I know that voice. But from where, from when? Was it my mother’s boyfriend? The one I shot? I doubt it. But in my haze I remember Mom lying in bed covered with bruises after he beat her up, and I’m thinking, No more of this—no more of him, not ever, why does she put up with it?
And now—
Vera has awakened some of us personally. There’s a look of concern on her face as she shakes us one by one. It takes hard shaking for some—for DJ in particular, but also for Joe and Tak.
We’ve all just had the crap beaten out of us.
“What the hell happened?” Joe asks. “Christ, I’m bloody! So are you.”
“Yeah,” Tak says ruefully. “I couldn’t fight back.”
He looks at me as he tries to flex life into his limbs. I touch my own face, feeling the swollen lips and cheeks, the crusted blood. We examine DJ. Blood and bruises all over. My sight is returning in a spotty manner, as if I’m looking through a slatted window.
How did I let it happen? What is this, some sort of sympathetic response, welting and pain as my mind is probed by Gurus? Feels wrong, feels crazy. They say you don’t remember pain, but new pain flares with every move I make. Something or someone struck me repeatedly. Someone I once knew.
Someone almost human.
So I lean into the memories and bring it all back—the smiling, heavily scarred face leaning over me in the gloom, the same piggy eyes and interrupted eyebrows, but now with nose almost smashed flat. Long since healed but pug-uglier than I remember him.
“Did you see him?” DJ asks. “He was laughing. Really enjoying himself. Then the squids moved in and tried to separate everybody. Man, you wouldn’t know they can’t fight.”
“Someone we knew,” I say. “I couldn’t wake up.”
“Sudbury! Fucking Grover Sudbury!” DJ shouts, expelling a fine spray of blood. “He and some other fuckers.”
“Some human, some not,” Joe says through broken lips. He holds his head as if it needs to be glued back together. “The searchers stopped them from killing us.”
The smile, the words, the delight Sudbury took in striking me with the back of his gnarly hand, over and over.
Ishida approaches carefully out of the fairy light. She points to the cubbies and cane bridges. “A lot of searchers. Looks like they tried to protect us.”
“They fought?” Tak asks.
“They died.”
Borden emerges from her cubby, the entrance of which has almost been blocked by a dead searcher. She shoves it into a slow, broken-armed spin. “What the hell happened here?”
“I knew we shouldn’t have waited!” Tak cries out.
“What do you think, Venn?” Borden asks.
“It was Sudbury,” I confirm. “Not alone. Another human and as DJ says, a couple of things. Not human.”
“Not Antag?”
I shake my head. “Didn’t see any.”
There are maybe five dead searchers in the ribbon space, up between the clock faces, in the canes—hacked, carved, gouged. Three more are spaced before the curtain, still alive, sighing and flexing. One isn’t moving and is being examined by its fellows. The plates along its skin are flaccid, peeling away. Who would be strong enough to kill a squid? I’ve felt the grip of their arms and can imagine what they could do to defend themselves.
Tak runs another inventory on DJ’s face, his hands. Then me. “Did a real number,” he murmurs, flexing my jaw, prodding my cheek. My whole face seems to explode, and I jerk away, but he says, “Nothing broken I can feel.”
Ishikawa and Jacobi seem barely touched. Ishida checks over Litvinov and Bilyk, but Bilyk shakes her off with an accusing look.
“Four of you seem to have borne the brunt of injuries,” Kumar says.
“I still don’t remember,” Joe says.
Vera shakes her head with cold anger. Then she takes me by the arm. Her hand is tight and wiry, firm. “She will speak with you, if you can go, if you can move.”
“Just me?”
“Just you,” Vera says. The others watch suspiciously.
“I’ll go,” I say. “I can move.”
“I’d like to come,” Borden says.
“No,” Vera says, and leads me toward the curtain. The searchers move the bodies and themselves aside. I try to keep from crying out in pain, but Tak’s right, there are no broken bones—I think.
The curtain gets closer. After what I’ve been through, I don’t want to touch it, or it to touch me. I turn my face aside, lean my head back, and one hand grips the other, to keep it from flailing.
“No fear,” Vera says.
We pass through. Feels like thin cotton wool, like a warm breeze. Vera tugs my arm again. “Rules change. Queen can explain!”
Rules change? Now the rules allow Grover Sudbury to come back from the dead and beat the crap out of me, out of us, and start murdering searchers? Is the ship’s brain breaking free of Ulyanova and trying to kill us all and regain control?
Vera seems to read my mind. “Ship does not care,” she says. “Ship goes, ship makes. It makes for Queen, for starshina. She is waiting.”
The smoky fog swirls and for a second I feel my stomach heave up emptiness… but then my feet touch floor. Flat floor. Things have reliable direction, up and down. I stand. The nausea fades. Ahead, a plaster wall shapes itself and corners with the floor. The floor spreads before me a paint of cracked, chipped, dirty black-and-white ceramic tile. The tile acquires a shallow depth and detail. What’s left of the grout is dark with dirt, as if it’s never been scrubbed.
Arrives before us a wainscot with a beat-up wooden strip and worn wallpaper printed with tiny flowers. The floor and wall become part of a long hallway that smells of cabbage and bacon. I hear voices from down the hallway, tinny laughter—children shouting.
“Ship cares not much about us,” Vera says. “But she is still Queen. You cannot know how much it hurts her!”
Vera opens a wood-panel door. We step through. Beyond lies a small apartment: three tiny, overheated rooms, a kitchen to the right, half-hidden in dark orange light, where someone makes sharp noises with pots and dishes. An old refrigerator sticks out of the kitchen, humming and buzzing. Through another door, half-open, I see a bedroom, a small bed on a gray pipe frame, paint flaking.
I’m more than half-convinced I’m going through another instauration—but this time, perhaps not mine. Maybe Ulyanova’s or Vera’s.
I tongue my mouth and realize I’ve lost a couple of teeth. Through all of my childhood and my adventures with Joe, through Mars and training back on Earth, I never lost teeth. Fuck, that’s a mortal insult.
Shoes are neatly paired beside the foot of the bed, men’s shoes, and a short, flower-print dress has been draped across the gray and pink quilted cover. A dress suitable for a party.
Ulyanova emerges from the kitchen, holding a pot filled with steaming potatoes. “Hard journey!” she says, with a pale, stressed-out smile. “You don’t know how wicked ship can be.” She raises her arms—and the pot goes away. Some of the steam remains. Then she wipes her hand on a towel. She’s looking, if that’s possible, even worse. Like me, she’s lost some teeth—but not through being beaten. I think she’s malnourished, despite the potatoes. What’s real here and what isn’t?
“We have arrived around Antagonista home,” Vera says. “Nobody knows we are here—again, we are invisible.”