Ultraviolet

by R. J. Anderson

  “Me? What did I ever do to—”

  “The poetry contest? When you got me disqualified by telling Mrs. Mailloux I’d copied my entry out of a magazine?” Which I really had done, to my lasting shame—but I hadn’t known that at the time, and neither had the judges. I’d been disqualified on a suspicion, nothing more.

  “I didn’t say anything to Mrs. Mailloux.”

  “What do you mean? Of course you did. You even warned me you were going to do it.”

  “I told you somebody was going to do it,” she retorted. “I never said it would be me. Lara was so upset that her poem didn’t get picked for the contest, she kept saying you must have cheated, and finally I told her I’d talk to you and try to get you to admit it. But you wouldn’t, so I told her to leave you alone.” She crouched and began pulling tools out of the bag, lining them up like surgical instruments. “So you really got disqualified?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Don’t you remember? That was right around the time my dad had a heart attack and spent three weeks in the hospital. You really think I’d be paying attention to some stupid poetry contest I didn’t even enter, with that on my mind?”

  She spoke with fierce conviction, a truth so raw I could taste it. Which meant . . .Tori really hadn’t accused me after all. All this time, I’d been blaming the wrong person.

  “And what about you?” Tori demanded. “Accusing me of trashing the sound equipment on Cabaret Night? Why on earth would I do something like that? I wasn’t wrecking that stuff, I was trying to fix it.” She dumped the last of her tools onto the floor and tossed the empty bag aside. “Why would I want to ruin an event I’d been helping plan for weeks? Why would I humiliate my best friend in front of everybody? When you came in, I’d just broken up with Brendan because he kept pressuring me to have sex with him. It wasn’t my fault he threw a tantrum like a freaking two-year-old—”

  Shame scorched my cheeks. No wonder Tori had been furious with me after the Cabaret, determined to hunt me down and set the matter straight. Still, it must have taken all her courage to face me down in the cafeteria and demand to know what my issue was, especially when she had good reason to be afraid of the answer.

  But hearing the Noise from her transmitter, so close and so loud, had pushed me to the edge of panic—and when Tori insisted that I stay and listen to what she had to say, I’d ended up struggling with her. Which was how I’d wound up in after-school detention with her for forty minutes, with the Noise needling at me all the while. Then just as I grabbed my knapsack and hurried out the side door, thinking my torment was over, Tori had caught up with me again. That was when she told me the last thing I wanted to hear—that Mel had been spreading nasty rumors about Tori all over the school, and when Tori’s friends confronted her she’d blamed it all on me.

  I wasn’t the one who had torn Tori to atoms. But at that moment, I’d been so hurt and angry that I would have, if I could. That was why I’d always felt responsible for what happened next—why I was responsible. Because if I hadn’t lost control and lashed out at her, she wouldn’t be here.

  “You were right,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “About Mel. You told me she was using me, that she wasn’t really my friend.” Maybe once she had been, but over the past couple of years she’d changed, and I’d been too willfully blind to see it. “You were right.”

  Slowly Tori straightened up from her crouch until we stood face-to-face. “Okay,” she said. “Good to know. But couldn’t you have figured that out before you hit me?”

  Embarrassed, I looked away. “I already had. I just didn’t want to admit it. She was my best friend. Pretty much my only friend.”

  “You could have had a lot more friends,” said Tori, “if you hadn’t acted so . . .”

  “Full of myself?”

  “Well, yeah, that was how it looked. Like you knew some big important secret about life, the universe, and everything, and you were keeping it all to yourself because the rest of us weren’t good enough.”

  “I wish,” I said, and then with sudden daring, “You want to know the big important secret? Your name tastes like cough medicine.”

  Tori’s nose wrinkled in confusion. “What?”

  “Well, Victoria does, anyway.” And more than once, when I was sick of hearing how perfect and talented and beautiful she was, I’d consoled myself with that thought. “Though Tori isn’t so bad. It’s more like black licorice.”

  “Wait a minute.” A suspicious look came over her face. “You’re telling me you have—what’s it called—synesthesia?”

  I was surprised. “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Well, yeah. I read an article on it in a science magazine, just a few months ago. About a guy who could taste words and a woman who could see music . . . can you do that?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh, that’s prime. I am so jealous. What color is my name, then? Does it look like cough medicine too?”

  Without the Noise poisoning my senses, without the cloud of suspicion and hostility between us, it was easy now to see what I should have realized a long time ago—that like Micheline, Tori was a better person than I’d given her credit for. “No, it’s kind of bluish-brown,” I said. “But, Tori . . .”

  I’d meant to apologize, but as usual, she was quicker than I was. “Truce,” she said, sticking out her hand. “We’ve got other things to worry about right now. You know?”

  “I know,” I said, and shook it.

  . . .

  A few minutes later Faraday rejoined us, empty-handed but visibly relieved to find me awake. “How do you feel?” he asked, as his fingers probed the swollen place on my neck and the bump on the back of my head to make sure neither was serious. “You’re not having any withdrawal symptoms, are you?” He glanced at Tori and added in a lower tone, “Or any . . . other difficulties?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “We’re fine. We’re just trying to find a way out of here.”

  By now Tori had pried the front panel off the door and was studying the mechanism inside, a bewildering array of silvery globules trapped between two transparent plates. “If this is the sequence when it’s locked,” she murmured, “then maybe if I altered the pattern here and here—” She picked up a tool that looked like a tire gauge with delusions of grandeur, and set to work coaxing the beads in different directions.

  I edged closer to Faraday and whispered, “How does she know all this?”

  “Bred into her, I expect.” He raised his voice. “Have you always liked fixing things, Tori?”

  “Yeah,” answered Tori over her shoulder. “Even as a little kid, I could see at a glance how stuff worked and how to make it work better. It drove my mother up the wall. She kept trying to get me interested in dance and gymnastics and modeling, and I kept collecting old electronics junk and tinkering with it. The only way to settle her down was to tell her I was going into engineering.”

  Faraday nodded. “So one of your biological parents must have been a technician.”

  “Not both?” I asked.

  “If they had been, she wouldn’t be here right now. I’m guessing she was an unlicensed conception, sold as a fetus for experimental purposes.” He spoke evenly, but with an acrid undertone that assured me he didn’t like that idea any more than I did. “After I left, someone must have gotten the idea to send her through the rift and see how growing up on Earth would affect her.”

  I choked. “They did that to a baby?”

  “It’s okay,” said Tori, still poking at the door, “I got over it. I’m more ticked off about the transmitter thing, especially since it wouldn’t let me go anywhere but Sudbury.”

  “Why would that be?” I asked Faraday.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “When we sent the first relay through the rift to your world, we suspected that it had been drawn to the Sudbury Basin because of the large amount of nickel in the rock. But that shouldn’t have kept it, or Tori, from going elsewhere.”
>
  “Well, you have a transmitter in your arm too, right?” said Tori to Faraday. “So maybe the relay was trying to stay close to both of us, and it couldn’t do that unless we were in the same place.”

  “Yes, but my transmitter was broken,” Faraday said. “If it had been communicating properly, I wouldn’t have had to search for the relay at all. I should have just been able to talk to Mathis—the older apprentice who’d sent me through the relay—and get him to bring me home.”

  “But you were still transmitting something,” I said. “I could hear it, and even see it, once I’d touched the mark on your arm. And the relay was receiving the signal, too. How else do you think I found it?”

  Faraday’s eyes darkened, and I could see I’d troubled him. But then Tori interrupted, “Hey, Sebastian or Faraday or whatever, does this pattern look right to you?”

  “I have no idea,” he replied. “Not my genetic expertise. However, if you don’t mind shutting that panel for a moment, we could try this.” He pressed his palm against the door, and it opened.

  Tori threw me an exasperated look. “Can I hit him? Please?”

  “Sorry,” said Faraday, though he wasn’t. “It seemed worth a try, since I doubted they’d bother to erase my security clearance once they thought I was dead. If they thought I was dead.”

  The last phrase was telling, and I knew we must be thinking the same thing. What if his fellow scientists had decided to make Faraday part of their experiment, and left him stranded on Earth on purpose?

  “You should go back to the cargo hold,” he said, looking at me. “They know Tori’s here, but there’s no reason they need to find out about you.”

  “I don’t know why not,” said Tori. “If they’ve been keeping an eye on me, they must have seen Alison by now, unless they’re all asleep or something. What about safety in numbers?” She pulled one of the tools out of her bag, hefted it, and handed it to me. “If anybody tries to grab you, hit him with that.”

  I took the makeshift club gladly, though I was sure Faraday would tell Tori she was being ridiculous. After all, if this science base belonged to a technologically advanced alien society, shouldn’t they have guns?

  But he only looked resigned. “Fine,” he said. “But let me go first. And stay back a bit, just in case.”

  SEVENTEEN (IS DEVIOUS)

  Compared to the dim quietness on the other side of the door, I’d expected to find this part of the science base buzzing with light and activity. But the curving hallway ahead of us looked no different from the one we’d left behind. We moved slowly at first, Faraday pausing now and then to listen at one of the closed doors, then to open it and stick his head inside. But they were all just as empty as the other rooms we’d seen, bare but for the occasional abandoned workstation or dusty bit of equipment. And there was no sound except the low, omnipresent thrum of energy I’d felt since we first arrived.

  “I don’t understand,” Faraday said. “The project was fully staffed when I left. Where is everyone?”

  “Well, we know there’s at least one person here,” said Tori. “The guy who knocked me out and fixed my nose. So all we need to do is find him, and he can tell us what happened to everybody else.” She paused. “Unless he went crazy and murdered them all. Then maybe finding him wouldn’t be such a good idea.”

  I’d met a lot of crazy people in the last few weeks, and most of them hadn’t been a danger to anyone but themselves. And yet her words gave me an uneasy feeling, just the same. What if Tori was right about the outcome, even if she wasn’t right about the cause? What if the other scientists were all dead, or dying, because of some plague or environmental disaster—and they’d blocked off half the station not to protect themselves from us, but to protect us from them?

  “Faraday,” I said, catching his arm. “The room I woke up in—the window was black. What does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It was turned off, that’s all.”

  “So there aren’t any real windows here? They’re all just . . . screens?”

  He nodded. “That way they can serve a variety of functions: communication, work, entertainment. And when you’re done, you can switch it back to show whatever view you prefer.”

  “How about the real one?” I said.

  “That, too—but when they’re off-duty, most people prefer to look at something else.” Faraday stopped at a junction almost identical to the one I’d first encountered outside the storage room, where a straight corridor ran perpendicular to the curved hallway in which we stood. “There’s nobody in the outer ring,” he said. “They must all be in the observatory.” He headed up the new corridor, and Tori and I followed.

  Unlike its dead-end twin on the other side of the base, this particular hallway ended in a door. Solid metal, like all the others we’d seen, but this one had a porthole. Faraday paused briefly to look through it, then turned back to us with a frown. “There’s only one person in there,” he said.

  “Then we can take him,” said Tori, slapping a tool against her palm. “Let’s go.”

  Faraday touched the door open, and one by one we stepped through. We emerged into an enormous circular room, whose domed ceiling looked out on a dazzling expanse of night sky.

  I’d never seen so many stars, all of them unfamiliar. More than half of them were colors I had no names for, and the music they made inside my head was as strange as experimental jazz. But as my gaze traveled slowly from one edge of the dome to the other, what struck me even more was the sheer breadth of the view. No matter where I looked, there was nothing but stars— not a hint of surrounding landscape or civilization in sight.

  A shiver ran through me as I realized, in that moment, something I should have guessed long ago: this observatory hadn’t been built on some remote mountaintop of Faraday’s world, as I’d vaguely supposed.

  It was a space station.

  I was still gazing up at the window—or was it a screen?— when Tori nudged my arm. Across the room stood a young man in a crisp gray tunic and slacks, one hand poised over the console in front of him. He looked not much older than twenty, with bronze hair sleeked back from a long narrow face, and as the three of us walked toward him, he blanched.

  “If the viruses and bacteria on Earth didn’t kill me,” said Faraday, “I doubt you have anything to worry about.” He put his hand over his heart and made that odd little bow I’d seen him give before. “Hello, Mathis. It’s been a long time. For one of us, anyway.”

  Mathis? I was startled. This was Faraday’s fellow apprentice, the boy who’d helped send him to Earth all those years ago? But back then he had been older, and now . . .

  For a moment the young scientist remained frozen. Then an incredulous look came over his face. “Sav Astin!” he breathed, then rushed forward and seized Faraday by both arms, gabbling out a torrent of words in a language I’d never heard before. They tugged at my shoulder and raised the fine hairs at the back of my neck, but they were all the same hazy green color, and they refused to tell me what they meant.

  “I’m glad to see you alive, too,” Faraday told him, half-smiling. “Though you can leave off the Sav part. I’m too old to be anyone’s apprentice now.”

  Mathis rattled off another string of syllables that sounded like a question.

  “Because,” Faraday said, “Tori and Alison deserve to know what’s going on. And I’m sure you’ve studied enough English by now to understand most of what I’m saying, even if you can’t speak it.”

  “He understands English?” asked Tori. “Does that include insults and swear words? Because if he’s the one who locked me up—”

  “Wait,” said Faraday. “Give him a chance to explain. That’s only fair, isn’t it?” He raised his eyebrows at Mathis, who seemed to understand. He led us to a circle of chairs on the other side of the observatory, and we all sat down while he launched into his story.

  He talked for a long time. I struggled with the unfamiliar words, trying to wring shapes and tastes out of them
, but nothing made sense until Faraday spoke up again.

  “That’s not your decision,” he said flatly. “Whatever her scientific value, Alison is here as a visitor, not a specimen. As for Tori, I understand that the data you’ve collected from her is extremely important to your research. But whether you paid for her or not, she has a right—”

  “Paid?” exploded Tori. “You mean this is the guy who’s been experimenting on me?” She lunged forward, but Faraday flung out an arm to hold her back.

  “Sit down,” he told her, in an authoritative tone I’d never heard him use before. “We’ll deal with that later.” He held her furious gaze with his own level one until she subsided, then returned his attention to Mathis. “I understand about the war back home,” he said, “and the government’s decision to strip this station down and repurpose it for military use. It’s stupid and infuriating, but it’s the kind of thing I’d expect the Meritocracy to do. And yes, I realize you’ve invested years in studying Tori, and that you didn’t want to leave without finishing the experiment—”

  Mathis tried to interrupt, but Faraday cut him off. “I’m explaining it to them, not to you. Be patient.” He turned to Tori and me and went on, “Our homeland is going through a civil war. The State’s running out of money and resources to fight the uprising, so they’re scavenging all the technology and personnel they can get their hands on. That’s why this base is empty, because the scientists have all gone back home and taken a lot of our best equipment with them. Mathis had to fight for the chance to stay behind, and he’s got only a few days until the troops arrive, so he’s been trying to collect as much data as he can before closing the wormhole.”

  “Wormhole?” I asked.