I turn, look her dead in the eye. “It would help if you weren’t so quick to panic. If you could have just atinybit of faith that I’mdoing what I think is best for us. You think I want to starve? You really think I want to walk around this ship and see our people wasting away? You really think I wouldchoose to look them in the eye while that happensif I didn’t think the direction we’re headed in is the best one?” I should stop, I really should. I can’t. “We don’t have to eat things we like. We just have toeat. We can do that, mostly, for a little while longer. So in the meantime, I need you to do your job—and quit telling me how to do mine.”
“‘Mostly,’” she says. “‘For a little while longer.’ Do you hear yourself? What does it matter if we have enough to eat for ninety percent of the time weneedit, if it’s not going to be enough to last?”
I knew those words were a mistake the second they slipped out. I knew she’d latch on to them, throw them back at me.
“We can make it work—”
“I ran the numbers again, twice, and we’d barely have enough to last until the first date they offered us. We need another delivery or we’re basically dead.”
Her words hang in the air, linger just long enough before crashing to the ground. Different perspectives aside, in this moment we are coming from the exact same place: terror.
“I’ll figure it out,” I say, too sharply.Alone, I want to add. She doesn’t move, just stands there like she’s grown deep roots through my floor. “I need some space, Nat.”
Finally she turns, heads for the door. “Unless you can getback on a call andfixthis,” she says before she leaves, no fight left in her voice, “you should start with the water. Find a way to get more of it, and wemighthave a chance.”
I spend the entire next hour at my window, alone except for the queen of clubs. She is the best sort of company, the silent sort who can’t judge the ideas I toss around: she doesn’t expect too much, and she doesn’t expect too little. That’s the problem with people—all their expectations, all their expectationsfor good reason. Queens on cards have no stake in staying alive. Queens on cards cannot die. If someone were to burn or shred or otherwise destroy them, they wouldn’t care because they cannot think or see or feel.
But our station is not occupied by cards. Our station is full of living, breathing people, who I care desperately about despite—because of!—all the messy complications that come along with blood and soul and heart.
Unless you can get back on a call and fix thisplays on a loop in my head.Fix this, fix this, fix this. It would be so easy—in theory. So easy to head up to Control, press my finger to a button, and tell him I was wrong.
I hate being wrong.
I could spin it with the truth, though—that after taking a closer look at our supplies, we can’t make the delayed option work after all. But what then? What about Vonn, what his intervention could mean for us down the line? If I was too optimistic before on the food front, maybe I’m being tooparanoid about what could happen to us later. My gut twists at the thought of asking for his help—but is that worry worth people’s lives? Is my pride worth people starving?
I have to admit it isn’t.
I close my eyes, count to ten. Steady my nerves. This is the right decision, I tell myself. This is theonlydecision, now that I know what I know. I only wish we had better choices.
Control is deserted when I arrive, which is a relief. It’s hard enough to face the mistake I’ve made on my own—it would be worse to have to do it in front of everyone else. I take a seat on the stool, roll over to the message-system section of the control board. Before I can think twice, I put in a call, pressvideothis time. Better not to leave myself any openings—with a video call, there’s no chance I’ll sabotage my own good intentions with more lies. Once Shapiro sees my face, he’ll see I’m not my mother. With that lie unraveled, the rest will fall out easily.
They will, anyway, if Shapiro ever actually picks up. Five rings go unanswered, then ten. At eleven, the message on screen blinks fromINITIATING VIDEO CALLtoTHANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE. At twenty, it saysFAILURE TO CONNECT, TRY AGAIN LATER.
Well. This is... not ideal.
I try again with audio-only—perhaps there’s just a satellite issue of some sort making the video option unavailable? Twenty rings pass, with the same basic messages. No luck—and no missed calls, no voice mails on the log. Nothing at all to assure me this outage is due to regularly scheduled maintenance, orany other reason that implies it will be up and running again soon. I’m definitely using the right system—last time I put in a call, Shapiro picked up on the very first ring. I’m fairly certain it’s not a problem on our end, since we were able to initiate this new call, too, and it only failed when it couldn’t get through to Nashville. I could be wrong, of course. I’m not a systems expert—and it’s not like Zesi has experience with this, either.
It could beanything, I realize, with a wave of dread. Hopefully it’s just a simple system failure, something that will be functional within the day, and not something much more severe. They’re far enough inland from most natural disasters—one of the primary reasons they relocated space headquarters from Texas and Florida decades ago—but they’re not immune to strong floods, or tornadoes. If not a natural disaster, perhaps the virus wasn’t quite as contained as they believed it to be—perhaps they let down their guard too early in the name of getting a shipment up to us; perhaps it flared up and hit them hard.
I hope that’s not it. I hope they’re coasting on sugar and caffeine and adrenaline in an all-out effort to address their technical issues and nothing more. I hope they’re okay.
I hope they’realive.
It is an incredibly helpless feeling to be this far away and have no idea what’s going on.
And what of our shipment now? Unless the system issue is resolved soon, we’ll have no way of knowing for sure thatShapiro even managed to get it off the ground. If it’s more than just a simple technical failure, their team could be sidelined forweeksdealing with... whatever it is that has happened.
Breathe, Lindley.Breathe. Just because everything else has spiraled to catastrophe, it doesn’t necessarily mean things are worst-case scenario down in Nashville. And it doesn’t have to mean things are worst-case scenario here, either, even though it feels that way.
I shut off Control’s overhead spotlight as I head out, back to my place. Natalin seemed to think we could stretch our supplies if we addressed our water shortage—if only water filters were as easy to come by as our light replacement disks, I think. We’ve gotdrawersfull of those, so tiny and flat. Water filters are bulkier, and oddly shaped; we definitely wouldn’t have any spares hidden away somewhere. There has to be a way to get a fresh one, though. As I walk, I keep coming back to the idea of possibly getting what we need fromNautilusinstead of from Radix.
The more I think about it, the more it seems like a viable option. It’s risky, yes, for so many reasons—but compared to leaving all of our people to go hungry, it might be a risk worth taking. Atmost, our mutation could infect fifteen people. Better fifteen than starving our entire station, right?
Not that itfeelsright. What a terrible choice to have to make, when the best thing doesn’t feel like agoodthing.
My buzz screen has been blessedly quiet for a good longwhile now. I put in a call to Heath once I’m back inside the private walls of my own suite. It can feel like before between us, if I just do my best to forget. Ineedit to feel like before.
He answers immediately. “Are you okay? Leo said you were upset, that we needed to give you some space—it’s been so hard not to call, Linds. What’s going on?”
