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Maddy was distraught. Nothing I did brought her around. We sat on the floor as I rocked her back and forth. Without warning, she got up and wandered across the room. My ass had been growing numb for a while but I didn’t like to complain. I wanted to be there for her.
She lay on the bed and stared at the wall, not moving.
I got up and dusted imaginary lint from my hands.
“Are you hungry?” I said. “How about breakfast? Or something to drink?”
She didn’t stir.
“I guess it’ll just be me then,” I said.
I tucked into a delicious jellyfish sandwich with mint sauce. None of those ingredients were what I was eating but it was a close enough translation for aliens to know the delicacy they’d be treated to.
“Mm,” I said. “Super tasty.”
I sat on her side of the dining table so I could watch her. Still, she didn’t get up. She just lay there.
I licked my fingers and placed the dish in the replicator. The dish would be broken down and dissolved, its atoms reused for future dishes and other ingredients.
I went into the bathroom and washed my hands. I came out. She still hadn’t moved. Was she asleep?
I moved around her and found her eyes still open. She blinked but otherwise didn’t move a single muscle.
“If you keep lying there like that I’m going to have to turn you over so you don’t get bedsores,” I said.
“Go away,” she said.
I sat on the edge of the bed, so close to her I could almost feel her heart beating.
“Come on,” I said. “We can’t let something like this keep us down. We can think of a new way to get out of here. You’re the engineer. I bet you’ve got lots of ideas.”
“We’re never getting out of here,” she said. “Never.”
“Don’t say that,” I said. “We can. We just need to believe in ourselves.”
Where was the endless hope she harbored last night? Where was the desire to rage against the Changelings and beat them at their own game?
Disappeared, like the hole in the wall.
I was wrong about her body not moving. There was one part of her—other than her eyelids when she blinked—that did.
The index finger on her right hand tapped at the bedsheet in a repetitive pattern over and over again.
“You keep doing that,” I said, nodding to her fingers. “Is it some sort of game you play?”
“No,” she said. “It’s not a game.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s something my teachers showed us once. It’s a signal system. A way to communicate without the enemy knowing what you’re doing.”
I sensed talking about it was something that might help her get out of the funk she was in.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Go on,” I said. “Tell me. How does it work? Or is it too complicated to understand?”
“It’s called tap code. It’s not complicated. It’s very simple.”
