The Bones Beneath My Skin

by TJ Klune

  He’ll sit too during movie time. He’s offered a chair. He takes it. He uses it. At first. But eventually, he’s sitting on the ground too, six inches of bulletproof glass separating them.

  Sometimes, the power flickers and goes out. It never lasts long.

  “Wiring,” Greer tells him. “It’s terrible here. I don’t think we were meant to go so far inside the Mountain.”

  In the second year, he goes inside her cage.

  They tell him to wear a hazmat suit.

  He tells them to fuck off.

  She’s fidgeting. Hopping from one foot to the other.

  There are many men in the room with them, standing back and watching. Waiting.

  Two doors lead into the cage. He stands in front of the first, and the electronic lock shifts from red to green. The door slides open slowly. He walks in. It closes behind him. Above, fans whir to life and a faint mist sprays over him, tasting faintly medicinal. The fans slow and eventually stop. The second door opens.

  He walks into the cage.

  She’s hugging him even before he realizes she’s moved.

  Her little arms are wrapped around his waist, her head resting against his stomach, and he hates her, hates everything she represents.

  But he puts a hand on the top of her head and says, “Hello.”

  It’s during the fifth year that she bonds with him.

  It happens with the greatest of ease.

  One moment she’s reading aloud to him from the book he’s brought for her (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH), and the next, he’s hearing it in his head. He doesn’t understand what’s happening at first, doesn’t understand why her lips are no longer moving but he can still hear her. Except it’s not just words, is it? He can see Mrs. Frisby and Nicodemus and Justin and Jeremy and Dragon. But not as if they’re real. No. It’s how she sees them, this little girl they call Seventh Sea, and she’s telling him the story inside his head, and it’s overwhelming. Too much so.

  He faints.

  They don’t let him see her for a week.

  They ask him what happened.

  They want to understand.

  He thinks about lying. About keeping this just between himself and the girl.

  But he has a duty.

  He tells them.

  When they let him back into the room, the relief on her face is palpable. “I’m sorry,” she tells him, stricken. “I never meant—”

  “It’s okay,” he says gruffly.

  She looks down at her hands. “I was… sad. When you were gone.”

  (Nate felt his heart break. He wanted to reach out and press his fingers against Art’s sleeping face, but he couldn’t move. He wasn’t even sure he was awake anymore.)

  And oh, doesn’t that set them off. In the years they’ve had her, when she was Oren and when she was as she is now, she never said anything about sadness. She’s never said anything about emotion at all. Oh, they’ve seen expressions on her face. She smiles. She frowns. She gets angry, rare though it is. But she’s never emoted aloud.

  She has now. She was sad when Alex was taken from her.

  For the first time, there in the fifth year, Alex thinks she doesn’t belong here.

  It’s a dangerous thought.

  So goddamn dangerous.

  So much so, in fact, that he doesn’t let himself think of it again for the longest time.

  Not until the ninth year, at least.

  During the ninth year, they bring in a woman who calls herself only Laura, and she changes everything. Alex is told they’re not getting the results they need, that they’ve plateaued and the higher-ups are demanding answers. Greer, who Alex has only seen a handful of times since being brought to the Mountain, grins ruefully at him. “She’s a hardass,” he says. “Hope you’re ready, bucko.”

  Laura’s no-nonsense. She’s older, maybe in her early fifties. She wears the same drab blouses, the same lab coat, the same pair of horn-rimmed glasses day in and day out. She doesn’t smile the first time she meets the Seventh Sea. She doesn’t even look shocked. Alex wonders what she’s thinking as she walks slowly around the cage, gaze calculating. For her part, the girl (Artemis, she’d shown him in his head in the sixth year, you can call me Artemis) doesn’t seem affected. She stands in one spot, spinning in a slow circle, watching Laura.

  Once Laura has circumnavigated the cage, she looks at Alex for the first time. “You’re the one she’s bonded with.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Alex says.

  “Good.” She glances over his shoulder at the guards near the door. “Get him out of here. I don’t want to see him in here again until I say.”

  “What?” the girl (Artemis, Art) says, sounding alarmed. “No, wait, what are you—”

  Alex thinks about fighting. Thinks about grabbing one of the rifles and telling this woman, this Laura, that she won’t take Art away from him. That she won’t separate them.

  He doesn’t.

  And Laura does exactly that.

  For seven months.

  It’s… agonizing. There are moments, brief though they are, when he can still feel her, little short bursts of images in his head. Alex doesn’t know if it’s the distance that’s weakening the bond, or if it’s something grimmer, but it’s barely there. And when it is there, it’s bright flashes of pain. Like they’re hurting her.

  Alex doesn’t eat. There are days when he doesn’t get out of bed. It goes on like this for two months. He’s sick. Feverish. He knows he’s being monitored, that he’s part of this just like Art is, but there’s nothing he can do to stop it.

  In the fourth month, he demands a meeting with Laura.

  It takes three weeks.

  He’s led to her office, which used to be Greer’s. “He’s… retired,” Laura tells him when he asks. “Fishing. Golfing. Whatever one does when they are no longer needed.”

  Alex doesn’t believe her.

  “Do you understand why?” she asks him. “Why we have to break her?”

  He keeps the mask firmly in place. He won’t allow it to slip. Not to this woman. She expects it. He won’t let her have it.

  “No,” he says.

  She nods slowly. “I thought not. Tell me, Mr. Weir. What do you think will happen if they come back for her? If she’s something important? What if they decide that what we’ve done here is equivalent to firing the first shot?”

  Alex doesn’t respond.

  Laura sighs, sitting back in the leather chair behind the desk. “We have to be prepared for an invasion. They aren’t like anything we’ve ever seen. How can we hope to stop them if we don’t understand them? This isn’t… this isn’t like Roswell, Mr. Weir. These aren’t beings of flesh and whatever fluid they call blood. They have the potential to be nothing less than a biological weapon. They won’t attack from above. They will attack from within. We run the risk of being nothing but hosts to an advanced race that has evolved far beyond anything we have ever seen before. Do you really think we can sit idly by and let that happen? Or should we be prepared for every eventuality?”

  She’s… not wrong. Alex knows this. But in his secret heart, in that place that’s only begun to put itself back together, he doesn’t believe it. At all. “Why?”

  Laura arches an eyebrow. “Why what, Mr. Weir?”

  “Why would they do that? Why would they come all this way just to attack us? To take us over. If they are as advanced as you seem to think they are, won’t they have evolved past such desires?”

  “Pragmatism has no place when dealing with the unknown. If someone comes uninvited through the back door, you don’t welcome them into your home. You get your gun and show them who lives there.”

  “Shoot first, ask questions later,” he says bitterly. “Art would never—”

  “Art?” she asks, deceptively soft.

  He closes his eyes.

  “Ah,” Laura says. “I see.”

  She keeps him away for three more mon
ths.

  (Nate had never hated anyone he’d never met before. He hated Laura.)

  He never figures out exactly why he’s allowed back into the room with the cage. He doesn’t know if it’s because Art demands it, if she says she’ll tell them what they need to know. He’s not sure, but he doesn’t care, because the relief he feels when he sees her again is all-encompassing, though he doesn’t allow the stony expression on his face to change. It doesn’t matter, because she knows. The bond between them flares to life, and he’s assaulted with images from her, pictures in his head that are like seeing a sunrise for the first time. She’s happy. Oh yes, she’s many other things too (hurt and angry and scared), but she’s happy.

  (Nate felt like he was barely breathing.)

  Hello, Artemis says in his head.

  Hello, he pushes back.

  And she smiles.

  Deep in his mind, away from where even Artemis can see, Alex begins to think that things shouldn’t be the way they are.

  Things return to… well, not normal, because nothing about this is normal. Laura seems to take a step back, though Alex is sure she’s never too far away. They still run their tests, but it’s not as extensive as it was in the months they were separated. Art tells him little about what she went through no matter how much Alex asks. He doesn’t know if he’s grateful or not.

  At one point, she asks him how long she’s been in the cage.

  He tells her it’s been almost thirty years.

  He flinches when she speaks aloud and says, “Huh. That’s not very long at all.”

  Time has… no meaning. At least not to her. She tries to explain it to him, but it’s too abstract for him to understand. Thirty years to a human could be considered a lifetime. In thirty years, a person could be born, learn to speak and walk and think. They grow during that time until they reach adulthood. Their minds solidify. They become who they are.

  It’s different for Artemis. Time is fluid. Thirty years is nothing.

  He asks her once how old she is.

  He gets back a complicated sense of images that makes him believe centuries, but that she’s still considered a child where she comes from. A word that almost seems like youngling.

  Toward the end of the ninth year, she sends him an image and a collection of words.

  He sees stars.

  And he hears I think they’re coming back for me.

  Every morning after that, he wakes up before the sunrise. He leaves the Mountain for the base below. He walks along the edges of the fences. He memorizes the perimeter. He counts the soldiers. He counts the number of steps it takes from the Mountain to the back gate. To the front gate. He tells himself his duty is to his country. That he needs to stop this now.

  He can’t. He can’t. He can’t.

  (Oh my god, Nate tried to say out loud. Oh my god.)

  His mind is sharp. It always has been. He can retain so much in very little time. He learns all the escape routes out of the Mountain. How often the guards rotate their shifts. How many are where. He finds their weak points. There are three rotations. Four in the morning till noon. Noon till eight at night. Eight until four in the morning.

  The 4:00 a.m. switch is the weakest. The men leaving are tired. The men coming on are barely awake. The sky is dark.

  And the wiring inside the room where she’s held has never gotten better. The power still comes and goes, especially during storms. They have backups, sure. Generators. But they take a good few minutes to kick in. There are contingencies in place. Art’s cage never opens when the power is out. He thinks she can open it if she wants to, but she hasn’t yet, and he hasn’t worked up the nerve to ask her why. The cameras in the room fall silent. The only light comes from the row of emergency lights along the floor showing the way to the exits.

  Alex doesn’t know if he can do this.

  He doesn’t know if it’s the right thing.

  The decision is made for him when he overhears Laura one afternoon, almost ten years to the day since the first time he was brought to the Mountain. He hasn’t heard from Laura in months, so he’s surprised to find her in the room with Art. Laura doesn’t see him, her back to him as she faces Artemis.

  She says, “Soon. I think it’ll be soon.”

  And then she turns and leaves, brushing by Alex without so much as a nod in his direction.

  He doesn’t know what soon means.

  But he knows he doesn’t like the sound of it.

  He hears whispers in the few days that follow. He’s such a recognizable face in the Mountain that people tend to think he’s there doing what’s asked of him. Maybe they don’t realize he can hear them. The scientists in the room speak of plans to do what they’d only done once before. With Oren Schraeder. To forcibly remove her from the body which she inhabits.

  Except this time, they aren’t going to provide her with another host.

  If it’s gaseous, they whisper, it can be broken down to the smallest of molecules. Instead of learning what they can from the host, why not go directly to the source? Surely there are secrets embedded in… whatever it is. They’re not finding out anything new. They don’t want to be replaced like Greer was. Some of them have been there for decades. There needs to be an endgame.

  And it’s coming.

  She stares at him curiously. “What is it?”

  “Do you trust me?” he asks her.

  And the image that she sends back to him is so full of love and light that it knocks the breath from his chest. She does. She trusts him very much.

  Okay, he thinks in response. Okay.

  It’s stupid, really. It won’t work. It shouldn’t work. Alex has never been lucky that way. He knows far too well that even something planned to the last detail can still go to shit at a moment’s notice. His entire life has been a prime example of just that.

  But he’s still got to try.

  And maybe he’s been planning it for longer than he’s aware. After all, there was a reason he’d been pulling money out weekly and stuffing it under his mattress, right? Why else would he have done such a thing unless he was always going to do this?

  He’s conscious of the choice he’s making for weeks.

  But he thinks it maybe goes back almost a year.

  And then everything aligns.

  He waits until he knows Laura is off the Mountain. She leaves every month or so for a week before returning. He doesn’t know where she goes. He wonders sometimes if she has a family waiting for her. And if she does, what they think she’s doing when she leaves for work. He thinks they’d be surprised to know their loved one has ordered the decimation of the thing inside the little girl.

  Coincidentally, it’s during one of her absences that the threat of a strong spring storm comes in.

  Now, he thinks. Now. Now. Now.

  He doesn’t sleep that night.

  He knows he should.

  But he can’t.

  Instead, he watches the digital clock as the numbers click by.

  It’s three thirty when he’s moving.

  Thunder peals overhead, faintly echoing inside the Mountain.

  He takes nothing with him, not that much remains. He’s already loaded a Jeep in the motor pool at the back of the base days before. No one even looked in his direction when he took clothes from Art’s cage. He’s done her laundry before.

  There are a few people out and about, but it’s late (or early, depending on how you look at it), and they’re all dead-eyed. They nod at him but say nothing more. He heads to the security room next to where Art resides. Inside is a sleepy-eyed man that Alex barely knows. He’s surrounded by monitors. Rock music plays from a small stereo.

  “Hey,” Alex says just as the monitors flicker with another rumble of thunder.

  “Hey,” the man says, glancing over his shoulder. “You’re up early.”

  Alex shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. How’s our girl?”

  “Hasn’t moved in hour
s,” the man says, nodding toward one of the monitors. A thin stripe of static rolls up the screen. There’s the faint outline of the bed. She’s on her side, comforter pulled up to her neck.

  The man yawns, jaw cracking.

  “I can take it from here,” Alex offers. “You’ve only got another fifteen minutes before shift change, anyway.”

  The man glances at him hopefully. Alex has done it a handful of times in the last year preparing for this exact moment. “Yeah? Dude, that would be awesome. I gotta date with one of the townies tomorrow.” He frowned. “Later today, I guess it is now. Waitress. Dude, she is hot. Got this set of tits like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Alex waves him away. “Get outta here. Get some sleep. Don’t want to fall asleep on your dream girl.”

  “Or do I?” the man asks, waggling his eyebrows. He stands, hands above his head as he stretches his back. Before he leaves the small room, he pats Alex on the shoulder. “Thanks, man. This is really cool of you.”

  “No problem. Hey, is it Reyes and Jones on guard duty?” He already knows the answer, but it’s good to get confirmation.

  “Yep. Got their table set up outside its room. Cheating at cards again.”

  Alex forces a chuckle. “Assholes.”

  “Don’t I know it. Thanks again, Weir. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  He’s out the door without looking back.

  Alex listens for his footsteps to fade.

  The monitors flicker as the storm grows overhead.

  He looks back to the screen for the camera near Art’s bed.

  She’s not sleeping.

  Instead, she’s wide-awake, standing underneath the camera, staring straight into the lens.

  He makes quick work of the recording equipment. He rips wires. Old coffee is poured on electronics.

  One by one, the screens turn to snow.

  He’s moving now, out the door and down the hallway. He stops at a T-intersection, the metal grating beneath his feet groaning slightly. He takes a deep breath. He’s doing the right thing. He’s doing this for her.

  He turns down the hall to the right. Reyes and Jones are sitting near the entrance to Art’s room, small folding table set up between them, rifles set off to the side, leaning back in their rickety chairs. Jones has a lit cigarette in his mouth, smoke curling up around his head. There’s an ashtray stuffed with discarded butts near his right hand. Cards are spread out between them.