But it does no good—my body continues on the trajectory set by my initial push-off. I cannot get away. I am a fish in a dry bucket, a bird without wings.
“Kovalik, what’s wrong?” Kane asks in my ear. “Claire! Talk to me! Did you see something?” Then, presumably to Lourdes, “Zoom in. I want to see what she’s seeing.”
What she’s seeing.
Kane’s words make me realize I’ve squeezed my eyes shut. I’m not seeing anything but the blackness of my own eyelids. Dangerous in this environment.
But opening my eyes and seeing her again would be worse.
“It’s not real, it can’t be real,” I whisper, trying to convince myself to look.
“TL, we didn’t copy,” Nysus says. “Repeat.”
“Your vitals spiked,” Kane adds. “Slow your breathing.”
I’d laugh if I wasn’t so close to screaming.
“I’ll come back and grab her,” Voller says reluctantly.
“Just stay there until we know what we’re dealing with,” Kane orders.
“Claire?” Lourdes asks, her voice taut with tension and a little too loud.
I need to get it together. Now.
But it’s the light tap on my arm through my suit that finally snaps my lids back. My eyes are watering heavily, blurring my vision. Iblink, expecting to find bony fingers plucking at me. Instead, I discover a storage crate, one of those floating freely, the shattered and sharp edge of it rubbing against my upper arm.
Not quite hard enough to create a tear, but a risk nonetheless. I bat it away from me carefully and then turn to look to my right, breath caught painfully in my chest.
A flap of translucent plastic sheeting glows white in my helmet light, and above that, a frayed and shredded safety strap dangles its loose black threads over the plastic.
My breath escapes in a rush and a slightly hysterical laugh. “Holy shit.”
“What is it?” Kane demands. “Is someone there?”
I shake my head, even though he won’t really be able to see the motion. “No, no. I just saw movement, that plastic sheeting, and freaked myself out.” Add to that the low-level dread of being trapped on theAurora,Kane’s warnings about possible cannibalistic passengers, and blood on the wall behind Voller’s head, and it’s a wonder I didn’t imagine a whole ship’s worth of ghosts.
“Come on, seriously?” Voller complains.
“Shut up,” Kane and I both say at the same time.
Though… why my mother? And why would I imagine her screaming? She was always very calm, controlled, even at the end.
What about after the end?A tiny voice whispers in my head, and I grit my teeth until they squeak to make that voice shut up.
It was nothing. Just stress and the product of an active imagination in a life-or-death situation. That’s what the Verux therapist’s official diagnosis was, and it had to be. End of story.
“Next time you’re going to have a meltdown over floating garbage, how about a little heads-up?” Voller says to me. But, keeping one hand on the airlock door, he reaches out and grabs my hand to pull me down with him when I drift close enough. And then he nudges me into the airlock ahead of him.
Working together, with our feet braced against the wall, we manage to pull the door shut behind us. Manual cycling to equalize thepressure without any power involves a hand crank, but eventually, the switch flips and the outer door leading to the corridor pops open silently.
“We’re in,” I say.
For a second, I feel the urge to rub at my eyes to make sure I’m actually awake. I spent so many hours dreaming about being on this ship, being part of the crew—before it disappeared. And after? How many hundreds, if not thousands, of people had dedicated months and years of their lives to a search that would allow them to be the ones standing right here? At the threshold of the most famous missing ship ever, about to discover what happened.
But instead, it’s us.
I shiver a little in awe and maybe anticipatory dread.
