“Yes sir,” I said, standing in a rush. “Thank you, sir.”
Caldswell nodded and shooed me toward the door, but as I turned to go, keeping my eyes firmly away from the cook or Ren or the newest little glowing bug that had just drifted through the ceiling right in front of me, the captain said, “And Morris?”
I stopped.
“The offer to talk is still open.”
I closed my eyes with a long, silent breath. “I’ll keep that in mind, sir.”
“Dismissed.”
I was out the door before the final syllable was out of his mouth. It was an appalling breach of decorum to run out while your officer was still talking, but I couldn’t stay in that room another second. I jogged down the hall, picking up speed, but I didn’t go up the spiral stair to my bunk. Instead I swung through engineering and entered the cargo bay from the back.
Caldswell had told me to get some rest. Considering I’d just come off a fight and a full day’s worth of work, you’d think that would be an easy command to follow, but I knew if I tried to go to sleep now, I’d only have more nightmares. What I really wanted was to get drunk and forget about this shit for a while, but I couldn’t do that either, not so long as the cook was also the bartender. So I did the next best thing. I ran.
The aeons had stacked the crates of ground nuts almost to the ceiling, but there was still a clear pathway around the outside of the cargo bay. I ran it as fast as I could, my bare feet slapping on the metal as I whirled around the corners. I ran until my legs burned and my lungs felt like they would explode, pushing harder and harder until my pounding heart drowned out all the fear and uncertainty.
But sweet as it was, it couldn’t last. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t run forever. Eventually, I stumbled to a stop, flopping down on the stairs to catch my breath and finally face what I’d been running from.
Funny enough, it wasn’t the HVFP team. Terrifying as it was to think there was someone out there who wanted me badly enough to send that kind of hardware, I understood armor. I could shoot up Terran tin cans all day and thank them for the exercise. What I couldn’t understand was everything else.
I dug my hands into my sweaty hair. If Rashid and the captain hadn’t clearly seen the black monster across the field, I would have chalked it up to another hallucination. Honestly, I almost wished it had been. At least a hallucination would have fit in with the rest of my weird shit, but I didn’t have a category for the real thing. I didn’t know where to put any of this—the guns from my dream, the floating bugs, Ren. I knew it was ruining my life and my chances of reaching goals, but I didn’t know how to beat it. I didn’t know what to do at all.
I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to shoot something, just kill whatever it was that was causing this and retake control, but there was nothing to shoot. I didn’t know where to find the black monster or what it was, and I couldn’t shoot the bugs. I couldn’t even touch them. I couldn’t do anything, and that made me angriest of all.
Shaking with rage that had no outlet, I slammed my hands down and heaved myself to my feet. I would run some more, I decided. Run until I was too tired to care about any of this bullshit. It was a coward’s escape, but anything was better than sitting here being furious over things I had no control over. But just as I was about to get going, I noticed that my hands were dirty.
At first I thought the black gunk must have come from the cargo bay stairs. They were high traffic and metal, prone to grime, and I hadn’t been looking when I’d flopped down on them. But the backs of my hands were dirty as well as my palms, and none of it rubbed off on my clothes. It was almost like they were stained, like I’d dipped them to the wrist in ink. Also, now that I was paying attention, I realized my hands were tingling with pins and needles, like they’d fallen asleep.
A cold trickle of fear ran down my spine, but I kept my breathing steady. I couldn’t panic. My senses hadn’t exactly been trustworthy recently. Just because I saw a black stain on my hands that happened to match the one I’d seen in the bunker dream from Io5 didn’t mean it was really there. This could be just another hallucination. It could also be something perfectly explainable, like an allergic reaction. A really, really bad one. Still, there was no need to panic. None. I almost had myself convinced of that when I saw the stain move.
It wasn’t nearly as dramatic as it had been in the dream when I’d watched the blackness sweep over my skin in the reflection of Ren’s eyes. This was just a twitch, like watching the last bit of water slowly seep into paper. Only this wasn’t paper and water. It was my arm and an unknown black substance, and before my brain could even finish processing that, I was running up the stairs as fast as my legs could go.
Considering all the running I’d been doing, I shouldn’t have been able to go faster than a jog, but fear gave me wings. I shot into the lounge like a bullet, vaulting over the kitchen counter and throwing myself at the sink. My hands were shaking so badly it took me two tries to get the faucet going. Once I had the water pouring, I shoved both my hands under the stream, willing the black to wash away.
It didn’t. The blast of hot water made the pins and needles ten times worse, but the stain didn’t budge. Heart pounding faster than ever, I knocked a soap pad off the sink’s edge with my elbow and began scrubbing my hands like I was trying to flay off my skin. But no matter how hard I washed, the black stayed put.
I was now closer to true panic than I’d been in years. I had no idea what this shit was, but after my dream, the animal part of my brain was absolutely convinced it would kill me if I let it. I was still scrubbing frantically when I heard a voice behind me.
“What are you doing?”
It’s a sign of how upset I was that I didn’t whirl around. Instead, I jumped with a yelp, banging my head sharply on the cabinet over the sink. I cursed and grabbed my smarting forehead, which of course got soap all over my hair, but at least the pain knocked a little sense into me. I took a deep breath and snatched my hands down, grabbing the kitchen towel off the sink as I went. My sopping wet hands soaked the thin cloth through at once, but that didn’t matter. I wrapped the towel around my stained hands like a muffler before looking over my shoulder at the cook, who was standing in the door to the kitchen.
I was so far gone, I didn’t remember not to look straight at him until it was way too late. I got a good dose of revulsion for my trouble, but I was so upset already that the nausea actually had a hard time getting through. I wasn’t even angry at the cook for sneaking up on me. I just wanted him to go away, and not for the usual reasons. Something deep inside me was screaming that I shouldn’t let anyone get close to the thing on my hands. I had to make him leave.
“Nothing to see here,” I said, turning back to the sink. “I’m just washing up.”
I heard the cook sigh. “Devi, what’s going on?”
My whole body cringed. Something about hearing him say my name that way, like he actually cared, twisted me up like a spring. “Nothing,” I snapped. “Cool your jets. I’ll be out of your kitchen in a minute.”
I’d tried to be sharp, controlled, but my voice sounded panicked even to me. That would never do. Black stuff aside, the cook already wanted me off the ship, and acting like a terrified nut job was just giving him more ammunition. I had to get a grip, so I slammed my eyes shut and focused on being still … being calm …
I was still working on it when I felt the cook right beside me.
My eyes popped open, but before I could react, I felt something soft brush my forehead. The cook had gotten a clean towel out of one of the cabinets and was using it to wipe the suds from my hair. He didn’t say anything while he worked, and I didn’t either. I couldn’t. I was spellbound by the gentle pressure of his strokes and the warmth of the hand he’d placed on the crown of my head to keep me still.
I usually hate it when people try to take care of me, especially men. I hate the sense of obligation it creates, the imbalance of power, but I didn’t hate this. For some reason I had this deep certainty that the cook wanted nothing except to make me feel better. The feeling was as intense and inexplicable as my need to drink with him last night, and I had about as much chance of fighting it now as I’d had then.
Also, not that I would ever admit it, but it was kind of nice to have someone touch me. After the panic over my hands and running myself half dead, my body was desperate for comfort, and though I knew it was the absolute wrong thing to do, I started to relax. With every stroke of his fingers, my terrified need to get away faded, and as the fear retreated, so did the pins and needles crawling over my hands. By the time the cook finished wiping the last of the suds away, the tingling feeling was gone completely, and I was so relieved I slumped sideways into his chest before I could think the better of it.
The cook went still as my weight landed. For a long moment, we stood, frozen, and then the hand on top of my head slid down to grip my shoulder as the cook pulled me into him.
I’m pretty strong even without my suit, but it didn’t matter. The cook moved me like I was a doll, crushing me against his chest so fast I gasped. My hands were still tangled in the towel I was clutching against my stomach, but even if I had dared risk showing him the black stuff, I don’t think I could have pushed him away. Worse, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
I’ve never been a nostalgic person—I prefer looking forward—but as the cook folded his body around me, I was overwhelmed by an intense pang of loss. Even though I couldn’t remember touching the cook other than during the madness last night, I knew, knew I’d been in his arms before, and it had been good. Something worth fighting to keep, but I couldn’t remember. Not that not remembering was anything new for me, but this was bigger. It was like the small pit of missing time I’d grown accustomed to stepping around had suddenly opened into a yawning chasm, and I was teetering on the edge. I was still trying not to fall in when the cook stepped back.
I didn’t dare look up at him. The horrible feeling of forgetting was bad enough. If I had to deal with the nausea too, something might break. Instead, I focused on the wet spot on his shirt where my head had rested. But even though I wasn’t looking, I knew he was getting ready to speak, and from the tension in his body, I knew it was going to be big.
I almost did raise my head then, because for a crazy moment, I had the feeling that whatever the cook was about to tell me would explain everything. But he didn’t say a word. He just stood there, his hands gripping my shoulders tighter and tighter. And then, without warning, he let go, practically shoved me away, and walked out of the kitchen without a word.
I looked up just in time to see him vanish around the corner, too shocked even to be angry. I’d thrown my hand up without thinking, like I could stop him, make him tell me whatever it was he kept himself from saying. But when my fingers came into view, I got another shock, because my hand was clean.
They both were. My skin was bright red from all the scrubbing, but there was no sign of black. The pins and needles were gone as well, leaving my hands feeling normal, like the whole terrifying experience had never happened. I was still staring down at them when I saw a little glowing bug drift up through the floor by the kitchen door.
It bobbed there for a second, twitching its cloud of feelers at me. I stared back, and then, because I had to say it or I would explode, I whispered, “What is going on?”
The bug jumped at my voice and scuttled away, vanishing back through the floor in a flurry of tiny kicking legs, leaving me alone in the kitchen.
After that, I decided it was time to go see Hyrek.
This was a very big deal for me. I have a deep-running distrust of doctors. But between the hallucinations, the black gunk on my hands, and the fact that I was clearly missing way more memories than my bump on Falcon 34 accounted for, even I could no longer deny that something was seriously wrong.