Taking the fixture off the wall is going to be the easiest way.
Carefully, I locate the screws and work them loose with myscrewdriver until the entire fixture comes loose. After disconnecting it from the wires behind, I grab for it before it can float away, my gloved fingers locking around one of the brass arms with an old-fashioned bulb at the end. It surely isn’t a real incandescent but made to look like one, which was, once, made to look like flame. A reproduction of an expensive, wasteful technology, simply for that exclusive ambience that certain passengers were willing to pay for it. To show that theycouldpay for it.
Taking a deep breath, with my hand tight on the fixture, I push off the nightstand toward the door. Cattie floats along behind me, like an obscene balloon on a string.
When I have to catch myself at the door to make sure we will both fit through, her body collides with mine, that solid, impenetrable mass smashing right up against me. Only my tightened grip on the wooden doorframe keeps me from flying out into the corridor, all tangled up with Cattie and the chain around her neck.
“Mark the door,” I say to Kane through clenched teeth because it’s taking more effort than I thought it would to keep from screaming.
Then I lead Cattie out and down to the atrium. At least she’ll be with her sister out here, outside the bulkhead doors. Though, it seems perhaps neither of them would be happy about that.
When I return, Kane has twoXs on the door in the red tape we use to flag potential trouble areas on a beacon.
I look to him in question. He’s waiting with the key outside the next suite. “Why two?”
“So we’ll know if we’ve searched it and if it was… occupied,” he says with a grimace.
That suite and the one after it are both empty. Kane and I search them carefully, just in case. Checking the shower and the closets.
In the third, however, no search is necessary. An older man with a graying beard and a much younger woman, her glossy dark hair drifting around her face, rest on the bed together, so peaceful looking that it’s almost possible to ignore the fact that they’re floating several inches above the mattress. And that their wrists are boundto handles on the nightstands on either side of the bed and to each other in the middle. Ties, belts, shoelaces, all strung together to keep them in place.
The room is tidy, spotless, except for the two of them, and a water glass spinning through the air along with several small white packets. I pull one from the air as it drifts past me.
“Sleeping pills,” I say. “From theAurora’s MedBay, it looks like.”
But Kane isn’t listening, his attention fixed on the couple on the bed, more specifically the man. “I think this is Andrew Davies,” Kane says flatly. “He looks… like the images I remember.”
“And presumably not his wife,” I say.
“Presumably.”
He doesn’t say anything else for a long moment. Not every day you come across someone you admired frozen (in this case, literally) in their last moments.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Why did they tie themselves down?”
“The gravity,” I begin.
“No, look.” He points to their wrists, which are scraped raw and bloodied. “At some point, they were trying to get free.”
It is, unfortunately, yet another scenario that doesn’t make sense and likely won’t without more information.
“Any luck on the ship’s log or remnants of it?” I ask Voller.
“Negative,” he responds. “It’s gone. That has to be deliberate.”
“Ny?” I ask.
He makes a humming-thinking noise. “Usually if there was corruption in a file, we’d see evidence of that.” In the background, I hear Lourdes murmuring to him as they work. “But it may be part of a larger data loss. I’ll have to check once I’m on board.”
In the next suite’s bathroom, a woman is frozen in a chunk of water near the ceiling that was once a bath in the tub. It’s hard to know if she drowned when the gravity generator shut off or if she was already dead by that point. Her expression, though, one of permanent surprise, leads me to believe it was the former.
“That’s Princess Margaretha of Sweden,” Nysus says quietly.
The gold faucet on the sink across from her catches my attention, and a pang of ingrained longing hits hard. It’s both smaller and more dramatic in reality. The gold gleams in our helmet lights, the nameAuroracarved in dark swirling letters on both sides. It sets off a strange sense of dislocation in my brain. Like it can’t be real. Or I’m not.
But maybe that’s just because of the dead princess floating in the corner.
