Almost.
Blood work, physical exam, skin cultures, throat cultures, sinus cultures—everything came out clean. The last thing they did was a whole-body magnetic resonance scan.
“Just to be sure,” Burke said.
Famous last words.
I was back up in the mess, sitting across from Nasha while she sipped a paste smoothie and went over in glorious detail all the things she was going to do to me once she was allowed to touch me again when she stopped midsentence to look over my shoulder. I turned. It was Burke. He was holding a tablet.
“Have you two exchanged fluids yet?”
“Not yet,” Nasha said. “We’re definitely going to, though.”
“No,” Burke said. “You’re not.”
He turned the tablet around so that we could both see it. There was an image there, a picture of a walnut cut in half, gray matter wrapped around white matter wrapped around …
“What is that?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I already knew the answer.
“It’s your brain,” Burke said.
“No shit,” Nasha said. She leaned across the table and poked the dark curl in the center of the image with one finger. “What the fuck is that, asshole?”
“It’s a tumor,” I said. “I’ve got a brain tumor, right?”
“No,” Burke said. “You definitely don’t have a brain tumor. Your body is barely a week old. Brain tumors don’t grow that fast.”
“Fine,” I said. “So what is it?”
“I don’t know,” Burke said, “but you’re going back in the chamber until we find out.”
* * *
SO YOU REMEMBER I said that you don’t want to die of a pulmonary hemorrhage? Well, here’s another thing to add to your list of deaths to avoid: having your brain eaten from the inside out by parasitic worms.
It took the better part of a month for them to finish me off, but for the last week or so of that I was basically an empty shell. Weeks two and three, though, were not fun. It started with headaches, then seizures, then progressive dementia. By the end, the walls were talking to me, telling me that Nasha didn’t really love me, that all my other iterations were in hell waiting for me, that the parasites were going to just keep eating and eating and never let me die.
That was a lie, anyway. They did let me die.
When it was over, the larvae came pouring out of my mouth and nose and ears, ready to move on to whatever the next stage of their life cycle was. We never found out what that might be, because Arkady sterilized the living shit out of them and then tossed the whole mess into the hopper to make a new me.
* * *
SO YEAH, AFTER all that, you wouldn’t think whatever Marshall has planned for me now would scare me, would you?
You wouldn’t think so—but for some goddamned reason, it does.
020
THEY MARCH US down the spoke corridor toward the hub in a single-file line, with the smaller goon leading, the bigger one trailing, and Nasha, Eight, and me strung out in between. When we start down the central stairs my stomach knots as I suddenly wonder if we’re actually going straight to the cycler. Apparently Nasha has the same thought, because when we pass the second level she says, “You know you can’t take any disciplinary action against us until you have a judicial finding, right?”
“Oh please,” the bigger goon says from behind us. “After what we just saw, you’re lucky we didn’t burn you down on the spot.”
“Fuck you,” Eight says. “What are you, a Natalist?”
“Yeah,” he says, “and so is Marshall. You guys are screwed.”
“He’s not wrong,” the one in front says without turning around.
“This colony wasn’t chartered as a theocracy,” Nasha says. “You can’t just burn us at the stake.”
The goon shrugs. “Guess that’s up to Marshall.”
When we get down to the ground level, they don’t take us to the cycler. They don’t take us to the dungeon either, because we don’t have one. We don’t even have a jail, as far as I know. Instead, they take us to the Security ready room. It’s an odd choice, because there are lockers there filled with body armor and weapons. There’s also a miniature auto-caf. We could start an armed insurrection, and also have a nice snack. This seems like really poor planning on Security’s part.
“Wait here,” the bigger one says before closing us in. “Keep your hands off the equipment, and don’t even think about ordering food.”
“Or what?” Nasha says.
He stares at her for a long moment, then shakes his head and says, “Just wait here.”
After he’s gone, Nasha walks over to one of the lockers and shows her ocular to the scanner. The light on the display flashes red.
“Oh well,” she says. “Worth a try.”
“Nice,” Eight says. “What would you have done if it’d opened?”
She shrugs. “Shot my way to freedom, I guess.”
If we could get into the lockers, what would we do? It’s an interesting question, actually. We’re not even locked in here. Even without being able to get at weapons, we could run. We could try to jump one of the goons when they come back for us. We could do lots of things. What would it get us, though? This dome is the only place on this planet that won’t kill us in short order. When I actually think about it, I start to realize that in some sense Niflheim itself is just a really big, really cold jail.
There’s a couch in the center of the room, and a low coffee table. Eight drops down on one end, leans his head back, and closes his eyes. After a minute, I take the other. Nasha sits between us, pulls us toward her, and slings her arms around both of our shoulders.
“You know,” she says, “if you’d asked me before we left Midgard how I thought I was going to die, shoved down the corpse hole for sex crimes wouldn’t have been at the top of my list.”
“You’re not going down today,” Eight says without opening his eyes. “We’ve only got two atmospheric pilots, and you’re one of them. Marshall will find some way to make you miserable over this, but he can’t kill you.”
“I don’t know,” Nasha says. “He may think that way now, but what about after I murder Chen?”
Eight shrugs. “Depends on how hard you try to make it look like an accident, I guess.”
We’re quiet for a while then, the three of us, eyes closed and heads touching. Eight’s probably right that Marshall won’t kill Nasha. He definitely will kill the hell out of us, though, and at this point I’m pretty confident that when Nine comes out of the tank afterward, it won’t be me looking out through his eyes, Ship of Theseus be damned.
Oh well. At least I’m in good company.
It’s maybe an hour later when the smaller of the two goons who brought us here comes back.
“Barnes,” he says, “let’s go.” He grimaces. “Both of you. Adjaya—you stay here for now.”
Nasha still has her arms around us. She kisses Eight, then turns to kiss me. The goon turns away.
“What the hell, Adjaya? Seriously. What the hell?”
“Suck it,” she says.