel inks and dhuba seed that they extracted from their Resource Worlds; he was an Acquisition. That was what he was named, before they took his body.
They did this in the vat. They lowered Acquisition into the translucent orange fluid, the body suspended as the hair drifted like seaweed. On the other side of the window, the surgeon fitted on his hands the conductor’s gloves, which were white, and patterned with the black lines of circuitry. The gloves were the masters of the vat’s fluid. The fluid did as the gloves commanded. When the surgeon dragged a vertical line through the air with his index finger, the fluid unzipped Acquisition’s belly, from sternum to pelvis. When the surgeon moved his hands as if parting a sea, the fluid spread open the incision, and revealed the many working organs beneath the skin. The gulp of the heart. They did not worry about losing Acquisition—they could keep the body alive through most anything. With his gloves the surgeon gestured toward himself, and coaxed the insides out. The stomach and the spleen. Unspooled the intestines. These things no longer organs but objects to be scrutinized under the rays, in search of the properties of the new. The body was divided into a series of frames. The skin, the skeleton, and the nervous system, which fractaled out from its locus, the brain, the last piece that was brought forth to the bank of windows by the surgeon, who steepled his hands, then spread the fingers apart, opening the folds.
And as this last part of him was opened, Acquisition heard a hum, like a zipper opening, in the far place in his mind. He followed the hum through the muraled streets of the Painted City, and across the on-off fields of black spice. Followed it through the shower of playing cards and the band of musicians at rest on their stools in the concert hall—followed it past the red curtains, into the wings of the theater and up the ramp that led into the cargo bay, where the hum was loudest.
She was there, standing beside a crate of seed.
“Did the noise wake you?” she asked.
Acquisition nodded. He looked around; it was coming from above.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” she said. She knelt beside him till they were eye to eye, one hand pointed up at the catwalk. “See there? That panel?”
“Yes.”
“Behind that panel is where we keep the machine that recycles the air we breathe. Every five days the machine has to clean its filters, so the air stays clean. That’s what you’re hearing right now.” She smiled. “Not so scary anymore, right?”
“No,” Acquisition whispered. “Not scary.”
She was confused by his worry. “Come on,” she said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “Are you hungry? I’m hungry.”
Acquisition nodded, tears in his eyes.
“Yes,” he said. “I am very hungry.”
He leaned against her as they walked down the causeway, used her for strength. He thought he could walk forever like that. But the hum was getting louder. It didn’t matter how far they were, he could always hear it. A needle in his ear that became a drill. In the kitchen she said something that was lost on h
im, it was so loud. He wanted to warn her that something was wrong, but she didn’t seem to hear him, or notice the plates that danced on the counter or the cabinets that were flung open, smiling as she mouthed words he could not hear but could read by the movements of her lips, she was telling him it was okay, that he was okay, and then the light bloomed, and the ship flipped on its side and he hit the wall like it was the floor and all the change spilled out of the cup, each coin a name that fell through the dark grates, the place where Sonja and Em and Royvan had gone, along with the dumb jokes in the cockpit and the food in the air, the metronome hand on his chest that beat the time, the lips on lips, these thoughts like birds startled from their perches, crashing through the window, taking flight into the cloudless sky, heedless of wind or gravity, until they were gone, the room empty, leaving behind only broken glass and bloody feathers.
* * *
—
They made a home for Acquisition. The home was a tube that was long and wide enough to fit one body. Nested inside this tube were wires and port-jacks and lights that blinked in sequence. The body of Acquisition was adjusted to better fit inside this tube. The fingernails were removed to allow the aleph/wiring a better angle of insertion, and long incisions cut along the arms and at the nape of the neck to allow the entry of the judiciary ports, which were thick, and blunt, like thumbs. They wove the body into this machine until the body and the machine were synonymous. And then they shut the door.
The work was for the most part done. Umbai Labs made their preparations before going public; tucked Acquisition away in a place where no one could reach it—a private eddy in the dark of Pocket Space, where the capsule could drift outside of time itself, safe from interference but still able to perform its good works. They thought they had done a thorough job scrubbing Acquisition’s mind, making it compliant to instruction, but there was a place they could not reach, for they did not know it existed—a pocket below the ancient instinct, where the water was black and lapped gently against the cool sands of the beach. An island outside of time. That was where he slept as he waited for the song.
A song that began with the beat of sharp metal on rock.
13
The Grave of Birds
The impact echoed throughout the dark, cavernous space of Substrata D—a sharp crack as the tooth of the pickax bounced off the rock and was brought back down again in rhythmic arcs. Each strike made a tuning fork of Fumiko’s arm. The sensation once unnerved her, but over the past few months of digging she had become accustomed to it, and even found pleasure in the dance of muscles. She raised the pick again and chipped away at the wall before her, smiling as she worked.
She had been tunneling since dawn, and though it was now early afternoon, she had no plans of stopping. Her body no longer demanded rest like in the beginning. She wore a work shirt with the sleeves ripped off. The jagged sculpt of her biceps squeezed and stretched. She was strong. When she went to the bathroom and caught herself in the mirror, it amused her how powerful her upper body had become, and sometimes she would flex for herself, and pretend she was on the stage of one of those Old Earth competitions; a small vanity she was unaware was within her until now, as she nurtured the sculpt with protein mixtures and vitamixes from the upper-tier kitchens before returning to her work in Substrata D.
Crack. A break was in order, but like most activities she took part in, it was hard for her to stop when she found her rhythm, never failing to find that addictive quality in the work. The percussive impact of the pick on rock. The hypnotic repetition of the swing. The keen awareness that every inch she broke off was another inch closer to her goal—the YonSef explosives she had once buried when she first erected this base. Every inch of concrete was another inch closer to restoring power to her base.
“You’re so close,” Dana whispered.
Close, she thought as she licked the sweat off her lip, I am close.
She raised her pick like a fiery sword.
* * *
—
Crack. The sound of a cork popping out of a bottle. Flutes of bubbled spirits toasted, the connection echoing throughout the brightly lit cathedral space of the banquet hall on Pelican. The hall was empty but for the two people seated at the end of the long table. It was a lonely celebration. Only one of them drank the sparkling wine that was served, and ate the many fresh fruits in the glass bowls dolloped with true cream. The other sat silent in her chair, with no appetite at all, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes cast toward the bank of windows that looked out over the unfolded expanse of Schreiberi Wing. It was a familiar view to her. She had been in this banquet hall once before, many years ago, back when she was still an accessory on Fumiko’s arm—back when she had a different definition of love.
“Do not hold back, M. Jenssen,” the representative said as the cakes were carted in. “You’ve earned every bite of this dessert.”
Vaila pushed aside her plate. She refused the cakes and the sweet words the representative plied her with, the medals he offered up to her, and as he spooned the cream onto his fruit and went on about how proud she should be, she slumped in her chair and zoned him out, praying for a quick end to this tiresome dinner. She took what pleasure she could in denying every effort the representative made to please her. “I’m not hungry,” she told him when he offered her a slice of gelatinous strawberry cake, the dessert wiggling when he set down the plate, and let out a restrained but still audible sigh.
“Then what is it you would like?” he asked.
There was only, and ever, one answer.
“Fumiko Nakajima,” she said.
He dropped his crumpled napkin on his plate. “As I told you before,” he said with a tight smile, “the moon is blackballed. I do not know the coordinates of her base, and even if I did, I would be unauthorized to hand them over to you. M. Nakajima is in exile for crimes against Allied Space. Even if she somehow still lives, she is allowed no visitors.”
“Am I not the reason for your victory?”
“A victory for which we are grateful,” he said with an obligatory nod of his head. “But there is no negotiation on this point. The tribunal has made this very clear. My hands are tied. Please, M. Jenssen, let her go.”
Vaila swirled her glass. “What about the boy?”
“The Acquisition,” he corrected.
“Is the boy still alive?” she asked.
“M. Jenssen,” he said. “Your service is complete. Your responsibilities to the traitor Nakajima and to the crew of the Debby have ended. As of this moment, you are in a position most Allies dream of—a life of easy retirement, if you so choose. Do not think of the past. Think of tomorrow. Tell me what the company can do to make your tomorrow a satisfying one.”
“Fumiko Nakajima,” she said again.
She could do it all night.
The representative breathed through his nose. “If you cannot think of something reasonable to request,” he said, “then you will be given the standard package.”
It was the standard package that they ended up handing her, in a small, sparsely attended ceremony on a noble’s balcony, where she was bestowed high rank in the Allied government: Custodian-Aerie of the Thrasher Fleet. The consul gave her a small gold pin, which bit into the lapel of her tailored jacket, and wished her congratulations on the new appointment. The position had no real power, but it paid well and had few responsibilities; a meeting every few days, if Vaila so chose to attend, and some console-work assignations her assistant was more than happy to complete on her behalf. She attended the meetings on a lark every now and then, when she had difficulty being alone, and would blink through the long and meandering talks of future expansions, startled alert when on the rare occasion a lieutenant would turn to her and ask for her thoughts on the latest Resource World acquisition. It was not long before they stopped extending her these invitations, and distracted her instead with a private scho
oner, with near-limitless access to stations and planetary bodies; everywhere but the place she desired to go.
This was Vaila Jenssen’s well-earned vacation. Long days of schooner-skipping across City Planets, lounging on the many well-lit balconies that overlooked the noble-owned beaches, and smoking fruit-laced pipes, alone, in her private alcoves. She baked under suns both real and artificial, drifting in and out of noncommittal naps on her lazy chairs, and she grimaced when inevitably those naps were interrupted by the memory of the gun in her hand; the weight of it, as she pointed the muzzle at Em’s back, and the percussiveness of the trigger—one shot—two. The sound of the sudden crumple of his body. Her eyes would snap open, her shirt stained with sweat, nothing for it now but to lean over the balcony railing and gag, nauseous from the blood she smelled in the perfumed City Planet air, even on this cold night, as if the stars themselves were wreathed with iron flowers.
* * *
—
It was easy to ignore the smells at first—the savory waft of curry and the perfume of cherry blossoms—as were the voices she heard, the low murmur of boardroom meetings and university panels. These were only small fractures. But once Dana appeared, and spoke to her with a voice so clear it seemed impossible she wasn’t real, Fumiko accepted that her thousand-year-old mind, without cold sleep or neural supplement, could no longer keep the real and the imagined separate. She worked through the breaks in reality, continued her tunneling as Dana talked about the things she’d done that day—that terrific biography she read, about the architect who designed the waterborne Ashgala Stadium—and never stopped tunneling, even when the rooms themselves began to change, shifting into the places from her past. She was in the central kitchen brewing her morning protein mixture, her spoon in mid-swirl, when she realized suddenly that she was standing in her mother’s living room, the transformation having occurred without fanfare—Aki on the couch, watching her old vids on the wall screen, swooning to the younger version of herself; her mother asking her if she had ever seen this one, telling her how underrated the vid was at the time of its release. Fumiko told her that she had seen it, many times, and not by choice, and as her mother glared at her, she finished off her drink in three large gulps and left the room, peeking back through the door, at once glad and saddened that the living room was gone and the kitchen had returned.
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