Salvaged

by Madeleine Roux

  Edison beckoned her over, and when she came near, he took the tablet out of her hands and dropped it on the table. He looked tired, but there was a new liveliness in his eyes and a better color in his cheeks. Probably from the booze. “You and your mom, you didn’t get along?”

  “That’s a nice way to put it,” Rosalyn told him, deciding there was no real harm in being honest. They were all on a suicide mission, why hold it in? “We don’t talk. Or rather, she talks at me and I avoid it at all costs. Never good enough for her, et cetera. I’m sure you know all about it, with your military mom.”

  “And dad?”

  “We were close,” Rosalyn admitted, eyeing another whiskey capsule. She was going to need the whole package if they were doing a deep dive into her family. “Really close.”

  “Were?”

  She snorted and dug into the cylinder packet, ignoring his look. “You noticed that, did you? Yes, we had a falling-out recently. I quit the family business over . . . over some serious disagreements. I screwed up, he screwed up, and we both said things you can’t take back, so I left.”

  “That can’t possibly be true,” Edison said with a chuckle, tilting back his head. “What work was it? Salvaging? You gotta excuse me for saying so, but you don’t strike me as a lifelong salvager. You’ve got grit, and I guess salvaging takes grit, but you’re holding out on me. That’s a fancy accent for a deep space janitor.”

  “I’m not,” Rosalyn assured him, injecting another whiskey capsule and sucking in a breath through her teeth. God, it was nice, more than nice, taking the edge off in a way she wanted badly. She just had to be careful she didn’t go too far. “I just don’t want you to feel sorry for me.”

  “Because?” he prompted, drawing out the word and then drowning it in a sip of whiskey.

  Rosalyn caught his eye and held it, losing her smile. “Because whenever I tell someone the whole story, they look at me differently afterward. They always promise it won’t happen and they’re always full of shit.”

  She expected him to press, like they always did. She expected a big speech about how he was trustworthy and different. Instead, Edison nodded and finished his glass, then poured another few fingers.

  “My wife left a year ago, just after my mother passed. Cancer that spread to her marrow, they slowed it down but eventually that wasn’t enough,” he said all in one breath. “She was adopted, hated her family, my dad had split, so I was the one that had to decide to pull the plug when she went into a coma.”

  “Edison . . .”

  “See? Now you’re looking at me differently, too.” He dredged up a smile for her, then quickly hid it behind his glass. “I’m okay. I think you’re okay, too. You don’t have to tell me, I just thought maybe if we both look at each other sideways, it would cancel it all out.”

  Rosalyn walked deliberately away from the capsules and sat on the makeshift bunk pushed against the far wall. “That’s an interesting theory. I guess we can test it. It’s, uh, a long story but the condensed version is that I had a big, important job at a big, important biotech firm. My dad runs the place, and I made the rather poor decision to date a colleague. He was . . . not a nice man, let’s put it that way. Treated me terribly, but was all smiles on the outside. Nobody but my best friend believed me when I told them what happened. He got tired of me one night and just . . . All the times, all the little warnings, they all made sense then, that he could just hold me down and hurt me that way.”

  Drawing in a huge breath, she let it out hard through her nose. “Dad didn’t fire him until, oh, a few days ago. For my birthday. But late, of course. At least he sent an apology of sorts.”

  He pushed away from the table with his hip but then leaned back against it, checking his whiskey before looking across the shadowy floor to her. “So you got the hell out of there.”

  She reached, reflexively, to push hair that wasn’t there behind her ear. Her fingertips bumped the shield and smudged it. “Yes, and I told myself I might go back, but even hearing about him getting fired didn’t make me feel much. He deserves so much worse.”

  “Now, when you say ‘fired,’ do you mean set on fire or . . . ?”

  At that, she gave a dry laugh. “Unfortunately, no. But I like where your head’s at.”

  Edison opened his mouth to say something else, then quickly ducked his head and clacked his teeth together. “I remember you said something before, something like you knew what it felt like to be controlled by someone else.”

  “I do know, in a way, what you’re experiencing. Some days I even want to claw my own skin off.”

  He nodded. “When the Foxfire feels like it’s going to take control? It kind of feels like, I don’t know, like that lump you get in your throat when you know you’re going to be sick and can’t stop it. Like that, but in your brain. Brain . . . vomit.”

  Rosalyn tried not to laugh at him, biting down hard on her lip. “Brain vomit. Mm, I think it’s safe to say you’re not the poet in this arrangement,” she teased, pointing between him and the tablet.

  “Told ya.” He took a few steps toward the bunk, examining his glass as he went. She preferred staying on safer topics, though the odd shift she had anticipated after their mutual sharefest remained absent. Whatever awkwardness she felt was from his being a relative stranger, not from the fact that he now knew one of her deepest secrets.

  “Where were you before the Brigantine?” she asked. His dossier would give her all of that information, at least his postings, but it felt like a natural question.

  Edison stood a few feet in front of her, in line with the door, resting his cup in the crook of one elbow. The music shifted to a more upbeat song, a scattershot trumpet blasting up and down scales while mellower drums tried to keep up.

  “I bounced back and forth between Merchantia Solutions campuses. Tokyo Bliss Station for a while, but they didn’t have much work for me there, it’s a small outfit. Vancouver for a while, then mostly space-based deployments after Candace and I split up.” He took a sip of whiskey and tsked softly. “I ran with this crew for quite a while, but we rotated security positions. Piero was a new guy. I’ve known Rayan for, oh, a while now. He was a good kid. So damned smart.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she murmured. She felt suddenly cold and wrung her gloved hands together, trying to get warm. “Rayan, I could have helped him. I think . . . I think he was still in there somewhere.”

  Edison took three giant steps and knelt, ducking his head until he could find her steadily avoidant eyes. “No. No. You don’t get to wear that one around your neck. I’m the captain of this ship, I make decisions about my crew, and I made a decision to flush the storage bay. Trust me, I didn’t enjoy doing it, it endangered you and killed two men, but I did it. Leading isn’t for everyone. After a while, it isn’t for anyone.”

  She nodded, but his words didn’t chase away the cold. “There’s something else,” she whispered, flustered. Rosalyn had to get away from him. The proximity was too intimate, too like real friendship, or . . . She had to get away. The whiskey capsules called to her so she found refuge there, struggling with the packaging to get another tube out.

  “At the end, when he knew he was dying,” she said quietly. “His eyes . . . they were brown again. Human.”

  “That doesn’t change anything. It could’ve been a trick of the light. You were in a panic, so was he . . .”

  “I suppose,” Rosalyn agreed. “I just—”

  Something on the packaging had caught her eye. The capsules were trapped in a vacuum-sealed white packet, which had clearly been peeled away from a duplicate, the perforations noticeable along the top edge. Small gray letters were stamped under the tiny puncture dots, an expiration date, serial number and distributer.

  “What is it?” She had been so distracted she didn’t hear Edison come up behind her.

  “Beta Tech,” Rosalyn read, showing him the pac
ket and frowning. “Wouldn’t Merchantia provide all the rations for you guys? Why would Piero even have this?”

  Her last conversation with Josh Girdy floated back to her through her hazy memories and the whiskey. He had mentioned Beta Tech. And Belrose. And ISS. The room spun a little. That pile of connections she had noticed adding up started to shake under the weight of another coincidence.

  Edison took the biodegradable package and inspected it for himself. He didn’t seem alarmed, turning it over and then shrugging. “He’s new. Maybe it’s from an old gig. We know he’s been around, with ISS at least, maybe he had other secret jobs, too, other identities.”

  “Maybe,” she echoed, but her skin prickled like it always did when her gut wanted her to follow a hunch. “It doesn’t make any sense, though. Beta Tech is earthbound; they don’t even run space missions. All of their experiments are done in Canada, they just contract out to get whatever samples they need.”

  Rosalyn snatched the capsule packet back from him and turned, hurrying out of the storage area and into the corridor, finding her way quickly back to the labs. As expected, Edison followed, grabbing the whiskey bottle on the way.

  “You said this was in his locker?” she called over her shoulder.

  “Yeah, why? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Rosalyn said grimly, remembering Josh Girdy’s smug face. His double finger guns. His favor-for-a-favor proposal. “Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s everything.”

  35

  So much for their nice, quiet evening.

  Rosalyn cut through the ship like a shark in chummed waters, scenting something important. He followed, pouring himself another round for whatever the hell was coming next. Idiot. It should have been his first move to sort through Piero’s things after his death, but he had been so distracted by Rayan’s death, by worrying about Rosalyn, that he had neglected to check. They knew Piero had poisoned Tuva, and they had found his fake identity with ISS. Now that he was gone, there was no stopping them from looking deeper. He was the newest among the crew, and he had fallen to the Foxfire the fastest, though Edison still wondered if that was due to his apparent willingness to kill his crewmates or the fresh head injury. The most injured among them seemed to fare the worst, just one more pitfall to fastidiously avoid. He rubbed at the bruise on his chin and winced, hoping it wasn’t enough to empower the Foxfire against him.

  I don’t need a wound. I need my children. Piero . . . Rayan . . . Our family is breaking apart.

  It was easier to ward off the voices with Dick Friday playing over the intercom; now he felt more vulnerable to the lurking suggestions. Edison tossed back a drink, close behind Rosalyn as she all but sprinted into the lab, continuing through as she caught sight of the crew lockers at the back of the room.

  “Here we go,” she said, rubbing her hands together and crouching. His locker was on the bottom row, right next to Edison’s. They were arranged alphabetically by surname. Once upon a time they had been locked with codes that were forwarded to their VIT monitors, but once the code blue hit, the locks disengaged and the doors swung free. Edison hadn’t given it much thought; he had nothing to hide in his. Without an implant, Tuva had opted for the more traditional locker at the foot of her bunk, and they had already found the secrets hidden there.

  There was no decoration of any kind inside the locker, just a neat pile of belongings. Edison had found the capsules right on top next to a very nice bottle of synthetic dolcetto. Rosalyn removed the bottle of wine to make room for rummaging, then pulled out an employee ID pass and stood, the plastic square dangling on the end of a twisty red lanyard.

  “Looks like what all the security guys get,” Edison said, huffing when Rosalyn tossed it at him to hold. She went back to work, coming back up for air with a personal work tablet.

  Rosalyn nestled it in the crook of her arm, turning it on and making a soft sound of interest when she found it unlocked.

  “No code,” she whispered to herself. “Strange.”

  The camera lens at the top brightened, a small red dot next to it indicating it was recording.

  “Paranoid much? That feed probably goes directly to his AR display,” Rosalyn explained. “A few guys in our labs did this. I always thought it was insane, you know, just choose a personal code and make it a long one.”

  “Right. Why would you do that?” Edison asked, leaning over to watch her flick through the few icons on the tablet.

  “Added security. Nobody can touch this thing without being recorded, so Piero, if he was still with us and his AR chip was functioning, would know if anyone tampered with his stuff. I guarantee you there’s a keylogger, too. We all used them at . . . at my work,” she said. Edison caught the hesitation, flagging it for later. She had freely mentioned that she worked somewhere important, but now he wondered just how important.

  Rosalyn stopped, squinted, then faced him squarely and held up the tablet, showing him the usual start-up screen.

  “Anything strange about this to you?”

  Edison raked his eyes over the three icons. Mail, ScribNotes and Trash.

  “It’s a little bare-bones,” he said. “Kinda sad. Very sad.”

  “We can’t access new mail without a signal, but look.” She opened his inbox. It was completely empty. “Does your inbox look like that? Mine certainly doesn’t.”

  “A killer with a scrubbed inbox,” Edison gave her. “Or he doesn’t get much mail. Would you send him messages?”

  “God, no, he’s a creep, but no professional has a completely scoured inbox. It’s shady, Edison. Everything about this is shady. Tuva. The badge. The note. He’s starting to seem like way more than just hired security.” She swiveled the tablet back around, navigating into the trash, which was also empty, and then into ScribNotes, which was filled to the gills with . . .

  “Code,” she murmured. She scrolled and scrolled, her eyes getting wider as she went, so wide Edison felt a cramp of nervousness in his gut. “We should have Misato look at this. Here.”

  Her fingertip moved over what looked like a screen name in the otherwise unintelligible, garbled language.

  pe_BRIT0711007

  Rosalyn stared at the little slice of code for a long time, then her shoulders began to tremble. He watched her crumple in on herself, then slowly, carefully turn toward him.

  “That’s an employee ID code,” she said, her voice oddly robotic. “I recognize it. I have one just like it; all Belrose Industries employees are assigned one. Oh my God, Dad, what were you getting us into?”

  Rosalyn clutched the tablet to her chest, going suddenly pale behind her visor. He instinctively reached to touch her shoulder, and she leaned into him almost imperceptibly. There was a tremor in her fingers, a dull sheen to her eyes.

  “We’re connected to this,” she went on with a shake of her head. “Belrose Industries. My family. What would my dad want with this stuff? What would anyone want with this stuff?”

  * * *

  —

  “You didn’t say you were part of Belrose Industries. Holy shit. Are you sure that’s the ID code?” Edison asked. He observed Rosalyn’s back while he sat perched on a stool in the lab and she studied Rayan’s notes.

  “Yes, I’m sure.” She thumped her fist against her visor in frustration. “My father sent a message for my birthday, I didn’t listen to it until I was here, but . . . he sounded spooked, spooked that I was working with MSC, that I was salvaging at all. It’s dangerous, sure, but it was more than that. He sounded terrified.”

  Edison felt his mind spinning out. He worried that the confusion would give Foxfire an easy in, a way to use his jumbled thoughts against him while he sorted out what Rosalyn was sort of telling him. “Then your dad is famous. Really, really famous.”

  “Not really, just famously jumped up his own ass.”

  “Still. I get what you meant now, about your co
mpany being a big deal.” She went quiet, and he noticed a pronounced tension in her shoulders. Even through the suit, he could tell she was nervous. He understood why; with the way her father had treated her, handled things, it would make anyone uncomfortable to think about their former life. She had run so far, about as far as a human could go, and all to get away from her father and that job.

  “Do you know that feeling you get when you walk right by someone you know? Your eyes just . . . cancel them out. Or they blend into the surroundings. That’s how I feel right now looking at this,” she said, gesturing to the table. “Like I should know what this all means. Like I should pick out the one thing that will make this all come together and make sense.” Sighing, she put both hands on her head and swung listlessly from side to side. “If I could rub my eyes right now I would. Tuva. Piero. My dad. What if this is his fault?”

  “Can I make a suggestion?” Edison asked.

  Rosalyn peered over one shoulder at him, distraught.

  “Let it go. Not forever, right? Just for now. You just survived a major ordeal, and as much as I want to understand how we got into this mess, it isn’t . . . it isn’t important.” Edison stood, wobbled, realizing just how much of the whiskey he had consumed. Steadying himself, he joined her at the table. “That didn’t come out right. I’m a little tipsy. Anyway. It’s important, but it’s not . . . urgent. I can see it in the way you look at us, like we’re just . . . another problem that needs a solution. Like if you just turn us the right way in the light, all will be revealed. You weren’t here when it hit, Roz. You didn’t see how hard we tried to understand it.”

  Turning toward him, she pulled her lips to one side and raised a brow. “What did you call me?”

  “Roz. Sorry. Remember? Tipsy.”

  “It’s fine,” she told him, wrinkling her nose. “Better than ‘chickadee.’”

  “Clearly I’m missing something.”