5
NOW
“So you admit that you brought the drill on board,” Reed says, leaning forward in his eagerness. “And according to your own report, Kyle Voller died from injuries sustained from that same drill.”
I grit my teeth. But playing along is the only way to get the information I need. Still, I direct my answer to Max. “I also said that he killed himself.”
Max nods. “So you did.”
As if on cue, a male voice cries out in a hoarse scream somewhere deeper in the facility. Reed starts in surprise, then recovers himself.
Reed is probably a decade younger than I am, in his midtwenties, with a precisely fitted suit that borders on fussy. You can tell at a glance that his whole world makes sense to him, and he wouldn’t accept any other outcome. Then again, as a junior QA investigator for one of the largest companies on Earth, how would he have personally experienced anything else? His existence has neat edges, sharp lines, with no shadows or uncertainties.
The Tower and its occupants are nothing but shadows and uncertainties.
In the far corner, Vera, the woman who cries at night in the room across the hall from mine, huddles near the wall screen. It’s acting as a window with a view on a winter scene. Today it’s Central Park in New York, sometime in the last century, based on the fossil-fuel vehicles in view. But she doesn’t seem to notice or care. She huffs a breath on the screen, tracing her fingers through the nonexistent fog on the nonexistent glass.
Disgust flits across Reed’s face. “You have an answer for everything.”
“If you don’t like the answers, ask different questions,” I say, as thehum in my ears increases.Someoneis coming. My hands tremble, and I ball them up in fists in my lap. Voller maybe, or God, Lourdes. They seem to take turns, Kane, Voller, and Lourdes, haunting me. Though never Nysus. I don’t know why.
The doctors say they’re hallucinations, triggered by “severe mental and physical trauma.” I don’t think so, though. Ghosts, maybe. Vengeful specters come to warn me, Jacob Marley–style, of my sins. To blame me for their deaths. And I deserve it.
I keep my gaze fixed steadily on Reed’s suit jacket, and the shiny Verux insignia pinned there. I’ve worn the same symbol on my shoulder for most of my life, one way or another, though usually with a ship designation and always as a patch made of thread and fabric instead of precious metals.
Reed’s pin is a viciously pointedVin gold, longer on one side than the other, more like a checkmark than a letter. Three diamonds glitter on the long side, but that just draws more attention to the two as-yet-empty locations on the shorter side. Someone in security wasn’t paying attention to let him through the door with a sharp like that. Or, maybe Reed pulled rank to keep it on him. I could see that. He’s proud of his corporate family status. Three generations, I think, to get that pin. And that just means he’s that much more desperate to prove himself as worthy. I wonder when he decided I was the route for that.
Over Reed’s left shoulder, Lourdes flickers into view and the buzzing in my ears vanishes temporarily with her appearance. Her eyelids blink over the red and empty sockets of where her eyes used to be, and her lips move but so slightly that it took me weeks from her first appearance to interpret her words:I don’t understand.
My legs twitch with the impulse to move, to rush toward her to help.
But she is, like all of us, beyond help now.
“Claire?” Max turns his head to follow my gaze but sees nothing. No one else ever does. And Lourdes vanishes a moment later anyway. She never stays very long. Unlike Kane. Another reason it’s so hard not to reach out and try to grab her, to keep her here.
Against my will, my gaze is drawn across the room. Kane is back. He looks as solid and as real as anybody else in here—which isn’t saying much—except his torso ends abruptly and alarmingly in the back of the worn gray sofa, and when he speaks, no sound comes out.
It’s like a video on a loop. He gestures emphatically, raking his hand through his close-cropped hair, a classic Kane frustration move, and then, as alarm slowly fills his expression, he leans forward to shout and urge me toward him.
As soon as it completes, it starts over. And over and over.
“Hallucinations again? How convenient,” Reed says, his lips curving in a mocking smile. “I have to admit, you are rather convincing when you—”
“What’s the heading?” I ask. It’s hard to stay focused; the drugs are pulling at me, whispering at me to let go.
Reed blinks, taken aback. “The—”
I shift my attention to Max. “The ship. You said she’s moving. What’s the heading?” I repeat.
Max’s mouth tightens into a thin, sad line. “I think it’s best if we focus on whatyouknow.”
Twenty-three years ago, Max Donovan was the lead QA investigator for Verux on the Ferris Outpost incident, and I’m sure Verux sent him today because we have that history. He used to bring me tubes of soda, boxes of real sugar candy, and, once, one of his daughter’s discarded dolls—never mind that I was eleven and a colony kid so the idea of playing at childcare was completely foreign to me. Why would I play at what I was expected to do anyway?
But Max’s well-intentioned awkwardness has apparently not stopped his ascent at Verux. Perhaps because that awkwardness signals that he’s a real person, someone who will understand the ugliness and imperfection of being human. And how that sometimes blows up in your face.
He must be getting close to retirement age, but the lines near his eyes and deep furrows in his forehead are still a surprise every time I look at him. My mental image of him is that of his younger self.
Max was kind to me, back then. The nameless orphan in the news with no family left to retrieve her. He came to visit me several times at the group home after I was out of quarantine to make sure I was settling in. I’m fairly certain he put in a good word for me years ago, when I applied to the Verux commweb training program. And he’s trying to help me now, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
