***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***
Copyright © 2017 Anne Corlett
Chapter Six
When Jamie woke the next morning, the cabin was growing gradually lighter. The previous occupant must have set the lighting to simulate a natural dawn, although on board a ship like this, day and night were nothing more than a consensus.
She washed as best she could in the sink before pulling on a blue T-shirt and the long denim skirt she used to wear on warm evenings back on Calgarth. There was a tiny mirror above the cabinet, and she brushed her hair and fastened it back. There were still shadows beneath her eyes, but her reflection didn’t look quite so drawn as the one she’d glimpsed in that bar window back on Soltaire.
There was no one else down in the hold. She was conscious of an out-of-place feeling, like being a guest in someone’s home with no understanding of the unspoken rules.
She made herself a coffee and stood at the counter to eat a bowl of cereal and rehydrated milk. She’d almost finished when footsteps clanged on the stairs. A few seconds later, Gracie stepped through the gap in the crates.
She gave Jamie a cool nod. “Morning.” She paused, as though scratching around for how this sort of exchange should go. “Sleep all right?”
“Fine, thanks.”
Gracie opened the fridge, apparently satisfied that she’d met her conversational obligations. As Jamie hurried down the last few mouthfuls, not inclined to linger in awkward silence, there was a sharp crackle of sound, and Callan’s voice echoed through the hold, distorted by the comm.
“Engineer to bridge immediately, please.”
The message snapped off. Gracie didn’t show any reaction to the peremptory summons, throwing a hasty cup of coffee together and heading back to the stairs. There was a brief collision of voices as she reached the top, and after a few seconds Lowry appeared.
“Good night’s sleep?” he said.
She nodded. “You?”
He smiled. “Not too bad. The engines take a bit of getting used to. Have you traveled much?”
“Not that much. I went from Earth to Alegria when I was twenty-two, then Soltaire a few weeks ago. I did a couple of short trips when I was living on Alegria, but that’s about it.”
“Not back to Earth at all?”
“Just once.”
“Do you have still have family there? I mean, did you have . . .” Lowry rubbed his brow. “Sorry. There’s no right way to talk about it, is there?”
“It’s okay,” Jamie said. “My father died a few years ago, but my stepmother was still in Belsley. I’m not sure where my half sisters were living. We didn’t really keep in touch.”
“And your mother?”
“She died when I was fourteen.”
“That must have been hard.”
Jamie looked away. Twenty-four years ago and millions of miles away, and people still always wanted to know what had happened and how she’d felt about it. It was as though you weren’t allowed to leave anything behind.
The clank of a door provided a welcome distraction, and she looked up to see Callan walking through the gap. He nodded at the pair of them before shoving his tin mug under the hot-water tap and tipping a large spoonful of instant coffee into it.
“Morning,” Lowry said. “Everything all right?”
Callan nodded. “We may be making another stop. We’ve picked up a signal.”
Jamie’s heart gave a hopeful leap. More survivors. More proof that the statistics were wrong.
“From where?” Lowry asked.
“Mining colony on Pangaea.”
“I haven’t heard of it,” Lowry said.
“It’s in the Gemmel cluster,” Callan said. “Fairly wealthy, if I remember rightly. Small-scale platinum mining. Gracie’s trying to raise someone.”
“Do we know who it is?” Jamie asked.
“No,” Callan said. “It’s your basic distress beacon. Date-stamped a couple of days ago.”
“So we’ll be landing,” Lowry said.
Callan gave a noncommittal shrug. “Let’s see if Gracie gets any response. Then we’ll make a decision.”
“What do you mean?” Jamie felt a sharp surge of adrenaline. “We can’t just leave someone down there.”
Callan tipped powdered milk into his coffee and swirled it around. “Well, we can. If we can’t raise anyone, I’m not inclined to land on spec. We won’t know the fuel situation.”
The memories were shoving for space inside Jamie’s head. Her cold stone floor, gritty and unyielding. Her arms wrapped tight around her body as she tried not to break into pieces, alone. And running through her mind, that relentless fugue—zero point zero zero zero . . .
“No.” She wrenched her thoughts back.
Callan’s eyebrows went up. “No?”
“I didn’t mean . . .” She shook her head, trying to clear it. “I just . . . whoever’s down there, they may think they’re the only one.”
Callan was still looking at her, and she felt a flash of resentment. He’d never had to face that possibility. None of them had.
“Like I said.” His tone was level. “If Gracie can raise someone, then we’ll see.”
“What if they can’t get to the comm in time?” Jamie could hear her voice rising. “What if they’re injured?”
“That’s a lot of what ifs.” Callan tapped his fingers on the scratched surface of the kitchen unit. “How about I add one? What if there’s no fuel?”
“You stocked up on Soltaire,” Lowry put in, his tone neutral. “Do we have enough to take off again?”
“Yes,” Callan said. “But it would mean another stop somewhere. That’s an unnecessary complication.”
“Unnecessary?” Jamie gave a harsh laugh. “Saving someone’s life?”
“It’s an established settlement,” Callan said. “It’s not like we’d be abandoning them on some backwater to chase their dinner with a homemade bow and arrow.”
“But they’d be alone.” Jamie could feel a tremor trying to break through her. If she started shaking, she might not stop. “You don’t know . . .” She broke off. The memory of those first hours was too close, too personal. But she had to make them understand. They couldn’t just sail off into the void, never looking back. “I was alone,” she managed. “I thought I was alone.”
Callan sipped his coffee, studying her over the rim of the mug. “You must have known you weren’t. The infomercials said . . .”
“It doesn’t matter.” There was a panicked edge to her voice. “When you wake up and there’s no one . . .” She drew a deep breath. “If we just fly on, and leave whoever’s down there, we might as well have murdered them.”
“There’ll be survivors all over the place,” Callan said. “We’re not responsible for every one of them.”
“But we’re responsible for this one.”
“How do you figure that?” Callan said. “If we’d never picked the signal up we’d never have known there was anyone there.”
“But we do know,” Jamie said. “We can’t stop knowing it just because it’s not convenient for you.”
A quick flash of anger crossed Callan’s face. “Is that what you think? That I just can’t be bothered?”
“Looks like it from where I’m standing,” she shot back.
“You’re standing on my ship,” Callan said. “And if I hadn’t picked the three of you up, you’d still be standing on Soltaire.”
“And we’re grateful,” Lowry said. “But Jamie’s right. We can’t just leave someone behind.”
He drained his coffee and put the mug down. “Let’s see what Gracie picks up.”
As he walked away, Jamie stared after him, a whole plethora of furious responses running through her mind. She wanted to scream, or hit something. But she knew she wouldn’t. She never had. She’d always kept everything shoved down inside her, growing harder and denser, hidden away, but never forgotten.
“Let it go.” Lowry stepped up to her side. “Let’s see what happens.”
Back upstairs, she’d just reached the door of her cabin when the comm crackled and Callan’s voice came on.
“Commencing approach to Pangaea in five minutes. Strap in for landing.”
The tight knot inside Jamie’s chest loosened. One of the other doors slid open and Rena appeared. Her hair was clumped at one side of her head, as though she’d been sleeping, but her eyes were suspiciously red.
“What is it?”
“Survivors,” Jamie said. “There was a signal.”
“More survivors?” Rena’s hand went to her forehead, as though she were about to cross herself, but she caught herself on the edge of the movement and pressed her hands together in front of her chest instead. “How many?”
“I don’t know.”
Jamie turned and walked along the corridor. After a few seconds there was a patter of feet and Rena fell in beside her.
She gave Jamie a quick, tremulous smile. “It’s starting. People will come together.”
“We need to get strapped in,” Jamie said, before the other woman could get into her stride. “Come on.”
Callan’s skill in handling the ship had been apparent when the Phaeacian had set down on Soltaire, and this landing was no less deft. Jamie barely felt a jolt as they touched down.
Callan appeared just as they were undoing their harnesses. “You three stay well back in the hold,” he said, walking toward the door.
“Who’s out there?” Rena asked.
“No idea.”
Jamie stared at him. “Didn’t you speak to someone?”
“No. So stay back.”
“You expecting trouble?” Lowry said.
“I don’t know what to expect. You never know how someone will react when they’re frightened, and stupid is hot-wired right into some people.”
Sharp sunlight cut through the gap as the doors opened. Callan took a couple of steps outside, his hand resting on his gun, and then stopped. He stood still, looking at something out of Jamie’s view, before turning and beckoning to them.
As Lowry and Rena hurried forward, Jamie hung back, conscious of an echo of the same feeling she’d had on Soltaire. As long as they stayed safely sealed inside the walls of the ship, she didn’t have to think about what was out there. She could choose to believe anything at all; that they were alone in the universe, or surrounded by living worlds, full of living, breathing people.
By the time she reached the entrance the others were walking down the gangway. The port was bigger than the one on Soltaire, and they’d set down on one of three platforms around a central loading area. The sky was a darker blue than on any other planet she’d seen, giving the place a pregnant, storm-heavy look despite the white-gold glare of the sun.
There were two people standing a few meters from the end of the gangway: a girl who looked to be in her early twenties, with a tall, thin lad of around eighteen or nineteen standing a few paces behind her, arms soldier-straight by his sides.
The girl was small and fair-haired, dressed in a pale blue dress that looked like something a child might wear to a party. It floated down to just above her knees, and her arms and legs were bare. Her expression was wary, and as Callan reached the end of the gangway, she held up a warning hand, shooting a quick glance over her shoulder at the lad.
“Sorry.” Her voice seemed too light and flimsy for the heavy, industrial surroundings. “Could you stop. Please.” The lad had risen up on his toes, shifting his weight back and forth, his gaze resting somewhere above the heads of the new arrivals. “He doesn’t . . . I mean, he finds people difficult. It was hours before he’d talk to me. But we get along fine now, don’t we, Finn?” She smiled over her shoulder. It looked forced, but the lad stopped his gentle rocking and nodded, a quick jerk of his head.
“What’s your name?” Callan said.
“Mila.”
“You the only two here?”
Something flickered across the girl’s face. “I haven’t seen anyone else.”
“That’s not an answer.” Callan had picked up on the careful shape of her response. “Any sign of anyone else?”
Unexpectedly it was Finn who replied. His voice was flat, his words delivered without intonation. “There’s the bad man.” He had dropped his gaze slightly, so that he was staring at the flanks of the ship.
“The bad man?” Callan said.
Mila tried to smile. “It’s nothing. Just a joke I made when I thought . . .” She broke off, reaching up to wrap a strand of hair around her fingers. “I keep thinking there’s someone here. Someone’s moving things. Or maybe I did it. Or Finn. I’m never sure.”
There was a shrill note in her voice, and Finn went up on his toes again. Mila instantly turned to him, dropping into a soothing monotone. “It’s okay, Finn, it’s okay.”
Callan glanced around the landing site, then looked back at Mila, regarding her appraisingly. As Jamie moved farther down the gangway, she could see what he was looking at. The girl had a mottled shadow of bruising along her jawline and a healing cut in front of her ear. There was also the faintest suggestion of a fading black eye hidden beneath her careful makeup.
“What happened to you?” Callan asked.
Mila flushed. “Someone hurt me.”
“I can see that,” Callan replied. “Is that someone your bad man?”
“No. It was before.”
Callan nodded, his expression still contemplative.
Mila’s face creased in an anxious frown, and then her expression changed, and she lifted her hand to push her hair back from her face. It was a slow, deliberate gesture, and when she smiled at him, there was a hint of practiced coquettishness about it.
“So,” she said. “Here we are.”
The words sounded too old for her. They didn’t fit with her child’s dress and her thin frame.
Callan gave her a long, level look. “Here we are. What now?”
Mila glanced away, her mask slipping a little, as though she didn’t have the right script for this. When she looked back, she was herself again, young and uncertain. It was as though she’d shrugged on someone else’s skin for a moment, but it hadn’t fit.
She chewed at her thumbnail. “Can we come with you?”
“If that’s what you want. We’re going to the capital.”
“Anywhere with people,” Mila said. “I don’t care where it is.”
She glanced over her shoulder as she spoke, and Callan followed the direction of her gaze. “You really think there’s someone else?”
Mila shook her head slowly.
“What?” Callan’s voice was sharp with impatience. “What are you not telling us?”
“There was a gunshot,” she said, after another long pause. “A couple of nights ago.” Her brow creased. “At least I think there was. Maybe I dreamed it. I don’t know.”
“Did he hear it?” Callan jerked his head toward Finn.
“He sleeps really deeply.” Mila’s tone was defensive. “But I know what I heard.”
“I thought you said you weren’t sure.”
“I . . .” Mila bit her lip. “I didn’t dream it. I just told myself that. I know what it was.”
“Shots.” There was a hint of skepticism in Callan’s voice. “From a bad man who’s hiding and doesn’t want to be seen. Maybe he decided to end it all, and that’s what you heard.”
Mila’s expression darkened. “No. I think there was someone else. The bad man . . . he’s still here. Sometimes I hear him at night, scratching around, as if he’s trying to scare us.”
“He?” Callan said, as though it had just occurred to him.
“That’s what it feels like.”
“And you haven’t gone looking for him?” Callan said.
A hint of anger sparked in Mila’s eyes, but Callan held his hand up. “That was a question, not a criticism. I’d have thought you’d want to find out if someone else was here, and what their intentions were.”
“I didn’t think . . .” Mila looked down. “I was scared. He felt . . . it felt wrong. Like I said. Bad.”
Callan regarded Mila for a few more seconds, then turned away. “Well, if there is someone here, he’s got half an hour to present himself. If he does show up . . . well, we’ll see. The two of you go get your things. I need to check the fuel situation.” He turned to Jamie. “Can you find the port depot and see if there are some medical packs we can load easily? It might be a good idea to have something worth trading.”
As he walked away, Jamie followed him.
“Are you sure we should be wandering about the place?” she said. “You heard what she said.”
“I heard her say she might have dreamed it.”
“She sounded pretty scared.”
He stopped walking and looked at her. “They’ve been alone here for days. Of course she’s scared. She’s probably jumping out of her skin at every bit of rubbish blowing in the street. If there really was a bad man, why wouldn’t he have shown himself? They’re not exactly much of a threat. And . . .”
He stopped abruptly.
“What?”
He shook his head. “Just thinking there are some things that probably never change. A girl like her, alone. There’ll always be someone out for what he can get.”
“She’s not alone,” Jamie said.
“The boy’s hardly likely to be much protection,” Callan said, setting off again.
Jamie fell into step beside him. “You really think she was imagining things?”
“I do. I can’t see any reason why someone would hide from them, but I can see a whole load of reasons why someone wouldn’t.”
There was a dark logic to his words, and Jamie nodded. “I’ll go check the depot. Anything in particular you want me to look for?”
He gave her a faint smile. “You’re the vet.”
Jamie found the depot easily enough. It was a wide-fronted prefab building, with the main entrance on a service lane leading off the landing site. Inside, Jamie checked the signs on the end of each aisle until she found the medicines, her footsteps echoing between the shelves, as if someone were keeping pace with her in a parallel aisle.
She loaded a stack of portable med kits onto a cart and pushed it around to a roll-up shutter at the back of the warehouse. When she tugged at the bottom edge, it didn’t move, and as she adjusted her grip, her knuckles scraped against the concrete floor. She yanked her hand back. There was a puckered graze across the back of her fingers, with a couple of tiny speckles of blood beading on the skin. She was about to turn and push the cart the long way around when she felt an irrational flare of certainty.
There was someone else in the building.
It wasn’t a sound exactly, but a particular kind of silence, like someone holding their breath.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded high and thin. “Is someone there?”
Was that a footstep?
Her pulse was beginning to thud. Mila’s nerves had infected her. There was no one here. But somehow she didn’t want to make her way back through the empty, echoing warehouse. She turned back to the shutter, reaching down to scrabble at the lower edge again. As she turned, feeling for a better grip, she caught sight of a lever just to the side of the door. When she yanked it down, the shutter clanked and strained, then slid slowly up into the roof. Jamie grabbed the cart and shoved it out onto the sunlit landing site.
By the time she reached the ship, her pulse had steadied, and she was uncomfortably relieved that no one else had witnessed that irrational moment of panic.
Mila was sitting on the edge of the gangway, next to Lowry. There was a clutch of small bags around her feet, clothes spilling out their tops, speaking of hasty and indiscriminate packing. Finn was pacing nearby, his steps careful and precise. A small backpack sat high up on his shoulders, with the chest strap pulled tight, like a child on a day trip from school. Rena was standing a little way apart, watching the pair of them through narrowed eyes.
“Are you sure you need all that?” Jamie nodded at the bags. Reds and golds, chiffons and satins. From one bag a blue sleeve hung limp, covered in sequins, some of which had pulled away, leaving trailing threads. “The ship’s pretty basic.”
“These are the only clothes I have.”
Jamie looked out across the rooftops. Callan had said that the settlement was wealthy, but the port didn’t look like the sort of place where women would have much call to float around in sequined chiffon. It was solid, industrial, and flanked by the scrubby slopes of a miserly hillside.
“You’re a prostitute,” Rena said suddenly. It was a pronouncement, not a question, and her tone was blunt and accusatory.
Mila flinched and reached out to touch the sequined sleeve with her fingertip. After a moment, she lifted her head, another of those bright, artificial smiles pinned on her face.
“Why not? Money’s good, and it’s not as though work’s easy to come by in a place like this.”
Rena stiffened.
“Rena . . .” Lowry began, but Jamie cut in, preempting anything the other woman might say.
“I don’t think we need to worry too much about money.” She tried to keep her tone light, but the girl’s smile faded.
“Is it like this everywhere?”
“I think so. But there might be more people on the capital.”
Mila dropped her head to her knees and began to cry. Finn stopped his pacing and turned to look at her, his face puckering in the first emotion Jamie had seen there. One hand clenched into a fist, the knuckles rubbing on the back of his other forearm, as though he was trying to scrub something off his skin.
Mila gave her face a hard swipe, knocking the tears away. She scrambled to her feet and moved toward Finn, stopping a couple of feet away, hand raised but not touching him.
“It’s okay,” she said, in a low, singsong voice, like a mother talking to a troubled child. “It’s okay, it’s okay.” Jamie was assaulted by an image that was both brutal and oddly tender: Mila, in her chiffon and sequins, lying back on a bed, a male head on her breast, her hands soft on the stubby hair. It’s okay, it’s okay.
Finn was still rubbing at his skin, and he’d started to rock a little. Mila stood up on tiptoe, trying to catch his gaze.
“Look up,” she said. “Look at the sky. Look how blue it is. And look at the ship. It’s going to take us up there.”
Finn shook his head violently, but he lifted his gaze to the sky. Gradually his rocking slowed and stopped. The rubbing continued, but with less force to it, slowing until it was just an occasional pluck at his skin.
Mila said something else, her voice barely above a whisper. Finn tipped his head, listening, although he kept his face turned up toward the sky. After a moment he nodded, turned away, and resumed his careful pacing.
Mila turned back to Jamie. “He’s okay.”
“How did you know what to do?” There had been something simple and instinctive about the way Mila had soothed the lad.
“I just figured it out. He likes the sky, and open places. He doesn’t like being touched. And he doesn’t like people getting angry or upset.”
“How did you survive?” Jamie said, then hesitated, not sure how to clarify her meaning with any sort of delicacy. The disease had been spread and respread through human contact. And Mila was . . .
“I wasn’t working at the time.” Mila lifted her hand to touch the bruise beneath her eye. “I had a client who got angry when I wouldn’t . . . well, it doesn’t matter. They told me to keep out of the way until I healed. He was someone important, and they didn’t want trouble. I stayed upstairs and someone brought my meals up. When I got sick no one came.” She looked down, fingers twining together. “I thought I was going to die. I tried to get downstairs. I could hear people. Some shouting. Someone crying. But I couldn’t walk. And anyway . . .” She gave Jamie a swift look, as though assessing how much this stranger might understand. “I thought if I was going to die, maybe dying alone would be okay. Being with someone isn’t always better, is it?”
Jamie didn’t reply. What would have happened if she’d still been with Daniel when the disease struck? They didn’t touch as casually as other people they knew. There were some couples who brushed one another’s arm when they spoke, or leaned against one another, as though they had to keep reminding themselves that they were one of two. Daniel had learned when to touch her and when to let her have her space. So maybe they would have made it, the pair of them.
Callan and Gracie appeared around the side of the ship. The engineer was shaking her head, and Callan looked irritated. Another dispute over this fresh set of survivors, no doubt.
Callan came over, casting his eye over the stacked cart. “That the medicines?”
She nodded.
“Is there likely to be any Lycidine in there?” Lowry said.
“Probably not in the multipacks,” Jamie said. “But there were some more specialist supplies. Do you need some?”
He nodded. “I’ve got a rather irritating little heart condition that surfaces at times of stress. If you tell me where the medicines are, I’ll go and look.”
“Quicker if I do it,” Jamie said. With the moment of their departure growing closer, she had an irrational urge to go back to the depot, to prove to herself that there’d never been anyone there.
That they wouldn’t be leaving anyone behind.
As she stepped back through the door, Jamie could feel the back of her neck prickling.
It was just the sudden chill of the place. That was all.
Her gaze fell on a doorway tucked into the alcove at the side of the shutter. She could see through it into a small office. A desk was tipped on its side in front of the door, as though to form a barrier of sorts. Jamie walked over to look inside, stopping dead on the threshold. The little room had been converted into something resembling a bunker. There were crates stacked around the walls, and a mattress was pushed into the corner, with a tangle of blankets on top.
And the body of a man lay facedown on the floor.
Chapter Seven
Jamie suddenly seemed to be breathing ice, fear crackling inside her lungs.
The man looked to have been about fifty, with thinning hair and a muscled frame. Now he was slack and gray-skinned, the only color about him coming from the rusty stains on the concrete floor, where the blood had seeped from the ragged wounds in his head and side.
For a moment the implications of the scene failed to register. There was just the utter shock of that lifeless form. In all the days since she woke from the fever, Jamie had never once seen death. Just dust. Just emptiness. But this was death in its most solid, undeniable
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2026 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
