Filaments dart out. They wrap themselves around Daniel and bind him to the wall. Daniel strains against them. His body puffs up but the more he pushes against them, the thicker they grow and the tighter they bind. The filaments, now thick cords, fray a little as they squeeze his chest, but they don’t break. A restraint Daniel doesn’t break out of with an easy shrug must be a new experience for him.
Ellie gapes. Only Chris’s words sawing through her brings her back.
“You’re lying.” Chris points to Daniel. “If you don’t get into the coffin, I’ll let the wall crush Daniel.”
“If I’m in the coffin, how am I supposed to know whether you’ve freed him?”
“You don’t trust your own sister?” Chris sounds righteously aggrieved. “And don’t count on Ahdi to help you. Even if he’s still a maintainer, the machinery in the wall is constantly reconfiguring the room. He’s not showing up without killing Daniel first. No one, not even Ahdi, gets in or out of this room.”
Ahdi hadn’t occurred to Ellie at all until now. Maybe he would show up to help. It says something that Chris figured this out before Ellie. The Head Archivist implied that Ellie had madeat least one friend. The realization that the Head Archivist was right is useless at the moment but still heartening. She’ll keep it in mind for the future if she makes it out alive.
Ellie’s gaze shifts between Daniel and the coffin. He’s stopped struggling for the moment. His face twists with a nuclear rage and anger she’s never seen in him. In that instant, she understands why almost everyone else is afraid of him. Heaven help Chris if he ever breaks free. Or maybe Ellie herself if she goes into the coffin. She can’t tell which. Maybe both.
Ellie is so tired of someone being angry at her for no reason that she just doesn’t care anymore. What pops into her mind is something her driver’s ed instructor told her. When faced with more than one danger, try to separate them and deal with them one at a time. Daniel’s rage can wait.
Even with Daniel, motionless, strapped against the wall, the cords continue to tighten. Chris is going to let the wall slowly crush Daniel until he suffocates. Nothing says she has to stay in the coffin.
“Fine.” She goes into the coffin.
“No!” Daniel shouts, if a choked rumble counts as shouting.
Chris slams the coffin shut. Ellie straightens. A dizzying array of machinery smothers her. The sheer density forces the tiny spinning gears and flapping gates into her consciousness. A few seconds pass before she realizes that she’s trapped in a dark, cramped space with no airflow. Chris needs the body of a direct descendant, but it doesn’t have to be a live body. In fact, dead may be better. Chris may have meant to keep Ellie on her toes at first, but she changed her mind long before Mom got sick. All the times Ellie escaped death must have been frustrating as hell for her murderous sister. Of course, Ellie is now slowly suffocating in a coffin in Chris’s office, so who’s really gotten the last laugh? She throws that unhelpful thought away and focuses on the task at hand, freeing herself.
Ellie pushes against the coffin lid. Locked, of course. She probes the machinery. In theory, she can find the mechanism trapping her and reengineer it to pop the lid. In practice, she’ll run out of air before she even finds the lock. There’s a better way to spend her remaining time alive. If nothing else, at least she’ll finally get some things off her chest.
“All my life, Chris.” Ellie struggles for breath. “Your standards for me have always been way higher than your standards for yourself.”
“That’s not true. I was the one who took care of Mom while you loafed around in Boston. You could have quit grad school.”
“I made all the arrangements to transfer to George Mason and do research at night and weekends. I was all set to throw years of work away and start over before you decided that wasn’t enough for you.” Ellie pants and struggles to push out a few more words. “What did you do?”
Chris has a tech job. With the right infrastructure, she could have done it from the moon. While Mom was still alive, she worked nights and weekends, exactly what Ellie proposed for herself. She saw this with her own eyes every weekend and every school break. Not that she expects Chris to admit now that what she didn’t think was enough sacrifice for Ellie was plenty enough for herself.
“I’m going to save Mom. You killed her.”
“Do you seriously think that perverting the physics of this universe is something Mom wants?” The air is thick and Ellie wheezes. “Chris, Mom’s dead. You have to let her go. Are you doing this for her or for you?”
“How dare you even think that?” Chris’s condescension is even thicker than the air. “I’ve never done anything for myself. It’s all been for Mom. This is the literal only thing I have ever asked you to do for her, and you have the nerve to complain.”
“Please, I saw you at the reception. The praise and adulationwas off the charts. You’ve spent years making sure that everyone knows you’re the ‘good daughter.’ You didn’t let me help, didn’t let Daniel help, because if we helped, you’d lose out on chances to show how fucking dutiful you are.”
Ellie gasps for oxygen that is barely there. The coffin starts to sway and spin as suffocation starts to set in. She spends three seconds thinking about cutting her way out. Unfortunately, sparks from her hands would excite the air. Oxygen atoms would split off and combine with each other. The by-product, unfortunately, would be carbon monoxide.
“Iamthe good daughter. Mom realized that I have been doing my filial duty all along, eventually, and gave me her ring.” Chris’s voice drills through the coffin. “Everything I’m doing, I’m doing for Mom, because I love her. You would go quietly, if you loved her, too.”
Ellie is really sick of hearing Chris talk about how much she loves Mom and how much Ellie doesn’t. That the Mom she loves isn’t even the Mom that existed is galling. The diamond ring isn’t supposed to exist. Just like the note Ahdi didn’t write. Just as Mom never led Tom to Daniel’s apartment. At least she won’t have to deal with Chris for much longer.
“No, you don’t love Mom. You don’t want Mom back.” Ellie has very little air left. She might as well go out in a blaze of glory. “You want the Mom-shaped monster who thinks perverting physics is a good thing, the one who likes the ways you’re corrupting the skunkworks, the one who kept working with you when you tried to destroy the isolationists’ archive.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Chris sounds so angry that Ellie is positive that she’s right. “Mom stopped working with me because of you.”
Ellie hears a high hiss from outside the coffin. A miniature beam of focused light makes tiny incisions in the coffin. The machinery changes around Ellie. The coffin creaks and groans as gears morphinto gates and vice versa. They swirl around her and settle into a new configuration. Whatever this machine was meant to do, it’s now going to do something similar but different.
The coffin clicks. The lid flips open. Ellie doubles over and takes a deep breath. When she straightens up, a stone-faced Chris glares at her.
“You don’t deserve to sacrifice yourself for Mom.” Chris pulls Ellie out of the coffin and substitutes herself inside. “I’ll show you who really loves Mom. There’s nothingIwouldn’t do to save her life.”
Chris slams the lid shut. Ellie feels the coffin for seams. There must have been at least one but now the surface is perfectly smooth. She can just make out the remnants of the reactions that bonded the lid to the rest of the coffin.
