“She’s trapped us in here.” I try to scrape at the substance on the door, but it’s oddly abrasive and tears at my gloves without so much as showing a dent from my efforts. “Damnit.”
“No,” Reed says flatly. “That’s not—”
I step back and gesture at the door. “Please, show me I’m wrong.”
Instead, he scowls at me. “Max,” Reed says into his helmet comm. “Call off your dog. She’s locked us in here.”
I grimace at his word choice—as if being insulting will help anything, but that’s just Reed’s primary mode, apparently—even as the meaning, meaning he probably didn’t even intend, sinks in.
Diaz is a company woman. She’s not going to do anything she’s not ordered to do. She was talking to Max right before she took action.
Which means…
Suddenly all the odd moments and behaviors I’ve witnessed on this mission seem to click into place. Diaz’s anger about the mission in general. Montgomery hushing her when I asked if she was a volunteer. The lack of body bags. The crates marked “dangerous” and “explosive” even though the security teams were already carryingtheir weapons. Shin’s team’s fixation on the Verux-marked equipment in the cargo bay.
I’m such a fucking idiot. So consumed with my own guilt and responsibility, I completely overlooked the most obvious signs.
“Max?” Reed repeats. Fear flickers across his expression and for the first time, he looks his—very young—age. “I’m not… he’s not responding and I don’t even hear anyone else…”
They’ve cut his comm. “They’re going to leave us here,” I say, the words slipping out of my mouth before I can stop them.
I launch myself at my helmet and the comm channel within, as if the few extra seconds might somehow make a difference. Kane flinches away from me and my flurry of movement, huddling against the back wall again.
“They wouldn’t,” Reed says in disbelief as I jam my helmet back into place. “My father is—”
“Important,” I say. “I know.” I have to hand it to Max—it’s a brilliant touch. A portion of a cover story that will make the whole thing that much more believable. And Max also gets the satisfaction of eliminating a young upstart rival on his way out the door to retirement.
“You’re insane,” Reed says in disgust.
“Max?” I ask. “Hello?”
Silence holds for a long moment, then I hear a sigh.
“I’m so sorry, Claire,” Max says. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
28
“None of it was,” Max says. “No one was ever supposed to find the damn ship in the first place. All of our analysts said that if it hadn’t happened in the first five years, it wouldn’t happen, but I guess they weren’t counting on the advances in commweb tech and the fucking distress beacon holding a charge for so long.”
For some reason, Max swearing is what makes this real to me. The kind, grandfatherly man who visited me as a child is gone, replaced by this icy stranger. Or maybe this is the real Max and has been all along.
“My compliments to the former CitiFutura engineers, that sustainability is impressive,” Max continues with a hearty—and fake—laugh.
“What’s he saying?” Reed asks, tapping at my shoulder, and I shrug him off.
“You did this,” I say to Max. “You did something to theAurora. Verux did.” After all, that is Max’s job, isn’t it? To clean up Verux’s messes.
“It was never supposed to be this dramatic.” He gives a soft laugh. “We just wanted to make the high-profile guests a little uncomfortable. Our scientists found that intense vibrations at a specific subaudible decibel level, when generated in a closed environment, can cause headaches, paranoia, unaccountable dread, depression. Visual hallucinations in maybe two percent of the population, generally those who were already experiencing mental instability.”
Vibrations. They made the ship ring like a bell. That’s what he’s saying. Only at a level that no one could hear.
“And that’s what made everyone start killing themselves and each other?” I demand.
“No, no, no! Of course not. It’s not that direct. The vibrations just make everything… resonate. Which can have some unpleasant side effects.”
Yeah, I would call a shipful of dead passengers an “unpleasant side effect.”
“That’s why they were seeing things, hearing things that weren’t there,” I say. Not ghosts, not like me. Just whatever their “resonating” nervous systems came up with. “And you put something on theAurorato do that.” It wasn’t a presence on the ship, just whatever this… device was.
