Amongst the debris, scorched bots floated. Several had been fused together in the heat of the explosion and formed a ball floating in the space before them. Why were bots up here?
On the other side, it was called the gate room. She did not want to call this the gate room. Those words were accompanied by a sense of awe. On the mirror side, this room brought only waves of revulsion. There was nothing reverent in the array of debris and the sickening smells and the wafting smoke.
On the mirror-side… She thought about that word. They had done just that—passed into a mirrored version of their world, as if passing through the glass itself.
If the other side was the gate room, then this was the mirror room. “The mirror room,” she muttered aloud.
Blip paused, his pace already slowed by the growing amount of debris in their way. “Huh?”
“This side is a mirror image.
“Through a glass darkly…” Blip quoted.
“Paul,” she said.
“You remember.”
Syn pulled at a piece of debris. As it spun, a ghastly visage stared up at her. Syn gave a startled gasp.
Blip halted and spun toward her and then followed her stare.
The debris she had just moved around was not metal. It was a body. Burned and ravaged beyond recognizability.
Syn swam around it. The body was still. No breathing. It continued its rotation until it faced away from them, and Syn felt a wash of relief as the face disappeared from view.
Blip nudged it. “It’s dead.”
“Scanned it?”
“Very dead. But that’s not all.”
The body slowly rotated until it faced up again.
“Oh,” said Syn as she caught a look at the blackened face. There was no surprise this time as she studied the corpse. She had seen her share of dead bodies. They were everywhere until Blip had programmed some dumb bots to haul them off to the body farms. Even years past their clearing of the Disc, they still found an occasional set of bones in the wild, its flesh torn from it by the animals roaming free.
“It’s a child,” Syn said.
Blip nodded. “Maybe. About your height. I think it’s a girl. Caught in this fire.”
“Was this the person we heard tapping?”
Blip wobbled his head in a gesture reminiscent of a shrug, even though he had no shoulders. “Maybe.”
Syn’s eyes went wide. “She was still alive then. You knew about the hatch. You could’ve rescued her. We could’ve rescued her.”
“No.”
“Yes! You lied, and we let the only other person on this ship die.”
“We would’ve been caught in this fire.”
“She was alive after the explosion.”
“The fire came much later.” Blip motioned around them and then at the iris. From the mirror side, the iris bubbled out. “Someone’s tried to punch their way through. This junk, the explosion, the fire. All attempts at getting through. Look at the blades.”
Syn did. The iris blades were scratched and dented up and down.
“Oh. The debris. They’re throwing these machines at the gate.”
“And bots,” Blip said.
Syn looked around, examining the burned bots. Eye-bots. Cleaning bots. Medics. A whole host of various bots. They were all deactivated—empty shells. They had been used as cannon fodder as well. Hundreds of dead bots.
“Oh,” Syn said.
“Someone wants through, Syn.”
“It wasn’t her.”
“I don’t know.”
“Did the companion bot come from here?” Syn asked the question that had been pressing on her the whole journey over.
“Maybe,” Blip said. Then after a moment, “Probably.”
They floated around the corpse, staring at the charred hide of the girl. What features she had had were all melted down to the blackened layer upon the skull.
“What do you think she was like?” Syn asked. She moved a hand up to the corpse’s face and rested the back of it against the dark cheek.
But Blip stayed silent. Perhaps he’d venture a guess later. Maybe the girl enjoyed singing. Or swimming. But this was not the time for jokes, even if they weren’t intended to be jokes. “I don’t know,” the bot said. “I don’t know at all.”
Blip floated away and up toward the dented bubble. It served as a small cave from this side. After a moment, he said, “Syn, come here.”
She followed and glancing back once to the corpse floating along amongst the garbage.
Inside the dent, someone had scrawled letters. A thin finger had pushed the soot away and left clean metal behind.
SHES COMI was written in large block letters.
“What’s it mean? Did she write it?”
“She’s coming?”
“Me? Was she talking about me?” Syn put both hands to the side of Blip’s head. “How would she know about me?”
Blip started to pull away and then recognized Syn’s fear. He pushed closer, “She didn’t mean you.” His voice was calm, assured. He might’ve meant the words. Perhaps even believed them.
Across the room, something large grunted.
Blip moved and shut off his lights. He darted back and nudged Syn over. He whispered, “Drop to the sides. Stay behind the big garbage. Quiet.”
Syn started to speak and Blip gave a sharp, “Shh.”
Something grunted again, and it was answered by another grunt. The two sounds were moving across the room in their direction, but slowly.
Blip dropped down and Syn grabbed hold of him, palming the top of his head, gripping onto the sides of his head as he pulled them both down. In seconds, they were out of the glow of the red lanterns and engulfed in shadows.
Blip allowed one word, “Quiet.”
Above them, near the center of the room, two large shapes moved. They had arms, legs. Humans. But they were twice Syn’s size in the least. She put a hand to her mouth. Again, the only phrase that came to mind was “Space Pirates.” She knew they weren’t. She knew it was outlandish, but the image kept rolling around in her head. She imagined their large craft jutting out of Olorun’s hull far down the way and the lumbering brutes piling out, looking to steal things.
But this was not a raiding party. There were just two of them. They seemed massive and moved without grace: burly, large, human-like creatures.
They grunted back and forth. At one point, the grunts become aggressive, and Syn was certain the two were going to start pummeling each other. They paused in the air above them and squared off. Syn stayed perfectly still, fearful they’d spy something from the corner of their eyes.
Did they have eyes?
They moved back toward the far wall, away from the iris. Syn was confused. Had the two things heard Blip and her? What were they looking for? They hadn’t taken anything. Their exit was slow and even after she could no longer hear them, their grunting conversation was still loud.
She and Blip huddled behind a large chunk of debris. Syn rested her hand on the trash and felt a familiar smooth texture—a coated plastic that felt as if it had been polished to prime. An Ogun. She felt a pang of regret. They had destroyed an Ogun. She loved her Ogun, and she thought all of them were the best toys she could find.
She couldn’t tell what color this was. It had a similar pin striping along the side, but the gray diamond design that intermittently scattered on hers was absent. So not her Ogun. Not even the mirror of her Ogun.
This was not a mirror world, she told herself. Despite the similarities, this wasn’t just the opposite world. She shook her head, trying to remove the cobwebs of confusion. No matter what she did, she couldn’t escape the mess that they had appeared in an alternate, polar world from the one they had been in.
This wasn’t fantasy. Not the Hobbit. Not Harry Potter. This was real. This was another gate room, and those were real monsters and a dead girl, and they had all been on the same ship that she’d grown up in.