could be alive, a voice in her head whispered. She was alive ten years ago. She could be, still.
She tried to shove the thought aside, but Niko had planted it in fertile ground, and its roots had dug deep. The intensity of it frightened her. There was nothing more dangerous than hope.
If she’s alive, you have to try, the voice said. Even if it’s only a chance. You have to try. For her.
There was no arguing that.
She paced until her feet were tired, and after a few minutes of sitting back down, she realized the rest of her was tired too. She washed up, folded her clothes, and got into bed. She stared into the dark for a long time, indulging in old memories and letting the pain of them sit with her. Hypatia was going to hurt. Might was well get ready for that.
Her mind drifted, then quieted, then let her go altogether.
Her rest began softly, but it ended with a shriek—a metallic shriek pouring out of every speaker and straight into Asala’s brain, erasing the immediately forgotten dream she’d been lost in, preventing any waking thoughts from gaining legs. Both hands shot up to her ears, and she dialed her implants all the way down as quickly as she could. Silence reigned. Her mind regrouped. She took a breath, shook her head, looked around.
What the hell was going on?
She ran across the room to the ship systems panel. The panel was frozen. She tapped and she tapped. She slapped her palm against its frame. A flicker. Then nothing.
She threw on some clothes, and shoved her feet into her boots. Presumably, the sound was still blaring, but she left her implants off. She opened her door and almost ran into the general, who was shouting something. She had her gun drawn.
“I can’t hear you,” Asala said, pointing at her ears. “Speak slowly.”
I said, Cynwrig’s lips read, what the hell is going on?
“I don’t know.” Asala looked around, trying to assess whether they needed to head for an escape pod. Everything else about the ship seemed fine. She didn’t think they’d hit anything. She couldn’t smell anything burning, couldn’t feel any change in air pressure. “Is that sound still—”
Yes! The general looked furious.
Asala hurried to Niko’s quarters and opened the door without a knock. Niko sat on the floor, in the middle of their nest of computers and wires, a blanket wrapped around their head as they typed furiously. They were in a panic, and looked as if they, too, had been ripped out of bed. They said something as the other two entered the room, too harried for Asala to make it out. Sorry and fix were the only words she caught.
“What’s wrong?” Asala shouted. She had no idea how loud her voice needed to be to get over the shriek, so she went full bore. “Is there danger?”
Niko shook their head vigorously, continuing to type and babble. A minute, Asala caught, and later, shit.
After a moment, Niko and the general both sighed and slumped. Asala took that as a cue to turn her implants back on. She did so gingerly, dialing them up just a touch at first. The sound had stopped. She turned them back to full, and looked hard at Niko. “What was that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” Cynwrig said.
“I mean—I do, I’m just—I’m not sure—” Niko looked bewildered, and the blanket dropped from around their ears. Their hair was sticking straight up on one side, and they still had pillow lines pressed deep into one round cheek.
Asala sighed and crossed her arms. “Niko. What was that?” She kept her voice calm, hoping the kid would calm down too.
Niko took a breath. “Some kind of malfunction in the comms system,” they said, their professionalism making a show at last. “Like a . . . a feedback loop, I guess. I think it’s related to the response lag, but I don’t know how yet.” That particular glitch hadn’t gone away since they’d left Khayyam, and Niko’s attempts to fix it hadn’t been fruitful. They glanced nervously at the general. “I disabled the whole comms system until I can figure it out. But it’s just a glitch. Some kind of sloppy code. I don’t know. It’s nothing dangerous.”
“How do you know?” the general said. “How can you say that, if you don’t know what it is?”
“General—” Asala started.
Cynwrig stormed back out. “I’m going to run a diagnostic on the scramblers,” she said. She’d already done four of those since Khayyam.
Asala rubbed the bridge of her nose. “What time is it?”
“Um”—Niko fumbled for their handheld—“three-oh-four.”
Gods. She walked over to the systems panel on Niko’s wall and tapped the screen. It leapt into action, just as it was supposed to. “Go back to sleep,” she said. “In the morning, I want you to do a—” She had no idea what the proper terms were, which wasn’t ideal when giving directions. “Can you check everything out, see if you can get to the bottom of it?”
Niko nodded, their mussed hair bobbing absurdly. “Yeah.”
“Okay,” Asala said. A comms system malfunction. She could feel the adrenaline bleeding out of her, but a hum of concern remained. “Okay.”
Without another word, she returned to her room, pulled off her boots, and crawled back into bed. Blanket tugged to her chin, she lay in the dark, thinking about the lags, the glitches, the panel freezes. She thought about the general, prowling the corridors again and again. She thought about Dayo, and where she might be.
She did not fall back asleep.
• • •
This is kind of hard to talk about.
That’s all right. Take your time.
Sorry. The camera’s making me self-conscious.
We can point it elsewhere, if you want.
No. People should see, right?
Yes, I think they should.
Okay. Okay.
How did you get frostbite?
I wasn’t the only one. There was this freak blizzard. Our housing block got buried, and everything got knocked out. Heaters, comms, everything.
How long were you there?
Five days. Two for the snow to stop, three more for them to dig us an exit.
And you went without heat for that long.
Real heat, yeah. We started burning stuff. Piled whatever we could find that would burn into old water drums, and kept it going as best we could. The smoke got terrible. I think there was some plast in there. Or some kind of paint, I don’t know. Made everybody’s eyes hurt. Some kids started choking, and then people were passing out, so we had to stop. We . . . Sorry.