City of Ruins

FORTY



We return to the hotel, hot, tired, and a little confused. My mind is full of shattered rocks, open corridors, and floors that absorb one material, but not others.

Bridge doesn’t say much, either, except to rub his ears. He veers off the moment we get inside the cool lobby and heads to his room, determined to shower. He’s mentioned that intent twice now, and I have no doubt he’s thought of it even more.

I stop at the desk and set up a catered dinner spread for the evening. Then I leave a message for the rest of my team, just to make sure they know the time as well as the place.

I still have my lunch. We never had time to eat it, not that it’s much past lunchtime anyway. I carry it upstairs to my room, where I sink into the privacy, and my own exhaustion.

I’m not used to being glassy-eyed, to have something as simple as sitting and watching tire me out. Usually I can go for days while others cannot. But my muscles ache, my eyes are tired, and I’m ragged from the heat.

The meal doesn’t refresh me, so I lie down on the bed—and immediately slip into sleep.

I dream . . .

I’m back at the Room of Lost Souls. It’s vast and empty, an abandoned space station or something, left by the ancients or a community unknown. I am aware enough in this dream to know this is not the Room of Lost Souls of my childhood, nor is it the recurring nightmare I’ve had all my life.

In that nightmare, I am still a child. I accompany my mother, holding her hand, as we go into the room. We see lights, hear music, and—

I wrench my mind from that. I am standing in one of my skips, my hands clasped behind my back. My team refuses to let me pilot the skip, refuses to let me dive the Room, because they know my emotional history with it.

My father is with us, and curiously, he is in the skip. He shouldn’t be. I have banned him from the missions.

I turn to him and see him as I last saw him, standing before a bottle of working stealth tech, a bottle he has created. He is conquering the technology, and he has done so by betraying me.

He has twice sent me into the Room, twice testing to see if I have the genetic marker that allows me to survive in stealth tech. If I do not have it, I will die as hideously as my mother, thinking I am alone, abandoned, as time leaches the oxygen from my environmental suit, as I struggle against a door I cannot open to get back to a world I can no longer reenter. I will die by degrees, but to those with the marker and those not inside stealth tech, it will seem as if I died in a moment. All that time passes for me, and none for them, and I cannot save myself.

I look at this man, this man who should have loved and protected me from the start, and I go to him, my fists clenched. I am not sure now who I am—the child he sent into that Room? The adult woman he tried to send in again?

“You wouldn’t have died,” he says. “You’ve done much more dangerous things on your own.”

He’s holding that bottle of stealth tech. It pulses in his hand.

I want to snatch it from him.

“Do you know what the difference is?” I ask. “The difference with those dangerous things?”

My father shakes his head. He actually looks interested.

“The difference is that I chose to take those risks,” I say. “I didn’t choose this one.”

He opens his hands as if he’s going to hug me. The bottle of stealth tech is gone.

“You said someone is going to die on this mission.” He speaks softly, reminding me. “I heard you. You said it more than once.”

My breath catches. My heart pounds. My fists are so tightly clenched that my hands hurt.

“I always tell my teams that,” I say. “It makes them vigilant.”

“But this time you believed it,” my father says.

“Yes,” I say. “Because someone always dies.”

I sit up. My heart is still pounding. I can barely breathe. My fists are clenched.

But I’m in a bed in a hotel in Vaycehn, after having gone into a group of caves in which none of my team has died.

No one died. Not here.

Not yet.

I rub a hand over my face, then get out of bed. My legs are so sore that it feels as if they creak when they move. I wouldn’t be surprised if I heard that same grinding noise I heard from the Bug every time I move a limb.

I stagger to the bathroom before getting sick.

I haven’t told this team that someone could die. I haven’t said a word, like I usually do on diving missions. I have believed what other people told me. I believed that being on the ground was safe.

And I am wrong.

My God. Sometimes you become your parents without even realizing you’ve made the transition.

I get up, splash cold water on my face, and turn on the shower.

Tonight’s meeting is going to be different than I planned.

Tonight’s meeting might change everything.

* * * *