“All right,” Kane says, taking a slow breath.
“We can do this,” I say, as much for myself as for him. “It’s not real. None of it is real.” Except I’m not really so sure about that.
We finish out the starboard side in just under an hour and find nothing. The emergency oxygen tanks and masks are still in place. There is no convenient handwritten journal for us to peruse. We find more old-fashioned tablets and ear-comm devices, but the charge is long gone in them. I take a couple of them anyway, in case we ever reach a point where we can spare the energy to keep the lights onandcharge them.
In the crew bunk room, though, I’m rummaging through the personal products in the one unlocked trunk when something familiar catches my eye. Several sets of bright orange foam earplugs in sealed plastic packets.
I pick up one of the packets. “I’ve seen ones like these before. I think the first officer was—”
“I didn’t! Isabelle, I would never!”
I look up to find Kane pleading with an empty bunk, his gaze at eye level with… nothing.
“Kane,” I say. “Kane!”
He looks up, tears running down his face, but he doesn’t seem to see me.
I drop the earplugs and run toward him. I’m reaching for his shoulder to shake him when someone screams, the sound piercing even through the partially closed door.
I go still, uncertain. I don’t know whether it’s real or…
Kane shifts. “Did you hear that?”
“The scream?” I ask, just to clarify. But he seems more focused now.
“Yes.”
“I did,” I confirm. Which means there’s a slightly better chance that it actually—
Another scream comes, followed by shouting. “Stop, stop! Voller! Help me!”
“That’s Nysus,” I say, bolting for the door. The bridge is directly across from us.
“I’ll be right back, sweetie,” Kane says, presumably to the hallucination of his daughter.
Fuck. Fuck. I keep going, not waiting to see if he’s behind me.
But once I’m in the corridor, I stop. The commotion—Lourdes sobbing, I think, and Nysus arguing with… Voller?—is not coming from the bridge. It’s farther away.
When I round the corner to the portside corridor suites, I find them and the sight stops me dead for a moment.
Nysus and Lourdes are yanking at Voller, who is struggling to get away from them, back to the bulkhead doors. The plasma drill—ourplasma drill—is raised in his right hand. A half dozen blackened spots—one or two still glowing red at their center—show his efforts against the metal.
“If we just let them in, they’ll stop knocking,” Voller says, sounding remarkably calm. “It’ll all stop.”
“You can’t open the doors, you’ll kill us!” Nysus shouts.
Voller throws an elbow toward Nysus, connecting with his temple hard, and Nysus just drops, like someone cut his strings. He doesn’t move to get back up. Doesn’t move at all.
Lourdes maintains her grip on Voller’s T-shirt, trying to haul him back. But he’s too strong for her, reaching up to apply the drill oncemore. I’m terrified he’s going to get annoyed with her and simply reach back and aim that drill at her instead.
I sprint down the hallway, trying to focus on the scene in front of me through the off-on-off pattern of the lights. With that added element, everyone seems to be moving in hyper-speed except me.
When I finally reach them, I shove into Voller from the side, knocking him partially into Lourdes and then all of us to the floor.
Breathless from the impact, I struggle to sit up and reach for the drill, which was thrown loose from Voller’s hand and is now lying near the base of the door, the bright blue plasma melting the carpet and creating another black spot on the metal.
But I’m a second too late. Voller shoves past me and reaches it before I do. He grabs it and swings up, forcing me to scramble backward.
