“Kane?” My voice is unsteady. “Did you copy that?”
“We hear it too,” Kane says. “Get back here, now.”
The noise grows louder before I can respond. Except it’s more than just a noise—this is the sound and sensation of movement, a giant shaking itself awake.
Fear dries my mouth, but I force the words out. “Voller, do you copy?” I ask, scaling down from the pillar, leavingGracedangling by that last remaining screw. “Answer me, goddamnit.”
No reply.
We haven’t seen anyone else, and conditions in the areas we’ve searched so far would seem to make life here improbable, if not impossible. But worry clutches at me all the same. If someone survived out here for this long, they would not likely be sane.
“Nysus, switch over to Voller’s feed,” I say.
“I’m trying, TL, but it’s not—”
Then without warning, a warm buttery glow pours down from above. I automatically throw my arms up to protect my eyes. It’s like going from midnight to midday in a blink.
I lower my arm slowly as my eyes adjust. And it takes me a second to process what’s going on. “The lights are on,” I say in wonder.
“TL, that noise, I’m pretty sure that was the engines rebooting,” Nysus says, restrained panic in his voice. “Someone flipped the switch.”
“But how is that—” I start to ask, but stop when a shadow drifts over me, blocking the light temporarily. Followed by another, and then another. Almost like fan blades passing through a patch of sunlight, only more irregular.
The helmets on our suits make it almost impossible to look directly up, so I have to grab hold of the post and tilt myself backward until I can see.
My lungs lock up tight, and I can’t move, can’t breathe, for a moment. I blink, trying to will the image away or turn it back into its component pieces, as it did when I thought I saw my mother in the cargo bay.
But this… this is no hallucination.
“Oh my God,” Kane whispers. “You found them.”
At the spot where the enormous dome joins the hull and all the way into the dome’s slightly rounded peak where the light shines down, dozens, maybe as many as a hundred, bodies hover above me, in a graceless ballet.
The ones closest to me, their eyes are open, their mouths contorted and frozen in a rictus of terror. They’re dressed in all manner of clothing—evening gowns, tuxedos, bathrobes, lacy lingerie, pajamas, swim trunks, and the dark blueAuroracrew uniforms—and their skin is covered by a thin layer of frost and tinted bluish-purple, especially around their mouths. They were clearly alive when the environmentals went out.
One woman drifts over, her long lavender-dyed hair floating around her close enough to be within easy reach when I was at thetop of the pillar, working to releaseGrace. She’s one of those in anAurora-branded bathrobe, the ship’s name embroidered in a discreet but swirly font across the left side, the dirty white fabric knotted tightly at her waist.
It is only luck—and timing—that her hair didn’t brush over me as she passed.
But on closer inspection, she is slightly different from the others.
Her lavender hair has turned a deep burgundy near her temple, a trickle of blood frozen in an aborted drip down her cheek. One red-painted palm is up by her head, as if she was applying pressure when the gravity betrayed her.
But in her other hand? A six-inch butcher’s knife, one that must be from theAurora’s kitchens. The shiny blade projects out, away from her lax hand, but the wooden handle is bound to her wrist, in layers upon layers of duct tape that scream desperation.
The knife itself isn’t a big surprise. Depending on what went down and how, it’s easy to imagine some passengers feeling the need to defend themselves. But that tape, turning a temporary weapon into a semipermanent accessory, that says something else entirely.
8
Silence holds over the channel in my helmet for a long moment, my harsh, uneven breathing filling all the empty space, drowning out even the noise that might be the engines.
Then an explosion of voices, talking over one another.
“—out of there right now,” Kane says.
“—dead. What happened to them? What happened to them?” Lourdes demands, her voice breaking.
“I think that’s Opal Dunleavy.” Nysus’s soft astonishment and very near gleeful delight comes through quite clearly. “She looksexactlythe same as she did on the show. Minus the knife, I mean. And the head wound.”
