Page 20
Author: Rachel Bach
“You,” Caldswell answered. “And what you claim to have seen in hyperspace. ”
“I’m not claiming I saw it,” I shouted. “I did see it!”
“Like you’ve been seeing other things?” Caldswell said.
The question was so quick, I almost slipped up and said yes. Caldswell hadn’t knocked all the sense out of my head, though, and I caught myself just in time.
“No point being tight-lipped, Morris,” Caldswell chided. “Hyrek tells me everything. ”
I looked him straight in the eyes and said nothing, but my bravado was all bluff, and Caldswell wasn’t buying it.
“I’ve known you were having problems for a while now,” he said, giving me a flat look. “I was trying to give you a chance to come forward on your own. Now, though, I think it’s time you told us exactly what you’ve been seeing. ”
“You’ll think I’m crazy,” I warned.
Caldswell shrugged. “I have a pretty high threshold for crazy. Just try me. ”
I took a deep breath. Considering how I’d come to be sitting here, I didn’t want to tell this man a thing, but like it or not, Caldswell was still my captain. This was his ship, and as Mabel had proven earlier, my opinion meant exactly zip compared to the captain’s business. If I wanted to get out of this at all, I was going to have to give him what he wanted. I just hoped the truth was it.
So, with a deep breath, I told him. I told him everything I could remember about the first time I’d seen the glowing bugs, both the one out on the hull and the one in the medbay. I didn’t tell him about the one Ren and I had both seen, mostly because I didn’t want to get any more involved with the captain’s creepy daughter than I had to. I didn’t tell him about the dream on Io5 for the same reason, though the fact that omitting this also meant I wouldn’t have to explain what I’d seen in the bunker didn’t hurt. I did tell him about the bugs I’d seen filling the cargo bay when I’d woken up, though, and the bugs I’d seen almost constantly since then, excepting the one I’d seen Ren squash earlier today.
By the time I was finished, I felt like a complete lunatic. To his credit, though, Caldswell had listened to everything with a straight face. He didn’t even look concerned until I got to the part about the monster that had attacked the ship.
“You’re sure about the size?” he said, cutting me off before I could get to the part where his cook had scooped me up like an unruly toddler.
“As sure as I can be,” I said. “There wasn’t much outside I could use for reference, but as I said, the end tip of each of those tentacles was still twice as thick as the Fool. I’d say the creature’s body must have been several thousand times that. ” Or larger, I thought with a swallow.
Caldswell leaned back on the couch with a sigh. “All right, Morris,” he said. “Thank you for being honest. ”
I smiled before I could stop myself. “So you don’t think I’m insane?”
“No,” Caldswell said. “Unfortunately for you, I believe every word. ”
I did not like the way he said that at all. “How is my being sane unfortunate?”
“Because if you were crazy, we could let you go,” Caldswell said. “But since you’re not, this situation is now officially too large for me to ignore anymore. We need to know what you’ve forgotten. ”
My blood ran cold. “My memories,” I whispered. “I didn’t lose them from a bump to the head, did I?”
“No,” Caldswell said. “They were taken to protect you. ”
I glared at him hard. “Protect me from what?”
“Us,” said an accented voice behind me.
I jumped. I hadn’t even realized the cook was here until he spoke. I turned as far as I could to see him leaning against the door to Ren’s room, just as he had been yesterday. Behind him, Ren was no longer curled in a ball. Instead, she was lying on top of her bed staring wide-eyed and vacant at the ceiling, which was almost worse.
Looking at him brought the revulsion back strong as ever, but I didn’t drop my eyes as the cook walked over to the bed. Ren stirred when he touched her hand, and then sat up slowly, her movement clunky and stiff, like an old, old woman’s. The cook waited patiently for her to stand before leading her over to take Caldswell’s place in front of me.
“Undo it, Charkov,” Caldswell ordered, moving to guard the door. “All of it. ”
I didn’t know what that meant, but the cook’s scowl deepened. “We talked about this, sir,” he said. “A full return is dangerous. If I give it all back—”
“All of it,” Caldswell repeated, his voice cold and sharp as a hard winter. “That’s an order, Eye Charkov. ”
My eyes went wide in horror. It was the title from my dream. The cook flinched too, but it was over so quickly I almost missed it, and he didn’t try to argue with the captain again. Instead, he reached down and gently grabbed the top of my head. The position of his fingers was just as they’d been last night in the kitchen, but there was no tender gentleness now. He grabbed my head hard, forcing me to look up until I couldn’t see anything but him. But though his grip was as harsh as the revulsion curdling my stomach, the cook’s face was set in an expression of regret so deep it took my breath away.
“I tried, Devi,” he whispered, fingers pressing harder into my hair. “I tried. ”
“Tried what?” I whispered back, my voice trembling.
He gave me the saddest smile I’d ever seen. “To save you. ”
Before I could demand to know what he meant by that, Ren’s hand shot out, grabbing my shoulder in a vise, and as she touched me, her voice spoke in my head.
Remember.
The word had barely formed before everything I’d lost came roaring back.
Memories are unruly things by nature. Some come when called, but most do exactly as they please, vanishing when you need them and popping up when you’d much rather they didn’t. Mine had always had a bad habit of surfacing at the worst moments, but even the biggest fit of unwanted nostalgia couldn’t have prepared me for what Ren did to my head.
I hadn’t even realized how much I’d lost until it was all back. The past flooded into my brain like a storm surge, and every single memory was clamoring for me to relive it, thrusting itself to the front of my mind to tease me with a flash before being pushed away by the next one. I was still conscious, still aware, I could even hear Caldswell talking, but I couldn’t make sense of anything. My memories took up every bit of me, leaving no room for anything else. But then, just before the flood of memories could pull me under, Ren’s touch on my mind gave way to a new hand. A strong, familiar, masculine one.
To this day, I could not tell you what Rupert did, but he did it well. Everywhere his touch landed, the chaos retreated. The jumbled memories rearranged themselves into an orderly timeline, connecting as they fell into place until I could no longer tell which ones were new and which had always been there.
Naturally, the first thing I looked for was what had happened on Falcon 34. Every time I’d reached for it before I’d gotten nothing. Now, though, the memories came as soon as I called them, and the whole bloody night—the symbionts, Cotter’s defeat, my capture, Brenton, my own near death—unrolled in my mind. Every event was as fresh and vivid as though it had just happened. I could feel the pain in my stomach where I’d been stabbed, the shock of Cotter’s death. He had died bravely, I knew it.
Mostly though, I remembered Rupert. I remembered the haunted look in his eyes when he’d changed from human to symbiont. I remembered his fury as he’d tried to kill Brenton on the lounge floor and his speed as he’d thrown the symbiont off me, abandoning his enemy to save my life.
That memory brought others. I remembered him touching my hair the night he put me to bed when I was drunk, and again when I’d lain stretched out against him the one night we’d slept together. I remembered the way he used to smile at me, the gentle brush of his kiss against my
knee in the medbay, the quiet desperation in his voice as he promised he’d never hurt me.
He’d kept that promise at first. He’d saved me twice, on Mycant and on the tribe ship. God and king, how could I have forgotten my escape from the tribe ship? I remembered it all with perfect clarity now, Rupert in his scales killing his way through the horde to save me. He’d been the one who’d picked me up when the battle drugs wore off, and then, when I was lost in the seizures, he’d been the one who held me down. He’d saved me, just as he always did. Even that horrible time in the rain, he’d been trying to protect me, to keep me safe from what he was. And then he’d told me he loved me and taken my memories, making me hate him without even asking.
I sucked in a furious breath. It was all coming together now. My inability to remember the cook’s name, the revulsion I felt every time he walked into my line of sight, it was all Rupert. He’d rewritten my mind, changed me, reordered my life as he saw fit …
Rage washed over me, clean and hot, and I threw myself into it. The bastard had actually had me believing I was nuts. I’d probably never even had a hallucination. The thing I’d seen outside the ship had certainly been real, and now that I had my memories back, I knew I’d killed a woman with the black stuff on my hands, so that was real, too. Everything was, and though I still didn’t understand what it all meant, I was sure as hell going to find out. My mind was back in order at last, bringing back all the old questions, only I was done being silent. This time, I was going to get some answers. And with that determination to pull me forward, I finally managed to wake up.
When I opened my eyes, I was alone in the captain’s sitting room. I must have been out for a long time, because we weren’t in space any longer. The gravity was heavier and the reentry shutters on Caldswell’s windows were down, which meant we were on a planet. What planet, I had no idea, but it didn’t seem immediately important, so I moved on to more pressing concerns.
They’d moved me from the chair to the couch while I’d been stuck in the memories, and though my hands were still bound behind me, I was no longer tied down. There was something on my feet, though.
I leaned over, wiggling my toes experimentally, but I couldn’t move them more than a quarter inch in any direction through the thick, invisible mass they were buried under. Inert plasma. Goddamn Caldswell had put a plasma weight on my feet.
“You can’t break it, so don’t try. We use that stuff to lock down symbionts. ”
My head snapped up as Caldswell emerged from his room. Since he hadn’t bothered with a hello, I didn’t either. “Not even going to play at secrets anymore?”
“Doesn’t seem to be much point now,” the captain said, sitting down in the sturdy chair they’d tied me to before.
I leaned over to peer into Ren’s room, but it was empty. “Where’s Rupert?” I demanded.
“I sent him away,” Caldswell said. “I thought this might go smoother without Charkov. He tends to lose his head around you. ”
I glowered. That wasn’t all he was going to lose the next time I got my hands on him. “What did he do to me?”
Caldswell sighed. “That’s a complicated question. The simple answer is that he returned the memories he took on Falcon Thirty-Four. ”
“You mean Ren returned them. ”
“Charkov guided her,” Caldswell said, meeting my scowl with one of his own. “He did it for you, you know. ”
“To save me from you,” I snarled, lurching forward as far as the weight on my feet would allow.
“Yes,” Caldswell said matter-of-factly.
I rolled my eyes. “So why aren’t I dead?”