I clear my throat. “I was coming to find you because when I woke up, I saw something. The woman we pulled from under one of the beds? The one with the blindfold?”
“Yeah,” he says, his face inscrutable.
I brace myself for his reaction and then tell him everything. How she tried to grab me. How she was trying to breathe.
He starts to speak, but I cut him off. “She was gone when I looked again. It was… it wasn’t real. A hallucination.” I hate admitting it, my own brokenness. “I don’t think I did anything to Lourdes. The timing is… I don’t know. But I can’t, obviously, guarantee—” I cut myself off and get to the point. “I think you need to relieve me of duty.” I force the words out. “For the safety of everyone else.”
“That’s why you were coming to the bridge,” Kane says slowly. “To tell me to relieve you of duty.”
“Yes.” It is a relief to admit it aloud.
“But you didn’t see Lourdes in the corridor.” Clearly he’s working up to something else, though I don’t know what.
“No.” I hesitate, then add, “Not that I remember.”
“So, you think that you somehow sleepwalked out here and led Lourdes down a hall of horrors, opening doors for her? And she somehow kept losing track of you in a space of, what, two hundred feet?”
“I don’t have any other explanation, so—”
“Bullshit.”
That sparks my temper. “It’s not bullshit,” I snap at him. “Do you know what happened on Ferris, Kane?”
“It’s in your file, Claire,” he says tiredly. “Of course I—”
“No, you have the official diagnosis, all the post-game analysis. But you have no idea what really happened. I killed those people. I knew what quarantine meant.” I can still see the tape in my mind. The big block letters in white on the blue background, strung across the hab door. “I broke protocols, crossing into the contaminated zone. Because I was selfish and I wanted to see my friend.”
He flinches but shakes his head. “You were a child.”
“My friend who’d been dead for two days by that point,” I add, daring him to challenge that.
His mouth opens, but nothing comes out and I feel a gritty sense of satisfaction.
I can picture it in my head. Becca still in her nightgown, maybe a little quieter and more distracted than usual. I was just happy to have my friend back. And to not have to cover her shifts in the greenhouse for much longer.
Me chattering away in that too-silent hab.
“I didn’t know she was dead, didn’t realize anything was even wrong, not until people were rushing me out of there into MedBay and decontamination.” I give him a tight smile. “I was seeing things before I was trapped on the outpost with the dead. It’s not PTSD or a mental break due to stress. I am fucked up.” I pause. “Remember when I panicked, getting off the LINA into the shuttle bay here?” I don’t wait for his answer. “It’s because I saw my mother. My long-dead mother screaming at me.”
His eyes go wide.
Yeah, exactly.
I sink to the floor in exhaustion. “When I was seventeen, almost out of the group home and waiting to find out if I’d be accepted into the Verux training program, I caused a ten-car pileup on Highway 5. A man in the middle of the road was calling for help. I went and by the time I got there… he was just gone. I didn’t even see the cars until after. They swerved to avoid me, collided with each other.” The safety mechanisms on mag-lev vehicles are programmed to preserve pedestrian life. So they did, at great cost.
The smell of burning metal and rubber singes the inside of my nose, startling me into alertness. Shiny metal suddenly all around me, tipped over and smashed, like a war zone that I’d been dropped into without warning. A woman is sobbing, and somewhere, in one of those wrecks, a moan of pain, followed by nothing but silence.
“Thousands of dollars in damage and people were badly injured.” I smile tightly. “Verux kept it quiet.”
“Claire,” Kane begins, but with hesitance in his voice. I can’t look at him. I might see the fear growing on his face, and that might kill me.
“She never said, but I think my mom took the Ferris job in the first place because I kept seeing my father everywhere after hedied.” I take a deep breath. “I scared her. So, we moved to a whole other planet. And poof, no more Daddy.” I wave my hands, like a magician finishing a trick.
“Stress and trauma seem to make this worse, whateverthisis. And the more people are around, the more… stuff I see. That’s why I took this job, out here, away from everyone. Why I wanted this sector that no one else wants.” I shake my head. “It doesn’t happen much anymore, not when everything’s normal. But right now? I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not. Which means I am a danger. And I cannot take the risk of hurting anyone again. Youneedto remove me from the equation until we’re back.”
I’m breathing hard from the exertion of speaking words I’ve never said aloud to anyone and with such conviction behind them.
But when he speaks, it’s not the resigned acknowledgment or angry accusation I’m expecting.
