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“Good girl,” Shah says, dropping a kiss on my head.
He leaves, the doors clunking together with bolt sounds behind him once he’s gone. I am locked in. I am trapped in a room with an entire hostile ship outside waiting to do me in. I feel like a sardine in a can that somehow survived the canning only to be forced to wait for the inevitable end.
Toying with the laser weapon, I imagine what it might be like to fire it at a person…
Click.
ZIP!
“Oops.”
I did not mean to hit the trigger button. It’s actually much more sensitive than I thought it would be. That really seems very unsafe. Also, I’ve set a pillow on fire.
Grabbing it, I throw it into the bath and turn the water on. Flames turn to hissing steam. Nothing that can’t be removed by the automatic venting system. It’s fine. I’m fine. As long as I don’t burn my locked room down with myself inside it, I might just survive.
I have time to think about things now. Like how horrified Shah was when he realized I hadn’t been chemically prevented from reproducing and that I had the ability to be pregnant. It’s not something I ever thought about either, though I suppose I should have. When Shah is inside me, I’m not thinking about anything besides pleasure. Pregnancy isn’t an issue in the Colony because we don’t have sex. So though I knew better, I wasn’t thinking better. Neither was he.
Everything about our coupling is instinctual and poorly thought out. Our attraction seems fated, like we are dolls the universe likes to push together and make kiss. The question he asked me before the scan, when he asked me why I went to the club that fateful night,thatgoes around and around in my head. I don’t know why I did it. I had no reason. I was acting without any kind of sense. It was like I was empty, just a thing doing another thing. That’s weird, I realize now. At the time I was so used to being a thing doing a thing that I didn’t even notice that the thing I was doing changed. I just…
I frown to myself and put the laser down. Safer not to touch that, in case I am overcome by some sort of impulse again. I try thinking about Zeki instead. Poor Zeki. I didn’t like her, exactly. But you don’t have to like someone to want them not to die. I can’t forget how small and weak she seemed in that bed, with Malik by her side looking helpless and hopeless.
I don’t know how much time has passed when I hear someone at the door. I scramble to grab the laser, but it rolls away under the bed. I take refuge under a table instead, hiding from whoever it is. Hiding is really much more my scene than attacking people with lasers anyway.
I hear a great big sob as the door opens. It is the rare and incredibly heart-rending sound of a man crying. Malik is beside himself with grief. I don’t need to be told what has happened. I feel a heaviness settling over me as I hear Shah trying to comfort him.
“I can’t believe it,” Malik is saying. “I can’t believe she’s gone. How can she be gone?”
“Sorry, brother,” Shah says.
The chair next to the table creaks. I see Malik’s legs and feet. I am about to crawl out when his fist hits the tabletop hard enough to make the whole thing dance.
“It’s that fucking drone!”
This does not sound like a good time to come out of hiding. Shah must be wondering where I am. Or maybe not. He’s not stupid, after all.
“It wasn’t Dreamy. She’s got nothing to do with this. She scanned clear.”
“I don’t give a shit what she scanned. She’s bad luck. She doesn’t belong. It’s her fault, even if it isn’t her fault.”
There’s some impeccable outlaw logic.
I sink back further under the table, hoping Malik doesn’t look down and under. I do not want to be in the middle of this. I want to be back in the Colony. I want to feel normal again. There’s no normal here. There’s chaos and death and the undercurrent of untrustworthiness that pervades this place. Shah doesn’t seem to feel it. Why doesn’t he feel it?
Shah
Zeki was dead before the medics transported her off the ship, but we had to try so we transported her to the hospital station anyway. Malik couldn’t accept her passing then, and he cannot accept it now. I watch him clench his fists, his face twisting and his eyes narrowing as grief turns into a more manageable emotion for a warrior: fury.
“This is your fault,” Malik hisses at me. “You led my sister to her death. All she wanted was to love you and to be loved by you, but she was never good enough, and now she is gone.”
“I am sorry for Zeki’s passing, Malik. I grieve her deeply. But I was never obligated to love her, and I did not lead her into any danger I was not myself in. We were all betrayed. We need to find who is responsible for this, not turn on each other.”
I can see he wants to kill me. I would be an easy target to end, a big trophy that might somehow go some way to making up for Zeki’s loss. But he’s not that stupid. I hope grief does not twist him into an action he will regret for the rest of his life.
“Fuck you, Shah. You could have saved her. You could have told her to stay on the ship. You could have taken someone else.”
“I could never have told Zeki to stay on the ship, nor could you, Malik. She knew her own mind. She saved many of us with the smoke grenade.”
“If she’d run instead of trying to save you, she’d be alive,” Malik growls.
