“What did you think I came for?” I ask.
She shakes her head slightly.
“Squishy,” I say, “what did you think I was asking?”
“I want to destroy it,” she says after a moment. “I deserve to destroy it. After all, it nearly destroyed me.”
I can say nothing to that. Squishy doesn’t look destroyed to me. She looks like a successful woman, a pillar in her community. People love her here. I’ve discovered that in my few days in Vallevu. They love her and they don’t understand why I am here.
I’m beginning to wonder that myself.
I leave her because we have reached an impasse. She won’t help me destroy the ship if she can’t place the charges. And I’m going to be the only one who places the bomb.
Too many other people have died in my place. Some of the early divers I’ve lost, I lost because we didn’t know how to properly run a dive. I can cope with that. We made mistakes, and any one of us could have died.
A few others died because of their own stupidity. I don’t blame myself for that either. I’m not responsible for every stupid act someone pulls.
But Jypé and Junior died for my greed, because I thought I knew best. I didn’t investigate enough. If anyone should have died in that wreck, it was me.
Only, as I later discovered, I couldn’t have died there. I was the only one on board who could have investigated stealth tech, and I was the one who didn’t dive that wreck enough to get to the tech first. I could have survived the tech. I could have pulled the debris away from the field and found the probe. I would have seen the danger, and warned the others away.
No one would have died.
I blame myself for their deaths, for not giving them enough information about the dive, and for not listening to Squishy.
But that’s not the death that bothers me. Karl bothers me. He died in my place, doing my job. Granted, we had discussed the dangers, and we both thought we understood them. But Karl had no chance of surviving the Room. Even without knowing the information my father and Riya Trekov kept secret, we knew that I had a chance of survival because I had survived the Room before.
I don’t know how to tell Squishy about these things. I can’t let her go into that cockpit. I can’t let her plant any bombs. She would be going in my place, no matter how much she says she deserves it, and I can’t let her do that.
I can’t let someone else die in my place.
Too many have died already.
I pace my hotel room, trying to think of a way to get Squishy to work with me instead of trying to take over the mission. The hotel room itself is uncomfortable, partly because it’s on land.
I’ve had several nightmares here, each worse than the last. First I see my mother drift. Then I hear the music for hours, and I wake to silence, clutching my ears. Finally, I dream repeatedly of Karl, his voice slowing as he realizes that he’s trapped and we’ll never find him, even though he’s only a few meters away.
In my nights here, I switch between the bed and the couch. The bed is soft and covered with blankets. It looks inviting. After I found Squishy, I napped here and forced myself awake as the first nightmare came on.
So I moved the half dozen pillows to the couch in the front room of the suite and slept there, thinking I wouldn’t get comfortable enough to sleep soundly. I dreamt more in that half sleep than I would have in a full sleep, so I moved back to the bed again.
The room itself has a view of the mountains and the sky. I can program everything from thousands of plays and holovids and readings that play on the wall across from the bed to the bed itself. I can make it softer or firmer, raise it up or let it flatten against the floor. I can even change its length and width—within the confines of the room, of course.
But the one thing I can’t program is the environment. Sure, I can change the temperature and the humidity. But I can’t change the gravity, and I can’t make the room feel like it’s on a ship, hurtling through space. If I could do that—if I could make the room feel like it’s traveling far from here—I would be able to sleep.
Being in the room only adds to my frustration. I leave, heading to the restaurant across the street.
The hotel has its own restaurant, but it’s like restaurants in a thousand other places, with a generic menu designed to appeal to people from all over the system. The restaurant across the street has local cuisine, using local ingredients, and I have fallen in love with one of the omelets, made with homegrown tomatoes and mint. I don’t recognize the cheese placed on top, but it adds a tang that only accents the mint.
The restaurant never closes. On my first night in the hotel, I came here after fighting the nightmares and ordered the best meal in the house, letting the chef decide what that was. He asked me what I needed, and I said comfort food, and somehow he figured out the kind of meal that soothed me.
From then on, I was hooked on the place. I’ve come often enough to become known as Rosealma’s friend. No one here calls her Squishy, and I’m careful not to. I don’t want to explain how she got the nickname.
To the people here, she’s a nice woman, a good doctor, someone who cares for the children.
And the children are the issue. Late one night, when I couldn’t sleep, I asked the owner about Squishy’s children. It wasn’t as abrupt as it sounds. The owner, a tall, slender woman who has a knack for listening, was doing an inventory—which mostly meant carrying a handheld and letting it examine each shelf.
The work wasn’t engaging her, so she asked me questions: Who was I? Why was I visiting Rosealma? How long had it been since I’d seen her?
I answered some questions truthfully. I told her that I ran my own business and that Squishy (although I said Rosealma) had once worked for me. I needed to get away after the sudden death of a colleague, and I realized that Squishy probably hadn’t heard the news.
Rather than send her an impersonal message, I brought the news myself, as an excuse to travel here and see the Vallevu I had heard so much about.
I don’t know if the owner believed me. But when it became clear that she wanted to know more than I was willing to tell her, I gradually shifted the conversation away from myself and onto Squishy.
“She worked as a medic for me,” I said. “Yet I was surprised to see she had a private practice here.”
“She’s a good doctor,” the owner said. “People love her. I got the sense she hated field medicine.”
“She did,” I say, “because you can only work with what you’ve brought and what’s at hand.”
The owner was quiet for a moment after that. I wasn’t sure if she was listening to her own memories or if she assumed I was stuck inside mine. Or maybe she was done asking me questions, having gleaned enough information to pass onto the locals about the strange friend of Rosealma’s who arrived in town unexpectedly.
“The children surprised me too,” I said. “Some of them are too old to be Rosealma’s.”
“They’re all hers,” the owner said. “She cares for them. She’s raising them.”
“They can’t all be hers,” I said.
The woman gave me a withering look. “Biologically, they’re not,” she said. “But Rosealma loves them as her own.”
“Orphans, then?”
She shrugged a shoulder and the conversation ended there. No matter how many times I tried to engage her, on how many future nights, I wasn’t able to.
Now I’m hunched over my omelet, a cup of the best coffee I’ve had steaming beside my hand. The owner sits at the counter. She’s watching me, and I get the sense that she wants to ask me a question but doesn’t know how.