Lourdes’s side of the bed is empty, her blanket bunched up between us where she’d evidently tossed it aside. Nowhere near my ankles. The comforter beneath me is now bunched and rumpled from my panicked movement, half hanging onto the floor.
A dream? It has to have been. A subconscious manifestation of all my anxieties and past traumas.
But as I sit there, crouched at the head of the bed, mouth dry and head throbbing, I realize I can still hear it. The uneven hissing sound. Only it’s not coming from the ventilation system.
It’s closer than that. And—oh, Jesus—underneath me?
Underneath the bed. Worse, now that I’m focused on it, the noise sounds familiar. Iknowthat sound. Not the continuous wheeze of a trashed-up vent, but the rasp of an inhale, followed by a pause, and then a labored exhale. It’s someone struggling to breathe. I listened to that noise for weeks on Ferris, while my mother tried to save the colonists. And then after, when I was alone and there was no one left to save, but somehow, I could still hear them.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. It can’t be.
I squeeze my eyes shut for a second, waiting for the click, the recognition that this is a dream. But I can feel the ridged wallpaper pressing into my back through my jumpsuit. The glossy finish of the headboard is slick beneath my sweaty palms clutching at it for balance.
We searched these rooms. We checked under every bed.
Did we? Or did we miss one?
Nothing is alive on this ship. Nothing could have survived. It’s not possible. So, it shouldn’t matter.
Except it seems to.
I draw in a breath, hold it for a count of four, and then let it out—a Verux-child-therapist-endorsed measure to stave off panic attacks. Though instead of helping this time, it only heightens my awareness of the similarity of the sounds beneath the bed.
It’s just some system on the ship. Something I don’t recognize. It’sjust… I don’t know what it could be. But it’s notthat…it’s not a person.
It cannot be.
Cautiously, I release the headboard and inch toward the foot of the bed, across the inordinately soft mattress that makes my balance wobbly.
The noise doesn’t change as I move, not even when I yank the edge of the comforter away from the floor where it hides the start of the shadowed gap beneath the bed. That newly revealed space shows nothing but another patch of cream-colored carpeting.
Of course there’s nothing.
Feeling stupid, I bend over the edge of the bed slowly, compelled to tip my head down to check the gap between the floor and the bed. I can’t help it, even though I know I’ll find only a larger stretch of empty carpet or perhaps some kind of additional in-room heater or air ionizer or humidifier. Some fancy “necessity” that the Platinum people might have needed or been expected to need.
So, when my eyes first meet hers—the blank space where hers should be, where that strip of torn white sheet covers them instead—I freeze for that extra second, my brain trying to make sense of what I’m seeing with what I expected to see.
My lungs lock up, holding me hostage.
Her face is an ugly shade of gray, her lips a dark purple and moving as she gasps for air in the shadowed recess beneath the bed. Her head turns from side to side as she struggles, revealing the frayed white edges sticking out from her ears.
I can’t move, can’t speak, a scream caught tight in my throat, like an interminable lump that I cannot swallow or expel.
But then she seems to sense my presence, her head stilling, focusing. She reaches toward me blindly, her hand shooting out faster than I expected, clawing toward my face. Her nails are ragged, dark, lined with thick, unknown substances.
I hurl myself backward, away from the edge of the bed and up to my feet to bolt.
Or, I try. But the softness of the mattress colludes with the tangle of the now-jumbled comforter, making it impossible to run. My balance is off, and a loop of bedding catches around my foot, and I fall. Off the bed, over the side.
16
My head hits first, a glancing blow against the sharp edge of the far corner of the nightstand, and pain is a lightning bolt, quick and razor-sharp, through my skull.
My shoulders and back slam into the ground next, knocking the air out of my lungs. I arch up off the carpeting instinctively, struggling for breath. But it will not come. It’s as if the front and back sides of my lungs have been squeezed together and are now stuck, unable to inflate.
I scrabble my fingers frantically against the carpet, searching for I don’t know what. My vision begins to darken, unconsciousness threatening. And right as I’m convinced that I’m going to pass out or suffocate, unable to move with that… woman just inches away and likely clawing her way toward me, something unlocks in my chest and I gasp. Air floods in, sweet and light.
Pushing against the bed with my legs, I scoot myself away. Not far, not nearly far enough. But it’s all I can do.
