No Life But This

by Anna Sheehan

Genres: Fantasy; Fantasy action & adventure; Magical Realism; Paranormal

Synopsis

Rose slept for a hundred years and when she awoke the world as she knew it had vanished, utterly. She has gone from being a cherished only child to being the sole heir to a vast, interstellar empire. From being alone to being surrounded by friends; from being protected against everything - whether she wanted to be or not - to having others depend upon her. In the superb stand-alone novel A LONG, LONG SLEEP we saw her survive assassination attempts and heartbreak alike. Now, in the stand-alone sequel, Rose must take control of her future for the sake of her friends - and find a way to protect them without unwittingly caging them in love ...

Release date: December 18, 2014

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 321

Sample

I woke with a bit of a headache that morning, but I dismissed it. I’ve always been prone to them. Having a genetically modified brain hypersensitive to electrical impulses did not make for an easy life in a technological world.

Around eleven o’clock my friend Rose’s limoskiff arrived at the dorms. My roommate Jamal and I piled in quickly, thus managing to avoid the battle between my siblings Penny and Quin, as they fought over window seats. Eventually Quin won – as he always did. For all the argument was heated and forceful, it was silent and expressionless. Europa Project children were strange that way. Quin was the only one of us who could even talk – our vocal cords under developed and our soft palate still the same shape as an infant child. Also our faces naturally showed little to no expression. No one was certain if this was a genetic difference – akin to the neutral affect of some schizophrenics – or if it was simply a natural result of growing up apart from normal society in a laboratory. It didn’t matter. What expression we did have was subtle. Most people said they couldn’t read our expressions at all. I could. Of course, I’d grown up with it.

At her loss, Penny slumped glumly in next to me as my sister Tristan and her roommate Molly climbed in.

I envied Tristan her roommate. Molly was from the mining colony on Callisto, another of Jupiter’s colonized moons. Callisto had lost much of its economic viability during the colonial isolation of the Dark Times, so Molly had only managed to make it to UniPrep on a scholarship, just like the four of us EP kids. She studied hard to keep her grades up. By contrast stood my own roommate Jamal, whose family owned nearly a third of Europa. He had always been a bit of a spoiled princeling, and felt entitled to goof off continually. It was often hard to sleep with him in the same room, what with the girls he snuck in and the bizarre substances he managed to imbibe and the music he played at all hours. Even so, I was grateful to him. He was the only boarder in the entire school who had agreed to board with me. There was a lot of prejudice against us, ever since we were kids. Even the nurses who had cared for us as infants called us the ‘Creepies’. It wasn’t meant maliciously, but we heard it, and we knew.

The two other boarders who would have been members of our party were gone for the summer. Wilhelm had gone home to his parents in Germany, and Anastasia, who had come from New Russia on Titan, was spending the summer with her relatives in ‘Old’ Russia. The limoskiff twisted over on its cushion of magnetized air and left UniPrep’s dorms for Unicorn Estates.

Penny looked purple, her blue skin flushed with renewed excitement at the thought of the upcoming party. My siblings and I all had blue skin, the reasons for which are complicated. Penny – her legal name was Pen Ultima, as her embryonic number had been 99 – was paler than most of us, and looked almost lavender when she blushed.

Penny was wildly excited. ‘I’ve never been to Unicorn Estates before!’ she signed at me. ‘Does it really have a ballroom? And a stables? Are there horses?’

‘Calm down,’ I signed at her. ‘You’ll see soon enough.’

Penny bounced up and down, unable to conceal her excitement. Whatever the genetic remodification had done to Penny’s brain, she was emotionally much younger than she seemed. This wasn’t strange for us. Many of us hadn’t taken the genetic remodification well, and more than half of those who had survived gestation were severely cognitively disabled. Penny was actually one of the lucky ones. She wasn’t damaged intellectually – as her math scores could attest – but when it came to her actions she seemed more eleven than seventeen. We all sort of babied her, which probably didn’t help.

My brother Quin, as per usual, stared moodily out of the window. ‘Hey, there,’ Jamal said, kicking him in the shoe. ‘Why so blue?’

Quin gave him a withering look. ‘Aren’t you sick of that joke by now?’

‘Hey, stick with the classics.’

‘If you have something to say to me, please raise your hand,’ Quin said. ‘Then place it over your mouth.’ Quin was the only one of us left who was able to speak. Most people were of the opinion that it would have been better if he wasn’t. He was often witty and cruel, and rarely said anything kind. He also did everything he could to make it seem like he hated absolutely everyone, and that included Jamal. I’d never bothered to find out why. That was just Quin.

I touched Jamal’s wrist. ‘Don’t worry about Quin,’ I told him silently. ‘He’s always like this.’

‘I know,’ Jamal thought back at me. ‘I’m trying to make him laugh.’

‘Quin only laughs when someone is hurting somehow.’

Jamal thought about this, and then kicked me firmly in the shin. I squawked with pain and fell over onto Penny, who hadn’t been able to follow our silent, telepathic exchange. ‘What was that for?’ I signed.

‘You said Quin only laughs when someone is hurting.’

As if to prove my point, Quin started to laugh. ‘There you have it, brother,’ he said. ‘Don’t make judgements.’

‘Or state truths!’ I signed.

‘Boys,’ Molly said with disgust. She looked over at Quin. ‘Isn’t Nabiki coming?’

Quin shrugged. ‘Ask Otto. She’s his bird.’

I glared at him. ‘Couldn’t we leave Nabiki out of this?’

‘I thought you broke up,’ Molly said.

‘We did!’ I signed.

‘Four months ago,’ Jamal reminded her.

I sat back against the seat in Rose’s limoskiff, fervently wishing that this conversation hadn’t turned to myself and Nabiki. Mainly because it still hurt. I hadn’t really wanted to break up with Nabiki, but I couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t even her doing. After all, I was desperately in love with someone else.

That someone else was the person whose birthday we were heading to right now. I didn’t want to be in love with Rose. I couldn’t help it. From the first moment I’d touched her, Rose had captured me. It wasn’t merely that she was beautiful. Nothing so simple. It was her mind that held me in thrall. Rose was different. Like me. She was fully human, but she was loving, accepting, kindly and wildly talented. She was also a hundred years old.

Rose had been regularly locked in stasis by her parents, which retarded her growth, eventually culminating in a sixty-some-year sleep from which she had been awakened only six months previous. Those six months had been some of the worst of my life – and that was saying something. Since the first moment I touched Rose I suffered nightmares, long nights of tormented longing, and bouts of enraged self-loathing punctuated by moments of uncontrollable glee. I’d lost my girlfriend, alienated myself from my friend Bren, annoyed my siblings, disturbed my roommate, and probably tortured my therapist. I was even being haunted by ghosts of my own past. And all because I’d fallen helplessly, hopelessly in love.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Not only that, but Rose’s subconscious was abnormally strong, due to a hundred years of dreaming. She kept picking things up from my mind – stray emotions and half-finished thoughts. I was terrified from the moment I touched her. Terrified and overjoyed and utterly overwhelmed. The day I met her I scheduled a special session with my therapist and mentally screamed at Dr Bija for an hour about how unfair everything was. I felt as if my life had been snatched by one of Rose’s briars, and this sudden, overwhelming devotion was choking the life out of me. Eventually Dr Bija had managed to bring me back to centre, but it had been a tough session. Dr Mina Bija was, in my opinion, the greatest psychologist the world had ever known. She had been my saving grace for more than three years, helping me to sort out both my mind and my life, both of which were exceedingly complicated.

When we arrived at Unicorn Estates we were greeted by no less than an actual liveried footman. Unicorn Estates might have technically been a condominium, but for all it was separated into apartments and suites, it was the most affluent and exclusive living space in the whole of ComUnity – which was the most affluent and exclusive controlled community on the planet. As we filed out of Rose’s limoskiff, another skiff slowly parked itself alongside. I knew this skiff. Sporty, bright yellow, tinted windows. Nabiki.

Nabiki lived with her parents in ComUnity, unlike us pitiful boarding students. After Rose and Bren, who both lived here at Unicorn, Nabiki was probably the wealthiest of us. Nabiki had changed a lot in the last four months. She had allowed her immaculately coiffed hair to grow out, and she’d added chameleon highlights, that changed depending on her outfit or the surroundings. Right now they were a piercing pink, echoing the shiny neon flight jacket she was wearing. She’d taken up some kind of high-risk air sport, sky-diving or atmosphere skimming or something. I wasn’t sure what. She didn’t talk to me much anymore.

She tossed back her highlit hair and ran up to hug Molly and Tristan. She gladly transferred her hug to Penny when Penny came bouncing up to her. Nabiki had become good friends with my sisters in the time we were together, and I was glad that relationship hadn’t changed when we broke up.

She didn’t look at me.

The footman bowed to us professionally and directed us behind the main mansion to the pool. Rose had decided on a pool party for her seventeenth birthday, mostly, I think, because she wanted to show off her new swimsuit, and her new body with it. The first few months after she’d come out of stasis, Rose’s body was emaciated and frail, pale and sickly and skeletal. After last spring and through the summer she’d exercised and filled out quite a bit, and she was proud of her new, healthier form. She was still underweight, still had a long way to go, but she looked great. Her body had become something that made me drop a few IQ points the moment I turned the corner to the pool patio.

Rose’s long gleaming golden hair captured the sunlight, set off by her pale white skin, shining with sunblock. Her swimsuit was a dusky red, almost exactly the same colour as her full lips. She wore a sarong around her hips with a green and red rose garden pattern. Rose wore no makeup, and didn’t need it. Her skin was so translucent that her eyes were shadowed naturally by the veins in her eyelids, her cheeks rosy and her lips red with her own blood.

Rose looked up from the buffet and grinned when she saw us, her white teeth bright against her red mouth. I tried not to drool. It was pointless, anyway. There were far too many complications between us.

One of the larger complications was already on the patio helping to set out towels. Rose had fallen quite neatly in love with my friend Bren shortly after she’d come out of stasis. Considering he was the prince charming who had awakened her – and he was a gorgeous glimmering mahogany tennis athlete, who did not look unnaturally blue in the least – it wasn’t very surprising. The other complication happened to be striding in through the other gate at that moment, leading Bren’s sisters, Kayin and Hilary.

This was Xavier – Rose’s old boyfriend from before she was stassed. Though he went by his middle name of Ron, she’d always called him by his first name. I’d taken to thinking of him by it as well, since I spent so much time with her. This man, for all intents and purposes an inter-planetary king, was now the president of UniCorp, Rose’s guardian, and the love of her life. The fact that he was now in his seventies and their relationship could no longer be romantic meant very little when it came to Rose’s emotional state. As of right now, she found it too hard to even think about being with anyone else. Which meant my pitiful infatuation had to be put on standby, most likely forever. So I kept my feelings secret, or tried to. Sometimes I thought she might have guessed, and then other times I was sure she was completely oblivious. I’d tried to bring the subject up a dozen times, but all I got from her mind in that direction was pain, and when I tried to talk about it with her over the net, she always changed the subject. I let her. It didn’t keep us from flirting, though.

‘They’re here!’ Bren’s youngest sister Kayin jumped forward and grabbed Penny’s hands. They had become fast friends in the last few months after Penny had been released from the laboratory.

‘Hello, everyone,’ Rose said formally. She caught sight of Nabiki. ‘I’m so glad you made it!’

‘Yes,’ Nabiki said, striding forward to give Rose a birthday hug. I sighed wistfully. Rose was desperate to ensure that she and Nabiki stayed on good terms. Fortunately, Nabiki seemed determined not to blame Rose for my infatuation, even though part of her, I knew, really hated Rose.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. My headache was bothering me.

Quin glanced at me, and then, quite deliberately, caught Rose up in his arms. ‘Happy birthday, princess!’ He lifted her high above his head and grinned at her. He set her down, and I tried not to sigh. He touched her so easily. Quin couldn’t read minds at all, so there were no nasty thorns tormenting his psyche as he touched her pale skin. The sight of Quin’s blue skin against hers did strange things to my insides. ‘It’s so nice to see you finally admitting to your age,’ Quin said. ‘But I think you forgot to mention exactly how many years ago you reached it.’

Bren was the only one who chuckled. He took Rose’s stass history in his stride. Rose had already learned that the best way to deal with Quin was with a series of impassive silences and occasionally rolled eyes. The eyes were important, otherwise he thought you hadn’t heard him, and he’d keep saying whatever was rudest until he got some kind of reaction. She rolled her eyes and turned back to welcome the rest of us.

‘What do you want to do?’ she asked. ‘Swim first, or eat?’

Penny clapped her hands and jumped up and down. ‘Swim!’ she signed, waving her hands as if splashing through the water.

‘I agree!’ said Kayin, who loved swimming.

Tristan snapped her fingers and looked at Bren. With a look of challenge on her face she mimed playing tennis.

‘Seriously?’ Bren asked, his eyebrows raised.

Tristan nodded, grinning wickedly.

‘Oh, you are so on,’ Bren said, snatching up Tristan’s hand and pulling her towards the tennis courts. ‘I’ll bring her pieces back in a bag for you, shall I?’ he called over his shoulder.

I grinned. Bren was in for a surprise. True, Tristan wasn’t a trophy-winning tennis player, but she was a highly accomplished athlete all around. She had cherished dreams of competing in the Olympics in track and field, until she was informed she didn’t qualify. If enhancement drugs and bionic implants were banned from sporting events, genetic modification disqualified her also, even if that modification was not aimed at increasing her athletic abilities. There was also some question about what country she would have competed for. Technically, she wasn’t a citizen of any country. She had human rights, but she wasn’t actually human. She was number 32, Tristan Twice, an alien hybrid, and her DNA was still property of UniCorp. UniCorp was an international, even interplanetary, corporation. I remembered Tristan’s fury when she realized her genetic status basically segregated her from normal society. We were probably the last humans on earth still discriminated against solely based on our ‘race’. Still, Tristan didn’t plan on giving up. She trained daily, hoping to compete in any sporting events that didn’t disqualify her, and she hoped one day to be an Olympic coach. She would give Bren a run for his money on the tennis court.

Penny stripped down to her swimsuit – purple, to complement her skin – and dove deftly into the pool. She laughed, sounding infantile and odd. She couldn’t control her voice as well as Tristan or I could. Kayin joined her with a splash.

I caught Quin watching furtively as Nabiki peeled off layers of clothes to a thin black bikini. I averted my eyes. I knew something about Quin that no one else did: he’d been in love with Nabiki almost since I started dating her. I think others suspected that he fancied her, but he was so cynical and hard to read that no one else had realized the depth of his feelings. I wasn’t even sure he knew himself. But I couldn’t tell anyone. Telling anyone what I saw in anyone else’s mind was against my code of ethics. Even telling someone what I saw in their own mind was touchy. Much like a psychologist, if I told people truths they themselves denied, it usually went badly for me. Rose, for instance, had no idea exactly how lopsided her subconscious was compared to her consciousness, and I had no intention of telling her.

Nabiki stretched before she went to dive in, and Quin seized the opportunity to touch her. He tackled her violently and fell into the pool with her. Nabiki sputtered to the surface, furious. Her highlights had gone blue and wavery in the water. ‘You sped!’ she snapped, splashing him.

‘Only on alternate Thursdays, bank holidays, and whenever I have a math test,’ Quin retorted, splashing her back.

Nabiki went under the water and swam to the other side of the pool. I wished I could tell Quin this was the wrong way to handle Nabiki, but he would have hit me for it.

Jamal screamed ‘Cannon ball!’ and leaped from the diving board, half splashing Molly. ‘Come on, Callisto, move your butt!’ he called when he resurfaced. I shook my head. Europa had a very strange relationship with other colonies – particularly other Jovian colonies. Europa was the only place besides Earth on which indigenous life had been discovered. They also had ample water, so they were much wealthier than the other colonies. Even though Jamal didn’t think of himself as prejudiced, he was rather scornful of Molly and even Anastasia, who was from the Saturn colonies and should have been beyond his arrogance.

Fortunately, Molly was used to other people’s disdain. Scholarship students at UniPrep need to develop very thick skins – a fact I knew personally very well. ‘Very funny!’ Molly called out, and turned to remove her shirt. Molly was hesitant in removing her outer clothes. Her parents hadn’t been able to afford gravity mats for their home on Callisto, and they certainly couldn’t afford the full exo-surgery kit once she got to Earth, so her body had rebelled shortly after she’d arrived at school. She’d gained massive amounts of weight and her muscles had been forced to develop all at once, so she was an odd, squat shape. None of us really cared – after all, my siblings and I were blue, and Rose had been a skeleton until a few months ago – but Molly was self-conscious about it. Her swimsuit, when she finally revealed it, was almost a sundress. Everyone was careful not to stare at her, and she slipped into the water quickly after Hilary. Rose waited until everyone seemed settled before she pulled off her sarong – distracting me severely – and climbed down the ladder. Quin and Molly started a pool-volleyball game, and most of the others joined in.

Rose slipped under the water and then surfaced like a mermaid, the water turning her golden hair to bronze. It was some minutes before she realized I hadn’t joined the others in the water. ‘Coming in?’ she signed to me. She’d been studying sign for the last four months, mostly so we could share jokes across the room. She wasn’t very skilled yet, but she was trying.

I shook my head, throwing her a careful smile.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t swim,’ I signed slowly.

Rose looked horrified. ‘I’m sorry! Come in, I’ll teach you.’

‘No.’

She frowned. ‘Why not?’

I shook my head again, avoiding the answer. Rose looked concerned, but she had other guests to attend to, and Penny looked like she needed help on her team. I pulled out my notescreen and glanced at a book, but mostly I watched Rose in the water. I wished I could swim with her. I let myself daydream about floating in the clear blue water beside her, letting my hands touch her skin, caress the bronze wave of her hair.

Eventually, Bren and Tristan came back. Bren was scowling. ‘You didn’t tell me she was a ringer!’ he told me angrily.

I chuckled at Tristan’s broad grin. I touched Bren’s arm. I rarely hesitated at touching Bren – his mind was so clear and concise, there were almost never any thoughts I didn’t want to read. ‘Did she win?’ I asked.

‘No,’ Bren said. ‘But it was close.’ He glared at her. ‘Too close.’ Tristan’s face twitched in challenge. Bren stripped off his shirt and dove into the pool, shaking his head with relief at the cool water. Then he tackled Quin with a roar, at which Nabiki cheered.

Rose had frozen, and was staring at the rippling muscles under Bren’s mahogany skin. Bren’s body seemed to do much the same things to Rose that Rose’s body did to me. I swallowed, but I couldn’t turn my head away. Finally, she shook her head and turned back to Penny, who was trying to sign something at her. I finally pulled my gaze from her, to find Tristan staring at me. She reached out for my hand. ‘I wish you’d just tell her.’

Tristan was the only one of my surviving siblings with even a hint of my gift. Hers was limited. She could ‘send’, but she couldn’t ‘receive’, so fortunately thunder storms and faulty wiring never caused her any discomfort, and she didn’t have to worry about absorbing a thought or memory she didn’t want to. Even so, she was the only person still living who had any idea what it was like to be me.

I shook my head. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘I don’t think it’s half as complicated as you make it out to be.’

I kept my thoughts still. Only Bren and myself knew about Rose’s former relationship with Xavier, and Rose wanted it kept that way. Even the rest of Bren’s family only knew that the two of them had been acquainted when Xavier was young – they had no idea how deep that relationship had gone.

Eventually, Xavier himself came down, and the swimmers climbed dripping out of the pool to eat. The food, of course, was fabulous, prepared by the gourmet chefs of Unicorn Estates, and served by liveried servitors. Nabiki and Bren, of course, knew how to handle it. My family and Molly were a bit more awkward with the fine dining, but no one seemed to notice. Finally, a birthday cake redolent with candied roses was presented.

Xavier opened a bottle of champagne and poured half a glass for everyone seventeen or older. This included everyone but Hilary and Kayin – except for Penny, who took one sip and put it down hastily. Then, holding up his own glass, Xavier sang a song to Rose in Swedish. Tears brimmed in Rose’s eyes, and the hand holding the champagne glass trembled. ‘Happy birthday, sweetheart,’ Xavier said softly, and raised the glass. ‘To Rose.’

‘To Rose!’ everyone who could speak called out.

Rose’s trembling was harder to conceal, now. She looked over at Bren, who was still shirtless and gleaming. Clearly he was too daunting a figure in his current state of undress. Finally, she turned to me. I opened my arm to her gladly as she came over and rested her head on my shoulder.

‘You okay?’ I asked silently.

She was fine, it was only that Xavier and her old maid – really more a godmother – had sung that song for her at her last birthday, more than half a century before. ‘I didn’t realize he was going to do that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered into her mind, and tried to smooth some of the sharper thorns from her emotional briars. She shuddered, but she let me. I try not to control people’s thoughts or emotions, but Rose was one of the few people I would make an exception for. For one thing, I knew her subconscious was strong enough to erase anything if I made a mistake. For another, hers was the only mind outside of my sisters’ I was willing to be responsible for.

Over Rose’s shoulder I caught a glimpse of Nabiki. She stared at me, and then set down her plate of cake. Quietly, Nabiki went up to Tristan and gave her a hug. I frowned, but Rose was there in my mind, and I had to concentrate on throwing up shields. I didn’t want Rose reading my confusion over Nabiki. Rose already – rightly – blamed herself for my breakup with Nabiki. She didn’t need to know how torn I was over it.

One of Rose’s birthday presents suddenly filed into the area around the pool. It was the band Overwrought, the members carrying their instruments and calling out a greeting. The band was a favourite of Hilary’s, and she suddenly squealed. ‘Oh my god, this is so sky!’ She jumped up and hugged Mr Zellwegger. ‘Thank you Granddad!’

‘This is Rose’s present, remember,’ Mr Zellwegger said, laughing.

Rose pulled a little away from me, but I could still hear her thoughts from her hand on my arm. She was just as happy getting a present for Hilary, and the fact that Xavier knew that pleased her.

Personally I was a little shocked by Overwrought’s appearance. After all, they played to sold-out stadiums across the planet; there was no reason why they’d play a special set at a teenager’s birthday party of no more than a dozen guests. But UniCorp had money, there was no denying that!

Overwrought greeted Rose, and then started by playing their hit song, Dead To Me. I thought it actually the best version of that song I’d ever heard. It wasn’. . .